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Atomic0

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Everything posted by Atomic0

  1. This reminds of the zombie game Dead Rising 2, where you create a lightsaber by combining a jewel and torch. Back on topic, I think the lightsaber from Star Wars was envisaged to produce actual light that has been so concentrated that it can cut through basically anything. However, the producers / storywriters probably never considered any scientific information, considering that many of the features of the lightsabers don't work in real life. Some points / features that doesn't with scientific evidence: - Light travels in a straight and doesn't stop until the beam of light is reflected or deflected somehow. Therefore, the fixed length feature of the lightsaber doesn't make sense scientifically. - The light beam would have a negligible weight, so without weight, momentum in lightsaber swings would be hard to gain and fluent use of lightsaber would not achieved. - Light beams can pass through other light beams, and would produce constructive or destructive interference. The idea of lightsabers able to block other lightsabers also doesn't make sense here.
  2. I watch Mythbusters from time to time, not regularly but whenever I come across episodes when channel surfing. Most of the myths that are tested on the show are great, although there are sometimes a few that seem too obvious to be busted myths and others that are a bit too simple and lacking in any technicality. It would be good if they maybe had category-based episodes. Also, I personally would like to see each myth tested one after another, instead of switching between two different myths tested by two separate teams. As a suggestion, it would be excellent if Mythbusters came to on-demand TV, allowing you to choose which episodes / myths you want to see.
  3. For me, the primary concern for space travel is safety i.e. getting passengers / tourists safely into space. Considering the number of spacecraft and space shuttle accidents that have occurred and the proportion / percentage of all space trips, space travel at the moment is a very risky proposition. Also, there have hardly any significant improvements in making spacecrafts more safe, apart from checking the exterior surfaces prior to launches and re-entry procedures. I personally think more time, effort and investment should be made in improving safety equipment and technology, rather than just inventing the technology to make the travel faster or more environmentally friendly and energy efficient (still an important part, but less important than safety concerns).Of course, some people would rather cherish the opportunity to be in space and have less concern of safety. Nevertheless, safety first, enjoyment later.
  4. I believe that as long you have the privileges available to set up an anonymous FTP account on your shared hosting site, you should be able to do so. I do not believe a dedicated IP is needed, since you can access your FTP site using a hostname instead of an IP address, However, a word of warning, I do not suggest you set up a FTP site where files can be uploaded and downloaded anonymously, since you will not be able to control the files that may be uploaded e.g. copyrighted / illegal files etc., plus you will also be unable to control the bandwidth utilised.For PHP upload forms, you don't have to use FTP for the code anyway. The PHP code should be able to access the folders / directories server-side and upload the specified file to the specified locations.
  5. Currently Australia has no internet websites that have been blocked by the government or authorities controlled by the government. Unfortunately, that is about to change, with legislation proposed by the current Labor government introducing a system of mandatory filtering of sites and blocking sites that have been 'refused classification'. I suppose it is a mixed good / bad thing depending on who you speak to, but in general I don't really see what differences it will make since for every filter or protection, there is always a loophole or bypass somewhere which would allow someone to break through and access any content at will. I somehow wish that the right to internet freedom should have been put into the Constitution, but of course, the Internet wasn't around when it was drafted. Source: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/
  6. The Buy-To-Let-Centre website looks quite professional and well styled, although there are a number of elements on the page that look a bit strange. For example, the massive white block adjacent to the logo and above the menu looks unusual, like a void or hole in the page waiting for missing content. Maybe the call-to-action message and phone number could be moved to this location. Also, I find the bullet points i.e. the white square with a surrounding shadow, to be bit dull and not really fitting well into the page. Unfortunately, I don't really have any suggestions on how to fix that.
  7. If you are hosting the new blog on a subdomain, it looks like you will have to host a new separate copy of Wordpress. Plus, you can safely migrate your blog over to the new site without fearing the loss of data. Also, you can leave the old blog as it is while you conduct the Wordpress migration, so your site visitors can still browse your old blog while you work on the new one.
  8. I currently have a Nokia 6500 slide phone and a cap mobile phone plan with no included data allowance. I have not used my mobile phone for web surfing other than to access the mobile carrier's portal to check up the account balances and options. Besides not having a data allowance on my current cap plan, web browsing is not a good experience, especially with such a small screen and difficulties in page navigation due to a lack of a touchscreen and even a lack of a cursor (the only way to move around is using the keypad to move from link to link on the displayed web page).Of course, if I eventually get an iPhone or an iPad, which I hope to do so within the next few months, I would most certainly use for web browsing, especially when travelling to and from university on the train (but unlikely on a bus). At the moment, I am barely surviving on using the university's wireless network on my MacBook Pro.
