I know people think Apple invented NFC payments, but they didn't. This is NOT unique to Apple Pay. Apple Pay is an implementation of a standard. Google Wallet is an implementation of the same standard. Either way, the vendor/POS terminal does NOT get the CC# during the transaction.

CoreOS uses systemd. RedHat has nothing to do with CoreOS. CoreOS makes use of systemd via a program called 'fleet'. The program manages a cluster of containers. Pretty cool stuff. Fleet is not the only program to do this. RedHat created geard that also uses systemd for container management. Systemd is actually pretty useful in a server.

I still use it. It works for me. I like the clean interface. I like the search function (tracker). I like the way it integrates with OwnCloud (really easy). I just like the overall feel of the environment. Way better than OpenWindows or CDE. BTW, I'm not a new Linux user. I started with Linux and fvwm sometime around 1993-1994. I started out on Yggdrasil and Slackware and whatever "distro" I downloaded off a BBS in 1992 (but didn't really do anything with it other than boot it up).

You may be right, but I wonder if the author of the article is aware that one of the leading cloud friendly distros, CoreOS, uses systemd. If fact, systemd is an integral part of fleet:

With fleet, you can treat your CoreOS cluster as if it shared a single init system. It encourages users to write applications as small, ephemeral units that can easily migrate around a cluster of self-updating CoreOS machines.

RedHat's geard, which is part of OpenShift, also uses systemd.

It seems to me that the opposite is happening, cloud ready distros are choosing systemd.

Exactly. BUT I will say with a company a person can quit or stop purchasing the companies products. Government? Not so much.

No meaning? Look up CVC3 security. Apple did nothing new here. It is all standard. It just works because the credit card companies have been building this stuff up for years and years. You don't have to know about the counter, it is there to prevent cloning.

What if you decrement? That is the whole point! You can't clone a transaction! Even if you get the CC number, the counter would prevent it from being used. This is a low level security measure that makes NFC payments more secure than magstripe. It is a good thing. I'm happen that Apple finally added NFC.

NFC has a counter feature as part of the standard. Each time a credit card number is used, the counter goes up one. This is to prevent a replay attach. The problem is you can't take a plastic credit card with NFC and put that number into the phone and expect the counter to work correctly. Use the phone, the counter goes up, use the plastic, the counter goes up. Use the phone again, counter is wrong. To fix this problem, Google creates a new credit card number for tap and pay. Apple says they go one step further and create a new number for each transaction. That seems to go a bit further than needed. The counter would prevent replay attacks since this virtual card would only be used for tap and pay. I just wonder if the wording by Apple today was slightly off. Just a guess.

The main point is what Apple was doing is, by and large, standard stuff. Both Google and Apple just implemented a standard. Yeah, a few tweaks here and there, but it is certainly now revolutionary!

Exactly. It makes no sense. The author of the article states the idea came from his article on systemd. Eh? I'm not sure he is saying that systemd is for desktops or servers. He never says if systemd is useful at all. Things like geard (RedHat/OpenShift) and fleetd (CoreOS) specifically use systemd to orchestrate container deployments. Cool stuff.

RedHat 7 ships with systemd. But, but, but, we all know that RedHat totally and completely abandoned the desktop years ago.

So we have two options. Either systemd is not just for desktops or RedHat never completely abandoned the desktop. Either way, there is no need to split distros. RedHat does provide a nice tool called 'tuned' that helps tweak kernel and system parms for desired load.

Then I guess I'm not in my right mind.

I like Fedora a lot. I like the desktop environment (Gnome3 has really grown on me). Fedora moves at a decent clip to track with the latest and greatest without a lot of hassle. I have always liked RedHat/Fedora's PXE/kickstart installer. I like the big projects RedHat/Fedora is working on like FreeIPA, OpenStack packaging, GFS2, KVM, OpenLMI, CloudForms, and oVirt. RedHat has spent a lot of money buying some of the companies that created some of that software and the turn around and open source all of it. FreeIPA is a big one. A seriously great project that took old code from Sun/Netscape and made it usable.

I know the big gripe is systemd, but so far I like it. It makes writing start/stop/status configuration easy and reliable.

Did you know that systemd will run standard sysV scripts? You could have done that. If you were making your own script. I don't know why you would want to make your own script since the package includes one.

Did you notice the line above ExecStart? EnvironmentFile= points to a possible place that IRQBALANCE_ARGS is located. This is a normal place for things like that in a RedHat/CentOS/Fedora system. Nothing new here.

Since you wanted apache to start up at boot, did you try '/sbin/chkconfig httpd on'? This is the normal RHEL/Fedora way. It will *tell* you the systemd way when you run it on a systemd system (Note: Forwarding request to 'systemctl enable httpd.service'.)

Maybe you aren't familiar with the RHEL tools and filesystem layout?

RedHat has options for you. There is Software Collections that package multiple versions of python and ruby. The versions can be pivoted at will. Then there is Docker in RHEL7 which allows shipping of containers as apps. Not to mention Fedora is heavily supported by RedHat and offers very recent packaging of almost everything.

PPA's are similar to adding a -release package to Fedora/RedHat/CentOS. So for example, I was to add EPEL to my repos. I just click on the epel-release rpm and it installs it. I'm not so hip on the Software Center. I like to stick to core debian tools when using a .deb-base system.

Unfriendly package manager? I thought this argument is over. Yum (moving to dnf) operates in a similar way to apt-get.

We are an agile shop. We have pair programming, continuous integration, and continuous delivery to AWS. The pipeline runs RedHat. We have also have some CentOS.

Fedora is not a bone, it is a great way to know what is coming in RHEL. CentOS (which RedHat supports) is a great server distro for everyone.