Re:Question on Purchasing the PDF ?
on
Small Form Factor PCs
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· Score: 2, Informative
I regularly get PDF files from O'Reilly and have never had a problem printing them. I suspect their employees know the "don't print me!" protection in PDF is trivial to bypass by the kind of people they sell to, and I haven't heard of them using it.
The main protection I've seen them use against PDF piracy is that some of their files, like chapter downloads from the Safari service, are imprinted with a light gray background watermark that contains your customer information. This works as a good deterrant from giving the PDF out to other people without interfering with your personal use of it. I don't know if they're using that scheme on this particular download, but I'd expect that's your worst case problem.
And thus this isn't a very useful crack, because the minute it is revealed, it gets plugged. Maybe earlier, if they figure it out anyway.
The only reason the software player used is visible at all right now is because the people involved are still working out the process. Once that gets nailed down and the scene goes completely underground, there will be people who crack disks and release the volume keys into the wild, and no one will have any idea how they got them. When one visits a Warez size to find out a serial number to install software, did you learn anything about the disassembler used to crack the key? Nope. Same thing will happen here.
AACS is as secure as it gets. It uses proper crypto, unlike CSS. Copy protection is a fundamentally unsolvable problem, but apart from that there is nothing wrong with AACS.
It's as secure as it gets, except for the fact that it's fundamentally flawed. I'm with you here.
And what does "implement revocation securely" even mean?
Examples of the kind of thing I think about:
a) You have two copies of a disc from successive mastering runs. The only difference between them is that the later generation pressing has removed a player key that existed on the previous version. Can you learn anything from comparing the two, given that you know how to decrypt the earlier one? Here I'd imagine AACS is genuinely secure.
b) The maker of your software player has been found guilty of releasing a hackable player whose keys can be extracted. They revoke that key and release an update with a new one. How much easier is it to find out that new key, given that you already broke the previous version and know its player key? Presumably the new release still shares a lot of code with the broken one, which reduces how many bytes need to be sorted through to discover where the new key and its related decryption code are at considerably. Each time a new player update comes out that is known to have a different key from the previous one, a bit more will be exposed about what part of the player does the decryption, making future cracks even easier.
And here's a slightly different idea to chew on, from the business side:
c) The key issuers of the content providers get so desperate that they start revoking keys given any provocation. A player manufacturer feels their key was revoked unfairly, because their player was secure (cough); they then sue the key authority for the hardship they and their customers were put through by this unfair revocation. What happens? I'm sure there's a clause about this in the licensing agreement, but this is America; we sue people in ridiculous fashion all the time here with unpredictable outcome.
There are at least two, and probably three, things wrong with the popularly echoed "they'll revoke the keys" response:
1) Which player gets its keys revoked? The people involved are being intentionally elusive on this topic. It's been determined that WinDVD can be used, but content providers can never be sure they eradicated the source of leaks unless they ban all software players. For all we know PowerDVD is cracked, too, despite their claims; the fact that muslix64 uses it for his demo certainly makes one wonder.
2) Even if you wipe out a player, you can still crack all the discs currently on the market. Key revocation only involves future titles, manufacturers have to change how they press discs to revoke a key and stop the hack.
I quote from Wikipedia which has all this correct: "if a given player's keys are compromised and published by an attacker, the AACS licensing authority can simply revoke those keys in future content, making the keys/player useless for decrypting new titles. However, if attacker doesn't publish the compromised player key, the AACS licensing authority doesn't know which key is compromised, and it can not revoke it." I'd also suggest the thread where muslix64 comments about this subject.
3) What gives you any reason to believe that the same misguided souls who believed AACS was a secure solution implemented revocation securely?
to add to this insult, i did all this on a cut throat budget at a bargin price for them. my rate is 50% of what the next guy would charge.
When you come back, tell them you now have a better offer somewhere else, but since you're old friends you'd continue to work for them for double your current rate if they want to keep you. That will quickly make up for the money you lost from the time off, and if you're right they won't find anyone cheaper. People who are working for bargain rates rarely get any respect, telecommuter or not. Management thinks, "why, if they were really good, they'd charge more".
