Object Pascal, more specifically Delphi, is one of the better languages I've ever worked with. I wrote Delphi code professionally for about 2 and a half years using Delphi 7, and I've written a lot more Object Pascal in my spare time, both on Delphi and Lazarus. The only reason I stopped writing delphi for a living was that I started working on more web-based applications and Delphi doesn't shine in quite the same way if you're not doing a desktop GUI application. You can use it to write console apps and network servers and whatever you want, but it's real strength is in developing a GUI app for the desktop.
Yes, the syntax is more verbose than something like C, but it's FAR less ambiguous and offers many many less 'gotchas' - it's much much easier to both read and write. A great example is the existence in c of both '++i' and 'i++' - something I found fairly unintuitive and unnecessary at first.
Yeah, C is probably better and maybe even more readable if you're writing a device driver. But how often do you write device drivers? In my experience it's roughtly 100% applications and 0% drivers. I doubt there's anybody out there who has 100% drivers and 0% applications. I think that Pascal is a really good 'midle ground' langauge which gives you helpers for the most common things (e.g a string datatype) but still gives you lots of power - it's possible to write a device driver or even an operating system in Pascal (google it - there are a couple). The Delphi compiler is also pretty damn clever and it does a really good job of building executables that run fast.
I have often lamented the fact that C and other languages lack no "assignment" operator like object pascal does. In Delphi, you never ever find yourself writing:
if (a=1) { printf('oops, i just did assignment rather than comparison'); }
because the assignment operator is:=, not a simple equals sign. In my perfect world, langauges like C would use a colon for assignment and a single equals sign for equality:
int a: 42; if (a=42) {//true }
These days, being a linux-only person, I don't use Delphi any more. But whenever I want to do something quickly with a GUI, Free Pascal and Lazarus are always a very attractive choice. The biggest problem with Lazarus is that it doesn't have the same huge ecosystem of custom controls Delphi has. It's a pity they couldn't make it fully compatible with delphi code (they have tried, porting isn't all that hard, it's just time-consuming).
If you want to quickly throw together an application (ranging from 'simple' to 'massive') with a GUI interface which compiles into apps that run fast on just about any plaftorm out there and don't require a framework to run on (java,.net), then I can't make a better recommendation than Lazarus and Free Pascal. If you're happy with only a few platforms and the cost, Delphi will give you a slightly richer environment.
Is Pascal underrated? Yes, very much so.
P.S: Delphi is your granddaddy. I've heard that the original project name at borland was something like "VBK" - "Visual Basic Killer". They were talking about Visual Basic 1.0. Delphi has been around for a long time.
P.P.S: You are using "liberated" and/or evolved Delphi ideas if you're using.net. The chief.net guy was the chief Borland guy who did a lot of the delphi work before Microsoft offered him his own yacht. Yet somehow.net still wasn't as good as Delphi 7.
So ready to talk about how these horrible meat eaters are horrible people for eating meat, but not once have I ever met a vegan who wanted to discuss my theory that plants are part of a superintelligent planetary organism and that animals, which have their own minds and are therefore not connected to the planetary mind, are actually the most humane (not to mention tasty) things to eat, and that it's the vegans who are the real monsters.
They're horrible, horrible, close-minded people. They simply refuse to entertain any hypothesis which might make them question why they eat what they eat. After all, a planetary mind filling the telepathic aether with endless cries of pain and doing everything it can from volcanic eruptions to climate change to get rid of this horrible infestation of vegans is nothing compared to their precious feelings.
Your employer doesn't mind you leaving your workspace to take calls all the time? If it is work related can't they supply you with some system to answer emails/phone calls etc in side of the clean room? (Generally I don't spend my own money to solve my employers problems).
That was my first take, too - I was going to say something along the lines of "Perhaps you should log off of facebook and do your job instead? Those cat pictures will still be there at lunch time".
Firstly, I made no such assumption - I merely pointed out that the assumption that a known criminal will abide by the law is problematic.
And secondly, No, it's not. It comes down to previous experience and character judgements.
you might use Michael Jackson as a methaphor: The first kid, I gave him the benefit of the doubt: "Oh, some kid's family has come up with a way to cash in on jacko being a bit weird"... But when the second kid turned up, things started looking a bit fishy.
If you're going to give Mad Dog Tannen the benefit of the doubt that he didn't kill your pa, despite the fact that you saw him kill your grandpa and that he's currently re-loading his six-shooter, then you sir are the idiot.
