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posted by
LaminatorX
on Monday October 20 2014, @07:30AM
from the ought-to-be-enough-for-anybody dept.
from the ought-to-be-enough-for-anybody dept.
In a recent engadget article, Jon Fingas points out the following:
If you're planning to snag the new Mac mini and load it up with aftermarket memory, you may want to reconsider your strategy. Macminicolo owner Brian Stucki (among others) has discovered that the RAM in Apple's latest tiny desktop isn't upgradable, much as you'd expect with the company's laptops and the 21-inch iMac.
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You Can't Upgrade the New Mac Mini's RAM
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Agnes' Law:
Almost everything in life is easier to get into than out of.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 20 2014, @12:23PM
==http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5845245&cid=48176317
by goruka (1721094) on Saturday October 18, 2014
Disclaimer: I wrote plenty of open source audio apps for linux, even worked with professional audio hardware with embedded linux.
Pulseaudio is just another victim of the attitude from the linux kernel developers of kicking a problem to userland when they should really be solving it. Userspace audio mixers are OK for many applications, such as a video player, desktop sounds, listening to mp3s, etc. as long as such applications don't need low latency. If you need videogames, pro-audio stuff, or even real-time video editing you need low latency and here is the problem happens. You need somehow a way to ensure that the low latency audio thread gets notification quickly and gets priority in the scheduler (because the buffers are small), while the regular latency audio just needs to accumulate more data into buffers.
But the problem is, that you have only one DAC, and different streams might request different configuration parameters, such as bit depth, sampling rate, channels, etc. In any serious OS, the kernel will open a stream with the maximum settings for real-time, and will ensure it gets the needed attention, while it mixes and resamples the audio that comes from the regular OS sound buffers over it. Linux kernel developers are against this, and the justification is that resampling should not happen in the kernel. As a result, asks user space to solve the problem. Pulseaudio is an attempt to solve that problem, and does what the kernel should be doing in userspace, but unfortunately it just doesn't work very well. Linux is not a "real time" OS and scheduling can still fuck you your user-space audio.
Back in the day, OSS handled this perfectly, but when it was replaced by ALSA (an extremely bloated and over-designed API and driver architecture) hell began, so please don't blame PulseAudio for this, this is purely the fault of kernel developers.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday October 20 2014, @12:42PM
Wasn't ALSA created to solve some features missing in OSS?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 20 2014, @02:34PM
==https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pro_Audio
Modern Linux systems are more than capable of supporting your (semi-)professional audio needs. Latencies of 5ms down to even as low as 1ms can be achieved with good hardware and proper configuration.
==https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/OSS
The Open Sound System (or OSS) is an alternative sound architecture for Unix-like and POSIX-compatible systems. OSS version 3 was the original sound system for Linux, but was superseded by the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (or ALSA) in 2002 when OSS version 4 became proprietary software. OSSv4 became free software again in 2007 when 4Front Technologies released its source code and provided it under the GPL license.
My inference, from reading the above pages: the OSS project shot themselves in the foot by going proprietary and closing up the source code. So ALSA took over from that point and OSS was abandoned by the community. the owners of OSS (4Front Technologies) realised their mistake a few years down the track an re-released the source code and provided it under the GPL license.
But it was too little too late, the OSS project had lost its goodwill and Linux userland had moved on. Also, the OSS project had lost a lot of technical ground during the proprietary years--such as under-developed USB support--and now they are playing catch up.
To come back to life, the OSS project needs a fresh injection of driver and system developers to bring it up to date with modern Linux operating systems. This seems unlikely, because just about all the people who drive the direction of Linux development are simply not fanatical about the worlds of audiophiles, pro audio, pro video, gaming.
So there we have the ultimate truth about 'Linux on the desktop'; it will never happen for a particular cross-section of serious computer users such as 'audiophiles, pro audio, pro video, gaming'; for system administration, business and government applications, and geeks who love hacking ones and zeros as an exercise in itself, 'Linux on the desktop' has arrived so take full advantage of it and let go of your shackles to Microsoft and Apple ASAP.
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P.S. -- The post which started this sub-topic was modded down to 'minus 1' by some lovely gentleman, so you may not see it.
If you want to read it, go here: ==http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=4454&cid=107787