If they go for it, they should have new respect for you as a highly-paid professional who has significant value to the company that they missed when you were unavailable. If they don't buy it, you were wrong about your value to this company, and you can move on to another job where things may go better for you. Either way, your current problem is gone.
Nope, cause you just gotta have Britney Spear's comeback album, even if you have to pay $25 for it, and is packed with so much DRM that the package includes KY Jelly for the installation of it
I was paying attention up to here, but then I started thinking about Britney, and KY Jelly, and...I gotta go.
Did he find this clip on a website out there (demoscene or otherwise) and decide to use it?
The similarities in melody between the two reminds me of the case where Huey Lewis sued Ray Parker Jr. over "Ghostbusters". For all we know, Timberland came across the music via a mis- or unlabeled download and never even knew the real source. It's not like there's good tagging information on SID files. I have a whole set of cool musical pieces on my hard drive that I have no idea of the source of; found then on random web sites, thought they sounded interesting, but all attribution was already gone.
What I would find hilariously ironic was if the lawsuit was filed, and Timbaland had his hard drive seized to look for evidence of downloads on it.
Linksys wrt54g's originally used linux based firmwares until cisco bought them and then started selling linux based wrt54gs's at a premium...
This statement has a spin on it that I'm not happy with; let's consider the facts instead. See Wikipedia for more details.
Between V4.0 and V5.0 of the firmware, Cisco/Linksys switched from using Linux as the firmware for the WRT54G/WRT54GS to VxWorks. The lower memory footprint of VxWorks allowed them to halve the amount of RAM and flash in the box, substantially lowering production costs.
Cisco still sells Linux based WRT54 boxes as the WRT54GL, but since they have twice as much RAM and flash on them they cost more. This is not the same as selling them at a premium, which implies you're paying more for the same thing. You're not--you're paying more to get more. It's hard to compare directly because so many other things changed, but I don't believe the current Linux-based boxes cost significantly more than similarly configured models used.
What is true is that the VxWorks ones have hit new price lows, and that since you can't get the Linux-based WRT54GL at retail there's no longer frequent sale prices available (although I note that as I write this, newegg has a $10 rebate).
It supports larger drives just fine; I have a 750GB drive happily running on my Windows 2000 box. To fully use a hard drives that's >137GB, Windows 2000 requires service pack 3 or later and a registry hack. You didn't need the IE and other extra patches just to be able to use the other partition.
Windows XP requires service pack 1 and a registry hack. It's possible for OEMs to upgrade the copy of XP they ship to have this feature by default.
For people who just have to format the entire hard drive as one big partition, then this limitation in Windows 2000 can be annoying. Those of us who prefer to keep the OS drive on the small side, separating out data files onto a separate partition, are barely effected by it. I'm already going to install SP4 on any new Windows 2000 system anyway, so I just need to remember which registry key to tickle after that's done and this problem goes away.
Flash memory has (depending on which technology) a limited life of 10^5 or 10^6 write operations...Get used to the notion that this will mean you have to buy a new drive as these wear out now too. and older drives will start developing mysterious read errors, so will also need additional space-consuming data-redundancy for an error recovery strategy.
The kind of flash controllers used for designs like these are built with wear levelling approaches that manages this problem at a level below where the operating system will see errors. I wouldn't want to run a database server that's being written to all the time on one of them, but for normal notebook computer use 10^6 writes on every block should last several years.
Now imagine your swap space being on flash.
Why would you possibly do that? Add more (cheap!) physical RAM instead until there's no need to swap.
I recommend getting a Model M from 1993 or earlier. There was a fast quality decline from there, to the point that my 1996 M samples have a noticably worse typing feel than the ones from a few years before. I picked up a Unicomp for comparision a few years back, and it wasn't even in the same league.
Or it could just be that this benchmark isn't coded well - it might use a global lock frequently so as you add more threads there's more contention. In any case someone with more time than me should dig into this benchmark which might show a weakness in the core 2 architecture.
Take a look at http://tweakers.net/reviews/661/7 if you want to see how the performance of the Clovertown Core 2 chips scales with a scalable database and many clients.
> Normal, every day, steady CPU utilization should hover no higher than around 50% (closer to 75%, if you like living on the edge) leaving enough CPU to handle peak loads
A server that's providing services to regular users, sure. But if your server is doing computational work, like many of the scientific computing examples given in the article, it should be spending every minute of every day at 100% utilization.
