Probably that leaving init scripts behind worked out for them. Their lack of presence in the datacenter doesn't really have anything to do with their init system but instead their attachment to proprietary hardware which offered little advantage over a generic PC either whitebox or from your preferred OEM running Linux or your BSD of choice. Likewise for OS X.

Because babies and bathwater and such.

A lot of people are convinced that systemd is the devil, so because humans are pretty stupid about this kind of thing they decide that if systemd is "them" then "us" must be shitty-ass init scripts.

Init scripts fucking suck no matter the application. Desktop, server, whatever. No dependencies, no standard format for easy maintenance, and a mess of either hardcoded paths or variables you may have to chase through multiple scripts to find. Anything that replaces them with a more sane system that realizes I have multiple cores and the web server couldn't care less whether OpenSSH is running is a good thing.

Well yeah, because the only place such discussion would likely be would be in a science book, and what's in a science book should be supported by evidence. The kind of "questioning global warming" that people like you mean is not supported by evidence, it's distorting evidence, and does not belong in a science book.

As Colbert put best, "reality has a well-known liberal bias". It comes from being willing to actually ask questions and observe the world to find our answers, rather than an unwavering loyalty to an ideology. In this case these fucknuts are taking their religious beliefs, based on nothing, and prioritizing them over actual science. That's not political in any way, that's just fucking idiots. Unfortunately for those who are politically conservative but aren't insane the "conservative" party has spent 20 years courting the religious morons in every possible way and happily set themselves up for this kind of shit.

There were 13 seats up for grabs in North Carolina in 2012. In the real election, Republicans won nine of these with Democrats getting the remaining four. In Duke's simulations using randomly generated districts the majority of the time more seats went to Democrats than Republicans, averaging apparently in the 7.x range for Democrats and 5.x for Republicans. Almost never did it swing so far in favor of Republicans as to even approach the real world outcome.

Since the real world outcome is unlikely in a map generated by an unbiased algorithm it supports the claim that the districts were drawn in a biased fashion.

The BMW E46 (3 series between 1999 and 2005) and other BMWs from that era all use an in-vehicle network called "I-Bus" which operates things like the windows, the sound system, the lights, and more. Most non-critical vehicle functions are exposed there and are fairly well documented by the community. You only need an inexpensive adapter that looks like a serial port as far as the computer's concerned to access it.

IIRC the first generation or two of Mini as well as a few Land Rovers of the time that used BMW engines also have I-Bus.

Newer models have an optical system called MOST running the infotainment system, I'm not sure where the windows and lights are connected in these days.

While being kept on life support by those who still care is definitely alive, I wouldn't say well for any of those. They're all in a long tail phase of life where those who still use them won't change unless forced, but basically nothing new is being done with them so the user and support bases will slowly dwindle until it truly is dead.

Let's take a look at the full quote again...

To me, that's calling the subset of the community who were shitty about it immature twats, not taking sides in the debate at all. Anyone can agree that there were plenty of people on both sides of the systemd issue who were most certainly deserving of the title "immature twat", so I don't have any problem with this statement.

I think you then sort of pot-kettle-black yourself with this:

As if the pro-systemd side was the only one with activist fans who don't understand the actual situation. Many of the criticisms have merit, but others do not and yet are continually parroted. The binary log for example, where the anti-systemd folks constantly complain that it's not ACID and that it'll be easily corrupted in a crash but never quite manage to explain how the plain text log doesn't have the same problem.

Personally I dislike systemd's breadth due to its impact on portability for those apps that would have to interact with it in a systemd environment, but I want an init system that is aware of dependencies so my boot process doesn't have to wait on something slow. As a side benefit I can have it automatically restart dependent services when something important needs to be restarted, like networking. Basically I'm not a fan of systemd, but it seems to be the only realistic chance to get what I want in an init system any time soon so given the choice between it and the status quo I say all hail our new integrated overlords.

It's not the script itself, it's the fact that init scripts are run sequentially. I have eight cores, there's no reason for seven of them to be sitting idle while one of the services being started shoves its thumb up its ass. Anything else that doesn't care whether the stuck service lives or dies should be able to start on its own.

Traditional init scripts can not do that.

Obviously that doesn't matter to the person who admins a cloud style infrastructure where each host (virtual or physical) has only one role and thus dependencies are basically sequential, but to anyone on an end-user machine or anyone operating a multi-role server it's very useful.

tl;dr: systemd may not be the right answer, but bash scripts are not without some major flaws which will require reducing or eliminating their influence on the boot process to resolve.

