rob86

What? Where are these games? New big name games only cost $80 CAD, unless the price has jumped a lot in the last few years. I haven't had the hardware to run new games for years, so I don't buy any Even popular "award winning" games from independent groups don't cost half that much. So I'm wondering what kind of games your friends are selling for $100. Some people make and sell games created by RPG Maker. A lot of people think that's lame, because it isn't very original (if you play any RPG maker made games, the graphics are often the same in different games which is definitely an unappealing sign of unprofessionalism) but if the story and characters aren't too bad, it's worth something I guess. I wish I could make a strategy war game. Not necessarily a huge one like Starcraft or something, but something that's at least enjoyable for a simple game.

What you're speaking of reminds me of Doom 3. It was widely regarded as being extremely boring but visually amazing but a lot of people loved the experience because of the atmosphere the graphics created. I want to make a game that plays awesomely. I don't have the artistic ability to focus on looks! Then again, I don't have the ability to make a game at all. I wouldn't mind making a simple game, but I think it's hard to learn how to do that.

I was checking out the satellite internet services here a few months ago, and they were practically a scam. Our government worked out a deal to get us "affordable" satellite internet, they apparently didn't do much research into the so called great services this ISP was offering. They advertised their super fast download speeds, but they don't even mention stuff like bandwidth caps. They limited your speed to dial up speed at every opportunity but this was all in the fine print, hidden away in small print in the terms. They also had a cap on how much you could download, a mere 240mb per day, and how much browsing per hour before they cut you down to dialup speeds. They also forbid any kind of downloading of torrents, legal or not. People have to check out these services, as companies will do anything to trick unsuspecting people into wasting money.

I'm looking at my xampp installation (for linux) and it looks pretty close to what you're describing, but almost all of those "files" you named are really folders/directories. I only have TWO files, 1. lampp 2. RELEASENOTES Even though they call it xampp, I still have to type lampp start from the command line. So maybe the xampp you see is the right thing. I don't know, it seems to be different for some reason since you're on mac, I don't see a xampp.pot. Here's a screen shot of how I started it http://i31.tinypic.com/nh1444.jpg

Gaming communities? If there's a word to describe the prejudice and negativity towards people with slow internet connections then I'm a victim of it! Some games like Command&Conquer and Starcraft were designed in a way that let people with slow connections play, it's not so noticeable, but most game developers don't take into account poor dial-up users and assume everyone has broadband connections. I've tried playing a few older games online that I thought my connection could handle, but I've met the same reception every time. People are like, U wanna play? I'm like, sure! They're like this is laggy! I'm like sorry, I'm on dial-up, maybe you should host and see if it's faster? They're like .............block............ :lol:I know it's annoying to play with someone using a slow connection, hey I experience the lag too!, but I wish they'd be a little more polite about it!

I don't really understand why people make open source remakes of a lot of games. I don't meant the small arcade games or card games, but the full fledged ones that take a lot of time. I've tried a few open source remakes of popular games, and they don't really compare to the commercial games they're copying, so why bother? Half of them are still buggy, some of them are years behind in the gaming world like FreeCiv. I love Civilization, but why would I play FreeCiv when I could play one of Sid Meier's Civilization's, which are better? FreeCiv would be an okay game, if Sid Meier was never born and Civ wasn't around years ago. I think the people who work on these games could make a great ORIGINAL game which would be a better use of their skills, time and effort. That way, they wouldn't always be compared to the original commercial games, and I might be more interested in playing a free, open source game if it was even a bit original. I just don't understand why they make a carbon copy of a successful game of earlier years.

I'm not sure where you are in the installing process now but I think Wordpress must come with some instructions. ..."WordPress is well known for its ease of installation. Under most circumstances installing WordPress is a very simple process and takes less than five minutes to complete." - Wordpress Well they say it's easy anyway . Where exactly are you in the installation progress? Do you have your server up and running? As far as I know, you should be able to type LOCALHOST/ and you should see some kind of a webpage if it's running. I've never used a mac, but I'll assume localhost works there too. You might have said if it works already, but I just skimmed through what was already said here. After you get it working, You should be able to access phpmyadmin which let's you continue the installation process. https://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress Follow the detailed instructions, and you should be okay.

