where's the problem?

Upon re-reading the original post, I have figured out what I missed the first time around: the original poster doesn't trust the SystemD journal system and wants the ability to completely remove it. (I had tunnel vision on the remote logging thing; mea culpa.)

The original poster also claims that, as existing logging solutions are well-understood, that using the SystemD journal system might expose the owner of the computer to liability. I consider this idea rather wild; I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure that no court would consider it negligent to use the provided logging daemon that Red Hat has been shipping for years now. And, one of the reasons for the binary format in the first place is to make it impossible to alter a log without the changes being detected; this seems like a rather strong advantage with respect to liability.

I would like to see statistics of how many computers are running SystemD, and of those, how many have had actual problems with the journal. If it's as bad as the original poster is claiming, then let's see the numbers.

syslog-ng is receiving a copy of what journald is deciding to write

Yes, that seems pretty clear. What of it?

The original poster was claiming that SystemD is unsuitable for servers because there was no possible way to get remote logs, and thus if someone cracks the server he could mess with the logs. Installing rsyslog would solve the problem. The attacker could scramble the SystemD binary journal files, but not the remote log.

Why should I care whether the log data was collected by the SystemD logger (I guess it's called "journald"?) before rsyslog got it? As long as the log messages are faithfully passed along, where's the problem?

Caveat: I am not a sysadmin. But I have read up on SystemD.

With systemd, one can't even remotely log a journal natively

Why not? SystemD offers its own logging system, but does nothing to prevent you from installing a more capable logging daemon such as rsyslog.

Note that before Fedora 20, rsyslog was installed by default, along with the SystemD logging. In the announcement it says:

rsyslog will remain the recommended option to install if users require /var/log/messages, need support for the syslog network protocol, or need to enforce strict data lifecycle policies. It's sufficient to install and start rsyslog to get /var/log/messages and BSD syslog support.

Emphasis added by me.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/NoDefaultSyslog

You stated "one can't even remotely log a journal"... well, one can if one is able to type: yum install rsyslog

So IMHO your whole argument fails. Not only is it not impossible, it's not even difficult.

...this entire proposition by samzenpus is inane. When one thinks backwards from what the motivations might be, none of them are good and make me lose that much more respect for the site.

The story was submitted by a user named "ewhac". Unless you are accusing "ewhac" of being a sock puppet fro samzenpus, this whole mini-rant seems rather pointless.

My understanding is that ARM-based microservers are attractive for low-compute workloads. For example, a half-rack with 1600 microservers in it would do a great job of coping with the Slashdot effect (it could spin up a whole bunch of web servers).

You are right that if you are scaling out major number crunching jobs, fast Xeon boxes will work out to be more efficient. But those Xeon boxes would be wasted just serving up web pages.

HP has released figures claiming that 1,600 of its Project Moonshot Calxeda EnergyCore microservers, built around ARM-based SoCs, packed into just half a server rack were able to carry out a light scale-out application workload that took 10 racks of 1U servers -- reducing cabling, switching, and peripheral device complexity. The result, according to HP, was that carrying out the workload used 89 percent less energy and cost 63 percent less.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-things-you-should-know-about-microservers/

I think Docker and microservers will turn out to be a great combination. Lightweight Docker containers should run great on the microservers.
IMHO the ARM competitors to Xeon are principally interesting to show that you won't be "painting yourself into a corner" if you adopt the ARM platform: it still has plenty of room to improve.

A quick console deltree "My Documents/Bengazi" while the computer is idle is easier and less obvious to the user.

From the article, quoting Ms. Attkisson:

It was described to me by the computer experts I consulted with afterwards that that was purely an attempt to let me know that they could do that, that they were watching, that they were in my computer.

She's not a computer expert and this part of the story I would want more proof before I buy it. I'd like to know who looked at her computer: what exactly this person's qualifications were and what exactly this person found.

She said that the malware found on her laptop was commonly used by the government... what was it exactly? Is there any malware in the world that is effective but isn't used by anyone except U.S. government agencies? From the article:

Attkisson says the source, who's "connected to government three-letter agencies," told her the computer was hacked into by "a sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware that's proprietary to a government agency: either the CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency."

