stingwray

I'm happy with Windows, Linux and BSD. All operating systems run fast when you install them and will continue to run fast if you look after them and get rid of the crap that builds up over time.

Wow! Is that cut out or have you just stuck paper stencils were you are going to cut that look the same colour of the wall behind? Very Professional Anyways.

I prefer Monowall over Smoothwall, its lighter and quicker to use in my opinion. 700MHz is a tad overkill unless you don't have any other computers to run it on that have less of a spec. 700MHz would make a nice server.

The sizes is the amount of Graphics Memory that they have onboard. Graphics Memory is used to hold all the information that the GPU is going to need very quickly so it doesn't have to request it from the system memory, which is slower. So obviously the more the better. Many people feel that 512MB of Memory on a GFX card is overkill at the moment, but the way I see it is if you get a good price on a 512MB card then go for it because you will be future-proofing yourself for when more games come out requiring it. Be warned some low end GFX cards used "TurboCache" in nVidias and "HyperMemory" in ATi chips, this means the card comes with a very small amount of memory on the GFX card (typically 64MB) and then uses a protion of your system memory. This really hurts performance because your reducing the amount of memory your CPU can use and as I said earlier it is slower to use that memory. Hope this helps.

Thats a lot of good publicity that TPB has had. Hopefully the MPAA and RIAA will think twice before trying this type of stunt again.

A lot of blacklists are provided by companies which charge you for access to them so they usually have people that spend all day looking at websites and catagorising them into different lists so people have the option of implementing them. There are some non-commercial ones out there but they are generally not a lot of good. It might be fine for small user group environments but with large numbers of users then too many people will be access websites they should be.

A lot of them are banned at my school, which is why setting you own up is a good idea and limiting its use, that way it is unlikely to get banned so will always be there.

I know from my school that we receive black lists which have different catagories which we can implement. For example it would work somewhat like this, we implement the porn black list and then we hope that all the porn sites in the world are blocked (not likely to happen), our list is then updated from time to time by the supplier as more are found. However if we find that someone has accessed a porn website at school (either by browsing the logs or being informed by someone) then we will add it to the block lists. As well as getting the black list from the company they take a list of the websites that we have blocked so that they can then look at them and add them to their lists etc. if they feel that need to. I would not have thought that Admins would communicate amoungst themselves as not all admins would need this information, some would already have it, or have heard it previously. The system were the black list provide takes the list of what we have blocked and looks at it I think is a much better idea as they can reach for more people more effectively than admins telling themselves. The blocking has to be preactive and reactive because the internet is changing so much every day.

Putting something down the left hand side would be nice, it looks a bit bald at the moment. Are you going to cut it out or engrave it?

We have a Proxy on the school network which all machines are default to go through, and if someone somehow manages to tell it to use a direct connection instead then when it leaves the network it is filtered by the counties proxy which is even more restrictive because it is for use by Playgroups and Primary Schools. You have to go through one of them in the end.

Yes that is the correct way of going about this but unfortunatly we don't live in a fair world. My schools previous IT head was an absolutely horrible and wouldn't do anything and you were likely to get detention for asking, (also back in those days we only have 30MB storage in our user accounts). Our new IT head is brillant and will do most things (in fact we have a quota of times to go on certain websites if you want to), and because he is great I'm also an admin at the school so I can sort things out as well. I did mention in my first post the ethics of bypassing the filter and hopefully he will take that on board if and when he does want to bypass it and I would hope it is not for MySpace. Yes it will depending on the set up but PHProxy will be a solution for most restrictions, as long as the site that is hosting the PHProxy is not blocked in the first place.

You best option is probably to have a poke around in "Folder Option" (Control Panel -> Folder Options - if you didn't know). I had a look in there but couldn't find anything in there that looked related to what you have said. However there is a reset to defaults button for all the folder options so I would have thought that will solve the problem (because it will make them like you have just re-installed). That is unless it is a third-party app that has cause this problem.

