The scenario actually isn't a very good movie plot. If it was about some goofy mixup electing an incompetent to office as part of a comedy rather than a drama, then the absurdity would be believed. As it stands trying to be a dramatic work, it falls into the same trap a lot of geeks have in imagining their day in court: technicalities do not trump the human element. The premise is that an obviously guy subverts the first online election without gaining genuine popular support and overcoming the established power structure and the nation would somehow let that stand.
It's not believable because such a result would be nullified so fast, even if no one has a precedent for doing so. I know the whole point is to be over the top, but there is also the goal of being plausible enough to work in a drama.
Actually I think this one and the child pornography one are the two worst of the five. Note none of them I think would be the main plot of a film, but would make decent subplots to drive the story.
One, the natural phenomenon of a solar storm figures in prominently to the risk factors.
Two, a lot of noise has been made about 'well if they had nukes, they would just blow us away'. This depends on the goals. If they just want to obliterate without regard for the global response, sure. If they want to conquer (unlikely at this point, but hey), an EMP might be a good way to soften things up and leave infrastructure you want. Also, if they want to do something to the US that would divert attention from some external military activity to fixing up things at home, an EMP attack may be the way to do it without turning the entire world against you for doing something as atrocious as indiscriminate killing of civilians with a direct nuclear explosion.
It's a valid point that we have pretty good awareness of both natural and tactical situations that could bring our power grid crashing completely down and aren't really doing anything at all to mitigate that.
I don't know where you live, but PERVASIVE MASS TRANSIT?!? That's a real knee slapper!
Across the US for *school* that is true. Every single public school offers reasonable public transportation. You mentioned sending kids off to school without having to drive them, which is already a solved problem.
Basically, if you don't have a rational need to own a car for a particular family member today, you won't have a rational need when you have autonomous vehicles. However I think if you currently have a rational need have a car today per family member, then an autonomous vehicle does not stand to alter that equation.
I also think that nearly autonomous vehicles (all this adaptive cruise control, automatically steering to the lane, blind spot radar, turn by turn GPS directions) are underrated. Technology available today that makes driving much safer and less tedious already. After driving a vehicle with a number of those capabilities today, I don't know if I even care that much about having a fully autonomous capable vehicle.
For kids to school, mass transit is already pervasive and more efficient than parents sending their car off. For the car drops you at the front door, and goes and parks itself in the nearby parking lot, ok I guess (though it wouldn't kill people to walk a little). But to drive *back home* (to allow other family members to ue it) means that your trip to work and back becomes 2 round trips instead of one, and also that if you need to go somewhere unexpectedly, you suddenly have a delay (where again, public transportation would do probably just as well).
Basically, I just have a hard time seeing scenarios where the car used for personal transportation being sent off without a human whatsoever has enough upside to offset the downsides. Now if you are talking about cargo transport things get pretty obvious, but if the vehicle is a people mover, moving when there are no people will rarely make sense.
I don't see how this is likely to be the case. If you have a personalized need for a vehicle basically every day, then you can either own it, or pay someone else to use theirs. The rental model means you still pay for all the maintenance and such, as well as profit margin for the owner of the equipment.
This is easily seen across all industries. If your need is occasional, rental makes sense. If your need is such that you are basically covering the full cost of the rental companies cost to own and operate the product, then you may as well own it and not have to give someone profit.
Self driving cars can be utilized much more efficiently so families may need less cars on the road
I doubt this will be realized remotely any time soon. For one, the technology won't be able to handle all probable scenarios for some time. Even if that time came, laws wouldn't be changing at a breakneck pace to enable anything beyond what can already be done. Besides, a scenario enabling a family to utilize a single vehicle more also leads to more fuel usage (basically doubling round trips).
Also, car sharing models like Car2Go may also become more common
Due to the same situations precluding occupant-free operation above, I don't see car sharing models getting any more interesting for autonomous vehicles than current vehicles in an interestingly imminent time frame.
But I don't see law allowing an unoccupied vehicle on public roads any time soon. There's too many issues. If there is some sort of incident, there's too many legal requirements that a human being be available to deal with it. Whether that's the vehicle at fault for an incident, being damaged in an accident, or a policeman wanting to pull it over for expired plates or something. There's a whole lot of laws that would need to change to enable the scenario you describe, without much upside. You describe some scenarios with upside, but it'll probably cause more trouble as people make their cars drive home to spare themselves parking fees, doubling how much fuel is consumed by those drivers.
