It specifies that they MUST NOT block lawful content, which simply implies that they MAY block unlawful content. But since it's not a lawful act for an ISP to police the content of packets to determine their lawfulness, then the implication means exactly nothing.
I think I see your logic, but I don't agree with it.
I think Sun would've gone belly-up no matter what. The Star Office purchase was probably a good deal (at a paltry $73 million during boom-time economics), but it's not at all clear to me how they might ever recoup that investment outside of earning some good will from the community. Open Office runs no worse on my PC than it does on Sun hardware, nor does Java, nor MySQL. I might even suggest that they've done too good of a job supporting all of the platforms that they do. However, giving Solaris away seems no-brainer in light of the onslaught of Linux, as continuing to license it as they used to would be just like whipping a dead horse.
IBM and Intel support OSS, to the extent that is reasonable for them to ensure a good experience for users of their hardware, which is obviously good for them. Redhat, essentially, sells support for what is one of the only Linux distributions with (what is perceived to be) corporate acceptance, and their pricing structure somewhat satisfies the old "you get what you pay for" buying mentality. These companies all have a clear path toward monetizing their OSS efforts; Sun did not.
I'm all for the whole "information wants to be free" mentality. But when making information free kills the creator, it really hasn't accomplished much that is positive when it's all said and done.
It's my understanding that with 7, I shouldn't have to goof with things like that. I've got better things to do than waste time assigning processes to cores manually -- any potential savings in cache efficiency is going to be swamped by all of the effort I've invested in dicking around with it.
Did you read the article, or the comment that I was replying to?
Interesting commentary. Keeping threads on their own cores is something I've predicted would help in certain situations for some time -- ever since I saw one CPU-intensive application jump randomly between two otherwise idle Pentium Pro 200's on an SMP OS/2 Warp Server box way back when.
Is there a simple way to test this theory about processor affinity in isolation? I just so happen to have a Q6600 here, running Vista x64, and it sure would be interesting to see for myself if 7 makes any meaningful improvements on this chip.
Sun was a big company, that seems to have just about failed despite their contributions to to the open-source versions of OpenOffice and MySQL. I'm not sure that it's the best example in the world.:)
They give away all of their flagship products, from the aforementioned MySQL (which cost them $1 billion), to OpenOffice ($73.5 million), to Java ($lots), Solaris ($lotsmore). It's not at all clear to me, from the current state of that company, that any of these moves helped them to succeed.
Right. Thank you for clearing that up for me. I'm afraid I was terribly confused. I guess you're right: Obviously, it's the OPEN SOURCE OPERATING SYSTEM which operates the E-book functionality of this device -- the application has nothing to do with that at all.
Oh, wait. That's not it. I mustn't have been confused at all.
Dammit, kid: Just because it can (or does) run Linux, doesn't mean that there's an upgrade path inherent in that trait.
So what if it can run anything? Suppose you do replace the core function of it? Great -- you've genericized the device! Hooray for you. Woo. Fire up an sshd and get hacking! See if you can get X to run on the thing. Or mame! Yeah. Sure. Whatever.
Haven't we grown past this once we started hacking the WRT54G? I mean: I must admit that my iPod touch is jailbroken and does have a command prompt on it. Was that an upgrade? FFS, I've never done anything useful with that function, so I'd guess that no, it wasn't an upgrade.
Just because "ZOMG! I can run appz on teh e-book reader!!!!1!" doesn't mean that a better ebook reader application will just appear, by itself, from the ether. And for such an application specific device as this, all that ancillary third-party stuff is generally pretty pointless.
It's a nice option to have, for sure. But the point is (and it's the only point I was really trying to make) that just because it's open-source, doesn't mean anyone's going to bother doing anything better than the binary blob already does. They might bother, of course -- and in many instances (principally, the WRT54G) they have. But it's not a given.
I'm old enough to remember 3D on Linux before Linux was cool, and 3dfx was the only game in town with anything resembling useful software support, courtesy of GLIDE and Mesa 3D. It took years for other vendors to have similarly functional hardware under Linux.
Most portable devices I have, these days, include various open-source software on them, ranging from libjpeg to the entire kitchen sink.
