1) The Russian forces are not wearing insignias, or identifying themselves as Russian military. They either refuse to identify themselves at all, or identify themselves as being from the non-existent "Ukrainian Self Defense Force."
2) They Russian units are surrounding and/or capturing Ukrainian military installations. They are not moving to their bases, they are taking over Ukrainian bases. The Ukrainian commanders have been keeping things very cool, to avoid Russia being able to say they were provoked, so there hasn't been any violence, but it is a military attack on military targets, make no mistake.
3) Speaking of provocation, the Russian military has been trying it. They've been moving in and taking over Ukrainian bases, then withdrawing, only to do it again later. They are trying to goad the Ukrainian military in to firing on them.
4) Russia has been importing other non-governmental groups like Serbian Paramilitary forces to do, well who knows, but it isn't likely anything good.
So no, it is nothing like the US in Japan. Now if suddenly troops showed up in Maizuru and blocked off the military port there, troops wearing American uniforms, speaking English, armed with American weapons but wearing no insignias, no identifiers, and refusing to answer questions. If they blockaded the base, and then later went in and took it over, well ya, I'd be saying that the US was invading Japan and that it was clearly underhanded and illegit.
Having bases in a country doesn't mean free run to do as you please.
But then you can't really complain about their goal to have more powerful weapons.
The thing is we come back to the question of what really is a country, what makes a nation a nation? Well there can be two situations:
The first and oldest is just the ability to act as one, the strength such that nobody can realistically question your status. This is what you see with something like the US. Even if another nation doesn't like the US, or doesn't think it should be valid, they can't question that it is because they can't do anything about it. They can't attack or threaten the US's status in any way, the US is in control of its territory because nobody can say otherwise. Obviously this is the kind of thing that changes sometimes, and countries have indeed been conquered, reformed, etc, etc.
The other is international recognition and protection. There are a number of countries with little to no military, they couldn't hold off an attack from even a fairly small force, yet they are secure as countries. The reason is that they are recognized by international treaties, and thus the big boys, as being countries. They agree they are sovereign and won't interfere, and further often agree to defend them if someone does. Iceland is like that. They have no real military, but they are a NATO member, due to their strategic location. So they have some NATO bases, and the commitment of all NATO members to defend them if they are attacked.
Now, as this applies to Ukraine. They've been invaded by Russia. Russia has sent in troops, who are not wearing any identification, to take over Ukrainian military bases in Crimea. They really can't do much about it. If they fire on the Russian soldiers. Russia will just use that as an excuse to go all out on an invasion (Russian soldiers have been trying to provoke them in to firing) and Ukraine lacks the troops to push that back.
So they have two choices for independence: Either the international community steps in and helps, or they get more powerful weapons, the kind Russia doesn't want to fuck with.
Thus regardless of if you think the US or other countries have any specific obligation to them, that is the general state of things.
The blockchain is currently about 15GB, and grows every time there's a transaction. That's a problem. Most phones don't have 15GB of free space. You'd have to get an SD card, just to hold it and that is only a temporary solution, since it'll keep growing.
Also this would be a real problem if BTC was actually used like a major currency and not just played with by speculators as the number of transactions would be orders of magnitude higher, and thus so would the growth.
So it would be totally unrealistic to just store it on mobile devices, which is something you'd probably want to do if you were going to use it as a general purpose kind of payment system, security issues aside and those are not minor.
In general, a citizen and only make an arrest if they witness a felony being committed. Also the same sort of idea with drawing a gun. A good way I heard it put is "If you pull a weapon on someone, one of you committed a felony so you'd better be sure ti was them."
Police have a more relaxed standard. They can arrest based on the suspicion of a crime, and can arrest for misdemeanors. Also they have wider latitude as to when they can draw a weapon.
Stuff like this is why universities have police forces. I work on a campus and we have both security (we call them police aides) and police. The security guards are cheaper, yet we have police offers too. There are good reasons, and the university has clear guidelines for who does what. The security guys more or less just lock buildings and call in problems. The police actually deal with the problems.
If the answer is "Well his life is in danger because he has lots of money in Bitcoins that can be stolen!" well, then there's another flaw in Bitcoins, or at least in keeping Bitcoins on your own hardware, which is what BTCheads have been advocating since the Mt. Gox 'asploded.
This isn't an issue for a normal rich people, because they don't keep their money in something like paper currency that can be easily stolen. It is in banks. So you break in to their house and kill them... well you don't get any of their money. The bank doesn't say "Oh hey you killed the guy, so by RPG loot rules you get his money!" If that's a concern with Bitcoin because it is like keeping lots of cash on hand, well that's another disadvantage now isn't it?
