The whole point of the "Sound on Linux" fiasco is that drivers in Linux are not allowed to fake it. ALSA is designated to serve only as an interface to the sounds card, exposing everything to user space (regardless whether it's worth it or not).
OSS in comparison does mixing in kernel (not that sound data rate was that high anyway) what makes it 100% transparent to user applications. Compared to ALSA, OSS exposes to user space a consistent generic audio interface.
I have seen some distros come with commented out dmix in ALSA global config file. That might be the cause.
Just like with PulseAudio, mixing in user space is latency-prone, contributing to jitter/etc. Since most cards support H/W mixing (gp's one apparently doesn't) they might have decided to disable by default.
To my limited knowledge, MS' C# developers are people who can be reasoned with.
They are simply not used to give their users choices.
Though reasoning with them now would leave FireFox vulnerable in future to the managerial decisions by MS'. And we all know how far-sighted they are. (It's the same as a Mono/C# on Linux loophole.)
MS essentially implemented a floodgate for the same malware that plagues IE users. And just like in IE, they do not allow you to disable it or disabling it (e.g. removal of.NET) means turning your desktop into a dust collector. (Unless you install Linux on it of course.)
Because now even on XP many programs and games require.Net: MS forced everybody to adopt it by simply dropping support for all other development technologies.
If I install this security update, do I need to disable the Windows
Presentation Foundation Plug-in in Firefox to be protected from this
vulnerability?
No. Customers who have installed the security updates
associated with this security bulletin are protected from this
vulnerability.
Uhm... "Protected from this vulnerability"?? What the hell?
Somebody has to file a bug against FireFox that plugins/add-ons are even allowed to prevent user from disabling them.
... and says such complaints and criticisms about PulseAudio in some Internet forums are not really shared by the vast majority of technical people.
I see. That clears the confusion to me. PulseAudio was never tested by people who can hear. And the quoted "technical people" are most likely simply deaf.
Because even on most $5 "Made in China" speaker one can hear the cr*p coming from PulseAudio and even jitter of ALSA. Yes, $5 "Made in China" speakers improved that much in past years. And the PulseAudio creators must be really deaf to not to hear all the sh*t PulseAudio does to sound.
P.S. OR they test it exclusively with YouTube. That might be another explanation.
P.P.S. And do not get me started on PulseAudio configuration nightmares... (They blatantly discarded lessons of ESD/Artsd fiasco.) Configuration tools are simply dysfunctional and just as before trivial task of switching from one sounds card to another is a chore involving config editing on command line and couple of reboots.
3DMark Vantage was never a legit benchmark. Heavily tuned for Intel CPU and nVidia GPU architectures it never actually meant a damm thing.
Just compare performance of gf285/295 v. radeon 4870/5870 (any review) in 3DMark and in games. In 3DMark Vantage nVidia cards have close to 50% advantage while in real games radeons sometimes score higher.
The statistical anomaly alone is sufficient to dismiss 3DMark Vantage results as outlier.
The damage claims also hypocritical when in many industries it is accepted practice to tolerated some piracy as a mean for cheap advertisement. Especially when it comes to expensive professional software which you simply can't evaluate fully with demo version. Some vendors offer special time-limited versions of full products - but most do not.
MS itself was admitting not once that they prefer people (in 3rd world) pirating Windows instead of adopting other competing OSs. (And something similar was happening whey they have been releasing first Windows versions - to spur the adoption of new system.)
Fight with piracy is a double edged sword and BSA members knows it well. Regardless of what they -as managers of public companies- are obliged to claim.
The problem with WinMo is Microsoft's past behavior in the desktop market. Why would phone manufacturers want to empower them and their proven monopolistic tendencies by embracing WinMo?
Don't be dumb.
OEMs *love* MS because they need not think about anything else but building the devices compatible with WinMo. They want to rely on somebody (e.g. MS) to supply full OS with all bells and whistles.
That is what surely MS promises them. How it works out in the... Before we couldn't even say anything definitive about that because there were really few customizable phones. With advent of iPhone and Android now we can point the drawbacks of WinMo phones. Competition is good.
But I'd like to find a replacement already. E.g. Gigabit switch would be nice. But browsing through list of DD-Wrt compatible devices can't find a single also with functioning USB *and* available in Europe.
Which only proves that some people will pay. Other will steal, and some will help them.
I'm not sure what point you try to make.
