Headhunting Headhunters asks: "I was wondering if anyone knew what the laws surrounding third-party, recruiters and headhunters are? As with a lot of tech workers now looking for a job, I've submitted my resume to a bunch or headhunters with the explicit understanding that they will not represent me to a company without my approval. I also have my resume on my personal website (with a watermark denoting copyright on it and forbidding distribution). I was waiting for a written offer from a company which I had applied to directly on my own. After an interview with the techs, they were sure they wanted me, but the HR department suddenly put a stop to the process a week later, claiming that I had been previously represented by a third party firm -- call them 'X Solutions, Inc.'; I had never given 'X Solutions, Inc' my resume, to my knowledge, nor had I ever talked to them by phone or e-mail. I certainly never gave them permission to represent me at this one company, and now I was out of luck: this company's policy was that they couldn't accept my resume since it had come through a third party before."

anonymous amateur silkscreener asks: "Here's a question for those Slashdot readers who fall into the intersection of Photographer / Artists / Computer user. A comment posted in response to the story on Sneaking Open Source Software Through the Front Door led me to this company which makes some cute silk-screened blank CD-Rs. I send out CDs once in a while with photos or (occasionally) my own graphics. Now for a little while, I've been thinking about making some home-screened graphics for them, and I wonder if anyone out there has already done some of the experimentation necessary. I have a silk-screen kit which I have successfully used to make T-shirts and other things (on paper and fabric, that is), but with CDs I'm uncertain about the results."

Ryan asks: "I've been stuck in a helpdesk position at 3 different companies for the past 5 years. What I really would like to be doing is programming. At each job, I would write small programs or dynamic web pages in PHP with a MySQL backend, a few small Linux utilities for automating jobs and small Win32 programs, all written in C. Sure, these programs were popular with my fellow coworkers, my boss liked them, but my primary function there is to answer phones, and programming is secondary. I can not transfer to the 'programming department' because its located in another state, nor would I think that department would welcome me, only because I would be coming from a helpdesk. My programming is self-taught, and I don't have a diploma from a university. I'm 25, and have a family, night school is out of the question. The market here (Danbury,-Connecticut) is dry, and HR wouldn't even look at my resume with out a degree. I know someone out there must have been in the same situation and some how gotten their foot in the door. What did you do? Any suggestions?" I'm sure there many on Slashdot who have been in this situation. If you wouldn't mind sharing your experiences on this matter, it would be appreciated. Share the ups and downs of your decisions and in particular, please answer the question: If you had to do it all over again, would you make the same decisions? Those interested in this topic may also wish to check out the the last article that touches on this subject.

tcyun asks: "I am helping to put together a small studio for a project at my workplace which will require some audio mixing. We have been able to find software solutions (often times open source) for almost all of our needs except for echo cancellation. I have done the requisite searches and have found a large number of hardware based echo cancellation devices, but have not found a purely software based solution. Is anybody aware of one?"

David Macfarlan asks: "My father owns a small medical practice and has always desired to get information to himself and his patients rapidly. With recent advancements of 802.11b and powerful Pocket PC's he's developed an itch for information-on-demand through a wireless handheld (preferrably color) while he is in the examination room. A database for the knowledge he's looking to access already exists, and can be queried via any browser. He has approached me on implimenting a system of reliable, fast PDA's which could deliver a browser-based wireless access (within 100 feet) of this system. Is there anyone who has experience with the PPC's, and could offer any suggestions as to which is best suited to such an application?"

Bakajin asks: "The posting about the camera speedometer hack reminded me of my interest in portable time lapse photography. I wondered if the astute Slashdot crowd can make some suggestions for a very portable digital time-lapse system. I was initially thinking about a PDA connected to a small web-camera. I'll hack my own code if I have to, but I'd prefer to have something off the shelf or not involving too much work. Any suggestions on the PDA/camera/software combo or any different system?"

photozz asks: "Our company has got itself into a bind. We need to standardize on a TN3270 emulator for the Wintel boxes in our environment (primarily Win2K) The Linux/Unix guys are OK already )of course), unfortunately, the budget has run out. Our preferred solution would be something host based, but a client side solution would work. Sun has some Java stuff, but I figured if anyone would have a range of solutions, it would be this community. Anyone have ideas? If it matters, we are looking at 1000-2000 clients."

