I second this proposal : the Canadian Normalized Keyboard has a huge lot of symbols, including accented capitals, french guillemots, and other useful digraphs like Spanish punctuation, copyright/divide/multiply/etc. symbols, and so on (sorry I can't show them, the lameness filter has apparently decided that showing characters is lame:-)... Sure, you can get all this with your Compose key if you're an Unix guy, or with Alt and a good understanding of the ASCII table if you're a Microserf:-) But it's a lot more pleasant to be able to type them directly. Note this keyboard has no writings whatsoever on the keys, it only use pictograms to avoid making two versions of the keyboard (one labeled in French and another in English). I did find a picture of the key arrangement (descriptions in French. Sorry, couldn't find an English-labeled image, but the keys described are obvious enough anyway). They also have a list of resellers providing this item (incomplete, though).
As an aside, if someone knows how to get that beast in France, I would be glad if he would let me know the address (no, I won't pay the astronomic shipping fees from Canada).
> Gotta love how they don't link to project Gutenberg on the books page.:D
Nor do they link to free-as-in-speech software sites like SourceForge, Savannah or TuxFamily. I presume they've seen those are dangerous terrorists advocating - horror ! - sharing and cooperation. Even when they want to show a human face, the MPAA & Co. are pretty transparent...
Here, we've SLAES and AbulÃdu. And I'm sure I heard about more projects (if I remember well, the Spanish Debian-based LinEx is also geared towards education). These are not made by a single educational institution, but they are clearly targeted at them. The main problem is that educational software is always made for Win32, but this is slowly becoming a moot point, as free software is developed, and emulation solutions get better support for these programs.
BTW, I talked recently with an official from a high school who pushes Linux in his establishment, and he sure saw the benefits of switching to a system with such a better manageability. His main problem was (amazingly !) Microsoft-infeodated executives trying to find every little flaw they could to push their solutions instead (despite national directives recommending Open Source to be used where applicable). PR are still the Achilles heel of Linux, it seems...
 You're just like a friend of mine who [...] has this bullish tactic of telling everyone "Linux is never going mainstream, deal with it. The money is in Windows." Â
I must say I'm impressessed by the quality of/. spell-checking. Now, even the titles are misspelled. I presume the next step will be to change the character set, so they can make typos in the letters themselves *sigh*...
> How the heck do you mistype an ASCII URL so you get non-ASCII characters? Do you have some kind of funky keyboard that produces non-ASCII characters? I'd love to see such a fucked up keyboard.
Just come by my place, then. You will then witness lots of AZERTY French keyboards, featuring such non-(7bit)-ASCII characters such as è, ç, à, ù, and of course the now-ubiquitous ''. I'm waiting for you.
> For those of us with standard ASCII keyboards there IS NO PROBLEM. You'd have to go out of your way to type these characters.
I think you're affected by the 'My-Country-Is-Alone-In-The-World' syndrom, which, curiously, seems to affect lots of Americans, even when the topic of the discussion is *internationalized* domain names (!). Something must be very wrong, here...
Yes. It's the mighty CAD drawing software AutoCAD, from Autodesk. The message shows up in a tooltip. And yes, the programmer has indeed been fired. A shame, if you want my opinion...
> These men and women work on the kind of basic research projects that don't have the flash and glamour of sci-fi novels and books, but which will one day lead to real breakthroughs in human knowledge and acheivement.
Like a space station so costly they had to pressure the Europeans to fund the enterprise, whose utility is far from being demonstrated (except to serve as a holiday resort for really wealthy people wanting to pay big money to cash-strapped Russians, and to get pictures of spationauts working on who-knows-what-new-device on the station modules), and that they now want to shelve in orbit ? Spare me that old troll. NASA has big, visible projects, but they aren't necessarily more efficient than anyone. And when they make mistakes, they're as big as their usual projects. Sorry, but I'm not convinced that NASA is the example to follow...
> I think that this word found in a french text would have been interpreted as a style effect.
Especially if used in conjunction with mulot (a sort of rodent) and Chirac's name (for those who don't know, Chirac made big efforts to ridicule himself more stupidly than Al Gore claiming he had invented Internet. Thus, he went to a IT fair, and when showed a computer asked what was a mouse. And then, these same politicians will decide what laws will be applied on the Internet. Amazing, eh ?:-)
By the way, Canadians do use other strangely mangled words, aside from cliquetez , like sélecter (for sélectionner ), and other odd variants. And what's totally incredible is that I've seen Canadian people on IRC speaking a truly awful French, and then complaining that the documentation URL I'd sent to them was in English because... they didn't speak English ! Some people probably have decided they don't need to communicate at all:-|
Simple ! You obviously *definitely* want to run a programming language with classes such as:
String.Elite
Contains methods that transfer ordinary readable text into leet-speak. A fairly good argument could be laid out for putting this in Crypto as a one way cipher...
