Ichabod Gates asks: "I have a home network with a few Windows 2000 servers that I run without monitors/keyboards/etc. the only cables attached are power and network. The servers are P200's with not enough RAM and whatever spare parts I can scrounge up for them and I admin them all using terminal services. Everything works fine and the uptimes are decent enough considering the power problems here. Due to a fixed frequency 19inch monitor, I had to shuffle video cards around till I found one that suited. This led me to attempt to remove all the unnecessary cards from the servers, just to make some spare parts available. This went fine until it became time to remove the VGA cards: the machines proceeded to boot up to the point where they would respond to ping requests, but then they'd reboot and repeat the process. I've had a reasonable search around and haven't found any definitive statement that says Windows 2000 can't run without a VGA card." What? You don't want to see the pretty GUI that Microsoft has spent billions in developing? You heathen!

SlashDotDashDot asks: "As a developer for 20+ years, I've developed a fairly fine tuned way to find 'The Zone' for optimal programming - a combination of furniture arrangement (PC and chair), lighting and music. I also have a pretty good sense of what time of day is best for working on a particular set of problems. But this is what works for me. My company is growing and I'm needing to mediate working conditions between my clients and consultants. This has me wondering what others have found important for finding 'The Zone' in their programming lives. How fast can you get there? How long does it last? What do you do that helps keep that state? What are the major interrupters?" We also touched on this issue in a similar article, last year. However, many of you may have ways of attaining "the zone" that don't depend on any of the factors listed above. If you have a method that works for you, please share. It may work for others.

Ed_Moyse writes "It's a beautiful sunny day here in Geneva, and I've just been outside, enjoying a game of Advance Wars on my GBA. What I'd enjoy even more is to be able to work outside. Does anyone know why reflective laptop screens don't exist? It'd save battery life and should (if the GBA is any guide) work indoors too. Geeks with tans!" Timothy points out that what this reader is probably looking for is a transflective display, not a reflective display. The difference is that transflective laptops don't depend on ambient light, because they can be selectably backlit. Anyone who has ever used a laptop outside will know the advantages this may provide over your traditional LCD screen.

dannyp asks: "Does anyone have advice and/or references for working with a (very large and cautious) corporate legal department to establish a policy for submitting company-developed patches back to Open Source projects? I work at a large company outside of the technology sector (financial services). As we've succeeded in getting Open Source packages approved for use within the company, we're trying to figure out how to submit patches back to the community. We have to convince management that it makes sense to give this Intellectual Property away, and then (more difficult) convince Legal that we aren't going to get sued for doing it. Any advice?"

Embedded Geek asks: "My wife and I, in an effort to get more exercise, have recently begun geocaching, which is basically global scavenger hunt using GPS. We have also been active in the Society for Creative Anachronism and my friends are always trying to draft us into paintball. While we're having a blast with all these, I wanted to see if other slashdotters could suggest more geek style, outdoor hobbies that would appeal to a pair of pasty faced nerds like us."

Anonymous Coward asks: "Back in the day it was not uncommon for games to contain 'Escape Buttons' and other commands to quickly exit a game. These games appealed to the Geek at Work as he could fill in his Friday afternoon and as soon as he heard his boss' shoes approaching, he could escape from the third dungeon and return to his spreadsheet. Yet games today are not allowing such activities to occur. Most games are requiring so much dedicated action that it is impossible to play a game and still switch back and forth without long delays. Where are the games for the worker?"

danboid asks: "I'm going to buy an 'internal' IDE burner for my iMac (revision A- I have to open it up and lead an IDE cable out and buy a power supply for it though!) so I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations or could tell me what to look out for or avoid. I will probably be burning under Linux but I'd like to get a burning program for Mac OS X- has anybody had any experience with such a setup?"

A not-so Anonymous Reader asks: "Is there any possible way, a blind person can READ a handheld like a simputer. I know there are text-to-voice converters, but really you can't beat reading. If you disagree with this, think about having a Physics passage or a complex sentence read out to you. I am sure it would be much more difficult to comprehend it that way then to read it. There are braille readers available, but none have been designed to be fit into a handheld device, until now. Most of them are in fact rather large. I would like to know if there are any projects that right now aim at fulfilling this void. Similarly, is there a way a blind person can input stuff into a handheld using braille input. Are there braille enabled handhelds. Is there any way a blind person can use it effectively. Do handhelds support accessibility standards?"

drcrja asks: "I am conducting some academic research on the use of cloaking and how it affects search engine rankings (cloaking is the practice of delivering a specially optimized page to search engine spiders while delivering a completely different page to the user). I am currently using Alta Vista's Babel Fish to retrieve pages and compare those pages to the pages on the actual web sites but I am trying to find other methods of detecting cloaking. I am wondering if any members of the /. community have any experience with this?"

Zwack asks: "I was wondering about a KVM switch capable of handling both Macintosh and Linux like computers. I would prefer the V part to be optional as I use multiple screens, but I prefer to use a single keyboard and mouse. Ideally there would be an open design out there that I could adapt to my needs. I've worked with large commercial products before with mixed results, but the prices seem exorbitant for my limited home use. I've searched google without any real success. Does anyone know of any low cost products or open designs that they would recommend. Initially PC/Mac support is all that is required, longer term I may want to add Unix workstations into the mix (I used to own Sun and SGI boxes, and I work with a lot of HP and IBM equipment)." The "mutant" part comes from the fact that the switch itself has to offer an easy way to adapt to the different platforms it will connect to. Such a switch might use special cables: a custom connector to the switch, but the opposite end will connect to whatever machine you like, be it a PC, a Mac, a workstation or even a TV. Something like this would strike me as a very useful portable device, has anyone developed something like this yet?

