And for the record: The last console I owned before buying the Wii was a Sega Genesis. Although I do have a DS, which I also happened upon by chance at a different Wal-Mart after a day-long search.
I love the Wii, and I don't think I'd really care for a PS3/360/etc. I'm more of a casual gamer, more so for lack of time than desire. It's just that the Wii looked like so much fun and it really is. It's lived up to its hype and it's been worth every penny.
My wife loves it, too -- Wii Sports/Wii Play at least so far. Her left hand is injured and she doesn't have feeling enough in it to work a directional controller or buttons. She also likes games on the DS that focus on the touch screen for the same reason. There's another market that MS and Sony are forgetting/ignoring -- disabled/impaired people.
Of course she's not too keen on Zelda since I spend a little too much time playing it:)
I happened to find one at a local Wal-Mart (small town, ~2500 people) they get shipments (at least) Sunday mornings. They had two left when I got there about noonish. I wasn't looking for it, but there it was and I knew better than to pass it up.
I sort of regret that I didn't buy both of them and sell the other on eBay. However, I figured much of the shortage is from people doing just that, so I let it go and left it for the next person.
I went to the same Wal-Mart a week later and they had one left then, too. Guy behind the counter said they had 18 of them come in one time, they weren't even sure why they got more than anyone else.
Moral of the story is: Troll Wal-Marts on Sunday mornings.
I like to take the "best of both worlds" approach. At home I use Thunderbird with IMAP. I also have a webmail client for the same account. The same mail is accessbile in both locations, including all folders, sent items, trash, etc. I can also make local copies or use folders offline if needed while using Thunderbird. The only thing that I can't do is sync the address book (which would be very useful!)
I much prefer to use Thunderbird for most of my mail usage, but webmail isn't that far off. I use RoundCube webmail (disclaimer: I help out on the project, so I may be biased) it has drag-n-drop message management, a nice look, and is generally useful. It's still quite beta but it's not so buggy it keeps people from using it on a daily basis.
I'd say IMAP+Thunderbird+Webmail is ideal for me, but it may not be an option for some people.
Ah, that could be handy. Although there are situations where you do not want symlinks to be followed.
I don't mind it being a separate copy, especially since/etc is in/, which is a different filesystem on 99% of my servers than/usr. I'd hate for anything in/etc to explicitly rely on/usr being available. Although if my/usr volume is gone, I probably have bigger problems than the local clock.:)
Both ways get the job done, so I suppose it's really a matter of preference. Either way, thanks for clarifying that point.
Are you sure that will actually replace/etc/localtime? In FreeBSD, you have to run tzsetup again after building world to copy over a fresh/etc/localtime from the updated zoneinfo files. Being from Indiana, when we switched to using DST last year the updated zoneinfo files already had the 2007 changes in them. I had to do nothing to any of my servers this year. Whee.
I thought the exact same thing, but after looking it up again, the name of that engine was Groovie. I think that Groovie was only used in 11th Hour, though.
Even better: The phone system says to *tell* it the numbers, but the numbers on the phone keypad work. They even work for yes/no 1=yes, 2=no. I hate, hate, hate voice recognition systems. Being able to just push the digits like mad is much easier, and speeds the process way up.
After punching in the numbers, the system still fails to activate -- because Microsoft locks major brand OEM keys to a single automated activation -- but then you do not have to repeat all 50-brazillion digits vocally to the person on the other end.
I'm not sure where Microsoft's call center is for that, but I suspect they have several. Once I got into a queue where the recording and the person on the other end both had very British accents.
And now back to the topic at hand: I've seen many motherboards replaced in OEM PCs, and never had a problem getting a key from Microsoft, but I also used generic OEM media and not the CD provided by the manufacturer.
Yeah, that would be reasonable too, as long as you don't charge too much extra for a static IP and you give all your existing dynamic IP customers sufficient warning before making that kind of a change. Hopefully there aren't too many people running SMTP servers on dynamic IPs, We charge $5/mo for an static IP, but for most business DSL customers it is included in their package price. It's actually against our ToS to run a server on a residential account or dynamic IP, but it isn't really policed unless it causes a problem. Even so, if we were to make a change like that we would send out a notification by some means (e-mail, in the bill, etc) at least a month in advance.
I have also toyed with the idea of submitting our dynamic ranges to a couple DUL RBLs myself as a proactive measure. They're already excluded from our domain's SPF record.
but it will also break anyone with an MUA configured to relay through an external server on port 25, so you'll need to be prepared for that in advance. If they're already configured to relay through a remote server, it shouldn't be any trouble to relay through the ISP's server instead - or as you suggested have the remote end also listen on a non-standard port.
