MS is doing exactly that with Windows 10, there will be the slow release branch that will be mostly security fixes, with infrequent but pre-announced feature changes (kind of the service pack model but more modern), and the fast release branch which will be more disruptive but will do things like keep Edge more up to date with emerging standards.

The least you can do is implement a real algorithm; but screw it up somehow

That's why the best recommendation is to not only use the approved algorithm, but also the standard implementation. Don't get cute, don't try to optimize it, just use it as is. AES was required to run on emdedded systems 13+ years ago, any modern chip should have zero problem running the standard C implementation today.

$20 is international shipping, US is $5, not every project needs HDMI, and this board includes WiFi and BT 4.0 which are expensive and bulky when adding to an rPi plus it includes storage.

Because Firefox or Chrome would run like crap on something as low end as a Desire HD, not enough ram or CPU. The best browser for something that old is Opera Classic or maybe Dolphin.

However, once you add the HDMI, it's essentially the same price as a raspberry pi model A.

But a heck of a lot cheaper than an rPi plus WiFi dongle plus BT 4.0 dongle and I'm sure it uses way less power (you generally can't run both wireless dongles without a powered USB hub. I'm working on a hub for my BT LE thermometer (ET-735) and it turned out to be cheaper to buy a Moto E or Allwinner based tablet than to add all the components to an rPi, which is just insane to me considering the non-rPi solutions added storage, a screen, a battery, and case to the BOM, oh and the Moto E would be considerably smaller.

Nope, SA is turned off even in war zones, in fact the newest birds don't even have the SA feature.

That's assuming that you haven't put your ESX hosts in lockdown mode or disabled SSH access, which is obviously a security best practice. If you have done these things then you can't script the actions without PowerShell.

You can, using vRealize Automation, it's just painful and so task specific that most places won't bother and therefore the time invested to learn it is of fairly minimal value versus learning Powershell which can be used across many problem domains and products.

Nano mode in Server 10 removes the GUI stack and the Win32 WoW components for a true 64bit native headless install. It's even componentized so that it will only run the services you define which is an optimization looking towards the Docker container integration.

It's been like this since the P4/Foster Xeon:
Desktop->workstation/1P server->DP server->MP server.

This is the final spin of the Haswell line, Broadwell-EP Xeon's are set to launch at the end of the summer.

Uh, it's nearly as much CPU power (141 cores at 5.2GHz, but even more CISC that x86) as the current mainframe, zSeries hasn't been about brute CPU in decades, it's about balanced CPU and I/O combined with high QoS and absolute stability. As an example the Z13 has nearly 1GB of L4 cache in the I/O coprocessors.

Something like Steam's daisy wheel perhaps? It wouldn't be perfect since the only inputs would be cardinal directions instead of two separate input surfaces, but probably at least as fast as graffiti and probably more accurate.

You're thinking of the local water company with it's water filtering plants and pipes that lead directly to your home. That is not where fracking is happening. Fracking is done out where there isn't public water and sewer.

Hate to break it to you, but yes, fracking very much IS happening right in the middle of where there are water and sewer service. Both Cleveland and Pittsburgh, the 31st and 23rd largest MSA's in the country are right in the middle of the shale boom and both states have their department of natural resource (exploitation) overruling local control so there's plenty of drilling happening in the middle of communities (my town of 30k took the DNR to the state supreme court to try to block projects after we had several leaking wells contaminate drinking water and local streams)

Cisco is all about software defined, from the Nexus 1000V (full on virtual), to the fact that every single Nexus switch sold today can be controlled through a robust REST based API Cisco has bought the software defined religion. The issue for them is that if you take away their special sauce then you can get 90% of the performance for 10% of the cost and probably 5% of the annual support costs through merchant silicon. Then again as a midsized enterprise I have zero need for a software defined featureset (the 1000V has some potential uses for us, but since it requires Enterprise Plus on the VMWare side and that would be a high 5 to 6 figure expense there's no way it's worth it) , I need a reliable and well supported platform with lots of other folks hitting on it harder than me so that they can find the bugs and have them fixed before I go to the next featuretrain upgrade. There's a reason that folks go with the big players, and it's not that they offer better phone support (dear lord do the not), it's that due to some sort of corollary to the many eyeballs theory if you have many defacto testers you find the bugs faster and get them ironed out before a large percentage of your userbase runs into them (generally).

He's probably talking about a fresh install, not an upgrade. During the first stage GUI installer it won't even ask you if it detects a SLIC key, there are ways around it but it's basically doing the hokey pokey blindfolded for all the advanced user friendliness it provides (ie we know better than you mere mortal)

I don't know if the installer somehow determined a preset key based on a unique identifier associated with the computer itself
It did, for large volume OEM's Microsoft has them burn the key into the BIOS which is why most don't come with the hologram sticker anymore, there's no need for it on Vista+ systems. The only problem it can sometimes cause is if you're doing a cross version and cross type install without an existing OS on the box (ie it came with 7 home and you're doing an upgrade install of 8.1 Enterprise)