deaflamb wonders: "I'm a biology major and have been writing a paper for a class. I'm using Microsoft Word on my mac. It's annoying me how often I have to click 'ignore' or 'add' on the spell checker when it comes across words only used in Science. Was wondering if there where any free scientific spell checkers out there that can be added into Word or OpenOffice (since I use that too), and how well they work?" It didn't take me long to find these guys, who look like they cover a significant portion of the terms used in the medical and science world, however, their price for a single user license for only one of their specialty packs can run into the hundreds of dollars. Might there be other options that are a bit more affordable or, as the deaflamb asks, free?

Squink asks: "I've got the fun job of having to recode a medium sized (500-1000 users) community site from the ground up. For this project, gratuitous use of XMLHttpRequest appears to be in order. However - with the all of the hyperbole surrounding AJAX, I've not been able to find any useful information regarding server load [Apache + MySQL] when using some of the more useful AJAX applications, such as autocomplete. Is this really a non-issue, or are people neglecting to discuss this for fear of popping the Web2.0 bubble?"

Milo_Mindbender asks: "For a C++ application I'm working on I want to be able to pop up an interface to a class that will display all the 'tunable' parameters of the class and let me inspect/modify them, while the program is running. The catch is that I'm running on a minimal embedded OS with Open GL but no GUI library. Rather than porting a widget set or writing my own, I was thinking about having the application talk to a web browser, and then use the browser to display the GUI, take user input, and finally push the data back to the app. The classes have metadata that describes the public data locations/types so they can be accessed, but not being a web-wizard I'm not sure of the best way of generating the information I need to create the UI. My first thought is to generate HTML and push that to the browser, but it seems like there must be a better way than this, maybe someone has written a library specifically for doing this sort of thing? Any help/suggestions would be appreciated!"

xlilacx asks: "The video game industry is worth $25 billion, and predicted to rival the global music industry in the next 10 years. Even Grandma is joining in on the fun. My husband and I bought three video game retail stores two months ago, and so far sales are dismal (down 25% from last year's sales), which seems to be an industry trend. I've noticed a few things that are contibuting to our lack of profits: the people who weren't able to get an XBox 360 have decided they will wait to get one (which most likely will be after Christmas), and they will not buy any games for their old systems in the meantime; people are automatically conditioned to go to the EB-Games and GameStop stores at the malls, even if they give less in trade-ins and have horrible customer servicr; lastly, kids come in with piles of junk games (Madden 2001, etc..), and get enough store credit to buy the latest greatest game that we only mark up like 5%-10%. I'd like to ask Slashdot readers if these observations are a good reflection of the mentality of video-game buyers everywhere, and what suggestions they have for a small ma-and-pa video game store. With all the huge retailers in the video-game market and the EB/GameStop merger, is there a place left for the local game store?"

etrgQUARK asks: "I am in charge of infrared spectrometers at our research center. One of the setups is used to measure the orientation of monolayers at the air/water interface, i.e. the signal we have to detect is very weak and noisy. We already have a great setup with quality components and electronics, except for one piece of hardware: the computer hooked up to acquire the data. How important is the computer in noise-sensitive data acquisition? What are your experiences? Do you have any suggestions on a workstation suitable for such tasks or is it a waste of money to use anything but the average computer system? Unfortunately, the software used is Windows-only."

bz asks: "I work for a small product development company that is considering the use of RF. Naturally, it seems that it would be easier to use a proprietary protocol rather than some of the standards on the market. We are restricted by small code space and low power. The Zigbee protocol needs more memory than we would like to give up. Naturally, if Zigbee is going to become ubiquitous, we would like to sacrifice the extra memory and jump on the bandwagon. However, if it is only going to be as popular as Bluetooth, we would prefer to pass. Is Zigbee going to succeed, or is it likely to follow along the low road that Bluetooth has already paved?"

glitch0 asks: "Recently, I found some pretty neat Christmas decorations, at a neighbors house. He has a light setup that syncs up with MIDI files of Christmas music. The cool part is the way you hear the music - it's broadcast using a radio transmitter so you can tune your car radio as you're driving by and hear and see the show. Do any other Slashdot readers have cool homebrew light setups or ideas for over-the-top holiday decorations?"