As someone who works in security, and knows that it's always the same people who end up in a fight (or whatever), I support this wholeheartedly. When I go out to get a drink, I want to go out without some idiot harassing me, when he's done the same to at least 30 other people this month. I believe most pub-goers feel likewise. But this is slashdot, here everybody is concerned about privacy, the majority probably so concerned that they'd rather stay home than to pay their beer with a credit card.
I find the English completely irrational considering how they go apeshit at the thought of a national ID card, but let things pass like continuous camera surveillance, excessive powers to any government instance, etc.
Pretty similar to any other countrys internal politics. If I had told you that for the last 5 years, the majority of political debate in Norway has been about the new opera building, you probably wouldn't believe me. It's still true, and it's like this everywhere. Once you have an outside perspective, you are more able to see how silly people can become over a non-issue.
Continental Europe is different - they're a bit more strict on privacy laws.
Thanks for the generalization. Southern USA is a bit different. They usually are Ku-klux Klan members.
The US on the other has one thing going for it: constitutional protections, and associated with that, pretty good transparency.
Surprise! The US is not the only country with a constitution. Nor is it the first country with a constitution. Nor does the constitution seem to help USians much, as the various political fractions interpret the constitution as inventively as christians interpret the bible.
As for transparency; I thought US was the country where standard political practice was bill-amendments, so that by calling the new law "Child Protection Act", and amend some minor law about mandatory ID-cards to it, everybody would vote for it, since nobody has time to read all the amendments, and we must protect our children.
Whenever there's a new law project that might touch constitutional protections, there's usually some people that will notice, and there's quite a bit more public debate about it. To the point that Europeans probably know more about privacy-related laws in the US than in their own country.
Look, just because you can read about it in your newspaper, doesn't mean that everyone else in the world reads the same newspaper. The silly little bickerings you have about privacy-laws in the US, interests us about the same as you would consider the debate about Oslos new opera building interesting. More to the point, people in civilized democracies (such as most of Europe) mostly ignores american politics, except that they dislike Bush, and thought Clinton was a jolly good fellow.
Secondly, in the eyes of most people in civilized democracies, US politics has mostly been dominated by rabid right-wing capitalists, dictated by powerful companies, since at least the 1960s. It's possible we will follow, but at least untill now, we have managed to keep the battle up for a little longer. And we have privacy laws, even laws that work!
Does it often matter whether a pixel has position (542,396) or (542.0518434,395.97862456)?
Per definition, no.
But does it matter whether the programmer has to create and populate lookup-tables, with lots of manual tweaking to find the right compromize between memory usage (cache issues), few branches (lookup must be fast), accuracy (lookup must be correct), etc... when the alternative is to simply call sin(x)?
Alas, this, and many other techniques have been mostly forgotten, and it's easier to leave it to the MMU or graphics card, even if you compute the same unneccessary calculations and conversions a million times.
Obviously, doing unnecessary calculations is unnecessary. But if the hardware has already circuits capable of calculating sin(x), I don't consider using those circuits as unnecessary calculations, even though it's possible to avoid the calculations by using a lookup-table. We are not in a competition to build programs the most suitable for the machines of 1960 here. If you want to compete, use real-world metrics like speed (wall-clock), memory usage, and perhaps even power usage. Your "unnecessary calculations" doesn't help reduce this.
Fast MMUs, CPU extensions and 3D graphics routines are good, but I'm not too sure they're always used correctly. Does a new game that's fifty times as graphically advanced as a game from six years ago really need a thousand times the processing power, or is it just easier to throw hardware at a problem?
Fifty times as graphically advanced? What does that mean? That there are 50 times as many pixels? That you need to read 50 times as many books about graphics programming to write a similar game? That the graphic library you use has 50 times as many source lines? Or that there are 50 times as many colours? Obviously the techniques that helped you write pong in the 1960s isn't what you are going to use to write a 3d-engine today. And obviously, if your computer has hardware to speed up graphics, if you need fast graphics, you are going to use them.
Write a specialized program that will only run at a single computer, the one the programmer owns, as everything is specialized and optimized for his/her hardware. If other people needs to run the program, write a new one, or at the very least use some other compiler options.
Don't use non-portable features. Always go for the lowest common denominator.
Manually testing for existence of coprocessor at each FPU instruction, branch to emulator if FPU doesn't exist.
Same as above, but tests are inserted automatically by the compiler.
