This is very, very cool; it's a thing I've been looking for on my backburner for several years. It's a very interesting problem.
There are a ton of directions I can think about you taking it in.
The household application: this one is already pretty directly applicable. Have a bunch of wireless speakers and you should be able to make it sound really good from anywhere, yes? You would probably want support for static configurations, and there's a good chance each client isn't going to be able to run the full suite, but the server can probably still figure out what to send to each client based on timing data.
Relatedly, it would be nice to have a sense of "facing" for the point on the virtual grid and adjust 5.1 channels accordingly, automatically (especially left/right). [Oh, maybe this is already implicit in the grid - "up" is "forward"?]
The party application: this would be a cool trick that would take a lot more work. What if each device could locate itself in actual space automatically and figure out its sync accordingly as it moved? This might not be possible purely with software - especially with just the browser's access to sensors related to high-accuracy location based on, for example, wi-fi sources. However, it would be utterly magical to be able to install an app, join a host, and let your phone join a mob of other phones as individual speakers in everyone's pockets at a party and have positional audio "just work." The "wow" factor would be off the charts.
On a related note, it could be interesting to add a "jukebox" front-end - some way for clients to submit and negotiate tracks for the play queue.
Another idea - account for copper and optical cabling. The latency issue isn't restricted to the clocks that you can see. Adjusting audio timing for long audio cable runs matters a lot in large areas (say, a stadium or performance hall) but it can still matter in house-sized settings, too, depending on how speakers are wired. For a laptop speaker, there's no practical offset between the clock's time and the time as which sound plays, but if the audio output is connected to a cable run, it would be nice - and probably not very hard - to add some static timing offset for the physical layer associated with a particular output (or even channel). It might even be worth it to be able to calculate it for the user. (This speaker is 300 feet away from its output through X meters of copper; figure out my additional latency offset for me.)
> This speaker is 300 feet away from its output through X meters of copper; figure out my additional latency offset for me.
0.3 microseconds. The period of a wave at 20kHz (very roughly the highest pitch we can hear) is 50 microseconds. So - more or less insignificant.
Cable latency is basically never an issue for audio. Latency due to speed of sound in air is what you see techs at stadiums and performance halls tuning.
Oh, thanks for correcting me! Now that you mention it, I'm confused by a memory I have. Wired speakers seem to be less common these days but I remember being told about two decades ago that the "proper" way to install speakers was to run out equal lengths of speaker cable (basically just jacketed copper, afaik) to different speakers even if they weren't equidistant in a room. (This was advice for home installation, not stadium-sized installations.)
Do you suppose there exists some other reason for that, like maybe matching impedance on each cable, or is this likely one of those superstitions that audiophiles fall prey to?
For those wondering: The rule thumb here is that light travels at one foot per nanosecond. 300 ns =0,3 μsec. Electricity is a bit slower but the same order of magnitude.
I’m in europe so I am all in on the metric system. But “about a foot” per nanosecond is so easy to remember, understand and reason about that it is worth the exception. If you prefer something European, think of a sheet of A4 printer paper: the long side is 29.7 cm. “One length of A4 per nanosecond” is within 1% of the actual value of the speed of light.
The original comment used imperial measures, following comments kept to that for consistency.
To put things into proper units: speed of light in vacuum is approx 1.8 terafurlongs per fortnight, and electricity in wires has a pace of similar magnitude, and sound in normal atmospheric conditions shuffles along at approx 2.1 megafurlongs per fortnight.
Thank you for the kind words! Yeah, I think it gets a lot more complicated once you start dealing with speaker hardware. It pretty much only works for the device's native speaker at the moment.
The instant you start having wireless speakers (eg. bluetooth) or any sort of significant delay between commanding playback and the actual sound coming out, the latency becomes audible.
Bluetooth audio devices that I use tend to change the protocol as soon as it switches to headset mode (with microphone enabled), which works terribly for music. I imagine the protocol used when the microphone is enabled might have completely different latency characteristics than the one used purely for audio, so a chirp might be measuring completely different thing
You could use a different device in the swarm for measurement, but yeah it seems pretty quickly complicated! I have no idea as well how stable the latency is
If you support mic input, you can allow the user to select a device as the "nexus" with mic recording on. Then you tell each device in your setup to "chirp" at the same exact time, but at different frequencies. Then you can derive the individual device's "local delay" and compensate.
