shiv

PC World has been snubbed by Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for a TV advt that went on.."A huge 40GB hard drive, great for watching DVDs, movies... It's our lowest ever priced laptop. You'll find it hard to beat even on the internet, and I guarantee they won't be in stock for much longer at this price...". Viewers had issues with th advt with intresting complaints like is a 40GB hard disk not a standard but exceptional for laptops?..what's so huge about it?! Other had complaints that the laptop was not available in the shops while the advt was still playing, so PC world wasted their time! read the full story for a few laughs

The "Aero" look for Windows Vista will be available only for users with genuine copies of the windows os..users need to go through the genuine copy test online to acquire the aero look. "Aero" includes translucent windows, animated flipping between open programs, and icons that show thumbnails of opened files. This was stated in "Windows Vista Guide" a document that was briefly posted in its website and then pulled by Microsoft for whatever reason. Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA)- Microsoft's anti-piracy program checks for genuine Windows running in the user's PC so for was used for validating use of Microsoft's Download Center and for security updates from Windows Update security patch service. Microsoft is now extending the strategy to even acquire the aero look unique to Vista which I would say is a part of the os..very soon Microsoft would want us to download the whole OS after entering a 'ticket'?! full story

one of the most thought provoking pieces i read in a long time..kuddos cinthia. as for my opinion on this issue i am certainly against it..even if the situation at hand in a particular case makes killing and putting an unnatural end - going against nature - seems merciful. but we may just be robbing off the person the chance to make it his last death i.e. his last life on earth, out of out ignorance. my Hindu belief says the sufferings we undergo are to eliminate the bag of 'samaskaras' or impressions(out of feelings/actions both good and bad..not just sins as in popular belief) that we have accumulated in our various lives(previous births) and we are born again and again untill we have no samaskara at the moment of a death. which implies each life is a chance to refine ourselves better ourselves to get 'liberated' - and going through pain is an essential part of it. we go through as much pain as samaskaras we have. so if a person is dying a horribly painful death - it may be nature's way or even 'gift' to him to 'exhaust' all his samaskaras before he breathes his last. we in out 'mercy' might just be ruining the point of his own life..in which case i just cant think of anything more unmerciful...dragging a fellow back to earth to come and suffer again by not letting him reach the brighter world or god whatever you call it. beliefs and faiths may vary...but the general principle should always be- DONT MESS WITH NATURE. simplay because we ourselves dont know why we are born , what are trying to 'live' inside a world and family we were 'put into'. we dont choose what we were given , we dont know why we were made to be what we are and not anyother way..each of us are in a journey in search of meaning of life - we are left here like someone put into a forest blindfolded. in such a scenario, with very little understanding , its simply utterly wrong to kill another person- when we simply dont know what he is going through and why he is going through it. pain as it may be in the physical level - quite simply - what if he is realising god or the truth or enlightenment - whatever you want to call it - in those last moments of unbearable pain and we intrude and pull the plug! merciless!

When I was in school I got used to typing fast without ever looking at the screen untill I complete typing the full stuff from the resource material placed by the keyboard, so everytime while I type in the school labs I always got those baffled 'stares'. I am not sure how fast I am but I know I type faster than most people.Of late with not much typing to do, I have got slower and also errors have started to creep in. Added to it is that nowadays you are more used to the sms way of typing, so whenever you are typing in formal english as this forum requires....sheess..I am getting tired!

thanks a lot final design....your review very imformative and helpful. i sure learnt a lot from what you have said. thanks pyost, organicbmx and samya too....all of you have pointed out the same thing which shows something glaringly wrong with the second one. thanks for helping me to improve guys! cheers! shiv