DRM everything to hell? Or what??
You could as well advise to put everybody to jail because we all do minor crimes pretty much all the time. (Ripped CD? Yes. Don't try to hide it. RIAA says it's illegal.) And often this is trespassing of the laws we never heard of. And since you try to drive the discussion in the direction, let's start by putting you behind the bars first. You can start thanking me for setting you on the right track.
Thanks for the anecdote, but its not evidence of anything, it doesn't even back up your point.
If you have mindset of thief, then yes. Sorry to have misjudged you.
P.S. This depends on publisher. Games published on Impulse by indies and StarDock themselves often have no copy protection of any sort. Not even serial number check.
What about accepting reality that pirates already enjoy the premium service - and providing legit customers with the something similar??
You're argument is that Sony should make it even easier for pirates (and people that may not have pirated before)?
Well, Apple with iTMS (and many other download services) proved already false the presumption that people would pirate anyway.
Or Sony felt compelled to feed the pirates with new and more justifications to do what they did before?
Heh... well people that steal do so and rationalize it all the time. Its irrelevent what Sony does, because people will steal anyway.
Pissed customer is much likelier to pirate.
E.g. on Impulse you can get many games without any sort of copy protection. Many of them also available for free on BitTorrent. Despite that Impulse still manages sufficient sales. (And I'm a customer there.)
The problem you mention relates only to few distributions which still (in this age) fail at trivial procedure as packaging and package installation. E.g. RedHat (which also btw notoriously known for breaking Perl with every minor revision).
Get yourself a Debian and it will be OK. (That is also helped by the fact that some Debian admin tools are written in Perl.)
Otherwise you can always compile Perl from sources. To me it worked on many platforms. Surprisingly, I even had no problems on Windows.
P.S. And I'm not mentioning here CPAN since I can't believe that anybody might have problem with it. Unless of course you are using -broken by definition- RedHat.
Presumably, unless each UMD has a unique serial number, and the hypothetical UMD-to-PSP Go converter phones it home, there would be no way for Sony to keep a given UMD disk from being turned into N copies, all blessed by Sony.
What about accepting reality that pirates already enjoy the premium service - and providing legit customers with the something similar??
Or Sony felt compelled to feed the pirates with new and more justifications to do what they did before?
And/or because Sony's secret bylaws compel them to treat their customers with precisely equal amounts of hatred and contempt at all times.
That's more like it.
Sony and Nintendo are quite similar that they pretty much always dismiss their own customers. That's why people are so divided: they either love it or hate it. It feels like their R&Ds live and work in some sort of isolated underground lab where novelties like internet and forums are not available. And all of customer feedback is substituted with directives and memos from upper management. Well, at least Nintendo has the luminary Miyamoto (who is already "upper management") and his games have some loyal fans.
Java does support run-time dynamic loading of classes - Perl supports run-time compilation from text.
Java's class tree is static - Perl's one is dynamic and can be twisted any funny way at any point of time.
Java is explicit language (has no/little of side-effects) - many Perl constructs are by definition implicit and some side-effects are documented as features.
In the end, Java is simpler to learn, simpler to develop with, simpler to maintain.
Secret is very easy: Java pretty much never requires one to use brain during no phase of development process.
Perl actually makes you want to use your brain. Because it's fun.
Benchmarks and whatnot have little relevance to the real world.
It's true that thanks to the "there is more than one way to do the same thing" isn't very appealing to commercial companies. But at the same time in the past 15+ years I work, literally every employer had some part of its infrastructure supported by Perl programs.
Perl isn't for everyone. Obviously simpler languages like Java or C# or Python would tend to dominate because barrier to entry is lower. Nothing new.
Perl dominated Web in the times when it was a new thing. Internet itself was a new thing. And obviously to start something new you need smart and experienced people. Among such people Perl tend to be quite popular. Now Web design became something what even your mom can do - tools are abundant. There is no need to employ such heavy lifting tools like Perl anymore.
But thinking that Perl was used exclusively to do web stuff is a rather silly mistake to make.
For software of any appreciable size, Perl has unfortunately died in industry.
Industry doesn't end with "web design".
People just aren't using it for anything more than 10-line throwaway scripts.
Perl is one of those languages which grows on you. I had wrote year ago primitive forking HTTP servers with minimalistic CGI support. In the time it was 20 lines + 100 lines for the CGI scripts themselve. Now that is about 5K lines of code.
