Great point. One that I should have thought of. I've actually known people who didn't really give a damn about an issue, but were perfectly happy to sign a petition so that people could vote on it. Someone with mod points should give you a few!:^)
That's right - Americanism. I am a proud American, and I have the DD-214 to show for it. Don't be surprised at all that men and women who serve are willing to voice their opinions. In fact, we EARNED the right to do so.
Don't like my opinion? Fine. Vote against my ideas and opinions. But, don't be surprised when you are outvoted, like you were with California's proposition 8. At the ballot box, an activist is just another voter.
The ballots have no identifying information on them. No one is required to sign their ballot. There is no thumbprint. No computerized notations to identify the voter. Ballots are impersonal scraps of paper (or computerized tallies) that can't be attached to anyone.
It seems that you have probably not voted in any United States elections, or you would know this.
Give me one good reason to believe that gay "marriage" is good for society. One. I will not consider some narcissistic nonsense about "it's my right". You have the rights designated by law, no more, no less.
You saw that I'm actively engaged in that conversation on the Seattle paper. Refute my objections. No one else attempts to. All I hear are complaints that "I should be allowed to gaze into my navel, or my gaybo buddy's navel, and eat lotus forever if I choose."
No one suggests that gay marriage will benefit society. No one.
I take it then, that you have never voted. Ballots ARE anonymous in the United States. They are guaranteed to be anonymous. It is NO ONE'S business how anyone marks a ballot. I'm not even permitted into the booth to watch how someone marks their ballot. The wife and I are not even permitted to occupy the same booth at the same time. Your understanding of the American voting system is seriously incomplete.
Now, I happen to be proud of my vote. I TELL people how I voted. Interested? I voted against Bill Clinton every chance I had. I voted for Bush the first time, and voted against him the second time. I voted for Obama. I'm proud of my votes, though I'm less proud of my Bush vote than my other votes.
But, anonymity at the ballot box is guaranteed for a reason. I could presumably bully my wife into voting my way, or punish her for not voting my way. She's a little bitty woman, it would be no problem to smack her around until she sees reason.
"Hell, I could draw up a petition and have a few hundred "signatures" by the end of the day if that is the standard."
Go for it. Pick an issue, get the "signatures", and submit them to whichever jurisdiction you're interested in.
Be sure to post back here, and let us all know how it works out. I suspect it is more likely that we will have to find you in the newspapers though. "Wannabe Geek Indicted on Fraudulent Petition Charges"
You seem to be confusing lobbying efforts with the signing of a petition. Walking into your congressman's office is LOBBYING. In that case, you are attempting to influence your congressman.
In the case of a petition, some minimum number of people voice an opinion that an issue should be VOTED ON, BY THE PEOPLE.
There is a process to check the validity of the petitioners. Mickey Mouse has signed petitions, and he has been discarded from the petition list, all over the country. Once the validity of signatures is verified, there is no good reason to save that data. No matter the value of the issue, or which side you are on, once the petition is declared valid, the issue goes onto a ballot, and ALL REGISTERED VOTERS will have the same opportunity to express THEIR opinion.
It's part of the voting process, and should be protected.
Sorry, you're way off base. A petition is NOT an attempt to influence a legislator. A petition is a CALL FOR A VOTE. Once the issue is on the ballot, then EVERYONE GETS A VOTE. The legislators don't get a say, as legislators - they only get one vote, the same as every other citizen who exercises their right to vote.
You are obviously confusing a lobbyist with a citizen who signs a petition. Lobbying efforts aren't even transparent (despite laws to the contrary) so why should a petition be any more transparent?
Name and shame? I'm quite proud that I oppose the gay agenda. Peter puffing ain't American. And, I'll thank you to stop comparing queer to being black, or Baptist, or Catholic, or male or female, or whatever else.
A "lifestyle" is not an inherited condition of your being.
And, you are obviously blind to the potential for abuse. The citizens who sign a petition will be subjected to harassment and picketing by the gay rights activists. There is no reason why a person who signs a petition should expect his name to go onto a hit list for activist harassment.
