Several folks wrote in over the last 24 hours about a topic that I noticed, and I'm sure many of you have also. Geocities (hoster of millions of free web pages) has recently begun putting a geocities logo watermark on every page. This is in addition to that window that pops up every minute or two. What do people think? Is this fair? They are giving free hosting to millions, and can do anything they want, but that watermark has angered a lot of people. James S. Baughn wrote His opinions that you should read. Many people are even talking of fleeing Geocities, is it justified?

dr. claw writes "Does there exist any source of information regarding the size of the Linux game-purchasing market? I'm in the employ of a major game developer, and I have been unable to find any market research numbers regarding this market. Of course, any big game house is going to want some market research before it shells out the necessary development effort. Perhaps a poll might be able to shed some light on the question? I'm not asking how many people would buy a particular game's Linux port but rather how large the Linux game market is at the present. "

Okay... weds we asked for submissions of weird links for a conspiracy feature to coincide with the opening of the X-Files movie. What happened? Click the link below...

Ben FrantzDale writes "I am planing on installing Linux on my computer (Toshiba Satellite 200CDS 100MHz Pentium, 40MB RAM, 800ish MB HDD) I am now running Windows 95 using hard drive compression, which gives me 1.3 GB, enough for all my programs. I am wondering if anyone knows what sort of support Linux has for compression, or do I have to get a new HDD or kill windows. Thanks, Ben "

Nate wrote in to tell us that PC Magazine has put up their quarterly top 100 links online, and Slashdot is officially on the list. I've sorta stopped mentioning Slashdot's awards here, but I figured that this one was worth the time.

We've got an easy one today. Jeremy Lepel writes " A friend and I have recently updated our kernels from 2.0.33 to 2.0.34. I had ppa support included in the kernel in 2.0.33 and he had it as a module. With the recent upgrade we've both included PPA v1.46 into the new kernel, but neither of us have been able to get the damn thing to work. I noticed during the boot process that it probes two of the parallel ports and then the scsi reports no paritions found. I've set my parallel port to match the 0x278 which is being probed on startup but this didn't change anything. I read in the README.ppa about a "lilo/loadlin command line" where you set "ppa=0x278,0" but I can't figure this out, either. Any help would be appreciated!"

Gregory Seidman wrote in to ask " I would like there to be a public (web) database of open source programs searchable by task/niche in particular." I can think of several, but I'm curious what people's opinions are of these. Some are fairly comprehensive, others are easy to use. Is there a clear winner? There are gold nugget applications out there, but so often they are things you stumble upon... it would be nice if they could be found simply.

With the X-Files movie opening up this friday, I just wanted to solicit links to articles related to Conspiracies. UFOs. Alien Abductions. Cattle Mutilation. Anything that is X-Filesish is probably worth a gander. Send submissions to Nate. By the end of this week, we'll post a collection of favorites and we can all enjoy the fun.

You know you've "Made It" when you get mocked on Ditherati. If you haven't seen the site before, you should check it out. They post stupid quotes from people each day. It's pretty cool- I'm glad I finally said something stupid enough to grace their pages *grin*.

Mike writes "Ok, here goes: Being a geek, I spend a lot of time on the computer. I'm a tall geek, around 6'4". That means the chairs I sit in while geeking are usually WAY too small, and I think it's starting to have adverse effects on my back. I'm not willing to give up computing, so...Who out there has advice on ways to reduce the pains associated with computing? I'm thinking perhaps a better-designed chair would help -- am I barking up the wrong tree here? "

Tim Doran was the first to warn me, but Salon Magazine has written a little diddy about Slashdot (linking through TCWWW^TM *grin*). For anyone who is arriving from Salon, Welcome. This sorta stuff kinda wierds me out, so I'm not really going to say much about it. (On the positive side, after the writing the article, the author of the article decided to get RH5.1 just to see what all the fuss is about :)

Nate wrote in to ask about something that I'm sure a lot of people around here have thought about- shopping online. He asks " For quite some time, I have been a big opponent of online shopping. I refused to put any kind of sensitive info across the Internet due to the insecurity of it. Well, they've had 'secure transactions' for quite some time now, yet I'm still paranoid. Is this paranoia justifiable, do I have a better chance winning the lottery than having someone sniff my credit card info, or is it quite safe?"

