MadDog

To me, that is the only post in this entire thread that I can understand and deal with.Firstly, I would never razz on anyone because of their beliefs, however bizzare they might seem to me. Each to his own I say. Diversity is a great thing. BUT. Where does this discussion leave people like me? I neither believe in god, in any of his thousands of incarnations around the world, nor do I subscribe to evolution, which I see as almost as faith-based as god. I know the topic only gave 2 choices, but are there any other possibilities?? Think about it. Why not? I know y'all posted your "qualifications" and stuff, but to me, that doesn't really mean a hell of a lot. ( I is just an uneducated country boy from outback Australia....) haha. I personally don't see how one "theory", makes any more sense than another. For all I know, "god", could be an alien from another system far in advance of our meagre intelligence... In fact, that actually makes more sense scientifically to me. God, or Grokk un Lahh from Sirius. Why the hell not? Until someone can prove what actually instills conciousness in the bundle of atoms we are made up from, I reserve my judgement. Oh, and again I say that I'm not pissin on peoples beliefs, because that is what defines folks lives, and people take that stuff very seriously. Fair Enough. What gets my goat, is people that are so fixed in their ideas, that they dismiss everybody else as lunatics or heretics. To me that is the sort of close-minded thinking that prohibits advancement of this entire planet. Open up your minds and smell the roses guys, not everything has to be defined in black and white. And until I see some absolute proof of a theory, it's all hypothetical to me. My 2 cents anyway. If I offended anyone, I apologise now. Once.

I dont believe that there should be a death penalty, for one reason and one reason only. What if they get it WRONG. From 1973 until 2003, 103 people were released from death row, (and prison), in the USA, with evidence of their innocence proven in court. How many were not? How many were deliberately put there on false evidence. Call me a cynic, but not all policemen are good blokes... Some are downright criminal.103 people in 30 years might not sound like a lot, but if even 1 innocent person gets killed by the state, thats 1 too many. And I'll bet that every one of those 103 folks wouldnt care that it sounds like a small number either.Thats the only argument I have, and I'll stand by it. Thank god we dont have it in this country.

Mate, if you arent happy, then go. But make damn sure you have something else to go to first, no matter how much you hate your job, (and I think weve all had jobs we hate), youd be foolish to leave without lining up something else first. You may think, yeah I'll get another job quick enough, but if you dont, well no money coming in is not a good scenario for anyone.Good Luck.

I reckon , if thats what your bosses have already stated, then of course it will help your career to learn it. In fact, anything that gives you the edge over a competitor for the same position, HAS to help. I dont know anything about chinese, but I have a mate who works for mitsubishi air-con and he goes there regularly. Apparently it is not the easiest to learn, until you discover out of the hundreds of characters in the language, you can apparently get by on about 50-70 well-chosen ones. Most chinese only know a portion of them anyway (hearsay ),as most are too obscure to become used everyday.

On my home PC I use Ubuntu, with gnome. Really not my cup of tea as far as linux distros go, but it easy enough so that the wife and kids can handle it without running to me with questions every 5 minutes. It just works. With programs like cedega for games, and wine for apps, its perfectly adequate for everyday use at our place. Im even thinking of buying crossover so I can use photoshop and dreamweaver as well. Pretty well the only reason I still dual boot with XP.On my server, I run debian 4.0, with fluxbox. But I rarely use the gui anyway, mostly for surfing the web and stuff. Most of my work is done through putty, as the command line is Sooooo much faster in my opinion. Deb based distros are where its at for me, dunno, Im just too used to them now I guess.I started with red hat about 10 years ago, but when I got the hang of debian, I never went back.Ive just got a 2nd box so now Im looking forward to setting up deb at home and letting the rest of the family use what they want, and they reckon theyre so used to ubuntu now, that theyre not interested in going back to windows. <_<I love linux.

