Recent Comments

Yeah, that's the thing - I'm not sure how many of those things the watch is gonna do without the phone in proximity.

Enable closed captions. They are there.

Small bug when I added "-" to the list of allowed characters in a URL for a title. Should be fixed now.

Going running with a 5" smart phone is quite annoying.

Let us make it shorter. Going running [...] is quite annoying.

The question makes no sense. The question you should be asking is "is there any reason to prefer btrfs", and the answer is, at this time, no. ZFS is not "getting there", it is THERE. Has been for a while. Super stable. btrfs is still very much in development. A very slow development.

If you really, really, really must insist on the question as framed, here are some reasons:
* I do not believe btrfs has as yet any counterpart to raidz, raidz2, or raidz3
* snapshots are handled in a very clumsy manner in btrfs, and very succinctly in ZFS
* ZFS has no fsck because by design it doesn't need one. btrfs needs fsck and has only a limited version as yet.
* ZFS filesets are much more versatile than btrfs subvolumes.
* Creation and destruction of ZFS filesets is essentially instantaneous. As I remember it, btrfs like ext2/3/4, etc, is emphatically not.
* Many, many more reasons.

> So... They think there is a market for a watch. Interesting.

The market for a watch exists, yes.

Going running with a 5" smart phone is quite annoying. Having an unobtrusive watch which does GPS, timing and logging, pulse monitoring, SMS, NFC for small purchases, music, etc. which is fully interoperable with the rest of your mobile devices will be a big thing for a lot of people.

Lots and lots of young people go out running or cycling and have the disposable cash. I know a number of non-geeks who want one of these watches badly.

That short anime is most impressive. Sub for it would be nice for those of us who don't understand Japanese :)

Which is how identification systems work. Register within the system something the user has, knows or is, then match that information to identify them.

What happens in the future when they have enough people on record to identify them in other areas? Compare voice prints against recorded phone calls to match exactly who is speaking perhaps?

Fixed.

Because anybody who is serious about giving a good talk will be prepared, and in this case being prepared means having the necessary video output adapter.

I agree. There's one comment above that's currently at -1, Troll, and it's not clear why. The commenter made a perfectly valid point about getting Hackintoshes working possibly being a colossal waste of time and money. Maybe it rubbed some weak-minded Hackintosh lover in some way, but that's no reason for the commenter to be punished and a good comment unnecessarily censored.

zfsonlinux.. The "actual" ZFS Linux implementation requires a kernel module. There's a more widely distributed FUSE module, but that one is buggy, and I don't recommend it's use. Check out zfsonlinux.org they should have install instructions for your flavor of Linux. For instance: Ubuntu PPA. It went extremely smoothly for me.

Thanks for all the kind words. I think we can keep doing this for another while or so. But sooner or later we'll run out of distros! Trying to avoid the big guns and the "Ubuntu plus WM plus theme" distros here.

Anyway, it's been fun for me to explore so let's see what else we can discover here.

Some other articles have stated the system needs a claimed ID or the caller's phone number to help narrow the list of records, then does verification of the voice against the "voiceprint" on record. I don't think comparing the caller's voice over thousands of records is particularly efficient for this application (NSA may be a different story)

For the record, no one can get to this thread now, because while this URL is currently

http://pipedot.org/story/2014-09-12/stanford-engineer-aims-to-connect-the-world-with-antsized-radios

the current front page points to
http://pipedot.org/story/2014-09-12/stanford-engineer-aims-to-connect-the-world-with-ant-sized-radios

which results in

"story not found - date [2014-09-12] title [stanford-engineer-aims-to-connect-the-world-with-ant-sized-radios]

Well, I guess it's simpler than using TOR. ;)

you forgot OpenSSL of heartbleed fame ;-)

• Samsung is making fun of the streaming problems Apple had on a new Youtube video called It Doesn't Take a Genius.

Seriously embarrassing. Heads should roll.

• The Telegraph is predicting that AndroidWear will come to quickly dominate the lackluster Apple Watch.

So... They think there is a market for a watch. Interesting.

• Macworld Magazine, the venerable journal that has covered Apple since 1984, is shutting its doors.

Nobody cares.

• The Apple store crashed during preorders for the iphone 6 (OK, we could construe that as good news)

Yeah, you could.

• The Register has panned the Apple Watch as "nothing more than digital perfume" and concludes gadget-mania is over.

What an apt description. Because perfume is so unpopular.

• Most damning is this post making the rounds on Google Plus, telling iphone 6 users: welcome to 2012! If you need help with your iphone 6 features, just ask an Android user: we've had this stuff for years.

