What do you need a sound server for? Alsa does mixing fine on it's own. (you say it doesn't work, and to that I would say yeah if you were using linux around 2002 it probably didn't work well then)
Bullshit. Try 2009! With modern kernels. With modern distributions. With modern hardware. With a user who is by no means an idiot.
Alsa does not mix "just fine" on its own. If it did I would never have had a problem and would not have become frustrated enough to seek out a solution. Again, my case is not unique.
Do you think I am making this up for my own amusement? Do you think I would not instantly switch to pure alsa if it would actually function?
Again, that was a looong time ago. It's just not the case anymore.
This is exactly why I objected in the first place! I will repeat again: It's great if it works for you! Please understand that your experience is not typical. Even if it were, please understand that your experience is not guaranteed and as such makes for poor evangelism.
At work the switch to vista has been completed ("officially") and as such our next internal web app is specifically ignoring IE6 and testing only for IE7+ and Firefox (IE7 is the only allowed browser, officially, but Firefox is tested anyway because the developers use it.) It's really an amazingly liberating feeling to, for the first time in my web development life, not have to special case everything for IE. IE7 certainly still has some quirks, but you no longer have to have a whole additional "How it will work in IE" plan.
It's an amazing reduction in effort to not test for IE4, IE5 or IE6.
If you are going to whine about this you really need to qualify it a bit more.
If audio works for you under Linux and you have no problems then I am happy for you. My experience is very different and, incidentally, my case is not unique. I can only provide anecdotal commentary on *PulseAudio* because I have had very limited exposure to it (a case in which it tended to fail).
I am not whining. I am correcting an inaccurate fanboy. I am an *accurate* fanboy. Audio under Linux doesn't Just Work and work correctly. If it has just recently started to do so... good! But don't say that it has worked "for a long time." Like I said, maybe PulseAudio is the magic that makes it all better. Like I said, I tend do doubt it based on my own experiences and those I have heard from others. I have heard good and bad things about PulseAudio and that is enough to make me reluctant to believe across the board claims that all audio woes are gone. And, again, even if this is true they have not been gone "for a long time."
I've been using Linux since before ALSA existed and I've had every kind of audio experience you care to name, from perfect to horrible. I'm really glad you're doing so well! But, please don't tell non-Linux users "It will Just Work and be Perfect!" if this is not entirely true. The only thing worse than someone who has never tried Linux is someone who tried it, found that he has been lied to, and has gone back to MacOS or Windows with a negative impression. Be *honest* about what his experience is likely to be! And, honestly, audio is likely to be an issue. If someone tried Linux a year ago and had audio issues and is then told that audio has not been an issue for "a long time" then that person is unlikely to (a) try Linux again and (b) believe anything any Linux advocate says about Linux.
If you don't do anything fancy, why would you throw another sound server into the stack? Maybe most users have better luck because they don't overcomplicate things.
I am not throwing "another sound server" on to the stack, I am using Jack and only Jack. ESD and its successors were never a good solution and only ever worked part way (ie, if everything used them, which everything never did). artsd was always a buggy piece of junk--something its creator freely admitted a few years ago.
Let me tell you a story. For years audio worked fine for me under Linux, because my sound card mixed for me... then I got a laptop with a cheap sound card. Start firefox, play a flash video, then start mplayer. No sound in mplayer! Start a video game, then start Firefox. No sound in firefox! This kind of thing is just plain stupid, so I told everything to use jack. Now I get sound from anything no matter when I start it (and even at the same time, wow!) This sort of thing should have Just Worked a long time ago but it didn't and it doesn't unless you use a sound server.
When all this was happening I looked at PulseAudio and it was enough to make me go "whoa." Complicated, at the time very buggy and new, and from everything I could see designed to be ESD plus some bells and whistles. Why would I want to shackle myself to that again? Jack had pretty much all of the advantages and none of the drawbacks, so that's what I used. I've heard since then that PA makes everything wonderful, but I have also heard the exact opposite many times.
