stlgoalie

Wiki is a useful tool. When I was doing book research, it had some different topics, and sometimes when I'm bored at work waiting for a render to finish I will look around Wiki. That being said, I am not sure I would use it for any academic work other than to see what sources they cite. The problem with something that anyone can edit is that any one can edit. That just makes it ripe for vandels and that 1% of the population that enjoys screwing things up for everyone else.

I think there is some animal out there that is causing the "goatsucking" of animals in Central america. Every year they find a new species or two around the globe. Last year, they found the Ivory-billed woodpecker wasn't so extinct.

Sterotypes don't apply to indivduals...but to groups as a whole? What do you think sterotypes are for?

Funny thing is that the symbol of Fulon Gong would be banned in most European countries. Why? It contains a Swastika right smack dab in the middle. http://www.falundafa.org/ As for dealing with China...the problem is a two edged sword. China is slowly shifiting away from communisum to a more market orinted economy. As the Chinese people get more money, I'm sure they are going to demand more politcal freedoms. This is not going to happen overnight, but I'm pretty sure it will happen. So the question is, what do you do till then? Do you cut off trade? Well for every country willing to do that, others are more than willing to aquire cheap goods. If the US did something, I seriously doubt the EU would. It would be a golden oppurinty to end the dominence of the Dollar in the world Economy making the Euro the currency of choice by 2020. Things like hosting the Olympics will force more scruntiny on the chinese governement and will put pressure upon them to make changes in their human rights policies.

Apple. My iBook is almost 4 years old now and it's time to replace it. I am waiting for more software to be released on MacOS Intel before spending the money. I really need for the Pro Apps and Office to be ported to OSX-intel before I spend the money. Also, I know better than to purchase a first generation Apple product. If you can wait, I'd suggest waiting about another 6 months and getting a MacBook Pro. Especially now since there is a hack to get Windows XP to install on a machine. Now you'll be able to run MacOS or Windows if you need to all on one machine without having to use emulation since they are both using the x86 architecture. (Even though the Mac uses a different abstraction layer)

I like milk. Milk doesn't like me. I used to drink a gallon or two a week when I was kid. Then when I turned 21, milk started not liking me. I started having a lot of gas and stomach problems. After my fiance and i broke up, I didn't realize that my dairy consumption was next to nothing. I went several weeks without any problems and then was at a friend's house and was eating some fresh choloate chip cookies and a nice tall glass of milk. I read up and chances are I'm lactose intollerant, but if only when I drink more than a glass a day. So if I have ceral for breakfast, no icecream for dinner. The biggest problem is not thinking about what you eat. A lot of salads have cheese, so do most tacos, and Pizza. So a lot of times I'll have a couple slices of pizza...get about half way through, and know I'm going to pay for it later. I think milk is good for you. People have drank milk for centuries. Acording to the scientists, this week wine is good for me, but steak is bad. Next week wine will be bad and steak will be good. I try not to eat a lot of fast food and watch portions, but if I want steak I eat steak. If I want milk...I make sure I take a lactaid first...

Has anyone tried the all in one package? The $90 a month package that includes unlimted long distance/local telephone, DSL, and Dish TV? Currently I live in an area where CenturyTel is the provider. My job provides my Charter High Speed connection and I use my cell as my one and only phone, but SBC/ATT is the teleco in my dad's area. He already has Dish network TV and is using the cable company for his phone ($40 a month unlimited calling) and pays $11 a month for Dial up internet. If he can get highspeed and everything on one bill paying about the same (if not less) than I think he'd be inerested in the service.

iBook: Purchased online from Apple.com before extensive travel in other countries July 2002. $~1800 G3 700, 14.1" screen, combo drive.PowerMac: Bought when the company I work for was replacing all the G4's with G5's. Dual 1.25Ghz G4, 4GB RAM, 4x160GB HDDs for $1250 about 1.5 years ago. (And Final Cut Pro Studio that I never bothered to wipe off...)Compaq Alpha Server: Bought from work when moved the renderfarm from Alpha to Xserve: $1750 in 2001 or 2002...can't remember. Quad Alpha 500mhz CPU's, NT4 for Alpha, 2GB Ram, 3x18GB SCSI HDD. DEC Alpha Workstation: Diddo from work, $750 in 2001. 350Mhz, 1GB Ram, NT4 for AlphaMac Mini: I bought online from various Ebay Auctions about $420 each. All are 1.25 Ghz with 1GB Ram. I use them for Xgrid nodes for Lightwave and Xgrid rendering for Terragen and Blender 3D. PowerBook: G4 1Ghz, 1GB Ram, $650. I just bought this last week from a friend. He's getting a MacBook Pro and I needed something to replace my iBook. Current Final Cut has no Intel versions out and I do a lot of video work on the side. I don't want to switch to Intel chips until the software is there and the bugs are worked out. 3x IBM PIII 867: got these at an auction for $60 a piece last year. They run FreeBSD just fine and are decent rendering nodes for Xgrid as well.

In one of my PERL books it states: "In PERL there is always more than one way to do it!". In terms of what is good coding practices on wether to have one cgi file or several, that really is up to you. There really is no "right" or "wrong" way to do it. It really is your personal preference. I've heard it both ways, but to me, there is nothing worse that going through a PERL file that is 65k lines long trying to find a mistake. Sometimes I wish the main file just called subroutines from linked files. So if there is a problem with submitting, then its isolated to the few dozen/hundred/thousand lines of code in that file. So the answer here is, what ever you want so long as it works. Actually that's my motto to coding.

