8ennett

Yes, if you start experiencing the problems again then get yourself a live linux distro (bootable off either a cd/dvd or usb flash disk so no need to install it) and do your normal thing on that for a while. If you do still experience problems then you have a hardware problem which you will need to locate.If you don't experience any problems then it is windows and I would suggest doing a system restore to a point before you starting having problems. Failing that then it might be due to a faulty driver you downloaded which can be a bigger problem.I used to think that with a faulty driver if you roll back the driver to a previous version or uninstall the driver then re-install it that would fix any problem, but I downloaded a Conexant driver for my laptops sound card through Windows Vista update and the sound card stopped working. Rolling back did nothing, uninstalling and reinstalling different versions did nothing. I even restored to a point before I did the update but still didn't work. Eventually I reinstalled the operating system from a ghost partition and it finally fixed the problem. The same driver is still available for download on the windows update but there is not a chance I'm touching it now lol.

It is actually quite a simple concept. You are familiar with magnetic fields right? The fact that the planet earth itself is constantly generating its own magnetic field shows how safe they can be. The north and south pole, a result of the negative and positive charges of earths magentic field. This is the exact same concept except on a smaller scale, there is no harmful radiation involved or anything of the sort. Like I stated before, the human body is "invisible" to magnetic fields and has no effect what so ever on it. Right now there are fields of electromagnetism surrounding your entire body, yes even the human body produces its own small electromagnetic static. Don't worry about any of it, scaremongering and worrying yourself over trivial things like this can lead to a very sad and possibly short life span. It's a medical fact that people who worry over such things all the time will eventually cause a psychosematic response in their own body and produce their own demise. People have been known to even create tumours inside their own body purely from constantly worrying they are going to get a tumour. You can cause blood vessels to burst just by being scared of your own microwave oven and so on. I can understand your scheptasism, but if you don't fully understand the concept then there is no point in thinking about what may be. Also to add, the likeliness of you actually passing between two coils while they are transferring electro magnetism is remote at best. Since objects like the recharging pad transfer directly between each coil and no electro magnetism is being broadcast in to the air then you have even less to worry about. When no second coil is in range of the charging pads coil then it does not draw power from the mains. Only the integrated circuitry will require power to detect when a rechargeable device is within range and then activate/deactivate the primary coil as needed.

It would appear the support software simply has different formats for different browsers, the people to talk to about it would be the software vendor which is Kayako SupportSuite v3.40.01. Just let them know that firefoxs' format of the page does not display the login screen when attempting to access a support ticket when not logged in. If Kayako get back to you and confirm it is actually a problem with firefox and not their software then they can supply a more accurate description of where the error is occuring which will save the firefox developers a lot of time in amending the error for the next release, but if it is a problem on Kayako's side then I'm sure they will amend it themselves and provide an update or a patch to their customers or simply include the amendment in the next release of their software. It's not really a major problem anyway, just be grateful that nobody can access your support ticket without having to supply your login credentials. Simply login, click My Support then the support ticket you want to view.

Xisto will choose for you, although it makes no difference really. If there are more hosted accounts on Gamma than Alpha then you will probably end up on Alpha, and vice versa. You will still receive the full amount of space and bandwidth allocation depending on your hosting type.

Servers are usually allocated depending on how much free space etc a server has, and with the recent upgrades to the alpha server I'm guessing they will be creating new hosting accounts on that one for the time being.There is no real distinction between first time hosted account and long time hosted account. As long as you pay for the hosting then it is all the same.It turns out the account was suspended for a different reason than I thought, my site was causing the Gamma server to slow down as it had a lot of drag on it, but they can't tell me what was causing it until it happens again. I'm guessing it is the live horse racing script I wrote, displaying the current race uses ajax and that can be quite taxing on a server. So they have moved me to alpha and wanted to inform me of what had happened before reactivating my account. Looks like I can't get in to fix the problem though until it happens again.I appreciate how hard the support staff work as well and understand how busy they can get. They are always apologising for the delay in response as well even if they reply within 30 mins of my posting the support ticket lol

