No thanks about drawing commercial CAs into it. If a game publisher *was* to implement such a system, they would simply make themselves a CA and distribute their CA cert with the software. They *could* go so far as including a private key with each copy of the software, but costs would skyrocket if releasing en mass. The system I would envision here is that one purchases the game, gets online, and goes to the server and registers the CD-Key in exchange for having a private key signed. The advantages would, of course, be that the authentication mechanism is not prone to theft (i.e. the server being connected to never sees your important credentials, no vulnerable information is transmitted over the wire), and could be more enforceable (coming up with a keygen is one thing, trying to fake a 4096 bit key with signed certificate is another), provided the process for getting a certificate were sufficiently rigorous.
Hell, if the game was critically dependent on online functionality, you could let the game go free on the net and just sell CD-Keys. If any small projects want to try to make it big without the potentially crippling barrier to entry into mass distributers, this would be the way I would think... Stick it on Gnutella and let people *think* it is illegal to download and its popularity could be good...
That is different, they are monitoring traffic on a local level without intrusive measures. Besides, with universities I have worked with, they don't rely on MAC addresses. Ports are linked directly to a smart switch which records usage over the port, and snmp is used to monitor and kill ports that are overused. Even changing network card or MAC means nothing then. They are forcing a sort of spyware on the client. While fine for these purposes, the fear is the information could somehow be used for profiling, though I'm not sure what the hell the system could do with such profiling data. User X tends to play this game from 7-8 and 5-9 on MWF...... Nothing is helpful about that data to marketers or anything, so I think detecting cheating is the lesser of two evils.
Easy, it is not depending on the network, the client is recording the MAC address and sending it as data. MAC address is a convenient, most universally enabled unique identifier of a system. They could have chosen the unique processor ID in Intel chips, except that is rarely ever enabled. With MAC addresses, most people have network cards and don't know how to fool the OS into thinking MAC addresses are different. Even those using dial-up will likely have an Ethernet interface as shipped by the manufacturer...
Why the hell would you need that sort of bandwidth for a SSL accelerator? Even if you were using it for Hard Disk I/O, Hard Disk I/O goes throuh the PCI bus, so it would not be saturated. For the most reasonable area of network usage, bandwidth on any PC equipment wouldn't go anywhere near such a need. For bigger needs, you probably need bigger equipment anyway. Don't think a dedicated Java processor would be a big seller, especially with the speedups in implementations seen as of late. AI hardware may sound intriguing, but it is so unsexy in terms of consumer visiblity. That, and methods to AI frequently change.
No, the place where the bandwidth has the most impact on the user experience remains the graphics. They look pretty nice nowadays, but until you see scenes generated on the fly at 60 fps or more that are indistinguishable from real life, graphics will always be lacking.
Re:Is media automount in the kernel yet?
on
Linux 3.0
·
· Score: 2
I know mandrake has this feature, at least the one you describe, as 'supermount'. Autofs/Automount is there and has been for a long time, but is less suited for removable devices than it is nfs mounts. Supermount is a far cleaner implementation for local devices. People on kernel-devel would probably argue that the implementation could be done using AutoFS and that would make supermount redundant, but I like supermount.... Between supermount and lpp, you have a decent Desktop OS...
I think that now, it is quite likely that they are pretty much sealed into their platform by the market pressures. But I think the decision to try to avoid clone possibilities hurt their opportunities. Back in the day when they were allowing Mac clones, they gained marketshare and could compete with Intel architecture then, possibly. They see the success of the platform, but pain on their hardware sales and kill it off, refusing to adapt to a new business model, or allowing the clone market to fully bloom. So the platform is suffering from lack of competition.