Again, why you would use JACK unless you had a specific need for it? I don't know why that setup is buggy for you but it could very well be the extra layer you are adding.
I *do* have a specific need for jack: I need a sound server. What "extra layer" am I adding? I can't remove ALSA, unless you're suggesting I switch to OSS4 (no thanks!) You don't get fewer layers then alsa->jack->everything else, unless you have no sound server at all (which does not work, see above).
Jack doesn't stand up to the abuse of being *the* sound system, period. I wish it did, but it doesn't. Maybe Debian's version is buggy, maybe I am really unlucky; whatever the reason I can report the hard facts of my experience: If you use jack as your sound system it will work and be beautiful, but only 99% of the time. It's still better than the alternatives.
I'm using onboard audio and I haven't had an issue in any distribution since I bought this motherboard years ago. There goes your anecdotal evidence I guess.
My anecdotal evidence is trumped by yours?
A single distribution (Ubuntu) rushed their PA support and implemented it horribly. I don't see how that single event means Linux audio sucks
You can say that and I can say PA issues are found outside Ubuntu, too. Some citations would help us both. Otherwise we will sit here and say "yes it is!" "no it isn't!" forever.
Maybe PA will be the magic fix for audio eventually, but so far not so much. And, in case you haven't noticed, PA is new. If a "long time" for you is "since PA" then you might have a point, but it certainly isn't for me. I think two commercial support cycles would be about right. Four to six years?
unless you think Ubuntu=Linux.
Let's not be any more insulting than necessary.
Do I really need to explain myself here? X11 is a part of Linux, and has had this feature since 1989, which is why I said Linux had this feature since 1989.
Are you new to flame wars? Never expose a weak point, however irrelevant, or it can be used as a lever to derail the conversation. If you can discredit one point you can then cast doubt on the others by insinuation. People do this all the time and it's better to simply not give them the opening. I understood you, but I don't have an anti-Linux agenda.
I like jack, generally, and use it for playback. I don't do recording or anything fancy, just playing MP3s, flash videos, DVDs, the normal kind of stuff.
My only two gripes with jack are:
- sometimes it just 'stops' and I have to kill and restart it. Buggy!
- they wrote PulseAudio instead of just using jack and adding what they thought was missing
As far as I am concerned the Linux audio stack is:
hardware->driver->alsa->jack->apps. or hardware->driver->alsa->jack->alsa->apps for apps that don't know how to talk to jack directly.
This works very well, apart from the bugginess I mentioned before.
I'm talking about artificial-sounding scenarios here simply because I'm trying to simulate "normal use" and the odd cases that average users run in to sooner or later. A robust system should handle all of these strange things happening in any sequence.
If your experience has been generally good--good! But, this is not the average.
On Linux one tends to have one of two experiences: It magically works, and it really doesn't work.
Sometimes you can turn "doesn't work" in to "works" with some manual tweaking, sometimes not. Generally this is getting far, far better over time and the magic of "no drivers to install, it just works" is certainly one of Linux for Windows converts.
With regards to audio: What did you then do with these 30+ cheap-audio systems? Did you try to watch a flash video and have an MP3 player running? Did you try to get a GNOME app to play sound at the same time as a KDE app? Did it work? Were there xruns? Did you try to play MIDIs? Sound will generally "just work" out of the box if your only test is "can I play a sound?" Even some level of software mixing has been generally okay since esd was made available. The problem is when you try to run an application that isn't configured the same way out of the box. Run Noatun, which launches artsd, then run XMMS. Then try an SDL game. Then open Firefox and try a flash animation.
On Windows or OS X you will get audio in every case if it works at all. On Linux you cross your fingers and hope it was all configured correctly and nothing goes wrong.
I will stoutly defend Linux where it is unfairly attacked, but I have to take issue with a couple of your points here:
I do not like having two(!) different sound systems being installed, and my system still not always have sound. (I loved how I'd get "No ALSA devices found" during boot, but could only adjust my volume through alsamixer.)
Yeah, sound on linux sucked for a while. Just like blue screens sucked on windows. However just like windows blue screens, sound on linux hasn't been an issue for a long time
Bullshit.
