For anyone else who may happen across this post, swap space is intended to be used mainly as somewhere the kernel can swap out inactive memory pages in favor of active pages. In a system with adequate memory you should see either no swap usage, or some usage. Even without memory pressure the kernel will sometimes swap out pages which have been inactive awhile in favor of using ram for caching, etc. This isn't a problem, it's the kernel doing *smart stuff*.
On a system which may hibernate, swap space can be used to store the contents of memory during the hibernation.
Having swap space on an SSD isn't a problem. In general usage you won't be writing to it much, if at all. If you are thrashing it, you need to re-evaluate your memory constraints.
FYI, I use an SSD for the ZFS L2ARC on my server. It's a 120GB drive and has seen 8TB of writes. No problems and the firmware shows it's used 4% of it's life. The hysteria over SSD write life is somewhat overblown. It's something to be aware of and plan for, but it's not worth freaking out about. I can buy a replacement drive for less money than I'd lose in time obsessing over the config trying to minimize writes.
Add to the list of things a local client is better at, secure communications. I don't trust any "cloud" company enough to place my PGP private keys in their hands, which makes secure webmail a virtual non-starter for me.
Enigmail under thunderbird makes the whole PGP process virtually seamless.
Not true. As I said I played with only a keyboard. I used to go to LAN cafe's (that dates me a bit) and would challenge people who brought in flight sticks and throttle controllers to a kill limit in Descent. With them using their hundreds of dollars worth of controllers and me with a $10 keyboard, I'd usually win. One time the guy running one local cafe didn't believe I could beat him with just a keyboard. He bet me my entire night for free if I won and I'd have to pay double the rate if he won. I got the entire night for free
Back when I used to play Descent 2 daily, I played exclusively with my old AT keyboard (which I still use with adapters) because it would reliably allow me to press more keys simultaneously than any ps2 or usb keyboard I've ever found.
Moving forward, rolling, pitching, strafing, firing primary, firing secondary, and running afterburners all at the same time was something I did more often than you would expect. That's 7 simultaneous keys. Most keyboards limit to 3 to 6, and often they are zoned so that only 2 or 3 in a local area of the board at a time can be pressed.
My wife still wants to start throwing things at the TV when that horrible abortion of an intro plays.
I gave up when the VERY FIRST EPISODE hinged on genetically engineered aliens from the future. They literally jumped the shark on a rocket powered jet-ski with disco balls and laser beams mounted on it, in the very first episode.
I turned it off, never looked back, and chuckled when I heard it ended up cancelled short of the obligatory 7 season mark.
You know your show sucks when the final episode ends up set on the holodeck from a preceding show that outclassed yours in every way. It's about the only way they got anyone to actually watch it. It's the only reason I ever watched it at least.
I pretty much only buy my music on CD's. I refuse to pay money for lossy copies of music. If I'm going to spend my hard earned money on it I want the real, all the sonic bits there, deal. This isn't because I can hear a difference between a lossless copy and a 256k mp3 (I can't), but because I usually CAN hear a difference if I transcode that mp3 to another lossy format.
I typically use OGG Vorbis around 96kbps on my portal devices because it's pretty much transparant. I rip my original CD to FLAC in my library. I play the FLAC files at home and I can transcode them to Vorbis, AAC, or whatever I want to for mobile or streaming use without worrying about multigenerational loss. This allows me to store anywhere from 3-4 times the amount of music in a given amount of mobile storage with generally no audible loss of quality.
Most online stores which sell lossless copies of music charge a premium for it. I see no reason to pay more to download lossless versions than I would pay to buy and ship a CD to me. With the CD I get the added bonus of a hard backup as well. When available, I have bought FLAC downloads from some indie bands who offer them at reasonable prices.
Wow, How is it I'm running my 1920x1200 monitor with 32 bit color at 60Hz over my $5 Monoprice DisplayPort cable? And how is it I'm running another machine connected to that same monitor with the same resolution, refresh, and color depth over another $3 Monoprice VGA cable? And how is it the image quality through both of these very cheap cables is absolutely spectacular? It's pretty obvious you have to spend a ton of money on the cables to get good quality.
I played Descent and Descent 2 using nothing but a keyboard, and I was a force to be reckoned with. Had to find specific types of keyboards which would allow more than 3 keys to register simultaneously for home, but I could get by with limited ones.
Probably one of my favorite memories was an old friend I used to play Descent with and I went to a LAN cafe. My friend bet the guy running the place our hourly fees for the night that I could beat him to 20 kills in Descent 2 using just a keyboard and he could use any controller he wanted.. He confidently dragged out a mammoth multi-button joystick and a throttle controller with even more buttons. Final score was me 20 and he hadn't even gotten 10. We had an audience watching and no one could believe I could fly that ship around like that with just a keyboard.
