Hmmm... I've administered Linux, BSD, Windows (NT4, 2000, XP), and OS X and I'd say in order of ease of administering: 1) Windows 2) Linux 3) BSD 4) OS X Sure OS X has GUI's for most stuff, but some stuff you still have to do on the command line, and lots of the gui stuff doesn't work quite right/as expected yet. Besides the fact that its proprietary enough to not follow BSD/Linux closely enough to put stuff in similar places. I'd charge more to admin an OS X network than a Linux one, and any admin coming from Windows wouldn't have a clue in either OS, so I don't think its really easier to admin than Linux even though it has pretty aqua buttons.
The idiocy of this argument of numbers in this case is simply that now it only takes 1 person to go through the "pain" of breaking the DRM and EVERYONE else in the world can benefit through p2p. The numbers game doesn't work in this situation, because unless the DRM is unbreakable (and therefore a huge pain in the ass for all consumers, not to mention that unbreakable DRM isn't possible) all content will be available anyway, because someone somewhere will exploit the analog hole, and make nearly perfect copies, and walla, DRM is useless.
Is it just me or is it not possible to get the one on the right down to $199?? it says starting at $199, but when you go to "customize it" there is no option you can dumb down anymore, and it says $249... lame dell
A million people have replied in this thread but noone has termed it this bluntly so I will. You are a complete idiot, your subject stating that "we all need to learn some economics" makes me laugh. From my microeconomics 1010 book I quote:
"[having a monopoly] Does not mean that the monopolist can charge any price it wants - at least not if its objective is to maximize profit. This textbook is a case in point. Prentice Hall, Inc., owns the copyright and is, therefore, a monopoly producer of this book. Then why doesn't it sell the book for $500 a copy? Because few people would buy it, and Prentice Hall would earn a much lower profit."
Monopolists are ruled by the demand curve in the market that they operate, they cannot charge arbitrarily high prices because the market will not support it. The definition of a monopoly is not "They can charge whatever price they feel like" (although this is true of monopolies they could charge whatever they want, but, they choose to charge at a price that maximizes profits which is not an arbitrarily high amount, it is determined by the demand curve in the market) it is "a market that has only 1 seller and many buyers, and has significant barriers to entry"
Go study economics yourself, monopoly rents are the difference between what would be charged in a competetive market and what the monopolist can charge.
Actually, you are wrong, have you ever added up the separate cost of getting all three things a la carte?? at wendy's for instance it is EXACTLY the same price, and mcdonalds I think you save maybe 5 cents, point is, value meals are not about saving you money, they are a cost saving measure for the fast food restaurants because they reduce order/order processing time, meaning they can process more people during the lunch hour rush, thereby making more money and improving their margins ever so slightly... they are not there to save you money in the least.
I use gentoo, the gentoo-sources kernel has low latency preempt pre-patched but it doesn't have xfs, they have an xfs kernel as well, but I don't know if it has low latency and preempt already, I seem to remember something about low latency and or preempt causing problems with the xfs kernel, but I might just be smoking crack. check forums.gentoo.org. Ok I just did, and yeah, preempt + XFS is a bad idea, much instability, the patches fight with each other (XFS trying to journal, preempt trying to let something else use the cpu) result, massive instability. So, no I don't think you can get all three to play nice, but you can run low-latency+XFS, or low-latency+preempt, but you can't throw preempt in with XFS... gentoo is nice and patches the kernel automatically, if not running gentoo, you'd have to patch the kernel yourself...
Inspired by the numbers and new "snappyness" under load, I decided to download and compile the 2.5.47 kernel, and see for myself, disappointed is all I can say, 2.4.19 with preempt and low-latency is snappier by quite a bit than 2.5.47. My test isn't quite as numeric as the stories... I simply start ripping a DVD (oops did I say that...) to avi, and compiling something (in this case xmms) and then get my term window, open limewire, and drag the term window around on the maximized limewire window, under 2.4.19 I can never get the whole window grey (as I drag the term window it acts as an eraser on the limewire window, until that window is redrawn) undery 2.5.47 I can easily grey out the entire limewire window, normally for 2 or 3 seconds before it redraws... under 2.4.19 I can maybe grey out about 1 term window worth of area in the limewire window before it is redrawn...
