I spawn services from init. It works very well, on, off, once, respawn. It's very fast when it restarts a service and if a service flaps then it won't expend all of CPU restarting, it will just wait before attempting to restart the service and scream loudly in the meantime. I don't wonder if it is working because init is so responsive.

Perhaps it's just easy for people to write bad init.d scripts and everything 'kinda' works?

I've tried to make init crash in tests - it's very difficult. As a daemon manager, init works well.

Sorry friend, I read your link but it's immediately apparent that this guy hasn't even read the inittab manual. The answer to many of the statements made in that blog are answered in the subject line of this post. Others are implementation issues with the application.

He may have a point with parallelism in the boot sequence, but I only care about boot speed if I am on a desktop - in which case I can just re-write how rc starts things. On a server rc's runlevel and service ordering K and S answer the question of service dependencies in a much easier and *transparent* way. And why are dependencies such a big deal - the application should be able to cope with a required service missing in an intelligent way. And if the dependency doesn't start it has a problem that systemd or init can't handle, so I'm back to wondering what systemd is actually doing for me.

Please don't see this as me defending init. I am trying to see what the justification is in choosing to run systemd with my servers - which I am trialling. I'm finding the unnecessary complexity of systemd can put me in a bad situation when I am trying to control the uptime of commercial services.

If you just want the system to boot faster - you can already achieve that with rc tweaks and implementing your service startup better instead of hacking it. The way I see it with systemd I now have three problems to deal with instead of one. 1. I still have crappy start-up implementations for services. 2. I have to now manage systemd's characteristics (obviously init isn't perfect) 3. When I have downtime I have to manage 1&2 at the worst time. Frankly operating init is so much faster and more transparent than systemd.

I see no tangible benefit for the expenditure of effort I've sincerely made, so far and I'm still wondering if there is a compelling reason. I'd rather have a discussion based on merit of the two systems, however what is compelling is that many people haven't used init to it's full capacity.

Sounds like those issues are implementation based.

Ok - well your talking about desktop stuff here, which is an interesting perspective that I didn't really consider, however I still think that is doable in inittab with much less effort. rc is only a runlevel solution, whereas inittab would be more relevant to desktop. I don't need to keep track of the process and it's children because init can maintain the parents state for me - if the parent isn't signalling it's children then we are back to implementation issues again.

jeeez. I'm just trying to figure it out. I'm not being a jerk about it, I'm trying to gauge other peoples experiences. I don't give a fuck about init if systemd is better - it's just another technology. But if it is better than shouldn't it be immediately apparent *WHY* it is better?

I did. I've been using it - to give it a fair chance. I'm still struggling to understand if those benefits will manifest and why it's required.

ba-dom-tish!

You have to wonder how much the employees were really hurt by this. It was a 'no poaching' agreement. That meant that recruiters from those companies weren't going to call down the entire Rolodex of the competing firms and try to recruit.

Yeah, they could just pack up and move to another city as well, or just accept less at a firm that hasn't been able to participate in a no-poach agreement - either way it's the employees or a potential competitor's, expense.

But.... there are nothing stopping external recruiters from doing that. And there was nothing stopping individuals from switching on their own.

Of course, smaller firms using external recruiters would be able to create their own no poach agreement so they can drive the salaries of IT folk even lower. There is no harm in that.

There's some logic to an agreement like that. Each of these firm's recruiters could waste huge amounts of employee time in their competitors by making thousand of recruiting calls.

Indeed, they could save huge amounts of company time by rendering pointless employees making thousands of recruiting calls and enabling the company to move them on at a time of the companies choosing, saving the company millions.

They sound like some real winning strategies for the tech firms you have there.

To put it into perspective the existing settlement is $5400 per class action participant showing just how much IT workers are under paid for the investment required to be skilled enough to do the work.

As to the lawyer, someone had to bring the suit because it's not as if IT workers have representation of their own and I expect a case like that was expensive to run. I doubt that the lawyers company will be looked upon favorably by the tech giants anymore either, so if the figure you say is real then it's about right for someone sticking their neck out against a group of behemoths that make that amount of money look like chump change.

Think about it, how much money to you expect Apple et. al would pay to reduce their primary capital expenditure, labour costs?

It's unlikely that tech giants will want that kind of represetation to survive to threaten them again and they want other lawyers will think twice about representing IT people thus making it more expensive for IT folk to get what they are entitled to.

If you need proof that IT folk are underpaid, here is one of the few times an ordinary person can see exactly what machinations occur to keep it that way.

I think thats the best way for me to deal with this issue right now.

I just don't know what I was thinking - thanks for correcting me.

One day we will turn them into space stations.

Maybe next time around.

It's about 10,000 kilos heavier than an (empty) 737 and about 10 metres longer.

Exactly! Star trek technology again. If you are going to use technology then look to where technology scenarios have been solved - even if it's only fiction. The ENTIRE division could have had a prefix code that disabled any number of functions.

prefix.all=disable

prefix.engine.all=disable

prefix.navigation.all=disable

prefix.weapons.all=disable

However America should not leave it's powerful weaponry for a third party to control. Iraq is completely demoralized they've just had the shit kicked out of them and their ideological enemy (Islam) has a knife to the throat of their children. It doesn't matter what weapons you give to someone who has no heart to fight and, when the enemy knows your families name and address they have you by the balls.

Islamic extremists have dominated the *psychology* of war constantly hitting at ideological weaknesses of the west, undermining our allies and using our own political shortsightedness against us to undermine western democracy - which they hate. Yet we have continued to make the same mistakes.

Over ten years ago our political representatives decided to lie to us (again) about compromising our values. They thought torturing and brutalizing people would be a good idea. However, long before 911 Islam was committing human right violations and we just didn't care. Now it all comes back to haunt us with new enemies, yet we are surprised when these psychos chop our citizens heads off. That's the price we pay for compromising our values. They don't have an ethical framework, we do. The answer is not to discard our ethical framework and become them - the answer is to strengthen our ethical framework and show the resolve of our mettle, not our metal. Our right *IS* might.

An old idea I've not heard in the news is "we are sending a crack team of diplomats" because the masses are too stupid to realize that hiding behind airstrikes and drones is cowardice, because the uneducated amongst us always think force is the right answer to every problem and because our Faux media insists on its shallow mindedness for ratings. We still haven't learned that Islamic extremism is using asymmetrical warfare against us to bleed us financially and worse, morally. Islamic extremism has effected a change in our entire way of life, and all we have done is radicalized them more because we turned from our ideals. This is not a path to victory.

Until the western world returns to the ideals that made us strong in the first place these extremists are going to continue to work a strangle game on us and slowly slowly slowly choke us. They hit us where WE think we are weak, but our ideals are our true strength because ideals can't be terrorized. When people of good character see the west sticking to its ideals *they* sympathize, when we don't *they* radicalize. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military equipment ain't going to do what winning hearts and minds can do. Why can't we learn that? Why can't we take a step back and say, hang on a minute - what is really going on here?

Leaving tanks and destruction then saying "here are some guns, it's on you now" was never going to work. Taking responsibility for what we have done with our military and leaving schools, hospitals, training police, teachers will. Let ISIS or al-ki-assholes blow up the Iraqi people's new infrastructure and see how many friends they win.

That's the nice America that Islamic extremists can never defeat, no matter how many heads they take.

Ok people - rant over - sorry about that but I think it needed to be said.