This paper argues that intangible files, such as MP3s will never replace the role of physical objects such as LPs, CDs and casettes since music enthusiasts are collectors, and just the ability to listen to music is not enough, rather a tangible object is desired.
This sounds wacky, but I think it's true. I got a bunch of MP3s of Primus. I had heard the odd Primus song before and after hearing a whole bunch of MP3s I realised I liked them.
Now I could have just burnt their songs onto CD-R and be done with it. I only listen to CDs on a discman these days anyway, so I don't care too much about sound quality. 128kbps MP3 is good enough for me.
Instead I went and bought every Primus album I could find. I'm not sure why. It would have only cost me $5 to put all the MP3s onto CD-R, print off the album covers, and I'd have something not half-bad without the effort. Buying the CDs was a relatively difficult thing to do!
You can't spread falsehoods, but if you stick to the truth McDonald's can't legally touch you.
If only this were true. You may have already read it, but for anybody who hasn't had the chance to read McLibel it's a fascinating investigation into the inadequacies of the British legal system in defamation cases.
Basically two very poor people got sued by McDonalds. These two people said things like "McDonalds food it not nutritous" and "McDonalds beef is grown on land that was previously rainforests". Nothing to dispute there, right?
McDonalds argued that anything with nutrients is nutritous: this definition covered paper, soil, and so on. They also argued that because the forests hadn't received rainfall 365 days a year they were not rainforests.
The judge agreed with this nonsense, ignored the experts brought in by the defendants, and somehow allowed his common sense to slip far enough to rule against the two very poor people.
Telling the truth is not a legal defence. If you have enough money - as McDonalds did - then you get to write your own laws.
Virtually no PC game allows head-to-head play without everyone owning their own PC and then networking them together.
Even if all of the above were satisfied you can't crowd 6 people around a 17" monitor.
Even if you could, most people don't have couches and tables around their computer for spectators to watch them game.
You're not wrong - I agree 100% with all four of your points - but I just thought I'd throw in a suggestion.
Put your computer in front of the couch! I did this recently and it's a dream. Use that TV-OUT, get a wireless keyboard and wireless optical mouse, sit on your couch, and enjoy widescreen TV while browsing and irc'ing.
I now have a clean desk - perfect for doing paperwork - and a comfortable place to use my PC. I don't know why I didn't do it sooner because I've had the benefit of console gaming on the TV for years.
Moreover, the
agreement appears to give Microsoft too many opportunities
to undermine the free software movement.
Why did you USAnians not vote this guy in as president? Nader has consistently shown himself to be perhaps the only American politician with any clue, ever.
Instead you lot went to a two party choice between Mr Personality and The Chimp. And the Chimp won!
The world weeps.
Re:Ternary has been known to be efficient...
on
Ternary Computing
·
· Score: 2
6 years as an electronics repair technician, USAF. BSEE. 13 years as a test engineer. I don't design logic IC's, but I might know more about circuit design than you.
With all due respect, you do know that this is like saying "19 years as a mechanic, I think I know more about thermodynamics than you do". That's not an insult against your skills as an electronics repair technician: electronics is larger than any one person can lay claim to.
And really, the problem here isn't about YOU knowing more about electronics than ME. It's not even about YOU knowing more about ternary logic than ME. It's about YOU or others like you who are saying they know more about ternary logic than the scientists and engineers working on this stuff. That really gets my goat.
And I don't see ternary logic in gate schematics...
They can be tri-state, but the third state is to turn both transistors off, allowing other chips to put binary signals on the same wires.
Now, I don't understand how you can say both sentences in the same paragraph without alarm bells going off in your mind. Design a circuit without tri-state logic. Now design the same circuit with tri-state logic. Which one required more transistors and will therefore consume more power and produce more heat? A good example that proves the point is a 4-bit bus. Binary logic forces you into a power-wasting ring-bus design.
Re:Ternary has been known to be efficient...
on
Ternary Computing
·
· Score: 2
Since transistors only work one way, what you seem to be suggesting would come out as a dual binary circuit -- one half processing plus or ground signals, the other half processing ground or minus signals. 100% more circuitry for 50% more information.
Gates in electronics aren't single transistors. They are many transistors and a handful of passive components. An actual gate will start with an unoptimised design and then remove redundant components. Your assumption that ternary gates would require exactly twice as many transistors is completely flawed. Check out any 74xx diagram in a National Semiconductor book: they show the internal schematic down to the transistor level.
