Grand Master Math asks: "I'm currently redesigning my website and I have checked out tons of various web sites, gone from link to link, etc...to find the best web design techniques, layouts, and features. Wow Web Designs proved to be a pretty useful site, as it showcased virtually 'the best of the web' in design and creativity. I was wondering what the Slashdot community has to say about web design and what the best web design should implement and address. From browser compatibility, to simplicity and complexity, and customization to user interaction, what should a perfect web design incorporate?"

NegativeK asks: "I'm currently a high school student, soaking up all of the math I can. Via a state program, the education department pays for my enrollment in a semi-local university, which is allowing me to take four mathematics courses at a time. My question is this: am I chasing a white-elephant? How much does it take to get a job in theoretical mathematics? What does it require to get a stable job in a university to do math research? This also applies to other theoretical positions; how competitive is the workplace in a research university?"

texatut asks: "With the computer industry in a slump, many college CS students nearing graduation are looking at pretty meek prospects. While 'formally' educated, few actually have concrete experience dealing with development of software. Many would like to have something concrete to put down on their resume or application to graduate school. However, starting their own project is a hard and time-consuming task. Obviously, the Open Source community is a perfect place for us to get our hands dirty. My question is, are there any resources that can help people with varying levels of experience connect with development teams in a way that would benefit both the project and the students?"

The Fun Guy writes "I'm running a PIII 600MHz, which I'm thinking of upgrading. If I could get rid of the fan and run more quietly, I'd love to. I run office-type apps, so I don't need the fastest processor around, but I also run d.net, so I'm constantly pegged at 100% usage. Aside from the obvious fact that your CPU is running slower than the listed speed, is there any downside to buying, say, a 1.8GHz chip and running it at 900MHz without the fan? Any experience or FAQ's to share on this?" We've covered this topic several times before, with some good feedback, however most of the approaches don't discuss the use of underclocking to accomplish this, although one common suggestion from the comments is to use a non-Intel processor, if you can. Have any of you tried underclocking your CPU to allow it to run silently? How far do you need to underclock a processor in order to enable it to run without a fan?

Case42 asks: "My former webhost company was recently acquired by a larger company that I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with. This presents me with a dillema and a question for all you slashdotters. Do I find another webhost or bite the bullet and host the site myself? I have a decent DSL connection and my site is low traffic, so i'm not concerned about the bandwitdth too much. I'm a sysadmin by trade so i can handle the technical aspects of setting up and running the site without a problem. Despite the fact that it means yet another system to administer i'm leaning towards hosting the site myself, anyone have any horror stories trying to host their site from home, any excellent webhosts out there?" How much traffic could a typical, residential DSL connection take out there, anyways?

Ed asks: "I am getting ready to move into a dorm at Kent State, and they have a 100Mbps port in the room. They allow routers, and switches to connect more than 1 PC, however every router I see at the consumer level has a 10Mbps WAN port. I would really prefer not to waste having a 100BaseTX port on a 10Mbps router. Does anyone make a semi-low cost router with a 100Mbps WAN port?"

dcdukeu asks: "We're a small software company that is about to enter into an 'Acceptance Period' with a much larger company for the purpose of determining if they want to license the source code and intellectual property of our main product. This involves giving them our source code, whitepapers, and providing the technology transfer of how things work. Once they receive this they get 45 days to determine if they want to move forward and incur royalties plus payment minimums. What I want to know is if other people have dealt with this before and what would they recommend in terms of how we can turn our information over to them in a time sensitive way (e.g. after 45 days the documents they receive cannot be viewed any more). We are basically giving up everything we have and training them before they say 'yes' or 'no' as to whether or not they are going to move forward. Thoughts?" Unless there are numerous protections already in place to prevent the larger company from running with the information gleaned from this transfer, this so does not sound like a good idea. If you've been in a similar situation before, what suggestions would you have for dcdukeu?

