My response (CC'd to our CFO) was to ask for copies of all receipts and serial numbers for the software they're using. and see what happens.
Sounds like that's more or less what they did. Or at least, the decision has been made, with plenty of CYA, and, I suppose, an opportunity for the CFO to back out and make Chinese piracy a corporate policy.
Somehow, that seems like it would defeat the purpose. KWin4 is pretty cool.
I'm not saying it's all bad -- even Vista isn't. But I honestly can't decide whether KDE4 or Vista was the worst release process I have ever seen. Definitely one of the two.
Maybe 4.2 is better. I won't really know until the next Kubuntu. Hopefully it'll support, I don't know, bluetooth. (Did I mention how much I hate Kubuntu Intrepid?)
Almost right. On Windows, you poweroff as quickly as you feel like, boot Linux, and restore a known-good Windows disk image, preferably something from ntfsclone.
How much do we really want to push the "just use Ubuntu" meme, and are there drawbacks to that?
Absolutely, there are drawbacks. Before KDE4, I'd have been encouraging people to use Kubuntu instead.
The point of "just use Ubuntu" is for those people who don't have a geek ready to set up their favorite distro -- just like Ubuntu also just chooses GNOME for you, so you don't have to ask about GNOME/KDE.
It's also nice in that it's so popular, you can just teach people to use "Ubuntu", without telling them it's a variant of Linux. Any geek will know what they mean, any Google search will turn up something relevant, as opposed to if they try to research "Linux", and find dozens of distros, rants from RMS and friends about how it's just a kernel, etc.
What I'm finding problematic now are the people who have tried Linux once, have no idea what distro it was, or what version, all they remember is hating it, and it's very difficult to get them to give it another try. I have no idea how to solve this -- you can't stop people from making shitty distros and putting them in instant-on motherboard features and such, nor can you force distros to include Wine, or at least tell users that it exists.
The real danger would be that Ubuntu gets popular enough that it's unstoppable, that no matter how much better another distro is, it will never surpass Ubuntu. I'm not worried for two reasons, though: Unless it's a truly radical change, Ubuntu would probably adopt it. And Ubuntu itself demonstrates just how quickly a good distro can unseat the established ones (in this case, Debian and Fedora/RedHat).
I used to agree with you. Then KDE pulled a Vista with KDE4.
I still hate GNOME, but now I hate KDE, too -- and I'm also starting to see the benefits of competition. Without GNOME, KDE could continue fucking up KDE4, and you would like it or switch to OS X. With GNOME, they must be very aware of the fact that every month that goes by with KDE4 broken, they're hemorrhaging users. And with XFCE, both GNOME and KDE must be very aware of how much of their footprint they could lose with some optimization.
Just as the very existence of Linux changes the game for Microsoft -- in their negotiations with larger organizations, even if those organizations would rather use Windows, they can use the threat of Linux to haggle down the price.
I didn't say it was difficult to use. I prefer the Gimp when I can, and lately, I prefer Krita to the Gimp.
That said, I almost never do much more than MS Paint could. I'm not much of a graphic designer.
When I say "hasn't caught up", I'm talking about raw functionality. Things like the amount of time it took for CMYK support (no idea where that is), lack of support for layer groups (unless something's changed very recently), and so on... If someone sends me a Word doc, it'll almost never fail to work properly in KWord, and when it fails there, it works in OpenOffice. If someone sends me a Photoshop file, I pretty much need Photoshop.
But yeah, I can see why Google would want to fund that. I imagine there are more Linux desktops than usual at Google, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were designers for whom a working Photoshop was the last thing they needed to make the switch.
You don't think there's enough room in a major distribution for people to learn? Or in a minor-but-niche distribution?
The main reason I see for starting a new distro is if you want to try something that isn't likely to ever be risked by a larger distro -- a new package manager, a new init system, etc. Once it's proven itself, the larger distro would probably adopt it -- or it'd be so good you'd become the new larger distro.
No one's suggesting that you force people into it, but discouraging fragmentation might be a good thing.
The other end, encouraging unity, seems to be filled by things like Ubuntu -- if you're working on desktop Linux, even if you're not directly hacking on Ubuntu, you'd be foolish to ignore it.
Religion isn't a great analogy. Yes, people can get into a religious fervor over this, but really, there's actually no more harm in having thousands of religions than there is in having only a few, much as I'd rather see none at all.