But in the end, yes, many 10-line Perl scripts become throwaway - when you realize how to do the job in 1 line.
Perl 6 was something those of us in industry had been anticipating with glee. We expected it to modernize the Perl platform, and make it a contender against Java,.NET and C++ for large-scale software development. But we also expected we'd have that around 2005. It's nearly 2010, and we still don't see much real progress on that front. Rakudo just isn't a production-grade product yet.
Change your dealer. He sells you something funny. Or get a real job.
I'm sad to admit it, but instead of waiting for incremental Perl 5 releases for the next decade until Perl 6 is finally mature enough, the company I'm with has started to migrate from Perl to Python. Unlike the Perl community, the Python community has shown with Python 3 that they're capable of working together to create a major release with many new features in a relatively short amount of time (especially compared to the Perl 6 effort).
If you were unable to exploit Perl 5 fully - it says more about you than about Perl itself.
Rewriting our approximately 3 million lines of Perl code into Python has actually gone reasonably well.
I would have wrote a Perl script for that;)
Because such heavy lifting is what Perl best suited for.
Although I was a staunch defender of Perl, I do have to give Python its kudos. Every day it looks more and more like we've made the right choice moving away from Perl, and towards Python.
I'm surprised that it took you that long to find a language which suits you better.
Perl is simply not for everybody. And there is no language for everybody. It's a matter of what they call "taste" - or rather matter of your own abilities to exploit strengths of the tool.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point of the "Sound on Linux" fiasco is that drivers in Linux are not allowed to fake it. ALSA is designated to serve only as an interface to the sounds card, exposing everything to user space (regardless whether it's worth it or not).
OSS in comparison does mixing in kernel (not that sound data rate was that high anyway) what makes it 100% transparent to user applications. Compared to ALSA, OSS exposes to user space a consistent generic audio interface.
Any example why I might need it?
YouTube works - check.
WebMail - check.
Slashdot - check.
So why the hell I need the "ActiveX NG"?? (Except of course supporting malware industry.)
I have seen some distros come with commented out dmix in ALSA global config file. That might be the cause.
Just like with PulseAudio, mixing in user space is latency-prone, contributing to jitter/etc. Since most cards support H/W mixing (gp's one apparently doesn't) they might have decided to disable by default.
To my limited knowledge, MS' C# developers are people who can be reasoned with.
They are simply not used to give their users choices.
Though reasoning with them now would leave FireFox vulnerable in future to the managerial decisions by MS'. And we all know how far-sighted they are. (It's the same as a Mono/C# on Linux loophole.)
Those are not "political shenanigans."
MS essentially implemented a floodgate for the same malware that plagues IE users. And just like in IE, they do not allow you to disable it or disabling it (e.g. removal of .NET) means turning your desktop into a dust collector. (Unless you install Linux on it of course.)
Because now even on XP many programs and games require .Net: MS forced everybody to adopt it by simply dropping support for all other development technologies.
Probably not deletable, but at least user should be able to disable *any* add-on or plugin. Without ifs.
If I install this security update, do I need to disable the Windows Presentation Foundation Plug-in in Firefox to be protected from this vulnerability?
No. Customers who have installed the security updates associated with this security bulletin are protected from this vulnerability.
Uhm... "Protected from this vulnerability"?? What the hell?
Somebody has to file a bug against FireFox that plugins/add-ons are even allowed to prevent user from disabling them.
I see. That clears the confusion to me. PulseAudio was never tested by people who can hear. And the quoted "technical people" are most likely simply deaf.
Because even on most $5 "Made in China" speaker one can hear the cr*p coming from PulseAudio and even jitter of ALSA. Yes, $5 "Made in China" speakers improved that much in past years. And the PulseAudio creators must be really deaf to not to hear all the sh*t PulseAudio does to sound.
P.S. OR they test it exclusively with YouTube. That might be another explanation.
P.P.S. And do not get me started on PulseAudio configuration nightmares... (They blatantly discarded lessons of ESD/Artsd fiasco.) Configuration tools are simply dysfunctional and just as before trivial task of switching from one sounds card to another is a chore involving config editing on command line and couple of reboots.
This is a serious regression in /. community: nobody yet quoted BOFH...
3DMark Vantage was never a legit benchmark. Heavily tuned for Intel CPU and nVidia GPU architectures it never actually meant a damm thing.
