Bought a new PC, oh how I forgot thine pleasures my dear....

[shikitohno]

Grab a non-Ubuntu distro's install cd. Linux Mint was good last time I used it, as if you downloaded the "international" version, or some such iso off their website, you could have all the proprietary codecs and plugins installed out the box for you.Here's a decent resource for seeing the many linux distros out there, and a little work with google and wikipedia should help you. Mint, Fedora, CentOS and Debian are all reasonably stable, but each has its strong points and its weaknesses. Personally, I like Arch Linux for having a bleeding edge system, being reasonably stable, and having a rolling release cycle, ie. there are no major release versions like Windows 7 or OS Lion, once you update you're computer you automatically have the most up to date version of it you're going to get. However, Arch is a system aimed more at technically competent users, and not necessarily suited to you. It can work for beginners, but where the community of Ubuntu and many other distros hold your hand every step of the way, Arch tends to just give you the documentation explaining how to do it, and leave you to do it yourself, only intervening if you really need help. Although, RTFM or STFW, and 90% of the time you can answer your own problem with Arch, because everything is written up so well.

[lxskllr]

Grab a non-Ubuntu distro's install cd.

Does Mint have easy access to wubi? That's the easiest way for just playing. That's a standard Ubuntu feature, and is available from the desktop. It gives near native performance, without the hassle of dicking with partitions. That's a good intermediate step between running from a live cd, and a real install.

[shikitohno]

I believe if they don't have access to wubi, they have something similar. I think one better, though, is just making a bootable USB drive, and running from that as an intermediate. You're not limited by the speed of your optical drive, and it's clearly separate from the rest of the pc, so there's no confusion for people who think they have a full install of linux on their computer, uninstall Windows because they liked Ubuntu in wubi, and then wonder why their computer won't boot. I know it sounds stupid, but I've been witness to such things.

[lxskllr]

Flash drive is a good idea. I'm running Debian sid off a flash drive to see how I get along with the fast, and potentially problematic update cycle. So far, so good. I watched my first install eat my Gnome desktop, but I knew it would do that. I just wanted to see :^D Having apt-listbugs lets you check first. It's not the careless update Ubuntu provides, but it's easy enough. It just takes time to read, and make an informed decision :^)

[shikitohno]

Shift+I is how I check to see if my next update has any potential bugs. Mutt pulls down my mail, and I look to see if there's anything on the arch-dev-public mailing list. Perhaps not as convenient, but it's alerted me to potential bugs and solutions every time I've updated and had to actually deal with them.

[Ainkor]

sgreger: Unless you specifically made steps to ensure you maintained hardware compatability with the Mac OS (hint: if you didn't know you needed to do such a thing, you probably didn't), you're not dual-booting anything. As far as I know, while OSX has gotten better in the past, there's still a fairly limited range of supported hardware.

Virtual Machines have come a long way, but they also still have their limitations. Chances are, whatever you or your wife want to do has a pretty easy way for you to accomplish it via Windows. Instead of taking really convoluted steps to baby your wife, why not just have her learn how to do it the proper way for doing the task in Windows? If I have to use a Mac for something, I don't spend hours looking for ways to chage Mac so it conforms to the way Windows works. I learn the Mac way of doing it, and do it that way. Anything more is introducing unnecessary complexity to what you're doing, and adding one more layer of difficulty and obfuscation of the origin of errors when inevitably, something fails.

QFT

The bad thing about OS X in VMWare or even dual booting is that updating is a pain. At some point someone will accidentally click on the update and then you run the chance of everything getting hosed. Just tell her that you store all of your midget lesbian porn on your desktop and occasionally stuff might just pop up since its windows. That should do one of two things:

A great great segue into that fantasy 3 way with your wife and a midget or....

She will stay the hell off and shake her head as she walks away. Either would work I think :P

[truthwolf1]

That will be more than you need for photoshop man it'll be blazing. All the photos I work on are like 18mb a piece (taken at the highest resolution my camera can take, shooting in RAW) and mine handles them like they were nothing. Really though it's more about how much RAM you have. I highly suggest getting or upgrading your ram to 10GB, it is amazing how much it helps. At Frys electronics you can buy 4 gigs of ram for $25 and you can just plug it in to upgrade it. For example, I have the i7 which is only a step up from the i5, and I have a widget that monitors my processor speed and I watch it constantly. It idles at .5% and never goes over 13% even when I am doing hardcore photoshop tasks or using after effects, the ram however can sometimes hit 50% or more on photoshop and in after effects I have it set to eat up the whole 10GB when rendering. So I could have 50% of the processor speed I have now and not notice it at all, because the most I use of the i7 currently is maybe 15% of it for any given task. The i5 will be more than you probably need.

