k_nitin_r

At the end of each post in a thread, there is a Quote button. I click on it whenever I want to add something from a previous post into my reply so I know who I am replying to if a thread spans multiple pages (I quoted a line from your post, just so we can test it and we know that it works). If I am replying to a single page thread or to posts on the last page of a thread, I simply type in my message and get the word across. BTW, for quoting, you can simply type the quote bbCode tags or select the text that you want to quote and click the quote button on the editor. I have noticed that many forums use different kinds of editors. In one particular forum, when I click the quote button, it displays a dialog box (not the regular javascript alert or input dialog box but rather one built with HTML and a background layer DIV that shades out the rest of the screen and provides me with a textbox to type in the quoted text or rather copy-paste it into the box. The editor then simply places the quoted text into the message text box surrounded by quote tags. I find the first approach of selecting the text and clicking the quote button less intrusive, as we have here on Xisto, but the second approach of displaying a popup style dialog box in HTML is much more user friendly for someone who has not used bbCode or when there isn't a help page to tell users how to use it. I'm glad they upgraded the forum too. I have seen many websites that run on old software and nobody really wants to get the license for the new software and take the time to migrate from the old version of the software to the new version. Each version of Invision Power Board seems to add new features and with this version we seem to have the progress bar, or more accurately, an activity indicator at the top of the screen so we know that the page is posting back to a server side script.

There was a news article that I read today saying that the government of Thailand can sentence individuals to fifteen years of imprisonment, or at least three years of imprisonment, for simply clicking the Like button on a FaceBook post that criticizes the monarchy of Thailand, let alone making an actual post in criticism. A couple of years ago, the folks at Skype figured that old folk would not want to use a computer to be able to talk to someone over Skype because they have telephones. Cell phones were a big leap enough and if I had to go from using computers to retina based displays and data processing implants it would be an advancement that I would skip on. Skype made Skype phones that are just like regular phones but they hook up to the Skype network instead of to a telephone line. If new technology were to be adapted to people who are accustomed to technology prevalent during their time, it would create a greater acceptance for the new technology. There are rumors of FaceBook going along the lines of a Skype phone but to hook up to the FaceBook network. FaceBook already includes video chat as a feature. Instead of a combo-keypad that most cellphones include, I would look for a keypad with dedicated keys for numbers and for alphabets.

The technician who informed you that the MAC addresses may be a problem is perhaps targeting an edge case scenario which is very unlikely to happen because computer component manufacturers build all network interface adapter devices with a unique identifier known as the MAC address. The MAC address is almost always unique but it can be changed. This is rather unlikely but then again, when people have no idea what to tell you, they try to thing of something that is beyond the comprehension of most people and hope that it gets them out of the picture; think of it as a kind of a smoke screen that they use to get away while confusing you with things that make the problem seem more complicated. That practice is pretty common in tech support and they all try to get away with it. What you need to do is be persistent in having the customer support help desk send over a technician to solve the problem and make sure that they do not close the issue ticket till they have finally resolved the problem.When you mentioned that the wired connections are running slowly, do you mean to say that the wireless connections are quick as usual? Perhaps you ought to try powering it down and powering it up again. I know it sounds very cliche but routers are like computers and they run on software and that software could be buggy and run into intermittent problems.You may also encounter slower speeds when your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is overselling its bandwidth. If your Internet Service Provider has access to one megabyte per second of bandwidth, they will probably sell 512 kilobyte per second of bandwidth to two customers. However, both those customers will not be using the Internet round the clock and they will not be using all of their allocated bandwidth so what Internet Service Providers do is get more customers to provide the unused bandwidth to. What this means is that when all of the customers decide to go online and download something or watch streaming video at the same time, the demands on the connection are more than the bandwidth provided therefore the users experience slower Internet access and possibly some loss of packet data on Internet data transfers. This is pretty common with video streaming and video conferencing software in which the application drops packets of video data if the connection is too slow, in order to attempt to provide a smoother playback of video (fewer displays of the loading message and reduced pauses when playing the video). When the number of frames dropped is high, then the problem of low bandwidth becomes more noticeable and you should probably switch to lower quality video, close some of the applications using the Internet connection running on your computer, or subscribe to a higher bandwidth package from your Internet Service Provider.The problem with the XBox 360s freezing when both of them are connected at the same time may be related to the XBox 360s themselves rather than the Internet connection. If I were in your place, I would think I'm lucky to not get the red ring of death because then I would need to toss out the console and get an new one. There is not much that you can do really to fix the problem with the XBox 360s because Microsoft did not provide an administrative interface to upgrade and downgrade software components or reset the box to a factory preinstalled state wherein you could undo all of the updates and installations that you did (or do they?).When ComCast changes their WAN IP address, it is based on the DHCP lease time. If you turn on your router, the router connects to your Internet Service Provider and gets a new IP address. Without an IP address, it cannot route your Internet traffic to the Internet Service Provider and therefore the first thing you do when you notice that you do not have Internet connectivity is to check if you have an IP address on the router and you have an IP address on the computer that you are trying to connect to the Internet from. An IP address is assigned to any device for a fixed period of time, assigned by the system administrator of the device. For your router, the Internet Service Provider determines the duration of the IP address lease and therefore you cannot do much to change it. When the router or any computer sees that the IP address lease has expired, it contacts the DHCP service provider and requests for a new IP address. On obtaining the new IP address, the router or computer then waits for the IP address lease to expire before requesting for a new IP address again. The DHCP service provider for your computer is the router, whereas the DHCP service provider for your router is your Internet Service Provider. When the DHCP lease is renewed, perhaps the version of the firmware running on the router does not handle the lease renewal correctly and that probably causes it to lock up. Try and get a firmware update for your router and see if that helps prevent the lock up.

