In all seriousness, whether global warming is real or not, and whether it's caused by human beings or not is immaterial. Regardless of any of that, it will be used to justify the taxation of carbon. Fake global warming will justify this as readily as real global warming so there's no reason for the controversy of the issue to divide people on this one thing. A tax on carbon is a tax on life, seeing how we are carbon-based life forms.
Lol. Actually, the tax would be on on carbondioxide, which is something living organisms *remove* from the atmosphere by tying up carbon in their bodies. So no, not a tax on life, but a tax on fossils. Which the entire developed, civilized world already taxes anyway.
This will represent a new era of governmental power and control heretofore unknown to us and found only in the wet dreams of statists and other would-be tyrants.
You know, I live in a democracy. Don't you? Why is it that some people are so fond of conspiracy theories? These latest "all-climate-scientist-were-one-big-conspiracy" is not even the most ridiculous to date. Anyone remember "US blew up the twin towers themselves"? Or "Aliens are visiting the planet all the time but the (US-for-some-reason) government covers it up"?
The hate is there because on any remotely controversial topic, Wikipedia has an unofficial official viewpoint and all edits (even those properly cited with mountains of evidence) which disagree, or merely point out that there are intelligent people on the other side, are reverted nearly instantaneously, in order to preserve the official viewpoint.
So there is a big conspiracy of editors? Or admins?;) You know, there are procedures for dealing with stuff like that. Seriously, I do the occasionally edit on Comparison of Java and C++, which is a subject of some contention, as you can imagine. And while I sometimes don't get through, it has never happened yet where I couldn't back it up with sources. Sometimes it takes a few tries, but still.
I still need to get in that the Java standard library is humongous compared to C++, but such edits keeps getting reverted to "relatively large" or similar. I mean huh? Java might very well be the language with the largest standard library in all time, humongous is entirely appropriate!:D
As an aside, I'd recommend never editing on subjects that you care too deeply about. It's not worth the emotional distress. And perhaps wikipedia is better for not having the very passionate write the articles?
But you were an editor too, along with everyone else giving their experiences here.
Editors can't delete articles, so that is factually wrong. Admins can, but that is not "without warning", it's after a debate when comments are invited from editors (including you), so again that is factually wrong.
There's also Speedy Delete which can be more contentious, but that's still not without warning, and again only Admins can do that. And it's a balance, without it, Wikipedia would be bogged down with thousands of nonsense articles that editors create, as this can be done at a faster rate than they could be deleted through the AfD debate. And if anything, this is another reason why more editors is not necessarily a good thing, as it also means more work generated - the number of editors is meaningless, without telling us what those editors are doing. And indeed, perhaps the editors leaving are the ones you dislike, in which case, you should be glad:)
Actually, admins can delete new articles as spam without any warnings. I have only seen this misused on the Danish wikipedia, which quite frankly has terrible editors. The article was one about the "controversial" subject if "lower bound", which one admin hadn't heard about in whatever schooling he had had --- and therefore deleted immediately as spam. Some protesting got me a string of warnings, demands, threats and whatnot... but I note the article was resurrected and is essentially unchanged. Not much of an apology, though:/
I always thought that these notices are very odd. I mean, can I put up a sign that says "In no event shall Esben be responsible for any crime he might do" and expect it to have any effect?
Of course not, since that claim would be false. Software maker responsibilities are a different matter. Would you hold the Apache Foundation liable for damages if someone hacks your web server due to security holes in their code? No, as they don't claim or promise responsibility any more than Microsoft or anyone else with half a mind do.
But the notice doesn't change anything, does it? Of course, in this country, the maximum damage award I could get would the price of the software:P (there are a few exceptions, but none that matters for software)
Still, when I was wondering the other day what Ochratoxin (I was reading a dire warning to avoid certain foodstuff for my baby due to this), wikipedia gave a good answer right away, for free. I don't get the wikipedia hate; I find it an extremely useful source of knowledge, completely replacing the by-now obsolete and bulky encyclopedias.
