Galahad

Well, mostly it's the internet, but there ar also so many other things...Computers are great for killing time, great for learning new things... You can do just about anything with computers... For me, as a programmer, the best thing is making a new piece of software, that works something usefull, or combining my software, and someones hardware...Possibilities are endless

I must add another post to this topic... I recently saw in some opening movie, for some tv show,an old cartoon I used to watch as a really litle kid...I pondered in my head what was it's name, and I couldn't remember... Then it hit me... Sabre Rider! I just loved that cartoon... And Robotech, but I also mentioned that one earlier...

Well... So many books...The one I'm currently reading is The Da Vinci Code, after that, it'll be Angels and Demons, both by Dan Brown...Others I read are all the Sherlock Holmes series by Sir Arthur Connan Doyle, then, I read Tarzan series, old books really... Several books by Agatha Christie... A ton of other, technical books... I like to read, actualy...Arthur C. Clark - all of his books I think... Red, Green and Blue Mars books, Hitchikers giude, and all the sequels...Oh, and let's not forget The Hobbit (or There and Back), The Lord of The Rings, Silmarilion...

Yeah, big companies really DON'T care about us, "mere mortals"... They will do anything to get every single dime from your pocket, but they won't move their finger to help you with something...Here, we have a certain mobile operator Mobtel, and they charge for customer service number! The other operator, Telekom, isn't charging for this phone, since you need to use it only when you want to set something up, or have a question about the service, and they don't charge when you call from their network, but those guys charge anyway...I'm with the Telekom operator (which by the way sucks big time, they're bery uncooperative, they're service is zero - maybe due to a fact that it's a national company, controlled by the government, and they do have 51% share in other operator Mobtel... And they ARE the only mobile operators there are... Oh, and Telekom has tha monopoly on the land lines, they are the only company that provides us with phone lines, provides ISP's with links to outside word, yadda yadda...)I remember one day, I was particularly nervous, and I received a promo SMS message from my operator, about some stupid service I didn't use, I don't use, and I never will use... So I call 789, customer number, and I say I want them to stop harassing me with those stupid promo SMS messages... Girl was, oddly enough, very curteous, and said that she will see what she can do, but generaly they don't offer that "opt-out" service... Talk about being #!@$@!... So I leave it be... For the next 7 days, I received a billion SMS promoting this or that... And that spilled the glass... I went directly to their offices, mad as hell, and set with the first available guy... I said I want them to stop harrasing me with those promotional SMS messages... He said that unfortunately, they can't do that... I said, very calmly, and with pleasant tone "I'm not asking you, I'm telling you to stop that"... After this sentence, the guy became rude, and asked me who I think I am to order them what or what not to do... So I saw who I was dealing with... I snapped ina second... I stud up, leaned over the table, and screamed at the guy to treat me with respect, because he is there for me, and not the other way around, and if he used that tone with me again, I would break his jay... Next I did, was order him to go get his superior... I had pretty much the same discussion with his supperior, who was a *BLEEP*, same as this guy... That pissed me off... I told them to bring me the general manager of they're office in my city... They said that she's not there... So I started yelling at them, saying I won;t leave until I spoke with the general manager... At that moment, guess who comes out of her office? General manager... Asking what's going on... So I turn to her, and say that I want to file a complaint against the guy I spoke wth first, and against his superior... After she asked why, I said they were extremely rude to me, and treated me like garbage... She sat me down at the desk, and she personaly took matters into her own hands... I said I want them to stop harassing me with SMS messages, and after that, she repeated that they can't do that... After that, I had no more strength to hassle with them... All I said to her, was: "See you in court then, I'll sue the company for the harrassment"...Gues what?For next few months, I never received a single promotional SMS message, until recently... You think it's time for me to go pay them a visit again?