Umm, I have lizards and snakes, as well as the usual dog and a few cats. Thing about the biggest lizard is its a shingleback. Google it. It looks like they have a head on either end of their body. Bout 2 foot long. He just has free roam of the house, and is toilet trained to poo in a cardboard box, (with a hole cut in it of course, lol), and the cats dont bother him. Amazing creatures. I got a couple of pythons too, but theyre pretty temperamental. If they dont want you to touch them, they'll let you know.... But most of the time theyre alright. Cant post pix of mine cause Im away at work at the moment. But all non-aussies should have a look at a shingleback. Theyre very unusual.

Interesting. A lot of computer related jobs, (which I guess is no surprise really). So I thought I'd throw something different into the mix...I'm 38, and up until last year, I was an aborist for 15 years. I used to get paid to travel all over outback Queensland, Australia to climb trees around power lines and cut them down. Ive 4 wheel driven in so many places where the nearest homesteads were over 100 kilometres away, only going home on most weekends. Usually staying in small town pubs, or camping out. Basically I just loved the adrenaline factor, knowing that if you screwed up, at best youd start a bushfire, at worst, someone would die. So you didnt screw up. Theres no-one to help you out there. I was only cut by a chainsaw twice during my whole career, and luckily both were managable, although a bloke did hit me in my helmet once and destroyed it... Glad I was wearing it. But theres nothing like being 100 or more foot in the air, tied to your tree, just gazing out over hundreds of miles of land till it just hazes out. Bliss. My mate got bit by a snake once (taipan, google it ),and was all but dead by the time we got to the nearest hospital with antivenom, nearly 200 k's away. Correct first aid saved his life. In our spare time, we got to fish and get yabbies, (freshwater crayfish), in streams and billabongs that no-one had even layed eyes on for 50 years or more. Explored and climbed anything we could find, rock formations, waterfalls, mountains etc. Good Stuff. You start to get a nose for water when you work every day in 40-50 degree (Celcius) heat, haha. Good Times. It was the best life ever, but unfortunately, after one too many falls out of a tree, my body just couldn't take it any more, so I was left contemplating, "what do I do now?".The answer came to me in the weirdest way, another administrator on a website I admin at built boats. So lo and behold, I became a self-employed marine carpeter. Putting carpet in pleasure craft and fishing boats. Not my idea of a dream job, and I miss the adrenaline rushes of climbing and stuff, but I make more now in a week than I did in 3 weeks of climbing. So its worth it for my families sake. I still have to travel week on, week off, about 5 hours to Sydney, and then fly 1000k's to Gold Coast to work, but thats OK.The drives worse than the flights.Anyhow, hope someone finds my little tale interesting. So much happened in the last 15 years, I only gave a brief over-view.So thats my life. Later guys.PS liwenjones, that sounds like a real interesting job mate. TBH I thought MC Hammer was dead!?!? lol. Shows how out of touch with "the scene" I am I guess. haha.

A friend of mine bought a new machine with vista on it not long ago, and it was barely a week old before it crashed the first time. By crash I mean, in her case, freezing, or randomly rebooting. She only installed about 1/2 dozen, reputable, paid for programs, and even after being "repaired" under warranty, it did the same thing. Now Im loathe to blame vista, (as much as I dont like it), because it smacks to me of a hardware problem, maybe overheating or something, but the curious thing was after 3 odd months, a complete reformat, and clean install of Ubuntu, it never happened again. I never personally looked at the computer, so this is all word of mouth, but I can only assume that 1/ Vista was at fault or 2/ The service technician replaced the faulty hardware (finally on the 3'rd trip to the repair shop).

I would never reccommend running two AV progs on one machine. Do some research and decide which one is the best one for your needs. Even if you did find 2 that weren't causing conflicts, (which several people here apparently have), the toll on your RAM should be enough to advise against it. So unless you have a fresh out-of-the-box, latest and greatest gaming rig. I would advise against it. One decent program that is regularly updated should be all you ever need.If you are CONVINCED you need two though, do your research, and check for compatibility issues first. It'll save you a lot of headaches later. (Especially if you want to uninstall Norton, at a later date. But thats another story)...