We do need different distros for different needs, the problem is there's also a lot of distros filling the same needs and some do a pretty poor job of it such that the resources would be better spent on a competing distro.
However, competition is good. If one of the distros clearly sucks, that's a waste, but otherwise, it becomes a bit like GNOME/KDE.
So it might be useful to look at the top Rails site, and see if it is, in fact, poo.
Re:I am afraid, there is lack of direction for Rub
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Ruby 1.9.1 Released
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· Score: 1
"server"? "Server"? As in ONE server??
Company is out of money, so yes, only one.
One which needed maintenance (other than updates) exactly once in its lifetime. And updates can be scripted.
Damn dude, you know there are just a _few_ organizations out there that are running more than a couple web servers right?
Point is that once you've got two, the model works. A few hundred could be done with the same principle -- when one goes down, spawn another.
Get a real IT job before running your mouth off like servers don't need maintenance, complex environments can be controlled from a little script,
In the very real IT job I had (until the economy imploded), I actually didn't do a lot of IT, mostly because, as much as you'd like to mock it, complex environments can be controlled from scripts. Those scripts aren't necessarily "little", but they get the job done.
When I can type one command to provision, boot, and configure a server, and with a little tweak, that command could do the same to n servers, no, there's not really a lot of maintenance. If they were 100 servers, each doing something completely different, you might have a point. But if they're 100 servers running the same app that, more efficiently coded, might run on 20 or 50, it really doesn't take any more effort to run 100 servers than it does 20.
Cedega is the result of a long-ago fork before the license was changed, and is a closed, proprietary app.
I'm aware. I was too lazy to look up which they ended up using, though.
My experience has been, occasionally Cedega is better at a game, and not all games work on Wine. However, more office-type stuff works on Wine, and as soon as a game works on Wine, it usually works better than on Cedega.
I'd easily pay $70 for Flight Simulator X if I could run it in my Linux box.
Unfortunately, Microsoft would probably rather use it to sell Windows.
I hate the idea of installing Vista (again) in my laptop (the thought of a virus deleting all my partitions scares me too much.)
Me, I'm more paranoid about a piece of malware giving people access to my partitions, but I suspect that's a long way off. As far as losing everything, that's why you need backups. NOW.
I would run it with vmware, but the graphic acceleration makes it difficult to impossible.
Depends what version of vmware/parallels/virtualbox/etc. Some of them take Wine's Direct3D layer and use it to convert the guest Windows' Direct3D calls to native OpenGL calls. So, it's still not going to be as good as native, but it will at least use graphics acceleration.
I think I could use the Windows files for Wine without paying any license.
Probably. However, most Wine things seem to work fine without any Microsoft code whatsoever, and a few might need you to find a DLL to download.
there are plenty of Linux users who are very eager to post about how all of their software is both free as in s speech AND free as in beer.
There are plenty willing to discuss it. I don't know there are many who are actually under that illusion -- most of us run on nVidia these days, and there are the binary blobs for firmware and such...
That said, I think most people are used to "free as in beer" by this point because Linux is free by choice and the high prices of a lot of proprietary programs has led to such massive rates of piracy...
Then you grow up, and at a real job, you learn things like -- suppose you're already on OS X. It costs a fraction of a single day's pay to buy TextMate, which should improve your productivity by quite a lot.
Bad example, because it's OS X, but you see this kind of thing all the time. People who use Linux, and like their Free Software, but they're on Gmail.
I would guess that a very large, quiet majority of Linux people are not at all afraid to pay for things. That's why you see things like Parallels and VMWare for Linux.
Not strawmen, maybe -- after all, RMS does exist. But RMS doesn't reflect on the community as a whole.
That's a harsh way of saying that you don't really have an accurate picture yourself.
That's true enough. But I never claimed to.
Again, this is the kind of thing for which you would need to do real, actual market research in order to find out for yourself. If you're writing a tool for graphic artists, you probably don't have to care about Linux at all. If you're writing a tool for animators and modelers, it's worth considering. If you're writing a tool designed to run on a cluster of servers built from commodity hardware, you'd be stupid not to support Linux.
Because those like yourself who are embedded in the subculture that is Linux do not have an accurate picture of the entire computer ecosystem.
Nor does anyone who blindly throws a number out there, like "0.1%".
Linux is a tiny minority on the desktop, and I have no illusions about that. Can you find where that invalidates anything in my post?
It's worth mentioning, that slideshow actually shows that Rails is much more efficient than CakePHP, but also that Merb is much more efficient than Rails.
