I'm pretty sure you have a damned good point there, but I was so distracted by the use of the made up word "unrelentlessly," used in such as way to be mean the exact opposite of what it would actually mean if it were a real word, that I must have missed it.
I make typing errors at times. I used to be a lot more strongly autistic, and so was neurologically capable of a much higher degree of precision/pedantry with such things than I am now. I smoked marijuana for two years at one point, however.
That had the effect of making me less visibly autistic, even after I stopped smoking, but unfortunately it also lowered my tendency towards pedantry, and also lowered my IQ by around 10 points (consistently; I've tested myself repeatedly) as well.
I don't have the capacity for learning languages that I did as a child now, either. I was learning Japanese at one point, and the teacher said I was the best student she'd ever had. Weed gives with one hand, but it takes away with the other.
Truthfully, most of the corporations within the "content," industry need to be.
They wreck and subvert the legal system in order to support their own greed, and they avoid any form of real creativity in the material they produce, as much as possible. They are staffed by the usual evil, soulless bean counters who don't want anything other than generic, white box assembly line product year after year, purely in order to make consistent profits.
They only profit from human stupidity, and the fact that those of us who care about how badly they treat everyone else, are the minority. If the majority didn't insist on being so unrelentlessly brainless and avoidant of personal responsibility, we might be able to generate support for these companies simply being rendered insolvent.
Unfortunately, however, the mainstream sheep just keep standing there, mindlessly, sleepily chewing their cud, waiting for the slaughter.
I don't like the idea of needing this "Cloud" thing to use something I paid good money for. I haven't downloaded anything from Steam for that reason, and because I'm forced to use it after I purchase one of their games at a brick-and-morter, I haven't purchased anything made by Valve since the original Half Life.
Same. Valve don't get my money for Steam. The only real reason why Valve has had anyone's money for Steam, is because when it comes to making buying decisions, just like when it comes to anything else, most people are so brainlessly stupid and wilfully lazy.
Steam should not have made money. If people were truly smart, it wouldn't have.
I might not have seen it, but I think Ubuntu's server area needs professional, detailed, Ubuntu-specific (if needed) DOCUMENTATION on everything an Ubuntu admin would need to use. http://doc.ubuntu.com/ has the most up-to-date version of the Ubuntu Server Guide, which is a decent start. It pales in comparison, however, to the FreeBSD handbook.
You know, there could be a hint in there somewhere.;)
Just use FreeBSD. Trying to get anything meaningful done with Ubuntu is like playing with a Rubik's cube while having your head stuck with one of those steel amputation traps that Jigsaw uses in the Saw movies.
The only problem with installing Ubuntu is, that as a large corporation, IBM presumably need to occasionally get some actual work done, rather than babysitting something which crashes all the time.
I tried using Ubuntu Intrepid for nearly two months, before I got tired of various elements of my hardware randomly going south, due to bad drivers or sound servers, in the case of ALSA. I'm not sure who came up with the brilliant idea of welding GNOME to the entire rest of the system, either, but whoever they are, they should be shot.
Then again, IBM doing a large scale internal deployment of Ubuntu possibly would be a good idea after all. Once they realise what a disaster it is on their own hardware, it might cause them to question their wisdom in partnering with Canonical entirely.;)
If the elephant plans to back Canonical, it had better be willing to put up some serious development money in the process. Ubuntu is nowhere near ready for prime time, and I don't care what its' fans try and say. Go and spend 24 hours or so on Ubuntu's forums before you try and tell me it is stable.
Sometimes I wonder how IBM has managed to stay in business for 110 years; they really don't display sound intuition where identifying/backing winners in the marketplace is concerned.
Instead of Windows, they went with OS/2, which bombed, at least in mainstream terms. Now they're backing Linux, when the truly intelligent thing for them to do would be to get hold of FreeBSD and build their own offering on top of that, a la Apple. At the very least, they could go for LFS or something else with a cleaner base.
Ubuntu is the proverbial dog with fleas, of Linux distributions. Before all its' freetard fans start baying at me about how popular it is, my refutation for that is simple; Windows is very popular too. Your point?;)
Linux in mainstream terms is a lost cause. Canonical might not be smart enough to have figured that out yet, but I would have expected IBM to be.
I'm really mystified by this attitude - if a company produces a stable, reliable product with closed software and the market is willing to pay for it, what difference does it make?
The reason why you can't understand this attitude, is because you're not a Stallmanite freetard.
You're essentially correct; from any sane, neurotypical point of view, there's absolutely nothing wrong with nVidia's hardware or its' drivers being proprietary whatsoever.
