I'm using the tovid tools, which is easily installed with URPMI under Mandriva. Not sure if your using Windows or another Linux distro, so getting the tools installed could have varying difficulty. I followed the instructions found here there is a couple of mistakes (possibly due to things changing with the tools) but it gives you pretty good starting point. I may post something on my blog (link above) about how I'm actually doing the process.
Also, I store my audio as flac, not because I can hear the difference between 256 kbps M4A, but because i lose/scratch the CD, I still want to have a way to get a perfect copy back.
I don't need to store any uncompressed video on my hard disk, but having a couple 15 GB of VOBs floating around that I haven't had time to burn yet takes up well, 15 GB. As far as i've found the easiest way to go from AVI (divx, etc) to DVD requires encoding to MPG, while the files are 3-4 GB, and then creating the VOB files from that, again 3-4 GB, and then burn those. I don't think I could go straight from AVI to burn, because it usually takes a few hours to go from AVI to MPG.
But even if I was working a lot of overtime, I'd still be doing a lot more interesting stuff than some people I know who are working in the large corporations.
Well, you could just back everything up on other hard drives, instead of using tapes or whatever else you are used to. Sure hard drives crash, but not when you just write the backup to them and then put them on a shelf. I don't think they'd be any less dependable than tapes.
This is exactly how I'm filling up my space. I got a new computer with a 160 GB drive, thinking it would be "enough". Started storing all my CDs in FLAC, and I'm currently transfering all hte movies I downloaded in AVI to DVD so I can watch them easily on my home theatre. Once you start working with video and sound that isn't compressed to nothing, you start to realize just how fast you can use up all that space. If my camera did RAW i'd probably use that to store my photos. I usually save any edits I do in PNG or TIFF so that I don't have to worry about the lossy encoding. Granted I still have space to spare, but I could see very easly using up a Terabyte drive if I had it, and a faster internet connection.
Sounds like he'd be better off not working for some giant corporation. I work for a small company, and although I don't get paid as much as some of my peers, it's nice knowing that I don't have to stay at work until 7 pm every night, or work weekends. I also get to do work on a lot of different and interesting projects, instead of being pigeon holed into some tiny insignificant role in the company. I find that people who work for larger corporations end up doing the same thing day after day, refining a very small piece of code, while I'm always doing new things, getting to work on everything from the database right up to the UI of the application.
Here's one that keeps me from being able to switch (on the desktop, anyway): professional-grade audio software, and driver support for a lot pro audio hardware.
So, like a said a small minority of users requires windows for some very specific uses, but most home users, and most business users (think secretaries using wordprocessors) would do just fine on a Linux machine. Most users don't want to buy more than the $299 Dell special let alone pay for expensive pro audio hardware and software that they couldn't figuure out how to use anyway. If you can't get by without windows because you need some professional audio software and hardware to work then it's fine to use windows. I think that's a very small percentage of the population. The rest of us that just use our computers for web/email/word processing/keeping track of finances/basic photo editing/ many other things will have no problem with Linux.
I'm not sure if this really falls into the same thing, but the 5 connections could be a real problem to home users. What do they consider a network connection? I know that I often used to get higher download rates in BitTorrent under Linux than my roommates (on the same connection) used to get on windows. Is this due to some artificial limiting of the number of network connections? It's the only explanation I can think of. There's no reason why the same program running on 2 different operating systems should have vastly different performance unless one of the operating systems is limiting the performance in some way.
Although I have no experience myself, Cedega says it plays most games pretty well. And it plays a lot of the popular games. Most home users don't need photoshop. My wife wanted to edit her photos. I installed GIMP (for windows) and she hasn't had any complaints. Most home users don't need 3D Studio Max or know what it is. WTF IS ETC?? you can't just list etc. and pretend that there are more reasons. I realize that not every computer can be replaced with Linux. Some professionals need certian programs that are only available on Windows. That's fine, they can keep on using windows. The other 98% of users who don't need those specialized applications will be able to get everything done just fine on Linux.
It only helps to have 2 monitors rather than 1 large monitor because the window managers handle 2 monitors much better than 1 large monitor. The maximize feature becomes useless if you're using a 30 inch monitor. Maybe we need new window managers to take advantage of the larger screens. I think the fact that they used Macintosh machines definitely changes the results, because the maximize button doesn't really maximize. WHich makes a lot of sense if you have a 23 inch apple cinema display, but doesn't make much sense if you use a 17 4:3 resolution monitor.