Puppy linux is great windows replacement, but be aware that it's probably not really in the same league as the bigger distributions like Ubuntu because it's really meant to be for older computers or people really interested in performance. It's meant to be light and fast, it's bundled software is designed to be light and fast as well, you sacrifice a lot in the fancy graphics department and maybe other areas. This might be okay for some people. I only have one computer, so I'm going to stick with Ubuntu as it's one of the most popular OS's, and it works good too, but I'm definitely wishing I had kept an older computer to install PupLinux on.I actually never had any problems with blue screens of death on XP. Windows ME was another story. Bluescreens every 5 minutes.As for your switch to Linux networker, what kind of music software are you trying to replace? My friend (not on Trap) and I do some music recording, and we try quite a few different music software. I haven't tried any completely linux compatible software yet but I plan to and will post here if I find anything. My friend, who's done a bit more software browsing than I, hasn't been too satisfied with the music recording options from what I hear.There's a program called Wine, which lets you run windows applications in Linux. I've tried this on a few things, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.There's also another alternative, I think called Vmware or Virtualbox, which lets you install Windows inside of Linux, (I think?) and you can run every windows software that way. I think the catch is, it slows your computer down a bit running an OS inside another OS. I havent tried it.

When I was looking for a way to burn images, K3b seemed like the preferred GUI burner for most people. I haven't tried it myself, I haven't tried ANY linux cd burning software myself. I was going to try K3b but it was going to take a few hours to download all of the dependencies, so I went with the command line. I'll try it some day. I've only been using linux a little while! :PI think the command line is one of the greatest things in linux. You can type $ man bash in the CLI to get a huge manual on how to use the command line. I think you'd have to be really desperate for entertainment though, it's about 5000 lines long of commands and command attributes. I haven't read a single line of it! but I saw somewhere that it was recommended every linux user read it entirely.

I think it's pretty good. I like the background, the font, and the position of Xisto. I'm not so sure about the free php web hosting, it kind of looks out place, but i'm not sure. It just seems to be in a weird position to me. It leaves that open space on the right side. I can't think of any better way to position it though so maybe I'm just looking for things to complain about :lol:What font is that anyway?

Hey boosie. Welcome to the forum. I've used FL Studio a few times.. it's a useful program. Never learned java though.

I hope you don't need assistance, because that's really all I know! I did a little research on the command so I could burn a linux OS image without downloading a program and it worked great, so I figured I'd share the tip. There was one thing I didn't mention. If you have on verbose mode (-v) at the end it will give you a little report cdrecord: fifo was 0 times empty and 10000 times full, min fill was 93%.If the FIFO was ever empty, I think that means the CD got corrupted somehow. If the percentage is low, I think that means you should shut down some running programs to prevent ruining the cd. I've only burnt one image with the command, so I'm no expert

You often want to burn CD images in the computer world. In Linux is a breeze with the "cdrecord" program. Simply start up your command line terminal, and type this in (no $) Step 1. $ cdrecord -scanbus This will show a list of your devices. You want to make a note of the group of numbers in the first column. CONSOLE rob@desktop:~$ cdrecord -scanbusscsibus1: 1,0,0 100) 'SONY ' 'DVD RW DW-D22A ' 'BYS1' Removable CD-ROM 1,1,0 101) * 1,2,0 102) * As you can see, in my case, what I need to note is 1,0,0 Burning a CD is this simple, you type: Step 2. cdrecord dev=1,0,0 theimagename.iso Replace 1,0,0 with what ever your scanbus results show! You can use wildcards such as * in the filename as well for even greater quickness. Step 3. Wait until it's done. Tip: you can use -v as an option to get a more verbose output, if you're interested or need to troubleshoot. cdrecord -v dev=1,0,0 theimagename.iso No need to use a bloated GUI, this is much quicker and simpler! Don't be afraid of the command line!

