driveLess asks: "Local hard disks are a pain, and I'd like to get rid of them. The problem? We have lots of computers running different OSes. Trying to support remote booting for every possible operating system would be a nightmare. The ideal solution would be a piece of hardware (PCI card, etc.) that emulated a drive at the block/sector level and fetched data over ethernet. The PC would think the drive was local, but it would actually be hosted on a server. Although this might sound easy, I haven't been able to find any practical way to do this. (iSCSI looks vaguely possible and might work someday, but it seems premature.) Has anyone else solved (or thought about) this problem?"

Otter asks: "iTunes comes with a sampler of MP3s selected to appeal to the Apple demographic. The one that really caught my attention was a track by Sasha and John Digweed, which has inspired me to learn a bit about electronic music. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone who likes that stuff and my local Tower Records only has Moby (didn't like it),Paul Oakenfold (not bad) and 11,000 'Best of Ibiza' sets. What are the must-haves I should start with? What are the best online communities and places to learn about new artists? Feel free to define 'electronic' as broadly as seems appropriate." I used to shop at Homebass, but they just went out of business, which is sad, as they had one of the most comprehensive selection of electronica that I have ever seen, and most of their tracks had MP3 previews. If you were going to try and turn a friend on to Electronica, what artists, songs, or even specific mixed sets would you suggest? What online sources of electronica are still around.

gauthier-s asks: "KEO is a project that intends to place a geostationary satellite in orbit that will keep our messages for future generations (up to 50k years after our current existence) as a 'souvenir of Humanity'. Everyone is invited to submit his own message to future civilizations, since it costs nothing to do so. It has been said that any message submitted will be included without any censorship. These messages will be stored for the long trip onto glass disc, which will hopefully be readable by whatever future technology exists when it is recovered. Submissions are possible until December 31, 2002, so take the time to think about your message!" If you feel inclined to share, what kind of message would you leave to the future children of Earth?

toaztke asks: "I've been charged with a quest by one of my employers. I am to sit on a regional committee and figure out how we can get high speed internet access all across Michigan's Upper Peninsula. For those of you not too familiar with the far north of this state one word can describe it all: 'rural'. So what I would like to know is if any Slashdot readers have any ideas/suggestions for me. Please send anything that crosses your mind my way. If you want more information on the project, just visit the Link UP website."

Jwfulcher asks: "This is kind of backwards from what normal people do, which is why i'm having problems finding any documentation on it, but I have around 150 users on exchange, with distribution lists and a few custom recipients as well. The CEO wants to switch to a Unix based POP/IMAP mail solution for licensing reasons (we don't use the groupware functions anyway), I was wondering if anyone knew of a method to convert the exchange userbase and add the users on a FreeBSD system and possibly point to our Radius server (which is capable of doing NT authentication) for authentication on those accounts."

cwikla asks: "Back in the .COM days, I worked at eGroups, now owned by a larger Company. During my time I added a couple of easter eggs to the site, which I was reminded of while watching Being John Malkovich this weekend. I checked, and ones sort of still there. If you append malkovich=1 to a message URL it would turn the message into 'malkovich' mode. It sort of still works, but over time I guess the code has been a changin' so it's kind of spotty. Oh, there are others that still are in there, but where's the fun of telling all the secrets? Any other folks done anything equivalent, especially on mainstream sites?"

Onion asks: "My company is considering giving us a new Computer Room, and Command Center, as our existing building is nowhere near meeting current needs, let alone future needs. I have seen a few plans for command center furniture, but no real designs or ideas for the layout of these two rooms. We have five racks for the actual computer room, and need around 25 screens for the command console. Add to this bench space for repairs, and things like: a cupboard, bookshelf, plus more storage space, and the design becomes more complicated. We need enough space for three or four admins. Has anyone seen plans for this type of setup ?"

PacketStorm asks: "There's always an argument between TCP and UDP users. TCP users complain that UDP is non-determinstic and lossy, while UDP users complain that TCP is slower and nobody needs all the features anyway. So the question is - has anyone actually seen/experienced UDP loss in high-traffic environments? Is the degeneration of UDP any better or worse than TCP in a congested environment? TCP also craps out in times of congestion, but at least you know - or do you? Experiences?"

An Anonymous Crawdad asks: "My workplace is a mixture of Windows and Linux users, but we use Exchange as our email server for the groupware features. For the Linux users this makes it necessary to have a second Windows box just for email. I'm curious as to how well the Ximian's Evolution and Connector works with the Exchange server since it has been out for a little while and reviews on the net are a little lacking. I don't think there is a "try before you buy" option. My general belief is that 1.0 releases are never worth buying, but how much hope should I have for the future?"

Gentu asks: "OSNews runs a quick blurb and poll on the idea of an ad-sponsored OS or desktop. What is interesting is that the answer is a bit hard, as embarrassing commercialism is against the freedom of Open Source Software, while on the other hand, it is a handy and easy way to get funding for your favorite open source project. What does Slashdot think about the issue? Which is more important: the software and how we can continue evolving it by any legal means, or the licensing and philosophy behind it?"