Actually, that probably is a better idea (and would require significantly less processing power on your end). If, as you suggest, you're looking at quantity rather than quality, then the style of spam doesn't matter. And that could be done by a simple perl/python/ruby/whatever script parsing the maillog and reporting on a regular basis, it wouldn't have to be run as a daemon or do anything too fancy. In fact I just put that on my to-do list for next week.:)
I've been on the receiving end of a lot of those calls, and a lot of users can be pretty unhappy with the idea that the service they're paying for has been turned off. It takes good training in your tech support department (something lacking at most ISPs I've worked for) to make sure the user comes away feeling like the ISP is on their side. When we turn someone off, they just get the standard windows "verify username/password" message if they're dialup, or if they are DSL they are either unrouted or in the case of a PPPoE router they'll just not connect. There's no way they can really know they have been cut off until they call and talk to someone. Otherwise it appears as though they've just had a random failure of some kind.
I agree though, it takes a fair amount of tact to ensure that they feel as though you're trying to help them.
What I was getting at was, if these ideas aren't technically problematic, why aren't more ISPs implementing them? I'm willing to bet a lot of it is bureaucratic nonsense or company policies that conflict with it. Most places will only act if it is directly affecting their bottom line.
These measures may seem all well and good, but in a very large ISP even a simple measure would take a large effort to implement across the board. For a small ISP, it's not that big of a deal -- but then the small (and smallish) ISPs probably aren't the major source of the problems, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread.
If I ran an ISP, I would set up a firewall that could allow or deny outgoing connections on port 25 on a per-customer basis, with the default being that all new customers would not be able to send out on port 25. Customers can configure their clients to relay through the ISP's mail server, or to relay through somebody else's server on port 587 (with proper authentication, hopefully), or they can call tech support and request that port 25 be opened for them (tech support would encourage them to try the first two options, but if they really want port 25 open, that's totally OK, as long as we aren't getting complaints about spam). That part isn't too unreasonable. We have considered doing just that, but more along the lines of dynamic IPs == blocked port 25, static IPs == open. The static IP customers tend to be businesses, some of which run their own legitimate mail servers (which we usually know about due to them requesting reverse DNS entries and such) That said, one of the spam complaints I got this month was a T1 customer with a couple infected PCs on their network, so nothing is foolproof.
I would also run spam filtering software on all outgoing mail on the SMTP server, and have it quarantine (for admin review) anything above a ridiculous threshold. That is a little more work, but doable. It could be problematic but you'd have better luck with looking at message rates than content. It'd be easier to pick out suspicious rates among your own customers. Grandma and Grandpa aren't going to be sending out 5 messages per minute let alone 100.
The same problem with incoming scanning applies there too, maybe worse. If someone is sending out a new style of spam that filters don't know about yet, it doesn't help you anyway.
If you're sending spam, you get a phone call. If you don't answer the phone, you get an e-mail and we shut off your Internet access (redirecting port 80 to a web page explaining why service was shut off). We've found that just flat out turning it off is more effective than anything. Their PC could be so full of spyware and trojans that they can't even open IE let alone view a web page. It's also more effective for tech support. They may not even open up a browser, but when their mail check fails they're bound to call and if a support tech doesn't look at their account first, it'll be an interesting call.:)
Is this ridiculous? Is it technically problematic? Does it create too much work for the ISP? Would users be pissed off enough to cancel their service? You might get a couple irate users, but once they figure out the situation (Even better if you have a fix/workaround for them) they're usually reasonable.
Botnets spoof IP addresses to make if harder to track down the bots. But the IPS know where the bots are and could kill them, or filter them, if they had the testicles to do it. By pass the spoofed IP addressed traffic they make it harder for the rest of the world to filter the bots. Spoofing might work for simple attacks like ping or flooding-style attacks, but IP spoofing does not help them with spam delivery or infection, which is where they make the bulk of their money (unless it's DoS blackmail...) Ingress/Egress filtering helps, but it's not a magic bullet against botnets. (See http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1674)
Also -- If finding and killing the bots were that easy, it would be done a lot more often.
