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Yes, Finland does this as you can see Here

You mean like this

See also the corresponding Dr Fun cartoon from March 6th, 2001...

http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200103/df2001 0306.jpg

Check out today's (well januari 7th) DrFun cartoon, seems like Dave knows what is going on here...

http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200201/df2002 0107.jpg

You mean these pictures of Linus? =) (linus*.gif in that directory)

In a similar vein, I've spent the past week or two trying to develop a way to produce seamless, stereoscopic 3D desktop backgrounds. I've always had an interest in stereography, but until now I couldn't find a way to apply it to my PROPAGANDA tiles..

Just yesterday morning I finally managed to produce (and can reproduce at will) stereoscopic 3D wallpaper in Gimp. No rendering, no photography, nuthin but pure hand-made goodness in Gimp. :) The next best thing to holography, I suppose. :) Have a look here for a small example image, or if you have a very large display, you can see the unscaled original here. Just bring it up in any image viewer, or set it as your background..The fun part about it is that casual onlookers look at your desktop and just see a nice background...You would only know it was 3D if somebody told you. :) It doesn't require any special 3D glasses or anything stupid like that -- All you need to do is lightly cross your eyes like looking at the image. Here's a quick lesson in how to see it in 3D -- Sit squarely in your chair a few feet away, directly facing your monitor. Don't look at it at an angle. Cross your eyes lightly until you see "the one in the middle". If you have problems seeing it, hold up a pencil exactly halfway between your eyes and the screen. Focus on the tip of the pencil for a few seconds and whammo, you'll see the background show up in 3D.. When tiled as a background, the 3D effect looks like an egg-carton, or like the sound-dampening walls of a recording studio. Spikes and pits. For added mirth and merriment, swivel in your chair a little bit and you'll see the image move correspondingly. Even more fun, is trying to move back slowly while seeing it. The farther you move back, the deeper the image will appear. I'll probably surprise the gimp-devel folks with an explanation of how its done in a day or two. :)

Cheers,

In a similar vein, I've spent the past week or two trying to develop a way to produce seamless, stereoscopic 3D desktop backgrounds. I've always had an interest in stereography, but until now I couldn't find a way to apply it to my PROPAGANDA tiles..

Just yesterday morning I finally managed to produce (and can reproduce at will) stereoscopic 3D wallpaper in Gimp. No rendering, no photography, nuthin but pure hand-made goodness in Gimp. :) The next best thing to holography, I suppose. :) Have a look here for a small example image, or if you have a very large display, you can see the unscaled original here. Just bring it up in any image viewer, or set it as your background..The fun part about it is that casual onlookers look at your desktop and just see a nice background...You would only know it was 3D if somebody told you. :) It doesn't require any special 3D glasses or anything stupid like that -- All you need to do is lightly cross your eyes like looking at the image. Here's a quick lesson in how to see it in 3D -- Sit squarely in your chair a few feet away, directly facing your monitor. Don't look at it at an angle. Cross your eyes lightly until you see "the one in the middle". If you have problems seeing it, hold up a pencil exactly halfway between your eyes and the screen. Focus on the tip of the pencil for a few seconds and whammo, you'll see the background show up in 3D.. When tiled as a background, the 3D effect looks like an egg-carton, or like the sound-dampening walls of a recording studio. Spikes and pits. For added mirth and merriment, swivel in your chair a little bit and you'll see the image move correspondingly. Even more fun, is trying to move back slowly while seeing it. The farther you move back, the deeper the image will appear. I'll probably surprise the gimp-devel folks with an explanation of how its done in a day or two. :)

Cheers,

In a similar vein, I've spent the past week or two trying to develop a way to produce seamless, stereoscopic 3D desktop backgrounds. I've always had an interest in stereography, but until now I couldn't find a way to apply it to my PROPAGANDA tiles..