(awesome gramattical, by the way - your mastery of tense are impressive).
I tried putting Linux on my HP 6515 back in the day. It wasn't fun. It's going to be really painful and you're not going to have 100% success. If you get X started you're doing really well.
The best thing to do if you actually want to use them is to not waste your time or energy with linux - use the built-in OS and find old pocket pc software. TomTom is great on those things. There's also a ScummVM port, so it'll run all the important games.
Alternative options:
* hit them with a hammer. laugh. upload video to youtube.
* put them on ebay with 'COLLECTABLE' in the listing. If you're lucky and they're in good condition (boxed will be a big plus) there might be a collector out there willing to give you good money for them. Use the money to buy something which is linux-friendly and has more processing power than all the pocket pcs combined.
Agreed, OP didn't ask "what should I do in nepal?" - I'm sure he also has "see nepal" pencilled in. Few answers to this question have been any help at all.
My recommendation: download a bunch of documentation (I recommend HTML format) and take it with you. I'm building my own offline documentation repository right now, and it's kind of fiddly but not difficult. Here's the process: * get out a text editor and start writing a list of languages / toolkits / etc that you use or are interested in. Mine looks something like this: php, javascript, jquery, python/pygtk, ruby, mysql, postgres, bash, linux from scratch, etc. * create a new directory for your compendium * for each item on your list, google it, go to the official site, find the 'download documentation' option, and download the docs - they're mostly small, only a couple of megs, and they're rarely difficult to find. In some cases there might not be downloadable documentation. In this case, I recommend wget --mirror * extract the docs and build a master index file in the root with links to each set of documentation. My index sits in a small frame at the top of the browser window so that you can switch to a certain docset easily. * When done, To save (lots of) space, use mksquashfs to create a compressed volume which you can mount and read offline.
You'll find the searching functionality of offline documentation limited, but i find that in most cases I can find what I want via the index. I'm also thinking about ways to do a search without resorting to running a local webserver or leaving the browser (one can obviously use grep for searching, but this is not a brilliant user experience). Any suggestions on how to do this would be welcome, btw.
I prefer html documentation because it's parseable / greppable and so that I can view it in links on a low-powered device. It also happens to compress really well. But PDF documentation has its merits too - e.g some PDFs have indexes which are quite helpful. The.chm format has the best of both worlds, but I'm not personally a fan of any of the.chm viewer apps. Your preferred format might depend on your device and interface preferences - I'm on a low-powered device and I want a text-only interface in this case, but to each his own.
In addition to language references, There are also many good free programming books on many subjects available online in downloadable formats. It all depends on what subjects you're interested in.
I was kind of suprised to find that there is no 'documentation compendium' project out there already - I had expected that I'd be able to just download all this stuff at once with a nice index. I did find a program called zeal, but the list of languages/toolkits seemed small and I wanted something more lightweight than a QT app. I've been thinking that once I have my own compendium sorted out I might put it out there for others.
Simple question: Which one has more parts and contains new software and is therefore more prone to failure?
Writing a binary log and then forwarding to syslog isn't acceptable because it makes the assumption that nothing will go wrong with the logging. Since we're talking about failure conditions this is not necessarily going to be true. This translates to an increased risk of lost and unrecoverable logging information, which in a mission-critical production environment is a big deal.
If you're going to write both plaintext and binary logs, you should be writing the text log first. That way if there's a problem like disk failure you can read the (partial) text log rather than being left with a corrupt and unreadable binary blob. The problem with doing it that way, apparently, is that then you wouldn't need binary logging...
Having rich meta data with every log entry is simply too good a thing to have. Small things like monotonic time stamps are really handy, the ability to filter messages based on field values is simply awesome.
So why don't you set syslog up to log everything to a database? It's had that ability since forever. The data files written by the DB engine will even be binary, just like you want. You'll be able to save very rich metadata and do all kinds of interesting things. For example, use the rich SQL language to do complex queries and joins - much more than simple filters you love in systemd. If you like binary logs, you'll *love* database logs!
Database engines are designed to handle massive amounts of data efficiently, so you can keep your entire log history all in one huge binary blob and query away at it to your heart's content - none of this 'only 3 months worth of logs' crap. Pretty much any modern database engine will handle a table with millions of rows no sweat - way more than you're likely to need for a logging system unless you're just being gratuitious.
