mactom asks: "Hello, I am a physics engineer with a background in lasers (non semiconductor), but during the last years I have slipped into a job in semiconductor technology development. We define the manufacturing technology and how the transistors, diodes and other devices are to be designed and manufactured on the silicon level. First I did lithography only but now I am involved in layout and design of devices and in the whole technology development. After all of this, I've discovered that I have some serious gaps in my semiconductor physics understanding! I need some suggestions for books, tutorials or even seminars (in Europe/Germany) about semiconductor physics. Yes, I have some books already, but I always have the feeling that I miss something important when I do some self studying. So, I need some 'semiconductor for dummies' books or seminars.Any suggestions?"

Iphtashu Fitz asks: "I have worked for a number of companies that implement different types of security policies for remote access. This has ranged from simply setting up a PPTP server with static passwords to bastion hosts using authentication tokens like RSA Security's SecurID and CRYPTOCard's product by the same name. Most people agree that static passwords on a PPTP server aren't all that secure, and anyway it's not all that easy to integrate with Linux servers. SecurID and CRYPTOCard are much more secure because they use one-time passwords generated by hardware tokens. However, when I used SecurID it seemed that their tokens would regularly lose synchronization with the server (not to mention they would expire every two years or so and were expensive to replace). The CRYPTOCard keychain token doesn't have the synchronization problem that RSA's does but it's also a pain to use because of the way you enter a PIN into it. What kind of authentication system(s) do you use where you work? What do you like and hate about it? How would you make it better if you could?"

thesp writes "We're all waiting for the releases of the next great games (naming no names) which have been mentioned over and over again here on Slashdot. No doubt they will look gorgeous and even be playable on not-too-unreasonable hardware. But there are some games that have an inherent capability to expand to take advantage of higher resolutions and improved rendering as the technology progressed. Would Slashdot like to suggest other titles that, although consigned to multipacks and bargain bins, have aged well and are even more beautiful in their old age, on modern systems, than they ever could be at the time of their release?" This may be subtly different to titles with "Olympian system requirements" at time of release, a category that definitely includes Ultima IX.

eSims asks: "Most all SysAdmins have the pleasure of picking passwords and while we know the rules for picking good passwords we also know how to have a little fun with them as well. Password choices may be inside jokes about management, comments on the company, or just torture for the users we assign them to, but often they are funny. Without giving away the company secrets what are some of your funny stories about password selection?"

danila asks: "Today I came across an intriguing review of Windows tweakers on a Russian technology news site. Among the plethora of traditional registry tweakers, the review mentioned Hare 1.5.1. The developers promised nothing less than up to 300% speed increase, 10% FPS increase in 3D games, automatic RAM preservation and even a wizard that automatically cleans and optimizes Windows. It also had AntiCrash 3.6.1 a program to prevent up to 95.8% of Windows crashes. Understandably, I was both intrigued and suspicious since it sounded too good to be true." Has anyone tried this piece of software with any degree of success? How successful are other "windows accelerators" at improving Windows performance?

guroove asks: "I have a small gigabit ethernet network at home, and I spent a lot of money getting gigabit NICs for all my computers and even bought cat 6 cabling. I only have 3 computers on the gigabit network (a Mac, a Windoze machine, and a Linux box) so instead of getting a switch, I triple NIC'd the Linux box, which I use as a gateway and a file server. After the network was complete, I wasn't satisfied with transfer rates, so I started a transfer of a very large file and found that the transfer rate was topping off at just over 145 Mbps (which is a far cry from 1000 Mbps). I'm wondering now where my bottleneck is. Is it the NICs? Are all gigabit NICs really giving us 1000 megabits per second? Is it the driver? Is it Samba? Could it be that the hard drives aren't fast enough? Does anyone have experience with gigabit home networking enough to know where the bottlenecks are? Does the current PCI technology even allow for bandwidth that high"

Joel McShiston asks: "Back in Europe I had set up a system through which urgent emails matching certain criteria were automatically forwarded upon arrival to a (free) email account which my cell phone carrier (Vodafone) provided for free with each account - {cell number}@vodafone.es. At the carrier's site I could then turn 'SMS notification of new email' on and would receive a text message telling me to check my email each time a matching email came through. I'll be soon moving to the US and would like to know whether any of you has a similar (or better) system working over there. Which kind of SMS-email 'interfacing' are you able to do on that side of the pond?"

DreamTheater asks: "With what I consider a battery of solid technical skills, I find myself increasingly interested in business skills to match. I am looking at MBA programs in either Technology Management or Operations Management. Has anyone pursued an MBA to enhance their career as a developer? If so, how has it affected you?"

piotru asks: "I live in Japan and am implementing a new idea in software. I was told that it deserves patenting, but I intend to make sure that it remains in public domain (preempting anyone else from patenting it). What can I do to make sure that no one else patents my idea? Here are some choices I have come up with: 1) Patent and apply free license; 2) Apply for the patent, then drop it (will be published with time stamp, and more than likely will be costly); or 3) Copyright the implementation (will have a time stamp, but will it remain compatible with the GPL?) Any ideas?" Some of these issues were touched on in an older story, but the basic premise remains a difficult issue. How would you go about releasing an idea to the public domain while making certain that close software couldn't co-opt it out from under you?

nailbite writes "Designing and developing software has been my calling ever since I first used a computer. The countless hours/days/months spent on imagining to actualizing is, to me, enjoyable and almost a form of art or meditation. However, one of the aspects of development that sometimes "kills" the fun is testing or QA. I don't mind standalone testing of components since usually you create a separate program for this purpose, which is also fun. What is really annoying is testing an enterprise-size system from its UIs down to its data tier. Manually performing a complete test on a project of this size sucks the fun out of development. That's assuming all your developers consider development as fun (most apparently don't). My question is how do you or your company perform testing on large-scale projects? Do you extensively use automated testing tools, and if so, can you recommend any? Or do you still do it the old-fashioned way? (manually operating the UI, going through the data to check every transaction, etc.)"

