On Sun, 2009-03-29 at 13:13 +0200, DB wrote: > OK<<< so "sink" = front & "source" = back (generally!) No, that's different things altogether. Source is the source of something, a sink is the opposite - where somethings output goes. And neither are to do with front-end and back-end. Front-end and back-end are the apparent and unapparent parts of something. e.g. Take any program, the front-end is the user-interface that you play with, the back-end is all the programming behind it. Analogies are generally a bad idea, try to understand something directly, rather than trying to inappropriately apply it to something unrelated. You might as well say email's like fish, and usenet is like turtles, and then try to explain their correlation with concrete. SANE (scanning software), its front-end is the bit you choose what to scan, etc., the back-end is all the driving the computer does to use the scanner. CUPS (printing software), the front-end is the parts you see when you want to control how to print something, or choose which printer, the back-end is what *it* does to your information to make it work with particular printers. In audio, a source could be the digitised audio from a microphone, a sink could be the input side of an effects generator. Further down the chain, that effects generator could be a sound source that would go to a recorder, with the recorder being its sink. While source is a good term to use in that case, as it's not an analogy (a "sound source" is a proper description) I think using "sink" was a bad case of putting an analogy into terminology, in the first place. In the real world, you put something in a sink and it goes down the drain, never to be seen again (except by sewage processors). It's not exactly representative of how you might make *use* of something, it's a disposal terminology. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.19-78.2.30.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