  9. I would consider Skype to be more appropriate conferencing tool for business professional rather than Yahoo Messenger, which is more of an Instant Messaging client with added video call functionality. Of course, any serious business / company would probably host their own servers if they were to use live video conferencing rather than rely on a third-party to handle the communications.
  10. As a suggestion for email security, it is unlikely that any reputable online business / company would send any attachments, especially if it is an executable phone. That probably is the first sign. Also, if possible, you should not click links from the email unless you are absolutely sure of its identity e.g. clear names in URL, email validation links for sites you recently registered for etc. For example, in the above Facebook email advising you of a message on your Facebook wall, the best option would be to login directly into Facebook rather than clicking the link in the email.
  11. Hopefully, if the two giants Microsoft and Google start competing against each in terms of investing in new technology, products and services, it would mean that we consumers will start getting more innovative and usable applications and devices. In the past, the lack of competition has meant that we have received less and less innovative and engaging products, and just more and more of the same products that have been relabeled with new names but lacking in any new features that make the products worthy of the price consumers are paying for these supposedly 'upgraded' and 'newer' versions of the same products.
  12. Go to: https://www.google.com/preferences?hl=en Under the heading Autocomplete, select "Do not provide query predictions in the search box." If that option is not available, it may under another heading Google Instant. Select "Do not use Google Instant". These options should disable the autocomplete window that appears under the Google search textbox. Note: These intructions only work for the web-based Google search. Browsers with search text fields may have their own preferences elsewhere.
  13. It is advisable to submit your URL to search engines if you want users to be able to find your blog. If you don't, you will be relying on sites that already be crawled and indexed to link to your site in some way or other, so that Google's bots 'crawl' onto your site.For Google, you can also submit an XML sitemap of your blog for indexing through the Google Webmaster Tools (https://www.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Ftools%2F&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Ftools%2F). Also, the Google Webmaster Tools also allows to monitor for indexing problems (i.e. dead or broken links) in addition to controlling what content you want indexed on Google's search results.For other search engines, there are sites like SubmitExpress which provides a free service to submit your blog's URL to a number of different search engine without having to find the URL submission form manually for every search engine.
  14. Apparently, from what I can gather, Google gets 97% of its income from its search advertising business (Source: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ which sources from: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/). Its all makes sense, consdering the massive market share Google has in the search engine market. Depending on your search term / keywords, you may find 10+ advertised / sponsored links on a single Google search result page. Multiply that by the number of users and you get billions of link impressions and billions in advertising revenue for Google. On the other hand, Google's Android open-source platform, Google Apps and other investments probably don't give much of income to Google, considering it only represents 3% of its total revenue. In my opinion, it's more about promoting its own agenda and products rather than trying to make profits out of these investments.
  15. From past experiences, I would highly recommend the book "Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics" by Jennifer Niederst Robbins (ISBN: 978-0596527525). It covers the basics of HTML and CSS very well, in addition to optimising web graphics and site development processes. Overall, I found it to be good source of reference when I needed to look up information on CSS features.I would also recommend the use of Sitepoint's HTML Reference (http://reference.sitepoint.com/html) and CSS Reference (http://reference.sitepoint.com/css) which is more of a complete reference and guide to every feature in HTML and CSS, in addition to being easily accessible as you can search for your desired information easily.
  16. Although I am not familar with the use of frameworks, there is a PHP framework called Zend Framework (https://framework.zend.com/) which you may want to have a look at. I also found a site that is dedicated to comparing the different PHP frameworks available, PHP Frameworks (http://www.phpframeworks.com/). It has a nice table comparing the different PHP Frameworks based on features and compatibility included in those frameworks.
  17. HTML and CSS should be essential skills to any webmaster, with knowledge of Javascript (for AJAX or JQuery) and PHP an added bonus.For create a website where users can register, you will probably need to learn PHP (or ASP if you prefer) in order to handle server side processing of data, in addition to learning SQL which will allow you to communicate with a database containing the user information.However, I would recommend using ready-built solutions in this case rather than building a PHP and SQL database application from scratch. This is because besides coding the functions, there are other stuff to considering like input validation for security reasons, which is a bit more advanced, and which have already been considered in the development of these pre-built solutions. An example of a pre-built solution is BuddyPress which is based off the popular Wordpress blog publishing platform.