Now their only chance at escaping the platform which seems to be stranding them (well, IBM may pick up the slack in the future, *maybe*) is to jump the PPC architecture and go to IA32 (Or perhaps x86-64 or IA64 soon). The m68k architecture was a dead end, and PPC looks to be one too. As ugly as IA32 is, it is still alive and compatible. One final architecture jump could have Mac customers free from migration nightmares for a while. Apple could have hardware systems based on the architecture with licensed and approved motherboards/components and still maintain control while being competitive. Maybe even push more resources into x86 architecture and make it able to run on commodity hardware and sell it at a price similar to Windows Professional offerings. This would quite possibly fail, going head to head with MS, but with the capital and name brand of Mac behind it, they could very well survive long enough to turn a profit....
Of course after the m68k to PPC and then OS9 to OSX migration pains, this would be quite a bitchslap to Mac users, but Mac users are used to it.
Won't ever happen... That sort of option would be a threat to the 'consistancy' of OSX feel. On top of that, that functionality is against the most fundamental principles of UI design. In apple thought, moving the mouse means the cursor moves without in any way having the UI take action. If a UI action is required, a mouse press is required. Personally, I use sloppy focus where possible, but to most people it doesn't make sense that something like window focus can be changed without a click, and it annoys them. If they move the mouse out of the way and a background app grabs focus, they get frustrated...
First of all is hard to nail down what exactly that means. When most peoople utter those words, they refer to Apache/Linux/Linux Apps vs. IIS/Windows/Office.
Very few security issues in the recent past have really had much to do with Windows itself, mostly IIS and some Office/IE vulnerabilities. Even with those, frequently the problem is that the administrators of targeted systems are not sufficiently security minded. Also, MS products draw a lot of attacks, simply because the systems are such a large target.
The enhanced security of Linux, at least in part, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When administrators are highly security concious, they will often go to Linux to drastically reduce the sheer number of attacks they receive and are influenced by reputation. Sure Linux boxes with Apache have had a number of problems and worms, but those administrators are far more likely to update Apache than IIS administrators.
One thing that really does make me think it would be difficult to update Windows as easily as Linux systems is the model for updating busy files. Under linux, the in-use inodes are kept open for the processes that need them, but the filesystem is updated for future processes. Under windows, the file updates are scheduled for reboot. Since so many of the updates for Windows touch so many files, updating IIS will likely require a reboot, huge no-no for mission critical apps..... Aside from that, I'm not so sure that Windows is that much less secure. However, I prefer linux because it *is* more flexible..
Well, while repeating history is a weak argument by itself, are you certain that Nintendo, McDonald's, and WalMart were the first pioneers in there respective fields?
Being a geek, I remember Atari's home systems with fondness, which got stomped out by nintendo when the NES was released. The withered up to the Atari Jaguar, but the home console market clearly did not go to the pioneers. Nintendo was clearly not in the game from the beginning..... I don't know about the fast food or retail outlet histories, but I can tell you that Nintendo would be evidence to support, not detract from their argument.
Though I cannot say anything about the boot loader problem (seems very strange, never saw it), I remember the one time I paid for a box set in order to support RedHat. I had a problem setting up a particular printer that was supported. Since I had paid for it, I figured I would use that support that comes with the box. The immediate response was that they didn't field questions regarding the printing system. This was back in the 5.2 days, but it left a really bad taste in my mouth. They likely have changed this since then, but at the time I had to wonder what part of things *did* they support? I eventually tweaked a ghostscript driver to get it to work based on some web searches and lucky hunches, but I never again paid for RedHat. Then I stopped using RedHat and now use Gentoo.
Compared to XBox, that system is crap on all fronts except memory and expansion. The video card is crap, and the VIA C3-800 Mhz, while producing little heat, competes more with a PII-400 than anything approaching it's clock speed. The audio is probably worse than XBox....
MS is not stupid, there is a reason the components as a whole are sold at a loss, it isn't possible to build a complete system with those components that cheap.
All this said, I have no interest in owning an XBox, for games or hacking. They lack good, exclusive titles, and I would rather shell out a little extra for good expandable system that doesn't require 'modchipping' and doesn't inflate MS's market numbers in any form.
