It's a classic case of the individual doing what's best for themselves, but when everyone does that it hurts the entire society because no one is looking at the big picture and how individual decisions aggregate to the detriment of everyone.
When I moved from Tax-Free New Hampshire to Kentucky some years back, I had to pay use tax on the Kelly Blue Book value of all of the cars I "imported" into Kentucky, even though the cars were purchased BEFORE I WAS A RESIDENT and I had paid all of the fees (only none of them were called "use tax") when I purchased the vehicles originally. The total came to well over two thousand dollars for a 4-year-old car and a 2-year-old car.
I'm not usually on the side of the states-righters, but how on earth is this crap constitutional? The Constitution says in Article 1, Section 9:
No state shall, without the consent of the Congress, lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection laws: and the net produce of all duties and imposts, laid by any state on imports or exports, shall be for the use of the treasury of the United States; and all such laws shall be subject to the revision and control of the Congress.
I mean --- you can dance around some constitutional restrictions, and Congress can invoke the commerce clause until it turns blue in the face, but what Kentucky does seems to directly contravene the plain meaning of the text. How can they get away with it?
Most people don't realize that there's a tradeoff between emissions and efficiency as well. Consider the Prius: it runs the internal combustion engine sometimes when it doesn't need the power just to keep the catalytic converter warm. Adding ethanol is similar: the additional oxygen allows the fuel to burn more cleanly, reducing carbon monoxide emissions. Yes, as a result, the energy content per gallon is a bit lower, but thems the breaks.
That's not true, and is one of the dangers of the legislation so many states are implementing against cell phones. Tests have shown that hands-free cell phones are nearly as bad as holding a cellphone, and far worse than conversing with another individual in the car. The problem seems to be more distraction, than the physical act of holding a cell-phone.
Even with this result, I'm in favor of allowing hands-free cellphone use in cars. Why? Look at big picture: for a long time, we could continue to increase safety at the expense of personal liberty and our quality of life. We could ban knives in homes. We could put ignition interlocks in all cars. We could close down state parks that have hiking trails near cliffs. We could ban rare meat. In principle, we could continue this process indefinitely.
But at what cost? Is the increase in frustration, the loss of free time, and the insult of supervision worth the marginal increases in safety? We're all going to die someday. We might as well make the time we have here more enjoyable, even if that comes with a slight danger. Everything in life is a trade-off.
As far as cell phones go: the benefits of being able to talk to anyone, anywhere, and be able to make up some of the time that would otherwise be lost behind the wheel makes allowing hands-free communication worthwhile. If you're able to finish over the phone on an hour-commute what it would have taken you an hour to do otherwise, you've just added an hour to your life. Let's keep in mind the benefits of technology as well as the costs. If you want to come up with a way to make that conversation safer, do be it, so long as it doesn't interfere with the essential capability itself.
If you want something that gets 10 mpg, go ahead and buy it. Just don't come looking to me for a handout when you can no longer afford the gas. Yep, history spoke against me last year, yep, were 70,000 dollar Hummer drivers got their handouts.
Economically speaking, a high tax on gasoline is the best way of increasing fuel efficiency. But like we've seen time and time again, the technically best solution is confounded by social issues. Fuel economy standards are the next best thing. Consider:
High gasoline prices hurt poor people. It's not their fault they can only afford a 1985 Fiesta. Yes, you can use rebates to somewhat soften the blow, but the proposed schemes are very complicated, and you can only draw the line so finely.
People are more price-conscious at the pump than at the dealership. People in general are terrible at estimating things like depreciation and amortization, which means they don't account for the cost of gasoline when choosing a vehicle. It's cognitively easier to accept a slightly higher across-the-board increase on the price of new cars than it is to accept high prices at the pump, even if they're financially equivalent
As a lemma from the previous point, politically, people rage at high gasoline prices, but calmly accept higher vehicle prices. Why? Vehicle prices are higher to start with, so the cost of better fuel economy gets lost in the noise. Second, people only go vehicle-hunting once every few years, and they expect the price to be higher anyway due to inflation. It's difficult to cognitively separate out the price increase from inflation and from better fuel economy standards. Because people compare the prices of new cards against each other and not against previous intervals, it's easier to stuff costs in new cars.
Because the cost of better fuel economy standards only affects new cars at first, the burden is shifted toward the people most able to afford it: those rich enough to be buying new cars in the first place.