(sorry, I couldn't resist. It's just too darn funny;-)
Try Area 51 . Or maybe The Black Crypt , or something in that vein. After all, lots of strange things not from this world happen in machine rooms. Trust me...
> but you guys should at least have removed the [...] tags from his document. It is extremely bad form to insert a whole html document inside another one.
Huuuuhhh... You're talking about Slashdot, the website for standards-loving geeks and nerds who doesn't even validate (and note that they've forbidden entry to validator.w3.org to hide the fact). In comparison, another site where I dwell, LinuxFR; not only validates but doesn't use old-fashioned table-based layouts, ditched in favor of more modern and user-customisable floating layers. To this day, I'm still ashamed at the sheer number of sites (even Linux/OSS/Free Software ones) that don't even do the minimum to be good netizens : provide an error-free site with a DOCTYPE that triggers standards-compliance mode in browsers. I shouldn't maybe draw conclusions too fast (some of these sites could still use non-standards-compliant middleware like ad banners generators and the like. I believe I remember Wired's Douglas Bowman said this were the major cause hampering efforts towards compliance) but I think the main problem lies with the laziness and the usual if it works with IE, it works nearly everywhere state of mind. And you can throw all the blows and whistles you want into your new shiny standards to attract followers, you cannot overcome laziness... *sigh*
I chose Cyrus for a customer that needed a MySQL backend for his server. But I quickly ran into a problem : the minimal timeout for unlocking the mailbox in the Cyrus POP3 server is 10 minutes (yes, that's right. 10 _minutes_ !). As people with buggy mailers (*cough* Outlook Express *cough*) are very common nowadays, I was forced to go patch the sources to weed out that stupid limitation. What's sad is that I found lots of messages on their mailing-list talking about this problem since a long time, and that one-liner patch never made it to the tree, which would lead me to think the authors are unconcerned about the needs of their users (I hope I'm mistaken here)...
BTW, there is a fine POP3 server that we've used without problems for a year (and we've customers that *never* empty their mboxes, so we've huge 300 MB horrors lying on the primary MX hard disk). It has no frills but works like a charm. It's called Solid-POP3, it's Polish, made by the same people who brought you the PLD Linux distro, and you can download it here (alternatively, just do an `apt-get install solid-pop3d' if you run that good ole' Debian:-) Or else, you could try using LARTs on your unruly, mailbox-filling users... Good luck to you, anyway !
> There was already an exchange killer. It was called Nimda.
You must be talking about the Nimda IIS worm, don't you ? I don't remember it could attack Exchange servers (although I *do* remember Microsoft issuing a security patch for Exchange that broke the software, generating angry responses on Bugtraq, and then a patch to patch the patch. With vendors like that, you don't need worm writers !). It would be really good for everyone -- and for the signal/noise ratio -- if people could stop posting inexact stuff...
> What's the moral of this moral? Geolocation does not work!!!!. Moronic solution such as this one are simply to easy to avoid. And, yes, UEJF, that one is for you.
You would have thought they'd learned since the Yahoo! fiasco, but this doesn't seem the case. Our beloved group of brainfucked retards has managed to be the scourge of the freedom of speech and the laughing stock of the computer-literate community *another* time. Clap your hands !...
Finding ways to route around the Google 'protection' is not difficult : I changed the location in the address bar after starting the search : success. I tried a proxy : success. I went to Google.It : success. The only thing such moronic actions do is making us lose confidence in our laws and lawmakers. Probably one day, these remnants of other times will disappear. For the moment, I'll just inform my friends and get them to pass the message around...
Oh oui, et au fait : t'as une page sur *BSD et tu utilises Opera *sous Linux* ? Traître, va !;-)))
> Even more meaningless than it would be if French and German users couldn't simply point their browsers at google.ca [google.ca].
We've got a little problem here : Google.Ca has a little link for the french-speaking Canadians which links to http://www.google.ca/fr which in turn... redirects to Google.Fr. This would mean, I assume, that unsuspecting residents of Québec would get a censored version of Google. Now, that's bad ! I hope they'll fix that soon.