I agree it's too early for this kind of film... But that's not what big holywood industries think... All they see is big pile of cash, just waiting for them...For me, the reasonable period to wait, to make such a movie, is AT LEAST 10 years, best make it 15... That way, wounds will heal, and they won't be opened as easily, as after 5 years...Ofcourse people shouldn't forget people lost in that terrible event, but let us try and be at least a bit decent, and not make money, off other people's misey...We should all remember 9/11, and all other unfortunate and sad events, and never to forget those people... I think there should be maybe some law passed, forbiding use of real events, such as September 11th, for a period of at least 10 years... And penalty should not be monetary, but 10 years in prison, so everyone should follow that law...That's my view of the things...

MD5 is a hashing algorithm... It means, it takes whatever string you have, be it a word, or a sentence, or some huge book, like "War And Peace"... It takes it's characters, and off they go through MD5 hashing algorithm... Hashes are some kind of random sequences of characters, of fixed length, no matter how long the text is... here are two examples, made with md5sum program 'A' => MD5 Hashing algorithm => MD5 Hash: 7fc56270e7a70fa81a5935b72eacbe29'This is a sample of MD5 hashing algorithm' => MD5 Hashing algorithm => MD5 Hash: 247d44a9b93f9396d67fe00b766f8ed2 This is a fixed size hash, of 32 bytes... No matter how long the string... This random sequence of numbers is repeatable, since same sentences, always give same seed for rnd function... Usefull for storing passwords, without someone stealing it... By knowing your passwords hash, they can't figure out your password, without some dictionary attack, or brute force... MD5 is generaly, a very good algorithm... There are several classes for VB, if you intend to hash something

Well, the best way would be to directly decode original picture, and scanned one, into some sort of pixel matrix, and compare them... Since I have absolutely no idea how to decode images into plain pixels, I'll post the way I'd do it... Use two Picture boxes, let's name them Picture1 and Picture2... Load original picture into Picture1, and scanned one into Picture2... Now, what you need to do, is set picture boxes' properties, autosize to true, and autoredraw to true, and scalemode to pixel.. Next, your code would look something like this: Dim x1 As Long, y1 As Long ' *** Picture1 CoordinatesFor x1 = 0 To Picture1.ScaleWidth For y1 = 0 To Picture1.ScaleHeight If Picture1.Point(x1,y1) <> Picture2.Point(x1,y1) Then ' *** Do whatever you need to do if pixels are different Else ' *** Do whatever you need to do if pixels are the same Endif Next y1Next x1I believe this would work, but don't take my word for it... This would be the basic concept, which ofcourse assumes that two images have the same dimensions... This metod is slower than the method I described, where you would compare matrices of two pictures... If this works, let me know... Or if you have any more questions... Ask them here, or drop me a PM...

RS-232 Port (aka Serial), is generaly outdated in the home application, but is still used in the industrial applications, and industrial motherboards continue to have at least 2 RS-232 ports... USB is good, generaly, but it has some latency issues, so RS-232 remains excellent in the industry applications...On my work, we use RS-232 to connect PC with a small converter (our own design and make), that converts RS-232 to RS-485, and we use that to communicatre with our hardware... We achieve about 10ms response time, using Atmel AtMega128, I believeRS-232 generaly remains very good, better than USB, when small amounts of data, are supposed to be sent somewhere, at high frequencies...So as I don't stray off-topic...Traditionaly COM and LPT ports are no longer used with new commercial hardware, since USB has inherited them...Speaking of easily accessible ports, there are those 3, COM, LPT and USB, also FireWire or IEEE-1394 (maybe I'm wrong with its designation), and, I believe those are the only ones, easily accessible ports...There are ofcourse ISA, PCI, AGP, PCI-X (PCI-eXpress), but those are not intended for the kind of abouse those "user" ports are <_<If there are any other ports anyone knows of, please, write them here, I'm sure there are some of us who would love to know about them...

As always Micro$oft is trying to have their say in everythig in the world... If anyone has ever tried making a HTML page in Word, they know it has a tom of useless tags... And, as people move to broadband, more, and more, the need for offline editors is getting lower and lower... Micro$oft is just trying to make a few more people buy Word, and increase their capital...Snce I dumped Word a while ago, and switched to OpenOffice, I'm much happier... I don't think Micro$oft will bring anything new and sensational... Just a few hundred useless tags in your blog, probably a lot of hassle, and most likely, drain on yur pocket...