I would say a turnaround is quite possible. A lot of companies are in a holding pattern on many fronts. People were pissing the money away and when the shareholders/VCs money got, on the whole, dangerously low with no sign of return on investment, they throw everything they've got into more conservative approaches, waiting and seeing while their captial slowly rebuilds.
Same as in the industry, things are kinda coasting on the whole at a constant rate of minimal maintenance, but once funding returns, companies will be looking to implement potentially profitable changes and taking risks again.
While it is true that the industry as a whole has a more realistic view of what can and cannot work, as well as what is and is not needed than it did in the.com days, I think on the whole companies do not feel they have sufficient IT/Developers to do anything sufficiently drastic that could turn a huge advantage for them. They will be looking to hire more in order to do the things they've been waiting on without sacrificing resources needed to maintain/return to the status quo if things go wrong. Not all the layoffs will be made up, but a great deal will be.... I'm hoping so at least, being the only IT guy left after layoffs is rough, and I know here with one IT guy they are not about to risk any more of my time on anything unnecessarily..
I thought that Windows would make a better HTPC, so I had mine dual-booting linux and windows, but have since zapped the windows partition. My main reason is that the mouse tends to play too big a role in Windows unnecessarily. mplayer is great for video with keyboard support. It also tends to be more universal than anything in Windows. For examlpe, mplayer can play Sorenson.movs and realmedia content as well as more.avi codecs than Windows Media Player easily supports out of the box...
xmms-lirc is great for using a remote with xmms. So now the mouse is mostly optional. Of course, for when I'm ultimately lazy, my laptop is my remote control. Wireless nework and x0rfbserver/vnc is great.
For those who are using Windows and don't want to change for one reason or another, ZoomPlayer makes media playback under windows livable.... Do a search for it. Hell, I never use WMP under windows anymore, I can't stand the lack of decent keyboard control...
I wouldn't give up on the computer unless the audio card delivers unsatisfying sound quality or the system makes too much noise on it's own.
For one, using the gui is not necessarily the best approach anyway. For one there are keyboard shortcuts in most every application. For another, you could get something like xmms-lirc and some other relatively cheap device and use a remote on your system.
The *huge* plus for having an HTPC is that you are not limited to mere music applications. Video is a decent option, and games as well. I know the resolution is not great on most TVs, but can't beat them for size.
But if you *really* want to go over the deepend in price, you could improve your display technology. A projector that does XGA (1024x768) is very awesome. If you like big screens and like Video, that is a life saver, and it can cut down in cords. For example, you would have your screen and probably stereo speakers of front, with one wire for each speaker running, say, behind your couch. You keep all your stereo and video equipment back there, or next to your couch. I'm big on video game systems, so the cords on controllers are more convenient this way. Plus, I don't have to move my butt off the couch to change DVDs when I'm watching a Box Set in a sitting... Of course, a decent projector runs a couple of thousand, and you can't walk in front of it, so it is something you have to carefully consider...
To be fair though, knowing which patches can and should be applied to particular versions of particular packages is not very useful, long term knowledge. Most of the patches installed by Gentoo are bugfix patches, which are *really* short lived. The occasional feature enhancement patch is relevant longer, but not too much longer. Same with the where to download and what to download. The learning experience of LFS basically boils down to knowing *every* dependency in your system, and how to manually configure every package (though that configuration step is not taken care of in gentoo). The dependency knowledge is of dubious value, as that too is subject to change in the details. All gentoo does is hide the nitty-gritty of requisite packages and keeps you from having to know every dependency. I did a Linux from scratch before (before the 'official' LFS existed, played it by ear), and it really doesn't teach you much that you don't learn in time with distributions. The useful knowledge is how to *use* the applications, not install them.
