Well, as I posted a day or two ago, I pre-ordered a copy of SuSE 9.1 Personal beginning of April and it shipped out to me last Friday.

There's an interesting Globe and Mail article this morning on a new Linux distro some UWO students are putting together, Ignalum. Their business plan is (I think) to follow other consumer-friendly distros by making things easier and with tighter integration with Windows.

Just got the word today that the copy of SuSE 9.1 I ordered is on its way. I hope it works with the new machine-all I can think of when I use it is, "I bet KDE would fly on this!" :)

Even if it doesn't work, I'll get a nifty SuSE Live CD out of it. And I figure it's my way of contributing to Linux. Or Novell, depending on your point of view.

I got an email last week from somebody who was having troubles getting the SuSE 9.1 live CD to work with their eMachines Athlon machine. Specifically, it would freeze up on bootup if ACPI was enabled. I haven't got my SuSE 9.1 yet, but I thought I'd post here in case anyone's got any $.02 I can pass along.

He's tried most of the other major distros with the same results, so any help would be appreciated.

After the untimely death of my poor little neodymium, I lasted longer than I thought I would in getting a new machine. Which was, 2 days.

I bought a Compaq Presario R3000 and it just came in yesterday. Verrrry nice. :)

This past weekend my favourite little workhorse computer "neodymium" died. I bought him used a couple of years ago for $75; he was only a P166 with 32M of RAM and a 2GB HD but he was great with small Linux installs like Vector Linux. He was the first notebook I ever owned, and the one responsible for putting me firmly in the Notebooks From Now On camp.

I might need some custom PC/104 hardware development done on a project at work. Anyone out there that can make a recommendation or would care to submit a bid?

So I just went and did my civic duty and meta-moderated. All was well and good until I recognized one of the signatures in the message, in and of itself not much of a problem. Later, one of the postings had a signature with a link to the user's journal. What that meant was even though Slashdot wouldn't tell me who wrote the message, it was plain as day thanks to the link.

Anyway just something to think about if you want to maintain your annonymity.

Well, maybe new to me, anyway.

Over the last little while I've noticed two new ways to try to sneak spam under my radar. By "radar" I mean spam filters of course. Anyway, the first was kind of interesting and it all but had to be designed to beat Bayesian filtration. The entire message was a commentary on Stanley Kubrick's film-making career, and was a good page and some in length. Then, right at the very end of the message, a single sentence with the actual commercial message. It remind

I've decided against putting FreeBSD on my old laptop for the moment, primarily because it looks as though it wouldn't support my Backpack CD-RW drive through the parallel port. Oh, well, it would've been cool. Since then, I've installed Debian stable on it and it's working great. It's a little more functional than it was under VectorLinux, although at the price of being a little slower.

I'm thinking of putting one of the BSD's on an older laptop currently running Vector Linux 3.2, but the laptop doesn't have a CD-ROM drive. I do have a Micro Solutions Backpack Drive but I don't see on any of the hardware compatibility lists for the various BSD's out there that it's supported.

So, if anyone's got any experience with getting one to work under *BSD, or can definitively say whether or not they're supported, it'd be appreciated.

Appeals Court Lets 'Do Not Call' List Go Forward

DENVER (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Trade Commission can go forward with its national "do not call" registry while an appeals court considers whether the list violates telemarketers' free speech rights, the U.S. Court of Appeals said on Wednesday.

The decision by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals makes it easier for the federal government to enforce its popular anti-telemarketing program.

U.S. Court Blocks Anti-Telemarketing List WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. court in Oklahoma has blocked the national "do not call" list that would allow consumers to stop most unwanted telephone sales calls, the Direct Marketing Association said on Wednesday.

The U.S. District Court in Oklahoma City said the Federal Trade Commission overstepped its authority when it set up the popular anti-telemarketing measure, according to the DMA.

So...am I the only one who still moderates? Here I am with Moderator status again, the third time in less than a week. In fact I only managed to use up the last two mod points yesterday afternoon.

I don't mind moderating, I think it's kind of a duty to make the site better. And so I'd rather not turn it off. But it seems a teensy bit much-I've tried steering clear of meta-moderating but to no avail.

So my original question stands-am I the only moderator out there?

Which leads me to several thoughts. First, I'm really glad it decided to do it at work rather than halfway home in the middle of nowhere. Second, I'm thankful so many people at work tried to help me out-I doubt any of them have ever even heard of Slashdot but thanks to them just the same. Third, I'm glad I finally went and got a cell-I can imagine the fun I'd have had if the car had died halfway home and I had no way to call for help.