SPDIF output will almost certainly give you trouble, because the chip only seems to be really happy with 48KHz. I found no way to get 44.1KHz audio to come out the SPDIF port, except to use something like sox to resample it at the higher rate.
As much as I dislike ALSA, it will do that for you as well. I once got around the above problem by telling it to resample everything to 48kHz through a conf file.
VIA82xxx sound card you say. Whats that I hear? Is that the sound off merry music playing on my VIA82xxx sound card in Gentoo Linux using Kernel 2.6.3? No it cannot be! For we all know that linux has very poor support for sound cards and that the VIA82xxx sound card does not work in any distro or with any kernel. Neither did it work with kernels 2.6.0 rc1 through to 2.6.2 it was all in my head.
The xxx is in VIA82xxx for a reason. There are a number of different chips that use the via82xxx driver, some more successfully than others. Oddly enough, the northbridge (or was it southbridge? Can't remember, it's been awhile) chipset can also affect the success rate when it comes to various features working.
This is making the assumption that more packages means more innovation. I propose that the entire mac PLATFORM is an alternative to x86/Wintel innovation, same as a train is an alternative to a car. You can't put a Type R sticker or a fat exhaust pipe on your train, in fact you can only go where the tracks lead -- does this make it a less viable transit solution? The millions of people who take trains to work every day wouldn't think so.
For most people, yes, trains are not an acceptible transit solution. The trains either do not go where they want to go, or they take too long in getting there.
So it IS the fault of Linux, it can't treat things as 'generic'... if it did what Windows does and installed a 'generic' Sound Blaster driver because the hardware is sound blaster compatible... then it'd work. Then, if the Linux crew can be bothered to create a specific driver for the soundcard then they can install that with whatever optimisations that might carry with it... but until that YOU COULD USE YOUR SOUNDCARD!
There are generic soundblaster drivers included with the kernel of just about every major distribution I know off. It's hard to say what the problem actually was, the article includes too few details.
I have found that my sblive (a simple oem Live Value model) works _much_ better with ALSA than with OSS. Not that it was difficult to set it up with either, but ALSA is a much better-designed system.
How is ALSA better designed? It's far far more complex than it needs to be and you have to jump through poorly defined hoops to do simple operations, it's unpredictable (ALSA drivers stopped working for my SB Live!, then spontaniously started working again without me changing a thing), they are hell to get working, the documentation is laughable, and the developer and user lists are non-responsive, so good luck getting help when you need it.
So ALSA supports more advanced features of the soundcard. The tradeoffs though are huge.
And for another one, let's go into security updates. Sure, Linux (and open source in general) have a much better track record than Windows of fixing security problems! That's great for sysadmins like myself, but it's not going to do a whit of good in some cases; my parents aren't going to want to stay on Bugtraq to discover that their print daemon has a remote-root exploit they'll need to download a patch for and recompile.
Why would they that the print server has root exploits? They're the only ones using the machine. You mean it's remotely exploitable? Then why did they modify the firewall rules that by default close off this sort of access? RedHat at least has had a fairly secure default setup.. you have to modify the defaults to allow outside access. Auto-update features mean you don't have to worry about what exploits are around -- you'll be patched as soon as the vendor has a fix out for it.
Now as for drivers, you have a good point there. I think that is Linux's greatest weakness, not the difficulty of using/learning gnome/kde. Hardware support is fairly limited, and it's usually not plug and play.
But you can't have it both ways; you can't say 'Linux will conquer the desktop world' as many people seem to do, and then simultaneously say '...but we don't give a shit about average mom + pop situations.'
There are two possibilities:
*) Linux users want it both ways, like you said.
*) There are two large and vocal camps who have different aims. The "must make linux usable by mom and pop" crowd and the "don't dumb down linux for the masses"/"You want it, write it yourself" crowd.
im glad you didnt get modded up for that mindless idiotic drivel.
Then you'd be amazed at how often kernel developers use this argument.
"Oh, you're running the NVIDIA module, that taints the kernel, so we won't even listen to your complaints about stability, because that simply has to be the cause."
