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Wow. As a long time Obj-C lover, that makes me happy.

I imagine it will be short lived, as Swift eats away at Obj-C. It will be interesting to see how that trends.

And the "homogenizing all distros by adopting systemd" argument in the article is bull. Weren't distros previously "homogenized" by running on sysvinit?

Homogenising thanks to systemd is a major point in systemd proponents arguments!

Should have been a big thin cuff with a huge integrated display panel, like Space Ghost's armbands or the Genie's armband shackles in Aladdin. They would have sucked up all the rest of the world's money.

This big square chunky thing is just terrible. A Playskool "My First iWatch" at best.

I wonder if Motorola has time to turn things around.

[FYI my last CAPTCHA here was wrong ("forty four thousand seven hundred and eighty as digits" is not accepting 44780) ]

Pretty much exactly that. I understand Oracle is business and is out to make money, and they do databases really well, but, "It's a trap!"

They get you in and locked into their stack of products then there's no getting out and they just suck the money and life right out of you all kinds of gotchas left and right.

That was really good. I suggest you swap that in as the summary for the article up top. :)

I'm guilty of NRTFA but I don't understand how one can call-everything-Windows and mean it without rewriting EVERYTHING that isn't i386 desktop and server. It just seems like something that is Not Going To Happen by definition. It's taken them over 20 years to keep rewriting Win 3.x and NT into something usable (and then breaking it again) so I don't really see how they're going to squeeze it down to these other platforms they've managed to screw up so badly. That's why I said it sounded like more-of-the-same Ballmer idiocy.

Yes? No? Or will Apple finally give the higher ground to Android

"they're in for a huge world of pain"

There are swaths of the hardcore masochist (Gentoo is too easy) Linux userbase who would choose zafiro17nux solely because of that claim. :)

OK, so if I want to avoid using systemd in my crappy, personal distro with 3 users, that's one thing. But what I really want is for the big guns to stop packaging systemd so I like their product more. Big distinction.

Anybody who wants to use zafiro17nux as their primary distro might not have to deal with systemd, but they're in for a huge world of pain otherwise.

I agree the Moto 360 is the better looking timepiece. But it's been destroyed in the press for using an old SoC and having crappy battery life - two definite nails in its coffin.

Still, it's pretty funny when Motorola's design guys outdo Apple. Somewhere out there, Steve Jobs is tossing and turning in his grave. "Cook, you putz! I'll haunt you, goddammit!"

Except ... Ballmer's gone. This is probably an effort to undo a lot of the mistakes made under Ballmer's watch, like the proliferation of incompatible versions of things with the name Windows splattered over the top, hoping name recognition makes up for crappy design, engineering, and functionality.

Nadella was handed a royal bag of shit, you have to admit. Consolidating the mess is a worthy endeavor but only if he can truly consolidate it from an engineering/code perspective instead of just relying on snappy marketing. Ballmer should be punished to wear a "Plays for Sure" t-shirt at every basketball game he attends, as punishment for the debacle that was seen in that marketing ploy. The t-shirt should be colored poop brown, like a Zune - another debacle. And on the back should be the words "I squirt," like the verb his team came up with for transferring pictures or music from one zune to another.

Good luck, Nadella. Remember, if you light the bag of poop on fire, you'll have to drop it when it burns your hands and then squish it out with your shoe to put out the flames.

"Just do it then" is pretty much the motto of open source as far as I'm concerned. What's with all these articles reacting to systemd and discussing what should or shouldn't be done with linux, as if it were a monolothic entity? If you want to build a server focused distro without systemd, just do it. I'll keep using arch.

And the "homogenizing all distros by adopting systemd" argument in the article is bull. Weren't distros previously "homogenized" by running on sysvinit?

This sounds exactly like Ballmer Business as Usual -- all he knows how to do is brand things "Windows" and hope magic will happen. It's ALL he's managed to do for 30 years.

Of COURSE consumers think of "Windows" as one thing already; it's what's lead to all their troubles. They were a lot better off when WinCE really did run Windows programs.