All the tech heads that bought it because it was the latest and greatest complain about it. I remember I looked at one a few months ago when they first came out showed me another motoroloa that cheaper and had more featuers. While the Razr looks cool, it is extremely flimsy. The tech heads have been slightly dissapointed with performance and two that I know went through two or three each in six months and finally got different phone. I one of them forgot about it, slipped it in his back pocket and then sat down on a concrete ledge. Given the guy weighs about 350...crunch!The other people that have purchased the phone seem to be those that want it as a status symbol or fashion acessory. These people wouldn't admit if they had bought a dud even if they had. Judging by the number of teenagers that have the phone and the number of more vein folks I know that also own one... I'm not sold on the phone. All the reports I've read is that the construction is rather poor, especially on the first gen. The more interesting phone to me, if I were a cingular customer, would be the newer silvr onlybecause it also has iTunes. But the biggest draw back is that with stuff that small, I'd better carry the protection plan because I'd loose the damned things.

Nope, if you make it and use for yourself, or even within a private orgainization like a company, your not required to release jack. Now, if you do release a distro, you have to make the sources available with the CD, but no where in the GPL does it state that you have to do this by making it freely available for download. And once you do release it, others have the right to then take what you did and reuse it. This means if you wanted too, you could make copies of the live CD and another CD rom containing the source and sell them online for a fee. There can be some wishy-washy legal stuff on "selling" linux, but you charge whatever amount you want as a "handling fee" or what not. We have an inhouse graphics application we built mostly from an OSS GPLed technology. We feel it gives us a unique competitive advantage over others in our field, so we don't release the tool. However, now that we've switch to all Macintoshes, we've started switching to another commerical tool to do the same thing (Apple Shake in this case). So we've thought about releasing the program we created making it available via CD only and charging $2500 for the CD and jewel case. Of course, chances are your only going to sell one or two copies before someone gets pissy and moany about it in the "Software should be free, as in beer", takes what ever you did, make a couple tweaks, and but it on sourceforge for free.

You know, these products would kinda overlap on a vin diagram, but not by much. Yes the PSP can play music and videos, but it's main function is playing games. The ipod, can't play games (other than someone managed to port DOOM I to the system....so go figure), but is designed for people who commute a lot to and from work. I know when I lived in Europe I would have loved to had such a system. Especially where I could have downloaded some of my favorite TV programs, like Battlestar Galactica, the day after it aired in the states. Yeah, the screen size might be small, but I can also play the video on my iBook as well, so...However, I'll will bet real money that Apple sells more video iPods than sony does PSP's because there is just a broader market for the iPods.

Wikipedia is useful for looking up general information and sometimes on off the wall information that you won't find other places. However, the fact that anyone can edit Wikipedia is a problem. There are people with way too much time on their hand that all they do is troll to see what miss information they can add and not have people notice, at least for a while. It's been said: the great thing about Wiki is anyone can edit. The bad thing about Wiki: anyone can edit. It is especially bad on certain topics that may have been written by someone with a PhD in the field, say econmics, and then someone else that might have had an econ course at a community college disagrees and writes something else. Or even if you have two respected people in a field that have different view points, especially with history, that this becomes a problem. I can cite wiki articles in my papers, but they profs won't take them as seriously as say an article in the Harvard Law Journal or some such source I find through Lexis-Nexis. I don't pay for Lexis-Nexis, but I know the school's subscription is like $35,000 a year for the service. When I go out in practice, I might be paying some $2,500 a year for access to the service and money well paid for it too. Information is only as good as the source you can cite and there are differences in terms of quality. Wiki is a good starting point, just not a good ending point.

I needed a desktop with more power than my 700 Mhz ibook, but I didn't want to invest a lot of money into the PPC plaform knowing that Apple was switching to Intel starting this year, so I bought this Mac Mini when the models came out with 512MB of Ram. I switched to Mac beause four years ago I was going to Germany for 6 months and was coding a lot of websites in PERL, MySQL, and PHP at the time. So I wanted the Unix enviroment, but I also needed microsoft Office. Apple was offering a machine I could use all my favourite *iux applications, all my standard applications by Adobe and Macromedia and even run Windows 2k pro thanks to Virtual PC all on one laptop. Bought it, loved not dealing with the virus of the week and never looked back and have been with Macintosh ever since.

AMd is better for gaming******Only if running AMD64 chips on Windows XP-64 edition and the game your playing is coded to take advantage of 64-bit processing technology.Of dealing with 64-bit processors for over a decade, more 99% of computer tasks 32-bit chips are actually going to be faster. Especially for your average office application. The only industries that can take advantage of 64-bit are games and graphics rendering and even then only if the software is coded for 64-bit applications. I can remember trying to run some of our CAD software on a 64-bit Ultra-Sparc workstation. The 32-bit Sparc station was killing it in operating performance. Now when it came time to number crunch, say airflow/particle simulatons, the UltraSparcs would win hands down, but in the actual modelling and using the program we went back to 32-bit Sparc machines for our workstations.