Big ball of mud: the radio is embedded into the car's unibody shell. You can't remove it without totaling the car. It works when it's not raining.
Functional: a standard six-foot antenna is bolted to the roof of every car. It may be over-sized and look ridiculous, but it gets the job done.
Object oriented: the radio receiver is in a trailer, which is welded shut. It connects to your stereo over a well-documented interface, but nobody knows how the receiver works. Everyone who has tried to find out has been electrocuted.
Generic programming: The car comes with two dozen different antennas, each optimized to receive a particular frequency. They're arranged in a barrel in the trunk, and changing the radio station changes which antenna sticks out of the car. The reception is great.
Aspect-oriented: the radio is controlled by an electrode attached to your brain that tries to detect when you want to change the station. It separates the concerns of frequency selections and desired music very nicely.
I agree. I'm all for environmental regulations, but they have be structured correctly. Mandate results, not particular technologies.
Remember the ban on incandescent light bulbs? It wasn't a ban on a particular technology, but a mandate for a certain level of efficiency. Manufacturers stepped up to the plate and did what nobody expected: gave us improved incandescent bulbs that met the specifications! That's how it should work.
It'd be really easy to quantify the benefit that's expected from Low-E glass, too: just mandate minimum reflective over certain frequency ranges and let manufacturers figure out how to achieve it.
Err, haven't you ever pulled over after hearing the phone ring to take an important call? Haven't you ever used a hands-free set? (My car has built-in Bluetooth.) Haven't you ever tethered your phone to your laptop as a passenger and gotten work done on a long road trip? How many people's lives have been saved after they were able to cell 911 while trapped inside a car after an accident?
We can talk about banning the use of cell phones while driving, but cheering measures that effectively jam all cell phones is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You might as well ban cell phones entirely because someone, somewhere might talk on one while driving.
Because version control is a solved problem. Audio, apparently, is not. Plus, everyone agrees on the qualities a good version control system should have: on the other hand, nobody will be satisfied with an audio daemon that comes out of a git-like process. You'll have people who don't want the "bloat" of anything but one-sound-at-a-time-with-zero-latency, you'll have people complaining about power consumption, and you'll have people whine about it breaking sound (when in reality, it's the drivers that are broken).
Plenty of people find Bluetooth Audio acceptable. Do you propose denying them this satisfactory output channel because you personally don't see the need for something so déclassé in a sound system?
That's the biggest load of crap I've seen. So it uses system timers and its own buffer management? That's sure looks to me like an overly complicated way of trying to get around poor primary interrupt latency in the OS kernel.
Forget the article: did you even finish the excerpt? Your post is just more know-nothingism from the audio crowd. What specifically about PA's buffering scheme doesn't make sense? It provides for low latency (especially when the PA daemon itself runs with realtime priority); it saves power; and it provides flexibility you'd expect from a modern operating system.
(Apparently, all these people here who never run more than one audio application over one output channel under one user would be happy back in 1995.)
Interesting. To be honest, I don't know much about speaker design. Why isn't there hardware in the speaker for cutting off the signal before it can cause physical damage?
Someone with a five-digit UID should know that's unreasonably optimistic view of software development. Name one successful real-world system that was actually developed like that --- shiny and perfect on day one. If you actually followed your dictates and implemented that kind of process, you'd wait a decade for a new audio system to appear, and we'd be stuck with the current intolerable state of affairs even longer.
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. You couldn't tell whether OpenAL or set BLASTER is the better API, and you're just throwing around big words in lashing out at being bitten by a bug. What you should be doing instead of foaming at the mouth here is filing real, helpful bug reports, helping track down problems, and generally trying to do something. Lambasting the PA developers for not "getting the core functionality right" when you couldn't even tell me what the hell the core functionality is is definitely not in the helpful range. How much did you pay for this crap again?
One of the nice things about PulseAudio's design is that it allows you to combine large buffers for some tasks with very low latency for others.