Imagine you are on school grounds and you can see this guy on the street, distance of maybe 200 feet. Would you be able to be sure the black gun shaped thing was a toy from that distance? One might reasonably infer that it was a toy from the blatantly obvious stormtrooper outfit, but if you make that assumption, a malicious person could wear a stormtrooper outfit to catch people off guard. If it were such a person and did open fire because the principal did nothing, the principal would be crucified by the media.
Basically, this was the option open to the principal, knock it over to the police.
It should be illegal because the point of H1-B is 'we can't find local skill to fill the position, we had to go overseas to get it'. The fact that you already *have* the skills and are laying them off to *replace* with H1-B workers means you are violating the intent of the H1-B program.
With respect to protectionism, having a coporate 'sponsor' for your VISA means handing a corporation unreasonable power over that guest worker. This weakens their negotiating power if the general market conditions suggest they are not as well compensated as other companies do. It's one thing if they would be as empowered to quit their job without fear of deportation as the person they are replacing. This is a factor that makes H1-B holders stay cheaper than their non-H1-B counterparts, even when they should be on a level playing field when working in the same geographic location.
While looking at other open source project hosting, the one thing that I couldn't see was a good alternative to sourceforge's file release system.
They basically provide a yum/apt friendly structure that can be rsynced to. Since it allows pretty much arbitrary structure and it gets mirrored, it works out ok.
Even before this, was interested in replacing everything on sourceforge, but now really interested in killing it off. Anyone know a good free CDN to cram yum/apt repositories into?
" HP wasn’t able keep up with its competitors. The company’s revenue share dropped from 25.5 percent to 23.8 percent, while its market share by volume dropped 2.6 percentage points to 20 percent, "
For anyone keeping score, this statement means 'HP is not keeping up because they are still in the lead, but the gap is narrower'.
"Dell increased revenue and shipments, but it too wasn’t quite able to keep up with the market. Its share of revenue and shipments each slipped by just under 1 percentage point to 17.1 percent and 19 percent respectively"
This is a little less blatantly wrong, but Dell is the #2 vendor Strictly true since they said keep up with *the market* which in aggregate grew, but being #2 in the market isn't such a dire thing.
" IBM had the third-largest server revenue, followed by Lenovo and Cisco Systems, while Lenovo was third by server shipments, " This particular statistic is pretty screwed up because it doesn't correct for the situation that IBM sold of x86 based servers partway through the year in some parts of the world, and at the end of the year in other parts of the world. It mentions this, but fails to recognize that IBM's situation partially included Lenovo still. Lenovo's big year to year growth is mostly a changing of ownership currently.
"Cisco’s year-over-year server revenue growth of 44.4 percent was well above average for the industry, and suggests the company is not done capturing incremental market share in the server market" Impressive and all, but given *after* that increase they still lag behind 4 other companies, it means that big year to year percentages are likely. Just like the lead experiencing a little crowding in a market shouldn't cause anyone to write them off, a large percentage gain by a relatively small player shouldn't send everyone into an excited state. You could write similarly exciting stories about some of the 'lower tier' vendors, but since those aren't exciting brands, they got omitted.
This is all off topic and the poster you replied to wasn't correct, however...
A minority of the people actively embrace it; the vast majority accept it somewhat reluctantly and go with the flow; and an even smaller minority
The simple fact is no one has data here. Magically, whoever is bitching and moaning about the other side calls out the other side as the smaller vocal minority. Convenient.
systemd is a different beast than other decisions. RedHat historically caught flak (justifiably) for releasing distributions incorporating pre-release upstream builds in fundamental places. No one argued that the components were going to be the wrong direction, just that they weren't ready yet. Red Hat ultimately 'fixed' that by reserving their brand for 'enterprise only' and recalibrating expectations around Fedora. Pulseaudio despite being ubiquitous still has a lot of discussion on how to disable it when it just doesn't work right still. NetworkManager is also close, and also is accompanied by instructions on how to revert to the 'old' way. Same for firewalld. systemd is the first decision that really forces the issue in a fundamental way that's hard to avoid. This is strangely without precedent, for something so controversial to not be in a place that could conceivably be turned off by those who don't want it.
Not true. In automotive space (what we are talking about here), repair of a 20 year old vehicle is quite common. In x86 space, modern software releases commonly apply to a decade old platform.
But the insinuation that Apple is a worst offender here is demonstrably false.
