No! Secureboot is required for Windows RT

Sorry AC. You might be right, but you've spewed so much crap over the years I just cant believe you. 30

IPMI is primarily used on sever hardware. Power On/Off, Serial over Lan, basic management stuff.

AMT/VPro is a useful tool in an enterprise environment.
As another person said, a laptop does not keep its wifi powered up while it is off.

So NASA Should Change it's name to U.S.A.?

USA Space Agency?

Unfortunately MS-Access is (ab)used in so many other way. Data entry forms, reports, labels, etc. It is not about the database only stuff. Not every company has time to update all their legacy systems. Trends change, things come and go. If you were starting fresh today, you would make very different choices than 15 years ago.

Thank you for a reasonable sentiment. slashdot is driving me crazy.

The real world is messy. You can't always update everything. You understand this, but other do not.

I have to maintain a Frankenstein PC that interfaces to a multi-million dollar piece of manufacturing equipment. So backups of the hard drives, spare motherboards, CPUs, memory, IDE Hard drives, and other things. This computer is 8 years old, with an expected life of another 7. Yuck!
Thankfully its network connection goes to 1 thing and 1 thing only! The PLC. Am I worried about a virus? No. My concern is hardware failing. If someone plugged a malicious USB drive in, then the machine will just be restored to a known good point.

what are you going to transmit with?

http://gitlab.org/

You're getting old. There is so many things in life that are more important. Spend time with your kids and family. For tasks that will run for a while, go do something else while it runs. I'm guessing by your UID, that you have seen IT cycle once or twice by now.

I've done this with m0n0wall. http://m0n0.ch/wall/
A computer with 2 network card. One network card plugs into your network. The other network card goes to your guest wireless AP.
In order to block access from the guest wifi to your internal network, you can put in a Firewall ACL to block access to your internal network.
For example, if your internal network is 10.10.1.0/24:
Setup the second interface as 192.168.1.0/24 (or take your pick). On that interface set a block Firewall rule for all traffic with a destination of 10.10.1.0/24. The guest Wireless can still get to the internet, but not to anything on your internal network.

With either m0n0wall or pfsense, you can setup captive portal. This will block outgoing connections until the user registers or logs in.
http://doc.m0n0.ch/handbook/captiveportal.html

Because smart meters are probably using some sort of zigbee or other 802.15.4. It makes sense for smart meters to run in a mesh. That way they do not have to have direct connection to the data collection unit. They can use the mesh network to hop over multiple nodes to get the data to where it needs to go.

I will second both points of this. Using buildroot for multiple types of boards/chips. buildroot helps in creating a reproducible toolchain, kernel, apps, and filesystem images. You can add your own application (The main thing to run) as a custom package.
http://buildroot.uclibc.org/

The Atmel at91sam9 series runs fine. Both in graphical and non-graphical environment. I use this for quick proto type testing/dev:
http://www.mini-box.com/pico-SAM9G45-X
(however, I add NAND Flash for os/apps)

As others have stated, Angstrom is also good for building the OS/applications. The build system takes a little bit more care to setup than buildroot.
http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/

Make sure the halon system is not computer controlled.
Kill internet connections to all sites at the same time, so they cant send out an SOS
Then kill the power