Inquiring minds want to know...

Or bad compared to a gang member, a warlord's soldier, or even security consultant?

Do you mean the NYPD? Those are all pretty apt descriptions of them.

Well this was 2006 by my best estimation, not fifteen years ago. I was ripping DVDs of Slayers: Next if I remember right, and turning them into iPod formatted MP4 files with the subtitles burned into them. There wasn't a free, push-button solution solution that I could find at that point in time that would do all that. Sure, there were tools that would rip a DVD into DiVX format or something. But I needed them resized, transcoded into h264 (or whatever), and the subtitle track extracted and added into the video stream graphically, as the Nano didn't support subtitles. That required a script--so no, I don't believe it was an exaggeration. There's a big difference between simply "ripping DVDs" and "Turning a DVD into something properly formatted for an iPod". :)

And as far as Handbrake, looks like they removed libdvdcss from it, so a default install can't remove DRM from DVD videos anymore.

I think I used MakeMKV the last time I had to rip a DVD. If it's the software I remembered, it did a damn good job. But then again, my Nano broke years ago so I don't need iPod compatible video files anymore. MKV containers work fine on Plex, XBMC, and Android.

It wasn't intended as an advertisement. You could fairly assume it was an unsolicited endorsement, I suppose, but I don't know anything about Cucusoft's current offerings to be honest. This was a long time ago.

If Handbrake (for some reason I thought Handbrake was an OS X only solution, so hadn't looked at it recently) has progressed to the point that there's a single button press for "Rip this DVD for my iPod" then that's worth knowing, and it makes the "only technically savvy people..." statement even more silly.

My Dad asked me once how I got DVDs that I owned onto my iPod Nano, and if he would be able to do it himself. I told him it was a pretty convoluted process involving multiple pieces of software I downloaded and built from source, some shell scripts, and invoking the Nyarlthotep, the Crawling Chaos, at the appropriate moment.

After a few minutes of research, I bought my Dad a piece of software for $20 that with one button click rips a DVD and transcodes it into an iPod-compatible file. I believe it was something from Cucusoft. I then watched him easily rip his entire DVD collection to an external hard drive using that software, This made me realize something important: The saying "Sure, a tech savvy person could do this, but not an average user..." is only true because "tech savvy" people (like myself) are morons and will happily accept a poor user experience and hours of lost productivity to save $20, and then pat themselves on the back because they did something "cool". Meanwhile the "average user" has already been watching their movie for a couple hours.

Or my favorite example from my home town, LUSFiber.

Your local government has picked Charter to be the local monopolist. The solution isn't to get Verizon to lay lines, it's to allow alternative cable providers to operate. If it comes down to it, require Charter to sell access to their lines. If Charter throws a fit, see how they like running cable without government granted right-of-ways.

Also, the Federal Government fscking LOVES XML. Like, a lot. The things I saw in the new "protocols" they're deploying for internatl air-traffic control data stuff... Wow...

Having said that, I don't really have much sympathy for someone who's trying to help students and employees circumvent network policy. They can watch their porn or check facebook on their own time.

Actually at my last job I'd regularly have to "circumvent network policy" to just do my goddamn job. That policy was quite literally set by Congress, by the way, so good luck getting it fixed.

Maybe we shouldn't apply technical solutions to these sort of non-technical problems. Maybe we should just discipline/fire people who waste time at work, or trash school computers.

So you read the handy transcript right below the video, right?

I see the benefit of driverless cars, but people need jobs too.

I fail to see what job would be eliminated by my purchase of a driverless car.

So that the Java Calendar objects provide consistent(ly bad) behavior across all platforms.

Not really a dumb question, just have to understand that's a design goal for Java: to abstract away anything platform specific.

There are limited run craft brews that get up to the $100-200 range per bottle.

I several times a year buy $10-15 bottles of beer.

I think you haven't done your market research very well.

I really appreciate the assurances of random anonymous giggling internet tough guys.

They really help me sleep at night.

Eclipse tries really hard to have good C++ support. I'm using Indigo still (I think), on my workstation. It does a few things well, but some of the automatic warning/error detection is bad bad bad...

As far as GUI editing, Qt's Creator is actually pretty great. Curious how it will integrate QtQuick going forward. As someone else pointed out, Eclipse actually has really good GUI editing capabilities for Java now, thanks to Google.

So, yeah. I think Eclipse + Plugins (and Qt Creator) is plenty sufficient for development on Linux. Is it as good as Visual Studio on Windows? No. But I'd MUCH rather develop a GUI-based desktop application for Linux using Qt 4.x than ever having to deal with Swing... and GridBag...