For the past few weeks my hosted accounts have been acting strangely, sometimes the web returned an error and was considered an incorrect address, or sometimes the database was missing and no connection could be made. I put it down to server maintenance which it turned out to be. My new server is now ALPHA instead of GAMMA and they have just finished upgrading it.One of my sites is working fine now, however my main site when loaded displays a message saying my account is suspended and my login to cPanel won't work either. I've filed a support ticket but I'm just letting everyone knos so they can double check their accounts. It appears as normal in the billing support area and is displayed as active, i'm just hoping they haven't lost all my data. It's not a tradgedy as I keep backups and the backup is more recent than the live site anyway, but still when the site is launched it has gotten me thinking that purchasing daily site backups might be a good idea.

I suppose I did make it sound a little too poetic lol but then again it is definately worth the experience, it doesn't just feel like you are driving the car but more like you are the car, once you get your movements perfect then you will be able to control the car far better than any console controller could, even the over-steering over-powered muscle cars will be under your full controlAlso I've realised the other games don't deliver the storyline the same way, in carbon the whole story is a mix of computer animated backgrounds and vehicles with real actors thrown in to the scenes. Most of the other games are just text based storylines and occasionally some voice-overs.

Lockerz is now open to the public and anyone can sign up now they have finally released their store and the videos section. The price of all their prizes has gone up considerably as well however that is justified by the amount of points you can get simply by watching all the videos (although I can't watch half of them because they are only available in the US).Also they seem to have gotten rid of most of their prizes, the majority of prizes available now is either gift vouchers (for stores only available in the US) and crappy desktop backgrounds (really?). They have a couple of Macbooks (urgh) and some paypal money, even a couple of ipods (they must have made some kind of promo deal with apple the silly sods) but apart from that the rest is just worthless junk. They don't even offer console games anymore which is a shame, I've got enough ptz saved up to buy their entire previous stock lolAlso priority is now given to US citizens first, then to the rest of the world. Also there are several tiers of redemption. If you pay 1,000ptz you can buy the first tier, 500ptz gets you the second tier and the third tier is for those who don't want to give up ptz just to get to the prizes first. The first tier get to have their pick of all the prizes, then an hour later the second tier join in followed by the third tier after that.Lockerz appears to have become exactly what they said it wasn't when they first started out, a SCAM. They have played it very cleverly though, but now it is what it is. You can buy ptz boosters, so for small fee you can earn 4x as many ptz which kinda defeats the point of earning them in the first place. You also earn more ptz than any other part of the site by buying stuff from their store. Sorry lockerz but you ruined a good thing and sold out, you made us believe what you were doing was for the benefit of the users and not your own pockets, now it would seem you are doing it for yourselves and trying to con the users as much as you can.

Yeah when I wrote this I wasn't really thinking straight and trying to iron out about 20 different problems in my head at once. I forgot about the advanced statistics features in cPanel

NFS was always my choice of racing game back in the day, however I've also gone off them as I got older., but I never did prefer any other racing game to NFS back then. I thought they had started to lose it after Most Wanted 2 and didn't bother looking in to any others, however I was pleasantly surprised by Carbon. My brother got a copy for his Wii and I spent hours on it having a nostalgia attack.The way the game actually utilised the phsycial controls of the Wii handset was amazing, tilting the nunchuck side to side to steer and lifting the handset up and down to accelerate and reverse, also the handbrake and nitro were in the perfect place and you could just feel the movement of the car, amazing. Also the gameplay itself was pretty good too, the storyline running (I thought they could have added more to it though) and the photography in the cut-scenes was amazing. Also the different types of crew members and their skills were good and made it different.