In the rush to be first post, you seem to have missed that all the source code to the tools (and even gpl.txt) are included in their zip file. You need to trust AutoIt to build some of them. I see a few binaries that don't have source included, but they're generic ones like mkisofs.exe and wget.exe that could easily be replaced with trusted versions.
I got my first burner in mid-1996, so my early discs are over a decade old. I've seen a small but non-zero number of failures among the CD-R burns over time, maybe 10 discs out of over a thousand discs. Haven't seen any from the better quality gold media (Mitsui, Kodak), but a few from CD-R and DVD-R discs made with other formulations. The failures I remember the details of were from Sony (x2, but I used a lot more of these than the others here), 3M, Memorex, and Mitsui Silver (x3). At any time I normally use a 50/50 mix of expensive gold media for important files and whatever's cheap for everything else. Normally the failure is that the disc will still mount but many sectors have unrecoverable errors.
I've lost multiple discs burned onto completely worthless KHypermedia DVD-R media after less than 3 years--two boxes of media that were free after some promotion, yet I was still ripped off.
Mitsui's gold media has generally been considered the best available for CD-R work, particularly from an archival perspective. The company has reorganized and now goes by the name MAM. If you look through the comments after the article, the author suggests that the currently available MAM media isn't as high of a quality as the older Mitsui discs. I would like to see some citation for that fact, as I wasn't aware the formulation was changed at all from that reorg, but I haven't researched this subject recently enough to be able to dismiss his suggestion outright.
I've managed to get my PostgreSQL installation tuned to very high speeds simply by switching the database disk over to/dev/null. It runs fast as hell, and the data integrity is basically the same as MyISAM.
At my firm, we switched some of our MySQL Enterprise databases over to PostgreSQL 8.1.
Every time I see the words "MySQL" and "Enterprise" next to one another, it really gives me a good laugh. Why, it's almost as ridiculous as suggesting that SQL:2003 Window Functions are critical for business reporting.
One approach to finding out which funds might meet your needs is to look at which institutional investors have large blocks in the open-source companies you consider worthwhile. For example, we can look at the data for Redhat (and, yes, I'm laughing too at who is providing that data) and see that there are large positions in the company held by Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, etc. From that, you can check out the various funds that company offers and see if you can find one that matches your requirements. Taking a glance at our host's ownership information shows a large Fidelity block as well, but no other overlap I noticed. From this limited look, I conclude you should be looking at Fidelity's funds. That approach should get you on the right path. You can do the rest of the legwork--you're the student here, after all; I already know how to invest.
I'll reply to you instead of the other posters saying the same thing because that gay voice is just so piercing. I did mention that memtest86 was on the other tool discs as well, and that the NT password was disc was becoming obsolete. I find the individual recovery CDs I recommended useful instead of just using Knoppix for everything because they boot faster and are easier to keep up to to date than Knoppix is. I don't want to have to pull down an entire new Knoppix just because I want support for a new motherboard chipset in memtest86, and they may not have integrated that into a release yet anyway.
Here's what I have in my CD case, in approximate order of how regularly use them...
Memtest86--because the RAM in the cheap PCs I come across sucks. Some of the other tool CDs have this one as well, I like to get the latest one regularly here. Good for stress testing, and even handy for figuring out things like whether the RAM is running correctly in dual-channel mode.
SystemRescueCD--I particularly like the partition editor and imaging utilities. Been weaning myself off Partition Magic/Drive Image even for Windows work with these two.
Ubuntu live CD and DVD. The CD works in more systems, the DVD version is a completely usable system with a lot of stuff in it. What most impresses me about the Ubuntu live disc is that I can download packages over the network and install them, even thing that run as services, from the live environment. I actually got PostgreSQL installed and some database tests completed, all without a single Postgres file on the media.
Knoppix--Some days, your first choice in Linux live CDs just doesn't work on a random machine; that's why I still carry around this one as a backup.
Bart PE--A bit of a pain to build the first time, but very handy for fixing Windows machines.
Offline NT Password & Registry Editor--this one has been less useful lately, as I've been running into NTFS partitions it really doesn't want to write to. My fallback position is to use this to generate a new SAM file, then copy it over with a BartPE disc.
