FrozedSolid asks: "I can understand that the kernel contains many drivers and support for a lot of platforms, but the fact that the full kernel download can amount to 32mb doesn't make it any easier to download with a 56k modem. Kernel patches are nice, but obviously only apply when you have access to an entire kernel tree beforehand. Is there a way you can download a leaner linux kernel source? Is there a place that carries sources for x86 only or possibly sources without some of the less popular drivers?"

Istealmymusic asks: "Now that Nmap 3.00's idlescan technique is fully documented, thousands of vulnerable NT and Linux hosts on the Internet are being exploited to perform stealthy port-scanning. My employer's Linux cluster was a victim of these attacks; apparently he has been used to perform hundreds of port scans on DDN machines. Needless to say we where contacted by the sysadmin and forced to blacklist the cracker. However, our Linux cluster is still vulnerable to the idlescan exploit from other attackers, and I believe our company has a false sense of security. OpenBSD is the only OS I know of which randomizes the IPID sequence therefore making it invulnerable to the idlescan, but we have neither the time nor urge to migrate to OpenBSD. How can one secure their Linux or NT TCP/IP stack from malicious idlescanning?"

krisguy asks: "As a Oxygen Transfill Technician for a DME (Durable Medical Equipment - wheelchairs, oxygen, and such) company, my only regulatory problems have been with the FDA. Recently, due to good management of FDA regulations, I was appointed HIPAA security officer for my company. I looked at the 'helpful' compliance manual from our buying group, and realized that I have to try to get over twenty people who have 'limited knowledge of computers' (read: don't want to learn) to begin to use stuff like PGP, ANSI X12 codes, and having to write, train, and enforce procedure rules. To top this all off, I only have until April 14, 2003 to get most of this fully functional or forced to have the company shut down. I am wondering if any Slashdot readers in medical fields are feeling the pain of HIPAA like I am right now, and what ways can I get everyone to comply besides "You don't do it, you don't work here."?" Ask Slashdot last touched on HIPAA issues when this article which concerned itself with Windows 2000 and HIPAA issues. For those who have already hopped thru the rings that represent HIPAA compliance on an general basis, what did you have to insure was done?

James asks: "My employer is a small consulting firm. Our owners have always tried to sell us as a solutions provider and tried to land project based contracts. Currently though our only truly successful business model is staff augmentation. I feel that our main failures in project based contracts is in our bidding and software development process. Our sales staff always seems to oversell our capabilities (not technically, time and money...I cannot squeeze 70 hours of work into one day). I want to better formalize our processes and was looking into the IEEE/EIA 12207 standard. Has anyone gone though the pains of formalizing to this extent their software development life cycle? If so, are there any tips, good resources to look to for insights?"

Adam Wise asks: "I'm a high school senior planning a career in science, and I don't have any plans for the summer. I'd like to put these two facts together to entertaining and educational results of the do-it-yourself variety. Reading about the home made electron microscope got me thinking along the lines of a similar project. Are there any resources specifically geared towards DIY scientists beyond baking soda and vinegar volcanoes?"

Veeru writes "In my career, I have run across some whopper error messages, but a call from the mainframe sysop one night beat them all: 'We are experiencing MVS processor spin loops, the programs are running while holding a disabled CPU. This is causing XCF communication delays to the point where we are losing VTAM RTP routing, are suffering OSPF adjacency failures on TCP/IP dynamic routing and MIM VCF failures. Whatever this code is, it should NOT be propagated to production or we run the risk of losing the development plex if XCF signaling is adversely impacted by processor disabled spin loops'. My friend once got an error message 'Error 2 while trying to report error 2'. I would be curious to hear from the Slashdot community on encounters with other bizarre error messages."

Not-a-BOFH asks: "About seven years ago while SysAdmin'ing for a (then) small software company, I was approached by the CEO regarding a technical issue. He explained to me that he got a bit hot headed at another employee and sent said person an email that he now wished he hadn't sent. His request to me was to dig through this person's email and delete it before he came in that morning. As the SysAdmin, this was certainly possible for me to do, but I've always tried to remain ethical when having such access to sensitive documents. In the case of email, I explained to the CEO that to me it was like tampering with the U.S. Mail, and I wasn't comfortable doing it. Long story short, my boss had no issue with it, and wound up doing it anyway. Looking back now, I'm not really all that surprised that that decision of mine led to my getting fired, but I've always wondered how many other people have had similar situations happen to them, where personal ethics and CEO heavyhanding came into play, and their job security suffered from the clash."