Just yesterday morning I finally managed to produce (and can reproduce at will) stereoscopic 3D wallpaper in Gimp. No rendering, no photography, nuthin but pure hand-made goodness in Gimp. :) The next best thing to holography, I suppose. :) Have a look here for a small example image, or if you have a very large display, you can see the unscaled original here. Just bring it up in any image viewer, or set it as your background..The fun part about it is that casual onlookers look at your desktop and just see a nice background...You would only know it was 3D if somebody told you. :) It doesn't require any special 3D glasses or anything stupid like that -- All you need to do is lightly cross your eyes like looking at the image. Here's a quick lesson in how to see it in 3D -- Sit squarely in your chair a few feet away, directly facing your monitor. Don't look at it at an angle. Cross your eyes lightly until you see "the one in the middle". If you have problems seeing it, hold up a pencil exactly halfway between your eyes and the screen. Focus on the tip of the pencil for a few seconds and whammo, you'll see the background show up in 3D.. When tiled as a background, the 3D effect looks like an egg-carton, or like the sound-dampening walls of a recording studio. Spikes and pits. For added mirth and merriment, swivel in your chair a little bit and you'll see the image move correspondingly. Even more fun, is trying to move back slowly while seeing it. The farther you move back, the deeper the image will appear. I'll probably surprise the gimp-devel folks with an explanation of how its done in a day or two. :)

Cheers,

Now for older boxen ... the best way to make them efficient is to follow the Keep It Simple Silly method of making a working box. Win95-Lite was made for this exact reason ... but that's just if you want win95 ... For linux I would have to recommend Slackware or Debian ... after a base install you have very little bloat and very few apps that you won't need. Apt makes it real nice to find and install, but slack also has a decent package list to choose from.

You may also want to look into the BSD's ... all of them have a very bland base install and all of them run the latest greatest stuff.

Along with being so great all of these (except slack) offer net installs, so all you need is a disk drive to boot the things up ... so if the CD has crapped out (which it has on many old computers) you can still do a full install on the net.

People are saying FVWM or other things like that ... SawFish and BlackBox were made to be VERY lightweight window managers and like windowmaker are very customizable and since they are so small ... they take up a very small memory foot print.

The thing would also make a cool Home Server, Make it into a router, webserver, email server, and file server ... perfect ...

Lastly ... you could set it up with a VNC client and use it that way as a terminal system. I think the one thing that needs to be realized is that old boxes are far from useless.

Like my stuff? Sure, its free -- but rent isn't. :) You can help pay my rent by going here and clicking on the $1.00 Donation button. Quick and easy. Doing so will help ensure that the tiles remain free for you and others to enjoy. :)

Shamelessly begging for pocket change in the post-dot-com economy, ;)

IIRC, Xerox originally came up with the concepts of the personal computer, the graphical user interface, the mouse, and several other substantial breakthroughs in computer science.

According to this page, the personal computer was invented in 1949. Xerox was a chemical company called Haloid at the time, and was just getting into the photocopy business.

This very good primer describes how various pieces of the GUI were invented throughout the 50s and 60s by people such as Ivan Sutherland and Alan Kay.

The mouse was invented by Douglas Englebart in the mid-1960s.

Xerox did invent at PARC in the 1970s and beyond: several other substantial breakthroughs in computer science, such as Ethernet and Object-oriented programming.

IIRC, Xerox originally came up with the concepts of the personal computer, the graphical user interface, the mouse, and several other substantial breakthroughs in computer science.

According to this page, the personal computer was invented in 1949. Xerox was a chemical company called Haloid at the time, and was just getting into the photocopy business.

This very good primer describes how various pieces of the GUI were invented throughout the 50s and 60s by people such as Ivan Sutherland and Alan Kay.

The mouse was invented by Douglas Englebart in the mid-1960s.

Xerox did invent at PARC in the 1970s and beyond: several other substantial breakthroughs in computer science, such as Ethernet and Object-oriented programming.

Probably thinking of Botticelli's Birth of Venus; there's a copy here.

Here's how you do make stereoscopic images with a digital camera:

Take a picture like you normally would, but be mindful of the position and angle of your camera.

2) Snap a picture.

3) If the subject you're photographing is close to you, take a small step to the right. If the subject is far away, take a large step to the right.

4) Aim your camera at the subject and photograph it again.

5) Pull up both images in the photo editor of your choice.

6) Arrange the photos side by side. The first image you took should be on the left, the second image you took should be on the right.

7) Sit directly infront of your monitor, and blur your eyes. If you cant blur them, try crossing them slightly. Try to focus on "the picture in the middle". If you still cant do it, hold up a pencil (eraser-side up) exactly halfway between your eyeball and the screen. Focus on the eraser. The image on the screen should pop out at you in stereoscopic 3D.