Why not start with the ISPs? Have them start policing their own customers and shut off their connections when a compromised system is discovered, then help that poor, unconnected shmuck clean their PC so they can rejoin the world wide pr0n. That's already standard practice for us, to some extent. When we find out about a compromised customer, we issue a warning and if they do not respond or we get more complaints, we shut them down. Maybe twice in the last several years have we had to actually shut someone down. Usually when we tell them, they are more than happy to get it cleaned up because they had no idea anything was wrong (Or "I thought I'd been getting a lot of popups lately" or "it has been rather slow", etc.)
We also happen to be a PC repair shop, so we encourage them to bring it to us so we can be sure it is clean (Have to be careful with that, since they might think *we* did it...)
Unfortunately with all the bots being so different there's no easy way to scan for them that I'm aware of (I'd LOVE to be proven wrong on that!)
I'm not defending pirates, I'm criticizing the MPAA's tactics. If you'll notice I did imply that a crime was committed if they actually would have downloaded a real movie.
I disagree in the child-predator scenario, though, because there are actually laws that cover intent to harm a person. Laws to protect people are in a whole different league than laws to protect corporations.
"OK, are you the ONLY person on Slashdot that doesn't know that theft and copyright infringement aren't the same thing?" s/theft/crime/ I hit the submit button without rereading much.
"Looks like I was wrong: You DO know, but are a hypocrite." On occasion, I suppose.
"No offense, but, by definition, a complete, exact download of something that you requested cannot be "fake". You got exactly what you asked to be downloaded. It might not have been what you wanted, but it certainly isn't fake."
Yes but what was requested was "Movie A" and you got "Random Data B", ergo you did not copy "Movie A", and the MPAA was freely distributing "Random Data B". If you were to relabel an MPAA movie as kiddie porn, and someone downloaded it, are they still guilty of possession of kiddie porn, or just copyright infringement for the movie?
"How your post got modded to +5, Insightful, in light of such egregious logic errors, is beyond me - the subscription helps, I suppose:)" Timing more than anything, but yes, that helped. I'll remember to disable the subscriber and karma bonuses more often:)
Only in this case, no actual theft has occurred. If it's fake, there is no crime. Sure there may be intent, but how exactly are you supposed to infringe on the copyright of a nonexistent work?
Subscribers can use tags so they can more easily find stories they liked later on. Under your personal page there's a 'tags' link and the stories you have tagged appear there with the tag names.
The tags are displayed publicly, I suppose, so that others can see how people have classified the story. Sort of suggestions for your own tags.
I suspect that someone has quite a large tags page full of stories that are very trap-like...
My current bank (a small credit union) doesn't support the automatic integration and I'm OK with that. Like you, I was never comfortable with my bank information being that easily accessible. Unfortunately, even with the manually exported data from their web site, it can still be a chore to reconcile. Most months I either put it off or just do it the old fashioned way, checking the paper statements against the written ledger.
I would feel a lot more comfortable with two-factor authentication but even then I'm sure there will be issues. Anything physical you have can be stolen or copied, including fingerprints and such, until technology sufficiently improves.
One thing that always bugged me about Gnucash- you have to pull OFX (or whatever) files by hand. Quicken could automatically fetch the latest data from my bank with a button click...
This will likely be a non-issue in the future, because even Quicken won't be able to do it. There was a story a couple days ago that banks are dropping the automated connections because of increased security regulations.
Actually, they have "work at home" licenses (I'd have to dig up the source, plenty of hits on Google for that phrase) that allow a copy at home if a license is purchased for a work computer. It's in the fine print, but last I heard it was still there -- at least it was for Academic Volume Licensing. I had thought a similar clause was in the retail edition but I could be wrong about that.
I still use tar, but ideally I'd like to use dump. As it is now, each server makes its own backups, copies them to a central server, which then dumps them all to tape. The backup server also holds one previous copy in addition to what got dumped to tape. It has come in handy on many occasions.
I bolded the word that has caused Adobe to sue Microsoft [slashdot.org]. My question is simple, doesn't Google face the same kind of lawsuit?
Microsoft probably backed down because they didn't want to encourage people to use a format they hadn't yet Embraced and Extended(TM). It's likely that they only gave it a try as more of a token gesture ("Look, we tried, mean Adobe threateded to sue! WE wanted to do it!")
Several years ago I was given survey by Microsoft that was was full of questions about PDF in general and whether or not I'd be willing to switch to another format if there was another choice, etc. I'm shocked they haven't tried this yet, but part of me thinks they haven't because they actually believe that it will make it so more people have Office, Windows, etc. If they have an openly exchangable format, it only hurts their market share, decreases shareholder value, yadda yadda yadda.
