Kernel not recognizing your hardware? Problems with power management or PCMCIA? What hardware is compatible with Gentoo? See here. (Only for kernels supported by Gentoo.)
How did I go from emerging (gentoo-dev-sources) kernel 2.6.9-gentoo-r12 on one computer, to then somehow emerging kernel 2.6.10-gentoo-r4 on another? Did we go down a kernel version?
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."
The problem is you are looking at a dot seperated string of numbers, and thinking it is 1 number.
It is actually three seperate numbers, each supposed to represent something different.
Usually the first number is the major version (changed when a massive user visible feature changes or an API/ABI changes, or a not backward compatible change) the second is the minor version number, (for other changes, usually user visible, that are backward compatible) and the third is for bugfixes.
The kernel doesn't work quite like this anymore, but you wouold have to look at the LKML archive for the massive rants about how it got to how it is.