mama_soap

I know exactly where you are coming from. *sighs* I have similar experiences -- it is sometimes unnerving because there are situations when I develop a purely instinctive (nonetheless strong) like or dislike for individuals I hardly know. Of course, you'll never really "know" anyone "completely" - for people with whom I interact with on a more long term or regular basis, I have noticed my opinions about them being variable, and different at different points of time. That's probably because my perceptions of those people are changing on the basis of experience - so someone I absolutely cannot stand today may be easier to get along with tomorrow - the lack of consistency in such things makes me considerably uncomfortable. Currently, I try to ignore my basic instincts and consciously chose to be non judgmental. Once you've met enough people and had enough of the experience, you might come to the following conclusion - first, that pondering or devoting time to forming an opinion about someone else isn't usually worth the effort, there must necessarily be something better to do with one's time or energies, and second, that this is a versatile world - thus one must allow for the existence of a wide variety of people, and not worry about it very much (read: tolerance). Usually, though, there's nothing you can do about a spontaneous reaction. I make specific efforts to think about other things, or distract myself, and it has worked so far. Even with my limited imagination, I can easily imagine people finding me perfectly retarded, unworthy of attention, funny, weird, or "sick", and I would hope that they also find more pleasing things to devote their attention to. Since I must do what I expect of others, (*grin*), I adopt the simple bottom line that I will not form an opinion about another person unless I am pushed to, and paying no attention is a good way of dealing with immediate unpleasantness. Ignore what you don't like - one's time is limited, we owe it to ourselves to use it well.

That free office suite is the KOffice thingy, or Open Office? Oh bother - I am too lazy to look it up :SWell, kde-look.org is a regular haunt for me, although I mostly use FC6, or Debian. (I should make the switch to a command line interface sometime soon, X has grown on me!) As for the "Some hardware still doesn't work at all" point, I have heard that Ubuntu beats most other distros on this front - most stuff evidently works out-of-the-box, and it is quite painless. Not sure of this myself, although I could vouch for the fact that things have come a long way from Slackware Apart from having to configure my sound card, my last Linux install (FC6) was very smooth on the h/w front. Say, sorry if I missed something, but you must have used ubuntu as well? Don't mean to start a KDE/Gnome flame war here - but I would love to read a personal, high-level comparision between the two. Is it just the window manager, or is there more to it? Besides, can't I just build KDE on ubuntu? The $time_spent_on_a_given_distro has reached it's threshold, so I might be looking for a change, and would therefore look forward to any comments that anyone has in this context

@DeM0nFiRe: I haven't specifically read Masters of Doom just yet, but I know exactly what you're talking about. Every single time I read a story-behind-something-big book, my faith in my current interest begins to dwindle, and I want to switch careers Actually - this happens with television too, I should really stop watching inspiring interviews of actors I admire, I end up with this very non-trivial desire to stop-hacking-and-start-acting... {grin} Coming back to books, The Man Who Loved Numbers, The Man Who Knew Infinity, Genius, Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman, and others are similarly inspiring. Anyone read those encyclopedia type (i.e., popular-science-ish, nothing technical) books that explain what goes into the making of special effects in movies? Or glossy reference books that enumerate dance cultures around the world? I have been subjected to the library for many hours on end (for reasons beyond my control, and not worth going into ), and I ended up browsing the reference section for a good deal. Wasn't life changing, but there were some interesting eye openers. Particularly memorable was the a book which was, erm, a comprehensive archive of crimes during a certain period of time in western Europe, if I am not mistaken - I stopped reading when it got gruesome, but the thing about reading non-fiction is that it's a distinctly unpleasant feeling to realize the nasty stuff happens outside Doyle's imagination too. (Yeah, yeah... I don't watch too much reality TV and steer clear of news channels ) I am usually affected more easily by non fiction than fiction as far as the written word goes, although writers like Orwell make for (important) exceptions.

@SamiFX: A most excellent compilation I thought the heated slippers were hilarious (not that I can't use them - particularly during winter here)! What is this talk about doubting liquids near boxes? A cup of black coffee is invariably located in a one-foot radius of my box! And {grin} I've never had a problem, though, don't quote me on that just yet.....

Ooooh yes, I saw the USB Mug Warmer first at ThinkGeek, and I thought it would be the perfect birthday gift for a lot of people I know! The opposite is on the offering as well - something to keep cold drinks cold :)I am planning to by the USB Mug Warmer + USB Hub combination - it's a mug warmer that has four usb slots at the bottom - methinks it is as cool as it gets. {grin}

$gal_count ++; For whatever it is worth, anyway.

Seasons' Greetings to everyone here... I hope you all have a great party!Also, a slightly belated Merry Christmas to all as well :lol:Cheers!

