987 kWh?

Mine was 150 kWh with electrical cooking (heating is district heating though). You should definitely investigate.

IMHO it was good that it ended up with the outcome it did. You'll notice that the option "we should not have a GR about this" won. What it means is that Debian elected NOT to try to force any particular solution through, but let things settle themselves through consensus decisions by individual package maintainers.

If enough people care about sysvinit, it will survive and thrive - if not, it will die in Debian, just like other things that have been abandoned. Whether project X is your pet project or not, this is just natural software evolution. You can't be in the software world for long without seeing something you like rot and be disbandoned.

I should perhaps add that unless you've looked at the data, intuition in energy production works really bad. For instance, the above sentences makes wind sound really bad, but in reality the wind conditions in Denmark are actually pretty good. Otherwise wind power wouldn't be economical here, and it certainly is.

Look, energy production is hard stuff, and the reporter here clearly didn't understand ANY of the intricacies.

Basically the situation is this: you have a consumption curve that you need to meet at every instance. It is important to understand that this is a curve with daily peaks. These peaks MUST be met or you get riots in the streets.

If you erect a wind turbine it will produce power as the wind blows. Same with solar and the sun. When you match the resulting production curve up against the consumption curve, there will be gaps that you need to fill in some other way.

Nuclear power is a bad way to fill the gaps. Due to high capital costs, to stay economical a nuclear plant usually needs to produce 100% all the time until it needs refueling (which takes a month I think) where it will produce 0%, in other words a flat line with some clearly defined gaps. But we need to match a curve with gaps, so a flat line doesn't help much.

Instead you need something you can dispatch relatively quickly without costs going through the roof. Currently stuff like hydro, biogas, biomass, etc.

In Denmark, besides all the wind turbines we have a bunch of big coal plants. These plants are currently being transitioned to biomass (i.e. wood pills and chips) and will fill in the gaps, as well as produce heat for district heating (which is really big in Denmark, winter's cold up here).

If these plants get into financial trouble, the national grid operator Energinet can increase a fee on each kWh (the PSO) and use the extra income to pay some of the plants for standby services. Besides this, we have really good grid connections to Norway where they have a ton of quickly dispatchable hydro. The connections to Norway are a two-way street - they get cheap wind turbine power in return which makes it easier for them to get through the winter without running out of water (very little water flows to the dams in winter because it's frozen).

Hence, apart from the transportation sector where we're waiting for Tesla and the like to come up with better electric cars, there really isn't anything tricky or hard about the transition away from fossil fuels in Denmark.

It was tricky in the past because wind turbines used to be expensive, but the industry has matured and wind is now the cheapest source of new (undispatchable) kWhs. Really, the only political question left is whether we should try to save some of the biomass by building more off-shore wind turbines.

It's also true that our current path is a bit more expensive than a fossil-based base scenario - I think it's supposed to be around 100-200 USD per inhabitant per year in 2050. So not overwhelmingly expensive.

I don't know how you got modded up, but you are actually wrong on most accounts:

- Greens in the government just pretended it doesn't exist until it's now hitting them square in their faces.

False. It is well-known that you need something to fill in the gaps. Energistyrelsen (~ department of energy) has recently calculated the costs. They are not excessive.

- Wind power is installed mainly offshore.

False. But it's true that much of the future growth is expected to be off-shore.

- Essentially, not a single watt of non-renewable energy can be sold on exchange until all of renewable capacity has been sold.

False. At least for Denmark. If you think otherwise, please provide a source. The producer bidding with the lowest price (so usually those with the lowest marginal costs) get to sell first. Solar and wind have lower marginal costs.

- This obviously leads to the problem where it's unprofitable to keep the non-renewable plants operating, so operators just shut down the plant. Except that woops, if they do, you have grid blackouts

Well, this hasn't really happened yet (many plants shutting down), and Energinet is responsible for making sure that if it happens, we don't get into trouble. Energinet can increase the PSO (a fee on each kWh sold) and use that to pay standby plants or build more power lines. We will not have regular blackouts, that's just FUD.

Except for price. Most alternatives when it comes to energy are limited by costs. Although I think you're right that we'll eventually end up creating/harvesting the hydrocarbons from other sources than the ground.

I think a perfect example is the recordings of Wilhelm Kempff of Beethoven sonatas. You can find some with video on Youtube - on those there's an occasional misplaced note (it's an old man playing), yet the music is... beyond this world.

Take a MIDI-playback directly from the notes written by Beethoven and compare that to Kempff's performance.

Technical ability is the means to an end.

I once thought the same. But investigating with a "OMGF!!! THE SERVER IS DOWN!!!!" over my head just doesn't work well in practice - so I tend to end up restarting the service anyway, in which case the difference between a program doing it and me is just loss of availability (and worse working conditions for me).

Have you ever found any practical advantage of doing this manually?

Your logic is flawed. Random bit flips sometimes happen. They don't necessarily take down the whole machine.

The reality is that before systemd showed up, there wasn't really any project with an active upstream that tried to solve the plumbing problem (I'm not talking about init in isolation here). Each distro had to invent their own hacks, some of them good, some of them not.

The fact is that the community that is beginning to form around systemd is much more healthy than the scattered bits and not-quite-fitting pieces we had before. Maybe that's sad, I don't know. I think that in the end, the unification around systemd will allow competitors to form (just implement the interesting subset of the systemd interface and you can integrate with all distros!). So long term we'll end up with a much more vibrant plumbing for Linux.

Obviously you haven't learned your lesson yet. Hardware failures happen.

I like that in the future when the integration is more complete, I'll be able to install a database or a webserver and then once in a full moon when a cosmic ray hits the process and kills it, systemd will just restart it.

Yes, you can do that with other tools too once you've learnt your lesson (many years ago I had 1.5 year uptime with Apache and then it suddenly crashed) and I am using one of those at the moment. What I like is that this will just work out of the box for newbies and veterans alike with no clunky configuration/interfacing.

Will the pope declaring this really have an effect on people who are deeply entrenched in anti-scientific teachings? It seems more likely to me that these people will reject the pope. Or find a way to twist his words so as not to contradict them.

If you are full-time sysadmin having setup the perfect shop with sysvinit, you'll probably not see that many benefits. However, lots and lots of people don't have access to a resource like you. When systemd is properly integrated, these people will get a much better experience out of the box, e.g. daemon supervision, watchdog integration or better on-demand startup of services (for really cheap VPS stuff).

If you know your stuff, you'll have configured this by hand long ago - but most people don't know their stuff. systemd allows distributions a better default experience.

It's not really intended for tablets, AFAIK the primary target is the touch screens you can buy these days and which some laptops come equipped with. Without some help from the desktop environment and applets, the touch aspect of those screens is more or less completely useless. Maybe you don't care, but the people who buy those screens probably do.