Of course it states in the story that 2.5 has not been tuned at all really, so hopefully this will improve, but for now I'm sticking with 2.4.19 preempt low latency
So like I said at the begining maybe I just don't know enough... (I had no idea x mapped the video card memory into its address space and then it counted against the X process) on the redhat box in question with a 64MB video card, that pretty well explains the 82MB of RAM... sorry I was uninformed, thus we learn!
the system has 576MB of RAM, unfortunately, when its running (as it is now) if I were to start up some memory demanding app, or really just about anything (mozilla with 4 tabs open) it will drop into swap and slow to a crawl. the system doesn't drop libraries out of RAM to make room for programs that need it, it puts the programs into swap... unacceptable.
Maybe I just don't know enough, but in my opinion X is slow/bloated, it always uses at least 75MB of RAM on any machine I've seen it running on. That is completely unacceptable, I've never seen a linux box with a modern gui (gnome 2 or kde 3) that idles lower than 200MB of RAM used at all times, windows XP idles at about 75-85MB... (by "idles" I mean user logged in, no programs running, desktop sitting there doing nothing). I really don't see why this is, except that X whenever it is running, uses soo much RAM currently I have a RedHat 8.0 box running sitting at the gdm login screen nothing running on the box, X is using 82MB of RAM, the system is using 452MB of RAM, sitting at the login screen!! what the hell is that? X takes as long to start up as the rest of the system, on my laptop (running gentoo) the kernel/bootscripts take about 15 seconds to start, and then its at least 20-25 seconds more before I get a login screen in gdm... In short, X is slow and eats more system resources by itself than an entire windows system.
You are a walking contradiction, extoling the benevolence and greatness of Intertrust in one post and then bashing them in the next.
no digital outs from the pvr? fine I'll get an s-video in... but in the near future pvr/dvd and other players will have digital outs, tv's are already shipping with dvi inputs... the components will start supporting pure digital out soon enough.
So, whats to stop me from putting a recorder inbetween my pvr and my tv?? that is very very easy to do, and dropping a computer in there would be very simple to keep it all digital, and walla, set hacked, drop it on p2p and the world has it. Intertrust's mechanisms are vaporware, the analog hole is still as great as ever, and just as easily exploitable, and because of the internet, you don't need an army of people doing this, only 1 or 2, because distribution (the great inhibitor of piracy up to this point has been the cost of distribution, not the ease/difficulty of making copies) is now free.
I disagree that DRM will make it more difficult to pirate, the difficulty in pirating in the 80's wasn't so much making the copies of tapes as it was the distribution of said copies, same today, how many people really spend hours ripping their cd's to mp3?? I've only done maybe 15 of my cds (my favorites that I want to have everywhere) I own more than 200 cd's, so already making copies is too much of a hassle for the average joe. The difference now is that distribution is free, so you only need 1 person to go through the trouble of exploiting the analog hole, and walla the world has the stuff anyway. It is advances in distribution not ease of copying that has created more piracy today than 20 years ago, and DRM will not remove the ease of distribution.
You've still got the huge gaping analog hole, that only 1 person has to employ and then the stuff is on gnutella/kazaa/choose your favorite p2p and insert here. If the music comes out of my speakers and I can hear it I can make a near perfect digital copy. Simply insert line from line-out to line-in on computer sound card, fire up your favorite wav recording utility, record, convert to ogg/mp3 whatever, and wait a second, copy your now copy-protectionless file to your/share directory, and walla the world can benefit from your 5 minutes of work. This cannot be stopped, unless the music cannot be played on speakers. (same goes for video btw, a little more involved but not a whole hell of alot more)
I disagree, big businesses are the one's with big names and everyone and their mom tries to crack their networks, small businesses on the other hand, are relatively unknown hence not very many hackers are going to be busting on the doors of the network, and most probably don't even have the IT staff to even know themselves that they've been cracked, therefore it won't matter, if mom and pop don't know how to read their network logs, they aren't gonna know that someone broke in, and mom and pop don't know how to read the logs, so in the end it doesn't change anything.
47 days?? as if thats some uptime record... lol my linux servers routinely do 3-4 months uptime, and the only reason they ever reboot is because the power in my office is shoddy and I only have about 10 minutes of UPS, so a decent power outage takes the servers... want uptime stats go to netcraft.com amazingly someone's been running windows 2k server for 3.5 years according to the latest survey, unfortunately that would mean that the server hasn't rebooted since about march of 1999.. oops, win2k server wasn't out then, amazing that they forged their uptime stats, but geeze really now. Anyway, thats the only windows box on the list of the top 50, all others are BSD/Unix.