Well back in the day I probably would have recommended a CAT5 twister pair cable, it has speeds of up to 100mb/s and would be the most cost efficient (seeing as the signal would start to degrade on a cable over 500m in length). However today with the low cost of fibre optic cables I would recommend using and ethernet cross-over cable. The ethernet crossover is basically just a standard ethernet cable however at one end the connections inside are connected the other way around so it is not mirrored enabling data transfer from one end to the other. It used to be you could only get a fibre optic crossover cable if you made it yourself (by opening the cable jacket and manually crossing over the wires) however there are companys out there that manufacture and sell them now so it saves time and work. With fibre optic cable you are really only limited to the memory and buffer size of both computers connected then, unless you have some kind of supercomputer. Obviously with wireless your signal degredation would be much higher, however when working with a LAN through a hub or router you must remember you are limited to the amount of onboard memory the router has. So 8mb memory would result in 7.5mb/s-7.8mb/s (or 8.1mb/s if you are lucky). With data transfer speeds of 30mb/s-40mb/s though I don't think you would have any problems with waiting times lol what kind of connection are you using to get those kind of speeds? I know it's possible with a CAT5 or fibre optic, even eSATA (which is going to revolutionise data transfer in the future, just watch) but I've never heard of standard USB and USB2.0 transferring at those speeds. In theory USB 2.0 can reach speeds of 35mb/s to 40mb/s but in practice many machines are incapable of providing enough power to the USB drive to support that data transfer rate. Mind you I'm slowly becoming out of date with my hardware, it's moving so fast nowadays it's getting hard to keep up without falling behind in other areas. I remember when I thought USB was the pinnacle of hardware development lol Speak for yourself lol I prefer to rip all my DVD's to my server so I can stream them anyway in my house. Now that can take up a hell of a lot of space and it is space I don't have. My DVD collection comprises of over 200 movies, no BR or HDDVD mind you. Let's say 50% are DVD5 around 4GB in size and the other 50% are DVD9 7GB in size (average), 200 movies would be 1,100gb. Next we add together all my complete sets of series, Deep Space 9, Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, Voyager, 24, That 70's Show, Sopranos, The Wire, and many more. You can imagine the storage space required to store all that data. I'm not going to calculate it either as it would take me all day lol Many people would see this as pointless, if you own the DVD's then why not just watch them? Well it's all about ease of use. I have devices hooked up to all the televisions in my house capable of streaming all these without the need to dig out the discs and swap them around etc. Just a few clicks and we're away. Also I can watch the same movie on more than one television at the same time. Not to mention my capability to play music all over the house, even out in the garden on my outdoor speakers. With a 1PB driver, I could seriously begin expanding my collection and finally get around to putting all films and series on to my server. Right now if I want to add more, I first have to get rid of some as I'm limited to a maximum of 500gb, and with all my music on there already more space is desperately required but I simply can't afford it right now.

My preferred method of transfer is through a standard ethernet routing hub, 8mb flash memory means I can usually transfer around 7.5mbps-7.8mbps (megabytes per second). So transferring around 10gb of data would take around 22 mins, then you would back it up on the target system instead of transferring all of that data over again saving even more time.USB transfers aren't recommended for extremely large amounts of data, even with usb 2.0 which is why I will always prefer network transfers instead of removable data devices. I know you can buy 500gb drives with an ide to usb cable and fancy little case however you will not find many professionals using these unless they aren't expecting to transfer much data at a time. If they were expecting large data transfers then they would probably use a network drive instead.I suppose you could use direct computer links using a cross over cable for faster speeds, but that would be FAR too easy lol

A 3.5" disk that can hold that amount of data would make massive leaps forward for multimedia. The quality of our movies was greatly improved with the invention of HD, however that medium was not available to purchase in shops until the creation of Blue Ray and HD DVD's because standard DVD's were not capable of storing that much data. There are many things which are limited by space, people reduce the size of their applications and media formats so they will be available to more people. An operating system isn't usually more than 5-15gb because for some people they don't have a large enough hard disk for anything else. Just imagine though the type of operating systems that would become available if the industry standard for hard disks becomes even 0.5pb. The computers with a disk that size in it could probably be used to run your own house with state of the art artificial intelligence.

