hatim

Well if you want a full fledged distro i would recomend Ubuntu DSL is good ..but its primary aim is to be small and not provide with the best possible free softwares ..not to mention skipping alot of stuff

I would vote for IBM , but the thing is that new coming IBM would be from Levono so i am not sure about their quality. If i were a gamer i would make my own Nforce based , Athlon64 System with PCI-Express and 2 Gig is RAM , 2500$ Is alooooooot of money for a desktop if you make your own system.I would how ever caution you to stay away from the Cow (Gateway) and lesser know brands..Sony has looks but its the smae as Dell or Compaq/HP systmes. Alienware rocks but u can get better deals if you search more. Macintosh is a totally differnt thing with differnt set of softwares. It is expensive but it is a good system for alot of desktop work (except Gaming of which many titles are not avialble)So post us what do you need this system for and how many do you want to buy.

i meant Spinnoff of Red Hat in general ..not 4.0

Well to start off RedHat 9.0 is now ancient ..Move to either Fedora Core 4 (spinnoff of Red Hat 4.0 ) or Ubuntu or Latst SuSe personal editionSecondly give the out out of these commands 1) lspci -v | grep audio2) lspci3) lsmodAlso ReapPlayer 10.x is available for Linux. It has better UI and other options. Your sound system is either alasa or oss ..it has support for both. I am not sure what RP 9.x supportseither try the new distros , or new player ..or if u want to stick with old one then post the out put of the commands i asked. (just commands and not the number or brackets)

Click Here Notice from Klass: Hi, I Copied & Pasted the above from the link, hoping I would get more Credits. Now Klass has seen the post and has notified the Red Team to deduct my credits, Hope I do not Copy & Paste again. CREDITS REDUCED.

First of all , if US wants to imprison some one who has done any thing wrong they have all the right to do so ..BY LEGAL MEANS. I am from Pakistan and have lived in US for 2 years (education). I was impressed by things such as "value for freedom" "freedom of speech" and "justice". US may be at its all time low (in terms of alot of values) But its still better than alot of other coutries. You guys want to spread justice and freedom (which is not necessirly democrecy) fine ...do it ..but do it by example. My reservations with GITMO are as follows. Its a legal loophole in US justice system. People are not being given and representatvies and are not being tried. I think in US its innocent untill proven guilt and not the other way around.Gitmo is causing hate for the US. Even an illeterate person in my region knows that this is the place where Quran was desicrated ..Although I value human life more than any Book (infact that is the true Islamic value...one mans life is more important than a book) But now people who didnt even care about all this war ..are against US (for their own ..beliefs) Your Governemnt knows it and tried to do damage control by shutting up NewsWeek.All in All present US Govt has become sneaky , loop hole finder etc etc. They dont care about the TRUE AMERCIAN values ..but they care about their own interetes (OIL,POWER...or otherwise please explain why u guys attacked Iraq)The thing is that since u r amercian . and i am a pakistani by Avg life expectancy i will die in 40 years ..and assuming u r 25 ull be dead in 50-60 years..no big deal ..but US has set it self on a collision course with its own destruction (like Roman Empire) ..it will happen now..Bush has done enough damage to clean up in 200 years.In my opnion real american values ..or real HUMAN values are to save human lives and be a prosperous planet. If a few ppl start thinking like that we may make things better. Till that please visit iraqbodycount.org

Another reason to use gentoo ..as u just need to put win32codes in ur use flags ..and u have wma capability

FireWorks is ok software ..but If you already know that Macromedia has been bought by Adobe. So i think in future they would be publishing a FireWorks which is blend of both Adobe and Macromedia technology. Adobe bought Macromedia mostly for its Flash. Adobe is a good company and so was Macromedia ..but i dont like the idea of Adobe being a cannot-be-challanged undisputed giant in print and internetIf you want free softwares..GIMP is ok to use image editing software.

Besdies bugs it does not support Web Standards. Some IT Gurus are calling to boycott IE7. I have recently tried Opears and I am impressed with that too. You may notice a differnence in speed in Opera if you have a slow computer as FireFox is XUL based UI and Opera is pure C++

You can also try coLinux on Windows ..its like VMWare ..but its more than an emulation.

There are still some posts which keep on giving errors. Forums are not laggy but still have some bugs. Like i wanted to read <a href="http://forums.xisto.com/topic/85806-topic/?findpost=1064316616; post but it keeps on giving error.

I would like to mention Client Side Active Agents , like Flash , AJAX and Java (applet). They can be used to hide incoming souce. One thing is for sure that if some thing is being displayed on system ..it can be copied eventually...but it becomes difficult if you have client side script. I wonder if there is away to block even screenshots of on screen things (some kind of virtual display via java ..which shows blank in a screenshot)

I dont think free domains are avialable these days..i used to have a .com address for free but not any more. Any ways ..i am using http://dyn.com/dns/ free redirecting service. It has other servcies on nominal rates ..but since i only need redirecting. If you want to cloack your address..if the redirect address should not appear in the address bar of your browser, a small popup will come..but i dont like popups so i have not used the cloack. Check out my website (which is hosted here at Xisto) at http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

the choice of OS all depends on waht you want to do. Some of my SystemAdmin freinds find FreeBSD to be more stable and secure for Mid-High volume servers.Linux is good..cause it works good. It may not be the most technically sound OS on the drawing board. Gentoo is great but it is not the ideal solution for Enterprise or more than 2-3 stations IMO. Although i read that its catching up with devel team at IBM and most of mozilla project uses gentoo.If you want to give some other OSes a try i would recomend cherryOS and AmigaOS. I have done some reading on them and havent tried them my self ..Tell us how you find them if you try them out.cheers

Well you can always use Lyx. Lyx is a free open source editor (it sits on top of latex..so essentailly its a tool to do latex easily). Check it here. It has a native Win32 port (which i think would be a bit outdated ..but should be more than enough to do what you would be needing)..you could always get Cygwin and Cygwin-KDE to run Lyx on Windows XP(Cygwin is an emulation program ..and with Cygwin and KDE-Cygwin you would be able to run KDE/Linux programs like lyx on WinXP/2K). Last but not least..just install linux if its easy for you and take advantage of all the native free softwares like lyx for free.... if you need further help..done hesitate to Private Messege me.

first just get the latest KNOPPIX image from internet and burn it on CD. And then boot from CD and test drive it..if you havent done that already....meanwhile snoop around for major distributions of Linux on distrowatch. I would recomend Ubuntu or SuSe.

