The difference is that upstream for upstart is open to BSD/Hurd/etc. ports, whereas upstream for systemd is pretty strongly opposed to them and it does not seem they would assist in the effort.
>As a programmer I find the concept of simply automatically updating libfoo 2.1.x to libfoo 2.1.y because "the developers say it does not break compatibility" scary. Software is written by people, developers accidentally break compatibility all the time, or write software which depends on buggy behavior, behavior which later gets fixed by other developers, thus breaking said software. Thus all common Linux package managers are themselves broken by design. They are only acceptable if you accept that occasionally some things will just stop working after a system update.
I experienced this myself recently. The Netflix metro app decided that something was wrong with the DRM path on my two-day old install of Windows 8.1. After much googling, I ended up having to re-install the OS. It was a very similar experience to when something breaks on a Linux install, except that I had less ability to go digging into the internals (not that that would be helpful for someone who doesn't know a lot about computers).
I think the primary difference with Linux is that developers are fairly content mucking about with things, so breakage that would be a showstopper for someone who is not intimately familiar with computers goes somewhat unnoticed. It's hard to step back and say "what would I do if I didn't know about <x,y,z>?" in daily life.
Incidentally, I didn't realize that he was the creator of Infiniminer. For those unfamiliar with the game, it is what inspired Notch to create Minecraft.
What's the opposition to MSG? I was under the impression that it was fine, though that there was a possibility that some people have adverse reactions to it — but if you're not one of those people, it's nothing to be concerned about.
Unfortunately while the CPUs themselves are quite reasonable, motherboards tend to be far more expensive and less available. I wonder how much of a markup Intel has on the server chipsets vs. desktop ones; it'd be interesting to know whether Intel or motherboard manufacturers are making bank on the boards.
Were it not for the current shortage of 280X cards due to Litecoin mining, one could build a similar Hackintosh for quite a low price. Though you'd be stuck with 3GiB of memory per card rather than 6GiB (at least until MSI releases their 6GiB 280X, which they have listed on their site).
Something I've heard about is integrating Guile into Emacs. Will Guile become the primary language for Emacs with Emacs Lisp as an option, or will Emacs Lisp remain the "default" choice, with Guile for those who want it? And does anyone know what sort of timeline we're looking at before Guile support is released?