Oh, and I am impressed with your highschool textbooks! If only they could bring the students up to this level;)
"In no event shall Microsoft be liable for any damages whatsoever, even in the event of fault (including negligence)."
I always thought that these notices are very odd. I mean, can I put up a sign that says "In no event shall Esben be responsible for any crime he might do" and expect it to have any effect?
The numbers on wind are based on all wind being optimal wind.It is not.
No, that is not the case. It is calculated using a regionally weighted average of available wind energy.
It also ignores the amount of matrials it would take to build that many wind farms and connections.
That is neither here nor there. It is certainly humanly possible using todays tech to build all those wind farms and connections; whether we want to from an economical, political and environmental point of view is beside the point.
While there is a proper place for wind, it's not everywhere.
I don't think anyone claimed so. I just addressed the (common) misconception that only coal&unclear could supply the worlds energy using today's technology. That is not the case.
Diversified power can be good, but it needs to be monitored and implemented with a consumer first mentality.
That is not the point. The point is politics: I do not want my country to be totally dependent on one item, whether it is glass-fiber, coal or uranium, that could be used to pressure my country/group of countries.
I imagine this particular technology will be economical, useful, but limited in its implementation, just as hydroelectric power is. Just as with hydro power, the ultimate power source is the evaporation, vapor movement and rain caused by the sun -- though I can't claim to be certain, I'd imagine you could predict now the total amount of power available from this, and I'd imagine it is significant but no panacea. This is the general problem I and other nuclear proponents see: not that "clean" power technology is bad or boring, but that current concepts of wind, solar and tidal seem incapable of meeting current demand -- anything that doesn't meet current demand is unlikely to be solely used if alternatives (such as nuclear) exist, since the public would rather not be inconvenienced.
I'm all for nuclear, but technically, that isn't true. Wind alone on land and near land can cover the worlds total energy usage several times over. I believe the usual quote is around 70TW. Of course, we would all have to get used to the sight of windmills if we decided to do this. Personally, I would prefer a mixture of energy sources for political/power reasons.
I actually think we have enough coders personally. We need better systems.
Hah. You wish! Every project needs more coders. As you show yourself below:
Biggest problem is unity. Linux is very flighty and spread far far far to thin. If there were only 2~4 versions of linux we'd have taken windows years ago (maybe even before the time we started claiming year of the linux desktop).
I sincerely doubt that. Look at e.g. FreeBSD: Lots of unity, lots of not-reinventing-the-wheel. Doesn't hold a candle to Linux in popularity. Maybe not an accident? Linux as a desktop alternative will be driven by cost; most users don't care for anything except that and that it works.
This leads into the next problem. Standards. We seriously need much nicer standards.
To be sure, lots of ground need to be covered with standards, and lots of people works on standards, and lots of standards get written. But good standards takes good people of the right kind, and these people are not common: They need extensive experience in the open source milieu, they need to have a talent for interface design, and they need to be politically apt. Then, when the standards finally get there, the transition to the standards upsets at least some people's expectations and whining ensues. In short: More standards will take a lot of coders.
For example, Gnome and KDE should be interchangeable, they sorta are mostly.
Exactly, see how standards are at work?
But wtf reason are apps aligned with one or the other?
Due to a lot of technical reasons. It is actually the same in many commercial OS's; I know there are several toolkits (which is what you mean) in both win32 and OS X. You just don't have the big flamewars:)
Even within a distro things aren't standardized. People often duplicate functions in different parts
Yeah, market forces suck, don't they? Lots of different companies produce shoes, instead of everyone just using the same shoe. Worked out great for the Soviets, didn't it?
or don't have parts work together properly. Example, gnome asks for root when you need it... sometimes, sometimes it just says sorry you need to be root, go restart your app as root and get back to where you were.
The reason for this is... not enough coders.
Don't even get me started on the confusing maze that is audio.
Pulseaudio, I guess? I like the idea. The tech maybe needs more time, though.
Bug fixing and reporting. Again this should be centralized more nicely.
