k_nitin_r

Piracy may be unethical and illegal, but it does help drive costs down. If it were not for piracy, publishers wouldn't stop to think, "Is this priced too much? Will these prices drive fans to piracy?" With pirated software, music, and films becoming so common that there are street vendors who exclusively sell pirated discs, there are products competing against their unlicensed counterparts and the only way to get consumers to buy the genuine product is to create a sense of loyalty. If you want to support us, buy our merchandise from the stores and not from the street vendor who can offer it for so much lower.There are commercial products that are pirated in developing nations because the average user simply cannot afford to buy them. A license for Microsoft Windows or even Microsoft Office alone costs as much as the entire computer hardware for a budget computer in India. Local PC manufacturers are more than happy to bundle Linux with their systems because it helps them compete against other brands that do pay the licensing fee. The Linux based systems end up in the hands of consumers who later have a need to run Windows-based software and eventually they run a boot-legged copy of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. The OEM versions that Microsoft sells are quite reasonably priced and the difference is pretty negligible for somebody in a developed nation and the added cost for an OEM license is affordable for a computer user even in a developing nation, but the cost of buying the products off the shelf is simply prohibitive for consumers in developing nations.Apple's AppStore, which sells products for about a dollar for most software seems to be the way to go except for the fact that it is an online transaction. If there were a similar model for consumers to walk into a store and pay up to five dollars for software, they would gladly walk into the store and walk away with their installed software. Credit card purchases seem to be a roadblock for most people since it raises uncertainties over charges and is pretty much analogous to handing your car keys to some guy on the streets - you never really know what he or she would do with the car while you aren't looking. Deals with cellular phone carriers to deduct prepaid phone credit or bill the expense to the consumer might work out better but people seem to be more confortable with handing out cash than anything else these days.The sale of blank CDs hasn't really stopped anybody but the folks who buy exclusively from street-vending pirates. People copy stuff off their buddies using USB flash disks, external hard disk drives, over bluetooth or infrared, over a LAN connection, or even through Internet file sharing. We can't really blame CDs without pointing at all of the other media that people use to copy files.

Hi!@chetdekThe use of the term Framework is not strict enough to clearly identify what one is speaking of. For example, one can refer to the Java framework, which includes all of the classes provided as a part of the Java Standard Edition (J?SE) or we could refer to the Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT) as a framework. AWT is included within Java, which makes the concept of a framework indistinguishable from a collection of frameworks. The Microsoft .NET 'framework' is simply a collection of frameworks such as the Windows Presentation Foundation, the Windows Communication Foundation, the Windows Workflow Foundation, the ASP.NET MVC framework, and many others.Although Microsoft has provided us with the .NET framework, there are open-source frameworks such as Log4Net, Spring.NET and others that are available to .NET developers. Log4Net is a pretty light weight logging framework for .NET that rivals Microsoft Enterprise Library logging framework (the MSEL, Microsoft Enterprise Library, is not a part of the .NET framework). For developing Windows Forms applications, we use the WinForm framework, which is part of the .NET Framework. Spring.NET provides many of the features of the Microsoft Enterprise Library such as data validation and inversion of control, and is an attempt at porting Spring for Java onto the .NET platform.Microsoft has been building in the functionality that 3rd party frameworks have been providing and as it is a commercial effort, they have been quite successful at replicating the efforts of the open-source movement and keeping up with open-source frameworks for the .NET platform. Language Integrated Query, Linq, along with the Entity Framework is a pretty good alternative that Microsoft has provided to match NHibernate. Language Integrated Query is simply a way for the programming language to be able to specify the data that is required and a provider hooks up the request with the actual database access code. The SQL statements are automatically generated by the Entity framework. If the application you are developing specifically targets the Microsoft SQL Server database, you could use Linq2Sql instead of the Microsoft Entity Framework. The Entity framework enables your application to achieve database independence in that you can connect to a variety of other databases. Linq itself, however, is not specific to the Entity framework or to Linq2Sql and can be extended to NHibernate too by adding in a provider.Generally, developments that become a part of the Microsoft .NET framework start off as separate frameworks. You might have heard of the ASP.NET MVC framework that has recently gained popularity among ASP.NET developers. The MVC framework started off as a separate library that ASP.NET developers had to add in to their projects and include with their deployments until recently that MVC has become a part of the ASP.NET framework, as is the case with ASP.NET-AJAX. However, the Microsoft Enterprise Library has always remained separate from the core .NET framework.An advantage of Microsoft's model of putting together all of its frameworks under the ".NET" badge is that installation of .NET ensures that all of the built-in libraries are present. However, if you do want to install your application on a machine that does not include the .NET framework, that would be one huge download as it is a bundle of a lot of different fraeworks, including those that you do not need. In addition, if a framework has been included with the .NET framework, it would not be possible for Microsoft to remove it from the framework because it would break backward compatibility. For example, the Linq2Sql framework included within the .NET framework will remain available although the entity framework has superseded it for all projects that have begun after the entity framework has been released.