I was going to outline a list of its' features, but said list is very large, so I'll paste the address instead, so you can go and check it out for yourselves:- http://www.postgresql.org/about/featurematrix
Truthfully, I'm now wishing I hadn't been so profane in this thread. Some of the Pulse supporters who've spoken here, come across as being genuinely well-intentioned people; they just apparently haven't experienced the problems we have. Colin Guthrie primarily comes to mind here, which is why I haven't attacked him.
The other problem, I realise now, with coming in here and swearing and nerd raging my head off, is that it just leaves Pulse's advocates feeling even more justified and sure of themselves. Steveha responded with a fairly long post about how my original statement to him was subjective and entirely baseless, and what a child I was for engaging in so much profane ad hominem.
As I think someone else said though, what many of you don't realise is, that for the first half dozen to a dozen times, a lot of us genuinely do try to be civil.
The profanity only really kicks in due to extreme frustration, after we've tried so many times to explain the problem, and we're still just met with the same responses. Denial, bogus rationalisation, and various forms of ad hominem directed at us, simply because we're saying things which, because you want to think that everything is fine, you don't want to hear.
I don't really want to engage in profane or otherwise hateful behaviour, and I realise that I shouldn't. Being angry, aggressive, and hateful just ends up making me feel ashamed of myself later, and probably doesn't leave the people I behave that way towards, feeling terribly good themselves. All I really want is to see problems solved, and most of all for the culture of denial to be reformed; and that isn't happening.
The tendency of Linux developers to stick their fingers in their ears and yell, "la la la I can't hear you!" when they're confronted with unfavourable feedback, is not going to help them. The thing which primarily antagonised me about Steveha's original post is that it seemed as though he was telling people to just shut up and accept how gloriously awesome Pulse supposedly was, in the face of the number of reports in this very thread (and elsewhere) about the degree of problems that people genuinely are experiencing.
What would be the point of that? FreeBSD is doing a good job of being FreeBSD. You like it, go use it and stop ear-bashing.
Translation: "FreeBSD works, and you want something that works, you say? Then go use FreeBSD. With Linux, we continue to support elitist incompetence. When critical operating system infrastructure doesn't function, we don't fix it; instead we make excuses for the developers who are responsible for the mess. We also try and humiliate and/or discredit users who complain about this state of affairs, and tell them to stop being such big meanies.
We also insist that we know better than the authors of the initial UNIX operating system, even though their software worked, and ours doesn't."
Extrapolating from 'my sound isn't working' to 'the entire architecture of PulseAudio, which I am about to make a wild-ass guess at describing, is utterly wrong' is what he's not qualified to do. Which is exactly what the post you're replying to said. What's hard to understand?
The point is that simply responding that he is unqualified, is both elitist and counterproductive. It is also entirely moronic, because as he rightly pointed out, if it can already be demonstrated at a macroscopic/external level that the application has failed, (i.e., that sound is not working) knowledge of the design on a more minute level is entirely unnecessary.
If the application is not performing its' stated task, to provide audio playback, then it is a bad design. It is that simple. He doesn't need to have read the source code to know that.
I notice the above paragraph appears to be missing approximately 10,000 references.
This type of cheap, pseudo-empirical trolling does nothing other than demonstrate just what an imbecile the person engaging in it really is.
I blame Wikipedia for the rise of this tactic; demanding citations from someone when you've already made up your mind on an entirely subjective basis, that you're going to disagree with them no matter what; in that case, the request for cited sources is essentially one of two things.
a) A form of rhetorical sarcasm, because you believe the other person won't actually be able to cite sources at all. b) A request for further ammunition which can be used to discredit and/or humiliate the other person.
I am learning to truly hate atheism. Don't try and troll me with the idea that I'm making a false assumption about you being an atheist, either. The above tactic is straight out of their rhetorical playbook.
My point is that you have no business commenting on PulseAudio's design. You're not qualified, and you're not even interested in becoming qualified.
He was wondering if you were trying to discredit him. Looks like you proved his point.
Here's what he's qualified to comment on. He's qualified to comment on the fact that his sound isn't working.
If Linux developers don't want users who aren't qualified to do more than that, then they need to stop making statements about how they want to take over the world, or how they want everyone who currently uses Windows, to use Linux instead.
Pulse's single main problem is rampant, uncontrolled featuritis. I got that from the linked article. You don't need to know anything about the minute crap involved with the design. There's too much emphasis on including a whole heap of features that most people don't care about or need, when the basic functionality of simply playing sound.
It is also true, as has been said elsewhere in this forum, that sound playback in FreeBSD just works; simply, quietly, without fuss.
You therefore have no excuses, no justification, and no escaping this issue. Pulse is a failure. It is not doing what its' users want it to do. End of story. Sounding as smug, elitist, and dismissive as you want is not going to change that fact.