Database engines also come with other nice features such as data consistency guarantees (this is a big one) and user access control and support for clustering, replication, and load balancing (if you're e.g pumping out a lot of log entries or need security, reliability, or redundancy). Hell, you could use triggers to make things happen when certain things are logged. You can do really cool stuff.
And if you have mysql installed you probably won't even need to install any new software. You definitely wouldn't need to go near the init system. Or mess with compatibility or reliability. Or force a bunch of dependencies down anybody's throat. And I could still use sane, simple tools like grep to look at the logfiles on my desktop system, and you could use your huge binary enterprizey system running on oracle databases, and neither would need to impact on the other, and we could all live in peace and harmony.
It's pretty cool what we already have. All you need to do is read the docs and configure things to do what you want.
It sounds more to me like he was running a distribution which had a track record of being fairly stable despite being declared inherently unstable, and that one particular piece of software broke things fairly substantially for him on more than one occasion, so he decided to avoid that piece of software, even if it meant changing distros.
You mean "the people he alledgedly attempted to have murdered".
I'm not saying he didn't do it, but at this point he's innocent because he hasn't been found guilty by a court.
Unless you were his accomplice or have seen evidence that hasn't been released publicly, you're making the assumption that he's guilty based on nothing. If you were his accomplice of have seen such evidence, then perhaps this public forum isn't the best place to be running your mouth off.
"systemd? New init system? Whatever. I trust debian, I'm sure it'll be fine."
"Oh that systemd thing again huh? Wow, seems to be controversial. But as long as I can easily configure my startup I don't care."
"Wait, what? THE PULSEAUDIO GUY WANTS TO GET INTO MY INIT SYSTEM??? FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU!"
Violence/threats/etc are never acceptable, but I think it's very fair to be concerned that people who want to be in charge of the most critical process on your system couldn't even get a sound server right. Especially considering that said sound server was unnecessary in the first place and was also shoved down our throats.
systemd sucks in many ways, and its adoption is due to it doing just a couple of things that people wanted done. But it is superseding many things which it has no fucking business messing with
Isn't it obvious? He's working with the secret remnants of the USSR who coordinate everything from their hollowed-out volcano lair on the dark side of the moon in cooperation with the reptilian overlords. Who are also communist.
I like having my desktop OS exactly the same as my server OS - it makes things easy: any command which works on my desktop is going to work on my server, as long as it's console-only and the appropriate software is installed there. If it's not installed, I know it's easily available, because it's available on my desktop.
If and when I ever run into a problem where I become convinced it's e.g the scheduler at fault and not my code, I'll go and read up on tuning and tune as required, or maybe look at a different distro. But in 99.9% of cases I can refactor a small piece of code and fix the problem without even going that deep. I've never ever tuned the kernel.
I totally didn't care about this debate until I read that, now I just want systemd away from me. eew!
Pulseaudio is indeed a really terribly horribly bad system. My favourite thing about pulseaudio is that even when you have a multichannel audio card capable of playing more than one sound simultaneously (i.e a good pro-audio card, or any 15 year old creative labs card), pulseaudio still does the mixing in software, because using my CPU to do something not-quite-as-well as the purpose-built hardware I have in my machine is a great idea. Another excellent feature of pulseaudio is the network transparency, because I love clogging up my LAN with uncompressed audio data, and jack didn't already do a better job of it.
Granted, it has gotten better - at least it works now, most of the time. 3 years ago it was the number 1 reason for me to reboot my system.
Based on my pulseaudio experience I don't want to be using systemd until at least 2030.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed.
Object Pascal, more specifically Delphi, is one of the better languages I've ever worked with. I wrote Delphi code professionally for about 2 and a half years using Delphi 7, and I've written a lot more Object Pascal in my spare time, both on Delphi and Lazarus. The only reason I stopped writing delphi for a living was that I started working on more web-based applications and Delphi doesn't shine in quite the same way if you're not doing a desktop GUI application. You can use it to write console apps and network servers and whatever you want, but it's real strength is in developing a GUI app for the desktop.
Yes, the syntax is more verbose than something like C, but it's FAR less ambiguous and offers many many less 'gotchas' - it's much much easier to both read and write. A great example is the existence in c of both '++i' and 'i++' - something I found fairly unintuitive and unnecessary at first.