I'm an 80's metal head. I even played bass in a metal band up until 2009.
The Black album was an abortion, but I could forgive them for it.
3 main things drove me away from them.
First, they essentially released Cliff 'em All and then relegated Cliff to nothing more than a footnote. I went to see them on their black album tour and they played a half hour video before the show of which, I kid you not, 30-45 seconds at the beginning mentioned Cliff. The remaining 29 minutes made a point of excluding him. Even in clips of old shows and behind the scenes footage from those years they purposefully omitted anything that had him in it. To top that off they billed it as a 4 hour show and played maybe 1.5 hours and called it a night.
Second, Load of shit, and Reload of shit.
Third, and what was the final nail in the coffin was the Napster incident. For a band, who were where they were only because of bootlegging, to unleash the lawyers on their fans was the biggest kick in the balls, douche bag move I've ever witnessed from anyone in the genre. I wouldn't have heard or bought their albums, or gone to their shows had it not been for my cousin giving me a dubbed cassette tape of Ride The Lightning.
I vowed then that they would never see another dime from me, and they haven't and never will. I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire.
I still listen to the Cliff era music, but that's the only music they ever put out really worth listening to anyway.
I'm quite sure they could find some low level mess that needs attention.. There is plenty out there.. Honestly, even if kernel code is what they dream of at night then spending their time testing, validating, and patching problems in either or both of the Linux and FreeBSD kernels would be far more beneficial to the entire FOSS ecosystem than another GNU distro port using the FreeBSD kernel.
Again, they can spend their time however they want. I just think it's a shame it wasn't spent doing something more beneficial/practical.
You're right, it's not my time and I'm not going to claim to desire to dictate how they spend theirs.
I just don't see the value proposition in spending time on this versus spending the time perfecting Arch Linux. I'm not an Arch user, though I'm interested in it. Right now I tend to mainly use Debian, Mint, and FreeBSD. What I'm sure of is that there are bugs and usability issues in Arch that this effort could have been used to address.
I can appreciate their efforts from a technical standpoint, but in the end they used that time to create a technical novelty that in reality will not see a long term use nor large scale adoption. A sharper and more polished Arch experience would have a tremendously larger impact compared to this.
Technological masturbation what these GNU "Linux" userlands with FreeBSD kernel projects boil down to. FreeBSD already comes with a tightly integrated and very secure userland. Use the best tool for the job.. The Linux kernel is great.. The FreeBSD kernel is great.. If you need GNU/Linux userland functionality either use GNU/Linux or simply use a native FreeBSD version of those tools on a native FreeBSD system. If you need FreeBSD functionality use a userland designed and optimized specifically for it instead of trying to hammer a foreign kludge on top of it..
Wasted effort that would have been better spent on something useful.
Bruce, Microsoft contributed the SILK codec used in Skype to the Opus project and released any related patents royalty free. I would have a hard time trusting MS if they told me the sky was blue, but they basically made the low bitrate capability of Opus legally doable.
As for those who are posting their scepticism about the opus codec's quality, the IETF standardised Opus as RFC 6716 and is making it a mandatory to implement codec for WebRTC based on it's proven performance at every applicable bitrate.
I got mine in the middle of last month from Element14. It arrived 3 days after I ordered it and they said it would take weeks.
I ran it for a couple of weeks with raspbian as a print server and last night I replaced my old TV connected media PC that ran XBMC with the Pi running OpenELEC. The media files are stored on a FreeBSD server in my basement and the Pi accesses them through an NFS mount. Works great for everything so far, though the interface is a bit more laggy than the old media PC. It's still very usable and for the power savings over that old P4 machine it replaced I'll deal with the minor lag.
I have several SDHC cards with different config images on them (print server, XBMC, etc).. It's nice to have a little low power device which can change into a completely new machine by simply swapping a little SD card.
I have an Asus ProArt PA246Q which is the predecessor of the linked monitor, and I've been nothing but thrilled with it.
Mine is very much designed for color accuracy and graphics work; the bezel even has ruler marks along the edges of the screen.
No issues playing games or video, and the color capability is outstanding.
I purposefully bought this monitor for the color accuracy and the aspect ratio,,
1920x1200.. It was a perfect replacement for my 21" 4:3 montior as the screen is the same height, just wider than the 21".
