DV for Teachers

Duplicate unencrypted DVDs in How To Make Copies of DVDs. This will only work with computer-burned DVDs, not encrypted ones, like movie rentals. Make backups of your software DVDs, for example, or duplicate projects from iDVD. Even make backup copies of iMovie project files if you think you’ll want to change your edits later, but need the disk space now.

OS X’s Burn Folders are explained in Burning Data CDs and DVDs in Leopard and Tiger. I’ve never used burn Folders as I have always used Roxio Toast Titanium, but if you want to use only what comes with your Mac, this is easier than I expected.

In a virtual machine on a MacBook Pro, Windows XP Professional took 18 seconds to restart, from choosing “Restart” to the restarted login screen. Dang, that’s fast.

I also just learned that we could take our existing PC configuration, the Windows image that Reginald Brewer installs on all our lab PCs, and convert it to a virtual machine installed on our Macs. If the licensing issues are covered – if the keyserver keeps too many instances of a given app from starting up – then I have a lot less to worry about. This is pretty impressive. I am sure there are gotchas yet to come, and a learning curve to climb, but I am really encouraged.

VMWare also allows Macs to run several virtual machines at the same time: different flavors of Linux; Sun Solaris; they even support more versions of Windows than Microsoft does, as their rep, Brian Whitman says, including Windows 95 and 3.1, if that’s what you need to run an old application, even games. So-o-o many possibilities.