I have Windows XP Professional, with Service Pack 1, and it works perfectly... I don't know why people run to downloading new stuff, even before it is tested, and they don't need it...I have a coleague here at work, that is one of those persons... As soon as he sees a new version of something, he downloads it, and stacks it on his hard disk, like a hampster... And of course, he installed SP3, and guess what? He has been having problems with his computer, ever since... And yet, he still blames it on the hardware or other stuff, not the SP3, which in fact, is not SP3... Can you believe some people...So, I suggest to all people to follow my motto: "If it's working, don't mess with it" (Or better yet "If it's working, don't fix it")...

If it weren't for you OpaQue, I would be still roaming the wast lands of the Internet, searching for webhosting, that has this level of quality... I can not say anything, that others haven't said before me, so I'll just add this:If you need any kind of help, any at all, feel free to ask me, and I'm sure many of other members would agree with me... We have our websites up, and visible to the world, because of you, and we would gladly help any way we can...As my own two-year aniversary is nearing (It's in november), I plan on switching to paid hosting with Xisto - Web Hosting, but remaining active here, and helping the community...So, to cut the long story short, OpaQue, any help you may need, feel free to ask...

Yes, dual core processors are not effectively faster, when working with one application, or one thread... Hyper Threading, uses parallel pipelines inside of CPU, to simulate two processors, resulting in a slight increase in performance over non-HT processors... Dual core, goes one step further, increasing that performance levels even more...However, if application is not designed to make use of multiple threads, or multiple cores, you waon't see some performance increase... As an option (and this is only a theory, I don't know whether someone tried it), you could assign one core to be used only by system processes, and second core to be used by other apps... That would result in some performance increase, and it would balance the usage of the cores...So, to answer your question, you can by HyperThreading processor, as Dual Core processor yields no significant speed increase over HT... And I do believe priice is much higher for Dual Core, than HT... You need motherboard that supports DualCore, etc tec... Much cheaper to go with HyperThreading...

OK, let's not forget that we're talking Microsoft here... Even Windows XP is rather unstable, no matter how you look at it... I will never, ever be switching to Vista for several reasons... First is obvious, it's very demanding, and I don't intend for my CPU to spend 50% of it's time displaying fancy windows... I personally liked Windows 3.1 the best... It had very nice graphics, it was very customizable, and it worked!Vista is more cosmetic change, though it has many "upgrades" and such... But that's disputable...And yes, since it is a Beta, it will most definitely not work as intended... And when engineers fail to make 100% backwards compatibility with XP, they will simply invent new "Vista Compatibility Tests", or something similar, Vista Certification, yada-yada-yada...I had the opportunity to try Longhorn in 2003 (that was pre-alpha of what is known today as Vista), and it sucked big time... No, not big time, it sucked a ton... It worked slow as hell, it looked ugly, and it crashed constantly... Vista is a lot better than what I tried back in 2003, but it's still very far from what could be calles "useable operating system"...That's my two cents...

You have 3 primary partitions and 3 logical? How can you have 3 primary partitions on the same drive? If you have them spread over 3 drives, you can't merge them... What you can do, is delete 2 primary partitions you don't need, and have them as extended partition, so you can make logical drives on it...Best is using Partition Magic for this, as it preserves data... If you want to save your data, use Partition magic, if you don't have any data, you can freely delete partitions from Disk Management console, and change them into logical drives...If you wanted to combine two or three drives into one extended (logical) drive, then you're out of luck - windows doesn't have that function yet... Linux does have virtual spanning over multiple drives, where you access them as a same drive, but not windows...As for constant ScanDisk scans... Convert to NTFS, and you won't have them anymore + it's much more reliable than FAT32...

