It's structured the same way the audio systems on Windows and OS X are.
networked audio daemon and a lower level kernel API
There should be no such distinction. Any "lower level" API should be an implementation detail of the application-level audio system, just as the PCI configuration space is an implementation detail as far as X clients are concerned. As for the traditional distinction between the audio deamon interface and the "lower level" one: it's an accident of history that we lived with that split so long. PA is a better world.
PA is userspace, trying to do things that require kernel level control of timing
You should read up on POSIX realtime scheduling. There's nothing PA does that required kernel-level support. In fact, you should be happy PA runs in userspace: the less code in the kernel, the less can go wrong in the kernel. Besides: being in the kernel means that you're non-portable, that you can't use floating-point, and that you have various other coding constraints. Userspace is far better.
As for switching users on a desktop machine, I don't know anyone who does this
Pauline Kael, on Nixon: "How can he have won? Nobody I know voted for him."
No its not. Video playback with an audio lag of several seconds? Not good.
You're confusing synchronization and latency. There's no particular reason you can't buffer up a few seconds of audio, yet make sure that audio is played exactly when the video calls for it.
The problem is that the implementation sucks, and that bugs are being ignored.
No, the problem is that the implementation sucked. Past tense. There were various CPU-eating problems. They were fixed a long time ago.
Really, the entire Linux sound system sucks. PulseAudio is one of the better parts of it. But because PulseAudio is visible, and because an old distribution once shipped with a CPU-eating PulseAudio, it makes the perfect scapegoat today.
What it comes down to is that if we want to make sure critical information is kept around in case civilization crashes, we'd better keep the important stuff on paper.
That didn't help much the last time civilization fell. The classical world used papyrus and other kinds of paper extensively, yet the vast majority of what they wrote was lost by the time of the Renaissance. We'd know nothing of Aristotle without a few fortunate translations that served as backups.
The classical texts we do have were preserved by repeated copying, not through the durability of a particular physical copy. The same applies to the digital world. You can't beat off-site backups.
I say this as an American: we've become barbarians. We torture people. We incarcerate more people, both in absolute terms and on a per capita basis, than any other nation in the world, and think it's okay to gang-rape 1% of our population. Our wealth is distributed like that of a banana republic. We're stupid, vapid, and like a feral child, we snarl and bite when someone tries to help us. America really is the sick man of the world, and personally, I'm about ready to give up and pronounce the disease incurable. We can argue about causes and solutions, but you can't deny that we're in a steep decline. As George Orwell write,
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
You're talking about individuals. I'm talking about society. As far as individual acts go, as Dan Ariely said, a fine is a price. Some people are willing to pay it. But I'm not talking about individuals weighing the risks and reward, but rather indications that particular laws are unjust.
I'm talking about wide-spread lawbreaking without social consequences for the lawbreakers. If littering were common, and nobody seemed to care much, then there would be a case for repealing the laws against it. But neither criterion is satisfied, really, so we can conclude that we actually do want laws against, err, opportunistic waste disposal.
I think corruption is only a partial explanation for these terrible laws.
As we age, through repetition, our worldview becomes burned into our minds like a phosphor afterglow on an old CRT. We then tend to face novel situations by constructing analogies between them and our ingrained repertoire of concepts, which explains the prevalence of car analogies for computing. But like all analogies, these are imperfect, and when aged lawmakers try to legislate based on these analogies, we get bad policy. Thus, to get truly effective policy, we need people who have an innate understanding of the subject: as the cynical old saying goes, "change comes one funeral at a time."
By the way: when will people start using computer analogies to explain cars?
I'm ambivalent on whether the parent is troll, but regardless, he has a salient point: when a significant portion of society breaks a law, there's not something wrong with the society, but with the law. Authority to govern comes from the consent of the governed. Ubiquitous lawbreaking without social consequence* is tantamount to retracting that consent. It's a terrible situation: not only is there a very real personal danger of capricious enforcement, but when a lawmaking apparatus is so aloof that it deems most of the people who make up a society unfit to be part of that society, that society is likely very sick in other respects as well.
* That is, practically nobody will shun you for sharing files, or smoking pot, (or in the 1920s) going to a speakeasy, but if you are acquitted of a murder on a technicality, you can expect to lose many of your friends.
Yes. As I explain in that other post of mine, I don't think our world, in which companies can arbitrarily refuse to do business with people, is the best of all possible worlds.
No civilized society is okay with punishing people for things over which they have no control. We abolished inherited guilt centuries ago, it seems, except as it applies to healthcare.
Backwards compatibility constraints work in our favor for once then. No major website would institute such a policy and potentially cut off most of its audience, and on the other hand, the "trusted" chain won't be set up until there's a demand for it.