Easily said, hard to do.
But tons of bugs aren't getting fixed, even fairly obvious ones (you can't tell me you have gone a few weeks without noticing something fishy, not so in windows even).
The reason for that would be lack of coders. E.g., I know some bugs in the application I maintain, but I won't have time to fix most of them before next release. Sucks, eh?
What I mean is to have regular people choose the future directions and planning. The coders of course will do w/e the fuck they want.
You might not be aware of this, but regularly users are even worse of directing the work than the coders themselves. Actually, I hear that was the biggest difference between Vista and 7: The coders had a much stronger voice in 7.
I'm not sure exactly what can be done to rectify this. I think studying what makes FF so good would be nice. But for sure we need something to unify and standardize us. I thought Ubuntu was doing that since it was getting enough weight it could make real decisions for the direction of the OS. So gnome fucking killing itself is sort of bleak.
Now, now. Everyone bitches at every change in every application. Remember the awsome bar in firefox? Lots of people bitched and moaned. Maybe the Gnome people have a good idea, maybe they don't. If worst comes to worst, Ubuntu could switch to KDE 4.5 (?) or whatever.
Many developed countries are facing the frightening reality of negative birth rates.
I don't think you know what birth rate is. It is number of births per (1000) people, a number which cannot be negative. If it lower than 2.xx, then you have negative population growth, which of course might be a bit worrying from an economic growth (GNP) perspective.
All you need to do to end it is require proof of citizenship(that's actaully checked out) to get hired in this country. Then charge companies who don't comply with rico laws (sieze their assests etc) .
This will never happen since companies make too much money off the backs of illegal immigrants working for less than minimum wage.
This is how it is in this country (DK), and it hasn't stopped illegal immigration. It beats me how anyone can live in DK without a CPR (roughly eq. to US social security number), yet it is a well-known fact that it happens. Besides, I don't think a democratic population could live without allowing some kind of immigation/emmigration; e.g. in the case of marriage.
In general, new instruction sets are mostly interesting in the custom software and the open source software areas. But the latter is quite a large chunk of the server market, so I suppose they could live with that.
They would need to get support into gcc first, though.
It seems it will only benefit to those that want to publish their software in an only binary form outside the framework of stablished distributions and that means closed source software.
Really? You cannot possibly imagine that someone making a tiny niche product outside of the purview of the established distributions would want to make binaries available to people?
Well, fuck you and your narrow minded obtuseness.
If I want to build in support for x86 64, i386, Power PC and a range of other platforms to make it easy for new users to get started, why the fuck would that mean PROPRIETARY CLOSED SOURCE SOFTWARE? Or did ease of use suddenly become a closed source model only?
Relax there, he probably just didn't think about it.However, I doubt that the this would help that niche product much, as a small developer is unlikely to have that many kinds of hardware to compile. A much better way to go about that would be to create a build service which can easily make packages for a large range of distributions and architectures.
If the computer is shut down, and you've a BIOS password enabled - you wouldn't be able to do this, right?
You'd first have to enter the BIOS password to boot the system, then press a key to boot from external media and do your mischief. But, if you had physical access to the machine, I suppose you could take it apart and reset the BIOS password anyway.
Really, if you have physical access to the machine, it's got no chance.
BIOS passwords are easy.. simply remove the harddrive and install in another laptop.
If you are the kind of person that are in the danger zone of this happening (not that you would leave a computer with such sensitive information in your hotel room.); You would probably feel a lot better if you were able to checksum the bootloader when returning, maybe from an external usb drive. This would offcourse run it's own OS, not being done from the bootloader(for obvious reasons).
Wouldn't it be a lot easier simply to use a boot loader from said USB stick?
I have 2 personally, but I do not know anyone else who does. So I think it is fairly important point for many people. I might be wrong, of course.
I'm going to come out and say that having a webcam is mainstream, since my grandmother has one (she's not on Linux).
One of those and/or some type of USB or Bluetooth headset for VOIP and you now need some method to connect applications to the correct inputs and outputs.