BTW, I'm French, and frankly, I would have hoped the lawsuit-happy morons at UEJF would have avoided putting pressure on Google, if nothing else because Google is used by researchers who could happen to research neo-nazism (note : the UEJF is the French Jewish student union, a bunch of sorry idiots who spend all their time suing people -- sometimes mistakenly -- instead of spreading good information. No wonder Le Pen has no problem posing as the Persecuted Whistleblower !). And with the axis-of-evil-terrorists-threaten-the-free-world frenzy, it seems there is no chance such stupid laws will go away anytime soon. *sigh* at least we don't have the DMCA...
> Basically it gives them power to get away with "murder". And they can collect taxes from their followers.
Pardon me, but what country are you speaking of ? I don't know for the rest of Europe, but if a priest here, in France, kills somebody, he goes to jail. And I'm not aware of a church tax being mentioned anywhere on my declaration (if it were the case, you can bet there would be screams of agony throughout the nation, we've enough taxes already dammit !)... Maybe there are some more religiously-minded countries that allow such taxes to be levied (Ireland ? Italy ?) but I don't know about one that doesn't punish religious murderers. Which is not a reason to allow $cientology to get the religion label, though...
What would be even better is link up that with their translation service, so I could get the American/British/Spanish/Whatever point of view in my native language (French in my case). Even if it would be a bit difficult to grasp the writers' ideas through the brain-damaged junk outputted by the translation software. Still, just having localized news pages (like the other services) would be great for a start. I encourage you to write to them about that.
Oh, and by the way, if there are others who want to see for themselves , here is the list of all chinese IP ranges and a list of proxies to cross-reference with the former. Have fun:-)
No problem, dude : just set your browser with 203.93.218.65, port 80 as proxy. I just tried it : Google isn't blocked, and it returns the same pages as here (I made a search for censorship , hope I won't cause problems to the poor fellows that own that proxy =)
Like I said, SMTP AUTH is the way. It's available on near every mail server software in the world : Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, and even more. There is no need for an unsecured relay nowadays. Trust me.
I fail to understand how this can be a valid argument against bad-maintained blackhole lists. The author was listed because *anyone could use his server to relay just by using a MAIL FROM command sporting his domain name*. Sheesh! When you configure your relay ACL, you use *IP ranges*, not domains (an awful lot of spammers forge all the headers in the messages they throw out). Even better, you use SMTP AUTH. That guy didn't bother to implement a technically valid solution, and thus his mail server definitely *could* be abused. No wonder it has been put on a blacklist...
BTW, this doesn't mean there aren't stupid blacklists out there listing innocent people. But this article proves nothing. Moreover, there are now better ways to filter spam, based on message content checksum, like Vipul's razor. This is not the first time people bitch and moan about their badly-configured relays being censored by the antispam Nazis (I remember a guy, from the EFF I believe, that did the same thing some time ago) but they simply are irrelevant. Their solution is to RTFM and play by the rules. Period (grrrr, I really dislike bad admins:-/.
Well, since we run this exact setup, too (ICRadius, MySQL replication, Sendmail/Exim/Solid-POP3), I would like to ask you a question (consider it a recursive Ask Slashdot:-) We want to change our network configuration, and this includes replacing our two access servers with a bigger one. Problem is, one of these is currently used partly for our customers and partly for those of a bigger ISP to whom we provide a POP in our region; so, this server queries that ISP's RADIUS servers, not our ones. Since the two E1s will go into a single NAS in the new setup, our RADIUS servers need to be able to forward the queries to the other ISP servers if they don't find an username locally. Is this possible with ICRadius? How?
You just forget one (very little) problem: The XBox has to be chipped to run Linux or anything else than Microsoft-blessed code. That means only knowledgeable people (read geeks ) will do that. The only others who cash out to chip their box are (1) people who want to play imported games (not a lot of people, and probably not interested in using their console as a computer) and (2) warez d00dz, who probably would boot it up just to be l33t but then put it in a drawer...
Oh, and BTW, you need a storage space for your documents. The XBox HDD uses FATX. Does this filesystem possess all the features you would need in an Unix OS (permissions, for example)? And how do you install new software on your machine (like that personal accounting package you just saw on SourceForge and that's not included in your distro)? Sorry to say that, but for now, the XBox isn't a menace to the PC hegemony, just yet another costly geek gadget...