This allows you to tune the surround setup to full accuracy for a given point in space, and it will take care of ring buffer differences, wireless transfers of non-teathered speakers, etc.
Absolutely! Silent disco still requires impractically expensive rental hardware to work well as far as I know. A lot of them run off FM radio, since it's the simplest way to go, but nobody owns portable radios anymore.
An OSS app with the ability to sync everyone up over mobile or wifi, on Android or iOS with BYO headphones, would be incredible. This should be a thing :)
I wonder if something like this (without the OSS part) doesn't already exist. Some cinemas in France have some kind of app for people who are either hearing or visually impaired which allows them to follow the movie.
I've never seen in action and don't know how it works, but at least for the audio part it should be able to synchronize the phone with the cinema screen.
Snapcast has a webapp and a native android client. Although I'm not sure how well it handles many, many clients. In theory, if all on the same WiFi they should all play in sync like a silent disco (at least for those not using Bluetooth headphones where the playback latency is too high/not available).
Web radios handle many clients. The first problem could be if the Wi-Fi hot spot can handle that many clients. The second one is that web radios and their protocols usually don't care if two clients are not in sync. They are usually in different places, maybe different continents.
I'm self hosting a web radio for my LAN at home. I set it up years ago, I'm not there so I can't check the details but I think it is: Icecast2 on an ARM small server with DeeFuzzer (sp?) to send my mp3s to the Icecast2 server. MPV or VLC to play music on my Linux laptop and Transistor from F-Droid (I believe)
They handle many clients but they absolutely do not play in sync. That's never a requirement for them and I'm not aware of any web radio protocol supporting that feature. Web radio is not the right solution for a silent disco type situation where you can at least guarantee everyone is relatively local.
"Their own source" looks like they are bringing their own files or (more probably) their Spotify or YouTube. It happens all the time on public transport. Or did you mean bringing their own music and taking turns at sharing it with the other people around? That might be against the terms of service of some services.
Surely, since "silent disco" only really works if everyone is dancing to the same music (which is the only thing that would make sense for a post about synchronizing audio), they're using "source" to mean "device"
> Pasting n-gate content or generally talking about n-gate on "Hacker" "News" is a violation of the Prime Directive.
In other words, they want to publish their rants, but are unwilling to discuss their views with anyone, not even the very people they are criticizing. This may be a valid (although insane) approach for a blog, but somewhat contradicts their stated goal:
> The purpose of n-gate is to be a remote island of contemptuous sanity in a sea of ridiculous webshit.
Be careful: not all clients support the newest algorithms. Example: Ubuntu 12.04 ssh client doesn't support curve25519-sha256@libssh.org (I'm still googling how to upgrade to the latest openssh, anybody has the answer?)
In general, check that you are still able to connect to your server before closing your last ssh connection to it.
That parameter is only for SSHv1 and if you have SSHv1 enabled you've already lost.
What they are refering to is the Key Exchange method named "diffie-hellman-group1-sha1" which uses a 1024-bit DH group. You can disable this with use of the KexAlgorithms parameter. Starting with OpenSSH 6.6 it is already disabled on the server side, but still allowed with the client. There are severe interoperability problems with embedded devices if disabled.
Doesn't really answer my point. An average increase in costs of 5% or even 3% is still enough to kill restaurants on the margin.
For instance, suppose you are a McD franchise owner whose restaurant has 50 "crew members" (source on that number: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070917131148A... ) and your restaurant recently became profitable to the point that it currently makes an annual profit of $250k. A quarter million dollars in annual profit isn't a lot but it's respectable - that is a sustainable business! That's something you can afford to keep operating indefinitely (and try to grow over time). You have some room to invest, some room to make mistakes.
Now suppose the state passes a law requiring you to give all 50 of your crew members an extra $5/hour. How much does that cost? 50 people * 2000 hours/year * $5 = $500,000. So your restaurant just went from gaining a quarter million to losing a quarter million a year.
Now it is not a sustainable business. Your pockets are not deep enough to keep losing that year after year; you should probably close the business or scale it way back.