USB headsets, sure for gamers --- after all, that is why I have one. In other countries were phone-over-IP via. the computer has caught on, it might be interesting for that group.
Does your grandmother use a webcam? I am impressed, despite the OS. I've only had one webcam, in a laptop, which used the same mic as the soundcard. I only ever used it once: for a mirror. A lousy mirror, too:)
My point is that pulseaudio got a poor reception among users because it solves a problem not many users have in an invasive and error-prone way.
Ok, I missed network transparency for sound, another rather esoteric use case. The rest is just rehash of what I said in several different ways. A lot of the "features" are just marketing, like "Low-latency operation".
And ok, I call all those sound cards, but if you want to call them devices, that is fine with me. Most people I know still only have 1.
Don't get me wrong. I think the ability to move streams around is interesting, but rather than introducing yet another layer, I'd like to see that at the ALSA layer.
Whatever happened to GStreamer? I thought that "circuit/pipeline" model for building audio systems would make it easy for developers, and foster a whole new generation of interfacing audio to apps, and people to each other by audio. Where did that catchy future go?
As I understand it, Pulseaudio acts as a backend to GStreamer to actually play sound. Right above the hardware layer. It is mostly a GNOME invention, with all that entails, and replaces ESD, which I understand worked just as well as the KDE3 arTs.. that is, not very well at all. If you use ALSA, it adds an additional layer underneath alsa, which probably explains the extra latency people complains about. From a user perspective, as far as I can see, it offers 2 things, of which one of them only apply to the Gnome applications.
(Gnome only): Kills ESD
Allows dynamically redirecting of sound input and output of running apps to and from sound cards
The 2nd point is of course entirely moot for those who only have 1 sound card.
Slashdot Mirror
In all seriousness, whether global warming is real or not, and whether it's caused by human beings or not is immaterial. Regardless of any of that, it will be used to justify the taxation of carbon. Fake global warming will justify this as readily as real global warming so there's no reason for the controversy of the issue to divide people on this one thing. A tax on carbon is a tax on life, seeing how we are carbon-based life forms.
Lol. Actually, the tax would be on on carbondioxide, which is something living organisms *remove* from the atmosphere by tying up carbon in their bodies. So no, not a tax on life, but a tax on fossils. Which the entire developed, civilized world already taxes anyway.
This will represent a new era of governmental power and control heretofore unknown to us and found only in the wet dreams of statists and other would-be tyrants.
You know, I live in a democracy. Don't you? Why is it that some people are so fond of conspiracy theories? These latest "all-climate-scientist-were-one-big-conspiracy" is not even the most ridiculous to date. Anyone remember "US blew up the twin towers themselves"? Or "Aliens are visiting the planet all the time but the (US-for-some-reason) government covers it up"?
The hate is there because on any remotely controversial topic, Wikipedia has an unofficial official viewpoint and all edits (even those properly cited with mountains of evidence) which disagree, or merely point out that there are intelligent people on the other side, are reverted nearly instantaneously, in order to preserve the official viewpoint.
So there is a big conspiracy of editors? Or admins? ;) You know, there are procedures for dealing with stuff like that. Seriously, I do the occasionally edit on Comparison of Java and C++, which is a subject of some contention, as you can imagine. And while I sometimes don't get through, it has never happened yet where I couldn't back it up with sources. Sometimes it takes a few tries, but still.
I still need to get in that the Java standard library is humongous compared to C++, but such edits keeps getting reverted to "relatively large" or similar. I mean huh? Java might very well be the language with the largest standard library in all time, humongous is entirely appropriate! :D
As an aside, I'd recommend never editing on subjects that you care too deeply about. It's not worth the emotional distress. And perhaps wikipedia is better for not having the very passionate write the articles?
But you were an editor too, along with everyone else giving their experiences here.
Editors can't delete articles, so that is factually wrong. Admins can, but that is not "without warning", it's after a debate when comments are invited from editors (including you), so again that is factually wrong.
