Ummm. Are you saying that the peoples' will is to keep the skies over the White House open to drones of all sorts? Really?

Or are you just looking for any vaguely political story onto which to dump your anti-government bullshit...

Surface RT always felt like Microsoft actually believing the hype that they convinced stupid media outlets to spew. You know, Metro is the future - all apps will be Metro apps because it's so 'modern'. Well, it turned out that for the most part, the web is the future for the kind of apps that made Windows dominant. Metro apps compete with iOS and Android apps - i.e. simple one-screen apps that work well with a touch interface. They do not compete with web apps, and even less with traditional desktop apps - the kind deployed by businesses with decades of resources invested in them.

If Microsoft had realized that in time, they could've made RT support desktop mode, and provided a way to cross-compile WIN32 apps to run on it. And it might have succeeded. But yes, Intel hasn't been asleep, and ARM is no longer as much of a requirement for mobile devices - certainly for tablets sporting large enough batteries. Either way, the Windows desktop and backward compatibility will always be relative resource hogs, but backward compatibility is Windows biggest strength, so may as well build the devices that play to that strength. That may be enough to become relevant in mobile - even if it's not enough to become dominant...

LibreOffice has the potential to be fully cross-platform, and it would seem to me to be to Apple's benefit to make it seriously good. The reason iPhones and iPads were able to take off is that the web (and web standards) made it possible to do most of what you do with a computer without that computer having to run Windows. Macs have benefited from that - as well as the fact that the success of the iThings has accelerated the process.

A successful LibreOffice would be the next step toward making the second biggest use of computers cross-platform. In fact, Microsoft's last best hope for success in mobile lies in the fact that Windows tablets can be bundled with MSOffice. Yes, they're coming out with iOS and Android versions - but that's just a desparation move. The minute Windows mobile devices gain some traction (or the iOS/Android versions outlive their usefulness in some other way), the non-Windows versions will become second-class. But if Libre got really good - and became available (and successful) on mobiles - iOS devices would continue to be able to compete on the merits. You'd think Apple would want to help that happen. Are they still afraid of losing the official MSOffice for the Mac? Google seems to have a difference of opinion about where document processing should happen. Much as a full-featured office suite would make Android laptops a viable - and even attractive - alternative, that doesn't seem to be their priority (though their use of Open Document formats in their online apps is helpful).

Windows will continue to dominate in the business world. There's just way too much inertia there in terms of third-party apps. But mobile (and, yes, Chromebooks) have demonstrated that the general public doesn't need or particularly want it at home. A cross-platform, full-featured office suite would just solidify that trend.

But those are the users that you could conceivably tell to 'just download Firefox on your old Windows system' and then stop targeting old IE versions in your app. That'd be just as easy as getting them to download a backported IE11 to their XP systems - and possibly less confusing if the IE11 had to co-exist with IE8 or 9, and users had to know which one to launch for your app. At least 'launch Firefox' is a non-ambiguous instruction.

And there is another class of in-house (or 3rd party) web applications that were written to use some features of old IE versions that won't work in newer versions, and for some people, at least, that's the reason they haven't upgraded Windows. Maybe they don't count in your book, but they're out there.

But the problem isn't backporting trident. It's forward-porting IE6. Anybody writing web apps today that require the latest IE is nuts. The problem is old web apps that were targeted to IE back when it was dominant. Those apps still exist, and those users need a version of Windows that supports that browser. New apps can run on those old Windows systems (and Macs, iPads and Chromebooks, etc) via Firefox, Chrome or Safari, but those old IE-specific apps can't run on a more recent Windows (or any other system for that matter).

Which begs the question - why open source Trident, when it has no real purpose any more? Why doesn't Microsoft simply wrap Webkit in a Windows-friendly frame and call it a day. It'd save them a ton of money, and it wouldn't cannibalize anything - unless there's still a part of MS's strategy that calls for leveraging what's left of their desktop monopoly to 'own the web'. But I think that strategy's dead by now - if only because it's failed...

And somehow RedHat was forced to use systemd just because this guy went ahead and wrote it? I'm assuming RedHat ultimately decided that what he wrote was better than upstart. If you think of a major Linux vendor like RedHat (and Debian, and Canonical) as too stupid to choose an appropriate init system to carry their distros forward, why are you using Linux at all? Oh, right, you're all fleeing to BSD. So why didn't you use BSD in the first place? Just curious...