Sound on Linux hasn't been an issue for a long time if and only if you have a sound card that supports mixing. If you're using a cheap card that relies on the OS to do its work, like 90% of users do, then it's been hell and is still hell. People tell me that PulseAudio is the magic fairy dust which makes everything better now, but from what I've seen it only does that for some people. I've seen dozens of people complaining about screwed up audio on their system where the diagnosed failure point was PulseAudio! So, even if that's going eventually to be the the answer as of today it's still problematic. Distribution configuration issue? Application support issue? Doesn't matter if audio still sucks for the end user.
And I still don't see what PA does that JACK didn't do five years ago.
Audio still sucks under Linux today. Ten years ago it sucked more and for (largely) different reasons, sure, but it is not yet fixed by any means.
OS's tend to incorporate each other's features as it makes sense to do so. Just like how OSX just implemented spaces, which has been a feature of Linux since 1989.
Please don't try to defend Linux, it only makes you look bad and Linux look bad as a result. Anyone who isn't in a coma will reply and say--correctly--that Linux didn't exist in 1989. It is better to say that "spaces" has been supported by Linux's graphics system since 1989, but it would be better to omit a reference to Linux and say X11 directly.
How does collocating menu bars with windows visually tie functionality to an application? You still have to click on a menu to discover it's functionality, which on any of the systems you've mentioned changes window focus and activates a different window, closing the current menu you have open.
The way MacOS does this (and has always does this) is really confusing. Their top-menu-bar system works well when you have few (preferably one) applications running, which is just not common on modern machines and definitely not if you're a power user.
It is entirely possible (and common!) for the menu bar that you see to not be related to the window that 'appears' to be active (that is, the one taking up the majority of the screen and that is atop other windows). Specifically Finder and an open application can be confused. Trying to talk my Actual Mom(tm) through the necessary clicks to perform some action is an exercise often filled with "No, that's the Finder menu. Click back on your Safari window first, then click the menu."
You may consider the top menu bar thing to be better overall, but do not deny that there are real drawbacks. By comparison a menu bar on every window makes pointing to menus harder (small drawback) but makes it entirely clear which application's menu you're using!
This all sounds totally crazy if you're Paul Vixie and have written a little article titled What DNS Is Not which specifically mentions that it shouldn't be used for this.
Of course id3 "can" do these things, but it's mostly useless. Some players and editors b0rk tags they don't understand, or break on tags they don't understand. Most players support one or another way of storing this or that... but there is little consistency in terms of features and less in terms of expected format for those features.
I have mp3s with BPM set by some player, but I cannot read it properly in any player I have. Album covers set in one app don't show up in another. The list of problems goes on endlessly.
At least with mkv you're pretty sure that if it's supported the format in the file is consistent such that apps don't break it.
It's amazing that these guys still have no clue what they're doing. I kind of expected this behavior a decade ago when it was all new to these guys, but today? Honestly?
You mean that if I don't buy the DRM'd version I get only static audio files? Ones that only play audio? Ones that don't get filled with pushed junk at the money grubbing production company's whim?
Why on earth would I want that?
And then, to top off the insanity, these "fancy" MP3s will cost--get this!--more than the kind without all of the misfeatures. Don't these guys know that if you want your broken system to replace the working one you have to incentively people to switch to it?
When I get done laughing my ass off I'll take some time to weep for the lost profits of these morons. But, only a moment.
I really don't know. It's an implementation of OpenStep, so it's a 'complete' desktop API and includes widgets and everything. I say complete, but it really is complete inasmuch as NeXT was complete when it was last released. Since then many things have been invented and I don't know how much GNUStep actually has evolved over time and tracked modern developments.
If instead of starting GNOME people had gotten behind GNUStep then the Linux desktop world would be a very different (and much better) place today. But, nobody wanted to write in Objective-C.
If you want to see GNUStep being used seriously, and not looking like it's 1989, you should take a look at Etoile. This goes to show that the framework is very capable if only people would use it.