I completely agree about running OEM drivers in favour of generic ones though. Both on Windows and Mac OS more often than not I've found that downloadable generic drivers perfom better and have more features than the bundled drivers (pretty major stuff, like new shaders being supported, and being able to toggle FSAA and AF in case of the ATI drivers on Mac OS).
Even thought it may be that it's just a prepackaged 'optimized' set of driver settings, it still performs better without having to find the sweet spot of all the various tweaks. It's convenient.
Unfortunately ATI doesn't provide generic drivers for the embedded chipsets such as the X1400, last I looked. They insist you use OEM-only drivers, which unfortunately really do suck.
I hate to reply to myself, but this is worth noting:
The ATI/OEM drivers for the X1400 are crap for gaming. They are choppy in-game, among other problems - like once you exit a graphics-intensive app, it chews 100% of one core of the cpu until you reboot.
Once you ditch those drivers and install the Omega Drivers ( http://www.omegadrivers.net/ ) it works like a dream. It's probably a good idea to do that for just about any Radeon card.
The Acer I've got uses the Intel 3945ABG chipset, which aside from lackluster open source support, works great. I use it at home and at work with WPA2 and it has no problems.
I have an Acer Aspire 5672WLMi and it's pretty good as a gaming system for my needs. It plays HL2 and CS:S admirably at the display's native resolution of 1280x800. Mine has a core duo T2300 (1.66GHz dual core), 1GB of RAM, and a Radeon X1400 (newer revisions come with an X1600)
The screen is a little glossy, but so far it has not proved to be a problem for me, though there have been times when some sort of anti-glare coating would be nice.
The price isn't too bad, either. I gave just under $1100 for it.
I swear if you showed someone PySol, TuxRacer, and most of the little games that come with KDE, you'd have instant converts. I've had many customers who really use their machines for e-mail, web surfing, and solitaire. You'd probably get converts just by showing them PySol with some extra card packs installed and they'll go nuts.
Slashdot Mirror
And for the record: The last console I owned before buying the Wii was a Sega Genesis. Although I do have a DS, which I also happened upon by chance at a different Wal-Mart after a day-long search.
:)
I love the Wii, and I don't think I'd really care for a PS3/360/etc. I'm more of a casual gamer, more so for lack of time than desire. It's just that the Wii looked like so much fun and it really is. It's lived up to its hype and it's been worth every penny.
My wife loves it, too -- Wii Sports/Wii Play at least so far. Her left hand is injured and she doesn't have feeling enough in it to work a directional controller or buttons. She also likes games on the DS that focus on the touch screen for the same reason. There's another market that MS and Sony are forgetting/ignoring -- disabled/impaired people.
Of course she's not too keen on Zelda since I spend a little too much time playing it
I happened to find one at a local Wal-Mart (small town, ~2500 people) they get shipments (at least) Sunday mornings. They had two left when I got there about noonish. I wasn't looking for it, but there it was and I knew better than to pass it up.
I sort of regret that I didn't buy both of them and sell the other on eBay. However, I figured much of the shortage is from people doing just that, so I let it go and left it for the next person.
I went to the same Wal-Mart a week later and they had one left then, too. Guy behind the counter said they had 18 of them come in one time, they weren't even sure why they got more than anyone else.
Moral of the story is: Troll Wal-Marts on Sunday mornings.
I like to take the "best of both worlds" approach. At home I use Thunderbird with IMAP. I also have a webmail client for the same account. The same mail is accessbile in both locations, including all folders, sent items, trash, etc. I can also make local copies or use folders offline if needed while using Thunderbird. The only thing that I can't do is sync the address book (which would be very useful!)
I much prefer to use Thunderbird for most of my mail usage, but webmail isn't that far off. I use RoundCube webmail (disclaimer: I help out on the project, so I may be biased) it has drag-n-drop message management, a nice look, and is generally useful. It's still quite beta but it's not so buggy it keeps people from using it on a daily basis.
I'd say IMAP+Thunderbird+Webmail is ideal for me, but it may not be an option for some people.
Ah, that could be handy. Although there are situations where you do not want symlinks to be followed.
/etc is in /, which is a different filesystem on 99% of my servers than /usr. I'd hate for anything in /etc to explicitly rely on /usr being available. Although if my /usr volume is gone, I probably have bigger problems than the local clock. :)
I don't mind it being a separate copy, especially since
Both ways get the job done, so I suppose it's really a matter of preference. Either way, thanks for clarifying that point.