westfirst asks: "I run a few small domains on a co-lo server. Many of the customers forward their mail from these domains to their home accounts and a surprisingly large number use Road Runner at home. This weekend, Road Runner started blocking all mail from the co-lo farm. The co-lo manager who runs the block of IP addresses seems to feel that this is 'within Road Runner's rights'. They didn't warn anyone and don't seem to be doing much to get the service going again. One customer tells me that, 'Road Runner doesn't accept forwarded mail. They said they finally caught me.' So what's so bad about forwarded mail? Does Road Runner want everyone to use their email services to get people locked into their accounts? Or is this just a last ditch effort to stop the Spamasaurus devouring the net?" This is confusing to me. If none of the users complained about mail from the co-lo, what right does Road Runner have in blocking legal mail for its users? All e-mail is based on forwarding. You break forwarding, and you break SMTP. It's open-relays that are the problem, not anyone who relays. There is a difference here. This behavior is extremely shady to me. I have no problem with ISPs blocking traffic from a location, but if an ISP has cause to do that, then they should say so. What do you think?

moominpapa writes "We are about to set up a project web site that will involve static and dynamically-generated XML pages serialized into HTML, PDF etc. and user interaction with a database (either native XML or MySQL). Previously we've dealt with SGML content and used DynaText/DynaWeb along with PHP and MySQL. Now we want to move to XML content and all-open-source tools. The two main choices seem to be a Java-based Apache/Tomcat/Cocoon 2 framework or a Python-based Zope (+ some XML tools) framework. Cocoon 2 looks powerful but installation on Solaris and Mac OS X has been rather buggy and the performance slow. However, our programmers know Java well and the XML tools are all there. Zope looks promising, although it would mean picking up Python and Zope doesn't seem to have the XML stuff well-integrated yet. Has anyone extensively used both? What would you say were the strong and weak points of each? Is there another possible framework you think we should consider?"

ideveroux asks: "I have started a company which designs Excel Workbooks to duplicate paperwork required for Bingo Halls in Mississippi. In all my years of experience, I have never considered a spreadsheet itself as software, only Excel. However, the Mississippi Gaming Commission has gotten itself into my business and is trying to require me to license my company with them ($10,000.00 and government involvement) because any 'software' sold to bingo's have to be licensed by them. What is your take? Are the workbooks software by themselves? As a startup with no venture capital, I haven't the resources to secure an attorney, nor pay their extortion money. Thanks for your input." Spreadsheets have always existed in this grey area because they mix functionality with data. This issue has grown more tricky over the years as in-spreadsheet macros become more and more complex. I don't think of spreadsheet files as software, because you can't edit or execute a saved spreadsheet without it's associated application. However some can say that anything that implements an algorithm qualifies for term. What are your thoughts on the subject?

cascadefx asks: "I work for a mid-sized mid-western university. One of our departments has started up a small Beowulf cluster research project that he hopes to grow over time. At the moment, the thing is incredibly weak... but it is running on old hardware and is basically used for dog and pony shows to get more funding and hopefully donations of higher-end systems. It runs Linux and works, it is just not anything to write home about. Here's the problem: my understanding is that an MS rep asked what it would take to get them to switch to a Microsoft cluster. Is this possible? Are there MS clusters that do what Beowulf clusters are capable of? I thought MS clusters were for load balancing, not computation... which is the hoped-for goal of this project. Can the Slashdot crowd offer some advice? If there are MS clusters, comparisons of the capabilities would be welcome." One has to only go as far as Microsoft's site to see its current attempt at clustering, but what is the real story. Have any of you had a chance to pit a Linux Beowulf cluster against one from Microsoft? How did they compare?

Matthaeus asks: "I'm a 3rd-year CS student who will most likely be writing end-user applications after graduation. Naturally, I would like my apps to sell well, so I want to minimize user annoyance as much as possible. In an effort to improve my coding skills, what are Slashdot readers' biggest pet peeves when it comes to software? For example, my largest pet peeve is when a program steals the focus from another program while I'm typing. Maybe other software developers could take notice of this discussion also."

Kris_J asks: "My InoculateIT Personal Edition anti-virus scanner will no longer be updated from around mid-March. I've really enjoyed this package, particularly the price (it's free for personal use). The company is complaining that so many new ways are being found for virii/worms/trojans to spread that they can't afford to keep the personal edition updated. Whatever. Does anyone have a recommendation for either a particular anti-virus package/bundle, or a good place for trusted, independant, reviews of anti-virus software, or even products to avoid. (If Zonealarm Pro was bundled with an anti-virus option I'd just get that.)" For those of you who have to deal with operating systems where viruses are a problem, what software do you use to detect them and weed them out? How about software that will scan your entire network?