Naming the authors, naming the ACTIVE participants of the petition drive is alright. But a private citizen should lose his privacy for signing a petition. The state officials only need to identify the signatures for verification. Once they are verified, they SHOULD NOT remain "public". Like many court documents, they should be sealed and filed.
The real unintended consequence is, that gay rights activists can come to your place of employment, or to your home, and picket. Signing a petition is very similar to voting - it's no one's business how I mark a ballot, nor is it anyone's business that I signed the petition.
State officials are responsible for ensuring that signatures are valid. The "opposition" might challenge the validity of signatures, but they have no right to make a list for publication. The ONLY reason for such a list, is future harassment.
This. The peter-puffers don't need to know WHO, specifically, is opposed to their agenda. All they need to know is, they can't get "married". The ONLY reason they want to know who signed is to start harassing people.
Wanna get married, dude? Go find a woman. Dick are for chicks, you silly faggot.
Yes, you have hit on the best reason NOT to explore space. While normal people are spreading out, staking out claims, and making babies for the next generation - our troglodytes, neanderthals, predators, psychotics, and assorted other riffraff will be riding along on the very same spacecraft that normal people are using. And, you can't stop them, because they look just like normal people!
While I'll admit that it's stupid to expect radio signals to be "private", there is something inherently wrong with a system where I pay someone to follow me around all day, just to spy on me. Or, in this case, I pay taxes so that the government can mount cameras, and intercept all electronic signals from devices I own, just to spy on me. Tell me again, why do I pay taxes?
Orwelle's story was right, he just got the year wrong.
As a young man, I could tell a difference in the quality of recordings on vinyl or on tape. Today? Meh. I lost a good portion of my ability to hear just by being around 5 inch guns. Lost some more in industrial work environments. Lost some more to big trucks and heavy equipment.
When it comes to music, I'm a rundown old wreck of my former self. *sigh*
All that said, I suspect a lot of other people have similar histories, and yet more people have health problems that contribute to crappy hearing.
Importing hemp products is "legal", but you have to jump through hoops. I'm not searching for citations, but I've read a couple of articles detailing precisely how much THC is permitted to be in a product. The limit is so ridiculously low that many products that are impossible to get a "high" from are excluded. To many hoops to make importation feasible.
I think I follow your reasoning - and I think you are missing something. Let's try this, and see if we are talking about the same thing:
ATI won't open source THEIR drivers either. But, we have a variety of drivers for ATI which are open source. As the end user, I can decide whether I want to use the FGLRX driver, or the proprietary Radeon driver. In most cases, I go with the Radeon, because it gives a little better performance than any open source alternative.
The parallel to OSS4, is, I downloaded source code from 4Front, compiled and installed it. It works fine. But, apparently 4Front offers a binary, which contains proprietary code, and which offers some "enhancements". As noted, I'm perfectly happy with the results of the "open" source that I downloaded. Why should I download the proprietary portion?
IMO, that code which has been licensed under GPL and BSD is sufficient. If/when the rest of the code is open source, maybe I'll find that I've been missing something - though I can't imagine what. The open sourced portions of that code can, and probably should be, put into the distros as an alternative. And, the proprietary binaries should be too.
I can get those Radeon drivers through the repositories, after all.
Are we any closer to a meeting of the minds, or is there something we simply disagree on? Please understand, I'm not trying to be an ass.;^)
For me, sound was choppy, scratchy, and sometimes I had to wait for buffers.
As for newer drivers - you are aware, I presume, that Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian. You can enable the Debian repositories for Lenny, Sarge, or whatever you like to get the newest drivers. Or, if you don't wish to enable a Debian repository, you can just download the driver from the repository, and install it. Ubuntu won't "support" a test driver, but it's "almost" certain to work. Do you care if Canonical supports it or not?
