schvenk asks: "I find myself overwhelmed by the decision about which 3D rendering package to get, and thought perhaps Slashdot readers could help me out. While I took a computer science course on computer graphics in college and am proficient in Photoshop, I'm otherwise new to working with 3D modeling, rendering, or animation tools. I tried Blender, and at least the Mac version is just too buggy and slow at this point. In addition the renderer doesn't seem quite as good as some of the commercial ones out there. There are other free apps but I have to wonder if like Blender, they won't quite stack up to the big boys in terms of UI, features, and render quality. I've read tons of reviews, but few are up to date and many aren't as helpful as I'd like. I don't have a lot of prior experience with 3D modeling (I'm a UI Designer by trade) but need it periodically for graphic design purposes, and in addition am interested in getting into it more. While animation interests me, still images are more of a priority, so the greatest emphasis should probably be on rendering quality, and modeling capability (as well as usability and speed). I'd be using it in Mac OS X."

mikosullivan asks: "I'm a programmer for the Roanoke Rescue Mission in Roanoke, VA. The mission provides meals, shelter, and other help to the homeless. We're looking at upgrading the mission's information systems to a Linux-based network, from server to desktop. One of the major wrinkles in our plans is finding a good accounting system for Linux. My manager strongly feels (and I sympathize) that they should stick to accounting software that is already used by established accounting firms. There are certainly a plethora of Linux and open source accounting packages out there, but she wants to stay away from the bleeding edge, at least for accounting. She wants a tried-and-true, established, conservative choice for accounting software. What accounting software for Linux is most accepted and established in the marble and wood-paneled world of conservative bean counters? It doesn't have to be open source, but cost is a major issue, and open source is, of course, preferred."

nileshch asks: "A very important development in recent times with regards to website users' privacy has happened with the W3C introducing the Platform for Privacy Preferences(P3P). P3P allows websites to create and maintain XML-based privacy policies for the entire website or sub sections of the site. These machine readable policies document what information is collected from users and how it is going to be used. Today, a few browsers like Mozilla/Netscape & Internet Explorer are committed to giving support for P3P (Mozilla here, IE here) . Although that support seems only skin-deep. I also find very few big sites adopting P3P seriously. Isn't it like the classic chicken-and-egg situation? Websites wait for full P3P support on browsers, browsers go slow on development because there isn't much feature demand happening on this front. Do you have P3P policies for your website? If not, what stops you from creating one? We all create hoopla over tiny privacy issues, user profiling and doubleclick.net . Then why isn't there much enthusiasm for P3P support in browsers?"

greyrax asks: "So I'm trying to convince someone to go open source for their list manager. They're about to upgrade to an expensive proprietary solution. With about 400,000 subscribers to this newsletter, a database back-end would certainly be helpful. Bounced address management and easy unsubscribes is important (I've read Smartmail vs. MailMan comparison here). Virtual host support and a web interface are desirable. Any thoughts from the /.ers since this thread last year would be appreciated."

brainchill asks: "I've got about 10,000 users split between a couple of quad 550 xeon machines. The machines have 2GB of ram. The problem is that the UW POP3 server takes a huge hit in both cpu and memory utilization when a 40+MB mail spool is requested via POP3. Sometimes it's bad enough to drag the monster boxes to their knees. What other POP3 daemons do you guys have experience with and how do they perform with large mailboxes"

EEGeek writes "With the advent of DSL a couple years back (1996 I believe), the capacity of simple twisted pair has gone from just POTS/Analog modems to high-speed internet, and now beyond. Recently the local phone company here released a new service, where you get television over the phoneline. They give you a set-top box, and a dsl modem, and you can surf the web, and watch tv on your television. you can also connect a computer or two for high speed internet. My question is, has anyone heard of any phone companies that have done this already? Have you heard of other interesting technologies over twisted pair, for example VoIP? This new service works really well, I'm extremely impressed with it." I remember being pitched movies-by-phoneline when I ordered DSL a few years ago, but have heard nothing since. Anyone with good or bad things to say about such service?

jutus writes "I work for a company which creates medical simulators using off-the-shelf components (including Linux and MacOS X). We're looking for battery powered LCD VGA monitors, but can't seem to find many appealing solutions. This just happens to be one of the rare times when Google has failed me. Does anyone know of a good starting point for such monitors and other industrial PC components?"

Mark asks: "I'm the President of the Brock University Students' Union, and recently our IT geeks completely cut off access to the Kazaa network for the entire school. It concerns me, while I understand the need to save bandwidth.. what's next? File sharing bandwidth has been throttled for quite some time here, this is the first all out "restriction" we have seen. As a Students' Union we advocate on behalf of the 13,000+ students here, and we need to develop policy around network 'censorship.' I'd love to hear your experiences and suggestions. Our website is here"

AtariDatacenter asks: "I have a teenage family member who has left the formal education system and we're wanting to enroll him into an accredited online high school curriculum. Happily, this is his wish as well. There seems to be a few services available online, but it is hard to tell very much about them from the outside. What should we be looking for? Are there any good deals (as far as quality or cost) out there?"