Re:Gentoo is a great iso-linux distro
on
LFS 4.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Well, to be fair, while I *love* portage, I would say the ebuild system isn't the best package manager feature wise (portage would be the package distribution system, ebuild the package system). Ebuilds add optional dependencies, but that is it. But from the perspective of the portage system as a whole, there is a problem. The end system is highly optimized and installs truly are managed well, but if you are undecided about packages that may become dependencies for other packages, well, there is often no turning back while knowing for certain what will be impacted. On installs, portage intelligently figures out what is needed and what optional packages to use based on USE flags. But unmerging will just do that package without regard to broken dependencies. If you are unsure about what you want, gentoo may not be right.
Personally, I use gentoo on my laptop and desktop (and would my router if I didn't mind spending days for it to finish), but there are things about it that make it not best for everyone.
That is really bizarre, I've never had any troubles. Especially killing the NIC and IDE controller, I wouldn't blame software if hardware is dying.
With the portage system, I've never really *needed* to maunally edit unmasked versions of packages. Occasionally I will change the mask rules to try stuff at my own risk, but I haven't needed to do anything.
All that said, it is at least as workable as LFS and much much easier. While both take forever to get up and going (my computer emerged for an entire weekend), the interactive time for gentoo makes it at least livable (I issued one emerge command with the packages I wanted and spent the weekend doing other stuff).
LFS is useful for learning a bit more about the system and how it works, but offers few details that can't be gotten in easier ways. What I have found extremely useful about the LFS references is that when I do go after masked packages and have problems, the LFS hints can explain why it broke and a workaround.
Putting lights outside the case, behind the door is not really a case mod. Don't blame him, I sure as hell wouldn't try to really do that kind of stuff to 1.3 million dollars of equipment, and his mod looks fine.
IIRC, I have only heard that with regard to AIX (rightfully so). We have Solaris, AIX, IRIX, HP-UX, Linux, and Solaris boxes, and I shudder when I have to mess with the AIX box.....
I can see the usefulness of the expiration and the CA signer field quite easily. Say you were in charge of authenticating these certificates and you were expected to be reliable and not have clients easily be faked. The lowest common denominator becomes the customer. If the customer has that certificate private key leaked, it becomes useless. This can happen without the company knowing, so having the certificate expire is useful in protecting the signee from themselves. Not something they should have to pay for, but the practicality is there. I personally don't see how the CA signer field in any way relates to profit. Ok, so there is the issue of branding, a certificate by Thawte *looks* more reputable than one signed by a small party, but it is a field rarely consulted if it ships with the browsers. The CA Signer field is somewhat critical with independent CAs, where the name does show up. Perhaps only a token, but still..
Interesting about mozilla determining the trustworthiness of a CA by financial stability, one would hope that would be irrelevant and they would instead be mindful of the verification behind the CA more than the financial status of what it stands behind. What kind of contract is it they want? If they require money to distribute a key, it is an interesting avenue of funding, though I wouldn't think it to be very useful... All said and done, if this works I hope the validation scheme proves to be quite reliable and opens up trusted certificates to a whole new class. I personally administrate two CAs and am glad that clients are typically a few businesses rather than end-consumers, else we would have to run to a CA with an unfair chunk of change...
I have a question regarding this sort of setup. Namely, what do the existing established (i.e. shipped with IE, mozilla, and netscape) CA's do in order to verify the identity of the requestor? I presume at least some of the cost an organization must pay is to cover administrative costs of verifying identities. And if the companies do nothing substantial to verify the identity of the purchaser, why the hell are browsers shipping with their certificates? If they provide decent identity verification, then I wonder if a free CA would work well. Even if it did get distributed, if it cannot provide decent verification of requestors due to budget constraints, it would be an exploitable weakness in the trust system...
Never had to worry about PPPoE, but perhaps a search on the gentoo forums could help? I see one, a more detailed, but German one, and another here.
After that, I suppose I see the charm of other source based distros. Gentoo really isn't that intuitive on the installation for those unfamiliar with the guts of the software...
