Yes, there will. In order to effectively multitrack, latency needs to be minimized, to the order of magnitude of a few microseconds. A real time kernel --direct input access to the iron-- is used to minimize latency. A virtual OS, I believe by definition, will never have real time kernel access. As a result the latency will suffer. I'd be surprised if you can get less than 10 ms with a virtual OS, and I think that anything over 6 is going to be useless.

OTOH, if you're working with music in which temporal precision is not a primary necessary --for example atmospheric or ambient sounds-- latency won't present (much of) an obstacle. Nor will it if you're working with single tracks.

Please, revisit this preconception of yours. At first I was tempted to dismiss it with something antagonistic like "oh, shoosh," but that would be counterproductive. There's an underlying stereophilic assumption you're making here that I hope you will honestly revisit.

Consider a longer-term view: the past century of music reproduction technology. 100 years ago you'd be dealing with piano rolls, player pianos; a bit later, '78s. Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, even the earliest Miles Davis was recorded under these relatively primitive conditions, and the music transcends the limitations of the tools. A few decades later the Beatles were cutting Sgt Pepper's with a fucking four track. Less than a decade later Queen gave us Bohemian Rhapsody, again using tape. Pink Floyd's The Wall.

There are countless examples of great music with limited technology. The functionality that all of these production studios had was much more limited than what you can do with Ardour.

The "grow up!" part of your comment really irks me. There are long term, RMS reasons for using free software. Professional artists are faced with a complex IP structure in which the use of proprietary solutions risks unintentional effects on your artistic output, such as surreptitious audio watermarking.

I don't wish to sound dismissive. At the risk of doing so, it sounds like you're a sysadmin professional, not a music professional. I don't understand why you feel comfortable giving career advice directed towards those in the music industry. Can you explain a bit more about your own experience earning a living from creating and producing music?

Try this: http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/

In particular, familiarize yourself with qjackctl and the jack server that it controls; it's a bit like the *nix concept of piping I/O, but for sound and sound apps.

"User friendly" is necessarily going to be subjective, but I think it's fair to characterize early Ubuntu as more user friendly than other distros at the time. Specifically, they seemed to really focus on making it accessible to people who were unfamiliar with Linux. Early on they would even mail out free install discs on request.

Law is complex because the world is complex. Are you able to understand that concept in under 20 minutes, without a law degree?

I hear this complaint a lot. I can certainly understand the frustration behind it. The problem is that the conclusion --"the law should always be simple!"-- is just plain wrong.

A lot of the basics of law are pretty straightforward. After all, you don't need a law degree to understand that killing, stealing, raping, arson, etc are against the law. The reason why law can get so complex is because the world is a complex place, humans are complex creatures, and it is apparently in our nature to continuously look for exceptions, workarounds, and other ways to hack the law for fun and profit. Take billions of us, hundreds of thousands of different types of organizations, interests, and activities, throw in the inevitability of entropy, and things naturally become very complex indeed.

You might as well complain that medicine, human history, or even the universe itself should be simpler.

I had been using one of these cards at a local big grocery for a few months after moving to a new place. It would regularly print out additional coupons with my receipt. The interesting thing to me was that I stopped getting any coupons immediately after I actually *used* one for a discount on a purchase.

Aside from temperatures and some curious issues with conductivity, the properties of liquid diamond are remarkably similar to the properties of liquid ice.

Few if any, I'd guess. Academic journals are usually not ad-based publications. The "open access" model described here means that either the author pays for the publication, the author's institution, or the publication has an institutional grant to pay for it.

When you follow the money, it leads you to two groups. At the bottom of the pole will be the individual scammers who've set up these "journals" -- the article mentions a few professors who were at best slipping and at worst cynically & intentionally running this simply for a profit. For the individually-published papers, it stops here.

For the rest, the money continues to a publishing company that cynically generates profits using a catalog that includes one, several, or only fake journals. These publishers include some big names in the traditional closed-access academic journal model (where subscriptions, often incredibly expensive ones, are required to read journal articles), such as LexisNexis owner Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, and Sage.

According to the criminal complaint, Ulbricht

It's interesting that they're not charging him for the murder-for-hire scheme; the criminal complaint describes it in lurid detail. http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf (The detail starts at point #31/page 21.) Ulbricht allegedly tried to pay ~$150k to have a supposed blackmailer assassinated. He claims to have had an earlier "clean hit" done for around $80k.

Contrast the murder-for-hire move with the following (allegedly) hypocritical drivel from his LinkedIn profile:

As little as a case of insider trading would surprise me here --and the possibility really needs to be investigated-- there is a non-cheating explanation.

Apparently, guessing *against* commonly expected outcomes, such as the Fed's move on the interest rate here, can often be a position that is relatively low-risk and high-reward. If common expectation had been correct, the trades will result in a loss, certainly, and this has to be mitigated. But if the counterintuitive position is correct, and your position is the first one to be right, you can win very, very big.

Insider trading is undoubtedly possible. However, I find it suspect that a person with both the inside knowledge and access to both the information AND HFT would also overlook such a fundamental tell off an otherwise very well-planned and executed fraud.

...of this stunt is how traceable it really has to be. (Taking the assumption that this was an act of sabotage as a given, that is.) I mean I'm sure the phantom authors were thorough enough to cover direct digital tracks, but the list of likely suspects here is going to be really, really small. I find it chilling that people accomplished enough to either develop this research OR steal the information from a competitor would be foolish enough to overlook the simple fact that they can't really easily, anonymously slip into a crowd when that crowd is so tiny to begin with.

The alternate explanations posited or that I could otherwise imagine certainly do seem to be comparatively bizarre and unlikely. The idea that a motive might have been to steal research/publication/academic thunder from interesting results to be a perfectly credible one, really. Current academic and journal models do indeed, perversely, tend to encourage self-interested behavior over behavior beneficial to the rest of humanity. It might be simply an inescapable consequence of the natural links between profit, power, research, and human nature.

Give him a break: he wrote that while waiting for the light to turn green.

Assuming the cop is correct --cops have been known to get the law wrong before-- the law prohibiting GPS apps on smartphones, while well-intended, is poorly designed. The use of phone GPS apps should be permitted, as long as they are attached to a hands-free device -- clipped/strapped/velcroed onto your dash, basically. Some other states already have this on the books.

Manhandling a phone, even for a GPS app, while driving is indeed dangerous in that both your hands and eyes are distracted. But a hands free navigation apps do not present these particular dangers.

I see your point about the tone of the comment, but it seems fair to say that the bible is both a central piece of puritan literature and a work that contains numerous depictions of violence. Then there's the fact that the *second* Thanksgiving feast was less crowded than the first because those particular puritans did a lot of killing.

It's not really that difficult to find examples of community-sanctioned violence in puritan culture: execution was the penalty for a lot more crimes than is the case today, corporal punishment was encouraged, witchcraft persecutions, torture, and execution ("pressed to death by stones" was an accepted form of death for male witches, I believe), etc.