I wasn't implying that Apple was any worse than Google. However I do think such a perspective is a valid one on the x86 desktop platform side, where every other player except for Apple does a better job of supporting platforms over a longer time.
as far as the hardware itself will allow,
At the whim of Apple dropping support from some component of that hardware. In the handset business, no provider has proven that it could be easy to support older platforms so there might legitimately be too much churn in the platforms for that to be reasonable, but in the desktop space, the causes for Apple dropping support seem to be things that don't phase the other OS providers on that platform.
*Being* the infotainment system is not that great a play. Those systems are increasingly tied to the platform of the vehicle so you can't easily upgrade it without buying a new vehicle. Apple nor Google are particularly well known for being fond of supporting tech that, on average, would not receive a hardware upgrade for 11 years for any user.
Improving infotainment systems interaction with the driver's handset so that a handset upgrade drives all the value add they would want, that works. Hence Google and Apple doing their respective platforms, and car vendors looking to support both from a neutral platform rather than locking a very expensive vehicle to one platform or the other.
I don't see how driver-less cars will change (other than the big one of actually *having* self-driving options). If someone would choose a corolla versus a taurus versus whatever today, I don't see them as suddenly not caring about whatever differentiate those cars today. Basically to the extent your categories would apply in the future, they already apply.
I agree that the concept that the infotainment solution would not really change the fundamentals of the workings of the market, but neither does driver-less (unless some companies neglect that concept, or a disruptive player gets something available to mass market early).
You are right that there isn't adequate data. The problem being that the sentence itself paints things in a rosy light based on that data, rather than some meaningful data.
In short, we have an anecdotal gathering of data by third parties that doesn't actually tell us anything at all, with different people praising or blasting it depending on their preconceived notions.
. While a car may be capable of self-driving, if a human is in control when an accident occurs, then the car was not a self-driving one as far as the accident goes.
Well it is interesting in so far as knowing when the companies think they need to have human operators still. Not really so much the crash, just the portion of the time that is human versus autonomous.
I have contended with corrputed files plenty. If they are plain text, it's highly unlikely that a glitch leaves it such that a human can't piece together what is left. If it relies heavily upon common features of binary formats (compression, alignment to very particular addresses, section headers), it's quite easily unrecoverable. Basically the exact things that make them attractive (performance, efficiency, analysis) make them lose all meaning pretty quickly if part is missing or something.
'48 self-driving cars have been navigating the roads... Of those, only four have been in accidents'
I know that the bigger point is that zero (known) incidents can be traced to the software making a 'mistake' (though even if the other driver is 'at fault', hard to say if a human would have done better at avoidance). The thing that strikes me though is the editorial bias here. *Only* 4 out of 48.. that's nearly 10%. That's far far above the percentage for the general population. It's perfectly likely that is simply a fluke of the small sample size, but implying that 4 out of 48 is a very promising rate of incident is pretty silly.
Right now the 'debate' is in full on 'no true scotsman' fallacy mode. No *real* users are complaining, so all people who *sound* like they are complaining need to shut up. If you complain, you must not be a *true* user.
dconf uses binary configuration files. As I've said many times, while systemd catches a lot of flak for messing with long standing conventions, it is far from alone in modifying the experience (dbus, dconf, systemd, udev all do interesting things, each component bringing interesting capability with varying degrees of drawbacks).
I think udev generally does a great job of delivering useful capability with minimal downside. Then dconf (most people don't even realize the binary dconf files exist, even when they poke dconf extensively). dbus starts going off the rails (many things that once were simple enough to explore/grep around for are now only possible through internet search of obscure dbus-send commands). systemd I actually consider less bad than having to do more and more dbus stuff.
SystemD - works well when it works, fails spectacularly when it fails.
Incidentally that is precisely the way Windows is. Windows is exceedingly structured and engineered (contrary to some beliefs), but as a a result when it fails... boy does it go down so hard that no one is going to bring it back. Not surprising many of the principles in Windows design match the design principles of many modern linux distros: Binary configuration files, binary log files, increasingly complex IPC schemes, and less and less friendly to simple scripts (though increasingly better for complex scripting).
Not true, or else you wouldn't be able to run 'notepad' on the console. Not that this is necessarily a big deal, but the Core editions are not GUI-free, they start cmd in a window. If you ignore the graphics console and use EMS only, the GUI is still running, just not visible to you.
