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

Well, I'm kind of wondering... is DamnSmallLinux really an embedded operating system as the title of this thread suggests? I mean, sure, it's pretty compact and probably efficient, but has it ever been used in any embedded computer system, such as teller machines or a jukebox or one of those magic LG refrigerators? :-D

I have many "hard-swallows" with 19th century's philosophies in general. I definitely do appreciate their usefulness -- they have served us beautifully for a long time. Still, I firmly believe that we've "outgrown" them now. We need new, better models to perceive and deal with the world around us.That said, I can't say that I agree with this view of the "free will." I guess it's my personal preference that I choose another model for explaining it, one derived from the ideas of Terence McKenna about the geometric nature of reality, Alfred North Whitehead about what he called "occurrences of experience," Edward de Bono about the pattern-making and pattern-using nature of the human mind, Scott Adams's humorous thought experiments, and my own nutty speculations. I'll try to elaborate more on that soon, since I'm very interested in listening to different opinions.But when all is said and done, and even though I don't think of myself as an existentialist (per se) anymore, I must admit that it still remains near and dear to my heart. Honestly, I prefer Sartre's take on existentialism over Kierkegaard's approach. It might be a case of unfortunate hypersensitivity toward attempts of religious appropriation of otherwise purely humanistic ideas (if there's such a dichotomy in the first place), but I sure hope it's not. Possibly, and hopefully, I think it's because I find Kierkegaard's ideas a tad inconsistent at times. However, this kind of generic, overgeneralized criticism is quite useless, so I'll stop my rambling and wasting your time now, and wait until I have more free time (and more sleep) to write something that bears resemblance to coherency :-)

I'm a lazy person by nature. I'm not a big sports fan (my idea of "sports" is a game of chess). I'd rather watch a half-decent movie than go to a club. I have a near-rectangular butt from sitting in front my computer screen for the better half of my adult life. To reiterate, I'm a lazy person. But if there was just one thing that had the potential to kick me into action any day of the year, it would be defending other people's rights. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not an activist by any means, no matter how stretchy your definition of activism may be. The most I usually do is talk -- although, on second thought, so do most activists! But I'm becoming increasingly convinced that sitting down in my comfortable chair -- contemplating the intricacies of Whitehead's philosophy or marveling at the almost magical findings of quantum physics -- while other, less fortunate people are being oppressed, smothered, manipulated, brainwashed, screwed, used and abused... I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this needs to quickly get off the menu. Of course, I'm not suggesting that philosophy, science aren't spirituality aren't important. I don't think I would find life worth living to boot without those things. And I'm not even promoting a philanthropic sentimentality. Au contraire. In fact, what I'm talking about here is how defending other people's rights can inseparably have a self-serving agenda. Let me explain... In the past, life had a much slower pace. It took a significant amount of time, sometimes up to several life-spans, for any status quo to shift course. Those who were born with spoons of any kind of precious metals in their mouths didn't need to worry much about losing their inherited privileges and good fortune. Change required decades, often centuries, to take place, and it was usually quite predictable. In other words, unless you really wanted to support a particular humanistic cause or something so la-di-dah, you could simply live your entire life without a care in the world, totally content with whatever social status, race, skin color, geographical location, or financial situation you were born or had grown into. Now, fast forward to the 21st century. Fantastic technologies are brought out every day, and they become effectively obsolete in less than a year. Communication systems have turned the entire globe into a backyard. The war machine has become so sophisticated that we don't even need to have actual face-to-face confrontation anymore. Just grab your joystick, push the red button and BAM... ... Bye-bye, Afghanistan.[/b] You will be sorely missed! Of course, we still engage in actual face-to-face warfare. The reasons for this vary enormously, but you could find a decent introduction to one such reason in George Orwell's 1984. Where am I going with all this? Good question... Evelyn Beatrice Hall once said, as a summation of Voltaire's beliefs on freedom of thought and expression, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Now that's definitely a noble and gracious thing to believe, do, or even just say. But I'm thinking there could be more to this than just being a Good Samaritan. First of all, sticking up for other people increases your chances of finding someone who will stand up for you when you need it. It motivates and it sets an example. But more importantly, if enough people adopt this attitude, it invariably leads to win-win situations. Paranoia diminishes. Cataclysmic clashes disappear. Overall productivity skyrockets. And best thing is, the need vanishes for a single Messiah who must sacrifice his/her life to save ours. Instead, everyone needs to exert only minimal effort in order to effect monumental change. I hope you'll pardon my uncouth metaphor, but if every living person on the planet gathered in one spot and "spit," odds are an entire city will drown in saliva! But here's the real clincher, the true crux and raison d'être of this rant... We live in turbulent times. Selfishness and greed, exacerbated by shortsighted vision and arrogance, now have enough resources to do whatever it is that pleases their black little hearts. And it's the sad fact that greed seems to have always been infinitely more active in pursuing its agenda than goodwill and peace of mind ever were. "Business as usual" cannot be on the menu anymore. Anything that anyone does anywhere around the world has an effect on you, and it's usually much more direct than you realize. All this is good and dandy. But, usually, it's fairly easy to defend other people's rights if they represent something that you personally cherish or believe. For instance, it's only natural to condemn the war on Iraq if you're an Arab, or to promote "green living" if you're an environmentalist. But say you're a Muslim -- could you endorse another person's right to choose his/her religiosity, or to abandon religion holus-bolus? If you're a rational scientist, could you be tolerant of somebody else's spirituality and unprovable metaphysical beliefs? Can you actually find it in yourself to defend a harmless idea that another person believes in, even if you don't buy it yourself? If you're smart enough, well, you must! Remember Bob Dylan's album, The Times They Are a-Changin'? Well, this is it, folks. These times are a-changin'! The international political climate is witnessing a major shift in its dynamics. Economies rise and fall in a flash. Wars erupt out of the blue for next to no reason. People go mad. Governments go mad. Nature goes mad. You can never know when you will be in a position where you need other people's support -- people who don't necessarily believe in you what you do. But make no mistake, my friend, such a time will come... if you don't make the first move. Selfishness used to be harmful only to the other guy. Today, however, it has turned around begun beating the Self over the head with a titanic hammer. We live in an era that is brimming with paradoxes, but it's particularly amusing to see that altruism and self-sacrifice may have actually become the only ways for selfishness to survive. The things that got me thinking about all this was a poem I read in God Wants You Dead (a huge "thank you" to my friend Omar Khalifa for telling me about this amazing book). Read it, re-read it, and then read it again. I can't recommend this book enough! OK, that was plenty of yapping for me. I'm sure I told you nothing you didn't know already, so I'll leave you with the poem. Perhaps it will have an emotional and intellectual impact on you as strongly as it did on me...