But that doesn't mean there's an upgrade path. And even the ones that go so far as to run Linux or BSD kernels, or have Android or Debian as their OS: They don't have a clear upgrade path, either.
Because, see: In all cases, the core functionality of these devices (pick just about any of them) is either a giant binary blob, or a collection of many smaller binary blobs. That the blob(s) might link to libjpeg, or run under the Linux kernel, does not inherently somehow give it any sort of meaningful upgrade path from what is already there.
("Upgrade," in this context, is meant to mean something that improves a device's functionality, and most distinctly not something which is installed simply because it is possible to do so.)
Don't be a fucking dickhead. Who rips on the console anyway? What I clearly stated is that you can play your videos and mp3s from USB media.
Hrm. Assuming that you're the same Coward:
Xbox 360 allows you to use any standard handsfree headset and any standard USB drive for storing media. They only restrict the game accessible media.
That doesn't look very clear at all, to me, since I've never seen the 360 store anything on a "standard USB drive".
But even if you really meant to clearly state that "you can play your videos and mp3s from USB media": Five years ago, I had a cheapo standalone DVD player which did that exact same thing, and it was a lot cheaper than an Xbox. And, nowadays, even my TV can do that by itself. But yeah -- all hail teh opens of teh 360, or something.
Moving on: My wife uses the rip-cd-and-copy-to-USB function of the PS3 fairly often. I've found myself using it from time to time, as well. It works rather well, and it is positively refreshing to handle media in a useful way without having a fucking computer involved.
Also: Might I suggest not being a fucking dickhead, and logging in next time? You'll find that your replies are far more kind, and far more likely to be in context with whatever you might've written before on a given subject.
Worse: I live in Ohio. It's pretty far from California, but somehow their various strangenesses (or at least their used vehicles) have a tendency to trickle Eastward...
There's only a couple of days out of an average year where I'm inclined to switch on the AC in my car. The rest of the time, the windows and/or sunroof are either open, the car's fresh air ventilation is turned on for quietness (which also bypasses the heater core), or the heat is on.
I don't think such new-fangled glass would ever pay for itself, if it were sold to me.
Much of the year, I'm very grateful for the self-heating nature of the car's black interior. I can head outside on a sunny, -10F afternoon, and *not* instantly freeze my hand to the metal gearshift knob.
Low-E glass very intentionally changes that.
Besides, it doesn't even help in many instances: Common vehicles usually have an air conditioner compressor which runs as much as it can, governed only by under/over pressure switches and the occasionally-implemented wide-open-throttle cutout. So, it's always running at maximum capacity. The frigid breeze which would normally result from this behavior is them tempered by mixing in waste heat from the engine.
It's a lousy system. Better gains would be had by fixing that end of it, first.
I have an old iRiver CD player. It never did sound very good, even though it was rather expensive when it was new. I now have a much nicer-sounding player.
The lesson here, of course, is that mid-to-high-end consumer digital audio products have all generally gotten better since their inception. Which shouldn't exactly be news, but folks seem surprised by it anyway.
Less scrupulous companies (especially toward the bottom end of the market) have been absolutely lying about audio products since... well, since we've had audio products for them to lie about. Open your ears, and you'll understand.
Meanwhile, I've got a bridge I think you might be just the right person for. And a there's a few books that you might be interested in reading, full of truth and other factual stuff -- I mean, it's in print for fuck's sake, so it must be true.
Xbox 360 allows you to use any standard handsfree headset and any standard USB drive for storing media. They only restrict the game accessible media.
I try to avoid these discussions, but I can't resist:
You mean with an Xbox 360 you can rip a CD to the hard drive using the built-in optical reader, dump the resultant MP3s into a bog-standard USB flash device, and then plug that into your car stereo and play the music?
No? Bummer. The PS3 does that just fine.
Or, perhaps you mean that with an Xbox, you can back up your save games to any old USB drive.
No? Such a shame. The PS3 does that just fine, too.
Not to be snide, but I always got a kick out of my brother-in-law removing the hard drive from his 360 so he could take his save games to a friend's house. And then I started to feel pretty sad for him as I watched him try, at length, to offload a couple of MP3s, only to end with failure.
So, in my experience, the Xbox 360 is like a black hole when it comes to data -- once it's in there, there's no escape.