Hi!@Little AsteriskWhat you need to do is get a theme that can display the categories along with the pages in the top bar. You can either get a custom theme developed by somebody or find a free theme that already does this. Alternatively, you might be able to find a plugin that can do this for you. Modifying the actual WordPress code is highly discourages so you should use a theme-based or plugin-based solution to customize your blog.For the most part, WordPress fits the needs of most individuals and organizations that use it. If you do want to make extensive modifications or feel that such a need does arise, you ought to switch to a more advanced content management system. Joomla might be a better fit for you if you find yourself having to deal with a lot of customization because you don't really have to write any code for common changes.@kosmikI find WordPress to be a very versatile and extensible blogging engine. There are a lot of free plugins and themes available, with a few commercially-supported themes cropping up as Automattic has been promoting them recently. Other systems are more commercialized and although your choices do seem more clear, there is a lot more that you can do with your budget when you are working with WordPress..

Hi!You must have seen an inline frame, often referred to as an IFRAME. They are pretty useful for displaying HTML documents within other HTML documents, though they are annoying for some people who want to bookmark pages on the website. When used in an appropriate manner, they can help in getting around some of the limitations of Javascript AJAX and are quite common on web email providers. The inline frame can scroll independently of the main browser window.

Hi!Wow! I've pretty much lost track of this thread and there's so much being said to me up there after my post on the thread. The flood control has been slowing my down in responding to forum posts. Here's my reply to the individual posters:@nolanI completely agree with you there. Popularity of languages is relative to the group that one is referring to. Web designers prefer to use PHP due to its simplicity. Some of the folks who worked with Flash in the early days would probably want to work with ColdFusion because it comes from the same vendor and probably because they have a license to work with the entire suite of products that Macromedia had to offer. Within universities, perhaps C, C++, and Java are more popular than any of the other scripting or programming language that the computing world has to offer. Programming language preferences vary between the developers in bioinformatics, who prefer Perl over all else with Java coming as a close second, and developers in software development firms who either work with C# or Java.@QuatruxAlthough CMS systems do vary greatly in functionality, we probably need to define the minimum functionality that needs to be provided by a content management system in order for it to be considered as one. An echo statement provides output to the end user, but does not really provide any interface for the administrator or content writers to submit content. The approval and disapproval process for articles is probably another feature that many content management systems have. I can't really think of anything more that a content management system should absolutely have, but I guess those two are the basics. Many content management systems support plugins so you do not have to modify the core system to provide additional functionality. Proprietary content management systems may not necessarily provide this functionality but would instead hand you the code for modification along with some documentation at which point your might be on your own.I'm a pretty big WordPress fan too, but there are times when I did wish for some capabilites that WordPress did not include and that I had to turn to other content management systems for. It may be possible to write a plugin for WordPress that adds the required functionality, I preferred to go with something that already had the feature available out-of-the-box.

