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Yes, it appears OSS is a viable local alternative, and any abstracted network device is too

It's much better to adjust the swappiness level way down: https://rudd-o.com/linux-and-f...

As you said, swap isn't needed so much, but there are still good reasons to have some around. Besides the usual graceful degradation argument, it can be particularly handy for portables as a suspend partition. However, Linux has lots of servery defaults, and the swappiness is one where a much lower value gives better response times for "desktop" uses.

Because ZFS has far better features than BtrFS
http://rudd-o.com/linux-and-fr...

It has SOME features which btrfs has not yet implemented. Btrfs also has some features which ZFS has not yet implemented, including support for dynamically resizing a RAID (not adding/removing a RAID from a zpool).

Because ZFS has far better features than BtrFS http://rudd-o.com/linux-and-fr...

Three items that may be of interest:

* A short history of btrfs [LWN.net] (2009) (highlights)
* How ZFS continues to be better than btrfs — Rudd-O.com in English (2012) (highlights)
* Btrfs & ZFS, the good, the bad, and some differences. | www | grep storage (2013)

I'm not sure BTRFS has gotten any of this

RTFA I linked to. http://rudd-o.com/linux-and-free-software/ways-in-which-zfs-is-better-than-btrfs

ZFS us vastly superior to Btrfs--yes, even on Linux. It's all about licensing crap. This is yet another example of open source foolishly generating waste heat on projects for dubious reasons.

It will be ready for production when it can be distributed with the kernel.

ZFS is not included in the Linux kernel because it is not GPL compatible.
Licensing has nothing to do with how production-ready a product is. ZFS is significantly more mature than btrfs.

Interesting, thanks for that info.

An aspect of the file change log capability already exists in ZFS ("zfs diff"), which displays the file/dir changes between two snapshots or a snapshot/filesystem. It would be nice to determine what has changed on the filesystem since an arbitrary point, like btrfs can do. However, this isn't a capability that is intrinsically precluded from ZFS—the filesystem uses transaction IDs—it's more like no one has extended the zfs diff functionality yet.

As for the extents, that term seems to be overloaded in btrfs: extent block groups, extent trees, btree extent backrefs, etc. Were you referring to the extent block group administrative control, the allocation strategy, or something else?

Does btrfs allow you to add cache or log accelerator devices to a storage pool? I couldn't find any equivalent of that feature, based on my googling. Hm, "How ZFS continues to be better than btrfs" seems to indicate that log acceleration isn't available.

Oh, and who could forget RAID-Z[2,3]?

Having more choice is better, and perhaps a bit of competition from btrfs will prompt the ZFS devs to add additional features (eg. like the file change search capability).

You need to buy more ram, if you ever find swap in use that is just a sign to buy more ram.

Not necessarily. While plenty of ram is important and good, "used" swap space is in many cases just reserved for copy-on-write, for instance after a fork. Your system can allocate lots of memory which is never touched, this may exist in swap without any disk I/O happening at all. Swap I/O is not good, that is what you need to watch out for :)
See the first comment on this article

Your computer might benefit from using swap as well, your memory might be better employed as disk cache. YMMV. This is from an article which describes it for Linux, but the same goes for Windows:

It's unbelievably simple, although not apparent at first.
Most running programs have code paths and data in memory that they rarely, if ever, touch. I would be bold and say most program-allocated memory is very rarely touched, but I might be wrong. So, the RAM taken up by unused code and data would actually be better utilized as cache for frequently-used files (or, even more beneficial, inode and dentry cache).

On Linux you can play with the swappiness parameter as well, mine is currently at 15. Please note that people can get pretty religious about swap space, correct me if you want, but I don't aim to get involved in a discussion. This is my experience, try it out for yourself (or not).

Steve is making this distinction: apps can be proprietary, web standards should not be.

LOL. Which is why Apple (along with Nokia and others) torpedoed the effort to an unencumbered baseline video codec for HTML5.

ANY statement that questions Apple in any way shape or form, be it legitimate questioning of policies, legitimate objective criticism or or outright flaming will get modded troll, off-topic, flamebait, or especially my favorite over rated just for questioning the mystical empire. I know, I've done my fair share of criticizing Apple for legitimate reasons, and I actually like Apple for the most part. Same goes for Linux, and BSD. There is a small population of Microsoft fan-boys around here that will do the same, but they're generally overpowered by the anti-Microsoft status quo. It's one of the main reasons - if you really look into the firehose - so few of the articles that question Apple ever make the main board. Apple fan boys are worse than Linux ones.

Disclosure - I ditched Microsoft a short time after Win 2000 came out. I was a Linux guy exclusively up until about two years ago when I added OS X to my computer environment. I'm thinking of ditching Apple now, not because I think any of there stuff is bad per se, quite the opposite, it's quite good. Apple has a "we're not denying Microsoft we would be stupid to do so" attitude, but Linux flat doesn't exist to them - literally, not only are they not supporting anything Linux they're pretending it doesn't exist at all - except in a few server situations they can't deny. iTunes for X anyone? Exactly.

