They're increasingly hard to justify though. Cortex-M cores are really, really cheap (M0 and M0+ especially) and a modern 32-bit instruction set can be a significant win. You can't justify a 16-bit microcontroller on cost grounds anymore, let alone an 8-bit one. The main places Z80s are used is in systems designed in the early '80s that would cost too much to change, but which need periodic repairs.

I've seen a few things recently that have taken an amusing middle ground and bought ARM cores and used them to run a Z80 emulator, because it was cheaper to get the associated peripherals to attach to the ARM core.

I don't understand why Microsoft wants to go down that path. Their big money comes from businesses. They should be trumpeting private clouds (buy Windows server, install on a rack, run all of the cloudy stuff that you want under control of your company) and privacy to actively differentiate themselves from Google.

I've spent a depressing amount of the last couple of weeks looking at hotel web sites to find somewhere to stay for a business trip. About a year ago, almost all of them would have used Google Maps for their location page. Now about half used Bing Maps. I was quite surprised by this, though I vaguely remember Google starting to charge businesses for using GMaps (it could also be that Google highlights all of the competing hotels in the map, which probably isn't something that hotels want...). I didn't find the Bing map any worse than the Google one. Both were annoying in different ways.

I expect Google to die in the same way that IBM died: it will still be a huge and influential player for a long time, but won't be the company that defines an industry that people care about. The same sort of path as Microsoft.

When I interviewed at Google a few years I was reminded of something that JWZ wrote about Netscape, claiming that it started to decline when it started hiring people who were there because it was a cool place to work, not because they wanted to change the world and believed in the things that the company was doing. Everyone I met at Google told me that I should would there because it was a cool place to work...

A win for rude, pushy and obnoxious people who shouted loudest and longest and ignored everyone else...

Well that's what I see from the systemd detractors, not its proponents. They're still shouting loudly, in the comments on every article even tangentially related to it. Of course they are being ignored by systemd proponents and most neutral parties because they mostly repeat the same myths and slurs.

Sorry about that. Once you've recovered, consider running 'reportbug release-notes' to request an additional note about this gotcha. (I assume that there is already a bug report against grub).

A true free and open process would be to include a choice at installation/upgrade time between the choices. If I do have a choice on the web server, on the DNS server, on the mail server, even on the kernel, on the shell that I deliver for my users [...]

You can't choose any of those through the installation GUI. All of them require a custom pre-seeded install or post-install action.

If you upgrade an x86 system, both systemd and sysvinit will be installed and you can select sysvinit from the GRUB menu.

Debian had a GR to decide this issue, so please don't spread conspiracy theories about "a small handful of people". Good luck with FreeBSD.

Debian 8 has libjpeg-turbo, replacing libjpeg8 and matching most other distributions.

Please read the release notes, there are various things that may need manual attention before you upgrade.

It obviously can be done, the question is whether it makes financial sense. It seems that, if it were cost-efficient to store electricity in LiIon batteries then the biggest buyers of them would be power companies, so maybe there's some market inefficiency that you can exploit by doing it in customers houses, but it even with that it sounds like it will have a very long ROI. I pay about £400/year for electricity (about $600). A $13K battery storage array would cost me the same as almost 22 years of electricity. Even if it reduced my electricity bills to zero, it would take 22 years for it to pay for itself. I think the overnight rate, if I switch to a tariff that has one, is about half of the normal rate, so it would actually take 44 years. Probably a bit less as electricity prices are likely to go up over the next few decades, but even with a 20 year ROI there are far better uses of my money.

Apparently a lot of the USA uses electricity for heating (and cooling). If you're using gas or oil for heating, then comparing your electricity usage to their energy usage is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

It depends on whether you're using electricity for heating. In the last quarter, we used about 7kWh/day of electricity, but about 23kWh/day of gas. If you're on electric heating (and live somewhere larger than me), then 48kWh doesn't sound too excessive.

Lawsuits don't have to be expensive, it depends on how much you're asking. If you claim, say, the cost of one year of Internet subscription then you're in the lowest bracket for small claims court filings (plus your time, which may be a lot more depending on how flexible your working hours are). The cost for the ISP to send someone is more than they're likely to lose, so you're very likely to get a default judgement against them. For added irony, you might ask for the ISP to be required to pay for you to transfer your subscription to A&A and pay the difference in the cost of Internet access for the next two years...

Google has a UI team now?