Slashdot Mirror
The scenario actually isn't a very good movie plot. If it was about some goofy mixup electing an incompetent to office as part of a comedy rather than a drama, then the absurdity would be believed. As it stands trying to be a dramatic work, it falls into the same trap a lot of geeks have in imagining their day in court: technicalities do not trump the human element. The premise is that an obviously guy subverts the first online election without gaining genuine popular support and overcoming the established power structure and the nation would somehow let that stand.
It's not believable because such a result would be nullified so fast, even if no one has a precedent for doing so. I know the whole point is to be over the top, but there is also the goal of being plausible enough to work in a drama.
Actually I think this one and the child pornography one are the two worst of the five. Note none of them I think would be the main plot of a film, but would make decent subplots to drive the story.
One, the natural phenomenon of a solar storm figures in prominently to the risk factors.
Two, a lot of noise has been made about 'well if they had nukes, they would just blow us away'. This depends on the goals. If they just want to obliterate without regard for the global response, sure. If they want to conquer (unlikely at this point, but hey), an EMP might be a good way to soften things up and leave infrastructure you want. Also, if they want to do something to the US that would divert attention from some external military activity to fixing up things at home, an EMP attack may be the way to do it without turning the entire world against you for doing something as atrocious as indiscriminate killing of civilians with a direct nuclear explosion.
It's a valid point that we have pretty good awareness of both natural and tactical situations that could bring our power grid crashing completely down and aren't really doing anything at all to mitigate that.
I don't know where you live, but PERVASIVE MASS TRANSIT?!? That's a real knee slapper!
Across the US for *school* that is true. Every single public school offers reasonable public transportation. You mentioned sending kids off to school without having to drive them, which is already a solved problem.
Basically, if you don't have a rational need to own a car for a particular family member today, you won't have a rational need when you have autonomous vehicles. However I think if you currently have a rational need have a car today per family member, then an autonomous vehicle does not stand to alter that equation.
I also think that nearly autonomous vehicles (all this adaptive cruise control, automatically steering to the lane, blind spot radar, turn by turn GPS directions) are underrated. Technology available today that makes driving much safer and less tedious already. After driving a vehicle with a number of those capabilities today, I don't know if I even care that much about having a fully autonomous capable vehicle.
For kids to school, mass transit is already pervasive and more efficient than parents sending their car off. For the car drops you at the front door, and goes and parks itself in the nearby parking lot, ok I guess (though it wouldn't kill people to walk a little). But to drive *back home* (to allow other family members to ue it) means that your trip to work and back becomes 2 round trips instead of one, and also that if you need to go somewhere unexpectedly, you suddenly have a delay (where again, public transportation would do probably just as well).
Basically, I just have a hard time seeing scenarios where the car used for personal transportation being sent off without a human whatsoever has enough upside to offset the downsides. Now if you are talking about cargo transport things get pretty obvious, but if the vehicle is a people mover, moving when there are no people will rarely make sense.
it will be cheaper than owning a car
I don't see how this is likely to be the case. If you have a personalized need for a vehicle basically every day, then you can either own it, or pay someone else to use theirs. The rental model means you still pay for all the maintenance and such, as well as profit margin for the owner of the equipment.
This is easily seen across all industries. If your need is occasional, rental makes sense. If your need is such that you are basically covering the full cost of the rental companies cost to own and operate the product, then you may as well own it and not have to give someone profit.
Self driving cars can be utilized much more efficiently so families may need less cars on the road
I doubt this will be realized remotely any time soon. For one, the technology won't be able to handle all probable scenarios for some time. Even if that time came, laws wouldn't be changing at a breakneck pace to enable anything beyond what can already be done. Besides, a scenario enabling a family to utilize a single vehicle more also leads to more fuel usage (basically doubling round trips).
Also, car sharing models like Car2Go may also become more common
Due to the same situations precluding occupant-free operation above, I don't see car sharing models getting any more interesting for autonomous vehicles than current vehicles in an interestingly imminent time frame.
But I don't see law allowing an unoccupied vehicle on public roads any time soon. There's too many issues. If there is some sort of incident, there's too many legal requirements that a human being be available to deal with it. Whether that's the vehicle at fault for an incident, being damaged in an accident, or a policeman wanting to pull it over for expired plates or something. There's a whole lot of laws that would need to change to enable the scenario you describe, without much upside. You describe some scenarios with upside, but it'll probably cause more trouble as people make their cars drive home to spare themselves parking fees, doubling how much fuel is consumed by those drivers.
But what if the school uniform was red shirts? What then?
