IN old england, the prisons became so over crowded they started using the rotting hulks of navy ships as prisons and as that became full they resorted to "transportation" which basically meant you get a one way ticket to help settle australia. (see book "the Fatal Shore"). Now that mars transport is about to approach feasibility ans Elon Musk says we need vast numbers of people for sustainable living I'm shocked the UK govt isn't sentencing these hackers to Transportation.

When it comes to telco it isn't nearly twice as expensive to hit every house as it is to hit every other house. It is much cheaper to have government organizing the digging up of streets and private property than to negotiate with the private and public landholders. Government can cut the cost per user enormously if they engage. I think the article is BS but your refutation is as well.

I don't buy it. Fiber's cheap

What makes you think fiber is cheap?

and our cities are plenty dense enough to support fiber to the home

That's fine. And if you wanted internet within cities then that wouldn't be a problem. But most people want to get to websites and internet services outside their cities. Which means they need to be using national bandwidth. If 100k people are consuming 1gbs of bandwith that's 100tbs going into the city often over hundreds of miles. So say 5 fiber links out 20-40tbs of capacity for often hundreds of miles. Then that gets intermixed with what the city itself is consuming.

We don't remotely have the technology to support that much bandwidth. So sure. You want to file share with the guy down the block the local cable company could put in fiber. But you want to gigabit+ bandwidth to everyhome that's unthinkably expensive.

But we don't, because lobbyists.

Yeah that must be it. The evil telcos don't want you to buy more of their product. The same banana importers are lobbying to block grocery stores from selling bananas by the bunch.

Why can't the USAians get the enjoy the same?

Because US population density looks more like Africa than it does like Europe and East Asia. We spread ourselves out which drives the cost of providing telco services through the roof.

How long have they been screaming for NFC

Mostly never. Apple customers were happy with Apple's position that Bluetooth did well what NFC did poorly. Android people were very upset that Apple people didn't have NFC.

Thx for the informative digression. :-) On the airwaves in the States we have heard plenty of broadsides against "Africa," likewise against Muslims everywhere. It gets old.

RHEL 6 (and its CentOS variants) are upstart, not systemd.

RHEL 7 is systemd though. Which means Cent is going to switch. And that means Facebook is going to switch.

Just admit you were wrong about them using it.

I know for a fact they are using it. They are using it for a backend I'm working with. Though it isn't terribly consequential to anything so it isn't a great piece of evidence, the system its on would run fine on Xenix.

"on hardware certified by RedHat Labs "
Also, Facebook's been rolling its own hardware for quite a while now, dude.

I included the quote. You missed the part where I said they were rolling their own hardware and the key point of who certifies it.

The point is that if you knew engineers working at those companies out here, you could have found out what they were actually running on by asking rather than making claims you can't back up.

Your claim from the start has been that systemd is unsuitable for server. Though your claim below is much weaker and something I would mostly agree with. So in terms of not backing it up you are disambiguating. You picked Facebook from my list:

a) They run CentOS. Cent OS is switching
b) They get their hardware certified by RedHat who is the single largest proponent of systemd.

I would say that's not opposite. But most importantly if you read the context I gave Facebook as someone advocating PaaS not someone advocating systemd. The PaaS vendors are the ones who care (and should care) about OS level components like systemd. I don't think clients like change.org should be concerned with the infrastructure at all. That's the whole point of DevOps it helps to further break the accidental bleed over between platform specifics and higher level software, which is what the whole enterprise Java movement was attempting to do for client / server.

Hi. I'm Jeff. My LinkedIn is the Homepage link next to my name. My apologies for not having it there previously.

Fair enough. Change.org DevOps architect is legit experience.

Well, we've already established that you've been lax about doing your research before making claims.

I think that's unfair and untrue. We just disagree about what constitutes a reliable source. I'm mainly interested in vendors because they have breadth you are mainly interested in engineers because they see things up close. The way you are phrasing it is unnecessarily harsh.

From my experience, given that for many of my jobs I've been the guy hired to clean up after a "systems integrator" with a cost sheet full of buzzwords and marketing woo came in and sold some magic beans to bigwigs who didn't listen to their engineers, your line of work tends to over-engineer a "solution", under-calculate cost of operations, and end up leaving a company with severe vendor lock-in disease and an engineering staff with a new solution that's outside of the team's core expertise, which leads to staff churn, high retraining costs for those that do stay, and dissatisfaction all around.