Why is it a problem if the company makes that choice for you? You just use a different search engine.
A company advertising a "Family Friendly Internet Search Engine!" would be held to a different standard. If you claim to provide a general purpose search facility and then limit the results, or in any way alter the results for any reason other than trying to provide the most accurate hits first, then you are acting inappropriately.
It's all well and good to say "Just use a different search engine"--this is a stock capitalist answer to every problem with every business! Vote with your feet and your dollar, right? The problem is that the search space is finite and there are not always other options as good (or at all.) If I use an inferior engine that gives me inferior results I am effectively censoring my results anyway. It is reasonable to request that a company provide the service they advertise and it is reasonable to keep requesting that they provide me the service I want, regardless of what they advertise. What I want is no filters.
Imagine a search engine that was so good it could filter out every link park site and every dumb conspiracy site. Would you think that was a bad thing?
Yes, if it were not possible to disable this misfeature! What if I *want* to find some dumb conspiracy sites? It is not up to them to decide that some kinds of information are bad. It is always up to only me. If I decide to turn on--or off--the filter-conspiracy-sites option then that's fine, but deciding for me is not fine.
I do not think that a company that one it's own offered a "clean" search is in any way evil. You may not choose to use them because you don't trust that their filters are smart enough to not block say a breast cancer site but that doesn't make them evil.
I did not ever say that providing the option for a "clean" search was evil. What I said is that it is evil--in general--for a search engine to self censor. I followed this by specifically outlining when this is acceptable--when there is an option to disable the censorship. Deceiving your customers is in no way appropriate and attempting to limit the free flow of information is inherently evil (IMNSHO, though one could reasonably take a less extreme view here.)
Again, "choose not to use them" is not the best solution to this problem. The best solution is to demand the service I desire.
No more evil than if you owned a store and the Klan wanted you to carry KKK T-Shirts and you said no.
This is not at all comparable. Shelf space in a store is very limited. As a result stores are expected to pick and choose what to stock. There is no expectation that every store will stock every type of item, but there is an expectation that search engines will return every type of result. In addition, stores usually specialize in a certain kind of item or a certain theme of item. This is analogous to a search engine which advertises itself as not-general-purpose, a case where not including certain results is expected.
1) We don't do it. 2) We can't do it the same way we do subtitles for foreign language films. 3) We're going to do it and we have chosen a subtitle format. 4) The subtitle format is not well supported by our various viewing devices/software. 5) It will be done soon anyway.
So maybe it could be done faster. So maybe they didn't even try to do it until recently. Oh, horror!
Just for arguments sake would it be evil for a search engine to self censor?
Yes.
Just why would it be wrong for a search engine to decide to offer a "clean" search product that didn't have porn, neo nazi, and klan sites?
As long as the non-"clean" version remains easily accessible this would be not be wrong, it would be fine.
The issue here is who decides. If you voluntarily, as a personal choice, choose to use the clean search (e.g. in prefs turn Safe Search on) then there is no problem. If the company takes that choice from you, then that's a problem.
But it would work, right? It just wouldn't be enough for an indefinite charge. I think it's enough that you extend unplugged lifetime, surely. It's not necessary to have an everlasting charge so much as a longer-lasting charge, offsetting the energy consumption by continual recharging. Isn't that the idea?
People are too quick to forget that the American revolution was the same way. It was as much about taxes and being harassed (property seized, etc) as it was about abstract concepts of freedom.
A great system should be built to *withstand* and *survive* a nut job in the top job in the government without major instability.
The fact that a democracy has incompetent or corrupt leaders now and again, or even frequently, is a sign of strength: They get replaced and the government keeps marching on.
Slashdot Mirror
Very simple:
- build a space elevator
- launch it in to the sun
And this is why /. is still better than every other discussion forum anywhere.
What do you need a sound server for? Alsa does mixing fine on it's own. (you say it doesn't work, and to that I would say yeah if you were using linux around 2002 it probably didn't work well then)
Bullshit. Try 2009! With modern kernels. With modern distributions. With modern hardware. With a user who is by no means an idiot.
