An anonymous reader asks: "In The Feynman Lectures on Computation, Richard Feynman poses an interesting little puzzle involving the synchronization of finite state machines acting as generals and soldiers. While he was able to find an answer to the problem, the minimum time solution apparently eluded him, and he ended his description of the puzzle with the following Fermat-like declaration: 'Somebody has actually found a solution with this minimum time. That is very difficult though, and you should not be so ambitious. It is a nice problem, however, and I often spend time on airplanes trying to figure it out. I haven't cracked it yet.' My best attempt performs at about 3N, not quite the minimum time of 2N-2. So I'm asking Slashdot: Has anyone ever come across the minimum time solution to this puzzle? Or maybe someone here can figure it out!"

Franklin_DeMatto asks: "My ISP keeps my server behind a tight firewall, only allowing outgoing HTTP(S) and SMTP. I would like to sync the system's clock using NTP. Does anyone know of any public time servers that can do some type of NTP over HTTP, to get through the firewall? What about the software (preferably open source) to do it? (No, the ISP will not change the firewall rules.)"

just currious asks: "I work for a large company (10,000+ pc's) who recently out sourced the help desk. After looking at about a year's worth of data we find the 30% to 50% of the calls to the helpdesk are password related (password resets, password changes, etc.) this is alot of calls (at 20+ dollars a pop). Now they want to reduce cost by cutting security, since if you don't have a password, you can't forget it. So here's what upper management wants to do: remove the security from all of our Windows 2000 machines. Has anybody else seen security cut just to save money?"

borgquite asks: "Does anyone know of any network aware screensavers? I am running a school network and would love to be able to have a screensaver where the other computers communicate with each other in some way - for example, if you could have a marquee where the message gets passed from screen to screen. The best I can find is n 0 time, but is there anything else a bit more exciting?"

ducman asks: "I'm a consultant and carry two laptops. I have to assume that my employer can see everything I do and access every file I store on the machine they provided me with. But I'm tired of hauling two laptops (and power supplies, etc) everywhere I go. My personal machine is an Apple TiBook, which will boot off an external, firewire drive. Could I do the same thing with an Intel laptop and run Linux on it for personal stuff? Am I the only one with this problem?" Which Intel-based laptop, that supports booting from an external drive, would you recommend?

An Anonymous Coward asks: "I'm preparing a proposal to my local LUG hopefully to persuade them to incorporate a weblog into their current website. It seems to me that weblogs would be better suited to the type of communication that is generally found on LUG email lists. My questions is: Are there any LUGs out there that are currently using some type of weblog application? Are there any who are considering it, or have considered it and abandoned the idea? What are the major reasons behind your choice?"

crevette asks: "I was looking on Amazon for some gizmo when I got a review from G. Cooke, TX, who is in the top 10 reviewers. Out of curiosity, I checked her reviews... She has 658 reviews, many on the same day, which include everything from knife sets to a plastic duck! She reviews many books on the same day... She must be spending hundreds of dollars on useless stuff every month. Worst of all, most of her reviews are 5 stars. Do you think those people are paid by Amazon or some company? Do you trust them? If not (like I tend to think) what can we do about it?"

Giger51 asks: "I'm trying to get a better idea of how a business goes about choosing a carrier & technology for their Wide Area Network. For the last little while, it's been difficult for a lot of the carriers out there. Those difficulties have resulted in questionable accounting practices and bankruptcies. When trying to make the decision, what are the key points that are considered? What technology (IP, Frame Relay, ATM...) are you avoiding or looking for?"

dnotj asks: "The boss (who is very technically astute) says: NO to using pthreads in any of our production applications. He wants us to do things the old fashion way (fork(), exec(), shared memory, etc). His reason for this is that he doesn't understand pthreads (by his own admission). Hence, he is limiting us to using methods and techniques that he understands. He is reasonable and would see our side (the developers) if presented with enough understanding in a satisfactory format. What I'm looking for are document technically detailed yet directed more towards management. Not something on the level of 'pthreads for Dummies', but more along the lines of 'pthreads for Managers'. Any suggestions? URLs or Books are fine."

ptaff asks: "We all know the nightmare of typical HTML developer: you get different results on different browsers/platforms (and we're talking HTML only, no CSS/scripts). To make matters worse, MSIE has this ability to render completely invalid HTML code (missing tags, invalid nesting, you get the point). Mozilla and its many cousins are trying hard to keep up with the inconsistencies of today's 'web-optimized-for-MSIE', but where is the limit? As an exercise, can you build the most malformed HTML document that can be rendered in MSIE but will choke on others browsers?"

Craig A. Smith asks: "I've always been able to use simply 'http://www' to get to my company's web site, presumably because my default search domain was 'mycompany.com.' Suddenly my browser started taking me to 'www.www.com' instead. This happened simultaneously in all browsers (tested Mozilla, IE, NS4.7 and NS7.0) an two platforms (RedHat7.2 and Win2k). The odd thing is the command 'nslookup www' (or dig or host) behaves as desired and still resolves to www.mycompany.com so I don't think this is a DNS issue. I've tried various /etc/resolv.conf settings with no luck ('domain mycompany.com' and 'search mycompany.com'). How do I get my browser to apply the default domain before tacking on the www prefix and .com suffix?"