Yes, when it's finished and you first register there will be an initial setup wizard for configuring some required features, then the opening part of the first storyline will begin. The mission system is also designed to familiarise people with the game controls and areas. Still haven't uploaded the latest files btw

GMails spam filter should stop doing that after enough people mark their mails as safe and not spam. There is a warning about that if you try to log in without validating your account and when you register as well.Not really a big problem for now, but will have it sorted by release time

I think he was referring to them in terms of when they were released (for playstation and xbox anyway).I have never used a cheat code in GTA before I have completed it. For me it just ruins the game and doesn't add any flavour to the story lines. To be honest, I never use cheats in any game until I have first completed it.Cheating in games defeats the entire purpose of the game to begin with. Why bother playing if you are just going to cheat? If you can't win the game without cheating then just keep trying, you'll get there eventually, and if not then you must be bad at gaming lolBut yeah, if you cheat at a game before you have finished it because you find it too difficult then it says a lot about your personality (that wasn't directed toward you Ahsaniqbal).

There are many things wrong with that statement that need clarifying. When using a router, the router assigns local network IP addresses. This tend to start with 192.168.xxx.xxx. This IP address will not be available to the world wide web and is only accessible on your local network. These IP addresses can be either static or dynamic depending on how you have configured your network. You can also configure your modem to forward all external connections to an ip on the local network, hence the term ROUTER. The ISP is what assigns an IP address to your internet connection. Dynamic IP addresses are not usually assigned to Dial-Up connections either as was stated by mHelmy. I have a 50 megabit (5 megabytes per second) connection which still uses a dynamic ip address, which trust me comes in handy. If they ever converted every user to a static IP then I would probably end up switching to a different ISP. And finally to comment on the tutorial lol It's very good and clearly written and offers a great method of dns forwarding for dynamic ip holders runnign a server. An alternate method I used to use for my old synchronet server (telnet) was by signing up with DynDNS.com and using their forwarding system. Now I wouldn't have much trouble because my server was constantly connected to the web, however there did come times when the server required a reboot if the OS became unstable or began to lag. If this happened then I would simply visit whatismyip.com, get my new ip quickly and easily and update my DynDNS account in seconds with the new ip address, so routing to the site was immediately updated and corrected. So my static DNS address was bennettbbs.darktech.org (I had a free account with DynDNS) which never changed however my IP was constantly changing.

Well the site is already up and running however I haven't uploaded the latest content for a while. Also development has currently stopped while I finish off a new project and try to find a job at the same time. Anyway you can sign up here http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ but there really isn't much to it yet, most of the stuff I have been working on is backend, the frontend is playable but you are still missing a hell of a lot of vital features. I'll upload the current files before the end of the day. You are bound to find bugs in some of the stuff made already like the combat system (needs a complete overhall) and I've changed some features which make the bank buggy as well. The live horse racing works fine, so does renting property and drug farming. Also the messaging system is now fully operational, inventory system and shops (however the only items currently available are just test items), animal training and house upgrades, airport, level up and mission system (only one mission is currently available though), and a few other things as well. Some of what you will be seing will be removed like the most wanted list, other stuff will be enhanced. If you have any other major bugs to report then my user ID is 1 obviously and my name is deathmonger. Users 2, 3 and 4 are also my accounts used for debugging. And the paypal system is up and running as well for site donations but I don't expect you to use that lol, if you want a resident card (premium status) then I'll just give you a couple for debugging purposes. Oh, and if you find yourself low on health and energy there is a link on the menu for refilling both.