That distinction is going away -- Merb is being merged into Rails (Merb 2 is Rails 3). I'm just pointing out -- you said Rails is an efficient framework, and it's about to become much more efficient, at the same time as Ruby just got twice as fast.
Re:I am afraid, there is lack of direction for Rub
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Ruby 1.9.1 Released
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· Score: 1
Sooner or later you'll be spending more on hardware than you are on programmers.
That generally happens later. Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
programmers that do not know how to optimise properly should either quit the job or go back to school and study some more.
The fact that I choose to focus on other things does not mean I don't know how to optimize. Knowing when to optimize is what's important.
I'll quote it again: Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Above all, build a clean, maintainable architecture. If you find out that certain parts of it are too slow, then you start to optimize -- ultimately, you may end up writing some parts of it in C. But when you've got enough traffic that you have to do that, you've got a nice problem, maybe enough money to hire a full-time person who's job is to optimize.
At the point where you've got a thousand servers, a 10% performance gain is a hundred servers you no longer need. At the point where you've got ten servers, a 10% performance gain is only worth it if it takes less than, oh, three hours, given the going rate for dedicated/virtual servers.
And chances are, again, that at this point in your lifecycle, you would probably be better served spending those three hours working on the app itself, to get it out the door.
Obviously, there are exceptions. If you're slurping an entire table into RAM, you're Doing It Wrong, and you're probably only saving yourself a few lines of code, or a few minutes reading SQL documentation.
Twitter.
Aside from the demonstrated fact that Rails wasn't their scaling problem, there's also the part where they still seem to be running Rails, and they still seem to be doing alright. (Correct me if I'm wrong on either of those.)
For that matter, Twitter also demonstrates exactly why you should put off the scaling issue. Twitter now has enough traffic and enough money that they should be able to rewrite from scratch if they have to. Others have tried to make better, more efficient Twitters, but so far, Twitter has first mover's advantage -- everyone is using Twitter, so why would they switch to something else?
It's the classic "worse is better" argument. If it takes you twice as long to get to market with a solution that's twice as efficient, all the money you've saved won't buy back the customers you lost to that first mover.
Horizontal scaling only gets you so far in the long run as well.
It depends what kind of app you're building, but if horizontal scaling works at all, you should be able to continue to scale horizontally as long as you have money to throw at it.
Contrast with scaling vertically, where you have to wait for Moore's Law, which may never kick in for you if you haven't designed for multicore. (Conversely, a horizontal scaling architecture, you can just spawn an instance per core.)
I'll admit it's good, but the problem comes from people who blindly follow the hype and will claim that RoR IS the best, and can do it better, and what the hell do us old Perl writing coots know anyway.
Perl, I get along with just fine. Python, I have no problem with. Erlang or Smalltalk, I have some respect for.
It's people who do PHP just because it'll supposedly be easier to hire crappy programmers, or Java because it's what Big Business uses, that get on my nerves. Especially people who use C because they need performance -- a web app written in C very likely belongs on thedailywtf, unless there's a very good reason for it.
Did I say you said rails is the best thing ever?
What you said was, specifically, other languages seem to have more people who know what they're doing, instead of just following the RoR hype.
See, I don't think I was "hyping" Rails. That's why I said, please reply to my comment, and not to "the Rails comm
"Yep. I can do that." Not without an addon you can't...
It takes a bit more effort, but I'm pretty sure on Linux (which I was talking about), Amarok responds to dcop, and mplayer operates from the commandline.
I'd never even heard of powershell, I like to think I'm pretty damn nerdy.
Have you heard of paragraphs? Sorry, don't mean to be rude, but it would be much easier to read...
You probably have heard of powershell. It used to be called Monad.
For windows there aren't a whole lot of good video players. WMP classic is the best by a longshot.
Better than VLC? Really?
Pretty sure I'm in a fairly nerdy school.
Sounds like it -- yet, amazingly, your classmates haven't learned some basic scripting to make your life easier?
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. I have a friend who seems to be learning all the right practices as far as actually engineering the software, but they've left out such basic best practices as version control.
Slashdot Mirror
My response (CC'd to our CFO) was to ask for copies of all receipts and serial numbers for the software they're using. and see what happens.
Sounds like that's more or less what they did. Or at least, the decision has been made, with plenty of CYA, and, I suppose, an opportunity for the CFO to back out and make Chinese piracy a corporate policy.