C# is also an open standard. It is an ECMA/ISO standard (as is the Common Language Infrastructure that underlies the CLR). Java is still Oracle's thing and they get snarky with companies that implement it in ways they don't like (like their BS with Google).
I think maybe because it is something that can be easily shown off, or because it can be done cheaper, or because they have a misguided belief that it makes everything fast.
Personally if I can't afford an SSD big enough to stick all the apps I normally want on there, I don't bother with an SSD in a system.
What you discover with SSDs is that for desktop usage pretty much any drive is "fast enough" and that faster doesn't much matter. I went from a SATA-2 SSD that was fairly slow even for that generation (WD Siliconedge) to a SATA-3 SSD that is fairly fast for this generation (Samsung 840 Pro) and I don't notice any difference. I can benchmark a difference, but I don't see any difference in load times and so on. SSDs are fast enough that they are making themselves not the bottleneck.
That's also why there isn't a ton of interest in the PCIe SSDs. You can get way more performance, but it is a somewhat limited set of scenarios (on the desktop at least) where that would matter.
The fact that Bitcoin goes backwards with regards to monetary policy is a feature, not a bug, according to its proponents. It seems that most people who are Bitcoin advocates do not have a very good knowledge of financial history. There is this belief that back in the day when we had currency that was backed by, or composed of, precious metals that we never had any financial problems. They believe that all our financial woes are a new thing, and that by moving back to an older monetary policy things would be better.
This is just typical âoenever wasâ syndrome. You see it from various people for all kinds of things: they look back to a glorious past where everything was better, in other words a past that never was. You frequently see this in relation to crime, schools, and social things like that, this is just the financial version.
Then of course there are people who the lack of regulation is a bonus for because theyâ(TM)re criminals, con artists, and things like that. A currency with no government regulation, no tracking, and no way to reverse transactions is an absolute boon for those that wish to rip others off. So they quite like Bitcoin as it is.
People who actually like new monetary policy? Well weâ(TM)ve all avoided using Bitcoin because we recognized it for the problem it is. So donâ(TM)t expect to see any changes. The problems with it that you quite rightly see his major flaws, the proponents see is a good things.
Most censorship in the US you see is self censorship of one variety or another. Like on TV, the only thing the government steps in on is over-the-air channels. The airwaves, belonging to the public, are regulated by the government. On cable? Do what you like.
So why then do cable channels censor/regulate various things? Well they internally decide what they want to show, what they are ok with. Usually this is based around what advertisers want and what kind of audience they target. But they are welcome to change it as they wish. Some do vary rules by time of day or things like that.
Same deal with game ratings. Publishers tend to avoid AO ratings because a number of retailers, like Walmart, refuse to carry AO games. So they shoot for M, or below. However the government isn't involved. You are free to make AO games, and you are free to sell games that are unrated at all. This is different from some places where a game gets refused classification by a government body and then cannot be legally sold.
Though the government has rumbled about more mandatory ratings/censorship in the US so far it has been nothing but rumblings. The government is fairly hands off.
There have been a few games I've seen that didn't bother with the ESRB, they just got a PEGI rating and that keeps the retailers happy. Civ 4 was such a title. No ESRB rating, even in the US, just PEGI. Kept Target, BestBuy, etc happy. Retailers don't seem to be that fussy about the rating system used, they just seem to want one. So supposing the ESRB were being dicks, but PEGI was being reasonable, a company could use the PEGI rating instead and that would work just fine in the US.
Of course on the PC side there's Steam, which is changing things because they have no fucks to give about ratings near as I can tell. They have plenty of indy titles that are unrated because the devs don't submit them for ratings. Given that Steam is becoming a major way of buying games it may lead to publishers being more willing to try games with content that would earn it a higher rating.
That proves the opposite of what people think. It was for a very long time extremely effective. The auto scanning l33t hax0r tools out there only looked for port 22 for SSH. They didn't scan the system. If they didn't find it, they moved on. I saw massive differences in the number of failed logins for servers on 22 and servers not.
Now that has largely changed, but it worked real well for like a decade-ish. That is not worthless. No it wasn't the only layer of security, it wasn't an excuse to ignore everything, but it did a hell of a job reducing attack profile and costs -nothing-.
The problem is geeks seem to think if security isn't perfect, it is worthless, which is stupid because in the physical world there's no such thing, EVER, as perfect security and since all computers are in the end physical entities, the same actually applies to computer security. It is all layers, it is all protection against different levels of threats.
Turns out simple obscurity can be really useful at times. It doesn't make you safe by itself, but it can make a breakin that much harder, and thus less likely.