Alsa does not mix "just fine" on its own. If it did I would never have had a problem and would not have become frustrated enough to seek out a solution. Again, my case is not unique.
Do you think I am making this up for my own amusement? Do you think I would not instantly switch to pure alsa if it would actually function?
Again, that was a looong time ago. It's just not the case anymore.
This is exactly why I objected in the first place! I will repeat again: It's great if it works for you! Please understand that your experience is not typical. Even if it were, please understand that your experience is not guaranteed and as such makes for poor evangelism.
At work the switch to vista has been completed ("officially") and as such our next internal web app is specifically ignoring IE6 and testing only for IE7+ and Firefox (IE7 is the only allowed browser, officially, but Firefox is tested anyway because the developers use it.) It's really an amazingly liberating feeling to, for the first time in my web development life, not have to special case everything for IE. IE7 certainly still has some quirks, but you no longer have to have a whole additional "How it will work in IE" plan.
It's an amazing reduction in effort to not test for IE4, IE5 or IE6.
If you are going to whine about this you really need to qualify it a bit more.
If audio works for you under Linux and you have no problems then I am happy for you. My experience is very different and, incidentally, my case is not unique. I can only provide anecdotal commentary on *PulseAudio* because I have had very limited exposure to it (a case in which it tended to fail).
I am not whining. I am correcting an inaccurate fanboy. I am an *accurate* fanboy. Audio under Linux doesn't Just Work and work correctly. If it has just recently started to do so... good! But don't say that it has worked "for a long time." Like I said, maybe PulseAudio is the magic that makes it all better. Like I said, I tend do doubt it based on my own experiences and those I have heard from others. I have heard good and bad things about PulseAudio and that is enough to make me reluctant to believe across the board claims that all audio woes are gone. And, again, even if this is true they have not been gone "for a long time."
I've been using Linux since before ALSA existed and I've had every kind of audio experience you care to name, from perfect to horrible. I'm really glad you're doing so well! But, please don't tell non-Linux users "It will Just Work and be Perfect!" if this is not entirely true. The only thing worse than someone who has never tried Linux is someone who tried it, found that he has been lied to, and has gone back to MacOS or Windows with a negative impression. Be *honest* about what his experience is likely to be! And, honestly, audio is likely to be an issue. If someone tried Linux a year ago and had audio issues and is then told that audio has not been an issue for "a long time" then that person is unlikely to (a) try Linux again and (b) believe anything any Linux advocate says about Linux.
If you don't do anything fancy, why would you throw another sound server into the stack? Maybe most users have better luck because they don't overcomplicate things.
I am not throwing "another sound server" on to the stack, I am using Jack and only Jack. ESD and its successors were never a good solution and only ever worked part way (ie, if everything used them, which everything never did). artsd was always a buggy piece of junk--something its creator freely admitted a few years ago.
Let me tell you a story. For years audio worked fine for me under Linux, because my sound card mixed for me... then I got a laptop with a cheap sound card. Start firefox, play a flash video, then start mplayer. No sound in mplayer! Start a video game, then start Firefox. No sound in firefox! This kind of thing is just plain stupid, so I told everything to use jack. Now I get sound from anything no matter when I start it (and even at the same time, wow!) This sort of thing should have Just Worked a long time ago but it didn't and it doesn't unless you use a sound server.
When all this was happening I looked at PulseAudio and it was enough to make me go "whoa." Complicated, at the time very buggy and new, and from everything I could see designed to be ESD plus some bells and whistles. Why would I want to shackle myself to that again? Jack had pretty much all of the advantages and none of the drawbacks, so that's what I used. I've heard since then that PA makes everything wonderful, but I have also heard the exact opposite many times.
Again, why you would use JACK unless you had a specific need for it? I don't know why that setup is buggy for you but it could very well be the extra layer you are adding.