Test for existence of coprocessor at start of program execution. If FPU doesn't exist, dynamically replace all FPU instructions with branches to emulator routines
Same as above, but done automatically by the OS program loader
Make it mandatory for CPUs to: either support the FPU instructions (with a coprocessor if necessary); or to issue some sort of trap/interrupt that can be used by software such as the OS kernel/libc to use an emulator routine instead.
I believe the last option (option 7) is what x86/87 CPU/FPU combo actually used. That's why there is a coprocessor-prefix in front of the FPU instructions. They are not just unused opcodes.
Option 5 (and sometimes even 3) is commonly used for MMX/3dNOW/SSE/SSE2/SSE3/whatever instructions.
Unless they *really* need nonportable features, most programmers tend to go with option 2.
Now, I'm not a hardware engineer, but I fail to see why having different parts of a chip running at different clock-speeds is such a big issue. After all, what you need in your example above, is a circuit that counts to somewhere between 5 and 10 before you send out a clock-pulse. I don't think that's to complicated to put on a chip that is intended to include both a modern CPU and GPU.
There's an old saying: "You can't fool an honest person". Yes, I support prosecution of people who are scammed. Most scams are so obvious that even if you fail to see that it's a scam, at least you must have known it might be illegal in some way. I fail to see what you mean by "even if you didn't know you were being scammed". If you knew it, you wouldn't be scammed, right?
As for blaming the victim, well, in a lot of cases, the "victim" is the person who did the stupid thing in the first place. It's called taking consequences of ones actions. Leaving the car door unlocked? Sorry, no insurance for you. Since you also made crimes more profitable, I see nothing wrong with the state punishing you for that as well.
On the other hand, if you are a victim, despite taking reasonable precautions, then it should not be punishable. The standard for this should be set through legislation and the court.
Ok, so let's make being stupid illegal. Your post was, IMO, right on track up to this.
For some reason, most people do not consider that as a realistic possibility. Personally, I think it should be illegal to be stupid, in a lot more situations than it is today.
This isn't exactly revolutionary. People are already being put into jail, for buying stolen goods, if the police can demonstrate that "they should have known it was stolen". And if you drive over some schoolkids while fondling with your car-radio, you are still guilty of murder. And if you are a surgeon and kills a patient through malpractice, you are also in deep trouble.
The society needs more legislation against stupidity, not less. It's too easy to excuse away all the damage you have done, by putting up the "I'm stupid" excuse. So, yes, let it be punishable for up to n years in jail, to through stupid or uninformed actions, create life more profitable for spammers.
As for making paper books obsolete. It will happen at most a few decades after e-books hit the mainstream. Sure, some people will insist on p-books, but they will be enthusiasts, just like the people who insist on vinyl today. Or black and white film. Or steam engine trains and boats. Or any number of other obsolote technologies.
Matches are already obsolete, lighters have surpassed them in number of fires started by a huge margin. People use matches mostly for nostalgic purposes. I can easily see tumbler locks becoming obsolete. Biometric is just so much more convenient, and once I can get biometric locks cheap enough for putting on my bike or locker, I can't see much reason to have tumbler locks anymore. But I agree the rest of them are stayers (at least for now;-)
Look, I'm not claiming that this is a particularly clever argument. All I'm claiming is that it's an argument that is likely to be made by politicians and decision-makers. It's possible that you haven't experienced it yet, but sometimes it happens that politicians and decision-makers make decisions that hardly can be described as the results of genius thinking. In particular, basing any policy on fear of terrorism, without having any significant understanding of what causes terrorism, strikes me as quite stupid.
Also, I have no intention of blowing up a mosque or synagogue.
FAT is probably the single most popular filesystem in the universe. At least these features makes it vastly popular:
It's the only filesystem that works with DOS
It is very suitable for floppies and for other small filesystems
It is reasonably effective with small cache sizes
It is universally supported (I doubt there even exist an OS with more than 100 users that doesn't support FAT in some form)
There are no permissions, resource forks, quotas, or other things that complicates file-exchange between different systems
It is simple enough for mere humans to recover data in a hex-editor, or write programs for it
Hopefully we are now entering an era when FAT can finally be laid to rest, with other filesystems such as UDF taking over. However, most flash devices are still using FAT.
I think that with all that other stuff you mention (including stuff that we don't have, and don't know how to get, i.e. proper algorithms), it would be misleading to label "a massive neural network" as "the key".