Ternary is quite nice mathematically, but the only practical application seems to be ternary decision trees and menus
The incredible nonsense of all this is that ternary is already in use in electronics. It's just not called ternary. People abstract their circuits back to binary before passing info to the next gate, but in the schematics for any gate you can clearly see ternary logic used as an optimisation of the internal design.
This is why I'm annoyed with you armchair electronic hobbyists going on and on about resistor values and middle voltages. I even saw a previous poster inexpertly try to explain why quiescent current proves the non-viability of ternary logic. You seem to be explaining away what the circuit designers are already doing!
Uh, 386bsd developed into Free because it was too large to just be a patch.
The name change to FreeBSD was because Bill Jolitz refused to handover the project and would not apply patches. The three developers of Free were going to call it 386BSD 0.5 until Bill went back on his earlier approval of the patchkit.
NetBSD was sprung from 386BSD after a bunch of developers expressed frustration with the slow pace of 386BSD. The first NetBSD release was a combination of Net/2 and 386BSD as a port to the Macintosh.
And OpenBSD forked from NetBSD because of disagreements between Theo and pretty much everyone else. Theo is still disagreeing with everyone else. He's famous for it.
I think that pretty much proves my point that *BSD aren't exempt from infighting.
Net evolved from 4.4bsd.
It evolved from Net/2 and 386BSD. If you'd bothered to read the netbsd.org site you'd have learnt this too.
You're a moron.
You're ignorant.
Re:Ternary has been known to be efficient...
on
Ternary Computing
·
· Score: 1
Fewer transistors would increase yields if the cost of producing each transistor were equal. And how can it decrease costs?
Even in the unexpected that costs of producing both transistors are equal, you'll only get increased yields and not reduced costs.
So in your world, you don't think that the disposal of a waste product is a cost? You somehow think that when your yields are lower that the non-sellable items magically disappear?
How in hell did your post get modded up? Simple: the same way yours did.
Now I see why you're posting at 1. You don't even preview things before you post them. Which "your" should I remove from your quip before it makes sense?
I do not doubt that the 2.4 Linux kernel does a better job at SMP than FreeBSD (release/stable) does...
How is this different to my comment of "BSD has poorer SMP than Linux"?
Obviously, you don't really know much about locking at all.
I didn't make any comment about locking.
Most processing occurs in userland, far away from kernel locks, so it doesn't tend to matter all that much.
Really?
To those of you babbling on and on about 'the giant spinlock', you might want to go do some research into the theory, and practice, of implementing locks in threaded systems. Until then, shut up, please.
... netbsd have had to be VERY smart about smp (and multiprocessing, in general) for a long time...
Read the NetBSD feature list by platform. Only 5 platforms have any NetBSD-support for SMP at all and not one of them is stable or usable. Four of the five have "spinup" support only.
http://www.netbsd.org/developers/features/
Myths and rumors.
Re:Ternary has been known to be efficient...
on
Ternary Computing
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Tertary would put us into "middle" voltage. But middle on the input, creates middle on the output, no direct way to get either high or low - making basic circuits more complex.
But the real killer with "middle" is manufacturing. Let's say we use 2.8 Volts for the high level, 0.2 Volts for the low level. Due to manufacturing tolerances some chips transistors would be "fully" open at 2.3 Volts, others at 2.7 Volts. Easy to compensate on binary designs, you just use the 2.8 to switch the transistor, but for the middle level? What's required to switch a transistor to middle on one chip, is sufficient to open the transistor completely on another chip...
Why would you choose such a brain dead scheme? 2.8V as your "middle" choice? A sensible scheme would have been +ve rail, -ve rail, and ground. This builds upon 100 years of analog electronics and op-amps. Locking a voltage to a rail is extremely easy AND fast.
Plus disadvantages in power consumption and and and...
The benefit of a ternary scheme is that you have LESS power consumption to achieve the same work. Your individual flip-flap-flops are more complex than a binary flip-flop, but you need fewer flip-flap-flops. Overall you'll have fewer transistors and subsequently less heat than the equivalent binary circuit.
So your manufacturing tolerances become way smaller, and that of course reduces yield which increases cost.
The fact that fewer transistors are required to achieve the same work (despite the fact that there are more transistors per gate) will INCREASE the yields. This DECREASES costs.