Yep, and you try and tell people what your experience was, and you get downmodded Troll, because you're not saying what the adolescent developers want to hear.
Linux programmers need to understand that they're not going to have their cake and eat it too. Frankly, I don't know why they want to win the mainstream desktop so badly, but they keep talking about it.
Yet they are also myopic, and determined to remain oblivious to end-user complaints when things aren't working.
A little logic here; if you want to conquer the desktop, it makes sense to listen to the desires and concerns of said desktop's users.
I see two possibilities here. Either you are just trolling, in which case shame on you for wasting our time; or else you really believe all this ranting stuff you wrote, in which case you need to gain some technical maturity.
Except you're not going to be any more specific here, are you? You'll call me immature, but you don't define what maturity means in that context.
I'm by no means the only person who has had problems with Ubuntu; if you think that, you might want to hang out on their support forums sometime.
And you don't offer any facts or even reasoned debate about any of this.
FFS; I keep hearing this over and over again, too. Go and look at my comment history. Read the comment I made there, only about two posts ago, about exactly what is wrong with GNOME. No, I'm not going to write all of that out again.
You asking for more and more and more "facts," is also BS. The only thing you're really asking for is ammunition that you can use to refute me, because on a completely emotive, subjective basis, you don't want to listen to me at all.
You don't understand why PulseAudio is designed the way it is, therefore it must be the work of an idiot, and anyone who defends it must be an idiot.
I understand that Pulse has a lot of features in it which it doesn't need, for the purpose of playing audio files. The other stuff might be nice, but there's a difference between something being nice, and something being necessary, especially if it doesn't work.
Regardless, this is yet more denial. There are so many people using and writing for Linux who think that the way things are done with it, is the only way things can or should be done, and what that usually translates to fairly directly is imitation of Microsoft, as closely as possible. Hence, when excessively, needlessly complex, bad software is written, you keep defending it, because you don't know any better, and you also falsely associate Microsoft's own history of writing bad code, with their popularity. Which, of course, leads us back to the real heart of the problem.
Attempting to achieve mainstream popularity at virtually any cost, is the only thing that Linux developers really care about at this point. Technical integrity or correctness don't enter into the discussion at all; or when they do, it's even worse. You've redefined what technical integrity means in your own heads, such that said definition always leads back to what will simply make Linux more popular. Not what is conducive to actual stability or efficiency with the system.
PulseAudio isn't perfect, but the basic ideas behind it are sound, which is why the whole Linux world is adopting it.
I call BS, here.
Things don't get adopted by Linux distributions because they're technically sound; they get adopted if, for whatever other reason, they become the fad flavour of the month.
I tried for nearly two months to use Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex; audio was dying constantly, and I was having kernel panics randomly from the video card drivers as well. Then there was the nightmare when I made the mistake of trying to use another window manager beside GNOME.
Linux in technical terms is crap, currently, and I'm fed up with the denial. I'm using FreeBSD, and have been since January; I wanted to use Linux, but aside from maybe Slack, Arch, and LFS, none of the major distributions are usable without giving me endless problems. It's either package management, or hardware drivers, or the DE is fused with everything else and can't be removed, etc...it's hell.
Stop claiming things are fine when they're not. Stop writing propogandist garbage like this, where you're basically just trying to force people to hold their noses and drink the Kool Aid, when they're telling you in droves that real problems exist.
The denial needs to stop, and the problems need to be acknowledged and fixed.
* We need a sound daemon that doesn't try and have a heap of other features which hardly anyone ever needs, but that just plays audio. THAT'S ALL IT NEEDS TO DO. No client/server crap. No being able to play files while changing the sound card. None of that shit. All it needs to do is play audio files.
* GNOME needs to be scrapped entirely, and replaced with something that isn't committed to simply reproducing all of Windows' design mistakes. We need a window manager that is genuinely designed according to the UNIX philosophy. That means dotfiles for configuration, not a centralised registry which just bogs everything down. It also means use of the pre-existing sockets system for IPC; NOT abominations like XML-RPC. It also means something which is genuinely modular, not where if you install any one single piece, you then HAVE to install all of the rest.
* Init/Upstart both need to be scrapped, and replaced with FreeBSD's init system. It is simple, clear, sane, and WORKS.
* Ubuntu's insane mess for kernel module loading also needs to be annihilated as well, and the standard module loading programs need to be used.
* This is something which I know will never happen, because Canonical are too stupid and delusional, but if they truly were intelligent, they would drop Debian as a base. They need to use something cleaner, like Slack, Arch, or LFS, and they could then save a lot more work for themselves by adopting pkgsrc (which is being maintained by NetBSD) as their package management system. Ports systems are a lot more robust than dkpg/apt, and I don't want to hear the contrary from the usual Debian fanboys, either. YOU ARE WRONG, and Ubuntu's upgrade routine trashing systems is the proof. For ONCE, sit down, shut the hell up, and accept it.