Hacking any account would be a bad mistake, even if you were the owner of said account, the host should pick up the signatures of any of the most commonly used tools, and I doubt very much they would listen to any excuses you may have to offer. (read the T & C of your account). For example if I tried using some well known tools (which shall remain nameless here ), to test the security of my VPS, I am well aware that my server would be shutdown quick smart. The guys above are right. Just hammer your admin with requests for a password reset, and if theyre still not forthcoming, well, it might be time to find a different host.

yes, you only need to click 1 file to extract it, usually the .rar file, or the .r01 file depending on how it's been packed. In my experience, even if one of the files are corrupt, winrar should still go through the motions of unpacking it giving you the appropriate error messages.Of course, if you are talking about a file that you dloaded off a public bittorrent site, or limewire or such, there's always the possibility thats its a fake... either files full of 1's and zeros, or an empty file thats been given the attributes of a much larger 700MB or whatever size file.Thats the risk you take if you want to use sites/programs like that. It could be worse, it couldve been a virus.Other programs you could try are ALZip, 7-zip, or even boot into linux and try unrar, or ark.

On any machine I have windows on, Ive tried several, including most of the free ones. I currently use iolo antivirus on my main everyday box. I got a year free off the front of a computer magazine. So far seems to be doing an excellent job. I cant complain at all. Fast and unobtrusive, just seems to do the job. Before that I was using a paid for version of bitdefender, also good but a lot harder to configure correctly, and prone to returning false positives. For example the plugin pack for irfanview image viewer would get picked up every time, and I hate having to make exceptions when you shouldnt have to.On my laptop, I use antivir, free, and seems to work very well. At least Ive never had any problems, and it is extremely easy to set up and use. Very minimal. Although the only things downloaded on that machine are emails anyway, it lacks the real-time protection for that, but it WILL pick up anything you try to open, or manually scan. Good product for those that might be overwhelmed by the whole configuration of AV thing.Lastly, I just HAVE to say, you couldn't pay me enough money to install Mcafee on any of my machines. The amount of times Ive been asked to check out machines that have slown down to a crawl, or worse, just stopped responding completely, have nearly ALWAYS had Mcafee on them, just booting the machine is an experience in pain. I'm sure it must work fine for some people, that just hasn't been my experience at all.Ive also used avast and AVG, good but average in my opinion.

G'Day. Well with the G'Day's and stuff, you probably noticed I'm an aussie, (and a country boy at that), I found this forum by trolling through the million odd results you get when you type "free web hosting" into google... Won't do that again in a hurry. Did a bit of research, and only heard good about the place.I was looking for a host to teach my 12yo how to design and run his own website. Rather than go into the complexities (for him anyway), of doing the hard yards on my VPS. Start him off gently I reckon. <_<I admin at a couple of other forums, and belong to quite a few, (music related), sites that I frequent more often than not, so I'm not a forum newb by any means. The first thing that struck me was how BIG this place seems to be. Large but well organised :PMy main interests are linux, linux, and , Ummmmmm, linux. So I'll probably be hanging round any of the tech forums most of the time.Anyhow, nuff about me, I'm off to explore... See y'all round.

Yeah it's addictive, (I think nearly everyones agreed on that fact), and it is a potent drug too, (indisputible). I actually drink several (up to 10 or more), cups of instant a day, and if I don't, I get physically ill. Headaches, irritability etc. Should probably stop, but I can't see that happening anytime soon.

I gotta say Alyssa Milano, Ive been watchin her since "Whos the Boss". (No Im not a dirty ol man, We're about the same age, haha).Last night I finally got around to watching "The Dukes of Hazzard" so I gotta plug Jessica Simpson too, even though Ive never really looked twice at her before. Just somethin about those cut-off denims....

