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Submission + - Why Apple Won't Adopt A Wireless Charging Standard (computerworld.com)

Lucas123 writes: As the battle for mobile dominance continues among three wireless charging standards, with many smartphone and wearable makers having already chosen sides, Apple continues to sit on the sideline. While the new Apple Watch uses a tightly coupled magnetic inductive wireless charging technology, it still requires a cable. The only advantage is that no port is required, allowing the watch case to remain sealed and water resistant. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, however, remain without any form of wireless charging, either tightly coupled inductive or more loosely coupled resonant charging. Over the past few years, Apple has filed patents on its own flavor of wireless charging, a "near field" or resonant technology, but no products have as yet come to market. If and when it does select a technology, it will likely be its own proprietary specification, which ensures accessory makers will have to pay royalties to use it.

Submission + - POSIX Standards Body Deeply Flawed (sdtimes.com) 1

bobo the hobo writes: "This all began with Ken Thompson. The original Unix geek, Thompson was once asked if he he’d change anything about Unix if he had to do it over again. His response was that he’d spell the flag “O_CREAT” “O_CREATE”. This admission inspired Spiegelmock, and he began a lengthy journey into the heart of Unix. ...
And this is where Spiegelmock encountered the silliness that is now the POSIX standards process. First, he was stymied by ridiculously invasive registration processes built with extremely old software. Then he was rebuked by the utterly fragile PHP website behind it. Finally, he washed ashore on a semi-functioning page that gave him some of the names of the folks associated with the POSIX standard and the Austin Common Standards Revision Group."

Comment Re:Photos being separated (Score 5, Interesting) 146

1) Google+ is probably not for friends, but for interesting people/companies/organizations/topics who you want to follow.

2) You can easily post a link which aggregates well with Facebook (this is probably the social network for people like friends and family, who you really don't want to follow, but only want to brag to about what you just ate and how cool your new mobile phone is).

Comment Re:One strike (Score 1) 248

I can be faster, and it is faster. At least my Windows XP that I need for some exotic old applications runs noticeably faster than from what I can remember on real hardware. Why can it be so? Because a virtual machine does not have that much hardware/devices like a real box. It can also optimize I/O of any kind with intelligent buffering of well-known access patterns (I don't know if it does it, but why else would vbox ask you what system you want to install in a given virtual machine?).

Comment Re:Will it run my databases and dev tools? (Score 1) 393

Just because you are some software vendors' bitch, it does not mean that other systems not running it are not professional.

When you have your dumb Windows-based utilities, use Windows. What problem do you have with it? I also use Windows XP (32 bit) in Virtualbox, because I need some crappy old software bundled to an old USB hardware, that is all not supported anymore, but my main system is still FreeBSD/amd64.

Comment Re:The basic problem that linux and the BSDs have (Score 1) 393

Find me something that competes with the features and enterprise support of Exchange, Office, Lync, Sharepoint, Outlook ... that runs on Linux.

Unfortunately, I don't know any of these utilties except "Office" which is easily replaced by LibreOffice. The fact that I don't know them lies in the nature that don't solve anything of value for me. Maybe I am working differently from others. Instead of telling me product names, tell me what you do (I also don't want to know what you do with the products; it is wrong to describe your problems by providing me wrong approaches for solutions). There are plenty of solutions that can be used and you can also develop some for yourself for your special purpose.

What I need more is a reasonable terminal application, Xmonad as a desktop (UTF-8 support), easy integration of gnupg into a mailclient, I need ssh, tmux, text-based vim, a text-based IRC client, a full compiler suite which is ready-to-use. I also need inspection tools for all my system components. And I need a reasonable way to manage time (UTC), so when I travel around the world, I just setup the timezone and not the time itself.

And now tell me, I should install CygWin, because I don't know this poorly emulated Windows crapability layer.

Comment Re:Unlikely (Score 1) 393

Take a look at FreeBSD Gnome, for example. I am sure that their patches to make Gnome portable again flow back upstream.

When someone develops an desktop environment that does not restrict users to Linux, you should expect from them to make the system portable. The work to make it run should be minimal.

Wayland is being ported to FreeBSD, too. It is a bit useless though, because of Linuxisms in libinput and Weston.

OpenSSH is portable. This is the difference between Linux and BSD developers. BSD developers stick to the Unix concepts and portability has a high value here. Linux developers invent (mostly already existing) solutions by themselves, multiple times, multiple times in a wrong way and mostly for themselves, because... most Unices/BSDs already have the solutions for the problems and why should they accept something that has to be ported with a lot of effort? It is only being done with things that are worth to port.

Comment Re:Reboot for Systemd (Score 1) 117

*waits for Systemd flamewar to break out*

Ok, I'll try...

Of course, as long as the kernel is patching itself, systemd will take over the kernel's role and keep your system running. Until next year, then the kernel won't get patches anymore, because systemd will fork it's own kernel service systemd-kerneld which will make Linux standalone kernel irrelevant.

Comment Re:My FreeBSD Report: Four Months In (Score 5, Informative) 471

FreeBSD user here since over a decade. Welcome.

You haven't seen FreeBSD crash? It only means that you haven't seen enough, yet. FreeBSD is a great system and I recommend it to everyone who can manage it, but you don't need to mention stability as a feature, because it is not the highlight about FreeBSD. You don't install a system and watch how stable it is, but how useful it is (for you and your special requirements).

The best thing about FreeBSD are the FreeBSD Ports and how much commitment there is to make every possible application work on the system. You have basically far more possibilities and options than on Linux distributions thanks to the great job they are doing on this system.

A second point is that it is easier to feel comfortable on the system, because the whole thing is consistent and easy to understand, provided you take some time and learn about the concepts.

Comment Re: UFS vs ZFS (Score 1) 75

You are partially right. I miss the good old dump/restore tools for ZFS, but zfs send/receive do their job (in a limited fashion) well.

I see ZFS as the best option to run larger systems. I've had some problems with it when it was still experimental on FreeBSD, but at the moment it is running fine. I had to replace 2 faulty drives recently. It was painless and has not cost me any bit of lost data. I cannot complain, because there is one administrative problem less that I have to care about.

Comment Re: UFS vs ZFS (Score 1) 75

It is not the task of a filesystem to recover data, but to keep the data as consistent as possible. UFS does not have any protections against bit rot or against hardware failures, so you'll never know if data is broken.

Data recovery is done with backups (which you'll always have, if the data is important for you). There is no way around it.

How exactly does fsck help, if it shows structural inconsistencies to you? It says "blabla... CLEAR [y/n]?" and when you press "y" something is lost and when you say "n"... the filesystem is still broken. And second thing is that when data is gone, it is gone on UFS and if you cannot describe (reliably!) in 5 lines on a display what is gone/affected, the user should always assume that a restore from backup is needed. And how exactly will UFS know if/what data is gone when it even cannot check its consistency? When you are lucky, you'll notice that libc is gone right after a reboot. When have bad luck, your system will notice a lot later that you valuable data is gone and your backups have been already overwritten because the backup tapes/disks are reused after a month or so.

Comment Re: UFS vs ZFS (Score 1) 75

ZFS has got "self-healing" and does not need fsck. It will probably destroy more data while a user cannot give hints with "y" or "n" during self-healing, but the filesystem will become stable and available. ZFS can of course become unrecoverable, like UFS can be un-fsck-able, because essential meta data might have become destroyed. You'll always need backups for important filesystems, no matter if it is UFS or ZFS, everything can get FUBAR.

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