Man, that is good to hear!!! I make a living with those high mb photos/designs!! My current system is from 2005-- with a 3.0 ghz dual core which by surprise has been a great processor, even with CS5. Lately it just pushes the limits moving from PHotoshop to Illustrator, back and forth. The memory is maxed to 8gb and yes that definately makes a huge difference. Our company purchased the i5 with 8gb but I will bump it as much as I can. Thanks for the tip of Frys

[sgreger1]

Man, that is good to hear!!! I make a living with those high mb photos/designs!! My current system is from 2005-- with a 3.0 ghz dual core which by surprise has been a great processor, even with CS5. Lately it just pushes the limits moving from PHotoshop to Illustrator, back and forth. The memory is maxed to 8gb and yes that definately makes a huge difference. Our company purchased the i5 with 8gb but I will bump it as much as I can. Thanks for the tip of Frys

Yah you will see a huge difference in using a new 64 bit Windows7 machine with the i5 processor and some decent amount of Ram over your current set up. I run After Effects open in a window while I am photoshopiing 4 or 5 different 18mb pictures at the same time and switching back and forth between them, then sometimes opening up illustrator or some other program and it all happens flawlessly as I switch between them (plus I have Firefox open with like 20 tabs open on top of it). After years of having slow computers it brings a tear to my eye to see things moving so quickly, and watching that guage for my "amount of processor used" stay at like 10% as i'm doing it is just icing on the cake. You are going to be so happy with yuor new setup, but I am telling you, get 10gb of ram. Sometimes my computer idles at 20% of Ram (mainly because of HP's bloatware security shit I need to uninstal), so if I had say only 5 gigs of ram than that would be over half my ram eaten up just by system processes. Spend the extra $100 to upgrade it if you are doing big photoshop files or any kind of post-editing, that way photoshop has enough space to write it to ram as its applying whatever it is your are telling it to do, or if you are having it alter a huge batch of photos as part of some automated process than it will really speed it up.



So what exactly do you do professionally? What sort of services do you offer? (If you don't mind telling us) I know you are in the general area of graphic design but never found out exactly what.

[truthwolf1]

Yah you will see a huge difference in using a new 64 bit Windows7 machine with the i5 processor and some decent amount of Ram over your current set up. I run After Effects open in a window while I am photoshopiing 4 or 5 different 18mb pictures at the same time and switching back and forth between them, then sometimes opening up illustrator or some other program and it all happens flawlessly as I switch between them (plus I have Firefox open with like 20 tabs open on top of it). After years of having slow computers it brings a tear to my eye to see things moving so quickly, and watching that guage for my "amount of processor used" stay at like 10% as i'm doing it is just icing on the cake. You are going to be so happy with yuor new setup, but I am telling you, get 10gb of ram. Sometimes my computer idles at 20% of Ram (mainly because of HP's bloatware security shit I need to uninstal), so if I had say only 5 gigs of ram than that would be over half my ram eaten up just by system processes. Spend the extra $100 to upgrade it if you are doing big photoshop files or any kind of post-editing, that way photoshop has enough space to write it to ram as its applying whatever it is your are telling it to do, or if you are having it alter a huge batch of photos as part of some automated process than it will really speed it up.



So what exactly do you do professionally? What sort of services do you offer? (If you don't mind telling us) I know you are in the general area of graphic design but never found out exactly what.

Dont want to give out too much info but our company creates Uniform and Sportswear programs for close to every type of client. From your lower-end High School teams to big chain establishments like Starbucks. We create our own designs and then take pictures or acquire pictures from the big labels (NIKE, Columbia, Adidas etc..) for websites and brochures. Hosting sites to working with China and India to get product created and then sending it out in the USA. My work is mostly photography and website interface designs. Not so much the coding but I am going to make a effort to get back into it with HTML 5. I use to do a lot of print but not as much lately. It was estimated that about 45% of our clients still prefer to buy things from catalogs though.

[sgreger1]

Dont want to give out too much info but our company creates Uniform and Sportswear programs for close to every type of client. From your lower-end High School teams to big chain establishments like Starbucks. We create our own designs and then take pictures or acquire pictures from the big labels (NIKE, Columbia, Adidas etc..) for websites and brochures. Hosting sites to working with China and India to get product created and then sending it out in the USA. My work is mostly photography and website interface designs. Not so much the coding but I am going to make a effort to get back into it with HTML 5. I use to do a lot of print but not as much lately. It was estimated that about 45% of our clients still prefer to buy things from catalogs though.