It's funny you picked that example. I don't know of any desktop system that will let you do that unless you are root, which requires a password.
Hrm.
I like that train of thought. Let's expand it.
If there were a way I could add gain to an audio stream using PulseAudio, at least as root, then I'd probably be happy. But I still can't, so it's still broken.
(I'm resisting the temptation to expound on the myriad of ways that a user can trash his own files without prompting, as that would be too much of a strawman for my liking.)
Maybe because that only covers about 50% of the stuff that I use my sound card for. FFS, all of my MP3s are already set with mp3gain. But there's a world of things on Teh Intarwebs outside of MP3s, and I spend a lot of time listening to them. Youtube, various talk programs, political commentary... Lots of stuff which never actually touches my hard drive, which may or may not be properly produced, but that I still want to hear anyway. Some of it is recorded way too loud, while some of it is way too soft. Why have a tool as general as a VOLUME SLIDER which is able to correct only the former of those two problems?
And, besides: "Auto volume normalization," as implemented in practice, is simply a form of compression. I don't want the computer to ramp the volume up and down for me with some fancy algorithm -- I just want to be able to turn it up myself when the need arises.
Is there noone on Slashdot who understands that the world is imperfect, and that we exist within it anyway? And that there are some problems which do have very simple solutions, but yet cannot be programmatically corrected?
It's my perspective that people who proactively oppose the use of slang are all asshats. It's a perspective that I like to promote whenever I can -- that condemning speech, of any kind, is stupid.
I like the idea of a checkbox. Except, as an audiophile, I don't like one bit of what you say it should do.
I'm not always looking for perfect, pristine audio -- some of the stuff that I play on a computer is very low-fi indeed. But one thing that I'm almost never looking for is any sort of compression or automatic gain control: Just because I want to increase the level of a given work, does not mean that I want it ramped up and down automatically.
I mean: If PulseAudio would, as you propose, allow me choose between either having audio that is sometimes too quiet, or audio that is always compressed, then I'll just use Windows, thanks.
A better idea, I think, would be to have a checkbox, and have it soft-clip or limit signals at or near 0dB when activated -- this will keep the nannies happy about their "OMG! Digital clipping!" concerns. Have it do none of these things when deactivated, for the audiophiles of the world. And then, just give everyone the ability to control gain themselves, including adding (gasp!) positive gain.
Community was a pioneer in the use of fancy light bulbs in series with loudspeaker elements as a simple, dynamic limiter.
The light bulb conducts very well while it is cold, influencing the sound very little. As current increases, the light bulb's filament heats up, and becomes more resistive. Thus, power is reduced. The effect is very dynamic, and able to be tuned to the loudspeaker drivers in question by designing a light bulb with application-specific characteristics. It's probably fairly expensive to design and build such a system and have it work properly.
It's not Community-specific: There's a few other manufacturers who use a similar method. The thing that they all have in common is that they are intended for pro audio use.
Another somewhat common method of limiting audio within a loudspeaker is to use a polyswitch, sometimes with a resistor in parallel with it (in order to turn things down by a predetermined level, instead of just switching it off). This method is slower, and more limited in application, but cheaper and easier to design for.
A much more common way to limit current to loudspeakers is the use of a simple fuse.
None of these things, however, are substitutes for using one's own ears to determine when things are too loud, and adjust levels accordingly.
Gosh, I never thought of that: I can just take the source audio and adjust it up with mp3gain or sox or something! How short-sighted of me. Thank you for showing me the error of my ways. [/sarcasm]
Of COURSE it's broken, but that doesn't mean it's the application's fault. Sometimes, the mic audio on (say) the camcorder is just too low, and the person running the thing doesn't have the knowledge, skill, or time to fix it. Am I really supposed to figure out how to adjust the gain on some H.264 multiplexed audio/video just so I can show a video to a friend on my laptop, with audio at a reasonable level?
Seriously?
Cuz, I mean: I don't have time to supervise every production that ever happens in every corner of the world, and accordingly things are very simply too quiet from time to time.
Really, folks. I want to live in your happyplace where all audio levels are always sane, everyone has a clue, and all volume controls are simple attenuators. I honestly do. But my reality doesn't work that way.