In the Rockstar Grand Theft Auto series, I found the first two games to be almost identical with little changes. They may have been fun to play back in the day but the graphics and game play do not match up to the games that we have around today. The third installment in the series was simply amazing. It features a more entertaining gameplay with better physics for the vehicles in the game, a wide diversity of vehicles and missions, and cinematics that build upon the storyline as the player progresses through the missions. Grand Theft Auto Vice City was not as much fun because the vehicle physics was altered and it simply did not feel the same. However, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas was and still is disputably the best game in the series. The vehicles included cars, boats, motorcycles, airplanes, helicopters, and tanks. The flying missions were too difficult to finish so they took the fun out of the game when I played it. The RC plane missions are also not fun to play so if all of the flying missions are taken out of the game and all the driving lesson missions are dumped too, the game would definitely get a higher rating on my scale.Grand Theft Auto 4 has received a lot of criticism for making the gameplay experience a little too real so many of Grand Theft Auto fans went the want of Sants Row to get what they were missing. I have not had a chance to try Grand Theft Auto 4 yet but I did catch a couple of videos on YouTube that are representative of the gameplay. It did seem rather tempting but I will probably need a new computer with a dedicated graphics adapter to be able to play the game.

It is rather impossible to be romantically in love with two people at the same time because if you love one of them then you are being disloyal to the other and if you love the other then you are being disloyal to the first and if you love them both then it is probably just an infatuation or a crush and you do not really love them both enough to be able to commit to him or her exclusively and therefore feel the need to be around both of them. At some time or the other you will have to choose between the two people. When you try to decide over which one to stay with then you should consider which one would reciprocate your love and affection for them.

RpgSearchers,Keeping animals in small cages like the kind you keep rabbits in may seem like animal cruelty but when animals are kept in large cages with enough space for them to move about, it is not really as cruel. If you look at the size of the tanks used at Sea World, the killer whales and dolphins get to go about the tank unless they are performing. When performing, they have the whole tank to themselves. Are they being trained to perform as circus performers have to? Yes. Do they have a say in what they get to do and where they get to go? No. But they do get their meals regularly so they no longer have to hunt for food and they have a safe environment within which they can interact with other living beings, they get medical attention when they are sick, and the people who look after them do not use cattle prods or anything similar to cause pain or injury to the animals.Velma,The Parel hospital in Mumbai is probably just a temporary place for shelter and treatment of animals. I believe the animals are then released into the wild or are adopted by other owners or organizations. The veterinary clinics that are set up in the rural areas cater to the needs of cattle, though in some cases people keep elephants as cattle too, and may occasionally deal with other wild animals that were maimed or have falled sick.MoonGumery,Peta does not voice against the use of animals as food. They are definitely not supporters of vegetarianism. What they advocate is the procurement of meat from family farms rather than factory farms. They posted videos to show the manner in which animals are slaughtered in slaughter houses and how factory farms use hormones and other chemicals, apart from biogenetic alterations, to solely get the most of the animals that they slaughter and process for meat, other meat products, and leather.

FaceBook is more of a website on which personal information gets stolen but as long as you do not do anything out of the ordinary, you should be good when it comes to viruses, trojans, and other malware. FaceBook's search does not really help much because it only searches the name fields of the profile or the name field of FaceBook pages (similar to the concept of groups on other social networking websites). Orkut seems to do a better job of searching because you can enter the name, city, academic institutions, and work organizations of the people you are looking for and can narrow down the search results by quite a bit. FaceBook's advantage is in getting you contact suggestions based on the people you currently have on your contact list so it takes a little while before it 'learns' of the people that you are connected to. If you have watched Hackers 2, you are probably aware of the extent to which this information can be used to identify possible terrorist organization links. The baddies do tend to cover their tracks rather well but if they get tempted to get onto FaceBook, they're bound to get tracked by an intelligence agency somewhere across the world.

Thinking of an elephant as a mouse built to government specifications is hard to imagine in developing nations. In fact, the citizens of India would boldly claim that a mouse is an elephant built by the government after most of the budget was spent on filling the pockets of the politicians and the mouse was the result of whatever little remained. Corruption in the United States is downplayed to a great extent when compared to corruption in most of the developing world. Sure, you can pay somebody to look the other way wherever you are, be it Paris, London, Lebanon, Perth, Nepal, or deep within the jungles of the Amazon, but you do not hear much about it internationally like you hear about it in the developing world.In India, farming is encouraged by the government and they do setup a lot of programs to get more people into a trade that is slowly becoming less attractive for the youth of today. To encourage people to take up farming, the government imposes absolutely no income tax on agricultural income. However, income that is obtained indirectly from agriculture, such as through the sale of cattle and the 'excessive' refining of agricultural product is taxed, but you do not really find a lot of people aware of the extent of taxable income as they do not hire tax consultants and the government does not bother going after dairy farmers and poultry farms to collect on the non-payment of income taxes. Farmers themselves get free electricity for their farms, as I mentioned in an earlier post, but the timings for the electricity supply have gone from bad to worse as a result of the free electricity program - right now, the electricity is supplied by the government for about two hours from midnight and within the two hours, you would still find powercuts. Farmers who have planted crops run diesel generators on their farms to power the water pumps to continue to harvest their crops instead of seeing their investment on seeds, labour, and farming equipment go to waste (a lot of it is spent on labour with farming being more of a labour intensive operation in India).Kids these days do not want to follow their parents' footsteps and run farms and would much rather sell the farm land and move to the city working for a software development firm because of the current payscale for software development jobs, which are the result of outsourced contracts from different parts of the world.