I bought mine for $480 new, which was quite a premium over similar 16:9 monitors.. But, 16:10 (8:5) aspect ratio matters to me because I want to do work on my computer, not just watch movies, and I voted with my wallet.
That's too complicated.. I typically use a short phrase of common words (usually 18-25 characters long) with misplaced numbers, capitalization, and punctuation. I've run them through password checkers that take dictionary attacks into consideration and even at 1 trillion guesses per second they average out to requiring about 4 quintillion years to break.. Since that is FAR longer than the age of the universe, I'm not too worried about it. It's also much easier to remember and type in a short phrase than to deal with a 128 character monster of a password.
To ensure a baseline level of interoperability between WebRTC
clients, a minimum set of required codecs are specified below. While
this section specifies the codecs that will be mandated for all
WebRTC client implementations, it leaves the question of supporting
additional codecs to the will of the implementer.
WebRTC clients are REQUIRED to implement the following audio codecs.
o Opus [RFC6716], with any ptime value up to 120 ms
"X-plane is a cross-platform flight simulator app, notably the only serious one that supports Mac OSX and Linux."
And here I've been using http://flightgear.org/ all this time. I thought I was using a serious, free, GPL open-source flight simulator that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.. I'm glad this slashdot post came up to tell me I was wrong.
Dude charges for X-plane.. When you decide to charge for software you accept all the financial responsibility for defending it against litigation. Welcome to it.
I think that noise is something in the hall resonating or something. It might be worth downloading the tracks for that composition and see if it's most dominant in one mic and attenuating that track a bit to reduce the effect.
The score sounds great to me, but I agree that noise is bothersome.
The beauty of this project is that not only are the final mixes released and available for free, but so are the original master tracks. You have the option of using the Musopen supplied mixes, or you can completely remix and remaster the composition as you see fit. In fact, I might just load that one into Ardour and give it a shot.
I understand the significance to the digital media market. I do not see any significant contribution to the writing, performance, or recording of music.
Slashdot Mirror
For anyone else who may happen across this post, swap space is intended to be used mainly as somewhere the kernel can swap out inactive memory pages in favor of active pages. In a system with adequate memory you should see either no swap usage, or some usage. Even without memory pressure the kernel will sometimes swap out pages which have been inactive awhile in favor of using ram for caching, etc. This isn't a problem, it's the kernel doing *smart stuff*.
On a system which may hibernate, swap space can be used to store the contents of memory during the hibernation.
Having swap space on an SSD isn't a problem. In general usage you won't be writing to it much, if at all. If you are thrashing it, you need to re-evaluate your memory constraints.
FYI, I use an SSD for the ZFS L2ARC on my server. It's a 120GB drive and has seen 8TB of writes. No problems and the firmware shows it's used 4% of it's life. The hysteria over SSD write life is somewhat overblown. It's something to be aware of and plan for, but it's not worth freaking out about. I can buy a replacement drive for less money than I'd lose in time obsessing over the config trying to minimize writes.
"a RAM disk for the swap file"
Did I read this correctly?
I use it on every computer I have.
Add to the list of things a local client is better at, secure communications. I don't trust any "cloud" company enough to place my PGP private keys in their hands, which makes secure webmail a virtual non-starter for me.
Enigmail under thunderbird makes the whole PGP process virtually seamless.
Not true. As I said I played with only a keyboard. I used to go to LAN cafe's (that dates me a bit) and would challenge people who brought in flight sticks and throttle controllers to a kill limit in Descent. With them using their hundreds of dollars worth of controllers and me with a $10 keyboard, I'd usually win. One time the guy running one local cafe didn't believe I could beat him with just a keyboard. He bet me my entire night for free if I won and I'd have to pay double the rate if he won. I got the entire night for free
Back when I used to play Descent 2 daily, I played exclusively with my old AT keyboard (which I still use with adapters) because it would reliably allow me to press more keys simultaneously than any ps2 or usb keyboard I've ever found.
Moving forward, rolling, pitching, strafing, firing primary, firing secondary, and running afterburners all at the same time was something I did more often than you would expect. That's 7 simultaneous keys. Most keyboards limit to 3 to 6, and often they are zoned so that only 2 or 3 in a local area of the board at a time can be pressed.
My wife still wants to start throwing things at the TV when that horrible abortion of an intro plays.
I gave up when the VERY FIRST EPISODE hinged on genetically engineered aliens from the future. They literally jumped the shark on a rocket powered jet-ski with disco balls and laser beams mounted on it, in the very first episode.
I turned it off, never looked back, and chuckled when I heard it ended up cancelled short of the obligatory 7 season mark.