The truth is, if we knew what "the key" was, we'd be a lot closer to creating AI than we currently are. As it is, we can hypothetize that it is proper algorithms, a massive neural network, or a lot of other things. In reality we haven't got a clue. In particular, labelling something we already have got as "the key" is most likely wrong.
I'm sure ardour doesn't try to be a third-rate ProTools clone.
but without the hardware support, plug-ins, and other features.
The hardware support isn't needed anymore. Fast multicore processors have pretty much replaced the need for specialized hardware. Of course, dedicated DSP hardware is still better, but it's certainly not the future anymore. Besides ProTools hardware is expensive, and I doubt you can get specifications for it. Besides, it's not obvious what other kinds of hardware you can use. On the other hand, software audio plugins, and support for multichannel low-latency sound-cards is there.
and if you go to a professional studio in L.A., you won't be seeing copies of Ardour running.
And if you go to a professional office in L.A, you won't see Blue Gene, you will see a DELL. And you won't see "La Modernista Diamonds" by Caran d'Ache, but a BIC-pen. Does that tell you that you something? Perhaps that proof by reference to "the pros" doesn't work?
Pro Tools has been the main tool for audio professionals for decades. Sounds like a good choice if you want to clone something. I'm sorry you can't get everything you want, but even though it's third-rate, at least it's improving. And it's not like it's the only thing out there for linux either.
It doesn't support the top plug-in formats, AU/VST/RTAS
Ardour supports LADSPA plugins. It doesn't support AU because that's mac only. It doesn't support VST because that's windows only. It doesn't support RTAS because it's not an open standard, and requires special hardware. It may work with VST through wine, and if a windows or mac version is ever made, it will most likely support native plugins there.
and it requires going through that crappy JACK format
JACK is not a format. Jack is to linux what ReWire is to windows. Since jack can be used to route audio between applications, it can also be used to route audio between your soundcard and your applications. In general this gives you more flexibility. If you don't want to know this, I can write you a 2-line script so you don't need to be aware of jack. However, it will still be there, giving you more flexibility than you ever had on windows, without any loss of performance. Just because it's different from what you're used to, doesn't mean it sucks. The only thing that sucks about jack is that it doesn't do MIDI!
and there aren't alternatives for all the apps that typically interface with Pro Tools, such as Logic, Ableton Live, Reason, Final Cut Pro, etc.
Well, if you can only be satisfied by having exactly the same applications as under windows, you know where to find them. I will not dispute that linux could need more audio applications, but we don't need clones of all the above. ProTools, Logic, and Ableton Live all more or less perform the same function. They allow you to play, record, and arrange audio and midi tracks. Final cut adds video tracks. Reason has a nice selection of synths and effects. What we need under linux is tools to do the above tasks: play, record and arrange midi, audio and video tracks; create audio; modify audio and/or video. Tools should focus on those tasks, not in whether it duplicates the function of Logic or Ableton Live.
Ardour also only runs on Linux, and Linux consumes time like a whore consumes jizz. Pros just want to get up and running, not tinker with Ubuntu installs.
That kind of "pro" also has near unlimited funds and can afford to fill their studio with hard- and software for millions of dollars. Surely they can afford someone to help them inserting an ubuntu disk. As a non-pro, and from experience, I know that windows consumes a lot more of my time than linux ever has. An ubuntu install just works, compared to windows that must be tweaked for days before it works well, and must be reinstalled every 6 months. As a hobbyist musician, and tinkerer, I'd be much more interested in a home-studio running linux, than one with windows. You'd be surprised how many computer musicians agree with me.
It's safe to say Apple isn't worried about losing ANY market share in the content creation industry.
They should. Everything seems to be going windows!
Ok, so let's include the jews and the muslims too.
