If you plan on buying that system to run 64bit Linux, last I checked ATI still had not released 64bit drivers for Linux.
While that's true, I believe the standard open-source radeon will work fine. They don't do 3D acceleration, but that's only an issue if you plan on playing 3D Linux games. Someone who would sink that kind of money into a gaming rig would probably be a mostly-Windows gamer, since there aren't too many visually demanding Linux games, and won't be until Doom3.
I've got a dual Athlon MP 2200+ w/ an SB Audigy and Radeon 9700 PRO. It works fine under Windows and Linux, and I've never had an SMP driver problems. Your friend did something wrong.
Neither would crash. Since there's not a recursive loop, the/. front page would simply get a little bit more traffic than usual (if it can handle 9/11, it can handle a Fark link). Fark itself would only have to do the redirecting, which is neither CPU- nor bandwidth-intensive.
You'll have to burn a CD and re-rip to get it into a non-DRM file, which will degrade the quality somewhat.
Alternately, you could hack the encryption, now that programs for doing so are circulating. Then you end up with a professionally-encoded, high-quality AAC file instead of the lesser-quality ripped MP3 or same-quality but much larger ripped FLAC.
Most WMA-supporting players (including Napster) can play DRM'd WMA files, which is what you get from every music store except iTunes. So basically, everything's compatible with everything else except for iPod/iTunes. It's conceivable that some other player could add AAC support. Also, RockBox, ipodlinux, or some other open firmware project could potentially add support for alternate formats, but that's a long shot.
An emulator emulates an actual physical processor, creating basically a whole new machine in software. Emulators, like VirtualPC and Bochs, can run x86 software on non-x86 hardware - Macs for example.
A virtualizer creates a new virtual machine on your current hardware, with instructions passed directly to the processor. They can only run software intended for the hardware they're on - so VMWare can't run Windows software on a Mac, but it can run x86 Windows software under x86 Linux. Since software is run natively by real hardware, virtualizers are generally quite a bit faster than emulators.
Basically, an emulator creates a whole new machine-within-a-machine, while a virtualizer just fools a guest OS into thinking it's the only thing on the machine.
I have an Athlon 1700+ with 768mb of DDR RAM and a Radeon 8500, why can I type faster than Gnome 2.4 can draw on my screen?
Are you sure X is set up properly and you're not using VESA or something? My ancient 500Mhz K6-2 w/ Voodoo3 can easily keep up with my (reasonably fast) typing in GNOME or KDE.
but they don't have the deep design skills fostered by the commercial groups.
Bullshit. The Linux kernel, Mozilla, XFree86, Apache, GIMP, Gnumeric, OO.o, and many others are quite complex and well designed, often more so than their commercial counterparts. There's no reason a team of open-source developers couldn't create an excellent DV editor.
That said, video editing is a rather niche field, and an open-source Final Cut Pro would likely not get enough developers to make much headway (case in point: Cinelerra). Possibly in the future something new will spring up, but the best solution at the moment is probably a G5 with Final Cut Pro (or Express).
With a decent sound card (any Creative card since the Live!, for example), ALSA supports hardware mixing, so any number of applications can access sound at once.
Outlook does not "execute all attachments". In fact current versions won't even allow the user to choose to execute an attachment without going through a few hoops. I dislike MS as much as anyone else, but please get the facts straight.
Another way to look at it is that Gates is keeping far more money for himself than I or any other/.er does. Gates should be commended for his generosity, but I don't think he's extaordinarily generous - most people would do the same thing if they had multibillion-dollar fortunes. After all, he couldn't really spend it all even if he wanted to.
No. RSA encryption, and public-key encryption in general, uses significantly higher keysizes to attain the same security as private-key cryptosystems at lower keysizes. The difference is that, in a public-key cryptosystem, two parties can talk securely without already both knowing a secret key.
128-bit private-key encryption is virtually impossible to break, because you'd have to test every single 128-bit number. 576-bit public-key encryption is much easier, because you don't have to test every possible key. In this case, RSA uses prime numbers to generate keys. You have to factor the given 576-bit composite into its prime factors, which is much easier than testing every possible 576-bit key (or even every possible 128-bit key).