You know your show sucks when the final episode ends up set on the holodeck from a preceding show that outclassed yours in every way. It's about the only way they got anyone to actually watch it. It's the only reason I ever watched it at least.
I pretty much only buy my music on CD's. I refuse to pay money for lossy copies of music. If I'm going to spend my hard earned money on it I want the real, all the sonic bits there, deal. This isn't because I can hear a difference between a lossless copy and a 256k mp3 (I can't), but because I usually CAN hear a difference if I transcode that mp3 to another lossy format.
I typically use OGG Vorbis around 96kbps on my portal devices because it's pretty much transparant. I rip my original CD to FLAC in my library. I play the FLAC files at home and I can transcode them to Vorbis, AAC, or whatever I want to for mobile or streaming use without worrying about multigenerational loss. This allows me to store anywhere from 3-4 times the amount of music in a given amount of mobile storage with generally no audible loss of quality.
Most online stores which sell lossless copies of music charge a premium for it. I see no reason to pay more to download lossless versions than I would pay to buy and ship a CD to me. With the CD I get the added bonus of a hard backup as well. When available, I have bought FLAC downloads from some indie bands who offer them at reasonable prices.
Wow, How is it I'm running my 1920x1200 monitor with 32 bit color at 60Hz over my $5 Monoprice DisplayPort cable? And how is it I'm running another machine connected to that same monitor with the same resolution, refresh, and color depth over another $3 Monoprice VGA cable? And how is it the image quality through both of these very cheap cables is absolutely spectacular? It's pretty obvious you have to spend a ton of money on the cables to get good quality.
I played Descent and Descent 2 using nothing but a keyboard, and I was a force to be reckoned with. Had to find specific types of keyboards which would allow more than 3 keys to register simultaneously for home, but I could get by with limited ones.
Probably one of my favorite memories was an old friend I used to play Descent with and I went to a LAN cafe. My friend bet the guy running the place our hourly fees for the night that I could beat him to 20 kills in Descent 2 using just a keyboard and he could use any controller he wanted.. He confidently dragged out a mammoth multi-button joystick and a throttle controller with even more buttons. Final score was me 20 and he hadn't even gotten 10. We had an audience watching and no one could believe I could fly that ship around like that with just a keyboard.
Man I miss that game.
I'm an 80's metal head. I even played bass in a metal band up until 2009.
The Black album was an abortion, but I could forgive them for it.
3 main things drove me away from them.
First, they essentially released Cliff 'em All and then relegated Cliff to nothing more than a footnote. I went to see them on their black album tour and they played a half hour video before the show of which, I kid you not, 30-45 seconds at the beginning mentioned Cliff. The remaining 29 minutes made a point of excluding him. Even in clips of old shows and behind the scenes footage from those years they purposefully omitted anything that had him in it. To top that off they billed it as a 4 hour show and played maybe 1.5 hours and called it a night.
Second, Load of shit, and Reload of shit.
Third, and what was the final nail in the coffin was the Napster incident. For a band, who were where they were only because of bootlegging, to unleash the lawyers on their fans was the biggest kick in the balls, douche bag move I've ever witnessed from anyone in the genre. I wouldn't have heard or bought their albums, or gone to their shows had it not been for my cousin giving me a dubbed cassette tape of Ride The Lightning.
I vowed then that they would never see another dime from me, and they haven't and never will. I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire.
I still listen to the Cliff era music, but that's the only music they ever put out really worth listening to anyway.
I'm all about Maiden though!
I'm quite sure they could find some low level mess that needs attention.. There is plenty out there.. Honestly, even if kernel code is what they dream of at night then spending their time testing, validating, and patching problems in either or both of the Linux and FreeBSD kernels would be far more beneficial to the entire FOSS ecosystem than another GNU distro port using the FreeBSD kernel.
Again, they can spend their time however they want. I just think it's a shame it wasn't spent doing something more beneficial/practical.
You're right, it's not my time and I'm not going to claim to desire to dictate how they spend theirs.
I just don't see the value proposition in spending time on this versus spending the time perfecting Arch Linux. I'm not an Arch user, though I'm interested in it. Right now I tend to mainly use Debian, Mint, and FreeBSD. What I'm sure of is that there are bugs and usability issues in Arch that this effort could have been used to address.
I can appreciate their efforts from a technical standpoint, but in the end they used that time to create a technical novelty that in reality will not see a long term use nor large scale adoption. A sharper and more polished Arch experience would have a tremendously larger impact compared to this.
I'll agree there. It's a nice resume bullet point.