I think part of that is because for many of the programmers who aren't very good, that is mostly what it is. Like those programmers you find that can only do Java, because that's what they were taught in university. They didn't actually learn how to solve problems, they memorized Java syntax and grammar and can now, poorly, apply it to attempting to solve problems.
Also you seem to see some programmers who think it is at least part of what makes it mysterious, difficult, or "hardcore" or whatever. You see them on Slashdot hating on IDEs as various kinds of crutches and saying that only by programming in a good text editor do you REALLY understand what you are doing. They seem to worry that if what they do is accessible, then anyone can do ti and they'll be worthless.
Of course as you point out that isn't what good programming is about. It is about problem solving, a very particular kind of problem solving at that. However there are plenty of programmers who aren't very good, and for a number of them I think memorization is how they try to convince themselves they are useful.
If you look at his account, it is brand new and this is his only post. I've noticed this kind of thing on various sites when there's a story on Venezuela that is critical of the government or that talks about the problems happening. People who have never posted before pop up and say it isn't true, or blame the US, or whatnot.
Now maybe they were longtime readers who just happened to suddenly decide to participate, but I kinda doubt it. I think it is a bunch of pro-government types that are out to shill. Could be officially sanctioned, could just be a bunch of nationalist types (which all countries seem to have) that are doing it of their own accord.
Seems to be happening fairly often with Venezuela stories though, so one way or another I think this is a concerted effort on the part of some people, and not just happenstance.
Games don't make use of double precision math on a GPU. Really the only thing that does is some GPGPU apps (plenty of others are SP). So it makes no sense to optimize for it, and nVidia does not in their consumer cards, particularly low end ones like the 750.
Don't go and try to sniff around to find benchmarks that make your favourite product win, as it is rather silly. Ya, there's a lot the 290X is better at, but that doesn't mean it is relevant. The idea here is for reasonable graphics (as in gaming, multi-media, etc) performance with low power. It seems to have that in spades.
Dictators love to pretend that their people actually love the oppressive government. So elections are quite a common sight. However that doesn't mean the people have any real say. Sometimes it is done like it was in Iraq, where there is only one choice and people are forced to go vote anyhow. Sometimes it is done like in Iran where the elections themselves are mostly left alone, but an unelected body (the Assembly of Experts) determines who gets to run, and the real power doesn't lie with the elected representative. Sometimes it is a case of using violence, bribery, intimidation, etc to keep opponents form running and/or people from voting for the opposition.
Regardless, elections don't mean "free". Dictatorships often like to use elections as a smokescreen. Indeed if you look up Venezuela on Freedomhouse you see they rate the country as only partially free and the press as not free.
Labview is visual code. As another poster mentioned, you can try Mindstorms NTX, which is a cut down version of Labview. It really isn't any easier though, at least for anything of any real complexity.
Their tech really didn't push boundaries that much, at least not usefully, in recent years. The measure of pushing forward with game engines isn't coming up with something new that doesn't work all that well on modern tech, it is coming up with new methods to make things look more real with existing tech. To make things work better, faster, etc.
So sure, the whole iDTech 5 "megatexture" thing sounds cool... But when you see it in practice it is less impressive than procedural techniques from other engines. On top of that, it requires server class hardware to build maps, whereas other engines feature tools that work on regular systems. Same kind of deal with iDTech 4's lighting model. Ya everything comes from a real light source is neat, but lacking radiosity or other kind of global illumination it ended up only working well at being dark and having extremely hard shadows. Other engines gave much more realistic looking lighting, even if the math was technically less correct.
To me, it seems like they've been too interested in playing around, and not in delivering useful products. Not that playing around isn't fine, but if you are going to make and sell games and game engines, you need to focus on delivering a good product.
Hence why iDTech 4 and 5 saw next to no licenses but Unreal Engine 3 saw hundreds. It had good tools, a good workflow, and looked damn good.
It's sad too because clever tricks to make things look better, even if it wasn't the "right" way of doing things is what made iD famous. Doom was a sea of compromise. It didn't actually have a 3d map, just height information, did clever tricks with the limited pallet to get distance fade, used shortcuts to make the math work fast enough on systems with no coprocessor and so on. Net effect was it looked better than people thought you could make a game look on the hardware of the time.
Now we have things like Rage. iD can crow on all they like about the technology, doesn't change the fact that Frostbite 2 (Battlefield 3) looks WAY better in actual operation and scales better too.
If it is just support for preemption and an MMU MS already created an API for that, it is called "DirectX 11.2" or more properly the WDDM 1.3. 11.1 (WDDM 1.2) supported full preemption, 11.2 supports page based virtual memory.
