Netsuj asks: "I'm doing some work for a firm which operates in B.F.E. Many miles before even arriving, I loose signal on my GSM phone. What is the feasibility of creating a limited-area wireless telephone network? As it is outside the area of repeater technology (I believe), is there such thing as a simple cellular-to-wireline system? What are the possibilities of this operating on a break-even basis for employees (i.e. charging minimal roaming fees)? Any ideas? Sadly, something like this appears to be the only option; contacting any of the mobile network operators in the larger area resulted in absolutely no interest in expanding their coverage." Unfortunately, along with the technical problems, there is also paperwork. What kind of permits and other red-tape-hurdles would be necessary to satisfy all of the lawyer-types?

An anonymous reader asks: "We all joke about how much of the Internet's traffic is porn, but are there are credible studies that give a definitive answer, or at least make a reasonably intelligent guess? Looking at the amount of movie clips and entire flicks posted to the '*.erotica.*' newsgroups on a daily basis, I have to believe that porn is a significant percentage of the traffic, but is it 10%, 20%, 50%? More? I've tried to research this on my own, but Google keeps sending me to sites with porn, not site about porn. (No, really!)"

Jonathan Andrews asks: "I remember back in the old days reading about a filesystem/device driver that had alomost no seeks of the physical disk. It worked by scanning the heads of the disk from track 0 to the end then back again in a constant motion. Disk reads and writes where cached so that they got written to disk only when the heads where on that part of the platter. My question is simple, now that disks are IDE, have lots of heads and even worse differing Heads/Cylander/Sector translation scemes is this type of system even possible? Would you have to fight the disk cache on the drive? I seem to recall it giving real throughput advantages, if the cache was large enough to hold 'one sweep times worth of data' then the cache almost never blocked and disk writes/reads sustained at the max throughput all the time. Best of all it gets rid of that blased seeking, chewing, seeking noise!"

An anonymous reader asks: "Sun and other UNIX vendors are always claiming that Linux lacks features that their UNIX provides. I've seen many Slashdot readers claim the same thing. Can someone provide a list of these features and on what timeline they might be implemented in Linux?"

pair-a-noyd asks: "I have a small PC repair company and am frequently encountering various hard disk drive problems with Windows systems. I often resort to booting up Mandrake to reformat the hard drives because it supports many different formats. However, it's sort of cumbersome to go through the Mandrake setup menus to get there then abort out once the disk is formated. Is there any Linux distro that boots from CD and is designed with ONLY hard disk drive utilities in mind (surface scans, flagging bad sectors, and so on)? It would be very nice if you could boot a Linux CD and go in and hammer a troublesome hard drive into submission and then reformat it with the FS of your choice. Going throught the Mandrake system is cumbersome and using the Windows installation routine is not very friendly either."

Tzaquiel asks: "I've recently gotten involved with a local computer recycling operation. We see quite a variety of machines pass through our hands, from the foolish corporate Pentium III discards to individual donations of Ataris and 286s. Some do end up scrapped for recycling, but most of the machines are tested, refurbished, and given (OS-less, for now) to various charities who find homes for them. I've shown off Linux in-shop on various machines, and the reaction has been positive. But we move a lot of boxes, some very old. Installing Debian on every one of these is not possible (due to time constraints, and end-user confusion) and neither is imaging the hard drive with a properly tweaked distro (hardware variance). Does there exist a distro on 3-7 floppies that would be suitable for use by the unwashed masses? Proponents of Linux speak often of its being able to draw usability blood from a 386 stone - does there exist a distro that can do this without a massive time commitment for every machine involved? Every distribution I've examined thus far has assumed you either have fairly decent hardware or the time to fool around with things if you don't. What I need is a quick-and-dirty, minimal-expendability, floppy-based graphical word-processing-and-web-browsing affair that is right at home on machines that probably should just be left to die. For all the talk of 'Linux and old hardware will be a blessing upon the third world', I would think something like this wouldn't be so hard to find. Surely, if Microsoft did it with DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 a decade ago, it can be done better in Linux now?"