sheepdog,I would suggest you send a letter, an email, or perhaps even do a FaceBook search to find out about her. I found a lot of people on FaceBook but there is a good number of people who are not hooked onto social networks yet (they still hang on to their Hotmail email accounts and have not moved through the progression of the times from Hotmail to Yahoo and now to GMail).When performing a Google search, I would suggesting performing a search for her by her full name rather than for the city. There are many sites out there that try to grab as much information as they can about people from their email addresses, postal addresses, employee records, and students records to their credit history, postings on social networking websites, participation in open source projects, and forums and blogs that he or she has been active on. Autovita is one such software system that has been created as a research project by students from the International Institute of Information Technology in India, and the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. It simply searches through the results returned by the Google search engine but there are other websites out there like RapLeaf (RapLeaf started off as a website that would aggregate as much information as it could but later it seems to have changes its approach and I believe they now offer commercial services to perform background checks).You can sign up on FaceBook rather easily - it does not require you to provide your cell phone number so you will not get targeted for text messaging spam, even if you do have a text messaging plan. All you have to provide them with is your email address along with your name and a password. FaceBook is pretty efficient at mapping all of your relationships along a graph and if you knew somebody else who knew the person you are looking for, FaceBook will display a contact recommendation for you to review. You may even find people you went to high school without remembering their names because FaceBook does a really good of matching up people to figure out if they know each other or if they are complete strangers. Apparently, if newspaper reports are to be believed, FaceBook indicates that there is less than six degrees of separation between any two people in the world and the figure is more accuratly represented by a figure between four and five, according to FaceBook. With the number of people on FaceBook today and the amount of data that FaceBook collects about them, it could be true, but I find it hard to imagine that there exists less than five degrees of separation between someone at a shopping mall in Centurion, Africa, and somebody working on a ranch in Texas, in the United States. In my opinion, six degrees of separation would also be too few when considering people from different parts of the world.Right after the Christmas season, which is the busy time for your business, you might want to plan a vacation to Illinois to perhaps pay a visit. If your knock on the door is answered, you perhaps found a place to crash for the night and, if not, you can hear about what happened from the neighbours and check into a hotel and make the most of your stay there by heading to the hotel's fitness center, treating yourself to the rich chocolate cake they have at the restaurant within the hotel, and doing some shopping from whatever stores they have around the hotel. Whatever you do, I would avoid the hotel's gift store because they hike up the prices of everything they sell to the extent that it is a ripoff.

Hi Mahesh!You do bring up a very good point - with so few posts to account for, the MyCENTs script should not take a really long time to run - I am guessing it runs once a day instead of for every post as it was back in the day. Perhaps the script should run more often now that we do not have as much activity on the forum. I believe the idea of crediting posts with fewer MyCENTs would drive people away rather than attract them back to the forum. Velma suggested that the MyCENTs credited for the posts have not been reduced, so I'll have to take her word for it. Perhaps the feeling that I have of getting fewer MyCENTs is because the script runs less frequently so I get the MyCENTs email less frequently, but I cannot tell for sure.I did not know about Meebo's service for website so, yes, I did learn something today :-)The Wibiya toolbar was pretty heavy because it had to load whenever the page refreshed and that slowed down the forum considerably when it was installed. They did have a bunch of online games and they tried to make it a script that did everything and they would have been successful if it was a part of the desktop wallpaper page (we can set web pages to be our desktop wallpapers too, but it runs only through Microsoft Internet Explorer; it was a central part of the anti-competitive practices lawsuit against Microsoft by Netscape when stating that Microsoft was creating a monopoly for its browser on its operating system).There is a television commercial airing over and over again about the Reliance tablet and so I have heard about it. It is apparently cheaper than most other tablets being offered and it is powered by Android. I have heard of the Akash tablet once but I have not heard much about where it is sold and how much it is sold for. I'm not really into tablets but I do like ebook readers because of their long battery life, which is about two weeks.I am not really a fan of forum extensions based on content management systems, especially if they woven into the upper abstraction of content management systems that are written in PHP because it becomes very processor intensive. A framework such as Code Igniter adds considerable processor overhead and can bring down a web server without even having to run a full-blown content management system. WordPress adds a lot more overhead so I imagine a forum based on WordPress (treating the first post in a thread as a WordPress post and replies to it as comments) would literally kill the web server with lots of requests waiting for processing and the request queue eventually preventing new requests to the web server. If a forum was based on a content management system written in Java or .NET, it would perhaps lead to less of a performance problem but I still would be concerned about stability. I had an ASP.NET application that did not do much except write logging messages to a file and it would cause the web server process to stop processing new requests with a high processor usage for no reason at all. There wasn't really a solution to the problem so all we could do was manually kill the web server process through another background process and eventually resorting to disabling logging messages entirely. I have not dealt with web-based Java applications in a production environment so I do not know if web masters have experienced similar platforms on a tried-and-tested Java platform as well. I have heard of high processor usage problems on newly released versions of Java enterprise application servers so I would imagine that most large organizations would run a version older than the latest out there hoping to get a stable platform for development. Speaking of older platforms, several banks have not yet moved to the Mircrosoft .NET 3.0 platform, let along the .NET 3.5 platform. Their reasoning is that the Mircrosoft .NET 2.0 platform is much too stable to consider moving to a newer development platform. Costs of licensing the Visual Studio integrated development environment is hardly a concern for them seeing how they spend upward of the equivalent of four million U.S. dollars on their I.T. budget.

