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Hey, since when did this morph into a php/mysql thread? I don't know that I've ever opened it because I assumed it was all about movie collections (a topic I have zero interest in). Serves me right for not checking. I can see you are getting some great advice here Dave, and building a very...

Very nice. Thankyou!

Ahh, but in the previous version of Spybot, you could download the updates ("sypbotsdincludes.exe", I think) and drop them on a CD. Start the infected system in safe mode, install Spybot, don't bother running it yet, close it and run spybotsdincludes which updates the Spybot install to the...

Over my head.

I've just spent about 15 minutes trying to figure out WTF this thread is supposed to be all about, and I give up. The ranting just goes on and on in a dozen different directions at the same time with the ultimate result that the reader's take-home message amounts to "some incredibly long...

One you can't walk away from and say it must have happened while you were in the supermarket.

This is just human nature, Clocker. We, all of us, tend to see things in terms of black vs white, us vs them, good vs evil, and we (all of us) tend to simplify the world by classifying people, organisations, and things in good/evil terms. In other words, we tend to assume that a "good" person...

I think in the armed forces, Lunar, they say "don't ask, don't tell". But as for me, the vast bulk of my stuff is things I do indeed own the copyright to, together with a much smaller but still significant collection of licenced stuff, and very little else. I have enough trouble managing the...

Merc, are you saying that the Ultrabays are the same between diffrent generations of Thinkpad - i.e., that I could buy the Ultrabay for the (all SATA) T60 (or etc) and use it in my (all IDE) R52? Must be some pretty fancy electronics there.

Thanks guys, I've been out of the loop since November, haven't seen a pricelist since then. There were Samsung 750GB and (I think) 1GB 3.5 inch drives on the list then, but no stock at that time, I guess they will be ex-stock in Melbourne now. As for the 500GB 2.5, yes please! I can't use them...

Nice work indeed, Dave. E_Dawg is a Nikon man, so can be forgiven for not realising that Canon cameras (at least ones of 20D vintage) don't apply any noise reduction worth mentioning to JPG images, so there is no requirement with a 20D to shoot raw just to avoid the horrible plastic look that...

0.5 degrees? Yike! I'll take my 46 any day before a 0.5, or even a 5.0 for that matter. But of course, a nice split-the-difference of around 22 would suit me better. And you, no doubt. I have a second battery, Dave. On the other hand, I need to be reasonably conservative with the way I drain it...

Not a pretty shot, but interesting, I think. This was taken the same day after it cooled off a bit to a mere 45 degrees. It's two common birds, a Yellow-throated Miner and a Grey Butcherbird having an arguement about, of all things, shade. Yup, under that woodwork (actually the base of a...

By the way, it gets a bit warm down here in Oz in January. This was not an inflated "trick" temperature reading, it's the real thing. For the backward ones among us, it equates to 115 Fahrenheit. I spent a fair amount of time in the car that day, but despite the heat the light was remarkably...

While a white gas/gasoline powered stove seems ideal - In many ways it is. I have one, and use it most of the time. In Australia, Blakerwry, we have very high fire risk (probable the worst of any country in the world, although fires get pretty bad in several other places) and on high-risk days...

I'm not so sure about a recession as such in the US. More like a permanent adjustment of living standards. For years now the USA has been producing less and less and spending more and more, living high off the hog on borrowed money. Sooner or later, the USA has to either start earning some...

Now you are getting into the hard stuff, Dave. What can you do with a subject like that? Several things: 1: get closer to the bird. (Yup, that's often pretty hard.) 2: use a longer lens (bearing in mind that this will cost you lots of money, weigh a ton, be difficult to hold steady, and...

I would benefit significantly by the availability of bigger drives. My desktop system has a motley assortment of drives at present and it's quite a pain managing all those seperate volumes - mostly 400 and 500GB units at present. And no, I am not interested in buggerising about with RAID and...

A hell of a lot of people, Dave. On an Australia-only basis, many thousands. Extrapolate that to a worldwide figure and we are talking tens of millions. Which, of course, Microsoft know better than anyone. This is evil empire conspiracy action of the worst sort, you need have no doubt about it...

I have ... er ... a few machines. In order of how much I use them: 1: Thinkpad: XP Pro 2: Office server: OS/2 3: Workshop mule: 2000 4: Showroom machine: 2000 5: Home desktop/storage server: XP Pro The only thing of any significance I prefer about XP as opposed to 2000 is the much ore...

A Forester, David, like an Outback but without the ridiculously long front and rear overhangs that make Outbacks useless in the outback. But it's too short to sleep in unless you want to be ridiculously uncomfortable. But in any case, I like to sleep under the stars. Mostly I just throw my...

Question: can I respond to Udaman's post before the mosquitos drive me spare? Let's try it and see. Camouflage outfit? Nope, though I do make a point of dressing in plain, earthy colours, and take advantage of any cover that is going. There is no secret to getting close, you just have to...

Oh, and handheld, BTW, that was taken out of the car window.

I have been for a little while now, david. It's wireless broadband, a little dohickie about the size of a matchbook that plugs into a USB port. Well, "wireless" insofar as it works anywhere you can get mobile phone coverage. And "broadband" for a given value of "broad" - i.e., up and down a bit...

Pretty ordinary day, all up. But let's try this one: Christmas Day 2007, Pemberton, Western Australa, Australian Ringneck: I'll post more after I make camp, if I'm in range. (No, no more pictures, just the usual boring wordy stuff.)