Are you going to claim that every restaurant in the chain has enough buffer to take a half-million-per-year hit to the bottom line and stay standing? Of course not. There are always some marginal businesses; those are the ones that are likely to shrink, cut benefits, or close.
it would be foolish to expect that such a measure can be passed without negatively affecting some businesses. a lot of people, including the electorate of Seattle, and the authors of the here oft cited study, obviously consider that the gains outweigh the losses.
surely you don't suggest we should allow majority of workers to be exploited because some weakly profitable restaurants might fail? (and 50 employees with 250k annual profits sounds pretty weak.) all these workers are paid the same miniscule wage, regardless of whether their restaurant makes more or less profit, so most of them are exploited, simply because they can easily be replaced.
> surely you don't suggest we should allow majority of workers to be exploited because some weakly profitable restaurants might fail?
Who is exploiting whom here? Most restaurants fail. Nearly all restaurants lose money in the first three years of operation. During that time, when the firm is losing money but still paying salaries, isn't the firm owner the one being exploited? And aren't you exploiting the owner even more by forcing him or her to lose even more money on the way to a slim chance of profitability?
People who consider that "the gains outweigh the losses" probably don't realize that even those who get a raise due to a minimum wage law might be on net worse off than before that law was passed. Certainly those who lose their job or fail to get a new one are worse off, but even some who keep their job are also worse off, because they lose other benefits in lieu of salary that they presumably valued more.
There is no plausible theory that says low-skill workers are made better off by making it illegal to hire them for less than a specified price. Legally fixing one term in a contract in general makes both parties to that sort of contract worse off. There are many reasons why it should be hard to measure the damage the minimum wage does so it's not surprising that a few empirical studies return the "man-bites-dog" result, but we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking it doesn't do any harm at all just because that harm is occasionally hard to measure.
The minimum wage is callous and cruel; it harms those least able to afford being harmed. It is at heart indefensible.
Fortunately, we live in a rich enough society that being legislatively forced into a suboptimal job situation or involuntary unemployment is usually recoverable. It's not a death sentence. Yes, Seattle is effectively kicking poor people in the face with this law, but in the grand scheme of things it's probably not the worst legislative indignity we inflict on them.
"when the firm is losing money but still paying salaries, isn't the firm owner the one being exploited?" - no. please consult a dictionary. low-educated workers are abundant, and are thus forced, if they want to make an honest living, to take whatever they can. anyone who has been in that situation or has been close to people in that situation should easily be able to see that.
"they lose other benefits in lieu of salary that they presumably valued more." - key word being "presumably", which is, given the election results in Seattle, apparently not true. and, there is of course no reason for all of them, or even a majority, to loose more in benefits than they gain in higher pay. makes no sense.
"we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking it doesn't do any harm at all just because that harm is occasionally hard to measure." - ah, but we should :) measurement is king. if any losses will occur, they should be measurable. otherwise, i guess we should throw the entire history of science out the window.
"There is no plausible theory that says low-skill workers are made better off by making it illegal to hire them for less than a specified price." -- see my very simple explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7840655 - generally, libertarians, a behavior typical of followers of any ideology, simply ignore all unfavorable aspects and just assume that the market automagically solves everything, without considering parameters under which a certain market operates.
"The minimum wage is callous and cruel; it harms those least able to afford being harmed." -- your concern for the poor is very moving. i personally, OTOH, would use the same words to describe the libertarian approach to economy and to the poor. but, in the end, those are just emotional soundbites.
> no reason for all of them, or even a majority, to loose more in benefits than they gain in higher pay. makes no sense.
I'm not sure you understand the argument here: A job is a bundle of benefits. There's a money component but there's also all sorts of tangible and intangible other factors that are of value to the worker and cost money to the employer. Other factors might include things like: Free food. Free training. Company-provided uniforms. A well-lit work environment. Flexible hours. Sick leave. Vacation time (paid or unpaid). A well-lit and clean and safe work environment. Job security. A 401k plan. Health coverage. Convenient employee parking. Educational assistance. Prescription drug discounts.
Suppose the value of your work to the company is $16/hour, of which you get paid $10 in salary, $5 in benefits, and the company keeps $1 as profit. If the minimum wage is increased to $15/hour, the only way the company can afford to keep you on is to get rid of ALL the benefits; they would then pay you $15 in salary and $0 in benefits.
The problem is that if you had WANTED that deal you could have BARGAINED for it. You CHOSE a 10/5 salary/benefit split because that's what you preferred, so when the government forces you to take a 15/0 split instead you are being forced to accept a deal you like LESS than your prior option. You're worse off.