Yeah, C is probably better and maybe even more readable if you're writing a device driver. But how often do you write device drivers? In my experience it's roughtly 100% applications and 0% drivers. I doubt there's anybody out there who has 100% drivers and 0% applications. I think that Pascal is a really good 'midle ground' langauge which gives you helpers for the most common things (e.g a string datatype) but still gives you lots of power - it's possible to write a device driver or even an operating system in Pascal (google it - there are a couple). The Delphi compiler is also pretty damn clever and it does a really good job of building executables that run fast.
I have often lamented the fact that C and other languages lack no "assignment" operator like object pascal does. In Delphi, you never ever find yourself writing:
if (a=1) { printf('oops, i just did assignment rather than comparison'); }
because the assignment operator is :=, not a simple equals sign. In my perfect world, langauges like C would use a colon for assignment and a single equals sign for equality:
int a: 42; //true }
if (a=42) {
These days, being a linux-only person, I don't use Delphi any more. But whenever I want to do something quickly with a GUI, Free Pascal and Lazarus are always a very attractive choice. The biggest problem with Lazarus is that it doesn't have the same huge ecosystem of custom controls Delphi has. It's a pity they couldn't make it fully compatible with delphi code (they have tried, porting isn't all that hard, it's just time-consuming).
If you want to quickly throw together an application (ranging from 'simple' to 'massive') with a GUI interface which compiles into apps that run fast on just about any plaftorm out there and don't require a framework to run on (java, .net), then I can't make a better recommendation than Lazarus and Free Pascal. If you're happy with only a few platforms and the cost, Delphi will give you a slightly richer environment.
Is Pascal underrated? Yes, very much so.
P.S: Delphi is your granddaddy. I've heard that the original project name at borland was something like "VBK" - "Visual Basic Killer". They were talking about Visual Basic 1.0. Delphi has been around for a long time.
P.P.S: You are using "liberated" and/or evolved Delphi ideas if you're using .net. The chief .net guy was the chief Borland guy who did a lot of the delphi work before Microsoft offered him his own yacht. Yet somehow .net still wasn't as good as Delphi 7.
Because they do have a tendency to improve
Welcome, traveller! It would appear that you have somehow managed to slip through the fabric of spacetime into an alternate universe!
Can you tell me how you plan to get back? Can I come with you? Your universe sounds like a really nice place!
If you showed ID to buy a record then I have no sympathy for anything that happens to you thereafter.
Vegans, they're all the same.
So ready to talk about how these horrible meat eaters are horrible people for eating meat, but not once have I ever met a vegan who wanted to discuss my theory that plants are part of a superintelligent planetary organism and that animals, which have their own minds and are therefore not connected to the planetary mind, are actually the most humane (not to mention tasty) things to eat, and that it's the vegans who are the real monsters.
They're horrible, horrible, close-minded people. They simply refuse to entertain any hypothesis which might make them question why they eat what they eat. After all, a planetary mind filling the telepathic aether with endless cries of pain and doing everything it can from volcanic eruptions to climate change to get rid of this horrible infestation of vegans is nothing compared to their precious feelings.
Your employer doesn't mind you leaving your workspace to take calls all the time? If it is work related can't they supply you with some system to answer emails/phone calls etc in side of the clean room? (Generally I don't spend my own money to solve my employers problems).
That was my first take, too - I was going to say something along the lines of "Perhaps you should log off of facebook and do your job instead? Those cat pictures will still be there at lunch time".
Firstly, I made no such assumption - I merely pointed out that the assumption that a known criminal will abide by the law is problematic.
And secondly, No, it's not. It comes down to previous experience and character judgements.
you might use Michael Jackson as a methaphor: The first kid, I gave him the benefit of the doubt: "Oh, some kid's family has come up with a way to cash in on jacko being a bit weird"... But when the second kid turned up, things started looking a bit fishy.
If you're going to give Mad Dog Tannen the benefit of the doubt that he didn't kill your pa, despite the fact that you saw him kill your grandpa and that he's currently re-loading his six-shooter, then you sir are the idiot.
(awesome gramattical, by the way - your mastery of tense are impressive).
It does other things too!
If they do bring enough backup, call me, and I'll come running with a model M in each hand. This is equivalent to about seven marines.
They may take our lives, but they'll never take our Model M's.
Good Answer.