That's not about systemd but just to defend our guys:

a) I'd love to do accurate cost assessments where IT companies use a sane rate of interest and depreciate their IT infrastructure over 10-20 years. We aren't the ones who force companies to do ROI accounting as if their depreciation / cost of borrowing / interest rate were 400%. That's not the engineers either (they are mainly on our side about that one). Blame your finance guys not us. But ultimately if the customer is mainly focused on the 1 year or 3 year cost, then we build a solution to keep the 1 or 3 year cost low and often by letting it explode in the out years.

b) In terms of staff churn often the point of an integrated solution is to prompt staff churn i.e. displacement of the people. We get involved quite often because peopel are unhappy with what they are getting from their in house engineering staff. When the in house engineering staff is buying it they are generally picking a technology they are enthusiastic to use / learn or they already have the right skill set. If you aren't the ones buying it you aren't the customer.

c) Of course there is often vendor lock-in! We have long term ongoing relationships with the vendors where we work account after account after account. In a vague sense we are on the same team as the vendors. The vendor lock-in is often how we get the good price. But we (as a profession generally not individually) are happy to construct solutions with less lock-in if the customer (who remember is many times not the IT group) wants it. As an aside, in-house software creates employee lock-in which is for most companies worse.

You're claiming that all the companies you've namedropped thus far are your clients?

No I'm claiming I have DevOps clients. I named those companies as being large users of DevOps and PaaS. Netflix incidentally is a client. Though I'll be honest here, I don't give a crap about their software I only care about some of their handoffs to various local cable companies. I don't care what their software does as long as it uses X amount of bandwidth at the right times.

You can run a server on it, but it's not ideal. It removes many of the knobs and switches that experienced sysadmins and engineers used to get extra performance out of their systems. It adds appreciable layers of overhead just to do the same thing the parts it replaces has been doing for years. The developers themselves have shown an inability to think about it in a multi-system context. It presents a large attack surface because of the dependency chain its seeking out and building up. Maybe it'll be ready for primetime by 2018. I know I'll be hacking on it and submitting patches since the major vendors decided that selling new integration packages was more important than keeping their users and customers happy.

I agree with this except for the developers being unable to think in a multi-system context and this not being something driven by customers. I think I deal with more customers than you do. Getting away from knobs and switches that experienced sysadmins use and towards generic solutions and commoditization is exactly what the customers do want. You may not like that they want that, but that's the reality. Almost all customers love hardware abstraction, the more the better. And they are willing to use an extra 2-5% of boxes to achieve it.

You still think vendors matter. This ain't Windows.

This ain't the Linux of the 1990s when it was hobbyist OS for guys like me who couldn't afford an SGI or Sun at home and wanted a Unix. Linux today is a professional server OS. Systemd came out of RedHat. If vendors didn't matter Debian wouldn't be following in Redhat's wake on systemd and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Damn right vendors matter.

Private companies wouldn't be using it for free. They would need to lease out usage, but that wouldn't be an exclusive lease. When people were still using dial-up modems there was more competition, so this would be an attempt to recreate something that allows for this. Line sharing is really necessary for something healthy and focusing on innovation. BTW always jealous of France's http://free.fr/

What we have now is broken, so it is time to come up with a model that will help foster competition.

Facebook most definitely does not use a single distro in production that uses systemd.

Facebook had been on a CentOS variant running on hardware certified by RedHat Labs for years. RHEL is systemd. Whether they have switched yet or not I don't know, but by 2018 or earlier they will be on systemd. If it isn't in production, it isn't in production yet.

You don't work out here. I do. It's not that big of an industry when it comes to systems administration and DevOps out here.

I don't work out there. Absolutely not. But PaaS is much bigger than the Valley. The ideas and technologies developed for DevOps are being deployed much more broadly

Don't make claims that anyone with a LinkedIn worth a damn can debunk with a few messages.

Maybe time to use your real name if you are going to play that game.

I've been very clear about the gripes I have about it.