Well JDK 1.5 has a thing called generaic which is similar to STL. Also the JRE has improved UI and Performance ..especially the JNLP aka Java Web Start. It has its advantages ..but I think Java 1.4 will stick around for another year or so in both JDK and JRE .. What do you people think..

I am using gentoo but i would recomend Ubuntu to newbies (now that it will be/is using Xorg instead of Xfree).I have had a full Gentoo system since last 6 months (had dual boot gentoo XP box) but since the only game I play these days is UT2004 and that has a native binary for Linux ..it runs perfect (in some sense better ..cause it has huge Map files and Linux is better at paging stuff)So I would suggest that unless u have alot of gaming requirements , or some other software which you cannot run on Linux via any mean (dont know alot) you can drop Windows for good.

Next Big Leap in ComputingIn my opnion next big leap in computing would be OS based Assisting Agents. Like the ones in star trek where Computers respond to voice commands etc. It is possible right now but requires a)signifiacant computing power training for softwareNext version of Windows will not be a deal breaker for economy as it will be very hard for people and businesses to convince to spend moeny on some thing which they really dont need. Microsoft has dropped all the cool stuff from Longhorn (WinFS etc) so i am not sure how Longhorn will do business ..i think MS will get losses for 1 year (compraed to the advertisemts they give out)

Google is great , but there are other search engines which are better than google in some respects.for instance yahoo has a yahoo search beta thing where it remembers all your searches and you can organize it with your bookmarks on my yahoo. It will be integrated with yahoo 360 where it becomes part of blog,photos etc.MSN search is also good and some times turns up sites which you would see way far down in google.IMO Google is simple to use and thats why its the best. In terms of search, speed , content all Search Engines are similar.Also google is exceling in new portal stuff like gmail and maps etc .

I would like to mention http://www.oswd.org/ . These are open source designs (ie covered by licences etc)

Well if you just wanted to give linux a try you should have downloaded the latest KNOPPIX iso. Its a live cd ie you dont have to install any thing . Just burn the CD (make sure you burn the iso image and not just copy ISO on CD) It becomes a bootable CD and then u can run Linux off that CD (yes that right no installation required...there are versions of SuSe for LiveCD too but Knoppix is the mother of all) It detects all the hardware and even your windows partitions automatically. Its easy to setup networking (although can be hard to setup some ralrey used modems)in KDE you can easily extract any thing by just a click. I think Linux is an awsome platform. It depends which distro you use. Some distributions are targetted for Windows users like Linspre (its commercial and not the best ..) You may want to reasearch on other Linux distros b4 totally ruling out Linux for Longhorn. Besides almost all the goodies which will come in Longhora are already there in any good Linux Distro.Linux's disadvantages for home users are some user unfreindliness , bad driver support and lack of Major Software titles (especially Games ..for every thing esle u get a free open source alternative)

I am a gamer and a gentoo user for about 2 years. I would not recomend Linux to you at all if you are a seriious gamer. I know its sad but true. I am unable to play most of my fav games. and almost any new title. Although You can buy Cedga from Transgaming Technologies (a special emulation tool tuned for games) But its better to just use the OS for which the game was built . (ie Win32) The only game I play these days is UT2004 that too cause it has a native Linux Binary (which atleast comes with the DVD)Gentoo is a sweet distro but will take up time for instllation etc. If you are a total Noob i would suggest u go with Ubuntu (you may like to wait for a month to try their latest release which will make installation easier)Fedora is good too but sux at multimedia..i mean atleast the default instlattionSuSe is an awsmoe distro (has very less hardware issues)In my opnion I have yet to find a single major distro which comes out of the box and gives the best gaming experience ..you always have to do the tweaking .perhaps thats the beauty of Linux . There is always room for improvement.You may also want to check distrowatch and search for special distros targetted for Gaming.Conclusion : Ubuntu if you can wait ..otherwise get SuSe Free version

Well for starters you can check out the Sun Java tutorials. They are freely Available from Sun's Website. I dont know if Uniface is Object Orriented Language but It may help to start off with Introduction to Object Orriented Programming. Thinking in Java from BruceEckel (a freely avialable ebook) is an excellet book . But its quite advanced.If you just want to start playing around with Java Programming i would suggest that you get NetBean IDE 4.1. NetBeans used to be a part of Sun but now its an independent organization which is supported by Sun. The IDE is probably the Best Free IDE out there.Try searching for Netbeans tutorials (which I am sure would give you what you want)

It doesnt matter which is old and which is new. What does matter is to use right tool for the job. I think Python would be an excellent choice for future open source projects. Java has its advantages ie a support/user base which just dwarfs Python. Huge Projects would definelty want to use Java. There was a story on Java being used in the twin rovers sent by NASA to MARS last year (NASA is quite picky on what they use. atleast thats waht they are supposed to do) Java is sweet Language and with JDK 1.5/j2se 5.0 things have become more interesting. For Java Devel I would suggest Netbeans IDE 4.1