I also believe that Xisto is worth much more, than a couple of thousand... I would put it at couple hundred thousand (around 500K)... Trap has very large network of users, and stable and reliable servers keep paying customers with them... As soon as I am able to pay for hosting, I'm switching to Xisto - Web Hosting, but I'll remain active here too... This is a great compunity, and we should all try and make it even better...I'm with Xisto for a long time, and I'm very, very, VERY, happy

I agree with you, they do put tons of money in their pockets... I never heard of this site, but from the calculations... I guess they do rip people off...Maybe you could make some sort of a deal with them, and introduce them to Xisto - Web Hosting, and claim the difference for your self, work for a percentage :)but 120.000 for running a site... That's even beyond Google's expenses... Maybe one of the Admins here could tell us how much Xisto costs to run per year, just for comparison...

I noticed how kioku has a way of calling everyone a hippie, when they don't see the world the way he does... I have two dogs, and I would gladly spend more money on their food, than on myself... I had a dog about a year and a half ago, that unfortunately died, but that was inevitable, as it wasn't curable... But I spent 2 months salary on the operation, and I never blinked doing that... And I would spend it again... But I guess people concider me a hippie, because I do that... My only message to them is to think about their on lives, and why they aren't satisfied with them, and why are they angry at every living thing on this planet... By stating that if some race is less evolved and inferior in some way, than us, and thus should be hunted, killed, and tortured, only shows that you are in fact, less evolved... I believe that could be called superiority complex?When I'm sick, my dog would come, and lie next to my bed, and look sadly at me, and try to ease my pain, and to help me get well... When he was little, only 4 or 5 months, my dog, Max, a German sheepdog, actually brought me grass when I was sick, hoping that would help me get better! How's that for intelligence? ANd that was so cute, he brought it, and put it next to my bed, and sat, and just looked at me, with his head tilted to one side... I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, it was so cute... And he still is cute, and good, and I believe he would give his life to protect me, faster than some humans would... And you say they don't have feelings? They do have feelings, and they do have them even more than we do... I don't know whether people realize this, but we are animals too... With one big difference - Animals never, ever, kill for "hahas"... Humans make them do that, with all those pitbull fights, and whatnot... Animal will only attack when attacked, or when in dire need of survival...I would really rather not comment on the level of intelligence of some people, and how civilised are they... Thanks to those people, world is the way it is today... Humans are not god given to this planet, and we are not masters of it... People will realize this, only, it will be too late for that, because nature will start over... perhaps with the fishes...And should the animals decide to fight for they rights, we will be in a big pile of doo-doo... and you kioku, will be in the biggest pile...

Ahhh... Good old AK-47... It's actually a standard military issue in Yugoslavian military...Invented in 1947 by Mikhail Kalashnikov, it still is very powerfull and usefull weapon, and is made by many countries, in many variants, such as: AK-47, AKS, AKM, AKMS, RPK, AK-74, AK-101, AK-102, AK-103, AK-107, AK-108...Also, many variants existed for individual coutries, for example, Yugoslavia made AK-47 in these variants:M70, M64 (AK-47 with longer barrel), M64A (grenade launcher), M64B (M70 with folding stock)... These were made by Zastava Weapons I believe...Original AK has ability to fire 600 rounds per minute, but variations that were made, can achieve even 1000 round per minute... That's why it's a good defensive, or even offensive weapon... By shooting that much rounds, you can pretty much make even your guys run for cover... 7.62mm caliber, with speed of 710 meters per second, and effective range of 300 meters...I had an opportuniy to use it in the army, and it's quite nice... Believe it or not, some of our more, how should I say, passionate hunters, use M70, or M64 for hunt! Yeah, I know, I don't think there will be much of a deer left after that :)And I agree, though a good weapon for wars (as if there is a good weapon), no one should keep it at home, as a defensive weapon... Sadly, during the wars in Balkan, many people brought weapons back home with them... Very bad thing...Oh, and yes, AK-47 has a name... It's called Kalashnikov, or in jargon, Kalash...

