rvalkass

When you have over 100 myCENTs they will get transferred within a few hours to your billing account automatically (unless you have received a warning). The Add Funds feature is to top up your account with "real" money - such as via a credit or debit card. If you don't have the funds available to cover your next bill, or want to upgrade or something, you can add funds with your card. These are added to whatever you have earned on the forums and can be spent in the same ways.

"Open source" means that the source code for the software is available to the general public, at no cost, with little or no copyright restrictions. However, there is no set definition - that is just the most popular one, used by the Open Source Initiative. They also publish a list of standard software licences which they believe are open-source licences. Linux, and much of the software related to it, is open-sourced.

This is because TV Licensing, for some bizarre reason, class every room as a separate address. Hence we ended up receiving demands to two rooms that didn't exist on our floor, which we can only guess were the boiler cupboard and cupboard with the electric meter in! To the surprise of TV Licensing, neither of these inanimate objects had paid their TV licence, or replied to the letters...

TV channels in the UK are mainly commercial, supported by advertising revenue. However, the BBC (and S4C in Wales) receive their funding from the licence. The idea is that they can make programmes and services that aren't necessarily commercially viable, because they have a guaranteed income source (unlike commercial channels, which have to see advertising time). However, we have no "public access" channels (where the public can broadcast to their community). It baffles me that some executive clearly sat down and thought "Hmm, all these people who aren't paying their licence... Maybe it's because we haven't given them enough ways to pay!" And so they decided to ram the idea down everyone's throats that it is now supposedly so easy to pay. Except it isn't.

I was debating whether to put this here or in the rants section, but I decided here eventually. Anyway... For those of you not in the UK, we have a company called TV Licensing over here. Anyone who has a TV in their home has to pay an annual license fee to watch it - this is currently Ł142.50 (US$234). If you don't pay it, and have a TV, radio, laptop or anything that can receive radio or TV in your home, then you can be fined Ł1000. What annoys me is their assumption that everyone is a criminal - guilty until proven innocent. I recently moved home, and therefore had to transfer my TV licence to my new address, which I did. However, a week after the date I moved I received a letter from TV Licensing demanding I buy a TV licence or they would prosecute me. This outraged me for a few reasons: They have assumed that I am a criminal by saying they will prosecute on a baseless claim. I told them of my change of address, yet they don't appear to have paid any notice. The only advice TV Licensing offer is on their numerous ways to pay, rather than trying to resolve the issue. TV Licensing employ incredibly intimidating language in their letters, and assume that anyone not listed on their database as having a TV licence is instantly a criminal. There are two factors they have overlooked: firstly, people who don't have a TV; secondly, their own mistakes in updating their records. One of my friends does not have a TV, and therefore does not need a licence. However, he is regularly 'raided' by the TV Licensing people to check, as they assume he is breaking the law and have to prove his innocence. Clearly the most basic principles of the justice system in this country passed TV Licensing by. Anyway, for their shoddy customer service, diabolical attitude and acting like the Gestapo, TV Licensing are probably the worst company I have ever had to deal with.

Some Internet service providers, as a method of preventing spam, like you to use their own SMTP server to send email. If you contact your ISP they should be able to tell you if this is the case, and give you the details you'll need to put into Outlook instead of the SMTP server you are using at the moment.If your machine has a virus or some form of malware that is sending out spam emails then your ISP may well have blocked your connection from using the ports for SMTP. Again, if you contact your ISP they will be able to tell you if they have done this, and what you can do about it.

This, according to a few reliable sources, can be a cause of the problem you're having. When you plug a USB drive into Windows, you have to click "Safely Remove" before you unplug it - well Windows does exactly the same thing with hard drives automatically when you boot up and shut down. By holding down the power button and forcing a shutdown, Windows never properly unmounts the drive, so Linux (or rather, ntfs-3g) will complain. Booting into Windows, running chkdsk, and letting the machine shut down properly might help. The other possibility is bad sectors on the drive. This could explain why one partition may work fine while another doesn't. If this is the case (and chkdsk should tell you if it is) then your safest bet will be to replace the drive with a new one before it becomes even more unreliable.

There is no set amount. The number of myCENTs you will get per post and topic depend on the length and quality of what you have written. A longer post that is written clearly and uses the right BBCodes will earn more than a one-line post with no punctuation or anything. I think the maximum you can earn for any one post is 100 myCENTs ($1) but I am not totally sure on that.