I dunno, I guess we'll see how performance in real games actually shakes out but if this is nothing more than an API with a couple newish features, features that DX already supports, I'm not really sure that the "giveashit" factor for devs will be very high.
I also wonder as to how they'll handle GPU memory mapping in user space. With large memory cards, that is going to mean saying no 32-bit versions which at this point is still something that may be problematic for game developers.
Well, assuming it takes off which I don't think it will. If this stuff is truly "close to the core" as the Mantle name and marketing hype claim, then it'll only work so long as they stick with the CGN architecture. It won't work with any large architecture changes. So that means that they either have to stick with GCN forever, which would probably cripple their ability to make competitive cards in the future as things change, or they'd have to abandon support for Mantle in newer cards, which wouldn't be that popular with the developers and users that had bought in. I suppose they also could provide some kind of abstraction/emulation layer but that rather defeats the purpose of a "bare metal" kind of API.
I just can't see this as being a good thing for AMD in the long run, presuming Mantle truly is what they claim. The whole reason for things like DirectX and OpenGL are to abstract the hardware so that you don't have to write a render for each and every kind of card architecture, which does get changed a lot. If Mantle is tightly tied to GCN then that screws all that over.
So either this is a rather bad desperation move from AMD to try and make up for the fact that their CPUs have been sucking lately, or this is a bunch of marketing BS and really Mantle is a high level API, but just a proprietary one to try and screw over nVidia.
You can get a bank that will let you make throwaway cards. Bank of America does. You specify how long in the future ti is to expire and how much its limit is. It'll create a throwaway number for you. It is charged against your regular card, but is a separate number with a separate limit that you can shut down as needed.
Most of the cross platform stuff works better in Windows. You can sniff around online for various tests, DAWBench has some good ones: http://www.dawbench.com/win7-v.... You also don't get away from driver issues if you are talking pro audio, since all the pro cards have their own drivers and many of them are... suboptimal to put it nicely.
If you like using a Mac, that's fine, but don't try and sell it as "better" because objectively, you can get more polyphony, lower latency, etc on a Windows system using the same software. Not really a big deal these days as an i7 + SSD generally means your system has more power than you need for anything, but the data is what it is.
There is just not much in the free software world, particularly for Linux, that is good for music composition. Just the way it is. If you want to do it well, you need commercial tools, generally for Windows or Mac.
For what the original poster is looking for, I'd say have a look at Cakewalk Sonar X3. Sonar is real, real good at MIDI, knows how to deal with SoundFonts, has some built in synths that aren't too bad, and only runs $100 for the basic version. It's notation is not the best, but anything I can think of that is a reasonable step up is also quite a bit more money (like Cubase).
However depending on what the ultimate goal is, the DAW can end up being the cheap part of things. High quality samples cost a lot, and there are few freebies. Reason is to make good samples you need to hire good musicians, a good recording studio/hall, good engineers, and then spend a lot of time on it. Gotta make that money back somehow. So if you want realistic sounds, you can easily spend far more on samples than the DAW/sequencer. I own Sonar X3 Producer, which is $500, but I've spent more than that on a single sample set, and I have multiple sample sets.
Also if he thinks that programming a synthesizer is easy, he's got another thing coming. Making a competent synthesis engine that sounds good, is usable, etc, etc is not an easy task. Particularly since there are all sort of different kinds of synthesis one might wish to use, and each is implemented and controlled differently.
So, like the parent said: religious statement or actual work? If you just wanna play around in Linux with free solutions, then go to it. No need to ask on Slashdot, just try stuff out. Wikipedia has a list of OSS music software, to name just one place. If you are asking because you want something that doesn't suck and can do some real work, then you'll need to stick with Window or Mac and drop some money.
Like I said, I'd go for Sonar. There's a free trial, and the base version isn't that much and has good features and capabilities (it isn't crippled with regards to tracks and so on). You can always upgrade later.
Other reasonably priced options to look at are Reaper and FL Studio Fruity Edition.
Also this stupid idea that "success" is some kind of binary thing where you either work really hard all the time and make a lot of money, and thus are successful, or you are a failure, not worth mention. If you don't have the right kind of job in the right field that pays the right amount of money and has the right kind of prestige then you just suck, your life sucks, and you are useless.
I think that is an exceedingly unhealthy and narrow minded outlook. This, really overtly material attitude at its core where success is equated to jobs that pay a lot. I think it is much healthier to worry about what makes you happy. Stop comparing your life to others, stop worrying about how much you make so long as what you make is enough to let you have a good life. Work to live, don't live to work.