If you really mean any of the talk that you keep endlessly engaging in about wanting to be competitive, Linux community, then fucking lift your game.
The first step to doing that is ending the denial, once and for all. The second is to cease mindlessly aping Windows, and establish your own identity; ideally one based on the very UNIX design principles that you've been so enthusiastically throwing away.
Let's see how many of the Generation Y, amateur, snot nosed brats I get making a response to this post; people like the idiot who wrote the post that I'm replying to, here. People who think that everything with Linux is just fine, and who continue churning out bloated, inefficient, unstable crap, because they don't know how to do everything else, yet still see themselves as an avatar of Neo inside their own heads.
Mod me down, instead of refuting me, as well. Use every lame Slashdot trick in the book for posts you don't agree with.
This is the truth, Linux developers. You might not like it, but you need to fucking hear it.
Perhaps you should consider a different career. If you're not coding for the end user, you're just masturbating.
Ordinarily I wouldn't bother dignifying this with a response; but it's worth pointing out that unfortunately, the above thinking seems to have infected the majority of programmers, at least where Linux is concerned.
It might take a while, but I'm predicting that gradually the Linux community are going to figure out the truth about this; that eventually, in their mad and largely inexplicable frenzy to recruit the most mindlessly unintelligent, illiterate, and technophobic of Windows users, Linux itself will be ruined to the point where eventually someone will stop one day and ask themselves, what the real benefit is of Linux continuing to exist at all.
Windows has only improved in the last few years because Microsoft started making real technical integrity more of a priority; stability and security, rather than continuing with insane feature creep. Linux is going backwards, because it is doing exactly the opposite.
The other thing that's worth commenting on about the above quoted statement, now that I think about it, was the level of arrogance inherent in it. I've mentioned this before, but it's the type of statement made by people who believe that writing programs to be as complex (rather than as simple) as possible, is the "modern, sophisticated," approach, and that the entire earlier UNIX philosophy is simply an irrelevant, obsolete anachronism.
After reading your comment I don't know which BSD Desktop Environment I should look at to see comparable code that is higher quality
Enlightenment is BSD licensed. That wouldn't be a bad place to start.
I've already spoken numerous times about GConf, as a major element; about how I can't (as one example) install Firefox without installing GConf and all of its' subsequent dependencies, because I'm not able to specify a GTK theme via dotfiles any more. There are also reports now of GNOME, on Ubuntu at least, beginning to emulate the famed winrot or registry creep effect that we all knew and loved so much with Windows.
Then, just for shits and giggles, let's list a suggested build order for Gnome 2.6.
...but the world as it could be. That has always been the nature of the Amiga.
I've always had a strange feeling that the Amiga was like something out of an episode of Sliders.
It was almost as if, with this system, instead of being something from our own world, at some point a brief window to a different and more positive reality was opened; a place where the priority systems of people was aligned with what truly worked, and said place's inhabitants cared more about creativity, and community, and real innovation, and less purely about the profit motive, than they do here...and that for the few seconds said window was open, an A500 fell through it, was found by someone here, reverse engineered, and then reproduced.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_1PjOEFPTk - This is an example of what I'm talking about. A comparison with Linux on a very old machine. The Amiga always demonstrated the kind of performance which logically, just didn't seem as though it should be possible......and yet somehow, it was.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure you have a damned good point there, but I was so distracted by the use of the made up word "unrelentlessly," used in such as way to be mean the exact opposite of what it would actually mean if it were a real word, that I must have missed it.
I make typing errors at times. I used to be a lot more strongly autistic, and so was neurologically capable of a much higher degree of precision/pedantry with such things than I am now. I smoked marijuana for two years at one point, however.
That had the effect of making me less visibly autistic, even after I stopped smoking, but unfortunately it also lowered my tendency towards pedantry, and also lowered my IQ by around 10 points (consistently; I've tested myself repeatedly) as well.
I don't have the capacity for learning languages that I did as a child now, either. I was learning Japanese at one point, and the teacher said I was the best student she'd ever had. Weed gives with one hand, but it takes away with the other.
Truthfully, most of the corporations within the "content," industry need to be.
They wreck and subvert the legal system in order to support their own greed, and they avoid any form of real creativity in the material they produce, as much as possible. They are staffed by the usual evil, soulless bean counters who don't want anything other than generic, white box assembly line product year after year, purely in order to make consistent profits.
They only profit from human stupidity, and the fact that those of us who care about how badly they treat everyone else, are the minority. If the majority didn't insist on being so unrelentlessly brainless and avoidant of personal responsibility, we might be able to generate support for these companies simply being rendered insolvent.