I really hate to say this, but I'm wondering if jumping ship to freebsd (etc) makes sense. I've been a major linux supporter for quite a long time, but I know that the *bsd guys have had their act together (good smp, good networking under load, etc) for a long time.
*BSD has poorer SMP than Linux. Networking is arguable (some benchmarks show Linux is faster, some don't).
*BSD has also had more than it's own fair share of infighting. Do people forget so quickly why we have *BSD instead of 386BSD?
Go use *BSD if you want to, but do so for the right reasons, not because of rumor and myth.
Most of the people on devel@xfree86.org would know. The nv driver shipped with XFree86 has poor acceleration for 2D as well as 3D. This is due to lack of specs from the manufacturer. You'll get significantly better performance using nVidia's binary-only driver from their website.
Well supported cards are easily flooded by XFree86 for 2D. The cards cannot draw fast enough to keep up with the XFree86 process. It isn't an architectural problem. It's almost certainly a driver or application problem.
It would be useful to develop a standalone benchmark system that used XFree drivers directly. That would make it much easier to determine when the performance problems lie in the driver, in XFree, or in the application. I suspect this would be really hard to write.
In the war against Iraq, many of those at the top of the pyramid (G.H. Bush, Cheney, Schwartzkopf, etc) were found GUILTY [deoxy.org] by the International War Crimes Tribunal. The war against Iraq was not about Saddam Hussein, but about oil interests. This was never covered in the media,...
You're either blind or trolling. There were entire MOVIES made about the USA's primary interest in the Gulf War being one of oil (eg, Three Kings). If even moronic Hollywood script writers can figure it out then it's hardly a big secret.
IAAA (I am an American), but I don't understand why we are at war--especially with Afghanistan. We were attacked by people who have never claimed responsibility. It is possible that all who were involved perished in the crashes. Our government and the major media want us to believe that Osama ibn Laden was responsible, despite the fact that he actually claims responsibility for his attacks. He is a guest of the Taleban, who has told us (since 9/xx) that they will turn him over upon receipt of conclusive evidence.
The USA government has declared "war" on all terrorists and anybody that provides safe havens for terrorists.
There is no publically available and conclusive evidence that Osama Bin Laden is responsible for Sept 11. This doesn't matter. He has claimed to be responsible for other terrorist attacks. For example, the attack on the USS Cole with 19 dead and many more injured. The USA government knows that the Taliban are providing a safe haven for him and the USA have now said "hand him over he is wanted for past crimes and for questioning on a new one". The Taliban have refused to hand him over. The USA has responded with force.
Now you might question the right of the USA to make these sorts of demands. I'm not an expert on international law, but Australia had some well publicised trouble trying to extradite a criminal named "Christopher Skase". Basically Australia had no rights in the matter and the foreign govt had every right to reject Australia's demands.
You might also question the hypocrisy of the USA government. They actively sponsored terrorism against the Soviets by training Osama Bin Laden and providing him with weapons. Is the USA govt any better than the Taliban?
You might also question whether we've been fed the entire truth. The popular media says that Osama is responsibile for the USS Cole bombings by providing funding to the suicide bombers. Is this true? I don't know.
I find it interesting that the crowd here, usually so quick to cry "trying to legislate against cracking/malicious users is pointless" is crowing about suing the RIAA for something akin to a DoS attack.
Did it occur to you that there might be more than one crowd?
Re:Mod this post down, it's informative.
on
No GNOME For Solaris 9
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's not informative. It's plain wrong on 3 of the points and arguably wrong on the other 2. And it's chockers full of trolls. I don't see how it ever got moderated insightful. Moderators apparently just give points to the posts with the most verbiage.
Can someone fill me in... Hasn't Microsoft been claiming windows has been preemptive since win95??? Is this some other form of 'preemptiveness'?
What you're thinking of here is userspace preemptiveness. A userspace application can be preempted to make way for another process. The other process could be in userspace OR kernelspace. Linux has always been like this.
The article is describing kernelspace preemptiveness. Basically if the kernel is doing something (eg, reading a block off disk) then the current Linux kernel can't preempt that to do something else in userspace OR kernelspace.
These patches add kernelspace preemptiveness in addition to the already existing userspace preemptiveness. It makes Linux extremely suitable for low-latency applications (eg, professional audio).
The other possibility is that the plate is firmly attached to the sphere and does rotate around with the shaft, but that the vane slides back and forth. The vane itself has a slot to allow the plate to pass through it.