I had used AVG for over a year and had always been one of its fanatic proponents. Lately, however, a friend of mine, who also had AVG installed on his system, got into some serious trouble with a virus (he insisted it was a virus, although I think the behavior he described was more of a worm). Anyway, he tried over 6 different antivirus applications, including some online scanners, but Kaspersky ( http://usa.kaspersky.com/ ) was the only one to identify the malware, delete it successfully, and restore the system to a reasonably working condition. I've been trying Kaspersky for a couple of weeks now, using the free trial ( http://usa.kaspersky.com/downloads/ ) which gives you the entire functionality of the licensed version for 30 days -- and I must admit it's amazing. It's very low on system resources (yes, lower than AVG itself), it offers the same level of protection you'd expect from any major antivirus, and I hardly even know that it's running on my computer, even though I have a fairly old one with low system specifications. You might want to give it a try. I definitely like what I've seen of it so far.

Well, it differs from one ad-provider to the next. But generally, yes, you need to be over 18 years old to apply for these programs. No, they don't require either of these, although some programs give you the option of supplying your bank account information so that they can wire-transfer your earnings to your bank account directly. Most of the time, however, they just mail you a monthly check. By and large, these programs work by supplying you with a simple script that you copy and paste into the pages of your website where you want the ads to appear. Other than that, the script itself automatically handles all the tracking. There are some general guidelines and terms of use that each ad-provider has. Other than those, ad placement is mostly a matter of optimization, so you don't really have to post an ad within a specific area.

I definitely am not an authority on Linux boxes, and my experience with the different distros is not all that extreme (I've only tried Debian, RedHat, Ubuntu, Mandrake, and a handful other small distributions) and so my opinion will probably be obsolete, but here goes... Among the Big Players, I found Ubuntu to be the easiest on system resources, followed by Debian and Mandrake. So, if you're willing to bear with significantly less pleasurable GUIs and give up some of the software you currently use on your Ubuntu box, you could go for one of the smaller Linux distros. I hear Xubuntu ( http://xubuntu.org/ ) is a very nice and versatile distro. Fluxbuntu Linux ( http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ ) might also be a decent alternative to try, although their later versions are still largely experimental. Again, I must repeat that my experimenting days with Linux ended around 3 years ago, so I'm my probably very much out of date. Today, I only use Xubuntu for general-purpose Linux usage, testing, and programming. So I hope my answer wasn't too irrelevant or inaccurate.