Slashdot Mirror
Read the article, this thing has an optical eye while on a surface, and uses gyroscopes when lifted and a special button pressed.
No thanks about drawing commercial CAs into it. If a game publisher *was* to implement such a system, they would simply make themselves a CA and distribute their CA cert with the software. They *could* go so far as including a private key with each copy of the software, but costs would skyrocket if releasing en mass. The system I would envision here is that one purchases the game, gets online, and goes to the server and registers the CD-Key in exchange for having a private key signed. The advantages would, of course, be that the authentication mechanism is not prone to theft (i.e. the server being connected to never sees your important credentials, no vulnerable information is transmitted over the wire), and could be more enforceable (coming up with a keygen is one thing, trying to fake a 4096 bit key with signed certificate is another), provided the process for getting a certificate were sufficiently rigorous.
Hell, if the game was critically dependent on online functionality, you could let the game go free on the net and just sell CD-Keys. If any small projects want to try to make it big without the potentially crippling barrier to entry into mass distributers, this would be the way I would think... Stick it on Gnutella and let people *think* it is illegal to download and its popularity could be good...
That is different, they are monitoring traffic on a local level without intrusive measures. Besides, with universities I have worked with, they don't rely on MAC addresses. Ports are linked directly to a smart switch which records usage over the port, and snmp is used to monitor and kill ports that are overused. Even changing network card or MAC means nothing then. They are forcing a sort of spyware on the client. While fine for these purposes, the fear is the information could somehow be used for profiling, though I'm not sure what the hell the system could do with such profiling data. User X tends to play this game from 7-8 and 5-9 on MWF...... Nothing is helpful about that data to marketers or anything, so I think detecting cheating is the lesser of two evils.
Easy, it is not depending on the network, the client is recording the MAC address and sending it as data. MAC address is a convenient, most universally enabled unique identifier of a system. They could have chosen the unique processor ID in Intel chips, except that is rarely ever enabled. With MAC addresses, most people have network cards and don't know how to fool the OS into thinking MAC addresses are different. Even those using dial-up will likely have an Ethernet interface as shipped by the manufacturer...
Why the hell would you need that sort of bandwidth for a SSL accelerator? Even if you were using it for Hard Disk I/O, Hard Disk I/O goes throuh the PCI bus, so it would not be saturated. For the most reasonable area of network usage, bandwidth on any PC equipment wouldn't go anywhere near such a need. For bigger needs, you probably need bigger equipment anyway. Don't think a dedicated Java processor would be a big seller, especially with the speedups in implementations seen as of late. AI hardware may sound intriguing, but it is so unsexy in terms of consumer visiblity. That, and methods to AI frequently change.
No, the place where the bandwidth has the most impact on the user experience remains the graphics. They look pretty nice nowadays, but until you see scenes generated on the fly at 60 fps or more that are indistinguishable from real life, graphics will always be lacking.
I know mandrake has this feature, at least the one you describe, as 'supermount'. Autofs/Automount is there and has been for a long time, but is less suited for removable devices than it is nfs mounts. Supermount is a far cleaner implementation for local devices. People on kernel-devel would probably argue that the implementation could be done using AutoFS and that would make supermount redundant, but I like supermount.... Between supermount and lpp, you have a decent Desktop OS...
I think that now, it is quite likely that they are pretty much sealed into their platform by the market pressures. But I think the decision to try to avoid clone possibilities hurt their opportunities. Back in the day when they were allowing Mac clones, they gained marketshare and could compete with Intel architecture then, possibly. They see the success of the platform, but pain on their hardware sales and kill it off, refusing to adapt to a new business model, or allowing the clone market to fully bloom. So the platform is suffering from lack of competition.