Slashdot collectively knows a lot about computers. Has anyone heard of spyware that matches the above description?

If I were a government spook and I was trying to crack a reporter's computer, I would use an off-the-shelf exploit, not something that pointed straight back at the government. I presume that computer spooks know where the black-hat marketplaces are, and thus where to buy new cracks as they go up for sale.

As for the classified documents, again I want more evidence. She should have gone to the FBI immediately with those documents if they really were classified. On the one hand that seems like a far-fetched thing, but on the other hand, the current Presidential administration is the first administration ever to prosecute journalists as spies.

P.S. Ms. Attkisson's first-hand stories about her bosses spiking stories, White House staff yelling at her for not being "reasonable", and all the rest of it are completely plausible to me (and fall within her area of expertise).

ESR has already helped several free software projects convert from CVS to Git using his existing computer. The bigger the project, the longer it takes. (Each attempt to convert the Emacs repos takes 8 hours with his current computer.) He has studied the C code for doing the conversion, and determined that the best sort of computer for doing these conversions would be as fast as possible (doesn't matter how many cores; this is a single-thread process) and would have as much RAM as possible. Graphics card? Whatever, who cares. Keyboard, mouse? Not going to buy those, he already has those. Oh, and he would prefer it not sound like a leaf blower so he is looking for quiet power supply and a case with large quiet fans.

He says that several people spontaneously donated money to help him buy a better computer. So he opened up a discussion for how to best spend the money.

Several people urged him to only use ECC RAM, which means either an AMD chip or a Xeon. Someone just donated $1000 (!!!) so he has pretty much settled on the Xeon.

Once he has this, he will go around to free software projects and offer to do the conversion for them. His plan is to grab a copy of the CVS repo, run the conversion to make sure there are no surprises, then ask the project maintainers to stop modifying the CVS repo while he runs the final conversion.

This seems like a reasonable service for him to be offering. Instead of each project figuring out the conversion process, he will become an expert on CVS to Git conversions (with more experience than anyone else) and he will have the purpose-built computer to do the conversions as quickly as possible. So he really will be saving time and hassle for the various projects.

P.S. He converted the NetHack repos, and stirred up a hornets' nest. Read about it here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6389&cpage=1#comment-1207141

Seriously, what's so broken about X? Is it just a pain in the ass for developers to work with?

You might seek out some of the tech talks given by Wayland developers. They lay it out pretty clearly.

Here's a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

From memory, X11 is full of cruft that no longer makes sense. Everyone wants beautifully rendered, anti-aliased fonts, but X11 not only doesn't give you that, if you comply with X11 you can't do that.

Wayland took a look at how X11 is actually used, today, and throws away the cruft that nobody uses anymore. Also Wayland adds a sane API versioning system.

Wayland is exactly as network-transparent as X11 is in actual use these days: not very but you can make it work. Everyone is pretty much asking X11 for a drawing canvas, drawing on it, then giving it to a compositor to display. See above comments about beautifully anti-aliased fonts.

My favorite comment: "Everybody says the UNIX way is small programs that do one thing well. What is the 'one thing' that X11 does well?" He pointed out that at one point X11 had a print server embedded in it (it wasn't a good idea).

TL;DR Several of the top X11 developers think Wayland is a very good idea.

Docker is sort of an extremely lightweight virtual machines system.

Docker organizes software into "containers". Each container has a complete set of libraries and files, and each container is isolated from the rest of the system. Thus if you need a specific and touchy set of libraries to run Software X, and you need a different specific and touchy set of libraries to run Software Y, you can simply make two containers and run them side by side.

As I understand it, Docker container images use a "snapshots" system to store changes; so the two containers for Software X and Software Y will together be much smaller than two VM images would be.

Using Docker, if developers make a server-side application, they can then hand a container over to production for deployment, and everyone can be confident that the application will run the same in production as it ran in development. (Of course it would still be possible to break things, for example by having different data in the production database compared to the dev test database.) Or, developers could run containers on their laptops and expect them to run the same as on the servers in the office.