[ Disclaimer: This post written in b0rkenEnglish. We axxept no reklamations on the bade gramar. Thank you. ]
Slashdot Mirror
I second this proposal : the Canadian Normalized Keyboard has a huge lot of symbols, including accented capitals, french guillemots, and other useful digraphs like Spanish punctuation, copyright/divide/multiply/etc. symbols, and so on (sorry I can't show them, the lameness filter has apparently decided that showing characters is lame :-)... Sure, you can get all this with your Compose key if you're an Unix guy, or with Alt and a good understanding of the ASCII table if you're a Microserf :-) But it's a lot more pleasant to be able to type them directly. Note this keyboard has no writings whatsoever on the keys, it only use pictograms to avoid making two versions of the keyboard (one labeled in French and another in English). I did find a picture of the key arrangement (descriptions in French. Sorry, couldn't find an English-labeled image, but the keys described are obvious enough anyway). They also have a list of resellers providing this item (incomplete, though).
As an aside, if someone knows how to get that beast in France, I would be glad if he would let me know the address (no, I won't pay the astronomic shipping fees from Canada).
> Gotta love how they don't link to project Gutenberg on the books page. :D
Nor do they link to free-as-in-speech software sites like SourceForge, Savannah or TuxFamily. I presume they've seen those are dangerous terrorists advocating - horror ! - sharing and cooperation. Even when they want to show a human face, the MPAA & Co. are pretty transparent...
Here, we've SLAES and AbulÃdu. And I'm sure I heard about more projects (if I remember well, the Spanish Debian-based LinEx is also geared towards education). These are not made by a single educational institution, but they are clearly targeted at them. The main problem is that educational software is always made for Win32, but this is slowly becoming a moot point, as free software is developed, and emulation solutions get better support for these programs.
BTW, I talked recently with an official from a high school who pushes Linux in his establishment, and he sure saw the benefits of switching to a system with such a better manageability. His main problem was (amazingly !) Microsoft-infeodated executives trying to find every little flaw they could to push their solutions instead (despite national directives recommending Open Source to be used where applicable). PR are still the Achilles heel of Linux, it seems...
 You're just like a friend of mine who [...] has this bullish tactic of telling everyone "Linux is never going mainstream, deal with it. The money is in Windows." Â
:-)
And he's still your friend ?
I must say I'm impressessed by the quality of /. spell-checking. Now, even the titles are misspelled. I presume the next step will be to change the character set, so they can make typos in the letters themselves *sigh*...
> How the heck do you mistype an ASCII URL so you get non-ASCII characters? Do you have some kind of funky keyboard that produces non-ASCII characters? I'd love to see such a fucked up keyboard.
Just come by my place, then. You will then witness lots of AZERTY French keyboards, featuring such non-(7bit)-ASCII characters such as è, ç, à, ù, and of course the now-ubiquitous ''. I'm waiting for you.
> For those of us with standard ASCII keyboards there IS NO PROBLEM. You'd have to go out of your way to type these characters.
I think you're affected by the 'My-Country-Is-Alone-In-The-World' syndrom, which, curiously, seems to affect lots of Americans, even when the topic of the discussion is *internationalized* domain names (!). Something must be very wrong, here...
Yes. It's the mighty CAD drawing software AutoCAD, from Autodesk. The message shows up in a tooltip. And yes, the programmer has indeed been fired. A shame, if you want my opinion...
> These men and women work on the kind of basic research projects that don't have the flash and glamour of sci-fi novels and books, but which will one day lead to real breakthroughs in human knowledge and acheivement.
Like a space station so costly they had to pressure the Europeans to fund the enterprise, whose utility is far from being demonstrated (except to serve as a holiday resort for really wealthy people wanting to pay big money to cash-strapped Russians, and to get pictures of spationauts working on who-knows-what-new-device on the station modules), and that they now want to shelve in orbit ? Spare me that old troll. NASA has big, visible projects, but they aren't necessarily more efficient than anyone. And when they make mistakes, they're as big as their usual projects. Sorry, but I'm not convinced that NASA is the example to follow...
> I think that this word found in a french text would have been interpreted as a style effect.
:-)
:-|
Especially if used in conjunction with mulot (a sort of rodent) and Chirac's name (for those who don't know, Chirac made big efforts to ridicule himself more stupidly than Al Gore claiming he had invented Internet. Thus, he went to a IT fair, and when showed a computer asked what was a mouse. And then, these same politicians will decide what laws will be applied on the Internet. Amazing, eh ?