You mention timing issues. And, that was the root cause of my problems with virtual machines. All other little foibles with Pulse were acceptable to me, but those VM's simply could not make decent sound through Pulse. It took me some searching on the various virtual machine forums to understand that it was a timing issue. Once I understood that, it only took a few google searches to point me at OSS4. Those timing issues are non-issues for me now.
And, don't ask me to explain all the timing stuff. It's over my head. If you're interested, I found the most useful information on the Parallels VM forums, with some posts at Sun's VBox forum substantiating what I read at Parallels.
Dude, you answered your own question, without realizing it.
"What the hell do either OSS4 or ALSA have to do with PulseAudio?" "It can, at the moment, only use ALSA,"
If you read, you will find that Pulse and ALSA have failed to provide a decent user experience for some users. Replacing Pulse doesn't necessarily mean replacing drivers - but many of us found that OSS4 was the way to go.
"In the long run, I expect PulseAudio will use whatever drivers get used the most"
It isn't the drivers, so much as, PulseAudio isn't doing the job that people need. I mentioned that Pulse was unable to mix sound from virtual machines and the host machine. Others have problems mixing from different sources. Pulse fails to deliver what some people need. OSS4 is a working alternative.
A: No. There are three drivers that have mosty been written by the hardware manufacturers. We are not permitted to release their sources unless their authors as us to do so.
Also some parts of the envy24 and envy24ht drivers contain some code written under NDA. We have not yet received the approval to open source the code from all manufacturers. So these drivers cannot be open sourced just now. If we don't get the approval in reasonable time we will distribute these drivers with the offending code stripped from the sources.
Finally there are some effects in the old softoss driver that are not included in the source packages. We will make the decision about their future later. At this moment it looks like we will remove the softoss driver from the OSS package so these effects will not be used in OSS anyway.
We reserve the right to include some "closed source" drivers only in our binary distribution if the hardware manufacturers refuse to give the programming specs without NDA. Our policy is to promote open source but not to enforce it. We will let hardware manufacturers to decide if they like to select the commercial distribution mode instead of the open source one with much wider customer base.
Postby dev Fri Jan 04, 2008 8:36 am We are releasing the FreeBSD version of Open Sound under a BSD license and we hope that the BSD community steps up with ports for NetBSD and OpenBSD and enhancement to FreeBSD ports.
Postby dev Thu Jun 14, 2007 4:16 am We're releasing the source code for Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD/Unixware under CDDL/GPL licenses - get the source at http://developer.opensound.com/
We thank our paying customers for keeping us in business all these years - and we now hope that no one has a reason to not use OSS because it isn't open sourced.
* 1 Building the OSS sound system from source
o 1.1 Requirements to build the source code
o 1.2 Building the source
+ 1.2.1 Obtain the OSS source
+ 1.2.2 Change to the source directory
+ 1.2.3 Extract the source tarball
+ 1.2.4 Create a build directory, and make it current
+ 1.2.5 Run the configure script
# 1.2.5.1 Notable configure switches
+ 1.2.6 Run make build
+ 1.2.7 Packing Open Sound System (
I'm not qualified to answer all of your questions and concerns. I DO KNOW that OSS4 handles USB speakers. I have no speakers plugged in to my sound card, all I use is the USB headset.
I also know that OSSMix can mix your multiple streams.
Since I don't switch between multiple input/output devices, I can't say.
As for analog/digital speakers, I'm lost. I THINK that you can plug in both, and even switch between them, but hell, I'm not an audio buff, so don't start me lying.;^)
Slashdot Mirror
Great point. One that I should have thought of. I've actually known people who didn't really give a damn about an issue, but were perfectly happy to sign a petition so that people could vote on it. Someone with mod points should give you a few! :^)
That's right - Americanism. I am a proud American, and I have the DD-214 to show for it. Don't be surprised at all that men and women who serve are willing to voice their opinions. In fact, we EARNED the right to do so.
Don't like my opinion? Fine. Vote against my ideas and opinions. But, don't be surprised when you are outvoted, like you were with California's proposition 8. At the ballot box, an activist is just another voter.