deque_alpha asks: "I am a system administrator for a small K-12 public school district. I am taking over after a bunch of goofballs have really messed things up, the technology department is in utter disarray. I have near infinite problems, but the hairiest are with people sucking up what little bandwidth we have, introducing virii, downloading warez, and generally causing problems with P2P file sharing programs. I don't generally have a problem with these programs, but they are not an appropriate use of the limited bandwidth of a K-12 institution as they provide little in the way of an educational resource, not to mention the legal liability they potentially introduce. The rub lies in that these people are teachers, and I have virtually no policy to back me up if I come down on them, but shutting them down is neccesary to maintain harmony (and legality) on the network. I don't have the authority to pen new policies myself, and my supervisor cannot to be counted on to do it either. Have any of you been in this position before? How would you approach solving it without totally alienating your users? How do you broach the subject of introducing new policies with supervisors?"

Big_Joe asks: "Lately Microsoft has put a satellite office in the Grand Rapids, MI area. Because of this I, an end user working for a large contractual company, have been getting harassment mail from Microsoft and the BSA. The information they are using to contact me is information from Chicago's Comdex 3 years ago. Since then I have switch my career direction from Windows to Linux. I would like to get my name removed from any association with Microsoft products. The only systems I use with any Microsoft software installed are owned and maintained by my employer. An earlier story here said not to reply because it is more of a headache. So how do I get them to quit bugging me? Is there any legal action I can take for harassment? How do I tell them that I am no longer a customer and that they have no further right to pester me?" Hmmm... smells like more spam. How should one handle any corporation that does crap like this, especially one that makes backhanded threats toward your workplace?

ThousandStars asks: "After watching Spider-Man, I noticed some miraculous physics like Spider-Man falling faster than a girl to save her and the girl catching the cable car at the end. It reminded me of a list of 12 problems with the plot and science of Independence Day, which brings me to my question: What are the most implausible, impossible and sheerly rediculous science-related things you have seen in movies?"

An Anonymous Coward asks: "Recently I've begun to get spam on my e-mail equipped cellphone. Now, you have to realize I took every precaution to make sure this never happened: I have never used that e-mail address anywhere; I have an alias set up on my server that forwards to it; and I only use the alias for my own personal use. However, the spam I'm getting is not going through my server's alias to get to the phone -- I checked the logs. Multiple complaints to Voicestream's abuse address have not even evoked a response. The only way I can figure they got my address is either: Voicestream supplied it to the spammer; or the spammer entered all Voicestream phone numbers in e-mail format. Either way, I'm pissed at Voicestream. Also, I know for a fact I'm not the only Voicestream customer having this problem. The guys at work are getting the exact same spam at the exact same time. Is anyone else having this problem now? It's enough to make me drop my e-mail address on my phone. Could you imagine deleting 80 spams a day from your cellphone?"

mikenetaim asks: "Numerous people have started projects aimed at emulating the PPC based Macintosh. Those that run on machines with a PPC tend to succeed (MacOnLinux, Sheepshaver, iFusion), and every single one which attempted to emulate the CPU failed. Everyone admits that an emulated CPU will run slowly, but no one has ever released a working PPC emulator at any speed (except for an incomplete one, whose name escapes me, that was released a long time ago to statically translate AIX binaries). There are a ton of 68k emulation code floating around the 'net, and a PPC emulator should be easier to produce (due to fixed instruction length, branch predication, opcodes that dictate if CCR flags must be generated, etc). Most of the authors just claim their project was harder than they expected before disappearing. Why do all these projects fail? Can anyone point me to any information or code?"

rhysweatherley asks: "With the increase in spyware, spam, etc, is it time for a Hippocratic Oath for Programmers? Should programmers be able to refuse to write code that harms the public more than it helps? Should they code defensively to prevent software and information being misused for unintended purposes? And how do we protect such programmers from being dismissed unfairly for standing on principle?"

An Anonymous Coward asks: "This may appear to be a simple question at a first glance but I have been trying to find a solution for it for quite a while. I have been playing with different System Accounting utilities (i.e. SAR etc) and they all provide a wide range of useful information but I did not find any one that would be able to tell me the full path and the name of every process that a user runs in a Solaris machine. A loop with ps does not help because you may miss the processes that ran between each call to ps. Any one know how to extract this info? Is there a good System Accounting solution that does the trick? What is the best System Accounting solution available today?"