As usual, Apple isn't doing anything new. They're just doing it well. And taking a slice of the pie while they're at it.

Please remain calm while your machine is assimilated

I like this distro already.

Was that dedicated case that turns an iPhone into the French "non" before or after Jobs?

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3017158/why-apples-iphone-5c-case-is-pure-trash

I think it was an early indication of the sloppiness and inattention to detail that marks the Tim "SUPPLY CHAIN" Cook era.

AC and entropy, thanks so much! I haven't used either file system but that seems like very good info to have. I wonder if either of them are doable on a VPS? Last time I tried something like that I needed FUSE to be enabled by the host.

So this isn't completely abstract, here are a couple examples:

BTR: btrfs subvolume snapshot /tank/subvolume /tank/snapshots/subvolume/20140721 ... 75 characters
ZFS: zfs snapshot tank/subvolume@20140721 ... 36 characters.

Plus you have to maintain a separate directory to manage snapshots... As snapshots grow to hundreds, or thousands your mount screen becomes a worthless jumble of crap. Fundamentally snapshots are treated as peers with filesystems in btrfs, and I believe this is absolutely incorrect. Also apparently not only are a bunch of things required to be mounted(subvolumes) BTRFS pretends it can't figure out how to mount a full volume without playing around in fstab for each things I create. In short it mounts what I don't want mounted, and doesn't mount what I do.

Compression?
BTR: you go into fstab, which is apparently mandatory(really?) and set compress=lzo.
ZFS: zfs set compression=on tank/textfiles

For a use case involving ZVOLs(block devices) it's very simple, in ZFS it's possible:
zfs create -V 20G tank/vm/pgserver0
In BTR? It's impossible. You're dealing with files in a filesystem which if you've ever benchmarked is tragically underpowered. Personally I think this is the first thing BTRFS should have implemented but perhaps not as many people use VMs or iSCSI? To me those are critically important.

Absolutely! I don't know how long he can keep this up, but so far Distro Friday has been great.

Because ZFS does those things, btrfs will have to add them, or die (well, receive less marketshare). Woo competition! I win! You win! We all win!

I 100% agree with you on the snapshots and syntax thing though.

I respectfully suggest that Pipedot reconsider its current moderation settings. Many of the comments above have gone in and out of existence (back and forth) over the last few days as people modded them up and down. None of them are bad enough to warrant being "disappeared". This is basically ALWAYS the case on Pipedot articles. There are few worthless posts here.

I suggest the disappearance threshold be lowered to -2 or -3, to avoid giving disappearance power to a single registered user.

btrfs doesn't have anywhere near the same featureset as ZFS. Here's a few examples:
ZVOLs for virtual machines. I extensively run VMs under Linux, they all need a block device(ideal) for their disk IO performance. ZVOL
is perfect, add in easy ZFS replication and I can back up virtual machines every day offsite, with absolutely no service interruption. BTRFS
is ages behind in this category.

The 'linuxey' syntax of btrfs is cute and all..but exactly why are my snapshots mounted, and read-write? I keep A LOT of snapshots, and having my mount tab polluted by thousands of entries not to mention users being able to write to the things?

Also I found the syntax of ZFS completely intuitive. tank/movies is my movies filesystem, tank/movies@20140701 is my 2014-07-01 snapshot of movies. All commands reference snapshots as a clear subcategory of it's parent filesystem. If I -r recursively remove a snapshot, I can take out a bunch of depending snapshots wihtout screwing around with them individually.

In short, ZFS naturally seems to work like I do... In my opinion BTRFS should mimic the syntax instead of going it's own way, and differentiate in the implementaiton.

Jobs would never have allowed a protruding camera bezel that makes the entire phone wobble when placed flat on a desk.

That was my favorite part. :) You don't see that word used..... every day!

I too appreciate this feature. I know basically nothing about Slackware, so didn't feel qualified to comment, but I enjoyed this.

Now please get back to the KDE distros as the spaghetti monster intended!

In the company where I was previously working, we were only 2 guys without a smartphone. The funny point is that we were also the only 2 guys in charge of electronic design / low level programing with smartphone/tablet SoCs :-) We had absolutely no interest in such devices.
Fortuitously, we also happened to have the exact same model of basic Nokia dumbphone :-)

Honestly, from the linked article it sounds as if their entire development and, more importantly, testing model is a complete mess. I wouldn't feel comfortable trusting anything this application does.

First TrueCrypt and now this. Why are the important open source crypto teams so squirrelly?

Distro Friday is my favorite pipedot feature. It's nice to see what is out there, and what other people think about when computing.

agreed

Why should I carry with me another part that can get lost or fail to work, and is just an additional hassle even if working correctly, if I can just use a laptop with the needed connector built in?