Slashdot Mirror
And not shilling, go educate yourself. Vice News has some good coverage, split in 5 pieces, on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The most important things to note:
1) The Russian forces are not wearing insignias, or identifying themselves as Russian military. They either refuse to identify themselves at all, or identify themselves as being from the non-existent "Ukrainian Self Defense Force."
2) They Russian units are surrounding and/or capturing Ukrainian military installations. They are not moving to their bases, they are taking over Ukrainian bases. The Ukrainian commanders have been keeping things very cool, to avoid Russia being able to say they were provoked, so there hasn't been any violence, but it is a military attack on military targets, make no mistake.
3) Speaking of provocation, the Russian military has been trying it. They've been moving in and taking over Ukrainian bases, then withdrawing, only to do it again later. They are trying to goad the Ukrainian military in to firing on them.
4) Russia has been importing other non-governmental groups like Serbian Paramilitary forces to do, well who knows, but it isn't likely anything good.
So no, it is nothing like the US in Japan. Now if suddenly troops showed up in Maizuru and blocked off the military port there, troops wearing American uniforms, speaking English, armed with American weapons but wearing no insignias, no identifiers, and refusing to answer questions. If they blockaded the base, and then later went in and took it over, well ya, I'd be saying that the US was invading Japan and that it was clearly underhanded and illegit.
Having bases in a country doesn't mean free run to do as you please.
But then you can't really complain about their goal to have more powerful weapons.
The thing is we come back to the question of what really is a country, what makes a nation a nation? Well there can be two situations:
The first and oldest is just the ability to act as one, the strength such that nobody can realistically question your status. This is what you see with something like the US. Even if another nation doesn't like the US, or doesn't think it should be valid, they can't question that it is because they can't do anything about it. They can't attack or threaten the US's status in any way, the US is in control of its territory because nobody can say otherwise. Obviously this is the kind of thing that changes sometimes, and countries have indeed been conquered, reformed, etc, etc.
The other is international recognition and protection. There are a number of countries with little to no military, they couldn't hold off an attack from even a fairly small force, yet they are secure as countries. The reason is that they are recognized by international treaties, and thus the big boys, as being countries. They agree they are sovereign and won't interfere, and further often agree to defend them if someone does. Iceland is like that. They have no real military, but they are a NATO member, due to their strategic location. So they have some NATO bases, and the commitment of all NATO members to defend them if they are attacked.
Now, as this applies to Ukraine. They've been invaded by Russia. Russia has sent in troops, who are not wearing any identification, to take over Ukrainian military bases in Crimea. They really can't do much about it. If they fire on the Russian soldiers. Russia will just use that as an excuse to go all out on an invasion (Russian soldiers have been trying to provoke them in to firing) and Ukraine lacks the troops to push that back.
So they have two choices for independence: Either the international community steps in and helps, or they get more powerful weapons, the kind Russia doesn't want to fuck with.
Thus regardless of if you think the US or other countries have any specific obligation to them, that is the general state of things.
The blockchain is currently about 15GB, and grows every time there's a transaction. That's a problem. Most phones don't have 15GB of free space. You'd have to get an SD card, just to hold it and that is only a temporary solution, since it'll keep growing.
Also this would be a real problem if BTC was actually used like a major currency and not just played with by speculators as the number of transactions would be orders of magnitude higher, and thus so would the growth.
So it would be totally unrealistic to just store it on mobile devices, which is something you'd probably want to do if you were going to use it as a general purpose kind of payment system, security issues aside and those are not minor.
In general, a citizen and only make an arrest if they witness a felony being committed. Also the same sort of idea with drawing a gun. A good way I heard it put is "If you pull a weapon on someone, one of you committed a felony so you'd better be sure ti was them."
Police have a more relaxed standard. They can arrest based on the suspicion of a crime, and can arrest for misdemeanors. Also they have wider latitude as to when they can draw a weapon.
Stuff like this is why universities have police forces. I work on a campus and we have both security (we call them police aides) and police. The security guards are cheaper, yet we have police offers too. There are good reasons, and the university has clear guidelines for who does what. The security guys more or less just lock buildings and call in problems. The police actually deal with the problems.
If the answer is "Well his life is in danger because he has lots of money in Bitcoins that can be stolen!" well, then there's another flaw in Bitcoins, or at least in keeping Bitcoins on your own hardware, which is what BTCheads have been advocating since the Mt. Gox 'asploded.
This isn't an issue for a normal rich people, because they don't keep their money in something like paper currency that can be easily stolen. It is in banks. So you break in to their house and kill them... well you don't get any of their money. The bank doesn't say "Oh hey you killed the guy, so by RPG loot rules you get his money!" If that's a concern with Bitcoin because it is like keeping lots of cash on hand, well that's another disadvantage now isn't it?