Jessica,You have to use a video format conversion program. I would recommend using the Xilisoft video converter. It is quite reasonably priced and is easy to use. For video conversion, you would want to have a computer system with a really good processor because the rendering can take a long long time. Each second of video contains several frames and they are 'compressed' such that within each frame, repetitions and minor differences between pixel groups are encoded to occupy very less space on your hard disk drive, flash drive, compact disc, or DVD. Apart from compression within a frame, compression also occurs between frames to save only the differences that occur between two frames to the file. These help reduce file size considerably so irrespective of whether you are downloading a video file from the Internet, watching it online on YouTube, or playing it from a BluRay disc drive, very little data is transferred for considerably large amounts of color and pixel data. Now, this compression, albeit a good thing takes immense amounts of computation when you consider the number of pixels on a screen. A video that plays at 640x480 resolution has over three hundred thousand pixels to store color information for and each pixel has its three colour components for red, green, and blue. When you take it on a per-frame basis, video conversion involves obtaining the red, green, and blue color values for each of the pixels of the video and re-encoding the data to another video file compression format. If you are encoding BluRay video, which is usually of a very high resolution compared to video CDs from back in the day, you are processing more data than you can write down in a notebook in the form of binary represented with octal digits (or maybe even hexadecimal digits?).

Seat belts can increase or decrease the damage that an accident can cause. Perhaps seat belts are not as crucial for the driver as it is for the passengers because the driver can prepare himself or herself for an accident but a passenger may be unaware that an accident is going to occur and therefore would hit the windshield or the glass on the side.Seat belts are quite narrow and this could cause some of the injury. Perhaps if cars were fitted with a harness-like seat belt like the racing vehicles do, the force would be distributed across a wider area than regular seat belts and would exert less pressure.If we were to stop using seat belts entirely, we would be relying a great deal on air bags and those are just as dangerous. Airbags have caused fractures in the past and are meant to prevent the occupants of a vehicle from hitting anything in the interiors of the vehicle. Seat belts and air bags serve the same purpose and are meant to protect the passengers of the vehicle in the same manner but they do so differently. An airbag deployment can be hazardous if there are any interior fittings within the vehicle that can obstruct the inflation of the air bag. Any such object placed close to an airbag deployment point would turn into a projectile weapon and would seriously main or kill the passenger in the event of an accident. The accident itself may not affect the occupants but airbags most certainly can.When a vehicle catches fire and the driver and his or her passengers are wearing seat belts, they have to get out as quickly as they can. Taking off their seat belts adds to the time they are within the vehicle and if they take too long, the seat belts can melt and fuse to their clothes and skin, trapping them within the vehicle. If you have tried going at a seat belt with a pair of scissors or with a swiss army knife, you probably know how long it takes to get out of the seat belts if the release mechanism fails to function. When the release mechanism of the seat belt does not operate, the driver and his or her passenger are essentially tied to their seats and cannot get out. Seat belts also tighten or loosen so if the seat belts neither loosen nor do their release mechanisms function after an accident that causes the fuel tank to rupture and the leaking fuel to ignite, the results would be very catastrophic.I doubt people would fly out of their seats if their vehicle was rear ended. On the contrary, they would be pushed further into their seats and if they were not using the head rests of the seats, they would even suffer from whiplash or injuries to their shoulders and back. If there was a full frontal collision when both vehicles are moving at high speeds, the driver and passengers would definitely fly out of their seats if they were not wearing seat belts and the front passengers do stand a real danger of going through the windshield.

