Sure. So now I get an additional log daemon which doesn't feed logs back upstream. Explain how this is simplifying my system.

They claim they're moving things, not removing them. If done well this will help KDE immensely because current prefs dialogs treat trivial and significant settings as equally important by barfing them all up together into a big dialog.

Odd, so does a syslog. And you can still use tools to read it. Indexed files could be built from it if you had that much logging done. And since systemd has no option to output the ascii log in realtime, you have to use the tools. If you want to use the body of existing tools which do things with normal log files, you'll now need a FUSE filesystem to treat the binary logs like real logs, or you'll simply be out of date as you read the ascii logs from journald.

android-x86 is a bit of a dog's breakfast. They only kick out a release image every now and again, everything never works, lots of crashes. The latest 4.4 image is way less stable than the last 4.0 image they put out, and they stopped building nightlies and so did everyone else. It's really quite useless and always has been, because they never actually finish a release. Google kicks out a new version, they say "Ooh, shiny!" and they move on before they actually get the system working reliably or properly. Then you get to deal with all the apps that won't work right on x86 on top of that. It makes far more sense at this point to go ahead and run the emulator.

Well, maybe. Or maybe it just demands a higher standard of living, one which cannot be supported without more oppression.

Exactly. I will not buy a device that doesn't have cheap, easily available removable memory. I've always been that way. I bought a Minidisc player when MP3 players were starting to get popular because Minidiscs were $5, while 128 MB cards which held about the same amount of music were around $200. Sony really could have maintained the market on portable music for at least 5 more years if they didn't put so much DRM on their Minidisc players. They could have made them as easy to use any other MP3 player, and they would have outsold everyone because you could bring so much music with you. They would have eventually lost out as flash drives got cheaper and larger, but for the initial period when MP3 players first came out, there's no reason why anybody should have been buying them at all.

too true. I like the servers with chat filters, which bring a level of amusement to the situation when the chat scrolls with tales of bananasing female dogs and so on

You have fallen into my trap: So then why did it have to be part of systemd at all? Why couldn't it just be improvements to one of the existing syslog daemons? Answer, NIH.

For $8 a month they offer a pretty good selection. I remember when blockbuster was still around, and they were charging almost as much for a single rental. Renting a single movie on iTunes will set you back around $5. Premiums channels like HBO cost $15+ a month, and you have to already have a cable subscription. Sure Netflix may not have everything, but they have a pretty good selection given the price they are asking. I definitely get my $8 worth every month. I guess it would be nice if their selection were better, or if they had an option for $25 for every movie and every TV show in existence, but that option doesn't exist anywhere. If Netflix isn't good, who offers a better deal?

Really this is the answer. To use Netflix, you need to pay for an account. And it has TV shows and movies. It's not like Youtube where somebody links you it and you just go watch a short clip and go back to your browsing. Things like Netflix don't need to run in a web browser at all. They just need to make full applications (or plugins in the case of XBMC and others) for all the platforms worth supporting.

I think the problem with Apple going to lossless, is that people would soon get really irritated with the very small amount of space that Apple gives you with the base model of their devices. From some basic searching it seems that FLAC is somewhere around 700 kbps. It could be less or more depending on the file, because it's lossless and will take as many bits as it needs, but I think that's a pretty good estimate. The last 16 GB iPod I bought came with 12 GB usable out of the box. That means you could probably fit about 40 albums (at about an hour and album) on an iPod assuming you used it only for music. You'd have no space for apps/games, or photos, or videos. 40 albums is quite a bit to be carrying around in your pocket, but when other devices allow you to carry around hundreds of albums, your 16 GB iPod is going to seem pretty weak.

This is the big question. What does the dealership do other than sell cars for Tesla? Dealerships make a lot of their money doing regular maintenance and warranty repairs on cars. With an electric car, there is a lot less maintenance to be done. And they are much more reliable. They have an 8 year, unlimited mile warranty. No other IC engine car can offer that, because they simple aren't as reliable, and by their nature, never can be. Most of the problems with Teslas have been software bugs. Once they get all that figured out, there's very little that can go wrong. And fixing software bugs can most likely be done by the end user at home, just like they do with their computers, phones, TVs, and game consoles.

The manufacturer likely could sell for less but in many cases they don't want to get on the bad side of Amazon or Best Buy or whoever else is selling so many of their products. Most manufacturers know very little about good marketing and how to ship a product to the end customer. They simple aren't set up for such tasks. Amazon and others actually provide a very good service to many manufacturers. All the manufacturer has to do is send truckloads of their products to Amazon's warehouse. And Amazon will send money to the manufacturer. Amazon will handle all the complicated stuff like running website, sending out emails to let people know about the products, advertising on websites so people know about the products, search engine optimization to ensure people find the product they are looking for, taking payment from the customer, shipping the product out to the customer. Very few businesses could offer the level of service that Amazon and other online retailers do if they were tasked with it themselves.

This is kind of how I got interested in building levels in Descent. In Descent, all the levels could only be made of cubes. You could make larger rooms by joining cubes together. You could make things look not completely square because you could move the vertices around to make the cubes skewed, but everything was made of 3 dimensional shapes with 6 sides that were all quadrilaterals. It made building levels really easy. You could make a curved hallway by making one side of a cube a bit shorter, and attaching it to another that was the same, and repeating this pattern. And it has tools to make repeating patterns really fast. Once you got the hang of using the tools (really only took a few hours) you could build new levels extremely fast.

It's a toy.

Which is fine though. Plenty of people spend plenty of money on "toys" to make this a viable product. $1000 for a 3D printer which is really just a toy isn't all that bad. The XBox One was $500 when it came out. By the time you get a second controller and a few games, you're probably getting close to $800. And the XBox One, or PS4, or any other console is really just a toy. You can't even run your own code on them. You can pretty much just play games. The new iPhone just came out and it's $650 for the cheapest one. And while there are some business uses of an iPhone, the vast majority of people I know with an iPhone use them solely for personal use and could do just as well with a $200 phone (or less).

Personally, I can't see the point in owning a 3D printer. The number of objects that I'd want to print out is quite small. It would make much more sense for me to go down to Home Depot and pay them to print out my parts on a $10,000 printer (assuming such a service existed), because I'd probably get better results and it would cost me less and take me less time. It's the same reason I don't own a photo printer. I can get a much better job done much faster by just taking my memory card into Walmart. If I feel like getting some really high quality prints, I can take them to a better photo place and get them printed better. But there's no way that I would have the money to afford that level of quality for my own personal use.