I am an engineering student and this is a project I am working on now. I conceived the idea a couple of years ago and the project is finally getting some headway now. My paper has received some very encouraging responses from international conferences and is pending for publication in IEE. I am happy to share it here, and I will try to give the basic idea in the simplest way possible, keeping out technical overtures.Here we go..With the world exhausting its current reserve of fossil fuels at an astronomical speed at one hand, but growing even more energy hungry at the other hand..we earthlings as a civilisation have to soon look for alternative sources of energy.Nuclear power as we all know is a double edged sword. The If's and Buts's are simply too scary.The best option is to develop natural renewable sources of energy and our safe bet is to tap into the sun.But Solar power technology has its big limitations today in terms of productivity. Two main limiting factors are : 1. Takes a long long time to charge up solar cells. 2. The output power is very low. The amount of power producing capability is still very low. So as you can see these two inter-twined reasons result in low effectiveness and productivity.One magical bullet that can hit the both the targets at a single shot is what I call SOLASER- to convert Solar Rays to LASER beams before feeding into the solar cells. As you may all know - LASER is coherent, monochromatic, and directional..high power LASER beams can 'Zap' you in a puff! Testing by feeding LASER into Solar Cells , productivity improved leaps and bounds...it reaches a new level of capability. It gives us just the power we want!But converting solar rays to LASER is the catch. As you may know LASER doesnot occur naturally. It is not natural light. It is created artificially by stimulated emission. My project tries to achieve just that through an indegenously developed system. Its not perfected yet..I dont get out true LASER..but its as close as we can get. You may be bemused because its embedded in our public consciousness that we can afterall 'concentrate' solar rays quite easliy by using a convex lens and burn up a paper. Well that's exactly what the latest solar cells do..the solar cells have a plate of convex lens attached on its top , to concentrate the rays better. The increase in productivity through this has been considerable - but does not give us the 'power' we seek. Another exciting avenue for future of energy is Fuel Cells. But fuel cells too are plagued by limitations very similar to Solar power. Same goes with Wind power.True LASER from Solar light is a far call off. But SOLASER might just be the future .Pardon me for sounding over ambitious..but i guess one got to be so to make it through.Cheers!Shiv

a couple of days back i did just that..tune up my system and im happy my system is feeeling younger and brisk now! of all the articles i heaved through in the net to find ways to tune up my system, i got to credit to a set of three articles that helped me achieve it. i would term these as the wholesome and complete guide to tune up xp. click here to read 10 simple ways to speed up windows xp, 10 intermediate ways to speed up windows, and more ways to speed up windows xp. steps i felt really made a happy difference are: 1. disabling indexing services. 2. speedup folder browsing by disabling "Automatically search for network folders and printers". a subtle but visible change. 3. installing cache man to improve memory usage. now here..i have used every damn ram booster softwares out there...this one definitely stands out and simply the best i have used so far. two thuumbs up for this one! my system has never felt so good and stable. i can 'feel' it breathing easier! 4. installing boot vis to improve boot times. my laptop DEFINITELY boots up faster now. 5. installing tcp/ip optimizer. again...my interner browsing and downloading speed is DEFINITELY faster. 6. disabling unnecessary serivices at startup..lesser frustrating wait watching your system wake up littlle by little. 7. installing page defrag..its cool in that it automatically defrags my page file at startup...in just 3 seconds. 8. speedup folder access by disabling "last access update". another nice subtle but visible difference. 9. installing clear mem.. now i can sit comfortable in the knowledge i have this power i can always use as a last weapon to get back my freezing system back to life. 10. and this is one that pleased me most...improving shutdown speed by the tweak suggested in 'more ways to speed up xp'. my system DEFINITELY goes to sleep in a zip now. used to be one of those things that always get on my nerves...when my laptop takes its own sweet time to go off while i have to wait to close it and put it in the case before i can - move and get going. thank god for this! cheers! shiv

"gpedit.msc" didnt exist in my home edition xp. but a couple of days back i installed this great piece of software tcp optimizer and i just chose the 'optimal settings' option in it...and i tell you the difference was telling! my internet download and browsing speed improved considerably. it basically increases the number of tcp/ip connections that can be established with a server we are communicating with. as you may know, microsoft in its service pack 2 for xp , though as great it was a service pack, decided to reduce and limit the number of tcp/ip connections to increase stability. by using this tweak you can be sure you squeeze out every inch of your bandwidth for maximum speed. downloaddownload it now if you dont have it yet! cheers! shiv