The greek and roman religions (like the nordic) were mostly compareable to Marvel comics. People would invent exciting stories about their favourite gods/heroes and tell them to each other around the fireplace. The main difference is that people don't think Marvel comics are real. Or if they do, at least they are afraid of admitting it publicly, at least after they are 13 years old. Greek and roman state leaders were not afraid of admitting publicly that they believed in their Gods. In fact, it was vital to do so, in order to get any support from the people (they weren't necessarily called "voters" back then). On the other hand, I'm quite sure that many prominent greek or roman men did not believe their Gods to be any more real than Marvel superheroes. But they didn't admit that publically. (Oh yeah, there's another difference. Marvel superheroes are intended for children. It lacks stories suitable for adults, there's no sex. Greek and Roman gods seemed to live in some sort of hedonistic socity where everyone fucked everyone, including their family)
Besides christianity/judeaism/islam, there are plenty of other religions to choose from. The only thing they have in common, is that they are different. Some of them focus on belief (like christianity). Most of them focus on acts and rituals. Some of them have a single God. Some deny the existence of anything beyond God, or gods. Some of them have no God(s). And most of them have many Gods. Some of them believe time is linear. Some believe time is circular. And some haven't really made up their mind about that, except that it seems linear now. Some think there's an afterlife. Some thinks there's a finite series of afterlives. Some think there's an infinite series of afterlives. Some think there's reincarnation. Some think reincarnation infinite, some think it will eventually stop. Some think that after reincarnation stops, there's an afterlife (and so on...) Some think you will live through the mind of people who eat your brain (yes, actually!). Some think that you will live as long as people can remember you. Some doesn't think there's an afterlife at all. Some people ban homosexuality. Some people find it divine. Some people believe that for boys to become men, they must suck the dick of older men and eat their cum (yes, actually!) The list goes on...
Go buy a faster CPU. I dont have any audio skipping problems on my P4 2.4ghz.
Neither did I on my Pentium 90. To get audio skipping with audio, you either need to use low-latency processing, or have a ridiculously busy box. Realtime will help low-latency processing run more reliable, and can also help by giving selected tasks higher priority, which will solve both problems. (And yes, I know what realtime means, and no, I'm not speaking in general, I'm speaking of this specific set of patches to linux).
Actually, windows isn't any better than linux for audio tasks. It's just that linux lacks the useful software. What people really want is something that is better than windows for audio-processing tasks. Not something that is on par with windows, we already have that.
Actually, the politicians are caring about who is going to vote for them. They usually also have a personal agenda, which was the reason they became politicians in the first place, but I can assure you that that agenda is certainly not to avoid lowering property values in certain slum-like areas of Seattle. Politicians might care about "white flight", as you call it, or "cultural plurality and integration", as they would call it, but I can assure you that if an area is dangerous, people will know it regardless of real-time fire-department maps.
If you don't want to listen to hearsay, or do independent research, one simple way to find out is to ask your insurance company how much a home-insurance costs in various parts of town. Another way would be to read the newspaper.
As for the claim that this is because of the risk of terrorism, I find that quite believable. If I were to bomb the nearest mosque or synagogue, the effect would be better if I could bomb it at a time when I knew all the fire-trucks were busy at the other side of town.
The concept of sin, is something that was mostly invented by christianity. I doubt there were many ritual animal sacrifices made to get rid of sin. Usually they were made to get to fuck that nice looking babe in the next village, a good crop, revenge over that guy who called you a moron, a safe birth, or something like that. Not to get rid of sin.
Well, if you really want to pick nits, you could argue that a word cannot be any concept. It's a word... nothing more and nothing less.
Well, to nitpick, the phrase "Can a word be immoral?" doesn't mean that the person asking the question wonders whether a given word is immoral. That would be as stupid as asking whether immoral (the concept) is a word . Besides immoral (the concept), nothing else is immoral. If you are still confused, "immoral" is a word, immoral is not.
The right way to go about this, is that immoral must be thought of as a function mapping concepts to true or false, where a concept can be anything (such as an act, a dream, a word, a person, a country, a fruit, or a mountain), and the question is whether there exists words that would be mapped by immoral to true. An alternate view, is to consider immoral and words as sets, and to speculate whether elements that are members of the set words can also at the same time be a member of the set immoral. Your interpretation of the question would be akin to asking whether the set immoral is a member of the set words
However, even a single word can represent an immoral concept.
Yes. That's what words do. They represent concepts. E.g. the word "bukkake" represents a concept many people find morally objectionable. And the word "flower" represents a concept many people find beautyful.
A government should create a policy which clearly defines what is morally acceptible for it's people.
This makes about as much sense as claiming that "a government should create a policy which clearly defines what is aesthetically acceptible for its people". The idea of separation between church and state that you talk about is there exactly to avoid having the government meddle with moral, aesthetical, or other value-judgements. What a government should do is to "create a policy which clearly defines what is legally acceptible for its people". Questions such as morals are better left to individual judgement.
So exchanging reiserfs for ext3 is a downgrade now? With ext3 you get a stable well-maintained file-system used by the majority of linux users worldwide. With reiserfs you get a poorly maintained file-system, which the original creator has dropped to work on something else, and that nobody else maintains, and that instead of trying to do well as a file-system focuses on performance for other random things, such as being a database, having small files, etc... Maybe you find it sad, I call it common sense!