Now their only chance at escaping the platform which seems to be stranding them (well, IBM may pick up the slack in the future, *maybe*) is to jump the PPC architecture and go to IA32 (Or perhaps x86-64 or IA64 soon). The m68k architecture was a dead end, and PPC looks to be one too. As ugly as IA32 is, it is still alive and compatible. One final architecture jump could have Mac customers free from migration nightmares for a while. Apple could have hardware systems based on the architecture with licensed and approved motherboards/components and still maintain control while being competitive. Maybe even push more resources into x86 architecture and make it able to run on commodity hardware and sell it at a price similar to Windows Professional offerings. This would quite possibly fail, going head to head with MS, but with the capital and name brand of Mac behind it, they could very well survive long enough to turn a profit....
Of course after the m68k to PPC and then OS9 to OSX migration pains, this would be quite a bitchslap to Mac users, but Mac users are used to it.
This post entered through an iBook too...
Won't ever happen... That sort of option would be a threat to the 'consistancy' of OSX feel. On top of that, that functionality is against the most fundamental principles of UI design. In apple thought, moving the mouse means the cursor moves without in any way having the UI take action. If a UI action is required, a mouse press is required. Personally, I use sloppy focus where possible, but to most people it doesn't make sense that something like window focus can be changed without a click, and it annoys them. If they move the mouse out of the way and a background app grabs focus, they get frustrated...
First of all is hard to nail down what exactly that means. When most peoople utter those words, they refer to Apache/Linux/Linux Apps vs. IIS/Windows/Office.
Very few security issues in the recent past have really had much to do with Windows itself, mostly IIS and some Office/IE vulnerabilities. Even with those, frequently the problem is that the administrators of targeted systems are not sufficiently security minded. Also, MS products draw a lot of attacks, simply because the systems are such a large target.
The enhanced security of Linux, at least in part, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When administrators are highly security concious, they will often go to Linux to drastically reduce the sheer number of attacks they receive and are influenced by reputation. Sure Linux boxes with Apache have had a number of problems and worms, but those administrators are far more likely to update Apache than IIS administrators.
One thing that really does make me think it would be difficult to update Windows as easily as Linux systems is the model for updating busy files. Under linux, the in-use inodes are kept open for the processes that need them, but the filesystem is updated for future processes. Under windows, the file updates are scheduled for reboot. Since so many of the updates for Windows touch so many files, updating IIS will likely require a reboot, huge no-no for mission critical apps..... Aside from that, I'm not so sure that Windows is that much less secure. However, I prefer linux because it *is* more flexible..
Well, while repeating history is a weak argument by itself, are you certain that Nintendo, McDonald's, and WalMart were the first pioneers in there respective fields?
Being a geek, I remember Atari's home systems with fondness, which got stomped out by nintendo when the NES was released. The withered up to the Atari Jaguar, but the home console market clearly did not go to the pioneers. Nintendo was clearly not in the game from the beginning..... I don't know about the fast food or retail outlet histories, but I can tell you that Nintendo would be evidence to support, not detract from their argument.
Though I cannot say anything about the boot loader problem (seems very strange, never saw it), I remember the one time I paid for a box set in order to support RedHat. I had a problem setting up a particular printer that was supported. Since I had paid for it, I figured I would use that support that comes with the box. The immediate response was that they didn't field questions regarding the printing system. This was back in the 5.2 days, but it left a really bad taste in my mouth. They likely have changed this since then, but at the time I had to wonder what part of things *did* they support? I eventually tweaked a ghostscript driver to get it to work based on some web searches and lucky hunches, but I never again paid for RedHat. Then I stopped using RedHat and now use Gentoo.
Compared to XBox, that system is crap on all fronts except memory and expansion. The video card is crap, and the VIA C3-800 Mhz, while producing little heat, competes more with a PII-400 than anything approaching it's clock speed. The audio is probably worse than XBox....
MS is not stupid, there is a reason the components as a whole are sold at a loss, it isn't possible to build a complete system with those components that cheap.
All this said, I have no interest in owning an XBox, for games or hacking. They lack good, exclusive titles, and I would rather shell out a little extra for good expandable system that doesn't require 'modchipping' and doesn't inflate MS's market numbers in any form.
