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Unless I misunderstand the link, for the people who experience the placebo effect for pain relief, naloxone blocks the effect, and proglumide increases the effectiveness. But for the people who don't experience the placebo effect neither of them do anything.

If that's the case I don't see how that prevents anyone from testing my suspicion.

But it may well that a person that's susceptible to placebo pain relief might not be susceptible to placebo treatment for something else. However that would also be worth investigating.

I hear in some burn cases they can't use real pain killers, so they inject saline into them and tell them it's a powerful painkiller. And it works well for enough people. Another thing expensive placebos work better than cheap ones:

http://psychologyofpain.blogspot.com/2008/10/ig-nobel-prize-for-study-on-placebo.html

[matrix]Your mind makes it real[/matrix] :)

The problems described in the article: Having it so it's not completely obvious a group is moderated, having a choice of either moderation of every post or no ability to control spammers, flamers, and trolls, and no protection against forged moderation sound like issues caused because Google groups tries too much to be like Usenet.

Usenet was a very good idea in the 1980s and early 1990s, before the internet became anonymous and spammers started moving in. My favorite thing about Usenet is that it's easy to read it offline (Google "Leafnode") for people who do not have a continuous connection to the internet--this was the norm in the UUCP-dominated 1980s, when just about nobody had a direct internet connection.

I recently posted a blog about the death of Usenet:

http://maradns.blogspot.com/2009/07/memories-of-usenet.html

The hard part is finding images of her that aren't nude. I think her nipples must repel clothes or something.

ITS QUITE OVIOUS

Do NOT go to law school under any circumstances. The job market is glutted and there is no guarantee of ANY work at all. The salary stats are inflated by bogus reporting, cherry picking from among those who have a job. More than half of recent grads had no job 1 year after graduating. Check out http://temporaryattorney.blogspot.com/ and http://www.lawschoolscam.blogspot.com/

Do NOT go to law school under any circumstances. The job market is glutted and there is no guarantee of ANY work at all. The salary stats are inflated by bogus reporting, cherry picking from among those who have a job. More than half of recent grads had no job 1 year after graduating. Check out http://temporaryattorney.blogspot.com/ and http://www.lawschoolscam.blogspot.com/

and tell me we didn't interbreed with neanderthals

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_CM1pqhodMRQ/STVQv5XO3BI/AAAAAAAABU8/2Iw4dL9R6Kg/s1600-h/pablo_picasso_58.png

Pogo is any oscillation along the vehicle's longitudinal thrust/flight axis.

Not so, I ripped some figures and a couple paragraphs from a 1970 report on what pogo is and how to prevent it in case you are interested.

Android 2.0 SDK is out! Check out the goods here:
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/10/announcing-android-20-support-in-sdk.html

Highlights:
http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.0-highlights.html

Uh... that post is from last year...
He did update it after 5 months of use http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2009/03/ssd-followup.html

Content blocked by your organization

Reason: This Websense category is filtered: Sex.
URL: http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-ssds.html

WTF?!

Linus updated his SSD post 5 months later and in the follow-up mentioned, among other things, an AnandTech article he liked at least parts of.

There is certainly a benefit to SRB's in that you don't have all the complexities of cryogenic fuels, and having to fuel before launch. That's why the Air Force uses them in ICBM's, they are extremely simple to launch. They are also somewhat safer than liquid fuels in some respects. It certainly remains to be seen if they will work the way NASA is trying to use them, especially how bad the vibration will be.