(L337 H4XXorzz who insist upon using "cracker" in lieu of "hacker," or "virii" instead of "viruses" are, happily, not consulted by the popular vernacularists)
Those who insist on "virii" instead of "viruses" are also linguistically wrong as well. Not all latin nouns ending in -us will have a plural form ending in -ii. The Romans were worse with the confusion of their noun endings than we are with -able and -ible.
Maybe because spamming isn't so serious a violation that requires jail time? Certain crimes are appropriate for jail, certain ones are appropriate for fines. By no means does spamming itself merit jail time. Not when jails are overpopulated as it is. Sue them into bankruptcy and confiscate their ill-gotten gains instead.
Now identity theft on the other hand...
One of the reasons other single issue advocacy groups are so successful is that they avoid straying onto other issues.
Whether spammers should get jail time is very closely related EFF's founding principles. This is not a case of EFF straying from its core issues.
No. Rights are not being violated here. Fair use doctrine is an assurance that you will be free from civil or criminal guilt if you perform certain activities, like making personal backups and such. It is not a guarantee that those activities will be made easy for you to perform.
Though the mini-discussion isn't about the legal fair use rights, but the moral rights.
Oh, so you can make someone look like a believable (emphasis on believable) Terminator using a small camcorder and no editing equipment? Riiiiiiiight. That'd be a nice trick.
It's not hard to do. Just don't start ripping off flesh or try liquid metal effects. Robert Patrick made a very convincing terminator even when he wasn't morphing.. it was the way he moved and the way he acted that added the real menace and made you think "there's something not quite human about that guy.." (something I think the evil terminator in T3 really lacked).
It's like Starship Troopers 2 which had effects on par with Starship Troopers 1, yet cost $3 - $6 million to make as opposed to $100+ million. The sequel had only a couple effects shots, and the rest of the movie didn't need much touchup.
Ok, so some people say the US may be founded by all the crazy religious fanatics that got chucked out of europe a few centuries ago, but aren't things changing for the better over there? Or are they getting whorse?
Better in general, but slowly. Generally, it's like the swinging of a pendulum. Things get better, then there's a conservative backlash, and things get worse. Right now we're in that "swinging back the other direction" phase. But we won't swing back as far as we used to be. That's my general hope anyway.
I like mutt and use it regularly.. unfortunately mutt's complete insistance on not building in an agent that can talk to SMTP servers like just about every other modern mail client in the world is a pain. It insists you use sendmail or some other MTA, yet I've never found one that is easy to set up and doesn't trip spam filters. Sendmail insists on leaving its grubby fingerprints all over the mail headers, and since my desktop isn't an approved mail server (not to mention my ISP never set up DNS properly for it), mail silently gets discarded by a small but growing number of mail servers (most notably, Exchange servers). All because the initial mail server is one sitting on my desktop, not the one my ISP uses.
What do you expect, America is the only place some guy can get up in front of everyone, say "God told him to run for president", then say "The jury is still out on evolution" and get elected to the highest position in the land. WTF? Anywhere else he would be thrown in an insane asylum.
Anywhere else? There are a few countries in the Middle East where this sortof thing isn't uncommon. A society with that type of religious oppression is right up the current administration's alley. They want to be the Puritans, the guys who are only for religious persecution as long as they're the ones doing the persecuting.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I dislike ALSA, it will do that for you as well. I once got around the above problem by telling it to resample everything to 48kHz through a conf file.
The xxx is in VIA82xxx for a reason. There are a number of different chips that use the via82xxx driver, some more successfully than others. Oddly enough, the northbridge (or was it southbridge? Can't remember, it's been awhile) chipset can also affect the success rate when it comes to various features working.
For most people, yes, trains are not an acceptible transit solution. The trains either do not go where they want to go, or they take too long in getting there.
There are generic soundblaster drivers included with the kernel of just about every major distribution I know off. It's hard to say what the problem actually was, the article includes too few details.