This would strike me as being less difficult to implement because you don't need a complicated lubricated bearing between the plate and the sphere. The sphere/plate/shaft assembly is all one fixed piece that rotates inside the hourglass created by the two cones. You would need a slot in each cone to allow the vane to completely seal the space even while moving back and forth through the largish distance.
The only complicated component is then the sliding vane. If the vane is pushed back and forth by the plate then there will be friction. If the vane is driven by some other mechanism (perhaps a pushrod attached off the shaft) then the engine isn't quite as elegant.
Putting the slot in the plate sounds like a bad way of doing it though. If the plate has the slot then the plate can now more easily deform under the high pressures from the combustion stage. Then the fixed angular position of the vane (always straight up) would mean the plate couldn't spin. Because the sphere is spinning and the plate is not you suddenly need bearings. It's all messy when you think down that path.
That's why I strongly believe that the plate is welded to the sphere and the vane itself is the moving mechanism.
To express this another way, there is a more precise name for someone who has no belief in God - and that's "Agnostic". The name for someone who believes there is no God is "Atheist".
I'm afraid not. The Agnostic position makes no posit about their belief or lack of belief in God. It makes a claim about the knowledge that can be gained regarding God's existence. This is pretty clear given that the name has "gnostic" in it. Google search for Huxley Agnostic if you want to know more.
There's no need, because you just did, and you rather succintly proved my point.
The "faith" used when a Christian claims to have "faith in God" is a different definition to the "faith" meant by "belief without proof".
So when people say that Strong Atheists have "faith" just like the Christians have "faith in God" they are changing the meaning of the word halfway through the sentence. The first use of the word means something different to the second use of the word. It's a shyster trick. Something you'd expect a slick slimey salesman to use.
So the Strong Atheist has "belief without proof", just like the first definition you wrote. There's nothing wrong with this though. I "believe I am hungry" isn't something I can prove either. Or "I believe I'm in love". Or "I believe I am scared". Belief isn't something you can make an active positive decision on. It's just something you have. There's no magic switch you can flick to turn off your belief. Sure this is all belief without proof. If you want to take it to the logical extreme, this is faith, but it isn't the same meaning of faith that a Christian means when they take a "leap of faith" or "have faith in God" or "put their faith in Christianity". To trivialise faith like this would make it have no more meaning than common everyday thoughts.
And this is all orthogonal to the issue of whether Atheists in general have faith. I believe that they don't. Perhaps you'd like to call this faith?
A set of principles or beliefs.
Now this is interesting, because this is a third definition that wasn't on dictionary.com. You've just thrown it in at the end. And it's nothing like the previous two definitions that you wrote. What was your purpose here?
None of the 4 possible combinations ar "rediculous", all describe existing, widely held belief systems:
I think they're all ridiculous:-) But I appreciate you listing out the combinations because it's a very clear way of demonstrating the orthogonal nature of Atheism and Agnosticism.
Sadly it seems there are people who read your list and still didn't get it.
Too simplistic. You can break down Atheist into Strong and Weak positions. The definition you wrote is arguably one form of Strong Atheism but even that is stretching it.
Try and think of it like this: the Weak Atheist does not believe in the existence of God whereas the Strong Atheist position believes in the non-existence of God.
To further understand the problem: Atheism is about belief, not knowledge. Agnosticism is about knowledge, not belief. In practise you can be Gnostic and Atheist, Agnostic and Theist, or any other ridiculous combination.
Back to your definitions. Atheism isn't a position of faith, it's a statement of belief. The Strong Atheist could arguably be accused of having "faith" in their assertion of God's non-existence, but to do this would trivialise the meaning of "faith". Suddenly you have "faith" that you are hungry and "faith" that it is cold. Clearly this isn't the same meaning of "faith" that a Christian uses when they claim to have "faith in God".
I don't have much of a problem with your definition of Agnostic, although it's nothing like Huxley's original definition. But I hope you now understand that your definition of Atheist is the one popularised by the United States of Christianity, and is not a reasonable definition of Atheism.
Israel attacked Egypt, claiming that Egypt had attacked them.
Not just Egypt. Lebanon too. And Syria. All the while claiming that the neighbouring countries attacked first. And perhaps they did. Who knows. Certainly not me. I'm fed so much conflicting information that all I'm certain of now is that I've no idea what's going on.