The ballots have no identifying information on them. No one is required to sign their ballot. There is no thumbprint. No computerized notations to identify the voter. Ballots are impersonal scraps of paper (or computerized tallies) that can't be attached to anyone.
It seems that you have probably not voted in any United States elections, or you would know this.
Give me one good reason to believe that gay "marriage" is good for society. One. I will not consider some narcissistic nonsense about "it's my right". You have the rights designated by law, no more, no less.
You saw that I'm actively engaged in that conversation on the Seattle paper. Refute my objections. No one else attempts to. All I hear are complaints that "I should be allowed to gaze into my navel, or my gaybo buddy's navel, and eat lotus forever if I choose."
No one suggests that gay marriage will benefit society. No one.
I take it then, that you have never voted. Ballots ARE anonymous in the United States. They are guaranteed to be anonymous. It is NO ONE'S business how anyone marks a ballot. I'm not even permitted into the booth to watch how someone marks their ballot. The wife and I are not even permitted to occupy the same booth at the same time. Your understanding of the American voting system is seriously incomplete.
Now, I happen to be proud of my vote. I TELL people how I voted. Interested? I voted against Bill Clinton every chance I had. I voted for Bush the first time, and voted against him the second time. I voted for Obama. I'm proud of my votes, though I'm less proud of my Bush vote than my other votes.
But, anonymity at the ballot box is guaranteed for a reason. I could presumably bully my wife into voting my way, or punish her for not voting my way. She's a little bitty woman, it would be no problem to smack her around until she sees reason.
Do you see the reason for anonymity, now?
"Hell, I could draw up a petition and have a few hundred "signatures" by the end of the day if that is the standard."
Go for it. Pick an issue, get the "signatures", and submit them to whichever jurisdiction you're interested in.
Be sure to post back here, and let us all know how it works out. I suspect it is more likely that we will have to find you in the newspapers though. "Wannabe Geek Indicted on Fraudulent Petition Charges"
You seem to be confusing lobbying efforts with the signing of a petition. Walking into your congressman's office is LOBBYING. In that case, you are attempting to influence your congressman.
In the case of a petition, some minimum number of people voice an opinion that an issue should be VOTED ON, BY THE PEOPLE.
There is a process to check the validity of the petitioners. Mickey Mouse has signed petitions, and he has been discarded from the petition list, all over the country. Once the validity of signatures is verified, there is no good reason to save that data. No matter the value of the issue, or which side you are on, once the petition is declared valid, the issue goes onto a ballot, and ALL REGISTERED VOTERS will have the same opportunity to express THEIR opinion.
It's part of the voting process, and should be protected.
Sorry, you're way off base. A petition is NOT an attempt to influence a legislator. A petition is a CALL FOR A VOTE. Once the issue is on the ballot, then EVERYONE GETS A VOTE. The legislators don't get a say, as legislators - they only get one vote, the same as every other citizen who exercises their right to vote.
You are obviously confusing a lobbyist with a citizen who signs a petition. Lobbying efforts aren't even transparent (despite laws to the contrary) so why should a petition be any more transparent?
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/reader_feedback/public/display.php?thread=198053&offset=0&column=create_date&direction=DESC
Join the discussion. Refute the arguments.
Name and shame? I'm quite proud that I oppose the gay agenda. Peter puffing ain't American. And, I'll thank you to stop comparing queer to being black, or Baptist, or Catholic, or male or female, or whatever else.
A "lifestyle" is not an inherited condition of your being.
And, you are obviously blind to the potential for abuse. The citizens who sign a petition will be subjected to harassment and picketing by the gay rights activists. There is no reason why a person who signs a petition should expect his name to go onto a hit list for activist harassment.
Naming the authors, naming the ACTIVE participants of the petition drive is alright. But a private citizen should lose his privacy for signing a petition. The state officials only need to identify the signatures for verification. Once they are verified, they SHOULD NOT remain "public". Like many court documents, they should be sealed and filed.