Just compare performance of gf285/295 v. radeon 4870/5870 (any review) in 3DMark and in games. In 3DMark Vantage nVidia cards have close to 50% advantage while in real games radeons sometimes score higher.
The statistical anomaly alone is sufficient to dismiss 3DMark Vantage results as outlier.
IIRC nVidia was first to cheat with driver optimizations for particular game's benchmark modes. I believe ATI was caught bit later at doing the same.
It's per se not cheating. Unless of course graphic card companies start to advertise the inflated scores. But they did just that.
The damage claims also hypocritical when in many industries it is accepted practice to tolerated some piracy as a mean for cheap advertisement. Especially when it comes to expensive professional software which you simply can't evaluate fully with demo version. Some vendors offer special time-limited versions of full products - but most do not.
MS itself was admitting not once that they prefer people (in 3rd world) pirating Windows instead of adopting other competing OSs. (And something similar was happening whey they have been releasing first Windows versions - to spur the adoption of new system.)
Fight with piracy is a double edged sword and BSA members knows it well. Regardless of what they -as managers of public companies- are obliged to claim.
The problem with WinMo is Microsoft's past behavior in the desktop market. Why would phone manufacturers want to empower them and their proven monopolistic tendencies by embracing WinMo?
Don't be dumb.
OEMs *love* MS because they need not think about anything else but building the devices compatible with WinMo. They want to rely on somebody (e.g. MS) to supply full OS with all bells and whistles.
That is what surely MS promises them. How it works out in the ... Before we couldn't even say anything definitive about that because there were really few customizable phones. With advent of iPhone and Android now we can point the drawbacks of WinMo phones. Competition is good.
Me too. Rock solid for *lost count* years.
But I'd like to find a replacement already. E.g. Gigabit switch would be nice. But browsing through list of DD-Wrt compatible devices can't find a single also with functioning USB *and* available in Europe.
No, it proves that some people will pay.
Which only proves that some people will pay. Other will steal, and some will help them.
I'm not sure what point you try to make.
DRM everything to hell? Or what??
You could as well advise to put everybody to jail because we all do minor crimes pretty much all the time. (Ripped CD? Yes. Don't try to hide it. RIAA says it's illegal.) And often this is trespassing of the laws we never heard of. And since you try to drive the discussion in the direction, let's start by putting you behind the bars first. You can start thanking me for setting you on the right track.
Thanks for the anecdote, but its not evidence of anything, it doesn't even back up your point.
If you have mindset of thief, then yes. Sorry to have misjudged you.
P.S. This depends on publisher. Games published on Impulse by indies and StarDock themselves often have no copy protection of any sort. Not even serial number check.
What about accepting reality that pirates already enjoy the premium service - and providing legit customers with the something similar??
You're argument is that Sony should make it even easier for pirates (and people that may not have pirated before)?
Well, Apple with iTMS (and many other download services) proved already false the presumption that people would pirate anyway.
Or Sony felt compelled to feed the pirates with new and more justifications to do what they did before?
Heh... well people that steal do so and rationalize it all the time. Its irrelevent what Sony does, because people will steal anyway.
Pissed customer is much likelier to pirate.
E.g. on Impulse you can get many games without any sort of copy protection. Many of them also available for free on BitTorrent. Despite that Impulse still manages sufficient sales. (And I'm a customer there.)
The problem you mention relates only to few distributions which still (in this age) fail at trivial procedure as packaging and package installation. E.g. RedHat (which also btw notoriously known for breaking Perl with every minor revision).
Get yourself a Debian and it will be OK. (That is also helped by the fact that some Debian admin tools are written in Perl.)
Otherwise you can always compile Perl from sources. To me it worked on many platforms. Surprisingly, I even had no problems on Windows.
P.S. And I'm not mentioning here CPAN since I can't believe that anybody might have problem with it. Unless of course you are using -broken by definition- RedHat.
Presumably, unless each UMD has a unique serial number, and the hypothetical UMD-to-PSP Go converter phones it home, there would be no way for Sony to keep a given UMD disk from being turned into N copies, all blessed by Sony.
What about accepting reality that pirates already enjoy the premium service - and providing legit customers with the something similar??
Or Sony felt compelled to feed the pirates with new and more justifications to do what they did before?
And/or because Sony's secret bylaws compel them to treat their customers with precisely equal amounts of hatred and contempt at all times.
That's more like it.