There are people dying. I'm not sure who did what to whom, but it all pretty much bites.
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds wacky, but I think it's true. I got a bunch of MP3s of Primus. I had heard the odd Primus song before and after hearing a whole bunch of MP3s I realised I liked them.
Now I could have just burnt their songs onto CD-R and be done with it. I only listen to CDs on a discman these days anyway, so I don't care too much about sound quality. 128kbps MP3 is good enough for me.
Instead I went and bought every Primus album I could find. I'm not sure why. It would have only cost me $5 to put all the MP3s onto CD-R, print off the album covers, and I'd have something not half-bad without the effort. Buying the CDs was a relatively difficult thing to do!
If only this were true. You may have already read it, but for anybody who hasn't had the chance to read McLibel it's a fascinating investigation into the inadequacies of the British legal system in defamation cases.
Basically two very poor people got sued by McDonalds. These two people said things like "McDonalds food it not nutritous" and "McDonalds beef is grown on land that was previously rainforests". Nothing to dispute there, right?
McDonalds argued that anything with nutrients is nutritous: this definition covered paper, soil, and so on. They also argued that because the forests hadn't received rainfall 365 days a year they were not rainforests.
The judge agreed with this nonsense, ignored the experts brought in by the defendants, and somehow allowed his common sense to slip far enough to rule against the two very poor people.
Telling the truth is not a legal defence. If you have enough money - as McDonalds did - then you get to write your own laws.
What a load of crap! Do you think car restorations cost $200k per panel? Creating a custom plastic or fibreglass piece is very cheap.
It might be $200k to make a mold that will churn out 1000s of cases, but to make a one-off mold is nothing extraordinary.
You're not wrong - I agree 100% with all four of your points - but I just thought I'd throw in a suggestion.
Put your computer in front of the couch! I did this recently and it's a dream. Use that TV-OUT, get a wireless keyboard and wireless optical mouse, sit on your couch, and enjoy widescreen TV while browsing and irc'ing.
I now have a clean desk - perfect for doing paperwork - and a comfortable place to use my PC. I don't know why I didn't do it sooner because I've had the benefit of console gaming on the TV for years.
Why did you USAnians not vote this guy in as president? Nader has consistently shown himself to be perhaps the only American politician with any clue, ever.
Instead you lot went to a two party choice between Mr Personality and The Chimp. And the Chimp won!
The world weeps.
With all due respect, you do know that this is like saying "19 years as a mechanic, I think I know more about thermodynamics than you do". That's not an insult against your skills as an electronics repair technician: electronics is larger than any one person can lay claim to.
And really, the problem here isn't about YOU knowing more about electronics than ME. It's not even about YOU knowing more about ternary logic than ME. It's about YOU or others like you who are saying they know more about ternary logic than the scientists and engineers working on this stuff. That really gets my goat.
Now, I don't understand how you can say both sentences in the same paragraph without alarm bells going off in your mind. Design a circuit without tri-state logic. Now design the same circuit with tri-state logic. Which one required more transistors and will therefore consume more power and produce more heat? A good example that proves the point is a 4-bit bus. Binary logic forces you into a power-wasting ring-bus design.
Gates in electronics aren't single transistors. They are many transistors and a handful of passive components. An actual gate will start with an unoptimised design and then remove redundant components. Your assumption that ternary gates would require exactly twice as many transistors is completely flawed. Check out any 74xx diagram in a National Semiconductor book: they show the internal schematic down to the transistor level.
The incredible nonsense of all this is that ternary is already in use in electronics. It's just not called ternary. People abstract their circuits back to binary before passing info to the next gate, but in the schematics for any gate you can clearly see ternary logic used as an optimisation of the internal design.
This is why I'm annoyed with you armchair electronic hobbyists going on and on about resistor values and middle voltages. I even saw a previous poster inexpertly try to explain why quiescent current proves the non-viability of ternary logic. You seem to be explaining away what the circuit designers are already doing!
The name change to FreeBSD was because Bill Jolitz refused to handover the project and would not apply patches. The three developers of Free were going to call it 386BSD 0.5 until Bill went back on his earlier approval of the patchkit.
NetBSD was sprung from 386BSD after a bunch of developers expressed frustration with the slow pace of 386BSD. The first NetBSD release was a combination of Net/2 and 386BSD as a port to the Macintosh.
And OpenBSD forked from NetBSD because of disagreements between Theo and pretty much everyone else. Theo is still disagreeing with everyone else. He's famous for it.
