Entheone

Personally, I use Adobe Dreamweaver for almost all of my web-development needs nowadays. I find it easy to use, quite intuitive, and extremely feature-rich. When I first started out in web development (i.e. back in the days where HTML was the only game in town, even before DHTML and CSS had come out), I used to prefer Notepad and other simple text editors. The main reason for this, other than my own feelings of savvy and superiority , was the fact that all the IDEs on the market at the time were totally standards-non-compliant and they infused your website with so much unnecessary and strange code. Still, I tried almost all IDEs I could find at the time, and even then Dreamweaver (which was then created and owned by Macromedia, not Adobe) struck me as the best of its class. Sure, it cost a good deal of money, but you do get your money's worth - at least, I feel that I did. Nevertheless, I understand there are numbers of very good open-source IDEs available nowadays. And while I have no immediate need (or time) to try them out, I suppose they're worth checking out for anyone who's just getting their feet wet in the web-development pond :-)

My personal favorite when it comes to mounting ISOs, NRGs, or most any other CD/DVD image file, is a free utility called MagicDisc, available at http://www.magicdisc.net/ It is a very small but efficient application. I'm not sure how other mounting utilities work, but this one works by installing itself as a virtual CD/DVD drive, on which you can mount almost any image format you can throw at it. It gives you the option to install more than one virtual drive (up to 6, I think) and mount them separately or simultaneously. It can start up with the operating system and it resides as an icon on the tray area of the task bar. There are two things I particularly love about MagicDisc... 1) It works perfectly with MagicISO - my favorite, simplest burner and archiver, right after WinRAR - since it's actually produced by the same company with integration in mind, and... 2) It is extremely ubobtrusive, light on system resources (almost non-existent), and it works like magic... hence the name, I guess ;-) I've never tried other virtual drive and/or mounting software, so I have no basis for comparison. But then again, I've never really had the need to try other utilities since MagicDisc simply does everything I need it to do.

I had installed Windows XP Service Pack 3 a couple of days ago on a new Lenovo G550 laptop. I couldn't see or feel any serious improvement in aesthetics (i.e. appearance), performance, options, or anything else for that matter. But still, truth be told, I didn't see any decrease in performance, either, which I actually expected, judging by Microsoft's trend of bloating up system resources with its security updates. With that said, I checked to see what updates SP3 included to begin with, and for my purposes, since I need a good number of those updates, I found installing this new Service Pack a reasonable choice. Granted, some updates are totally unnecessary, but at least installing the Service Pack altoghether saved me the time and hassle of downloading and installing several individual updates manually, one by one. To sum up, since I didn't see any decline in performance or any unnecessary pressure on system resources, I have no problem recommending the installation of Service Pack 3. P.S. to Soviet Rathe: Thanks for the mention of the Windows 7 Transformation Pack. I didn't know such a thing existed, but I'm definitely gonna give a try :-)

Here's an update if anyone happens to be interested... I ended up buying a Lenovo 3000 G550. And I must say that I think I made an outstanding choice! The Lenovo G550 has an Intel Celeron Dual Core processor with a clock speed of about 1800 (1.8GHz), a 1MB L2 Cache, a built-in graphics card of 256 MB, and a 15.6" WideScreen LCD monitor, as well as the regular things you can expect from any decent-quality budget laptop, such as Super Multi DL CD/DVD, 250GB Hard Drive, Ethernet and Wireless cards, etc. First off, I think this laptop is a true aesthetic win for people like me, who prefer dark, poised, and elegantly simple gadgets. Its black color, sturdy and durable plastic, and sleek lines all add to its elegance. Plus, the screen is absolutely amazing, even though I generally don't like widescreen monitors. An interesting thing is that this Lenovo G550 has a decent Numbers Pad on the right side, something I admit to have never seen in a laptop before. One point should be made clear... Don't let the bit about its being a Celeron fool you. This is a true Dual Core processor in the same way that a Core Duo is. There are differences in performance and capabilities of course, but I saw way too many reviewers of this laptop confusing its processor for a Solo or a single core, which it isn't. I haven't tested this laptop on any heavy-duty stuff yet (no video editing, no wicked number-crunching, no intense gaming, etc.), but for my current purposes, which are mainly related to word processing, internet browsing, and general multimedia viewing, this laptop is a true bad-*bottom*. It takes anything I throw at it and deals with it like a powerhouse! Now, some of the downsides... The Lenovo G550 has no Card Reader, no Blutetooth, and no dedicated multimedia or sleep buttons. And even though the Drivers and Downloads section of Lenovo Support website ( http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ ) does include a rather large driver for the High-Definition Audio driver for Windows XP, it doesn't work... at least, not without a workaround -- which I found on the Lenovo Support forum, to give credit where credit is due. All in all, for the price I paid for this laptop (2,600 Egyptian Pounds, or about 465 USD), I'm pretty content with the quality and performance I got for the money. Remember, I live in Egypt, and technology is quite costly around here. If you find yourself in a similar situation, I can totally, wholeheartedly, and with a clear conscience, recommend this product. I'm simply in love with it :-)