An Anonymous Coward asks: "I work at a mid-tier software company (which shall remain nameless, lest I draw attention to myself). Recently we have started making 30 day evaluation versions of our software available for download after prospects register. An email containing a username and password is sent to the registrant a few hours after submission. We have been surprised to find that not a few registrants don't actually go on to download the software. We make the file size and system requirements clear up front. I would guess some slashdot readers get involved in evaluations. What process do you go through? Why might you stop short of actually downloading the software?"

Ramses0 asks: "Now that I've got my Linux box 100% functional with full DVD support, I want to archive all my media to it's 60gb hard drive. Since I don't have 60gb's of OGGable CD's, I started looking with a lustful eye at ripping and encoding my DVD collection to the hard drive as well. Most of the guides out today are targetted towards windows software, which is not an option for me. The only reference I could find to encoding under Linux is about ffmpeg on the DivX website. What is the best file format to target? DivX? VCD? What tools are available under Linux to encode DVDs? Why isn't there the equivalent of abcde for DVDs?"

Anonymous Coward writes "Just about everyone has used either the CDDB or freedb CD databases. And many people are also familiar with DVD Profiler, a well developed database for DVD fans. Each of these public databases have a number of wonderful strengths, and a few weaknesses, but they are well thought out and well developed. After searching Google, sourceforge and every other search engine I could think of, I have come to the conclusion that there is not a well developed internet book database. While many people would be quick to point out the various commercial websites (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc), and the various library databases (Library of Congress, Boston Public Library, and other online catalogs), none of these online databases offer the same ease of use of DVD Profiler, or the open structure of the online CD databases. The closest program I could find was the shareware program Readerware. This program will search several web sites and download the pertinent information, but it is extremely inefficient, as it does not then store the data in a central database to make it easier for the other users, and in my opinion, the UI is terrible. What programs, if any, do those of you reading /. use to keep track of your books? If you were to start an open source internet book database project, what features would you include in it?" Books in Print is the definitive book database; apparently it costs about $30,000/year to license it.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "I work for a University department and we're looking to find an affordable flatbed scanner with a scanning area of 11x17". Affordability is critical, and it's surprising how hard it is to find one of these... Some basic models I've found range from $1,000 to $4,000. Can the Slashdot community suggest any scanners? Will they?" I settled on a smaller scanning surface after finding the same thing, but my scanner (an Epson Perfection 1650 Photo) is supported nicely by the excellent Xsane. What scanner advice can you offer, especially when it comes to cross-platform support?

Anders Schneiderman asks: "I'm involved in a project that's planning to create open source toys for educating people around complicated policy questions (e.g., policy on prescription drugs). We'd really like to use Flash as our main language, but we're concerned about the fact that the major Flash development tools cost $500--more than some of the community group folks we want to involve can afford. I took a look at Sourceforge, and while there are plenty of projects that offer ways to create Flash for free, there didn't seem to be any v.1 general development tools. Did I miss something? If you want to build Flash and you don't want to pay $500, how do you do it (aside from copying somebody else's, which as Bill Gates told us is just bad, bad, bad)? And if there aren't any powerful open source tools for it, any thoughts on why?"

flupps asks: "I've been asked to hold a two-day crash course in a class of students that currently are studying to become MCSD certified. I'm looking for ideas how to set this up. I was thinking about starting with some general file system descriptions, where to find what files, the man pages, the tab-button, etc. After that move on to some of the daemons and just explain what they do." He's got at least one idea to start with (below), but what must-have skills or demonstrations would you add?

Takeel asks: "I'm a geek who is about to graduate from university with a bachelor of science in television production, but, for the life of me, I can't seem to find any geek jobs in TV. I know these jobs have to exist in some form; if they didn't, we wouldn't have things like TechTV! :) Does anyone happen to know about or have a geek job in the TV production industry?"

jducoeur writes "So Hailstorm has died an unlamented death. But the demand for the idea of an information repository isn't going to go away -- users demand convenience, and this would be convenient. So here's a timely question looking for wild speculation: how would a truly secure, public data repository work? How would your data be stored? Would it be centralized or distributed? How would you grant access to specific elements within it? What would the business case for running such an archive be? Maybe if we can come up with a good design now, we can head off the next inevitable bad one..."

legLess writes: "Jakob Nielsen's latest Useit column lists his opinion of the best HCI research labs, from 'The Dawn of Time' (1945) 'til now. Xerox PARC made the list each decade, naturally. He says that future HCI research is in jeopardy, partly due to Universities backing away from 'real-world' research, and partly because 'HCI has rarely been the first priority of new research organizations, so by the time research managers recognize the need for it and build up a world-class HCI team, it's often too late.' Is he right about the best labs? Is he right about his other conclusions?"

Martin Blank writes "I work in a NOC, and one of the debates you will find in any strongly-mixed environment like this is preferred OS. We have people who prefer Windows, some who like Linux, and some who do almost everything on Solaris boxes. However, this also means that much software is not available over all three. With all of the servers, routers, and various other protected systems we have, the sheer quantity of passwords is mind-bogglingly difficult to keep track of in a secure fashion. Are there any packages out there right now running on at least Windows and Linux, and preferably also Solaris, that can access a central password file?"