Linux Sound System Mess

ALSA, OSS, Xine, Phonon, Gstreamer, PulseAudio...

All these jargons of Linux sound architecture are really confusing. Not long ago, I was running KDE applications using aRts layered on ALSA.

These days, we have PulseAudio, Phonon & Gstreamer for most of the distributions. All the three systems are horribly broken IMHO. I had to kill Pulse Audio on Ubuntu to make applications use ALSA API directly. I am using Mandriva these days and thank God it has a switch to disable PulseAudio.

Here is a pictorial proof of the mess 

This picture is taken from this presentation (OpenOffice.org Impress file format). I hope things improve in future :-(

Burton Malkiel's advice on current market turmoil

In all this market madness, here are some calming words from Burton Malkiel, author of A Random Walk Down The Wall Street

"A century of investing experience, as well as insights from the field of behavioral finance, suggest that investors who bail out of equities during times like these are almost always making the wrong decision."


"It is very tempting to try to time the market. We all have 20/20 hindsight. It is clear that selling stocks a year ago would have been an excellent strategy. But neither individuals nor investment professionals can consistently time the market."


"My own calculations show that in the aggregate, investors who moved money in and out of equity mutual-funds underperformed the buy-and-hold investors by almost three percentage points per year during the 1995-2007 period."


"So what should investors do? By all means, young 401(k) investors, and those in their prime earnings years, who are stashing away funds from every monthly paycheck, should stay the course."


"Well diversified investors should, at the end of each year, consider rebalancing to ensure that your portfolio composition remains consistent with the risk level appropriate for your financial circumstances and tolerance for risk."


"Don't forget that the U.S. economy is still the most flexible in the world and our "innovation machine" is alive and well."

For full article visit WSJ here