By the way, Canadians do use other strangely mangled words, aside from cliquetez , like sélecter (for sélectionner ), and other odd variants. And what's totally incredible is that I've seen Canadian people on IRC speaking a truly awful French, and then complaining that the documentation URL I'd sent to them was in English because... they didn't speak English ! Some people probably have decided they don't need to communicate at all
> You'd rather we eat LIVE ones?
Well...
Simple ! You obviously *definitely* want to run a programming language with classes such as
(sorry, I couldn't resist. It's just too darn funny
Try Area 51 . Or maybe The Black Crypt , or something in that vein. After all, lots of strange things not from this world happen in machine rooms. Trust me...
> but you guys should at least have removed the [...] tags from his document. It is extremely bad form to insert a whole html document inside another one.
Huuuuhhh... You're talking about Slashdot, the website for standards-loving geeks and nerds who doesn't even validate (and note that they've forbidden entry to validator.w3.org to hide the fact). In comparison, another site where I dwell, LinuxFR; not only validates but doesn't use old-fashioned table-based layouts, ditched in favor of more modern and user-customisable floating layers. To this day, I'm still ashamed at the sheer number of sites (even Linux/OSS/Free Software ones) that don't even do the minimum to be good netizens : provide an error-free site with a DOCTYPE that triggers standards-compliance mode in browsers. I shouldn't maybe draw conclusions too fast (some of these sites could still use non-standards-compliant middleware like ad banners generators and the like. I believe I remember Wired's Douglas Bowman said this were the major cause hampering efforts towards compliance) but I think the main problem lies with the laziness and the usual if it works with IE, it works nearly everywhere state of mind. And you can throw all the blows and whistles you want into your new shiny standards to attract followers, you cannot overcome laziness... *sigh*
I chose Cyrus for a customer that needed a MySQL backend for his server. But I quickly ran into a problem : the minimal timeout for unlocking the mailbox in the Cyrus POP3 server is 10 minutes (yes, that's right. 10 _minutes_ !). As people with buggy mailers (*cough* Outlook Express *cough*) are very common nowadays, I was forced to go patch the sources to weed out that stupid limitation. What's sad is that I found lots of messages on their mailing-list talking about this problem since a long time, and that one-liner patch never made it to the tree, which would lead me to think the authors are unconcerned about the needs of their users (I hope I'm mistaken here)...
:-) Or else, you could try using LARTs on your unruly, mailbox-filling users... Good luck to you, anyway !
BTW, there is a fine POP3 server that we've used without problems for a year (and we've customers that *never* empty their mboxes, so we've huge 300 MB horrors lying on the primary MX hard disk). It has no frills but works like a charm. It's called Solid-POP3, it's Polish, made by the same people who brought you the PLD Linux distro, and you can download it here (alternatively, just do an `apt-get install solid-pop3d' if you run that good ole' Debian
> There was already an exchange killer. It was called Nimda.
You must be talking about the Nimda IIS worm, don't you ? I don't remember it could attack Exchange servers (although I *do* remember Microsoft issuing a security patch for Exchange that broke the software, generating angry responses on Bugtraq, and then a patch to patch the patch. With vendors like that, you don't need worm writers !). It would be really good for everyone -- and for the signal/noise ratio -- if people could stop posting inexact stuff...
> What's the moral of this moral? Geolocation does not work!!!!. Moronic solution such as this one are simply to easy to avoid. And, yes, UEJF, that one is for you.
;-)))
You would have thought they'd learned since the Yahoo! fiasco, but this doesn't seem the case. Our beloved group of brainfucked retards has managed to be the scourge of the freedom of speech and the laughing stock of the computer-literate community *another* time. Clap your hands !...
Finding ways to route around the Google 'protection' is not difficult : I changed the location in the address bar after starting the search : success. I tried a proxy : success. I went to Google.It : success. The only thing such moronic actions do is making us lose confidence in our laws and lawmakers. Probably one day, these remnants of other times will disappear. For the moment, I'll just inform my friends and get them to pass the message around...
Oh oui, et au fait : t'as une page sur *BSD et tu utilises Opera *sous Linux* ? Traître, va !
> Even more meaningless than it would be if French and German users couldn't simply point their browsers at google.ca [google.ca].
We've got a little problem here : Google.Ca has a little link for the french-speaking Canadians which links to http://www.google.ca/fr which in turn... redirects to Google.Fr. This would mean, I assume, that unsuspecting residents of Québec would get a censored version of Google. Now, that's bad ! I hope they'll fix that soon.