How is ALSA better designed? It's far far more complex than it needs to be and you have to jump through poorly defined hoops to do simple operations, it's unpredictable (ALSA drivers stopped working for my SB Live!, then spontaniously started working again without me changing a thing), they are hell to get working, the documentation is laughable, and the developer and user lists are non-responsive, so good luck getting help when you need it.
So ALSA supports more advanced features of the soundcard. The tradeoffs though are huge.
Here on Slashdot. Oh wait! I see your point now...
Why would they that the print server has root exploits? They're the only ones using the machine. You mean it's remotely exploitable? Then why did they modify the firewall rules that by default close off this sort of access? RedHat at least has had a fairly secure default setup.. you have to modify the defaults to allow outside access. Auto-update features mean you don't have to worry about what exploits are around -- you'll be patched as soon as the vendor has a fix out for it.
Now as for drivers, you have a good point there. I think that is Linux's greatest weakness, not the difficulty of using/learning gnome/kde. Hardware support is fairly limited, and it's usually not plug and play.
But you can't have it both ways; you can't say 'Linux will conquer the desktop world' as many people seem to do, and then simultaneously say '...but we don't give a shit about average mom + pop situations.'
There are two possibilities:
*) Linux users want it both ways, like you said.
*) There are two large and vocal camps who have different aims. The "must make linux usable by mom and pop" crowd and the "don't dumb down linux for the masses"/"You want it, write it yourself" crowd.
Then you'd be amazed at how often kernel developers use this argument.
"Oh, you're running the NVIDIA module, that taints the kernel, so we won't even listen to your complaints about stability, because that simply has to be the cause."
Sharing the same goals (because you face similar threats) does not make one party the wing of the other.
Nice, but completely infeasable for many/most in the US. There are some places where it works great.
And if there isn't a right to drive, perhaps there isn't a right to own a car either?
No, there is a right to own a car. There's even a right to drive said car. The restrictions come when you drive them on public roads.
Those who insist on "virii" instead of "viruses" are also linguistically wrong as well. Not all latin nouns ending in -us will have a plural form ending in -ii. The Romans were worse with the confusion of their noun endings than we are with -able and -ible.
Maybe because spamming isn't so serious a violation that requires jail time? Certain crimes are appropriate for jail, certain ones are appropriate for fines. By no means does spamming itself merit jail time. Not when jails are overpopulated as it is. Sue them into bankruptcy and confiscate their ill-gotten gains instead.
Now identity theft on the other hand...
One of the reasons other single issue advocacy groups are so successful is that they avoid straying onto other issues.
Whether spammers should get jail time is very closely related EFF's founding principles. This is not a case of EFF straying from its core issues.
Though the mini-discussion isn't about the legal fair use rights, but the moral rights.
It is also easy enough to fork from a specific release. Closed-source projects will also change in many areas, they can fork too.
It's not hard to do. Just don't start ripping off flesh or try liquid metal effects. Robert Patrick made a very convincing terminator even when he wasn't morphing.. it was the way he moved and the way he acted that added the real menace and made you think "there's something not quite human about that guy.." (something I think the evil terminator in T3 really lacked).
It's like Starship Troopers 2 which had effects on par with Starship Troopers 1, yet cost $3 - $6 million to make as opposed to $100+ million. The sequel had only a couple effects shots, and the rest of the movie didn't need much touchup.
Better in general, but slowly. Generally, it's like the swinging of a pendulum. Things get better, then there's a conservative backlash, and things get worse. Right now we're in that "swinging back the other direction" phase. But we won't swing back as far as we used to be. That's my general hope anyway.
You don't think he hasn't had some role in this do you?
Guilt by association then? Is the Secretary of the Interior responsible too?
This is the United States, where nudity is considered porn, yes.
Anywhere else? There are a few countries in the Middle East where this sortof thing isn't uncommon. A society with that type of religious oppression is right up the current administration's alley. They want to be the Puritans, the guys who are only for religious persecution as long as they're the ones doing the persecuting.
That's right, it's the mom and pop porn producers that will be hurt the most.