Hi!I have been hearing good things about Feather CMS, but I haven't been able to find much information about it. It is a traditional CMS system at the core but it does support blogging and polls right out of the box. I haven't seen much information on their website, but have known Feather CMS based systems to handle very heavy loads due to their efficient caching mechanism.Feather CMS claims that it has one of the simplest interfaces among content management systems but because I have not used Feather CMS, I can either refute nor support that statement.WordPress has a very small learning curve for both administrators and developers. You can upgrade the system and install plugins without having to leave the web interface. The WordPress plugin directory lists pretty much every free plugin under the sun and as PHP source code isn't compiled, the source code is available for modification and re-distribution under the GPL license.Drupal is pretty simple too, but doesn't have as large a user base as WordPress. Joomla is a bit more complex in terms of development and administration but you just might end up with a more structured system with Joomla.

Hi!Just in case, you consider a car purchase in the future, you might want to consider a car that hasn't travelled over 100,000km. The car quoted would have to priced really low and even then perhaps you might want to use it only for short distance travel.You should also look for any signs of damage that were covered up - look for uneven paint, and look for any chassis damage. Fixing bodywork near the fuel tank can get expensive so if there are any dents arounds the fuel tank you would have to negotiate for a lower price as you would have to pay for the costs of fixing it.If the car has an expired registration or insurance, you might have to check if the vehicle is roadworthy because that's the first tell-tale sign that the car may have failed emission tests and cannot be registered or has been in a major accident that the insurance won't cover it.

Hi!@The SimpletonI would like to clarify that HTML is not a scripting language but is rather a markup language, as the acronym's expansion indicates - it is a Hypertext Markup Language. It is quite similar to a page description language that tells a parser what to place and in which location on a page. Markup languages offer more flexibility than page description languages in that the web browser can wrap text based on the screen resolution and the size of the browser window. The web browser may also apply presentation layouts to the markup through an external means, such as by using cascading style sheets (CSS) or extensible stylesheet language (XSL). For Extensible Markup Language (XML), you can apply either CSS or XSL, but for HTML, you can only apply CSS. You may decide to go with using attributes within HTML instead of using CSS, which is commonly used by WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors such as Adobe DreamWeaver (formerly Macromedia DreamWeaver) and Microsoft Frontpage.Using HTML to build your website has no security issues as such because there is nothing that is executed. The HTML is rendered by your web browser but there is no execution of code. Think of it as opening a bitmap (BMP) or JPEG file in a picture viewer - there's no execution of code but the picture viewer determines the values of the red, green, and blue components of a pixel (or in some cases, with other file formats, the cyan, magenta, yellow, black components that are used for print media and are converted to their red, green, and blue equivalents for display on-screen).BTW, the HTML 5 standard does include specific provisions for WYSIWYG editors, much to the ire of purists who indicate that the standard should do away with 'lame' sections of the old standard in the interest of cleaner markup that can be parsed more easily.

Hi!@web_designerI remember my mom would call me by phone too because my room was upstairs and the kitchen was downstairs, so coming up to my room meant climbing up a flight of stairs so it was easier to just call up and have me come down. Later, we moved out to a regular apartment and it was easier to get to my room than to pick up the phone and dial.I've seen the comic strips that you've posted, but I find some really interesting ones on Dilbert that I think I can relate to in certain situations at the office. BTW, you can also watch a couple of the Dilbert animated series toons - the one of the outsourcing to Elbonia is particularly amusing.

Hi!You can get a copy of the Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 web browser for Windows XP by installing all of the updates available through Windows Updates. I'm assuming they haven't discontinued the download of existing downloads for Windows XP (I'm not sure if they even discontinue old downloads).I still run Windows XP Service Pack 3 OEM that was pre-installed on my IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad T60 when I got it. Anytime I restore the operating system from the operating system restore CDs that I created using a utility provided with the computer, I run windows updates a couple of times till it indicates that there are no more updates available for Windows. It's time consuming, but if you wish to do it just once, you might want to get a system administrator from the office to do it for you because many offices maintain a server containing Windows updates and if the administrator is skilled enough, he can get it working without getting your computer to join the corporate domain... even if he can't, he can put your computer on the domain, install all of the updates, and separate it from the domain again.After installing all of the updates on Windows XP, you should have Microsoft Internet Explorer 8! There are minor differences between Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP and Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7, as is apparent from the version number displayed in the Help - About Internet Explorer dialog box. For the most part, you will not notice any difference between the two though.If you can't seem to get Internet Explorer working through the Windows Updates, you might want to consider using the system restore disks that you were provided with when you bought the computer, or you might have to get a copy of Windows XP through some other means (you won't find them on store shelves any more unless you happen to find a store that sells old stuff).