I saw this on Slashdot the other day and his position was pretty soundly dismantled in the comments there. We've already been through this plenty of times, and we keep coming back to the astounding realization that while servers require a robust operating system core, desktops require a robust operating system core.

:)

Whether systemd is an atrocity or not has exactly no bearing on a misguided notion of splitting up OS development.

Original (OG) AC here, and I guess I'm happy that it's actually Apple who blew it. Their new not-iWatch is butt-ugly compared to the elegance of the Moto 360. It's a piece of wrist luggage that Jobs would have NEVER EVER let out the door. (And I had no respect for Jobs.)

Void Linux dropped systemd support in favor of Runit. Systemd can be optionally used but Runit has become the default init system. Runit aims to be a SysVinit replacement that runs on Linux and other BSD/OSX/Solaris platforms.

YES! we need more distros like this.

I don't know the kernel configuration well enough (or at all), but my understanding was that having a Linux kernel with specific custom configurations (compilation flags, modules, scheduling policy, file system, minimum amount of necessary drivers and so on) was exactly the sysadmin's job (i.e. the guy in charge of the server is supposed to know better).

Besides, there are so many different servers out there, I fail to understand how one Linux with minimal packaging could fit them all. I understand the idea of stripping the repositories from all the unnecessary desktop-related packages, but it can't be just about that, is it ?

There's quite a bit more to his argument than these two paragraphs so read on before pointing out that Linux distros are already mostly divided into server and desktop focuses.

That's one of the many reasons I like pipedot. You're supposed to read TFA :-)

That's insightful. Interesting how many stories involve Oracle's involvement being like the kiss of death. I know a good business manager who worked for Oracle at one point and he said even on that front, 'never again.' These high power manager/CEOs forget that their own personalities translate into corporate culture and eventually business practices. And if they're not careful, those practices can come back to haunt them.

I really miss Sun. I even bought StarOffice over OpenOffice to support the company that was making an office suite available for Linux and then going on to support the users. Oracle seems cold and distant and clueless and rather deaf to the concerns of its users.

There is enough pushback to systemd to warrant a fork of a major distribution that excises systemd and the GNOME dependencies, while providing a more traditional and stable server platform that has no hint of desktop support. No time need be wasted managing the hundreds upon hundreds of desktop packages present in the distro tree, no need to include massive numbers of desktop peripheral and graphical drivers (RHEL 6.3 ships with 57 xorg drivers, for instance).

There's also the matter of security. The security concerns for a desktop are vastly different than those for a server -- and server security concerns are vastly different among servers, depending on what each server is doing. However, it's safe to say that protecting against malware delivered by clicking through a malicious Web page is not high on the list of possible threats for a Memcached server.

I'm a Java developer for internal applications. There's nothing wrong with the language itself, but it's on its way out. Unfortunately there is too much instability when it comes to what people THINK Oracle is going to do with it. My corp. moved to java over a decade ago because it was free, available, cross platform and easy to learn. It looked like it would be supported well into the future. Then Oracle bought out Sun and now there's speculation that Oracle wants to split Java into "paid for" and "free" meaning there's a good chance anyone not paying for it are going to end up with an incomparable poorly supported version. Those doing the major development, like my company, will be forced into paying tens of thousands a year in licensing only to have to deal with supporting the people using our software under the "free" version. There's also the fear that Oracle will do what they do with their other products and split things out into separate modules with confusing license agreements. You'll end up needing everything and the licensing will be unclear. Make one bad decision, or include an unlicensed module you have access to, but aren't paying for, and Oracle will sue you into oblivion for licensing violations.

So of course with that expectation, we're planning for the worse case and have recently started training developers in several different languages to try and find one that might be a suitable replacement going forward. Ruby, Python and R our our top three choices at the moment. We're also looking at how difficult it'll be to provide software through web applications.