For some good examples of a stereoscopic images I took, go here. Try the picture of the steering wheel first...Its really easy. You'll also see a number of stereo photos of Tumacoccori, an 18th century Spanish mission that got the shit beat out of it by native americans. You'll also find another picture thats rather interesting---It's a downward view of a deactivated nuclear missile still in the silo at the Titan Missile Museum outside of Tucson. The view extends about 20 floors below ground. If I were to have taken this photo in 1981 versus 2001, I would have been shot on sight. :)

Cheers,

Help out Project Gutenberg!!
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Help out Project Gutenberg!!
Distributed Proofreaders

• For free hosting of free-as-in-speech books, see Andamooka. They also allow you to give annotations and comments.
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Furthermore, UDP for data is highly unreliable, and I wouldn't trust it across WAN's.

You're missing the point of UDP. UDP is just a *tiny* layer on top of IP, which adds a little extra information (basically the port number) so that the OS can deliver a packet to the right application. UDP can not be compared with TCP - it doesn't provide reliability and flow control, and it has absolutely no notion of a stream of data. If desired, these can be provided in the application layer (see UDP, TFTP, NFS, etc. etc.)

TCP is a reliable transport, but it's much, much more than that. First off, the fact that you're using TCP doesn't make the path between sender/receiver any more reliable. Your packets get dropped just the same as if they were UDP or any other protocol over IP. TCP provides reliability by retransmitting lost packets, but you knew that. It also provides flow control and congestion avoidance - this means detecting when the receiving end (and the router queues in between) are ready for more data, and throttling your transmission rate to match that capacity. It also means being "fair" to other streams sharing the same bottleneck(s). It does this by "backing off" the number of packets in flight, i.e. halving the congestion window, to reduce the data rate. These algorithms are a very active field of research - there's a *lot* more to TCP than meets the eye of a socket programmer.

When TCP loses a packet, that packet must be retransmitted. This is expensive because it means another RTT.

Anyhoo...

You can think of FEC for data transmission as being analogous to RAID 5 for storage. By adding one extra bit (the XOR of the rest of the word) you can lose any single bit and still know it's value. It's very simple. If the word is:

0 1 0 1

And I add an extra "parity" bit, where the parity bit is 1 is the number of ones in the rest of the word is odd, zero if it's even:

0 1 0 1 [0]

I can now lose any one bit (including of course the parity bit). Eg if I have only

0 1 X 1 [0]

Then I know the missing bit is a '0', because if it were '1' then the parity bit would be a zero.

Applying this to data transmission, you can see that by sending just one extra packet, you greatly reduce the chance of having to retransmit anything.

EG if I have to send you 10 packets over a link with 10% packet loss, there's a 65% chance that I'll have to retransmit one of those packets. (and a 10% chance that each retransmitted packet will have to be sent again, and so on).

However if I'm using FEC and I send one extra "parity" packet, then I only have to retransmit if TWO OR MORE packets are lost. The chances of losing TWO out of the eleven packets is only 30%, so you can see that for an overhead of 10%, I've reduced the number of retransmits by a factor of more than two! I hope those figures are right. I used this tool to calculate them. Of course there are a lot of knobs you can turn depending on how much overhead you can afford for the parity information, and what degree of packet loss you want to be able to tolerate.

Anyway, you can see that there are lots of possible improvements/alternatives to TCP - it's an old protocol and a lot of research has been done since RFC 793.

Dr. Fun shares your concern about old USENET posts...


http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/electronic-publicatio ns /Dr-Fun/df9601/df960124.jpg

You can find the Project Gutenberg version of Marx's Communist Manifesto here.

The trouble with referencing Marx - well, one of the troubling things - is that you implicitly invoke an association with any number of unsavory ideas he had, in addition to anything valid he may have said. For example, I'll quote a bit:

Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives.

Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with,
is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.

There are plenty of other interesting tidbids to be had as well. In other words, it might just be best to let the old boy Marx rest in peace.

It's called the DSL. There are already free books with it too from what I gather, see the open book project...

Obviously, the only thing to do is contact the FBI for a full recording/transcription. If they don't have it contact homeland security and the NSA. I mean somebody's got it, right? ... or maybe I'm a little paranoid.

Personally, I thought the interview was cool, even if it did fog up Bruce's style. I guess we can get the book to see that.

Well, getting Java to use unicode shouldn't be a problem :)
>One thing I'd really like to see is something for latex that would allow me to do typesetting and printing of characters.

What about CJK-Latex? Or the TeX extension Omega?

