jTepp... asks: "The company I work for is upgrading the majority of our systems, and migrating to Linux for most of the machines. I have a lab full of early PPC Macs that I now have been told to Migrate to Linux if possible, or scrap the entire room and start over. Since this would come directly out of my IT budget, and I need to use it for other projects, I'd rather keep the machines. The catch is that most of these units are powered by 601 chips, for which I'm having a difficult time finding a flavor of Linux that will support. I see support for older chips, and newer chips, but not the 601. Anyone know why? Or where I can find support?"

mcwop asks: "My company's IT department is trying to set up secure FTP with a vendor. It would be set up on a Sun box (not running Solaris 9). I emailed suggesting they look at OpenSSH. The response I received stated that they don't like to use freeware, but only consider industry proven and supported software. I have found one commercial version at SSH. What other commercial versions are out there (I know Solaris 9 comes with SSH)? But more importantly, what are some commercial successes? What large organizations are implementing SSH?"

[RNP]Venom asks: "With AMD prices as low as ever, it leaves several of my co-workers and I asking some common questions. With some 50+ Dual, Quad, etc.. Intel-based Motherboards/Chipsets, why is it we've not seen an influx of Dual-AMD equipment? I know we have at least 4 AMD Athlon cpu's sitting around the shop here that would be great to have in an SMP setup, however short of spending $200-$500 on a Tyan Product, or around the same mark for one of the few other products with dual-Athlon Support, what can one do? Where are the $50-$100 Dual-AMD CPU boards that Intel users enjoy? A Google search reveals little but Tyan and more Tyan. I thought their 'exclusive' was only 6 months? I figure the Slashdot readers would be the best to query on current or upcoming 'affordable' products in this area."

DerBryGuy asks: "I work for an ISP in Canada. Recently we have had a rash of customers whose computers can connect via DSL, but cannot browse, or often even ping. Invariably it turns out that there is some spy ware of some sort installed on the customers machine - usually New dot Net or the other drek that comes with Kazaa. About half the time if this is removed correctly (manually or by using ad-aware) then the machine will regain http access. However the other half of the time the only option we have found is to format and reinstall the OS. So I am wondering, are other ISP's seeing this? What do they do when they get a similar complaint and they detect spyware on the machine. Is there any recourse for the customer? I mean most of these people had no idea what New dot Net was when their kid installed Kazaa, and now they are stuck with a computer store bill for reinstalling their machine."

El_Nofx asks: "I have several home videos and hundreds of video clips stored in dozens of CODECs that I want to consolidate into one format so 10-15 years from now I can show them to my children. One in particular I don't want to loose is a video of 9-11 put out in Shockwave Flash. Has anyone thought of a better way to do this, as opposed to convert them all to full-frame AVI. Is there a CODEC out there that in 10 years will still be backward compatible enough to play those old clips. There seems to be a lot of buzz around about doing everything digitally with regards to pictures, movies, etc. But what use is it if 15 years from now you can't find anyway to watch them. What really bothers me is the CPRM movement. If not done correctly, that could negate the work all of us have done to digitize video. Any thoughts?" Open Formats and CODECs will beat any proprietary format for this exact problem, and with that usual twist of computing irony, these are the formats that are least used when dealing with multimedia. Many people cite better compression with closed formats as their main reason for using them, but when the CODECs are obsoleted, they'll be then feeling the crunch. For now, consider dumping your digital videos to VCD or DVD, as these should be viewable on the consumer level players which exist. For those looking for a more economical route: VHS/Beta is also an option. Proprietary digital formats, especially the bleeding edge formats involving high compression CODECs, should be avoided at all costs.

ajaygautam asks: "For the past few months (on and off), I have been trying to locate Anime stores, rentals and theaters in and around Central New Jersey, but have not been able to find much. Only Blockbuster, which carries a very limited selection. I was wondering if there is a list of such things on the Internet somewhere. I propose that we create this 'Ask Slashdot' a comprehensive list of Anime stores, rental locations and theaters that do show Anime movies."

gammoth asks: "My company has a successful web site which gets roughly 1,800,000 hits from 45,000 sessions a day. A few years ago, our web stats software, HitList, broke when we crossed it's capacity threshold (~1,000,000 hits). I replaced it with a tailored version of Webalizer supported by an array of perl scripts and a Suitespot server plugin. My reporting system runs with little intervention, managing log files from 4 hosts, and competently reports on hits, popular pages, referrers, etc. But it's not perfect and I'm the first to admit it doesn't provide the kind of info the marketing department would find really useful. I have plans of a comprehensive system using a DB and a report engine, but I've not had the time to implement it. (We're interested in info on marketing campaign success, path through site, etc). Meanwhile, marketing is tired of waiting and the otherwise exceptionally supportive IT management (truly) is considering contracting out some of our site usage reporting. Webtrends is being looked at seriously. I was wondering if any readers out there had had any experience with Webtrends or other software package or service provider. Are there any OS packages that provide features well beyond Webalizer?"

