whschwartz asks: "I'm looking for a low cost solution for allowing myself and a few others the ability to share a server at one of our locations. One thought was using SSH tunnels to establish secure connections, forwarding any ports needed by our apps. We'd want to be able to map network drives, control the server with something like PC Anywhere or VNC with the possibility of running apps that have remote data on the server. I use the Cisco VPN solution for work, but that's not in our price range and is probably overkill. Are there any other options I should be looking at other than using SSH port forwarding?"

Joe asks: "I'm a grad student studying medical product design. My thesis work is being done on devices used in the monitoring and treatment of Diabetes. I'd like to solicit feedback from the Slashdot community regarding the state of the art in the field. Are you a Type One who loves the OneTouch UltraSmart, or a Type Two that swears by the multi-strip AccuCheck Compact? My goal is to develop products that meet the varied needs of diabetics, in a manner closer to the iPod, rather than the current products which resemble crappy 2-button Tiger electronics videogames. What features in these devices do you like and dislike?"

tomschuring asks: "A friend of mine has Motor Neurone Disease (MND) and because of it, he is using a Voice Output Communication Aid (VOCA). When I heard the quality speech of the portable device I was less than impressed. My Mac is much better at it and at least has a few different voices (like one with an English accent) to choose from. Has anybody used a laptop for this purpose? What text to speech engine are you using and what are our impressions? Is there predictive text software available for this purpose? Is the startup time and battery time acceptable for this sort of application?"

papaia asks: "Having watched, for a while, the development in the area of high-density server hardware solutions (i.e. blade servers), like IBM's 'top gun', and their increased presence in Data Centers, I have been wondering if anybody has had any experience (thus comments) in regards to how important - in such highly priced solutions - is (or could be) the [always neglected] cabling, connecting the servers. One such comment caught my attention, in this regard. Slashdot, how important is the server cabling infrastructure in your Data Centers, and how do you resolve the cable management aspect of it?"

christophe.vg asks: "We are currently investigating the feasibility of a new (open source) project and part of this study involves a scope definition of how people/developers currently actually use UML. So there it is: How do you use UML? Do you use it to have nice class diagrams to pin up to the wall so you/it just looks great or do you first model out every little detail into class and sequence diagrams before generating or writing even one line of code? Now for a moment, let's dream the UML dream. Do you think that in the future one could maybe even envisage software development where UML could simply replace all existing coding languages? One could argue that coding languages are merely formatting tools to implement the actual logic, which can be portrayed 'in a Unified way' using UML schemas. What are your ideas regarding the real merits of UML, currently and in the not so distant future?"

muffinresearch asks: "I've been thinking about picking up a new PDA/Smartphone in the seasonal sales, I am finding a lack of more technical information with regards to being able to use SSH software via GPRS. Now as far as I can see, the Treo 600, and the Sony-Ericsson P900/P910i can all use third-party SSH clients.However what is lacking here in the UK is info on which networks allow access on port 22, and whether this access requires a pay-monthly account or can you do it on a Pay-as-you-go account? I'm reckoning some of you will have useful info on what is working for you as far as phones and networks that do SSH, and your experiences in practice. Happy New Year to all!"

timmyv asks: "I have recently been tasked with developing a corporate wide policy that will standardize all employee created documents on vendor neutral file formats. OASIS is good in theory, but I haven't been able to locate enough concrete examples of policies or implementation schemes that work at a corporate level. Does anyone work at a company where documents can only be saved as RTF, HTML, etc. or have any experience with this type of problem?"

mrscott asks: "Does anyone have any good, simple benchmarks about iSCSI performance in a SAN as it relates to fibre channel and direct attached storage? There's a lot of information out there about iSCSI TCP offload adapters that improve performance, but it's still hard to get a handle on even those stats without the original numbers for comparison. We're considering an iSCSI solution from Lefthand networks, but finding independent (and reasonably simple) numbers has proven somewhat difficult, even with the awesome power of Google behind me."

