1. "What the hell is with these new commands? Great, now I have to learn a whole new way of administration cause people had to change something that was never broken."
2. "Where's all the init files? How am I supposed to configure anything? I don't have time for this..."
3. "Everything is done with service descriptors? Okay..."
4. "So wait, I no longer have to write massive shell scripts that manage the entire process lifecycle, or scour google in the hope that someone else has already written said script so I don't have to?"
5. "Wow, I never realized how much I hated dealing with init scripts until I didn't have to anymore. This is SO much cleaner!"
6. "Whoa, I can monitor and control entire *heirarchies* of dependant services from one command? That's pretty damn slick..."

I still don't completely understand systemd, but now that I'm getting a handle on it, I find it conceptually and functionally cleaner, and more rigorous than the old init system. The downsides are that it's new and therefore has a learning curve, and that it blackboxes the actual service controller which is going to piss off anyone with an ounce of control-freakery in them.

Case in point... Apple still supports their iPhone 4s, which was released over 3 years ago.

Compared to pretty much every other phone company out there, that's nothing short of phenomenal. The support policy for most android manufacturers is 'buy our next model'.

I find it hilarious that it's so fashionable to slag Apple despite them being leaps and bounds better than everyone else for support.

I completely agree with what you say, and these kludges are indeed a problem, they at least had some level of logic to them. You could understand why they did it, even if you disagree that it was necessary to do so.

Add to that that sometimes you HAVE to bypass the API, because the API is either incomplete, or intentionally hamstrung to put competitors at a disadvantage (Microsoft being a perfect example). The hacking situation is not black and white.

But what I'm talking about is the kind of stuff you can find on The Daily WTF (http://thedailywtf.com/). These sorts of things are a depressingly common occurrence.

Because despite what one would reasonably expect, most developers are actually shockingly incompetent.

They got the shizzle but forgot the nizzle.

I personally don't understand the need to have system-wide access to email in a moment's notice. Is email not obscenely pervasive enough already?

I disable it from my spotlight preferences as a matter of course.

For that matter, I don't even use the default Mail app that comes with OSX cause it has a couple odd behaviours that tend to drive me nuts, so I'm using PostBox instead. Good ol' fashioned indexing and searching, as god intended.

Apple has reached the stage that Microsoft reached in the 90s. I hope they learn from their mistakes faster than Microsoft did.

"2. However in case you need to have your Contacts or Calendars information synchronized separately, you can use third-party Caldav/Carddav applications. Please check the configuration process below:"

So basically your choice is to use activesync, assuming the server you are using supports it, or you have to use a 3rd party tool to use actual carddav/caldav support.

Instructions please. I've had android devices between v1 and 4.x and not a single one of them had built in caldav/carddav support. I was stuck purchasing problem-ridden addons just to get this functionality.

Maybe you're talking about Android 5?

Not only that, but we're talking about DDOS, not just DOS.

So these people are probably maintaining large beowulf clusters of XTs and ATs, Even if Linux can be installed on them, it's still a non-trivial effort simply because of the number of machines involved.

Logistics is the name of the game.

In death, The Pirate Bay will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

Because Microsoft is not Oracle. Look at how they handled the thread of ODF to see how they think outside the box. I would be applauding the brilliance of their strategies if they weren't so utterly counter to the public good.

By 'exactly', I was referring to their MO, not specifics like licensing. I thought I had been clear. Sorry about that.

You mean, like Nokia?

I've read plenty of articles in the past about partners complaining that they showed Microsoft something, Microsoft temporarily working with them, and then showing them the door while coming out with their own product. I tried googling for such just now but there's so much noise I can't find the specific articles I was looking for.

They may well be trying to clean up their act, but they have a lot, and I mean a LOT of bad-will that they have generated over the years. If they think that people are going to accept these supposed changes at face value, they're mad.

Why is parent modded troll? This is *exactly* the kind of thing Microsoft has done in the past. Not just once, but repeatedly. The most obvious one was Java, and it took a lawsuit from Sun to get Microsoft to stop trying to commandeer the platform. Microsoft then dropped Java in a big public hissy fit, and came out with .NET instead.