I don't see how this got modded as funny, but ok he makes a valid point, the northern polar ice cap FLOATS in the water when it is there, therefore if it melts it will not cause any increase in sea levels because floating ice displaces exactly its weight in sea water, hence when it melts, sea levels stay exactly the same, only the south pole will increase water levels as it sits on land, and therefore is not displacing water currently.
it covers all of the implimentations that they think of, however, patent lawyers write patents broadly on purpose, because then it covers all of the implimentations, good patent lawyers write patents that patent the "idea" being patented not the individual implimentation, hence there are patents on e-commerce (an idea), kick-up rudder systems (another idea), cotton gins (once again, an idea, I'm sure if you read the cotton gin patent it says "a device for separating cotton from... " I don't remember what cotton gins separate from the cotton.. ) but the patent is on the function of the device, not the manufacturing of the device, or the way the components are put together. Hence the patent on the cotton gin would cover any device that performed the same function (hence no one else made slightly varied cotton gins, the cotton gin was 1 device and if you wanted to build one you paid the inventor the royalty for the plans). This is how patent law has always worked, and the only way to make it work in our favor is to get as many open and free patents (alla Red Hat) as we can.
Um... your comment regarding CSS is not true about later versions of netscape (6.0 and on) I use that mouseover color change all the time with CSS, and it renders perfectly in mozilla, netscape 6, 6.1, 6.2 and 7... sure netscape 4 doesn't support it but IE 4 didn't either, so thats a silly argument. I could tell you that mozilla is better than IE because IE 3 won't even open up MS's own home page anymore... but thats irrelevant.
Unfortunately you are not correct, IANAL but my father is, and the art of patent law is to write the patent so that it does cover all methods of implimentation. The example he used was kick-up rudder systems on hobbie cat catamarans. The patent on that system covers *all* kick up rudder systems all retractable rudder systems, all systems that allow you to tow the boat with the rudder up, and then deploy the rudder when the boat is in the water.
There is no way to create a system that does this without paying the royalty fee. Good patent lawyers get paid very well to be able to cover all of the implimentations of the idea in the patent, and thereby assure that the company with the idea gets paid for their idea, and that some cheap change of 1 bolt here (or 1 for loop there, or for that matter *completely* different source code) doesn't nullify the patent.
I'll have to agree with that! Schools these days excel (hmm is that TM??) at teaching kids not to think for themselves, to accept what is spoon fed them by anyone in any sort of authority position, and above all else to maintain the status quo...
She didn't, she couldn't figure it out, I had to:) actually same goes for my aunt, uncle, mother, brother, both sets of grandparents, sister, yeah basically my whole family except my dad (he's been programming since the punch card days...)
good point! hadn't thought about that before but its totally true, my mom couldn't install windows xp, my grandma has had me installing os's for her since win 3.1, and she's a smart lady (phd in math).
I'd mod you up as funny/insightful if I had points... but I'll reply instead:)
Re:Your hardware under Win2K and Linux
on
Halloween VII
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· Score: 1
I agree computers are to do work on, my point is, I have to fiddle less under linux... sometimes getting an initial setup done is a little more difficult, but once its set, its set and I don't have to touch it again.
Ok under WinXP and Win2K installers; Gentoo 1.3 and 1.4 Beta suck and die claiming that there is either a) no disks present or b) the empty (partitioned) 18gig drive has less than 250MB of space.
Why are you using Gentoo if you don't want to be bothered by config files??? that is about the most config intensive distro there is... and it is a pain to get it to recognize all hardware and everything. My guess would be that Gentoo's install kernel doesn't have your scsi controller built in... but I dunno.
I use the MS optical intellimouse USB, and the MS Optical Wireless Explorer USB in redhat 7.3 and 8.0 and they both come up fine with no config, I also use exclusively nVidia cards and they have never fussed in any distro (suse, redhat 7.1-8, gentoo, debian, mandrake...) but installing the nvidia drivers from windows update on a win 2k machine would cause the machine not to be able to display better than 600x800 at 16 colors... (geforce 2 mx, and tnt2 cards ). I'm sure they've fixed that by now but for a good 2 months from feb-april of this year, the drivers on their site broke my win2k installs...
Our mileages have varied... the only hardware problem I've had in linux is getting x to start on an ancient s3 chipset, (that btw, doesn't work at all under windows, and when I called about it their solution was "Buy a new video card.") it wouldn't come up in redhat, but under suse it worked fine, so that system ran suse until the cpu fan seized, and it died..:)
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm...