The very premise of a casino is that it's a business that plays games for money. These games are conducted fairly and have public rules set out in advance. The profit comes from structuring these games such that the casino has a slight edge. Everyone knows that.
The problem comes when the casino breaks its own rules. It's a fundamentally deceptive business practice in any field to tell public that one set of rules applies, then to actually enforce another. If Blackjack is not profitable, the game should be modified or dropped. "You are not permitted to win" is not a fair rule, especially when it's a hidden rule. It's no different from rigging the odds of slot machines, and there are laws against that.
No more than Andrew Carnegie, or John Rockefeller. These weren't great or particularly cutthroat men, but instead lucky men. Thousands of people could have been in their places and done the same thing, and the same principle applies to most famous people throughout history. The problem is that we imagine there's some reason to it: that if we just think harder, network more, or spend a few more hours in the lab, we'll be successful too. That's bullshit. It's luck. (And increasingly these days, the luck of having been born into the correct socioeconomic stratum.) The best we can do is to pursue opportunities to the utmost when they do appear and make the most of the luck we get in life.
Easy money is an phemeral subatomic particles, existing barely long enough to detected before decaying to something else. The moment an opportunity to make easy money appears, it begins attracting people. These people competing with each other, which makes the money hard, not easy, to get. Thus, the easy money decays into the same kind of hard-to-get money you'll find anywhere else in an economy.
Really, any time sometime tells you there's a fortune to be had, he's trying to sell you something.
No. In Feist vs. Rural Telephone, the Supreme Court ruled that in order to qualify for copyright, a work must exhibit at least some degree of creative expression, and reaffirmed the notion that facts cannot be copyrighted. Unless some creativity went into creating the encryption key, I cannot see how it can be copyrighted. (IANAL, of course.)
No. The DMCA reads "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title".
How does TI's signing system do that? The TI system just prevents people from loading a new OS onto devices that they already own. It doesn't protect access to work.
The DMCA is a bad law, but it's not so broad as to say "everything to which a technology company with a market capitalization of over $10 million objects is henceforth illegal."
We're already doing this in Buffalo, NY, on the old Bethlehem Steel site. It used to be one of the largest steelmakers in the world; now, we get clean energy.
Outdated: after all the negative feedback in beta, this behavior was changed for release to always require an UAC confirmation for any UAC level change, regardless of the current level.
No, seriously --- people like to complain about the syntax, but using a shell script makes it flexible. What's so bad about it? Autoconf has been used for decades by thousands of software projects. It can't be all that bad, can it?
Slashdot Mirror
It's structured the same way the audio systems on Windows and OS X are.
There should be no such distinction. Any "lower level" API should be an implementation detail of the application-level audio system, just as the PCI configuration space is an implementation detail as far as X clients are concerned. As for the traditional distinction between the audio deamon interface and the "lower level" one: it's an accident of history that we lived with that split so long. PA is a better world.
You should read up on POSIX realtime scheduling. There's nothing PA does that required kernel-level support. In fact, you should be happy PA runs in userspace: the less code in the kernel, the less can go wrong in the kernel. Besides: being in the kernel means that you're non-portable, that you can't use floating-point, and that you have various other coding constraints. Userspace is far better.
Pauline Kael, on Nixon: "How can he have won? Nobody I know voted for him."
You're confusing synchronization and latency. There's no particular reason you can't buffer up a few seconds of audio, yet make sure that audio is played exactly when the video calls for it.
How would it work otherwise?
No, the problem is that the implementation sucked. Past tense. There were various CPU-eating problems. They were fixed a long time ago.
Really, the entire Linux sound system sucks. PulseAudio is one of the better parts of it. But because PulseAudio is visible, and because an old distribution once shipped with a CPU-eating PulseAudio, it makes the perfect scapegoat today.
That didn't help much the last time civilization fell. The classical world used papyrus and other kinds of paper extensively, yet the vast majority of what they wrote was lost by the time of the Renaissance. We'd know nothing of Aristotle without a few fortunate translations that served as backups.
The classical texts we do have were preserved by repeated copying, not through the durability of a particular physical copy. The same applies to the digital world. You can't beat off-site backups.
Eventually, our devices will differ only by form factor. They will all be general-purpose computers capable of running the same software.
HanzoSpam:
Seek help.
We're coasting on the accomplishments of our ancestors. Unfortunately, their America is not our America.
I say this as an American: we've become barbarians. We torture people. We incarcerate more people, both in absolute terms and on a per capita basis, than any other nation in the world, and think it's okay to gang-rape 1% of our population. Our wealth is distributed like that of a banana republic. We're stupid, vapid, and like a feral child, we snarl and bite when someone tries to help us. America really is the sick man of the world, and personally, I'm about ready to give up and pronounce the disease incurable. We can argue about causes and solutions, but you can't deny that we're in a steep decline. As George Orwell write,
You're talking about individuals. I'm talking about society. As far as individual acts go, as Dan Ariely said, a fine is a price. Some people are willing to pay it. But I'm not talking about individuals weighing the risks and reward, but rather indications that particular laws are unjust.