PA configures the audio hardware to the largest playback buffer size possible, up to 2s. The sound card interrupts are disabled as far as possible (most of the time this means to simply lower NFRAGS to the minimal value supported by the hardware. It would be great if ALSA would allow us to disable sound card interrupts entirely). Then, PA constantly determines what the minimal latency requirement of all connected clients is. If no client specified any requirements we fill up the whole buffer all the time, i.e. have an actual latency of 2s. However, if some applications specified requirements, we take the lowest one and only use as much of the configured hardware buffer as this value allows us. In practice, this means we only partially fill the buffer each time we wake up. Then, we configure a system timer to wake us up 10ms before the buffer would run empty and fill it up again then. If the overall latency is configured to less than 10ms we wakeup after half the latency requested...
utterly broken- in design, in implementation, and in application. It is horrendous, shameful, and embarrassing
Perhaps you could call attention to particular aspects of PulseAudio's design you disagree with? Perhaps propose a better implementation? All I see above is an elaborate (if unhelpful) bug report.
Most cards were (and are today) little more than buffers you could write data in to to be played.
Yep. But some weren't. Sound card quality started a long, slow decline once Aureal folded. Keyboards and sound cards are two pieces of hardware that were better ten years ago. And you'll take my Model M and my AU8830 [with its hardware mixing] from my cold, dead hands.
the graphics subsystem was moved in to user mode
That's not entirely correct. What actually happened is that the kernel retained the mode-setting functionality functionality and the low-level command queuing infrastructure, but the higher-level logic, CPU-side graphical calculating, shader compiler, etc. moved to userland.
When an application can make the soundsystem stop working for all other applications, than there is a bug in the soundsystem, not just the application that caused the problem.
Pulseaudio is not an application. It is a system component that happens to run in userspace. Why aren't you complaining that if you kill X, your desktop dies?
We're getting further and further away from the monolithic kernel model. It's something you'll just have to live with.
Turning the volume louder than the total of 0db demolishes your speakers, unless you have mid, high and lows.
And even if it doesn't actually damage anything, amplification can cause clipping. On the other hand, many sources really are too quiet and don't fully exploit the available dynamic range, so having a way to increase sound volume up to the point where you'd start overdriving the hardware would be nice. But that appears to be beyond the state of the art for online algorithms. (Offline, people have been normalizing volume for years.)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, BFS performance is shitty. No, really shitty.
[citation needed]
It doesn't matter what they call it.
In effect, it's a duty on goods imported into a state, and it's blatantly unconstitutional.
That is, a textbook example of a tragedy of the commons.
I'm not usually on the side of the states-righters, but how on earth is this crap constitutional? The Constitution says in Article 1, Section 9:
I mean --- you can dance around some constitutional restrictions, and Congress can invoke the commerce clause until it turns blue in the face, but what Kentucky does seems to directly contravene the plain meaning of the text. How can they get away with it?
Most people don't realize that there's a tradeoff between emissions and efficiency as well. Consider the Prius: it runs the internal combustion engine sometimes when it doesn't need the power just to keep the catalytic converter warm. Adding ethanol is similar: the additional oxygen allows the fuel to burn more cleanly, reducing carbon monoxide emissions. Yes, as a result, the energy content per gallon is a bit lower, but thems the breaks.
He has nothing on a tank. An M1 Abrams takes ten gallons of fuel just to start. Of course, that's not all that much when you have a 500 gallon tank.
An M1, at current market prices, would cost $1300 to fill up. Compared to that, a Hummer looks like a scooter.
Even with this result, I'm in favor of allowing hands-free cellphone use in cars. Why? Look at big picture: for a long time, we could continue to increase safety at the expense of personal liberty and our quality of life. We could ban knives in homes. We could put ignition interlocks in all cars. We could close down state parks that have hiking trails near cliffs. We could ban rare meat. In principle, we could continue this process indefinitely.
But at what cost? Is the increase in frustration, the loss of free time, and the insult of supervision worth the marginal increases in safety? We're all going to die someday. We might as well make the time we have here more enjoyable, even if that comes with a slight danger. Everything in life is a trade-off.
As far as cell phones go: the benefits of being able to talk to anyone, anywhere, and be able to make up some of the time that would otherwise be lost behind the wheel makes allowing hands-free communication worthwhile. If you're able to finish over the phone on an hour-commute what it would have taken you an hour to do otherwise, you've just added an hour to your life. Let's keep in mind the benefits of technology as well as the costs. If you want to come up with a way to make that conversation safer, do be it, so long as it doesn't interfere with the essential capability itself.
