Curious Geek asks: "I'm in the market for a good, cheap laptop. Primarily I'm looking for something that is relatively rugged, has a LONG batter life, and that is *nix friendly. I'd primarily use it for Perl, PHP and Java coding either on client sites, in front of the TV, or on the train. It would also be nice if I could run dummy websites from it and let it take care of customer invoicing (again, this is all going to be Perl/PHP/Apache stuff) At the moment, the best bet looks like an apple iBook, it has a 5 hour battery life, ships with OS X (although I could use mac linux or YDL) and is rugged enough that loads of spotty yoofs have been given them at school. It also has the ability to house an internal wireless LAN card, which is pretty groovy. Can anybody recommend anything better? My price range is limited ~$1400 USD. I know that for that price I could get an X86 laptop - but do any of these have a battery life as good as the iBook?"

benreece asks: "During my few years as a programmer/developer I've come across some strange bugs. Recently I found that Microsoft's VB/VBScript(ASP) round function has problems (for example, 'round(82.845)' returns '82.84' instead of '82.85'). It took me an annoyingly long time to realize the problem wasn't mine. I'm wondering what other obscure, weird, and especially annoying bugs in languages/compilers/etc have frustrated other developers." Memorable bugs. Every developer has one. What were yours?

carefulCredit asks: "I just checked my AMEX balance, and found around $13k in fraudulent charges. Fortunately, AMEX makes it relatively easy to get a new card and the charges revoked, but this is the second time I've had this type of problem. It's clear to me that the steps I've taken to prevent fraud are inadaquate. (reduced number of cards, restricted availability of some funds, increased vigilence in not allowing CC slips to display the full card #, etc). What measures have any of you taken, or can you suggest, to help put a lid on this problem and to help prevent repeats?"

debrain asks: "How does one access accent characters (such as tilde, grav, acute, etc.) over normal characters in XFree86? I am quite good with Linux, X, and the like, but I have never found a *good*, *simple* way to do this. Some programs have post-character keystrokes, such as 'a' followed by 'alt-g' or some such, but is there a consistent way to do this, without hacks such as 'dead keys' in XFree86?" A system-wide facility for entering such chars would be a nice thing, if it does exist, then please share the info. Most apps have their own handling for these special characters. What applications do have keystrokes that allow you to easily add character accents, and if you were to design a system-wide handler for such, how would you do it?

ZMan asks: "A lot of IS groups are using Open Source tools (Linux, MySQL, PHP, etc...) to build cost effective and reliable IT infrastructures for their companies. Upper and executive management wants to know how these tools will be supported since their isn't one single commercial entity that does by default (ie. Microsoft). So, what does your IS group do? Do you hire staff with the expertise to do support in-house or out source all your support to a third party? Or something else?" You've got the source, why not find someone who can care for it, be it an employee, or contractor?

Daniel Paull asks: "I recently asked one of our developers to draw up a design for a specific component. After a few hours he returns telling me that he'd solved a very similar problem a previous place of employment and that they had developed a "neat" solution. The developer then became concerned that a ground-up re-implementation of these design patterns and principals may infringe on the other companies intellectual property or breach some copyright laws. This developer is talented and experienced - that's why we hired him. The question is, at what point does 'drawing on experience' cross the line and invade others IP?"

MartinB asks: "I help out running evolt.org, and one of the things we provide is a comprehensive browser archive, with over 100 different browsers, some in multiple platforms and versions, going right back to Mosaic 0.4. This is both a piece of web history, and a resource that lets developers test their sites on browsers which vendors don't offer for download any more. We have an expensive problem - the browser archive chews through 140GB of bandwidth a month and growing, even though we've throttled the FTP server and restricted the maxclients. How do we find people who provide mirrors like these and get browsers.evolt.org spread across lots of hosts?" If you would like to mirror this valuable net resource, please volunteer here (or drop a line to the original submitter)