Who knows what Microsoft is cooking up? I'm sure the plan is nebulous in all but a few of the Windows team leaders. One thing that has hurt Windows is that the world of computing has been changing faster than they can keep up. The original Windows fulfilled a serious need...providing a simple GUI was absolutely necessary in order to get a computer on everyone's desk in the office. Now, what is the need to be met? I believe, again, the interface is where the opportunity lies. Someone saw this as well, and that person or persons tried to think outside of the box when Metro was designed, but many of a computer's uses do not fit into the tile paradigm.

Of course. There is no other other phone that would know how to talk to it. It would be nice if there were open standards for this sort of thing, but perhaps that will happen in time.

Is there a single smart watch on the market or on the horizon that can interface with any old smartphone. If so, what does it/would it do? If not, why did you make this comment?

Today's PCs could more or less do that today if the BIOS was well engineered. I don't know exactly what the factory BIOS is doing for all that time, but it certainly isn't just what is needed to bring the system up.

I have seen Coreboot systems (then LinuxBIOS) come up to a single user mode shell in 3 seconds from power-on.

Does it?

Everyone says a newer SOC is more power efficient, and on the face of it, sure, that sounds correct. Moore's law essentially backs this up indirectly, because we can only keep adding processing power if we're keeping power consumption in check. However, we're not talking about generic "moved to a newer process" power efficiency numbers, we're talking about a very specific comparison, between the Moto360 with an OMAP3360 and "everything else" with a Snapdragon 400. Until someone can drop specific power numbers of just the SOC for similar tasks, I'd like everyone to stop parroting that newer SOC would have been more power efficient. If you have proof, then that's awesome, show it, because I think you're right and I'd love to see it, and I can't seem to find those numbers.

A good start might be comparing absolute power numbers from the OMAP3360 and the Snapdragon 400, but I think in this case we might be more concerned about idle power, which isn't always totally obvious in a datasheet.

So iPhones are out of the question...

Opensuse's build service might be similar in that anyone can post, build, and provide packages. But the AUR being its very own repository is neat. I think I like it even more than the suse model. Glad to have learned about it.

Not only are they a "companion", it's an exclusive companion. You can't pair just any old dirty smartphone with this watch...

Looks like it's a companion to the iPhone (5 or above). Sorry, Charlie!

Seems to me battery life is the holy grail here, in the short term. In the long term, a long-lasting watch with lousy apps and software still loses the race. But given the truly abyssmal performance of current hardware, selling a smartwatch that lasts a day or two would be considered huge progress.

Just using a newer SOC would be enough to realize longer battery life through reduced power consumption.

Different AC than above...

So because the battery might only last about a day, Motorola blew it? I'd say they hit it pretty square on for a first generation product. It looks great, but it's got some issues that might cause some folks to say, "I'll wait for round 2." Anyone remember the first iPhone? Not everyone was buying into it, but as time went on, after a few rounds of releases, it became the most recognizable phone out there.

To be fair, if Apple releases a watch today with *objectively* better specifications, then Motorola may have blown it. But based on the state of technology, I do not think that Apple can pull leaps and bounds ahead here, unless they've also developed a new battery chemistry.

that Apple earns its moronic devotion because the rest of the industry is just that bad.

Big Fruit waited at least year after others jumped in on watches and wearables, and yet, once AGAIN, they are poised to lead the way, if their "innovative" version actually works well. The other guys just can't seem to put together products that work well for the no-brainer crowd.

Motorola came SO close to delivering an industry leading smart watch, and yet they blew it -- http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/moto-360-review-beautiful-outside-ugly-inside/

If this were meatspace this would now be an appropriate moment for a brofist or a high five. :p

I have a suspicion that the other distros don't have AUR equivalents because they don't necessarily have as high standards for their users as arch does. Anyone could put anything they want in the package they upload to the AUR, and it's up to the user to verify the PKGBUILD and ensure that he can trust the source. Or even just read the comments. Such reliance on the user's good sense of analysis is not necesarily common outside of arch. I think other distros are content to give you a way to clumsily access user repositories while making sure that you know they in no way support this endeavour. They wouldn't want to integrate user repos the way arch does and then have to deal with clueless users screwing things up and blaming them for it.

