Looks like something between 640x480 and 2000000x1500000. Also, needs moar lensflare.

So is the Algebra coming along?

Those monitors are 1440x900 iirc.

You're right. That's a lot of Compaq so the power supply, CD drive, or hard drive are due to spontaneously break down any minute!

..!!..then doused in a few liters of condensed water.

According to the attached picture, Macs are catering to the market that are confused and intimidated by other computers.

...which is nice. But consider that 20 years later, computers are still bemusing, confusing and intimidating.

But now they are catering even better to computer experts who no longer care to go through the horrible pain of keeping an UNIX rig working.

For his unwavering loyalty and service to the King, >>5 will be awarded 72 virgins in the afterlife.

This apt has super cow powers?

Because they don't open their API?

>>1

>>2
Pic's out of date, from a couple of years ago. ATI (now a subsection of AMD or sth like that) have in fact released substantial register-level specs for some of their video cards.

Freedom?
I just don't buy them because they'll boast a feature on the box and not support it, cheat on benchmarks, have drivers from hell, ugly renders, and frequent compatibility issues with games.

Don't think ATI or nVidia is really in it for your "freedom."

>>5
RMS's view of freedom is about the liberty to control one's system and the liberty to cooperate in a community. When this image was relevant, neither the driver source code or the technical hardware specifications were available to the public. Without these crucial publications, the users of these are stuck to only one vendor to control their hardware - Ati. If the users had these publications, then the user can help themselves.

>>6
RMS's view of freedom is that freedom is a thing you enforce.

Somebody called?

>>7
Really? Where does he say that?

what

Seagates are very noisy and their performance as desktop drives are not as good as other manufacturers. So, I'd say go for the Western Digital. You may also wish to consider Hitachi drives.

For the external enclosure, yes, you need an internal SATA interface with an external USB2.0 interface. Take a look at Akasa's Integral range, some support both PATA and SATA drives and have an additional eSATA output.

>>2
Seconding the Western Digital recommendation

Whatever you do, avoid Maxtor drives

Incidentally, I have a 320 GB Seagate drive and it doesn't make any noticeable noise above the other things in my case but then again drive noise isn't a priority to me

Never had a problem with Maxtor since the last 10 disks (also, Maxtor is now Seagate but they probably still have separate production lines).

Two of my last 5 Western Digital disks blew up but for their defense, their RMA procedure works well.

One has to be lucky I guess

Google's report on their hard drive failures pretty much ended this debate; all manufacturers were practically identical. It doesn't matter what manufacturer you choose.

Thanks Anonymous for the Google hint, which led to: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/25/google_barroso_datacenter/
and hence http://www.barroso.org/

But note that the paper does not say that all the manufactuers were identical, indeed it says the contrary. It just says that the paper's conclusions are not changed whether you group by disk series or not:

"Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do not contradict this fact. For example, Figure 2 changes significantly when we normalize failure rates per each drive model. Most age-related results are impacted by drive vintages. However, in this paper, we do not show a breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage due to the proprietary nature of these data. Interestingly, this does not change our conclusions. In contrast to age-related results, we note that all results shown in the rest of the paper are not affected significantly
by the population mix. None of our SMART data
results change significantly when normalized by drive model. The only exception is seek error rate, which is dependent on one specific drive manufacturer, as we discuss in section 3.5.5."

My Maxtor survived this! A Miracle!

>>I don't want to be responsible for soldering or wiring a bunch of delicate parts.

This doesn't happen when building a pc.
Also you can just find a local person to pay $20 to build it for you if you're worried about breaking something.

tomshardware.com is a good free web sight full of information you will find useful.

>Anyway, what about buying an HP or Gateway or something around the 4400-5000 processor range with 2 gigs of RAM and a nice size hard drive, and then adding an 8600 or 8800 GT vid card? Is that a basically decent method?

No.

Building a computer is as difficult as plugging things that only fit one way into holes or slots. If you know how to use a screwdriver you'll be fine.

Also, what exactly is a '4400-5000' processor?

Making a PC is pretty lego hardware-wise. Just remember to touch the metal chassis of your PC case periodically to electrically ground yourself, and try not to touch CPU pins/card contacts directly. Delicate parts are rare.

It can be tough putting a heatsink on a CPU - or easy depending how it's designed. Just remember, a THIN coat of thermal paste will do the trick.