CarlosOlivaG4 asks: "We're in the process of acquiring and setting up a renderfarm, and I'm hoping the Slashdot community might light us up a little here. We'll use 6 to 8 nodes first, but would like to be able to expand it in the future." There was an earlier version of this question, but it dealt more with the hardware of the farm's nodes, rather than the network and software infrastructure on which these nodes would be based.

Samhain138 asks: "My company streams video via multicast in a pretty large network. They have a client program for viewing this video stream. Everything works fine, and since the stream is ISMA MPEG-4, almost any player would be able to view it. Lately, they've been looking for a solution for encrypting the video on-the-fly with minimal delay, however all of the solutions they've come across require something physical (dongle, smart-card) which may cause a problem (we can't physically reach all the viewers and it might also become expensive when we have a lot of viewers). Can Slashdot readers suggest anything that is simple to implement (or buy...)?"

artlu asks: "I have a great idea for a dotcom company, and I just started to execute the initial stages of my business plan. I developed the initial website, gained a user base, and am about to incorporate in Florida. Now I need to find a venture capitalist! However, every capitalist I approach is fearful of dotcoms. I ask the Slashdot community: How do I find a post-bubble dotcom investor?"

TempusMagus asks: "My company developed a custom content management system for a large arts organization. Our relationship with them was great and the value of the software was appreciated by everyone. Recently they put in place a large Management/Ticketing/CRM solution for events and ticket sales (essentially a huge transaction heavy Microsoft SQL server database). The CRM system was sold to them as a community based, non-profit software application perfect for other non-profit arts organizations. Here's the interesting part: the 'community' arts management software was developed by a -commercial- company who just so happens to be the -only- vendor they recommend. In fact, when we inquired about the system with the software company in order to integrate it into our CMS all of the sudden the client received tons of calls from the 'approved' vendor to convince them that no one but themselves were capable of integrating with it. Basically, the client has been frightened into using one vendor and is going to throw away a perfectly wonderful (and non-Microsoft based) system. Has anyone any other experiences with companies who use free/open source software or 'community' development to simply lure customers as a front? Do you think we'll see more of this type of behavior as the popularity of F/OSS increases?"

An anonymous reader asks I am thinking about setting up a local "community" network over WiFi minus internet connection. In other words, I would like to run a small server isolated from the web as an experiment in small scale networks (e.g., serving a café-heavy one-block radius.) I have plenty of clever ideas -- discussion/gripe boards, weird artistic projects -- anything to bring back the old-school BBS memories where online users were drawn from a single geographic location. But everything I've learned so far is how to act as a small node on someone else's network. How can I make my own -- and make it wireless? Google doesn't pull much up that I can find: it is mostly targeted towards those building a (free or profit) Internet access point." (Read on for more.)

kabrakan writes "Finding myself in an extremely boring tech job, I find the best way to pass the time is to listen to someone speak, specifically an interesting conversation about science, or a comedian. After exhausting NPR's database, could anyone recommend any online repositories of spoken word entertainment, especially talk in the technology world?"

An anonymous reader writes: "I would like to hear from fellow /.ers that consider themselves unusually but non-traditionally 'bright' and how you have dealt with it. What are you doing now? What did you do for education? How is your life now? I'm on the verge of entering college, never having liked school much yet always in love with learning. I would like some tips, suggestions, and experience in living with an extra degree of intensity, depth, and general intelligence. I love learning, yet I never have found school enjoyable. I'm incredibly intense and concentrated, yet I often become bored of specific projects in a few months. It's not anything diagnosable (I've looked into it) but more an inherent trait. Academically, I have managed to be alright, but nothing spectacular. Lots of people I meet think I should have a 4.0 easy, but I'm pretty far from it. My interests are broad, from computers (linux/os x/php/mysql/etc) to photography to cookery, I'm creative and technical. Friends and others recognize my strength in these areas. I can't stand being completely technical alone, but I love it in moderation. My attention span is practically unlimited when I am interested in a topic, and I get intensely interested in it. I want to hear from people who share some or all of these traits. I'm just coming up on entering college, so most of my life is ahead of me. I'd like to hear about everything from your education to your career to things you wish you had done differently!" Sounds like an INTP to me.

Slashdot Reader CanadianCrackPot decided to be adventurous and went and installed the latest offering from X.org's X-Server project. Below, you'll find "the basics" of his "first attempt to install [their] X Window Server on a system with a 450 MHz PIII, and Diamond Viper V770 (TNT2 chipset) graphics card, running Mandrake 10.0 Official (FTP download of everything but the RPMS.cooker dir)." To make a long story short, while he did have some luck with installing it, running it was...problematic. He asks: "I'm just wondering how other Slashdot readers are doing with the new X11R6 server, and more importantly, how did you install it?"

J. J. Ramsey asks: "schnell has already asked the question What's Keeping You On Windows? It seems only fair to ask the opposite question. For those of you who have elected to not use Windows, what keeps you away from it? Concerns about stability? Security? Dislike of Microsoft's business practices? Or are you simply a fan of your chosen platform and just don't care about Windows one way or the other?" Might recent events sway your decision to keep Microsoft's premier software offering off of your computer?