On the other hand, there's plenty of ways that SRBs are also more dangerous. Pretty much the only failure modes SRBs have are catastrophic explosions, and since you can't shut them off like you can with liquid rockets it makes it rather difficult to launch-escape if something goes wrong. It's also considerably more difficult to handle for the ground personnel, as summarized well in this blog post by "Chair Force Engineer":

http://chairforceengineer.blogspot.com/2009/10/worlds-largest-stick-of-dynamite.html

Just when it seemed like the history books had been closed on the Challenger disaster, I came across a review of Truth, Lies & O-Rings, an interesting look at the faulty decision-making leading up to launch. (hat tip to Clark Lindsey's Hobbyspace.) The reviewer makes an interesting point about the dangers inherent in ground handling of solid rockets. Many of the inherent disadvantages of SRBs have been long-discussed, such as the inability to shut them down during abort situations. But handling and storing the motors carries all the potential dangers of riding on them. For that reason, SRB stacking operations are classified as "hazardous operations," and all non-essential personnel are banned from the Vehicle Assembly Building. The procedure is similar for stacking the stages of other solid-fuel launch vehicles. In spite of all the precautions and built-in safety mechanisms, the potential always exists for a catastrophic solid-fuel detonation, as occurred with Brazil's orbital launch vehicle.

While I tend to think that the risk is overstated (the industry has been dealing with large solid rockets since the 1940's,) it can never be entirely eliminated. For this reason, Jeff Bell predicted that the SRB would be deleted from the shuttle-derived launch vehicles under development by NASA. Many "space boosters" are dismissive of Jeff Bell, viewing him as a cynic whose arguments aren't worth the paper they're written on. I'll concede that his predictions often come with fatal flaws, but he does make a lot of solid arguments and presents plenty of pertinent facts. In the case of the aforementioned prediction, Jeff Bell's fatal flaw is assuming that NASA would choose a safe, clean-sheet launcher design over one that protects the shuttle's entrenched workforce and contractors.

The ground-handling of large solid rockets (and even the individual segments) was an issue that should have been re-examined when Ares I was designed to be "safe, simple and soon." While NASA personnel have done an admirable job in handling the SRB's up to this point, it's sobering to know that just one mistake could cost a lot of lives and pull the plug on the nation's manned space program. The Ares 5-segment SRB will be the world's largest stick of dynamite, and that risk should never be lost on anybody who works in the space business.

http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-ssds.html

He sorta knows what he's talking about more often than a random average slashdotter.

This is a trend in corporate/news/etc photography, to provide photo illustration that's interesting and creative rather than a boring portrait. Check out Strobist, which in the past couple of years has greatly influenced this kind of photography.

The real answer, though, is this - BYU probably has a staff photographer or two to provide publicity photos. Their assignments probably don't specify to do anything other than a simple portrait, which I'm sure they do - but then since they're bored they also try stuff like this, which the PR person in charge sees and realizes is a lot more interesting and therefore makes the university seem more interesting. And whether that works or not for nerds on slashdot is irrelevant - the university obviously wants a positive and interesting public image, and good web design and photography greatly help toward that goal despite having nothing to do with the school's academics or research.

Hopefully this will show some promise: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-powermeters-first-device-partner.html

Read up on the Earth's temperature over geological time scales. It's fascinating - the world we live on is far more than a passive ball of rock.

For your example, the tank of water has an axolotl in it which blocks the leak when the water gets low enough. It's also situated next to a thirsty giraffe which can only drink water out of it when it's nearly full.

I guess what I'm getting at is that there are so many factors affecting the climate on a scale we couldn't dream of doing with present-day technology that while we may perturb it slightly, whether or not the global climate messes up to a degree which threatens life on the planet is way out of our control. (Obligatory blog whoring link, read it if you agree with me so we can engage in a round of "hear hear"ing and drinking port and smoking cigars in the drawing room.)

You post assumptions you pulled out of your ass, but that doesn't mean real world works the way you think it does.

Here is a post to get you started, from the horse's mouth. This is for their "enterprise" filtering system, there are links for the gmail one as well. Notice how "total volume of spam" they get keeps increasing, just like everyone else's.

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/07/q2-2009-spam-trends.html

Your perspective is the luser perspective, you're content with a problem as long as you don't see it.

"If we all had our one acre of land, even if one of us screwed it up, humanity could continue. But if the King owned all the land, then, the King could screw up all the land, and frequently, will."

