Luke Butcher asks: "I recently moved back to Australia and I'm appalled at the price of blank Minidiscs, here. In the UK they range to about £1 per disc and the US about $1.60 This equates in both cases to roughly AU$3. Over here the cheapest I can find them is $4.50 and average prices are $5-6. I have tried to get blanks sent from the US and UK from several online sites only to find them not able to deliver to Oz, when they can quite happily ship DVDs and the like. I have done some searching and am unable to find anything explaining this "phenomenon", other than it looks like a blatant price fixing situation. I can find no reason why consumer demand would play a part, I wouldn't mind betting all such discs are produced in Asia, so this also rules out transport costs. Perhaps someone out there can provide an explanation as to why we in Australia pay more than double the normal cost blanks."

apago asks: "I travel alot on business and always need to exchange files with other people. We are always trying to figure out the best way to link two or more PC or Mac systems together. I carry regular and crossover cables and a small hub. Even then everyone has to configure a temp. IP address or have someone running a DHCP server. Most of these people have wireless 802.11b capability. Is there a way to share files between OSs using 802.11b without having to configure a temporary network setup? The autodiscovery and configuration of Bluetooth and ZeroConf sound like a good start. I like the easy of use of P2P apps." Does 802.11b need a TCP/IP stack to work? Could a low-profile stack, designed around ease-of-use, be used instead (all you would need to connect to the network would be the SSID, for example)?

Alvin Pettit asks: "I wanted to get a Flash drive for my PC for the following reasons: it is quiet, I can save electricity and I don't have to worry about moving parts. When I looked for these drives I found them to be rather expensive, much more so than the smaller devices such as CompactFlash! Why do Flash drives cost so much more than CompactFlash devices?"

Gizzmonic asks: "I was looking at PowerPC upgrade cards for my Mac G3 Blue-and-White and I couldn't help but notice that the offerings by PowerLogix and Sonnet are quite pricey. So, I started poking around Motorola's site looking for the G4 or my dreams. I could probably pull a few strings at work and get them to order a G4 direct. Is there any reason that a G4 from Motorola wouldn't work with the ZIF socket on my motherboard? (Yes, I know about the G4 enabler software) Ordering from Motorola or one of their suppliers could potentially save me a lot of dough, but I'd hate to plunk down the money for an incompatible CPU. What do you folks think?"

rsilverman asks: "I recently bought the 23" Apple Cinema Display, which I am using on my TiBook, and I'm loving it! Now, I would like to also connect it to my Intel box running Win2k (perhaps ultimately using a digital video switch box). I thought this might be relatively simple -- I went out and bought an AGP video card with the same chip set as is in some Macs, the nVidia GeForce Ti, and it listed the monitor's highest resolution as supported. No go. Tried the Radeon 7500 -- also no go. The monitor backlight powers up, but no picture. Then I read some more, and judging from what I was able to find (and don't really understand), the monitor's resolution (1920x1200) is near the edge of what can be done using the DVI standard. Does anyone out there know more about this? Got it working?"

DrEducator asks: "Has your company ever contracted external instructors to train its programmers? Have you been satisfied with the lecturer's level of expertise? I think we all have a good grasp of how vital the role of training is to both a corporation and its employees, but given its importance should you have more of a say in selecting or evaluating instructors before they deliver training? I firmly believe in the tenet that 'geeks should train geeks'. Moreover, I think that the geeks themselves have to take a more active role in the whole process. So, I'm curious - do you think you have enough say in your training? Do you actively refer instructors that you've seen at conferences or previously taken courses from (university, college, or adult ed)? If not, have you had the opportunity to interview an instructor, or at least review their qualifications? Share your experience - how much input do you want/need/have?"

Genady asks: "Maybe I'm getting old. I've been looking around lately at all the little scripts I've created to watch log files, drive space, web pages, general SysAdmin stuff really. It's really a mis-mash of stuff I've written and aquired over the years. I've used the higher end enterprise management frameworks, as well as lower end apps like NetSaint. My problem with these has always been lack of intelligence. Does anyone know of a project to do monitoring/alerting coupled with some artificial intelligence that can learn that I don't care about particular servers after a certain time of day?"