Wow that all sounds really awesome. I wish I had a cool profession like that

I am trying to get into photography myself lately, I bought a Canon Rebel T3i for my wife for Christmas since she wanted one but ever since I got it I have been really into photography and have hijacked it, spending most of my days reading everything I can about it and shooting as much as possible to try and get better at it. Any tips for someone who is just getting into using DSLR photography? Right now I am trying to figure out how to get lighting right indoors. I bought 2 500 watt shop lamps and a 250 wat lamp and use those for the green screen room that I turned one of my spare bedrooms into, and those do well to keep the lighting even on the green screen, but the light is way too harsh for taking pics of my wife for example or anything else (like my attempts to take pics of our xmas tree last night lol). I am looking into getting some umbrella fixtures and a remote flash to bring some softer light into the picture for when I take portraits. But my real passion is photographing nature, I love going on hikes and just taking pics as I go. Right now all I have is a tripod, the stock kit lens, and a polarizing filte, but that's all I really need right now. If I get rich someday I will buy a better lens but they are so damn expensive that it's kind of out of the question.



Do you ever do any video editing, like after effects or premier or anything? Or is it all mainly 2d mediums that you work with?

[lxskllr]

Is that you Richard? Nah, can't be, that's a bit too soft of a stance.

[Crow]

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[sgreger1]

Elect this man ****ing president. On a side-note, this is the worst production quality for an RT interview I have ever seen. The sound guy is not mixing it correctly and the green screen is completely off, what gives?

[lxskllr]

Elect this man ****ing president.

Indeed. One thing you can count on with Stallman, is he'll tell you exactly what he thinks, and he won't compromise his ideals for anything. People talk about compromise like it's a good thing. I tend to disagree. Some things ARE black and white, and compromise dilutes the truth. *Stallman's views on software are somewhat controversial, and he has a tendency to alienate people, but he's pretty much right. Freedom for all should always trump financial gain for the few.


*RMS on Steve Jobs' death...

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.


As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.


Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.

And his clarification(He's a stickler for details and accuracy). A little more conciliatory? Nope! :^D...

In my first posting about Steve Jobs, I misquoted Mayor Washington's words. According to this radio program, his exact words were:

When he says that he would hope that I would have all the good qualities of past mayors, there are no good qualities of past mayors to be had. None. None. None. None.
I did not mourn at the bier of the late mayor. I regret anyone dying. I have no regrets about him leaving.

I remembered two sentences ("I regret...leaving.") of what Washington said, but got the words wrong. The error did not alter the meaning, but accuracy requires this correction.
Overall, Washington's statement was harsher than mine. He criticized Mayor Daley as a person; I criticized Jobs' public activity. My feelings about Jobs as a person are not strong, since I barely knew him. The important thing about Jobs is what he directed Apple to do to those who are still living: to make general-purpose computers with digital handcuffs more controlling and unjust than ever before. He designed them to refuse even to let users install their own choice of applications — and installing free (freedom-respecting) applications is entirely forbidden. He even tried to make it illegal to install software not approved by Apple.
Jobs saw how to make these computers stylish and smooth. That would normally be positive, but not in this case, since it has the paradoxical effect of making their controlling nature seem acceptable.
Jobs' death inspired a flood of articles lauding him for these very devices. That further increases their potential for harm, which is why now more than ever we must focus attention on it. We must not let secondary considerations about Apple or Jobs distract us from this threat until we have thwarted it.
Jobs also made it a personal crusade to attack Android with software patents. In practice, Android is not entirely free software, but it is a big step closer compared with the iPhone. If Apple's guns hit Android, they could wipe out all possibility of free software portable devices that are attractive to use. Jobs' final legacy may be the patent disaster we have warned about for 20 years.

:^D

[sgreger1]

FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY... please someone help me with this ridiculous issue I am having.

I bought a Seagate Barracuda 3TB 7200RPM HDD and I got it all installed okay, but what I am trying to do is make a clone of my existing 1.5 TB drive onto my new one os that I can use my new HDD as the boot/master that will host my OS and all my programs.

In other words, I had a 5400 RPM 1.5TB hard drive and I want to move everything to the new 3TB 7200 RPM HDD. The problem is that in their stupid disc utility tool used to clone the drives it only shows as having 745.6 GB available for some reason so it won't clone the drive. I then got a copy of Norton Ghost 15 and that won't make a clone of my existing disc either...


I have spent nearly 12 consecutive hours on this. Does anyone know how to make a copy of one hard drive and move it onto another, so that I can then use my newer faster hard drive as my main hard drive? I've read everything on the entire internet I swear and nothing is working.