Are you sure that will actually replace /etc/localtime? In FreeBSD, you have to run tzsetup again after building world to copy over a fresh /etc/localtime from the updated zoneinfo files. Being from Indiana, when we switched to using DST last year the updated zoneinfo files already had the 2007 changes in them. I had to do nothing to any of my servers this year. Whee.
:)
That's what I call relaxing.
I thought the exact same thing, but after looking it up again, the name of that engine was Groovie. I think that Groovie was only used in 11th Hour, though.
t er_game)
When in doubt for links to 7th Guest and 11th hour info, there's always Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7th_Guest and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_11th_Hour_(compu
Even better: The phone system says to *tell* it the numbers, but the numbers on the phone keypad work. They even work for yes/no 1=yes, 2=no. I hate, hate, hate voice recognition systems. Being able to just push the digits like mad is much easier, and speeds the process way up.
After punching in the numbers, the system still fails to activate -- because Microsoft locks major brand OEM keys to a single automated activation -- but then you do not have to repeat all 50-brazillion digits vocally to the person on the other end.
I'm not sure where Microsoft's call center is for that, but I suspect they have several. Once I got into a queue where the recording and the person on the other end both had very British accents.
And now back to the topic at hand: I've seen many motherboards replaced in OEM PCs, and never had a problem getting a key from Microsoft, but I also used generic OEM media and not the CD provided by the manufacturer.
I have also toyed with the idea of submitting our dynamic ranges to a couple DUL RBLs myself as a proactive measure. They're already excluded from our domain's SPF record. but it will also break anyone with an MUA configured to relay through an external server on port 25, so you'll need to be prepared for that in advance. If they're already configured to relay through a remote server, it shouldn't be any trouble to relay through the ISP's server instead - or as you suggested have the remote end also listen on a non-standard port. Actually, that probably is a better idea (and would require significantly less processing power on your end).
If, as you suggest, you're looking at quantity rather than quality, then the style of spam doesn't matter. And that could be done by a simple perl/python/ruby/whatever script parsing the maillog and reporting on a regular basis, it wouldn't have to be run as a daemon or do anything too fancy. In fact I just put that on my to-do list for next week.
I agree though, it takes a fair amount of tact to ensure that they feel as though you're trying to help them. What I was getting at was, if these ideas aren't technically problematic, why aren't more ISPs implementing them? I'm willing to bet a lot of it is bureaucratic nonsense or company policies that conflict with it. Most places will only act if it is directly affecting their bottom line.
These measures may seem all well and good, but in a very large ISP even a simple measure would take a large effort to implement across the board. For a small ISP, it's not that big of a deal -- but then the small (and smallish) ISPs probably aren't the major source of the problems, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread.
The same problem with incoming scanning applies there too, maybe worse. If someone is sending out a new style of spam that filters don't know about yet, it doesn't help you anyway. If you're sending spam, you get a phone call. If you don't answer the phone, you get an e-mail and we shut off your Internet access (redirecting port 80 to a web page explaining why service was shut off). We've found that just flat out turning it off is more effective than anything. Their PC could be so full of spyware and trojans that they can't even open IE let alone view a web page. It's also more effective for tech support. They may not even open up a browser, but when their mail check fails they're bound to call and if a support tech doesn't look at their account first, it'll be an interesting call.
Also -- If finding and killing the bots were that easy, it would be done a lot more often.
We also happen to be a PC repair shop, so we encourage them to bring it to us so we can be sure it is clean (Have to be careful with that, since they might think *we* did it...)
Unfortunately with all the bots being so different there's no easy way to scan for them that I'm aware of (I'd LOVE to be proven wrong on that!)
I'm not defending pirates, I'm criticizing the MPAA's tactics. If you'll notice I did imply that a crime was committed if they actually would have downloaded a real movie.
I disagree in the child-predator scenario, though, because there are actually laws that cover intent to harm a person. Laws to protect people are in a whole different league than laws to protect corporations.
"OK, are you the ONLY person on Slashdot that doesn't know that theft and copyright infringement aren't the same thing?"
:)" :)
s/theft/crime/
I hit the submit button without rereading much.
"Looks like I was wrong: You DO know, but are a hypocrite."
On occasion, I suppose.
"No offense, but, by definition, a complete, exact download of something that you requested cannot be "fake". You got exactly what you asked to be downloaded.
It might not have been what you wanted, but it certainly isn't fake."
Yes but what was requested was "Movie A" and you got "Random Data B", ergo you did not copy "Movie A", and the MPAA was freely distributing "Random Data B". If you were to relabel an MPAA movie as kiddie porn, and someone downloaded it, are they still guilty of possession of kiddie porn, or just copyright infringement for the movie?