I think a large part of the "problem" is that gaming, especially when youre playing online against real people, itself attracts a disproportionate number of addictive personalities. Take the gaming away, and a large percentage of those folks would find something else to fill the void.I certainly agree that if youre spending 50% of your life playing anything online, you have a problem. But blaming a computer program seems to me to be a cop-out of a major kind to me. In fact Id wager that you'll find far more people are addicted to being online full stop. Be it forums, e-bay, myspace, gaming, or whatever else floats your boat. In fact, Id probably put myself in that category. Considering that my job, (marine contractor), has absolutely nothing to do with computers, I usually spend a couple of hours before work, and however many after work, as admin at a couple of boards, and as a member at several others. I console myself with the thought at least Im not getting drunk every day, or zonked out of my head on drugs with the music cranked etc.Back to gaming, (sorry ), Yeah I don't mind a bit of a game every now and then. I'll quite happily sit down for 7-8 hours and play Oblivion for instance, and then not look at it again for a month. Like you all said, when it takes over your life you have a problem, but the problem is YOU, not the machine.BTW Ive played WOW, it just didn't turn me on.

firefox on my widows partition, or iceweasel (firefox derivative, uses the same engine) on ubuntu.On Debian4 server, iceweasel if Im using fluxbox, or lynx if Im ssh with putty.

I gotta disagree on a couple of points here bro. My mother in her late 60's managed to install and configure Ubuntu Gutsy on her machine and she is about as far from having "extensive knowledge about open source", as you can possibly get. Newer distros make it easier and easier to install, configure and use them all the time. Sure, she's only surfing the web and using emails, organizing photos etc. but hey, so are 90% of users out there. Programs like synaptic, actually make it easier to install new programs than it is in windows. No tedious web surfing to try and find that program that you want, the list is just there. And you can add more repositories all the time. If you do run into trouble, the support online is phenomenal. There are 10's of thousands of sites and forums out there with folks more than willing to help, and you can guarantee that your question has been asked and answered somewhere before. Next, have you ever seen compiz fusion running? If you are one of those people who loves special effects, and pretty OS's etc. It literally blows anything vista has to offer out of the water, and will happily run on half the specs. In fact beryl before it has been using the same effects that are "new" in vista for years. Honestly, just try it on Ubuntu, (or SUSE if you like rpm, I dont), or just go to youtube and type in compiz or something, there are plenty of vids out there as demos. Finally, (and not directed at anyone in particular), programs like Crossover for Linux support the running of nearly 4000 windows apps, including Office, Photoshop, Quicken etc. Yes, it IS proprietry, but at $39 or $69 for pro, it is far less than the cost of a vista licence. Cedega, allows the running of a ton of games on linux. For a list check out HERE. With more being added all the time. Cedega is a derivative of wine, which has already been mentioned here, which also supports a wide variety of apps and is something I use on my server every day. I'm not trying to diss your choice of OS or anything mate, after all, each to their own, it just irks me sometimes that vista is plugged as some sort of supernatural deity in the OS world, when a lot of its newer implementations have been *ahem* appropriated *ahem* from linux... Thats just my 2 cents anyway.

thanks paVer, that looks like a very nice distro. Being an amateur muso and big linux fan, I might just give it a try. Is it a deb based distro? Personally using Debian4 on a VPS and Ubuntu Gutsy on my home PC. Just used to apt-get I spose. And youre right about live CD's, they rock! No windoze user has an excuse not to try out linux these days, its all to easy. As a side note, there are even distros that will boot off a flash drive too. (If your bios supports it). Enabling you to take your OS anywhere. 2 such examples are Puppy Linux (My personal favourite, it loads into and runs from your RAM giving outstanding speed), and Damn Small Linux, also a nice fast distro. Just food for thought for all you windoze users out there.

I too lost ntldr, and rather than reformat or muck around with the command line, I just used a copy of GAG that I conveniently had lying around on a CD. <_<Worked very well, and in fact I still have it installed on that computer, (which is my sons), with dual boot ubuntu XP pro. A better idea would have been to maybe restore the MBR from within windows first, and then using paragon or some such partition tool to del the partition from windows as well.