An anonymous reader writes: It may come as a surprise to many, but the 20-year-old Compaq LTE 5280 still plays a vital role in maintaining multi-million dollar McLaren F1s. Jalopnik recently visited McLaren's Special Operations workshop where it found several of Compaq's old laptops serving their masters. Why do they rely on these dated computers, you ask? A McLaren Special Operations staff explains, "The reason we need those specific Compaq laptops is that they run a bespoke CA card which is installed into them. The CA card is an interface between the laptop software (which is DOS based) and the car. We are currently working on a new interface which will be compatible with modern laptops as the old Compaqs are getting less and less reliable and harder to find." For those wondering, the Compaq LTE 5280 comes with a 120MHz Intel Pentium processor, up to "80MB" of RAM, and up to 1.2GB of HDD.

Red Hat Linux 9 is out, and as of today the ISOs are officially available to Red Hat Network subscribers ($60/yr). Or, as of right now, you can grab the same ISOs using BitTorrent. For those unfamiliar with this free/Free P2P download protocol, an introduction follows, written by ololiuhqui. Update: 03/31 23:45 GMT by J : After roughly four hours, BitTorrent has transferred over 500 full copies of all 3 ISOs, and a total of over 1.5 TB, at 170 Mbytes/sec. Thanks to the more than 3000 people who helped each other download the data, and especially to the more than 200 who got full copies and still have their clients open, to keep serving data to everyone else :)

Just weeks after Littleton, there's been another school shooting -- this time in Conyers, Georgia, where a sophomore student shot and injured (none-fatally) six students. The suspect profile is familiar. Classmates describe him as a "normal" kid with plenty of friends, and no associations with any particular "groups". These shootings will almost surely re-spark, at least in part, the post-Littleton hysteria, including the media notion that computer gamers and people who wear dark clothing are mass murderers. Here's some perspective. This week, the FBI announced that crime is dropping like a rock, to its lowest levels in half a century. Says a leading criminologist: "For most of our kids, school is the safest place to be."