littleweseth1405241521

Windows : Easy to use, lots of apps, everyone owns one. However, more security holes than you can shake a stick at (admittedly better than it used to be). Interface is basically the same as it was back in the windows 95 days, just prettier.OSX : Pretty looking, of course, and the interface is undescribably better. It's the millions of little touches that make OSX feel very refined.OSX is also built on a variant of FreeBSD, so you can literally run anything on OSX you can run on Linux, natively. OSX is great for learning how to use linux because it starts you fully set up, but lets you hack away as you please. Also, OSX is vastly more secure, mostly because it's built on *nix and secondly because it's a minority target for malware.While it's commonly argued that OSX has less software, the software that is developed for mac only tends to be of *very* high quality, as if Mac developers have much higher standards. (apologies if anyone here is a Win32/*nix dev.) For an example, see BBEdit (http://www.barebones.com/), which many people cite as a reason to own a mac, all on its own.Also, though this isn't strictly realted to the operating system, on new mactel boxen you can dual boot winxp SP2 using Boot Camp, so the 'no software' and 'no games' arguments against buying macs become effectively moot.*Linux*Very secure provided you stick to some basic rules, (like not leaving your PHP install wide open, last time I do that one...) rock solid reliable. Absolutely free.You can use emulators or WINE to run win32 applications and games (World of Warcraft, for example, runs on linux), but hardware support tends to be a little flaky. Software IS easy to get, but can sometimes be hard to set up of you don't like command lines.From personal experience with Ubuntu, the Synaptic package manager (a front end for something called apt-get) does a pretty good job of downloaing things from the internet and installing/configuring them.Alright, i'm going outside to get some air/ see some friends. Bleh.Cheers;-lws

Personally, I think everyone should just go read Eric S. Raymond's Smart Questions FAQ, then sit down and read a few well-written books of some sort. Unrelatedly, studyig grammar and stuff in school didn't really do anything for me. After being a book addict since the tender age of three, correct spulling and grammar vocaublary and come naturally. I could pick any misformed English phrase and intuitively tell you how it needed to be changed, but I couldn't tell you exactly why.

Regarding the portability of antimatter : I was reading on technocrat.net somewhere that they consider it the only feasible energy source for interplanetary trips, for the mere reason that you have to carry too much fuel if you use something else.The catches are:a) Producing enough antimatter. You only need a gram or a gram and a half to get to Mars, if memory serves correctly... but *only* is a little deceptive in this context. You can't store antimatter in a tank, because... well... it annihilates with the tank, causing large energy release at precisely the wrong time, which isn't cool. You actually end up having to put a giant magnetic containment tank on the ship.... which weighs just as much as if you'd used a nuclear reactor or something.Food for thought :PCheers;-lws

Screw conventional flat keyboards, I wanna get me a pair of these : https://www.datahand.com/ The idea is that you never have to move your wrists ever, which helps avoid RSI.

G'day guys :PI'm Li-aung 'Littleweseth' Yip from the fair land of Terra Australis. More specifically, I live at a beach in Queensland, but i'm currently doing the first year of a dual Engineering/Science degree at James Cook University, Townsville. If you feel a need to abbreviate my name, feel free to use the three-letterism 'lws'.Anyway, in the way of standard boiler-plate introductions, I'm a huge geek (not necessarily a nerd - I do have non-techie friends and some social skills) who gets fascinated with pretty much anything. I've been using computers since about age 5 or so, and while I don't think I'm going to attain hacker-like prowess with a computer anytime soon, I aspire to it. (Hacker, of course, referring to 'computing god' and not 'cracker'.)I belong to DeviantART (Littleweseth.deviantart.com) and I'm active in the astonshell community (http://www.astonshell.com/index.html), in the way of skinning and tech support. Ah, the joys of giving tech support to people who newbies who think you're getting paid to do so...Cheers;-lws

W00t, hamsters as nuclear fuel sources Ironically enough, right now our fresher engineering design project is to design a DC motor.... if you hang around under a balcony at JCU Engineering for a while, someone will throw one out the window in frustration and you can use it for a generator

Currently 16, started making webpages in Frontpage in about grade 9, moved up to Dreamweaver a bit later. I basically learned HTML because Dreamweaver was sometimes a bit reluctant to do things my way, so that taught me basic discipline. Next I tried C++ in grade 10, which I failed miserably (I mean *miserably*) at.Kinda gave up programming anything for a little while, then in grade 12 I started learning PHP. Since PHP is interpreted, it actually gave me feedback on runtime errors (unlike my C++ programs, which just crashed). Made me feel a bit better when I got stuff working :PI'm currently doing MATLAB for my engineering/science course and picked it up pretty well, so I can say I know two real languages (PHP and MATLAB) plus HTML and CSS, the last two inside-out and back to front.

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ lot of free books on here, notably a lot of expensive textbooks on... pretty much everything. Mostly technical stuff and science/math textbooks, some of which I see in my university bookshop for AUD $80 and up. Between these books, wikipedia and DeviantART, i'm lucky to have a life.

The site that Houdini referenced is *the* Hudzilla PHP Book, now in print as PHP in a Nutshell. A very complete, well-written book probably well worth buying in dead-tree form.Personally I'm cheap, so I wgetted it like any internet-scabbing greedy bastard would, but my penace is recommending it to everyone else I find

There's an article on Snopes.com that deals with using cyanoacrylate adhesives (superglue, krazy glue) to seal wounds. Cyanoacrylates were originally developed by Eastman Kodak to use for gunsight crosshairs, I presume the 'cross' in a sniper scope or similar. Anyway, they turned out useless for that, but during Vietnam one guy pulled out the formula and developed it into a spray-on wound sealant. Source : http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2187/was-super-glue-invented-to-seal-battle-wounds-in-vietnam Also I heard stories about people with fingers and stuff chopped off using superglue to keep them on until they could get back to a medic. So there ya go 'Cyanoacrylate' does sound nasty, and when it cures it releases some mildly unpleasant things (fomaldehyde and some other stuff) that cause skin irritation, but new stuff has been developed that lacks the side-products during curing, probably the same stuff the vets used on Sarah81's cats.