Remember when I wrote about jumping through hoops? THAT. I don't want to have to massage every bit of quiet audio that I encounter, FAIL or not. I just want to turn it up so I can hear it.
There is PC audio outside of music MP3s on a disk, anyway. Youtube comes to mind. So does Google Voice. And so does the stuff I yank out of my pocket voice recorder. And then there's Shoutcast. And. And. And.
I suppose I should concoct a way to deal with increasing the levels of each of these things when they happen to be too quiet, just so that I can work around PulseAudio's lack of gain?
In my computer room, I have an amp and some speakers, plugged into an X-Fi card. It's just an amp, though: There's no controls on it whatsoever except for a power switch. Voltage goes in, gets amplified, and heads out toward the speaker jacks.
On the X-Fi, I've got all the control I need: Parametric EQ, volume, and...well, that's about all I use. I don't need nor want an extra set of controls (and associated electronics) to muddy up my sound, and I don't want to make room on my desk for such a contraption, either. Thanks.
With Windows, I can turn up quiet things just fine, using the just the Audigy as a preamp. With PulseAudio, I can't. And as more than one other poster has already pointed out: This is also a problem on a laptop, where there's simply no practical way to insert an additional amplification stage before the speakers.
Positive gain in the digital domain is very common in consumer audio: Your car stereo, if it is anything modern, offers it. So does your home theater receiver if it is at all recent. Get your head out of the sand. The world isn't perfect, and we sometimes need gain to make good use of existing audio hardware.
Besides: Clipping ANY stage of an audio path sounds bad, and can damage loudspeakers. It's not at all a new problem, having existed since the dawn of the Hi-Fi. Back in my day, we used our ears to tell when things were being pushed too hard in one area of a system or another, and turned things down when appropriate. Meanwhile, I don't need a computer to hold my hand and tell me that I can't turn something up when it is simply too quiet to be useful.
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No, they mustn't.
It specifies that they MUST NOT block lawful content, which simply implies that they MAY block unlawful content. But since it's not a lawful act for an ISP to police the content of packets to determine their lawfulness, then the implication means exactly nothing.
I think I see your logic, but I don't agree with it.
I think Sun would've gone belly-up no matter what. The Star Office purchase was probably a good deal (at a paltry $73 million during boom-time economics), but it's not at all clear to me how they might ever recoup that investment outside of earning some good will from the community. Open Office runs no worse on my PC than it does on Sun hardware, nor does Java, nor MySQL. I might even suggest that they've done too good of a job supporting all of the platforms that they do. However, giving Solaris away seems no-brainer in light of the onslaught of Linux, as continuing to license it as they used to would be just like whipping a dead horse.
IBM and Intel support OSS, to the extent that is reasonable for them to ensure a good experience for users of their hardware, which is obviously good for them. Redhat, essentially, sells support for what is one of the only Linux distributions with (what is perceived to be) corporate acceptance, and their pricing structure somewhat satisfies the old "you get what you pay for" buying mentality. These companies all have a clear path toward monetizing their OSS efforts; Sun did not.
I'm all for the whole "information wants to be free" mentality. But when making information free kills the creator, it really hasn't accomplished much that is positive when it's all said and done.
Sure. But so what?
It's my understanding that with 7, I shouldn't have to goof with things like that. I've got better things to do than waste time assigning processes to cores manually -- any potential savings in cache efficiency is going to be swamped by all of the effort I've invested in dicking around with it.
Did you read the article, or the comment that I was replying to?
Interesting commentary. Keeping threads on their own cores is something I've predicted would help in certain situations for some time -- ever since I saw one CPU-intensive application jump randomly between two otherwise idle Pentium Pro 200's on an SMP OS/2 Warp Server box way back when.
Is there a simple way to test this theory about processor affinity in isolation? I just so happen to have a Q6600 here, running Vista x64, and it sure would be interesting to see for myself if 7 makes any meaningful improvements on this chip.
Sun was a big company, that seems to have just about failed despite their contributions to to the open-source versions of OpenOffice and MySQL. I'm not sure that it's the best example in the world. :)
They give away all of their flagship products, from the aforementioned MySQL (which cost them $1 billion), to OpenOffice ($73.5 million), to Java ($lots), Solaris ($lotsmore). It's not at all clear to me, from the current state of that company, that any of these moves helped them to succeed.