theconman,By building your own computer, you have the ability to decide what components go into the making of your computer system. Some people prefer an assembled computer because it is cheaper, as they can cut back on the features that they do not require, whereas other people use assembled computers because they have components that would not otherwise be available in a mainstream computer sold of retailer shelves.To start with, an assembled computer system consists of a case. The case can be anything from a wooden box that you make from a slab of wood, a saw, and some nails, to a crafted aluminium case with LEDs. It does not really matter which way you go as long as you have the mounts for the motherboard of your choice and can fit a power supply unit and, optionally one or more cooling fans for the case. Considering that hot air rises and air with a lower temperature would be situated toward the bottom of the case, you can look for a case that either has fans that draws in cold air from the bottom of the case and lets out hot air from the top rear of the case, or you can look for a case that lets you fit the additional cooling fans yourself. Proper airflow is essential for high performance computer workstations that are used for gaming or high end graphics and video editing. The horizontal cases have an advantage over the tower cases in heat dissipation because when the components are located at the bottom of the case, the components can be cooled with the air at a lower temperature from the bottom of the case while the air at a higher temperature rises to the top of the case and is extracted by the case fan or, in some cases, by the fan of the power supply unit. In mainstream computers, only two cooling fans are present within the computer system - one is used to draw air from the heat sink of the processor while the other fan is located within the power supply and serves the dual functions of cooling the parts of the power supply unit and extracting hot air out of the computer case. This minimizes power consumption and reduces noise considerably because cooling fans are the primary source of noise from a computer system.Then, comes the heart of the computer, the processor. You can get processors that are built cheap by reducing the amount of cache on the processor, such as the Intel Celeron processor. While these are cheap, they are also limited in their processing power by the limited cache because instructions are often executed in the processor faster than they can be fetched or sent back from the bus, which carries data to and from the processor as well as to and from the other components and peripheral devices of the computer system. There are processors built for low power consumption from Via/Cyrix (Cyrix was a popular manufacturer for desktop processors back in the day and it was later acquired by Via. Via continues to manufacturer low-priced processors for desktop and notebook computer systems) and Transmeta (Transmeta was popular for building low-power processors, especially those for mobile computer systems. Novafora itself winded up its business operations). Intel's Xeon line of computer processors are built for server application and feature a large amount of cache. They are also used in high end workstations such as those used for computer graphics and video editing. They reduce the rendering time for conversion of video formats and improve the computer's responsiveness when altering large graphics files. Among mainstream processors offered by Intel today, the Intel Core i7 is the flagship desktop processor and is also used in high end workstations. The Intel Core i3 is the entry level processor and the Intel Core i5 offers a higher performance for those on a budget. The price difference between an Intel Core i3 and an Intel Core i5 is roughly sixty dollars so you might as well shell out the extra cash to invest in an Intel Core i5 processor to take advantage of the turbo boost, which automatically increases the clock speed of the processor when certain conditions are met. AMD processors offer better value at the expense of performance.The memory of the computer system is largely standardized across all mainstream computers, with servers incorporating memory with error checking and control. In other words, you can get a memory stick for any modern desktop and can expect it to work with a modern motherboard for building your computer system. If you are building a computer system with an old motherboard, you have to ensure that the memory types match but for the most part it is not really worth the effort to build a computer system out of old components because of the rather low prices of computer components today. As a general rule of thumb, get at least 2GB of memory for your computer unless you plan on using it as a router or a web server with a text-based console for administration. You can use a portion of your memory for your graphics adapter if your motherboard and the integrated video graphics adapter supports it but ideally you are better off getting a video graphics adapter that has its own dedicated memory because it takes longer for the video graphics adapter to access the main system memory of your computer system than for it to access its on-board memory.The motherboard of your system is like a platform upon which you build everything. You have to pick a motherboard that can work with the processor you choose and for the amount of memory that you want to include so, in essence, it is central to the design of your computer system. Look for a motherboard with as many memory slots and USB ports as you can afford because it makes the computer system easier to upgrade. Also, getting multiple memory sticks of a lower capacity is cheaper than getting a single memory stick of the capacity of all of the memory sticks combined. For example, you can get four memory sticks of one gigabyte each instead of a single memory stick of four gigabytes because of a lower price but this does mean that when you do decide to upgrade the memory, you will have to take off the old memory sticks and will not be able to use them because of a shortage of memory slots. Some motherboards support dual channel memory access and would either require you to install memory sticks in pairs, with some motherboards even requiring you to install three memory sticks of a kind for triple-channel access, and other motherboards providing you with the option of running in dual-channel memory access mode if the memory sticks are identical and falling over to single-channel memory access when a single memory stick is present or the two memory sticks are not identical, and other low end built-for-economy motherboards offering only single-channel memory access. Depending on your needs and budget, you can decide to get a motherboard that just meets the requirements for your computer system and can be replaced whenever your needs exceed the capabilities of the computer system or meets your future requirements and can be easily upgraded when you have the budget and the need for more components or higher end components. Some motherboards feature on-board audio and graphic support but if you want a computer system purpose-built for graphics and video editing or for audio production, you can get a motherboard without those features or can get a motherboard with the features on-board but disable them if you do not need them.My description above is for a computer system on which you plan to run Windows. You can also build a computer exclusively for running a Linux or Unix based operating system or perhaps even a specialy operating system by using a processor that does not use the x86/x86-64 instruction set. For example, the ARM processor, which is used by most smart phone devices, personal digital assistants, and high end calculators, can be used to run a Linux based desktop or notebook system, with some cheaper low-end notebook computers employing the ARM processor and powering a Linux based distribution. You may be able to find one of these computers at a store near you. The ARM processors are much more energy efficient than mainstream x86 computer processors owing to the research and development focused on reducing the power consumption and heat envelope because of their application in embedded and mobile computing systems. They are also much cheaper than mainstream computers making them ideal for netbook applications if you do not need to run Windows (or can run Windows application through WINE emulation or through computer virtualization software that can emulate an x86 processor on a Linux or Unix based operating system).If you do decide to buy a computer off the retailer shelves, you may want to consider an all-in-one design because of the space savings. These computers are either integrated into a monitor or within the keyboard. Although they offer limited upgradeability, they are more economical because of the cost savings for the manufacturers to reduce casings and through a shared use of power supply units and chassis, and a reduced need for cabling. Some all-in-one computer systems also include a touch screen and they often have a large computer screen for display. Often the primary reason for people to choose an all-in-one computer over a laptop/notebook or a netbook system is the large screen or the touch-screen.You do not really have to know how to put together the components of your computer when deciding to get an assembled computer system. Most computer stores will do it for you if you buy the parts for them without charging you for the assembly service and can even offer you discounts if you buy all of the parts for your computer system from them. They would have the advantage of bulk orders and receiving discounts from manufacturers as well as having the shipping costs spread over a larger number of units when compared to having to order the components of your choice from eBay.While you are looking for computers, I do suggest that you take a look at factory outlets from Dell and Lenovo because they offer huge discounts on some of their merchandise either because of cosmetic defects such as scratches that occured during handling or because of selling store-returns and computers that were returned under warranty and repaired.

