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Yahoo and MSN may definitely have an edge over Google in terms of IM - but this topic was about Google as a search engine, not an IM. And anyway, even if Yahoo and MSN did team up, if Google and AIM teamed up they'd be a good match for them! Like many other people, I have google as my default homepage in Firefox (because I could never be bothered changing it) and I don't even remember the last time I used another search engine.

Haha!I guess with Google buying and probably moving towards melding YouTube with its other services Google Video will become dysfunct soon?

Interesting views... Anyone remember the same thoughts occurring when Windows XP first came out too? I think Vista will probably move in the same direction as XP and be widely accepted in a few years. I mean, if computers are being sold with Vista it could hardly be otherwise, could it?I have heard a lot of bad things about Vista and there's no way I can afford to buy an upgrade now, but I will probably get it when I get a new computer.

Is there some ways of making the other directories undeletable (if that's a word?) by users who may accidentally get rid of them or not realise their significance and delete them to free up more space?

Yep, you can - all they need to do is sign up for a Google account (but people who have a Gmail account automatically have a Google account, and therefore Google Talk account). I only use Google Talk nowadays to talk to my few geeky friends who also have Google Talk because I get very annoyed with the general IM scene, especially the MSN one. "Do I know you? Then no, I don't want to be your friend, I don't want to be forced to listen to your problems with your little 12 year old friends spelled out in a toddler's attempt at language and will you please leave now." I ended up with more people on my blocked list than my friends list. Probably not a very good picture. I don't think Google Talk will ever achieve the status of the other IM clients because it doesn't have all those bangs and whistles - backgrounds, thousands of emoticons, different coloured text, animation, etc. etc. which a lot of people like to use. So it will probably be left to the ones of us who actually only want to communicate, in understandable English, to use.

Hmm... I imagine that would be a good way to hide spoilers and such, or non-work-safe pictures, but I personally like seeing everything up big and revealed! Why else would I buy a 20.1" screen??Good CSS insight though, I hadn't thought of that before.

Umm... I don't. I weigh something in the order of 100lbs (but I'm only 5 feet tall!), or a bit less (according to my phone's conversion feature), and I've been warned by my doctor that if I lost more weight it would be positively unhealthy. Seeing your ribs when you stretch is normal, damn! I've always been on or around the underweight/normal weight line edge, and I go through (like most people! At least I hope so!) this weight fluctuation throughout the year which increases around Christmas and tapers off afterwards, only to quickly go up again next Christmas I imagine the best way of losing weight would be the oldie - eat less and exercise more! I've seen my friends do everything from corsets to carrot sticks (which are pretty yum, actually). But it's mostly the determination to actually keep on going that sheds the pounds, I guess, I've seen a few of them triumphantly step off the scales and maintain their new weight for all of a week before they leave off the exercise and start getting big again.

I remember this thing about the iPhone - they distributed about a thousand or so, realised that they had forgotten (I think, it was a while ago that I saw this on TV so I don't quite remember) the audio features of the phone and so had to recall them all. It was either the audio features or the actual mobile phone features.... It was completely idiotic and so funny which is why I remembered it. And as for my phone.. It has a "media centre" where I can play and record audio and video, but I have something like one single song on there and the memory's flooded. And it was a 2006 release phone too -- so I'm a little disappointed with the somewhere about 56mb (56!! Sheesh!) memory they gave me. Oh, and I take so many photos that the shared memory is full of those too! It would be nice if you could uninstall some things from your phone that you didn't want to free up more space, like java games (which I don't have any use for whatsoever - PSP all the way!), why on earth would the people at Samsung headquarters assume that everyone wants to shoot robot aliens in their phone?? </rant>

I would also say that Gone with the Wind is a bit too modern to be "classic".I've always loved Jane Austen personally - I first read Pride and Prejudice when I was 8.

I use SwishMAX sometimes, it is very cheap compared to Macromedia (or should I say Adobe) Flash, only about $100.None of the free programs I have seen are any good really, I'd recommend saving up for the real thing like I did.

Has anyone got/is considering getting this?I didn't really understand much of what it's about from what I've read on it, only that it seems to be a bit of a light edition Sims with a more story focused approach..Personally, I won't get it because I have the full real thing, though it does sound interesting.

I'm agreeing with all the colour comments..The blue and red don't suit each other, and the bright yellow saying "BACKGROUND CHECK NEWS ARTICLES" is not very attractive either. The second block under the should have been the same blue as the block on top, or the blue should be turned into that yellow (which would suit the red more).The little block at the top with Address City and State doesn't really need to be there since there is the same thing directly below it, and also the white around it looks terrible. The little black nav links should be a colour that stands out more, I think.It does look interesting though, good luck!

They've always been free.. That kind of stuff has always been available from magazines, yes. But I'd rather sit here and wait the 20mins it's going to take to download rather than walk to the nearest newsagency, and spend actual money buying a magazine just for the CD it comes with.

Just like everyone else has said.. Amazing.I've been around so many hosts that have died, this really is amazing to hear.