Imagine you are on school grounds and you can see this guy on the street, distance of maybe 200 feet. Would you be able to be sure the black gun shaped thing was a toy from that distance? One might reasonably infer that it was a toy from the blatantly obvious stormtrooper outfit, but if you make that assumption, a malicious person could wear a stormtrooper outfit to catch people off guard. If it were such a person and did open fire because the principal did nothing, the principal would be crucified by the media.
Basically, this was the option open to the principal, knock it over to the police.
It should be illegal because the point of H1-B is 'we can't find local skill to fill the position, we had to go overseas to get it'. The fact that you already *have* the skills and are laying them off to *replace* with H1-B workers means you are violating the intent of the H1-B program.
With respect to protectionism, having a coporate 'sponsor' for your VISA means handing a corporation unreasonable power over that guest worker. This weakens their negotiating power if the general market conditions suggest they are not as well compensated as other companies do. It's one thing if they would be as empowered to quit their job without fear of deportation as the person they are replacing. This is a factor that makes H1-B holders stay cheaper than their non-H1-B counterparts, even when they should be on a level playing field when working in the same geographic location.
While looking at other open source project hosting, the one thing that I couldn't see was a good alternative to sourceforge's file release system.
They basically provide a yum/apt friendly structure that can be rsynced to. Since it allows pretty much arbitrary structure and it gets mirrored, it works out ok.
Even before this, was interested in replacing everything on sourceforge, but now really interested in killing it off. Anyone know a good free CDN to cram yum/apt repositories into?
" HP wasn’t able keep up with its competitors. The company’s revenue share dropped from 25.5 percent to 23.8 percent, while its market share by volume dropped 2.6 percentage points to 20 percent, "
For anyone keeping score, this statement means 'HP is not keeping up because they are still in the lead, but the gap is narrower'.
"Dell increased revenue and shipments, but it too wasn’t quite able to keep up with the market. Its share of revenue and shipments each slipped by just under 1 percentage point to 17.1 percent and 19 percent respectively"
This is a little less blatantly wrong, but Dell is the #2 vendor Strictly true since they said keep up with *the market* which in aggregate grew, but being #2 in the market isn't such a dire thing.
" IBM had the third-largest server revenue, followed by Lenovo and Cisco Systems, while Lenovo was third by server shipments, "
This particular statistic is pretty screwed up because it doesn't correct for the situation that IBM sold of x86 based servers partway through the year in some parts of the world, and at the end of the year in other parts of the world. It mentions this, but fails to recognize that IBM's situation partially included Lenovo still. Lenovo's big year to year growth is mostly a changing of ownership currently.
"Cisco’s year-over-year server revenue growth of 44.4 percent was well above average for the industry, and suggests the company is not done capturing incremental market share in the server market"
Impressive and all, but given *after* that increase they still lag behind 4 other companies, it means that big year to year percentages are likely. Just like the lead experiencing a little crowding in a market shouldn't cause anyone to write them off, a large percentage gain by a relatively small player shouldn't send everyone into an excited state. You could write similarly exciting stories about some of the 'lower tier' vendors, but since those aren't exciting brands, they got omitted.
This is all off topic and the poster you replied to wasn't correct, however...
A minority of the people actively embrace it; the vast majority accept it somewhat reluctantly and go with the flow; and an even smaller minority
The simple fact is no one has data here. Magically, whoever is bitching and moaning about the other side calls out the other side as the smaller vocal minority. Convenient.
systemd is a different beast than other decisions. RedHat historically caught flak (justifiably) for releasing distributions incorporating pre-release upstream builds in fundamental places. No one argued that the components were going to be the wrong direction, just that they weren't ready yet. Red Hat ultimately 'fixed' that by reserving their brand for 'enterprise only' and recalibrating expectations around Fedora. Pulseaudio despite being ubiquitous still has a lot of discussion on how to disable it when it just doesn't work right still. NetworkManager is also close, and also is accompanied by instructions on how to revert to the 'old' way. Same for firewalld. systemd is the first decision that really forces the issue in a fundamental way that's hard to avoid. This is strangely without precedent, for something so controversial to not be in a place that could conceivably be turned off by those who don't want it.
No one in tech does that.
Not true. In automotive space (what we are talking about here), repair of a 20 year old vehicle is quite common. In x86 space, modern software releases commonly apply to a decade old platform.
But the insinuation that Apple is a worst offender here is demonstrably false.