"How your post got modded to +5, Insightful, in light of such egregious logic errors, is beyond me - the subscription helps, I suppose
Timing more than anything, but yes, that helped. I'll remember to disable the subscriber and karma bonuses more often
Only in this case, no actual theft has occurred. If it's fake, there is no crime. Sure there may be intent, but how exactly are you supposed to infringe on the copyright of a nonexistent work?
Subscribers can use tags so they can more easily find stories they liked later on. Under your personal page there's a 'tags' link and the stories you have tagged appear there with the tag names.
The tags are displayed publicly, I suppose, so that others can see how people have classified the story. Sort of suggestions for your own tags.
I suspect that someone has quite a large tags page full of stories that are very trap-like...
My current bank (a small credit union) doesn't support the automatic integration and I'm OK with that. Like you, I was never comfortable with my bank information being that easily accessible. Unfortunately, even with the manually exported data from their web site, it can still be a chore to reconcile. Most months I either put it off or just do it the old fashioned way, checking the paper statements against the written ledger.
I would feel a lot more comfortable with two-factor authentication but even then I'm sure there will be issues. Anything physical you have can be stolen or copied, including fingerprints and such, until technology sufficiently improves.
This will likely be a non-issue in the future, because even Quicken won't be able to do it. There was a story a couple days ago that banks are dropping the automated connections because of increased security regulations.
Actually, they have "work at home" licenses (I'd have to dig up the source, plenty of hits on Google for that phrase) that allow a copy at home if a license is purchased for a work computer. It's in the fine print, but last I heard it was still there -- at least it was for Academic Volume Licensing. I had thought a similar clause was in the retail edition but I could be wrong about that.
I'd say he hasn't seen the "dump" command on FreeBSD:o pos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+6.1-RELEASE&format =html
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=dump&apr
I still use tar, but ideally I'd like to use dump. As it is now, each server makes its own backups, copies them to a central server, which then dumps them all to tape. The backup server also holds one previous copy in addition to what got dumped to tape. It has come in handy on many occasions.
It does take some planning, though.
Microsoft probably backed down because they didn't want to encourage people to use a format they hadn't yet Embraced and Extended(TM). It's likely that they only gave it a try as more of a token gesture ("Look, we tried, mean Adobe threateded to sue! WE wanted to do it!")
Several years ago I was given survey by Microsoft that was was full of questions about PDF in general and whether or not I'd be willing to switch to another format if there was another choice, etc. I'm shocked they haven't tried this yet, but part of me thinks they haven't because they actually believe that it will make it so more people have Office, Windows, etc. If they have an openly exchangable format, it only hurts their market share, decreases shareholder value, yadda yadda yadda.
Even thought it may be that it's just a prepackaged 'optimized' set of driver settings, it still performs better without having to find the sweet spot of all the various tweaks. It's convenient.
Unfortunately ATI doesn't provide generic drivers for the embedded chipsets such as the X1400, last I looked. They insist you use OEM-only drivers, which unfortunately really do suck.
I hate to reply to myself, but this is worth noting:
The ATI/OEM drivers for the X1400 are crap for gaming. They are choppy in-game, among other problems - like once you exit a graphics-intensive app, it chews 100% of one core of the cpu until you reboot.
Once you ditch those drivers and install the Omega Drivers ( http://www.omegadrivers.net/ ) it works like a dream. It's probably a good idea to do that for just about any Radeon card.
The Acer I've got uses the Intel 3945ABG chipset, which aside from lackluster open source support, works great. I use it at home and at work with WPA2 and it has no problems.
I have an Acer Aspire 5672WLMi and it's pretty good as a gaming system for my needs. It plays HL2 and CS:S admirably at the display's native resolution of 1280x800. Mine has a core duo T2300 (1.66GHz dual core), 1GB of RAM, and a Radeon X1400 (newer revisions come with an X1600)
2 E16834115246
The screen is a little glossy, but so far it has not proved to be a problem for me, though there have been times when some sort of anti-glare coating would be nice.
The price isn't too bad, either. I gave just under $1100 for it.
Here is a current version of it on Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
I swear if you showed someone PySol, TuxRacer, and most of the little games that come with KDE, you'd have instant converts. I've had many customers who really use their machines for e-mail, web surfing, and solitaire. You'd probably get converts just by showing them PySol with some extra card packs installed and they'll go nuts.