nhn asks: "Being a caffeine-addict, I feel quite miserable not having my favourite coffee, every morning. I can't walk to Starbucks/Gloria Jeans, while I'm at work, since there is an instant coffee machine available (and I dislike filtered coffee). For the record: I hate Nescafe, it simply sucks." What must you drink, after your dreams have evaporated into the waking world? What types of coffee would you recommend to a seasoned coffee afficionado...or even your garden variety caffeine addict?

urgent asks: "In March of 2002, Ask Slashdot ran this article, wherein advice on 'hardware to digitize the VGA output of a PC' was sought. Most of the responses seemed to assume that remote administration of PC's/servers was the end goal. If you've got control of the software and/or hardware, it's pretty clear there are easier solutions for that. On the other had, there are many legacy and embedded systems where it would be nice to monitor and record display output. For instance, integrating old computerized factory equipment into a SCADA system, or recording old embedded maritime and medical displays (hint: jobs). My dream hardware would be a dongle that connected to a VGA out and could be polled over ethernet or CAN."

tfiedler asks: "I'm trying to find a low cost digital eyepiece for my microscope, around $200 or so in cost, and have ran across very little useful information. I want something that can be plugged into my video capture card, so RCA or S-vid output is a requirement. I've found the following two products. The barrel for my microscope is 18mm in diameter. Does anyone have other suggestions, or any experience with the ones at the mentioned URLs? Additionally, has anyone done anything like this with a webcam?"

fl_ska asks: "I recently attended a meeting of local amateur astronomers in my area known as The Local Group of Deep Sky Observers. After being blown away by views of the Orion Nebula and such, I got to thinking about the state of modern amateur astronomy. For instance, I recall reading about a project to link multiple optical telescopes so as to approximate the light-gathering capacity of a much larger telescope, a so called 'array of optical telescopes.' With the advent of the Web, it seems like it would be relatively easy to coordinate such a project via some central server which could then process and link images for all to view. I was wondering if there were any amateur astronomers out there who were possibly working on a similar project?"

bigmush asks: "I have an old pair of speakers, and they had been working fine until recently. I took off the covers, and saw that the foam surround had started to wear out on both of the woofers. After 15 years of service, this was a sad discovery (though also an opportunity to justify an upgrade!). I found a few foam surround repair kits available online. How well do these work? What experiences have you had with them?"

phyrebyrd asks: "I have been known to pry things apart to see how they work now and then - Especially when I feel something is being deliberately hidden from me. I was rather amused to see that, inside my shiny new NetGear WG311 PCI card for my desktop, was actually a Mini-PCI card! The release clips were soldered onto the adapter, but otherwise extractable. Just for grins, I un-soldered the release tabs, popped it out of the adapter and put it into my Dell laptop, which was ready to receive a Mini-PCI wireless adapter already. This is where I ran into a problem. The drivers loaded, and the monitor popped up, just like it did on my desktop, but all of the configuration tabs had disappeared, even though the status screen showed that it was still scanning for an open network. The model number stamped on the card is T60H677, with a sticker next to it reading T60H677T04. Has anyone actually gotten one of these desktop PCI/MiniPCI cards to work in their laptop successfully?"

sydsavage asks: "My mom, who is profoundly deaf, has finally qualified for a cochlear implant. She is having the procedure done at the University of Minnesota, and is scheduled for surgery in early March. The doctors have left it up to her to choose between two different implants. The differences between them are highly technical, and well above her level of comprehension. So she decided to ask her geek son to take a look at the differing technologies. Unfortunately, I'm a systems administrator, not an audio engineer or signal processing guru, and reading up on the technologies made this fact blaringly obvious to me. About the best I can tell her is one has more accessories available, as any good geek could ascertain. While this may have an impact on her decision, at the end of the day, she just wants to be able to hear better. Are there any slashdot readers with first or second hand experience with these two devices? Any signal processing engineers that would like to weigh in on the different technologies involved?"

CrypticSpawn asks: "I read an article on Joel on Software it talks about Microsoft missing one important thing from the .NET infrastructure, and I wanted to know what Slashdot readers thought were Microsoft's reasons for leaving [a linker] out?"

tck1000 asks: "I currently maintain some legacy webservers, running Apache 1.3.x on Linux, on x86 hardware. Two separate daemons are used. One to serve SSL vhosts, and one to server non-SSL vhosts. Each of these servers also is compiled with PHP, mod_perl, and JServe, and also works with a Tomcat servlet engines. In the process of planning an upgrade path, I've thought about using a single daemon to serve both the SSL and Non-SSL vhosts. Is this a good idea?"

BigBlockMopar asks: "A friend of mine runs a web site which offers a very large archive of files. He wishes to continue to offer free and unrestricted access to his archive, but his bandwidth consumption has been through the roof because of people using wget (and similar) to download his entire site. Current traffic is around 200 gigabytes per month with over 50% of that being clients who are downloading every document on the site. The server space is donated by a hosting provider who is understandably starting to become impatient with the traffic. I've checked out mod_throttle and mod_bandwidth, neither appears to do exactly what is desired. Does anyone have any suggestions?"

A Conflicted Hosting Admin asks: "Imagine you're a webmaster running your own server. You provide email accounts to a third party as a 'service' in addition to hosting a web site for the third party. Now, suppose that one of the companies that you are hosting a site and email addresses for decides they need access to an email account for a previously disassociated employee. Does that company now have access to the email even though there is no written contract nor technology use policy? Where does the independent hoster look for guidance on something such as this?"

Siddly asks: "OK, I've used databases in DOS, like dBase2, dBase3 and others. None of those mentioned needing a knowledge of database theory, they allowed you to layout and manipulate data quite easily. In Linux, we have MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, and more. None of these are intuitive, even the GUI's aren't very helpful to any casual or very occasional user, who just wants to create a simple database and forget it until something significant needs to be added, deleted or amended. I obviously don't posses the skills or time to undertake writing such an animal. Does anyone else suffer this frustration? Has anyone managed to get something like dBase3 working under dosemu?" The problem isn't necessarily the underlying RBDMS, but the interface presented to the user. Are there front-ends for the various Unix database offerings that simplify database concepts to the level of what a dBase3 user would feel comfortable with?

ivi asks: "I first bumped into the XP approach to system development, some years ago, on Dr Dobbs' now-defunct Seminar-On-Demand site TechNetCast. XP has some short, simple rules for growing software from Users' Stories, eg, with programmers working in pairs, showing prototypes to Users "early & often" et al. Download this XP site (under 400KB, zipped) for more. So, who's used or using XP, does it work for OSS projects & what have your experiences been with it, so far?"