I'm talking about wide-spread lawbreaking without social consequences for the lawbreakers. If littering were common, and nobody seemed to care much, then there would be a case for repealing the laws against it. But neither criterion is satisfied, really, so we can conclude that we actually do want laws against, err, opportunistic waste disposal.
I think corruption is only a partial explanation for these terrible laws.
As we age, through repetition, our worldview becomes burned into our minds like a phosphor afterglow on an old CRT. We then tend to face novel situations by constructing analogies between them and our ingrained repertoire of concepts, which explains the prevalence of car analogies for computing. But like all analogies, these are imperfect, and when aged lawmakers try to legislate based on these analogies, we get bad policy. Thus, to get truly effective policy, we need people who have an innate understanding of the subject: as the cynical old saying goes, "change comes one funeral at a time."
By the way: when will people start using computer analogies to explain cars?
I'm ambivalent on whether the parent is troll, but regardless, he has a salient point: when a significant portion of society breaks a law, there's not something wrong with the society, but with the law. Authority to govern comes from the consent of the governed. Ubiquitous lawbreaking without social consequence* is tantamount to retracting that consent. It's a terrible situation: not only is there a very real personal danger of capricious enforcement, but when a lawmaking apparatus is so aloof that it deems most of the people who make up a society unfit to be part of that society, that society is likely very sick in other respects as well.
* That is, practically nobody will shun you for sharing files, or smoking pot, (or in the 1920s) going to a speakeasy, but if you are acquitted of a murder on a technicality, you can expect to lose many of your friends.
Yes. As I explain in that other post of mine, I don't think our world, in which companies can arbitrarily refuse to do business with people, is the best of all possible worlds.
No civilized society is okay with punishing people for things over which they have no control. We abolished inherited guilt centuries ago, it seems, except as it applies to healthcare.
Even if as a result of that ownership model, the AGPL's required redistribution clauses become toothless?
Backwards compatibility constraints work in our favor for once then. No major website would institute such a policy and potentially cut off most of its audience, and on the other hand, the "trusted" chain won't be set up until there's a demand for it.
The very premise of a casino is that it's a business that plays games for money. These games are conducted fairly and have public rules set out in advance. The profit comes from structuring these games such that the casino has a slight edge. Everyone knows that.
The problem comes when the casino breaks its own rules. It's a fundamentally deceptive business practice in any field to tell public that one set of rules applies, then to actually enforce another. If Blackjack is not profitable, the game should be modified or dropped. "You are not permitted to win" is not a fair rule, especially when it's a hidden rule. It's no different from rigging the odds of slot machines, and there are laws against that.
No more than Andrew Carnegie, or John Rockefeller. These weren't great or particularly cutthroat men, but instead lucky men. Thousands of people could have been in their places and done the same thing, and the same principle applies to most famous people throughout history. The problem is that we imagine there's some reason to it: that if we just think harder, network more, or spend a few more hours in the lab, we'll be successful too. That's bullshit. It's luck. (And increasingly these days, the luck of having been born into the correct socioeconomic stratum.) The best we can do is to pursue opportunities to the utmost when they do appear and make the most of the luck we get in life.
Easy money is an phemeral subatomic particles, existing barely long enough to detected before decaying to something else. The moment an opportunity to make easy money appears, it begins attracting people. These people competing with each other, which makes the money hard, not easy, to get. Thus, the easy money decays into the same kind of hard-to-get money you'll find anywhere else in an economy.
Really, any time sometime tells you there's a fortune to be had, he's trying to sell you something.
No. In Feist vs. Rural Telephone, the Supreme Court ruled that in order to qualify for copyright, a work must exhibit at least some degree of creative expression, and reaffirmed the notion that facts cannot be copyrighted. Unless some creativity went into creating the encryption key, I cannot see how it can be copyrighted. (IANAL, of course.)
No. The DMCA reads "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title".
How does TI's signing system do that? The TI system just prevents people from loading a new OS onto devices that they already own. It doesn't protect access to work.
The DMCA is a bad law, but it's not so broad as to say "everything to which a technology company with a market capitalization of over $10 million objects is henceforth illegal."
It's times like this that I wish I could moderate myself down.
We're already doing this in Buffalo, NY, on the old Bethlehem Steel site. It used to be one of the largest steelmakers in the world; now, we get clean energy.
I'm quite relieved to be wrong. Thanks!
What's wrong with autoconf?
No, seriously --- people like to complain about the syntax, but using a shell script makes it flexible. What's so bad about it? Autoconf has been used for decades by thousands of software projects. It can't be all that bad, can it?