I've said it before: companies that are perfectly happy with ARM chips now are not going to be in a hurry to lock themselves in to sole-source chips.

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3202785&cid=41735071

Intel would have to be better than ARM, and not just a little bit better... they would have to be dramatically better, such that the risk of being locked in to a sole source vendor would be worth accepting. It hasn't happened yet and I don't expect it to happen.

It will be difficult for any company, even AMD, to really challenge Intel in the high-end CPU market. But it would take a miracle for Intel to lock down the mobile CPUs market.

Intel's plan:

0) Get everyone locked in to needing to buy chips from Intel.
1) Charge stiff margins for those chips.
2) Profit!

Intel does have some chips in some Android devices, but they aren't charging the stiff margins they would like to charge. I don't think they will ever manage to do it.

Second best would be to not charge stiff margins but at least get a large chunk of the available profits from the mobile space. But I don't think they will be able to push out ARM and gain majority share of the market; they will continue to be a niche player.

Another turn in the wrong direction, in my opinion, is Wayland, which breaks many highly useful (to users) capabilities provided by X11.

If Keith Packard thinks Wayland is a good idea, I'm inclined to trust him. And, he does.

Perhaps you don't fully understand what Wayland is or why the senior X11 developers think it is a good idea. Please read through this and see if it changes your mind:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=x_wayland_situation&num=1

I'm not an expert, but you asked on Slashdot so I guess you are willing to listen to non-expert opinion.

• Insulate as much as you can. In the USA we can hire experts to come out, look at a building, make recommendations, and then carry out the work. My home, for example, had its insulation upgraded as much as possible: thick insulation in the attic space, as much insulation into the walls as they could take (not much), and windows replaced with triple-pane windows filled with krypton gas.
• If you expect to lose power for only short times, it may be enough to have a large capacity UPS on your server. For long-term independence you will need a generator.
• Could your server needs be handled by a low-power server? I use an HP Proliant Microserver which is pretty much a laptop motherboard (uses an AMD Turion II mobile processor). Perhaps you could use an actual laptop for your server and have a built-in "UPS" in the battery.
• For rooftoop solar, photovoltaic panels would be simplest, but I believe that panels that collect heat are the most efficient. I suggest you Google search for "solar off-grid" and "solar water heating" and read about these.

The user experience is a bit laggy on the first-ever device using the new chip. PROOF! Proof that the chip is a complete failure!

Hmm. Maybe we should wait a while and see if any updates from Google will improve things.

Why make it harder to vote for people who have to work, single parents, the elderly, those without transportation, etc?

When in-person voting was standard in my state, there was always a provision for "absentee" ballots, available to anyone who would have a true hardship to vote in person. I never proposed getting rid of all absentee ballots; I just think they should be limited to those who truly need them, rather than all voters mailing all ballots always.

The number of fraud cases is likely extremely low, to the point of being a statistical anomaly.

How can you know this?

If you prevent 1,000 cases of fraud by stopping 10,000 legitimate voters then would you really say that is a solution?

Do you have any evidence whatsoever that in-person voting stops any voters, let alone ten thousand of them?

If in-person voting is such an unreasonable burden, then why was it the way my state did things from the time it became a state until a couple of years ago?

Do you at least agree that voter fraud is a problem? If an honest count of the people's votes would choose candidate A, but ballot-stuffing manages to swing the election over to candidate B, would you agree that some harm has been done?

I claim that 1,000 fraudulent votes is equivalent to disenfranchising 1,000 legitimate voters. Do you agree, or do you disagree with this statement? If you disagree, then why?

It is disenfranchisement for the sake of exclusion, not actually making the system better.

Who is trying to disenfranchise voters for the sake of exclusion? Who are the voters to be disenfranchised?

Did you intend to specifically imply that I'm a liar, that I don't actually care about voter fraud but just want to disenfranchise people? If so, upon what evidence do you base this conclusion?

I don't personally have any evidence that it's happening. James O'Keefe, however, collected video evidence that if it did happen, that the Democratic party operatives he talked to would be okay with it and encouraged it.

"I mean, that's not even like lying or stealing. If someone throws out a ballot, you should just... do it."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_uHDjk3fSc

But isn't this sort of beside the point? If I told you about a vulnerability in a server, would you (a) fix the server, or (b) demand to know whether I had any evidence that the vulnerability was actually being exploited?

Much better solution. No lines. No scheduling around work. Several weeks to study out everything.

It's also much easier and lower-risk to vote fraudulently by mail. Even if someone comparing the signatures detects a forged vote, it will be pretty much impossible to find the person who forged it.

I much prefer showing up at a polling place and marking a piece of stiff paper or light cardboard, with volunteers (all political parties welcome) watching everything. I want the ballots hauled away in locked boxes and watched at all times.

Go ahead and use computer scanners to tally the votes. But keep the ballots as a paper trail. Recounts are easy to do and humans can easily check up on the results from the scanners.

And, polling places can have unofficial vote tally scanners that count votes all day and then forward the results to the state department of elections, so the news can find out who appears to be winning.

In fact, the above is the way elections used to work where I live; in recent years the state has gone to mail-in ballots only.

Where I live, the state department of elections mails out a voters's guide many weeks before the actual election, so it's easy to study. Ideally the guide should include a printed sheet that would list the offices for which you could vote, so you don't even have to figure that out on your own from your voter's ID card or whatever.

Politics is the art of the possible. There are big-money companies that really, really don't want some properties to go into the public domain... and I don't think it will be possible to make a simple scheme like 14+14 in the face of their opposition.

I think the best we can hope for, the best we can realistically obtain in the current political environment, is to allow copyright holders to renew forever, but absolutely require that renewal (nothing automatic).

So Disney will pay people to meticulously track every old Disney cartoon, will pay the copyright renewal fee on each one every 5 years or whatever, and won't oppose letting other stuff fall into the public domain. Meanwhile, wacky old video games where nobody is even sure who controls the copyright would fall into the public domain, as nobody would pay the fee.

I don't even care how much the fee is. Make it $1. What I want is for the default case be that things fall into the public domain.

I don't view the above solution as perfect, but I do think it is the best that we can hope for in the current environment.

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.