Yes, you're making $15/hour, but now you have to work HARDER and the work conditions are worse and the timing is less flexible and the schedule is less relaxed and the job security is nonexistent and you have to pay for your own food and uniform and training and so on where before those were all provided. It is now a miserable job even at the higher wage, where before it was an okay job with a merely not-great wage.
But wait, I hear you cry: "minimum wage workers have no negotiating power so they can't just demand exactly what they want!"
Ah, but they kind of can. They do so not by arguing with employers directly but merely by CHOOSING employers. When considering whether to work at McDonald's or Burger King, workers look at the whole package and pick the one they like MORE. (The company cares about the SUM, not how much is salary versus benefits - it just wants to get the best workers they can at a low OVERALL cost) Over time, the company that offers a better overall blend of benefits+salary will find it easier to hire the people they need so the packages offered will tend to evolve to best meet the needs of the average workers.
Then the government steps in and says screw that, you can't HAVE those benefits anymore, because the company can't afford to give them to you along with your new higher salary.
If the minimum wage went from $10 to $15, people whose value to the company was between those two simply lose their jobs; people whose value to the company was $16 or more keep their job but the job is now a really crappy one they (according to revealed preference) probably like less than what they had before. So they aren't actually made better off by the change, even though they got a raise.
Which means there's no net benefit to the higher wage, only costs.
> key word being "presumably", which is, given the election results in Seattle, apparently not true
Election results are mostly about signaling and group affiliation. They don't tell us anything about what minimum wage workers want, because minimum wage workers are such a small portion of the electorate.
> measurement is king. if any losses will occur, they should be measurable.
Bad study design could easily render them unmeasurable in any particular study. And most minimum wage increases are essentially designed to be nearly unmeasurable by the sort of study you're thinking of. Yes, the theory says that, all else being equal, businesses will tend to respond to higher labor costs by such measures as: cutting benefits, cutting shifts (so there are fewer hours but not necessarily fewer jobs), investing in automation, shrinking or failing to expand, not opening (as many) new businesses. But theory doesn't say exactly WHEN this will happen or even in which business sectors. An exceptionally stupid study design might compare just the number of jobs right before the law takes effect to one year later, and find no effect. But wait: the law was argued about in the legislature for two years and then passed but didn't take effect until the next calendar year, and took effect in multiple small stages. A smart, pro-active businessman who knew he needed to make changes might see the writing on the wall and start making those business changes before the law even passes much less takes effect, confounding that study design. On the other hand, a lazy, re-active businessman might just suck it up and change nothing, losing some money for a year or two after the change, either hoping to make it work or hoping the law gets repealed. Eventually he is driven to make those changes but does so after the study window, again confounding the results. In short, what sort of delayed or premature response we should expect for a particular sector and a particular sort of legal change is an empirical question - you might have to run one study to find the shape of the expected response and then run another to estimate its magnitude. Doing the sort of thing Card/Krueger did is almost guaranteed to miss most of the signal, even if it's really there.
"The problem is that if you had WANTED that deal you could have BARGAINED for it." -- it's plain as day you have no idea what you're talking about :D you guessed correctly later on - "But wait, I hear you cry: "minimum wage workers have no negotiating power so they can't just demand exactly what they want!"" -- that's right. some people have little to no choice, it's amazing that you are unaware of that...
as for the whole reasoning, it goes under the assumption that all the gain will be taken out of benefits, which is unfounded. also, why would the worker not cover benefits him/herself? with cash in hand, s/he has a much wider choice then picking McD's or BurgerKing's bundle package or nothing... ultimately your argumentation also goes to show how important workplace safety regulations are, since many business owners think like you, and history has already taught us how that can end.
as for the reasoning about studies, this is so full of fallacies and arbitrary pseudo-reasoning it's hard to even start answering. these things are hard to measure, yes. maybe you will be surprised, but people did already realize that long before you wrote that comment. but, when a couple of unemployment figures suit your point, then, OTOH, i am supposed to immediately blindly agree with you? :)
this is getting boring.
