That's a pretty good article, but I expect more in-depth information on booting modern Intel CPUs ... I am very interested in modern UEFI / BIOS firmware development and how do they bring up x86 CPUs, but unfortunately there are very little source (I guess, except for EDK2), and the majority (?) of x86 firmwares are proprietary. Booting x86 is much more complicated than writing a linker script with a vector table for your microcontroller ... so, this seems very interesting.
I have been running my homelab for 2 ~ 3 years, and I never considered rpi to be one of the servers ... It is just for toys or some "high school robots" stuff, with 0% availability and are very fragile. How many times your SD card fail / filesystem break / undervolt occurs / accidentally short-circuit? If you want to have a host running Linux 24 * 7, go with a used Thin Client on eBay (they are at least x86). If you are like me who want to build a rack at home, go with some used PowerEdge / ProLiant gears from eBay. They do way better things than your Pi (with BMC, Xeon cores, and ECC memory, possibly), and they are cheaper as well (my PowerEdge R520 servers only cost less than C$200 each). These machines have proper CPU, hard drive, and power supply. Do not use a Pi unless you are building some IoT experiments that require GPIOs.
No, they shouldn't. They can make more profit by treating customers badly, and profit and shareholder value are the only things that matter, so that's what they should do.
If consumers don't like this, then they should find alternatives. Microsoft treating consumers badly is nothing new.
Indeed. Parsing files is a less robust way compared to calling some APIs or at least parsing some files with a schema (e.g. JSON or XML). For example, uptime(1) on Linux:
