mm22

Very strange thing. My website (as well as gamma.xisto.com) is accessible from one location (1), but it's not from another (2). Tracerouting it fails from BOTH locations (at least within the maximum limit of 255 hops). Still the website is accessible from location 1 but not from location 2.I thought it might have something to do with different DNS servers used but then if I used the IP address (of gamma server) instead I still do not get there from location 2 (it gets there from location 1). I am not aware of any internet restriction at location 2 (besides I have accessed it for a long time from there).Any explanation for this? and most importantly how can it be fixed? whether it is or it isn't a Xisto issue...

Thanks a lot for the info. I cannot access CPanel now but I seem to remember my server was gamma, which according to the status page is up and running. I recovered the ip address from browser history and from that site you suggest I tried a couple of the hosted websites, none of them is up. Must be something serious... anyway very interesting things to learn

I am experiencing the same thing for the last two or three days, all my domains down with only brief uptime breaks (of course I am not checking 24 hours a day, I might just be very unlucky). I am not sure on which server (beta or else) I am on, how do you check that anyway? I also notice the forum itself is slow, so it might be a general issue.

Here I meant server, The Opera Unite feature will turn your browser into an internet server and from there you can share files on your computer without installing a proper server or uploading them anywhere. I wonder if it works fine, in that case it might be useful. Anyone who has tried it? Does it work behind a firewall and with dynamic IP addresses? (Guess yes for the second question, not sure about the first one...)

Firefox can also search from the address bar, and search through your tags as well :angel: it can also do simple math from the search bar (or maybe that is a Google feature...) Has anyone tried out the Opera Unite feature of Opera browser? It is supposed to turn your browser into a mini browser to easily share content on your computer, I will try it some day.

Yes that is what I did in the end... I downloaded *some* installation ISO which I hope to activate with my product key. I haven't tried yet, but this is anyhow not a *proper* way of doing. But sometimes you've got to do what you've got to do :angel:

Well you know maybe if you present the item in the right way, and it looks really brand new, and you offer Buy It Now option... sometimes buyers just want to save time and get something quick and conveniently shipped to their address. That is also the reason they might use eBay, not just the price. But I agree this "idea" alone cannot get you much far, but if you already have an online store or eBay store or something, it makes sense exploring it.

This sounds like something that might actually work... still as you say sites get "saturated" pretty fast so I find it hard to think of this as a reliable source of business in the medium long term...

If I am not mistaken Intel concentrates its efforts solely on the x86 family of processors, that is what powers most personal computers, laptops, servers around the world. Mobile phones, palmtops, and things like that are a different world. Since their inception they could not afford wasting any amount of energy and/or producing excessive heat. As such the Intel x86 type of processors were just not suitable for this category of products. So other architecture, like ARM, kept the scene up until today... Yes because I read somewhere that the new family of Intel Atom processors (still x86 based though) has cut such low energy consumption levels that it *might* become suitable for embedded applications such as those of mobile phones and portable devices. If that would ever happen the same operating system that powers the PC I am typing from could be *easily* installed onto a mobile phone without any modification, that is without the need to recompile all of its source files for the new architecture. Talking about operating systems, Linux has so far played a major role in embedded systems because of its source being publicly available thus enabling anyone to compile a version of the Linux kernels for their architecture (there are limits to that but in principle Linux can be run *anywhere*). Being able to use the same architecture (same CPU ultimately) on a mobile phone or on a laptop or on a server, might actually playing in favour of closed source operating systems like MS, given that an OS such as Windows will ever be made lean enough to run on a still limited piece of hardware. I always wondered how come they clone everything (being it hardware or software) but I haven't heard of cloned Intel CPUs? Now I have :angel: And who know if one is running right under my fingers right now... after all the BIOS will not tell you.