Sony and Nintendo are quite similar that they pretty much always dismiss their own customers. That's why people are so divided: they either love it or hate it. It feels like their R&Ds live and work in some sort of isolated underground lab where novelties like internet and forums are not available. And all of customer feedback is substituted with directives and memos from upper management. Well, at least Nintendo has the luminary Miyamoto (who is already "upper management") and his games have some loyal fans.
"We did so because other did so too."
In retrospect, I glad you - USA - haven't copied what Hitler did.
Of course Java is simpler than Perl.
Java is strict typed - Perl is weak typed.
Java does support run-time dynamic loading of classes - Perl supports run-time compilation from text.
Java's class tree is static - Perl's one is dynamic and can be twisted any funny way at any point of time.
Java is explicit language (has no/little of side-effects) - many Perl constructs are by definition implicit and some side-effects are documented as features.
In the end, Java is simpler to learn, simpler to develop with, simpler to maintain.
Secret is very easy: Java pretty much never requires one to use brain during no phase of development process.
Perl actually makes you want to use your brain. Because it's fun.
[ I did it myself for two years 1999-2001 and know what you talking about. Only difference that I grew up. You apparently didn't. ]
This is the best explanation - why it is *never* done right.
And nothing will be ever done right as long as single persons would be required to sit on more than one chair.
Doing web apps the right way, is by far no easy thing.
That's why everybody does it *cheap* way.
Lessens business risks too.
Benchmarks and whatnot have little relevance to the real world.
It's true that thanks to the "there is more than one way to do the same thing" isn't very appealing to commercial companies. But at the same time in the past 15+ years I work, literally every employer had some part of its infrastructure supported by Perl programs.
Perl isn't for everyone. Obviously simpler languages like Java or C# or Python would tend to dominate because barrier to entry is lower. Nothing new.
Perl dominated Web in the times when it was a new thing. Internet itself was a new thing. And obviously to start something new you need smart and experienced people. Among such people Perl tend to be quite popular. Now Web design became something what even your mom can do - tools are abundant. There is no need to employ such heavy lifting tools like Perl anymore.
But thinking that Perl was used exclusively to do web stuff is a rather silly mistake to make.
But there is more!
print qq{The title is $Book.\n}; # double quotes, not forgetting the \n
print q!The title is !.$Book.q!.\n!; # single quotes, not forgetting the \n
Quoting is the f***ing best feature in Perl. Ever.
Limitations in studio, please.
Larry is old enough we should start placing bets, does he die before Perl 6 comes out?
I'm accepting bets whether a card runs you over before you read the comment.
For software of any appreciable size, Perl has unfortunately died in industry.
Industry doesn't end with "web design".
People just aren't using it for anything more than 10-line throwaway scripts.
Perl is one of those languages which grows on you. I had wrote year ago primitive forking HTTP servers with minimalistic CGI support. In the time it was 20 lines + 100 lines for the CGI scripts themselve. Now that is about 5K lines of code.
But in the end, yes, many 10-line Perl scripts become throwaway - when you realize how to do the job in 1 line.
Perl 6 was something those of us in industry had been anticipating with glee. We expected it to modernize the Perl platform, and make it a contender against Java, .NET and C++ for large-scale software development. But we also expected we'd have that around 2005. It's nearly 2010, and we still don't see much real progress on that front. Rakudo just isn't a production-grade product yet.
Change your dealer. He sells you something funny. Or get a real job.
I'm sad to admit it, but instead of waiting for incremental Perl 5 releases for the next decade until Perl 6 is finally mature enough, the company I'm with has started to migrate from Perl to Python. Unlike the Perl community, the Python community has shown with Python 3 that they're capable of working together to create a major release with many new features in a relatively short amount of time (especially compared to the Perl 6 effort).
If you were unable to exploit Perl 5 fully - it says more about you than about Perl itself.
Rewriting our approximately 3 million lines of Perl code into Python has actually gone reasonably well.
I would have wrote a Perl script for that ;)
Because such heavy lifting is what Perl best suited for.
Although I was a staunch defender of Perl, I do have to give Python its kudos. Every day it looks more and more like we've made the right choice moving away from Perl, and towards Python.
I'm surprised that it took you that long to find a language which suits you better.
Perl is simply not for everybody. And there is no language for everybody. It's a matter of what they call "taste" - or rather matter of your own abilities to exploit strengths of the tool.
It's not Perl's fault that it doesn't suit you.