Mousit asks: "I am curious on how fellow Slashdot readers have dealt with negligent and unresponsive registrars. For a few years or so now, I've been using Jump Domain as my registrar for the domains I own and maintain. This was originally by choice, but for the last year or two it has been by force. I lost a domain to them early last year when I attempted to renew it and the automated process failed, putting it into a 'pending' status in wait for 'manual intervention' as the message told me. This intervention never happened, support tickets about it were never answered, and on top of it my money was never refunded. The domain simply lapsed, expired, and nothing was done about it. Have others experienced similar problems with Jump Domain or any other registrar, and what did they do to recover their domains? Is it even possible? Short of getting a lawyer, the options seem rather slim when a registrar decides to simply ignore you and eat your domains (and your money)."

CDarklock asks: "I'm getting seriously interested in setting a new Mac next to my Windows box (to replace the Mac SE, which should tell you about how long it's been). But on Linux and Windows, I'm accustomed to writing lots of custom apps in C++ to fill the gaps around the system, but I haven't written anything on a Mac for something like fifteen years. As a professional Windows developer, what sort of expense am I facing to outfit a new Mac with development tools comparable to Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET, and what sort of learning curve should I expect?"

EvilTwinSkippy asks: "I am on a team generating a proposal for the Wireless Philadelphia Initiative. In short I have to figure out how to cover 135 square miles of city with Wifi. I'm reading through the requirements. (Not linking to them, no fair slashdotting the customer, or my employer.) I have already figured out that supporting Wireless B and G simultaneously has to go. As does supporting cars traveling at 60mph. And getting 1MB sustained across the network is a pipedream. In the end, I'm looking down the barrel of designing a network this is projected to have 160,000 users in 5 years, over at least 3000 nodes. I know that Rooftop mesh networks are going to be a large part of the design, as will Linux boxes acting as routers and access points. What massive network issues has 4 years of electrical engineering, and 10 years of hacking routers and servers not prepared me for?"

ErikZ asks: "Lately, I'm having issues with my RAID. Specifically, closed source drivers for my RAID card that only support Red Hat 9. So I've decided to Ebay the card, and try to figure out how to turn 4 SATA drives into a software driven RAID 5 setup. Yes, I know I'll lose all the data, and I'm not worried about it. Finding a 4 port (or more) SATA controller card, that's well supported under Linux, has been difficult. Everyone wants to slap on their own RAID chip and charge you another 100$ for the pleasure. Where can a guy get a highly recommended, well supported, 4 port SATA card for Linux? The Rocket 1540 cards have vanished off the face of the earth. There are a few motherboards out there that have 4+ SATA connectors on them, but they also add RAID and some other cutting edge features that aren't well supported under Linux. So, I thought I'd try another route and ask Slashdot: What are you using for your Linux software RAID needs? What do you suggest?"

An anonymous reader asks "I am searching for a box into which I can plug a hard drive (IDE or SCSI of various flavors) and automatically begin a secure deletion process (DoD 2250 compliant or the like would be good). This is normally for dead drives which need to be RMA-ed. Because of various regulations (HIPAA for starters), we need to at least attempt to do a good job clearing the disk. I've heard from a number of places, including this Slashdot story, that degaussing isn't great. There are software solutions out there, but in general, I want to toss a replacement hard drive in and not have to hunt around for hardware to put the bad drive in in order to run the software. Given the right case, a solid state drive, some SCSI cards and one of various pieces of software, I can imagine such a beast. Has anyone seen someone selling something like this?" No case-opening is necessary to use a USB/IDE converter, which might be a good middle ground. Any other ideas?

muonman asks: "There is a business in town which refurbishes old computers and distributes them to kids, roughly at cost. Part of this cost is a $5 license for Windows 98 (they do use OpenOffice, tho). I have outlined to them the benefits of migrating to Linux, but the showstopper is modems, which most of their customers require. They buy in bulk at $4 each, with unpredictable chipsets. I can find reliable(?) drivers for Smartlinks, but cant buy them for less than $6 each, and I hate to recommend the switch in suppliers without more info. I haven't had luck getting license info from linuxant for using Conexants. It seems there has been no activity on the linmodem front for some time. Any wisdom from the Slashdot crowd?"

