Player issues this query: "Since the holiday season is rolling around, I've been contemplating shelling out the big bucks for a nice LCD display. I'm a die-hard gamer, with several choices of monitors in the market today, it can get a little confusing. Ghosting seemed to be a problem with intense games, but with displays reaching 8ms-16ms response time, is it really an issue anymore? Is it time for this gamer to move on to greener pastures, or stay the course with my trusty CRT?"

LostInTranslation asks: "If I were an MBA looking to make a fantastic new dotcom company, I would look around places like /. to try and net some technical wizards to do my bidding. Sites like this collect that kind of tech genius. But the problem is that I already am a technical wizard, and what I need is someone who is driven to sell wizardry. Where does one find that kind of person? Is there some kind of newsgroup they frequent? I've done a few searches, but nothing of value came up. How does a geek find a suit that wants to be exploited?"

MagnusDredd asks: "I am trying to build a large home drive array on the cheap. I have 8 Maxtor 250G Hard Drives that I got at Fry's Electronics for $120 apiece. I have an old 500Mhz machine that I can re-purpose to sit in the corner and serve files. I plan on running Slackware on the machine, there will be no X11, or much other than SMB, NFS, etc. I have worked with hardware arrays, but have no experience with software RAIDs. Since I am about to trust a bunch of files to this array (not only mine but I'm storing files for friends as well), I am concerned with reliability. How stable is the current RAID 5 support in Linux? How hard is it to rebuild an array? How well does the hot spare work? Will it rebuild using the spare automatically if it detects a drive has failed?"

mgessner asks: "I'm searching for some new and interesting things to read related to geekdom, humor, the Internet, and all things technological. Normally, I'd search Google for this, but trying to find something like RSS feeds on Google would be like looking for a needle in a haystack: there's just too much to sift through. So, does anyone want to share their favorite RSS feeds (other than our own beloved /.) they'd like to recommend?"

WillAdams asks: "I have an idea for an almost embarrassingly simple USB device, which I believe would be fairly popular --- no hardware or device driver development skills though. Ideally I'd like to approach a company, hand the product idea off and just collect a small royalty. Unfortunately the most obvious choice doesn't accept product submissions. Any suggestions?"

sapped asks: "Whenever somebody advocates a new programming language for you to try, they will usually suggest writing something in it that will take you an hour or two to code, so that you can get a feel for it. My problem is that I tend to go from extremely trivial ideas straight to stuff which will keep me busy, for at least a few days. I don't seem to have a handy in-between size project that I can test stuff in. The closest I came to this was writing a little ad-blocking proxy for my browser, a few years back. Any ideas on neat small non-trivial projects?"

Tocano33 writes "Saw a story regarding this quietly residing in the /. Story Retirement Home (tm), but it was from over 2 years ago and wanted to see if anyone had some new insight. We have about a dozen servers in our one rack - not a terribly large setup. However, our admins are not located in the server room and while we can use RDP/SSH/VNC/etc for everyday maintenance, we need to be able to perform offline work and may need to evaluate POST information on bootup, etc. So we're currently looking at KVM options - IP based specifically (ie Raritan Dominion) but we're wondering if there are cheaper options and wanted to know what slashdot readers would recommend."

Everguide writes "Sony Online Entertainment recently announced that they would be releasing EverQuest 2 on November 8th, ahead of their main competition World of Warcraft (last predicted release date: Week of November 22). SOE is notorious for launching games with content that is not finished or buggy, and Blizzard is known for at times delaying a game just to work out minor bugs. Is it worth launching a game early, yet buggy, to grab market share from the competition? I know the Themis group thinks a poor launch can cost a company millions of dollars but will the benefit of launching early exceed the costs?"

geoff lane writes "Ballmer wants a $100 computer. OK, can we build a reasonable PC for just $100 and a copy of Linux? The rules are: It's assumed that a monitor, keyboard and mouse are already available. Ethernet connectivity must be provided. All components must already have Linux support. All components must be new and currently available. The result must be electrically safe for the home. Is it possible?"

j.cherney writes "I recently moved my son up to a dorm at Michigan State University. We set up a wireless router (D-link) and everything worked well-until the rest of the dorm moved in. Now he is getting intermittent outages which I am quite sure is related to the large numbers of cordless phones on the 2.4ghz frequency. So my question to everyone is: Is there anything that I can do to make wireless work in this environment? Obviously I'm not willing to buy everyone in the dorm a new cordless phone! Is one brand more resistant to interference than another? Is there a filter than can be installed? Or is he S.O.L.?"

Ben Collins writes "I recently won a satellite tournament at Full Tilt Poker for entry into the World Poker Tour Final at Foxwoods Casino. I picked up poker as a hobby about 4 months ago, and consider myself a decent player, maybe due to programming experience (analytical thinking). Any other programmers/computer people find that they can play poker better than the average person because of their computer experience?"

