jqh1 asks: "I'm the "inventor" of spamgourmet, a fairly un-obvious approach to spam prevention through auto-create/expire email addresses. I'm fully committed to keeping the software free for all to use. Recently, I've seen other 'patent pending' disposable email address services that are not immediately forthcoming about their own processes. I don't have the time or resources to monitor and challenge patent applications, but I'm afraid that if I ignore them, I'll regret it. Should I seek patent protection for this open source software? If so, is there a way to do it without losing all semblance of an open source project?"

McDoobie asks: "Is there a market for low cost shareware in the Linux/BSD and Unix market in general? Would it be worthwhile to have a small home based business next to ones regular day job producing well made, but small, shareware for an environment that is dominated either by large corporations or Open Source developers? If so, what should a potential developer/publisher focus on to make their products/price range attractive to customers? What type of customers are most likely to look into such software? SOHO? Small Enterprise? Home users? In a nutshell, where should one begin when investigating the potential of the Un*x (and perhaps Apple) environment for the small time developer who's interested in earning a few dollars on the side?"

It's Freezing in here asks: "I'm involved in a study to set up a multimedia language laboratory for teaching Japanese. The most difficult aspect that I'm finding is actually locating a good software suite to supplement a Japanese language curriculum. The question of my day is: Can anybody recommend an excellent multimedia software package for teaching Japanese to foreign students (mainly Arab) in a language lab setting? It must scalable as well. I'm specifically looking for a package that includes pronunciation practice, placement testing, intro, middle and advanced levels, and tons of audio/video along with practice questions. As a benchmark, I'm using the Ellis Academic Series package. I'm well aware that most people don't gain fluency in a language by sitting in front of a computer, so please don't pound that issue. I appreciate Slashdot readers' advice. Thanks!"

An anonymous reader asks: "I am using an older, standalone CD-ROM drive as my audio CD player in my sound system. It is a NEC 4X SCSI in a small case with power supply. The case outputs very clean analog audio, great headphone output and a SPDIF coax link which plugs directly into my receiver. It works great standalone, it has a complete front panel, ie backlit LCD display, stop, play, pause, next and previous track buttons. But it doesn't read CD-RW, it uses a caddy and it heats up the CDs quite a bit. I know that all recent CD-ROM drives have only the eject button, not all of them output SPDIF (and with DRM who knows what the future holds) and who knows if they will work with only the power connected? Which CD-ROM drives, old or new, support being used standalone, have a decent set of front panel controls (at least a play and a skip button) and output SPDIF?" Generally for this type of purpose, I'd use a regular old portable CD player, but these generally do not output to SPDIF, either. Has anyone managed to find decent examples of either piece of hardware?

Gurami asks: "I'm a part of a student run team at my school that develops a student website, like those found at many schools, that offers news and services to the college community. Recently, we agreed to create a web based set of apps for a new online student publication. It allows the editors of a publication to manage assignments (articles and media), layout, advertising, workloads, contact information, and some other neat things related to online newspapers/publications, in PHP. Our question is: Is there a market for this sort of web suite, would we be able to package and sell it, or open source it, and sell setup and maintenance services for it to college and university student groups?"

WeNeedBetterTools asks: "Help! I am trying to convince the leaders of my development organization that the quality of our bugtracking tool has a meaningful impact on the quality of products we produce. Right now, the tool we have is difficult to use because there is a high overhead to creating bugs, and they are very difficult to find in the system once they're reported. My main argument is that the easier the tool is to use, the more people will be motivated to enter bugs. My managers argue that if people aren't entering bugs, it's their own damn problem, and we ought to crack the whip until they always file every bug they possibly can. I need some solid references for my position. JoelOnSoftware has a great argument for making it simple to enter bugs, but he lacks credibility with my managers by virtue of the fact that he is also selling a bugtracking tool. Can anyone point me to any solid research on the relationship between the quality of bugtracking tool and the impact on product quality?"

PizzaFace asks: "My son and I have to start building his first Pinewood Derby racer, and I'm looking for tips. I've found conflicting advice online about even the basic science (e.g. high vs. low centers of gravity) so I'm hoping to tap into some of Slashdot's expertise." Might someone have some pictures of cool designs that might useful as a starting point?"