BTW, I'm French, and frankly, I would have hoped the lawsuit-happy morons at UEJF would have avoided putting pressure on Google, if nothing else because Google is used by researchers who could happen to research neo-nazism (note : the UEJF is the French Jewish student union, a bunch of sorry idiots who spend all their time suing people -- sometimes mistakenly -- instead of spreading good information. No wonder Le Pen has no problem posing as the Persecuted Whistleblower !). And with the axis-of-evil-terrorists-threaten-the-free-world frenzy, it seems there is no chance such stupid laws will go away anytime soon. *sigh* at least we don't have the DMCA...
> Basically it gives them power to get away with "murder". And they can collect taxes from their followers.
Pardon me, but what country are you speaking of ? I don't know for the rest of Europe, but if a priest here, in France, kills somebody, he goes to jail. And I'm not aware of a church tax being mentioned anywhere on my declaration (if it were the case, you can bet there would be screams of agony throughout the nation, we've enough taxes already dammit !)... Maybe there are some more religiously-minded countries that allow such taxes to be levied (Ireland ? Italy ?) but I don't know about one that doesn't punish religious murderers. Which is not a reason to allow $cientology to get the religion label, though...
What would be even better is link up that with their translation service, so I could get the American/British/Spanish/Whatever point of view in my native language (French in my case). Even if it would be a bit difficult to grasp the writers' ideas through the brain-damaged junk outputted by the translation software. Still, just having localized news pages (like the other services) would be great for a start. I encourage you to write to them about that.
Oh, and by the way, if there are others who want to see for themselves , here is the list of all chinese IP ranges and a list of proxies to cross-reference with the former. Have fun :-)
No problem, dude : just set your browser with 203.93.218.65, port 80 as proxy. I just tried it : Google isn't blocked, and it returns the same pages as here (I made a search for censorship , hope I won't cause problems to the poor fellows that own that proxy =)
Like I said, SMTP AUTH is the way. It's available on near every mail server software in the world : Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, and even more. There is no need for an unsecured relay nowadays. Trust me.
I fail to understand how this can be a valid argument against bad-maintained blackhole lists. The author was listed because *anyone could use his server to relay just by using a MAIL FROM command sporting his domain name*. Sheesh! When you configure your relay ACL, you use *IP ranges*, not domains (an awful lot of spammers forge all the headers in the messages they throw out). Even better, you use SMTP AUTH. That guy didn't bother to implement a technically valid solution, and thus his mail server definitely *could* be abused. No wonder it has been put on a blacklist...
BTW, this doesn't mean there aren't stupid blacklists out there listing innocent people. But this article proves nothing. Moreover, there are now better ways to filter spam, based on message content checksum, like Vipul's razor. This is not the first time people bitch and moan about their badly-configured relays being censored by the antispam Nazis (I remember a guy, from the EFF I believe, that did the same thing some time ago) but they simply are irrelevant. Their solution is to RTFM and play by the rules. Period (grrrr, I really dislike bad admins :-/.
Well, since we run this exact setup, too (ICRadius, MySQL replication, Sendmail/Exim/Solid-POP3), I would like to ask you a question (consider it a recursive Ask Slashdot :-) We want to change our network configuration, and this includes replacing our two access servers with a bigger one. Problem is, one of these is currently used partly for our customers and partly for those of a bigger ISP to whom we provide a POP in our region; so, this server queries that ISP's RADIUS servers, not our ones. Since the two E1s will go into a single NAS in the new setup, our RADIUS servers need to be able to forward the queries to the other ISP servers if they don't find an username locally. Is this possible with ICRadius? How?
You just forget one (very little) problem: The XBox has to be chipped to run Linux or anything else than Microsoft-blessed code. That means only knowledgeable people (read geeks ) will do that. The only others who cash out to chip their box are (1) people who want to play imported games (not a lot of people, and probably not interested in using their console as a computer) and (2) warez d00dz, who probably would boot it up just to be l33t but then put it in a drawer...
Oh, and BTW, you need a storage space for your documents. The XBox HDD uses FATX. Does this filesystem possess all the features you would need in an Unix OS (permissions, for example)? And how do you install new software on your machine (like that personal accounting package you just saw on SourceForge and that's not included in your distro)? Sorry to say that, but for now, the XBox isn't a menace to the PC hegemony, just yet another costly geek gadget...
[ Disclaimer: This post written in b0rkenEnglish. We axxept no reklamations on the bade gramar. Thank you. ]