einstein asks: "How many other geeks out there are purchasing high speed commercial net connections to the remote areas they live, and then selling access to their neighbors to help cover costs? I know of a remote area with about 20-30 house all of which could access a wireless lan connection to share a 1.5 ADSL connection. I'm planning on bugging the neighbors to see if there interested soon, and I'd like to have some idea if this has worked for other people. So, who's doing this in a Co-Op fashion, and how is it working?" This probably won't be possible with most residential DSL providers, however would they let this fly on their commercial lines?"

a-singularity writes "I work for several small businesses and try to promote Linux and Open Source Software use amongst them. Several of them now use Open Office and have deployed Linux servers. Recently one of them acquired an InstagateEX2 for email serving. A Linux-running closed appliance, that does quite a few things including web serving. It doesn't, however, use MySQL which is something that their website runs. They can't configure a Linux server for themselves, and I don't have the security experience. Is there a place to buy preconfigured Linux servers that will run Apache, PHP, and MySQL out of the box?"

Todd asks: "Does anyone have good suggestions or advice regarding techniques for determining the checksum of a serial data protocol? I am currently working on a fun little project using a digital display sign which uses an unknown serial protocol. I cannot move on with the project until I figure this dreaded checksum out."

masonbrown asks: "I've got about 2000 songs in my MP3 collection, using iTunes on the Mac. I'd love to fill in the empty ID3 tags such as Album Title, Date, etc. automatically from something like CDDB. Is there any way to automate this after the song is already in MP3 format (like going by Artist and Song Title)?"

Recently, I've been entertaining the idea of getting into a little Java programming for a side project I'm working on, and I realized that I really don't know where to start. This led to a larger question of what the best books and websites are for pepole new to a language. What about for the experts in a language? So this week, I was wondering what slashdotters thought are the best websites to go to for information on the major languages (like C, C++, PHP, Perl, etc) and the important topics in programming (x, gtk, win32, etc). I obviously have some opinions on some of the better places to visit, but I wanted to see what slashdotters thought. (hence the paucity of links in this story) Where do people find the authorities? My intention is to ask about web sites this weekend, and books next weekend.

jstockdale asks: "Lately I've been working on the security of the few Windows boxes I administer, specifically XP and 2000 stations. I havn't had much of a problem finding decent solutions for file/email/disk encryption (besides the fact that PGP is no longer selling their products), or for smartcard or smartcard+biometric solutions (besides the limitations on key size (2048-bit RSA maximum) and flexability). However when it comes to SSH services for remote administration, windows filesharing, and SFTP for file transfers I have hit a dead end. I have looked into SSH but their SSH for Windows Servers only runs on 2000, and costs $565. I ask what solutions have /.er's found in the realm of ssh network encryption, and also in integrating all these components simply and effectively."

IOOOOOI asks: "I work at a high traffic web hosting company and we're trying to find a simple effective way to limit bandwidth hogs, some of whom we've clocked pulling over 4Gb/hr off our servers. We've tried mod_throttle and have looked into QoS/fair queuing as well as a couple of custom solutions in-house. None of these quite did the trick. Has anyone found an effective way to do this, one that can handle individual connection streams?"

WWYD asks: "I am going to be setting up a fresh web server for the company I work for and am looking for some advise. It will be a Redhat 7.3 / Apache / PHP standard everyday setup that will be hosting 50+ radio station sites. My question is about SGI's XFS file system. I've been running it at home and love the recovery time after the system dies. (I experiment a lot). Would XFS be a good filesystem for a web server?"

jackla asks: "I'm now looking for software to do traffic-control on my Windows XP box. I am connected with DSL and my upstream is capped at 96kbit/s (down is 1.5Mbit/s) - this means that high(>70kbit/s) upstream utilisation KILLS my downstream: it just drops down to about 400kbit/s and stays there unless there's more upstream space. That said, I read alot about the Linux shaping solution (wondershaper or something) which sounds exactly right, except I need something that works for Windows. What I want to do is prioritize upstream ACKs (for example) so that my downstream isn't affected by upstream use. If anyone heard of a peace of software that can do this, I would love to hear about it." It would be nice if something like this existed cheaply for Windows. I am unaware of such, but maybe a few of you have ideas. Could such a traffic shaper be built using low powered computers? If so, how would you build and configure it so it would maintain compatibility for the single Windows machine, behind it? (Think: homebuilt traffic-shapping appliance)

Dandre asks: "I'm trying to capture video from an X11 window containing a java display of my research into an MPEG. The only 'solution' I was able to find was to use x11rec, which stores an animated gif from the window. I then can presumably use various tools (mpeg2encode & gimp) to split this into separate images then bind it together again into an MPEG. I would have thought there was a simple tool to just capture directly into MPEG from the given display. Does anyone have any suggestions?"

Johann asks: "As my friend and I embark on building a large web site using open source development tools, I planned on using PostgreSQL. I was reminded that another 'enterprize' database is now released under the GPL - SAP DB. Since there have been countless Pg vs. MySQL comparisons on Slashdot, I wanted to ask: how does SAP DB compare technically to Pg?"