I use Delicious for bookmarking. It's quite simple to use and looks just like a directory, building the social aspects around the core functionality. Digg and other websites of the sort are social bookmarking websites and they do make it difficult for the average user to maintain a list of bookmarks that he or she likes. Perhaps a desktop application interfacing with the social bookmarking websites would help solve the problem of different complex user interfaces - something that DestroyTwitter, TweetDeck and other apps of the sort did for Twitter and FaceBook.

Sure it can! Didn't you see what happened to that poor guy in District 13 after he picked up that canister built with alien technology and morphed into an alien? Not funny? Sorry, I just had to say that after reading the title of the thread :-PI'm at work right now and instead of socializing with the natives, my co-workers, here I am posting on the Xisto. Sure, it's definitely a negative sign but I guess there's got be a good mix between stuff. If I were going about the office all the time, the folks here would simply be irritated. Between work, talking to co-workers, and posting to discussion forums, it's also a part of my job as a knowledge worker to read about recent developments and that takes quite a bit out of my time. Sure, the social image that folks who are adept at using technology puts us somewhere between a rodent and a cactus tree (Umm.. is it a plant or a tree?). In either case, the job stability in the I.T. industry seems to be marginally better than in other industries and when we get laid off, there's some freelance work to go around too.The use of social networking sites has helped people get in touch with one another. Apparently, Orkut was started as a means of getting a couple back together, or so the email forward says. Email forwards sent to folks you know tells them that you're thinking about them but don't really know what to say to them and so decided to send them a forward instead... though if they notice that the To field is blank, they would know that you just have a mailing list that you send the email forward to and it gets sent around to all of the folks on your mailing list.

Hi!@BaniboyOh, I wasn't really aware of the gesture support on resistive screens apart from the basic scrolling. Is the gesture support on resistive screens limited to a single point gesture, or do they also have resistive screens that detect changes in the shape of the blob and effectively emulate the abilities of capacitive touch screens? I mean does it support things like pinching to zoom out, sliding a finger across the screen to move to the next page, and things of the sort? I've got a GPS device that supports scrolling by moving a finger across the screen and it's got a resistive screen; it does not, however, support zoom in and zoom out with gestures and instead it has an on-screen button to push.You are right about the size and resolution of screens. GPS devices come with larger screens than the iPhone yet they cost so much less. Resistive screens are cheaper to manufacture when compared to capacitive screens but the feel of it just doesn't seem right, probably because I haven't been using any resistive screens extensively - touch to click just felt more natural than the push to touch since it's an on-screen button, and like you said, it's the one that regular users would prefer.

Hi!I've been on and off on the Trap... errr... Xisto. I've got to get used to the new name.I see a couple of the old members from Trap pretty active on Xisto too - Bani, Nameless, anwii, ... but, yeah, there are some others who went missing. I've been occupied with course work when I took up philosophy. I wouldn't say I took it up willingly as it was a required course and so I had to take it as a part of the program. Philosophy is not really my cup of tea so I had to put in a little more effort and cut back on some of the things that I love to do, in order to earn my "A". Keeping up the grade point average is hard work!Anyway, so what have the rest of you folks been up to?

Hi!When I logged into Trap 17 and noticed that I was being redirected to Xisto, I thought there was some sort of merger or acquisition too. There was a poll for whether Trap 17 was an appropriate name and whether it should be changed and I'm pretty sure a lot of folks out here wanted it to stay the same. Trap 17 was built upon the culture at an Internet cafe and it had this red background with a black spider web. Xisto is a departure from that old name and tradition yet I like the new website with the mouse roll over and roll out effects.BTW, what have you been doing while away for so long? School? Vacation? Wedding? Personal project?