RedHat Enterprise 3 and 4 CDs. While not technically live CDs, you can do a lot with booting into this environment, and I deal with enough people running RedHat versions that they're worth carrying around. I still keep one of the older versions around so I have something running the 2.4 kernel to tests against; occasionally I'll run into some old hardware that 2.6 pukes on, while 2.4 still works great.
I'm 6' tall, and my head just touches the top of the 71" General Store Zero-Gravity chair, while my feet hang an inch or two off the bottom end. There is a pillow they provide for the top area that just keeps my head from hitting the bar and slouching isn't an issue at all. It has considerably more "headroom" than I expected. More of my height is in my upper body than average, so I'd expect that at 5'10 you'd fit even better, unless you're that tall with really short legs.
Kneeling in a chair pushes much of your body's weight onto your knees and hips. They'll breakdown under the strain just as badly as your spine will over time. I used to like that type of design when I was a kid; after using a kneeling chair for a year in my early 30's, I found my hips so inflammed from it that I still have trouble walking, quite some time later.
What you want to do is spread your weight over as large a surface area as possible in order to minimize the strain on any one part, which means a chair that leans backward you're resting against. These latest suggestions seems similar to the "Zero Gravity" chairs that claim they're based on NASA research on reducing pressure on the spine (I'd love to find a real citation for that rather than just sales copy). I purchased a cheap recliner based on that type of design from General Superstore that I've been happy with. At the office, I just lean my chair back; after a full day of working my back and hips feel dramatically better in that position than they ever did when I was sitting up straight.
While I'm babbling on this topic, I'd also suggest those trying to improve their back health look at the recommendations from Dr. Bookspan I've become a real fan of some of the exercises she recommends there, and much of the most useful information from her is free on the web site.
Those games were never going to make good movies. What I think would be totally awesome was if someone released a movie based on that E.T. game for the Atari 2600.
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I regularly get PDF files from O'Reilly and have never had a problem printing them. I suspect their employees know the "don't print me!" protection in PDF is trivial to bypass by the kind of people they sell to, and I haven't heard of them using it.
The main protection I've seen them use against PDF piracy is that some of their files, like chapter downloads from the Safari service, are imprinted with a light gray background watermark that contains your customer information. This works as a good deterrant from giving the PDF out to other people without interfering with your personal use of it. I don't know if they're using that scheme on this particular download, but I'd expect that's your worst case problem.
And thus this isn't a very useful crack, because the minute it is revealed, it gets plugged. Maybe earlier, if they figure it out anyway.
The only reason the software player used is visible at all right now is because the people involved are still working out the process. Once that gets nailed down and the scene goes completely underground, there will be people who crack disks and release the volume keys into the wild, and no one will have any idea how they got them. When one visits a Warez size to find out a serial number to install software, did you learn anything about the disassembler used to crack the key? Nope. Same thing will happen here.
AACS is as secure as it gets. It uses proper crypto, unlike CSS. Copy protection is a fundamentally unsolvable problem, but apart from that there is nothing wrong with AACS.
It's as secure as it gets, except for the fact that it's fundamentally flawed. I'm with you here.
And what does "implement revocation securely" even mean?
Examples of the kind of thing I think about:
a) You have two copies of a disc from successive mastering runs. The only difference between them is that the later generation pressing has removed a player key that existed on the previous version. Can you learn anything from comparing the two, given that you know how to decrypt the earlier one? Here I'd imagine AACS is genuinely secure.
b) The maker of your software player has been found guilty of releasing a hackable player whose keys can be extracted. They revoke that key and release an update with a new one. How much easier is it to find out that new key, given that you already broke the previous version and know its player key? Presumably the new release still shares a lot of code with the broken one, which reduces how many bytes need to be sorted through to discover where the new key and its related decryption code are at considerably. Each time a new player update comes out that is known to have a different key from the previous one, a bit more will be exposed about what part of the player does the decryption, making future cracks even easier.