If the task is complex, you can do it over dozens of times or you can do it once well. No one's hiding anything, it's all open source. It's just that with systemd or a similar system any tangled messes that may have to remain aren't directly exposed to people who just want to change a command line flag or run their homebrewed app as a service.

When you use a lot of software from outside the normal system packages you tend to notice that a lot of init scripts end up looking very much like a lot of others. There seem to be a few basic templates that people started modifying and ended up forked a bunch of different ways, all to accomplish the same basic things.

If you implement all of those common tasks in one standard tool or package of tools, suddenly all of those different and potentially buggy in their own way reinventions of the wheel become one easily updated thing. You have to get that right, but with large distros going this way any major issues are likely to show themselves quickly. As long as they can be fixed in a timely fashion it's not a huge problem.

For the record I take no position on systemd. I believe that a parallel, dependency-based replacement for init is far overdue so I like the concept as far as that goes but I don't know enough about the implementation to judge systemd specifically.

I may be mistaken on my understanding of heat and efficiency, but I believe that if you have electric heat in your home the "waste" heat from a computer costs the same per preferred unit of heat.

If gas is cheaper than electricity for you like it is for me that doesn't really help as much, but if you have electric heat you may as well run Folding/SETI/Bitcoin/whatever during the cold season.

Agreed as a general principle, but in this case it's a matter of power in vs. power out. If the average power in over a reasonable time the average power out, it's producing power. There's not much room for fooling as far as this is concerned, we can easily measure both. If we can objectively measure a claimed ability it's just a matter of having enough unrelated individuals or teams perform the measurement that a reasonable doubt is defeated. All that's needed here is a search for experimental flaws. If they're truly metering power in and power out, the rest is a matter of what the numbers say.

"Psychics" and those claiming magical powers over subjective matters, that's where magicians shine. When the test involves a judgement of the mind, bring in those who make a living by fooling it.

I was this guy for a while. I like open source, but it's not my top priority. I just want a computer that lets me get done what I need to get done most effectively. For admining *nix boxes and diagnosing networks it's pretty helpful to be on a *nix box yourself, but which variety is not really important as they all tend to have the same basic tools available.

A Mac laptop provides a *nix machine that is 100% supported by the manufacturer with a well-known OS and a good selection of both free and commercial applications. For a while they were better built than most too, my last Macbook Pro was the generation before the "unibody" models and only Thinkpads really compared as far as sturdiness. I haven't yet found a laptop that feels stiffer than one of the unibody models, though some of the PC vendors have adopted that design as well and are thus in the same range.

These days I'm running a refurb Acer because the battery on the MBP wore out and I couldn't see putting more than a third of its remaining value in to a replacement on a Core 2 where the motherboard couldn't reliably handle 4GB RAM sticks (only 2+2 was officially supported, though 2+4 was reported to work with most sticks, 4+4 was not usable in most cases). Core i7, 8GB, 1080p, and 100% of the hardware works in Ubuntu 14.04 so it fits what I need in a laptop.

Why anyone who doesn't need Final Cut would ever buy a Mac desktop I'm not really sure. The G5-like Mac Pro was intermittently price competitive with other workstations in dual-socket form but the new trash can model strikes me as the second coming of the G4 Cube.

Mozilla hasn't made any notable public comments I can find since acknowledging that they would support EME (Encrypted Media Extensions) back in May. I do not see anything about the feature having made it to even the trunk yet, so it'll probably be a while.

Also curious, what difference do you see between Firefox and Chrome as far as UI? I'm on a Windows machine right now so I can't verify if it's the same on Linux but aside from slightly rounder tabs and more blue Firefox 32 looks pretty much the same as Chrome 39. Firefox has a separate search bar by default and the back/forward/refresh layout is a bit different but if I ignore the extra buttons my various extensions have added to both the color scheme is the most significant difference.

Did I ever say I had a problem with Windows overall? I don't, at least no more than any other ordinary OS. It's that second part...the one that starts with an X and ends with a P. That's the problem. Like I said, deploying new Windows XP is fucking stupid.

Windows itself is a fine core platform these days. The key is these days, meaning not a full major revision and two lesser (but hard to call minor) revisions ago.

I'd still personally prefer Linux or a BSD, but I'd have a hard time making a purely technical case for that.

The important part. Brand new systems are still being deployed with Windows XP. Anyone who doesn't see how fucking idiotic that is should never be allowed to make an IT-related decision again, but unfortunately the people who make these decisions don't know and aren't held accountable for their stupidity.

Most of the local banks have installed new Diebold ATMs that scan checks automatically. I saw one reboot the other day. Take a wild guess what OS...

Fuck "enterprise IT" and the bullshit anti-update mentality. If you can't update, you're doing it wrong.