Right. Thank you for clearing that up for me. I'm afraid I was terribly confused. I guess you're right: Obviously, it's the OPEN SOURCE OPERATING SYSTEM which operates the E-book functionality of this device -- the application has nothing to do with that at all.
Oh, wait. That's not it. I mustn't have been confused at all.
Dammit, kid: Just because it can (or does) run Linux, doesn't mean that there's an upgrade path inherent in that trait.
So what if it can run anything? Suppose you do replace the core function of it? Great -- you've genericized the device! Hooray for you. Woo. Fire up an sshd and get hacking! See if you can get X to run on the thing. Or mame! Yeah. Sure. Whatever.
Haven't we grown past this once we started hacking the WRT54G? I mean: I must admit that my iPod touch is jailbroken and does have a command prompt on it. Was that an upgrade? FFS, I've never done anything useful with that function, so I'd guess that no, it wasn't an upgrade.
Just because "ZOMG! I can run appz on teh e-book reader!!!!1!" doesn't mean that a better ebook reader application will just appear, by itself, from the ether. And for such an application specific device as this, all that ancillary third-party stuff is generally pretty pointless.
It's a nice option to have, for sure. But the point is (and it's the only point I was really trying to make) that just because it's open-source, doesn't mean anyone's going to bother doing anything better than the binary blob already does. They might bother, of course -- and in many instances (principally, the WRT54G) they have. But it's not a given.
*shrug*
The real question here, then, is thus: Are we all FAIL or not?
I'm old enough to remember 3D on Linux before Linux was cool, and 3dfx was the only game in town with anything resembling useful software support, courtesy of GLIDE and Mesa 3D. It took years for other vendors to have similarly functional hardware under Linux.
It really doesn't matter.
Most portable devices I have, these days, include various open-source software on them, ranging from libjpeg to the entire kitchen sink.
But that doesn't mean there's an upgrade path. And even the ones that go so far as to run Linux or BSD kernels, or have Android or Debian as their OS: They don't have a clear upgrade path, either.
Because, see: In all cases, the core functionality of these devices (pick just about any of them) is either a giant binary blob, or a collection of many smaller binary blobs. That the blob(s) might link to libjpeg, or run under the Linux kernel, does not inherently somehow give it any sort of meaningful upgrade path from what is already there.
("Upgrade," in this context, is meant to mean something that improves a device's functionality, and most distinctly not something which is installed simply because it is possible to do so.)
FAIL. Parent was correct: "fail" is generally not a noun. "Failure" can more often be.
(Yes, I'm perfectly happy to attack my own improper use of language when appropriate, and also am quite capable of hypocritically using it anyway.)
Hrm. Assuming that you're the same Coward:
That doesn't look very clear at all, to me, since I've never seen the 360 store anything on a "standard USB drive".
But even if you really meant to clearly state that "you can play your videos and mp3s from USB media": Five years ago, I had a cheapo standalone DVD player which did that exact same thing, and it was a lot cheaper than an Xbox. And, nowadays, even my TV can do that by itself. But yeah -- all hail teh opens of teh 360, or something.
Moving on: My wife uses the rip-cd-and-copy-to-USB function of the PS3 fairly often. I've found myself using it from time to time, as well. It works rather well, and it is positively refreshing to handle media in a useful way without having a fucking computer involved.
Also: Might I suggest not being a fucking dickhead, and logging in next time? You'll find that your replies are far more kind, and far more likely to be in context with whatever you might've written before on a given subject.
Worse: I live in Ohio. It's pretty far from California, but somehow their various strangenesses (or at least their used vehicles) have a tendency to trickle Eastward...
There's only a couple of days out of an average year where I'm inclined to switch on the AC in my car. The rest of the time, the windows and/or sunroof are either open, the car's fresh air ventilation is turned on for quietness (which also bypasses the heater core), or the heat is on.
I don't think such new-fangled glass would ever pay for itself, if it were sold to me.
Much of the year, I'm very grateful for the self-heating nature of the car's black interior. I can head outside on a sunny, -10F afternoon, and *not* instantly freeze my hand to the metal gearshift knob.