Puppylinux is a light weight, 100mb Linux OS that can be run (and run WELL) off a Live CD. I was shocked to install Puppylinux, and have it immediately recognize my dialup modem and install it, and dial it with ease. What took me two or three days to figure out on Ubuntu, took me 5 seconds to figure out on Puppylinux. Ubuntu clearly needs to get some advice from the designer of Puppylinux in this area.It comes bundled with a lot of great apps. You can literally have a fully usable OS running from a Live CD or a flash drive that's a mere 100mb cd image. This is a quality OS, it's no lightweight last-resort. I'm so impressed with it I had to recommend it to the members of Trap. You may not choose it as your primary OS, and most likely neither will I as my PC can handle Ubuntu fine. It's designed to be lightweight and it can't compare to the bigger distributions, but it sure comes close. It's clear a lot of work went into designing this. This Puppylinux would make a great OS for an older computer. It's designed for really old computers, and it runs lightning fast on my not so old Athlon64 3200 with 512mb Ram. It boots up in about one second off the CD!It would also make an incredible backup OS in case your primary one dies and you need to get on the internet. I'm burning a second copy of this OS for safe keeping, to know I've always got an OS to turn to. I've killed windows more than once, and it's extremely difficult to fix it when you can't google for help and don't know what you're doing. An Ubuntu CD would never work as a backup OS for me (Unless, ofcourse I kept drivers on another drive), because of it's lack of built in dialup support. How I wish I knew about PuppyLinux then.If you have an old PC, do yourself a favor and restore it with PuppyLinux. I'm liking PuppyLinux so much (it's blazing FAST!) that I'm hesitant to boot up Ubuntu again :lol:Windows? What was that? With all these great OS's, I feel very naive using Windows all these years.

I just installed my video card driver in Ubuntu (it was so easy too, why did I try to do it the hard way before??) and enabled the "Extra" graphics effects for the GNOME desktop. Wow! Wild. It looks very impressive. It's really cool how everything bounces around and changes shape. I've customized XP a lot, but never had anything like that.I'm wondering if it would drive me crazy when the new-ness wears off though. I'm not using Linux for much gaming, so the hit on performance won't be too bad. So the question is, how do you like your desktop? On Linux or Windows, it's not a OS specific question though you can refer to Gnome's special effects if you want.Do you like it really visually appealing, with every special effect option enabled and great skins? Or do you like it plain and simple and think the special effects are nothing but an annoying gimmick.I've always ended up going with the plain and simple look, though I often go through short phases where I want my desktop environment to look great. I'm thinking my liking of Gnome's Extra FX will be short-lived once I get tired of it.

I've been trying Xfce for a Desktop Environment. I can understand now that "Theme" is probably an inadequate way to describe these full fledged desktop environments. They're completely different and it's almost like using an entirely new OS since all the settings, the terminals, the windows, file managers, are different. I was quite surprised by how good Xfce was. It is much faster than Gnome and it's not too shabby in the looks department. It came with quite a few decent looking themes (in my opinion, I'm not too fussy about appearance). It's not as fancy as Gnome, but I don't find it ugly. The Xfce file manager doesn't have the arrows that expand a folder, but it's much speedier than Gnome's. I still dislike them both though. I just don't like the look and feel, the text is so far apart, so little information on the screen and they both lack features I used a lot on windows, like filtering. I I'm still searching for my dream file manager. I can see how Xfce/Xubuntu would be an excellent Desktop Environment / OS for an older PC. I have 512MB, enough to run Gnome fine (but not great), but I can still notice a big difference in the speed using Xfce. It's got a Windows style start button, which isn't too bad, and takes up less space than Gnome's way of doing it. One gripe is that stuff that doesn't fit a category like Graphics, Network etc, for example Wine programs, doesn't seem to fit anywhere in the "Start Button" menu. I thought I saw it in an Other menu, but I can't find it now. Either way, it's hard to find. Anyway, Xfce is pretty good. Better than Gnome or KDE (which I haven't tried yet) ? I don't know. They're all pretty good. I'm liking the increase in speed, but this might be minimal on a new computer anyway. I know one thing for sure, though, there sure are lots of options when you're on Linux... I can't believe I didn't install it years ago! I'm not sure it's increasing my productivity though, I stopped working on my webpage and other things to make time to play with Linux.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_window_managers http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