There's also Speedy Delete which can be more contentious, but that's still not without warning, and again only Admins can do that. And it's a balance, without it, Wikipedia would be bogged down with thousands of nonsense articles that editors create, as this can be done at a faster rate than they could be deleted through the AfD debate. And if anything, this is another reason why more editors is not necessarily a good thing, as it also means more work generated - the number of editors is meaningless, without telling us what those editors are doing. And indeed, perhaps the editors leaving are the ones you dislike, in which case, you should be glad :)
Actually, admins can delete new articles as spam without any warnings. I have only seen this misused on the Danish wikipedia, which quite frankly has terrible editors. The article was one about the "controversial" subject if "lower bound", which one admin hadn't heard about in whatever schooling he had had --- and therefore deleted immediately as spam. Some protesting got me a string of warnings, demands, threats and whatnot... but I note the article was resurrected and is essentially unchanged. Not much of an apology, though :/
Of course not, since that claim would be false. Software maker responsibilities are a different matter. Would you hold the Apache Foundation liable for damages if someone hacks your web server due to security holes in their code? No, as they don't claim or promise responsibility any more than Microsoft or anyone else with half a mind do.
But the notice doesn't change anything, does it? Of course, in this country, the maximum damage award I could get would the price of the software :P (there are a few exceptions, but none that matters for software)
Still, when I was wondering the other day what Ochratoxin (I was reading a dire warning to avoid certain foodstuff for my baby due to this), wikipedia gave a good answer right away, for free. I don't get the wikipedia hate; I find it an extremely useful source of knowledge, completely replacing the by-now obsolete and bulky encyclopedias.
Oh, and I am impressed with your highschool textbooks! If only they could bring the students up to this level ;)
"In no event shall Microsoft be liable for any damages whatsoever, even in the event of fault (including negligence)."
I always thought that these notices are very odd. I mean, can I put up a sign that says "In no event shall Esben be responsible for any crime he might do" and expect it to have any effect?
The numbers on wind are based on all wind being optimal wind.It is not.
No, that is not the case. It is calculated using a regionally weighted average of available wind energy.
It also ignores the amount of matrials it would take to build that many wind farms and connections.
That is neither here nor there. It is certainly humanly possible using todays tech to build all those wind farms and connections; whether we want to from an economical, political and environmental point of view is beside the point.
While there is a proper place for wind, it's not everywhere.
I don't think anyone claimed so. I just addressed the (common) misconception that only coal&unclear could supply the worlds energy using today's technology. That is not the case.
Diversified power can be good, but it needs to be monitored and implemented with a consumer first mentality.
That is not the point. The point is politics: I do not want my country to be totally dependent on one item, whether it is glass-fiber, coal or uranium, that could be used to pressure my country/group of countries.
I imagine this particular technology will be economical, useful, but limited in its implementation, just as hydroelectric power is. Just as with hydro power, the ultimate power source is the evaporation, vapor movement and rain caused by the sun -- though I can't claim to be certain, I'd imagine you could predict now the total amount of power available from this, and I'd imagine it is significant but no panacea. This is the general problem I and other nuclear proponents see: not that "clean" power technology is bad or boring, but that current concepts of wind, solar and tidal seem incapable of meeting current demand -- anything that doesn't meet current demand is unlikely to be solely used if alternatives (such as nuclear) exist, since the public would rather not be inconvenienced.
I'm all for nuclear, but technically, that isn't true. Wind alone on land and near land can cover the worlds total energy usage several times over. I believe the usual quote is around 70TW. Of course, we would all have to get used to the sight of windmills if we decided to do this. Personally, I would prefer a mixture of energy sources for political/power reasons.
Most people are prideful and would rather be dead than admit they're wrong.
I think you are wrong: most people would rather be alive and wrong than the other way around.
I actually think we have enough coders personally. We need better systems.
Hah. You wish! Every project needs more coders. As you show yourself below:
Biggest problem is unity. Linux is very flighty and spread far far far to thin. If there were only 2~4 versions of linux we'd have taken windows years ago (maybe even before the time we started claiming year of the linux desktop).