C# is also an open standard. It is an ECMA/ISO standard (as is the Common Language Infrastructure that underlies the CLR). Java is still Oracle's thing and they get snarky with companies that implement it in ways they don't like (like their BS with Google).
I think maybe because it is something that can be easily shown off, or because it can be done cheaper, or because they have a misguided belief that it makes everything fast.
Personally if I can't afford an SSD big enough to stick all the apps I normally want on there, I don't bother with an SSD in a system.
What you discover with SSDs is that for desktop usage pretty much any drive is "fast enough" and that faster doesn't much matter. I went from a SATA-2 SSD that was fairly slow even for that generation (WD Siliconedge) to a SATA-3 SSD that is fairly fast for this generation (Samsung 840 Pro) and I don't notice any difference. I can benchmark a difference, but I don't see any difference in load times and so on. SSDs are fast enough that they are making themselves not the bottleneck.
That's also why there isn't a ton of interest in the PCIe SSDs. You can get way more performance, but it is a somewhat limited set of scenarios (on the desktop at least) where that would matter.
The fact that Bitcoin goes backwards with regards to monetary policy is a feature, not a bug, according to its proponents. It seems that most people who are Bitcoin advocates do not have a very good knowledge of financial history. There is this belief that back in the day when we had currency that was backed by, or composed of, precious metals that we never had any financial problems. They believe that all our financial woes are a new thing, and that by moving back to an older monetary policy things would be better.
This is just typical âoenever wasâ syndrome. You see it from various people for all kinds of things: they look back to a glorious past where everything was better, in other words a past that never was. You frequently see this in relation to crime, schools, and social things like that, this is just the financial version.
Then of course there are people who the lack of regulation is a bonus for because theyâ(TM)re criminals, con artists, and things like that. A currency with no government regulation, no tracking, and no way to reverse transactions is an absolute boon for those that wish to rip others off. So they quite like Bitcoin as it is.
People who actually like new monetary policy? Well weâ(TM)ve all avoided using Bitcoin because we recognized it for the problem it is. So donâ(TM)t expect to see any changes. The problems with it that you quite rightly see his major flaws, the proponents see is a good things.
Most censorship in the US you see is self censorship of one variety or another. Like on TV, the only thing the government steps in on is over-the-air channels. The airwaves, belonging to the public, are regulated by the government. On cable? Do what you like.
So why then do cable channels censor/regulate various things? Well they internally decide what they want to show, what they are ok with. Usually this is based around what advertisers want and what kind of audience they target. But they are welcome to change it as they wish. Some do vary rules by time of day or things like that.
Same deal with game ratings. Publishers tend to avoid AO ratings because a number of retailers, like Walmart, refuse to carry AO games. So they shoot for M, or below. However the government isn't involved. You are free to make AO games, and you are free to sell games that are unrated at all. This is different from some places where a game gets refused classification by a government body and then cannot be legally sold.
Though the government has rumbled about more mandatory ratings/censorship in the US so far it has been nothing but rumblings. The government is fairly hands off.
There have been a few games I've seen that didn't bother with the ESRB, they just got a PEGI rating and that keeps the retailers happy. Civ 4 was such a title. No ESRB rating, even in the US, just PEGI. Kept Target, BestBuy, etc happy. Retailers don't seem to be that fussy about the rating system used, they just seem to want one. So supposing the ESRB were being dicks, but PEGI was being reasonable, a company could use the PEGI rating instead and that would work just fine in the US.
Of course on the PC side there's Steam, which is changing things because they have no fucks to give about ratings near as I can tell. They have plenty of indy titles that are unrated because the devs don't submit them for ratings. Given that Steam is becoming a major way of buying games it may lead to publishers being more willing to try games with content that would earn it a higher rating.
That proves the opposite of what people think. It was for a very long time extremely effective. The auto scanning l33t hax0r tools out there only looked for port 22 for SSH. They didn't scan the system. If they didn't find it, they moved on. I saw massive differences in the number of failed logins for servers on 22 and servers not.
Now that has largely changed, but it worked real well for like a decade-ish. That is not worthless. No it wasn't the only layer of security, it wasn't an excuse to ignore everything, but it did a hell of a job reducing attack profile and costs -nothing-.
The problem is geeks seem to think if security isn't perfect, it is worthless, which is stupid because in the physical world there's no such thing, EVER, as perfect security and since all computers are in the end physical entities, the same actually applies to computer security. It is all layers, it is all protection against different levels of threats.
Turns out simple obscurity can be really useful at times. It doesn't make you safe by itself, but it can make a breakin that much harder, and thus less likely.