SuSE has some good information about its support of the CJK languages.
And there is always the Linux Chinese HOWTO, which you've probably already read, but could be helpful to other people, who are reading this post.

...runs the popular Java site called "Cafe Au Lait," and he just posted news yesterday about this very subject.

Apparently, he went through a lot of trouble, but managed to get it done. You might try sending him an e-mail to see what he had to do.

The show is about a guy, named Mike Nelson, who is stuck up in space with his robot companions, and they have to endure bad movie after bad movie. That's all that you have to know to get started. The whole plot is confusing if I try to get you up to speed in the next few lines, but trust me, this is a show you cannot afford to miss.

In the not too distant future (next Sunday, A.D.) Joel Robinson was under the employ of one Dr. Clayton Forrester. By trapping Joel in space and sending him bad movies, Dr. Forrester and his assistants (such as TV's Frank) attempted to determine the movie that, when inflicted on the masses, would cause insanity and he could control the world. To combat this, Joel invented several robots to keep him company and to heckle the movies mercilessly to ensure his sanity. After several years, Joel escaped to be replaced by Mike Neslon, a temp worker without a clue. After Mike and the bots were turned into omniscient energy beings, they returned to the Satellite of Love (their ship) in the future and were confronted with new adversaries including Pearl Forrester (Dr. Forrester's cryo-frozen mother), Professor Bobo (an ape), and Observer (a super-intelligent alien that carries his brain in a bowl).

The show is about a guy, named Mike Nelson, who is stuck up in space with his robot companions, and they have to endure bad movie after bad movie. That's all that you have to know to get started. The whole plot is confusing if I try to get you up to speed in the next few lines, but trust me, this is a show you cannot afford to miss.

In the not too distant future (next Sunday, A.D.) Joel Robinson was under the employ of one Dr. Clayton Forrester. By trapping Joel in space and sending him bad movies, Dr. Forrester and his assistants (such as TV's Frank) attempted to determine the movie that, when inflicted on the masses, would cause insanity and he could control the world. To combat this, Joel invented several robots to keep him company and to heckle the movies mercilessly to ensure his sanity. After several years, Joel escaped to be replaced by Mike Neslon, a temp worker without a clue. After Mike and the bots were turned into omniscient energy beings, they returned to the Satellite of Love (their ship) in the future and were confronted with new adversaries including Pearl Forrester (Dr. Forrester's cryo-frozen mother), Professor Bobo (an ape), and Observer (a super-intelligent alien that carries his brain in a bowl).

cmclean

UNIX Gurus in Hell

To start, look at the files in this minimal distribution that runs X:

2-Disk Xwindow Linux

Look at other minimal distributions including the various floppy linuxes and bigger ones like Peanut Linux. Ibiblio's list of distributions is probably the place to start. Look at some of those distributions that come on busincard sized CDs.

So pick one of these that seems configurable and set up a machine with the hardware you have in mind and install it (or boot from the floppies) and start adding to it. First do X, then your rdesktop client, whatever that is. Here's a hint: don't worry about removing compilers, unused libs, etc until you are done. Even then, keep several CDs of the "development edition" around, because you may need all that stuff to add more things in the future.

To get your automatic boot up and start of the client and etc, look at how Mandrake does the automatic log in thing, and simply put all the commands you want to be run in your .xinitrc file, and then have the window manager be the last command. Look at man xinit for details.

The final step would be to trim it down and set it up. My approach here would be to make it a bootable CD like Finnix. In fact, what I would do is start with Finnix, add X and the other stuff, and if I still had space on the CD, stop. Free space on a read-only medium is useless, you might as well put every single thing you think you might need on there until you fill it up.

Some modifications I would make to Finnix would be putting all of the /etc directory in the ram disk, so you could re-configure things on the fly, and if your machine did have a local harddrive, maybe you could use that for swap. Running off a CD means that the user can just turn off the machine when done -- there is no disk to fsck, everytime it starts up it thinks it is the first time, so to speak. I've been playing with modifying finnix, I copied the cd to disk and modified some stuff, and got busy and never burned my new copy to see if it would boot.

But in the long run, you have to realize that you are not going to get someone to do this for you for $150. You might try out DemoLinux and see if it already meets your needs as is -- I would expect that you would need to add that rdesktop thing. You have to either pony up the money, or do it yourself.