Clue4All asks: "The time has come for me to start looking for a new car to buy after the winter snows have come and gone. Every car I'm interested in seems to come standard with Remote Keyless Entry with all their models. Has this technology become safer since I last bought a car? I remember seeing a news story years ago about burglars receiving signals used to open garage doors, and Google turned up articles like this from a few years ago. Apparently, some keyless entry systems now use "code hopping," which changes the signal after each use, making copying the signals pretty hard. I've requested information from a few car companies as to whether they employ such technology, what are your findings? Are these safe? I ask because I live in an apartment complex, not that I'd worry about anyone living around me doing something like this, but the thought is still there."

gwhiteacre asks: "I have been asked to assist a small TelCo that has recently begun acting as an ISP for it's customers having DSL and Cable connections. They currently use the DHCP config file as their authentication database. They add/del/mod the mac address in the config file for each change, stop and start the dhcpd, and are rapidly discovering that this is not a scalable or sustainable approach. I have spent several days researching alternate forms of DSL/cable authentication and am not finding much. My current 'best thoughts' are to put a wrapper around DHCP to intercept the request, check a database, and then call dhcpd. Has anyone dealt with this or a similar issue, and can point me in a good or alternate direction."

strredwolf asks: "After upgrading my Zaurus SL-5500 to the much-better OpenZaurus 3.0 ROM, I'm left with a lack of an e-mail application that does POP. Short of compiling one up, what would folks there use with the OZ-bearing PDA? Ether a POP-capable mail app, or even a webmail system I can use Konqueror on? (And no, Yahoo! Mail doesn't work on it, even though Opera on the Sharp ROM worked well with that site)"

fishdan asks: "I know there are a few tools for selectively disabling flash in IE, but there is currently nothing in Mozilla. I'm wondering how many people have just removed Flash (as I have) by deleting the appropriate files? I find it greatly enhances my web experience, and on the very few cases when i think there is something worth seeing in Flash, I'll check it out on someone else's computer. I know someone is working on a 'disable flash from this site' for Moz X.x.x, but I'm wondering what people are doing now? I'm also actively advising people I know to remove Flash because of the lack of control for it on the users end. Short of deleting Flash, there's nothing uses can do to to stop those irritating ads. I don't mind the moderate ones, but the excessive ads are enough for me to throw the baby out with the bath-water."

frenchgates asks: "I recently moved near a long and steep sledding hill with dangerous trees right at the bottom. I have acquired a fleet of sleds at this point, plastic shells, inflatables, a toboggin, a flexible flyer, etc, but all have one potentially fatal (literally) flaw: no brakes. I figure this crowd probably takes its gravity-fun seriously so I am looking for info on sleds (or customizations) allow rapid stopping in all snow conditions."

Jack William Bell asks: "Could the PHBs possibly be right on this one? A recent evaluation I performed of competing commercial and Open Source products yielded the surprising result that the Open Source products were more expensive (in terms of lifetime costs) over a long term than many of the commercial offerings! Why? Basically this mostly revolves around higher support costs for Open Source products where no commercial support is available (unlike, say, Linux where you can purchase support from Red Hat, etc). This particular case might also be a result of one special set of requirements and environment and a similar evaluation for a different set of requirements and environment might yield a different outcome. But, nonetheless I found the experience instructive and I would like to ask two questions of the Slashdot readership: Firstly, is Open Source usually more expensive when all lifetime costs are factored in? And, secondly, is anyone in the business of providing commercial support and training for the entire universe of Open Source, perhaps contracting on a product-by-product basis? I guess a corollary to that question is, if not then why not? There might be a viable business model here!"

krog asks: "I've recently signed a contract with a local middle school to replace their aged Apple /// cluster with a roomful of IBM Aptivas running Linux 7.3. Now surely I will be installing such ease-of-use tools as KDE3, Gnome, and screen, but I am looking for suggestions of other software to install. Anyone know of any good text editors/BASIC interpreters/shells/etc suitable for eight-year-old children?"

hayduke.com asks: "I've recently been assigned to a program that is designing a 'Network Operation Center (NOC)'. I started to look for books, online material and other sources to help define a baseline for the Services Level Agreement for our intended customers. Not having any customers yet we are trying to incorporate the design elements that will provide the best possible level of service to the largest number of customers. A search on my favorite search engine brings up a lot of articles that have companies boasting that they have been recognized for being 'Best Practice' leaders in their respective fields but there are no references as to what those practices are. As this will be a NOC (pro-active) as opposed to a Call Center (reactive), I would like to know what other people think that NOC should be at bare minimum or if there are 'standards' that all NOCs should be held to."

InspectorPraline asks: "I'm doing a paper on the 'cultural aspects' of both sides of the MP3/DMCA/CBDTPA/DeCSS/etc debate, and I'm trying to find out some of the possible reasoning behind why each side feels so strongly about the way it feels. (Yes, I do understand what I'm doing.) Specifically, since the Slashdot crowd is presumably on the opposing side to the RIAA/MPAA side, I have a few questions I'd like answered so that I can do a well-informed, balanced paper (note - this isn't an opinion paper, merely a statement-of-fact paper)."

gsfprez asks: "This article documents the stories of three Microsoft customers (organizations that voluntarily buy Microsoft products) who are clearly unhappy with the product offerings of Microsoft - but are simultaneously petrified of this fact being made public. My question to the crowd is not regarding the subject matter of the article: rather, I want to know what is it that could scare a company away from telling a product vendor that they are unhappy and merely *considering* not buying their next product? Fear of reprisal (in the form of a software audit) is simple extortion...no? More ethereally - do we actually live in a world where MS not only 'demands' you buy their new products, but appears to have people pissing their pants at the thought of doing otherwise?"

Unknown Relic asks: "Because of the number of virii which are propagated through email, and the tendancy for some users to open executable attachments no matter what they are told, we have decided to seek out a server side solution. We are currently running Linux with qmail on the server side, and while a we have found a couple of products which may fit the bill, I wanted to hear about the experiences and recommendations of slashdotters on this subject. Do you or your company make use of a server side virus scanning engine, Open Source or otherwise, and if so what are your impressions?"