Make a pretty glow-type liquidy border for your text! This is for people who use Photoshop. I have CS 2, but you can make it with older versions. 1. Open a new document (default PS size should be fine), and make the background black. 2. Using the text tool, write a largish word in white. Works best with bolder fonts - I used "vein" (from dafont.com) at 72px. You should have something like this: 3. Make a copy of the text layer by either dragging the layer over the New Layer button or right-clicking on the layer and selecting "Duplicate Layer". Right click the copy, choose "Rasterize Type" and make a copy of the copy, so you should have something like this: 4. Select one of the copies, and use the Motion Blur (Filter => Blur => Motion Blur) with an angle of 0 and distance of 30. Enter Ctrl+F to repeat the filter. Now, select the other copied layer and apply the Motion Blur, but this time with an angle of 45 (distance still 30). Ctrl+F again to repeat. It should now look similar to this: 5. Click the New Layer button, and press the D key to set the default palette colours. Apply the cloud filter (Filter => Render => Clouds). Press Ctrl+U or go Image => Adjustments => Hue/Saturation to bring up the Hue/Saturation dialog. Make sure the "Colorize" field is checked, and enter the following values - Hue: 222, Saturation: 75, Lightness: 0. You should now have this: 6. Drag the original text layer up to the top of the stack, so that the order is "yourtext", Clouds layer, two "yourtext" copies and Background. Now select the Clouds layer and choose Color Burn from the Blending Modes, like this: 7. If you have Photoshop CS or CS 2, Shift+Click the two text copies, right click without releasing the Shift key and select Merge Layers, like so: Alternately, or if you have another version, merge them by clicking the top layer and pressing Ctrl+E or selecting Layer => Merge Down to merge them. 8. Click on your newly merged layer to select it, and press Ctrl+T or selecting Edit => Transform => Free Transform. Drag the layer out a little bit so it borders the text a little better. You can also enter in the values, I used Width: 105.0% and Height: 110.0%. Press the little tick in the corner to complete the change, if you've mucked up click the crossed circle and start again. 9. Now, copy the layer by dragging the layer over the New Layer button or right-clicking on the layer and selecting "Duplicate Layer". Select 40% or something thereabouts for Fill, depending on your personal taste. 10. Choose your original text layer (the one at the top), and apply Bevel and Emboss (click on the Fireworks logo or select Layer => Layer Style => Bevel and Emboss) with the following options. Note that the Gloss Contour is called "Cove - Deep" and the colour for the Shadow Mode is #074f82. 11. Crop your image to a nicer size, and you're finished! I got this: And as always, by changing the colours or options a little you can get a totally different look. If you finished the entire thing and fancied a different colour, click the clouds layer (Layer 1 or Layer 2), press Ctrl+U and drag the Hue bar to another colour. Notice from cmatcmextra: Please post all graphics tutorials under the "Xisto Graphics" section. Thanks Notice from mayank: Edited topic title

If it won't open at all then there's something wrong with the disc, obviously.I have both University and Nightlife, and they're quickly sucking up all the available space in my C: Drive because I was stupid enough to not install it on another spacier drive.

Pfft. Ask somebody who can work the beauty to do it. There are so many try hard grunge kiddies it's not funny any more. Nice tut.. Where did you get the picture? Though it rarely happens, if the original owner of the pic sees you using it as a render they may get rather tetchy about it. It has happened, though the chances of such meetings are very rare.

But it is.. I mean, he hits mushrooms! lol. It is pretty dumb, not quite on the same scale as banning the G, PG, M, MA, R, X etc from the movie world, but probably has the same implications. Those politicians must be really bored or crazy or something, to think they can take on something like this..

Link We've all at some point heard of Darwin's theory of evolution - survival of the fittest. Well, the Darwin Awards draws on that in a way Charles Darwin probably never thought of. Their manifesto is, basically, everybody improves the gene pool - some by being born, others by removing themselves from it. The Darwin Awards celebrate the absolute stupidity of people which leads them to being eliminated from the gene pool in ridiculous (and for us readers, hilarious) ways.

Sidis posted this link on CWH, so I thought I'd share it with you guys http://www.apophysis.org/index.html Apophysis is a freeware fractal proggie. For people who don't know, fractals is maths, chaos theory to be exact. It means the same thing which repeats over and over again, smaller each time. Translated into image form, they make very pretty pictures. If you do a google image search of fractals, you'll get thousands of pretty fractals made from people all over the world. Have fun!

lol. The google guys really have an unbelievable sense of humour. Though mind you, if my bro was just a bit older and able to understand that the moon was a sphere which revolved around the earth, he'd probably claim for the rest of his life that it's made out of cheese.

Eek - wrong links there. phpBBFM is actually http://phpbbfm.net/ and phpBB2 Plus is http://www.phpbbhacks.com/viewhack.php?id=595, I thought they had their own website but apparently not o.o

Both phpBB2 and SMF are in Fantastico for an auto install, which makes it easy for you to get a board if you're hosted here at Asta. If you have other hosting, just go to the board's site - SMF {link} and phpBB2 {link}, download the files, upload to your server, configure if need be and run the setup.php file. Of course, if you don't want to install there are a lot of sites that offer hosting just for boards.. One of the most popular ones is InvisionFree {link} because the boards are IPB, which is actually a commercial board unlike phpBB and SMF. phpBB has been around for so long now that lots of variations have been made on it - phpBBFM (phpBB Fully Modded) {link} which includes a lot of mods (click here to see it working in a big scale). The other one which comes to mind is phpBB Plus {link} which is a slightly altered one which (I think) includes a portal type thing or something like that.

Useful.. If you had something against RealPlayer. I've used RealPlayer for a long time, and I prefer it to Windows Media Player because it's less obstrusive, but I guess if you wanted to look at the pretty visuals you'd use the patch

OpenSourceCMS is a site where you can demo many open source software systems (they have more than just CMS's) They have these systems installed for you to demo: Webcalendar As you can see from the pretty enormous list, if you are thinking about using a system that's open source, chances are they have it The systems are there on default installation, and they encourage you to do whatever you like with them when you try them out (though some features have been disabled for security reasons) because it gets reinstalled every two hours (and you get a popup message asking you to stand by while that happens). They update the systems regularly, and also add new ones. I hope some people here will find it of use - I myself really appreciated being able to try out so many things on just one site before having to install them on my own site. jet