Unfortunately, however, the mainstream sheep just keep standing there, mindlessly, sleepily chewing their cud, waiting for the slaughter.
I don't like the idea of needing this "Cloud" thing to use something I paid good money for. I haven't downloaded anything from Steam for that reason, and because I'm forced to use it after I purchase one of their games at a brick-and-morter, I haven't purchased anything made by Valve since the original Half Life.
Same. Valve don't get my money for Steam. The only real reason why Valve has had anyone's money for Steam, is because when it comes to making buying decisions, just like when it comes to anything else, most people are so brainlessly stupid and wilfully lazy.
Steam should not have made money. If people were truly smart, it wouldn't have.
So just because Windows is unstable, that lets Ubuntu off the hook, does it?
That's always the standard comeback. "No matter how bad Linux is, Windows is worse!!!1!1"
Congrats also to the groupthinking drone who modded you Insightful.
It must make you very mad that I am at this very moment printing a map, and listening to pandora.com all the while using my wireless on ubuntu 8.10.
Do you get paid to shill?
Do you know of anyone who's offering paid shilling positions? I could use some extra money, and this is hard work, ya know. ;)
I might not have seen it, but I think Ubuntu's server area needs professional, detailed, Ubuntu-specific (if needed) DOCUMENTATION on everything an Ubuntu admin would need to use. http://doc.ubuntu.com/ has the most up-to-date version of the Ubuntu Server Guide, which is a decent start. It pales in comparison, however, to the FreeBSD handbook.
You know, there could be a hint in there somewhere. ;)
Just use FreeBSD. Trying to get anything meaningful done with Ubuntu is like playing with a Rubik's cube while having your head stuck with one of those steel amputation traps that Jigsaw uses in the Saw movies.
The only problem with installing Ubuntu is, that as a large corporation, IBM presumably need to occasionally get some actual work done, rather than babysitting something which crashes all the time.
I tried using Ubuntu Intrepid for nearly two months, before I got tired of various elements of my hardware randomly going south, due to bad drivers or sound servers, in the case of ALSA. I'm not sure who came up with the brilliant idea of welding GNOME to the entire rest of the system, either, but whoever they are, they should be shot.
Then again, IBM doing a large scale internal deployment of Ubuntu possibly would be a good idea after all. Once they realise what a disaster it is on their own hardware, it might cause them to question their wisdom in partnering with Canonical entirely. ;)
If the elephant plans to back Canonical, it had better be willing to put up some serious development money in the process. Ubuntu is nowhere near ready for prime time, and I don't care what its' fans try and say. Go and spend 24 hours or so on Ubuntu's forums before you try and tell me it is stable.
Sometimes I wonder how IBM has managed to stay in business for 110 years; they really don't display sound intuition where identifying/backing winners in the marketplace is concerned.
Instead of Windows, they went with OS/2, which bombed, at least in mainstream terms. Now they're backing Linux, when the truly intelligent thing for them to do would be to get hold of FreeBSD and build their own offering on top of that, a la Apple. At the very least, they could go for LFS or something else with a cleaner base.
Ubuntu is the proverbial dog with fleas, of Linux distributions. Before all its' freetard fans start baying at me about how popular it is, my refutation for that is simple; Windows is very popular too. Your point? ;)
Linux in mainstream terms is a lost cause. Canonical might not be smart enough to have figured that out yet, but I would have expected IBM to be.
I'm really mystified by this attitude - if a company produces a stable, reliable product with closed software and the market is willing to pay for it, what difference does it make?
The reason why you can't understand this attitude, is because you're not a Stallmanite freetard.
You're essentially correct; from any sane, neurotypical point of view, there's absolutely nothing wrong with nVidia's hardware or its' drivers being proprietary whatsoever.
Wow...someone really doesn't want anybody to know about non-GPL licensed FOSS, do they? ;)
Fixed.
(Sarcastic responses from rabid, clueless, brainwashed, American white male capitalist fanatics incoming)
I invite people to investigate PostgreSQL.
I was going to outline a list of its' features, but said list is very large, so I'll paste the address instead, so you can go and check it out for yourselves:- http://www.postgresql.org/about/featurematrix
Truthfully, I'm now wishing I hadn't been so profane in this thread. Some of the Pulse supporters who've spoken here, come across as being genuinely well-intentioned people; they just apparently haven't experienced the problems we have. Colin Guthrie primarily comes to mind here, which is why I haven't attacked him.
The other problem, I realise now, with coming in here and swearing and nerd raging my head off, is that it just leaves Pulse's advocates feeling even more justified and sure of themselves. Steveha responded with a fairly long post about how my original statement to him was subjective and entirely baseless, and what a child I was for engaging in so much profane ad hominem.