https://aur.archlinux.org/

Basically, anyone using archlinux can make a PKGBUILD for a piece of software and upload it into the AUR. The PKGBUILD allows you to install that software with your package manager. So the AUR is this giant repository of software available to all users, where you can find all manners of experimental browsers, patches for various hardware, community projects, etc. There is no need to mess around with PPAs, you just download the software from the AUR (something which can be done from the command line if you have the rigth wrapper), use the PKGBUILD and then install it with your package manager the way you would any piece of software. There's actually wrappers for arch's package manager (the most famous one being yaourt, I'd say) which will search the AUR as well as the offcial repositories when you make a query, allowing you to seemlessly integrate the AUR packages with the official repos. It's not really recommended though since it's important to understand how PKGBUILDs work.

It's a great concept. You can really find anything on the AUR.

No nuclear apocalypse option?

(Ok, Terminator technically counts.)

Errr, no, we're not. IQ is trending upwards. Global literacy rates are improving.

There's an xkcd for everything.

Is there more to your point, or do you just want to feel superior to people with children?

Maybe because he wants to see you again soon.

Maybe your doctor is trying to desensitise you to taking something on a daily basis so that he can progressively addict you to more and more dangerous substances and thus ensure your continued dependence on him and more and more business from you as the side effects of all the things he has you one start to stack up into actual illnesses requiring oh more poisonous chronic medications and more visits to him.

Your points about the pills being a scam seem compelling (though unfortunately uncited), but I see no call for this conspiracy-theory bullshit; ignorance seems far more likely than malevolence.

I'm in the market for a no-smartphone-pairing-required "smartwatch". I don't want to purchase an iWatch, regardless of whether or not it is standalone. I do hope it is however, because that might just be the kick in the pants other manufacturers need to start producing their own!

Yeah, I was also missing some options in this poll.

• My boss: reasonable
• My employees: motivated and skilled
• My co-workers: intelligent
• The software and systems: we write our own or install what we need
• The bureaucracy and administration: moderate, but appropriate
• The workload: I usually leave at 5
• The point of it all: direct, significant impact on financial results of a large company

Quantitative finance is great if you avoid the long hours (and questionable ethics) of an investment bank or hedge fund. (And we're hiring, if you can code and price derivatives.)

My main issues are that I have to get up early and that I can't do other things that I'd prefer even more, like getting work done around the house or playing games. But the work itself is not a negative. Then again, I always looked forward to school too...

Meanwhile, Steven J Vaughan Nichols (SJVN - wow that guy has a long name) has chimed in with his list of Top things he'd like Apple to finally get around to fixing, although they probably won't:

http://www.zdnet.com/iphone-6-four-things-we-need-but-may-not-get-7000033442/

I was glad to see one of the items is itunes. Itunes drives me crazy too, and even though it was somehow magical or revolutionary back in the day it came out, it has gotten gummed up since then, and I hate it you almost have to upgrade your hardware at a certain point, if you want to update or sync a more modern iOS device - that's not cool.

I finally took the leap and moved all my music over to a NAS, and manage it using Clementine, which I really like. See ya later, itunes!

I have been using an android tv box for a few months. It sucks. Get a small pc and use windows or linux.

My in-laws just cut their satellite to save money. I finally managed to talk them into getting a SmartTV, which I ended up paying for because my wife owes them money for something I'm a little bitter about. I digress, I set it up for them over the weekend, Netflix built into the TV.

1) Press Red button on remote labeled Netflix
2) Pick movie/TV show
3) Stop calling me to ask why there's only static on the TV because you put it on channel 5 and the satellite box needs to be on channel 4, or why the VCR isn't playing because you've set the input to the DVD player... Seriously, you were doing this stuff for decades without my help before I married your daughter.

Even if the TV is off, pressing the Netflix button turns the TV on and goes right to Netflix.

