piped logs vs tail

[Ryan Chan <ry...@gmail.com>]

 Using piped logs can be more efficient, but is riskier because Flume can
deliver messages without saving on disk. Doing this, however, increases the
probability of event loss. From a security point of view, this Flume node
instance runs as Apache’s user which is often root according to the Apache
manual.

from:
http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2010/09/using-flume-to-collect-apache-2-web-server-logs/

It seems to me that it is the REVERSE:

1. piped logs is less efficient - more server operations for piping to
flume, while tailing is truly asynchronous and web server has zero works on
flume
2. piped logs has less chance of event loss, since piped log should be
processed before writing to the log file, so if an event can be written
into the log file, it should always exist in flum, but not the vice versa.

Any comment?