I have shown "advanced users" (web developers) firefox, and it seems that some of them just don't get the tabbed browsing concept. They try it out, don't really use it all that much. They are so used to having everything in a separate window, that they just fail to grasp how much easier it is to use tabs. Meanwhile, they have 8 IE windows open, and have to click on about 5 of them each time they want to find the window they want to, they are all grouped on the task bar, so clicking on each one requires 2 clicks. It takes them about 20 seconds each time they want to switch the page they are looking at. With firefox I can usually switch to the tab I want after at most 2 clicks. having the tabs layed out horizontally, and being able to reorder them make it a lot easier to find tabs that I need to.
I've often wondered why they don't use special media for movies and music such that it can't be read in a PC with a standard drive. For an example, look at the Gamecube. Because it uses nonstandard media, there's a lot less piracy going on for gamecube. Although piracy does happen, it's a lot more difficult to do, and not something the average person does. I don't know why the RIAA/MPAA don't get together and create some proprietary disc that doesn't work on a computer. Sure you'd still be able to copy them somehow with modded hardware, but it would make things a lot harder, and people wouldn't be able to play them on their home players anyway, because there would be no way to transfer to the home theatre box. Sure you could download stuff off the internet that people had managed to copy, and play it on your computer, but I think that they would take a major blow to piracy if you couldn't just drop a DVD in your computer, run DVD shrink, and have a great copy in half an hour.
Oh, i know it's capped. although at 60 Gigs. I had no idea it was capped though. I think that's a recent addition. I know a couple years ago you could get an uncapped connection. My point is, is that your either get capped from Rogers, or take your chances with some DSL provider who has an ugly website.
Ah yes, just checked their page, that's with a 20 gig limit. To get that uncapped you need to pay $29.95. I don't know if I could bring myself to buy a service from a site that looks as bad as OntarioDSL. I use rogers and currently pay $35 for 1MB. I think it's a little expensive, and may think of switching. Is Ontario DSL actually reliable?
It's like the myth that computers will create a paperless society. Computers just help us create more stuff to put on the paper. Sure you could bring a computer with you everywhere, and distribute everything on the internet, so we wouldn't need to use paper. It sounds like a nice idea, but in reality, it never ends up happening that way.
I want to know why MS thinks that 1 filesystem fits the needs of all their users. Surely Databases, Webservers, Corporate workstations, and home computers have very different needs. It seems to me that it's kind of naive to think 1 file system should be able to please all the users.
What happens to the developers of the drivers. How are keys managed in that situation. Does every developer have a copy of the private key for signing? Does every developer have to submit their file to some other server so it can be signed before they are able to test it? I don't develop drivers myself, so I'm not completely familiar with the testing/development/debugging process, but it seems like requiring to have these drivers signed would create a lot of extra hassle for the people developing them.
I've always wondered why there was little/no support for other file systems under windows. Linux supports tons of file systems. Windows only supports 2, and is phasing out 1, so they pretty much only support NTFS. I hate that when I boot into windows, I can't access my ReiserFS files. I hate having to keep my music and picture files in a separate partition, just so I can access them under windows the few times a month that I bother booting into windows.
It's not that much for a determined hacker either. And as we have seen with signed ActiveX controls, signing code doesn't really mean anything either. The cost of buying a license to sign something doesn't hasn't stopped hackers in the past from breaking through security holes, and it's not going to stop them in the future.
Sounds like shaving with an electric razor is more of a pain (pardon the pun) than shaving with a plain old disposable razor. I've only used disposables (currently Gillette Mach 3) in my life, and I have to say, that I probably only cut myself about once per year. It's very quick to shave, and I don't ever have to take a day off. Although I usually take either saturday,sunday or both off every week. Sometimes I shave twice a day if I fell I need to, and i've never had a problem with it bothering my skin.
I still think that Nintendo did the "Right Thing TM" when they released the N64. They used cartridges, because CDs were too slow at that point. I remember games taking minutes to load, whereas games on the N64 would load instantly. The gamecube had the same high speed load times. Nintendo waited until optical media was ready to provide sufficient load times, and applied the technology when it was available. When you look as the PS1, PS2, and XBox, the load times are abysmal compared to the N64 and GC.
