Adam V’s Tumble Blog

[Brother],

Here are various ways you can incorporate linux into a future computing platform.

1) A plain dual boot system with windows and linux on it.
Advantages:  Both operating systems have complete access to hardware, both run at full speed.
Disadvantages:  While you can mount a windows hard drive partition in linux, you probably won’t be able to mount the linux partition in windows; have to reboot every time you want to switch.

2) You can download one of the better virtualization suites out there.  The two best are VMWare (vmware.com) and Virtualbox (virtualbox.com – the one I use).  They are both free for personal use.  These programs usually have special driver’s you can install on the “guest” OS to make them a little bit faster.  I’d actually recommend making Linux the main operating system, and making windows the guest, because the virtulization programs can modify the linux kernel a bit easier than they can with windows.  Also, check to see if your new AMD processor has hardware acceleration for virtualization (the AMD-V extensions).
Advantages:  Don’t have to reboot all the time; you can designate a “shared folder” that both can access; some of this software let’s the  “guest” OS access the 3D card; you can take a “snapshot” of a guest system and reload it any time you want (like on video game console emulator)
Disadvantages:  Hogs RAM; Slows down performance; the Technology is still evolving

3) Run linux as your only OS and use WINE (winehq.org) to run windows programs in linux
Advantages:  Only one system to maintain; much faster than virtulization
Disadvantages:  Some programs are not supported;  newer graphics support can be touch-and-go

Also, you need to get a linux distribution to install.  The best one right now is Ubuntu (ubuntu.com).

——

Adam V

via Tom’s Hardware

The six different barks were called “stranger”, a response to seeing a new person in the house, “fight”, when the dog’s owner encouraged the dog to bark, “walk”, in preparation for an outside walk, “alone”, when the dog was tied up with no one around, “ball”, when the owner was holding a ball or other kind of toy, and “play”, a bark used when the owner was playing a game with the dog.

via MIT News

Antonio Torralba, assistant professor in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and colleagues have been trying to find out what is the smallest amount of information–that is, the shortest numerical representation–that can be derived from an image that will provide a useful indication of its content.

My profile, for people who use it.