I have to agree, I don't like apple either. In fact, I have such a strong dislike for apple and their products I am proud to say I have never once owned any apple product of any kind.They used to use macs when I was back in high school, the old things with a black and white display, however they finally came to their senses and replaced the entire lot with PC's.Never liked macs much either, in my opinion they are far too commercial and are really only designed for one thing and one thing only, to make money. Not so much with the operating system but more so with the amount of available software. Apple are a greedy company, more so even than microsoft, and will stop at nothing to get all of our money. At least microsoft understand the need to develop for the sake of development and not just for profit. I don't have any love for microsoft either, but I have more respect for them than I do for apple. So it's true Bill Gates ran apple for a time before founding microsoft, but that was because he didn't believe in the mandate set down by apple.Apples presence in the uk with their macs is slowly dwindling to nothing which I find great. Everyone today is buying a pc and apple macs are almost a thing of the past. Now if we can only get people to stop buying ipods and iphones this country would be a better place.

If you are interested in making your own rpg, I suggest first of all you learn html, css, php and mysql. Don't be lazy, you want to make this stuff then you will have to WORK for it. Say goodbye to the shortcuts and hello to the grind! After you have learned all the basics then you can start with my series of tutorials I am currently writing. The first is an advanced user account registration, login, lost password, account validation system. Once you have learned all there is to know from this tutorial then it is time to move on to the second part of the tutorial, this includes creating the main home page and module system with health/energy display, cash on hand and so forth. Also it includes two starter modules for you which is a player stats page and a bank for depositing and withdrawing money. Also there is a configuration file which is constantly being updated and later on we will be making a nice and easy user interface so you don't have to keep editing the config.php file. Go through these tutorials and learn as much as you can, by the end of it you will have your very own working rpg written in php, mysql, html, css and some javascript. From there you can edit and build on it. Part 1: Advanced user account system Part 2: Home page and module system + Stats and Bank Modules Once the tutorials are written I am considering opening a site devoted to independant developers creating their own modules for anyone using the free system. Hopefully it will grow and develop in to a large open-source community project.

I have to agree on one of the earlier posts, irfanview is an amazing tool which seems to be able to handle pretty much every multimedia format available to the public. I used to use it for my 3d graphics design, it renders dds and tga graphics perfectly and is also able to properly render DX meshes perfectly. Thumbview Lite: Along with the many problems in reading and viewing tga and dds (especially dds) files, I found it really annoying that I couldn't view tga and dds thumbnails in explorer, png files as well (in XP and below) but thumbview lite was a great little addon for windows that supports .cut, .dcx, .dds, .mdl, .mng, .pcd, .pcx, .pic, .pix, .png, .pnm/.pbm/.pgm/.ppm, .psd/.pdd, .psp, .pxr, .sgi/.rgb, .tga/.vda/.icb/.vst, .tif/.tiff, .wal, .xpm thumbnails. Obviously from Vista+ a few of these formats are now supported by the windows thumbnail viewer, including png, but still no dds or tga which is why thumbview lite is still a great piece of software. There is a full featured version of the program as well capable of giving full control over the thumbnail extractor and offering the possibility to create your own, however I don't really have any need for that which is why I just stick with the lite version. Also I use CoreFTP a hell of a lot when transferring videos, games and roms to my XBox (X2 chip with Evox dash)

