These guys are awesome.

Dacentec is a datacenter, based in the small town of Lenoir, North Carolina, USA (which Google also happens to have a datacenter in). What's so awesome about them is they sell dedicated servers with really good specs, at a low price, that you own after 12 months of payment. I'm looking into getting one myself, but they have pretty random stock everyday. From what I understand, it's just what they have shipped to them that day.

The only dis-advantage is the rather cheap-o peering (Cogent, Hurricane Electric, and TiNet), so ping may be a bit higher for some. Plus, once you own it, you must pay for co-location or the shipping to have them send you the server, they don't cover the shipping.

http://billing.dacentec.com/hosting/

QUICK EDIT: They've been having site issues recently so don't mind if it looks ugly.

You can buy one from Wal-Mart for $5.

I have one, but it's not activated yet as you must be 18 to have one and I don't turn 18 until the 26th. Just a little interesting link I figured I'd share.

Since it functions as both a prepaid debit card and bank account, you can also activate your PayPal with the card!

Hi, I usually go by Suzaku but am unable to recover my password as I do not know the e-mail and the only other place I can get a hold of DarthApple at seems inactive.

What is the best Messaging Apps? Which one do you use? WhatsApp vs Skype vs BBM vs iMessage vs Viber?

Undoubtedly, social networking has become much more popular in recent times. The popularity of traditional forums seems to slowly be decreasing as a result, and I think that the market for something "new" is growing stronger.

Software options such as Xenforo have been new and innovative, but options such as discourse or oxwall seem to be redefining what forum software is. I will say, I'm not personally a fan of discourse, but I do like the innovation that's going on. Forum software today is just too complicated, and all of the extra features get in the way of pure discussion.

I was thinking about either downloading a very simple forum software solution and modifying it, or building a custom forum software solution to have only the absolute bare essentials. I think it would be interesting to see what would happen if everything about the a forum was centered around discussion, and only discussion. I'd also like to try it as an experiment as far as community management when decisions are all brought to a public petition.

Obviously, this is only an idea, but I would definitely be interested in seeing what could be done if a complete rethinking of forum software were to take place. What do you think would make such an experiment successful? In what ways could forum software today be improved for a modern world?

One of the things that is nice about Picasa is how easy it is to apply popular effects to images. I've been playing around with the posterize features, and for some images, with the right settings, it seems to give a certain "painting-like" feel or a cartoonish look. Of course picasa doesn't do a great job of it, but you can end up with stuff like this:





Both of the above images only use a few colors. The technique seems to work better on some images than others. Does anyone know of any good tools or GIMP plugins for this sort of thing? It'd be neat to see what could be done with more than just picasa to work with. I might try to use some GIMP-based tools soon and compare what can be done.

Art is certainly a very vast field in the grand scheme of all things. It is natural for mankind to want to create something, but as for what gets created, that's a pretty vast "field of study" if you want to put it that way.

There are many things that one would immediately recognize as "art," such as architecture, paintings, graphics design, music, you name it. However, many would consider a bunch of spilled paint cans on a driveway to also be "art" despite the fact that it looks like a big mess more than anything else.

From dictionary.com...

dictionary.com Wrote: Art:
the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.

Someone created a pretty nice Windows XP-like skin for Gnome a while back. Unfortunately the start menu isn't really rendered well, but everything else seems to be pretty complete for the most part. It's worth checking out.

http://xpgnome.en.uptodown.com/ubuntu

Figured I'd go ahead and formally introduce my self

My name is Amanda. I'm 26 years old. I'm a freelance graphic and web designer. Currently I'm enrolled in school to achieve my AAS in Information Technology Networking Administration. Nice to meet you all

Personally, I like the reputation system. It isn't really good for all forums, but for many forums, it's a great way to recognize active members in the community as long as it isn't abused. I of course always disable negative reputation, and that usually makes it much more difficult to abuse the system.

I still prefer the xenforo-style "Like" system over a reputation system, however.

What is your opinion of the reputation/karma model for forums?