Dasein asks: "I am working as a Tech Support Developer, and I had a wonderful idea a few months ago. After stumbling upon Trinux, I modified it so that I could run Linux on any PC with a floppy. By doing this, I was able to backup on our network valuable data on users' computers when their OS failed. This summer I wanted to develop a similar idea but this time with a CD. I was having trouble finding Linux/BSD distributions that could run solely off a CD, and I'm a bit scared to start one from scratch because I wouldn't know where to begin. Does anyone have any suggestions?" nik suggests: On the BSD front, there's the LiveCD project, which seems to do exactly what you want.

vw asks: "I was wondering if anyone has setup a webserver farm that uses both SSL and zero-affinity network-load-balancing. (i.e. requests in an SSL channel can be handled by any server in the farm) I have been having a very difficult time locating information on this specific combination of features in a web server product. The closest I found was WLBS, which implies that there must be an affinity toward a particular server for a given client IP. I understand the problem has something to do with sharing SSL certificates between physical machines. Any suggestions?"

animys asks: "In the last few years, we have begun to witness the inevitable shift from 35mm cameras to high resolution, cheap, consumer oriented digital cameras; with this, the move away from a tangible photo album has also ensued. This change has obviously left many families with huge amounts of developed pictures and albums. For reasons of preservation and usability, some families would like to convert their previously taken pictures to a digital medium - yet many have hundreds or even thousands of pictures. What type of tools can the DIY'er use to make this process easier? Beyond the obvious scanner and graphics package, is there any good quality software that can augment this arduous and possibly over-daunting task?" What about folks looking to do the opposite? Most people take decent care of their albums, and the pictures are always viewable regardless of the changes in technology. What options are there for those folks looking to make near-picture-quality hardcopies of their digital photos for inclusion in their albums?

dirkmuon asks: "The streaming video shootout on Network Computing and the subsequent Slashdot discussion touched upon the process of creating and streaming live content on Linux. The article mentioned one method that required $1000 worth of hardware, not including the camera or the Windows 2000 box. Has anyone devised a simple, specific mix of Linux software and hardware for serving up a live video feed, particularly a method that costs less than $1000? RealSystem Producer Basic and Server Basic with a capture card would cost less, obviously, but are there other solutions? For example, is there a Linux way to broadcast *live* video with the Darwin Streaming Server?" This topic was discussed over a year ago, and the answers weren't very encouraging: Real is expensive; Darwin is great but you can't watch the movies in Linux; and Microsoft Media for Linux is vaporware (and likely to stay that way). Has that year improved the outlook?

kerrys_1999 asks: "Good friends have just given birth to their first child, Ashton Tate Rogers, named after the heroes of dBase 3. I know Dr Bob, a Delphi fanatic, has children called Erik Mark Pascal and Natasha Louise Delphine. Finally there's the story that Robin Williams named his daughter Zelda after the legendary video games. Anybody know more?"

Jeramy asks: "Hello, In February I entered into a partnership with a friend and now own and operate a 'mom and pop' computer store. In this day and age of PriceWatch and $599 systems from Wal-Mart, it is very frustrating (to say the least)to try to sell anything computer related to anyone. Customers walk into the store trying to haggle down our relatively low prices (relative to what we pay plus shipping to get it here) like we are a discount fish market. So my question is: Since 'every day low prices' are not possible, what can a local store do to attract customers?"

superid asks: "Our facility is just beginning to install small wireless 802.11b networks to support our office developers and staff. I think most people end up happy with wireless and enjoy the freedom. Our little branch office has about 100 people and our whole facility has close to 3000 people, so it's reasonable to expect our wireless needs to grow. However, I have just received an email, sent to all network administrators of our facility, directing us to shut down all wireless devices until they are certified by our Information Security department. Of course I'm not surprised by this. I'm aware of the problems with WEP and tools like airsnort. I know there are numerous security products and projects, but can any of them trace a lineage back to FIPS? Wouldn't it be a major victory to see an OSS product listed as validated by NIST?"