P.S. I cannot resist - do you even realize that after so much market-efficiency-based reasoning, you completely took a shit on it in order to discredit the study? the effects you expect are products of a theory based on ideal markets and market agents, yet when we fail to measure the expected effects, that's because they are anything but ideal. genius :D
> ultimately your argumentation also goes to show how important workplace safety regulations are
I'm not sure if you realize that across multiple industries the rate at which worker fatality stats improved either stayed the same or even declined when OSHA was introduced. In short, it's not clear at all that federal worker safety regs actually improve worker safety. You can perhaps see that best in the graph (Figure 34.1) on the third page of this PDF:
Regarding the study, I'm not saying you can't learn anything from studies. I am saying that when we have hundreds of studies showing that the minimum wage generally causes unemployment - and we do - one or two that say "but it's hard to see the effect of this one small change in this one small area with this one specific way of looking at the data" aren't enough to rebut that general presumption. If you want to "even start answering", you should read at least ONE study on the other side, not just look at data sources that agree with you. For instance, you could read this:
The unemployment stats I pointed to were comparing having a minimum wage AT ALL to not having one - bigger changes are more likely to be highly visible in the output data. BTW, to answer your question (somewhere else in this thread) about Germany, the last time it had very high unemployment was around 2005 when it had a high minimum wage and lots of "worker protection" laws. After the German labor market was freed up a bit (including getting rid of that minimum) the unemployment rate there dropped quite dramatically. Here's a chart of what that looked like:
(UPDATE: Wait, that's showing values in millions of workers, not as percentages, which is a little misleading. So here's a chart that shows the rate while comparing Germany to France over the same period:
from what i can read OSHA was introduced in the 1970s? i'm not talking about that period, but rather about the famous textile factory fire incident and similar stories from the end of 19th - early 20th century. i'm not from the US, and i find it hard to understand data from your country, since every individual state could have already had even stronger regulations in place before this OSHA thing was passed. is that not correct?
as for the study, for the third time now i will repeat - i agree that minimum wage may raise unemployment. as far as i have noticed here, so does this study that Seattle commissioned before introducing the minimum wage. the question is, what is the relationship between the gains and losses?
Actually, San Francisco and San Jose both have laws increasing the minimum wage. Richmond also just passed an ordinance in March to raise it to $12.30 by 2017, which will be the highest minimum wage in CA.
"A larger body of economic research investigates the effects of state and federal minimum wage increases. These studies compare employment trends for states or counties that have different minimum wages. The best studies make comparisons to nearby states or counties to control for regional economic trends. These studies also find no statistically significant negative effects on employment or hours at an aggregate level or for low-wage industries such as restaurants and retail stores, or for specific groups of workers such as teens. These studies also do not find substitution effects (such as shifts in hiring away from black and Latino teens)."
...
"Several additional studies of Santa Fe and San Francisco have been produced by the restaurant industry-backed Employment Policies Institute. In a study of Santa Fe, Yelowitz (2005a, 2005b) found an increase in the probability of unemployment for low-skilled workers and evidence of replacement of low-skilled adults by teens. In his study of San Francisco, Yelowitz (2012) found the opposite result: a decrease in teen work hours and no discernible effect on overall employment.
Unfortunately, both studies suffer from serious methodological problems that make the results unreliable. Since higher wages are likely to increase the labor supply, unemployment rates can increase even as the number of people who are employed also increases. Pollin and Wicks-Lim (2005) replicate Yelowitz’s (2005a) study but look at employment, rather than unemployment. They find no negative impact on employment. Furthermore, even if the reported results for each of the studies held, total compensation for teens and low-skilled workers would still have increased. Any employment or hours reductions would be more than offset by the increase in hourly earnings (Pollin and Wicks-Lim 2005; National Employment Law Project 2012). "
...
"In his review of minimum wage research, Schmitt (2013) considers several channels through which employers might adjust to increases in the minimum wage. One possible scenario is that employers will simply switch to hiring more skilled workers, thereby hurting the employment prospects of less educated workers and, in particular, black and Latino teens. Schmitt reviews several studies that have explicitly researched this question, some of which yield conflicting findings. Again, research design matters a lot here, and studies that thoroughly control for regional or local differences do not find evidence of labor substitution. For example, Allegretto, Dube and Reich (2011) examine the impact of the minimum wage on the employment of white, black, and Hispanic teens, covering the period from 1990 to 2009. After improving on previous research by controlling for regional differences, they find no statistically significant negative effects on employment or hours for teens, regardless of race or gender. In their contiguous counties dataset, Dube, Lester and Reich (2013) similarly find no evidence of such substitution by either age or gender."
This isn't the first time we've seen an artificial increase in the minimum wage in the US - it's just the highest artificially increased minimum wage.
There are nine other localities where this has been done where there's empirical evidence available. See a link somewhere in the child tree of your comment.