Mahesh,I have been posting on Xisto as well as Asta Host and have not been receiving the MyCENT emails so I cannot tell which is sending me the MyCENTs but I do know that at least one of the two forums is crediting my account for the posts that I make. You can keep the rest of us posted about what has been happening to the MyCENTs for your postings. I have not been tracking my MyCENTs statistics and I rely entirely on the MyCENT emails and the balance displayed on the Xisto - Support and Billing website to tell when my account has been credited. In the absence of MyCENT emails, I have no clue as to which posts were accounted for because I posted both to Xisto and to Asta Host.The toolbar isn't Meebo - Meebo is a web instant messaging application. I'll look up Wibya to see if I can find the toolbar, not that I have any intention of using it.I have not hopped onto the Android bandwagon yet. It's still all Apple and Nokia-Symbian for me. Nokia has just about abandoned the Symbian platform in favor of Microsoft's Windows for Mobile. With Steve Jobs' passing, the future of Apple's platform seems uncertain. I don't really know which the right platform would be for a tablet or smartphone purchase, but Samsung seems to be pushing forward with the Galaxy and some pretty heavy marketing.The new Invision Power Board forum does take longer when posting messages with the Ajax loading bar. It is supposed to run quicker because there is less data being passed back and forth. I imagine there must be CPU overhead because a WordPress based blog I created for a client that I ran was pretty slow because the server CPU was maxed out in handling all of the requests that the server would get, and it is not even a Reddit or Digg front page kind of site but rather simply a website with about half a dozen concurrent visitors.

StarScream,I am guessing that you used a newer version of PHP when using XAMPP and have the Windows Uniform server running an older version of PHP. When switching to a newer version of PHP, the warnings that appear can be disabled but, ideally, you want to know when you are using deprecated features of the programming language and should be avoiding them. A lot of old PHP code that small organizations use generate warnings and the small organizations do not have the resources to have their software patched to avoid the warnings and they may not have the ability to configure PHP to hide the warnings so the organizations use an older version of PHP. With more organizations sticking to older versions of PHP comes more web hosting firms that continue to offer web hosting on older PHP platforms and that holds back the entire PHP web development community.Eclipse and NetBeans are the two most popular free and open-source integrated development environments for PHP. You should not really bother about setting up a low memory footprint development environment because it would not make much of a difference to the application that you build - when you deploy it on a production environment, there is no need to have an integrated development environment setup. Most integrated development environments are memory hogs. Consider Eclipse, NetBeans, Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft SQL Server Administration Studio, Oracle SQL Developer, and Oracle Data Integrator. Minimizing the memory footprint for an integrated development environment is not really a priority for most software vendors and few developers actually demand it - they invest heavily in their development machines so do not see a need for pushing vendors to reduce memory usage and instead demand more features.If you do not have a system capable of running an integrated development environment, you can still use text editors. On Windows, you can use Notepad++, EditPlus, or TextPad. On Linux, you can use gVim, vi, emacs, gEdit, or NEdit.The LAMPP server itself does not consume as much of the system resources as most enterprise grade application servers but if you are still short on resources, you can use FastHTTPd or nginx instead of Apache. You should be able to run a web server with even 64MB of RAM, provided that you disable the graphical interface of the operating system.

If you want to use your computer for home automation and for setting up a CCTV network, or you want to have a touch screen, you ought to get a desktop because you can easily fit in a PCI Express card into a full-tower case or can get an all-in-one with a rather large touch screen.Barring these needs, a laptop offers pretty much whatever a desktop has to offer and at a lower price point if you do not mind the smaller screen size. Unless you are planning an assembled desktop computer, a laptop computer will cost almost the same even if you were to pick out a desktop with the smallest computer screen (which nowadays is about 21 inches, unless you were to pick out a really low specification which would have an 18 inch or a 19 inch monitor to go with it).From an environmental perspective, a laptop runs more efficiently and has parts that are built to run with lesser electricity. However, from a durability perspective, a desktop computer would last longer and is not something that you would toss into the dumpster after you are done with it so it would be re-used even after it has lived its useful life for you. Some people may argue that this is one of the negative impacts of old desktop computers on the environment because people would still be using old inefficient computers instead of getting newer more energy efficiency computers and electronics. While that may be true, unless the computer is running round the clock, which is unlikely to be the case for many computer users, the cost of building a new computer and processing the waste from an old computer would be much higher on the environment in terms of a carbon footprint when compared to re-using an old computer. If you were to get a computer powered by an Intel Atom processor, you would be using much less electricity than if you were still running on an old computer with an Intel Core 1 processor while still getting comparable computing power (that is debatable but the performance of the two processors would be rather close).When you get a laptop computer, a lot of the components are fixed or soldered onto the mainboard itself or are not user-upgradeable so you would be 'stuck' with whatever you buy with the exception of getting more memory for the computer or upgrading the hard disk drive. However, with a desktop computer, you can change the graphics adapter by swapping in an old dedicated graphics adapter with a newer one, or perhaps even stick with the integrated graphics initially and get a dicrete graphics adapter when you have the budget for it. However, I doubt I would be going down that route right away considering that computer components have got rather cheap and the convenience of using a laptop outweighs the benefits of getting a desktop considering that I frequently move - I mean I shift my location of residence so paying for international shipping and paying for import duties on a desktop computer does not really make much sense considering that laptops can be taken around without any import duties and a laptop is considered a personal item and is not counted as a hand bag.My laptop is in need of replacement and right now I am considering another laptop purchase sometime next year. I may consider holding out till Intel launches their Ivy Bridge processors, which are supposed to be more energy efficient when compared to the current generation of Sandy Bridge processors while offering a twenty percent increase in performance, which does not really seem much when compared to the performance difference between the first generation and second generation of Intel Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 processors. I am considering a larger screen too simply because I do not want to have to get an external display when I need to multi-task, which I tend to do a lot - I watch a movie while working or need to keep track of my downloads while I post to the forums. A 17 inch screen is pretty much the largest that most laptop manufacturers have to offer (though there are some rare laptops with 19 inch screens too and I image those must be heavy) but I may eventually decide to go with a 15 inch screen if I cannot find laptop cases and other accessories for it.

Velma,I am usually on Xisto most of the time so I do not earn much on Xisto either. I remember a long long time ago when the MyCENT script on Xisto was stopped for upgrading the forum and right after the script was back online, I got credit for all of the posts that were made so I can vouch for the fact that we never lose any of the MyCENTs. I have never had any unaccounted posts and the credit does get added to my account somehow even if it is a bit delayed.The Lo-Fi version of Asta Host is slower for me because of the advertisements that have to load with the website. The full-featured version does not have any advertising while I am logged in so it loads so much quicker. In either case, I doubt I would be using the Lo-Fi version of the website for the most part - I am quite happy with the full-featured version of the website.BTW, whenever I got to Xisto through Google, I would land on pages with a pink theme and they looked rather nice. Do you happen to have a screenshot of that theme or perhaps even a saved web page of it? I only got to it once when I had cleared by browser's cookies and cache. Although it was visually rather appealing, it was hard to figure out how to log in - I found a "full-featured interface" link that I followed to get the login link on the upper right of the website. The Lo-Fi version of Xisto did not really compare to that of the old Lo-Fi interface of Xisto though... if there's some way to get the theme ported to the new version of Invision Power Board, that would be really great.

Mr.Dee,As you are not using a content management system for your website, you do not have the ability to configure your setup to send out updates via RSS. If you are running your website on a template engine, such as Smarty, you may be able to create another template with XML output instead of sending out HTML. This approach is the simplest if your website is currently running on a template engine. You may be able to get an RSS template that you can replace the variables in to get your data through. If you are using custom PHP scripts to power your website, you have to code the scripts to generate XML output yourself. You have to escape the bits of data that would be invalid within the XML so you could use some sort of a filter ( a function through which all of the data is passed so you can substitute the data that is invalid XML). The W3C site may be able to help you with validating the XML that you generate. I'm not sure, but I am guessing that they may have an RSS validation service as well.I would classify this thread under programming rather than under telecommunications because I see telecommunications as the signal processing and transmission of signals through radio waves, light, and other forms of communication, rather than the study of data formats and interoperability of information systems, which I see as more of a programming ordeal.

AnnyPhp,I have tried using WordPress, Drupal, CakePHP, Code Igniter, and Barebones PHP (there are two different frameworks with the exact same name; I used the one that was present on Cisco routers). Of the lot, Barebones PHP was quick and simple to use. In comparison, Code Igniter came with a lot of features that I did not really need and so did CakePHP. CakePHP has a scaffolding feature that I found rather useful in developing internal business applications and it sped up the development considerably. Code Igniter, on the other hand, excluded the scaffolding feature in newer versions of its software. WordPress and Drupal are content management systems, but you can do a whole lot with a content management system, getting it to host blogs, websites, shopping carts, and even product catalogs.If you are looking for something that you can develop software with and can run on a cheap old Linux box, you should build your PHP scripts with no framework at all to avoid the overhead. If you run WordPress and hold down the F5 key while the website is open in your browser, you will know what I mean. There are lots of people who complain about the CPU usage of WordPress and there's an article you can Google for titled "WordPress: Destroyer of CPUs" (or something along those lines - search without the quotes). To get around the CPU usage, web masters typically setup their WordPress websites to use some form of caching. W3 Total Cache is currently a favorite among web masters and web developers while WP Super Cache is pretty common among blogs that were setup back in the day when WordPress caching was in its infancy. Some people prefer HyperCache too, so the WordPress community is rather fragmented over their choice of caching plugins.If you want to look at software built without a framework, take a look at the Mantis open-source bug tracking system. It uses no framework and does not create much of a CPU processing overhead. The Mantis bug tracking project is still active and there are frequent updates to the software so you might be able to pick up a thing or two as you follow their development on the project.