Slashdot Mirror
While that's true, I believe the standard open-source radeon will work fine. They don't do 3D acceleration, but that's only an issue if you plan on playing 3D Linux games. Someone who would sink that kind of money into a gaming rig would probably be a mostly-Windows gamer, since there aren't too many visually demanding Linux games, and won't be until Doom3.
I've got a dual Athlon MP 2200+ w/ an SB Audigy and Radeon 9700 PRO. It works fine under Windows and Linux, and I've never had an SMP driver problems. Your friend did something wrong.
If you would read the fucking article, you'd see that that's exactly what this setup does, among other things.
Neither would crash. Since there's not a recursive loop, the /. front page would simply get a little bit more traffic than usual (if it can handle 9/11, it can handle a Fark link). Fark itself would only have to do the redirecting, which is neither CPU- nor bandwidth-intensive.
Alternately, you could hack the encryption, now that programs for doing so are circulating. Then you end up with a professionally-encoded, high-quality AAC file instead of the lesser-quality ripped MP3 or same-quality but much larger ripped FLAC.
Most WMA-supporting players (including Napster) can play DRM'd WMA files, which is what you get from every music store except iTunes. So basically, everything's compatible with everything else except for iPod/iTunes. It's conceivable that some other player could add AAC support. Also, RockBox, ipodlinux, or some other open firmware project could potentially add support for alternate formats, but that's a long shot.
A virtualizer creates a new virtual machine on your current hardware, with instructions passed directly to the processor. They can only run software intended for the hardware they're on - so VMWare can't run Windows software on a Mac, but it can run x86 Windows software under x86 Linux. Since software is run natively by real hardware, virtualizers are generally quite a bit faster than emulators.
Basically, an emulator creates a whole new machine-within-a-machine, while a virtualizer just fools a guest OS into thinking it's the only thing on the machine.
There are many other major brands that can sell millions on reputation along. Blizzard and id are good examples.
Technically, no. A virtualizer like VMWare could achieve the same effect.
Quake 4 is being built on the Doom 3 engine. I don't think Doom has much reason to be scared of itself.
Any browser released within the past decade has support for changing the font size. You might want to look into that.
This is not the hot rod world. Fugly has a different, more appropriate meaning
Are you sure X is set up properly and you're not using VESA or something? My ancient 500Mhz K6-2 w/ Voodoo3 can easily keep up with my (reasonably fast) typing in GNOME or KDE.
Because it would be buggy, a pain to implement, and an additional layer of overhead on an already none-too-speedy desktop.
Konqueror used to have a Gecko rendering backend available. I haven't heard about it in a while, maybe it died from lack of interest.
Only until the open-source OS implements support.
And that's why they're directing it, and not you. Books and movies are two different mediums. What works in one does not work in the other.
And it's bigger than an iPod and has maybe 1% of the capacity.
Oops. Guess slashcode it smarter than I gave it credit for. The \0x01 was there in preview, but got stripped altogether when I posted.
Google
Bullshit. The Linux kernel, Mozilla, XFree86, Apache, GIMP, Gnumeric, OO.o, and many others are quite complex and well designed, often more so than their commercial counterparts. There's no reason a team of open-source developers couldn't create an excellent DV editor.
That said, video editing is a rather niche field, and an open-source Final Cut Pro would likely not get enough developers to make much headway (case in point: Cinelerra). Possibly in the future something new will spring up, but the best solution at the moment is probably a G5 with Final Cut Pro (or Express).
With a decent sound card (any Creative card since the Live!, for example), ALSA supports hardware mixing, so any number of applications can access sound at once.
Outlook does not "execute all attachments". In fact current versions won't even allow the user to choose to execute an attachment without going through a few hoops. I dislike MS as much as anyone else, but please get the facts straight.
Another way to look at it is that Gates is keeping far more money for himself than I or any other /.er does. Gates should be commended for his generosity, but I don't think he's extaordinarily generous - most people would do the same thing if they had multibillion-dollar fortunes. After all, he couldn't really spend it all even if he wanted to.
128-bit private-key encryption is virtually impossible to break, because you'd have to test every single 128-bit number. 576-bit public-key encryption is much easier, because you don't have to test every possible key. In this case, RSA uses prime numbers to generate keys. You have to factor the given 576-bit composite into its prime factors, which is much easier than testing every possible 576-bit key (or even every possible 128-bit key).