Low-E glass very intentionally changes that.
Besides, it doesn't even help in many instances: Common vehicles usually have an air conditioner compressor which runs as much as it can, governed only by under/over pressure switches and the occasionally-implemented wide-open-throttle cutout. So, it's always running at maximum capacity. The frigid breeze which would normally result from this behavior is them tempered by mixing in waste heat from the engine.
It's a lousy system. Better gains would be had by fixing that end of it, first.
I have an old iRiver CD player. It never did sound very good, even though it was rather expensive when it was new. I now have a much nicer-sounding player.
The lesson here, of course, is that mid-to-high-end consumer digital audio products have all generally gotten better since their inception. Which shouldn't exactly be news, but folks seem surprised by it anyway.
Wow. Do you believe everything you read?
Less scrupulous companies (especially toward the bottom end of the market) have been absolutely lying about audio products since... well, since we've had audio products for them to lie about. Open your ears, and you'll understand.
Meanwhile, I've got a bridge I think you might be just the right person for. And a there's a few books that you might be interested in reading, full of truth and other factual stuff -- I mean, it's in print for fuck's sake, so it must be true.
Caveat emptor.
Xbox 360 allows you to use any standard handsfree headset and any standard USB drive for storing media. They only restrict the game accessible media.
I try to avoid these discussions, but I can't resist:
You mean with an Xbox 360 you can rip a CD to the hard drive using the built-in optical reader, dump the resultant MP3s into a bog-standard USB flash device, and then plug that into your car stereo and play the music?
No? Bummer. The PS3 does that just fine.
Or, perhaps you mean that with an Xbox, you can back up your save games to any old USB drive.
No? Such a shame. The PS3 does that just fine, too.
Not to be snide, but I always got a kick out of my brother-in-law removing the hard drive from his 360 so he could take his save games to a friend's house. And then I started to feel pretty sad for him as I watched him try, at length, to offload a couple of MP3s, only to end with failure.
So, in my experience, the Xbox 360 is like a black hole when it comes to data -- once it's in there, there's no escape.
That sure is "open".
It's funny you picked that example. I don't know of any desktop system that will let you do that unless you are root, which requires a password.
Hrm.
I like that train of thought. Let's expand it.
If there were a way I could add gain to an audio stream using PulseAudio, at least as root, then I'd probably be happy. But I still can't, so it's still broken.
(I'm resisting the temptation to expound on the myriad of ways that a user can trash his own files without prompting, as that would be too much of a strawman for my liking.)
Why?
Maybe because that only covers about 50% of the stuff that I use my sound card for. FFS, all of my MP3s are already set with mp3gain. But there's a world of things on Teh Intarwebs outside of MP3s, and I spend a lot of time listening to them. Youtube, various talk programs, political commentary... Lots of stuff which never actually touches my hard drive, which may or may not be properly produced, but that I still want to hear anyway. Some of it is recorded way too loud, while some of it is way too soft. Why have a tool as general as a VOLUME SLIDER which is able to correct only the former of those two problems?
And, besides: "Auto volume normalization," as implemented in practice, is simply a form of compression. I don't want the computer to ramp the volume up and down for me with some fancy algorithm -- I just want to be able to turn it up myself when the need arises.
Is there noone on Slashdot who understands that the world is imperfect, and that we exist within it anyway? And that there are some problems which do have very simple solutions, but yet cannot be programmatically corrected?
Alas, Slashdot. You make me sick.
Talk about dense, asshat.
It's my perspective that people who proactively oppose the use of slang are all asshats. It's a perspective that I like to promote whenever I can -- that condemning speech, of any kind, is stupid.
FWIW. HTH. HAND.
Talk about *woosh*.
I like the idea of a checkbox. Except, as an audiophile, I don't like one bit of what you say it should do.
I'm not always looking for perfect, pristine audio -- some of the stuff that I play on a computer is very low-fi indeed. But one thing that I'm almost never looking for is any sort of compression or automatic gain control: Just because I want to increase the level of a given work, does not mean that I want it ramped up and down automatically.
I mean: If PulseAudio would, as you propose, allow me choose between either having audio that is sometimes too quiet, or audio that is always compressed, then I'll just use Windows, thanks.