And here's a slightly different idea to chew on, from the business side:
c) The key issuers of the content providers get so desperate that they start revoking keys given any provocation. A player manufacturer feels their key was revoked unfairly, because their player was secure (cough); they then sue the key authority for the hardship they and their customers were put through by this unfair revocation. What happens? I'm sure there's a clause about this in the licensing agreement, but this is America; we sue people in ridiculous fashion all the time here with unpredictable outcome.
There are at least two, and probably three, things wrong with the popularly echoed "they'll revoke the keys" response:
1) Which player gets its keys revoked? The people involved are being intentionally elusive on this topic. It's been determined that WinDVD can be used, but content providers can never be sure they eradicated the source of leaks unless they ban all software players. For all we know PowerDVD is cracked, too, despite their claims; the fact that muslix64 uses it for his demo certainly makes one wonder.
2) Even if you wipe out a player, you can still crack all the discs currently on the market. Key revocation only involves future titles, manufacturers have to change how they press discs to revoke a key and stop the hack.
I quote from Wikipedia which has all this correct: "if a given player's keys are compromised and published by an attacker, the AACS licensing authority can simply revoke those keys in future content, making the keys/player useless for decrypting new titles. However, if attacker doesn't publish the compromised player key, the AACS licensing authority doesn't know which key is compromised, and it can not revoke it." I'd also suggest the thread where muslix64 comments about this subject.
3) What gives you any reason to believe that the same misguided souls who believed AACS was a secure solution implemented revocation securely?
managment think i do nothing
Then take a long vacation and prove them wrong.
to add to this insult, i did all this on a cut throat budget at a bargin price for them. my rate is 50% of what the next guy would charge.
When you come back, tell them you now have a better offer somewhere else, but since you're old friends you'd continue to work for them for double your current rate if they want to keep you. That will quickly make up for the money you lost from the time off, and if you're right they won't find anyone cheaper. People who are working for bargain rates rarely get any respect, telecommuter or not. Management thinks, "why, if they were really good, they'd charge more".
If they go for it, they should have new respect for you as a highly-paid professional who has significant value to the company that they missed when you were unavailable. If they don't buy it, you were wrong about your value to this company, and you can move on to another job where things may go better for you. Either way, your current problem is gone.
Nope, cause you just gotta have Britney Spear's comeback album, even if you have to pay $25 for it, and is packed with so much DRM that the package includes KY Jelly for the installation of it
I was paying attention up to here, but then I started thinking about Britney, and KY Jelly, and...I gotta go.
Did he find this clip on a website out there (demoscene or otherwise) and decide to use it?
The similarities in melody between the two reminds me of the case where Huey Lewis sued Ray Parker Jr. over "Ghostbusters". For all we know, Timberland came across the music via a mis- or unlabeled download and never even knew the real source. It's not like there's good tagging information on SID files. I have a whole set of cool musical pieces on my hard drive that I have no idea of the source of; found then on random web sites, thought they sounded interesting, but all attribution was already gone.
What I would find hilariously ironic was if the lawsuit was filed, and Timbaland had his hard drive seized to look for evidence of downloads on it.
If I were to give you a 5 1/2" floppy right now, could you extract the data?
Depends on whether the media was still readable after I trimmed 1/4" off to fit it in a 5 1/4" floppy drive.
It's the next step in enterspankment. Yes, I have coined a new a catchy phrase!
Nope, already been used.
Linksys wrt54g's originally used linux based firmwares until cisco bought them and then started selling linux based wrt54gs's at a premium...
This statement has a spin on it that I'm not happy with; let's consider the facts instead. See Wikipedia for more details.
Between V4.0 and V5.0 of the firmware, Cisco/Linksys switched from using Linux as the firmware for the WRT54G/WRT54GS to VxWorks. The lower memory footprint of VxWorks allowed them to halve the amount of RAM and flash in the box, substantially lowering production costs.
Cisco still sells Linux based WRT54 boxes as the WRT54GL, but since they have twice as much RAM and flash on them they cost more. This is not the same as selling them at a premium, which implies you're paying more for the same thing. You're not--you're paying more to get more. It's hard to compare directly because so many other things changed, but I don't believe the current Linux-based boxes cost significantly more than similarly configured models used.
What is true is that the VxWorks ones have hit new price lows, and that since you can't get the Linux-based WRT54GL at retail there's no longer frequent sale prices available (although I note that as I write this, newegg has a $10 rebate).