I *do* have a specific need for jack: I need a sound server. What "extra layer" am I adding? I can't remove ALSA, unless you're suggesting I switch to OSS4 (no thanks!) You don't get fewer layers then alsa->jack->everything else, unless you have no sound server at all (which does not work, see above).
Jack doesn't stand up to the abuse of being *the* sound system, period. I wish it did, but it doesn't. Maybe Debian's version is buggy, maybe I am really unlucky; whatever the reason I can report the hard facts of my experience: If you use jack as your sound system it will work and be beautiful, but only 99% of the time. It's still better than the alternatives.
I'm using onboard audio and I haven't had an issue in any distribution since I bought this motherboard years ago. There goes your anecdotal evidence I guess.
My anecdotal evidence is trumped by yours?
A single distribution (Ubuntu) rushed their PA support and implemented it horribly. I don't see how that single event means Linux audio sucks
You can say that and I can say PA issues are found outside Ubuntu, too. Some citations would help us both. Otherwise we will sit here and say "yes it is!" "no it isn't!" forever.
Maybe PA will be the magic fix for audio eventually, but so far not so much. And, in case you haven't noticed, PA is new. If a "long time" for you is "since PA" then you might have a point, but it certainly isn't for me. I think two commercial support cycles would be about right. Four to six years?
unless you think Ubuntu=Linux.
Let's not be any more insulting than necessary.
Do I really need to explain myself here? X11 is a part of Linux, and has had this feature since 1989, which is why I said Linux had this feature since 1989.
Are you new to flame wars? Never expose a weak point, however irrelevant, or it can be used as a lever to derail the conversation. If you can discredit one point you can then cast doubt on the others by insinuation. People do this all the time and it's better to simply not give them the opening. I understood you, but I don't have an anti-Linux agenda.
I like jack, generally, and use it for playback. I don't do recording or anything fancy, just playing MP3s, flash videos, DVDs, the normal kind of stuff.
My only two gripes with jack are:
- sometimes it just 'stops' and I have to kill and restart it. Buggy!
- they wrote PulseAudio instead of just using jack and adding what they thought was missing
As far as I am concerned the Linux audio stack is:
hardware->driver->alsa->jack->apps.
or
hardware->driver->alsa->jack->alsa->apps for apps that don't know how to talk to jack directly.
This works very well, apart from the bugginess I mentioned before.
I'm talking about artificial-sounding scenarios here simply because I'm trying to simulate "normal use" and the odd cases that average users run in to sooner or later. A robust system should handle all of these strange things happening in any sequence.
If your experience has been generally good--good! But, this is not the average.
On Linux one tends to have one of two experiences: It magically works, and it really doesn't work.
Sometimes you can turn "doesn't work" in to "works" with some manual tweaking, sometimes not. Generally this is getting far, far better over time and the magic of "no drivers to install, it just works" is certainly one of Linux for Windows converts.
With regards to audio: What did you then do with these 30+ cheap-audio systems? Did you try to watch a flash video and have an MP3 player running? Did you try to get a GNOME app to play sound at the same time as a KDE app? Did it work? Were there xruns? Did you try to play MIDIs? Sound will generally "just work" out of the box if your only test is "can I play a sound?" Even some level of software mixing has been generally okay since esd was made available. The problem is when you try to run an application that isn't configured the same way out of the box. Run Noatun, which launches artsd, then run XMMS. Then try an SDL game. Then open Firefox and try a flash animation.
On Windows or OS X you will get audio in every case if it works at all. On Linux you cross your fingers and hope it was all configured correctly and nothing goes wrong.
I will stoutly defend Linux where it is unfairly attacked, but I have to take issue with a couple of your points here:
I do not like having two(!) different sound systems being installed, and my system still not always have sound. (I loved how I'd get "No ALSA devices found" during boot, but could only adjust my volume through alsamixer.)
Yeah, sound on linux sucked for a while. Just like blue screens sucked on windows. However just like windows blue screens, sound on linux hasn't been an issue for a long time
Bullshit.