I should change my topic to Linux: :(:D:D:D I'm really liking Linux now that I understand it more. Is it really so much harder than Windows? You know, I'm not so sure now that the frustrating stages are almost over. To be completely honest, it's beginning to feel a lot easier than windows. Once you understand the basics like file permissions and being root, and how to navigate the filesystem in the terminal, it all kind of comes together. Some things are overly difficult, for example, when installing (I still haven't done it) my video card, I had to give the .run file permission to run. Then I had to log in as root, then I had to kill X (I didn't even know what X was!), then I had to do something else, and then it failed anyway. Apparently I can just go to the synaptic manager and do this, I don't know, but installing that video driver seemed unnecessarily hard..Or maybe we just take for granted that we know so much about Windows from using it all the time and it makes it seem like it's easier.My friend who really convinced me to install Ubuntu (she installed it a few days before me when her windows died) is hating it. She's good with computers, but she's noticing the same things we all do. Everything with linux is like a research project! You can't do anything without consulting some kind of manual,forum or webpage. Once you know these commands from experience (I can sudo all over the place ) it starts to seem easier. Things are weird with linux though, we both installed the SAME version of Ubuntu. We both tried to get a particular windows program working in wine. It worked pretty well for me, but I couldn't decode ogg files in it (it was a sound editing software). It didn't work for her, but she can play OGG files fine. I downloaded every ogg decoder and update that I could find, and I still can't play them! Weird!I have absolutely no desire to ever go back to Windows. Some day I'll get a new desktop computer or laptop - Linux of some kind will be going straight on it.-edit-After reading razoredge's post, I'm starting to wonder if there is lots of more that ever exciting linux frustration yet to come! I think it's always good to have Windows as backup in case things get too stressful. What keeps us using Linux despite it being so time consuming? I find myself spending hours trying to fix a simple problem (get something working in Wine) instead of booting up windows and doing what I want to do (use the program for 15 minutes!). I think I should just get XP booting up fast and then it wouldn't seem like such a hassle to use it. It takes forever to start up XP with all the junk I have on auto-run. Restarting Ubuntu is pretty fast.

Hello there! I hope you weren't expecting a lesson on indian classical music, because I don't know anything about it! I was actually hoping there was someone here that did. I've always (always, as in the the last year ) been interested in the classical music of India. It just seems to fit my idea of what music should be. Music to me isn't about heavily produced rap songs, it's this improvised classical music from the soul. It interests me very much that there's so much feeling in ICM. I heard some Indian musicans play, with tabla's, sarods, sitars.. etc and I was blown away. It was so radically different, so "live" sounding, so loosely structured and captivating, it intrigued me. It's definitely an acquired taste for sure, and even the Canadian-Indian people I know tell me it sounds like animals dying and they avoid it like the plague, so it's hard to find anyone interested in it. If anyone knows anything at all about this genre of music, could somebody tell me what the difference between Carnatic and Hindustani music is? I guess Carnatic is south Indian, and Hindustani is North Indian..but there must be something else to it!Another thing that interested me is just the way stuff is learned in India. When you want to learn how to play the piano or guitar, you buy books, or take weekly lessons. From what I read about learning Indian music, you have to move to India and spend all your time with a Guru for a couple years. They say that's the only true way to learn ICM. That's a little too intense for me I think...