For more technically inclined people I recommend getting a "dumb" TV, if you can, with an HDMI port and just plug a PC with wireless keyboard and mouse. I have that setup in my bedroom and it works great, also my wife can't figure out how to use it so I don't have fight with her over the remote. It's getting harder to find good quality TVs that don't have a smart feature now. The new TV in our living room, we just got a month ago, does have a smart TV feature, but when I replace my wife's laptop next year I'll be plugging that in instead. It'll make it a lot easier to watch our downloaded TV shows. The built-in media server client for SmartTVs is really hit or miss and takes a lot of fiddling with to get working. Media Server/Client from PC to PC is a snap, as long as you don't mind using a keyboard and/or mouse instead of a remote to control it. Plus built-in DVD/BlueRay, Netflix and internet. Internet is a nice feature because you can watch a lot of shows, or news in some cases, right from a networks website, which you can't do easily with a SmartTV's crappy built-in basic browser, at least not that I've found.

Maybe that's because the majority of people have never even heard of AUR. For example, I haven't. So what is it, and why is it an advantage?

These aren't "sexy" projects everybody would want to work on, so I guess it's hard to find a maintainer for "GNU rm" unless you pay.

Bad example, given that GNU rm is part of the GNU project (as part of GNU binutils). As general rule, if something has "GNU" in its name, you'll find it at https://gnu.org.

Optometrists and "chiropractors" are both on that fringe between real medicine and complete and utter bullshit. The chiropractors are really only clinging on by the flimsiest of threads...

Meanwhile real doctors push real prescription drugs that are being campaigned at them by pharmaceutical salespeople. No escape I guess.

I agree that arch shouting down the opposition to systemd when they forced it on the users was not their finest hour. To put it mildly.

As a fellow arch user, let's agree that arch users have the advantage on everybody else here with the AUR. I'm surprised no one in any of the other distros has figured out yet what a massive advantage the concept of the AUR is.

This is purely guesswork, I don't read Debian mailing lists or whatever, but I think you're right in that they might be forced in some way.

Many Linux distributions have depended on RedHat or Ubuntu for a long time. If you look at the "base system" source code including file utilities, kernel, various basic daemons, you will see that someone from RedHat or Ubuntu has worked on it or is maintaining it. These aren't "sexy" projects everybody would want to work on, so I guess it's hard to find a maintainer for "GNU rm" unless you pay.

Now RedHat is bringing their agenda on the table. They aren't going to maintain login(1) anymore, because systemd supercedes it. If you are an anti-systemd Linux distributor, you have to maintain login(1) yourself. Why does an unmaintained piece of code cease to work, you may ask, but it's a completely different idiocy.

Anyway, this is all well and doable until you get to more complicated and ever-changing components like udev. Gentoo people have their own udev fork not because they love to code device managers (I'm guessing), but they either fork it or accept systemd. These guys take the risk of chasing behind the Linux kernel team regarding the changes to the udev interface, but others -understandably- may not. Those who don't will switch to systemd sooner or later..

Other dependencies are small potatoes compared to udev. udev manages all devices including the fixed drives and your PCI cards, most of the other daemons do stupid stuff like counting how many people are working on your computer, raising an alarm to all programs when you insert a USB stick etc. A Linux distributor could get away with a mostly-fake systemd package but not with a fake udevd.

Regarding GNOME, you could run it without any senseless daemons or whatever. I've been doing so in an XFCE system which somehow makes use of GNOME daemons. I killed and -x'ed most gnome daemons and some systemd daemons. It surely complains a lot but it still works.

I think both of these are true. Can we split the difference and call it a big bowl of Flintstones chewables in milk?

Likewise, I'm down to a Linux box and a Blu-ray player, both of which run Netflix just fine. I set up a Roku for some friends of mine, and they love it. I almost bought one because I found the near unlimited free channels intriguing.

Is there a reason beyond that the word conjures images of something brown at the bottom of a toilet bowl?