Sound on Linux hasn't been an issue for a long time if and only if you have a sound card that supports mixing. If you're using a cheap card that relies on the OS to do its work, like 90% of users do, then it's been hell and is still hell. People tell me that PulseAudio is the magic fairy dust which makes everything better now, but from what I've seen it only does that for some people. I've seen dozens of people complaining about screwed up audio on their system where the diagnosed failure point was PulseAudio! So, even if that's going eventually to be the the answer as of today it's still problematic. Distribution configuration issue? Application support issue? Doesn't matter if audio still sucks for the end user.
And I still don't see what PA does that JACK didn't do five years ago.
Audio still sucks under Linux today. Ten years ago it sucked more and for (largely) different reasons, sure, but it is not yet fixed by any means.
OS's tend to incorporate each other's features as it makes sense to do so. Just like how OSX just implemented spaces, which has been a feature of Linux since 1989.
Please don't try to defend Linux, it only makes you look bad and Linux look bad as a result. Anyone who isn't in a coma will reply and say--correctly--that Linux didn't exist in 1989. It is better to say that "spaces" has been supported by Linux's graphics system since 1989, but it would be better to omit a reference to Linux and say X11 directly.
How does collocating menu bars with windows visually tie functionality to an application? You still have to click on a menu to discover it's functionality, which on any of the systems you've mentioned changes window focus and activates a different window, closing the current menu you have open.
The way MacOS does this (and has always does this) is really confusing. Their top-menu-bar system works well when you have few (preferably one) applications running, which is just not common on modern machines and definitely not if you're a power user.
It is entirely possible (and common!) for the menu bar that you see to not be related to the window that 'appears' to be active (that is, the one taking up the majority of the screen and that is atop other windows). Specifically Finder and an open application can be confused. Trying to talk my Actual Mom(tm) through the necessary clicks to perform some action is an exercise often filled with "No, that's the Finder menu. Click back on your Safari window first, then click the menu."
You may consider the top menu bar thing to be better overall, but do not deny that there are real drawbacks. By comparison a menu bar on every window makes pointing to menus harder (small drawback) but makes it entirely clear which application's menu you're using!
This all sounds totally crazy if you're Paul Vixie and have written a little article titled What DNS Is Not which specifically mentions that it shouldn't be used for this.
How quickly we forget.
Of course id3 "can" do these things, but it's mostly useless. Some players and editors b0rk tags they don't understand, or break on tags they don't understand. Most players support one or another way of storing this or that... but there is little consistency in terms of features and less in terms of expected format for those features.
I have mp3s with BPM set by some player, but I cannot read it properly in any player I have. Album covers set in one app don't show up in another. The list of problems goes on endlessly.
At least with mkv you're pretty sure that if it's supported the format in the file is consistent such that apps don't break it.
It's amazing that these guys still have no clue what they're doing. I kind of expected this behavior a decade ago when it was all new to these guys, but today? Honestly?
You mean that if I don't buy the DRM'd version I get only static audio files? Ones that only play audio? Ones that don't get filled with pushed junk at the money grubbing production company's whim?
Why on earth would I want that?
And then, to top off the insanity, these "fancy" MP3s will cost--get this!--more than the kind without all of the misfeatures. Don't these guys know that if you want your broken system to replace the working one you have to incentively people to switch to it?
When I get done laughing my ass off I'll take some time to weep for the lost profits of these morons. But, only a moment.
I really don't know. It's an implementation of OpenStep, so it's a 'complete' desktop API and includes widgets and everything. I say complete, but it really is complete inasmuch as NeXT was complete when it was last released. Since then many things have been invented and I don't know how much GNUStep actually has evolved over time and tracked modern developments.
If instead of starting GNOME people had gotten behind GNUStep then the Linux desktop world would be a very different (and much better) place today. But, nobody wanted to write in Objective-C.
If you want to see GNUStep being used seriously, and not looking like it's 1989, you should take a look at Etoile. This goes to show that the framework is very capable if only people would use it.
It was Jobs and (IIRC) he was doing a NeXT 4.0 promotional video.
Something more recent which uses the actual GNUStep IB would be nice.