Hello everyone, I'm currently in the process of shopping for a budget laptop. But since I live in Egypt, it's quite difficult to combine "quality" and "budget" into one grammatically correct sentence Anyway, I did some research and finally decided that I'll either get a netbook or one of the two following laptops... HP 550 Notebook PC or... ACER Extensa 5635Z-422G25Mn. Since the price difference between the netbooks available in Egypt and these 2 laptops is negligible, and since I prefer larger screen sizes, I decided to dump the netbook idea and go straight for one of these two. Of all the different hardware specifications between the two, I'm mostly concerned with the "processor" itself. The HP has an Intel Celeron Processor (2.1 GHz, 800 MHz FSB, 1 MB L2 cache), while the ACER Extense has an Intel Dual Core T4200 2.0GHz. So my question is: do you have any direct experience with either one of these two laptops? If so, which would you recommend, and why? And if not, do you know whether the performance of a Celeron processor is too low compared to a Dual Core? I'm leaning toward the HP since I find it usually produces better quality products than ACER but, like I said, I'm somewhat concerned with the processor. So any information or insight will be hugely appreciated :-) Thanks in advance.

I'm not quite sure, starscream.Most of the time, these files are "zero-byte" files and they contain no data (at least, none that I could see). They're some sort of residue that is left behind after a failed or an incomplete upload.In the same vein, Pure-FTPd per se is simply a free BSD FTP server. That explains the file(s) naming convention. I suspect that the reason these files are difficult to delete is because they include too many "dots" in them. I can't be sure about this, though, since it's been years since I last used a Linux or a BSD, and I can't remember how many dots Unix-systems allow in file names.So, to answer your question, I don't think these are log files, for the simple reason that they don't seem to contain any log data. However, I might be wrong.

This is a really old thread, but I suppose someone might find it useful. So here are my two cents...Whenever I try to delete those residual ".pureftpd-upload" files using either with my FTP Client itself (which is FileZilla) or with the "new" File Manager in cPanel, nothing happens! They occasionally tell me the files are deleted, but when I refresh the display or log back in later, I find the files intact and still as annoying as ever.The only method that worked for me is to use the OLD File Manager in cPanel. For some reason, it doesn't take no for an answer when it comes to deleting. It simply does it, no ifs and no buts.

The simple answer is: you can't. These "sitelinks," as termed by Google, are at the moment completely automated. Head over to Google's own explanation of sitelinks... https://support.google.com/webmasters/ In addition, Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team, has a short and interesting video where he explains a bit about sitelinks, as well as a quick overview of how Google renders its search results in general... http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