No you haven't. You've said that you have to change stuff you do for an existing infrastructure. That's about it. Lots of hyperbole and nonsense claims about desktop.

You don't administer systems. You don't design the internals of system architecture

I don't administer systems. I most certainly do design the internals of system architectures. What do you think happens when you sell a solution that you put together random parts without thinking about how they work? I've done the specialist job when you knew every little detail of a system, and I went through large scale changes before as an engineer. I remember when I was an engineer people like you gripping about the change over from DECnet to IP and how the sky would fall. I was intimately involved in the migration of working systems from Metacode to Postscript and AFP. The systems are far better today for progress.

I can't even tell from your LinkedIn (we're third degree contacts) that you've touched a Linux system in your life.

I have, Unix since 1988, Linux since 1995. I've also touched a wide range of the big box Unixes, zSeries, iSeries and VMS. Which gives some perspective on having seen styles of solutions for process management over the years. I'm certainly not a Linux specialist. I rely on Linux specialists.

You've been management for over a decade.

Yep. What do you think management does?

You seriously don't think the same infrastructure that some shops you namedrop are -the- solution for every use case, especially out here, do you? Especially when they don't even use what you're advocating for?

I don't use PaaS? Really? You tell me what am I using for the clients we are deploying too?

I don't know about every client out there. I do know that the claim that you were making that systemd was for desktop and didn't have support for server is BS. I talk to far too many vendors who sell server solutions to believe that. I talk to far too many people system admin cloud or colos admins who see hundreds of clients to not know if systemd were causing problems to any significant fraction. I work with one of the research groups that publishes studies on this collecting the data.

So sure you are an admin in the valley. So what? You aren't the only place doing DevOps, though you guys do invent many of the best ideas.. Its gone mainstream. And believe it or not, people on opposite coast do talk to one another.

Madonna wore a Boy Toy tee shirt. Does this explain the lack of female pop singers today?

Google, IBM, Facebook, Netflix, Random House, GE... Those are complex server installations. Your side hasn't said much of anything. Mainframes, minis, bigbox Unix have had monolithic systems for decades. I'm presenting evidence you aren't presenting any well known vendor who disagrees.

Windows phones did not carry your credit card information nor did they have your google wallet password.

>>And it sucks for that your use case tramples their use case. These things are symmetrical. There are choices. Some are helped and some are harmed.

Bull!

You can't run around claiming you don't want to talk about internals and then just make statements like that. You don't know what you are talking about. The fact that you don't like reality doesn't mean it isn't reality. Yes there are choices in life. Not everyone gets to have everything. Do you really think that the debates regarding network transparency for the last four decades were because of spite and that: Microsoft, Apple, Commodore, Digital, NVidia, Intel, IBM, Sun, SGI, the current X-Windows team... are just wrong while your "I don't like it, so it isn't true" is right. Grow up!

This is /. Stop cursing. Start thinking about these problems from the developer's end. Either the application and graphical buffer is shared or it is separate. Either the network protocol is intelligently decomposing graphical objects or it is oblivious to them and just passes buffers around. No you cannot have both.

If supporting the X protocol means someone else's video doesn't play right then fine, don't support the X protocol. (makes no sense to me, I can play videos all day long with seeing tearing, what ever the hell that is). Just make sure it still has the possibllity to do somethign that works like an X terminal but uses RDP or VNC or whatever protocol makes you happy.

That's what it does. There is no reason you can't build a VNC client that boots instantly on bad hardware. The VNC use case is covered by Wayland today. But that is not network transparency.

So? The least common automatically gets no support?

No. But it a well designed system when there are tradeoffs that's the group that is disadvantaged.

Somebody always must be descriminated against? Where is the logic in that?

The logic of that is we live in the real world.

I'm sure there are many others using LAN support. So what if it's the least common. It's still common enough to be important!

No it isn't. And we know that because we have data. NEC didn't leave the XTerm industry 15 years ago because sales were too strong to keep up. SunRay are selling for less than the case it worth on ebay, that's not a sign of strong demand. It is time to deal with reality. Your use case is a tiny niche. A well supported niche and one likely to continue to be supported in a limited fashion for decades. But you aren't under 2%, not 90% anymore.