I just wanted to mention an optimized version of Firefox for Linux users is Swiftfox. It is build almost entirely on Firefox source and optimized to run on specific processors, like Intel Core2Duo, AMD64, etc. on the Linux architecture. As far as I can tell it is not any slower or any buggier than "normal" Firefox and it "feels" fast. The really nice thing is that it is totally integrated with Firefox, so you can use the same profile and use both of them, Firefox and Swiftfox, sharing the exact same configuration, history, bookmarks, etc. You can swap from one to the other, what you cannot do is running them simultaneously as far as I know. Well this is open source and some of the effects this can cause, any one can take the source code of say Firefox and turn it into something very similar or very different but sharing something with the Fox. This for better or for worse cannot happen with say Opera or other non open source browsers. And yes, although I like some features of Opera and I have recently rediscovered I mostly stick to Firefox, having my profiles and bookmarks and history and plugins and (...) shared between several computers and so on.

If the Maya predicted the course of some celestial mass and thus the time it will hit the Earth... it's possible, but that is very unlikely to be exactly on the 31st December on one particular year. As someone suggests it might well be that they simply ran out of space or considered not worthy continuing any further. Sadly enough most of their civilization was wiped out way before that so we can't even ask them. So in astronomical terms our solar systems is still in its middle-age (was it a few billion years to go? I forgot...), much closer to end might be the presence of humans on Earth. What's not clear about these predictions is if the Earth is going to end its existence (i.e. disintegrate into space, fall towards the Sun, explode, ...) or life on Earth is going to end, the second option being more likely caused by "terrestrial" forces (natural phenomena). Is the human race helping towards that? Many say yes. Our presence on mother Earth, and the burden we are loading on her, will be the immediate cause of such extinction scenario. Will this happen? And when? One thing is for sure in my opinion. If we as humans were able to have such a great impact on our Earth, then saving it is within our reach. The question is whether we want to do it or not. Most people might think this is out of their hands, they are not the one accountable for it or the ones that should take action. But then, who should?

In fact I do not *want* Vista, or any other Windows version for that matter. But since I (without having a choice) paid for the license I might as well have a real installation disk, just to add to my collection In some cases it *might* be useful to have such disk, even though at the moment I can't really think of any! And first of all it's just out of curiosity, to see if and how it can be done. To be honest I would expect a more straightforward way, if not some official help from MS, to perform this "basic" operation. The reason behind such a way not being straightforward might well be an attempt to discourage installation on multiple computer, or maybe just the fact that most people ultimately don't care whether they have a real installation disk or just a restore disk. Both will get the job done when it comes to reinstalling your OS. I have been using Linux based (or I should say GNU/Linux) operating systems for some time now. I wouldn't say they are absolutely better than Windows, but sure they are in many ways. One of things I appreciate most is the ability of understanding what's really going on behind the doors and therefore being able to understand more about computers in general. Another noticeable difference, and this goes back to the topic of this thread, is the ability of customizing nearly everything, not necessarily resorting to advanced programming skills in order to do so. To the specific case, any Linux OS will make your life very easy when it comes to creating a bootable disk from which you can run the operating system directly. In fact most Linux distributions comes in a bootable disk (or live disk) format. It is not all nice and sweet, in some cases half finished applications or partially compatible drivers will get you think that Windows after all was not such a bad place. Your sound may or may not work and so your wi-fi card. But then you come to think of how much additional (or 3rd party) software you need to get in order to do even something as basic as opening a pdf file when you are running Windows. Or the fact that you have to remember the make of your sound/display/wifi card in order to get proper drivers every time you need them. And ultimately your system will still crash and it will still not work 100% fine and in any case not for too long. While things might not work 100% on a Linux system either you can be pretty confident that a fresh install of any distributions will provide you with everything you need for a basic computing experience. You can open a pdf file, edit a picture, work on a spreadsheet, browse safely and have pleasing graphical visual effects pretty much out of the box. Over time you will learn which applications work and which ones do not, and, just like for Windows, you will have your own set of tools that you can use to get the job done. Not to mentions the ability to manage your hard disk partitioning scheme, which is in my opinion unparalleled on Linux systems. There is not need to install (often commercial) 3rd party software, the basic partitioning tools which are included in most Linux distros will let you quickly get a hang of your hard drive, including providing other operating systems with their own filesystems and booting preferences. I am aware this thread went a bit off topic, but I believe this is a good example to illustrate some of the advantages of using GNU/Linux operating systems over Windows. Linux is not just free (meaning you don't need to pay for it) and thus inherently free of license key issues. It is also free in the way you can play with it, tweak it to suit your needs and get basic things solved the way they should. With a simple straightforward solution.

Thanks for your reply BuffaloHelp. Yes I do have the sticker attached to my laptop. I am pretty sure that will match if I run one of those tools, well it should! As for what you say about incompatible licenses between different SP versions, yes it makes sense. It could also be that periodically more licenses are released and hard coded into the installation images.I guess there is no easy way to know until I try installing through a Vista DVD (which I need to find first) and then use my license key. This can be delayed a great deal, as I am not really going to use either Vista or 7, so it's just out of curiosity

This is the situation. I have a laptop which came with Windows Vista preinstalled. The deal also included a free update to Windows 7, which I got some time later. Now before upgrading to Windows 7 I would like to create a real Windows Vista Installation Disk. Beware I am not talking about a rescue disk, factory reset, ghost image, or anything like that. I would like to have a Vista DVD that can install the OS on a computer using the license key I purchased with my laptop. This is never provided by manufacturers which instead provided a restore disk which is basically a hard drive image of your laptop as it was in the factory. That is fine but it is not what I want. Since I purchased a license key, I would like to have a real installation media, I believe this is allowed by MS copyright agreement but I may be wrong... you never know. Anyway I did some searching and found that to have a Vista installer you need a bunch of files, called boot.wim install.wim and something else, which are common to all Vista editions (Home, Premium, ...) but different from XP or previous OSs. Someone else says you can download (for free) a Microsoft tool, called Windows AIK and with that you can create your ISO file to burn to DVD. But in that case apparently you need all the installation files to be present on your hard drive which is not the case. What I am thinking now is that I can borrow a friends installation DVD and get the files, then create the ISO image from my installation of Vista. This lead me to another question, where are license keys stored? I mean when you install a copy of Windows they will ask for a license key, how do they check that the key is valid? It obviously shouldn't rely on a remote server because a connection might not be available, so that information must be present locally. In this case which keys are recorded on which DVD? A predetermined set of licenses? All license keys that have been and ever will be released? Or maybe there is some calculation involved so that you can tell if the key is valid or not? What I am thinking is whether it would be possible to use any installation DVD with any license key. In this case I could use another installation DVD (from a friend for example) and when asked for a license key enter my own. This would mean that all you buy is after all just a key. Any insight would be appreciated

And will the "paper" be able to support writing on it with a pen/pencil/marker? The way I see it one of the reasons we still print is that we like to sketch things, circle words, etc on the sheets of papers we print on. So if that possibility isn't there it might not be so useful to have a reusable paper. If on the other hand the plastic paper can be written on, and then completely erased (i.e. the printed part and the handwritten part) before feeding it to the printer again, then it is a viable solution and a great idea. Personally I try to take as much as possible of my notes in electronic format (it is also much easier to archive them and search through them), but for quick drafts and jotting down ideas sometimes paper is still the way to go.

A little update on that. After restarting my computer I noticed I could not connect to the internet when both the on-board ethernet card (eth0) and the newly configured USB to LAN device (assigned to wlan0 by Ubuntu) were connected. I found out the problem was related to USB to LAN device becoming the default connection once it was activated. Looking to change the default connection I found many solutions involving changing configuration files and so on. But I found a way to do so in Network Connections manager (right-click tray icon and Edit connections...). From the Network Connections window change to Wired tab and Edit the connection referring to USB to LAN device (it is kind of confusing because the device is actually called wlan0 but it is not a wireless card and here it rightly appears where it belongs, wired connections). Go to the IPv4 tab and open Routes... Check the box "Use this connection only for resources on its network". In this way the connection will not be used as default, thus your other connection (e.g. on-board lan) will be the default and the one connecting to the internet. There are probably other ways to solve this, perhaps setting up manual routes, but I find it convenient using "automatic" settings whenever possible so that I can quickly change things if the physical configuration changes without having to mess around with static configuration files.