Gee, it must have been a long time since you were using ext3. By the time ext3 was announced, it was a minor modification to an already very mature file-system.
Remember, ext2 was *the* file-system the vast majority of linux users all over the world used. ext2 survived through Yggdrasil, Slackware, and RedHat. Then people started porting various journalled file-systems to linux, and ext3 was created as a journalled variation of ext2. Even by the first version, ext3 was probably safer than XFS or JFS, who had to be modified extensively to fit inside the linux kernel.
It didn't take long for ext3 to take the place of the default file-system on linux, with ext2 having second seat. Other file-systems, such as reiserfs, XFS, JFS, and so on, hasn't got nearly the same amount of testing. Calling ext3 immature is like calling FAT untested.
You forgot something. You need to skip the boring parts. Assuming you only watch about 10% of the porn, and skip past the rest, you need 3150TB. And of course, you may want something a little higher definition than the typical 2006 DivX. In twenty years time, I'll probably want a fully immersive experience, with a tactile VR suit. This will need much higher bandwidth (or is it called "wider bandwidth"?;-)
The transputer was a multithreaded cpu at a time when nobody wanted a multithreaded cpu. Crusoe was a power-friendly cpu at a time when very few people bothered about power usage in cpus. And in 1938 somebody probably created an environmentally-friendly car, at a time when nobody cared about the environment either. None of them sold. Guess why? The correct answer is not "lack of a free market".
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who works in security, and knows that it's always the same people who end up in a fight (or whatever), I support this wholeheartedly. When I go out to get a drink, I want to go out without some idiot harassing me, when he's done the same to at least 30 other people this month. I believe most pub-goers feel likewise. But this is slashdot, here everybody is concerned about privacy, the majority probably so concerned that they'd rather stay home than to pay their beer with a credit card.
Pretty similar to any other countrys internal politics. If I had told you that for the last 5 years, the majority of political debate in Norway has been about the new opera building, you probably wouldn't believe me. It's still true, and it's like this everywhere. Once you have an outside perspective, you are more able to see how silly people can become over a non-issue.
Thanks for the generalization. Southern USA is a bit different. They usually are Ku-klux Klan members.
Surprise! The US is not the only country with a constitution. Nor is it the first country with a constitution. Nor does the constitution seem to help USians much, as the various political fractions interpret the constitution as inventively as christians interpret the bible.
As for transparency; I thought US was the country where standard political practice was bill-amendments, so that by calling the new law "Child Protection Act", and amend some minor law about mandatory ID-cards to it, everybody would vote for it, since nobody has time to read all the amendments, and we must protect our children.
Look, just because you can read about it in your newspaper, doesn't mean that everyone else in the world reads the same newspaper. The silly little bickerings you have about privacy-laws in the US, interests us about the same as you would consider the debate about Oslos new opera building interesting. More to the point, people in civilized democracies (such as most of Europe) mostly ignores american politics, except that they dislike Bush, and thought Clinton was a jolly good fellow.
Secondly, in the eyes of most people in civilized democracies, US politics has mostly been dominated by rabid right-wing capitalists, dictated by powerful companies, since at least the 1960s. It's possible we will follow, but at least untill now, we have managed to keep the battle up for a little longer. And we have privacy laws, even laws that work!
Per definition, no.
But does it matter whether the programmer has to create and populate lookup-tables, with lots of manual tweaking to find the right compromize between memory usage (cache issues), few branches (lookup must be fast), accuracy (lookup must be correct), etc... when the alternative is to simply call sin(x)?
Obviously, doing unnecessary calculations is unnecessary. But if the hardware has already circuits capable of calculating sin(x), I don't consider using those circuits as unnecessary calculations, even though it's possible to avoid the calculations by using a lookup-table. We are not in a competition to build programs the most suitable for the machines of 1960 here. If you want to compete, use real-world metrics like speed (wall-clock), memory usage, and perhaps even power usage. Your "unnecessary calculations" doesn't help reduce this.
Fifty times as graphically advanced? What does that mean? That there are 50 times as many pixels? That you need to read 50 times as many books about graphics programming to write a similar game? That the graphic library you use has 50 times as many source lines? Or that there are 50 times as many colours? Obviously the techniques that helped you write pong in the 1960s isn't what you are going to use to write a 3d-engine today. And obviously, if your computer has hardware to speed up graphics, if you need fast graphics, you are going to use them.