Actually that is a very good point, outsourcing is common practice now a days. I lost a very good job after my entire department was moved to a complex in india. I wouldn't have minded so much but I missed out on the opportunity to go out there and train the new team, my boss decided it was in the best interest of the company if he went out there to train them instead (even though he didn't know how to do the job my team was doing). With web development however, if you are offering visitors access to dynamic site content that would mean having to create a connection between the site and the companys database, and usually they don't like linking their database to a 3rd party somewhere on the other side of the world which is why I end up working in an office the database is already securely linked to. When a company outsources to places like India it is usually when there is need for a team of five or more people required to justify the costs of setting up a secure connection to the site. There are large complexes in India owned by a single company and they employ people to work in the office complex and basically rent their employees and office space out to companies all over the world. Usually there is also an employee of the company renting the work force present at the complex to oversee the work being done, offer advice and guidance, but mostly it is to oversee the secure connection to the company and prevent anyone from accessing data for malicious purposes or industrial espionage. I know someone who works for a banking group in my local area. He was employed several years ago to design some policy software for use by the groups employees. He has been very clever about it though, he knew they would keep him on afterwards to maintain the system until it has been perfected and there are no more errors or exceptions, but once the software had been perfected he knew he would be out of a job again. The company was relatively small at the time and didn't have too many clients, and the guy has been maintaining the software and manually correcting the exceptions since, but the software will never be finished because he has purposely inserted many different bugs to ensure he still has a job. The company realised what he was up to fairly recently and have brought someone else in to take a look at the code he has constructed and surprise surprise, the entire code is literally twenty times larger than it needs to be. It is pretty much impossible to work it out without his notes, and he keeps them locked away in a safe at home. So the company decided to price up how much it would cost to have a new piece of software built to replace the one he has made and came to something silly like ÂŁ2,600,000. Obviously they didn't think the costs were justified and have just let him carry on, but I couldn't believe the cost until I realised what was going on. When it comes to database management and direct coding, it is stated in law that you must hire a business consultant per working team (In the Isle of Man anyway). Business consultants charge a fee of between ÂŁ500,000 and ÂŁ1,500,000 per annum, and with a minimum contract of 12 months. I think this is sick. On top of that you also need to employ a business analyst to actually do the hard work and write the code while the consultant just sits around not doing much, and the business analyst will cost a further ÂŁ50,000 to ÂŁ100,000 per year. Now, the pay of these people disgusts me, especially considering what they are doing is not that hard. I worked as a systems analyst and got a measly ÂŁ12,500 a year, and that is the next step down from business analyst. Anyway I'm getting off point, the fact is on the Isle of Man it is recognised that outsourcing work is going to cost jobs for people over here which is why certain job tasks have mandatory employment laws surrounding certain types of work. Unfortunately these laws are there to ensure the financial sector does not leave the Island (I think we have the 3rd largest financial sector in the world now next to Zurich and someone else) and simply leave a plaque behind on a door for tax haven purposes. These employment laws are supposed to protect people like me however as I outlined in the opening post, now my Government has helped to prevent massive outsourcing, instead it's all these amateurs who are lowering my pay grade and making my profession look bad. I did actually try a couple of times to win the bidding at http://ww1.php-freelancers.com/ but the underbidding going on there is immense. A possible ÂŁ1,000 job will be intercepted by a little kid for ÂŁ100, who will then mess it all up, not get paid, forcing the contract holder to find someone else, who then underbids to ÂŁ200, who then messes it up, and after that happens a few times eventually the contract holder gives up and searches elsewhere.