I think part of that is because for many of the programmers who aren't very good, that is mostly what it is. Like those programmers you find that can only do Java, because that's what they were taught in university. They didn't actually learn how to solve problems, they memorized Java syntax and grammar and can now, poorly, apply it to attempting to solve problems.
Also you seem to see some programmers who think it is at least part of what makes it mysterious, difficult, or "hardcore" or whatever. You see them on Slashdot hating on IDEs as various kinds of crutches and saying that only by programming in a good text editor do you REALLY understand what you are doing. They seem to worry that if what they do is accessible, then anyone can do ti and they'll be worthless.
Of course as you point out that isn't what good programming is about. It is about problem solving, a very particular kind of problem solving at that. However there are plenty of programmers who aren't very good, and for a number of them I think memorization is how they try to convince themselves they are useful.
If you look at his account, it is brand new and this is his only post. I've noticed this kind of thing on various sites when there's a story on Venezuela that is critical of the government or that talks about the problems happening. People who have never posted before pop up and say it isn't true, or blame the US, or whatnot.
Now maybe they were longtime readers who just happened to suddenly decide to participate, but I kinda doubt it. I think it is a bunch of pro-government types that are out to shill. Could be officially sanctioned, could just be a bunch of nationalist types (which all countries seem to have) that are doing it of their own accord.
Seems to be happening fairly often with Venezuela stories though, so one way or another I think this is a concerted effort on the part of some people, and not just happenstance.
Games don't make use of double precision math on a GPU. Really the only thing that does is some GPGPU apps (plenty of others are SP). So it makes no sense to optimize for it, and nVidia does not in their consumer cards, particularly low end ones like the 750.
Don't go and try to sniff around to find benchmarks that make your favourite product win, as it is rather silly. Ya, there's a lot the 290X is better at, but that doesn't mean it is relevant. The idea here is for reasonable graphics (as in gaming, multi-media, etc) performance with low power. It seems to have that in spades.
Dictators love to pretend that their people actually love the oppressive government. So elections are quite a common sight. However that doesn't mean the people have any real say. Sometimes it is done like it was in Iraq, where there is only one choice and people are forced to go vote anyhow. Sometimes it is done like in Iran where the elections themselves are mostly left alone, but an unelected body (the Assembly of Experts) determines who gets to run, and the real power doesn't lie with the elected representative. Sometimes it is a case of using violence, bribery, intimidation, etc to keep opponents form running and/or people from voting for the opposition.
Regardless, elections don't mean "free". Dictatorships often like to use elections as a smokescreen. Indeed if you look up Venezuela on Freedomhouse you see they rate the country as only partially free and the press as not free.
Labview is visual code. As another poster mentioned, you can try Mindstorms NTX, which is a cut down version of Labview. It really isn't any easier though, at least for anything of any real complexity.
Their tech really didn't push boundaries that much, at least not usefully, in recent years. The measure of pushing forward with game engines isn't coming up with something new that doesn't work all that well on modern tech, it is coming up with new methods to make things look more real with existing tech. To make things work better, faster, etc.
So sure, the whole iDTech 5 "megatexture" thing sounds cool... But when you see it in practice it is less impressive than procedural techniques from other engines. On top of that, it requires server class hardware to build maps, whereas other engines feature tools that work on regular systems. Same kind of deal with iDTech 4's lighting model. Ya everything comes from a real light source is neat, but lacking radiosity or other kind of global illumination it ended up only working well at being dark and having extremely hard shadows. Other engines gave much more realistic looking lighting, even if the math was technically less correct.
To me, it seems like they've been too interested in playing around, and not in delivering useful products. Not that playing around isn't fine, but if you are going to make and sell games and game engines, you need to focus on delivering a good product.
Hence why iDTech 4 and 5 saw next to no licenses but Unreal Engine 3 saw hundreds. It had good tools, a good workflow, and looked damn good.
It's sad too because clever tricks to make things look better, even if it wasn't the "right" way of doing things is what made iD famous. Doom was a sea of compromise. It didn't actually have a 3d map, just height information, did clever tricks with the limited pallet to get distance fade, used shortcuts to make the math work fast enough on systems with no coprocessor and so on. Net effect was it looked better than people thought you could make a game look on the hardware of the time.
Now we have things like Rage. iD can crow on all they like about the technology, doesn't change the fact that Frostbite 2 (Battlefield 3) looks WAY better in actual operation and scales better too.
If it is just support for preemption and an MMU MS already created an API for that, it is called "DirectX 11.2" or more properly the WDDM 1.3. 11.1 (WDDM 1.2) supported full preemption, 11.2 supports page based virtual memory.
