So what would you want to have happening in the case Cantrill was talking about? The aim is to have good systems and there have been plenty of bad holistic systems in the history of computing. But by good, non-holistic systems, do you mean that we have a motherboard with well-documented firmware that the buyer of the hardware can't see into except according to the interfaces the vendor has provided? This seems to be potentially hiding the kind of information about a malfunctioning system that gets Cantrill so worked up about.