Hi!I have not had to setup a bilingual website using WordPress yet, but I get what you are hinting at. You can have WordPress setup in two different folders or can have it host two different sub directories with a single installation. However, an alternative is to create each of the pages twice and in separate categories. WordPress has the ability to add a page to multiple categories so even if you are using WordPress categories for your website, you do not have to give up the use of categories to setup a bilingual WordPress website. When the user signs up, you can display a menu for the pages within a specific category so the user only gets the links to the pages that you specify as the category for the language that the user selects. In summary, you would be using a single installation of WordPress, with a single database, but will be creating categories to represent the two different languages. You will then create separate menus for each of the two languages and display the menu for the language selected by the user.The URLs in the address bar may not be what you would like to see but that should not really matter much anyway.You can integrate WordPress with an existing website by specifying the page as a home page, or by adding a link to the page using a custom menu.

Hi!I visited the website today and it seems to be working normally. I guess you got the help you needed.Moving WordPress between different domain names is the hard part because unlike some other content management systems, WordPress generates absolute URLs, even for the CSS stylesheets! There are ways around it by writing up a plugin for turning the absolute URLs into relative URLs through the WordPress API.The URLs that appear in the database often contain the URL of the posts and are absolute URLs as well, though another developer once mentioned that WordPress does not use those URLs but a few plugins do so you've got to check if any of your plugins are pointing to the wrong URL. WordPress has the domain name within URLs in several different places but you should be able to find them all in the SQL scripts that you use to export data from the database.

If you are a newbie at WordPress theme development, you would no doubt have looked at using the_date() in displaying the dates for each of the posts on a blog. The function has the same naming convention as the_title(), the_author(), and the_content(), so it seems like the most logical choice of WordPress API functions to display the date of a post. However, what many new theme developers do not know is that the the_date() function will only display unique dates. What I mean is that when a date is displayed on a post, if the following post has the same date, the the_date() function does not display the date. This may seem weird but that is the way it works. Perhaps somebody who does not want to display the dates over and over again would find this function useful but for the rest of us, we want the dates to be displayed for each and every post, such as in the post metadata that appears below the title of each post or below the article itself. The solution here is to use the get_the_date() function and echo the return value instead of calling the the_date() function.The get_the_date() function can also be substituted with the the_time() function with a date format parameter. The the_time() function can also be used to output the time in addition to the date, so if you are looking for the time of the post too, the the_time() post is what you are looking for.

The upgraded software on Asta Host does look a whole lot better. I spotted a website still running on a slightly customized default theme of the older version of Invision Power Board so I had a chance to compare the two websites. The sidebar menu of the new version of Invision Power Board can be seen on Xisto as it is missing on Asta Host right now, but you may see the Asta Host sidebar coming up sometime soon as features are activated following the upgrade.The coolest features of the new version of Invision Power Board that I have noticed over the past few days are the progress bar that appears on the top of the web page when an operation is in progress, so you do not accidentally close the window before a post gets through, and the ability to set your current status on your profile by clicking on your username on the top bar of the website (the one on the upper left, next to the Sign Out link). You no longer have to go to the profile page or have to type in a much-too-narrow text box limited by the width of the sidebar.

Velma,The link from forums.html to index.php may be simply a re-map done through Apache. Some web masters configure Apache to display the .html extension instead of the .php extension becuase they believe that it improves their web site's ranking in search engines. It may no longer be true but some people do it anyway so having the Xisto link changed from forums.html to index.php will not really affect the ranking much. However, the folks managing the web application install and maintenance at Xisto does have to ensure that they deals with the page not found 404 errors that the search engine bot gets when it attempts to connect to the old URL to ensure that it retains the page ranking for the old pages, especially if it has a lot of backlinks pointing to forum.html.I tried accessing the lo-fi version of the website but for me it loads slower than the full-featured version of the website because when I am logged in, the forum does not display any advertisements but the lo-fi version of the website does display image based advertisements and that makes the forum load slower than it does right now. Also the navigation in the lo-fi version requires me to navigate through two levels of the forum categories before I can access the posts so I would much rather use the full-featured version or put together a script that picks up posts from the news feed (I'm assuming that the news feed has also been enabled for the new version of the website).Quatrux,I've seen a lot of posts by you on Xisto in the past and have not seen much of you on Xisto but recently I have seen you more often on Xisto than on Asta Host. I haven't been on Asta Host in ages but I decided to check it out to see what theme they have on there. Also, Velma's post mentioning that the upgrade to the Invision Power Board software was on both forums so that prompted me to take another look. I could not find references to the Xisto website on the Xisto - Web Hosting website so I simply assumed that Xisto was not around any more but with the upgrade, I got the link again and I stand corrected - Asta Host is as active as ever, or perhaps more active than it used to be.BTW, the new logos for Xisto and Asta Host are up! Xisto had a different logo when I checked yesterday but it changed now. Also, I noticed that the logos have a plain-color background unlike the gradient that has been applied to the header bar so it looks a little out of place... it is the kind of thing that happens when you scroll and Windows (the operating system) only refreshes a part of the window (the GUI container).