The easy answer is to use a proxy, although finding one which isn't blocked in the first place is hard. You can use some very well known websites as proxies because of some of the features that they have but it is fairly hit'n'miss. I would recommend setting your own proxy up at home. All you have to have is a webserver and php installed and you can run PHProxy which is great. As long as your school doesn't scan every page for black listed words you should be fine. As for the ethics for bypassing a school filter, i think it is acceptable to do so, as long as you cause no damage to school computers or systems and are responsible with you use of it. (i.e. if you school is stopping you from playing games on the net by blocking them and you want to do that, then wait to get home. However if the block is blocking legitamate sites that you need access to then it is fine). Also you should bypass the filter if you have signed anything that basically says you won't do anything, some schools have "policies" which you have to sign before you get access to the internet which may contain restrictive clauses, its always worth checking them out.

What really annoys me about this is that when they went in and took all the servers at the hosting company for TPB, they also took everybody elses servers that the hosting company hosted. Which means that a load of other people were also affected unnecessarily. They should be getting a lot of compensation from the Government.

Well I wouldn't recommend you to try hacking into an e-commerce website, and generally hacking into any website is stupid, unless it is your website which you are testing. Hacks for websites though is a different thing completely. Hacks are a term for getting a website to do something which is cool by using features already in it. Like there are tons for the Google search engine for getting it to look in different places etc.

I own a Toshiba 3110CT which is brillant. It has a 300MHz Pentium II (with MMX) and 128MB of PC100 SDRAM, followed by a 6.4GB 2.5" IDE HDD and 2.5MB of Graphics Memory. Plus it only has a 12" screen which means its tiny. Bad points about it are that its not very powerful, which means anything I run on it has to be light and I have to code my stuff to be light. Good points, its fits into a A4 folder and it makes the perfect Wardriving machine/text editor.

I know how you feel about needing the laptop for a long time, i'll be getting one between now and september before I go off to uni. You could always look at IBM/Lenovo, as they also have some very nice hardware, plus good linux support if you are interested in that. Best place to try out laptops is the net, read plenty of reviews, its the best way to get a feel for something you can't touch. Its also worth looking at comments by owners because they might pick up on something someone else didn't, but remember they might not be telling the truth, purposefully or accidently. As you are in the UK, if you haven't already check out www.ebuyer,com for some pre-built ones, they generally have a good range of Acer models and I've never had a problem with using ebuyer (although their enotes system is crap). The hardest thing to get in the laptop at the moment is fairly decent graphics, most laptops seem to have ATi which I dislike and the rest have crappy nVidia, getting somthing around the 6600/7600 mark is difficult.

www.howtoforge.com has all your answers, check out their "Pefect Setup" tutorials, there is usually one for most of the common distros. And of course, completely free.

I like Acer personally because they offer AMD laptops, (although if you want AMD then it probably best to wait a few months to get the Turion X2 CPU). Although I hate to admit it "Dell" do make some good stuff (servers and laptops). Although all of dells laptops are really made by Ergo which make some stunning laptops (especially the ones which are armour plated for the army and will stop small arms fire while working as body armour). I suppose the one thing that Dell does have is that you can customise what you want very easily, but it is quite hard to find somewhere to customise an Acer, they all tend to be pre-made machines (at least in the UK).

I'm doing the LAMP install now, I sure all it is doing is default installing the pacakges, so its not really doing the hard bit, which is configuring everything nicely.

Downloading currently at 200KB/s steady, not sure about the one command lamp setup, but will give it a go and see what happens. Just hope the OS is lighter than Suse still.

Many of the trackpads I have used have drivers which you can use instead of the generic windows ones which let you customise features like that. I would look their first, I would think that new laptops will have it available, older ones might be harder.

I second linux, even if your arn't familiar with it, its still easier to set up a server with than windows. Check out www.howtoforge.com and specifically their "Perfect Setup" tutorials for various distros, they run through a lot of stuff in a clear way.

I saw a video of someone playing Doom on their ipod video, looked pretty good but the controls were useless.

I've seen them have some sub £400 Acer laptops in there with not to bad a spec for the price. wouldn't buy one though as they of course are all Intel. Plus I think you really want to buy components etc. from people who know what they are and what they do. (Unlike the people in dixons who were trying to push an Apple laptop on me and told me it was the new MacBook Pro when it had iBook G4 written underneath the screen, and then after I corrected them they tried to tell me I was wrong).