This isn't going to be a real beginners lesson, more of a "getting to the good stuff" kind of lesson for the people who just have old guitars or pianos lying around and it won't be as in depth as it could be because I don't really get the feeling many people want to learn how to play the guitar out there so I'm not going to spend too much time making diagrams and stuff unless anyone is really interested.This lesson is a brief introduction to the 12 barre blues, the pentatonic minor and the pentatonic major scale. First - blues music. Blues music comes in many different styles, which I won't detail here, because there are books on the subject, but it's important to know that it has a massive influence on western music. It originated in America, the African American's played this style of music often on plantations during the days of slavery. It slowly emerged to being a professional style of music, and grew in popularity despite much racism against black people being around in those days. Familiar names from this early era of blues are BB.King, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker. (There were many more than that). Blues had different sounds going on in different parts of america. Texas blues, Mississippi blues, Chicago blues.. Many white people were intrigued by this form of black music, and it caught on big time in England and elsewhere in America. As Muddy Waters says, Blues had a baby, and they called it rock'n'roll. Blues was no longer a form of black music played only in small black-only clubs, it was catching on and breaking down racial boundaries. Rockers in England, such as Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, and almost every classic rock band was influenced by the blues. This may not be obvious to someone who doesn't know much about music, but once you realize this, it is quite interesting. Jimi Hendrix, often thought to be one of the most influential guitarists in the world, was a BLUES MAN. He played the blues, but electrified it. You may know these people as rock musicians but they played the blues. Most of them even played true blues songs. Without writing an essay on the subject, in short, this humble black music of the American plantations literally influenced almost every part western music. Country musicians in those days often mingled with the blues, famous musician Johnny Cash did a lot of blues music. Heavy metal bands play the blues. Black Sabbath, pioneers of heavy metal, played blues songs with an unholy distortion. Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammet throws blues solos in his songs all the time. Blues influenced Reggae, Rap, Jazz, everything. Jazz influenced Blues as well!Now that the introduction to Blues music is over, let's move on to the other stuff. You all know what a beat is in music, it's what you tap your feet to, or clap your hands to. 1 and 2 and 3 and four. Well in western music and most (not all) rock music, this beat is simply, 1 & 2 & 3 & 4. Even if you've never studied music, this rhythm is totally embedded in almost every mind, at least if you listen to western music. It's called a 4/4 rhythm. A Bar, or Barre, or Measure (all synonyms) is a bunch of beats grouped together. In this case, 1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4. < -- 4 barres.Well now that we know what a barre is, we know that the 12 Barre Blues has 12. Quite simply, you just play 12 barres and repeat over and over, while someone solos or sings over it. This is used in 99.9% of blues music, in classic rock, and even some modern heavy metal. It's usually three chords, played in a pattern. You can play chords almost any way, ranging from extremely easy, to a bit harder, to needing Shaquille O'neil (is he still around?) hands. You can play it on a piano, or on a bass guitar (notes, not chords).Wait - hold on now, did I say solo? Yes! Can you imagine soloing? Well, guess what. It's easy! There are absolutely simple patterns of notes that you can play that will sound excellent over these three chords. You just have to practice them and you can play so much music you wouldn't believe it. These patterns are called pentatonic minor scales, I won't tell you what these patterns are, because I'm a mean guy. No, not really, but it'd take a diagrams and some question answering that I don't know if anyones interested in. It can get as complicated as you want it to, from a simple pattern memorization, to scale and music theory understanding, to physics (most guitarists don't get that into it though). The incredibly cool thing about these pentatonic scales is not only that they're simple, no, the really cool thing is that you can move them, and they change into the major key. That's called the Pentatonic Major scale. This is used in happier sounding music, such as country music, reggae. So basically, you learn one simple thing, and can confidently solo over almost anything. If you're showing off your guitar skills and only have to play for 5 or 10 minutes, then you will have enough of a repertoire to make people think you're a guitar God (or Goddess!). Seriously!I realize this wasn't really a beginners lesson at all, and if you're a complete newbie, you'll probably know nothing about tuning your guitar and your fingers won't work right. That's why I didn't really describe what the scales were and how to play chords. There are entire books on playing blues music, pentatonic scales, etc. This was mostly a lesson to pique the interest of a person who's always been interested in playing guitar but has always thought they couldn't do it. Well let me say this, playing the guitar isn't impossible. It takes practice, but anyone can do it. If you choose to go on this musical journey, you will realize that bands you thought were inhumanly talented, might not be so far out of your league in a few years. If anyone wants to play guitar or bass guitar (I don't know much about advanced bass like slapping, and popping so don't ask for that!) , I can help you along the journey. I just need to know you're interested and that you're willing to practice. If anyone is interested, this blues lesson can continue, with a lesson on what exactly you're supposed to do, or I can start at a more basic level... how to hold a guitar, how to put the strap on, or even in another area. Or you can get help elsewhere on a dedicated music lesson site, or a book, and I'll be here to help you with any questions.Was this exciting? No, probably not as exciting as I made it sound like it would be ! .. There's a lot to learn, and it's impossible to post even a fraction of it all in 30 minutes.Disclaimer: I don't guarantee the accuracy of my lesson (GASP!) especially since I'm rushing to finish this post. So if anyone notices anything wrong, feel free to point it out, I won't care! I don't claim to be a musical genius.I also want to add something important. Hand size is not an excuse. Your hands aren't too small to play guitar, your hands aren't too big to play guitar. Men with small hands and girls often go for smaller scale guitars, but this isn't absolutely necessary. It's up to you. I have small hands for a guitarist, and this concern has plagued me through my entire guitar playing adventure. There isn't too much I can't (theoretically, with practice) play now. I won't lie, small hands makes things annoyingly more difficult, but almost everything is still achievable. I understand the frustration of stretching my fingers for weeks and still not matching the stretch span of a newbie guitarist with long fingers. If you want to play the guitar, there's no excuse why you can't. There are excellent guitarists with missing fingers, deformed arms, or even NO arms. There are blind guitarists. The only thing holding you back is a lazy "No-Try" attitude.