Dan asks: "Our research group just moved into a new lab, and I am in charge of organizing the computer systems. A graduate student half-joked about finding a way to get the lab a DVD burner. At first I thought using DVD for backup would be cumbersome, but then I found a few products designed for backups. I targeted a DVDRAM Jukebox by Powerfile for $4000. While it appears to be a good solution for nightly backups, Powerfile does not support Linux. After searching for topics on Linux support for DVD backup systems, I found an unsupported script that was hacked together. There must be more support out there, right? Has anyone else had experience with using DVD as an automated backup system? It wouldn't be such a good idea to spend $4000 on hardware we couldn't guarantee to work, but it would be sweet to have a jukebox DVD burner running on Linux."

arizaphale asks: "I stand in front of the somewhat complex task of load testing a fairly simple distributed telecom computer system. Is there anyone who has links or references to where I can find information about some theory on which I can base my tests? Both formal theories and test methodology are of great interest to me."

zonker asks: "I live in a relatively new, moderately sized home that doesn't have conduit in the walls, nor does it have extra wires for networking. I am investigating getting a broadband connection, but first I have to decide how I will connect the network for the 6 computers in the house. As per the owners, I am not allowed to drill holes in the walls, and as per my girlfriend, I am not allowed to run Cat5 through the halls, so I am looking at my alternatives: wireless, HomePNA, and HomePlug. I'm afraid the house is a little too big for wireless without getting expensive, so it looks like either phonewire, or electric-wire. I've done some initial googling for people's opinions of these products and my quick findings where that magazine and website reviews seem to be favorable of some of them, while personal accounts seem to vary wildly. What solutions have worked for you? Are these things ready for primetime? Or should I suck it up and buy a few WAP's to extend the radius of a wireless network?"

Han Onymous asks: "In nine months my contract as a research assistent at my Alma Mater will come to an end. It will not be renewed, I don't want it to be anyway. But outside the economy is too ill to welcome me. I am young. I am healthy. And I want to see the world before I've got the wife and the kids and the double mortgage. I have no money saved, and I don't plan to save some until then. What can a skillful geek (electrical, electronical and software engineer, speaks three languages fluently) like me do to see the world. Volunteer ? Working for a multinational with exchange programs? Something with no connection at all to the tech world? Please share your experience."

NaDrew asks: "Fox has seen fit to use two of its worst broadcasters (Joe Buck and the horrid Tim McCarver) for the upcoming World Series. I'd love to just turn down the TV and listen to the Giants' regular broadcast team (Duane Kuiper, Mike Krukow, Jon Miller) on my local Giants affiliate radio station, but as a DirecTV user this doesn't work. Why? Think about it: The radio signal traverses the 20-odd miles from Sutro Tower to my home in Palo Alto in a fraction of a second, but the video signal goes from KTVU's broadcast center in Oakland via satellite to DirecTV's operations center in Boulder, then via satellite again to my home--22,500 miles x 4 bounces equals almost 100,000 miles. Coupled with the MPEG processing done at DirecTV's operations center, this adds up to a delay of about six seconds. What I would like to do is buffer the audio from my radio for the appropriate amount of time and then play it back in sync with the video. Ideally I'd like a software solution that will run under Win32. A Google search yielded some specialized hardware solutions but nothing for my purpose. Ideas, pointers, even 'you idiot it's right here' flames are welcome. Thanks!"

Linuxathome asks: "I'm a resident in the Washington DC-Baltimore Metropolitan area. If you've kept up with the news lately, you've probably have heard about the serial killings. I realize that this question may spark a political debate, but my question pertains to current technology. The gun law debate has been recently re-ignited. And the hot topic of current is in regards to fingerprinting firearms. Gun rights supporters argue that the technology behind fingerprinting is not reliable (see John Dingell). Dingell estimates there are approximately 50 million gun owners in the US (I don't have estimates of how many guns are out there). Is an image database of 50 million spent casings not feasible?" What issues, both technical and political, would there be surrounding the creation (and the current hold up) of such a database?

