Bifurcati asks: "I'm a grad student at the University of Queensland, Australia. I am frequently required to submit forms (e.g., annual reports) which are sent as Word or RTF documents and must be filled in electronically. However, these are almost impossible to use under Linux (e.g., StarOffice) because the tables and formatting are just too complicated and get mangled. Even Word for Mac sometimes has problems. Can anyone suggest a better, cross-platform format? Could PDF files with forms do this? What are the costs & learning curve? User friendliness is vital for both admin and student. Alternatively, can anyone suggest ways they could make their Word files more compatible across platforms?"

Frozen-Solid asks: "With the release of Windows XP SP2, I got to thinking about how all of these windows updates leave their uninstall information 'just in case' you need to uninstall them for some random reason. However, after you've had them up and running for a few weeks/months/years and no longer need that backup information, is it safe to just delete those ugly hidden directories from the Windows directory or is there a 'safer' way to free up that wasted space? My current update backup collection is totaling over half a gig which could easily be better spent elsewhere."

not-so-anonymous Anonymous Coward asks: "I'm working for a company that does all of its programming and script development in a Unix environment (90% of our work is either Bash or Perl scripts that communicate with an Oracle database). We've recently gotten a new customer and for reasons beyond our control, the server must be a Windows box. Since we want to reuse our existing scripts that we've spent a considerable amount of time developing, we're looking into Cygwin as an option. Has anyone run Cygwin in a production server environment for any extended period of time? If so, what were your experiences with it?"

SantiagoRoza asks: "Hello, Slashdot. I am asking for your collaboration because someone I know needs a software to manage his (small) Internet cafe. Ideally, we're looking for software that is free/libre and multilingual (with a Spanish version), but I'd gladly take free/gratis and English-only. Additionally, the software has to work on Windows. After searching the 'net, I've only been able to find CafeTimer, which doesn't impress me. Nothing else out there looks like it will support more than 2-3 computers. Might you all have other suggestions?"

Mark asks: "As demand for storage continues to grow and prices continue to drop, network attached storage (NAS) devices are popping up everywhere...from large enterprises to restaurants to small offices and homes. Several vendors are now offering low-end NAS solutions targeted at SOHO users, with varying results. Most of them are just standard PC components and standard IDE hard drives running Linux, but the price tag on these often far oustrips what one would expect to pay for the parts. Hence, people all over the world (myself included) are building their own NAS machines at home at a fraction of the cost. Beyond support for RAID, CIFS, NFS, HTTP, and FTP, what would the ideal home NAS operating system include? And more importantly, what should it leave out to avoid conflicts, security vulnerabilities, and instability? Are there any Linux/*BSD/other distributions out there optimized specifically for NAS applications? What does the ideal NAS distribution look like to you?"

Goeland86 asks: "Has OCR (Optical Character Recognition) died down? Where have all the magical programs that translate your handwriting to office compatible files gone? Most of the windows programs nowadays are either expensive (ReadIris Pro 9 about $400) and not that many OSS projects for OCR have released a recent update (Kognition was last updated on July 17th 2003 according to Freshmeat). Has everyone already scanned/translated all of their paper files? Has OCR outlived its use, or is it just a fancy technology that hit a dead end in terms of the market? Have Slashdot readers used it? If so, are you still using it? If not, why?"

JayBonci asks: "Here's a question to the Slashdot readerbase. How powerful is the turnoff power of spam? With an upcoming political election in the United States, and a nation not very-well defended against mass unsolicited emailings, what kind of anti-marketing medium is spam? Could a spammer push out millions of: 'V0te for G3orge W. Bush!' or 'J0hn Kerry for Presidnet@', in the hopes to turn off (or on) voters. Spam marketing penetration is terrible (I've heard figures like .001%), but how powerful is its anti-marketing capabilities? An interesting discussion for the Slashdot audience." How often do you make the decision to NOT buy something form a company because you know they engage in spamming activities?

An anonymous reader asks: "I work for a large multinational firm with a network that spans the globe and am responsible for evaluating the software we use to monitor our network. Our department has a lot of money, and we're usually willing and able to spend it on good commercial software. Recently though, I find myself evaluating and approving more and more open source software. We are actually in the process of replacing some of our commercial tools with software like Nagios, LooperNG and syslog-ng. We are also evaluating MRTG, RRDTool, ntop and a host of other tools. The problem is that there's just too many of them, most of which are not maintained anymore. Here's my question: What other open-source tools do you use to monitor your networks? I not just looking for names, but how long you've been using them for, how easy / hard is it to administer and I guess how well it scales as the network grows. More importantly, are their respective projects still alive and kicking?"