  18. Those paid PSD to HTML are a bit expensive (most charge per page and depending on the delivery timeframe), so unless you can afford it or you expect the site to profitable, you are probably better off slicing and coding the HTML page yourself. There are numerous articles and post on the topic of slicing PSDs and coding HTMLs, though I would recommend following these tutorials before starting on your own project.
  19. Personally, I think it is important for a site to have a dedicated mobile device theme, primarily due to the differences in screen size and user interaction.In the screen size reason, the screen resolution of most mobile devices are a fraction of what is available to computers and laptops. With smaller screens on mobile devices, the amount of content that can be displayed on the screen at a time is limited, so it is important for mobile sites to be designed to deliver the content in compact form and have unnecessary elements and information removed from view. Plus, most of the times when users use mobile devices for viewing websites, they would be looking for specific information rather than enjoying the graphical look of the site.On user interaction, most mobile devices have touch screens and no longer utilise a cursor-based approach to navigation. Therefore, it is most important that mobile sites do not include features that are activated from cursor hovering (which is not available on touch screen platforms).Economic-wise, one should decide whether it is worth investing in mobile web design based on the number of users who visit their site on a mobile device and whether the content presented on the site is appropriate at a mobile device level. For example, it may not be worth investing in mobile web design if your site if not frequented by mobile device users or the content is only appropriate for users of desktop or portable computers.
  20. I would say the best way here is to float the text over the image using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), although pixel-perfect positioning is hard to achieve (especially when dealing with floating elements and positioning them relative to each other). Also, with the use of CSS, you will have to test your site on different browsers, as compatibility across browser platforms is not uniform, such that your site may look different in different browsers.You could also use HTML tables to position everything correctly, but this method is outdated due to the popularity of CSS. Rather, you could consider a CSS grid system, such as 960 Grid System (http://960.gs/) or Blueprint CSS (http://www.blueprintcss.org/), which can help you simply development by providing pre-built sized grids in CSS code ready for immediate implementation into a HTML site.
  21. I think with most routers you can manually release / renew the Internet Service Provider's (ISP's) IP address through a web or software configuration interface. For example, with my D-Link router (DIR-855 to be precise), I can log into the router's web interface (using the IP address of the router gateway) and release / renew the IP address lease with my Internet Service Provider.Although, this release and renewal of the IP address through the router configuration interface may not always work, especially if the Internet Service Provider keeps giving back the same IP address for you to use (in the past, my Internet Service Provider had fixed leases of a few months, whereas now a new IP address is given whenever I trigger the release / renew function on the router, or when I turn the power to my cable modem completely off, resulting in the cable modem needing to re-establish IP address leases with the Internet Service Provider).
  22. The Free Wordpress Themes towards the end of this topics (i.e. the more recent posts) look much more appealing and stylish than the ones featured at the start of this topic, with more distinctive colour schemes and contrast. I must admit that I didn't get a good impression when looking at the first few Wordpress themes on the front page of this topic. To me, they did look a bit dull in terms of colours and styling of the navigaion and page content, and somewhat lacking in 'eye-popping' features that have made other Wordpress themes in marketplace successful.The one theme I really like is the Sasha Wordpress theme, which in my view, is nicely laid out in terms of page structure and content, coupled with nice contrasting colour scheme and design.
  23. Looks like this site is totally dead now.In my opinion, this was bound the happen, since it was obvious that the costs of the domain names and website hosting could not be sustained from revenue from the advertising banners placed on the hosted sites.
  24. I am currently using a custom built computer and an Apple MacBook Pro which both utilise dual-core CPUs (Core 2 Duo and Core i7 respectively). Personally, since I do not do any video editing at all and use it for gaming and graphics applications (e.g. Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator) at most, the current dual-core CPU configuration is sufficient. Personally, considering my current uses, I would prefer a dual-core CPU with a higher clock speed than a quad-core CPU with a lower clock speed, as most of the applications I use on a daily basis would not benefit or be able to utilise all the cores of a quad-core CPU.On a side note, recent technological improvements such as Intel's Turbo Boost Technology which can 'shut down' inactive cores and boost the performance of active cores (which is great if you are running an application without multi-threading support).
  25. Unfortunately, PCi Express x8 are quite hard to find. The only graphics cards below PCI Express x16 I could find were some PCI Express x1 cards (Nvidia Quadro NVS graphics) (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/PNY-VCQ290NVS-PCIEX1/dp/B000XABCJK). But these ones seem to be a bit expensive, probably because there are built for "business professionals' for use in workstations that require a bit more graphics power than can be provided in generic integrated graphics solutions.
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