Unlike VMs, the Docker containers don't run their own kernels. So you can't run a Linux server with Docker that in turn runs OpenBSD in a container.

As I understand it, many people use Docker to run a single process per container. The web server in one container, the email server in another, the SSH server in another, etc. One use case: if you have a web site hosted in the cloud, and the Slashdot effect starts slamming on the web site, the cloud hosting service could spin up another 500 instances of the web site (500 fresh instances of the Docker container, each container running a single process, the web server).

I talked to an expert sysadmin, and he told me "This is the future." I'm going to set up a Docker server at home and learn my way around it.

https://www.docker.com/whatisdocker/

My reading of the press release is that Microsoft is going to (a) implement the Docker APIs for Windows, so that Windows server applications can be container-ized; and (b) add the ability to run Linux containers. The latter is not implausible; Windows NT has always had so-called "personalities" and Posix has been available as a personality for decades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_kernel#NT_kernel

The article discusses wind power vs. coal and other types of power purely on the basis of cost, with absolutely no discussion of reliability.

If wind power is as cheap as he claims, then with a reliable storage technology wind would be a total no-brainer. But as it is, wind can only be part of a strategy. You can't count on wind for base load, and when wind varies you need to have other types of power (such as natural gas) ready to pick up the slack.

I'm hoping that the Ambri liquid metal batteries will do everything that Professor Sadoway claims. If so, they will change everything, and I will be cheering for more wind and solar. Until then, wind power only can serve as a niche producer.

The article discusses wind power vs. coal and other types of power purely on the basis of cost, with absolutely no discussion of reliability.

If wind power is as cheap as he claims, then with a reliable storage technology wind would be a total no-brainer. But as it is, wind can only be part of a strategy. You can't count on wind for base load, and when wind varies you need to have other types of power (such as natural gas) ready to pick up the slack.

I'm hoping that the Ambri liquid metal batteries will do everything that Professor Sadoway claims. If so, they will change everything, and I will be cheering for more wind and solar. Until then, wind power only can serve as a niche producer.

Hollywood has an idea shortage.

True, but there is another point you might want to consider: media fragmentation.

It used to be that there were only three TV networks, and most people could only see a movie by going to the theatre (which didn't have 12 different screens in those days either). For music, there were a limited number of radio stations.

Now, there are many different cable channels, plus YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Rhapsody, and DVD rentals or purchases. For consumers this is great, because you can watch what you like, when you like it.

But Hollywood is unhappy because it's much harder now to build a new franchise. As a result, Hollywood is recycling old franchises, even if the end product has very little to do with the original.

For a bonus, many people who have purchasing power now have fond memories of things they watched as kids.

Thus, you have crazy stuff like the Battleship movie; I'm pretty sure they literally started with the brand name, and ginned up a movie project to put on it. I submit to you that Battleship isn't an example of scraping the barrel for ideas, but rather an example of jump-starting the marketing for a movie by building off a well-known pre-existing brand. It's gotta be the same thing with Tetris: we have this brand, how can we leverage it to sell movies?

Many of the reboots and sequels have little to do with the original source material; and I think in many cases Hollywood just took some script and said "we can shoehorn this into a pre-existing franchise" and did it.

Also, in my opinion the reason Guardians of the Galaxy was so successful was that it was made with love, and well-made at that; the third-tier Marvel characters are so obscure that they didn't really bring much to the marketing. I, for one, saw it because the previews made it look fun and because I read some really favorable reviews.

This is a little bit tricky because it is, in theory, a violation of the DMCA to play DVDs without a properly licensed DVD player program. (Specifically, a program that has licensed the dread secret of CSS.)

Both Ubuntu and Mint have packages you can install to play DVDs.

If you don't mind paying some money, you can get a properly licensed DVD player from Fluendo. I bought this, and it Just Works.

http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/oneplay-dvd-player/

I wish Fluendo would also offer a Blu-Ray player, but as far as I know the only legal-in-the-USA way to play Blu-Ray on Linux would be to install Windows in VirtualBox or some other VM, and then install a Windows Blu-Ray player.