Nathan Wallwork asks: "I work as a Linux system administrator for a company with about 2600 employees. This company is currently implementing PeopleSoft to manage financial data (HR, Payroll, Stocks, Compensation, Accounting and SEC Reporting, etc). This doesn't really relate to Linux, so I only became involved when I found out that they had implemented the web interface with HTTP instead of HTTPS. I'm being told that although PeopleSoft claims to support HTTPS, they typically don't recommend the use of HTTPS as a best practice, because they've seen 'unspecified' problems at other sites, and claim that our switched network will protect us." Would you trust important, internal financial data using a switched network as your only safety net?

Loki_1929 asks: "Having just installed a trial of VMware workstation 3.2, I'm left wondering if anyone has used it as part of a security solution on a network. Specifically, has anyone had any experience using a virtual machine as a 'honeypot' on a business network that experiences a sizable volume of attacks? If so, what successes and problems have you run into? I would assume that a virtual machine compromise would pose no security threat to the rest of the network, and an 'undoable' disk would make picking up the pieces of the honeypot quite simple, but what other sorts of pitfalls are there to deal with, if any? As a consultant for many small to medium size businesses, it occurs to me that this may be a reasonably safe, secure, and cost-effective solution, but I thought the Slashdot community might have some experience and insights into the actual feasibility of a system like this."

Scaife writes "I make a video project for school each year, and this year we want to produce it on DVD and sell it. The only catch is that we don't have the time or money to get copyright permissions for the 100+ songs we use for it. I'm wondering if there is a large repository of CD-quality royalty-free music somewhere. Whenever I try and take one of the royalty-free MP3s available on the web and use it on a DVD, the quality is awful as it pops and hisses. I suppose this is because of the lossy compression. Any ideas?"

Steve Suppe writes "As an American who is going to be living overseas for a few years (Germany, to be more exact), I'm curious as to what advice/information Slashdot could provide people like me. How much can I expect to pay for dial-up/broadband, and from who? I'd be interested to hear how it differs around the world. Any good reference sites? Thanks!"

stevelinton writes "I am looking for a tutorial similar to Dave Ragget's excellent HTML tutorial(s), but for XHTML 1.1. I am NOT looking for a "HTML to XHTML" conversion tutorial. I want to teach a class XHTML 1.1 from day 1, without assuming that they know any HTML at all. Does anyone know of such a thing?"

Matey-O writes "I just purchased a Linksys firewall/switch router (WAP54g) and two of their 802.11g cards for home use. Like MANY things linux, I found out after the fact that Linksys' 54g products use a different chipset (broadcom) rather than the intersil Prism chipsets of their linux supported 11b products. So my _main_ question is: does anybody know if/when the broadcom chipset will be supported? Google wasn't very helpful, it came up with an online petition to another Broadcom product, but neither Broadcom, not Linksys plan support for linux soon. My secondary question is: Just where does one go to get info on 'cutting edge' linux development? I've used Linux off and on for years, but never needed to see what was going on this deep into the kernel, nor do I know where to look to see if any development is occurring for this chipset. (meanwhile, RH8 is dormant on the laptop as the XP support is adequate.)"

An anonymous reader asks: "Several years ago, I saw several manufacturers that sold LCD displays that slid out of the 5-1/4" bay, flipped down, and allowed you to have a minimal monitor that stored in the case. Since it slid out and flipped down, that meant it easily fit into 1U and 2U rack mounted hardware. Now that I'm about to get charged beacoup bucks for having a monitor at the CoLo where I have my servers, I'm looking for something like this again. (SSH doesn't help with hardware and BIOS settings.)" Read on for some details on what he's looking for -- you may be after the same thing (or better yet, have such screens to sell).