I would say a turnaround is quite possible. A lot of companies are in a holding pattern on many fronts. People were pissing the money away and when the shareholders/VCs money got, on the whole, dangerously low with no sign of return on investment, they throw everything they've got into more conservative approaches, waiting and seeing while their captial slowly rebuilds.
.com days, I think on the whole companies do not feel they have sufficient IT/Developers to do anything sufficiently drastic that could turn a huge advantage for them. They will be looking to hire more in order to do the things they've been waiting on without sacrificing resources needed to maintain/return to the status quo if things go wrong. Not all the layoffs will be made up, but a great deal will be.... I'm hoping so at least, being the only IT guy left after layoffs is rough, and I know here with one IT guy they are not about to risk any more of my time on anything unnecessarily..
Same as in the industry, things are kinda coasting on the whole at a constant rate of minimal maintenance, but once funding returns, companies will be looking to implement potentially profitable changes and taking risks again.
While it is true that the industry as a whole has a more realistic view of what can and cannot work, as well as what is and is not needed than it did in the
I thought that Windows would make a better HTPC, so I had mine dual-booting linux and windows, but have since zapped the windows partition. My main reason is that the mouse tends to play too big a role in Windows unnecessarily. mplayer is great for video with keyboard support. It also tends to be more universal than anything in Windows. For examlpe, mplayer can play Sorenson .movs and realmedia content as well as more .avi codecs than Windows Media Player easily supports out of the box...
xmms-lirc is great for using a remote with xmms. So now the mouse is mostly optional. Of course, for when I'm ultimately lazy, my laptop is my remote control. Wireless nework and x0rfbserver/vnc is great.
For those who are using Windows and don't want to change for one reason or another, ZoomPlayer makes media playback under windows livable.... Do a search for it. Hell, I never use WMP under windows anymore, I can't stand the lack of decent keyboard control...
I wouldn't give up on the computer unless the audio card delivers unsatisfying sound quality or the system makes too much noise on it's own.
For one, using the gui is not necessarily the best approach anyway. For one there are keyboard shortcuts in most every application. For another, you could get something like xmms-lirc and some other relatively cheap device and use a remote on your system.
The *huge* plus for having an HTPC is that you are not limited to mere music applications. Video is a decent option, and games as well. I know the resolution is not great on most TVs, but can't beat them for size.
But if you *really* want to go over the deepend in price, you could improve your display technology. A projector that does XGA (1024x768) is very awesome. If you like big screens and like Video, that is a life saver, and it can cut down in cords. For example, you would have your screen and probably stereo speakers of front, with one wire for each speaker running, say, behind your couch. You keep all your stereo and video equipment back there, or next to your couch. I'm big on video game systems, so the cords on controllers are more convenient this way. Plus, I don't have to move my butt off the couch to change DVDs when I'm watching a Box Set in a sitting... Of course, a decent projector runs a couple of thousand, and you can't walk in front of it, so it is something you have to carefully consider...
To be fair though, knowing which patches can and should be applied to particular versions of particular packages is not very useful, long term knowledge. Most of the patches installed by Gentoo are bugfix patches, which are *really* short lived. The occasional feature enhancement patch is relevant longer, but not too much longer. Same with the where to download and what to download. The learning experience of LFS basically boils down to knowing *every* dependency in your system, and how to manually configure every package (though that configuration step is not taken care of in gentoo). The dependency knowledge is of dubious value, as that too is subject to change in the details. All gentoo does is hide the nitty-gritty of requisite packages and keeps you from having to know every dependency. I did a Linux from scratch before (before the 'official' LFS existed, played it by ear), and it really doesn't teach you much that you don't learn in time with distributions. The useful knowledge is how to *use* the applications, not install them.