BigPoppaT asks: "Computerworld has an article reviewing the effectiveness of CAN-SPAM one year after it passed. In the article several anti-spam companies cite spam as a huge (and increasing) percentage of the total e-mail load. Most state that it is more than 50%, and some are saying as much as 75%. (This matches what I see in other articles on the subject.) Are these figures reasonable? I do not work for an ISP or maintain a mail server, but speaking as an end-user, I do not have anywhere near this much spam - more like 5 to 10 items a week (out of a few hundred messages). This is in my personal email - I do not recall ever receiving any spam in my work inbox. If the numbers above are reasonable, I wonder why I get so little spam? I am on a number of mailing lists, and have purchased things online, so it is not as if I have gone too far out of the way to hide my email address. I am not complaining, mind you, I just think it would be useful for the Slashdot readers who deal with this in an administrative capacity to explain it to the rest of us. Are the spam numbers being inflated by these anti-spam groups as a marketing tool? (This is not a rhetorical question - I really am not in a position to evaluate this, so those who know, please fill the rest of us in.)"

toastyman asks: "Is anyone out there using anything similar to what Pointcast used to be? For those who don't remember, Pointcast was a screensaver/taskbar program from the late 90's that constantly displayed news, weather, stock quotes, and more. Pointcast is gone now, but one of my clients wants something similar to install on a few PCs/monitors in a waiting room and have them display the local weather, headlines, sports scores, whatever. Unless there's a pointcast-like screensaver out there that I'm missing, the closest thing I can think of would be some kind of RSS reader meant for full screen unattended operation. It has to be easily readable from a distance, automatically rotating what is displayed on the screen (think automated Powerpoint presentation) and automatically updating the content. Has anyone come across something that would work well for this? If not, does the idea of an 'informative' screensaver sound appealing?"

SilverDivan asks: "A fairly large non-profit charity organization recently asked me how they can permanently take care of the spyware and adware problem that is plaguing their computing environment. I told them to simply use Mozilla/FireFox, but as it turns out they access outside applications that only run in Internet Explorer. So, I am planning to make a recommendation to publish Internet Explorer on a Citrix Farm, and let the users use the IE published on Citrix instead of the locally installed IE This way they can lock down the IE to their heart's desire. Also publishing IE 'anonymously' on Citrix will further secure the environment, as the anonymous profiles can be deleted on a nightly basis. However one issue with 'anonymous' access to Citrix applications, is that the user can not maintain their preference or even their bookmarks. Another issue is that there is no tracking, and no way to hold someone accountable in case of abuse. Has anyone implemented a similar solution before? What was your experience? Will it work? How can you configure the Citrix environment to best handle a situation like this?"

heretic108 asks: "For 3 years, I've been running a home office EXIM mailserver to handle mails on my 3 personal domains. All had been fine - I'd fastidiously configured EXIM to guard against relaying, and even now receive a clean bill of health from the various relay-checker sites. Spam levels were moderate, and mostly arrested by SpamAssassin and Thunderbird's inbuilt filters, until today. I got up this morning to find 3500+ e-mails in my inbox. All were bounces - spoofed and genuine, and came from a vast variety of IP addresses (eg lots of AOL users' IPs), which indicates they're being sent largely via compromised windows boxen, as well as from inadequately-configured corporate/ISP mailservers which don't bother to check the purported 'from' addresses against the originating domains. This hurricane continues, with 10-30 new incoming spams every minute! I've re-enabled Active Spam Killer, but this is next to useless, since ASK passes all 'bounce' messages, real or otherwise, to the mbox without challenge. I'm hoping to hear from anyone who can share success stories in dealing with such a menace, without undue complication or loss of legitimate mail. Thanks in advance for all your constructive and positive suggestions." It seems that dealing with regular Spam is almost easy in comparison to dealing with its consequences: bounced emails. Does anyone have suggestions, or filters on how to handle bounced e-mail that has resulted from someone using your e-mail address to spam someone else?