Not that anyone has talked about in public, and I've been following RISC-V for a long while.

I haven't looked but probably all you get is the layouts

Pro-tip: Look at what you're posting about before posting such nonsense.

I've been working for a couple of years on Fedora and Linux on RISC-V and the "Seeking alpha" article is the strangest thing. The RISC-V Foundation offers BSD-licensed specs and multiple CPU designs (and a lot more besides). WD, Google, and many more are members. But they are not in any real sense "joining forces to develop a new open-source chip design". The design and chips are already out there, you can make your own FPGA or (if you're very rich) ASIC and have been able to for years. WD are going to switch all their hard drives to RISC-V soon. Google are likely interested because it could be used for their TPUs of their own design. "Joining forces" just means the companies subscribed to the Foundation for a very nominal fee, back-of-the-sofa loose change for these companies.

These run KVM and Xen out of the box. I've been using this chip and its predecessor (Hawker) for a while and they are very nice indeed. It is far from being a "re-purposed" mobile chip (although of course Qualcomm do make buckets of those). They've been developing this as a server-specific chip for several years (4 years I believe from reading another press release).

(Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat on virtualization)

Red Hat and Fedora have a strict "upstream first" policy. We also have a large team working on KVM and qemu. A natural consequence of this is that we implement many features and fix many bugs in KVM/qemu, and these go upstream, and every other distribution benefits. This is great for open source. But I think your question is How is it good for Red Hat? since your implication is you can free ride on Red Hat's efforts.

There are three cases where you might benefit buying RHEL: Firstly if you call support with a serious bug, then eventually it'll get escalated likely to the person who actually wrote the original code. Secondly RHEL subscribers influence the future development direction (of course, the larger ones have a bit more influence). We really care about how our customers are using the tools. Third, you're probably not just using a single KVM host, you might want to try out OpenStack or oVirt, and we have systems architects who help customers with these larger deployments - the same architects who previously worked with large telco subscribers using OpenStack or huge bank deployments of oVirt, so they have loads of real world experience.

However if you're happy to free-ride, then us developers are happy too, because at the end of the day we really care about Free software.

Work makes me take my laptop when I go on vacation.

People are becoming addicted to prescription painkillers. They cannot just buy these products. Therefore they (or others) have to rob them. Men worry about "erectile disfunction" because of advertising. Robbers steal the same products that are advertised for this. Guns are widely available in the US. Guns are used to commit these robberies. Police shoot the suspect because he's carrying a gun.

The decoy pill bottle is just a symptom in all this.

The system described is identical to the one we used to use in our shared house to settle bills. We even did it on a computer, so they don't get to use the "but it's on a computer so it's complete different!" defence.

This just means that booksellers are getting a hidden subsidy from French readers. Sure, you can make anything a success if you have the government enforcing your rent-seeking behaviour. But I wonder if the customers would be happy if it was laid out to them that this policy directly costs them a hidden X euros a year.

Rich.

Eventually I'll just replicate the entire database on my N terabyte USB key. Really, this one isn't a problem.

This is going to be a feature in Fedora 16 (it already works in earlier versions of Fedora, we're just polishing it). More screenshots.

You can also mount and modify virtual machines securely (including Windows VMs and VHDs), using libguestfs and guestmount.

Rich.

PulseAudio sucks, but systemd is reasonable stuff. It's like upstart (but done right) combined with inetd.

Unlike what another reply says, systemd does not require changes to daemons.

Rich.

The two times I've bought houses, you bet I read every single word of every document, even the ones I didn't have to sign. Not doing so is just laziness and stupidity when you're making such an enormous purchase.

Rich.

Safe fast languages:

SML, OCaml and some of the other functional languages. Usually within a few % of the speed of C, and far safer.

However you're absolutely right in your list, and it's very unfortunate that programmers have forgotten or never even knew about these things.

Rich.

If you track down The Secret Life of Machines Series 1, The Television Set you can see this sort of set (perhaps even this very set) being demonstrated.

AIUI you wouldn't want to turn this on for very long, or at least not without a fire extinguisher handy. Some of the electronics (capacitors I think?) are made of paper and after all this time have dried out and are prone to catching fire.

Rich.