Grimwiz writes "Similar to a few of you, I have some of my computers on a UPS. However, the UK press have recently been warning that power supply interruptions are likely this winter and I've been pondering about upgrading my power protection from those few machines to include a few key house components. In particular, I need to ensure that the gas-powered (but electrically controlled) central heating stays working. I have reviewed a few solutions, including Solar / Photovoltaic or purchasing a generator but they seem to be hugely more expensive than my simple UPS solution, although they do provide a much longer lasting solution than running off batteries. (A battery solution becomes quite expensive if I require more than an hours backup.) My power requirements for a quiescent house is about 4amps @ 250V, and I'd like to survive at least 8 hours. What solutions do you recommend?"

Ronster writes "Dear /.ers (slash-daughters?) I am looking for an elegant online solution to a real-world annoyance. I lead regular tours of my local cemetery, which I enjoy immensely. However, I hate the administration - can you recommend an on-line service, or some software (ideally open source) that I could host on my website, that would allow people to register for these tours, perhaps issue them with a ticket, and even let them cancel their reservation, all without allowing the total number of reservations for each event becoming more than, say, 25? Thanks."

An anonymous reader writes "We are running mainly Windows on our HS campus with the exception of Macs in the visual arts department, and are just beginning to get into the process of teaching using computers in the area of art. What recommendations do you have for starting a program? I am looking fo apps that will be able to be used on both our Macs and on our PCs in the Library etc., and specifically I am looking for a program (curriculum, not software) for teaching digital art concepts using the FOSS tools that are out there. I am aware of Gimp, Blender, and Inkscape, but have not seen any curriculum per se. Any help?"

foQ writes "I work in the IS department for a ~2000 networked computer environment across 10 locations. As with most people, we have experienced serious problems with spyware/adware. We have SpyBot and Ad-Aware installed on most computers, but this doesn't prevent the computers from getting these programs and only sometimes properly removes all of them. Is there a tool that we could push out to all the PCs to basically do what anti-virus programs do and block these programs from running and clean them from the computer?"

NerdOfPrey writes "I'm nearing completion of development and testing of my first self-produced commercial application, but just beginning to appreciate the full bevy of other associated tasks ahead. There are help files to compile, end user license agreements to write, a website to create - and a secure online payment system to identify and integrate, automated installers to build, logos to design, marketing, and so on. Are there any good web-based single sources of information covering these sorts of issues? I've never had to do all of these things myself in the past; a comprehensive 'small developers guide' would be of considerable benefit." So is there anything besides "imitate, guess and pray" for all the tasks that come after the app is written?

akgoatley writes "Recently my technically inept parents bought a new stereo and have expressed a wish to have it connected to a computer for storing large amount of music - a Linux CD jukebox. An example of this would be The Idiot Jukebox, but the solution has to be less complicated than that. I've already written a fairly basic music database in Perl with a web frontend for searching through it from our LAN, and I'm looking for a Linux-based collection of software to run the jukebox. It has to rip CDs when inserted, store them in a directory structure based on the name of the album. Modification of the ID3 tags is not necessary as my database handles that centrally. To complicate matters, it has to be command-line based as I will be SSHing into the jukebox to control it. The solution has to be a simple collection of software that can be easily controlled via SSH. Due to hardware (and budget) constraints the jukebox will be too slow to run X, anyway :( This means programs like Grip will not be usable. What do you Slashdotters out there think? Any good suggestions or pieces of software you would use?"

dark_requiem asks: "I've just built a new system based on a Shuttle SN45GV2 XPC, and it's a great little system. However, I'd like to make it more portable by attaching a flip-up LCD display (preferably with speakers) to the top of the case. My video card has TV Out, so connecting via composite or s-video is no problem. The case is just under 8" wide, so the width of the LCD cannot greatly exceed this (it wouldn't fit in my carrying bag then). Thus far, I have been looking at the various 5.4" displays for console systems like the Gamecube, but all of these connect to the systems via proprietary connectors that stick out of the front of the displays and would interfere with mounting it to my case. Has anyone from Slashdot ever attempted a mod like this, or does anyone know of an LCD display that would suit this purpose well?"

An anonymous reader asks: "This question was posted on Ask Slashdot about a week ago: 'If Mac OS X Came to x86, Would You Switch?' This makes me ask why not have Windows run on PowerPC? Windows/PPC would not necessarily have to run on Apple hardware, or at least not exclusively on it. I'm sure their friends at IBM and Motorola would be happy to provide chips to anyone that wanted to make computers to run this new OS. Microsoft could dust off the code from NT4/PPC, add some code from Virtual PC to get Windows/x86 compatibility, and have it up and running in about the same amount of time it would take Apple to get Mac OS X running on common Intel hardware." An additional question comes to mind, however: If Microsoft made this move, how would Intel react?

Omega1045 writes "Where I work we are developing a new product that receives an XML document (on a W2k workstation), and we need to format and print said document. We are currently using XSLT + CSS to build a cool little HTML page out the the XML, then use a browser to print out the HTML. However, while HTML is a nice format for display, it is not a nice format for printing. We have messed around with the idea of spitting out Rich Text with XSLT. However, Rich Text is confusing and quite frankly sucks. We are looking for a (free if possible) format that we can translate our XML document into via XSLT, and print. The best idea we have at this point is to translate into a Word or OpenOffice XML schema document, and use one of those applications to print. Other ideas?"