The Whois information seems to suggest it's legitimate. The nameservers being pointed to Nintendo.com give a pretty strong indication Nintendo runs the site. Personally, I think they could have come up with something better

For some random comedy, check out Russel Coight's All Aussie Adventures and Lano & Woodley, both from Australia. Here in the UK there is far too much to mention Always a good choice. Where would I be without Dave? Colin Mochrie is originally Scottish, but now lives in Canada. Ryan Stiles was born in the US, but now also lives in Canada.

The stock fans provided by Intel are generally just good enough to keep the CPU within the thermal limits, and are often very loud. If you choose to go for air-cooling then you will want to replace the CPU fan with a much better model. An after-market fan will not only keep the CPU (and therefore the rest of the case) cooler, but also run quieter, so will not be so distracting. With 3 power-hungry graphics cards you are going to be generating an awfully large amount of heat that you will need to dissipate quickly. A case like the Antec Twelve Hundred is about the best you can get for air-cooling, but even that may not be enough to keep everything cool. If you go down the water-cooling route then you will certainly want to enlist the help of someone who has built a water-cooled PC before to be with you every step of the way, from ordering the parts, to assembling them, to leak testing etc. You must remember that water cooling can ruin your PC if done wrong, so be very careful.

I'd certainly be interested in those topics. They will certainly generate discussion (especially 5 and 6) and I'll participate with whatever knowledge I have on those topics too, once you've got the ball rolling - I knew doing a physics degree would be useful at some point!

Having read through the Terms of Service and Acceptable Usage Policy for both Xisto and Xisto - Web Hosting, there is nothing that explicitly forbids torrent files on your hosting as long as they point to legal material. However, I would still recommend contacting Support to check, and basically let them know that the torrent files are pointing to legal material - they should be happy you're using them as it saves them bandwidth.

The "space lift" is an idea that plenty of groups are working on bringing into a reality. The problem is that many of the devices are currently too small to move people around. That last sentence put me in mind of SimCity Everyone always wants to avoid dirty industry, but especially to start with it is unavoidable. Even then, if you have no dirty industry then everything normally produced by them would have to be transported in from Earth, which would be just as bad. Would these be regular checkpoints for people already living on the planet, or only for new arrivals? Either way it does seem a little bit invasive, and would certainly discourage many people from living there.

That's the idea, but people always have the following two reactions: Paid software with lots of features: "Ooh, that's good value!" Free software with lots of features: "It's really bloated." Better to get stuff you don't need for free, than get stuff you don't need and pay for it! Your choice of forum software depends mainly on the features you want and the community. Download all the ones that have the features you want (they're free after all!) and install them on your own PC to try them out. See which ones you like, which you don't. Have a look online for themes and modifications. How easy are they to install and manage? Do they require complex code changes or can they just be added with a click of a button? Have a look at how often the software is updated too - don't go with a package that leaves security holes open for ages before releasing an updated version.

I have a laptop at the moment, so upgrading it is fairly limited. Staying on top of everything available is a virtual impossibility. When I built my brother's computer, every day we would have a new list of parts to order. And every day he would say "Don't order it yet - wait til tomorrow and see if there's something better." It took a bit of convincing to make him see that would go on forever and at some point you have to just bite the bullet and get your computer, in the knowledge it's out of date the moment you walk out of the shop :(Other upgrades - new PSU and hard disk drive to the main desktop at home, and a replacement hard disk to the older desktop (due to the old one failing). The old desktop could also do with some new RAM and a new PSU, but I don't know if I will get around to that any time soon.

I think American sitcoms and British sitcoms are very different. I generally hate the US ones, but love the British ones. With shows such as Friends in the US, everything goes over the top and seems too staged, especially the audience reactions - something often parodied in British sketch shows and humour. The UK ones are more subtle and more believable, and often feature more complex humour, and that appeals to me.I haven't really seen any sitcoms from elsewhere in the world, so I'd be interested to hear what they are like.

I should point out I have never tried this. This is just what I have been told by friends:The general method is to take the photos at night with a film (not digital) SLR camera. You also need to have a remote trigger for the shutter, and a mode on the camera that keeps the shutter open as long as you hold the button down. Set the camera up on a sturdy tripod so that there is absolutely minimal ambient light in the shot. Hold the trigger button down to open the shutter and hope some lightning appears. When it does, release the trigger to close the shutter. You'll need to experiment to see how long you can keep the shutter open in any location before the image is washed out and overexposed. It can be done with a digital camera as long as it has the required settings and remote trigger. You'll also need to turn off any settings that automatically try to cope with exposure problems, or your pictures probably won't come out that well.