Really? Is Chromebook really that much of a factor? I thought most people were still buying them in the $200 variety to replace lower end netbooks (which disappeared goddamit), not really the higher end Pixel stuff or even the midrange where Windows is still the only choice...

I think the triumph of the web and the lack of compelling new CPU-hungry applications, combined with the unquestioned lousiness of Win8, is what's doomed the market there...

those damn hyphens will be the death of us all...

...erm...my mistake...Sun had nothing to do with btrfs. I misread the wiki article many moons ago.

Sorry this is off topic, but the AntRadio story below seems to have a bad link now?

I can still get to the story with

http://pipedot.org/story/2014-09-12/stanford-engineer-aims-to-connect-the-world-with-antsized-radios

but the current front page points to
http://pipedot.org/story/2014-09-12/stanford-engineer-aims-to-connect-the-world-with-ant-sized-radios

which results in

"story not found - date [2014-09-12] title [stanford-engineer-aims-to-connect-the-world-with-ant-sized-radios]

Back on topic, I'm happy to know that ZFS is finally getting there, but is there any reason I wouldn't use BTRFS instead?

I always thought btrfs was the answer (also brought to you by Sun) for the same feature-set as ZFS, but in a linuxy way.

I hail all progress made on this front. I dinked around with running a failover ZFS before, and I can say it is pretty awesome stuff (as is btrfs).

Competition in the filesystem field is slow going (as it should be), but fierce. That's the ways I's likes it.

I had a bunch of questions, and it turns out you answered them all within the post. Dependencies? check. Third party apps? check. Desktop or server? check. Window manager/interface? check. There's really nothing I even feel compelled to ask anymore.

There was some concern previously about how much each type of post was being read. Friday Distro is a winner, and wanted to throw that out there. Nice work, we appreciate it even if an article doesn't generate a bunch of commentary.

This reminds me an awful lot of the Localizers from A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.

Right, similar to callerID routing you based on your home phone number.

I definitely switched to vim several months ago and feel so much better, give it a bit of time and you'll see me join the Mutt crowd soon enough :-)

Looks like an additional system for which if it fails the customer identification would fall back to the existing talk-to-a-human-who-can-see-your-records method

Besides being suddenly very slow, it is now saving *all* drafts as encrypted

okay, in all honesty, it's highly likely that the slowness is because it is saving all the drafts and that the mail I was working on had several embedded figures making it quite heavy in size.

Still, this shouldn't happen. I disabled all the checkbox and I'm not even using IMAP, so not a chance that the draft could leak to a distant server.

OK, you're right. But it /did/ cost them, in a way. While Microsoft was continuing to be jerks about their OS and while they were simultaneously ruining it in the form of Win8, Google was able to build ChromeOS and OEMs were able to deliver decent quality laptops running it for no cost. Guess which segment is the fastest growing sector in the laptop market these days?

So Microsoft didn't stop being evil, but that decision hurt them strategically, as it opened up the door to a competitor that has made real inroads into markets they previously considered theirs alone.

Nelson: ha ha!

Welcome back! It's nice on the CLI mail reader front. I've never left it. If you need help with Mutt I can highly recommend my popular Woodnotes Guide to the Mutt Email Client (PDF, HTML versions). http://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/198-Woodnotes-Guide-to-the-Mutt-Email-Client.html It gets pretty good reviews.

The ad is also somewhat in bad taste. I'm not a fan of attack ads, even when they are successfully funny ("I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" was somewhat entertaining). Not a cool move, Sammy.

Cool, thanks for the reply. I was always afraid I'd end up using a console mail reader again some day. :)

Nobody understands the cloud!

Probably the best quote from that Apple advertisement. :)

FTFY

Minor disagreement -- price CANNOT be a factor because MS has managed to continue "invisibly" bundling the cost of Windows licenses in 99.82324% of PC sales. It has never been a level playing field and is still not a level playing field.

If people could choose a fully functional desktop with Windows for $500 versus the same fully functional desktop with Linux for $350, you're damn right price would be a factor. But it is NEVER that clear due to the continued OEM bundling/coercion force of Microsoft.

Only system builders get to see the economics of this first-hand when they have to decide whether to spring for a Windows license (and which one).

In short, Microsoft didn't stop being evil just because Google and Apple started.

will the system be able to distinguish between his voice and mine? I have a hard time distinguishing between my sisters' voices on the phone, and my voice printing system has several orders of magnitude more R&D than this project (so far).

Will "I had a cold and couldn't authenticate" become a popular excuse for missing deadlines with the ATO?