hethatishere asks: "Does such a thing exist? Better yet, is it easy enough for my parents to use? PRISMIQ seems to offer a pretty good one, but it has very limited codec support. D-Link also offers a wireless Media player, but it too struggles with the copious number of codecs available. So is there a cheap and affordable Wireless Networked Media Player, that supports most if not all common and advanced codecs (DivX, XviD, and various wrappers like MKV and OGG, etc), or is this still a pipe dream?"

kokaubeam asks: "I've been working for several years in the publication office of a small academic journal and am currently in the process of reworking our circulation management system. For a variety of reasons, a web-based system seems to make the most sense, and although I'm not too concerned about just sitting down and hacking one out, I'd much rather contribute to an existing open source project (if one exists that would fit the bill) than reinvent the wheel. After several hours scouring the web, I've yet to come up with anything that seems even close. I need something to manage the names and (postal) addresses of subscribers, securely store payment information, and print slip sheets or mailing labels. Any language would be fine, but PHP would be ideal since I'd like to integrate the subscription system with manuscript and book review management systems I'm working on. Does Slashdot have any suggestions for projects that I may have overlooked?"

DigitalRaptor asks: "I live in a small city with about 4 or 5 computer stores, most of whom I know personally. None of these stores offer Open Source software on the computers they sell (Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, etc), and none of them have anything in place to educate their customers about spyware and viruses. I'd like to approach them with all of the relevant information in a presentable format. I think this would be a great way to spread OSS and to help the average consumer at the same time. Is there a project out there for this purpose that local advocates could use to approach computer stores in their town?"

TheCamper asks: "The generation of random numbers is very important in many areas, especially encryption. Pseudo Random numbers created by software is simply not good enough. Many key generation applications ask the user to move the mouse or bang on the keyboard to add to the randomness. You can also purchase a (very expensive) hardware random number generator to make truly random numbers. Wanting the randomness of a hardware random number generator without wanting to pay for or build my own, I was wondering if crinkling cellophane (or the like) into my computer's microphone would be considered random enough for serious encryption key generation." What entropy sources would you use for the generation of strong encryption keys?

capsteve asks: "I've gotten back into 3D modelling after YEARS of absence in the 3D scene, and I'm having some difficulty sorting out the chaff from the wheat. I cut my teeth on 3D back in college, learning a dead end system called Z-Grass then moving into Super3D and StrataVision, shortly thereafter. Recently, I've gotten back into doing 3D modelling using Blender, Wings, and a tiny bit of POVray and YAFray for rendering. I'm looking for an all around 3D modeller that has the ability to perform subdivision modelling, particle effects, and HDRI rendering (to name a few options), yet still have an intuitive interface. Also, my platform of choice is a Mac. I'm pretty happy working between Blender and Wings, but I wonder if there are others out there who've had experience with some commercial apps that would be comparable with the ones already mentioned?"

Pinky3 asks: "I recently started digitizing my reel-to-reel music tapes. Most are thirty to forty years old (the first was recorded in 1964). How confident are you that the music you are collecting today will still be playable in forty years? What strategies are you adopting to keep your music safe?"

torpor asks: "Has anyone on Slashdot ever stepped off of the grid? I don't just mean long yuppy vacations to pacified islands, but seriously gone from 'tech-dedicated' to 'doing my own thing in the middle of nowhere for a while'. It's that time of year again. I've killed my TV, and I'm finding myself looking for adventure and mayhem in distant quarters. Have any of you ever done this, and returned with interesting stories to tell?"

mr number two asks: "I live in the mountains and have poor GSM reception. I can buy an active repeater to boost signal strength in my home to good levels, but what I'd really like to do is have a private GSM picocell, such that at home I would be connected to my own PBX. Calls to my home phone number would ring through to my cell phone. I wouldn't have to worry about a home cordless phone (and 802.11 interference) and I'd have all my speed dialing / contacts info right there. There are many other benefits. Ignoring FCC licensing issues, is there a base station I can purchase which has a signalling interface that will interface to a small PBX?"

Now that we've seen what's in the pipe for the immediate future IGN is running an article hoping for the games of the future, and talking about novels, tv shows, and other properties that they'd like to see be made into games. From the article: "...while we at IGN are all for original, non-franchise titles--reference Katamari, Psychonauts, God of War, Spore--a lot of us have places in our hearts for certain TV shows, films, and books that made us all fuzzy with joy." What would you like to see be made into a game? Microsoft, if you are listening, I have two words for you: Shadowrun MMOG.

squared99 asks: "I have just delved into some research on a set up for very high traffic websites. I'm particularly interested in how many webservers would be needed at minimum and the type of technology powering them. Slashdot seemed like a good sample site to check out, so I went to Slashdot's technology FAQ to get a starting point. This setup seems to be from 2000, is most likely a bit out of date, and I'm assuming the same number of webservers would not be needed with current server technology. What would experts in the Slashdot community recommend as a required setup to handle Slashdot-like volumes, if they had to do it today using more current hardware? How many webservers could it be reduced to, while maintaining enough redundancy to keep serving pages, even under the heaviest of loads?"

papaia asks: "As the network geek in my company, I have been tasked with defining a high-end, fully connected and extremely easy to use conference room, for our CEO, who is your classic non-computer-using person. The requirements are to accommodate 'local' (to the conference room) meetings, as well as interactive sessions with people in other locations, allowing him to discuss/debate various product solutions, on files being opened and available to him to pinpoint issues, without the knowledge of the underlying software used to create them (e.g. CAD drawings where he could make annotations, etc). Do any of you have recommendations for building the 'meeting room of the 21st century'?"