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I'm using the tovid tools, which is easily installed with URPMI under Mandriva. Not sure if your using Windows or another Linux distro, so getting the tools installed could have varying difficulty. I followed the instructions found here there is a couple of mistakes (possibly due to things changing with the tools) but it gives you pretty good starting point. I may post something on my blog (link above) about how I'm actually doing the process.
Also, I store my audio as flac, not because I can hear the difference between 256 kbps M4A, but because i lose/scratch the CD, I still want to have a way to get a perfect copy back.
I don't need to store any uncompressed video on my hard disk, but having a couple 15 GB of VOBs floating around that I haven't had time to burn yet takes up well, 15 GB. As far as i've found the easiest way to go from AVI (divx, etc) to DVD requires encoding to MPG, while the files are 3-4 GB, and then creating the VOB files from that, again 3-4 GB, and then burn those. I don't think I could go straight from AVI to burn, because it usually takes a few hours to go from AVI to MPG.
But even if I was working a lot of overtime, I'd still be doing a lot more interesting stuff than some people I know who are working in the large corporations.
Well, you could just back everything up on other hard drives, instead of using tapes or whatever else you are used to. Sure hard drives crash, but not when you just write the backup to them and then put them on a shelf. I don't think they'd be any less dependable than tapes.
This is exactly how I'm filling up my space. I got a new computer with a 160 GB drive, thinking it would be "enough". Started storing all my CDs in FLAC, and I'm currently transfering all hte movies I downloaded in AVI to DVD so I can watch them easily on my home theatre. Once you start working with video and sound that isn't compressed to nothing, you start to realize just how fast you can use up all that space. If my camera did RAW i'd probably use that to store my photos. I usually save any edits I do in PNG or TIFF so that I don't have to worry about the lossy encoding. Granted I still have space to spare, but I could see very easly using up a Terabyte drive if I had it, and a faster internet connection.
Sounds like he'd be better off not working for some giant corporation. I work for a small company, and although I don't get paid as much as some of my peers, it's nice knowing that I don't have to stay at work until 7 pm every night, or work weekends. I also get to do work on a lot of different and interesting projects, instead of being pigeon holed into some tiny insignificant role in the company. I find that people who work for larger corporations end up doing the same thing day after day, refining a very small piece of code, while I'm always doing new things, getting to work on everything from the database right up to the UI of the application.
So why does bittorent on Windows show such bad performance in my experience while the Linux client shows great performance.
Here's one that keeps me from being able to switch (on the desktop, anyway): professional-grade audio software, and driver support for a lot pro audio hardware.
So, like a said a small minority of users requires windows for some very specific uses, but most home users, and most business users (think secretaries using wordprocessors) would do just fine on a Linux machine. Most users don't want to buy more than the $299 Dell special let alone pay for expensive pro audio hardware and software that they couldn't figuure out how to use anyway. If you can't get by without windows because you need some professional audio software and hardware to work then it's fine to use windows. I think that's a very small percentage of the population. The rest of us that just use our computers for web/email/word processing/keeping track of finances/basic photo editing/ many other things will have no problem with Linux.
I'm not sure if this really falls into the same thing, but the 5 connections could be a real problem to home users. What do they consider a network connection? I know that I often used to get higher download rates in BitTorrent under Linux than my roommates (on the same connection) used to get on windows. Is this due to some artificial limiting of the number of network connections? It's the only explanation I can think of. There's no reason why the same program running on 2 different operating systems should have vastly different performance unless one of the operating systems is limiting the performance in some way.
Although I have no experience myself, Cedega says it plays most games pretty well. And it plays a lot of the popular games. Most home users don't need photoshop. My wife wanted to edit her photos. I installed GIMP (for windows) and she hasn't had any complaints. Most home users don't need 3D Studio Max or know what it is. WTF IS ETC?? you can't just list etc. and pretend that there are more reasons. I realize that not every computer can be replaced with Linux. Some professionals need certian programs that are only available on Windows. That's fine, they can keep on using windows. The other 98% of users who don't need those specialized applications will be able to get everything done just fine on Linux.
I had a friend who used to joke that cryptography was taking pictures of dead people.
It only helps to have 2 monitors rather than 1 large monitor because the window managers handle 2 monitors much better than 1 large monitor. The maximize feature becomes useless if you're using a 30 inch monitor. Maybe we need new window managers to take advantage of the larger screens. I think the fact that they used Macintosh machines definitely changes the results, because the maximize button doesn't really maximize. WHich makes a lot of sense if you have a 23 inch apple cinema display, but doesn't make much sense if you use a 17 4:3 resolution monitor.