NaturePhotog asks: "IT clearly isn't "it", at least as far as personal transport goes--price and weight rule that out. I live in the SF Bay Area, and while regional transport such as BART is pretty good, there are a lot of gaps and annoyances in local transport. I'm looking for something like the RAD2GO E10 or Zappy to help fill those gaps. It doesn't need to be fast, but it needs to fold and be light enough to carry on BART, be able to handle some hills, and ideally have a range of about 10-15 miles on a charge. There are hundreds of electric scooters and dozens of sites, so figuring out what would be best is difficult to say the least. Any in the Slashdot crowd have experiences (good or bad) with something like this? Or suggestions for other alternatives?"

G-shock asks: "I've worked for the government (NASA), large public companies, and small startups as a software engineer. They all have something in common. It seems like management at this company is just winging it. I find myself putting all my energy, both mental and emotional, into a project only to be disappointed by decisions made by management. I really feel like management at my current employer is disconnected from what is actually going on. They manage a project, but not the people. They also seem to lack any real vision. Direction is constantly changing and proper time is not given to engineer these changes correctly. This leads to mandated quick and dirty solutions that end up being maintained with great pain for long periods of time. All this leads to me feeling cynical about the work I'm doing. What I want to know is, how can I feel good about the work I'm doing if I don't have confidence in my management? How many of you are happy with your management? Why? Why not? What can I do about this? Thanks in advance for your insight." Considering that this seems to be a common problem in technology companies, and seeing as we have been producing software for basically half a century, do you think that managing software projects is a different beast than the management of anything else? How many of you have had this problem in your career and what did you do to adjust?

Jeremy Welling asks: "I work in a corporate data center with all the major Unices present. Currently we are using a third party product to manage user logins and authentication. In our goals for 2002, we want to move off that product, and the current plan is to go to NIS. Due to the inherent security holes in NIS, I am investigating using LDAP. We would also like to tie this into the NT domain logins. My question is, how difficult is this to do, what LDAP server software would be best, and what OS platform should we look at?"

Mandoric asks: "I recently had a RAID-0 array die due to the controller refusing to recognize it as anything but a pair of single drives. Are there any software RAID programs (preferably under NT, as it's an NTFS partition I'd be restoring) that allow manual entry of a preexisting array's stripe size, rather than forcing all stripe data to be rewritten before reading from an array? Or ways to modify the volume data of an existing program to do this?" Are there decent RAID tools, for either NT or for Unix, that will allow one to recover from errors such as this?

blinky2 asks: "I just read this article on Tom's Hardware about small PC-cases. I would really like to have a small box next to my current one for development stuff etc. Here's the problem: I don't want to have any fans in it, and case like the one in the article needs heavy cooling. Is there anything out there that is small and doesn't need any cooling? the box should run 24/7 here in my room and i don't want to hear some noise while I sleep. A case like the SAX01 from Gigabyte would be nice, too. BTW, there is no need for a high-performance box: something like 300-500 Mhz with a moderate amount of RAM would be enough." A while ago, Ask Slashdot tackled this very question, has the intervening time made such a system a practical possibility?

Spacemonkey asks: "So, IBM has finally ported Linux to run on their veritable plethora of hardware. Sounds like a real solid commitment to OSS, right? Well, the devil's in the details, however. After spending several hours searching on the Internet, I could not find one single implementation of the RPG ^? environment on Linux. So IBM really wants to run Linux on their machines, but what if you want to run your AS/400 applications within the Linux space instead of OS400?"

kwertii asks: "Does anyone have any information on computing in the former Soviet Union? A Google search turned up this virtual museum, which has some good historical background on the development of early Soviet computer technology (a lot only in Russian, unfortunately) but not much on later systems. What sorts of architectures did Soviet computers use? Were there any radically different computing concepts in use, like a standard 9-bit byte or something? What kind of operating systems were common? How has the end of the Cold War and the large scale introduction of Western computer technology affected the course of Russian computer development?"