KDE4 with Compiz-fusion
Somehow, that seems like it would defeat the purpose. KWin4 is pretty cool.
I'm not saying it's all bad -- even Vista isn't. But I honestly can't decide whether KDE4 or Vista was the worst release process I have ever seen. Definitely one of the two.
Maybe 4.2 is better. I won't really know until the next Kubuntu. Hopefully it'll support, I don't know, bluetooth. (Did I mention how much I hate Kubuntu Intrepid?)
Whoops, meant to reply to this comment.
That would be the ultimate "Fixed it for you."
(Accidentally posted it here.)
That would be the ultimate "Fixed it for you."
Almost right. On Windows, you poweroff as quickly as you feel like, boot Linux, and restore a known-good Windows disk image, preferably something from ntfsclone.
How much do we really want to push the "just use Ubuntu" meme, and are there drawbacks to that?
Absolutely, there are drawbacks. Before KDE4, I'd have been encouraging people to use Kubuntu instead.
The point of "just use Ubuntu" is for those people who don't have a geek ready to set up their favorite distro -- just like Ubuntu also just chooses GNOME for you, so you don't have to ask about GNOME/KDE.
It's also nice in that it's so popular, you can just teach people to use "Ubuntu", without telling them it's a variant of Linux. Any geek will know what they mean, any Google search will turn up something relevant, as opposed to if they try to research "Linux", and find dozens of distros, rants from RMS and friends about how it's just a kernel, etc.
What I'm finding problematic now are the people who have tried Linux once, have no idea what distro it was, or what version, all they remember is hating it, and it's very difficult to get them to give it another try. I have no idea how to solve this -- you can't stop people from making shitty distros and putting them in instant-on motherboard features and such, nor can you force distros to include Wine, or at least tell users that it exists.
The real danger would be that Ubuntu gets popular enough that it's unstoppable, that no matter how much better another distro is, it will never surpass Ubuntu. I'm not worried for two reasons, though: Unless it's a truly radical change, Ubuntu would probably adopt it. And Ubuntu itself demonstrates just how quickly a good distro can unseat the established ones (in this case, Debian and Fedora/RedHat).
I used to agree with you. Then KDE pulled a Vista with KDE4.
I still hate GNOME, but now I hate KDE, too -- and I'm also starting to see the benefits of competition. Without GNOME, KDE could continue fucking up KDE4, and you would like it or switch to OS X. With GNOME, they must be very aware of the fact that every month that goes by with KDE4 broken, they're hemorrhaging users. And with XFCE, both GNOME and KDE must be very aware of how much of their footprint they could lose with some optimization.
Just as the very existence of Linux changes the game for Microsoft -- in their negotiations with larger organizations, even if those organizations would rather use Windows, they can use the threat of Linux to haggle down the price.
I didn't say it was difficult to use. I prefer the Gimp when I can, and lately, I prefer Krita to the Gimp.
That said, I almost never do much more than MS Paint could. I'm not much of a graphic designer.
When I say "hasn't caught up", I'm talking about raw functionality. Things like the amount of time it took for CMYK support (no idea where that is), lack of support for layer groups (unless something's changed very recently), and so on... If someone sends me a Word doc, it'll almost never fail to work properly in KWord, and when it fails there, it works in OpenOffice. If someone sends me a Photoshop file, I pretty much need Photoshop.
But yeah, I can see why Google would want to fund that. I imagine there are more Linux desktops than usual at Google, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were designers for whom a working Photoshop was the last thing they needed to make the switch.
My mistake, you're right. WinRAR is shareware. The rar commandline tool, however, does appear to be freeware.
It appeared to be a DVR recording, so that's plausible -- maybe he saw something, rewinded, and started recording.
You don't think there's enough room in a major distribution for people to learn? Or in a minor-but-niche distribution?
The main reason I see for starting a new distro is if you want to try something that isn't likely to ever be risked by a larger distro -- a new package manager, a new init system, etc. Once it's proven itself, the larger distro would probably adopt it -- or it'd be so good you'd become the new larger distro.
No one's suggesting that you force people into it, but discouraging fragmentation might be a good thing.
The other end, encouraging unity, seems to be filled by things like Ubuntu -- if you're working on desktop Linux, even if you're not directly hacking on Ubuntu, you'd be foolish to ignore it.
Religion isn't a great analogy. Yes, people can get into a religious fervor over this, but really, there's actually no more harm in having thousands of religions than there is in having only a few, much as I'd rather see none at all.