I believe the last option (option 7) is what x86/87 CPU/FPU combo actually used. That's why there is a coprocessor-prefix in front of the FPU instructions. They are not just unused opcodes.
Option 5 (and sometimes even 3) is commonly used for MMX/3dNOW/SSE/SSE2/SSE3/whatever instructions.
Unless they *really* need nonportable features, most programmers tend to go with option 2.
Now, I'm not a hardware engineer, but I fail to see why having different parts of a chip running at different clock-speeds is such a big issue. After all, what you need in your example above, is a circuit that counts to somewhere between 5 and 10 before you send out a clock-pulse. I don't think that's to complicated to put on a chip that is intended to include both a modern CPU and GPU.
There's an old saying: "You can't fool an honest person". Yes, I support prosecution of people who are scammed. Most scams are so obvious that even if you fail to see that it's a scam, at least you must have known it might be illegal in some way. I fail to see what you mean by "even if you didn't know you were being scammed". If you knew it, you wouldn't be scammed, right?
As for blaming the victim, well, in a lot of cases, the "victim" is the person who did the stupid thing in the first place. It's called taking consequences of ones actions. Leaving the car door unlocked? Sorry, no insurance for you. Since you also made crimes more profitable, I see nothing wrong with the state punishing you for that as well.
On the other hand, if you are a victim, despite taking reasonable precautions, then it should not be punishable. The standard for this should be set through legislation and the court.
For some reason, most people do not consider that as a realistic possibility. Personally, I think it should be illegal to be stupid, in a lot more situations than it is today.
This isn't exactly revolutionary. People are already being put into jail, for buying stolen goods, if the police can demonstrate that "they should have known it was stolen". And if you drive over some schoolkids while fondling with your car-radio, you are still guilty of murder. And if you are a surgeon and kills a patient through malpractice, you are also in deep trouble.
The society needs more legislation against stupidity, not less. It's too easy to excuse away all the damage you have done, by putting up the "I'm stupid" excuse. So, yes, let it be punishable for up to n years in jail, to through stupid or uninformed actions, create life more profitable for spammers.
As for making paper books obsolete. It will happen at most a few decades after e-books hit the mainstream. Sure, some people will insist on p-books, but they will be enthusiasts, just like the people who insist on vinyl today. Or black and white film. Or steam engine trains and boats. Or any number of other obsolote technologies.
Matches are already obsolete, lighters have surpassed them in number of fires started by a huge margin. People use matches mostly for nostalgic purposes. I can easily see tumbler locks becoming obsolete. Biometric is just so much more convenient, and once I can get biometric locks cheap enough for putting on my bike or locker, I can't see much reason to have tumbler locks anymore. But I agree the rest of them are stayers (at least for now ;-)
Look, I'm not claiming that this is a particularly clever argument. All I'm claiming is that it's an argument that is likely to be made by politicians and decision-makers. It's possible that you haven't experienced it yet, but sometimes it happens that politicians and decision-makers make decisions that hardly can be described as the results of genius thinking. In particular, basing any policy on fear of terrorism, without having any significant understanding of what causes terrorism, strikes me as quite stupid.
Also, I have no intention of blowing up a mosque or synagogue.
FAT is probably the single most popular filesystem in the universe. At least these features makes it vastly popular:
Hopefully we are now entering an era when FAT can finally be laid to rest, with other filesystems such as UDF taking over. However, most flash devices are still using FAT.
I think that with all that other stuff you mention (including stuff that we don't have, and don't know how to get, i.e. proper algorithms), it would be misleading to label "a massive neural network" as "the key".
The truth is, if we knew what "the key" was, we'd be a lot closer to creating AI than we currently are. As it is, we can hypothetize that it is proper algorithms, a massive neural network, or a lot of other things. In reality we haven't got a clue. In particular, labelling something we already have got as "the key" is most likely wrong.
Unfortunately, it isn't true. People with a clue has built massive neural networks before. They didn't magically become intelligent.
I'm sure ardour doesn't try to be a third-rate ProTools clone.
The hardware support isn't needed anymore. Fast multicore processors have pretty much replaced the need for specialized hardware. Of course, dedicated DSP hardware is still better, but it's certainly not the future anymore. Besides ProTools hardware is expensive, and I doubt you can get specifications for it. Besides, it's not obvious what other kinds of hardware you can use. On the other hand, software audio plugins, and support for multichannel low-latency sound-cards is there.
