Wow, you got rated +4 Informative and yet you described exactly the same approach and the poster you are "disagreeing" with. Allow me to translate:

multi-way extender = 3-way cube
one plug adapter = single-purpose adapter

I know, reading is hard.

It's about time they fixed that.

Am I missing something here? What doesn't SVN do that you need? Clients exist for all named platforms and it handles OO, Latex, and source code files very well.

You seem to be confusing VOIP to POTS service with VOIP. Services like Gizmo5 and others offer free VOIP to VOIP calling across a wide variety of similar providers, let you use your choice of hardware and/or software, and only charge for bridging to POTS lines. VOIP is here now, it is very easy, includes presence and even video chat.

What you have just described is virtualiztion in the hands of the typical small biz consultant: Someone who has no idea what they are doing.

The 5 to 6 servers you described could easily be run on two physical systems (for redundancy) for less than the price of 5 or 6 physical systems.

Also, just because you do not understand virtualization does not make it "a complex setup."

You could do all those things if you made them part of the sales contract. However, it better be a pretty amazing book if you expect to get anyone to agree to such terms.

Seriously, why? If your goal is to run dillo and a couple of xterms, pick up an old p3 laptop. People are throwing them away. If you want to do it as a "fun" project, why Ask Slashdot? Is not half the fun in figuring it out?

As someone who used to run linux on a 486 (and a 386), I can tell you that you aren't going to do any usable web browsing in X in 28megs of ram. Those are lynx specs.

You can actually do some interesting/useful things in linux with that hardware, but graphical web browsing isn't going to be one of them. Unless maybe you restrict yourself to Craigslist.

Might be because you live in Portland and look, at least superficially, like a marijuana enthusiast.

Or I could just use a livecd to do the same thing and save all the hassle. Just sayin. I've been using linux as my only OS for 10 years, and I've never understood the need to install more than one distro at a time on my computer. If there is some good reason to do it, I'd love to know what it is.

Unless you meant on two different machines. But if you meant dual booting, then please enlighten me as to the advantages of this setup.

What's the point of running two distros? No, seriously. I've never understood this in the age of VMs.

I knew I should not have trusted them and their web!

If you want to get technical, here is a quote from Wikipedia:

Also in analog connected picture displays such as CRT TV sets, the horizontal scanlines are not divided into pixels, and therefore the horizontal resolution is related to the bandwidth of the luminance and chroma signals. For television, the analog bandwidth for luminance in standard definition can vary from 3 MHz (approximately 330 lines edge-to-edge; VHS) to 4.2 MHz (440 lines; live analog tv) up to 7 MHz (660 lines; DVD). In high definition the bandwidth is 37 MHz (720p/1080i) or 74 MHz (1080p/60).

Even a hypothetical widescreen System E (the 819 line French system) would not be as high resolution as 720p due to its relatively limited 10MHz analog bandwidth.

Not all digital over-the-air broadcasts are HD. For example, the 480p you mention. It is digital but it is not HD.

Nice try, but "by today's standards, it could be called 737i with a maximum theoretical resolution of 816x737 pixels with a 4:3 aspect ratio (10Mhz * 40.8 / 1000 *2 = 816)" Now compare this to the 720p standard which is 1280x720 pixels and a much higher resolution.