Businesses

Redundant Credit Card Processing Solution? 86

Posted by Cliff from the backups-for-everything dept.
RokaMoka asks: "As I type this, I'm on hold with Verisign Payment Services, our (only) merchant services provider. I run several e-commerce sites, and how shall I say... 'tis the season. At the moment, VPS is totally down, and I am losing thousands of dollars per hour. Does anyone have any experience in designing and supporting e-commerce solutions with multiple vendors for CC processing? What other networks are out there, and what has been the customer experience with them? What should the strategy be, load-balance or fail-over?"
Science

Consensus on Global Warming 1200

Posted by michael from the heads-buried-in-the-sand dept.
FredFnord writes "Well, here's an interesting one: the fine folks at Science Magazine have done an analysis of the last ten years' published scientific articles (articles from crank or non-peer-reviewed publications were not counted) on the subject of global climate change. The results themselves are interesting, but the most remarkable part was that, of the 928 papers they found, 75% accepted that global warming was caused by human activities, either explicitly or implicitly. 25% made no mention either way. And not a single paper asserted otherwise." JamesBell submits this article by a geologist which suggests that the Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger.
Software

Easy Way for Sharing OpenOffice.org Documents? 83

Posted by Cliff from the lite-and-simple-viewing dept.
rekrutacja asks: "I'm trying to find easy way for reading OpenOffice.org documents in places where you can't (or don't want to) install the full OOo suite. I found an on-line reader, but I would like something for offline viewing. There is a Java-based standalone program that you can download from here, but I can't seem to get it running to my liking. OOo Lite/Reader/Viewer should be easy to install (especially for Windows) and I'd like it to be small enough to fit my 16MB pen-drive. Even a Firefox/IE plugin is better than nothing. Does anyone know of such a beast?"
Graphics

Professional Photographers Using Linux? 724

Posted by Cliff from the new-developments-in-a-specific-area dept.
thesun asks: "I'm a freelance writer and photographer and I'm wondering what Pro Photographers have done in regards to color matching and scanning under Linux, especially when going from slides to digital. I just can't get anything close to a good image when I scan a slide. They're blurry and the colors are so off that doing anything with my thousands of slides is proving to be prohibitively time-consuming. Are other Pros (or talented amateurs) having similar problems? Are there solutions out there I haven't found? (Sorry, I can't dump thousands into a piece of hardware---I'm looking for a way to make the most of my Epson Perfection 2400 with transparency adapter)."
Handhelds

Fave All-in-One PDA for Worldwide Connectivity? 31

Posted by Cliff from the world-travellers-with-disdain-for-local-cell-plans dept.
dr-vjk asks: "I just bought a new *unlocked* HP iPaq h6315 PocketPC. This phone/PDA supports quad-band GSM, Bluetooth and Wifi. This is a huge improvement over my old travel kit (Sony P900, h4315 iPaq, and Apple iBook). I needed an unlocked unit as the standard h6315's are locked to the T-Mobile network which charges over a buck a minute to roam outside the U.S. I have tested it in Europe and Africa with pre-paid local SIM cards and it works great. It works out of the box with GSM networks around the world for voice and GPRS for IP Data. I loaded SJPhone in order to access my Vonage account over WiFI (Skype doesn't work on this unit yet). It was great talking as long as I wanted with friends back in the U.S. with no concern for long distance charges. They could also call my Vonage number in the U.S. and my PDA would ring in Europe."
Businesses

Getting an IT Job in Europe as an American 187

Posted by Cliff from the americans-getting-employed-overseas dept.
IvanHo asks: "I'm looking for success stories, hints, tips and tricks from any Slashdot readers with U.S. citizenship that have managed to find gainful employment in Europe. For various reasons, my wife and I would like to spend a couple years working in Europe -- preferably Southern Europe. For the last couple months, I have been applying for IT positions there with no luck. Although, my wife grew up in Rome and her family is there now, she is a U.S. citizen, so that well trodden route to a work permit is unavailable. Any advice? I'm trying to avoid incorporating and transferring myself if possible."

Doom Movie Update 454

Posted by michael from the floating-eyeball dept.
WeAz writes "Dark Horizons has an update on the currently filming Doom Movie. The article sums up the history of the production thus far and also includes a cool tidbit that reveals 'a large number of sequences will be shot purely in "first-person" perspective of the leading character (Karl Urban).' Unfortunately, the article also reports that 'The monsters aren't from hell, but rather people mutated by some nasty super-virus although the monsters look very similar to those in the game.' Sounds like a version of 28 Days Later based on Mars to me."
Data Storage

Distributing In-House Engineering Code? 49

Posted by Cliff from the internal-engineering-grapevines dept.
caswelmo asks: "My company has recently moved from Solaris workstations to Windows workstations (Ohhh, the humanity). As an engineering focused company, we use our computers to run many in-house (command line) codes to analyze and design our products. We currently use NAS storage to store everything and use batch files and init scripts to run the correct codes over the network. This makes sure everyone is running the latest version. This also stinks. I know this isn't an original problem, so what are some other solutions for rolling out lots of simple codes like this?"
Businesses