Apple has declared war on GPL despite the fact they like BSD. You can see this in their active suppression of OGG that is only rivaled by Microsofts attempts to suppress it - though for some reason Nokia is on the same bandwaggon.

Despite the fact they consider Linux an abject nothing, they actually have some great interaction with it, mostly because they like POSIX.

Despite the fact they hate freedom that threatens their proprietary world they make great products. I'm seriously considering ditching Apple products soon, my iPhone for certain, mostly due to OS and even system Lock-In, it's not like I can really use my phone with multiple computers. I am not 100% certain about the Mac systems. Despite the fact I feel like they're trying a little too hard to push Safari on me, it's nowhere near as bad as Microsoft tried to push IE on me, on the Mac anyways - on the iPhone they make the way Microsoft used to push IE look like nothing more than a telemarketer next to a Chinese official suggesting you put the camera down - surrounded by armed G-Men. I love my Airport Express's, but they only work fully with an actual Airport base station, why can't they play repeater for my Linksys if I want them to?

Now - let's start the bets now. I have legitimate criticism of Apple - a company that makes great products and I've said as much.

Which will I get modded first?

1. Flame Bait
2. Over Rated
3. Off Topic
4. Troll

My personal favorite it Troll. When I get modded Troll that makes me feel like I actually accomplished something. In this particular post case Flame Bait is probably the most appropriate, Over Rated and Off Topic are both cop-outs.

The time is 353:06:34:45 according to the time code reader - place your bets now. Fan Boys start modding!

I wrote something apropos your comment.

I can't speak for small hard drives, but a great thing you can do with a 40 GB external hard drive is to install a persistent live linux disk to it. One of the best seems to be portable linux. That way, you always have a bootable OS around which will work with just about any hardware that can boot from USB, which is really valuable for troubleshooting, etc. I use mine to do things like fix grub problems, or use gparted to resize partitions, etc. With a persistence-capable live distro, you can customize all your settings and install any tools you like which aren't included on the default live disk, and even treat it as a mobile home when you're traveling.

Posted it on: http://rudd-o.com/archives/2008/07/21/the-dns-fiasco/

And LG (along with Nokia and Apple and Samsung) has been one of the major players stymying the adoption of non-patentencumbered video formats as base webstandards

Ok. How should this be fixed without separating the advanced features from the standard ones? :)
Trimming down the advanced features comes to mind, but it's rarely feasible. The other thing is Firefox-style extensibility... we have a long way to go.

I have reviews of the general KDE desktop and Dolphin 4 on my page. I will review RC1 as soon as I can get Kubuntu packages.

I have reviews of the general KDE desktop and Dolphin 4 on my page. I will review RC1 as soon as I can get Kubuntu packages.

Don't know if it's related, but maybe Ecuador isn't too afraid of MS nowadays since they're moving to free software:

http://rudd-o.com/archives/2006/12/13/%C2%A1success-for-free-software-in-latin-america/

Since my story didn't get posted, I'll just paste its text here ;-)

"Hours ago, Google announced the launch of AdSense for Mobile, an advertising service in its own class, targeted to mobile users. I took it upon myself to write up a cursory look into the implications of this new class of service, asking myself if it will change the Web advertising landscape."

Conservative and religious fears have been documented in the past. Jack up the fear factor of bunnies enough, and you can get a conservative to vote for banning all rodents any day.

repeating the HD-DVD processing key...

Especially when the zune phone is kicking in.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
http://rudd-o.com/archives/2007/04/30/spread-this- number/

I'm fucking glad. I took the liberty of gloating in his death at my blog.

And it worked out great.

http://software-libre.rudd-o.com/

Used MediaWiki to write the chapters, wrote a small python proggie (available there) to consolidate the wiki into a single HTML file (mostly conforming to the Boom! microformat), then used Prince and Hakom's book CSS to generate the PDF.

Great typesetting, collaborative book editing, screw LaTeX!

Hakom was right.

but it was too long, so I just blogged about it: Of licenses, Microsoft Office, and user interfaces

And here's my analysis (in Spanish, of course)

and I've done so in my own site.

I hope laws are passed soon to explicitly allow this research. Read more at http://rudd-o.com/archives/2006/03/03/the-truths-a bout-stem-cell-research/

I have a recipe which has served me well for years. If you want to know more, read:

http://rudd-o.com/archives/2006/02/16/how-do-i-sto re-my-previously-written-code/

(this post contains the valid link, the others I couldn't edit and I don't know why)

I have a recipe which has served me well for years. If you want to know more, read:

http://rudd-o.com/archives/2006/02/16/how-do-i-sto re-my-previously-written-code/

I have a recipe which has served me well for years. If you want to know more, read:

http://rudd-o.com/archives/2006/02/16/how-do-i-sto re-my-previously-written-code/