Inspite of what some Zealot Hypesters may have told you about Linux being as easy to use as the interface to a coke machine or whatever, you have to come to the realization that Linux is about Freedom. It will always be easier not to be free. Worrying about "is linux ready to meet this bulletized list of requirements" is like worrying whether you might have to walk around a lot and get rained on sometimes and have to get a job if they let you out of prison. If you have any self-respect, it doesn't matter: a free system is the only choice. This means that you have to either put up with not being able to do what you want with computers, or bite the bullet and spend some of your own personal time reading and learning how to install things and configure stuff. Just like you spend your personal time reading the newspaper and going to vote.

If I sound like a dirty gnu hippie Stallman-worshipping fanatic, it's because I am, and I'm proud of it.

To start, look at the files in this minimal distribution that runs X:

2-Disk Xwindow Linux

Look at other minimal distributions including the various floppy linuxes and bigger ones like Peanut Linux. Ibiblio's list of distributions is probably the place to start. Look at some of those distributions that come on busincard sized CDs.

So pick one of these that seems configurable and set up a machine with the hardware you have in mind and install it (or boot from the floppies) and start adding to it. First do X, then your rdesktop client, whatever that is. Here's a hint: don't worry about removing compilers, unused libs, etc until you are done. Even then, keep several CDs of the "development edition" around, because you may need all that stuff to add more things in the future.

To get your automatic boot up and start of the client and etc, look at how Mandrake does the automatic log in thing, and simply put all the commands you want to be run in your .xinitrc file, and then have the window manager be the last command. Look at man xinit for details.

The final step would be to trim it down and set it up. My approach here would be to make it a bootable CD like Finnix. In fact, what I would do is start with Finnix, add X and the other stuff, and if I still had space on the CD, stop. Free space on a read-only medium is useless, you might as well put every single thing you think you might need on there until you fill it up.

Some modifications I would make to Finnix would be putting all of the /etc directory in the ram disk, so you could re-configure things on the fly, and if your machine did have a local harddrive, maybe you could use that for swap. Running off a CD means that the user can just turn off the machine when done -- there is no disk to fsck, everytime it starts up it thinks it is the first time, so to speak. I've been playing with modifying finnix, I copied the cd to disk and modified some stuff, and got busy and never burned my new copy to see if it would boot.

But in the long run, you have to realize that you are not going to get someone to do this for you for $150. You might try out DemoLinux and see if it already meets your needs as is -- I would expect that you would need to add that rdesktop thing. You have to either pony up the money, or do it yourself.

Inspite of what some Zealot Hypesters may have told you about Linux being as easy to use as the interface to a coke machine or whatever, you have to come to the realization that Linux is about Freedom. It will always be easier not to be free. Worrying about "is linux ready to meet this bulletized list of requirements" is like worrying whether you might have to walk around a lot and get rained on sometimes and have to get a job if they let you out of prison. If you have any self-respect, it doesn't matter: a free system is the only choice. This means that you have to either put up with not being able to do what you want with computers, or bite the bullet and spend some of your own personal time reading and learning how to install things and configure stuff. Just like you spend your personal time reading the newspaper and going to vote.

If I sound like a dirty gnu hippie Stallman-worshipping fanatic, it's because I am, and I'm proud of it.

Well, I have a 5 year old Toshiba, and the disto I use (older laptop, small harddisk) is Peanut Linux . Everything works, XFree86, sound, network PCMCIA card and modem PCMCIA card. Give it a try. I ditched KOffice and parts of KDE2 (well, most of it, not everything) because it's too heavy for my laptop, but with WindowMaker it works fine.

A few questions:

1) I thought the company was no longer "VA Linux Systems," as it had dropped the word "Linux" from its name?

2) From several articles written by Bowie J. Poag I gather than the founding of SourceForge was not quite so happy as you seem to indicate. His allegations are that VA requested that he work on such a project (at the time called system26), but that VA appropriated his work and turned it into sourceforge.

[For those who don't know, Bowie J. Poag is the main force behind Propaganda Desktop Graphics, which used to be the main feature of VA's themes.org until Mr. Poag deliberately destroyed the site in protest against VA's actions (it took VA about 6 months to put the site back together again, minus Propaganda, which is now at the new location linked to above).]

Contracts themselves have no inate power

Maybe the contracts you sign! Mine generally involve blood and elder signs...

Meanwhile, back in Dunwich

Hmm, I've built Linux From Scratch with XFree86 4.x, KDE 2.x, & a few other bits & pieces, in less than a weekend. It simply isn't as hard as you think. For what one person can achieve by themselves, have a look at Peanut(I used it to build Linux From Scratch).

