byronne asks: "It seems like spam has escalated so much lately that it seems to actually become a quantifiable bandwidth waster. The less bandwidth available, the less productivity due to spam-dedicated bandwidth is lost. Being primarily a phone system transmitted medium, why can't unsolicited junk email be regulated and controlled like junk fax? Just a simple question that I haven't seen anybody ask or relate together." SPAM is becoming more and more of a problem with today's e-mail. I used to find e-mail a valuable tool for communication, but even with filters, folders and SPAM software, I spend more time culling my inbox than I do reading mail (and if I see one more mail with "allhallowmas" in the title, I'm going to go postal!). Is regulation the answer? Many people fear such a move, but might it be time to give it some serious thought?

An anonymous reader asks: "After being away from IRC for over a year, changing ISPs and moving my physical self to another apartment, tonight I tried to get back on EFnet. With a brand new IP, and a brand new computer, I discovered that all over EFnet, all channels related to Linux are banning all Canadian Sympatico users, this includes high speed customers, dial up users, and business users. In fact, the ban is quite severe and bans the entire sympatico.ca domain. I've tried to message several operators in #linux, #linuxhelp, and #slackware, but nobody is responding. What's going on?"

musicmaster asks: "If you search the net for free drawings you will find a lot of them, but usually they are free for private use only. I tried to look for drawings that are really free - that is public domain, but I didn't find very much. Wikipedia has some images - scanned from books with expired copyrights - but not much Could you help me further?"

Mattygfunk asks: "Coming to the submission date of a major university project the other day, myself and another group member coded in XHTML/CSS and ASP (yuk!) for 27 hours straight to complete it. What is the longest Slashdot readers have coded in a single session? Apart from being more organized and having plenty of coffee, do you have any tips on getting through ultra-long coding sessions?"

DBOrNotDB asks: "At some of the places I've worked in the past, there have been DBAs who generally insisted that given accurate specifications and enough hardware and software, you could stuff nearly anything you wanted to into a database, manipulate it, and pull it back out again in a reasonable time. The feeling at my current workplace seems to be that very few projects lend themselves to database usage and that a customized one-off data storage solution should be developed for each project. This seems like a violation of many major software engineering principals (e.g. reuse) to me. My question is, what kind of success or horror stories does the community have about trying put different projects into databases? Numbers (# of rows, tables, total data storage, cost, etc) would be nice, but even just anecdotes would be helpful."

amokk asks: "Let's assume for a second that somebody would want to take the time and effort to build a Personal Computer but base it on a PowerPC architecture. Besides saying 'Buy a Mac' (I already have one) or 'Buy an IBM server', is there any way of acquirng the individual parts and slapping them together? Why you would want to do this isn't up for debate. Rather, this is one of those 'wouldn't it be neat if...' type of experiments."

adrian asks: "I've been wrestling with this problem some time now. I'm looking to buy a new machine to act as a SQL server. Unfortunately, we have to use M$ SQL Server 2000 and the per CPU unlimited licensing is very expensive. My question is this: Is there a benefit to running 4 slower CPUs as opposed to running 2 faster CPUs on a MS SQL box? I've found some people seem to think having more processors is better for SQL server... But, getting only two CPUs is certainly cheaper for licensing. Will performance suffer even if the two CPUs are faster? I've searched high and low using google and have yet to find any good hard numbers or benchmarks. Take these machines as an example: A quad PIII Xeon 550Mhz/512k cache box versus a dual P4 Xeon 2Ghz/512k cache box. The P4 machine would be more expensive, but we would save about $10,000 on licensing. And I know a 2Ghz P4 wouldn't be as fast as a 2Ghz PIII (if it existed) but yet I still want to think the dual P4 rig would be faster. The machines I am looking at are both IBM boxes with the same RAID and disk configs, 4 gigs of RAM, etc. Maybe some Slashdot. readers, who have experience with similar situations, could shed some light on this topic?"

Lil Fritz asks: "Following on from the cool Flash Adventure game last week, this geezer Neil Pearce has written a full client side JavaScript CPU chess player (which drew with me, but then I'm papz at Chess). Now this sort of thing always amazes me. Doing stuff for which it was never intended. Do we have other warped (ie 'they wrote it in what?!?') uses of languages and tools?"

The Mainframe asks: "I visited a nameless college campus recently and was shocked at the degree of specialization within the student body. Of the many CS and other IT-related majors that I talked to, not a single one had any real breadth of experience. Web developers knew Perl, but couldn't tell Apache from MySQL. C++ coders knew their language, as long as it was presented in Microsoft Visual C++. I suspect if I'd asked them to use G++ they would have said 'bless you'. Essentially, I'm worried. I plan to do some very interesting things in the next few years, but I'm not going to be able to pull it off if I have to wade through 100 narrow-minded people for every 1 useful human being. Is this something that other employers and co-workers have been having a lot of problems with? Is the whole world having to show its database developers how to use a copying machine?"

{e}N0S asks: "The cable guy came over to install a cable modem at my Dad's house. As I watched him do his stuff I noticed he was installing something called Broadjump Client Foundation. I know you don't need software for a cable modem to work so I asked if it was necessary. He said he had to do his list of things, and we had to sign that he did his list of things, otherwise he couldn't leave it with us to use. Since I can always remove the software, I agreed, but I noticed while he was flipping through the install, he was clicking 'agree' on every EULA that came up. Doing a search on Google for 'Broadjump Client Foundation' comes up with some pretty scary stuff as far as what it does, like: 'Builds a database of subscriber demographics and buying behaviors to help evolve and refine marketing efforts.' Now, how does this affect us? Neither myself or anyone in my family agreed to the software; the cable guy did. And is there anyway to get cable companies to stop doing this as I can imagine since the cable company is a monopoly in this town, that the percentage of people who still have this software on their computers is pretty high."

aibrahim asks: "I just saw a proton pack (alternate site) a friend has built. It made me wonder what other neat high tech things the Slashdot crowd might be brewing up for the coming holidays. What I am really after is stuff that one of you made, better yet would be diagrams or explanations of how you made it. Doesn't have to be a costume item, anything interesting that fits the season would do." This is a follow-up to the earlier article. So what are you dressing up as for Halloween, and how do you plan on making your costume interesting?

