"Great" clearly means different things to different people.

To malware authors, JRE is clearly great, because it is a frequent (successfully attacked) target. Maybe it's also great if you trust Oracle, which I don't.

Oracle's JRE patching record is not great, but worse than that you daren't set it to automatically update itself because Oracle has previously distributed malware bundled with JRE security updates ( http://www.zdnet.com/article/a... ).

Er, yes, for many/most people, but for a significant minority, it is not, which is the point (and actually even if it is all about the chromosomes, you still have the trisomy etc. conditions).

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medline...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... (see definitions section)

Thought I'd actually look up some real numbers for reliability by country (terms can be found on wikipedia, larger is not better...):

Sounds more like doing a crap job does not work - which is pretty much a universal truth.

The underground cable coming into our property looks to be at least 50yrs old and I doubt the path above it has been lifted in that timescale either, and it definitely hasn't been touched in the 17yrs I've been here. Some of the distribution wiring out in the street has been upgraded in the last ten yrs because we were getting outages every couple of months, now we get zero, I doubt that wiring had been touched for decades and I don't expect the new stuff under the street will be replaced in the next few decades either. Doing this stuff right isn't rocket science and we knew how to do it over 50yrs ago.

Transformers sometimes flood, but new ones shouldn't unless you don't have design standards or don't enforce them - just looked up some here and for consumer substations it's 300mm of concrete above the 100 year flood level. There are problems with older substations built to lower standards or because flooding risks have simply changed - there are places that haven't flooded in over 100yrs and then this century have flooded several times, call it climate change or whatever, it means the 100yr flood line has effectively moved. But that is older infrastructure, if you have new areas where transformers are "constantly" getting flooded then you have poor standards or poor monitoring of standards.

That is not the problem - most of our long distance high voltage stuff is above ground here, but that is usually redundant (hence "grid"). The weird thing about the US is the way the last-mile low voltage stuff, which is more vulnerable and typically _not_ redundant, is above ground too. Many people are convinced that is why your power is more flaky - it is not actually the grid (although the US high voltage grid does not have a good reputation either).

So, how's our grid ? Well, a few years ago we started to get more power outages - by which I mean one every couple of months for a few minutes to a couple of hours. The distribution cable from the substation was either degraded or handling too much new load, anyway that was enough for them to dig up all the roads a year or so ago and replace / add new cables. Haven't had a single noticeable power outage since then.

Exhibit B, God (or Gods), generally regarded as being infinite/omnipresent/omnipotent/otherwise not subject to laws of physics - hence plenty of room for an infinite tape.

God does the complicated bit of deciding whether puny humans should kill or not - the "why" - leaving the humans to decide the simple bits like "when / who" (goes first), "how" (which bits to cut / shoot / throttle / stone), and which way up to hold the camera.

My understanding is that cgroups is moving (for various reasons) to require a single userspace process manager a la systemd. No, it doesn't have to be systemd but it sounds like it will have to be something _like_ systemd if you don't use systemd. Also, if your one process manager needs to manage stuff spawned from init, maybe it is right that it should _be_ init - I am not actually sure, but that seems to be the argument.

I am not sure if RedHat is chasing a phantom use case as you say or a genuine and valuable innovation - probably only time will tell - I just think it is clear they are chasing something in the PAAS / cloud / server space, and that that is where systemd is coming from.

Mod parent up.

Exactly right - systemd isn't about desktop boot times at all, it is about servers and process management and supporting containerization (and managing using cgroups). See RedHat Atomic / OpenShift / Geard etc.

I agree that monitoring and re-spawning doesn't _need_ to be at OS level, but the cgroups type of stuff (resource limits, accounting, namespace isolation) really does.

Systemd is definitely about servers, lots and lots of servers delivering PAAS clouds, so no, traditional discrete server admins won't like it, but then they won't like PAAS either (if it really takes off) as it outsources / automates a large part of their job.