I think that pretty much proves my point that *BSD aren't exempt from infighting.
It evolved from Net/2 and 386BSD. If you'd bothered to read the netbsd.org site you'd have learnt this too.
You're ignorant.
So in your world, you don't think that the disposal of a waste product is a cost? You somehow think that when your yields are lower that the non-sellable items magically disappear?
Now I see why you're posting at 1. You don't even preview things before you post them. Which "your" should I remove from your quip before it makes sense?
How is this different to my comment of "BSD has poorer SMP than Linux"?
I didn't make any comment about locking.
Really?
I suggest you practise what you preach.
Read the NetBSD feature list by platform. Only 5 platforms have any NetBSD-support for SMP at all and not one of them is stable or usable. Four of the five have "spinup" support only.
Myths and rumors.
Why would you choose such a brain dead scheme? 2.8V as your "middle" choice? A sensible scheme would have been +ve rail, -ve rail, and ground. This builds upon 100 years of analog electronics and op-amps. Locking a voltage to a rail is extremely easy AND fast.
The benefit of a ternary scheme is that you have LESS power consumption to achieve the same work. Your individual flip-flap-flops are more complex than a binary flip-flop, but you need fewer flip-flap-flops. Overall you'll have fewer transistors and subsequently less heat than the equivalent binary circuit.
The fact that fewer transistors are required to achieve the same work (despite the fact that there are more transistors per gate) will INCREASE the yields. This DECREASES costs.
How in hell did your post get modded up?
*BSD has poorer SMP than Linux. Networking is arguable (some benchmarks show Linux is faster, some don't).
*BSD has also had more than it's own fair share of infighting. Do people forget so quickly why we have *BSD instead of 386BSD?
Go use *BSD if you want to, but do so for the right reasons, not because of rumor and myth.
Most of the people on devel@xfree86.org would know. The nv driver shipped with XFree86 has poor acceleration for 2D as well as 3D. This is due to lack of specs from the manufacturer. You'll get significantly better performance using nVidia's binary-only driver from their website.
Well supported cards are easily flooded by XFree86 for 2D. The cards cannot draw fast enough to keep up with the XFree86 process. It isn't an architectural problem. It's almost certainly a driver or application problem.
It would be useful to develop a standalone benchmark system that used XFree drivers directly. That would make it much easier to determine when the performance problems lie in the driver, in XFree, or in the application. I suspect this would be really hard to write.
You're either blind or trolling. There were entire MOVIES made about the USA's primary interest in the Gulf War being one of oil (eg, Three Kings). If even moronic Hollywood script writers can figure it out then it's hardly a big secret.
The USA government has declared "war" on all terrorists and anybody that provides safe havens for terrorists.
There is no publically available and conclusive evidence that Osama Bin Laden is responsible for Sept 11. This doesn't matter. He has claimed to be responsible for other terrorist attacks. For example, the attack on the USS Cole with 19 dead and many more injured. The USA government knows that the Taliban are providing a safe haven for him and the USA have now said "hand him over he is wanted for past crimes and for questioning on a new one". The Taliban have refused to hand him over. The USA has responded with force.
Now you might question the right of the USA to make these sorts of demands. I'm not an expert on international law, but Australia had some well publicised trouble trying to extradite a criminal named "Christopher Skase". Basically Australia had no rights in the matter and the foreign govt had every right to reject Australia's demands.
You might also question the hypocrisy of the USA government. They actively sponsored terrorism against the Soviets by training Osama Bin Laden and providing him with weapons. Is the USA govt any better than the Taliban?
You might also question whether we've been fed the entire truth. The popular media says that Osama is responsibile for the USS Cole bombings by providing funding to the suicide bombers. Is this true? I don't know.
Did it occur to you that there might be more than one crowd?
It's not informative. It's plain wrong on 3 of the points and arguably wrong on the other 2. And it's chockers full of trolls. I don't see how it ever got moderated insightful. Moderators apparently just give points to the posts with the most verbiage.
What you're thinking of here is userspace preemptiveness. A userspace application can be preempted to make way for another process. The other process could be in userspace OR kernelspace. Linux has always been like this.
The article is describing kernelspace preemptiveness. Basically if the kernel is doing something (eg, reading a block off disk) then the current Linux kernel can't preempt that to do something else in userspace OR kernelspace.