Anyone get caught up in the "hacking" scene? I did when I was younger. I wasn't an elite hacker by any means, I never used any onion peelers or high tech microscopes, but I did do some stuff! It was an interesting experience for sure, but I wouldn't suggest anyone get involved with "unethical" hacking. I was young and stupid, rebellious and completely unconcerned about the trouble I caused people. That period of my life ended when I ended up seeing on multiple news websites that I had been traced to my location for "cyber crimes". Apparently I had been "watched" for at least a month and I let my guard down and they knew what I was doing and where I lived! I was paranoid for weeks that I was going to be arrested in the near future. I never did get in trouble though, but regardless, it was a horrible experience! I would never do that stuff again.There was a lot of " virtual gang warfare" too. I remember there was a real camaraderie between groups, and when one person did damage to someone else's computer (over something stupid like a girlfriend!), or even attempted to, everyone would rush to their defense and start going all out trying to attack the person. I remember one common "tactic" was to take a person's entire ISP (well their part of it) offline so they, and anyone in their CITY couldn't connect! Can you imagine?! This was common stuff! This was often done to the most technically proficient person, because they couldn't defend themselves against it and help the other people who were involved. I didn't do too much of that, I never really considered taking down an ISP a very safe thing to do. People did some other real unethical stuff too. Another thing that people did was to trace someones phone # and post it all over the web with stuff like "I'm a bored 18 year old female, looking for someone to talk on the phone to" and they would be constantly bombarded with phone calls...There was a lot going on with hacking back then, it doesn't seem so common now. Though I wouldn't know, I haven't been too interested in computers for a few years. I think everyone has fire walls, big websites take internet security more seriously and patch holes better etc. You wouldn't believe how many of the big websites were completely vulnerable.. I took "the big G" offline once. I remember knowing it was a bad idea, but it sounded so thrilling to try it, then when I succeeded, reality set in and I was like, oh my god, I shouldn't have done that!It was a long time ago though.. when you're young.. you think you're smarter than everyone else and invincible. You don't really seem to realize that you're causing people a lot of problems either. My behavior was immature and stupid! I don't recommend doing any of that stuff!As for defacing school websites, well that's a funny story. I hacked into my school website in school, and defaced it with a very mature "School Sucks!". Later that year, I became webmaster of the school webpage and was GIVEN the password I already worked to find out. Irony..Let me repeat, unethical hacking is bad! It's bad for all involved! It's bad for the victims, and bad for the offender if they get caught!This has very little to do with the original post doesn't it? I think that shut down commands useful, I wish I had known it a long time ago. I used to want to shut my computer off by itself if I fell asleep, now I just leave it on 24/7.

Have you tried that other lighter desktop, Simp? I forget the name, but it's supposed to be faster than both Gnome and KDE -- though it sacrifices a lot in the looks department. I haven't tried it, but I think I might, I don't care too much about the appearance of my desktop, especially when it takes more RAM. I just like my Desktop Environment messy. Icons everywhere, monitors and buttons flashing all over the place.. the more confusing the better. :lol:On windows, my desktop had thousands of files on it and about a dozen folders. I couldn't see them all of course, which made the desktop relatively useless for anything other than launching programs installed half a decade old ago. I used to get lazy and extract all my archives on the desktop because it was convenient and they kept building up! My start menu was a mile long too, I made it one scrolling column (I liked it that way) and I would literally put the mouse on the scroll arrow and walk away for a minute and wait for it to scroll down to the newly installed program......

