...my take on systemd is this: As an init system, I actually like it - far better than other SysV replacements, especially SMF on Solaris and friends. Where it goes off the rails, though, is the ever-expanding mission creep into things that really aren't an init system's purview.

If systemd would just be an init system and get out of the way, I'd cheer it on. But one of the first things I do when I set up a CentOS 7 server is to shut off firewalld and use iptables directly. Firewalld is OK on a laptop where you're connecting to a variety of different networks, but leave it off my servers, please.

The phone I have has an especially wonky GPS, since they combined the GPS and NFC antennas and put them on the removable back. If the pins on the phone don't make absolutely perfect contact with the antenna, it will get a poor signal or no signal at all, and the location guesses tend to be downright laughable. Sometimes, its location data even gets "stuck" and my weather widget keeps reporting a faraway location I had been earlier. Indeed, after avoiding flagship phones for a long time, I'm ready to go ahead and pop for a G5, because I'm so pissed off at this phone's GPS performance.

I'm not surprised the 911 operator asked for your location.

Seems like there's been an awful lot of hate exploding against the Mozilla folks lately, and it seems that a lot of it is politically motivated. Politics aside, there have certainly been missteps, but Firefox has worked well and I don't have much to complain about. I'm not especially happy about the recent bloat (I've never once used Pocket, for instance), but at least it has stayed out of my way.

Well, what do I switch to, then, haters? Do you have a better solution? I need a browser that offers this:

* A rich selection of add-ons (adblock and script controls are security features these days, and there are other useful extensions I use)
* Cross-platform (I use Windows, Linux desktops, and Android)
* Open source (even if I never have occasion to build or modify the browser, I want to be able to)
* Address bar is separate from the search bar (when I type in an intranet URL, I don't want a search query going out, FFS)
* Performs well enough for me (I've never seen the horrible performance that some people allege)

If someone comes up with something significantly better and offers all of the above, I'd consider giving it a try, but for now I'll stick with Firefox.

As for Thunderbird, I'm glad to see it being picked up... yes it works, but there are a few things that have long needed fixing (like the mystery progress bar on IMAP accounts).

...but only because it can be turned on or off by the customer. I keep it shut off on my account, but I rarely stream video anyway. Watching video on even a large-screen phone just doesn't have much appeal to me. If I'm at home, I want a large screen, and if I were using a Chromecast I'd be on Wi-Fi anyway. If I'm away from home, there aren't many places I'd be wanting to watch video at all, especially on a phone. Indeed, I find autoplay videos infuriating.

My plan is soft-capped at 3 GB/month, and I rarely go beyond 2 GB. T-Mobile's service now is vastly better than it was three years ago, and as long as features like this are impartial and user-controllable, I have no real problem with them.

And then there's fingerprints. Nothing like a "password" that gets printed onto almost anything you touch!

Considering how many missiles they've been firing at the sea, I can't be too surprised that the sea would decide to fight back.

Unlike Microsoft, Canonical actually listened to its users. Unity 8 will have the Amazon thing as opt-in instead of opt-out.

Besides which, there are other Linux options out there besides Ubuntu, and there are other desktop options besides Unity.

Opt-out is the standard excuse of spammers, scammers, and assorted miscreants.

I found something a while back that seems to work:

cp /bin/true /bin/true.bak
mv /usr/sbin/weak-modules /usr/sbin/weak-modules.NONONONONO
ln -s /bin/true /usr/sbin/weak-modules

I, for one, would absolutely love to have official ZFS modules in CentOS instead of relying on DKMS. DKMS on a CentOS box is a nightmare, because of the "weak-updates" shortcut that it likes to take (where it symlinks the modules from a previous kernel into /lib/modules/foo/weak-updates instead of, you know, actually rebuilding the modules). Sure, that's nice and fast, but it falls apart horribly once that old kernel gets deleted.

I've also found JFS to work best for me on a MythTV box. Aside from the file deletion issue, there's also streaming throughput during recording (especially if the storage is accessed via NFS). As much of a ZFS fan as I may be, I prefer using the best tool for the job, and MythTV is where JFS shines.

I'm not going to wade into the minefield regarding the sexual misconduct case, but I'd most definitely consider the Jeep story to be pretty damn relevant for anyone building computer-controlled devices. Let's see: computer-controlled car with a radically different user interface compared to almost any car in the last 60 years or so. And, unlike Windows 8 or GNOME 3, we're talking about something with potentially life-threatening implications.

Back to the subject at hand, I'm very glad to see Sourceforge getting repaired, even if a lot of projects have moved elsewhere. Monocultures are a Bad Thing in my view.

I was just about to suggest the very same thing. Sourceforge has been dead to me ever since that fiasco erupted.

Are you kidding? I've found that Illumos is not at all friendly to white-box hardware. Examples:

Some 2-port AHCI cards mysteriously fail after a random amount of time (oops, there goes my L2ARC device until I reboot).
AHCI hot-swap on my motherboard SATA ports is a game of Russian roulette. I'll randomly get write errors on other drives when I slot a drive in. At least hot-swap worked well on my SAS HBA.
Hardware sensors that work fine with lm_sensors on Linux are not at all usable on Illumos, which expects IPMI.
KVM on Illumos? Not if you have an AMD CPU.
USB3? LOL!

A couple of weeks ago, I finally ditched my home OpenIndiana system (was running 151a9) and threw CentOS 7 on it with ZFS from the official ZoL repo. Yeah, it has systemd. So far, I've found that systemd isn't any worse than SMF; I can live with it. Things that wouldn't work in OI work nicely on C7. The ZFS pool imported without a hitch, though I had to rework my sharenfs options and do a little tinkering to get sharesmb to work with Samba. It was worth the effort. I no longer need to use crazy ACLs to get my shares to work as expected, another plus. I might try later to run a ZFS root, but for now I'm using MD-RAID mirrors for the OS itself.

Aside from the better hardware support, a big advantage of CentOS is that I don't have to worry (as much) about something breaking when I update the system. OpenIndiana's new Hipster approach is fine if you're the type who would run Debian Sid on a server, but that's not my style. Add to that, there's no clean upgrade path from 151a9 to Hipster.

I wish them well, but my foray into Solaris-land is over.

Those fast CPUs/GPUs and large-pixel-count screens are going to suck up the juice. Consider going a notch down instead - a 720p screen and a 4xx series processor can handle things quite nicely. The LG G Stylo has the same battery as the G4, but the battery life is flat-out awesome. With moderately heavy daily use, I rarely see below 60% remaining battery life when I plug it in for the night.

Like the G4, the battery is removable and there is an SD slot.

Keep in mind that the T-Mobile/MetroPCS version is better than the others; it has 2GB RAM/16 GB internal storage vs. 1GB/8GB for other carriers.

The main drawback to the Stylo is that LG purposely crippled the camera; there are very few shooting modes available, and no manual controls, even though it's the same camera hardware as (at least) the G3. Fortunately, XCam LG will run fine on it, even though it was intended for the G3.