David Hilbert asks: "I have a very amateurish home page for sharing family photos and unusually useful links with my friends and family, here. For a long time my son hosted my website on his computer. He added a visitor log to it. Even though my web site is rarely accessed, I still had great joy in looking over my visitor log daily to determine who was accessing my website. My son's situation, changed, however, and he could no longer host my website. I still wanted a web site, however, so had my ISP host it as they do for any member. However, my web site visitor log was gone. My ISP was either unwilling or unable to give me a log file of accesses to my site. I found a temporary alternative, however. I subscribed to a commercial service at the ToolShack to capture and do a fancy analysis of my site's visits (with colorful pie charts, bar graphs, etc). Several months, later, however, Toolshack quit working for me. I sent email to the techies at Toolshack. 'It's a mystery to me' is all I got from them, so I canceled my account. I would like some help finding an alternate web site logging service. I have had no luck thus far. I could do it myself but my ISP doesn't allow any scripts on user's web sites. Any ideas on how I could get a visitor log?"

brendano writes "I've been doing some research into the fascinating world of community networks and websites -- online places that can inform and connect people of a real-life community. They typically provide news, discussion forums, and email for local residents. There are some quite successful ones (such as the nonprofit Seattle Community Network or the Blacksburg Electronic Village), but also also ghost town-like failures that show how hard it is to get a community network/website rolling. In addition, many struggle with questions of how to get funding; whether they can be for-profit while serving the community, or be non-profit with enough money to keep going. Unlike the wireless community networks we hear about so much, these types of community networks go beyond just internet access and try to provide access to the community itself. Some, even, are being done to help build up disenfranchised communities, such as one in a housing project, or the three of HP's Digital Village project (one of whose projects I'm researching for.) I was wondering if members of the Slashdot community know of more examples of community networks, and what people think of these projects. Can real-life communities succeed in the online environment as well? How so?"

screwBrinks! asks: "I would like to begin a new project to do during those long and boring weekends. I thought about creating an alarm system in my apartment which would be connected to my computer. Then, if there is any intrusion, it would page me or phone me. I also want to be able to see a live report from the web and some other goodies. I have no problem doing the software part, but I don't have much experience with building hardware. Have any of you ever built such a system? If so, what would be your recommendation? I know much of this may already exist prebuilt, but I really would like to make as much of it as I can, for fun. I have no problem against using prebuilt infrared detectors, prebuilt door contacts, and the like as long as they aren't X-10 products."

jgrr asks: "I'd like to be able to take a DVI file and convert it to some less palatable format, like MS Word. Some journals I want to submit papers to accept electronic copies as either MS Word or WordPerfect documents, not as TeX. (These are in ecology and zoology, not math journals). People I ask to look at papers don't use TeX either, and like to make the changes to the text itself, so PDF won't work. I know about latex2rtf, but I use some different packages and BiBTeX, and I'd rather not have to re-write the paper in Word after converting it. It seems like the DVI level is better than the TeX level for this, but I can't seem to find any existing software that does it. Any ideas?"

A Very Anonymous Coward asks: "I work as a technical writer for a web-based, highly secure, collaborative software program. My company has been growing at a huge rate and we now are faced with the task of training 300+ new users at 80 different sites across the country. We can travel to the sites but this is costly and our human resources are fixed so we want to avoid this. My question is what is the best way to do this type of large-scale training, especially when it is not possible to get everyone together in one room?"

peddrenth asks: "Software licenses are, we keep saying, difficult to read. The public clicks OK without reading, either implicitly trusting or mistrusting us the software authors. There have been calls recently for companies to clean-up the license, to bullet, section, and colour their licenses, to remove THE UPPERCASE and to draw charts and graphs to explain the license. Anyone who's had to read a 3-page document in a 3"x1" textbox knows how useful this would be. The GPL is one of the most important licenses in the world, and appears on thousands of products. Everything from windows programs to operating systems to people's artwork requires understanding and acceptance of the GNU GPL. Should we, the free software community, take the first step in this effort, and show the world what an easy-to-read license looks like? Would it be useful if long textual software licenses stood out like a sore thumb amongst the cool, pretty, and clear free licenses?" Many may think the GPL Preamble to be clear enough, and this may be true. However there are a lot of people out there that would like to read the entire license so that they know exactly what they may be getting into, before they agree to it. This usually implies being able reading the actual license, and not just the preamble.