I sincerely doubt that. Look at e.g. FreeBSD: Lots of unity, lots of not-reinventing-the-wheel. Doesn't hold a candle to Linux in popularity. Maybe not an accident? Linux as a desktop alternative will be driven by cost; most users don't care for anything except that and that it works.
This leads into the next problem. Standards. We seriously need much nicer standards.
To be sure, lots of ground need to be covered with standards, and lots of people works on standards, and lots of standards get written. But good standards takes good people of the right kind, and these people are not common: They need extensive experience in the open source milieu, they need to have a talent for interface design, and they need to be politically apt. Then, when the standards finally get there, the transition to the standards upsets at least some people's expectations and whining ensues. In short: More standards will take a lot of coders.
For example, Gnome and KDE should be interchangeable, they sorta are mostly.
Exactly, see how standards are at work?
But wtf reason are apps aligned with one or the other?
Due to a lot of technical reasons. It is actually the same in many commercial OS's; I know there are several toolkits (which is what you mean) in both win32 and OS X. You just don't have the big flamewars :)
Even within a distro things aren't standardized. People often duplicate functions in different parts
Yeah, market forces suck, don't they? Lots of different companies produce shoes, instead of everyone just using the same shoe. Worked out great for the Soviets, didn't it?
or don't have parts work together properly. Example, gnome asks for root when you need it... sometimes, sometimes it just says sorry you need to be root, go restart your app as root and get back to where you were.
The reason for this is... not enough coders.
Don't even get me started on the confusing maze that is audio.
Pulseaudio, I guess? I like the idea. The tech maybe needs more time, though.
Bug fixing and reporting. Again this should be centralized more nicely.
Easily said, hard to do.
But tons of bugs aren't getting fixed, even fairly obvious ones (you can't tell me you have gone a few weeks without noticing something fishy, not so in windows even).
The reason for that would be lack of coders. E.g., I know some bugs in the application I maintain, but I won't have time to fix most of them before next release. Sucks, eh?
What I mean is to have regular people choose the future directions and planning. The coders of course will do w/e the fuck they want.
You might not be aware of this, but regularly users are even worse of directing the work than the coders themselves. Actually, I hear that was the biggest difference between Vista and 7: The coders had a much stronger voice in 7.
I'm not sure exactly what can be done to rectify this. I think studying what makes FF so good would be nice. But for sure we need something to unify and standardize us. I thought Ubuntu was doing that since it was getting enough weight it could make real decisions for the direction of the OS. So gnome fucking killing itself is sort of bleak.
Now, now. Everyone bitches at every change in every application. Remember the awsome bar in firefox? Lots of people bitched and moaned. Maybe the Gnome people have a good idea, maybe they don't. If worst comes to worst, Ubuntu could switch to KDE 4.5 (?) or whatever.
and fill it with nervous gas.
They tried, but the gas bolted and ran away ;)
More seriously, don't blame the people doing their best. Blame the people not doing anything at all (except whining).
I will be voting with my feet, and returning to KDE.
Oh no! Don't take your free downloads elsewhere! ;)
Many developed countries are facing the frightening reality of negative birth rates.
I don't think you know what birth rate is. It is number of births per (1000) people, a number which cannot be negative. If it lower than 2.xx, then you have negative population growth, which of course might be a bit worrying from an economic growth (GNP) perspective.
All you need to do to end it is require proof of citizenship(that's actaully checked out) to get hired in this country. Then charge companies who don't comply with rico laws (sieze their assests etc) . This will never happen since companies make too much money off the backs of illegal immigrants working for less than minimum wage.
This is how it is in this country (DK), and it hasn't stopped illegal immigration. It beats me how anyone can live in DK without a CPR (roughly eq. to US social security number), yet it is a well-known fact that it happens. Besides, I don't think a democratic population could live without allowing some kind of immigation/emmigration; e.g. in the case of marriage.