"University of California, Berkeley study: Who Would be Affected by an Increase in Seattle’s Minimum Wage?" is a more comprehensive study on the empirical effects of raising minimum wage in nine other US localities.
This is like the 3rd or 4th post I've seen where you quote the same studies. Make a root comment, please, so we can all debate it and post counter-studies.
It would be an interesting and compelling secret if there was evidence for this occurring. Research indicates that it's simply untrue.
"A larger body of economic research investigates the effects of state and federal minimum wage increases. These studies compare employment trends for states or counties that have different minimum wages. The best studies make comparisons to nearby states or counties to control for regional economic trends. These studies also find no statistically significant negative effects on employment or hours at an aggregate level or for low-wage industries such as restaurants and retail stores, or for specific groups of workers such as teens. These studies also do not find substitution effects (such as shifts in hiring away from black and Latino teens)."
...
"In a prospective study of the San Francisco minimum wage, Reich and Laitinen (2003) carried out a representative survey of establishments. They estimated that a 25.9 percent increase in the minimum wage from $6.75 to $8.50 would result in a 1.1 percent increase in the overall wage bill. When viewed from the perspective of operating costs, a 26 percent increase would result in 82.0 percent of establishments experiencing an increase in operating costs of less than 1 percent or more, and 95.2 percent experiencing an increase in operating costs of less than 5 percent. Breaking down results by industry, they estimated that 17.9 percent of restaurants
would experience an increase in operating costs of 5 percent or more, as would 8.6 percent of retail establishments. For manufacturing, entertainment, hotel, and personal service firms, the estimated increase in operating costs was close to zero.
Pollin (2004) similarly estimated that the average increase in firms’ costs relative to sales under Santa Fe’s 2003 minimum wage ordinance would be 1 percent; the average cost increase for hotels relative to sales would be 3 percent.
Benner and Jayaraman (2012) analyzed the impact of a proposed increase in the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 (a 39 percent increase, not accounting for inflation during the phase-in) on the food industry. They estimated a maximum increase in operating costs for the food service and drinking establishment industry of 2.25 percent over three years, and 1 percent in the retail food industry. "
from "University of California, Berkeley study: Who Would be Affected by an Increase in Seattle’s Minimum Wage?"[1], one of the pieces of research commissioned during the development of the Seattle ordinance. "This research was based on nine localities in the United States currently have enacted minimum wage laws: Albuquerque, NM; Bernalillo County, NM; Montgomery County, MD; Prince George's County, MD; San Francisco, CA; San Jose, CA; Santa Fe, NM; Santa Fe County, NM; and Washington DC."
There are a ton of directions I can think about you taking it in.
The household application: this one is already pretty directly applicable. Have a bunch of wireless speakers and you should be able to make it sound really good from anywhere, yes? You would probably want support for static configurations, and there's a good chance each client isn't going to be able to run the full suite, but the server can probably still figure out what to send to each client based on timing data.
Relatedly, it would be nice to have a sense of "facing" for the point on the virtual grid and adjust 5.1 channels accordingly, automatically (especially left/right). [Oh, maybe this is already implicit in the grid - "up" is "forward"?]
The party application: this would be a cool trick that would take a lot more work. What if each device could locate itself in actual space automatically and figure out its sync accordingly as it moved? This might not be possible purely with software - especially with just the browser's access to sensors related to high-accuracy location based on, for example, wi-fi sources. However, it would be utterly magical to be able to install an app, join a host, and let your phone join a mob of other phones as individual speakers in everyone's pockets at a party and have positional audio "just work." The "wow" factor would be off the charts.
On a related note, it could be interesting to add a "jukebox" front-end - some way for clients to submit and negotiate tracks for the play queue.
Another idea - account for copper and optical cabling. The latency issue isn't restricted to the clocks that you can see. Adjusting audio timing for long audio cable runs matters a lot in large areas (say, a stadium or performance hall) but it can still matter in house-sized settings, too, depending on how speakers are wired. For a laptop speaker, there's no practical offset between the clock's time and the time as which sound plays, but if the audio output is connected to a cable run, it would be nice - and probably not very hard - to add some static timing offset for the physical layer associated with a particular output (or even channel). It might even be worth it to be able to calculate it for the user. (This speaker is 300 feet away from its output through X meters of copper; figure out my additional latency offset for me.)