[NetBehaviour] why i'm tempted to delete vista

[james morris]

On 15/8/2009, "Alan Sondheim" <sondheim at panix.com> wrote:

>
>
>The issue I have with linux - it stops me cold - is video. I also think
>this is true for a lot of people who otherwise might switch to the OS. (I
>use it on an Asus EEE PC, on two old Sharp Zauruses, and on a Kubuntu
>flashdrive.) There's no support as far as I've been able to find for .mov
>or .avi which are pretty much standard. .mp4 plays as audio; there's no
>handling for the H264 compression among other things. There may be fixes

ffmpeg supports all these things, though while watching some of your
videos, there are warnings about brainfart (!?) cropping not being fully
supported. VLC is another good one, uses ffmpeg too. I've not recently
had any problems watching what you produce - I don't watch much video
tho - and that's in Debian which is always a bit behind the times.

You should try a multimedia centric linux distro for sure.

>and workarounds, but it's a nuisance. And unless you're an animation farm,
>the editing is useless. I also don't like Audacity for that matter - too

I've occasionally tried video editing, having never got anywhere.

I really don't like Audacity, the GUI is horrible. I never use it. Try
SND if you know scheme - which is where most of its functionality lies.

>much of it is obscure, and at least with CoolEdit I have total control
>over reverb/echo/sweetening, notch filters and the like. Linux is still a

I have total control over reverb/echo/sweetening, notch filters and the
like in Linux. I recently ported some old LADSPA plugins to the new LV2
standard. (LADSPA and LV2 are ways of writing plugins for linux audio
applications).

For audio, you need JACK, ardour2 is superb though perhaps a bit overkill
for your requirements ( but i'm not familiar with cooledit ) as it's a
digital audio work station designed for pro studio usage/hard disk
recording etc. - Again get a multimedia centric Linux distro if you
don't care to set this up yourself.

>hacker's paradise (I use the command like all the time), but it's way
>behind on multimedia - and that's the way the world's going. So I'm stuck.
>Damn!

It's catching up slowly.

>Can you say something about AHCI? (I think this is worthwhile for other
>users on these lists, since a lot of us work linux one way or another, and
>the OS is free, lean, and relatively fast.)

AHCI? Advanced Host Controller Interface. It's some hardware thing for
SATA  hard drives and the like. It supersedes IDE.


James.


>On Sat, 15 Aug 2009, james morris wrote:
>
>>
>> Yeah I think you are probably right about AVG, I might have just got
>> carried away there. It was Zone Alarm that was playing up. Last time I
>> used ZA, it seemed fine - 3 months ago.
>>
>> Also, I've not really noticed any particular difference in disk speed
>> between having AHCI on or off. In Linux, using the hdparm -t command
>> shows very little difference in performance with AHCI on and disabled.
>>
>> There's an article on wikipedia about AHCI and Vista, with links to
>> fixes. It's nice to see that Windows has a long list of problems with
>> AHCI, while Linux is only struggling with one or two issues particular
>> to certain hardware.
>>
>> Both Intel and AMD are contributing code to the Linux kernel for it to
>> work with their new technologies within their latest processors (not
>> that I can afford them) while Linux is also going to be the first OS to
>> support the new USB3 hardware.
>>
>>
>> On 15/8/2009, "Alan Sondheim" <sondheim at panix.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> more reasons -
>>>
>>> the UAC is miserable. the audio balloons are almost impossible to turn
>>> off. it's slower than XP. constant permission messiness with the console.
>>> no tweakUI without paying for it. too much configuration - too many
>>> effects to disable. AVG does work btw and auto-updates. I'm waiting for 7,
>>> see if I can put it on top w/out losing efficiency or the programs I'm
>>> using.
>>> - alan
>>>
>>> On Sat, 15 Aug 2009, james morris wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> why i'm tempted to delete vista
>>>> -------------------------------
>>>>
>>>> 1) I must disable SATA AHCI mode in the BIOS because Vista Home Premium
>>>> can't handle it. Consequently the hard drives are not operating at full
>>>> speed. If I don't do this, Vista crashes around 2 seconds after it
>>>> first begins booting up.
>>>>
>>>> 2) I've got no software that makes using Vista worth the hassle. I have
>>>> two games, Tomb Raider, and Crysis, but I can't be bothered to play
>>>> them because it feels so unproductive and a waste of time learning how
>>>> to.
>>>>
>>>> 3) Somewhere along the line while Windows was downloading and installing
>>>> updates, it broke something. While I was fumbling around in Tomb Raider,
>>>> Windows suddenly decided it had better things to do and began
>>>> configuring updates. It got halfway along configuring update 2 of 3 and
>>>> then decided it wouldn't bother after all... it rebooted the computer
>>>> instead.
>>>>
>>>> 4) The firewall and anti virus software crashed and I can't be bothered
>>>> to keep updating them either. They suck. So does the trial version of
>>>> the Nero or something media player which does nothing but suck.
>>>>
>>>> 5) Because I don't ever use Vista. It would free up some disk space if I
>>>> were to delete it.
>>>>
>>>> 6) It's good to do a bit of cleaning and dump things which are unused.
>>>>
>>>> 7) It's been at least 3 months since I used Vista. And I only used it
>>>> then because someone sent me a Word document as an attachment. It seemed
>>>> that OpenOffice.org could not read the contents. Turned out I was sent
>>>> an empty document.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ONE NOT VERY GOOD REASON WHY I SHOULD NOT DELETE VISTA
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------
>>>>
>>>> 1) I might need it for some irritating reason, presently unknown to me,
>>>> in the future.
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
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>
>
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>| sondheim at panix.com, sondheim at gmail.org, tel US 718-813-3285
>! http://www.facebook.com/alan.sondheim
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