Why would LibreOffice or GIMP ever be dependent on systemd? They have nothing to do with the startup or shutdown of the system - they are plain vanilla applications (same most likely goes for JBoss and KDE, though they may provide some 'system-like' services). Seriously, folks. It's just this kind of hyperbole from systemd haters that makes me think it must be good...

Fine. Then it sounds like you simply prefer BSD and its developers to Linux and its devs. That's a valid argument to make. But Linux seems to have a lot more traction and is embedded in tons more devices. I'm assuming there's a reason for that. Perhaps it's just the GPL - surely that's what got it off the ground so fast in the first place.

In any case, dumping Linux for BSD if you're not somebody who was already a BSD fan sounds like jumping on a bandwagon. I can't wait for the frenzy when Wayland starts to take off...

It sounds like your version of that philosopy is "the smallest tool is always the best tool". Shell scripts are nice, small and (sort of) simple, but they're not all that powerful. I'm guessing that some parts of the init system needed more functionality than a simple startup and shutdown script. As far as I've read, systemd uses a modular approach of its own - and allows shell scripts for some init functions. So, maybe they're building binary modules where they're not necessarily needed. Then complain about that. But there are some systemd modules that are making power management, network management and other things much more flexible than they were.

I kind of like the init script and text logs, but I'm not that dogmatic. And the outcry over systemd is way beyond reasoned argument. The original question was not much more informed than "I'm switching my router to BSD because...Windows!!! - but I really don't know how to use BSD, so somebody please tell me what to do". I'd suggest you don't switch. How's that?

I'm not sure why all you systemd haters feel the need to say "If I wanted Windows, I'd run Windows". I don't know the technical details, but I assume systemd as a Linux init system is nothing like Windows - except maybe for the fact that it's not based on a bunch of shell scripts. If you're a Linux fan, I'd be surprised if the only reason you like Linux is it's script-based init system.

Anyway, I assume the various distros that are switching to systemd are doing it for a reason - and that reason isn't to make it work more like Windows. I assume it's to make it work - i.e. resume from suspend reliably, etc. And if they find that necessary, what makes you think the maintainers of BSD aren't going to run into the same walls that the systemd approach circumvents? Then what are you gonna do?

So sure, if systemd doesn't need its 'tentacles' in an area, complain about that. Maybe your distro won't use that component. But as it stands the systemd flame wars are veering into conspiracy theory territory - and that's rarely a good thing.

Obamacare was first floated as a way to deride the law. As in "anything associated with Obama must be a Communist plot". Just because it was pushed so hard that it has become the common way to refer to the law doesn't negate its political origins. That said, now that the term's so commonly used, it's political aspect is so diluted that it's hard to attribute a political motive just to using the term.

The only reason GNOME is the default for most distros is a historical one based on licensing issues at the time. KDE and QT today are LGPL - no licensing issues at all - but history is history. For all the work Ubuntu and RedHat put into polishing GNOME, they could easily roll a version of KDE that hides some of the unnecessary complexity (I run Mint KDE, and love it - though I find the settings over the top too).

Perhaps. But they were pretty sneaky about it, saying as how the new search box simply says 'Search' with an hourglass icon. I believe it used to show your selected search engine's icon there. So they were deliberately (or contractually) deceiving you about the switch, IMHO.

I don't think it's Islam per se that's the problem here. I think it's the combination of Islam (or any fundamentalist religion) with an 'honor' culture that thinks it's okay to kill to avenge an injury to your honor. These killers think it's okay to kill your sister because she dishonored you by getting raped. So if their religion defines a caricature of the prophet as dishonor, killing is an appropriate response in that culture. I'm sure there are fundamentalist Christians that would be plenty upset about a cartoon that defames Christ. But most of them don't live in societies that condone killing to avenge your honor.

And like Fox news, the WSJ doesn't believe the tripe in this article. It's just another tactical maneuver to discredit the rest of legitimate journalism for refusing to print reasonable sounding 'opposing views'. To them, it's irrelevant that those opposing views are based on easily countered, cherry-picked data. But the real goal is to lend legitimacy to right-wing pols and think tanks that use the so-called "liberal bias of the mainstream media" as the only evidence that their arguments make any sense at all...