kenp2002 asks: "I recently tried to disable my Sleep Key on a Dell GX150. I found several ways to do this manually, but now I have to find a way to script a solution to do this on over 4000 machines! I tried keyboard re-mapping both through tools (which didn't see any ACPI keys) and through Microsoft's documentation (the old HKLM\Keyboard Layout change). Does anyone know of a solution on how to either remap or disable the Sleep key through a script or a really good internet resource where I can find information on issues like this? Keyboard filter drivers are not an option unless it can auto-install itself."

cheros asks: "Due to lack of options I had to stick one of my machines in a spot where I'm worried it might get hot, so I am looking for a low cost way to monitor environment temperature. As it's a humble 486 it doesn't have sensors, but it DOES have a joystick port. I'm merely looking for one of 'OK', 'Warm', 'Hot', or 'Get the fire extinguisher!' style status info so I'm not too bothered about granularity. If I remember correctly, a joystick port gives me 2 channels to fool with. I was wondering if anyone has already been playing with the idea to use an NTC (temperature sensitive resistor), and if they got anywhere. In my case it's a matter of scanning the port every so often and sending an SMS email if the situation warrants attention. As a matter of fact, the joystick port also has a couple of switch lines as well - there's all sorts of fun to be had. The last time I've coded was in 6303 assembler on Psion Organisers, so don't expect too much of me in the way of coding skills - it'll take me a while to get up to speed in Perl. Yes, I run Linux [it's a 486 - what did you expect? XP? ;-)]"

millisa asks: "I've been looking into options for inexpensive web based load balancing services for both Apache and IIS based web servers. There are plenty of commercial products out there that claim to do the job, but they are often too pricey, offer too many features, or are unreliable. I have lost the small amount of confidence I had in the MS based NLB services and do not like the idea of running multiple services on the same system anyways. I would like to build one (or more) simple front end load balancing Linux (or BSD) servers to direct traffic to the back-end systems if possible. I have seen mention of implementations based off of the Linux Router Project or the global load balancing oriented Eddie. What approaches are other geeks out there using for their LAN load balancing needs? I am especially interested in implementations that can maintain state (ie, handle sessions) as well as do some form of request inspection (so as to redirect those pesky web spiders to their own playground so a live user has the best web experience)." It's been long enough since the last time this came up, so lets revisit this question and touch upon the new solutions that have come up since 1999.

Dean Siren asks: "When will mainstream moviemakers, such as Lucasfilm, finally replace their render farms and Renderman with a GPU (Geforce or Radeon) and Cg based renderer? Would the savings in equipment cost and rendering time be worth the learning curve? Is anyone developing such an app? We've had the tech for years with video games, but the art form hasn't really been tried. Is anyone working on this now?" An interesting thought, and it puts an interesting spin on the old computers-will-replace-actors argument. It also means good planning ahead of time, since there will be no "post-production" stage where you can clean up the mistakes, and perform the minute adjustments needed to make things just right. Do you think such an art form will ever catch on in Hollywood, or will small shops have to be the ones to pioneer this before others follow suit?

ayden asks: "Now that the universe has conspired to keep me unemployed for the foreseeable future, I'm taking the time to fill in the gaps in my Babylon 5 collection thanks to the SCI-FI channel. I'm frustrated the linear nature video tape and the problems associated with recording directly from broadcast to tape. It occurs to me that there has to be a better way. I've thought about using my ATI All In Wonder Radeon to record the program directly to my hard drive and editing the resulting file to remove commercials. Should I then record the file to video tape? Or would it be better to make a Video CD I could play back on my DVD player? Are there other options should I consider? How are people archiving shows from their Personal Video Recorders? What techniques are people using to accomplish these tasks?"

rice_burners_suck asks: "For some reason beyond my comprehension, a whole bunch of family members are coming in to visit over the next month. The busiest weekend will take place when I'll have six guests to entertain, and I don't know where I'll take them or stay with them. I'd like to have a good time without breaking the piggy bank. Where, on the Internet, can I find good vacation places and compute a budget? I'm thinking of a service similar to AAA, but online. If something like this doesn't exist, how could I go about implementing one myself?"