Where's My CreditCard asks: "Recently There has been a large increase in the amount of press relating to identity theft and the related crimes. I have recently been subject to several fraudulent transactions on my credit card and debit card through the internet. It has been over a month and my bank is still stringing me along saying it will take up to 10 weeks to get my money back. What have other on Slashdot done in this type of situation. What is the best way to keep things moving forward?"

Tyrson asks: "I work at a university and we are looking to purchase new A/V carts. At the moment we have the plain and simple shelves-on-wheels and the nicer multimedia display carts. The simple carts are sturdy yet insecure and lack useful features. The display carts are secure and useful yet built from weaker materials that only last a few semesters. We are looking for A/V carts with useful features preferably built from metal or plastics. After googling it and making some phone calls I had found several good carts that were sadly upwards of $1,200 apiece. I don't expect them to be cheap, but $1,200 was a little to steep. Does Slashdot have some suggestions for us?"

bionic-john asks: "We are a relatively small shop running 11 point-to-point T-1's carrying both voice and data. It seems weekly we have an issue, and it takes SBC at least a day from notification to resolution. To my knowledge, they are the only game in Chicago since they control all the copper which resellers just resell. The data bit is easy -- DSL with VPN, but what about the voice and central voice-mail? I have spoken with other vendors offering pseudo-VOIP using a hardware layer between their CO and our voice-switch, but it seems like the technology is still in its infancy, is not fully tested, and it's still SBC copper out the door. The strange thing with all this is, that we have just as many PRI's, and probably 1/20th of our issues involve those. It's always the point-to-point. What am I missing? What can I do?"

miazmatic asks: "I am one of the tech managers for my high school's FM radio station. We have been using Rhythmbox on Debian to play music after hours when no one is broadcasting. However, it took some pretty ugly hacks to get it to transmit the station ID every hour. We are adding a 600GB RAID 0 VG to our PC (P4 2.4/512MB), to which we plan to encode all our CDs losslessly. Along with this upgrade I would also like to find a permanent solution for broadcasting the station ID hourly. Has anyone used Linux to run a radio station before? Can anyone suggest a F/OSS software package or solution? Any help is appreciated."

An anonymous reader asks: "Last evening I was waiting for a bus and realized that it would be very nice to have a little portable word processor; not a fancy PDA, but something with a bare minimum of processing power, small screen, and a cheap mini-keyboard, so that it could fit in a jacket pocket. It doesn't seem like an infeasable product - consider the price that all-in-one 8-bit game machines like the C64 DTV go for, add that to the price that the cheap organizers go for, and you get a retail value under $50. The only major difference would be in the software, and with some attention given to expansibility it might even be a decent device for homebrews. Does Slashdot have any thoughts on what might fill these gap, or is there really no product that tries to be small, cheap and low-powered like what I'm looking for?"

Bob Bobbinson asks: "I'm currently looking to convert my workplace's CVS repository over to Subversion. The main issue I'm having at the moment before I can commence a roll-out is how we are currently using tags, and sticky tags. The project is a website and we have two tags which are used to put changes from the main trunk live (internally, and externally). All development is committed to the main branch, and when we want a change to go live we move the two 'live' tags to that current version. The live servers are both sticky tagged to these tags, so when we run an update on these servers they will only update to the version that the 'live' tags refer to. Currently I haven't found a satisfactory way to replicate this in Subversion, as moving tags, and updating on separate servers seems to be quite kludgy i.e. need to remove current tagged version from tag, then copy from the main branch over to the tag, then update this on the live server. So I'm trying to look for an alternative way to implement this staggered releasing of code live, and maintaining the ability to see what versions of files constitute what is live. Any ideas?"

CyberSpaZtiK asks: "I am going to build a Linux audio appliance to hold my music collection in various formats and for output to my stereo system. Because of a probable lack of Linux availability or support for audio cards with high quality D/A converters and low-noise electronics (or am I mistaken?), I want to keep the output path completelely digital by using a card with SPDIF output. However, it occurs to me that I actually know very little about SPDIF - are all SPDIF outputs made equal? Can I expect every SPDIF interface to emit the exact PCM data of the source audio, or are there over/under-sampling/aliasing, etc. issues that you sometimes get with digital signal processing? What do I need to understand about SPDIF and/or other digital output interfaces to make an informed decision?"

Kanagawa asks: "The last few years have seen a slew of new Linux clustering and blade-server hardware solutions; they're being offered by the likes of HP, IBM, and smaller companies like Penguin Computing. We've been using the HP gear for awhile with mixed results and have decided to re-evaluate other solutions. We can't help but notice that the Google gear in our co-lo appears to be off-the-shelf motherboards screwed to aluminum shelves. So, it's making us curious. What have Slashdot's famed readers found to be reliable and cost effective for clustering? Do you prefer blade server forms, white-box rack mount units, or high-end multi-CPU servers? And, most importantly, what do you look for when making a choice?"

cheezycrust asks: "I'm part of a small organisation (four staff members, seven board members), and we get a lot of mail on our info@... email-address. Some of the questions are complex, and require input from several staff and/or board members. I'm looking for a way to track and handle these messages. It seems to be a combination of a bug tracking and a groupware system. It should be very simple to use, be platform-friendly (Windows, Mac, Pocket PC), and work on- and off-line (if I want to handle 50 messages on a train ride, this should be possible). I have a preference for free software, but the administration of the software itself should not take too much time. What solutions have you used in your organisation?"