One thing that I don't like about this forum is that the members are very temporary. On other forums, there seems to be some kind of community and people are around for a long time. People join other forums because they are interested in the theme or topic of the forum. People join here for the free hosting so they don't necessarily have a great desire to converse. From what I can tell, a lot of people (this isn't counting me) aren't satisfied with this forum. It's strange, because you see many people register and introduce themselves, lured in by the idea of free web hosting, but end up not staying around. I gave up greeting most people in the introduction thread because it seems like a waste of time greeting people that will never post again. I like this forum, but obviously there's something that's missing because from what I can see, more people come and go than come and stay. There just doesn't seem to be enough of a reason for most people to stay and post. I don't think free hosting is enough. I check out a few other forums every other day and they are almost always more active than Trap despite being about one certain theme and having less (in total) members . Trap should be immensely popular with all it's topics and the free hosting incentives, but it's not. Why do you (anyone) think that is? I don't know, it could be anything, the appearance of the site (I'm not overly fond of the look, but I live with it), the overwhelming broad selection of topics (some people don't like sorting through stuff they have no interest in). I'm not saying the owner should offer more MyCents or anything, but I think the forum could use an overhaul or something. One thing I noticed about this site is that it doesn't seem to have a real community feel to it. The name Xisto just doesn't inspire any kind of community feeling inside me, I don't even know what the name means. It's hard to feel like a part of something you don't really understand. I don't know who owns the site, I don't know who runs it, I hardly ever see moderators or even veteran members around with the exception of a few. On EVERY forum I've ever been on, there are always members with thousands of posts, like StMichael, and it's a reassuring feeling to know someone stuck around that long. On this forum, it seems like almost every active member is relatively new. It's got a real feeling of being a dead forum with a handful of active newbies who actually stick around for a few months, a forum past it's prime years.What's the focus of this site anyway? Web designing? Computers? I think it should have some central theme, so people get the impression it's actually organized. I'm not saying get rid of all the other topics, but I think it'd be good to make the site about something, instead of everything (and hence, nothing in particular)I'm not complaining about Trap, I personally think it's a fine forum, I like the wide range of topics because you never know what's going to be posted, but the fact is other people don't seem to be interested in it. I don't know why, I'm just considering possible reasons.. Plus, the website is always down lately, including right now, when I want to post my reply.....

Wolfenstein? I assume you don't mean the first one, which was the first 3D game I ever played. I remember the experience well, I was very young, getting my first real computer, and I remember the salesman guy telling me about how amazing and revolutionary the game was. He was right, I was awe struck by the amazing (at the time) graphics of Wolfenstein 3D. I had no clue what it was about at that age, or what exactly I was doing shooting everything, but I thoroughly enjoyed the massacring regardless. It'd be interesting to play an updated version of it..

If Downforeveryoneorjustme.com gets paid for every time I visit their site, the owner isn't broke! I use it all the time to check Trap's status. Xisto is down quite often, and even worse, when I'm in the middle of typing a post. I'll hit submit and "Page not available".. darn! That's really annoying. Sometimes I use a Firefox extension called Mr Uptime to alert me when Trap is back up.

I did notice there seems to be a lot of heated debating going on regarding KDE vs GNOME and I couldn't understand why. It seemed like it was just about appearance and a minor change in functionality in stuff like the file explorers and the "task bar" panels. It doesn't make sense to me, because these are linux gurus who spew out command lines a mile long, and then argue about whether a simple GUI menu is better than an even simpler GUI menu. I had no trouble adapting to GNOME's desktop from Windows, in fact I find it rather limiting and simplistic. The file explorer on GNOME (and probably KDE too) is so featureless and in-versatile it isn't even funny. I know it's on par with Windows' default functionality but I had software on windows that replaced Windows Explorer. For example, when renaming a file, I can't just click on it, I have to right click and go through the menu. In KDE, it looks like renaming even has a POPUP box! I don't need that kind of newbie guidance, just let me click on the name and rename please! Gnome straight out of the box (so to speak) is nothing to write home about. It's fine and works okay, sure, but I wouldn't fervently defend it's honor or anything. It's like a starting point for the desktop functionality I really want. I don't expect anything fancy out of KDE either though.I've been searching everywhere for something to replace the Gnome file explorer. I prefer a more "power-user" approach. I saw a glimmer of hope in "Worker" which I've yet to try. The more I'm using Linux, the more I'm liking it. It just feels right. I don't have much desire to go back to Windows anymore, even though I'm missing a bunch of stuff from it. I just need more "Power-user" tools to bring it up to the functionality I had on windows.