Marine Aquarium 3 Rumors and Speculation

[Jim Sachs]

I haven't been having trouble with losing data lately. My problem is getting these objects to look real. At the moment, it's clams. There are three of them, all slightly different colors. The problem is getting them to look like they are NOT just 3 instances of the same 3D object, with different tinting.

[feldon34]

Are they?

Resizing, rotating, etc. might help?

[Jim Sachs]

They've been resized, recolored, rotated, retextured, and they are not the same model, but they still look fake. They did start out as the same model, but all these clams are pretty much the same shape, so I can't think of any way to morph the models to differentiate them. When I go to an aquarium store and see all the blue clams lined up in the front of the tank, they are obviously all different. I need to figure out what makes them so.

[cjmaddy]

Could it be the name badge that they all wear?

[jleslie]

I bought a Terastation for use at work, but sent it back. It was useless on a domain and even when out of one (as most home users would have it) I found it slow (it's basically running linux on a slow microcontroller). However other people love them, so don't entirely take my word for it. (I use IcyBoxes with big hard drives in them for backup, usually over firewire and sometimes USB2. See http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...Thumbnails=yes for more.) A friend just bought a NAS he liked, I'll ask him what it was when he gets in.
John

[Jim Sachs]

Cliff - Ah, yes. I'll name the middle one "Cliff"

[feldon34]

Originally posted by jleslie:

I bought a Terastation for use at work, but sent it back. It was useless on a domain and even when out of one (as most home users would have it) I found it slow (it's basically running linux on a slow microcontroller).  

Thanks for the testimonial! I will certainly include it in my thoughts.

Maybe I will reconsider building a cheap PC and running Windows Server 2003 on it and use its RAID controller features.

[jleslie]

This is what my friend got:
http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509
He's happy with it, although I haven't played with it so can't comment.
John

[Jim Sachs]

My web site, fish-byte.com is down. I switched ISPs, and for some reason the new DNS just isn't working. I've got an email in to the new ISP, iPower.com, but no response yet.

[feldon34]

Please tell me you're kidding. Please tell me you didn't switch to iPowerWeb.

[Jim Sachs]

I shouldn't have? They got the top reviews during my research.

[cjmaddy]

Yes, but did RottenTomatoes recommend them?

[feldon34]

I use WebHostingTalk.com for reviews.

Also I have personal experience with iPower allowing a friend's domain name to expire. A company in South Africa swiped the domain and are asking $5,000 to get it back.

iPowerWeb uses a non-standard control panel called "vDeck" for which little or no documentation exists. Whenever I have written PHP applications for the same friend who lost his domain name, I have had to modify them to work with iPower's hosting setup.

Some examples from WebHostingTalk.com:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=585912
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showth...11#post3790994
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=460746
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=550199

Note that most of these examples are of iPower letting domains expire and fall into other people's hands. If you have registered your domain with GoDaddy or another 3rd party, then this does not affect you. GoDaddy is great for domains but terrible for web hosting, and I'm sure you already know that the worst thing you can do is have your domain name and your web hosting handled by the same company.

[Jim Sachs]

All my domains are registered with Register.com. They send me frequent reminders (too frequent) when the domains are within a couple years of expiring.

I haven't tried the VDeck interface. I use Dreamweaver, and just upload my pages through FTP. Dreamweaver was able to instantly connect with my site -- far quicker than with my old ISP. In fact, for the past few months, I had been totally unable to FTP my site, and the ISP just wouldn't respond to by emails.

My only problem now is getting the site to come up through http.

[feldon34]

Well then you will probably not have any problems with iPower.

The vDeck/cPanel/Plesk control panel is needed to password-protect directories (unless you are very handy with .htaccess files), administrate e-mail accounts, setup databases, scheduled tasks, etc.

I have this site registered thru 2009 and at that point I will probably transfer it to GoDaddy.

[jmeacham]

I thought I should put this out there. I had trouble getting my keycode about a month ago. I sent probably 5 or 6 emails trying to get my key code. I finally called tech support.

[Jim Sachs]

That was about the time that Prolific was having server problems. Everything should be running smoothly now.

[cohiba420]

in regards to differentiating the clams... perhaps some sort of alge or other 'growth' could do the trick?

[Jim Sachs]

Hmm, maybe.

[edaniels]

Hey, guys... I'm a little dismayed to read the comments about iPower, because that's who I use for my goldfish website. Thanks for the heads-up, Feldon... I'll try to stay on top of my domain name's expiration date.