I have shown "advanced users" (web developers) firefox, and it seems that some of them just don't get the tabbed browsing concept. They try it out, don't really use it all that much. They are so used to having everything in a separate window, that they just fail to grasp how much easier it is to use tabs. Meanwhile, they have 8 IE windows open, and have to click on about 5 of them each time they want to find the window they want to, they are all grouped on the task bar, so clicking on each one requires 2 clicks. It takes them about 20 seconds each time they want to switch the page they are looking at. With firefox I can usually switch to the tab I want after at most 2 clicks. having the tabs layed out horizontally, and being able to reorder them make it a lot easier to find tabs that I need to.
I've often wondered why they don't use special media for movies and music such that it can't be read in a PC with a standard drive. For an example, look at the Gamecube. Because it uses nonstandard media, there's a lot less piracy going on for gamecube. Although piracy does happen, it's a lot more difficult to do, and not something the average person does. I don't know why the RIAA/MPAA don't get together and create some proprietary disc that doesn't work on a computer. Sure you'd still be able to copy them somehow with modded hardware, but it would make things a lot harder, and people wouldn't be able to play them on their home players anyway, because there would be no way to transfer to the home theatre box. Sure you could download stuff off the internet that people had managed to copy, and play it on your computer, but I think that they would take a major blow to piracy if you couldn't just drop a DVD in your computer, run DVD shrink, and have a great copy in half an hour.
But what if the web developer is also the CEO? Maybe that's how they offer such low rates.
Oh, i know it's capped. although at 60 Gigs. I had no idea it was capped though. I think that's a recent addition. I know a couple years ago you could get an uncapped connection. My point is, is that your either get capped from Rogers, or take your chances with some DSL provider who has an ugly website.
Ah yes, just checked their page, that's with a 20 gig limit. To get that uncapped you need to pay $29.95. I don't know if I could bring myself to buy a service from a site that looks as bad as OntarioDSL. I use rogers and currently pay $35 for 1MB. I think it's a little expensive, and may think of switching. Is Ontario DSL actually reliable?
It's like the myth that computers will create a paperless society. Computers just help us create more stuff to put on the paper. Sure you could bring a computer with you everywhere, and distribute everything on the internet, so we wouldn't need to use paper. It sounds like a nice idea, but in reality, it never ends up happening that way.
I want to know why MS thinks that 1 filesystem fits the needs of all their users. Surely Databases, Webservers, Corporate workstations, and home computers have very different needs. It seems to me that it's kind of naive to think 1 file system should be able to please all the users.
What happens to the developers of the drivers. How are keys managed in that situation. Does every developer have a copy of the private key for signing? Does every developer have to submit their file to some other server so it can be signed before they are able to test it? I don't develop drivers myself, so I'm not completely familiar with the testing/development/debugging process, but it seems like requiring to have these drivers signed would create a lot of extra hassle for the people developing them.
I've always wondered why there was little/no support for other file systems under windows. Linux supports tons of file systems. Windows only supports 2, and is phasing out 1, so they pretty much only support NTFS. I hate that when I boot into windows, I can't access my ReiserFS files. I hate having to keep my music and picture files in a separate partition, just so I can access them under windows the few times a month that I bother booting into windows.
It's not that much for a determined hacker either. And as we have seen with signed ActiveX controls, signing code doesn't really mean anything either. The cost of buying a license to sign something doesn't hasn't stopped hackers in the past from breaking through security holes, and it's not going to stop them in the future.
Sounds like shaving with an electric razor is more of a pain (pardon the pun) than shaving with a plain old disposable razor. I've only used disposables (currently Gillette Mach 3) in my life, and I have to say, that I probably only cut myself about once per year. It's very quick to shave, and I don't ever have to take a day off. Although I usually take either saturday,sunday or both off every week. Sometimes I shave twice a day if I fell I need to, and i've never had a problem with it bothering my skin.
I still think that Nintendo did the "Right Thing TM" when they released the N64. They used cartridges, because CDs were too slow at that point. I remember games taking minutes to load, whereas games on the N64 would load instantly. The gamecube had the same high speed load times. Nintendo waited until optical media was ready to provide sufficient load times, and applied the technology when it was available. When you look as the PS1, PS2, and XBox, the load times are abysmal compared to the N64 and GC.