An Anonymous Coward asks: "Previously on Slashdot we have covered the hacking and programming of numerous consoles,- the Xbox, Dreamcast , and of course the Playstation 2. With Linux migrating to all of these platforms as fast as you can blink, why isn't it that I haven't heard anything about the Gamecube. These little beasts have been promoted by Nintendo as easy to develop for, so are there as yet any open source tools for Gamecube development? Are there any Initiatives to get an alternative OS on these systems? The feature of being able to plug a gameboy advance into one of these units makes them even more hack worthy." There was a Sourceforge project for this, but it's activity stats are fairly flat. What barriers are there in getting Linux to run on this piece of hardware, and how do they compare with the difficulties faced by similar projects on the X-Box?"

Milo_Mindbender asks: "I've been involved in doing a number of games and other realtime 3d apps and I always run into the same problem: the 3d modelers that most artists use (MAX, Maya, Softimage, Lightwave...etc) are all heavily biased towards doing non-realtime rendering using raytracing or some other technique. While they can be used to make models for realtime 3D hardware, a very large number of their features don't map well onto realtime 3D hardware. For example many of the procedural shaders used by these packages map very poorly to a hardware shader's abilities, and similarly, if you want to use a hardware shader on some polygons, most modelers give you no way to see the effect while modeling."

llamaluvr asks: "My friend is employed at a Starbucks coffeehouse, and he told me about a system they use for controlling what kind of music is played in the store. The machine can only play a particular type of CD, which contains 90-100 songs that "expire" after awhile, and is appearantly compiled/ produced by Hear Music, a subsidary of Starbucks. PlayNetwork is in charge of the the hardware. Anyway, he and his fellow employees are sick of Starbucks lame playlists, and they can't use normal CDs, as the machine tells them that the CDs are "expired". Does anybody know anything about how this system works? Is it at all possible to make a CD on your own that can be played on these machines?"

zpengo asks: "Anyone who has owned a game console for more than a month knows that sofas (or couches, or whatever you call them) are out of the question. The floor is truly the only place to go when you need serious gaming focus. But what's the best floor furniture to use? A pillow? A bean bag? The venerable Fat Guy Pillow? Or, if the ideal doesn't exist commercially, has anyone hacked together their own?"

mbishop asks: "After reading an the article on games decreasing brain activity, I thought back through childhood to when there were an abundance of 'construction set' games. I owe much of my music education to 'Music Construction Set'. These games were unique in that you could not only save a creation, but you could compile it into a standalone program that someone else could play even if they didn't have the original software. Creation was very easy, no programming necessary, and fun. My guess is that these sorts of games do much to increase the brain activity of the player. What are the 'Construction Set' games of today? Is there still a market for them?"

Oscar Carrillo asks: "We have to do a large NIH grant which collects tons of data. And much of that data is in the form of questionnaires. The forms will be available on the web, but it's mostly not feasible to have the subjects sit in front of the computer all day (not to mention that people get annoyed sitting in front of a computer all day). The study is being conducted at several universities and institutions around the country. Using Linux/JSP/Struts/PostgreSQL will take care of most of our needs. But it would save a lot of data entry, if all forms could be scanned at each site, images uploaded to the website, and then automatically put through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to get only the relevant raw data that subjects wrote. Does anyone know of something that can handle this? Are there any open source projects that can handle this? Any good commercial alternatives?"

Tarrek asks: "Eight or more hours of sitting and slouching with my feet propped up in an uncomfortable, half broken computer chair every single day for years has begun to take it's toll on my back, and I'm still quite young. I was wondering if the slashdot community might have any ideas with regards to a new chair, or just types and designs of chairs, that might be a little kinder to my back, as well as being comfortable enough to sit properly in for an extended period of time?" This is a revisit to a question from two years ago. That was then, what does the picture look like, now?

hensley writes "There is a (not quite) new effort by the IETF to standardize a framework for network applications, called BEEP, the Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol. Standardized in RFC3080, it takes care of all lower level tasks an application level protocol has to like framing, authentication and capabilities negotiation in a modular and lightweight way. In the current issue of Internet Packet Journal (a quite nice and free-as-in-beer technical publication by Cisco) is a well written Introduction to this framework. Why isn't anyone adopting this protocol besides some Java libraries like beep4j and PermaBEEP and a C library called RoadRunner. I couldn't find any applications based on this protocol, regardless of it's promised capabilities. Is everybody still inventing his own application layer protocol?"

An Anonymous Coward asks: "I'm currently working as an 'IT technician' (lowly tech support position) in the southern United States, but I am considering a move to the U.K. to be with a significant other. What's the best way to gather information like the U.K. technology job market, immigration laws, cost of living, housing arrangements, and of course, how I would move my belongings? Sites like this would be most helpful." While the link that is provided is fairly comprehensive, other sources of information, both referential and anecdotal would be appreciated.