For me, for _typing_, anything less than a good solid desk and a proper keyboard with springs in (i.e. Model M or similar) is already inadequate, the chromebook keyboards I have seen look awful, and probably are given that the whole machine is less than twice the price of a proper keyboard (and probably about the same weight). Yes, the clamshell format is better for typing than a tablet, but both are a lot worse than a desktop. Tablets can also use fancy predictive or modal keyboards (swype et al) to swing the balance back.

Let's also not forget that these are kids, they have not grown up with real keyboards and then switched to touchscreen, they have grown up with touchscreens, they live by their overwhelmingly touchscreen phones, what is more comfortable and efficient for us old ones may not be for them.

> Plus when the lid closes the screen is protected, the iPad has to go into a sleeve of some sort for protection.

The kids' school iPads never come out of the (allegedly mil-spec) protective case, and I'd be a lot happier dropping one than any kind of laptop, closed or open.

See this is where I think people go wrong - you are viewing a tablet as "can it replace a laptop" rather than "what can it do". I don't understand why schools even use laptops in the first place - the entire purpose of a laptop is to be portable (less so than a tablet), but you say they "sit on a table". In that case, a desktop is surely better in every way - more robust, more upgradeable, more ergonomic in terms of screen and keyboard positioning, etc. If on the other hand you are actually _using_ the portability (the raison d'etre of a laptop) then you have schoolkids carrying them around, and then bring on the breakages - unless you have the budget for the likes of ToughBooks.

Tablets on the other hand are straightforward to ruggedize with external cases (being essentially a cuboid slab with zero moving parts), and open up a lot of use cases you simply wouldn't even consider a laptop for. When my kids' school trialled them, the most interesting and perhaps the most compelling use cases they came out of it with were things I had not even considered, simply because I had always used some combination of desktops laptops and phone.

Notepad++, full screen mode, portrait if you have it, or landscape with multiple tabs side by side.

I am astounded how many people still think it is a good idea to give non-ruggedized kit to school kids, it's as if they deliberately forget what it was like to be a kid.

Tablet form factor (and lack of moving parts) lends itself to ruggedization, and there are lots of case options available, laptops (or chromebooks etc.) with moving and spinning parts need to be built rugged so you want ToughBooks or similar - but then you've blown your budget by a mile.

My kid has a school iPad, it's locked into a case that claims to be mil-spec - I have my doubts, I don't think you could throw it in a puddle, drive over it and pick it up and use it afterwards like the old Husky Hunters (the military being somewhat like overgrown school-kids) but you can certainly splash drink on it or drop it down some stairs without problems. Their breakage rate after a year was about 1%, which is way better than professional developers manage with corporate laptops IME...

Like anything else - research properly before splashing cash.

The ASUS transformers are awesome little beasts, but they don't have the camera capability which seems to be a major use case for tablets at my kids' school. I'd also question if the surface "cover" or even the transformer are rugged enough for schoolkids on their own, and getting ruggedized cases that accommodate the convertible feature may be tricky. Tablets are relatively easy to ruggedize.

It is doomed, but that is not why. If MS chose to unlock it, you could rebuild native x86 apps for RT no problem - that's how they did Office. But MS didn't want to allow that, they wanted a go at the 30% of everything sold in the app store model - the fact that that failed is IMO good.

The real reason RT is doomed though is that it was built to give Intel a kick to get better performing low power x86 chips out (or alternatively to hedge their bets on mobile hardware platform). Since Bay Trail atoms came out there is just no reason to run Windows on an ARM tablet, and hence no need for the arbitrarily crippled RT.

They are going to take the ARM port and produce ARM server Windows I believe, which might actually make more sense (more limited set of software than desktops, more of it custom and hence rebuildable, and admins who won't be as confused as desktop users about requiring ARM or x86 binary). Again, it will be to hedge their platform best but also maybe to push Intel to more efficiency in server chips.

Problem is they aren't laptops, they are locked down limited devices like tablets, but without the portability (and camera etc.) benefits of a tablet - worst of all worlds really. Ok, so you get a sort-of proper keyboard, but you could add a keyboard (bluetooth or docked) to a tablet and get the same without losing the portability of the tablet to, say, get instant video feedback on your technique in athletics.