We do need different distros for different needs, the problem is there's also a lot of distros filling the same needs and some do a pretty poor job of it such that the resources would be better spent on a competing distro.
However, competition is good. If one of the distros clearly sucks, that's a waste, but otherwise, it becomes a bit like GNOME/KDE.
On ratemypoo, the top rated poo is still poo.
So it might be useful to look at the top Rails site, and see if it is, in fact, poo.
"server"? "Server"? As in ONE server??
Company is out of money, so yes, only one.
One which needed maintenance (other than updates) exactly once in its lifetime. And updates can be scripted.
Damn dude, you know there are just a _few_ organizations out there that are running more than a couple web servers right?
Point is that once you've got two, the model works. A few hundred could be done with the same principle -- when one goes down, spawn another.
Get a real IT job before running your mouth off like servers don't need maintenance, complex environments can be controlled from a little script,
In the very real IT job I had (until the economy imploded), I actually didn't do a lot of IT, mostly because, as much as you'd like to mock it, complex environments can be controlled from scripts. Those scripts aren't necessarily "little", but they get the job done.
When I can type one command to provision, boot, and configure a server, and with a little tweak, that command could do the same to n servers, no, there's not really a lot of maintenance. If they were 100 servers, each doing something completely different, you might have a point. But if they're 100 servers running the same app that, more efficiently coded, might run on 20 or 50, it really doesn't take any more effort to run 100 servers than it does 20.
I caught a guy wearing a shit like that once who didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.
Clearly, he's not one of the people I was talking about.
Are you sure that Joe SixPack would even understand why you were wearing the shirt?
Somehow, I think "No, I will not fix your computer" is pretty unambiguous.
Cedega is the result of a long-ago fork before the license was changed, and is a closed, proprietary app.
I'm aware. I was too lazy to look up which they ended up using, though.
My experience has been, occasionally Cedega is better at a game, and not all games work on Wine. However, more office-type stuff works on Wine, and as soon as a game works on Wine, it usually works better than on Cedega.
I'd easily pay $70 for Flight Simulator X if I could run it in my Linux box.
Unfortunately, Microsoft would probably rather use it to sell Windows.
I hate the idea of installing Vista (again) in my laptop (the thought of a virus deleting all my partitions scares me too much.)
Me, I'm more paranoid about a piece of malware giving people access to my partitions, but I suspect that's a long way off. As far as losing everything, that's why you need backups. NOW.
I would run it with vmware, but the graphic acceleration makes it difficult to impossible.
Depends what version of vmware/parallels/virtualbox/etc. Some of them take Wine's Direct3D layer and use it to convert the guest Windows' Direct3D calls to native OpenGL calls. So, it's still not going to be as good as native, but it will at least use graphics acceleration.
I think I could use the Windows files for Wine without paying any license.
Probably. However, most Wine things seem to work fine without any Microsoft code whatsoever, and a few might need you to find a DLL to download.
there are plenty of Linux users who are very eager to post about how all of their software is both free as in s speech AND free as in beer.
There are plenty willing to discuss it. I don't know there are many who are actually under that illusion -- most of us run on nVidia these days, and there are the binary blobs for firmware and such...
That said, I think most people are used to "free as in beer" by this point because Linux is free by choice and the high prices of a lot of proprietary programs has led to such massive rates of piracy...
Then you grow up, and at a real job, you learn things like -- suppose you're already on OS X. It costs a fraction of a single day's pay to buy TextMate, which should improve your productivity by quite a lot.
Bad example, because it's OS X, but you see this kind of thing all the time. People who use Linux, and like their Free Software, but they're on Gmail.
I would guess that a very large, quiet majority of Linux people are not at all afraid to pay for things. That's why you see things like Parallels and VMWare for Linux.
Not strawmen, maybe -- after all, RMS does exist. But RMS doesn't reflect on the community as a whole.
Until their computers are broken. Then they suddenly become very friendly.
There's a reason some of us wear this shirt.
That's a harsh way of saying that you don't really have an accurate picture yourself.
That's true enough. But I never claimed to.
Again, this is the kind of thing for which you would need to do real, actual market research in order to find out for yourself. If you're writing a tool for graphic artists, you probably don't have to care about Linux at all. If you're writing a tool for animators and modelers, it's worth considering. If you're writing a tool designed to run on a cluster of servers built from commodity hardware, you'd be stupid not to support Linux.
