And it turns out that people were still launching boards with AGP in 2010. You can probably still buy one...

True, but SMP systems are older. I used a dual P3-700 for years, which I picked up cheaply on eBay because not many people searched for 'duel processor' (I think eBay now does some phonetic matching in their search). Before that, the ABit BP6 (1999) was quite popular. It ran two Celerons, so you could get a dual-processor machine for cheaper than a single-processor one (though you needed to run Windows NT or *NIX to be able to use the second one, as XP was the first SMP-capable consumer OS from MS). The 300MHz Celerons overclocked to 450MHz by bumping the FSB from 66MHz to 100MHz, making it quite competitive with the P2 (the L2 cache in the Celeron was half the size, but twice the speed, and the core was the same).

Really? Wikipedia tells me that kindergarten in the USA means up to age 6. By that time, I had been taught to read, write and do arithmetic (though I sucked at long division and found long multiplication hard until I was taught a third method a few years later). My handwriting is not much better now than it was then, though it did improve a bit in the middle as a teenager when I was writing on a regular basis.

I don't, but if you want to get the same fun without all of the old annoyances there are two things I'd recommend:

The first is to get an FPGA dev board. BlueSpec is a nice proprietary high-level HDL that is free for academic use, but if you don't qualify for that then CHISEL from Berkeley is also not bad - they're both a nice step above Verilog / VHDL.

The second is the mbed boards from various ARM partners. Some ARM folks handed me one of these to play with a few months back. These are aimed at getting embedded development to people who don't normally do it. They've got all of the fun I/O stuff from the BBC micro (plus some new stuff like USB and Ethernet) and a nicely put together development environment.

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.