I tried putting Linux on my HP 6515 back in the day. It wasn't fun. It's going to be really painful and you're not going to have 100% success. If you get X started you're doing really well.
The best thing to do if you actually want to use them is to not waste your time or energy with linux - use the built-in OS and find old pocket pc software. TomTom is great on those things. There's also a ScummVM port, so it'll run all the important games.
Alternative options:
So would they? Probably not.
So you're just going to assume that a company with a history of breaking the law won't break the law?
Did you know that 'gullible' isn't in the dictionary?
the first paragraph of that wiki article was very damning! I thought wikis were supposed to be neutral.
I thought that wikis were supposed to be factual. Sometimes the facts are damning.
Agreed, OP didn't ask "what should I do in nepal?" - I'm sure he also has "see nepal" pencilled in. Few answers to this question have been any help at all.
My recommendation: download a bunch of documentation (I recommend HTML format) and take it with you. I'm building my own offline documentation repository right now, and it's kind of fiddly but not difficult. Here's the process:
* get out a text editor and start writing a list of languages / toolkits / etc that you use or are interested in. Mine looks something like this: php, javascript, jquery, python/pygtk, ruby, mysql, postgres, bash, linux from scratch, etc.
* create a new directory for your compendium
* for each item on your list, google it, go to the official site, find the 'download documentation' option, and download the docs - they're mostly small, only a couple of megs, and they're rarely difficult to find. In some cases there might not be downloadable documentation. In this case, I recommend wget --mirror
* extract the docs and build a master index file in the root with links to each set of documentation. My index sits in a small frame at the top of the browser window so that you can switch to a certain docset easily.
* When done, To save (lots of) space, use mksquashfs to create a compressed volume which you can mount and read offline.
You'll find the searching functionality of offline documentation limited, but i find that in most cases I can find what I want via the index. I'm also thinking about ways to do a search without resorting to running a local webserver or leaving the browser (one can obviously use grep for searching, but this is not a brilliant user experience). Any suggestions on how to do this would be welcome, btw.
I prefer html documentation because it's parseable / greppable and so that I can view it in links on a low-powered device. It also happens to compress really well. But PDF documentation has its merits too - e.g some PDFs have indexes which are quite helpful. The .chm format has the best of both worlds, but I'm not personally a fan of any of the .chm viewer apps. Your preferred format might depend on your device and interface preferences - I'm on a low-powered device and I want a text-only interface in this case, but to each his own.
In addition to language references, There are also many good free programming books on many subjects available online in downloadable formats. It all depends on what subjects you're interested in.
I was kind of suprised to find that there is no 'documentation compendium' project out there already - I had expected that I'd be able to just download all this stuff at once with a nice index. I did find a program called zeal, but the list of languages/toolkits seemed small and I wanted something more lightweight than a QT app. I've been thinking that once I have my own compendium sorted out I might put it out there for others.
systemd-journald has long been capable of forwarding the logs to rsyslogd.
Unfortunately, if they acknowledged this, systemd haters would be left with one less thing to hate.
This isn't true - compare:
* daemon -> systemd -> syslog -> textfile
with
* daemon -> syslog -> textfile
Simple question: Which one has more parts and contains new software and is therefore more prone to failure?
Writing a binary log and then forwarding to syslog isn't acceptable because it makes the assumption that nothing will go wrong with the logging. Since we're talking about failure conditions this is not necessarily going to be true. This translates to an increased risk of lost and unrecoverable logging information, which in a mission-critical production environment is a big deal.
If you're going to write both plaintext and binary logs, you should be writing the text log first. That way if there's a problem like disk failure you can read the (partial) text log rather than being left with a corrupt and unreadable binary blob. The problem with doing it that way, apparently, is that then you wouldn't need binary logging...
Having rich meta data with every log entry is simply too good a thing to have. Small things like monotonic time stamps are really handy, the ability to filter messages based on field values is simply awesome.
So why don't you set syslog up to log everything to a database? It's had that ability since forever. The data files written by the DB engine will even be binary, just like you want. You'll be able to save very rich metadata and do all kinds of interesting things. For example, use the rich SQL language to do complex queries and joins - much more than simple filters you love in systemd. If you like binary logs, you'll *love* database logs!
Database engines are designed to handle massive amounts of data efficiently, so you can keep your entire log history all in one huge binary blob and query away at it to your heart's content - none of this 'only 3 months worth of logs' crap. Pretty much any modern database engine will handle a table with millions of rows no sweat - way more than you're likely to need for a logging system unless you're just being gratuitious.