Raising Money for a Tech Venture? 50

Posted by Cliff from the entrepreneurial-necessities dept.
phosphor-boy asks: "Age old story: a friend and I have a fun, part-time technology venture that's actually generating a little cash. To take this to the next level, we need to raise few hundred thousand dollars. There's good reason to believe that it has enormous potential to make money - but since it's a new concept, it's (obviously) extremely speculative, so going to the bank won't work. We've been tentatively offered venture capital funding, but would have to take A LOT more than we need ($millions!), and give up way more control than we'd like - giving up some control is OK, but we've seen firsthand how VC money can run amok, and it's not pretty. However, a few hundred thousand is more than is do-able with friends, family, and second mortgages. So to sum up: too little for VCs, (maybe?) too much for friends and family. Have any others on Slashdot faced this situation? What works here, and what doesn't?"
Hardware

Running a Server at Freezing Temperatures? 196

Posted by Cliff from the brrrrr! dept.
mw13068 asks: "As a part of a backup solution, I'm thinking of running a backup server in my unheated, unattached garage. I live in central New York State, and the temperatures very often drop below zero degrees Celsius. The computer is a Pentium III Celeron running at 733MHz. Has anyone else tried this sort of thing? If you have, please share your experiences."
Bug

Bugzilla on Windows? 111

Posted by Cliff from the a-painful-process dept.
slipandfall asks: "I just started work at a 100% Windows shop (no chance of changing this) and would love to implement Bugzilla for issue tracking but statements like this - 'Making Bugzilla work on Windows is still a painful processes.' in the OS-Specific installation notes don't make it seem reasonable. Since there is no chance of using Linux/UNIX here, can I get people's experiences using Bugzilla on Windows or experience with a tool (open source or not) on Windows with similar notification, discussion and issue tracking features?"
Technology

Reducing RFI at Home From Lighting Fixtures? 126

Posted by Cliff from the less-noise-more-candelas dept.
amper asks: "I'm in the process of building a new home recording studio. When I originally moved into my new (very old) house, I decided that in the interests of conserving energy, I would replace most of the incandescent lighting fixtures or lamps in my home with fluorescent fixtures or compact fluorescent replacement lamps in those fixtures which could not easily be replaced. Unfortunately, these fixtures are creating a massive amount of radio frequency interference in my home. The worst culprits seem to be the dimmable fluorescent fixtures in my living room. Barring replacing all my fixtures and lamps with conventional incandescents, can anyone point me in the direction of alternatives? Is it possible that the decreasing quality of most home goods has led to a decreasing quality in fluorescent ballast systems that are much more noisy from an RFI standpoint? Some of these fluo's are so noisy, they even emit audible sound! It's gotten so bad that I can't even play an electric guitar without turning off all the non-incandescent lighting in my house, which pretty much limits me to playing and recording during daylight hours (when I'm supposed to be out making money)."
Security

PC Setup for Small House with Child? 199

Posted by Cliff from the not-enough-room-for-the-computer-room dept.
nzgeek asks: "I've been managing with a pokey Windows notebook for a couple of years now, and am desperate to get a decent PC for development and gaming. Problem is, our house is tiny and we have a 1-year-old entropy generator running amok. What's the best recommendation for getting a full-power desktop PC installed in our house? My ideal setup would be a mini-tower case hidden in a cupboard, with a remote LCD monitor, mouse, keyboard, and headphones. The keyboard and mouse can be done via bluetooth, and there is no problem with cable length for headphones. The major stumbling block is VGA connection for the monitor. Any suggestions on how to overcome this problem?"
The Media

What Do You Look For in a Big Iron Review? 262

Posted by Cliff from the ask-and-he-will-try-and-provide dept.
ValourX writes "We're starting to write more reviews of enterprise-class hardware and software and although we've done pretty well with our reviews, the high-end products are a lot trickier when it comes to testing and evaluation. Obviously it is not possible to build an enterprise-grade 'your neck is on the line' production environment just for writing reviews, but maybe we can do something smaller, just for testing purposes. What do you as an IT professional want to read in a review for a server OS or a high-speed switch, or a big iron server or proprietary workstation? What tests should we run? What results and feature comparisons are going to be most meaningful to you?"
Portables

IBM Thinkpad -- Sudden Laptop Death Syndrome? 101

Posted by Cliff from the beware-the-hiberante-revive-cycle dept.
Bronz asks: "In one day I went from pondering selling my IBM Thinkpad T20 on eBay to mourning it's inevitable death, and I don't think I'm alone (nor is the T20 is the only fatality). The symptoms are illusive but a pattern may be emerging -- be wary of putting your Thinkpad into a hibernate/sleep state and leaving it connected to AC power. A cursory web search has revealed a smattering of threads detailing the illness. First it won't come out of hibernation and then it simply won't boot at all. One interesting facet of the first thread is that the frequency of posts has been steadily increasing over the past few months and doesn't seem limited to any one particular model." Has anyone else run into this problem with their Thinkpad laptop?

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