And if one of those people on their one acre of land makes a bioengineered plague, then everyone dies? Or, when the nuclear power plant next door melts down, we permanently evacuate Manhattan?

Here is something to consider, by Manuel de Landa:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

Manuel de Landa suggests we need a healthy balance between meshworks and hierarchies.

By the way, make sure you get enough Vitamin D while working inside on simulations, as I agree the public health agencies have dropped the ball on a lot of things:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/vitamin-d-and-h1n1-swine-flu.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://curtisduncan.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-michelle-obama-is-more-likely-to.html

Also, on "socialism":
http://digg.com/political_opinion/Socialist_Agencies_Destroying_America_Graphic
"""
This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.
I then took a shower in the clean water provided by a municipal water utility.
After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level
determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.
On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.
After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and Fire Marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.
And then I log on to the internet -- which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration -- and post on Freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in me

leaks are about showing off.

That's 26 times the price. Sure SSDs are getting cheaper every day but so are hard drives. I am sure they will get so close that the price gap becomes less important than all the other features which separate them. Some time after that, SSDs may even become cheaper, or both SSDs and hard drives will be supplanted by some other technology. It just won't happen right away.

Going by this website:
http://lab-notes.blogspot.com/2007/05/historical-storage-prices-raw-data.html
and harddrive prices verified here: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddiskdata.html

I took the sweetspot price of both HDD and flash for 2002:

A 128mb flash module cost $147 making it $1176 per GB.
A 60GB harddrive cost $275 making it $4.58 per GB.

$X/GB, the flash price was 256.8 times the price of hard drive. So it dropped an entire order of a magnitude since then in 7 years. Assuming everything goes along as in the past, that another magnitude of an order drop would occur by 2016/2017. That would leave flash 2.5x that of a 3.5" HDD. Of course, that would make it a comparable price for a higher-capacity 2.5" notebook, which is the size of all SSDs as well.

I don't think the wait will be until 2020. There will always be desktop computers and servers. But the growth market are small devices now. Unlike a decade ago, a notebook can be the primary machine for a great many people without much performance penalty on normal tasks, and that's what many people are buying in lieu of a desktop machine. The previous decade saw digital cameras, GPS systems, and iPods really grow the flash market, iPhone/smartphones are adding cellphones to that list. Who knows what will be next?

Louis Gerbarg's written up a summary that gybes with what the AC above said. Louis is another ex-Apple engineer. IIRC, he was in the networking group until about two years ago.

When Linus does it... can his followers be far behind? http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-ssds.html I'm looking at doing the same thing for my next machine.

Isn't that sort of a defining aspect of a union?

No. You are obviously ignorant if this is your belief.

The owners look out for the company and the unions look out for the workers. As long as there is balance in the force then everyone is treated fairly as both sides make reasonable compromises.

When there are no unions, as in the industrial revolution, the owners were raping the workers. Now the unions have too much control and refuse to vote down wages and benefits during a recession...

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/10/five-major-pension-problems-one-simple.html

There seem to be some simple checks you can do. Some of them are outlined here. For those not who don't want to read that link it is basically about checking the info.plist file for the app to see if it has been modified. Not that sophisticated but probably good enough in most cases.

Holy crap, Robert Locke reads slashdot? Why did you never reply to that email I sent you with my huge, detailed rebuttal? Or are you just a damn, dirty plagiarist trying to pass off something Robert Locke wrote as your own?

Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks.

It is arguable that this was included as a hat tip to the Acer deal.

I've got hardy on my thinkpad at the moment. I'm considering upgrading just because the new gtk in karmic enables a transparent system tray so AWN will finally look right.

I never liked having two horizontal bars or panels on my screen, especially on a 14" widescreen. too much wasted real estate. especially when applications have a title bar. then add fire fox book mark bar, menus and address bar and that doesn't leave a lot of real estate!

AWN with google chrome makes the most of it.

And here we are, in year 2009, reading "research" telling us things we all already know.