216pi asks: "It seems that there is no good site where to post the data about my free WiFi HotSpot in Cologne / Germany. This one doesn't help (map is unusable), this looks nice but has no map, a good name is nice, but doesn't help if it doesn't contain any data and Telepolis (in English) has only blabla sites but without usable search function or map. Any suggestions, especially for Europe (and/or Germany)?"

Creosote asks: "Concerns about piracy are no longer just for the big commercial media outfits. JSTOR, one of the major repositories and distributors of online versions of scholarly journals, has been hit by crackers taking advantage of open proxy servers to download about 51,000 articles from 11 JSTOR journals. Even nonprofit academic publishers rely on income from publications to exist, so the spectre of large-scale unauthorized copying is legitimately scary to them. In a letter to librarians and publishers, the president of JSTOR notes that while the "threat of open proxies has been recognized for some time in the web community...it does not appear that network administrators, librarians, or content providers are aware that organized efforts are being employed to gain unauthorized access to restricted campus resources" through them. I work for a nonprofit publisher (a university press) that will soon be making peer-reviewed digital projects available online, and they can't all be given away for free, so this hits close to home. Are there better solutions than turning into an attack dog, ala the RIAA and the MPAA?"

NewtonsLaw asks: "With Christmas coming up I dare say that lots of people are going to spend big bucks on consumer electronics in the next few weeks. This column asks an interesting question -- are consumer electronics manufacturers sacrificing quality and reliability for an endless list of features? If you're like me, you've probably got a TV, VCR or other appliance you bought over 5 years ago which is still going strong -- but much of the stuff you've bought in the past 2-3 years is already giving trouble. What's more, it seems to be the big-name manufacturers such as Sony who are most affected by this decline in standards. I'd love to hear the experiences of other Slashdot readers in an effort to get as many data-points as possible. Are you better off buying a $49 DVD player on the expectation that it will only last a year or so -- or do lay out two or three times that amount something made by a big-name manufacturer in the (possibly vain) hope it will provide superior performance and last longer?"

Longjmp asks: "Once again I though about how often programmers find themselves in a situation where they may have a specification for their work but, as it turns out later, the specs didn't really meet the customers' requirements. Techies and customers almost always speak a completely different language and likely the specs were written by a tech person who doesn't quite comprehend the customer's workflow, or sometimes even worse, by the customer himself, trying to 'speak tech' without having the technical background. In either case, the resulting product would be right out of a Douglas Adams novel: 'almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.' How often do you (as programmers) get a chance to talk to customers directly or watch them in order to understand their workflow? How often did you as a customer (or user) talk to the techies? What are your experiences?"

unix-coder asks: "How can a small software company get to 'rent' accounts for short times on a wide range of machines running different commercial Unixes with different CPUs? SourceForge's compiler farms are great for open source projects (and besides, open source projects will get ported/tested/fixed on all the platforms that matter to the people that use them). But what about commercial projects where you want to port/build/test for a wide range of architectures and OSes (AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, ...) but don't want your several server rooms full of weird hardware of your own?"

PlatterMan asks: "The question of how to cope with backing up disk drives which are rapidly increasing in size, onto tape and other backup devices which aren't scaling in size as quickly isn't new to Slashdot. Neither is the use of single, raided, and removal disks as backup devices, this has been covered numerous times on Slashdot in e.g. here and here. One thing I haven't really seen discussed however is the feasibility of disk drives as medium to long-term archival media, say 5 to 10 years. Like many people I'm in the position of now having multiple machines with a combined data pool of about 220 Gig, and backing up these onto DDS or DLT tapes is slow and manual to do, and expensive in tape costs. So I'm looking to add a removal drive bay to my primary backup machine and pick up a bunch of large IDE drives, so that I can do regular disk to disk backups over 100 Meg Ethernet (and for my machines which are in cages, over the Net) pulling out and alternating the backup drives on a 3-way backup cycle."

glassware asks: "Perhaps you know that LED holiday Lights last hundreds of times longer than regular lights. Perhaps you know that your local utility company recommends them for drastically lowering your electricity bill. But my real problem is, where can you find them? I've found lousy battery-operated LED lights in some department stores; but even in the best stores I give up after a half hour of searching, and so far I see only one vendor making them. Surely there must be alternatives. Where do you get your LED holiday lights?"

Chip asks: "The small business for which I work is preparing to release a free software title for Windows and hopefully Mac and Linux as well. This software is something I believe many people around the world will find useful without ever having to pay a dime. Does anyone have experience with releasing free software on a small budget? Any advice would be very helpful. We have a few months to prepare for beta launch and I am nervous about getting the word out, crashing our servers, etc..."

In previous posts, I've asked for the Slashdot community to help me identify good books and websites for developers and I thought the response was really useful. This time, I'd like to ask you all for your recommendations for great Linux beginner books and also what you think is the best way of showing off Linux on TV. Read on for more info ...