I've administered Linux, BSD, Windows (NT4, 2000, XP), and OS X and I'd say in order of ease of administering:
1) Windows
2) Linux
3) BSD
4) OS X
Sure OS X has GUI's for most stuff, but some stuff you still have to do on the command line, and lots of the gui stuff doesn't work quite right/as expected yet. Besides the fact that its proprietary enough to not follow BSD/Linux closely enough to put stuff in similar places. I'd charge more to admin an OS X network than a Linux one, and any admin coming from Windows wouldn't have a clue in either OS, so I don't think its really easier to admin than Linux even though it has pretty aqua buttons.
The idiocy of this argument of numbers in this case is simply that now it only takes 1 person to go through the "pain" of breaking the DRM and EVERYONE else in the world can benefit through p2p. The numbers game doesn't work in this situation, because unless the DRM is unbreakable (and therefore a huge pain in the ass for all consumers, not to mention that unbreakable DRM isn't possible) all content will be available anyway, because someone somewhere will exploit the analog hole, and make nearly perfect copies, and walla, DRM is useless.
Is it just me or is it not possible to get the one on the right down to $199??
it says starting at $199, but when you go to "customize it" there is no option you can dumb down anymore, and it says $249... lame dell
A million people have replied in this thread but noone has termed it this bluntly so I will.
You are a complete idiot, your subject stating that "we all need to learn some economics" makes me laugh. From my microeconomics 1010 book I quote:
"[having a monopoly] Does not mean that the monopolist can charge any price it wants - at least not if its objective is to maximize profit. This textbook is a case in point. Prentice Hall, Inc., owns the copyright and is, therefore, a monopoly producer of this book. Then why doesn't it sell the book for $500 a copy? Because few people would buy it, and Prentice Hall would earn a much lower profit."
Monopolists are ruled by the demand curve in the market that they operate, they cannot charge arbitrarily high prices because the market will not support it. The definition of a monopoly is not "They can charge whatever price they feel like" (although this is true of monopolies they could charge whatever they want, but, they choose to charge at a price that maximizes profits which is not an arbitrarily high amount, it is determined by the demand curve in the market) it is "a market that has only 1 seller and many buyers, and has significant barriers to entry"
Go study economics yourself, monopoly rents are the difference between what would be charged in a competetive market and what the monopolist can charge.
Actually, you are wrong, have you ever added up the separate cost of getting all three things a la carte?? at wendy's for instance it is EXACTLY the same price, and mcdonalds I think you save maybe 5 cents, point is, value meals are not about saving you money, they are a cost saving measure for the fast food restaurants because they reduce order/order processing time, meaning they can process more people during the lunch hour rush, thereby making more money and improving their margins ever so slightly... they are not there to save you money in the least.
I use gentoo,
the gentoo-sources kernel has low latency preempt pre-patched
but it doesn't have xfs, they have an xfs kernel as well, but I don't know if it has low latency and preempt already, I seem to remember something about low latency and or preempt causing problems with the xfs kernel, but I might just be smoking crack.
check forums.gentoo.org. Ok I just did, and yeah, preempt + XFS is a bad idea, much instability, the patches fight with each other (XFS trying to journal, preempt trying to let something else use the cpu) result, massive instability. So, no I don't think you can get all three to play nice, but you can run low-latency+XFS, or low-latency+preempt, but you can't throw preempt in with XFS... gentoo is nice and patches the kernel automatically, if not running gentoo, you'd have to patch the kernel yourself...
Inspired by the numbers and new "snappyness" under load, I decided to download and compile the 2.5.47 kernel, and see for myself, disappointed is all I can say,
2.4.19 with preempt and low-latency is snappier by quite a bit than 2.5.47. My test isn't quite as numeric as the stories... I simply start ripping a DVD (oops did I say that...) to avi, and compiling something (in this case xmms) and then get my term window, open limewire, and drag the term window around on the maximized limewire window, under 2.4.19 I can never get the whole window grey (as I drag the term window it acts as an eraser on the limewire window, until that window is redrawn) undery 2.5.47 I can easily grey out the entire limewire window, normally for 2 or 3 seconds before it redraws... under 2.4.19 I can maybe grey out about 1 term window worth of area in the limewire window before it is redrawn...
Of course it states in the story that 2.5 has not been tuned at all really, so hopefully this will improve, but for now I'm sticking with 2.4.19 preempt low latency
So like I said at the begining maybe I just don't know enough...