The real unintended consequence is, that gay rights activists can come to your place of employment, or to your home, and picket. Signing a petition is very similar to voting - it's no one's business how I mark a ballot, nor is it anyone's business that I signed the petition.
State officials are responsible for ensuring that signatures are valid. The "opposition" might challenge the validity of signatures, but they have no right to make a list for publication. The ONLY reason for such a list, is future harassment.
Troll somewhere else? You want to censor me? Oh - I see your name now. Oh-kay
This. The peter-puffers don't need to know WHO, specifically, is opposed to their agenda. All they need to know is, they can't get "married". The ONLY reason they want to know who signed is to start harassing people.
Wanna get married, dude? Go find a woman. Dick are for chicks, you silly faggot.
Your bestiality porn might sell some places, but this is SLASHDOT!
Oh, wait.............
Yes, you have hit on the best reason NOT to explore space. While normal people are spreading out, staking out claims, and making babies for the next generation - our troglodytes, neanderthals, predators, psychotics, and assorted other riffraff will be riding along on the very same spacecraft that normal people are using. And, you can't stop them, because they look just like normal people!
Life's a bitch, aint' it?
The only reason to send an unmanned craft, is to scout out the habitable planets.
While I'll admit that it's stupid to expect radio signals to be "private", there is something inherently wrong with a system where I pay someone to follow me around all day, just to spy on me. Or, in this case, I pay taxes so that the government can mount cameras, and intercept all electronic signals from devices I own, just to spy on me. Tell me again, why do I pay taxes?
Orwelle's story was right, he just got the year wrong.
People deteriorate over time, too.
As a young man, I could tell a difference in the quality of recordings on vinyl or on tape. Today? Meh. I lost a good portion of my ability to hear just by being around 5 inch guns. Lost some more in industrial work environments. Lost some more to big trucks and heavy equipment.
When it comes to music, I'm a rundown old wreck of my former self. *sigh*
All that said, I suspect a lot of other people have similar histories, and yet more people have health problems that contribute to crappy hearing.
Importing hemp products is "legal", but you have to jump through hoops. I'm not searching for citations, but I've read a couple of articles detailing precisely how much THC is permitted to be in a product. The limit is so ridiculously low that many products that are impossible to get a "high" from are excluded. To many hoops to make importation feasible.
I think I follow your reasoning - and I think you are missing something. Let's try this, and see if we are talking about the same thing:
ATI won't open source THEIR drivers either. But, we have a variety of drivers for ATI which are open source. As the end user, I can decide whether I want to use the FGLRX driver, or the proprietary Radeon driver. In most cases, I go with the Radeon, because it gives a little better performance than any open source alternative.
The parallel to OSS4, is, I downloaded source code from 4Front, compiled and installed it. It works fine. But, apparently 4Front offers a binary, which contains proprietary code, and which offers some "enhancements". As noted, I'm perfectly happy with the results of the "open" source that I downloaded. Why should I download the proprietary portion?
IMO, that code which has been licensed under GPL and BSD is sufficient. If/when the rest of the code is open source, maybe I'll find that I've been missing something - though I can't imagine what. The open sourced portions of that code can, and probably should be, put into the distros as an alternative. And, the proprietary binaries should be too.
I can get those Radeon drivers through the repositories, after all.
Are we any closer to a meeting of the minds, or is there something we simply disagree on? Please understand, I'm not trying to be an ass. ;^)
For me, sound was choppy, scratchy, and sometimes I had to wait for buffers.
As for newer drivers - you are aware, I presume, that Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian. You can enable the Debian repositories for Lenny, Sarge, or whatever you like to get the newest drivers. Or, if you don't wish to enable a Debian repository, you can just download the driver from the repository, and install it. Ubuntu won't "support" a test driver, but it's "almost" certain to work. Do you care if Canonical supports it or not?