Hi! @Baniboy There are a couple of websites out there that send out messages via GoogleTalk whenever the users are online. However, when the users are offline, they switch to email instead. With free/economical hosting providers, it may not be possible to implement GoogleTalk integration due to the limitations of the hosting service. There are a lot of websites that use Skype or GoogleTalk links on their Contact Us page and many forums let other members see a user's IM IDs too, so that's one way they use IM instead of email. When using IM, blocking spam is harder because most IM clients do not have automated spam filters. BTW, logged in users do not see advertisements on Xisto. Perhaps you're not logged in or have cookies disabled? @rvalkass One way to get around the problem is to hold messages in queue till the user comes online. Skype does not support true offline messaging but rather the Skype client holds on to the messages till the user comes online and sends the messages out. What this means is that both users have to be online at the same time to community and composing messages to an offline user simply gets the messages queued till both users are online again. As Skype uses a peer-to-peer technology for communication, offline messaging would be hard to accomplish when compared to Yahoo Messenger, GoogleTalk, or MSN Messenger that have a client-server architecture. @Little Asterisk There's a website that provides throw-away email addresses for use, so unless you're expecting to receive a password or activation link via email, you can use one of the throw-away email addresses. Some email services give you a temporary email address. Examples of such services are: https://www.24fundraiser.com/ and 10minutemail.com

Hi!@Little AsteriskI kinda like the flash-based website and do have concerns about search engines being able to index the contents of the website, but in terms of user experience, it's pretty cool. Flash often takes the text out of the Flash object and places it as a comment within the HTML while publishing the website, so I'm not really sure if it does help search engines find the content. I do notice a difference between the main website and the forums though, so it does make it apparent that they are two separate systems.A user can access his or her own posts by visiting the profile - it's pretty much the same as for Twitter or Google Buzz, where you access a user's profile to find posts by him or her.

Hi!@Little AsteriskThanks for the information.Although the STYLE and the SCRIPT tags weren't all that much of a bother, the DOCTYPE was just a complex addition to the top of every HTML document in the past. Browsers rendered web pages based on whether they had a valid DOCTYPE or were just a bunch of HTML so it wasn't something we could just leave out. The quirks, the browser compatibility issues, and stuff just keeps making it harder and harder for newbies to get started in web design and web development. When I first got started with web design in 1998, HTML was pretty minimal and CSS wasn't widely used. With the focus on separation of the presentation layer, we got MVC and 'cleaner' markup with most of the presentation being moved into CSS.Right now, the hardest part about web design is trying to get something to work across all browser because although there is a standard out there for something, not all browsers incorporate it. For example, the rounded corners are supported by Gecko based browsers (Example: Mozilla Firefox) and Webkit based browsers (Example: Apple Safari and Google Chrome) but not by Internet Explorer browsers. The ellipsis through CSS for long text is supported by Webkit based browsers and Microsoft Internet Explorer, but not by Gecko based browsers. Both of these are part of the HTML 5 spec, so building websites according to current standards does not always work across all browsers. Rendering browser-specific output causes problems when caching proxies and web server caches are used, which complicates the whole mix of problems further. It just might be simpler to deal with it all by putting together everything in a Flex, Flash, Applet or Silverlight object and serve it to clients as a rich Internet application. But then again, you've got version incompatibilities between different versions of Flash for Flex and Flash content, different versions of the Java runtime that might make using Applets a problem, and Silverlight has got multiple versions too. Users may not have the plugins needed for displaying the objects, such as Apple's lack of support for Adobe Flash on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and the iPad.

