Oh man, an astronomer at Princeston states that some planets in our galaxy may have a thick layer of diamonds just below the surface. Woohoo! Where's my spacesuit? Oh, none in our solar system though. Figures. Story at Reuters.

Despite recent health issues for Patrick, Slackware Linux 10.1 has been release with mostly bug fixes and a few updates. Details and changelog on Slackware.com.

On a related note, here's a nice little summary.

Information Week has another story covering last weeks Open Source Summit with quotes from Linus and others on the future plans for the kernel, the patent issues, and standards. A nice read.

We had about an hours down time this morning due to a fight between a 97 Ford Explorer and one of our old power poles. The pole lost. Well, actually you should have seen the other guy too - what a mess. There were splinters and glass everywhere. But our greedy electric company was their usual prompt self and got us back online in record time with little loss of revenue. I apologize for any inconvenience this must have caused. Thanks.

Here's a real nice article by Stuart Cohen on Businessweek Online exclaiming that SCO's legal maneuvers only made Linux stronger. It states SCO's litigation seemed to bring developers and the community together fighting for the cause. He says "we can thank SCO for helping to move Linux even faster from the fringe of the computer network to the heart of the data center."

This story kinda hits home for me as I now work on a computer all day for cingular wireless (formerly AT&T in our branch). I guess this is why call volume has been increasing steadily lately. Here's the full story on Reuter's slow ass site.

Seems Jason Miller is finding fault in the Linux kernel security bug fix procedure. He goes on and on about security and how security vulnerabilities are handled. Although he mentioned that Gentoo had an accessible security contact, that really didn't apply to things like the underlying kernel. You can read the rest of his article including his thoughts on how to improve the situation here on securityfocus.

According to AMDZone and ATI's own site, ATI has released 64-bit drivers for XFree86 and Xorg. Here's a link the download page.

Just mount every thing on the wall! LOL Here's the discussion thread with pictures. Too funny.

Browser of the Year - Firefox (77.12%)

Distribution of the Year - Slackware (19.36%)

LiveCD Distribution of the Year - Knoppix (57.69%)

Database of the Year - MySQL (53.51%)

Desktop Environment of the Year - KDE (58.25%)

A little birdie told me that an update to the acclaimed PCLinuxOS Preview 8 is in the works and possibly due out next week. Details are a bit sketchy at this time, but it seems Tom has been hard at work updating the hardware detection and mklivecd scripts. Now don't get your hopes up, but I hear it might sport a newer 2.6.10 kernel, including patches to fix a little kvm switch problem. Of course it will include all kinds of application updates and other goodies. More on this as it develops.

Mandrake is apparently joining a consortium to help the advancement of what I think of as distributed computing to the point of and what they are terming clustering. Mandrake has a some previous experience in that arena so maybe they can prove to be an asset. Here's a more in depth article on the subject. They want to harness our cpu cycles, and it sounds like for commercial purposes. Show me the money then I say. Until then, I'm looking for aliens.

Woo hoo Gals, this months Cosmopolitan magazine is chocked full of nice tips and tricks to tantalize even the most frigid of geeks. It looks like Ashley Simpson on the cover, but more importantly are the words: The Power of Pre-sex, Beyond Kama Sutra, His Butt, and 50 Ways to Have Fun With Your Man. I can't wait to try some of this stuff on my man!!!

Has anyone else noticed they now have 50 gmail invites to get rid of? I couldn't even get rid of the original 5 or 6! Well, here's a summary of this weeks google wars.

Spam has new way to evade security

E-mails via service providers clogging system

Yep, just what we need, more spam. Apparently they aren't as concerned with hiding from their isps as getting the mail out as they are now just sending it through their isps servers. Read the gory details here.

Here's a long borin^H^Hserious story on how Linux was represented at last weeks open-source summit. I didn't read too much of it, but it might interest you hard core advocates.

Have you seen the previews for Vin Diesels's new movie? He is starring in a soon to be released Walt Disney production co-starring five children! I hope all those tattoos in XXX were stick ons! Well, here's a summary of the flick and here's a shot of the promotional poster. Heck anything with Vin Diesel has got be good!

Here's a story on a board game based on and entitled Doom: The Board Game. This is apparently not breaking news, but I just heard about and got a chuckle over it a few days ago. But hey, I think it might make a neato gift for those diehard doom series lovers, or those who wished they could have played doom3 but couldn't swing the hardware upgrade! Get yours here!

Seems Mr. Gates is at it again with saying one thing while trying to cleverly conceal his jabs at Linux. This time speaking of interoperability amongst differing architectures while stating that doesn't mean open source as open source is detrimental to interoperability. Does that seem backwards to anyone else besides me? This is posted all over the net, but here's one reference at Betanews.