Ask them: http://www.ts.vcu.edu/it-support-center/ That page contains a phone number, so even if he's not there yet he can phone up and ask them if they block/monitor things. It also gives you a chance to ask them why they have those policies in place (if they do).

You'd be surprised how willing some companies are, and how serious their online presence and reviews are to them. For example, I complained about Vodafone on my blog, and that prompted two comments from staff at Vodafone A good online review can have a big impact on their sales. You're unlikely to get to keep the products until your site is much bigger, but there is no harm in asking for review samples from companies.

Generally tutorials and reviews are best with images, especially reviews - lots of high quality images of the product being reviewed are incredibly useful. There are two options. Firstly, you can take the pictures yourself with a digital camera. This is generally the best option because you can offer very high quality, detailed shots of the product which aren't available anywhere else. These images would be copyright to you, and therefore perfectly legal. Your photos will be unique to your site and (hopefully) better than the ones available from the manufacturer of the product. Good photos are something I always look for in a review - they are incredibly useful and show effort has gone into the review rather than just copying from somewhere. The second option is to use the publicity material provided by the manufacturer. Most manufacturers will have a set of photos and related material they can provide to you for any product you are reviewing - just get in contact with the press department of the manufacturer. The downside to doing this is that you will have exactly the same photos as everyone else, and they will only show what the manufacturer wants people to see. Of course, don't limit your site just to reviews and tutorials! There is plenty more you can offer, but these are often good at drawing people to your site from search engines and making your site appear trustworthy and helpful. Just remember to make review titles include the official title and model of the product, such as "Review: Creative SBS Vivid 80 Speakers" rather than just "Review of Creative Speakers".

If that were a true concern then there would be no Internet access at all and Windows PCs would be banned. Access to the Internet and a search engine can return any amount of adult and unsavoury content, no matter how much filtering you put in place. If you're worried about the security of your network and receiving viruses and the like, then Windows PCs would not be allowed. Perhaps it's to appease the PRS/RIAA/MPAA/Whoever which seems ridiculous, but increasingly likely...

I use torrent files to download Linux distributions, to reduce load on individual servers. After a while I suddenly noticed I could not download any more .torrent files. Any that I had would work fine, but I couldn't download new ones. When I asked support what was up, they told me they are now blocking the download of torrents because "they're illegal". That was a massive facepalm moment for two reasons. Firstly, not all torrents are illegal (Linux distros for example). Secondly, blocking the .torrent files was their method for stopping the actual torrents, which shows a fundamental lack of understanding in what they were actually trying to achieve and how torrents work.Practical upshot: they wouldn't do anything about it, because "all torrents are illegal". Sigh...

One of the keys to drawing visitors to your site is to offer unique content - something they can't get anywhere else, and will therefore cause you to appear highly in search engine rankings. Any computer issue you search for and don't find a satisfactory answer to (or do, but it could do with rewriting) then write your own answer to the problem. Writing reviews is also a possibility. To start with you are unlikely to get companies to send you review samples to keep, but you can always ask, especially if you can't find a review for the product online anyway. If not, review any computer products you buy or use - hardware, software, games, peripherals, anything. Well written, in-depth reviews often appear highly in search pages and add a sense of trustworthiness to your site.

osCommerce will probably be the best idea here. It is an open-source PHP application for e-commerce, which includes various plugins for dealing with payment gateways including PayPal and WorldPay (if I remember correctly). To accept credit and debit card payments will require a merchant bank account, a business bank account to link it to, and access to a payment gateway. This is best sorted out by speaking face to face with the business manager of the bank used by your client. Alternatively, you can use something like PayPal or Google Checkout. They will deal with all the payment processing, but will take a higher percentage of your earnings. Direct debit is used for recurring payments, and is set up between an individual and their bank to pay bills. If you feel you need direct debits then you will again have to speak to the business manager at your client's bank to see what is involved and whether you can set them up online. PayPal does have the option to set up subscriptions and recurring payments, and there is probably a module to do it for osCommerce, which will save you from dealing with direct debits.