Hi!@johnnyabcIf what you want to do is hook up your PC to your TV, all you need to do is run a cable from the VGA/HDMI/DVI/AV port of your computer to the television. Now, it is perfectly understandable for most people to not have matching port types on their computer and their television sets, so there are converters available. You can convert an AV signal into an RF signal, or vice-versa, with a simple cable-like converter since they are both analog signals. You can convert an HDMI signal into a DVI signal, or vice-versa, with another simple cable-like converter since they are both digital signals. However, if you do want to have something that converts between analog or digital, or converts between different modulation types (frequency modulation, phase modulation, and amplitude modulation for those of you who are physics freaks and electronic geeks), you would need to buy a device that processes the signal from the input source and converts it into the standard of the output source. These converters typically cost much more than a cable (even the cables are priced more than they should).There is a lot of conversion between different standards that modern television sets perform so if you have a television that supports all of the different standard interfaces, you don't really need to buy a converter. If you do not have a television that takes in the kind of interface you need, you can get devices that range from simple devices that cost about $70 to really complex devices that cost over $800, in which case you might be better off justing buying a new television consider how cheap the plasma and LCD television sell for these days.If what you would like to do is display the picture from multiple input sources simultaneously, the feature is described as Picture-in-Picture, commonly represented with the PiP acronym as Tramposh has suggested in his reply to the thread. The higher end converters as well as higher end televisions provide this as a feature, and is analogous to multi-tasking in Windows/Linux/Mac OS where you have one window displaying the interface for one application while another window displays the interface for another application (or better yet, VLC player playing one movie, while the Windows Media Player plays another one). The PiP feature is supported different by different television sets - some televisions limit you to viewing one other channel while displaying the primary selected channel in the background (think of it as an image viewer displaying a picture while you have another one as your desktop wallpaper). Other televisions let you watch multiple inputs (more than two) simultaneously. There are others still, such as televisions from Samsung, that have the feature enabled on some television models but others that have a very minimal price difference do not have the feature (in fact, the television menu even provides the PiP as a menu item but reports that the feature is not enabled).If you get a TV tuner card (or a high-end graphics card that can perform a similar function), you might as well get one of those because you can create digital recordings, using your computer as a PVR, and can do different stuff with different software without having to rely on the television to provide you with the needed features.

The XHTML 2 standard aims at making the web more friendly for XML parsers. You can write a script that can fetch data from web pages just as you can for XML documents. XHTML 2 drops support for some of the older elements that we have all grown accustomed to and have been using for a while, so there's a bit of un-learning and re-learning involved. Switching from current standards to XHTML 2 involves a greater learning curve than for previous standards or even HTML 5. As an example of one of the changes made by the XHTML 2 standard, IFRAMEs are no longer supported. This makes development of scripts that use XML parsers simpler because they no longer have to determine if the tag being accessed is an IFRAME and they do not have to fetch multiple documents to perform operations, such as a search.HTML 5 aims at achieving compatibility with older standards so documents created with an older version of the standard can be parsed as documents following the newer standard. It eases the development of web-based applications with all of the enhancements that have been introduced. In fact, Google has decided to stop using Google Gears for their Google Docs application and would be using HTML 5 to provide the lost feature set. In the interim, however, users no longer have the option to use Google Docs as an offline application. If you are a web designer or a web developer and would like to move to a standard where you can put your existing skills to use, HTML 5 would be a better choice than XHTML 2.

Hi!@RigaudonYou are correct. Omegle is a predecessor of ChatRoulette. To build upon the success of Omegle, ChatRoulette added video and to keep up, Omegle had to introduce video too. However, Omegle's video chat doesn't seem to work as well as ChatRoulette's does. There are a couple of users who have posted about problems with Omegle's video chat while ChatRoulette's video chat works fine for them. I did get Omegle's video chat working once, but that was about it. Both video chat services have way too much mature content and unless they find some way to moderate chat, their services would simply go the way of the dinosaurs.

Hi!@kleongI've got an iPhone that I sync with my laptop using iTunes 9.1.0.79. It works just fine and so I'm not really sure of why you are experiencing problems with it. Did you download iTunes off the Apple website and install it, or did you get it with the automatic upgrades from the Bonjour Apple updater service?Could you provide more information about your setup, such as which operating system you use, is the operating system 32-bit or 64-bit, which iPhone OS do you have?