As I think someone else said though, what many of you don't realise is, that for the first half dozen to a dozen times, a lot of us genuinely do try to be civil.
The profanity only really kicks in due to extreme frustration, after we've tried so many times to explain the problem, and we're still just met with the same responses. Denial, bogus rationalisation, and various forms of ad hominem directed at us, simply because we're saying things which, because you want to think that everything is fine, you don't want to hear.
I don't really want to engage in profane or otherwise hateful behaviour, and I realise that I shouldn't. Being angry, aggressive, and hateful just ends up making me feel ashamed of myself later, and probably doesn't leave the people I behave that way towards, feeling terribly good themselves. All I really want is to see problems solved, and most of all for the culture of denial to be reformed; and that isn't happening.
The tendency of Linux developers to stick their fingers in their ears and yell, "la la la I can't hear you!" when they're confronted with unfavourable feedback, is not going to help them. The thing which primarily antagonised me about Steveha's original post is that it seemed as though he was telling people to just shut up and accept how gloriously awesome Pulse supposedly was, in the face of the number of reports in this very thread (and elsewhere) about the degree of problems that people genuinely are experiencing.
Are you a PA developer, QuoteMstr? What exactly is your agenda, here?
What would be the point of that? FreeBSD is doing a good job of being FreeBSD. You like it, go use it and stop ear-bashing.
Translation: "FreeBSD works, and you want something that works, you say? Then go use FreeBSD. With Linux, we continue to support elitist incompetence. When critical operating system infrastructure doesn't function, we don't fix it; instead we make excuses for the developers who are responsible for the mess. We also try and humiliate and/or discredit users who complain about this state of affairs, and tell them to stop being such big meanies.
We also insist that we know better than the authors of the initial UNIX operating system, even though their software worked, and ours doesn't."
Extrapolating from 'my sound isn't working' to 'the entire architecture of PulseAudio, which I am about to make a wild-ass guess at describing, is utterly wrong' is what he's not qualified to do. Which is exactly what the post you're replying to said. What's hard to understand?
The point is that simply responding that he is unqualified, is both elitist and counterproductive. It is also entirely moronic, because as he rightly pointed out, if it can already be demonstrated at a macroscopic/external level that the application has failed, (i.e., that sound is not working) knowledge of the design on a more minute level is entirely unnecessary.
If the application is not performing its' stated task, to provide audio playback, then it is a bad design. It is that simple. He doesn't need to have read the source code to know that.
I notice the above paragraph appears to be missing approximately 10,000 references.
This type of cheap, pseudo-empirical trolling does nothing other than demonstrate just what an imbecile the person engaging in it really is.
I blame Wikipedia for the rise of this tactic; demanding citations from someone when you've already made up your mind on an entirely subjective basis, that you're going to disagree with them no matter what; in that case, the request for cited sources is essentially one of two things.
a) A form of rhetorical sarcasm, because you believe the other person won't actually be able to cite sources at all.
b) A request for further ammunition which can be used to discredit and/or humiliate the other person.
I am learning to truly hate atheism. Don't try and troll me with the idea that I'm making a false assumption about you being an atheist, either. The above tactic is straight out of their rhetorical playbook.
My point is that you have no business commenting on PulseAudio's design. You're not qualified, and you're not even interested in becoming qualified.
He was wondering if you were trying to discredit him. Looks like you proved his point.
Here's what he's qualified to comment on. He's qualified to comment on the fact that his sound isn't working.
If Linux developers don't want users who aren't qualified to do more than that, then they need to stop making statements about how they want to take over the world, or how they want everyone who currently uses Windows, to use Linux instead.
Pulse's single main problem is rampant, uncontrolled featuritis. I got that from the linked article. You don't need to know anything about the minute crap involved with the design. There's too much emphasis on including a whole heap of features that most people don't care about or need, when the basic functionality of simply playing sound.
It is also true, as has been said elsewhere in this forum, that sound playback in FreeBSD just works; simply, quietly, without fuss.
You therefore have no excuses, no justification, and no escaping this issue. Pulse is a failure. It is not doing what its' users want it to do. End of story. Sounding as smug, elitist, and dismissive as you want is not going to change that fact.
Yep, and you try and tell people what your experience was, and you get downmodded Troll, because you're not saying what the adolescent developers want to hear.
Linux programmers need to understand that they're not going to have their cake and eat it too. Frankly, I don't know why they want to win the mainstream desktop so badly, but they keep talking about it.
Yet they are also myopic, and determined to remain oblivious to end-user complaints when things aren't working.
A little logic here; if you want to conquer the desktop, it makes sense to listen to the desires and concerns of said desktop's users.