Milo_Mindbender asks: "I'm sure many of the readers of this site know the joy of skipping commercials using a TiVO, Replay or other form of PVR box. I'm sure it has occurred to a lot of us that if someone produced a schedule of commercial stop/start times the PVR could easily make all commercials instantly vanish from a recording. While this would be really cool, if it got really popular it would KILL all the local TV stations and TV networks who depend on ads to survive. Sure, you could say it's their fault for having an outdated business model, but there's a problem: these sources are where A LOT of the content for your PVR comes from. If they die, there's nothing for your PVR to record. My question for this crowd is: 'If the commercials stopped tomorrow, what business models can you come up with that would keep TV content flowing to your PVR?'"

Jersiais asks: "I am trying to get some command line stuff running on NT4 server with Take Control installed on an old 200MH Pentium II (Before anybody throws up, it's the test-it-&-wreck-it machine, not the real thing so there's no actual LAN there). Even on the real thing the compiler under command line has a tendency to blow up at random with 'Unexpected Interrupt 0D'. This only happens on the Pentium II, on the real (Workstation) thing it doesn't. I've found 3 different descriptions of Int 0D, none of which make any sense. Anybody any ideas how to get around it, or get rid of it? The compiler is 32-bit to interpreted intermediate and I have a RP calculator running as a test on the work system already, despite its use of soft interrupt IO."

Jeff asks: "So the folks at a place called Conniption Films (great name) developed a camera called the Millisecond Camera which can shoot 12,000 frames of film a second. I read the article and thought 'Hmm that's neat' but then realized they were still using an analog process for shooting this highspeed film. Being a geek, not necessarily into the film side of things but curious nonetheless, I wonder, shouldn't a computer be able to do a better job of such a thing? They say the film runs around a spindle going 500 mph (!). Wouldn't that be prone to failure and use alot of energy? Wouldn't it be more appropriate, easier, and overall cheaper to just hook up a high res CCD to a beowulf </duck> cluster of 2 ghz+ machines and capture high speed images that way? Why hasn't it been done yet? Or has it and I haven't seen it yet?" I did a double-take, when I first read this question, and then got curious and did a little digging. Turns out, high frame rates are not exclusive to the analog photography world, and to illustrate my point, I provide this link. It's woefully short on details, and the explanations as to why a camera that can record 1M frames per second is limited to a playback of only 103 frames, but the technology is out there. Has anyone seen any other digital cameras out there with high frame-rates? What visual mischief could you aspiring photographers get into with such a camera?

enzyme asks: "A couple of weeks back, chrisd asked for recommendations on computer books. This made we wonder: What are the great chemistry books? I want to know what books the chemistry geeks recommend! What are good books on chemistry - textbooks, popular science...whatever! Anything that an intelligent person without a PhD in chemistry can comprehend. What can I read to help me understand chemistry - my old chemistry textbooks don't really do this."

patrick42 asks: "I am working on a project where I'll be replacing a DOS/Windows-based system with that of Linux or FreeBSD. The company for whom I'm working uses cheap PC's running some proprietary software on DOS/Windows to perform a certain task. The machines are deployed in environments where there are no keyboards or displays, and minimum-wage clerks are the people watching these machines. The company has decided to go with a free Unix system because they no longer wish to pay the licensing fees for Windows. The machines get unplugged all the time when they are moved or whatnot. They do not get a proper shutdown procedure ever, and it's not possible to change this due to the environments in which they are deployed. I've been told that they've never had a problem running DOS in terms of filesystem corruption. So I guess I'm looking for the safest filesystem possible that I can use with either FreeBSD or Linux. My head would be served on a platter if I picked something that sometimes requires user-intervention." Note that Ask Slashdot covered a similar question back in 1999, the situations differed, but the need remains the same: can Linux work in environments where proper shutdowns are rare-to-non-existant?

mike.851 asks: "I'm an engineer working in the embedded systems field. For the past few years, I've been using RS-232 to interconnect various modules into the embedded systems that I build. Lately, I've found that RS-232 simply isn't flexible enough for my growing needs. I need to switch to something else, and I don't think that USB is really an option for me. I've been looking into embedded ethernet as an alternative. I've found several great low-power platforms for hardware development including several of the uClinux kits as well as products from Rabbitsemiconductor. However, I'm having trouble finding ethernet hubs that meet my power requirements (my goal is 2W or better for the hub). So far I've found Ctrlink and W-linx, and I've considered replacing the power supplies in commodity hubs with switching regulators. Does anyone have experience with these products? Does anyone know of other low-power hubs? Thanks."

bhsx asks: "With all the innovations going into open source software these days, why do I still need to run Exchange to meet my clients' needs? Even when demonstrating technology like LTSP mixed with any combination of OpenOffice, Star Office, even Codeweaver's Crossover Office running the latest Microsoft suite, the clincher is always over Exchange functionality. I'm aware of Bynari's InsightServer(Coincidentally, I noticed on that page, that their code is for sale) and have started using that as a possible closer, and the cost is much less prohibitive than eXchange+w2k server+CALs; but why isn't there an open source solution to this problem yet?"