Let us distinguish two things: religion and belief... Religion is nothing more, than an organization, brought together by mutual interests (it's disputable what are those interests, most likely it's the money, and controll of the masses), whereas, belief is something one person believes in...In my oppinion, if someone choses to believe in God, they don't need to have church, or belong to Christianity, or Islam, or Hinduism, or any other... But long ago, someone figured, that using someones beliefs, he could controll huge masses, if he could only bring them together somehow.. So, Christianity was created... I believe there was someone named Jesus Christ, and probably the whole story is true, to certain degree... probably, that poor man did die on the cross... But I don't believe he was resurected, I believe that's when those in the shadows, begun their "propaganda"...From Christianity, there emergend dosens of smaller Christian religions, such as Orthodox, Catholic, Evangelist, Protestants, and many more... All essentialy the same, but with small differences... Why is that? Because, you can't controll the masses if they are content... You need them to argue, to look at those petty differences, and fight, to debate, to start wars over it, and so on... Only in that way, you can control people, by presenting them an invisible enemy, and enemy that doesn't exist, and keep them in fear, and keep them angry...Now, just to say again, this is not my rant about someones beliefs, this is my rant about religious organisations, and religion...We are born as individuals, right? And as such, we all have our own view of the things.... Often, our views are very similar to, or the same, as someone elses... But! We all have our brain, and our free will, to think what we want, to do as we want (as long as we don't commit any crimes), and to BELIEVE in what we want to... That means, that if my mother is an Orthodox Christian, and my father is a Catholic, I, by default should be what? Orthodox Catholic? Or something else? Or should I just be pulled into religion, of the "stronger" parent?Yes, it is true we weren't given the choice of parents, and we weren't given the choice of country to be born in, and the language we will understand... But we do have the free will to believe in what we want...Who is to say that God himself, wants ME, to believe exactly what I believe? What if I am the one he has the plan for? Who can say that? No one?So, my moto would be, "LIVE, AND LET LIVE", which could be extended with "BELIEVE, AND LET BELIEVE OR NOT BELIEVE"...When I meet someone, or see someone in the street, who is not white as I am... I beg your pardon, who is not caucassian as I am, but is of dark tan, or Asian, or Native American, I don't actualy see the color of their skin, and I don't see what they believe in... They are just another fellow human being, trying to live to her/his 80 years, or more, and die in peace, the way they want to... Who am I to forbid them to believe what they want to, or follow theyr religious customs?Or not to believe and not to follow theyr customs?We are all individuals, and in our own way, we are all unique... Everyone should respect other 6+ billion people on Earth...And to answer the question, I agree, religion should NOT be inherited...

Is that site made in Flash, or is it attempting to play a sound in the background? Perhaps you are missing some codec? Or your Wave is muted, or set to lowest setting?Tell us more about that site, about what hardware you have? There are millions of reasons that could happen...

I would tip on hard drive "problem"... I don't know wether this problem occured from the moment you bought your computer (or upgraded it, or something...)... It could be that someting in standard BIOS configuration, regarding your hard drive, has changed, has been reset to lowes settings, etc...Go and check if the UDMA (or DMA) mode is enabled, if it is, os it UDMA-33, UDMA-66, UDMA-100, or UDMA-133, next, check to see if Block transfer is enabled, if PIO mode is set to 5 (actualy, you should be careful with setting PIO mode, since it can cause data loss)... Generaly, most new hard drives support PIO mode 5, block transfer, and UDMA-100 (or UDMA 5)... There is ofcourse, a lot of fine details, that are not very relevant for the current topic (PIO mode is used for non-UDMA transfers, whereas, when UDMA is enabled, PIO can't be selected on some motherboards, etc...)So, for now, just check you standard BIOS settings: go to Standard BIOS configuration, and select you hard drives properies, and check for the before mentioned items... Hope I helped some...[edit]I just remembered... This is not that critical, but who knows... Is S.M.A.R.T. enabled on your hard drives? SMART is known to slow down hard drive performance a bit, so it's worth checking I guess...