(I had no idea x mapped the video card memory into its address space and then it counted against the X process) on the redhat box in question with a 64MB video card, that pretty well explains the 82MB of RAM... sorry I was uninformed, thus we learn!
the system has 576MB of RAM, unfortunately, when its running (as it is now) if I were to start up some memory demanding app, or really just about anything (mozilla with 4 tabs open) it will drop into swap and slow to a crawl. the system doesn't drop libraries out of RAM to make room for programs that need it, it puts the programs into swap... unacceptable.
Maybe I just don't know enough, but in my opinion X is slow/bloated, it always uses at least 75MB of RAM on any machine I've seen it running on. That is completely unacceptable, I've never seen a linux box with a modern gui (gnome 2 or kde 3) that idles lower than 200MB of RAM used at all times, windows XP idles at about 75-85MB... (by "idles" I mean user logged in, no programs running, desktop sitting there doing nothing). I really don't see why this is, except that X whenever it is running, uses soo much RAM currently I have a RedHat 8.0 box running sitting at the gdm login screen nothing running on the box, X is using 82MB of RAM, the system is using 452MB of RAM, sitting at the login screen!! what the hell is that? X takes as long to start up as the rest of the system, on my laptop (running gentoo) the kernel/bootscripts take about 15 seconds to start, and then its at least 20-25 seconds more before I get a login screen in gdm... In short, X is slow and eats more system resources by itself than an entire windows system.
ROFLMAO!!!
right so Word's spell check isn't that great either we can see.
You are a walking contradiction, extoling the benevolence and greatness of Intertrust in one post and then bashing them in the next.
no digital outs from the pvr? fine I'll get an s-video in... but in the near future pvr/dvd and other players will have digital outs, tv's are already shipping with dvi inputs... the components will start supporting pure digital out soon enough.
Or do they not have for Linux yet? Ever heard of a grammar check? Or does MS Word not do that properly still?
So, whats to stop me from putting a recorder inbetween my pvr and my tv?? that is very very easy to do, and dropping a computer in there would be very simple to keep it all digital, and walla, set hacked, drop it on p2p and the world has it. Intertrust's mechanisms are vaporware, the analog hole is still as great as ever, and just as easily exploitable, and because of the internet, you don't need an army of people doing this, only 1 or 2, because distribution (the great inhibitor of piracy up to this point has been the cost of distribution, not the ease/difficulty of making copies) is now free.
I disagree that DRM will make it more difficult to pirate, the difficulty in pirating in the 80's wasn't so much making the copies of tapes as it was the distribution of said copies, same today, how many people really spend hours ripping their cd's to mp3?? I've only done maybe 15 of my cds (my favorites that I want to have everywhere) I own more than 200 cd's, so already making copies is too much of a hassle for the average joe. The difference now is that distribution is free, so you only need 1 person to go through the trouble of exploiting the analog hole, and walla the world has the stuff anyway. It is advances in distribution not ease of copying that has created more piracy today than 20 years ago, and DRM will not remove the ease of distribution.
You've still got the huge gaping analog hole, that only 1 person has to employ and then the stuff is on gnutella/kazaa/choose your favorite p2p and insert here. If the music comes out of my speakers and I can hear it I can make a near perfect digital copy. Simply insert line from line-out to line-in on computer sound card, fire up your favorite wav recording utility, record, convert to ogg/mp3 whatever, and wait a second, copy your now copy-protectionless file to your /share directory, and walla the world can benefit from your 5 minutes of work.
This cannot be stopped, unless the music cannot be played on speakers. (same goes for video btw, a little more involved but not a whole hell of alot more)
I disagree,
big businesses are the one's with big names and everyone and their mom tries to crack their networks,
small businesses on the other hand, are relatively unknown hence not very many hackers are going to be busting on the doors of the network, and most probably don't even have the IT staff to even know themselves that they've been cracked, therefore it won't matter, if mom and pop don't know how to read their network logs, they aren't gonna know that someone broke in, and mom and pop don't know how to read the logs, so in the end it doesn't change anything.
47 days?? as if thats some uptime record... lol
my linux servers routinely do 3-4 months uptime, and the only reason they ever reboot is because the power in my office is shoddy and I only have about 10 minutes of UPS, so a decent power outage takes the servers... want uptime stats go to netcraft.com
amazingly someone's been running windows 2k server for 3.5 years according to the latest survey, unfortunately that would mean that the server hasn't rebooted since about march of 1999.. oops, win2k server wasn't out then, amazing that they forged their uptime stats, but geeze really now. Anyway, thats the only windows box on the list of the top 50, all others are BSD/Unix.