To be fair, Rutkowska does acknowledge this "Q: Is this Evil Maid Attack some l33t new h4ck?
Nope, the concept behind the Evil Maid Attack is neither new, nor l33t in any way."

'Basically they don't want to label themselves as Libertarian because that would foolishly scare away potential non-Libertarians from reading their work. Instead they rely on their publications to speak for their views instead of a label with baggage'

Or because they're a rather blatant front organization rolling out astroturf for various vested interests, and their paymasters might not be terribly keen on the label:

http://mediacitizen.blogspot.com/2009/08/unmasking-astroturf.html

'The Heartland Institute, in particular, is a poster child for deception. This coin-operated "think tank" specializes in aping industry talking points to downplay global warming, oppose health care reform and attack Net Neutrality. Its Fortune 500 clients include Philip Morris USA, the ExxonMobil Corporation and major telecommunications companies...When asked to report the sources of its funding, Heartland President Joseph L Bast said Heartland "now keeps confidential the identities of all our donors" because revealing it would give fodder to those who want to "abuse a sincere effort at transparency."'

'Popular knowledge agrees.'

Looks more like they astroturfed their own wikipedia article, too. Why are we even taking their 'opinions' seriously?

Banks sometimes evict people but don't complete the foreclosure process. This does 2 things:

1) keeps the evicted person on the hook for taxes and maintenance, e.g. weed control.

2) keeps the property off of their balance sheet so they do not look insolvent.
I'm supposed to ba happy about the bailouts why?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/23/AR2009062303500.html

http://exurbannation.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html (references a NYT article)

RTFA This attack is done by booting into a different OS and replacing the boot loader. Logging out won't protect you. I think that way to defeat this type of attack is to enable the hard drive password lock in the BIOS. Without this password, the BIOS would keep the drive from being accessed. Of course, one might be able to put the drive in a different computer and access it, so you really should have a drive with built in AES encryption where it forces you to enter a password no matter what.

Version 6.0+ of Truecrypt does do full disk encryption. In fact, the original attack was against Truecrypts full disk encryption mode.

Illegal tapping of newspapers in the NL:

http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2009/07/09/nisnews-nl-dutch-newspaper-suing-state-for-phone-tapping-journalists/

http://badnewsfromthenetherlands.blogspot.com/2009/10/court-intelligence-service-illegally.html

The Amsterdam court has determined that the General Intelligence Service AIVD broke the law of freedom of press by tapping the phones of journalists of the Telegraaf daily

and, in hawaii, i can stand on a street corner and say so. i can go on a website and say hawaii should be independent. no us official will punish me. in fact, if a us official tried to punish me for expressing my political opinion, that official in turn could be punished, sued, even possibly charged with a crime. would that be true of the beijing official who cracked down on the tibetan's expression of political opinion?

i can make a movie about the injustice of hawaii being part of the usa. i can create a political party to that effect. on the mainland usa, i can view said party's literature, i can agree with it, openly, and i can even give that cause money. can a resident of shanghai do that?

http://www.freehawaii.org/
http://freehawaii.blogspot.com/
http://www.hawaiiankingdom.info/

where are those servers located?

they are located in the usa

they are freely allowed to run by the us government

can you say any of those things about what tibetans can do?

a better allegory would be if you had used puerto rico rather than hawaii as an example. puerto rico is not a state of the usa. puerot ricans can not vote for american president. yet in puerto rico, votes continue to come up, and PUERTO RICANS (not washington dc) continue to decide to be part of the usa as a commonwealth by a vast majority rather than be an independent country (they do this for the generous financial reasons of this commonwealth situation)

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/15/us/puerto-rico-votes-to-retain-status-as-commonwealth.html

By choosing to maintain the commonwealth status that has been in place here for more than 40 years, Puerto Ricans made it clear that they prefer "the best of two worlds," in the words of a pro-commonwealth campaign slogan, to the prospect of more intimate ties with the United States. By an overwhelming margin, they also rejected independence, the third option that had been offered to them in the nonbinding vote today.

do you really think any of that would be true for tibet and tibetans? if tibetans could vote like puerto ricans, what would tibetans choose?

china uses tanks and coercion, the us uses votes and consensus

so do you really believe your comparison between tibet and hawaii is valid in any way whatsoever?