are you another frustrated hapless webmaster with your mails getting lost in the reciever's bulk folder? for me this is the biggest headache now. and if your site like mine depends on emailing as a basic functionality of existence..you are simply doomed. writing to the email providers only fall on deaf ears. all your hard work in conceiving and creating the site and getting it up and running and then getting visitors to it - all get reduced to nothing in a second's methodical madness of a heartless bot deciding your mail as spam. even mails from this forum of ours end up in bulk folder in my yahoo mail. i tried to look up for ways to avoid it, on what we can possibly do to get to the inbox as we ought to and not land up buried along legimate spam..i didnt come across a golden solution, but this one seemed to offer some light. hope that helps. i would greatly appreciate other good suggestions and advice on fighting against being labelled spammer. thanks. shiv

yahoo and aol are starting on a new controversial system that will give only 'paid' senders, the electronic equivalent of buying postage stamps, for guarantee of safe delivery of emails sent...or else your email will end up burried as spam in 'bulk' folder or even be undelivered. click here if you dont want to login. the idea seems to be control spam...but this is ridiculous because our normal personal mails may end up in bulk because we dont pay! so what will our inbox become the paid 'official' spam box while we will have to fish in for personal mails in the bulk box among other unpaid spams? absurd! looks like yahoo and aol, internet's two highly preferred free email service providers as of today, are using the spam issue to their advantage to fill in their coffors out of their sheer - greediness. hope this means the beginning end of the monopoly of these two, and not that of free email. hope gmail and other email providers dont follow suit, to cash in on the user's helplessness. makes me wonder who is destroying email...the spammers or the email service providers? shiv

thanks for your reply kazdoran . im quite well versed with C++..what i am looking for is specific c++ game developing books to get my shot at gaming started! i will try out the SDL API you suggested . would greatly anymore specific suggestions on where and how to start. thanks! cheerz! shiv

there are lot of them and happily many of them produce good returns. i have used 4 so far and i would say google is what impressed me most....but it may also be because its easy to trust google but one flip side of google's ironically is they dont look that cool ofcourse looks doesnt matter much here i know, but if it looked better it wont look sore in your other wise cool looking page. but then who cares as long as it brings money!i dont like those annoying pop-ups when i browse and i dont intend to put my visitors through that annoyance which i want for myself, no matter how much money it would bring me.cheerz!shiv

depends.....if i get a template with the effect and looks i conceived then i would readily use it, or take it modify it a little to suit or enhance it to what i want.if i none of the ready made templates capture what i imagined....time to sit down and put on your designing cap then! :lol:i dont agree that it depends on the skill of the person concerned....even if you are highly skilled but what you need is already excellently done and ready for you to use, then why not?!cheerz!shiv

i downloaded IE7 Beta and have been using it for two weeks now...does anyone know if i uninstall this crap will i get back IE6? or will IE be wiped out completely?i am baffled how come the biggy microsoft can come out with such a poor update full of hacks, bugs, crashes and quick fixes....seems like the patented microsoft way nowadays.why do they release (even if its Beta) without getting it to some usable shape? they famously go public with a bag of bugs...?!looks like its best you always wait out any microsoft product with utmost caution..you can trust them to do work and rework on the same thing over and over again and yet never fix all the bugs that crop up. (they gave up on IE6 finally and said they wont be fixing it! ) so i was xpecting atleast IE7 would be better and they would have done some good work to undo the embarrasment with IE6...but hats off to microsoft..they are never gonna change..lol!but so to say hear even firefox isnt perfect..heard it has some big error in content area calculation for table border or something like that which i didnt fully understand. but guess anycase it would be miles better that IE7.what about Opera 7 anybody? it used to be a great product and i have always felt mozilla borrowed heavily from Opera...but i dont see much of it nowadays...what is it like now?anyways i have now come to accept one thing....NEVER get excited about any new microsoft update or product... let vista take its own sweet time to grow as stable os...im keeping away from it even if it is released late this year or next year. i would prefer a stable os than see windows prettier.has anybody had a good time using IE7? let me know!cheerz!shiv

can anyone help me with some good latest C++ game programming books (2D, not ready for 3D yet) or any good lesson sites for beginners? thanks in advance!cheerz!shiv