Technological masturbation what these GNU "Linux" userlands with FreeBSD kernel projects boil down to. FreeBSD already comes with a tightly integrated and very secure userland. Use the best tool for the job.. The Linux kernel is great.. The FreeBSD kernel is great.. If you need GNU/Linux userland functionality either use GNU/Linux or simply use a native FreeBSD version of those tools on a native FreeBSD system. If you need FreeBSD functionality use a userland designed and optimized specifically for it instead of trying to hammer a foreign kludge on top of it..
Wasted effort that would have been better spent on something useful.
Bruce, Microsoft contributed the SILK codec used in Skype to the Opus project and released any related patents royalty free. I would have a hard time trusting MS if they told me the sky was blue, but they basically made the low bitrate capability of Opus legally doable.
As for those who are posting their scepticism about the opus codec's quality, the IETF standardised Opus as RFC 6716 and is making it a mandatory to implement codec for WebRTC based on it's proven performance at every applicable bitrate.
For quality comparison info:
http://opus-codec.org/comparison/
RFC 6716:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716
I got mine in the middle of last month from Element14. It arrived 3 days after I ordered it and they said it would take weeks.
I ran it for a couple of weeks with raspbian as a print server and last night I replaced my old TV connected media PC that ran XBMC with the Pi running OpenELEC. The media files are stored on a FreeBSD server in my basement and the Pi accesses them through an NFS mount. Works great for everything so far, though the interface is a bit more laggy than the old media PC. It's still very usable and for the power savings over that old P4 machine it replaced I'll deal with the minor lag.
I have several SDHC cards with different config images on them (print server, XBMC, etc).. It's nice to have a little low power device which can change into a completely new machine by simply swapping a little SD card.
I have an Asus ProArt PA246Q which is the predecessor of the linked monitor, and I've been nothing but thrilled with it.
Mine is very much designed for color accuracy and graphics work; the bezel even has ruler marks along the edges of the screen.
No issues playing games or video, and the color capability is outstanding.
I purposefully bought this monitor for the color accuracy and the aspect ratio,,
1920x1200.. It was a perfect replacement for my 21" 4:3 montior as the screen is the same height, just wider than the 21".
I bought mine for $480 new, which was quite a premium over similar 16:9 monitors.. But, 16:10 (8:5) aspect ratio matters to me because I want to do work on my computer, not just watch movies, and I voted with my wallet.
That's too complicated.. I typically use a short phrase of common words (usually 18-25 characters long) with misplaced numbers, capitalization, and punctuation. I've run them through password checkers that take dictionary attacks into consideration and even at 1 trillion guesses per second they average out to requiring about 4 quintillion years to break.. Since that is FAR longer than the age of the universe, I'm not too worried about it. It's also much easier to remember and type in a short phrase than to deal with a 128 character monster of a password.
Is that the IETF WebRTC draft mandates the Opus audio codec for all clients..
http://www.opus-codec.org/
From:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-rtcweb-audio-01
3. Codec Requirements
To ensure a baseline level of interoperability between WebRTC
clients, a minimum set of required codecs are specified below. While
this section specifies the codecs that will be mandated for all
WebRTC client implementations, it leaves the question of supporting
additional codecs to the will of the implementer.
WebRTC clients are REQUIRED to implement the following audio codecs.
o Opus [RFC6716], with any ptime value up to 120 ms
"X-plane is a cross-platform flight simulator app, notably the only serious one that supports Mac OSX and Linux."
And here I've been using http://flightgear.org/ all this time. I thought I was using a serious, free, GPL open-source flight simulator that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.. I'm glad this slashdot post came up to tell me I was wrong.
Dude charges for X-plane.. When you decide to charge for software you accept all the financial responsibility for defending it against litigation. Welcome to it.
Your install has issues..
Every Linux machine I own can decode ALAC just fine..
It's an open format.
I think that noise is something in the hall resonating or something. It might be worth downloading the tracks for that composition and see if it's most dominant in one mic and attenuating that track a bit to reduce the effect.
The score sounds great to me, but I agree that noise is bothersome.
The beauty of this project is that not only are the final mixes released and available for free, but so are the original master tracks. You have the option of using the Musopen supplied mixes, or you can completely remix and remaster the composition as you see fit. In fact, I might just load that one into Ardour and give it a shot.
http://ardour.org/
I've been hard pressed to find anything I can't do with it.
It's GPL so if there is something you can't live without, write it and contribute!
without a commitment to support Linux at release. I don't run Windows, and hoping to use wine as a kludge isn't something I'm willing to pay for.
I understand the significance to the digital media market. I do not see any significant contribution to the writing, performance, or recording of music.