I just thought I would share my views and opinions on this topic as there are some things that are really starting to annoy me. With the amount of people using the internet dramatically increasing as the price of computer hardware drops we are starting to see many companies in the private sector trying to either create an online presence or increase their online visibility using web pages that are not only beautifully designed but also full of feature-rich dynamic content. This has given rise to a number of software applications being released that are designed to improve the speed and performance of developing web content. Because of the creation of this software, professional developers are now able to speed up the design process while using their own libraries to develop the dynamic content. However, this freely available software has also given rise to the amount of amateur web developers out there. Just to clarify how I classify the rankings of amateur, intermediate and professional web developers. Amateur web developers are those whose skills and knowledge of web development are severely limited, maybe they are new to the area or just haven't bothered increasing their skill levels. These people generally do not or have not worked in the web development area before and have little to no idea of the real work that is involved. Intermediate developers are those who have taken it upon themselves to continue learning about the different areas of web development but only work part-time/in their spare time while working other jobs. Although they are more knowledgeable about what they are doing, they are still relatively slow in their work and do not rely on their skills to support themselves and/or their families. Professional web developers are people who have been studying web development for many years and have the highest levels of skill. They are able to complete projects much faster than the previous two and to a higher standard both visually and dynamically. A professional is proficient in both all security techniques and especially cross-browser support. Now amateur web developers are not what bother me, I think it's great that so many people are getting in to this area. People are able to create their own personal web sites and improve their skills to becoming intermediate and possibly one day professionals. What does bother me is the amount of amateur developers out there who underbid contracts for companies in the private sector. Some prime examples of this are outlined below. These examples are in fact REAL, the contracts were ones I had placed a bid for myself and lost due to amateur underbidding however later was either approached to take the contract away from the winning bidder or employed to work along side the winning bidder. A small telecommunications company were looking to completely overhaul their current site. The site had practically no dynamic content and contained nothing but contact information and a list of packages available which was updated through editing the html document. The contract called for easily updated site content (including packages, special offers, news and announcements etc.), a search feature which was linked to their customer database (the phonebook basically) and several other features as well. I put in my bid for the contract at £5,000 with an estimated work time of 8 weeks. I was underbid by an amateur who put in £1,500 over 4 weeks. I was contacted around 5 months later and was asked if I was available to work on the project with the winning bidder as they had still not finished the project. I agreed and came in only to find that the site was not even half written (not including the visual aspect of the site). I told the company to get rid of the guy immediately and to stop paying him £1,500 a month. I then told them I woluld have to start again from scratch and because of the urgency of the project due to the time lost I increased my bid to £3,750 per month and estimated 8 weeks. They agreed and I undertook the project, finishing it within 4 weeks to which they were so relieved they paid me for the 8 week estimate even though it was finished in half that time. Before I recommended getting rid of the amateur we worked together for a few days and he told me that his only experience was messing around with his friends website and most of the code was modified snippets off the web. He had lost his job with some accountancy firm and saw the advert so thought he would give it a shot. I was underbid for a contract involving a simple creation of websites for several primary schools (elementary schools for the americans out there) within the local councils area. It was a simple job, with the proper photographs and logos I put in a bid of £500 and estimated a weeks work in my spare time. The winning bid was for £100 with no time estimation. The finished interlinked websites were completed after about 2 months and although they looked ok, there really wasn't much to them at all, I found it hard to believe a html only website could take that long. Anyway the council seemed satisfied with the work and use that experience to dictate future web development needs. They had a rather extensive contract out about a year ago, designing a council website which required a large amount of dynamic content linked to several databases and tonnes of individual department information pages. The job I would have estimated to be around 14 weeks of work and personally would have bid around £8,000 for those 14 weeks. They advertised the starting bid (don't forget development bids go down) at £500 a month which I later found out was at the recommendation of the developer who took the schools contract. That developer took the contract as well, from what I understand they are still building the website after a year and have had to get a second job. So not only are these amateurs taking away work and money from real web developers, but they are also giving the world of web development a bad name. Because they constantly underbid contracts, the private sector are beginning to think that the work isn't really that difficult. Let's face it, who considers flipping burgers to be difficult? And how much do they get paid as a result? Well it works the other way around as well. I have put in for contracts in the past that have been very reasonable offers for my skills and services, and some of the people who have put that contract out there have been in shock. Because of their experience with amateurs in the past they laugh me right out of the building then wonder why they end up with a website that needs constant maintenance and is in essence sh**. Employers wouldn't be so naive IF there weren't so many amateurs out there trying to undersell the web development field. But because the number of amateurs applying for these jobs far outweigh the number of professional and intermediate developers combined then it really is a big issue and is putting many professionals out of business or forcing them to work other jobs. The only real hope any of them have is to be signed on as a full time member of staff with a company. If you are unable to do that then your hopes of success in the field of web development freelancing are slim to none. Does anyone else have problems with this, or have any views or opinions they wish to express on this matter?

I can't believe people are still replying to this post, it was made over 5 years ago now lol

For now I just test using IE-tab for firefox, it's stable enough however you can't enter an address and press return otherwise it just reverts back to a firefox tab, refreshing and links etc. still work though.I'll have a look at browserbox and let you know what I think, I've come across loads of things like this before but they never render a page EXACTLY how the selected browser would which just makes them useless if you are working on cross-browser compatible websites in detail. browserbox looks promising though.