Dan Lyke asks: "Friends and I have gotten into reading short stories to each other. I'd like to start recording these. There are tons of decent audio recording apps out there for music and sound effects, but what I really want is something more oriented around recording prose; organize a longer recording session into sequences of "takes", with the edit decision list made in mostly real time (ie: that sentence was good, or re-take from the last checkpoint). A prototype is only a few tens of lines of wrapper code around one of the command line recorders, but I'd rather be building on other's efforts. Anyone out there got suggestions for Un*x recording apps centered around spoken word and prose?"

LightForce3 asks: "I'm a beginning CS student, and in my studies I've come across examples of programmer error causing very large problems, such as the Ariane 5 failure and the Therac-25 accidents, often as tales of caution to beginner programmers such as myself. My (morbid?) curiosity has been piqued, and I'm looking for other examples of programmer error leading to serious problems. After all, it is better to learn from the mistakes of others than from your own, right? ;) What programming-related accidents, incidents, and failures, both well-known and obscure, do Slashdot readers know about, and are there any good resources for researching these?"

naph writes "It seems that as programming languages have developed there has been a steady increase in the level of abstraction they use. Early languages were all very low-level, but successive generations have become higher and higher. Is this trend going to continue, or do you think we've reached a kind of happy medium between power and abstraction? Would developers prefer higher level languages, or is the direct control of things good? I was just wondering what other developers out there thought of this."

CoolVibe asks: "Remember that project called 5dwm? It was supposed to give us free Unix users a Magic Desktop clone. The project seems to have died. What happened to it? Are there any mirrors? As far as I can remember, this project wasn't open source. Too bad, because if it was, we would have a MD clone. Anyone who remembers working on a SGI machine (I used to use an O2) probably has fond memories of the Magic Desktop for IRIX. If anyone from SGI is listening, how about porting that fantastic piece of work to Linux and the *BSD's?"

Martin writes "I just saw the DVD Region-Free utility, the other day. 'It allows you to watch all region DVDs on any DVD drive (especially RPC2) even if it has been locked. You don't need hack DVD drive (flash firmware) which is sometimes dangerous, useless or unavailable.' This seems really significant to me, yet I haven't heard anything about! Is this the first software based solution to RPC2?" Of course, it should be stated that the software mentioned above is for Windows only. Are there other similar pieces of software for other platforms?

cr0sh asks: "I have a question that I am hoping someone can answer - today I was looking into cheap handhelds - I first looked at Palm, then at Handspring, then at something called LinuxDA, which seems to be a company offering not only an embedded Linux for handhelds, but also a device with it pre-loaded as one of their products. Looking at each of these companies offerings, I began to notice how they all seemed to be identical, hardware-wise (case, processor, button-layout, memory size, etc), so my question is - is there some company in Asia making the hardware, which each of these companies now source from, with the difference being the software on the platform? Handspring was kinda "spun-off" (not in the traditional sense) of Palm, but what is LinuxDA? The hardware they have looks the same, and their software can run on Palm devices. They surely didn't design and built their own hardware, and besides, each of these companies having such similar designs would cause them to lob trademark infringement lawsuits around - but they aren't - that only leaves the option of one of them acting as the source for the hardware, or an outside supplier. Basically, I want to know where I could get the bare hardware..."

richeddy asks: "I am going to start teaching elementary school in the near future. As a new teacher, I have the crazy idea that I might be able to actually teach my students a few things that other teachers just don't seem to be able to teach. This involves teaching methods that might be a bit unconventional. To this end, I am interested in building and installing a network of classroom computers that the students can use in real-world ways. That's right, no glorified flash cards in my classroom! I want my students using computers for research, presentations, writing, data collection and analysis, etc. In order to do this, I am going to have to personally foot the bill for the hardware and software. So I am looking for suggestions on what direction to go. I figure that I will need 5-7 computers to accomplish my vision, and I can't imagine paying for Windows and Windows apps. It looks like my only real option is to build the systems myself, which isn't a problem. Any ideas? Suggestions? Comments?"

zpengo asks: "I'm trying to find the best way to implement a large-scale Electronic Software Delivery (ESD) service for my software company. I've been able to find very little information online (after weeks of research) so I must take it to America's best and brightest. Have you ever worked with ESD on a higher than plain-vanilla FTP level, and if so, what did you learn from it? When do you consider the product 'delivered'? Was it worth it? (I'm planning to put together a public domain whitepaper on the subject with the information I gather, to help fill in the gaps I found while researching online)."

like-it-or-not asks: "I'm the network admin for a Mom & Pop chain of warehouses and stores. The owners finally want to take the leap to the 'online market' and have asked me to build them a storefront (catalog and shopping cart, etc.). I haven't done any Web building in several years so I haven't kept up with the many changes in the field. Rather than construct something 'from scratch', I'm wanting to just buy (and then customize) a 'store in a box' (pre-made HTML+CGI+? templates). I've looked around some and wonder what recommendations this community might offer. I have only one requirement: I want to 'own' the software and hardware, not simply use it as a part of renting some space from a provider). Thanks!"