TheLocustNMI asks: "So, earlier today as I was typing out some magnum opus of a stored procedure, I highlighted to copy it, and hit SPACE instead of Ctrl-C. Without thinking, I hit Ctrl-Z to 'undo' my folly. Pausing a moment to reflect, I realized that I own countless hours of thanks to whomever came up with the "undo" button. In short -- my question is this -- where did it come from? What are the earliest implementations of the 'undo'? (a quick googling returns this page, a cornucopia of undo and history related treatises)"

Kenny Mann asks: "I currently run a Linux distribution called Lunar Linux and it is a source based distribution branched from the original Sorcerer GNU Linux. I've done a bit of research on compiler optimizations and such and was wondering what kind of performance is there really to be had for setting these options? I know that the more options the greater chance of unexpected failures, so my next question is what about optimizing your kernel?" Optimization is tricky, and I think the answer to this question is more complex than "yes, optimize" or "no, don't optimize". Rather there might be classes of applications that are safe to optimize and classes of applications that are not. How do those performance hounds out there feel about optimizing the kernel, however?

DumbSwede asks: "I have embarked on a do-it-yourself HDTV project with a NEC 135LC quad-XGA projector purchased on eBay. But I have only found 2 HDTV tuner cards, AccessDTV and WinTV-HD, both far short of quad-XGA resolution (if I am reading the specs right, they max out at SXGA for VGA output). ATI claims to support all DTV resolutions and has quad-XGA resolution with its All-In-Wonder 9700, but has only a standard analog tuner built in. A search of ATI or NVIDA web-sites, give no recommendations on DTV turners to use in conjunction with their products (perhaps either accessdtv or wintv-hd will work). Any details and insights would be appreciated, as two or three days of web searching seems not to have provided me with total solution answers."

Broue Master asks: "I was recently faced with the task of finding a way to prevent some users from taking 100% cpu time in Citrix. I'm no MS certified anything (but I am a Citrix certified admin) and I couldn't find a built in way to do this. After someone on the NTSysAdmin List suggested trying to set the CPU priority to low from the command line, I investigated and found a small freeware that did the trick: PrioSet. I don't have a big user base: 3 power users (who are my problem with their Access and Excel use) and 10 regular users (and the people most affected by the problem). I'd like to know if any of you have previously tried this software, or if you've run into the particular problem when one user is getting 99% of the CPU for a long time while all other users only share the spare 1%. Did the software solve the problem or did you solve the situation by other means?"

Anonymous for Good Reason asks: "I'm working for a small-medium sized software company that looks like it's going to be bought by a much larger company. We (employees) aren't being told anything yet, but the behavior of our management and some of the information we have been asked to provide all make it pretty clear that somebody is going through due diligence and trying to close the deal. How have other people fared during these kinds of buy-outs? What did you do to make sure you kept your job and weren't RIF'd after the dust settled? How did your stock options, pay, benefits, etc transfer, and was there anything you would have done different to protect yourself? Was the cultural change a problem, or were you welcomed warmly into the fold? I'm mostly interested in stories from people whose companies were bought by the really big players (IBM, MS, Sun, CA, HPaq, etc.) since that's what this will probably be. Since I have never been through a merger of this type, I'm not sure what to expect and with the current economy I would like to increase my chances of staying employed. Any insight the Slashdot crowd has would be interesting."

snapman asks: "My wife and I are looking to move to another state because of our respective job situations and we forecast a lot of travel (to return home to visit family and friends). We were looking at portable DVD players to help ease the boredom of long flights home, and we were wondering if the road warriors of the Slashdot community have any advice on the best portable DVD player (features, drawbacks, battery life, etc.)?"

BladeMelbourne asks: "As a web developer with a healthy love of Linux, I was wondering which fonts look great in Linux web browsers (particularly Mozilla/Netscape). Using 'Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif' just doesn't look nice. Do different distro's have different fonts? Which fonts resemble Arial/Helvetica? Which fonts are anti-aliased? Speaking of anti-aliased, does anyone know concisely how to get AA fonts with Mozilla on RedHat 8.0? I have my TTFs working, but don't seem to display correcly and look rather ugly on my display."

meridian-gh asks: "Microsoft is releasing new patches and updates for their products continually. For those of us who have to deal with large, geographically diverse windows-based networks, managing patches can be a nightmare. You cannot trust the users to do it. Tools such as SMS and HFNetCHK Pro are neat, but incredibly expensive. Most free programs I have seen don't support Windows 98, which many of us are forced to deal with. My question is, how do you deal with the remote deployment of patches in a efficient (and cheap) manner?"