Once the iPhones will have all flown away, Nokia will be left with noone to sue !!!

I upgraded Vista Ultimate x64 to Windows 7 Ultimate x64 and had no significant issues. The 'upgrade advisor' program even advised me to deauthorize my installation of iTunes before continuing. No fuss, no muss, as they say.

First Snow Leopard, tomorrow Windows 7, new Ubuntu, now this... its like their cycles are all coming together.
Play the Windows 7 launch drinking game - here

The point is that it doesn't have to be done via regular old computing. Some of it could even be completed manually (resolving captchas a la google books: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-computers-to-read-google.html). It's an abstraction. You submit a job and it gets completed within a certain timeframe. It doesn't matter if it's running on a mainframe, distributed systems or a bunch of users providing free OCR via a login process. It doesn't matter how many CPU's, HDDs, how much memory, what OS the backend has. That's for them to sort out, as long as you get the service you are paying for, you are happy. Your argument is like saying "I hate it when people talk about high level languages - It's all just machine code"

Benz tried joystick cars almost 15 yrs ago at a car show, here's the pics

I think joysticks are the wrong way to go. Give me a PS2 controller and I'm good, but make sure it's wired because I'd hate to accidentally bring it inside and grab the wrong controller and wreck my car.

You may wish to read here: http://davelargo.blogspot.com/

I can see missing Visio, but sharepoint access? I can only dream of the day I cant access sharepoint, what a mess that software is. I think people get to believing MS is the only way to do things because they have trained themselves to believe that overly complicated software that isnt the right tool for the job as long as its "industry standard" is the way to go.

In any case, every now and then I visit here: http://davelargo.blogspot.com/ because Dave is open and honest with the struggles and success of implementing his own reality using FOSS and saving tons of money while he's at it..
Pay attention that he has time to act on his users needs, rather then re-act to software breakages, outages, support and vendor issues only.

If you are only using FF because of Adblock 9which i know a lot of people like that) then maybe you should look at Kmeleon CCF ME which is Firefox hotrodded with built in ABP and NO XUL. It is also a simple .zip which means it is great to carry on a thumbdrive. On older hardware I stick with Kmeleon, and use Firefox on more modern machines.

No, no, you got it wrong. The "everything white" decor only existed in sci-fi shows, not in real life. See Buck Rogers.

1970s decor is the "fake woodgrain panel" look, as epitomized by the classic Atari game console. Even my old 70s television looks like it was made from fake wood. If you really wanted to make your iPod or Kindle have the 70s look, slap some paste-on woodgrain on the front. Like so: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_XzjG65PlXj4/SluT0Q1RIiI/AAAAAAAAA-M/aZphER_TxdU/s400/woodipop.jpg

One solution that I have implemented at several commpanies is to use Hudson and the Hudson Promoted Builds plugin. Read this brief introduction to the concept.

The new Android SDK attempts to solve this problem by allowing developers to specify screen size profiles. Check out the blog post.

nice tin foil hat.

Here's a real world example http://greentransportandenergy.blogspot.com/2009/03/great-importance-of-wheel-motors.html
 
They had a working prototype, they approached Detroit to get their making-cars expertise... and the project gets quickly scrapped for no apparent reason.

 
The problem being - your link fails to support your claim. It explains how wonderful the invention could be, but doesn't mention Detroit at all.

nice tin foil hat.

Here's a real world example http://greentransportandenergy.blogspot.com/2009/03/great-importance-of-wheel-motors.html

They had a working prototype, they approached Detroit to get their making-cars expertise... and the project gets quickly scrapped for no apparent reason.