Omegle is a pretty good idea, but the Internet community that it attracts isn't something that you or I would want to hang out with. In response to Omegle, ChatRoulette introduced the concept of video chats with strangers and now Omegle has video chat too.Video chat takes away anonymity and although that does increase openness, most people don't have a webcam setup. The Omegle video chat doesn't work for everybody though ChatRoulette simply works. There's also too much mature content on Omegle and ChatRoulette and there just isn't anything that can be done about it without driving people away. But then again, in its current state, it is already driving people away, especially with all of the mature content on video chat. The report abuse feature can't really be used to do much because the users do not have to sign up for the service - the lack of signup is actually one of the more appealing things about the website because you can just get to the website and start chatting right away. Introducing single sign-on or a sign-in through a third party wouldn't really help either because a lot of people would not want to trust chat websites with their credentials on other websites.There are a lot of clones of Omegle and ChatRoulette that have been coming up in recent days. Many of them seem to be customized versions of commercially available scripts, and there are a lot of freelance projects on creating Omegle and ChatRoulette clones too.@The SimpletonThere are a whole lot of users on Omegle and ChatRoulette because I rarely manage to get the same user again. There has got to be a huge number of losers too though because I keep getting connected to folks who start off a conversation with an "asl?" and disconnect the very minute the answer to that question indicates a male.@Soviet RatheThere are some really amusing conversations that you can have on Omegle and ChatRoulette. Perhaps one of the cooler things that you can do is when you're really mad about your boss, you can tell people on Omegle or ChatRoulette because you don't really know any of those people. Of course, giving out personal information isn't something one ought to do, especially with how easy it is to find information over the Internet after you hand out a bit of information about yourself.@Ho-oh's RealmThat line really does work, although I've changed it to "my age is 0, my gender is undefined, and my location is undefined" in keeping with the stuff we see in dynamic programming languages :-PApparently, it seems to keep all of the people of distasteful interests away.@The Dark HackerFinding an interesting conversation on Omegle takes a couple of tries. A lot of people post their interesting conversations online to share with others and the sharing bit is a whole lot more fun. Although, after you have read some really ultra-cool conversations that other people have had on Omegle, you would be disappointed with the ones that you have subsequently.@Saint MichaelThe video chat on Omegle hardly gets me anything interesting... and there's a lot of graphic content out there that makes video chat on Omegle seriously NSFW, not that I spend all that much time in the office on Omegle or anything. Some people have put on costumes and found other computer game characters... either that or it's all photoshopped and is an attempt to get us all to look.

Patience is dead. No arguing there. It is dead. R.I.P., Patience. People these days just have no patience, just like the guy who I saw run the red light yesterday despite the heavy traffic fine that he could have had to pay, not to mention the 15-day impounding of his vehicle.The day when we could take a walk in the morning for the pleasure rather than the weight loss, the day when we could wait in a queue with the excitement building up rather than the irritation, and the time when we could wait at a restaurant table for the meal to cook rather than remind the waiter (or waitress) about how much time has passed, are long gone.People demand perfection, yet they say, "I want it NOW!!" They then complain about something that hasn't been done very well and blame it on worksmanship. People insist they have the ambition to grow, yet they lack the patience to develop their skills to get to where they want to be. People complain about other around them, yet they fail to take the time to get to know them and understand their circumstances.Where does impatience come from? What makes people get upset when others take just a little longer than they usually do to perform something? Over commitment. People have way too much to do and they lack the time and the resources to do it. Moving away from joint families that were common in the past and moving toward smaller nuclear families has had fewer people trying to get more done. Single moms try to balance the pressures of work life with raising the kids. People are increasingly committing themselves to more than they can actually perform in order to make an extra buck and they lack the work ethic to finish what they already have before going out to get more. They crave recognition over responsibility. They want to be rewarded for work done before it actually gets done, yet once their pockets are filled their mind wanders onto the next piece of work without the patience to complete something that they have actually been paid for.Patience was taught at a very young age when people had to work to satisfy their cravings for a cone of ice cream or a bar of chocolate. Adults of today have failed to learn what children of previous generations had learned and practiced. People today place too much value on money and less on getting something done just right, spending time with family, and being nice to other people.@Running with scissorsMP3 players and portable video players have their uses for meaningful stuff too - you can use them to catch up with listening to verses from the bible, if you have a greater value for religion and the message of God, or watching an episode of a series that you have to create a write-up about, if you value time and want to get more accomplished in lesser time. @anwiiA long time ago, I used to get car sick and I would think to myself, "When will this end?" It wasn't really a lack of patience. I would sit quietly in the back seat, looking out the window. Hey, "are we there yet," is the name of a film, isn't it?@OpaqueThat is very true. Patience is often considered a part of spirituality. We see Buddhist monks always in their calm and composed state. Many religious practitioners, meditate to clear their minds and make themselves more patient.@RigaudonThe flood control gets so annoying! I know it may seem like I'm being impatient, but I've got other stuff to do and I'd like to finish posting the message that I've composed before I start on that other thing. Sure, posting more than half a dozen different messages in under twenty minutes is a lot, but if all I want to do is post four reply messages within fifteen minutes and then return to the forum the next day, it does get very restrictive and limit participation in the forums.@Sheep DogI believe all of them, respect, decency, common sense, and patience, are tied together in some way. People of older generations took the time to show their respect for other people, and they took the time to think through their decisions. Making decisions at the spur of the moment may sound like it is a smart thing to do, considering the current emphasis on efficiency and speed, but a well thought plan can go much further than a half-baked idea that was put into place in haste. More and more people are developing animal-like tendencies, with irritation and violence mounting among people waiting in queues.