It supports larger drives just fine; I have a 750GB drive happily running on my Windows 2000 box. To fully use a hard drives that's >137GB, Windows 2000 requires service pack 3 or later and a registry hack. You didn't need the IE and other extra patches just to be able to use the other partition.
Windows XP requires service pack 1 and a registry hack. It's possible for OEMs to upgrade the copy of XP they ship to have this feature by default.
For people who just have to format the entire hard drive as one big partition, then this limitation in Windows 2000 can be annoying. Those of us who prefer to keep the OS drive on the small side, separating out data files onto a separate partition, are barely effected by it. I'm already going to install SP4 on any new Windows 2000 system anyway, so I just need to remember which registry key to tickle after that's done and this problem goes away.
Flash memory has (depending on which technology) a limited life of 10^5 or 10^6 write operations...Get used to the notion that this will mean you have to buy a new drive as these wear out now too. and older drives will start developing mysterious read errors, so will also need additional space-consuming data-redundancy for an error recovery strategy.
The kind of flash controllers used for designs like these are built with wear levelling approaches that manages this problem at a level below where the operating system will see errors. I wouldn't want to run a database server that's being written to all the time on one of them, but for normal notebook computer use 10^6 writes on every block should last several years.
Now imagine your swap space being on flash.
Why would you possibly do that? Add more (cheap!) physical RAM instead until there's no need to swap.
I recommend getting a Model M from 1993 or earlier. There was a fast quality decline from there, to the point that my 1996 M samples have a noticably worse typing feel than the ones from a few years before. I picked up a Unicomp for comparision a few years back, and it wasn't even in the same league.
Or it could just be that this benchmark isn't coded well - it might use a global lock frequently so as you add more threads there's more contention. In any case someone with more time than me should dig into this benchmark which might show a weakness in the core 2 architecture.
Take a look at http://tweakers.net/reviews/661/7 if you want to see how the performance of the Clovertown Core 2 chips scales with a scalable database and many clients.
> Normal, every day, steady CPU utilization should hover no higher than around 50% (closer to 75%, if you like living on the edge) leaving enough CPU to handle peak loads
A server that's providing services to regular users, sure. But if your server is doing computational work, like many of the scientific computing examples given in the article, it should be spending every minute of every day at 100% utilization.
In the rush to be first post, you seem to have missed that all the source code to the tools (and even gpl.txt) are included in their zip file. You need to trust AutoIt to build some of them. I see a few binaries that don't have source included, but they're generic ones like mkisofs.exe and wget.exe that could easily be replaced with trusted versions.
I got my first burner in mid-1996, so my early discs are over a decade old. I've seen a small but non-zero number of failures among the CD-R burns over time, maybe 10 discs out of over a thousand discs. Haven't seen any from the better quality gold media (Mitsui, Kodak), but a few from CD-R and DVD-R discs made with other formulations. The failures I remember the details of were from Sony (x2, but I used a lot more of these than the others here), 3M, Memorex, and Mitsui Silver (x3). At any time I normally use a 50/50 mix of expensive gold media for important files and whatever's cheap for everything else. Normally the failure is that the disc will still mount but many sectors have unrecoverable errors.
I've lost multiple discs burned onto completely worthless KHypermedia DVD-R media after less than 3 years--two boxes of media that were free after some promotion, yet I was still ripped off.
Mitsui's gold media has generally been considered the best available for CD-R work, particularly from an archival perspective. The company has reorganized and now goes by the name MAM. If you look through the comments after the article, the author suggests that the currently available MAM media isn't as high of a quality as the older Mitsui discs. I would like to see some citation for that fact, as I wasn't aware the formulation was changed at all from that reorg, but I haven't researched this subject recently enough to be able to dismiss his suggestion outright.
How fast is it against MyISAM?
/dev/null. It runs fast as hell, and the data integrity is basically the same as MyISAM.
I've managed to get my PostgreSQL installation tuned to very high speeds simply by switching the database disk over to
At my firm, we switched some of our MySQL Enterprise databases over to PostgreSQL 8.1.
Every time I see the words "MySQL" and "Enterprise" next to one another, it really gives me a good laugh. Why, it's almost as ridiculous as suggesting that SQL:2003 Window Functions are critical for business reporting.