Hi all... FreeBSD user, not really a Linux guy. What's the difference between our sound system and Linux, anyways?
The difference between Linux and FreeBSD in terms of audio, is the same as the difference between Linux and FreeBSD in general terms.
Namely, that FreeBSD is developed by adults, who know what they're doing. As a result, things in FreeBSD generally just work, without fuss.
I see two possibilities here. Either you are just trolling, in which case shame on you for wasting our time; or else you really believe all this ranting stuff you wrote, in which case you need to gain some technical maturity.
Except you're not going to be any more specific here, are you? You'll call me immature, but you don't define what maturity means in that context.
I'm by no means the only person who has had problems with Ubuntu; if you think that, you might want to hang out on their support forums sometime.
And you don't offer any facts or even reasoned debate about any of this.
FFS; I keep hearing this over and over again, too. Go and look at my comment history. Read the comment I made there, only about two posts ago, about exactly what is wrong with GNOME. No, I'm not going to write all of that out again.
You asking for more and more and more "facts," is also BS. The only thing you're really asking for is ammunition that you can use to refute me, because on a completely emotive, subjective basis, you don't want to listen to me at all.
You don't understand why PulseAudio is designed the way it is, therefore it must be the work of an idiot, and anyone who defends it must be an idiot.
I understand that Pulse has a lot of features in it which it doesn't need, for the purpose of playing audio files. The other stuff might be nice, but there's a difference between something being nice, and something being necessary, especially if it doesn't work.
Regardless, this is yet more denial. There are so many people using and writing for Linux who think that the way things are done with it, is the only way things can or should be done, and what that usually translates to fairly directly is imitation of Microsoft, as closely as possible. Hence, when excessively, needlessly complex, bad software is written, you keep defending it, because you don't know any better, and you also falsely associate Microsoft's own history of writing bad code, with their popularity. Which, of course, leads us back to the real heart of the problem.
Attempting to achieve mainstream popularity at virtually any cost, is the only thing that Linux developers really care about at this point. Technical integrity or correctness don't enter into the discussion at all; or when they do, it's even worse. You've redefined what technical integrity means in your own heads, such that said definition always leads back to what will simply make Linux more popular. Not what is conducive to actual stability or efficiency with the system.
PulseAudio isn't perfect, but the basic ideas behind it are sound, which is why the whole Linux world is adopting it.
I call BS, here.
Things don't get adopted by Linux distributions because they're technically sound; they get adopted if, for whatever other reason, they become the fad flavour of the month.
I tried for nearly two months to use Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex; audio was dying constantly, and I was having kernel panics randomly from the video card drivers as well. Then there was the nightmare when I made the mistake of trying to use another window manager beside GNOME.
Linux in technical terms is crap, currently, and I'm fed up with the denial. I'm using FreeBSD, and have been since January; I wanted to use Linux, but aside from maybe Slack, Arch, and LFS, none of the major distributions are usable without giving me endless problems. It's either package management, or hardware drivers, or the DE is fused with everything else and can't be removed, etc...it's hell.
Stop claiming things are fine when they're not. Stop writing propogandist garbage like this, where you're basically just trying to force people to hold their noses and drink the Kool Aid, when they're telling you in droves that real problems exist.
The denial needs to stop, and the problems need to be acknowledged and fixed.
* We need a sound daemon that doesn't try and have a heap of other features which hardly anyone ever needs, but that just plays audio. THAT'S ALL IT NEEDS TO DO. No client/server crap. No being able to play files while changing the sound card. None of that shit. All it needs to do is play audio files.
* GNOME needs to be scrapped entirely, and replaced with something that isn't committed to simply reproducing all of Windows' design mistakes. We need a window manager that is genuinely designed according to the UNIX philosophy. That means dotfiles for configuration, not a centralised registry which just bogs everything down. It also means use of the pre-existing sockets system for IPC; NOT abominations like XML-RPC. It also means something which is genuinely modular, not where if you install any one single piece, you then HAVE to install all of the rest.
* Init/Upstart both need to be scrapped, and replaced with FreeBSD's init system. It is simple, clear, sane, and WORKS.
* Ubuntu's insane mess for kernel module loading also needs to be annihilated as well, and the standard module loading programs need to be used.
* This is something which I know will never happen, because Canonical are too stupid and delusional, but if they truly were intelligent, they would drop Debian as a base. They need to use something cleaner, like Slack, Arch, or LFS, and they could then save a lot more work for themselves by adopting pkgsrc (which is being maintained by NetBSD) as their package management system. Ports systems are a lot more robust than dkpg/apt, and I don't want to hear the contrary from the usual Debian fanboys, either. YOU ARE WRONG, and Ubuntu's upgrade routine trashing systems is the proof. For ONCE, sit down, shut the hell up, and accept it.