And if you go to a professional office in L.A, you won't see Blue Gene, you will see a DELL. And you won't see "La Modernista Diamonds" by Caran d'Ache, but a BIC-pen. Does that tell you that you something? Perhaps that proof by reference to "the pros" doesn't work?
Pro Tools has been the main tool for audio professionals for decades. Sounds like a good choice if you want to clone something. I'm sorry you can't get everything you want, but even though it's third-rate, at least it's improving. And it's not like it's the only thing out there for linux either.
Ardour supports LADSPA plugins. It doesn't support AU because that's mac only. It doesn't support VST because that's windows only. It doesn't support RTAS because it's not an open standard, and requires special hardware. It may work with VST through wine, and if a windows or mac version is ever made, it will most likely support native plugins there.
JACK is not a format. Jack is to linux what ReWire is to windows. Since jack can be used to route audio between applications, it can also be used to route audio between your soundcard and your applications. In general this gives you more flexibility. If you don't want to know this, I can write you a 2-line script so you don't need to be aware of jack. However, it will still be there, giving you more flexibility than you ever had on windows, without any loss of performance. Just because it's different from what you're used to, doesn't mean it sucks. The only thing that sucks about jack is that it doesn't do MIDI!
Well, if you can only be satisfied by having exactly the same applications as under windows, you know where to find them. I will not dispute that linux could need more audio applications, but we don't need clones of all the above. ProTools, Logic, and Ableton Live all more or less perform the same function. They allow you to play, record, and arrange audio and midi tracks. Final cut adds video tracks. Reason has a nice selection of synths and effects. What we need under linux is tools to do the above tasks: play, record and arrange midi, audio and video tracks; create audio; modify audio and/or video. Tools should focus on those tasks, not in whether it duplicates the function of Logic or Ableton Live.
That kind of "pro" also has near unlimited funds and can afford to fill their studio with hard- and software for millions of dollars. Surely they can afford someone to help them inserting an ubuntu disk. As a non-pro, and from experience, I know that windows consumes a lot more of my time than linux ever has. An ubuntu install just works, compared to windows that must be tweaked for days before it works well, and must be reinstalled every 6 months. As a hobbyist musician, and tinkerer, I'd be much more interested in a home-studio running linux, than one with windows. You'd be surprised how many computer musicians agree with me.
They should. Everything seems to be going windows!
Ok, so let's include the jews and the muslims too.
The greek and roman religions (like the nordic) were mostly compareable to Marvel comics. People would invent exciting stories about their favourite gods/heroes and tell them to each other around the fireplace. The main difference is that people don't think Marvel comics are real. Or if they do, at least they are afraid of admitting it publicly, at least after they are 13 years old. Greek and roman state leaders were not afraid of admitting publicly that they believed in their Gods. In fact, it was vital to do so, in order to get any support from the people (they weren't necessarily called "voters" back then). On the other hand, I'm quite sure that many prominent greek or roman men did not believe their Gods to be any more real than Marvel superheroes. But they didn't admit that publically. (Oh yeah, there's another difference. Marvel superheroes are intended for children. It lacks stories suitable for adults, there's no sex. Greek and Roman gods seemed to live in some sort of hedonistic socity where everyone fucked everyone, including their family)
Besides christianity/judeaism/islam, there are plenty of other religions to choose from. The only thing they have in common, is that they are different. Some of them focus on belief (like christianity). Most of them focus on acts and rituals. Some of them have a single God. Some deny the existence of anything beyond God, or gods. Some of them have no God(s). And most of them have many Gods. Some of them believe time is linear. Some believe time is circular. And some haven't really made up their mind about that, except that it seems linear now. Some think there's an afterlife. Some thinks there's a finite series of afterlives. Some think there's an infinite series of afterlives. Some think there's reincarnation. Some think reincarnation infinite, some think it will eventually stop. Some think that after reincarnation stops, there's an afterlife (and so on...) Some think you will live through the mind of people who eat your brain (yes, actually!). Some think that you will live as long as people can remember you. Some doesn't think there's an afterlife at all. Some people ban homosexuality. Some people find it divine. Some people believe that for boys to become men, they must suck the dick of older men and eat their cum (yes, actually!) The list goes on...
Neither did I on my Pentium 90. To get audio skipping with audio, you either need to use low-latency processing, or have a ridiculously busy box. Realtime will help low-latency processing run more reliable, and can also help by giving selected tasks higher priority, which will solve both problems. (And yes, I know what realtime means, and no, I'm not speaking in general, I'm speaking of this specific set of patches to linux).
