And now we all trail the civilized world in the available products, competition and pay the most for it. Lets make this an election year campaign.

Do you have a name? Putting a face on this might help.

Verizon stopped in North Jersey too, despite promising to get broadband to the whole state in 1993 by 2010, and tacking on a surcharge to EVERY bill they send out. For some reason the jokers that run the show decided to let em off the hook : http://www.dslreports.com/show... This is just wrong.. These little monopolies are not justifiable.

What we face losing is the buy-in from the majority of users. Perhaps a surveymonkey would be good to pick out the good from the bad, and start anew on improving the boot process. While Linus is a benevolant dictator, he had many good choices and built a stellar product that inspired a global assemblage of workers thru trust and inspiration. Systemd (how ever its spun now) seems to have revoked that trust, and switched passion for frustration. $.02. Redhat 6 is good. I predict a long life there.

Great point... everyone feels slighted by the belevolant dicatator thats very self assured. Its really a philosophical change marketed as a technological update. From the Wiki page: The name systemd adheres to the Unix convention of making daemons easier to distinguish by having the letter d as the last letter of the filename. Thats about as far as it adheres to any Unix Convention. This is where we all leap over the beast, pick out the good bits and revisit how the objectives are met. in the long run, this may be a very healthy thing for the Open Source movement, in that we all get to decide where it goes, right?

Should SystemD then be a fork, and leave other init managers to fight it out? If all the things that rely on systemd had published hooks, then there could be some co-opetition. Then the most popular solution would (in theory) be adopted most probably, and the others would wither away?

Very interesting that you note sound devices being a userspace issue, when it really has to do with hardware, device, kernel drivers etc. Sure.. USB brings this devices to userland as well, but if its handled properly in kernel land, hooks could provide some control into Userland. I used to compile (2.4) kernels and work in bttv, tda, emu10k and so for TV and sound cards and it just worked (a lot of it, but it was predictable!). Then I stopped compiling my own kernels and tried to do it in /etc/modprobe.conf, but that got crazy between kernel updates and Pulse and Alsa and OSS getting all blurry. So much for history. Where are we now, years later? Does a lInux desktop user have to dabble in /etc/modprobe.conf ? Doesnt make much sense to me. From working with Udev under RH6 at work, udev is working predictably with ethernet devices, seems a valid model. How about we start with a soundconfig utility that captures a systems setup at that moment, and spits out a consistent lattice work of device configurations. Users dont care about /dev/dsp01, or incomplete mixer apps, we just want sound to work.

What admin wants the clarity of /etc/init.d/* to disappear, and how clear is the difference between "telinit 3" and "systemctl isolate graphical.target"? Systemd needs to be more intuitive? Annexing Cron and Syslog seems heavy handed. Most admins value the control and the clarity of how it works. The new approach doesn't really match a consistent language pattern. This should be a system fork, instead of feeling like a hijack.

Is there a way to see if his immune system has developed something that could be useful to innoculate others? Thought go back to the first innoculations. http://amhistory.si.edu/polio/... - maybe this is the guy that hosts the solution? Adaptive immunity is very useful.

Say a friend sets up a Google Drive account in Albania, and I add content there.Would that data be subject to seizure? Would a customer, then, be more likely to buy a service from a Non-US service provider, as the privacy laws in the US are so porous? Sounds like a slippery slope to me.

Cmon.. who should really be afraid of the big bad wolf? Are you really doing anything that private? I can see some things like a password repository or CC numbers being so protected, but, seriously ... what are we hiding? While I don't want to pay for a whole class of society to collect and review the contents of my phone, but, why would someone -need- complete protection - to break the law? Watergate stuff? Texting while driving?

Because the monopoly is already sustained when someone buys the system, and therefore is forced to pay the Tax. Thats the Idea. The wild crazy thought that you -might- buy ONLY hardware is whats new here. This is not going to force everyone to use Linux or OS2 or ... (insert favorite OS here).... rather make some competition possible. Did any one see or feel the pressure dumped on OS2 Warp when it was pushed off the table by MS? I tried to purchase my Intel/Zappa P100 board with OS2 instead of WinXX, but the terms changed.. Only WinXX was allowed to be installed. It was then I smelled the rotten fish. Miss my Zappa. Music and Motherboard.

Currently, my state seems to be a group of ISP monopolies that roughly follow town boundaries. Commoditized Internet access should help us all pay our bills. Globally, we are way behind on the value/cost ratio.

This has huge legs if enterprise level software vendors complie everything for PPC (ahh like Oracle!?!?!). The hardware is great in that its monitored to the deepest levels. Low level checks confirm that the platform is stable for the OS.. Who has had to try to debug a low level Whitebox issue with a memory error, or even main-stream box with a spurious power supply issue? The Benefit of the SMT 2-4-8 will be interesting to head of when coupled with a low latency storage like SSD or flash arrays. Anyway, its great to have options! The cost value will be interesting when you skip the VMWare layer, and bundle in the OS. Should be a great platform if the ISV's pick it up. Can anyone comment on the completeness of PPC vs x86 OS distributions?