For the past couple of weeks, I've been heavily interested in learning about one of the most obscure and least known philosophies of the twentieth century, and that is Alfred North Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism. This post is my preliminary impressions of the philosophy, some of my opinions of it so far, and a few pieces of advice about what I believe is the best way to approach the undertaking of exploring this philosophy if you find it interesting enough. First, a few words about the philosopher himself... Alfred North Whitehead Alfred North Whitehead is an English mathematician and philosopher. He wrote many papers, essays and books about mathematics and logic, including "A Treatise on Universal Algebra." In fact, he was the co-author of the Principia Mathematica, collaborating with the infamous mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell – who was actually one of his students. The Principia Mathematica is considered by most specialists to be one of the most important and seminal works in mathematical logic and philosophy – so if I seem to be overly enamored with Whitehead, you know why. He was also quiet interested in physics, biology, the philosophy of science, and the theory and practices of education. I'm yet to read any of his books or writings on these subjects, however. I first came to know about Whitehead through the recorded lectures of Terence McKenna, a man whom I deeply respect and admire. He repeatedly mentioned and referred to Whitehead's ideas about the processual nature of the world and how nature seems to be biased toward the creation and the conservation of novelty. His ideas seemed interesting enough, and they resonated very well with my own unstructured thoughts and speculations, so I made it a point to study his work more closely. About a month ago, I finally decided it was about time that I took a good look at his magnum opus on this subject, Process and Reality. Now, please bear in mind that I have yet to finish the book, so the following are, as I already mentioned, merely my preliminary impressions and thoughts, and they reflect only my current understanding of the philosophy. The Philosophy of Organism, as Whitehead himself calls it – or Process Philosophy, as it is more widely known – is a system of metaphysical speculations which aspire to describe the world in concrete, distinct, and comprehensive terms. First, let me clarify what I mean by "speculations..." A Speculative Philosophy Whitehead strongly believed that "philosophy has been haunted by the unfortunate notion that its method is dogmatically to indicate premises which are severally clear, distinct, and certain; and to erect upon those premises a deductive system of thought. But the accurate expression of the final generalities is the goal of discussion and not its origin." It took me a while to understand the full magnitude of this simple statement. For one, I've spent the better part of my life considering myself to be a skeptic. I used to get my kicks from poking holes in speculative theories and unfounded assumptions. Lately, however, I've come to realize that skepticism isn't always the best method of dealing with things, although it certainly has its good place. But that's another discussion... The notion that this passage implies, and which Whitehead examines in great detail as well, is that "imagination" is the vehicle for any serious advance in thought. This is the part that the scientific, Baconian method of induction left out of its declaration, even though it couldn't – and can't – do without in practice. Imagine an advance in thought and understanding – be it scientific, philosophic, or otherwise – as an airplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation, where immediate experience provides us with a lot of input and data. Then it makes a flight in the thin air of the imagination, where we try to make sense of these data and come up with a system of generalization that binds them together into a sensible, coherent whole. Then it again lands for renewed observation couple with rational interpretation. The tricky thing about imagination is that it cannot be subject to strict logic. You have to let your mind wander freely and unrestrictedly for a while. Censorship of free adventures of imagination effectively kills it and renders it totally pointless. That doesn't mean that logic doesn't have its place in this deal. Indeed, the results, but absolutely not the process, of the imaginative wanderings must be subject to the scrutiny of logical examination. What this means is that we shouldn't judge a philosophy by how logical, coherent, or justifiable its premises are; we should reserve this judgment for its final statements and general success. The criteria for this judgment should definitely include coherence, logicality, applicability and adequacy, criteria which Whitehead defines thoroughly in the first chapter of the Part One of the book. Whitehead also gives one of the most beautiful definitions of "philosophy" that I've ever read... Now, let's get to some general concepts from the Philosophy of Organism itself, as I understand them so far... Some Highlights of Process Philosophy The most noticeable thing about this philosophy is the premium it puts on "creativity." In fact, Whitehead speculates that creativity is the ultimate metaphysical principle. What he means by "creativity" is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating novel entities, occasions, and events. In his words... Another prominent observation is the attention and the significance he gives to "experience." For most of my life, I had generally adopted the belief that "consciousness" was the ultimate matter of fact. I had the vague notion that consciousness is somehow the entire "substance" of existence, although I couldn't – or didn't take the time to – clearly define what this meant. However, even having read only one third of Whitehead's book, I'm starting to rethink this notion. Whitehead delves into this topic in great detail, but here's a summarization of his thoughts on it... Trust me, this will make a lot more sense after reading the first 50 pages or so of the book. But the true crux of Whiteheadian metaphysics is that the world is best viewed and understood in terms of "processes" rather than "things." He does believe that the actual world is atomic, but he also believe that the "atoms" are not material objects, but rather "occasions in the process of becoming." In my understanding, he stresses that nothing can actually "be," since once something "is" it ceases to exist in "subjective immediacy" and passes into "objective immortality." The first two parts of this 5-part book are devoted to the definition and elaboration of what Whitehead speculates are the "building blocks" of the world. These include "actual entities," "prehensions," "nexus," "societies," etc. If this sounds complicated, let me assure you... it IS complicated! One of the things I'm enjoying most about this metaphysical system is how well it seems to correspond with our physical reality. I realize this is to be expected from, even demanded of, any philosophy. But it usually takes me some time and a great deal of intimate familiarity with a metaphysical system before my mind manages to apply its principles to the many aspects of perceived reality. However, with Whitehead's philosophy, I can see those applications almost immediately across a wide range of variety of instances. It's naturally applicable to human beings, human interactions, history, and societies. But it's even simpler to see its applications in physics. For example, if we substitute his concept of a "quantitative emotional intensity" with the term energy and his concept of "specific forms of feelings" with the term forms of energy, we'll find that his "datum" is the basis of the vector-theory, and that the "quantitative satisfaction" in his metaphysics is the basis of the scalar localization of energy in physics. So far as I understand all these concepts, of course. This is probably due to the attention he pays to immediate experience. It seems that his imaginative speculations are always derived absolutely from his perceptions of reality, not from pure noetic ramblings. This is best illustrated in his own words... An added bonus to Whitehead's cosmological accounts would be if it included a discussion of ethics and morality. It seems that such a discussion may actually be present in the later portions of the book, since Part One includes the following passage, which seems to indicate that a more detailed examination will follow... As I said, I haven't finished reading the book yet, so I can't write more about its content and conclusions. But I can give some general advice based on my experience if you're going to read it... How to Read Process and Reality? First of all, the edition I have is the corrected edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. It seems to be fairly accurate and honestly representative of Whitehead's original manuscript, even though I naturally can't be sure of this. Process and Reality is a very complicated and dense reading. You'll need to arm yourself with self-discipline, patience, and perseverance. There will be a lot of frustrating moments when you'll want to shred the book and throw it into the nearest trash can. But if you're the type who enjoys a true mental stretch, you'll also have plenty of "a-ha" moments, even if you don't fully agree with the conclusions. I think the ideal way to read this book is the "multi-pass" method, i.e. you go through it in a quick initial read to get the general idea, and then you give it a deep, contemplative read. This is because first third of the book – the part which I've read so far – is extremely abstractive and general, and the author occasionally explains some terms and ideas far from where he first mentions them. He doesn't seem to leave anything unexplained – at least, so far – but he definitely keeps you wondering sometimes. If you're familiar with 17th century and later philosophy, you'll have a great advantage here, since the Philosophy of Organism seems to me to accept large portions of the ideas of Hume, Descartes, Kant and Locke, with the exception of a few presuppositions. A Conclusion of Sorts I hope to write more about this philosophy as I become more acquainted with it. It's definitely very interesting and it makes a lot of sense to me, even though there are certain notions that are not exactly my taste. Perhaps my mind will change, one way or the other, after finishing the book. Aside from that, I want to read some of Whitehead's other books, since he seems to have a lot of interesting science-related ideas, such as a rival theory to Einstein's theory of relativity, an "epochal" theory of time, and a few other controversial, but hopefully solid, speculations and hypotheses. I'll probably add to these initial thoughts as I progress through the book. If you have any thoughts, comments, or criticisms, especially if you're familiar with the philosophy, please feel more than welcome to share :-)