Christmas Day 2007, Lake Unicup, Western Australa, Australian Ringneck: Nothing fantastic so far, but the day is yet young - it's lunchtime here in Western Australia. The forecast is for 39 degrees later on today, though my guess is that it will top out around 36 or 37. Either way, it's no...

What is traffic?

Errr .... Which planet are we discussing here? It's certainly not Planet Earth. The number of coups in which the upper classes have suffered worse than the poor are few, very few. In all of recorded history, you could count them on your fingers. Thinking about it a little more, it occurs to me...

Tea, wouldn't it be more useful if you contributed something of substance to the conversation, suck as listing the specific things you dislike about Vista?

I can't speak for squirrels, but our local volplaning mammals (Sugar Glider, Squirrel Glider, Yellow-bellied Glider, Greater Glider, Mahogony Glider, and Feathertail Glider, if I remember correctly) have very similar aerodynamic properties, and indeed look much like your flying squirrels - once...

I'll pay that one, Sechs. :)

Hmmm ..... can I see an 85mm lens in your future? Might suit you well. I struggle to see a lot of point to the 28-300, though unlike Lunar, I've never tried one for myself. At 28mm it's too long at the short end to be walkaroundable (sorry about the term, I just made that one up), it's very...

Gull plumage. Excuse crappy pictures, just the first ones I found to illustrate with. This is an adult Kelp Gull. Most other large gulls will look broadly similar. This is a juvenile Pacific Gull. Again, most other species of large gull are much the same. To tell the species, you need...

No editing, Paugie, not since my original upload. I did do a little tweaking then though. Apart from the crop, I ran it through Neat Image to (a) remove a little digital noise in the sky (at the cost of removing a little detail in the clouds and sand, which I judged was acceptable trade-off)...

Just the crop. Perspective doesn't change when you change lenses, it only changes when you move closer or further away. For this sort of shot, depth of field doesn't change either: even the foreground is close enough to count as infinity focus, especially because you are probably at f/11 or so...

Just a guy getting it monumentally wrong, by the sound of things. No need to panic or bring conspiracy theory into it. We can all go back to business as usual now, and continue buying just as many Western Digital drives as we were previous to this thread. (Which is to say none.)

Big, empty scenes are always hard to do much with - you have to work for your compositions under these circumstances! (Unlike some other places where interesting shapes keep jumping out at you and you just have to decide which one of them you like best.) The first thing one wants to do with...

I'd have said juvenile Kelp Gull, or something rather similar to a Kelp Gull - not sure which gulls you have in California. Nice work Dave!

Freerice is dangerously addictive. I love words (as witness my stupid post count here, among other places). But I had work to do so I got Tea and the Grammar Police to have a crack at it. They got to 48 max, but kept bouncing back down to 47. A strange thing: I had a quick look at home this...

What fool would buy one of those? You'd have to be a complete idiot. Sadly, there are a zillion idiots out there. Consumers are so stupid much of the time. Hell, look at Vista, a more than equally crippled product. Sure, it has sold at barely better than half the rate that XP sold at the...

Actually, I don't much care for moving pictures. YMMV. And it's not about capturing every moment, not even close. It's about capturning the best moment. But, eventually, the technology will be good enough to allow raw even with action work. BTW, why do you write "raw" (an ordinary English...

Oh, and the pictures are really just OK, David. I can do (and have done) better, but I wanted ones taken on Christmas Day, so that only gave me 1/364th of a portfolio to choose from. The first two are old digiscoped ones, which tend to lack contrast and be noticably blurry. The 2003 one is the...

What about a "Yeah, LOL, ROFL, RLY"? Would that do?

No, I never use "dude". Here in Australia we went metric decades ago, and I haven't measured a length of wood in dudes for 40 years or more.

Oh, I'm not talking about the subject of the image, Lunar, only the background. With the 500/4 bare lens, I tend to get beautiful, creamy out of focus backgrounds; even if I apply quite a bit of sharpening, the background tends to remain creamy and restful on the eye. But with the 1.4...

I always have a merry christmas, Bozo. Indeed, Christmas Day is usually one of the best days of the year for me. I make it a rule to spend Christmas Day with those I love most of all. Christmas Day 2003, Lake Wendouree, Victoria, Eurasian Coot: Christmas Day 2004, Porongurup Ranges...

I always have a merry christmas, Bozo. Indeed, Christmas Day is usually one of the best days of the year for me. I make it a rule to spend Christmas Day with those I love most of all. Christmas Day 2003, Lake Wendouree, Victoria, Eurasian Coot...

Funny you should say that, Time. For some years a former girlfriend of mine (who will remain nameless for now) had a favourite pair of knickers which were decorated with both stripes and spots. These items, being of the classic bipolar personality type, were known as the "phrenzknitsicks"...

A final word. None of the above should be taken to mean that "JPG is better than raw" or "always shoot JPG", or anything of the kind. Always shoot whatever it is that will give YOU the best chance of getting YOUR best shots, doing the sort of photography that YOU like to do. I shoot birds in...

Now a word about the "machine gun police" - the people who spray the epithet "machine gun" around at other photographers, with the underlying meaning that "real photographers don't take many shots", and "you machine-gun types are inferior, you think that quantity = quality, and if you only...