One approach to finding out which funds might meet your needs is to look at which institutional investors have large blocks in the open-source companies you consider worthwhile. For example, we can look at the data for Redhat (and, yes, I'm laughing too at who is providing that data) and see that there are large positions in the company held by Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, etc. From that, you can check out the various funds that company offers and see if you can find one that matches your requirements. Taking a glance at our host's ownership information shows a large Fidelity block as well, but no other overlap I noticed. From this limited look, I conclude you should be looking at Fidelity's funds. That approach should get you on the right path. You can do the rest of the legwork--you're the student here, after all; I already know how to invest.
I'll reply to you instead of the other posters saying the same thing because that gay voice is just so piercing. I did mention that memtest86 was on the other tool discs as well, and that the NT password was disc was becoming obsolete. I find the individual recovery CDs I recommended useful instead of just using Knoppix for everything because they boot faster and are easier to keep up to to date than Knoppix is. I don't want to have to pull down an entire new Knoppix just because I want support for a new motherboard chipset in memtest86, and they may not have integrated that into a release yet anyway.
Here's what I have in my CD case, in approximate order of how regularly use them...
Memtest86--because the RAM in the cheap PCs I come across sucks. Some of the other tool CDs have this one as well, I like to get the latest one regularly here. Good for stress testing, and even handy for figuring out things like whether the RAM is running correctly in dual-channel mode.
SystemRescueCD--I particularly like the partition editor and imaging utilities. Been weaning myself off Partition Magic/Drive Image even for Windows work with these two.
Ubuntu live CD and DVD. The CD works in more systems, the DVD version is a completely usable system with a lot of stuff in it. What most impresses me about the Ubuntu live disc is that I can download packages over the network and install them, even thing that run as services, from the live environment. I actually got PostgreSQL installed and some database tests completed, all without a single Postgres file on the media.
Knoppix--Some days, your first choice in Linux live CDs just doesn't work on a random machine; that's why I still carry around this one as a backup.
Bart PE--A bit of a pain to build the first time, but very handy for fixing Windows machines.
Offline NT Password & Registry Editor--this one has been less useful lately, as I've been running into NTFS partitions it really doesn't want to write to. My fallback position is to use this to generate a new SAM file, then copy it over with a BartPE disc.
RedHat Enterprise 3 and 4 CDs. While not technically live CDs, you can do a lot with booting into this environment, and I deal with enough people running RedHat versions that they're worth carrying around. I still keep one of the older versions around so I have something running the 2.4 kernel to tests against; occasionally I'll run into some old hardware that 2.6 pukes on, while 2.4 still works great.
I'm 6' tall, and my head just touches the top of the 71" General Store Zero-Gravity chair, while my feet hang an inch or two off the bottom end. There is a pillow they provide for the top area that just keeps my head from hitting the bar and slouching isn't an issue at all. It has considerably more "headroom" than I expected. More of my height is in my upper body than average, so I'd expect that at 5'10 you'd fit even better, unless you're that tall with really short legs.
Kneeling in a chair pushes much of your body's weight onto your knees and hips. They'll breakdown under the strain just as badly as your spine will over time. I used to like that type of design when I was a kid; after using a kneeling chair for a year in my early 30's, I found my hips so inflammed from it that I still have trouble walking, quite some time later.
What you want to do is spread your weight over as large a surface area as possible in order to minimize the strain on any one part, which means a chair that leans backward you're resting against. These latest suggestions seems similar to the "Zero Gravity" chairs that claim they're based on NASA research on reducing pressure on the spine (I'd love to find a real citation for that rather than just sales copy). I purchased a cheap recliner based on that type of design from General Superstore that I've been happy with. At the office, I just lean my chair back; after a full day of working my back and hips feel dramatically better in that position than they ever did when I was sitting up straight.
While I'm babbling on this topic, I'd also suggest those trying to improve their back health look at the recommendations from Dr. Bookspan I've become a real fan of some of the exercises she recommends there, and much of the most useful information from her is free on the web site.
Those games were never going to make good movies. What I think would be totally awesome was if someone released a movie based on that E.T. game for the Atari 2600.