Actually, windows isn't any better than linux for audio tasks. It's just that linux lacks the useful software. What people really want is something that is better than windows for audio-processing tasks. Not something that is on par with windows, we already have that.
Actually, the politicians are caring about who is going to vote for them. They usually also have a personal agenda, which was the reason they became politicians in the first place, but I can assure you that that agenda is certainly not to avoid lowering property values in certain slum-like areas of Seattle. Politicians might care about "white flight", as you call it, or "cultural plurality and integration", as they would call it, but I can assure you that if an area is dangerous, people will know it regardless of real-time fire-department maps.
If you don't want to listen to hearsay, or do independent research, one simple way to find out is to ask your insurance company how much a home-insurance costs in various parts of town. Another way would be to read the newspaper.
As for the claim that this is because of the risk of terrorism, I find that quite believable. If I were to bomb the nearest mosque or synagogue, the effect would be better if I could bomb it at a time when I knew all the fire-trucks were busy at the other side of town.
The concept of sin, is something that was mostly invented by christianity. I doubt there were many ritual animal sacrifices made to get rid of sin. Usually they were made to get to fuck that nice looking babe in the next village, a good crop, revenge over that guy who called you a moron, a safe birth, or something like that. Not to get rid of sin.
Well, to nitpick, the phrase "Can a word be immoral?" doesn't mean that the person asking the question wonders whether a given word is immoral. That would be as stupid as asking whether immoral (the concept) is a word . Besides immoral (the concept), nothing else is immoral. If you are still confused, "immoral" is a word, immoral is not.
The right way to go about this, is that immoral must be thought of as a function mapping concepts to true or false, where a concept can be anything (such as an act, a dream, a word, a person, a country, a fruit, or a mountain), and the question is whether there exists words that would be mapped by immoral to true. An alternate view, is to consider immoral and words as sets, and to speculate whether elements that are members of the set words can also at the same time be a member of the set immoral. Your interpretation of the question would be akin to asking whether the set immoral is a member of the set words
Yes. That's what words do. They represent concepts. E.g. the word "bukkake" represents a concept many people find morally objectionable. And the word "flower" represents a concept many people find beautyful.
This makes about as much sense as claiming that "a government should create a policy which clearly defines what is aesthetically acceptible for its people". The idea of separation between church and state that you talk about is there exactly to avoid having the government meddle with moral, aesthetical, or other value-judgements. What a government should do is to "create a policy which clearly defines what is legally acceptible for its people". Questions such as morals are better left to individual judgement.
Wow, you must have some other concept of math than I. In my world, strict superset means outside of California too!
So exchanging reiserfs for ext3 is a downgrade now? With ext3 you get a stable well-maintained file-system used by the majority of linux users worldwide. With reiserfs you get a poorly maintained file-system, which the original creator has dropped to work on something else, and that nobody else maintains, and that instead of trying to do well as a file-system focuses on performance for other random things, such as being a database, having small files, etc... Maybe you find it sad, I call it common sense!
Gee, it must have been a long time since you were using ext3. By the time ext3 was announced, it was a minor modification to an already very mature file-system.
Remember, ext2 was *the* file-system the vast majority of linux users all over the world used. ext2 survived through Yggdrasil, Slackware, and RedHat. Then people started porting various journalled file-systems to linux, and ext3 was created as a journalled variation of ext2. Even by the first version, ext3 was probably safer than XFS or JFS, who had to be modified extensively to fit inside the linux kernel.
It didn't take long for ext3 to take the place of the default file-system on linux, with ext2 having second seat. Other file-systems, such as reiserfs, XFS, JFS, and so on, hasn't got nearly the same amount of testing. Calling ext3 immature is like calling FAT untested.
You forgot something. You need to skip the boring parts. Assuming you only watch about 10% of the porn, and skip past the rest, you need 3150TB. And of course, you may want something a little higher definition than the typical 2006 DivX. In twenty years time, I'll probably want a fully immersive experience, with a tactile VR suit. This will need much higher bandwidth (or is it called "wider bandwidth"? ;-)
The transputer was a multithreaded cpu at a time when nobody wanted a multithreaded cpu. Crusoe was a power-friendly cpu at a time when very few people bothered about power usage in cpus. And in 1938 somebody probably created an environmentally-friendly car, at a time when nobody cared about the environment either. None of them sold. Guess why? The correct answer is not "lack of a free market".