Well, I've been designing websites, both professionally and as a hobby, for almost 10 years now. My thinking on whether to Do It Yourself or to use some sort of "site builder" has changed several times during this time, but here's where I currently stand. If your intention for building a Website is to learn the nitty-gritties of the process (i.e. you, like myself, have a bit of a geek in you), or you want to become a professional Web designer/developer and have Web design as a source of income, then you certainly need to learn HTML and CSS, along with other rudimentary technologies, such as Java, JavaScript, PHP, Flash, etc. Even with the plethora of easy-to-use, point-and-click tools available on the market today, no professional Web designer can do without this basic knowledge. On the other hand, if you're building a simple non-business-y Website, such as your own personal site or a website for your family members, then you don't really need to learn all that. It's enough for you to use a simple CMS, such as Drupal, or even a blogging platform, such as WordPress. Drupal ( https://www.drupal.org/ ) is very simple to learn and use. My only problem with it is that, if you need to customize beyond the usual stuff, you need to know your PHP well. I also found it hard to find Drupal themes that suited my taste, and I usually had to heavily tweak the ones I found or make my own themes from scratch (not a very pleasant task, let me tell you.) WordPress ( https://wordpress.org/ ) is my favorite blogging platform. It's extremely easy to use, works great out of the box, has loads upon loads of great templates, and is a snap to customize when you know its basics. There are also literally thousands of plugins for it that you can use. Now, if you're interested in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and you need to have your websites ranking well at the Search Engines, such as Google and Yahoo, then you have either one of two routes to take. You can do it yourself, by learning how it all works and then applying this knowledge to your websites -- however, beware that this can easily take you months to understand, and perhaps a year or two to master. The other route is to use integrated systems, such as Site Build It ( http://buildit.sitesell.com/ ), to guide you through the process and handle most of the time-consuming labor. These tools are usually pricey, but if you're going to do this for a living, then I suppose it's a good long-term investment. The bottom line is: I don't think there's one "be all and end all" way to go about building a website. It all depends on the "purpose" of the site, your "expectations" from it, and the time, effort, and money you're willing to put into it. I know that sounds sort of vague and possibly useless, but hey, nobody said life was clear-cut

Whether I agree or disagree with what you guys are saying, that's something that I leave for later. But I was hoping for a discussion about the book and the points it contains

Hello everyone. To begin with, I'm well aware that the subject of this post is unusually bizarre and extremely controversial, and so I'd like to stress the fact that it's definitely NOT my intention to offend anyone or put down anybody's religious beliefs. I'm merely trying to start a line of discussion that will hopefully be interesting to some of you. So there goes... I recently heard about Professor John Rush's new book, Failed God: Fractured Myth in a Fragile World. In a (perhaps oversimplified) nutshell, this is a book about certain issues in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and their relation to entheogenic and psychedelic plants and substances. Entheogens and psychedelics are basically chemical compounds that are capable of inducing altered states of consciousness. Some people believe those states to be of some existential, personal, and/or mystical pertinence and import, while others maintain that those states and the experiences that they provoke or induce are nothing more than hallucinations which result from the chemical imbalance that these substances produce in brain chemistry. While shamans and spiritual leaders of places like Amazonia, Peru, Siberia, and Middle Africa use these compounds as spiritual aids and sacred medicines, most Western societies outlaw the use of these substances on the basis that they're harmful on both the personal and societal levels. Examples of those substances include Psilocine (the active form of Psilocybin, which can be found in magic mushrooms), Ayahuasca (an orally-active form of dimethyl-triptamine, or DMT), and even nicotine and caffeine to some degree. But back to the book. Professor Rush holds to the very unorthodox opinion that Jesus Christ, the central figure of the Christian belief system, was not actually a real person. Of course, many people have proposed the same idea over the years, presenting certain arguments that the historical accounts of a man called Jesus are nothing more than fictional accounts to propound a certain ideology/religion for one reason or another. Rush's contention, however, is even more heretical than this. He argues that there is overwhelming proof that Jesus was an experience with the Amanita muscaria mushroom and other mind-altering substances, and not a living, breathing human being. Such an idea may seem outwardly nonsensical, probably even comical to many people. The interesting thing is that, throughout his book, Professor Rush makes a compelling case for such a wild claim. He's done a lot of research on the subject and he presents a significant amount of historical, anthropological, and even artistic data in support of this idea. I haven't read the book yet, so I can neither defend it nor reject it. The only things I know about its content are things I read in reviews and several online discussions. However, I've read a number of other books and papers that revolve around similar notions and hypotheses. I can't say that I'm entirely convinced, but I must also admit that they're not just interesting and amusing ideas to ponder, but the evidence for them seems to be growing. So anyway, I was wondering if somebody has read this book or has come across a similar idea. If so, what do you think about it? Of course, I'm hoping that the discussion, should it gain any interest, be more than a simple snub. And I'll write more about the book and its arguments as soon as I get my hands on it. Again, I'd like to repeat that I'm neither an advocate nor an opponent here â at least, not yet. I'm simply interested in a new idea that, even if proved completely wrong, may lead to some important consequences and/or contemplations. General Book Description [Copied from Amazon.com]

I don't believe you can get rid of this notification -- at least, not without a system-wide modification. This warning is simply a way for you to see if/when a moderator or an administrator gives you a warning. It's an easy and immediately-visible way for you know when you've done something that went against the forum rules. Having a 0% warning means that you're a good, upstanding member of the forum and that you have no warnings whatsoever. This warning is either a built-in feature in IP.Board forums, or it's an added feature (such as a plugin or a custom code modification). If I remember correctly, it's actually built-in. The point is, it'd be unreasonable for any single member to request an individual removal of his/her warnings, since it's either not possible to do it on a case-by-case basis or, if it was possible, then it'd put unnecessary load on the administrator. Um. I know it isn't my place to ask, but I'm rather curious... why would you want to remove such a helpful hint? P.S.: Aside from the moderators and administrators, it seems that a member is the only one able to see his/her own warnings. For example, I can't see yours whether on your posts or on your profile.