Economically speaking, a high tax on gasoline is the best way of increasing fuel efficiency. But like we've seen time and time again, the technically best solution is confounded by social issues. Fuel economy standards are the next best thing. Consider:
Better CAFE-style standards than nothing at all.
If cars were computers:
I agree. I'm all for environmental regulations, but they have be structured correctly. Mandate results, not particular technologies.
Remember the ban on incandescent light bulbs? It wasn't a ban on a particular technology, but a mandate for a certain level of efficiency. Manufacturers stepped up to the plate and did what nobody expected: gave us improved incandescent bulbs that met the specifications! That's how it should work.
It'd be really easy to quantify the benefit that's expected from Low-E glass, too: just mandate minimum reflective over certain frequency ranges and let manufacturers figure out how to achieve it.
Err, haven't you ever pulled over after hearing the phone ring to take an important call? Haven't you ever used a hands-free set? (My car has built-in Bluetooth.) Haven't you ever tethered your phone to your laptop as a passenger and gotten work done on a long road trip? How many people's lives have been saved after they were able to cell 911 while trapped inside a car after an accident?
We can talk about banning the use of cell phones while driving, but cheering measures that effectively jam all cell phones is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You might as well ban cell phones entirely because someone, somewhere might talk on one while driving.
Because version control is a solved problem. Audio, apparently, is not. Plus, everyone agrees on the qualities a good version control system should have: on the other hand, nobody will be satisfied with an audio daemon that comes out of a git-like process. You'll have people who don't want the "bloat" of anything but one-sound-at-a-time-with-zero-latency, you'll have people complaining about power consumption, and you'll have people whine about it breaking sound (when in reality, it's the drivers that are broken).
Plenty of people find Bluetooth Audio acceptable. Do you propose denying them this satisfactory output channel because you personally don't see the need for something so déclassé in a sound system?
Forget the article: did you even finish the excerpt? Your post is just more know-nothingism from the audio crowd. What specifically about PA's buffering scheme doesn't make sense? It provides for low latency (especially when the PA daemon itself runs with realtime priority); it saves power; and it provides flexibility you'd expect from a modern operating system.
(Apparently, all these people here who never run more than one audio application over one output channel under one user would be happy back in 1995.)
Do you have any clue what you're talking about?
Interesting. To be honest, I don't know much about speaker design. Why isn't there hardware in the speaker for cutting off the signal before it can cause physical damage?
Someone with a five-digit UID should know that's unreasonably optimistic view of software development. Name one successful real-world system that was actually developed like that --- shiny and perfect on day one. If you actually followed your dictates and implemented that kind of process, you'd wait a decade for a new audio system to appear, and we'd be stuck with the current intolerable state of affairs even longer.
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. You couldn't tell whether OpenAL or set BLASTER is the better API, and you're just throwing around big words in lashing out at being bitten by a bug. What you should be doing instead of foaming at the mouth here is filing real, helpful bug reports, helping track down problems, and generally trying to do something. Lambasting the PA developers for not "getting the core functionality right" when you couldn't even tell me what the hell the core functionality is is definitely not in the helpful range. How much did you pay for this crap again?
One of the nice things about PulseAudio's design is that it allows you to combine large buffers for some tasks with very low latency for others.
Confused much?
Perhaps you could call attention to particular aspects of PulseAudio's design you disagree with? Perhaps propose a better implementation? All I see above is an elaborate (if unhelpful) bug report.
Yep. But some weren't. Sound card quality started a long, slow decline once Aureal folded. Keyboards and sound cards are two pieces of hardware that were better ten years ago. And you'll take my Model M and my AU8830 [with its hardware mixing] from my cold, dead hands.
That's not entirely correct. What actually happened is that the kernel retained the mode-setting functionality functionality and the low-level command queuing infrastructure, but the higher-level logic, CPU-side graphical calculating, shader compiler, etc. moved to userland.
Pulseaudio is not an application. It is a system component that happens to run in userspace. Why aren't you complaining that if you kill X, your desktop dies?
We're getting further and further away from the monolithic kernel model. It's something you'll just have to live with.
And even if it doesn't actually damage anything, amplification can cause clipping. On the other hand, many sources really are too quiet and don't fully exploit the available dynamic range, so having a way to increase sound volume up to the point where you'd start overdriving the hardware would be nice. But that appears to be beyond the state of the art for online algorithms. (Offline, people have been normalizing volume for years.)