In the last five years, starting around 2010, the shifting priorities of Google’s management left these archival projects in limbo, or abandoned entirely.

After a series of redesigns, Google Groups is effectively dead for research purposes. The archives, while still online, have no means of searching by date.

Google News Archives are dead, killed off in 2011, now directing searchers to just use Google.

Consider the humble video game cartridge. It's a small, durable plastic box that imparts the most immediate, user-friendly software experience ever created. Just plug it in, and you're playing a game in seconds.

If you’ve ever used one, you have two men to thank: Wallace Kirschner and Lawrence Haskel, who invented the game cartridge 40 years ago while working at an obscure company and rebounding from a business failure. Once the pair's programmable system had been streamlined and turned into a commercial product—the Channel F console—by a team at pioneering electronics company Fairchild, it changed the fundamental business model of home video games forever. By injecting flexibility into a new technology, it paved the way for massive industry growth and the birth of a new creative medium.

A Minecraft builder has created a word processor, complete with keyboard and monitor, entirely in the game. And it isn't just for show. The build mechanically functions when keys are pressed, and can load files from memory. It has taken almost two years to build, and the builder plans to expand it into a full-on, working computer.

That's the key, of course. Birch and his colleagues essentially "brute forced" the game of limit poker, in which there are roughly 3 x 10^14 possible decisions. That, ​according to some estimates, is more possible permutations than hands of poker than have ever been played in human history.

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs
Dec 31, 2014  |  Eric Brown


2014 brought us plenty of new open-spec, community-backed SBCs — from $35 bargains, to octa-core powerhouses — and all with Linux or Android support.

In May of this year, LinuxGizmos and Linux.com collaborated on a joint survey, asking our readers to choose their favorite open-spec hacker SBCs from a list of 32 that run Linux and/or Android. Our SBC survey winners, ranked one to five, included the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, Odroid-XU, CubieTruck, and Banana Pi single board computers. Thanks to the flood of new open-spec, community-backed boards, as well as the demise of others, we have updated our list for this end-of-year snapshot.

We’re skipping the survey — and the prizes — this time around, but we hope to offer a similar, but updated list and survey in May or June 2015. With even better prizes.

We removed more than a dozen boards from the list that were no longer in stock, were not being actively supported, were just plain old, or scored too poorly in our last survey to merit inclusion. Some of these, such as the Odroid-XU, were fairly new boards but have already been replaced by newer models (Odroid-XU3). We also added about two-dozen new SBCs, thereby ending up with a total of 40 boards. <more>