These patches add kernelspace preemptiveness in addition to the already existing userspace preemptiveness. It makes Linux extremely suitable for low-latency applications (eg, professional audio).
The other possibility is that the plate is firmly attached to the sphere and does rotate around with the shaft, but that the vane slides back and forth. The vane itself has a slot to allow the plate to pass through it.
This would strike me as being less difficult to implement because you don't need a complicated lubricated bearing between the plate and the sphere. The sphere/plate/shaft assembly is all one fixed piece that rotates inside the hourglass created by the two cones. You would need a slot in each cone to allow the vane to completely seal the space even while moving back and forth through the largish distance.
The only complicated component is then the sliding vane. If the vane is pushed back and forth by the plate then there will be friction. If the vane is driven by some other mechanism (perhaps a pushrod attached off the shaft) then the engine isn't quite as elegant.
Putting the slot in the plate sounds like a bad way of doing it though. If the plate has the slot then the plate can now more easily deform under the high pressures from the combustion stage. Then the fixed angular position of the vane (always straight up) would mean the plate couldn't spin. Because the sphere is spinning and the plate is not you suddenly need bearings. It's all messy when you think down that path.
That's why I strongly believe that the plate is welded to the sphere and the vane itself is the moving mechanism.
I'm afraid not. The Agnostic position makes no posit about their belief or lack of belief in God. It makes a claim about the knowledge that can be gained regarding God's existence. This is pretty clear given that the name has "gnostic" in it. Google search for Huxley Agnostic if you want to know more.
There's no need, because you just did, and you rather succintly proved my point.
The "faith" used when a Christian claims to have "faith in God" is a different definition to the "faith" meant by "belief without proof".
So when people say that Strong Atheists have "faith" just like the Christians have "faith in God" they are changing the meaning of the word halfway through the sentence. The first use of the word means something different to the second use of the word. It's a shyster trick. Something you'd expect a slick slimey salesman to use.
So the Strong Atheist has "belief without proof", just like the first definition you wrote. There's nothing wrong with this though. I "believe I am hungry" isn't something I can prove either. Or "I believe I'm in love". Or "I believe I am scared". Belief isn't something you can make an active positive decision on. It's just something you have. There's no magic switch you can flick to turn off your belief. Sure this is all belief without proof. If you want to take it to the logical extreme, this is faith, but it isn't the same meaning of faith that a Christian means when they take a "leap of faith" or "have faith in God" or "put their faith in Christianity". To trivialise faith like this would make it have no more meaning than common everyday thoughts.
And this is all orthogonal to the issue of whether Atheists in general have faith. I believe that they don't. Perhaps you'd like to call this faith?
Now this is interesting, because this is a third definition that wasn't on dictionary.com. You've just thrown it in at the end. And it's nothing like the previous two definitions that you wrote. What was your purpose here?
I think they're all ridiculous :-) But I appreciate you listing out the combinations because it's a very clear way of demonstrating the orthogonal nature of Atheism and Agnosticism.
Sadly it seems there are people who read your list and still didn't get it.
Too simplistic. You can break down Atheist into Strong and Weak positions. The definition you wrote is arguably one form of Strong Atheism but even that is stretching it.
Try and think of it like this: the Weak Atheist does not believe in the existence of God whereas the Strong Atheist position believes in the non-existence of God.
To further understand the problem: Atheism is about belief, not knowledge. Agnosticism is about knowledge, not belief. In practise you can be Gnostic and Atheist, Agnostic and Theist, or any other ridiculous combination.
Back to your definitions. Atheism isn't a position of faith, it's a statement of belief. The Strong Atheist could arguably be accused of having "faith" in their assertion of God's non-existence, but to do this would trivialise the meaning of "faith". Suddenly you have "faith" that you are hungry and "faith" that it is cold. Clearly this isn't the same meaning of "faith" that a Christian uses when they claim to have "faith in God".
I don't have much of a problem with your definition of Agnostic, although it's nothing like Huxley's original definition. But I hope you now understand that your definition of Atheist is the one popularised by the United States of Christianity, and is not a reasonable definition of Atheism.
Not just Egypt. Lebanon too. And Syria. All the while claiming that the neighbouring countries attacked first. And perhaps they did. Who knows. Certainly not me. I'm fed so much conflicting information that all I'm certain of now is that I've no idea what's going on.
There are people dying. I'm not sure who did what to whom, but it all pretty much bites.