I just can't help getting that feeling that there is some catch behind those "free domains and hosting"... I suppose maybe pages that aren't made with Office, won't be viewable, or they'll check for some serial numbers, accessing your private information... Who knows...Xisto is definitely the best hosting option that exists currently... And I mean, exist in the whole world... I've been a member here for a very long time, and I can say that in all this time, their uptime was about 99.8% (0.01% only MySQL was down, and 0.01% server was unreachable)... Many paid hosts can't meet this uptime, let alone free hosting...My advice would be: get as far from Micro$oft as you can, and don't look back I don't think anyone here has ordered that hosting, if they are hosted at Trap...

As I see you have SP2 for Windows (I actually don't like that SP, and I don't have it installed, and everything works perfectly), I think there is an error with your Java Virtual Machine... I see it is not Sun Java (I may be wrong, please correct me if I am, I only quickly flew over the file), and that VM is definitely not getting along with something on your system...What you should do, is go to Sun website, and download the latest Java Run-time Environment (JRE), I believe it is 1.5.0.06... After you install it, go to your internet properties, if you use Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Internet Options > Advanced, and there, in the big list of features, you will find a Java (Sun) section, where you will have a check box, to select to use Java Sun for <applet> tags... That only means IE will use Sun Java VM, not Microsoft Java VM... I will try to find a tutorial, that explains how to remove Microsofts Java VM from the system, and use Sun Java VM instead...In case I was mistaken, and you DO use Sun Java VM, try reinstalling it, maybe there was some file corruption, or something... It's worth a shot... And let us know what you did, if any of this helped you... And I will try to find and post beforementioned "tutorial" on removing Microsoft Java VM from the system...

Well, this is a tough situation... First of all, if this person is my good friend, I would probably feel bad for him/her, for the obvious reasons ((s)he is my friend, is (s)he not?)... Turning him/her in, for the money is out of the question! I really could use that kind of money, but selling out a friend, for any price, doesn't exist in my vocabulary...I would first try to find out what actually happened, I would probably already know the answer by the look on his/her face, the tone of their voice... If (s)he was nervous, crying, and generaly upset, and if it was an accident, I would first try to calm him/her down, to relax, and we would talk for as long as (s)he needs it... After that, I would try to convince him/her, to go to the police, and tell them everything (s)he said to me, and that I would go along with him/her, as a support...If it wasn't accident, and (s)he had a good reason to kill that person (believe me, I had thoughts of killing several people in my life, some of them - in the most brutal ways), I would provide shelter for my friend, for as long as (s)he needs it... Ofcourse, I would still try to convince him/her to go and give him/her self up, but if (s)he decides against that, I would give him/her any help (s)he might need...This is ofcourse highly theoretical discussion, and I can't claim with 100% certainty that I would do exactly as I wrote here... There are too many variants of this situation, to write them all down, but to sum all this up - My decision would depend on: how good this friend of mine is, if intentional - what's the reason to kill this John Doe guy, if by accident - how did it happen, who this John Doe guy is (believe me, this is very important, to me, and most likely to the cops)...Don't forget, it's situations like this, that you can really see who is your friend, a true friend...

I've read quite a bit about this Trusted Computing, and I personaly don't like the sound of it... Yes, it's cover story is great, stop piracy, and make people use legal versions of software... But has anyone stopped to think about privacy concerns? Software companies, or whoever get's to control those TP servers (90% certainty is that Micro$oft will control them), will be able to see anything on your hard drives, and all things you keep on your computer... And they could delete it without notice! Also, you won't be able to put new hardware into your computer, without authorisation from those who control the servers... So you could end up buying a new graphics card, and OS developer (mainly M$), could say: "OK, just pay us $100, and we'll authorise your new graphics card." Don't you think it's a bit too high price for stoping piracy? Where does it end?I really don't like the sound of all this Trusted Computing stuff, and it has actually pushed me over the edge, as I have been thinking of switching to Linux for a long time... But this is it, I'll switch there, and enjoy the world of OpenSource...Also, come to think of it, maybe this is another attempt of M$, to undermine spred of Linux...Oh, and did you know they put those TPM chips ever since 2002 or 2003, and nobody knew about it? If this is such a great thing, why keep it a secret? Think about it...