An anonymous reader asks: "Like many others these past few weeks, I took the time to download the latest RedHat (replace with your favorite distro here) and upgrade my system. Despite the usual mail hangovers (corporate mail is still Outlook through POP3, etc.), the new *Office suites are great and I can almost dump Windows. However I was amazed at the sorry state of Linux instant messaging. Before you flame me, mod me down or doom me to a lifetime of Windows usage, allow me to explain: I am not a native English speaker, and it seems that every single Windows IM client I use (except Trillian) can deal properly with accented characters. Worse, every third-party Linux client I have tried deals with them differently, resulting in garbled (vaguely Unicode-ish) junk! Does the Slashdot crowd (especially the non-English folk) have a solution for this? (Short of VMware and Win32 clients, that is. Wine doesn't work at all for me)"

Stuee asks: "Isn't it about time my friend and I could sit opposite each other on the train and share documents or images without having to build a small network?! I mean, what's the point of both systems having infrared, and software to bridge the platform gap, if we can't connect? It's so frustrating that my XP laptop reports that my friend's iBook is in range, but cannot do anything about it, especially when my phone (which was a fraction of the cost of either laptop) and pocket device can communicate with both machines without any problem! If anyone knows of a workaround for this (other than cables), I think there would be a lot of people interested in hearing about it. Thanks for listening."

subversionfactor asks: "I am a philosophy student with an intense interest in mathematics and programming. However, while I've always been able to find books about various experimental areas of mathematics, I've never seen (m)any on the subject of programming theory. Most bookstores' "Tech" sections only include how-to books and books about why dot-coms failed. Does anyone in the Slashdot community have any recommendations for books dealing with any aspect of programming theory?"

XNuke asks: "I have been searching for intelligent discussion (on dead trees or otherwise) of the issues involved in designing very complex GUIs. Things on the level of TecPlot, AutoCad, 3DS, etc, where there may be very many different views of the same data and there are many degrees of freedom for the user. I am not interested in 'where to put the buttons', but rather the nuts and bolts of making the 'Well Designed UI' work. I guess I am looking for a sort of 'Design Patterns applied to a big deskptop application' sort of discussion. It is no problem to find discussions of Model-View-Controller concepts at the component level, but at the application level there seems to be nothing. Too often the architectural level discussions encompass non-interactive, server side design issues and not the extremely chaotic problems a client side application with many degrees of freedom has. Short of wading through megabytes of source code for KWord et. al., does anyone know of any digested information? There is obviously no 'One Solution' to this, but there must be something out there."

stevenso asks: "I would like to set up a low power radio station (on the cheap) that people could call up and discuss topics. To make it mostly hands-off (ie. I don't have to be there to pick up the phone) I was thinking of using a few voice modems and send the discussion via a sound card to a transmitter. Does anyone know if there is a software package that can handle multiple voice modems, setup a teleconference (mix the signals), and send it out as audio? Can you think of any other solution like using some sort of auto-answering/auto-conferencing system or VOIP or a way to conference cell phone signals? Please keep in mind this is a technical question not a question about FCC regulations."

Tom Davies asks: "Every GUI platform has a document which describes the conventions developers should use when building GUIs with that toolset. There are also lots of good resources for Web site usability (e.g. Jakob Nielsen's useit.com). But what about web -applications-? I am developing an intranet application which is aimed at people who use it every day, not those who stumble on a web site and need to be able to use it immediately. It can have a higher learning curve, but must deliver more 'client/server like' usability. Are there any sites/books which address how to make HTML GUIs for applications?"

leonia asks: "At Columbia University, we are investigating methods and software to automatically deal with sudden, unpredictable load spikes ala the 'Slashdot effect'. We are looking for web sites that have been the 'victim' of this effect who would be willing to share anonymized web logs with us. If you know of a site that went under after it was mentioned on Slashdot or similar site or are the proud owner of such a site, we'd love to talk to you."