If you really mean any of the talk that you keep endlessly engaging in about wanting to be competitive, Linux community, then fucking lift your game.
The first step to doing that is ending the denial, once and for all. The second is to cease mindlessly aping Windows, and establish your own identity; ideally one based on the very UNIX design principles that you've been so enthusiastically throwing away.
Let's see how many of the Generation Y, amateur, snot nosed brats I get making a response to this post; people like the idiot who wrote the post that I'm replying to, here. People who think that everything with Linux is just fine, and who continue churning out bloated, inefficient, unstable crap, because they don't know how to do everything else, yet still see themselves as an avatar of Neo inside their own heads.
Mod me down, instead of refuting me, as well. Use every lame Slashdot trick in the book for posts you don't agree with.
This is the truth, Linux developers. You might not like it, but you need to fucking hear it.
Perhaps you should consider a different career. If you're not coding for the end user, you're just masturbating.
Ordinarily I wouldn't bother dignifying this with a response; but it's worth pointing out that unfortunately, the above thinking seems to have infected the majority of programmers, at least where Linux is concerned.
It might take a while, but I'm predicting that gradually the Linux community are going to figure out the truth about this; that eventually, in their mad and largely inexplicable frenzy to recruit the most mindlessly unintelligent, illiterate, and technophobic of Windows users, Linux itself will be ruined to the point where eventually someone will stop one day and ask themselves, what the real benefit is of Linux continuing to exist at all.
Windows has only improved in the last few years because Microsoft started making real technical integrity more of a priority; stability and security, rather than continuing with insane feature creep. Linux is going backwards, because it is doing exactly the opposite.
The other thing that's worth commenting on about the above quoted statement, now that I think about it, was the level of arrogance inherent in it. I've mentioned this before, but it's the type of statement made by people who believe that writing programs to be as complex (rather than as simple) as possible, is the "modern, sophisticated," approach, and that the entire earlier UNIX philosophy is simply an irrelevant, obsolete anachronism.
You're wet behind the ears.
After reading your comment I don't know which BSD Desktop Environment I should look at to see comparable code that is higher quality
Enlightenment is BSD licensed. That wouldn't be a bad place to start.
I've already spoken numerous times about GConf, as a major element; about how I can't (as one example) install Firefox without installing GConf and all of its' subsequent dependencies, because I'm not able to specify a GTK theme via dotfiles any more. There are also reports now of GNOME, on Ubuntu at least, beginning to emulate the famed winrot or registry creep effect that we all knew and loved so much with Windows.
Then, just for shits and giggles, let's list a suggested build order for Gnome 2.6.
* libxml2
* libxslt
* gtk-doc
* glib2
* libIDL
* ORBit2
* intltool
* libbonobo
* fontconfig
* Render
* Xrender
* Xft
* pango
* atk
* shared-mime-info - download
* gtk+
* gconf
* gnome-mime-data
* gnome-vfs
* esound
* libgnome
* libart_lgpl
* libglade
* libgnomecanvas
* libbonoboui
* hicolor-icon-theme - download
* gnome-icon-theme
* gnome-keyring
* libgnomeui
* startup-notification
* gtk-engines
* gnome-themes
* scrollkeeper
* gnome-desktop
* libwnck
* gnome-panel
* gnome-session
* vte
* gnome-terminal
* libgtop
* gail
* libgail
* libxklavier
* gnome-applets
* metacity
* libgsf
* libcroco
* librsvg
* eel
* gstreamer (make sure you have libraries for any audio codecs you plan to use isntalled)
* gst-plugins
* nautilus
* control-center
* libgnomeprint
* libgnomeprintui
* gtkhtml2
* libgtkhtml
* yelp
* bug-buddy
* gtksourceview
* gedit
* eog
* ggv
* file-roller
* gconf-editor
* gnome-utils
* gal
* gnome-system-monitor
* gnome-media
* nautilus-media
* gnome-netstatus
* gcalctool
* gpdf
...but the world as it could be. That has always been the nature of the Amiga.
I've always had a strange feeling that the Amiga was like something out of an episode of Sliders.
It was almost as if, with this system, instead of being something from our own world, at some point a brief window to a different and more positive reality was opened; a place where the priority systems of people was aligned with what truly worked, and said place's inhabitants cared more about creativity, and community, and real innovation, and less purely about the profit motive, than they do here...and that for the few seconds said window was open, an A500 fell through it, was found by someone here, reverse engineered, and then reproduced.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_1PjOEFPTk - This is an example of what I'm talking about. A comparison with Linux on a very old machine. The Amiga always demonstrated the kind of performance which logically, just didn't seem as though it should be possible... ...and yet somehow, it was.