Why is it a problem if the company makes that choice for you?
You just use a different search engine.
A company advertising a "Family Friendly Internet Search Engine!" would be held to a different standard. If you claim to provide a general purpose search facility and then limit the results, or in any way alter the results for any reason other than trying to provide the most accurate hits first, then you are acting inappropriately.
It's all well and good to say "Just use a different search engine"--this is a stock capitalist answer to every problem with every business! Vote with your feet and your dollar, right? The problem is that the search space is finite and there are not always other options as good (or at all.) If I use an inferior engine that gives me inferior results I am effectively censoring my results anyway. It is reasonable to request that a company provide the service they advertise and it is reasonable to keep requesting that they provide me the service I want, regardless of what they advertise. What I want is no filters.
Imagine a search engine that was so good it could filter out every link park site and every dumb conspiracy site. Would you think that was a bad thing?
Yes, if it were not possible to disable this misfeature! What if I *want* to find some dumb conspiracy sites? It is not up to them to decide that some kinds of information are bad. It is always up to only me. If I decide to turn on--or off--the filter-conspiracy-sites option then that's fine, but deciding for me is not fine.
I do not think that a company that one it's own offered a "clean" search is in any way evil.
You may not choose to use them because you don't trust that their filters are smart enough to not block say a breast cancer site but that doesn't make them evil.
I did not ever say that providing the option for a "clean" search was evil. What I said is that it is evil--in general--for a search engine to self censor. I followed this by specifically outlining when this is acceptable--when there is an option to disable the censorship. Deceiving your customers is in no way appropriate and attempting to limit the free flow of information is inherently evil (IMNSHO, though one could reasonably take a less extreme view here.)
Again, "choose not to use them" is not the best solution to this problem. The best solution is to demand the service I desire.
No more evil than if you owned a store and the Klan wanted you to carry KKK T-Shirts and you said no.
This is not at all comparable. Shelf space in a store is very limited. As a result stores are expected to pick and choose what to stock. There is no expectation that every store will stock every type of item, but there is an expectation that search engines will return every type of result. In addition, stores usually specialize in a certain kind of item or a certain theme of item. This is analogous to a search engine which advertises itself as not-general-purpose, a case where not including certain results is expected.
What he says, specifically, is:
1) We don't do it.
2) We can't do it the same way we do subtitles for foreign language films.
3) We're going to do it and we have chosen a subtitle format.
4) The subtitle format is not well supported by our various viewing devices/software.
5) It will be done soon anyway.
So maybe it could be done faster. So maybe they didn't even try to do it until recently. Oh, horror!
tl;dr No malice here, calm down and relax.
Just for arguments sake would it be evil for a search engine to self censor?
Yes.
Just why would it be wrong for a search engine to decide to offer a "clean" search product that didn't have porn, neo nazi, and klan sites?
As long as the non-"clean" version remains easily accessible this would be not be wrong, it would be fine.
The issue here is who decides. If you voluntarily, as a personal choice, choose to use the clean search (e.g. in prefs turn Safe Search on) then there is no problem. If the company takes that choice from you, then that's a problem.
But it would work, right? It just wouldn't be enough for an indefinite charge. I think it's enough that you extend unplugged lifetime, surely. It's not necessary to have an everlasting charge so much as a longer-lasting charge, offsetting the energy consumption by continual recharging. Isn't that the idea?
This is a terrific idea, no joke.
It's inhumane as all hell, but the Chinese government is already like that.
I salute you, AC.
Sure, be the biggest importer. Send all of your raw wealth elsewhere. Destroy your economy.
William Sumner would like to have a word with you.
People are too quick to forget that the American revolution was the same way. It was as much about taxes and being harassed (property seized, etc) as it was about abstract concepts of freedom.
Perhaps true, perhaps not true.
A great system should be built to *withstand* and *survive* a nut job in the top job in the government without major instability.
The fact that a democracy has incompetent or corrupt leaders now and again, or even frequently, is a sign of strength: They get replaced and the government keeps marching on.