You mention timing issues. And, that was the root cause of my problems with virtual machines. All other little foibles with Pulse were acceptable to me, but those VM's simply could not make decent sound through Pulse. It took me some searching on the various virtual machine forums to understand that it was a timing issue. Once I understood that, it only took a few google searches to point me at OSS4. Those timing issues are non-issues for me now.
And, don't ask me to explain all the timing stuff. It's over my head. If you're interested, I found the most useful information on the Parallels VM forums, with some posts at Sun's VBox forum substantiating what I read at Parallels.
Dude, you answered your own question, without realizing it.
"What the hell do either OSS4 or ALSA have to do with PulseAudio?"
"It can, at the moment, only use ALSA,"
If you read, you will find that Pulse and ALSA have failed to provide a decent user experience for some users. Replacing Pulse doesn't necessarily mean replacing drivers - but many of us found that OSS4 was the way to go.
"In the long run, I expect PulseAudio will use whatever drivers get used the most"
It isn't the drivers, so much as, PulseAudio isn't doing the job that people need. I mentioned that Pulse was unable to mix sound from virtual machines and the host machine. Others have problems mixing from different sources. Pulse fails to deliver what some people need. OSS4 is a working alternative.
A more complete quote from your link:
Q: Is everything in OSS open sourced?
A: No. There are three drivers that have mosty been written by the hardware manufacturers. We are not permitted to release their sources unless their authors as us to do so.
Also some parts of the envy24 and envy24ht drivers contain some code written under NDA. We have not yet received the approval to open source the code from all manufacturers. So these drivers cannot be open sourced just now. If we don't get the approval in reasonable time we will distribute these drivers with the offending code stripped from the sources.
Finally there are some effects in the old softoss driver that are not included in the source packages. We will make the decision about their future later. At this moment it looks like we will remove the softoss driver from the OSS package so these effects will not be used in OSS anyway.
We reserve the right to include some "closed source" drivers only in our binary distribution if the hardware manufacturers refuse to give the programming specs without NDA. Our policy is to promote open source but not to enforce it. We will let hardware manufacturers to decide if they like to select the commercial distribution mode instead of the open source one with much wider customer base.
http://www.4front-tech.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2411
OSS now released under BSD license
Postby dev Fri Jan 04, 2008 8:36 am
We are releasing the FreeBSD version of Open Sound under a BSD license and we hope that the BSD community steps up with ports for NetBSD and OpenBSD and enhancement to FreeBSD ports.
http://www.4front-tech.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2139
Open Sound System is now open sourced!
Postby dev Thu Jun 14, 2007 4:16 am
We're releasing the source code for Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD/Unixware under CDDL/GPL licenses - get the source at http://developer.opensound.com/
We thank our paying customers for keeping us in business all these years - and we now hope that no one has a reason to not use OSS because it isn't open sourced.
Best regards
Dev Mazumdar
http://www.opensound.com/wiki/index.php/Building_OSSv4_from_source
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Building the OSS sound system from source
o 1.1 Requirements to build the source code
o 1.2 Building the source
+ 1.2.1 Obtain the OSS source
+ 1.2.2 Change to the source directory
+ 1.2.3 Extract the source tarball
+ 1.2.4 Create a build directory, and make it current
+ 1.2.5 Run the configure script
# 1.2.5.1 Notable configure switches
+ 1.2.6 Run make build
+ 1.2.7 Packing Open Sound System (
I'm not qualified to answer all of your questions and concerns. I DO KNOW that OSS4 handles USB speakers. I have no speakers plugged in to my sound card, all I use is the USB headset.
I also know that OSSMix can mix your multiple streams.
Since I don't switch between multiple input/output devices, I can't say.
As for analog/digital speakers, I'm lost. I THINK that you can plug in both, and even switch between them, but hell, I'm not an audio buff, so don't start me lying. ;^)
My best advice is, visit the 4Front forums, and search or post your concerns: http://www.4front-tech.com/forum/index.php?sid=dadb22fbf3e8e7037a272e7e241fa1c5