Froze asks: "This is the beginning of my seventh year in school (yes, I am a grad student) and I am looking for the most cost effective solution in a scientifically oriented PDA. A strong compatibility with Linux is a must. My background is in Physics and Mathematics, so it would be nice to have some way of handling mathematical input (like the Zaurus). An on-board language would be a plus as well, something along the lines of bash, Perl, or Java would do."

Captain Morgan asks: "I work at an engineering company where we have a website for our engineering projects. The problem is that modifying our internal website requires both file server access and the desire to locate and edit html documents. It would be great to have some kind of web based site management software that ran on apache to enable editing and other tasks via a browser. Simplifying website management would also enable more people to contribute to keeping webpages up to date. I've found a few web based site management projects but nothing that stuck out as being great. Does anyone have any experience with open source/free software solutions to this problem?"

Ikester asks: "I've been evaluating a couple of barcode scanners including the CueCat (which some of you may recall from the failed off- online marketing stint by Digital Convergence) for a cataloging application. However, getting ahold of these 'free' wands is not that easy these days and it occurred to me that an optical mouse's hardware may be able to perform a similar function with the right mouse driver. For example, it could work as a regular mouse until it 'recognizes' a valid barcode. It could then send the code as if the user had typed it. I Googled the web and newsgroups but I didn't find anything relevant. I'm wondering if anybody from the Slashdot crowd has come across such an approach. With the recent proliferation of optical mice I'm thinking this could be the next best input device for linear barcodes. I have limited knowledge about mouse drivers and the actual design of these mice. Is this even possible?"

phamlen asks: "Having hired several programmers who haven't worked out, I'm wondering if other people have better success with interviewing techniques. Usually we have a two 'technical interviews' and a final interview. The technical interviews tend to be a combination of specific technical questions ('Is friendship inherited? How would you find out?') and algorithmic ('Given the numbers from 1-10 missing one number, how do you find the missing number?'). In addition, we essentially try to interview for: intelligence/performance. technical skills (algorithmic, etc.), and team compatibility. Unfortunately, we've been burned a couple of times by people whose performance didn't measure up to what we expected from the interviews. So I'm wondering if other people wanted to share their interviewing tricks - how do you find out if someone is a good programmer?" Surprisingly enough, we've done a series of these, so if you are interested in similar questions for sysadmins, network engineers, or the one who will follow in your footsteps, then we've got it covered. We've also covered core IT questions as well. What special ways do you have of evaluating potential coders? How well have they worked out?

rmmeyer asks: "I'm in the process of building an e-mail server for my company with a new twist. Since most of the clients are going to be Windows based (don't go there, I can't change 'em) and running Outlook (I know, I know...) I need to be able to scan the incoming and outgoing Emails for viruses. A quick check on Freshmeat shows fourty-nine projects related to email viruses. I intend to use Sendmail for the MTA with the milter API for scanning. There appear to be several commercial anti-virus scanners for Linux and at least one Open Source scanner. What are the community's experiences doing this? We expect to have 150 clients and potentially several thousand incoming Emails per day. Points are added for solutions that also include the capability of scanning Samba shares! =)" Ask Slashdot last touched on this issue in this article, from early March of last year, and before that in another article from October of 2000. I'm sure things have changed greatly since then.

farrellj asks: "I have a customer that wants to be able to sychronise time on hundreds of servers that are spread all across the continental US and Hawaii. He was using publicly accessable NTP servers, but would rather have his own server that is not dependant on outside servers, and not have to worry about NTP based attacks. You can get a good quality and accurate time from GPS, so he looked at using a GPS reciever hooked up to a machine in his server room, but none of the GPS software out there seem to be able to just pull out the time, and then feed it to an NTP server. Has anyone tried to do this before, or know of a program that will read at GPS reciever and feed it to a NTP server process?"