Harry asks: "Last week I had a laps in judgement and subscribed to the Lindows Insider program. After playing with Lindows for a few days, I decided that Lindows was not worth my trouble and un-subscribed from the program. When I did so, I mentioned my disappointments and requested that they take a survey on Slashdot to see what Linux users really thought of their product. They stated they did and received 'great results and mostly positive feedback.' After having a chance to play with Lindows, I can not believe this to be true. So, my question is: What do Linux users really think of Lindows and will they support it?" I'm not aware of any such poll (maybe I missed it) and I don't remember many glowing reviews from our previous stories on Lindows. So maybe it's time to get the answer straight from the horses' mouth. Do you think Lindows is worth it?

mumkin asks: "I have been shopping for a new domain and am considering going with a more obscure ccTLD for my namespace needs. I like the thought of my lan being a virtual extension of a tropical isle or wind-swept steppe, and generally looking weird in people's logs :) Ideally the NIC would lack a full-on whois server, for that extra degree of anonymity. It is important to me that the registry be doing something worthwhile for the country whose TLD it's hawking, and not just ripping them off. Oh, and I want nothing to do with VeriSign, so .TV and .CC are right out (sorry, Tuvalu! sorry, Cocos Islands). So, the question is: what tiny ccTLD registrars allow non-resident registration, are trustworthy, inexpensive, preferably privacy-conscious, and give something truly meaningful back to the countries whose domains they sell? Here's what I have so far -- who else should I be looking at, or what have I got wrong?" Read on for mumkin's ccTLD listing.

symbolic asks: "I just finished watching a small segment of World Business Review on PBS, where the topic of discussion the use of biometrics by employers to not only provide confirmation of identity, but as something to drive other parts of the operation - like tracking employee time. Briefly mentioned were face and iris scans, but as I was watching a picture of someone's iris, I realized that once an employer has captured a scan of your iris (or any biometric data), who has control over it? Does it become part of the cesspool of information trading that occurs between business and government entities? Will trading of someone's biometric information become as ubiquitous as their address or phone number. Is there any reason we should be concerned about this? I'd like to hear what others think about this." Ask Slashdot has previously approached the Biometrics topic for technical issues, but the privacy issue of such data has yet to be addressed. How do you feel about biometric data (or any data derived from your physical makeup, like your genome) being used as another commodity (like your address) in the corporate data exchange?

BoneFlower asks: "Anonymous remailers are all well and good, but sometimes people use them to abuse people through email or through trolling newsgroups. I've had limited results filtering "anonymous" on a USENET group I frequent but many anonymous remailer trolls get through. The group was nearly unuseable for over a week due to the volume of anonymous remailer trolls. Does anyone have tips on filtering them out? I personally use Forte Agent 1.9.1, many others use Netscape/Mozilla, OE, and various others. If you could help us out, we'd appreciate it."

Milo_Mindbender asks: "While listening to the whine of my heatsink fan I was wondering. It seems like a good way to get quiet cooling for the CPU would be to mount a fan in the back of my case and run a duct of some kind (folded sheet metal or some kind of hose) from the back of the fan directly onto the top of a fan-less CPU heatsink. You should be able to get the same amount of airflow with a large slow (quiet) case fan as you do with a little noisy cpu fan...and the air being blown onto the heatsink would be cooler as well. This seems like a fairly obvious idea so I'm wondering if there's some reason why it wouldn't work, or if anyone has tried it and could tell us how it turned out." Yeah, but what about the heat in the rest of the system? Depending on the size of your enclosure (and what's in it), you may or may not need more than one fan. Has anyone tried something like this and can comment on how well it worked?

Evanrude asks: "With DVD writers having significantly come down in price over the past year more companies are coming out with their version of the DVD-R. My company has a large file archive of documents and data that don't necessarily need to be stored on read/write media, but need to be kept online. I want to accomplish this with online DVD storage but is this the right way to go? Who has the best value with the most features of all the DVD-R's on the market? What are some things to look for and things to avoid when purchasing a DVD-R? Is it even time to purchase one, or should I wait another six months?"