Hi!Notepad++ is open source and free! I love Notepad++ too and I use it for quick edits, though when I'm working on something complex I switch to Adobe Dreamweaver, which is commercial software. I haven't had a chance to look at the HTML editor in Open Office though I don't really like using Open Office except for when I have to edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations due to its long startup time.The folks at work provide me with a bundle of Adobe software - the Adobe Master Collection. It includes Adobe Fireworks, Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Acrobat Professional, InDesign, and lots of other stuff from Adobe. I often using Microsoft Visual Studio when editing HTML within an ASP.NET project, but it's primarily because most other editors don't provide autocomplete support, which Microsoft refers to as Intellisense, when working with the ASP.NET tags. In addition, when using the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC framework, an enhancement that works over the traditional ASP.NET WebForms framework, we frequently have to use server-side code - even for generating the FORM begin and end tags, the INPUT tags for the form fields, the SELECT tags for dropdown lists and list boxes, and the LABEL tags to associate labels with the form fields. Although some developers may have simply included in the HTML tags manually when working with the ASP.NET MVC framework version 1, the ASP.NET MVC framework version 2 automatically generates the code required for form field validation and thus provides a compelling reason to use server-side code for generating the HTML markup for the forms.Just as I use Microsoft Visual Studio when working with ASP.NET solutions, I use Eclipse when working with PHP or Java JSP projects, and occasionally use NetBeans for Java JSP projects. Eclipse is quite popular as a platform upon which to build integrated development environments for software and web developers, and there are a couple of HTML editors that are based on the Eclipse platform as well. Aptana is a pretty good example of an IDE built over the Eclipse framework for HTML and Javascript development. Aptana did support PHP earlier, but dropped support for PHP scripts in later releases.Adobe Dreamweaver is quite simple to use and it provides autocomplete and snippets for most common functions. I have not been able to get autocomplete for writing jQuery within Adobe Dreamweaver yet, but Dreamweaver does have plenty of commercial add-ons and I'm sure there must be one out there that enhances the auto-complete abilities of Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver also provides limited autocomplete for ASP.NET, JSP, and PHP scripts. Some folks out there use an alternate Javascript library, such as Mootools, ExtJS, Prototype, Scriptaculous, YahooUI, and any of the other popular Javascript libraries out there. jQuery has become the more popular of the lot and is here to stay, so it would be really neat if the HTML editors with autocomplete include support for jQuery, if not for any of the other Javascript libraries.@mandlaThe name Expression didn't come from Frontpage Express, but is rather another creation from their marketing team. The Express suffix usually indicates a product that Microsoft provides as freeware but with reduced functionality. For example, the Microsoft SQL Server Express edition is limited when compared to another of the other editions of Microsoft SQL Server, such as the Standard or the Enterprise editions. Similarly, the SQL Server Management Studio Express edition does not provide complete functionality, even when using it to connect to the full version of the database server - the database server includes a full-featured edition of the SQL Server Management Studio.