I wanted to add one more network interface to my desktop computer and the easiest way to do that was to purchase a USB to LAN adapter, i.e. one of those devices that plug into a USB port and let you connect a network LAN cable to it. Having two or more network interfaces on our PC lets us create several subnets, one of them can then be used to connect to the internet, the other one to conenct to another computer and so on. As my USB to LAN adapter did not come with a Linux driver (or Mac for that matter, only Windows provided) I did some research in order to get it to work under Linux Ubuntu. The system somehow recognized the device whose presence appeared in /var/log/syslog but I didn't know how to use it for my purpose of connecting to a network. Either the driver was not installed correctly or further configuration steps were required. While looking for a solution I found a note on the Ubuntu help about installing Windows drivers on Ubuntu, by using a "wrapper" to convert them back to Linux. While the tool is mainly designed for wireless cards it worked well for me for the USB to LAN adapter, and I believe it could work for other devices. Here is what I did (Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty, USB to LAN device JP108) open System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager search and install ndisgtk (a few more packages will be automatically installed) open System>Administration>Windows Wireless Drivers click on Install New Driver (an error might popup but didn't cause any harm for me) select the inf file from your Windows drivers folder/disk (I chose the XP version in my case) once the driver has been added you should be able to use Network Manager (icon in the application tray) to configure IP settings for the USB to LAN adapter (in my case I manually set the address to 192.168.0.2 so that I can connect to another computer directly connected via LAN cable)

You say there aren't processes using a lot of CPU, are you actually looking at ALL processes or just those belonging to your username? If a process belongs to root you will not see it if you are only looking at the processes started by your user. You change this in View menu in Gnome System Monitor (change from My Processes to All Processes). Apologies if this sounds obvious and you have already done it In my experience with Ubuntu 9.04 what sometimes hangs the CPU with no apparent reason is 'wineserver', that is when I run an application through WINE (e.g. IE 6) and I close it the 'wineserver' process will still be there, often eating a good percentage of CPU (but not close to 100% anyway). I have to kill it manually. Other things that normally clog my CPU on Ubuntu are browser plugins as someone suggested, mainly the Adobe flash player, which I need for full compatibility for some of the website, but I normally switch to one of the Linux alternatives for flash players, which work fine for most websites.

All I can say is that yes you need to spend some time on it to grasp the main concepts and start being productive with it. Once you do that chances are you won't look back I started trying out different distributions of Linux a few years ago but only on a from time to time basis. I always liked the feeling of it, its simplicity as you say, but never spent enough time to understand it under the surface so that what I could do was quite limited. In the meantime I did some trial and error to set up a dual boot, that really helps you understanding not only Linux but also how computers and OS in general operate. A few months ago I decided to do the switch... for real! Installed Ubuntu (which is in my opinion the perfect distro for first time users but also very powerful and well supported) as my main OS and forced myself to do everything I'd do on Windows with it. Surprisingly 99% of things I could do in Windows I could now easily do in Ubuntu, often in a more convenient way. In this regard we have to consider that Linux distributions like Ubuntu but also others get upgraded all the time (at least every year or so) while Windows is mostly stuck to were it was back in 2001 (for Win XP), so the difference in terms of usability and support for the latest computing applications and hardware is most definitely in favour of Linux. With the latest dual core computers installing Windows on top of a Linux OS is a very convenient and usable solution, using VMWare type of applications (I use VirtualBox). So you can still run the few apps that you really need to run on Windows, or just try things out if you develop software / web to ensure compatibility with Windows. Whether you embrace the open source philosophy is up to you, in any case having the source code of software opens up a whole new range of possibilities for you if you are a programmer. But even if you are not you can be pretty confident someone will for example port a version of your favourite desktop Linux software on your Linux-based mobile device some day, and you know you will be able to use that straight away. Having said so I do think using Linux still requires a moderate dose of adventurous attitude, at least that is required if you really want to take advantage of it. You should be prepared to occasionally type something on the command line and/or edit configuration files. But these tasks are by no means the norm for day to day operation on modern distributions like Ubuntu. You will instead find that they are a natural complement to your desktop experience once you start playing around with it. So my advice is give it another try if you are so inclined