LordNite asks: "Here is the situation. I am maintaining a piece of source code which is written in K&R C. One of the original goals of this code was to be as portable as possible to as many platforms as possible. The code runs on UNIX and its clones as well as OS/2. The code avoids POSIX functions such as mmap(2) since at the time it was initially written (early 1990s) POSIX was not very wide spread. The code is well written, but in need of some serious fixing. As I go around fixing parts of the code I would also like to modernize it a bit. Since it is now 2004, can I rely on ANSI C89 and POSIX routines without sacrificing the portability of this code? (Yes, I do realize that the purpose of POSIX is code portability...) I am not really interested in the OS/2 port at this time. I am just interested in keeping portability with UNIX clones. To put my question another way: Are there any UNIX-like OSes in common use, which are currently developed and supported by some entity either OSS or proprietary, that do not support POSIX and ANSI C89?"

americanatavist asks: "I was wondering how feasible it would be to digitally copy LaserDisc movies to DVD. Clearly this would require the standard suite of tools to make a DVD. What method would yield the maximum level of quality? Is it worth the effort to find a means of extracting the digital information using an LD-ROM drive, or would the S-video from a regular LD player suffice?"

Michael Droettboom asks: "I recently purchased a Linksys WMLS11B. Nice enough unit for the money. One gotcha, though: when upgrading the firmware (past its refundable date where I bought it), my machine crashed, turning the WMLS11B into a doorstop along with it. Linksys has offered to replace the unit, but I don't want it if the box is so easily corrupted. I have always been on a strict policy of updating firmware on all my devices, but was wondering if anyone else has had experience with devices so broken as to not recover from a broken upgrade?"

nb caffeine asks: "Having recently graduated, and now working as a developer, I've discovered that after 9 hours of programming at work, I have little interest in coming home and working on my personal programming projects. I've become upset with this fact, because while I was in college, I spent quite a bit of time working on personal projects for my own use. I also noticed this trend during my summer internship, and I have a feeling that it isn't going to get any better. It's not to say that I don't get to work with cool technologies at my job, but they aren't anything that I would pick up in my spare time. So, how do my fellow programming geeks balance work related projects and personal projects? Or, if you've already discovered that after 9 hours of programming, the last thing you want to see is a computer, what hobbies does the Slashdot crowd enjoy after they've ruined their hobby by turning it into a job?"

superid asks: "I'd like to get opinions and real world experiences that people have had with database centric applications that rely extensively on stored procedures. I believe that most enterprise class databases such as Oracle, MS-SQL, PostgreSQL, DB2 and others implement stored procedures. MySQL has been criticized for not supporting stored procedures and will be adding them in MySQL 5. The ANSI-92 SQL Standard also requires implementing some form of stored procedure (section 4.17). So, I'm asking Slashdot readers: if you were architecting a highly data-centric web based application today from a clean slate, how much (if at all) would/should stored procedures factor into your design? Where are they indispensable and where do they get in the way?"

rinkjustice asks: "I'm one of those unlucky souls damned to dial-up internet access. I've been trying to make the best of the situation, however: I use the stripped-down Slashdot homepage, and my kids are slowly acclimatising to dial-up friendly gaming fare ala Games.com, Yahoo! Games instead of bandwidth clotting MMORPG's like RuneScape. What other fun, interesting websites cater to the 56k crowd? Are there any websites specifically 'optimized' for a lo-bandwidth audience?"

DeMechman asks: "As many on Slashdot may know, storage is one thing which you can never have enough of. Given the current situation with CD/DVD rot (Personally I can attest to a 10% attrition rate) hard drives in a RAID configuration seem to be a better and more economical solution. If you own more than fifty CD/DVDs, it can be a daunting task to find a file. I am wondering if anyone has found a hardware solution that can inexpensively be set up to handle 10 or more 250GB HDDs in a RAID configuration. Primarily, has any case manufacturer tackled this niche market yet?"

hugo_pt asks: "I have had sleep problems for some years, but it always get worse in the Summer. Yesterday I slept one hour, so when I got home at 8PM I thought I'd sleep till 9AM or so. Wrong. It's 1.36AM, and I can't sleep anymore. Instead, I'm reading The Complete FreeBSD, and the urge to sleep is gone. I was wondering how many Slashdot readers suffer from this problem, and what they do to combat it ?"

Ars-Fartsica asks: "We've been living with HTTP/HTML ("the web") for a quite a while now, long enough to understand its limits for content distribution, data indexing, and link integrity. Automatic indexing, stateful-ness, whole-network views (flyovers), smart caching (P2P), rich metadata (XML), built in encryption, etc are all fresh new directions that could yield incredible experiences. Any ideas on how you would develop a post-HTTP/HTML internet?"

RPI Geek writes "Everyone's heard the stories about people who, knowingly or unknowingly, abuse their computers. Personally, I've had a faulty power supply literally burn a hole through the motherboard, with the only ill effects being a dead PCI slot and USB ports. I'm curious as to what kind of abuse fellow /.ers have done or seen done to electronics while the hardware still worked afterwards. Soldered a broken keyboard PCB back together so that it worked fine? Taken sticks of RAM out of a running computer to see when it would notice? Overclocked a 386... to 386MHz? I'm interested in hearing any stories about abused-but-working hardware."