Yes really.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moura_photovoltaic_power_station
€250 million or $373 for 10 megawatt average. That's $37 per watt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants#Recent_construction_cost_estimates
The recent high estimates are about $5-$8 per watt. A twenty year supply of nuclear fuel less than $1 a watt.

Even if we assume $10 a watt for nuclear, and $3 a watt for 20 years of fuel, that's still $13 billion for a a gigawatt of power for 20 years. A gigawatt from solar would cost over $30 billion.

That's if it would even be possible to build a gigawatt solar plant. The current largest plant has a peak of 60 megawatt.

http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2009/07/test.html

Yes, and one of the traditional ways that we used to freely exchange those ideas without the fear of reprisals before the internet came along was the "nom de plume".

People invented separate personae for the purposes of their writing. A lot of the great political and religious pamphleteering that helped reform Europe and bring about the French and American revolutions was published under pen-names. Anything vaguely political published by someone working for a country's civil service tended to be under an n-d-p. Hell, even Gulliver's Travels was published without the real author's name on it, so that he wouldn't lose his day job over it. George Orwell's real name wasn't George Orwell. Voltaire's supposed to have had more than 170 different pen-names.

It doesn't always mean that the author is spineless. Sometimes it just means that the author reckons that their work and "author's persona" is good enough to stand up by itself without the reader needing to know the exact details of who created the arguments, and sometimes it means that the writer finds it easier to continue with their work without having to risk being sacked from their mundane job that pays the rent and keeps a roof over their head, because their employer feels that having the name of a controversial writer on their public list of employees, representing the company, is asking for trouble.

If you demand of your employer that they take no notice at all of your extracurricular activities, because those are none of the employer's business ("What I do in my own time is up to me"), then it's sensible to use different identifiers for your work persona and your other activities. If you use the same linkable identifier for both, and your work involves introducing yourself as an employee of the company and giving out your full legal name, then your employer is liable to reckon that if that name is attached to some "cause" that might alienate some of their important customers, they don't want you as an employee.

They can say, "Look, we don't give a damn what you do in your own time as long as it doesn't reflect on us. We don't care what religious or sexual views you hold as long as you leave them behind when you walk through our door in the morning. But if we're promoting you as our named representative, and you're using that same name to promote other things that we don't want to be associated with, then we have a legitimate reason to sack you."

Taking away people's ability to create separate "brands" for their work and personal online activities means that unless people have very understanding employers, they're liable to self-censor pretty much anything they write for fear of upsetting their work situation.

It also means that if an employer knows that ==anything== their employee does online from home is linked to all the employee's other personal details, including their place of work – including what forums they visit and what iffy websites they view, no matter what computer they use to view it – then it means that the employer can argue that it's now their legitimate right to spend more time tracking what their employees are doing out of work hours, since it could impact on their business.

If you can't decouple your work identity from your recreational web use, it means that you no longer have a personal life (for web-related stuff) that's separate from work.

OK, if we use your definition of latency and lag (which is fine by me, I simply meant lag by latency before then), and if latency is there because of power savings, how much power /does/ it save? I havent seen dramatic improvements because of it, on my laptops (which I presume are the 'many applications and use cases' you're talking about, have you, eg are there benchmarks on this? Even so, Pulse certainly gives many users the perception of lag. Whether or not this is because of buffering or simply /is/ laggy, (which many of us infer) will you do anything about this? I use ALSA because for me it always Just Works, and in the cases Pulse does work, I percieve it to be laggy. No matter which way you slice it, there seems to be consensus on this, and I'd like to see stuff fixed. The 'laggy experience' Pulse gives me and many other together with the fact that every article I read on the subject moans about the bad design of the total software stack you use with Pulse, gives me the impression Pulse is simply too big and complicated. Now, the software itself I admit I don't know jack shit and just restate the comments of other devs, but can you comment on that anyway? Do you really think Pulse has a sane design? If I look at this article, it certainly seems to me OOSv4 has it right and Pulse not: http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2009/06/state-of-sound-in-linux-not-so-sorry.html