A better idea, I think, would be to have a checkbox, and have it soft-clip or limit signals at or near 0dB when activated -- this will keep the nannies happy about their "OMG! Digital clipping!" concerns. Have it do none of these things when deactivated, for the audiophiles of the world. And then, just give everyone the ability to control gain themselves, including adding (gasp!) positive gain.
Community was a pioneer in the use of fancy light bulbs in series with loudspeaker elements as a simple, dynamic limiter.
The light bulb conducts very well while it is cold, influencing the sound very little. As current increases, the light bulb's filament heats up, and becomes more resistive. Thus, power is reduced. The effect is very dynamic, and able to be tuned to the loudspeaker drivers in question by designing a light bulb with application-specific characteristics. It's probably fairly expensive to design and build such a system and have it work properly.
It's not Community-specific: There's a few other manufacturers who use a similar method. The thing that they all have in common is that they are intended for pro audio use.
Another somewhat common method of limiting audio within a loudspeaker is to use a polyswitch, sometimes with a resistor in parallel with it (in order to turn things down by a predetermined level, instead of just switching it off). This method is slower, and more limited in application, but cheaper and easier to design for.
A much more common way to limit current to loudspeakers is the use of a simple fuse.
None of these things, however, are substitutes for using one's own ears to determine when things are too loud, and adjust levels accordingly.
Gosh, I never thought of that: I can just take the source audio and adjust it up with mp3gain or sox or something! How short-sighted of me. Thank you for showing me the error of my ways. [/sarcasm]
Of COURSE it's broken, but that doesn't mean it's the application's fault. Sometimes, the mic audio on (say) the camcorder is just too low, and the person running the thing doesn't have the knowledge, skill, or time to fix it. Am I really supposed to figure out how to adjust the gain on some H.264 multiplexed audio/video just so I can show a video to a friend on my laptop, with audio at a reasonable level?
Seriously?
Cuz, I mean: I don't have time to supervise every production that ever happens in every corner of the world, and accordingly things are very simply too quiet from time to time.
Really, folks. I want to live in your happyplace where all audio levels are always sane, everyone has a clue, and all volume controls are simple attenuators. I honestly do. But my reality doesn't work that way.
Nice.
Remember when I wrote about jumping through hoops? THAT. I don't want to have to massage every bit of quiet audio that I encounter, FAIL or not. I just want to turn it up so I can hear it.
There is PC audio outside of music MP3s on a disk, anyway. Youtube comes to mind. So does Google Voice. And so does the stuff I yank out of my pocket voice recorder. And then there's Shoutcast. And. And. And.
I suppose I should concoct a way to deal with increasing the levels of each of these things when they happen to be too quiet, just so that I can work around PulseAudio's lack of gain?
Talk about fail.
Oh my gosh. *looks around* I didn't realize we were in church.
Thanks for the tip, Pastor.
Eh?
In my computer room, I have an amp and some speakers, plugged into an X-Fi card. It's just an amp, though: There's no controls on it whatsoever except for a power switch. Voltage goes in, gets amplified, and heads out toward the speaker jacks.
On the X-Fi, I've got all the control I need: Parametric EQ, volume, and...well, that's about all I use. I don't need nor want an extra set of controls (and associated electronics) to muddy up my sound, and I don't want to make room on my desk for such a contraption, either. Thanks.
With Windows, I can turn up quiet things just fine, using the just the Audigy as a preamp. With PulseAudio, I can't. And as more than one other poster has already pointed out: This is also a problem on a laptop, where there's simply no practical way to insert an additional amplification stage before the speakers.
Positive gain in the digital domain is very common in consumer audio: Your car stereo, if it is anything modern, offers it. So does your home theater receiver if it is at all recent. Get your head out of the sand. The world isn't perfect, and we sometimes need gain to make good use of existing audio hardware.
Besides: Clipping ANY stage of an audio path sounds bad, and can damage loudspeakers. It's not at all a new problem, having existed since the dawn of the Hi-Fi. Back in my day, we used our ears to tell when things were being pushed too hard in one area of a system or another, and turned things down when appropriate. Meanwhile, I don't need a computer to hold my hand and tell me that I can't turn something up when it is simply too quiet to be useful.