I think his argument is rather horrible, that being said...your statement isn't any better, how do you know he is a liberal? even if he is, what does it matter? there is no liberal collective consciousness that makes them all alike, also, last i checked its still a country where you have the freedom to choose your own beliefs...or do you want to get rid of that?

Im not saying what he said was right, what i am saying is how you responded to it is equally wrong.

Operating with cutting-edge technology out of a trailer in rural Illinois...

They'll more likely come to the conclusion that the universe is 16 years old and pregnant.

Must be marketed toward the old geezer crowd or something.

No, you've got it exactly wrong. He's lamenting that they stopped marketing tape drives toward the old geezer crowd.

Reality...

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/l...

The House Ethics Committee has quietly done away with the requirement that lawmakers disclose their all-expense-paid trips on annual financial forms, National Journal reported on Monday.

Trips paid for by private groups are now no longer required to be noted on annual financial-disclosure forms filed by Congress members, according to the Journal. The move was never announced publicly; the Journal said that it discovered the change in a review of the disclosure filings.

Welcome to the "Web 2.0" world, which is where the volume is these days, and consequently most of the money.

IBM makes 85% of their money from fortune 100. From there it falls off fast. The money and especially the margin is at the top.

If one cannot order it cheaply and easily on the web ala Amazon shopping experience, who is going to bother to go through a reseller? That was the model 40 years ago! Kids today do not bother

What kid gets to pick the hardware infrastructure for his company of any size?

Why would I pay the vendor or the reseller higher prices when I can automate hundreds of thousands of servers on x86, in a lights out management datacenters across the globe, to the point of throwaway systems?

The prices aren't higher and the system outperforms thus lowering total cost. This is the whole "why quality saves money" issue that comes up in every industry.

Please provide links with pricing.

IBM doesn't do that. They should be more transparent but they aren't. They want you ordering through a partner or for larger customers through the sales channel. There is some pricing on the website but the real prices are 20-30% lower.

DELL has become expensive as well. For the price of one DELL server one can easily put together two or three blackbox servers, from motherboard to chassis, made 100% by intel.

Not really relevant. The question was Power vs. x86 not generic vs. name brand.

The only company I know of who has announced they would be offering it as cloud is Ubuntu cloud. IBM's hosting solution has it but so far nothing in the cloud space.

I've seen pricing on Power8 systems they are in line with someone like Dell for rack mounted servers. No they aren't priced out of the market. And BTW the Linux on Power is where they are mentioning the advantages of their virtualization.

Phones take good advantage of systemd. For one thing they get plugged into hardware all the time. They have lots of processes, their situations as far as network is constantly changing. That's the hardware use case where systemd is a no brainer.

Well if you are right about Gentoo switching then OpenRC is dead. Without a distribution it is unlikely to catch on.

Now, that being said, systemd seems to bring on top of the previous the ability to dynamically reconfigure the system upon changing hardware. That is indeed a feature that some people may have, yet not necessarily all. Forcing the baggage of that upon the whole linux population, is the major point of contention,

Systemd is a complex system. Rather than greatest common denominator it goes for least common multiple. Absolutely it is not lightweight. It is moving towards being the daemon equivalent of /bin.

Service startup should be a like a tree, not like a chain.

It is worse than that. It is a long complex cycle for some daemons and one that is changing. So something more like an event handler that just starts from a clean initial state. This is kind of the issue. Again this would have been easier to build on top of OpenRC and had that happened the dam wouldn't have broken.

And servers - do they still care about the servers?

Depends on which kinds. Macminis get used as servers. They are suddenly doing well with the MacPro. They have an excellent small business server product. Also remember they just recommitted to enterprise. Apple is very hard to read on this, but I think in general they would want to be able to support a server quickly not have a long lag.

As for ignoring Gnome I agree. But I also suspect heavy server processes will use it. Docker for example already has built in support for process managers. I suspect OpenStack will use it. While FreeBSD can walk away from Gnome can they long term walk away from containers?

I understand your point about portability. I'm not sure I agree with all the trash / junk... type comments. Gnome applications are going to and should have dependencies on glib. I think interprocess communication is valuable so I'm not going to agree that kdbus is trash.

As far as RedHat driving changes to Linux. I kinda like that, I hope you are right. With the death of mini computing platforms we need systems to replace VMS and OS/400. We don't really have good enterprise Unixes. I kinda like the idea of Linux/systemd being a full featured mini computer OS while Linux/SysV (or better Linux/OpenRC is more like a traditional lightweight Unix). That would be terrific. Someone has to lead and RedHat has over two decades proven itself to be good leader.

As far as the port of systemd, we aren't disagreeing. See what I wrote above.

I get that. Which is what I said that a port of systemd has to be done by those alternative Unixes because they are going to need to make choices about their own daemons, what to emulate and what to implement... The BSDs are used to having to follow in Linux's wake. They'll go through this process of deciding. I'm not sure whether FreeBSD or Darwin will be first but I doubt Apple is going to want huge chunks of Linux code to simply never be able to be ported over to Macports easily. I don't think FreeBSD is going to want huge numbers of applications one simply can't run.

So I don't think long term this has much impact on applications. For the next 5 years those applications that have complex startup will probably have slightly reduced functionality via. init scripts.

Systemd is open source, it can be ported. Right now the version that exists depends on features of the Linux kernel. The other operating systems are going to have to make choices about whether they want to support systemd or not. Basically this isn't something systemd developers are going to do it is something IBM/AIX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, QNX... are going to do.