MMC asks: "Later on this year I'm going to travel in Europe for a honeymoon (specifically Italy and maybe others) and now that I have a digital camera I'm going to take a laptop etc. Dialing up is fine, but I'm really keen to find places which have publicly accessible wireless networks or somewhere I can plug the laptop in with Ethernet. I'm happy to pay for access in a Cafe or Hotel etc. Does anyone have any pointers (other than wandering around with NetStumbler)? Most Internet Cafe references seem quite incomplete and out of date."

BarefootClown asks: "I'm currently the sysadmin for the University of Oklahoma Aviation Department. (I know the website looks horrible, it's being redesigned right now by somebody with talent.) Our systems here include two Intel-based servers, one running Windows 2000, one running Linux. The webserver is running on the Linux box. We need a new server, as the old one is about to die (I've lost two of the six hard drives, only one of the two processors is working, and it's just old--we got it second-hand). My boss has been very indulgent in letting me put Linux on a few boxes here, including the webserver, and a couple of web-only terminals (weather/flight planning stations), but he's expressed concern that, if I were to leave my job for some reason, having *nix machines would leave the department unsupported, and out of luck if problems were to occur. Our official departmental (one level up) support channel doesn't support Unix (he didn't support Windows 2000 until the end of last year...), though I might be able to talk to Campus support. This is all becoming a concern because I want to replace the dying box with a Sun NetraX1, which (obviously) doesn't even have the option of running Windows. Any suggestions on how I can convince my boss that it's worth doing? The price on that box is fabulous, at just a bit over a thousand (US) dollars out the door. The nearest PC/Linux box from Dell is about $1400. It seems to me that I know enough *nix people on campus who are looking for jobs that he wouldn't have trouble finding support if I were to leave. How do I convince him that Unix isn't that big of a risk?"

Friend of perl developers everywhere, Jeremy Zawodny, has an intriguing question: "If you had to explain to Microsoft why they should change their attitude toward Open Source, what would you say?" For more about this, read on...

Chris Lesner asks: "What handy UNIX tricks/tools do you use everyday? I'm asking for stuff that amazes your friends and makes you wonder how they use UNIX w/o them. Some simple examples include: job control (with fg, bg/&, jobs, Ctrl-Z); moving login sessions between machines with Screen for vt100 and VNC for X11 and using screen and VNC to share login session b/w users for demos etc.; using find, xargs -i and echo to build command strings which after inspection can be piped back though bash e.g. `find . -type f | xargs -i{} echo "cp {} {}.bak" | bash` I'm asking b/c my source for this kind of information has dried up as my UNIX skills have matured. I'm guessing other Slashdot readers have the same problem. By the way, if you think the examples I give are lame I challenge you to better them!"

An Anonymous Coward writes about his experience with a brand-new Palm: "Having a few years experience watching co-workers scratching out Grafitti on their little palm-sized toys and being reminded of appointments by musical ring-tones, I decided to take the plunge. More of a dip into a wading pool, as I chose the Palm m105. It was inexpensive enough ($149), and the 8 MB of memory seemed a more prudent choice over the tiny 1 MB in the $99 m100. My experiences quickly turned from elation to dread, however." This is the story of a piece of hardware's inexplicable degradation within 14 days. I thought we were making hardware better than this, but over the past few years, this is becoming more the rule than the exception. Is hardware issue limited to Palm, a case of bad manufacturing of a specific product, or a sign of things to come?

sandbenders asks: "I'm interested in building a product that would be of interest to some Slashdot readers (in other words, it's full of geeky goodness), and I have had great luck finding companies to help me build my design. It uses electricity, obviously, and I know this means that it has to be inspected, listed, etc. by the appropriate bodies. Does anyone have any advice for how to get this process completed, what costs to plan on, or other advice for someone starting up a business of this type?"

a voice in the crowd asks: "We're investigating different PKI technologies to introduce support for strong authentication, single sign-on and secure messaging. There seems to be a broad range of both companies and approaches out there. I'm looking for success and horror stories from those who have taken point on this issue. Your help is appreciated." Read on for more information on what is being evaluated and the critical questions being asked.

angst_ridden_hipster asks: "Like many people, I have a bunch of machines I use regularly. These include Linux machines, BSD machines, a Mac OS X machine, and a Windows machine. These machines are on a number of networks. All have internet connectivity. Some of them are always powered on. A few of them are not. Obviously, I have a bunch of accounts. And, it goes without saying, I have a bunch of data. What are the best approaches to sharing data? I want to be able to securely access my home data while at work, and from one machine to another, etc. Opening ssh terminals is the approach I have traditionally used, but I'm beginning to wonder if some mirroring software (e.g., Unison) might be in order. It'd provide the function of backups, as well as guaranteeing availability. Would it be wiser to tunnel nfs over ssh? Or is there some better option? Assuming I actually start mirroring data across multiple machines, I'll need to organize it in a portable taxonomy. This is almost easy, since I use cygwin on the Windows machines, so I can assume a standard Unix-ish directory structure. But this gets more complicated when there are scripts or other code involved. What about application/platform-specific data? How do other people organize their data, anyway? Are there any useful standards? I'm hoping people will describe their approaches, and why they think they're (not) the best."

mkrosky asks: "I purchased a new PC recently, and also got a Hauppage PVR USB (http://www.hauppage.com/). This seems much more desirable than Tivo or Replay TV, because I control the hardware (no subscription fees). If Hauppage went broke or chose to stop supporting it, I can still use it in its present form (not true with Tivo). However, the software and drivers that ship with the hardware are beta-quality. I was wondering if anyone reading this owns the hardware. Are there any alternative drivers?"