Recently I've had at least a dozen people comment about case design and modern computers. SGIs look cool, and the NetWinders, MicroServers, and even yesterday's Rock thing are interesting case design. Now I realize that a lot of people don't give two shakes what their case looks like (as long as it is big *grin*) but a lot of other folks seem to desire exotic and strange new case designs. Do people know where we could get cases? Is there a demand? Could the prices be reasonable? I realize that this is a really strange topic, but I've had an amazing amount of mail related to it lately so I figured I'd let you guys have at it.

Paul is finally ready to start selling the long awaited Slashdot T-Shirts. They are quite simple- the logo that you see next to this article, on a black or white shirt. They look absolutely awesome. They're gonna be $15 (shipping is included if you're in the US, foreign costs extra), and you can order them over at Bright Eye Productions. (Please address any questions about them to Paul)

Ok let's be careful with this one... this could erupt into a Distro Flame war, but I'd really like to see some helpful responses to this one, so everyone be careful, and see if you can't help Joe Bowman who asks "I've heard a bit of Stampede Linux and am just curious on whether any people currently running it would suggest a switch to it, and why? Currently I am using RedHat 5.0, and am a Linux newbie. I've been working on Linux servers for about a year, only learning what I needed to know, and just recently have put Linux on a machine at home. The idea of Stampede interests me, though would it be soon for a newbie like myself to give it a try?"

Allright we've got something of a doozy this time guys. Iuri Wickert has written in with a strange problem involving updating his RH system, and a mysterious problem that prevents his drives from being unmounted. When he reboots, it needs to fsck despite being, at least theoretically, properly shut down. Hit the link below for the full details of this whole conundrum.

Jason Cook writes " I've been trying to install OpenLinux 1.2 on my secondary machine and have run into some problems. First of all, they only provide a boot image for booting off of either a CD or a 2.88 floppy. Neither of which this machine has. So I tried using a boot image for 1.1 and then do an NFS install. It appears to work, but it doesn't seem to install the kernel. So when the lilo configuration comes, it spits out error messages. I could go and download all of the 1.1, but I don't want to spend the time upgrading all of the packages. Any suggestions?"

Nate and I just had a cool idea- The Net (the terrible Sandra Bullock movie) is going to be Fox tonight at 8pm. I was thinking about trying to get a bunch of people in IRC tonight to lampoon the movie. Interested parties should join #thenet on irc.slashdot.org (check out SlashNET for more servers) tonight around 8 o'clock. It'll be fun ripping the crap out of what is just a painful movie for any self respecting computer geek to watch.

clarkcd wrote in with an easy question that I don't think has been addressed before: " Do you know of anyone with a list of Linux Powered/Linux-Friendly ISPs ? I'm moving soon, and since I'll be changing ISPs anyway, I thought it'd be nice to make an informed choice. I got lucky this last move and found an outfit running FreeBSD. It made my life much easier." It just strikes me that geeks should try to accumulate ratings for ISPs somehow so when you move to a new city (or visit another one :) you can find out easily where to get good access.

Dave Finton sent us this link where you can hop over to ZDNet/Yahoo's Internet Life Yippee/Yahoo thing. Then click on "Join the Propellerheads" If you post comments, you gotta read what they have to say about us. Although what is this 'propeller head' thing? This is like the 4th time I've read a review of Slashdot using that term. And they linked through The Cursed WWW^TM *grin*. (which shall hereafter be referred to as TCWWW^TM) I think this should be the official way to see if people really read Slashdot, or just skim.In anycase, cool to get recognition, Its pretty much how I like to look at Slashdot, although they did forget that 50% of our content is open source related. That's kinda important.