Never let a hostile agent know his operations were successful.

First generation i7 (i7-740QM), 8GB ram, 1GB Nvidia Quadro 1800M, 15" 1920x1080 screen, 240gb Crucial SSD.

OS is Debian Unstable.

Nice to meet you, AC. Former Linux sysadmin and current Sid user here; I've been using Debian for years. ;-)

...I was a trucker long before I was a geek.

Autonomous trucks will still need fuel, most truckers don't sleep in hotels and I can't speak for anybody else but when I was a driver I ate one sit-down meal a day when I stopped for fuel.

Will be interested to see how AI deals with a mountain pass or city traffic; I think autonomous trucks will need human assistance for at least the foreseeable future.

...but encrypt everything I can't afford to lose with my own 2, 048 bit key. IM frequently less than HO encrypted cloud storage isn't secure unless you have control of the encryption key.

I keep the key on optical media in my house and a printed copy in a safe deposit box at the bank.

I have a pair of WD TV Live boxes in my house and love the little gadgets. I've used them for four or five years and have yet to see a video file they wouldn't play so for me, transcoding is not a requirement. My media server is an HP Atom N270 netbook with 2GB RAM running Debian Unstable and I use minidlna to serve up video and audio; I also use this machine to manage network backups to an external hard drive. Works like a charm.

Although the netbook has a GUI installed I never use it, preferring to manage it over an SSH session.

If you're committed to the crawlspace thing (and it appears that you are), as others have mentioned as long as you can keep water, dust and critters out of the machine you should be fine; but with the WD box you really don't need anything fancy to act as a DLNA server. You seem to be committed to running a Windows machine as well, so I'm not gonna debate that point :)

I think the biggest challenge you'll have is keeping critters out of the machine while still maintaining reasonable airflow; so I'd think that a low-power box that didn't require much in the way of cooling would be the way to go; I think your biggest issue will probably be keeping bugs out of the thing.

Would disagree pretty strongly. I was a longtime KDE user and was scared witless of lightweight WM after a few failed attempts back in the day. #! gave me a lightweight distribution that worked OOB and gave me a usable system; I felt free to backup configs and tweak to my heart's content, knowing I could always put it back the way it was if I screwed it up.

That's how I learned openbox. That's also how I learned that I preferred fluxbox to openbox.

Then I figured one day that since I had a really nice #! configuration I could migrate the thing to full Debian. After that I learned that migrating a #! install to Debian isn't as easy as one would think, but I got through it. That gave me the confidence to clean-install Jessie and later, Sid which is where I am now.

But I'm still using the default #! theme :)

corenominal saved me a lot of pain and I learned a lot. I'm not sure there really is anything to replace what #! is out of the box.

This. This right here.

I'm an American working for an Indian IT company in a middle management position. The company for which I work seems to believe that employee attrition is cost of doing business and although I'm compensated fairly (which was a pretty good trick all by itself), the majority of my peers and subordinates are not. I wouldn't blame any of them for leaving. If my company hadn't made things right with me I'd have left a year and a half ago.

Most companies based in India don't pay anywhere near market; that's how they win contracts. Sad to say, but the customer gets what he pays for; if you want to outsource and want American workers the customer has to be prepared to pay the price. There is one client at this location that requires their service desk to be all native speakers; since this will be staffed with all US employees they're gonna pay more than if the company had outsourced some or all of that service desk to India.

High employee attrition appears to be an acceptable business risk to most of these companies.

Seconded.

#! Waldorf is Debian Wheezy running openbox with training wheels installed. It comes with a working panel, compositing, wallpaper, screensaver, conky and as parent pointed out, one tool per task. I wanted to learn a lightweight WM without all the pain of first-time configuring a lightweight WM ;-)

I won't need crunchbang next time I install but am grateful to the #! team for teaching me openbox in the most painless way possible.

terminator is awfully tough to beat. You can split one fullscreen console into as many consoles as you need ;-)

IIRC Linus switched *from* XFCE.