m1cajah asks: "I've been trying to find an 'all-in-one' package for creating (and migrating to) online manuals and am having some difficulty finding what I'm looking for. I'm hoping Slashdot can help. We have a large number of manuals (designed for paper-based presentation) that suddenly need to be provided online to our customer base. Yes, the PHBs have changed the landscape on us once again. This will, once configured, be managed totally by the documentation staff and analysts (none very tech-savvy). It needs to be really easy to use because I would like to say there's a huge budget for this (as well as for training), but there isn't. Lower cost is good. Free is better.Can any of you point me to some other options?"

gmletzkojr asks: "The company that I am currently working at develops a fairly complex industrial controller, complete with embedded software, a GUI on the controller, and a Windows app to connect over Ethernet. On previous versions of a similar project, we have performed testing manually - ie, monkey presses button, and sees that light turns on, widget turns, GUI updates, etc. However, this is extremely time consuming (previous complete regression testing took ~3 weeks) and is error prone in itself. How do you perform complete system regression testing? Do you use shrink-wrapped packages, or build your own? How do you test features that are easy for humans to observe, but not as easy for software to detect (ie, the light came on, the GUI updated when I pressed the external input, etc)?"

ahowl asks: "At my previous employer, I signed a traditional NDA, and when I was laid off, I signed another agreement stating I wasn't taking anything with me that belonged to the company. This included all the scripts, stored procedures, and anything else that I had created while employed. However, most of the subsequent jobs that I was looking at wanted work samples. If this continues I could have a ton of work I've done that I can't show anyone, so what can I do?"

zxnos asks: "What evil, underhanded, dirty mean trick did you pull on April Fool's Day? Since I arrive in the office first, I wrote a little routine to go off when my coworkers tried to open the application that we all work in. It said: "Sorry, you arrived late for work today. The application you have requested is unavailable." The only response was 'OK' and would then close the application. What did you do?"

Catalin Braescu asks: "I have an Egyptian friend which wants to finish highschool in US, using an online degree institution. Her American BF advises her to go for Keystone, but I really don't think she can later on be admitted to any college with that kind of diploma. So I am asking Slashdot if there are any good resources online (or at least some easy-to-understand checking points) to verify whether any online diploma is good for going to college or is just some worthless paper. Being from Europe, I can hardly know such details myself - and the same issue can be applied to online college degrees, too. HELP!"

Bubblehead asks: "A few years ago, everybody was talking about returning their copy of Windows to receive a refund. I plan on buying a Laptop shortly, and most manufacturers still insist on shipping it with some version of Windows. I was wondering what the state of the affairs is - there isn't that much information on the net. The most prominent piece of information is this 2003 Linux Journal Report outlining how the author had to go to small claims court to receive a refund. Any experiences - especially with vendors that do not offer an alternative?"

hydopower asks: "I recently stumbled upon a collection of online libraries. This was fascinating to me, but too many of them cost money or offer Google Print-like limited functionality. I decided to put together a list of sites that offer free books in a format that would allow a person to actually read through them. As Slashdot readers are known for being well read and for enjoying free things, I figured I'd tap into the knowledge pool here. Any suggestions?"

jsailor asks: "A large client and their engineering team will be evaluating cabinets and their ability to cool high density blade server deployments. Some of these systems can consume upward of 21 kW per rack and accordingly require a lot of airflow and/or liquid systems to cool. The systems actively monitor heat conditions, increase airflow rates, and can throttle CPU speeds if necessary. What we need is an easy, fast, and cheap way to run the 2-way and 4-way blades at or near peak CPU utilization for extended periods of time so thermal analysis can be performed. Ideally, we would be able to boot them off a CD and have some means of monitoring the CPU on each or even setting the level of CPU utilization we'd like them to run at. Please note that we do NOT need to simulate a real world application and disk and network access are not of much concern. While running your favorite compute-intensive project is a nice idea, we need something simple so I've come to the Slashdot community for assistance. What are your thoughts?"