Well, to be fair, while I *love* portage, I would say the ebuild system isn't the best package manager feature wise (portage would be the package distribution system, ebuild the package system). Ebuilds add optional dependencies, but that is it. But from the perspective of the portage system as a whole, there is a problem. The end system is highly optimized and installs truly are managed well, but if you are undecided about packages that may become dependencies for other packages, well, there is often no turning back while knowing for certain what will be impacted. On installs, portage intelligently figures out what is needed and what optional packages to use based on USE flags. But unmerging will just do that package without regard to broken dependencies. If you are unsure about what you want, gentoo may not be right.
Personally, I use gentoo on my laptop and desktop (and would my router if I didn't mind spending days for it to finish), but there are things about it that make it not best for everyone.
That is really bizarre, I've never had any troubles. Especially killing the NIC and IDE controller, I wouldn't blame software if hardware is dying.
With the portage system, I've never really *needed* to maunally edit unmasked versions of packages. Occasionally I will change the mask rules to try stuff at my own risk, but I haven't needed to do anything.
All that said, it is at least as workable as LFS and much much easier. While both take forever to get up and going (my computer emerged for an entire weekend), the interactive time for gentoo makes it at least livable (I issued one emerge command with the packages I wanted and spent the weekend doing other stuff).
LFS is useful for learning a bit more about the system and how it works, but offers few details that can't be gotten in easier ways. What I have found extremely useful about the LFS references is that when I do go after masked packages and have problems, the LFS hints can explain why it broke and a workaround.
Putting lights outside the case, behind the door is not really a case mod. Don't blame him, I sure as hell wouldn't try to really do that kind of stuff to 1.3 million dollars of equipment, and his mod looks fine.
IIRC, I have only heard that with regard to AIX (rightfully so). We have Solaris, AIX, IRIX, HP-UX, Linux, and Solaris boxes, and I shudder when I have to mess with the AIX box.....
I can see the usefulness of the expiration and the CA signer field quite easily. Say you were in charge of authenticating these certificates and you were expected to be reliable and not have clients easily be faked. The lowest common denominator becomes the customer. If the customer has that certificate private key leaked, it becomes useless. This can happen without the company knowing, so having the certificate expire is useful in protecting the signee from themselves. Not something they should have to pay for, but the practicality is there. I personally don't see how the CA signer field in any way relates to profit. Ok, so there is the issue of branding, a certificate by Thawte *looks* more reputable than one signed by a small party, but it is a field rarely consulted if it ships with the browsers. The CA Signer field is somewhat critical with independent CAs, where the name does show up. Perhaps only a token, but still..
Interesting about mozilla determining the trustworthiness of a CA by financial stability, one would hope that would be irrelevant and they would instead be mindful of the verification behind the CA more than the financial status of what it stands behind. What kind of contract is it they want? If they require money to distribute a key, it is an interesting avenue of funding, though I wouldn't think it to be very useful... All said and done, if this works I hope the validation scheme proves to be quite reliable and opens up trusted certificates to a whole new class. I personally administrate two CAs and am glad that clients are typically a few businesses rather than end-consumers, else we would have to run to a CA with an unfair chunk of change...
I have a question regarding this sort of setup. Namely, what do the existing established (i.e. shipped with IE, mozilla, and netscape) CA's do in order to verify the identity of the requestor? I presume at least some of the cost an organization must pay is to cover administrative costs of verifying identities. And if the companies do nothing substantial to verify the identity of the purchaser, why the hell are browsers shipping with their certificates? If they provide decent identity verification, then I wonder if a free CA would work well. Even if it did get distributed, if it cannot provide decent verification of requestors due to budget constraints, it would be an exploitable weakness in the trust system...
Never had to worry about PPPoE, but perhaps a search on the gentoo forums could help? I see one, a more detailed, but German one, and another here.
After that, I suppose I see the charm of other source based distros. Gentoo really isn't that intuitive on the installation for those unfamiliar with the guts of the software...
I agree, but the moderators with the sense to see this feel so strongly on the matter they would rather reply than moderate :)