Database engines also come with other nice features such as data consistency guarantees (this is a big one) and user access control and support for clustering, replication, and load balancing (if you're e.g pumping out a lot of log entries or need security, reliability, or redundancy). Hell, you could use triggers to make things happen when certain things are logged. You can do really cool stuff.
And if you have mysql installed you probably won't even need to install any new software. You definitely wouldn't need to go near the init system. Or mess with compatibility or reliability. Or force a bunch of dependencies down anybody's throat. And I could still use sane, simple tools like grep to look at the logfiles on my desktop system, and you could use your huge binary enterprizey system running on oracle databases, and neither would need to impact on the other, and we could all live in peace and harmony.
It's pretty cool what we already have. All you need to do is read the docs and configure things to do what you want.
It sounds more to me like he was running a distribution which had a track record of being fairly stable despite being declared inherently unstable, and that one particular piece of software broke things fairly substantially for him on more than one occasion, so he decided to avoid that piece of software, even if it meant changing distros.
Seems sensible enough to me.
the people he attempted to have murdered
You mean "the people he alledgedly attempted to have murdered".
I'm not saying he didn't do it, but at this point he's innocent because he hasn't been found guilty by a court.
Unless you were his accomplice or have seen evidence that hasn't been released publicly, you're making the assumption that he's guilty based on nothing. If you were his accomplice of have seen such evidence, then perhaps this public forum isn't the best place to be running your mouth off.
heh, that's exactly what happened to me:
"systemd? New init system? Whatever. I trust debian, I'm sure it'll be fine."
"Oh that systemd thing again huh? Wow, seems to be controversial. But as long as I can easily configure my startup I don't care."
"Wait, what? THE PULSEAUDIO GUY WANTS TO GET INTO MY INIT SYSTEM??? FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU!"
Violence/threats/etc are never acceptable, but I think it's very fair to be concerned that people who want to be in charge of the most critical process on your system couldn't even get a sound server right. Especially considering that said sound server was unnecessary in the first place and was also shoved down our throats.
10 projects looks a hell of a lot better on your resume than 1 does. HR people are not going to look at your bugzilla.
systemd sucks in many ways, and its adoption is due to it doing just a couple of things that people wanted done. But it is superseding many things which it has no fucking business messing with
This answer also applies to pulseaudio
writing lots of great software that a lot of people simply do not like
Am I the only one who finds this statement somewhat paradoxical?
Isn't it obvious? He's working with the secret remnants of the USSR who coordinate everything from their hollowed-out volcano lair on the dark side of the moon in cooperation with the reptilian overlords. Who are also communist.
Duh.
Indeed, we have distros for what he's suggesting.
I like having my desktop OS exactly the same as my server OS - it makes things easy: any command which works on my desktop is going to work on my server, as long as it's console-only and the appropriate software is installed there. If it's not installed, I know it's easily available, because it's available on my desktop.
If and when I ever run into a problem where I become convinced it's e.g the scheduler at fault and not my code, I'll go and read up on tuning and tune as required, or maybe look at a different distro. But in 99.9% of cases I can refactor a small piece of code and fix the problem without even going that deep. I've never ever tuned the kernel.
You don't use Linux as an audio editing workstation for instance. Theres a reason.
huh?
It's been more than 5 years since I did audio editing on something other than Linux.
systemd is written by the pulseaudio guy?!?
I totally didn't care about this debate until I read that, now I just want systemd away from me. eew!
Pulseaudio is indeed a really terribly horribly bad system. My favourite thing about pulseaudio is that even when you have a multichannel audio card capable of playing more than one sound simultaneously (i.e a good pro-audio card, or any 15 year old creative labs card), pulseaudio still does the mixing in software, because using my CPU to do something not-quite-as-well as the purpose-built hardware I have in my machine is a great idea. Another excellent feature of pulseaudio is the network transparency, because I love clogging up my LAN with uncompressed audio data, and jack didn't already do a better job of it.
Granted, it has gotten better - at least it works now, most of the time. 3 years ago it was the number 1 reason for me to reboot my system.
Based on my pulseaudio experience I don't want to be using systemd until at least 2030.
Just for the record, what you got is store credit, not the refund you were entitled to.