Irony deals with opposites; it has nothing to do with coincidence. If two baseball players from the same hometown, on different teams, receive the same uniform number, it is not ironic. It is a coincidence. If Barry Bonds attains lifetime statistics identical to his fatherâ(TM)s it will not be ironic. It will be a coincidence. Irony is "a state of affairs that is the reverse of what was to be expected; a result opposite to and in mockery of the appropriate result." For instance:

* If a diabetic, on his way to buy insulin, is killed by a runaway truck, he is the victim of an accident. If the truck was delivering sugar, he is the victim of an oddly poetic coincidence. But if the truck was delivering insulin, ah! Then he is the victim of an irony.

* If a Kurd, after surviving bloody battle with Saddam Husseinâ(TM)s army and a long, difficult escape through the mountains, is crushed and killed by a parachute drop of humanitarian aid, that, my friend, is irony writ large.

* Darryl Stingley, the pro football player, was paralyzed after a brutal hit by Jack Tatum. Now Darryl Stingleyâ(TM)s son plays football, and if the son should become paralyzed while playing, it will not be ironic. It will be coincidental. If Darryl Stingleyâ(TM)s son paralyzes someone else, that will be closer to ironic. If he paralyzes Jack Tatumâ(TM)s son that will be precisely ironic.
-
The late and great, George Carlin.

But dirt cheap DAPs were not what caused them to take off. DAPs first took off around 2000. The first iPod was $400, and the breakthrough device, the iPod mini was $199. While I agree that the prices of EBook readers needs to come down, the idea that they need to be the price of a hardback to become popular is ridiculous.

I should say, high speed and relative non-linearity of the level design.

Of course not, but it can ensure it doesn't get interrupted until it's done. Which means it can get the work done faster than it would if interrupted. I'm thinking context switching. If it's done uninterrupted in kernel, that is less context switching then if it's done in user space.

Good idea, but a pain in the neck if you need to moved files often, as I do. My solution for two machines in particular (one Fedora, one WinXP) was to install an ext2 driver on the Windows box --- http://www.fs-driver.org/ --- and use ext2 on the USB key. Permissions are retained.

On that criterion, NTFS on Linux fails too, since not all distributions include r/w NTFS support by default. At least in both cases it's fairly simple to install the necessary software.

Hopefully future versions of OS X will have read/write NTFS support built-in.

Invalid comparison.

When you fire an atomic weapon, your desired output is widescale destruction. Correct, a simulation doesn't give you that.

When you simulate an intelligent being, your desired output is its inferences. The simulation does give you that (if you do it well enough).

Of course, I should add that it's not helpful to focus on simulating human brains. It's like saying, "Heavier-than-air human flight is easy. You just have to build good enough mechanical replicas of hawks, and then get a flock of them to tow someone."

In other words, yes, it's true -- that is the upper bound on the engineerng difficulty of the problem. But we can, and most likely will, solve the problem by better understanding the phenomenon in question, and then using that understanding to come up with something easier to build than than a mimic of a biological system.

Apparently you haven't used it. It is now my daily user at work, while it is a million times better than Vista, I still would rather use my Ubuntu at home or even my wife's Mac. The cool visuals wear off after about 2 days, and the long load times, random hangs start to become more noticeable. While Ubuntu is not perfect, it is free. And the cost to upgrade my wife's mac to Snow Leopard was a reasonable $29 versus the nearly $200 for windows.

Microsoft doesn't need to do that. The open-source community has been doing that just fine by themselves for years now.

... doesn't seem to be working so well against open-source stuff. Maybe Microsoft's new strategy is to split and balkanize the open-source community with a bunch of conflicting licenses and communities.

Division, Discord, and Destruction

Yeah, Microsoft certainly can't use a common word ending like "plex" for its own gain, that's stealing. Google clearly had a the creative idea. Nobody came up with any other "plex" based names before Google... like megaplex, supaplex, Com Plex, Plex...

You know, it goes to show, how little the judges making decisions on these types of cases really know about technology, let alone software technology, where simply put, someone could easily swipe whatever facebook developed, and resell it on the open market...

Facebook did (like so many other companies) use many copy and paste code lines from about everywhere they could find, however,
for someone to say specifically it belongs to them, I know many different applications which uses categories to a piece of data.
It really is not something you can patent, ...a song which belongs in the rock category and metal category, would make windows media player go through the same thing as facebook, should they ever want REAL money for their infringement.

"We believe that commercial software companies and the developers that work for them under-participate in open source projects," Microsoft stated.

While I applaud the intent to appear to be open source friendly, they haven't yet begun to address two of the major issues with Microsoft and open source:

1. What happens when a Microsoft developer inadvertently contributes to their Open Source repository something better than a commercial Microsoft offering?
2. Most of us developing commercial software *CAN NOT* participate in open source projects due to overly broad non-compete clauses in our contracts. The extent of our participation is not up to us, or Microsoft - it's up to our employer, and Microsoft's recent action in this regard does nothing to change this.

Now, here we have Microsoft reinventing the wheel, aka sourceforge. I could even go for a BSD style license, or even public domain. But I have one question:

Would they host, and allow development on ReactOS? (for those who don't know, it's an open source Windows clone)

How Codeplex and Microsoft deal with this question would reveal far more about their true intentions than what their pundits say about their open source attitude.

that's a lot of heavy post-processing for a problem which if you use modern technology and something with low latencies you really just won't have to deal with at all at that stage

The main difference in our opinions though comes from the rather different way you're doing things, which is a great deal more difficult and might have been necessary a decade ago.

Prime example is the idea of loading soundfonts on to a sound card, it isn't done that way these days for a myriad of reasons, pci bus latency being a main one. Flexibility another. Hardware midi with soundfonts on a sound card isn't even seen as something beneficial now.

These days everything is integrated, volumes for individual tracks etc are adjusted easily even in midi form while you're working on it and playing with it. no need to render it to a fixed saved waveform until you're completely done, it can do whatever you like in real-time.

with the 4msec jack latency i mentioned, with everything as it should be that's all the latency you'll ever get. (ok to be pedantic you could maybe add 1msec for usb polling for the midi device you're using if you are) This is an advantage of the heavy integration of everything.

Mastering pre-done waveforms is still a handy skill of course, chances are you'll deal with analogue instruments at some stage. But might i heavily recommend you look into some of the more modern ways of making music electronically? things aren't what they were like a decade ago, where what you have said would have been necessary

Surely you mean downgraded, right?