Quite true, actually I think in Debian this is already supported for the system boot sequence at least since Squeeze.

Together with dash being the default /bin/sh now, it already boots pretty fast, I don't see the startup time being a major factor in this decision.

It's probably more because of the fact that systemd now reaches into areas beyond pure service control that forces Debian to either follow that move or switch to another alternative that has enough manpower behind it.

Even assuming this was true despite it sounding like a Gene Hunt quote, on /. it's not the most striking argument...

For my part, I'm not a girl and I currently have a bunch of bike-riders sitting a few meters down the hall from my office, and on some days I smell the sweat coming out of their offices whenever I have to go past them. OK maybe it's not them but the colorful mountainwear they hang over their chairs, but it's pretty bothersome. When 2000 people are packed in one building there ought to be some standards. (This also means no offensive fragrances, of course.)

I think that a government that is likely to give you socialist healthcare is also not likely one that is going to disband an agency like the NSA, mainly because it's not one to disband any agency. (If the situation here in Europe can be any indicator.) The "perfect" laissez-faire society would be the one without an NSA. Now granted there is no such thing in the real world and it would just mean going over that civil vs. economic liberty thing again. But still. Hiding away talented mathematicians and engineers like that is just a waste of taxpayer money.

I rarely go to the theater to see a single movie, but I very often visit themed (e. g. Japanese / splatter / Japanese splatter / etc.) film festivals where you can watch five or six movies a day, over a period of one or two weeks. These offer value that I don't find elsewhere. The movies are not going to run in town later. They often wouldn't even be released on DVD in my area, meaning I would have to import them, which could mean $50 each. Some of them later run on subscription TV but you can't be sure of that in advance. Streaming might be an option someday, but my country really has a lot of catching up to do there.

That said, people using their phone is pretty much a non-issue there. The more common nuisance are glass beer bottles tipping over, which is unfortunate if your bag was standing next to them on the floor. But really this can happen to anybody, you can't be mad at them.

But yeah, I'm not sure about the future of the mainstream movie theater industry either. 3D might be its swan song.

http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=107359&cid=9137723

...or GNU.

Last time I checked, there were a number of BSD-derived files in the glibc source. Not that many, but still. Which were then made public, to use your wording, under license terms of GNU's choosing.

Which is fine of course.

A good question which I've asked myself a number of times. As for Android, its libc is BSD based, but the kernel isn't.

I don't know whether the decision to use a Linux kernel for Android was made at Android, Inc or later at Google, but it's pretty clear that Google wanted Linux.

I suppose at the time, the whole Linux mobile thing had already generated a sufficient amount of traction so that a lot of the necessary infrastructure was already there.

I was working for a mobile phone manufacturer at the time (that was later acquired and shut down by BenQ) and for us, the successor to Symbian would have been Linux, too, built along the Opie and Qtopia userlands on Texas Instruments OMAP hardware. Both Google and Trolltech had offices in the city (Munich). At that time, Google was still developing its products as J2ME software though.

I recall frequent kernel panics while booting that were related to the Intel Ethernet chipset on a SuperMicro H8SGL-F board (not exactly the least common hardware) in a released version (I think it was 8.2 or 8.3), which was probably this. Rather annoying.

There have been other problems, too (off the top of my head), like

• the mediocre PAE support,
• and the in my eyes rather ungracefully handled transition to Xorg 7.2 in the 6.x releases, which for me didn't work at all like the documentation said, although this was not a problem of the base system, but the ports collection.
• Then there's stuff like some guys arbitrarily deciding to reimplement the system installer and on top of that, to remove the old one in the time window between 9.0 RC 3 and 9.0-RELEASE, see (along with some elitist Linux bashing going on:) here and here
• or the transition to Clang at a time when it wasn't even ready for the non-x86 architectures!

So sometimes I ask myself whether this OS is really ready for prime time

But enough of the rant. I've been sticking to it since 2000 and for most of the time it just runs and does its job. It's got some nice coherent documentation too.

Well I mean Minix was already microkernel at the point of the Tanenbaum/Torvalds discussion. (Kind of funny actually how the later replies to that thread talk about how legendary that same thread is.) Don't know what version it was though.

Actually NT4 was already the first version to move GDI into the kernel, because of (as you and others have already mentioned) the high cost of context switches and marshalling/unmarshalling in NT 3.5's microkernel-style display server architecture. See this TechNet article.

I'm being a bit pedantic here, but Minix was Tanenbaum's microkernel system, so kernel-mode drivers are more like Linus' legacy...

Second that. Larger cities generally have ones that open till midnight. Hostels are not ideal, the ones I've been to (Germany, UK) aren't quiet at all. If you already know what you'll be working on, that's good, I think finding projects locally could be a real challenge.

this happens in Summer too, like 2010/2011, when hm, surprisingly high temperatures knocked out a number of trains' AC systems ('Schienensauna'). Bottom line is it shouldn't be too hot nor too cold, nor too wet/windy, then the system works well enough. Except sleeper trains, that often accumulate 30+ min delays regardless of environmental conditions. I still use them often enough though because short-distance flights can suck, too (like sitting on the runway for one hour until you get the slot from the destination airport...)