hashbang

Wow,Very interesting and something for some of these games coders around here to bite there teeth into. I would be interested in seeing the picts ... perhaps post a link to them rather than using the IMG tag.Keep up the good work.cheers matehashbang

Why do we need a purpose? I think this is giving humans much more credit than we deserve. A sort of self importance which isn't warranted. Why are cockroaches here too? cheers hashbang

Here's an easy reference link ...defense of Socrates enjoy, hashbang

Although, just because science can not explain them today does not mean it cannot in the future ... man has always believed there were unexplainable things or certain 'truths' which have been dispelled over time. I don't believe in a flat earth nor do I believe the earth is the center of the universe. I do believe that there are explainations for all things ... whether we have the capacity or technology to understand them is another question. We are a emotive social creature which seeks explainations. If an explaination isn't available we conjour dieties or supernatural ones to supplicate our needs. cheers hashbang PS I have this sinking feeling that I should be doing my 'real' job at the moment rather than responding to this post ... I don't attribute that feeling or emotion attached to it to a higherpower (unless you consider my employers :-) ).

Although this is a bummer for those of us who don't allow MS products on their computers :-). As a *nix only user, IE is not an option. cheers all, hashbang

Hey All, Platoâs Allegory of the Cave serves as an interesting metaphor for online communities. The prisoners according to Plato experience a limited perspective of reality. Their perspective is limited and unclear. They experience reality as mere shadows upon a wall. Is this also a metaphor for Virtual Reality and if so, what does it mean for the culture of cyberspace? Does it render any attempt to study, explain, and experience cyberculture invalid? Is it as invalid a depiction of reality as the shadows upon the cave? In essence ... is 'Virtual' Reality as limited as Plato's Prisoners viewing shadows? Are our online friendships and relationships mere shadows? click for the full allegory (first news item on my site) cheers hashbang

Hey Mate,Good point!cheershashbang

Hey Guys, To kick off this forum ... I found this article while reading the paper this morning. It really amazed me that modern day religious leaders suggest that the Tsunami disaster was a message from God ... almost like the Sodom and Gomora (unsure of spelling) story! I think this is nature pure and simple. As a matter of fact, I actually liked the buddist response best of all of them. I can come closer to believing in harmonic/karmic forces more than the 'hand of god sending us messages' line. To move off topic a bit, I even see the Buddist monks explaination come close to scientific Chaos Theory. What are your thoughts?? cheers hashbang

Hey All,Interesting thread ... but I was wondering, can you have 'virtual' friends or 'online' friends? Are they the same as real world friends? Should there be a different term rather than friends for close 'virtual' associates?cheershashbang

Hey Mate, I just stumbled across another great resource for the beginner (and advanced alike). It's a new Knoppix Users Guide which would be beneficial even if you were running a distro other than Knoppix. You can find it here: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Happy Linuxing! hashbang

Hey Mate, I get around with a camera a fair bit too. I have heaps and heaps of picts which I am just now begining to organise and put online. Like you, I knock my picts down to a max of 600 px (one side). I have found the photoalbum scripts available under Xisto cpanel to be pretty good. I tried out coppermine and gallery. Both worked well. Gallery had a cool slide show feature. Currently I am using tikiwiki and organising mainly family picts in their image gallery module. This requires next to zero knowledge of html. Just uploading picts. If you are going to use tikiwiki, let me know. There are a few tweeks you can do to prevent problems later on. You can see my image galleries here just click on the Image Gallery link on the right side. the BB wouldn't let me post/insert my pict here due to dynamic tags but I though you may want to see one of my landscpae picts ... desription is underneath on the site: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/tikiet=0&imageId=52 cheers hashbang

Hey Mate,If you poast a link to your site ... more people will have a look. My psychic abilities are offline today. Looking forward to seeing what ya got. cheers hashbang

Excellent.I've just organised our governmental offices (approx. 3000 staff) to make collective donations to Oxfam here in Australia. I chose them because they were non-demoninational and they sent out a cargo plane yesterday with water and generating equipment to Sri Lanka. I appreciate their quick responsiveness. cheers hashbang

The Following is from Buddist Peace Fellowship: Urgent: Help victims of the earthquake/tsunami throughout Asia The Buddhist Peace Fellowship sends our heartfelt prayers and support to all who have been affected by the December 26th earthquake and subsequent tsunamis affecting parts of Asia and Africa. We encourage our chapters and members across the world to collect donations and medical supplies and send them directly to agencies in these African and Asian countries. Donate to Groups Responding to the Tsunami Disaster Below is a list of just a few of the many groups providing critically needed humanitarian aid to tsunami victims. Please consider making a generous donation to one or more of these groups. American Friends Service Committee (AFSC Crisis Fund) 1-888-588-2372 Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres 1-888-392-0392 OXFAM Go to: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ to find your country or the Oxfam home page. In the USA go to: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ U.S. Red Cross 1-800-435-7669 International Red Cross/Red Crescent Mercy Corps 1-800-292-3355 Please note that some of these sites are experiencing heavy traffic, so try back if you are having trouble getting through. The Buddhist Peace Fellowship has also received and seen the following requests from friends in some of the areas affected:

In doing some research for a collection for my agency I came across the following for Australians ... please make the attempt to contribute: Care Australia or 1800 020 046 Caritas or 1800 024 413 Christian World Service or 1800 625 611 Oxfam Community Aid Abroad or 1800 034 034 Plan Australia or 1800 038 100 Red Cross or 1800 811 700 or at any Commonwealth Bank branch TEAR Australia or 1800 244 986 UNICEF Australia or 1300 884 233 World Vision or 13 32 40 or at any National Australia Bank branch

Hey Mate,I think the web is the domain of opensource / GNU / free software. There are already some spectacular sites such as freshmeat, sourceforge, opensource.org, etc ... promoting the opensource movement. Freshmeat is probably the best. Whenever I need a specific application, I search there first. You may be more successful with a 'community' approach where opensource users/developers could interact on forums. This said, creating a vibrant and successful community is very difficult without a very clever 'hook'. Good luck in your endeavor. cheers hashbang

Hey Mate,There's heaps of info just waiting for you. I've run most every flavor of *nix available. Currently I am playing with Mandrake 10.0 too. I also run debian and freebsd just for kicks. To get started ... learn a few commandl line essentials: Here's the One Page Linux Manual that I keep handy. It'll give you some basic command line tips. Try a google on learning linux for some very good tutorial sites. The cool thing about Linux is that there are numerous programs which do the same thing ... it's up to individual preference. What do you do the most? For starters, get firebird running. I'd then recommend Evolution for your email. Gimp for graphics (i used to be a photoshop pro and now can do most everything from GIMP that I did in photoshop), XChat for irc, GAIM for instant messanger, openoffice for spreadsheets, powerpoint and word processor, K3B for CD burning, Kooka for scanning, Quanta for web development, geez .. there's heaps. If you have any specific questions, message me or leave a post. happy linuxing! hashbang

Hello fellow Astahosters,I wish to personally convey my concern and sympathy for the victims in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and others in SE Asia affected by this weeks tsunami. Also, condolences and sympathy to our community members who have have been affected or have family in the zone of destruction. I would like to encourage all to contribute to relief organizations that can effectively distribute resources to afflicted families within the shortest timeframe possible.sincerely,hashbang

Hey All, I am trying to get a profile of the users in this community. This is not for marketing or advertising material, it's for my own research regarding online communities. If your interested, see my cyberanthropology site. I find this community fascinating because it is new and I have watched it develop over the past month. My thoughts about a good survey for on-line communities is still developing and this represents a crude first attempt. I would be intersted in anyones opinions of data that would be helpful in capturing the essence of an online community. I would also be interested in working with someone who could code such a survey so that results would auto tally (like the poll system on many websites) but would include a multitude of questions. Again, if you would like to partner on this message me. As for the survery below. You can reply to the post with your answers or message them to me. Either way, in 2 weeks I'll publish a breakdown of the results and probably further refine/redevelop the survey Survey of Xisto Web Community [age range?] 10-14 15-19 20-25 26-30 31-40 40+ [amount of time online in this community/week?] <1 hour 1-2 hours 2-3 hours 3-5 hours 5-7 hours 8-10 hours 10 hours + [occupation?][country?] [native language?] [number of web communities you actively participate?] [how should this community be moderated?] ie ... (this list is not all inclusive ... feel free to add your own) not at all by community peer pressure by community appointed/elected moderators by board owner appointment [Other than free hosting, is there anything else that keeps you active here?] Please either post responses or message them to me. Many Thanks hashbang

Wow .. this thread has grown in a hurry!I agree with Dendrobates Azureus on the 2 points above. This has been what I have been loosely applying when I rate posters. Nice to see the rep mod taking off. cheers all, hashbang

Hey Guys, I am running an old clapped out PIII 600 machine. I have been starting to experience preformance handicaps particularly when running something like openoffice. I try and work off the command line as much as possible (like using pine for mail, vi for editor, etc.). Part of my problem is the current Mandrake distro I am using ... I think I'll switch back to debian unstable or gentoo (I'm still deciding) to maximise the resources of the machine. Anyway ... I have played with most all of the windowmanagers. I liked KDE but found it to be too much of a hog on system resources. Gnome is also OK, but ... I dunno, just something about gnome that bugs me. I used Enlightenment for a long time and found that novel and fun and excellent to customise but I got irritated with it after a couple of months. Recently I had been running blackbox and icewm. Both are again OK but nothing spectacular. I briefly tried Xcfe and havn't looked at that one enough to know if I like or don't like it. And then there was WindowMaker ... I used this one a couple of years ago and found that it is still the same today .. again, fun to play around with but frustrating over time. Which windowmanager do you prefer and why? cheers hashbang

I assume were talking gridiron football here and not other sports which are more popular in the world community such as cricket, rugby or soccer.Go Austin College (Sherman, Texas) Kangaroos!whoooopeeeee, yippppeeeee!uh ... sure dude.

Howdy,I'm unsure what you mean by OSS. Things I can't live without on my box are: the GIMP (graphics) XMMS (multimedia - mp3 player) K3B (burner) GtKam (digital camera software) Open Office Firefox gFTP Quanta (html editor) Enlightenment (Windows Manager) GAIM (instant Messenger) Kooka (Scanner software) and of course ... all the command line goodies such as: vi bash shell pine just to name a few of my most often used. cheers hashbang

I concur! cheers hashbang

Why don't we post some mod guidelines ... besides ... doesn't the community have a strong voice in the governance of these forums?? Perhaps post some guides and ask for feedback from members and admin. cheers hashbang