llamaluvr asks: "As I understand it, there are some financial benefits for businesses leasing hardware equipment. Does anybody know what exactly those are, and how much they really help? Do they really outweigh the additional costs of replacing, repackaging, and returning old hardware? How do the size of the business and the computing environment affect these benefits? Additionally, what is the best balance between leasing and purchasing equipment -- would leasing desktops and laptops, but purchasing monitors be best, or should one just lease everything?"

James Renken wrote in to tell us about a humorous ZD articles revolving around the destruction of those annoying office assistants. Death to Clippy! Brett Taylor wrote in to say that the October issue of Daemon News, a BSD based ezine, is now out. Bill Kilgallon sent in a link to what is unquestionably the Ultimate PalmPilot Case. And lastly, several folks wrote in to tell us that ZD now has something they call "the ultimate linux resource". Hit the link to read some notes about moderation as well as comments about future direction of Slashdot content)

I know I know, it was about time already. Well big thanks go to Stephen Langasek for putting this release together for us. I believe we should have RH5 compatibility, imlib 1.*, fixed load meter, a configure script and tons of other nifty little things. Snag it from My Enlightenment Page. We should be caught up now. If something is missing from this release, feel free to send me a diff.

So lately class, work, Slashdot and my Mystery Project has consumed every waking moment and ePlus has fallen by the wayside. The problem is that with imlib 1.x and RedHat 5.0 and the load bug from DR9, we really need a new release and I don't have time to do it. I do however have a dozen or so .diff's ready to go in. If anyone is interested in lending a hand at making this happen, drop me an email. We can get a DR10 out in a week or so and make things much simpler. Update:Sorry, I didn't post links 'cuz I forgot that these days Slashdot readers came here from places besides my Linux Page, ePlus is the little imlib based utility that combines all of my AfterStep Widgets plus cool new ones into a nice unified system monitor that is extremely customizable. Check it out.

kIRC, the best looking of the new breed of X IRC clients has reached a halting point in development. Click the link to read Aaron Granick's announcement that he just doesn't have time to maintain kIRC anymore. His feelings are all to familiar to yours truly- ePlus development has all but halted as I am busy making mugs, slashdot articles etc. Anyway, read Aaron's message and maybe some of you guys are up to the task of picking up where Aaron is leaving off. (How about a Gnome port?) Jean-Philippe Couture sent in this bit,along with a note that if you are interested in helping the project, email parallax@ucsd.edu.

I know I procrastinated on this one, but I've been really busy lately. Anyway, DR9 is available for download for the E FTP Server. Mostly bug fixes, but we now have sysnice/user in the load meter, and tool tips. Read more about this release at my Enlightenment page.