evolutionaryLawyer asks: "I have a RazrV3 phone and the charging interface is USB. This means if my cell phone is dying I get to pull a USB cable out of my bag, plug it into my laptop and charge it wherever I am, and at the same time data transfer is possible. This got me to thinking, why do all these cellphones, PDAs, and other devices use funky data and power interfaces when USB 2.0 is capable of providing both data and power in a universal format? I cannot think it is to sell cables, because I am sure they lose a lot of that to 3rd parties, not to mention that it has to be more expensive to design and manufacture these proprietary formats. Look at the PSP, it has both a power port, and a USB 2.0 port. Why shouldn't they cut out one?" While such a question is better asked of the cell phone manufacturers, it is unlikely that the average consumer would be able to get a straight answer. Can you think of plausible reasons as to why companies might be bypassing usable standards for their own proprietary cables, especially given the fact that there are third-party cables out there for just about every make and model of PDA or cellphone?

Memorize writes "Josh Wolfe writes an article in Forbes arguing that it is too early to regulate nanotech. Wolfe is worried that the 'green gang' (his term for environmentalists) are going to regulate nanotech out of existence before the technology even works in the lab. It seems like much of the discussion of nanotech is hype, including the potential benefits, such as immortality and the potential dangers such as grey goo. However, nanotech does hold some promise of environmental benefits such as cheap solar power. Are the risks real, and if so, is it worth the risk?" From the article: "There are rumblings that regulations are needed. They say they want to guarantee the safety of the technology and instill confidence in the general public."

patrick42 asks: "Recently, my co-location facility was hit by a massive blacklist by an over-zealous 'investigator' at MAPS. 180,210 IP addresses in total are included in the blacklist -- and all because of a few spam complaints that weren't dealt with quickly enough. To make matters worse, they put this in effect either late Friday night, or early Saturday morning -- hours during which MAPS is not available for contact! (Mon-Fri, 9-5 only) How do people deal with MAPS and other RBL services who will not cooperate or be reasonable? And on a broader front, are you really prepared to trust a company like Kelkea, Inc. (owners of MAPS) to decide what emails gets to you without really knowing how they operate and deal with resolution processes?"

brandorf asks: "With the multitude of compressed audio formats that are available today, (MP3, Ogg, AAC, and FLAC to name very few) our music libraries start to spread across quite a few different formats. While this isn't a problem for desktop/media PC use, as programs like Winamp or iTunes have plugins available for almost every format. However, when it's time to start using a portable unit, it's unavoidable that some files will get transcoded. Have there been any studies or experiments as to how similar the codecs really are? Will transcoding from Format A to B sound worse than going from A to C? What's your experience with this?"

arnie_apesacrappin wonders: "I'm in the process of designing the network for a new building in what I would consider a small to medium sized company. It is on the scale of tens of access layer switches, not hundreds. There is a ongoing argument about the need for a distribution layer. My position is that with today's layer 2/3 switches in the core, the distribution layer is outdated for a network of this size. The layer 2/3 core can provide all the aggregation services of the old distribution layer and the routing/filtering functionality of the core with better price and performance. My opponents can only argue that having a distribution layer is the standard. So, are there good reasons for having a distribution layer in a small to medium network? If you were going to argue against the distribution layer, what points would you make?"

An anonymous reader asks: "Most open source projects seem to started by individual contributors working in their personal capacity. I am thinking about projects like attendance maintenance systems, and not high-end infrastructure projects like Sun's Solaris. Most internal IT products are probably reimplementations of what exists at other companies, and do not bestow any competitive advantage to the developing company. The cost of developing the software is overhead, and they could potentially save money by open sourcing the projects and utilizing contributors' expertise. So, are there lots of instances of companies' internally developed IT products being open sourced?"