In general, new instruction sets are mostly interesting in the custom software and the open source software areas. But the latter is quite a large chunk of the server market, so I suppose they could live with that.
They would need to get support into gcc first, though.
Free has meant 'no charge' for a lot longer than it has meant 'free (as in liberated) software'.
That does lend another meaning to "The land of the free" :P
Really? You cannot possibly imagine that someone making a tiny niche product outside of the purview of the established distributions would want to make binaries available to people?
Well, fuck you and your narrow minded obtuseness.
If I want to build in support for x86 64, i386, Power PC and a range of other platforms to make it easy for new users to get started, why the fuck would that mean PROPRIETARY CLOSED SOURCE SOFTWARE? Or did ease of use suddenly become a closed source model only?
Relax there, he probably just didn't think about it.However, I doubt that the this would help that niche product much, as a small developer is unlikely to have that many kinds of hardware to compile. A much better way to go about that would be to create a build service which can easily make packages for a large range of distributions and architectures.
If the computer is shut down, and you've a BIOS password enabled - you wouldn't be able to do this, right?
You'd first have to enter the BIOS password to boot the system, then press a key to boot from external media and do your mischief. But, if you had physical access to the machine, I suppose you could take it apart and reset the BIOS password anyway.
Really, if you have physical access to the machine, it's got no chance.
BIOS passwords are easy.. simply remove the harddrive and install in another laptop.
If you are the kind of person that are in the danger zone of this happening (not that you would leave a computer with such sensitive information in your hotel room.); You would probably feel a lot better if you were able to checksum the bootloader when returning, maybe from an external usb drive. This would offcourse run it's own OS, not being done from the bootloader(for obvious reasons).
Wouldn't it be a lot easier simply to use a boot loader from said USB stick?
Yep. Facebook too...
Impressive, and delightful :) My grandmother is 96, she doesn't remember me anymore :/
I'm going to come out and say that having a webcam is mainstream, since my grandmother has one (she's not on Linux).
One of those and/or some type of USB or Bluetooth headset for VOIP and you now need some method to connect applications to the correct inputs and outputs.
USB headsets, sure for gamers --- after all, that is why I have one. In other countries were phone-over-IP via. the computer has caught on, it might be interesting for that group.
Does your grandmother use a webcam? I am impressed, despite the OS. I've only had one webcam, in a laptop, which used the same mic as the soundcard. I only ever used it once: for a mirror. A lousy mirror, too :)
My point is that pulseaudio got a poor reception among users because it solves a problem not many users have in an invasive and error-prone way.
Ok, I missed network transparency for sound, another rather esoteric use case. The rest is just rehash of what I said in several different ways. A lot of the "features" are just marketing, like "Low-latency operation".
And ok, I call all those sound cards, but if you want to call them devices, that is fine with me. Most people I know still only have 1.
Don't get me wrong. I think the ability to move streams around is interesting, but rather than introducing yet another layer, I'd like to see that at the ALSA layer.
This is a shrinking use case. Plenty of people already have hardware devices (besides sound cards) that handle audio data.
I have 2 personally, but I do not know anyone else who does. So I think it is fairly important point for many people. I might be wrong, of course.
Whatever happened to GStreamer? I thought that "circuit/pipeline" model for building audio systems would make it easy for developers, and foster a whole new generation of interfacing audio to apps, and people to each other by audio. Where did that catchy future go?
As I understand it, Pulseaudio acts as a backend to GStreamer to actually play sound. Right above the hardware layer. It is mostly a GNOME invention, with all that entails, and replaces ESD, which I understand worked just as well as the KDE3 arTs.. that is, not very well at all. If you use ALSA, it adds an additional layer underneath alsa, which probably explains the extra latency people complains about. From a user perspective, as far as I can see, it offers 2 things, of which one of them only apply to the Gnome applications.
The 2nd point is of course entirely moot for those who only have 1 sound card.
Hope I didn't miss anything important!
Who cares what the community could legally do... the place would get burned down before the legal-minded portion of the community even heard of it.
So mob rule, eh? I'll pass.