Hi there OutlawGuy, OK, here is my own experience in trying to create an Operating System. The OS s friend of mine and I had in mind was to be a fully Arabic operating system to be sold commercially in Egypt (where I live) and other Arab countries. It was a very intense project - one which, unfortunately, we abandoned after about 10 months of work - but I hope some of the hands-on insight might be of help to you. First of all, let me reiterate that, indeed, persistence and mental stability (a better term might be resilience) will be your true ultimate challenge here. Technical knowledge can be acquired. Information and details can be researched, asked for, or even created from the ground up if needs be. But you have to have an absolutely compelling reason to finish this project, and you need to know this reason, this purpose, before you start even thinking about the outline of your project. Now, the programming languages we used for this operating system were C and Assembly, with the assembly code usually included in the C source files, except for the boot-loader and other low-level functions, for which assembly code was written separately. I believe that the way to go about this is to, first, clearly define what you want out of your operating system. Is it simply a learning experience? Are you planning to continue developing for your own personal use? Do you intend to go commercial some time in the future? Once you know what you want your operating system to do, you're in a much better position to research what you need. There are some very good online communities, books, and tutorials that will help you every step of the way, but you need to know which ones you're going to focus on first. Otherwise, you'll completely waste your time, energy, and motivation reading a ton of material you don't even need. Unfortunately, I don't have the links to those resources anymore. However, as "tansqrx" mentioned above, I personally found Tanenbaum's book, Modern Operating Systems, an absolute, unqualified life-saver. It probably won't be your be-all-and-end-all in your pursuit of gaining knowledge about this subject, but it's definitely an outstanding starting-point. In some occasions - at least in my case - I didn't find his explanations and examples totally satisfactory, but they sure did let me know where to look for more information. If I remember correctly, he heavily leaned toward using demonstrations of his own open-source, UNIX-clone operating system, MINIX, which I found rather helpful, since I already had the source code available. The last piece of advice I could give you here is: don't give up! This is going to take a lot of time -- a lot more than you realize, expect, or exaggeratedly estimate. But if you're the type who enjoys learning new concepts and facing big challenges, then it's definitely an undertaking worthy of your time and effort. Best of luck :-)