brokenbeaker asks: "I friend of mine is a modern dancer, and she is working with a 3D modelling program to record dance performances. Apparently, the system is very primitive - if you make a dancer jump, she doesn't fall back down to earth. My question is, does anyone know of a sophisticated (physics based, I guess) modelling program that can be used to record dance? How about motion capture in 3D - would this be feasible? Anyone looking for a programming challenge?"

wyrfel asks: "I'm going to build a router & switch based on LRP on the software side and on a FIC PA-2005 with Pentium 200 on the hardware side. Having read some discussions and wanting to make the system as quiet as possible I've remove everything except the floppy (which will be removed once the system is up an running), CPU and RAM from the board, lowered the boards speed from 66MHz to 50MHz which brought down CPU speed to 150MHz, did cut of the power supplys fan and lowered voltage of the CPU fan to 5V instead of 12V. So far everything seems to work fine. The power supply gets a bit warm on the top but it seems to be ok. I didn't add any PCI / ISA cards yet, so I wonder if doing so would bring problems through higher power consumption. What I really worry about is the heatsink that is placed directly beneath the CPU heatsink and that gets a bit hot when running the CPU fan with 5V. With 12V it's fine because of the extra airflow that comes from the fan located near that heatsink. BTW it is attached to some tiny piece labelled 'LINFINITY LX8382A'. Can someone tell me if I have to worry about it becoming too hot and if so what means 'too hot'? Any hints or further suggestions?"

Aengus asks: "We have a round of job interviews coming up and the people we will be interviewing will be of different backgrounds, so we are looking for a core set of general questions that you could apply to any IT/CS candidate that would display that they knew what they were talking about. ie questions that are not language or job specific. So far all we have come up with 'What algorithm is your favourite or most commonly used?'....." What questions have you been asked on interviews you have participated in?

NeuralAbyss asks: "With all the recent discussions on biometric, password and token authentication, I thought I'd ask one simple question that no websites seem to be able to answer: What devices integrate transparently with pre-built infrastructure (Linux, *BSD, Novell, Windows NT/2K)? Any advice from Slashdot readers out there would be quite helpful, as I am looking into biometric/token authentication for a network that I administer, currently a Win2000/Novell hybrid."

Wrighter the Pessimist asks: "I've been seeing a lot of stories recently about cable modem companies raising rates and baby bells winning monopolies on broadband. It seems that indeed cable companies are already raising rates, or will be in the near future. Shouldn't broadband be getting cheaper, with improvements in technology? Or has demand already surpassed the capability? Or, have the monopolies just decided to give themselves a raise? What can we as consumers do to prevent prices from going sky high?" The first article mentions the need for higher pricing for users who tend to use more than their fair share of the bandwidth. The second article is about AT&T raising its rates, which is not news to many Slashdot readers, I'm sure. I would think that in situations like this, that a tiered pricing approach might be better than applying a flat rate. Think you are going to be a high bandwidth user? Pay a fair price to your upstream. Web and e-mail only? Pay less. So do you think the current trend in broadband pricing is fair, or are broadband providers pricing themselves out of the market?

inkfox asks: "It seems that whenever one buys a motherboard, there's already a BIOS upgrade available by the time you get your hands on it, usually dealing with some degenerate hardware behavior. Given that Linux and Windows 2000/XP replace all BIOS routines once loaded, do these upgrades really matter? If a system is successfully booting, is a BIOS upgrade more a risk than it is preventive maintenance?" This may be true, but what if you are running an OS that depends on the BIOS? If the BIOS is replaced by a specific OS, then BIOS upgrades can't really hurt anything, can they?

paul_harrison asks: "I am trying to introduce a new P2P protocol. It's technically superior in several respects to existing protocols, but there's one big problem: too few people using it. Now this is not a new problem, there's even a name for it, "Network Effect". It crops up all over the place: which websites become popular, which formats and protocols people use, which operating systems people use, even which side of the road people drive on... So my question is this: how do things like these overcome network effects and become popular?"

dialupInHoboken asks: "I'd like to know if anyone has compiled a list (that they'd like to share) of hotels in metropolitan areas that offer broadband connections, hard-wired or wireless, and how much the service costs per day, etc. I've found a few hotels that offer it, but don't advertise it, or really know that much about what they're offering. A comprehensive list would be something of value to us bandwidth-crazed individuals." There was an Ask Slashdot about this, early last year. Now that "broadband" is a marketable buzzword for businesses, have more hotels caught on?

blackcoot asks: "I'm about to start work on a summer project with my advisor, part of which involves getting a lab set up for real time (or as close as we can get) computer vision applications. Currently, the only machines in the lab with digital video cameras attached to them are Win2k boxen, and that's only because we haven't been able to find reasonable drivers for the firewire cameras that we have. My advisor and I would much rather *not* write our own driver for these cameras; right now my advisor has the budget for a couple reasonably inexpensive cameras. This leads me to a couple questions: are there firewire (or equivalently high bandwidth bus) based digital video cameras (not framegrabbbers) out there that have reasonably solid Linux or Video4Linux drivers; have any Slashdot readers tried to build a vision type application under Linux (something that does more processing than Xaw TV); Am I setting myself up for a whole world of pain trying to make this happen under Linux, or is it doable? Any words of wisdom? Your help is much appreciated."

chromatic asks: "I've been working with promising prospective programmers for a while. They're interested in college, but as non-traditional students with young families, the financial burdens are overwhelming. We're aware of FAFSA, financial aid officers, and standard grants (all of which have a bias toward traditional students). What other resources (grants, work study programs, low interest loans) should we explore?"

openyourmind asks: "A friend's daughter is going to college, and I want to send her a package to help her in school. What kinds of things did you wish you had, but couldn't get, in college? I have already included a lockpick set, a UVmarking pen, and an LED flashlight in her care package. What else? Legal items only, please."