WCityMike writes "I plan to donate a grape iMac to a local church-run non-profit coffeehouse for teenagers, and would like to give it to them appropriately set up for the atmosphere it'll be in. I'm seeking advice on a number of fronts - what freeware or shareware applications would be good for such an environment? Should visitors be allowed to have their own accounts (presumably created by the administrator), or should I just set up one 'student' account and one 'administrator' account? If the latter, is there a way to prevent students from saving things on the hard drive (thus forcing them to use a diskette and/or the CD drive?), and/or a 'Simple Finder' interface extant for OS X? Is there existing software that makes this easier or more configurable, or is it all inside the OS? I'm fairly familiar with Mac OS X, but have never needed to run anything outside a single-user environment."

Sqwubbsy writes "Stumbling through Google, looking for info on the Big Trak by Milton Bradley, I came across an article about one that was retrofitted with an OOPic controller. I was wondering if anyone else had a good story about a retrofitted toy that they beefed up?"

An anonymous reader asks "Recently I have noticed that I haven't used caps lock other for any purpose other than hitting it by accident. Once upon a time, COBOL was written in all caps, and other languages like BASIC and Fortran were not case sensitive. Capitals were the way to go for writing code. Does the caps lock key serve any purpose any more, and if not, should it be removed, moved, or replaced?"

An anonymous reader asks: "Recently, I have purchased Sony's new Hi-MD player. I popped in their driver CD, and instead of installer launching, I was greeted by the message, 'Cannot install for this Windows language.' It seems like it rejected installation, because my default language setting is Japanese, although I am using English version of Windows. I got the response from Sony stating that: 'If you are using a different language set up for your computer, you will not be able to use the software supplied with the product. Unfortunately, currently there is no workaround for this issue. The only option would be to change the language setting of your computer.' Now I'm asking for my money back. The hardware device is practically useless without the software installation, and it seems like they are going too far, especially since this may affect anyone who uses more than one languages on their computer. Isn't this discrimination to multi-lingual people living in the targeted market? And isn't it unfair to impose such restrictions on software that is required to use hardware?"

el topher asks: "After 5+ years of being married, my wife and I have been blessed by her becoming pregnant. I've professionally been a programmer for a while now and am now concerned that commercial software development is not a good job for a dad to have. Thinking back on all the software development groups I've been in, it seems most of the coders were not parents, and the coders that were parents seemed to have trouble with things like dealing with unplanned death marches and not being there for their family. So my question to the programmers with kids out there: How does a programming career jive with family life? I'd especially like to hear about parents who have been coding for a while and the situations in this area they've faced."

charyou-tree asks: "I'm a US Navy doctor deployed with the Marines in Afghanistan. I and many Marines have brought along our own laptop computers, but hooking up non-government machines to the network here is prohibited. Consequently, we're all stuck waiting in long lines for 15 minute blocks of time on a few designated 'morale' computers to send email home. What I'd like to do is set up a bidirectional satellite connection (like what DIRECWAY offers in the US), and then have individual computers hooked up over 802.11 - completely bypassing the Army network and its restrictions. In the sense that I'll be providing network access to other people I'll be an ISP, but I'm not interested in turning a profit on this. What other hardware and service provider options are there?"

An Ominous Coward asks: "The University of Florida student chapter of ACM hosts a yearly programming competition for students throughout the state of Florida. It is based on the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, and for the past ten years has been very successful, currently drawing a crowd in the hundreds. However, this year was the first we had a problem with wireless networks. We doubt that cheating was the intention, as no one had SSID broadcasting turned off (as far as we know). Wireless networking gear is quite inexpensive now. And while we don't believe it affected the contest this year, we would like to take precautions for future contests. Is there any way to disable all wireless networking in an area about the size of a large lecture hall?"

SadPenguin asks: "I am currently working for a small company of about 15 people each with one to two workstation/laptop machines a piece. We are looking for a new server solution, as our last one crashed, and lacking any server redundancy, we nearly lost all of our data since our last backup (it was only a few days, but an important few). What the kind of server (and redundancy) solution would be appropriate for a company of my size? Most advertisements are for large scale enterprise serving solutions, but these are costly and excessive for my situation. I'm sure that there is a simple Redundant Server technology out there that is a bit less costly, but won't result in any downtime in the event of a motherboard component failing (like we faced this time when our mysterious surface soldered VRM failed). So what do you use? What should I use?"

lancomandr asks: "I'm interested in getting into digital photography. I have looked at many tutorials and buying guides but there are so many digital SLRs I have no idea which ones to even start considering. I want to be able to make decently large prints, I'd like to get a decent amount of use out of it before upgrading, I want good battery life and durability is key. All of you photographers out there, any suggestions? What did you buy when you started?"

Yaztromo asks: "I'm about to try to make the jump and move my jSyncManager Project from being a time-consuming hobby into a full-time business. I'm hoping to follow the model of other successful Open Source businesses by selling integration, development services and support contracts. Has anyone in the Slashdot community attempted to move their Free/Open Source projects from hobby to business? What were the special challenges or obstacles faced?"

AKInnovation asks: "My company produces peripheral hardware used in commercial applications, such as retail POS. In our market, amongst other such hardware manufacturers, we are the only ones to offer Linux software solutions (drivers). This distinction has recently won us several large accounts. When the hardware becomes a commodity, and you must compete on the software side to keep the money coming in, how can releasing your code as Open Source be rationalized to management?"