Your favorite for no reason?? Man, there are LOTS of reasons to favor uTorrent, my most beloved Bittorrent client ever -- and I've tried quite a few of them, I kid you not :-D uTorrent is extremely slim, fast, and "system resources"-friendly. It has essentially all the features offered by any other torrent client, particularly the ability to select individual files to download from a given torrent -- a feature that not many other clients offer. Add to that a wealth of customization options and preferences, speedy downloads, accurate limiting of download and/or upload speeds, and what in my experience has been a never-crashing interface, and you probably will find no shortage of reasons to love this torrent client

It's always amusing to see how different people react to this subject. And while I honestly have completely conflicting feelings and thoughts about it myself, I finally decided to simply keep up with the latest discoveries and watch how this moves along. For example... Midway through the previous centuries - and for some decades before that, really - there had been many speculations on the nature of the human brain and how the mind works its apparent magic. One of the better researched and scientifically-supported models was that of Edward de Bono, in his book: The Mechanism of the Mind. This is the model of neural net computing, whose main features are pattern recognition and creation, which implies rather directly the ability to "learn intuitively," the currently most notable difference between human beings and machines. Current neural net computers do indeed exhibit incredible ability to use their "experience" to recognize patterns, form new ones, and modify current ones to reflect changes. In fact, in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil does a thorough, although quite controversial, examination of the future of neural net computing, parallel computing, the exponential rate of technological acceleration, and many other topics, and ends up with a vision where computers will undoubtedly surpass human beings in all intelligence, survival capacity, and self-reproduction. This is not one of those post-apocalyptic or dystopic scenarios, however. It's actually quite a promising and cheerful vision, if you look at it through an appropriate lens. If you think of the human race as the center of the universe, or the "apple of God's eye" as most of us do, then I suspect you have to refuse any such scenario altogether. But if you look at our species as simply the evolution of inorganic life (chemistry), into organic life (biology), and then, as a perfectly natural next step, into technological, possibly informational life, then this scenario might strike your fancy in many more ways than one. Of course, this is all conjecture and extrapolation so far. However, I suspect that the "facts" will unfold soon enough. My only wish is that I'll still be around to witness it and satisfy my own curiosity :-)