Because those like yourself who are embedded in the subculture that is Linux do not have an accurate picture of the entire computer ecosystem.
Nor does anyone who blindly throws a number out there, like "0.1%".
Linux is a tiny minority on the desktop, and I have no illusions about that. Can you find where that invalidates anything in my post?
It's worth mentioning, that slideshow actually shows that Rails is much more efficient than CakePHP, but also that Merb is much more efficient than Rails.
That distinction is going away -- Merb is being merged into Rails (Merb 2 is Rails 3). I'm just pointing out -- you said Rails is an efficient framework, and it's about to become much more efficient, at the same time as Ruby just got twice as fast.
Sooner or later you'll be spending more on hardware than you are on programmers.
That generally happens later. Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
programmers that do not know how to optimise properly should either quit the job or go back to school and study some more.
The fact that I choose to focus on other things does not mean I don't know how to optimize. Knowing when to optimize is what's important.
I'll quote it again: Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Above all, build a clean, maintainable architecture. If you find out that certain parts of it are too slow, then you start to optimize -- ultimately, you may end up writing some parts of it in C. But when you've got enough traffic that you have to do that, you've got a nice problem, maybe enough money to hire a full-time person who's job is to optimize.
At the point where you've got a thousand servers, a 10% performance gain is a hundred servers you no longer need. At the point where you've got ten servers, a 10% performance gain is only worth it if it takes less than, oh, three hours, given the going rate for dedicated/virtual servers.
And chances are, again, that at this point in your lifecycle, you would probably be better served spending those three hours working on the app itself, to get it out the door.
Obviously, there are exceptions. If you're slurping an entire table into RAM, you're Doing It Wrong, and you're probably only saving yourself a few lines of code, or a few minutes reading SQL documentation.
Twitter.
Aside from the demonstrated fact that Rails wasn't their scaling problem, there's also the part where they still seem to be running Rails, and they still seem to be doing alright. (Correct me if I'm wrong on either of those.)
For that matter, Twitter also demonstrates exactly why you should put off the scaling issue. Twitter now has enough traffic and enough money that they should be able to rewrite from scratch if they have to. Others have tried to make better, more efficient Twitters, but so far, Twitter has first mover's advantage -- everyone is using Twitter, so why would they switch to something else?
It's the classic "worse is better" argument. If it takes you twice as long to get to market with a solution that's twice as efficient, all the money you've saved won't buy back the customers you lost to that first mover.
Horizontal scaling only gets you so far in the long run as well.
It depends what kind of app you're building, but if horizontal scaling works at all, you should be able to continue to scale horizontally as long as you have money to throw at it.
Contrast with scaling vertically, where you have to wait for Moore's Law, which may never kick in for you if you haven't designed for multicore. (Conversely, a horizontal scaling architecture, you can just spawn an instance per core.)
I'll admit it's good, but the problem comes from people who blindly follow the hype and will claim that RoR IS the best, and can do it better, and what the hell do us old Perl writing coots know anyway.
Perl, I get along with just fine. Python, I have no problem with. Erlang or Smalltalk, I have some respect for.
It's people who do PHP just because it'll supposedly be easier to hire crappy programmers, or Java because it's what Big Business uses, that get on my nerves. Especially people who use C because they need performance -- a web app written in C very likely belongs on thedailywtf, unless there's a very good reason for it.
Did I say you said rails is the best thing ever?
What you said was, specifically, other languages seem to have more people who know what they're doing, instead of just following the RoR hype.
See, I don't think I was "hyping" Rails. That's why I said, please reply to my comment, and not to "the Rails comm
"Yep. I can do that." Not without an addon you can't...
It takes a bit more effort, but I'm pretty sure on Linux (which I was talking about), Amarok responds to dcop, and mplayer operates from the commandline.
I'd never even heard of powershell, I like to think I'm pretty damn nerdy.
Have you heard of paragraphs? Sorry, don't mean to be rude, but it would be much easier to read...
You probably have heard of powershell. It used to be called Monad.
For windows there aren't a whole lot of good video players. WMP classic is the best by a longshot.
Better than VLC? Really?
Pretty sure I'm in a fairly nerdy school.
Sounds like it -- yet, amazingly, your classmates haven't learned some basic scripting to make your life easier?
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. I have a friend who seems to be learning all the right practices as far as actually engineering the software, but they've left out such basic best practices as version control.