questamor writes "After reading the recent Slashdot article linking to drivesavers and their list of damaged hardware that was still recoverable, I'm curious about the worst things slashdot readers have done to their hardware and still had it work. So far I've been lucky, and in more than a decade of owning computers I've hotplugged almost everything except a CPU (sometimes accidentally, sometimes through laziness) and never knowingly broken anything. What have you all done to your machines? I imagine there are many stories of dropped, drowned, stolen and generally abused machines still working and doing their thing; or at least, able to be brought back to a working state"

innocent_white_lamb writes "I am using an X-based menu that doesn't recognize a mouse. Keyboard input only. I load the menu with the command "startx -e menu", which loads the menu and gets stuff going without any need for a window manager. The problem is that the mouse cursor sits in the middle of the screen and, without a mouse attached, there appears to be no way to move it or get rid of it. I've asked around and nobody seems to have run into this situation before. So my question is, how do you get rid of the mouse cursor under X without using a window manager?"

grungy asks: "On several computers I have owned, I have noticed an audible noise related to large screen re-draws. A hardware guy once hypothesized that the large memory-move operation was creating electronic 'noise' which was then picked up and audibly amplified by my speaker. I unwired my speaker, removed it from the machine and put it in a different room, and the phenomenon still occurred. At this point I assumed it was something going on/emanating from the monitor itself. Now I have a TiBook laptop with an LCD panel. At quiet moments I can still hear it when I drag windows around. I have tried doing big memcpy's & the like, I don't get the same noise. I've been wondering about this for years. Anybody know what gives?"

drew_92123 asks: "I've got a friend who does a LOT of video editing but is on a limited budget. He is currently using a raid array and while quite large, it's not as fast as he had hoped. I had an idea and wanted to know if there is a way to make it a reality, so of course I though of all the brilliant minds here. I have about a dozen Pentium II computers with 1GB of RAM. I would like to upgrade them to 2GB and throw in some gigabit NICs and create a 1.9GB RAMdisk on each one. Then I want to use one of the computers to RAID the RAMdisks together to be shared via Samba most likely. They are all 1U systems, with no HDD's, just a 64MB IDE flash disk. Any ideas out there?" Has anyone successfully put together such a system? How well did it work for you and are there any caveats that you would like to share with others who would do the same?

DavonZ asks: "Being that many readers of Slashdot may have contributed to Open Source projects, I thought this the best place to ask this question: What is the best way to outline our side projects into our resumes? I did the conversion of the C700 from Japanese to English, review hardware for nvmax.com, run MaxProjects which ports applications to the Sharp Zaurus, founded the Embedded Linux Developers Group and still maintain a full-time job with a semiconductor. How to I add these into my resume? I have been told not to; to only enter them into my cover letter. Others have told me to add a projects section. I have even been told that I shouldn't mention my projects at all. Which is the best approach? What are other Slashdot readers doing?"

e8johan asks: "I have been thinking about trying to sell a Linux based thin client solution to different markets, like schools. One of the big problems with migrating to Linux is the loss of old applications such as Microsoft Office. Has anyone tried to combine Wine and the LTSP? Does it work? If so, it would enable me (and anyone else) to sell services based on a free (as in libre and beer) server running both open office and their proprietary equivalents in a Windows-like environment, thus reducing the migration costs and making the offer more attractive." While this would be an interesting to tackle, would the licensing terms on some proprietary packages complicate such a system?

d00dman asks: "I work for a colocation reseller. We don't own our datacenter, we lease cage space and with it we get an array of 30amp and 15amp power circuits. My problem is, inside of the cage we need to do our own power distribution. We have around 50 hosts in the facility, and are growing quickly. We need to add another 20 or so hosts in coming month. We are looking for a simple, scalable, and even power distribution method. As always, money IS an object. Right now we have a group of UPS's with power strips plugged into each. While this was sufficient for as many as 30 hosts, its starting to become a bit of a mess. Does anyone have any advice to offer...any creative tricks?"