I don't see how this got modded as funny, but ok
he makes a valid point, the northern polar ice cap FLOATS in the water when it is there, therefore if it melts it will not cause any increase in sea levels because floating ice displaces exactly its weight in sea water, hence when it melts, sea levels stay exactly the same, only the south pole will increase water levels as it sits on land, and therefore is not displacing water currently.
it covers all of the implimentations that they think of, however, patent lawyers write patents broadly on purpose, because then it covers all of the implimentations, good patent lawyers write patents that patent the "idea" being patented not the individual implimentation, hence there are patents on e-commerce (an idea), kick-up rudder systems (another idea), cotton gins (once again, an idea, I'm sure if you read the cotton gin patent it says "a device for separating cotton from... " I don't remember what cotton gins separate from the cotton.. ) but the patent is on the function of the device, not the manufacturing of the device, or the way the components are put together. Hence the patent on the cotton gin would cover any device that performed the same function (hence no one else made slightly varied cotton gins, the cotton gin was 1 device and if you wanted to build one you paid the inventor the royalty for the plans). This is how patent law has always worked, and the only way to make it work in our favor is to get as many open and free patents (alla Red Hat) as we can.
Um... your comment regarding CSS is not true about later versions of netscape (6.0 and on) I use that mouseover color change all the time with CSS, and it renders perfectly in mozilla, netscape 6, 6.1, 6.2 and 7... sure netscape 4 doesn't support it but IE 4 didn't either, so thats a silly argument. I could tell you that mozilla is better than IE because IE 3 won't even open up MS's own home page anymore... but thats irrelevant.
Unfortunately you are not correct, IANAL but my father is, and the art of patent law is to write the patent so that it does cover all methods of implimentation. The example he used was kick-up rudder systems on hobbie cat catamarans. The patent on that system covers *all* kick up rudder systems all retractable rudder systems, all systems that allow you to tow the boat with the rudder up, and then deploy the rudder when the boat is in the water.
There is no way to create a system that does this without paying the royalty fee. Good patent lawyers get paid very well to be able to cover all of the implimentations of the idea in the patent, and thereby assure that the company with the idea gets paid for their idea, and that some cheap change of 1 bolt here (or 1 for loop there, or for that matter *completely* different source code) doesn't nullify the patent.
I'll have to agree with that!
Schools these days excel (hmm is that TM??) at teaching kids not to think for themselves, to accept what is spoon fed them by anyone in any sort of authority position, and above all else to maintain the status quo...
She didn't, :)
:)
she couldn't figure it out, I had to
actually same goes for my aunt, uncle, mother, brother, both sets of grandparents, sister, yeah basically my whole family except my dad (he's been programming since the punch card days...)
good point! hadn't thought about that before but its totally true, my mom couldn't install windows xp, my grandma has had me installing os's for her since win 3.1, and she's a smart lady (phd in math).
I'd mod you up as funny/insightful if I had points... but I'll reply instead
I agree computers are to do work on, my point is, I have to fiddle less under linux...
:)
sometimes getting an initial setup done is a little more difficult, but once its set, its set and I don't have to touch it again.
Ok under WinXP and Win2K installers; Gentoo 1.3 and 1.4 Beta suck and die claiming that there is either a) no disks present or b) the empty (partitioned) 18gig drive has less than 250MB of space.
Why are you using Gentoo if you don't want to be bothered by config files??? that is about the most config intensive distro there is... and it is a pain to get it to recognize all hardware and everything. My guess would be that Gentoo's install kernel doesn't have your scsi controller built in... but I dunno.
I use the MS optical intellimouse USB, and the MS Optical Wireless Explorer USB in redhat 7.3 and 8.0 and they both come up fine with no config, I also use exclusively nVidia cards and they have never fussed in any distro (suse, redhat 7.1-8, gentoo, debian, mandrake...) but installing the nvidia drivers from windows update on a win 2k machine would cause the machine not to be able to display better than 600x800 at 16 colors... (geforce 2 mx, and tnt2 cards ). I'm sure they've fixed that by now but for a good 2 months from feb-april of this year, the drivers on their site broke my win2k installs...
Our mileages have varied... the only hardware problem I've had in linux is getting x to start on an ancient s3 chipset, (that btw, doesn't work at all under windows, and when I called about it their solution was "Buy a new video card.") it wouldn't come up in redhat, but under suse it worked fine, so that system ran suse until the cpu fan seized, and it died..