I wasn't implying that Apple was any worse than Google. However I do think such a perspective is a valid one on the x86 desktop platform side, where every other player except for Apple does a better job of supporting platforms over a longer time.
as far as the hardware itself will allow,
At the whim of Apple dropping support from some component of that hardware. In the handset business, no provider has proven that it could be easy to support older platforms so there might legitimately be too much churn in the platforms for that to be reasonable, but in the desktop space, the causes for Apple dropping support seem to be things that don't phase the other OS providers on that platform.
*Being* the infotainment system is not that great a play. Those systems are increasingly tied to the platform of the vehicle so you can't easily upgrade it without buying a new vehicle. Apple nor Google are particularly well known for being fond of supporting tech that, on average, would not receive a hardware upgrade for 11 years for any user.
Improving infotainment systems interaction with the driver's handset so that a handset upgrade drives all the value add they would want, that works. Hence Google and Apple doing their respective platforms, and car vendors looking to support both from a neutral platform rather than locking a very expensive vehicle to one platform or the other.
I don't see how driver-less cars will change (other than the big one of actually *having* self-driving options). If someone would choose a corolla versus a taurus versus whatever today, I don't see them as suddenly not caring about whatever differentiate those cars today. Basically to the extent your categories would apply in the future, they already apply.
I agree that the concept that the infotainment solution would not really change the fundamentals of the workings of the market, but neither does driver-less (unless some companies neglect that concept, or a disruptive player gets something available to mass market early).
You are right that there isn't adequate data. The problem being that the sentence itself paints things in a rosy light based on that data, rather than some meaningful data.
In short, we have an anecdotal gathering of data by third parties that doesn't actually tell us anything at all, with different people praising or blasting it depending on their preconceived notions.
. While a car may be capable of self-driving, if a human is in control when an accident occurs, then the car was not a self-driving one as far as the accident goes.
Well it is interesting in so far as knowing when the companies think they need to have human operators still. Not really so much the crash, just the portion of the time that is human versus autonomous.
I have contended with corrputed files plenty. If they are plain text, it's highly unlikely that a glitch leaves it such that a human can't piece together what is left. If it relies heavily upon common features of binary formats (compression, alignment to very particular addresses, section headers), it's quite easily unrecoverable. Basically the exact things that make them attractive (performance, efficiency, analysis) make them lose all meaning pretty quickly if part is missing or something.
'48 self-driving cars have been navigating the roads... Of those, only four have been in accidents'
I know that the bigger point is that zero (known) incidents can be traced to the software making a 'mistake' (though even if the other driver is 'at fault', hard to say if a human would have done better at avoidance). The thing that strikes me though is the editorial bias here. *Only* 4 out of 48.. that's nearly 10%. That's far far above the percentage for the general population. It's perfectly likely that is simply a fluke of the small sample size, but implying that 4 out of 48 is a very promising rate of incident is pretty silly.
Right now the 'debate' is in full on 'no true scotsman' fallacy mode. No *real* users are complaining, so all people who *sound* like they are complaining need to shut up. If you complain, you must not be a *true* user.
dconf uses binary configuration files. As I've said many times, while systemd catches a lot of flak for messing with long standing conventions, it is far from alone in modifying the experience (dbus, dconf, systemd, udev all do interesting things, each component bringing interesting capability with varying degrees of drawbacks).
I think udev generally does a great job of delivering useful capability with minimal downside. Then dconf (most people don't even realize the binary dconf files exist, even when they poke dconf extensively). dbus starts going off the rails (many things that once were simple enough to explore/grep around for are now only possible through internet search of obscure dbus-send commands). systemd I actually consider less bad than having to do more and more dbus stuff.
SystemD - works well when it works, fails spectacularly when it fails.
Incidentally that is precisely the way Windows is. Windows is exceedingly structured and engineered (contrary to some beliefs), but as a a result when it fails... boy does it go down so hard that no one is going to bring it back. Not surprising many of the principles in Windows design match the design principles of many modern linux distros: Binary configuration files, binary log files, increasingly complex IPC schemes, and less and less friendly to simple scripts (though increasingly better for complex scripting).
This is another round of the same thing WMI is, a bad replacement for a standard method.
Thank goodness there are other voices out there calling out WMI (and by extension CIM/WBEM) for the crapfest it is.
can be run without a GUI at all
Not true, or else you wouldn't be able to run 'notepad' on the console. Not that this is necessarily a big deal, but the Core editions are not GUI-free, they start cmd in a window. If you ignore the graphics console and use EMS only, the GUI is still running, just not visible to you.