I dunno, I guess we'll see how performance in real games actually shakes out but if this is nothing more than an API with a couple newish features, features that DX already supports, I'm not really sure that the "giveashit" factor for devs will be very high.
I also wonder as to how they'll handle GPU memory mapping in user space. With large memory cards, that is going to mean saying no 32-bit versions which at this point is still something that may be problematic for game developers.
Well, assuming it takes off which I don't think it will. If this stuff is truly "close to the core" as the Mantle name and marketing hype claim, then it'll only work so long as they stick with the CGN architecture. It won't work with any large architecture changes. So that means that they either have to stick with GCN forever, which would probably cripple their ability to make competitive cards in the future as things change, or they'd have to abandon support for Mantle in newer cards, which wouldn't be that popular with the developers and users that had bought in. I suppose they also could provide some kind of abstraction/emulation layer but that rather defeats the purpose of a "bare metal" kind of API.
I just can't see this as being a good thing for AMD in the long run, presuming Mantle truly is what they claim. The whole reason for things like DirectX and OpenGL are to abstract the hardware so that you don't have to write a render for each and every kind of card architecture, which does get changed a lot. If Mantle is tightly tied to GCN then that screws all that over.
So either this is a rather bad desperation move from AMD to try and make up for the fact that their CPUs have been sucking lately, or this is a bunch of marketing BS and really Mantle is a high level API, but just a proprietary one to try and screw over nVidia.
You can get a bank that will let you make throwaway cards. Bank of America does. You specify how long in the future ti is to expire and how much its limit is. It'll create a throwaway number for you. It is charged against your regular card, but is a separate number with a separate limit that you can shut down as needed.
As expensive as other pro solutions, but without all the good tools.
Most of the cross platform stuff works better in Windows. You can sniff around online for various tests, DAWBench has some good ones: http://www.dawbench.com/win7-v.... You also don't get away from driver issues if you are talking pro audio, since all the pro cards have their own drivers and many of them are... suboptimal to put it nicely.
If you like using a Mac, that's fine, but don't try and sell it as "better" because objectively, you can get more polyphony, lower latency, etc on a Windows system using the same software. Not really a big deal these days as an i7 + SSD generally means your system has more power than you need for anything, but the data is what it is.
There is just not much in the free software world, particularly for Linux, that is good for music composition. Just the way it is. If you want to do it well, you need commercial tools, generally for Windows or Mac.
For what the original poster is looking for, I'd say have a look at Cakewalk Sonar X3. Sonar is real, real good at MIDI, knows how to deal with SoundFonts, has some built in synths that aren't too bad, and only runs $100 for the basic version. It's notation is not the best, but anything I can think of that is a reasonable step up is also quite a bit more money (like Cubase).
However depending on what the ultimate goal is, the DAW can end up being the cheap part of things. High quality samples cost a lot, and there are few freebies. Reason is to make good samples you need to hire good musicians, a good recording studio/hall, good engineers, and then spend a lot of time on it. Gotta make that money back somehow. So if you want realistic sounds, you can easily spend far more on samples than the DAW/sequencer. I own Sonar X3 Producer, which is $500, but I've spent more than that on a single sample set, and I have multiple sample sets.
Also if he thinks that programming a synthesizer is easy, he's got another thing coming. Making a competent synthesis engine that sounds good, is usable, etc, etc is not an easy task. Particularly since there are all sort of different kinds of synthesis one might wish to use, and each is implemented and controlled differently.
So, like the parent said: religious statement or actual work? If you just wanna play around in Linux with free solutions, then go to it. No need to ask on Slashdot, just try stuff out. Wikipedia has a list of OSS music software, to name just one place. If you are asking because you want something that doesn't suck and can do some real work, then you'll need to stick with Window or Mac and drop some money.
Like I said, I'd go for Sonar. There's a free trial, and the base version isn't that much and has good features and capabilities (it isn't crippled with regards to tracks and so on). You can always upgrade later.
Other reasonably priced options to look at are Reaper and FL Studio Fruity Edition.
Also this stupid idea that "success" is some kind of binary thing where you either work really hard all the time and make a lot of money, and thus are successful, or you are a failure, not worth mention. If you don't have the right kind of job in the right field that pays the right amount of money and has the right kind of prestige then you just suck, your life sucks, and you are useless.
I think that is an exceedingly unhealthy and narrow minded outlook. This, really overtly material attitude at its core where success is equated to jobs that pay a lot. I think it is much healthier to worry about what makes you happy. Stop comparing your life to others, stop worrying about how much you make so long as what you make is enough to let you have a good life. Work to live, don't live to work.