JHDrexler asks: "I have read Slashdot for several years and often find topics/posts about security to be especially interesting, enlightening, educational, and sometimes entertaining. I consider myself to be fairly well educated and experienced when dealing with and enforcing security. But the situation that I am forced to deal with is, at its core, the basic fundamental reason for the requirement of security, but at such an unbelievable extreme that it has perplexed everyone that I have asked for assistance. While most security systems are designed to keep the un-trusted out. My application requires keeping the un-trusted out, while also keeping the un-trusted in and robust enough that the trusted users cannot break it." JHDrexler has three children, one of whom is autistic and tends to get into trouble. Could some form of system be developed (on a budget) that would be easy to use for the non-autistic children, yet restrictive enough to keep the autistic child from getting out, and possibly harming himself?

KalvinB asks: "According to The Case for Micropayments, Nielson makes the case that subscriptions fence you in because you either pay nothing and get nothing or pay a large fee. I'm curious as to why a large fee is the only option. Perhaps in 1998 bandwidth was as expensive as gold but five years later I propose A Viable System for Micropayments and how to implement it. The cost can easily be calculated either arbitrarily or by determining the amount of bandwidth the average user uses per month or year. I'm curious as to how viable you think this system is and if you have any ideas for improvement. Mainly in calculating cost and accepting payments. I think the biggest obstacle to micropayments is a complete misunderstanding of the term 'micro.' In the article it's talking about paying several dollars per page at some sites. By my calculations that file better be 5GB or more. It's greed, I think more than anything, that's limiting it's acceptance. Sites don't want to charge a reasonable fee and people think their ISP bill is an all access pass to the Internet. The idea of actually paying for products they use and paying more than the product was produced for is suddenly lost when they go online."

Daanji asks: "Being a struggling Electrical Engineering student at Northern Arizona University I have taken on a Math tutor job to support myself at the Learning Assistance Center. Being one of the few computer literate tutors on staff, I have been asked if I wanted to participate in online tutoring. This trial will begin with moderate means, consisting of Microsoft Netmeeting (which almost everyone has on their machines), a digital pen, and hopefully Mathematica, Maple, or some other math program. I've also been asked to think about how to fully implement this idea to its full potential to provide students with an acceptable service. What I would like to know is if anyone has been involved in a similar situation. What technologies have any of you used (software or hardware) to implement a similar system: what works best, what doesn't, how effective was it, and how much did it cost? Was your experience successful or worth the effort? Any suggestions or constructive criticisms, helpful hints, or links would be appreciated."

shylock0 asks: "I use AutoCAD pretty extensively, and one of the things I've always loved about it is the fact that, in addition to having a GUI, it has a really great command line -- which you access simply by starting to type, and which will actually work alongside your mouse. CAD lends itself to this duality, mainly because its nice to be able to deal with the overall work visually, but be able to specify dimensions exactly. Having to use the mouse to click on a separate dimensioning tool-box for every element you create wastes a substantial amount of time. You can even use mouse and keyboard side-by-side, without clicking yourself into a different environment -- for instance, if you have selected an element, and are using the mouse to rotate it, starting to type commands to resize the object doesn't stop the mouse from being in rotation mode. Such functionality would allow complex tasks -- beyond just opening, saving, and so forth -- using direct keyboard input, but would work in the context of the GUI. For instance, it would be great if I could copy files from an open window just by starting to type 'copy'. What other apps, both commercial and free, still have an easy-to-enter command-line style element?"

rscrawford asks: "I'm a former web developer who's been playing with open source solutions wherever possible for just over a year, and now I'm on that obsessive track toward becoming a librarian. Now, I've seen a lot of library websites and catalog software packages that are MS-based; what open-source solutions are there for libraries, and where have you seen libraries using open-source technologies (like Linux) to solve problems?"