H*ll yes Now that is a bit of an ove[r|rt]ly wide generalization, don't you think? You will probably come up with statistics to attack any counter argument... {sighs} lies, dam*ed lies, and statistics (a subject I've studied formally for over a couple of years now). This reminds me of Russel's twisted comment (paraphrased) - the men will point out that most scientists and engineers have been men, and women will retort that so are most criminals. Ah. Well. I'm afraid you're generalizing again. Most generalizations, in particular ones that are directed at (or against) around half of the human race, are bound to be inaccurate, foolish and an indulgence that is an absolute waste of time. Your comments, if in jest, are in poor taste, and if in seriousness, amount to being discriminatory, and in a derogatory way. I am all for freedom of speech and opinion, but I'm against complete lack of sense, respect, and - I'm afraid - tact. I want nothing more along these lines, and if you do decide to go on in the same spirit, I will probably not find it worth responding to. Finally: Having good things to say about women is almost as bad as having to say bad things about them. It may not sound as tactless or derogatory as this, and may even be flattering, but it'll still be a generalization, and therefore discriminatory and nonsensical, apart from being another waste of time. As for m107 - please use a spellchecker! I think I see what you're getting at - you're wondering if women amount to being more than 'objects' in a certain sense, and you want to check what the general feeling is. I think the notion of discussing a class of people really doesn't make sense - unless the class is defined by a governing characteristic over which one has some control. By this I mean it might make some sense to talk about teachers or cooks in general - a statement like "most cooks must love to eat", or "people who own websites are more likely to know HTML than a random person who's walking down the street", may sound like statements which make some sense, or as being worth debating or talking about (I'm still not in favor of generalizations - but there are bad generalizations and good ones). However, on the other hand, talking about women - or men - or Christians, or the French - doesn't make sense (with very rare exceptions - you could say Frenchmen are good at french, that's fine for obvious reasons), because your gender, religion, and nationality, are things over which you have no control whatsover. Most teachers are people who have become teachers, so you might talk about something being common about everyone who has made that particular choice. But how many people "become" French or Spanish? The only technical counterargument (as far as I can see) is that sex-change operations exist, you can change your religion, and even nationality. But these are exceptions, and you certainly can't make a valid generalization on the basis of a few exceptions. Which is why most constitutions condemn discrimination on the basis of sex, nationality (except where necessary, such as perhaps military occupations), religion, caste, color, and so on. If even the laws, organizations, and businesses are able to recognize the fact that such discrimnation doesn't make sense, I don't see why people in general don't understand the simple fact. What you're talking about is a non-issue. There are serious social, economic and legal issues that need to be sorted out in the context of gender differences, but none of this discussion appears to be along those lines. I am myself amused about jokes that were aimed at women (or men) specifically, and sometimes even to the extent of nodding and thinking, 'yeah, I know that's so true of most women!'. However, I refuse to believe that these things make any sense beyond the context of a light-hearted discussion. I hate lurking in the murky depths of opinion - so I will try and conclude with a couple of facts. One, women are human. For everyone who is debating about whether they deserve to be-respected/Co-exist, well, they deserve to exist just as much as the men do. Everyone needs to justify his or her existence in his or her own, personal way - you deserve to exist if you succeed, and vice versa, irrespective your gender. The second fact is that the human mind is a complex thing. "Women" aren't complicated in particular - some women are, just as some men are. This is the n-th time I emphasize that generalizing is dangerous, and not a worthwhile exercise. Cheers.

Ziat,It appears the problem's been resolved - I browsed around a bit, around apparently - and happily error-free pages --I love the look and feel, although I'm not very partial to the horizontal scroll that the google ads induce on the hosting directory website. I would also think that it'll be a good idea for all the websites beloging the Xisto family to have a somewhat uniform look and feel, and still maintain their own unique styles at the same time. I'm sure this is not easy to achieve, but I think it's worth mentioining that it'd probably appear more professional that way. Currently, I _think_ (correct me if I'm mistaken), it's only the footer that seems to tie all the sites together.Apart from that, awesome work, in terms of both code and design. I'm not sure about the blue background suggested by Hadi - I am somewhat partial to white backgrounds and black font (old school, I'm afriad). But it might be an interesting thing to explore, to whip up the background a little bit.In the meantime - keep at the growth. Congratulations to Xisto, and in particular, OpaQue (and team) for the wonderful stuff you guys come up with. Cheers!

Occupation: Full-time studentInterests (Please be specific, e.g., application programming, web designing):1. Mathematics - particularly, enumerative combinatorics2. Books, movies and music.3. WritingHours Online/day:Nature Of Sites you visit often:Sites You Visit Often:1. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/. planet.foss.in4. planet.debian.org5. en.wikipedia.org(These are sites apart from gmail, okrut, Xisto, and such... these are of course, even more frequently pinged )

slavak: a. Search before you post Most likely someone else has asked the same question, and it's been answered - in your case, many times over! b. What is...? is a forum for explaining concepts, as in "What is a computer", and is not the place to ask questions related to your hosting account. Go to "questions and queries" under Support and post your query there. c. When you enter http://forums.xisto.com/, and you're logged in, your hosting credits are displayed right on top. In some other place, I remember someone posting a screenshot to explain this. Good luck... Cheers!

You appear to have less than ten credits with you - this, as the others have pointed out already, is not enough for you to be able to transfer credits to your friend. If you have 30 + x credits, you can transfer at most x credits to your friend. Hope that helps, and g'luck

NigaiAmaiYume: That was a very well-written post in the sense that it was vivid and expressive - and besides, I know exactly where that class of emotions is coming from. Strangely enough, even though I've had the kind of life (luckily enough) which gives you nothing to complain about, I have been through similar tempraments many times before. As for why I am not dead yet - my reasoning is very similar to yours - I know at least a couple of people (not hard to guess who, *amused grin*) who will be saddened to some extent when they find out I'm not around anymore - or at least I hope this is the case As a matter of general principle, I would like to avoid being the cause of somebody else's sadness as much as possible, which is why I haven't tried jumping off a very convenient window in my room which would be so easy. The day I am reasonably certain that no one would be seriously bothered after I'm gone, I'll be dying like it's the most natural "next step". For a better collection of thoughts on what drives suicide, I strongly recommend your going through Albert Camus' the The Myth of Sisyphus even if it means your having to walk down a couple of lanes to a bookstore and spending some cash It's a book well worth reading, especially given your thoughts above

Perhaps he's talking about this website.