Just because Microsoft stops producing it doesn't mean it's dead. My office still uses MS Winword 1.1 on some PCs because it works and that's all they need.

-sting3r

I don't know if you are serious are not, but I am going to assume you are.. I don't think I would have ever thought of that lol.. Do they really have that much of a voice?

I am serious, indeed.

And, yes, the librarians have that much voice. In fact, SunSite/Metalab/iBiblio (is the same thing; they change anmes every other year or so, because they change sponsors) is actually an on-line library. They host, for example the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) . and many more goodies.

And of course they have a big voice over the Congress. Where do you think the Congressman get their p0rn? At the Library of Congress, off course!

Well, maybe not. But it is a funny thought.

700KB for an HTML tag stripper? Come on. .

Even Tinyapps' apps are somewhat bloated. Pong in 52 bytes -- Thats tiny. Not to mention, I wrote a full-featured image viewer for X11 that fades in any image from black, holds it according to a user-specified number of seconds, and fades it out. Its fast, flexible, well documented, and bug free. It has support for images as small as 1x1 to 32767x32767 in any depth, supports nearly a dozen different image formats, has wildcard support, scaling support, a controllable fader speed, and a verbose mode tossed in for the hell of it. Total weight of the binary? ... 19KB.

Here's a tarball with the source and a precompiled binary, if you want it. Slideshow 1.1.

Cheers, and yes, PROPAGANDA is still running,

http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/electricCircuits/

Here is a partial list of books published online, that I happened to like enough to bookmark. I find that reading a book on the computer screen is tedious, I mostly use the online version as a reference.

Handbook of applied cryptography: http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/

Underground: (I actually haven't read this yet) http://www.underground-book.com/

Netizens: (only partly read this) http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/

http://www.und.nodak.edu/org/crypto/crypto/army.fi eld.manual/

Big Breach: http://www.antioffline.com/bigbreach/

The Prof's Book: http://frode.home.cern.ch/frode/crypto/Turing/inde x.html

I have a lot of other links also, but my bookmarks have become so nested and folderized that many are lost in there, I really need bookmarks for my bookmarks . . . Anyway, I would suggest that if you find yourself looking for interesting reading online, you will find plenty. If you choose you can find scanned in pdf's of various works on newsgroups and in freenet, etc.

However, my advice is to use the 'net primarily as a way to figure out what to read, and become familar with the local public library. Almost all libraries have inter-library loans which give you access to huge amount of stuff. When I can't get a work that way, I fall back upon checking databases of used bookstore inventories -- http://abe.com/ and http://powellsbooks.com/ are the places I generally go to.

If you're interested in these issues (and if you're an American or interested in political liberty, you should be. ) you might check out an essay I recently wrote on these issues. I cover how the US has behaved in time of war and what this might mean for you, now. http://ibiblio.org/jem/rights-rant.html

Actually I'm glad I did it the "harder" way, because the machine is quite old and I had some hardware that is not by default compiled in most kernels, but you coudn't know that. And why would I need USB support, if I don't have USB...You know, that kind of stuff. It's very interesting to customize a kernel (and the help in make menuconfig is really good).

Nowadays (for that machine) I have my customized .config I keep around on backup "just in case", and if I want to recompile the latest kernel I just retrieve it.
My point was not that there isn't an easier way (other comments refer to the automatic binary installs via rpm), there is, but my point was just that it is even easy if you take the "hard way" and read the documentation. No, I'm not one of those RTFM-guys, I'd help anyone compiling his/her kernel if they ask (and are willing to learn).

Look in the Mirror

Ok, ok, so these clowns think they can make diffrence... does it really matter, while we watch all the start up telcos in the US start to go belly up, taking a lot of the infrastructure support companies with them? I mean REALLY! who cares !

Look at what this guy looks like! http://www.ibiblio.org/propaganda/html/images/topi cs/bowie1.jpg!!!!! Looks like the Michelin man!

I don't think that it's really a troll, just somebody with an axe to grind. Mr. Poag is the creator of the wonderful PROPAGANDA desktop backgrounds, and apparently feels that he's been screwed out of credit or reward for his work. I'm not sure exactly what his complaint is, but I've definitely heard him complaining about mistreatment (especially by Sourceforge, IIRC) in the past.