A Nominal Coward asks: "I've been doing some research into making my communications more secure, everything from email to news, from IRC to www. Most of the information I've found repeats one suggestion, 'tunnel your connections over SSL.' Yet while everyone claims this is the best thing to do, no one seems to explain how. I haven't been able to find a faq, howto, or demonstration of how to set this up properly; just lots of people saying 'SSL is good.' What am I missing? I've downloaded and installed stunnel, a free (speech & beer) SSL tunneling proxy, but - don't laugh - now what? All I've managed to do is make an SSL connection to an IRC server a friend set up specifically for that purpose. Where do I go from here in order to secure my other connections, like mail, news, and web? Do I have to subscribe with providers who explicitly provide SSL access, if so, which are recommended? I would appreciate advice from others who have managed to get this working."

TwistedTR writes "I work for a company currently developing an application to run in an environment with a very small sum of available memory (sub 6 megs). My boss and I are in disagreement over speed vs memory overhead. He feels that speed is 100% key reguardless of the memory overhead required to meet it. The application is very math intensive so the more lookup tables we pre-generate at load time the faster the overall application runs. However, my boss is having me take us dangerously to the point where our target environment is going to run out of memory. The application makes use of user inputted data, and if the user so chooses it can be a WHOLE lot of data, which also uses a decent chunk of memory. My boss will not fold on my request to sacrifice some speed to prevent a possible fatal memory fill up. Has anyone out there had experience in dealing with developing in a simmilar situation, and if so do you have any ideas of how to balance performance vs memory on such a restrictive environment?"

RevHead asks: "Although after-market performance modification of cars is a discipline which claims a significant following all over the world, most of the information available on the topic tends to be more of anecdotal nature. To add to this and the plethora of conflicting information out there, most of the tips and techniques tend to be of 'do it and see if it works' type of experimentation. I am interested in the simulation approach prior to actual experimentation to get a decent picture of what to expect during the experimentation phase, which IMHO should be safer and more cost-effective. Has anyone resorted to this approach (successfully) when it comes to engine modification, suspension design, aerodynamic performance and emission control? If so what software is available for these tasks? Which are the most popular/most effective? Does anyone know of any public-domain automotive engine models available for CAE applications such as Catia and ADAMS?"

HCIGuy asks: "I'm the technical communications manager for a company that sells and implements infrastructure for data centers. We often put in equipment and software that substantially change the environment, such as high availability clusters and enterprise data management. We've known for a long time that the critical post-engagement time for admins was one to six months, after which, even without help, admins are usually comfortable with the new stuff. We're concerned with those first few months, and asking both ourselves and the universe of admins what would help during that time. We already provide system configuration manuals, and of course there are manuals and training classes provided by manufacturers. But what else would help an admin during the "break-in" period? What's been of the greatest help in the past? What would be on your wish list?"

Michael Mattes asks: "I have been looking for a set of ports/subnets to block in order to disable instant messengers behind my firewall. While MSN is easy to block, ICQ is a little more difficult and it seems as though Yahoo Messenger is designed to do everything possible to not be blocked. I have been reading more and more articles showing companies choosing to block these tools. It seems irresponsible of Yahoo to leave, what appears to me, no choice but to block their entire domain in this situation. Any help would be appreciated."

plazman30 asks: "I am a customer of comcast.net, which provides usenet access through Giganews, but they cap downloads at 1 GB. Giganews will allow greater access for a monthly fee, but the amount of download you get is based on how much you pay. I am interested in getting usenet access greater than 1 GB and am willing to pay for it, but I want to get the best value for my dollar. I was wondering what slashdot users that pay for usenet access are using."

Greg Searle asks: "I'm going to be in the market for another PC soon, and have been watching the prices drop and the power go up over the years. There are a lot of 'bargains' out there, but then I heard that the best and least expensive PC's are 'white box' systems that are custom build by small, local companies. This got me thinking, I know how to put together a PC from scratch, why don't I just do it? This should save me quite a few bucks, and I get the exact system I want. My question to you: Where is the best place to order the parts (case, MB, drives, etc.) over the web? I am familiar with sites that sell typical consumer products, but have no idea where to start to get raw parts. I'd prefer one site that sells everything, but wouldn't be surprised if there are some specialty sites that provide the most bang for the buck for a particular piece. What do you think?"