Why would I? Believe me, it's not my intention to make you wrong or make myself right. I'm simply talking with you, one human to another :-) Actually, I was educated in a country that's been ruled by tyrants for as long as anybody can remember. In fact, one of its recent presidents has been labeled "Hitler of the Nile." In fact, since most everyone in Egypt hates Jewish and Israeli people because of their religious difference, I live in a country that in some ways, although extremely few and never explicit, considers Hitler a good-doer. He is considered a monster by many, myself included. I tried to give you some examples of what I think is important in addition to economic, industrial and military growth. By the way, what does "belic" mean? I tried looking it up but I couldn't find it. I would like to rephrase this piece of advice into this: don't blindly agree or disagree with anything until you consciously understand why why you're agreeing or disagreeing. How does that sound?

I have a good old Canon MP140 printer. It's one of those all-in-one machines (well, alomst) with a printer, scanner, and copier. So it's sans a fax machine, which I really don't need and don't want. All in all, I'm pretty satisfied with it. It produces great quality prints and very high resolution scans under Windows XP (which is the only Operating System I've tried it under so far). My only problem with it is that it can be a trifle uneconomical as far as its ink is concerned. If I set its printing quality to medium, it can usually produce somewhere around 200 pages. I'm taking about the black ink cartridge, of course -- I never bothered to count its printing capacity with color prints. Basically, if your printing needs are not particularly high, you'll probably love this trusty Canon MP140. Otherwise, I definitely wouldn't recommend for hardcore printing demands.

Hello fermin25, This may well be the most interesting vindication of Nazism that I've read, by the mere virtue of its being the least documented, most self-contradictory, and easiest to refute. Let me explain... That sounds like a mighty definitive statement. I wonder if the majority of Germans agree on this. Perhaps you have some kind of official poll or survey to support this? I totally and wholeheartedly agree with you on that. Indeed, Germany witnessed some of its most expansive and industrial days under the Third Reich. But are you sure that economy and military power are the only two criteria for gauging the growth of any country? Quality of life? Germans? History of the world? I'll have to assume that you're joking, and I'll have to apologize for considering it a very unfunny joke to boot. How about quality of life? Wages in Germany dropped by about 25% between 1933 and 1938 (source: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/). Citizens were classified as Aryans and non-Aryans - such as jews, Romani, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other minorities - and the non-Aryan were systematically and severely persecuted, along with people with mental or physical disabilities and homosexuals. Notice that non-Aryans were "Germans" who certainly wouldn't believe that they enjoyed the "highest quality of life in the history of the world." That's a good point, but let me make sure I understood you correctly. Is this analogous to saying: "since every human being has lied to someone at some point in their lives, it's alright to lie?" And, if this statement is not the same as your contention, would you be so kind as to tell me how it isn't? Actually, I find myself obligated to correct you. USA, England, France, USSR, and the other Allies, had to fight against against not only the Third Reich - oh no, sir - but against the entire force of the Axis powers, which included Germany, Japan, Italy, Hungary, and Romania, to name just some of them. Another wonderfully definitive statement that I find extremely hard to understand. Are you sure you're talking about the same Germany that is a driving industrial force? Actually, since you just said that "Germans are the best people" just a couple of lines ago, that makes you a racist by definition. I generally find racism at its purest sense a loathsome and despicable persuasion and tendency, but if you have a positive spin on it I'd be more than interested to hear it. Oh, and yes, many-bodies can deny that Germany had its best time during Hitler's rule, not least a good portion of the Germans themselves. Now those are excellent examples. Unfortunately, it's a long discussion that will take us outside the realm of this topic and into some serious philosophical debate that I'm not ready for. And, I suspect, neither are you. Hitler is and will probably always be fully recognized in history, my good man. Recognized as what, that's up for personal interpretation. I don't think there's such a conspiracy as the one you hint at, but I suspect that, if such a one did exist, the conspirators would be prudent to be afraid!! Have a good day, fermin. I hope, should Nazism comes back in your life, that you're either Aryan or that you find some way to convince the SS that you are