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Note you said "professionals". People who want to start photography don't have the resources professionals do.

Yet another reason to use digital. Digital photography is at least an order of magnitude less expensive than film photography.

Yet I've taken pics with an SLR in much less light that came out dandy because I could set the f-stop to 1.7 and speed up the shutter by a factor of 4 or so. I could *never* have taken these pictures of the aurora with anything but an SLR.


Being able to adjust the f-stop, shutter speed, and exposure values has nothing to do with the camera being (or not being) a SLR.

Here is a shot comparable to yours taken with a Nikon Coolpix 995 and here is someone else I know with the same camera. He uses it with a spotting scope for some outstanding close-ups. And here is a place you can get them for under $400.

Here is a shot of mine that was taken at night with a Monolta DiMage 7i... a SLR-like camera, though not a true SLR.

I like the subversion that Napigator offers since it still uses the Napster program for its main interface. Windoze users, take note! (If you haven't already!). It rocks.

For Linux users, I've had great success with Gnapster which uses many of the same Musiccity servers. Free music for everyone!
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KDE comes with so many other good programs as well, like KNode (News reader) and KMail (lightweight email program)... Does GNOME have any comparable programs?

Errr... yes! Pan is probably the best free newsreader for any platform, Evolution is an incredibly well-integrated mail, calender and addressbook program, and Balsa is a very decent more lightweight mail reader. For office programs, Gnumeric is way more advanced than KSpread, Guppi (still in CVS) is one of the only serious free graphical data analysis tools, GnuCash is very polished, and Dia rocks. Graphically, Sodipodi is shaping up very nicely, gPhoto rules, and the GIMP integrates better with a GNOME environment than with KDE. And then there's XMMS (the best mp3/ogg/mpeg/divx Linux player), Grip (the best CD player/ripper combo) and GStreamer for multemedia; there's GnomeICU, Gabber, Gaim and X-Chat for messaging; there's Gnapster for file-sharing; and there's more useful utilities (e.g. Bug Buddy), system utilities (e.g. Red Carpet), and panel applets than you could shake a stick at. And I know I've missed out quite a few more (Gnome-DB, Oregano and Dr. Genius have just spring to mind - and, yes, Galeon, which rocks and is now my primary browser). In other words, GNOME is hardly short on applications.

If anything, I've often found it to be the other way round. While Konqueror rules, and KWord is much better featured than AbiWord (though I personally dislike the interface), I think where KDE usually excels is in the underlying desktop core, rather than the applications. But that's just my opinion.

PS Sorry for ranting.

Faradic.net has an amazingly sensible price list that includes background daemons, IRC bots, and the like.

The one thing that is kind of limited is the disk space. The default ($9.95/month, $7.95 if paid annually) shell account only has 30 MB of quota, and additional space is ordinarily kind of dear ($0.25/MB/month), but I suspect that price just hadn't been adjustted lately and a few GB is negotiable.

They appear to be allergic to hand-holding, but do keep things working just fine.

Speaking of which, for a real change of attitude, see FlexNet in Hawaii. They offer zero tech support with attitude. You get a username, password, and phone number. Their NOC phone number is fairly easy to find, and they promise to hang up on you rudely if you call about anything except a problem at their end.

This is kind of an irrelevant plug, because they don't offer shell service (AFAIK), and I'm nowhere near Hawaii. I just think anyone who starts their main web page with "So that things are clear to you, please read this Letter From a Disgruntled Customer." is cool.

• lopster - a very cool client
• gnapster

I can't recall the number of times I see someone getting something interesting from me, but when I try to check their list, they are sharing nothing (this continues to be true even after Napster recent fixes).

It's easy if you are using a Napster clone such as Gnapster I just set my upload directory to some non-existant directory, and boom, no more sharing.

I would reccomend gnapster. I've tried about 3 or 4 different linux clients and this one has by far the most features. The latest version supports just about everything the 2.0 Windows client does. Download it @ http://virtual.faradic.net/~jasta/programs.html