There might be some other OS-specific key combination as someone suggests on Mac. In Windows Vista and XP there is usually a On-Screen Keyboard that you can run from the Accessories >> Accessibility menu or similar. That will allow you to "click" on the Print Screen button and capture the screen just like with a normal keyboard. I know for sure it works on a MacBook running XP.

That looks like a hard thing to do, unless Microsoft itself provides some sort of tool to do that, for example exporting to a more universal format. Don't they offer a different format / learning materials on their website? The obvious thing I can think of is print-screen all of them but that obviously is not a good solution.

Yes you are right, Linux is still associated with geeks and obscure commands, much like DOS was before the invention of Win 95 and almost CLI-free operations. As for myself I used DOS a lot before knowing a GUI so I guess I am already keener to typing things than other people are. At the time I never used Win 95, instead jumped straight from DOS/Win 3.x to Win 98 and later 2000, I regret I never looked into Linux until more recently. Generally speaking using a CLI makes me feel like I can somehow control what is going on, rather than just clicking colourful buttons, probably just a feeling. But even computer-savvy friends of mine are generally reluctant to use a CLI, so I guess it's just a matter of taste in the end. But I think a Linux desktop like Ubuntu nowadays is a very good platform to use GUI and CLI seamlessly in a way that is not so apparent to my knowledge in any Windows system starting from Win 95. I am curious to know a bit more about the use of command line in Mac, I've tried a bit and saw that most Linux/Unix commands work on it but I wonder if you can do something useful with it, like installing stuff or launching programs or instead Mac OsX "blocks" some of these features. Yes in the end it's all about audience, users being there developers and big firms will come and Linux based OSs will be just another OS and not something for geeks only.

I am a casual iMac user and have only started looking into it. Normally I use Linux and sometimes Windows. The iMac is certainly impressive in its design, such a powerful machine in a neat aluminium case is really a nice thing to have on your desk even if you are not a design fanatic. The idea of squeezing everything in this beautiful case and drilling very few holes in it is certainly a good idea towards achieving that beautiful look but I wonder if at least a few basic features should be include for completeness. These include:- a multimedia card reader, i.e. to read SD cards or other types that your camera may use, it is really no big deal to get a separate reader and connect it to one of the USB ports, still it is such a small devices to incorporate that I see no reason why it shouldn't be there, for example next to the dvd drive, for a casual user like me it would make things easier if I didn't have to go look for a cable or a card reader when I just want to quickly transfer a picture from my camera- a few front connectors, I know that would break the design a bit but it is really annoying to access the back of the screen every time you want to connect disconnect headphones or microphone, the same can be said for plugging in a USB pen drive, again you can have an extension cable sticking out from the back but doesn't that also break the design a bit? sure the USB ports on the keyboard (I have the wired version) are very handy for that- an eject button for the DVD, maybe that is a Mac feature, not having a button for that, they want you to click somewhere on the screen every time you want to extract a disk, sleek sure, but sometimes an external button would be more immediate to reachAs I said I am only a casual user of the iMac so all I say are first look things that I noticed, not really critiques. In fact I am not a design or ergonomics fanatic at all, in case the latter would come first for me though. But it seems like Apple puts a lot of effort in this area. Attention to detail is really amazing though, see for example the power cord plugging into the iMac without leaving any gap as if it were one with it! And the keyboard USB connector with a dent to make it easier to insert it in the right direction. Simply amazing.