PhaseBurn writes "In all my findings, I've yet to see things like Bawls or Jolt in a soda machine. Even bottled water is hard to come by... Working in a call center for an ISP, we don't have to worry too much about what's popular with the rest of the world, and so, I'm tasked with finding a vending machine replete for geeks. While Jolt can come out of any normal soda machine that supports plastic bottles, the glass Bawls bottles woultn't fare so well. Do they make a soda machine that would work for this? What's around your office... And what's popular among the geeks today, as I want it to appeal to the vast majority of our staff?" Why use a vending machine when a community cooler would work just as well. With that aside, what kind of beverages would you like to see more of in vending machines?

Leandro Dardini is desperately seeking Hinrich: "As consultant for a local provider, I have to present a solution for a big problem: tunnel IPX over IP to permit old application users to connect via Internet. After digging google, I found ipxtund, written by Hinrich Eilts in 1998. It works great even after 4 years, but I have a question to the author. The author vanished. After searching again in Google, I found the last clue of Hinrich in a post on 23 Jul 1999, then nothing. I don't want to think the worst, but, Hinrich Eilts, where are you?"

Ellen Spertus asks: "My husband and I lease a pure electric GM EV-1, which we love, and need to replace our second car, a conventional Honda Accord, which recently died. We'd get a second EV-1, but GM has stopped making them. I haven't been able to find any available all-eletric car with the range (>=50 miles roundtrip) and speed (>=65 mph) that I need. Does the Slashdot community have any experience, wisdom, or advice on choosing an alternative fuel car?"

matt conway asks: "I'm working in an alternative school for 'at-risk' kids: Inner-city, economically disadvantaged, K-8, in a midwestern rust-belt city. Seems Handspring has a program to provide their hardware for these kids. I'm looking for suggestions on how to use their products to give these kids a leg up in life. Obvious uses are collaborative class projects beamed back and forth, GPS to map out neighborhoods and incidental environmental data, digital photography and writing to produce a school paper. I'm not a CS major, so I wondered if ./ readers had more suggestions for turning hardware into better brains." If Handsprings aren't ideal for this sort of thing, what handhelds might be a decent replacement?

Sludge asks: "I just finished leading a team through a software project. It was the first of it's type for our company: financial transactions were involved, and it was therefore very fault intolerant. In order to complete this, a set of regression tests were written. For example, if the amount of money collected doesn't match up to our order table, we get notified via our cellphone's text messaging as soon as the cronjob picks it up. Lots of other implementation-specific tests exist as well. My question is, how common is this for the software industry? My company had never heard of this before I came along. Is it the norm? (When you answer, also say whether or not your company does risk management.)"

An Anonymous Coward asks: "On Windows XP today when i ran 'netstat', I noticed an http connection to wustat.windows.com. Several minutes later when i tried again I had an http connection to wutrack.windows.com. A search on google yields few results. Since windows.com is registered to microsoft, it makes me curious to know what wustat and wutrack stand for and what their purpose is. Is it Windows Usage Statistics/Tracking?" Has anyone else seen this on their XP systems?

DavonZ asks: "Like many Linux users, I have installed Ximian's Gnome desktop. The biggest issue is that Ximian is still based on Gnome 1.4. With the release of Gnome 2.0, many users have looked into upgrading Ximian to Gnome 2.0, but there are different approaches to this. One, the 2.0 Developement Snapshot available in RedCarpet. Another, the Ximian RPM's that are available via the Gnome.org web pages. Has anyone used either approach? Which is the most stable? Which will allow RedCarpet to upgrade to Ximian's Gnome 2.0, when it becomes available?"

NeedaFirewall writes: "With all of the recent vulnerability announcements and increased concern about terrorism, a lot of folks are starting to take security and privacy more seriously, both at the network and node levels. Large companies can afford to send their IT people to detailed technical security conferences offered by the likes of SANS, Blackhat, and others. Some of these cost thousands of dollars for a single seminar, class, or other event. Small companies and individual programmers, network admins, etc (like me!) often can't afford these. Where can they go to learn more about security? Are there quality security conferences, seminars, trade shows, and the like out there that the little guys can afford? Particularly broad-scope gatherings that can teach these 'security newbies' the basics and alert them to the most pertinent threats?"

An Anonymous Coward asks: "I have been tasked by my noble employer to find a better way accessing the 4,000 odd management documents and procedures we have. Currently MS Index Server is being used to provide a fairly good searching system. Index Server (for those that don't know) trawls through files and indexes their content.. ASP is then used to search the resulting database. My question is, there has to be a way to do this with nice open source software? Does anyone know of any competitors to index server that can index microsoft office documents? Thanks!" Might not HT://dig be a good foundation on which to build such a system?

sheetzam asks: "I am the manager of the mail system for a reasonable (3000 employees) sized media company. Recently a website has decided to post the e-mail addresses of a few of our employees, and suggest readers send those people abuse. We know we have no legal recourse for removing the e-mail addresses from the offending web site. We can't filter the abusive e-mail based on header information because it is coming from many places. Our only choice seems to be to change the person's e-mail address. If this were an abusive phone call, we'd know exactly how to handle it. But e-mail is quite different. How are others dealing with this?"