k_nitin_r

When vehicles are sold with hybrid engines, they are expected to give more to the gallon than the average vehicle does. However, when you are driving a sports utility vehicle instead of a sedan, you ought to expect the mileage of an average sports utility vehicle rather than an average sedan. Unfortunately, the average consumer who buys a hybrid vehicle buys it to be able to crunch more miles, therefore the sales of vehicles such as the Toyota Prius would be higher than the sales of a hybrid version of the Cadillac Escalade.When you want to get into comparisons of how far you can get, you should look into comparing the Toyota Yaris Hatchback, the Toyota Corolla, and the Lexus CT200h. The Lexus CT200h is built for fuel economy, but the price tag associated with it would turn most people away. The Toyota Prius is not available in all geographical regions yet and neither is the Toyota Camry hybrid, so the only hybrid option from Toyota is the Lexus CT200h and the price tag is enough to keep most people away. In fact, I am sure a lot of people do the math and think that even their fuel bills cost less than the difference in the price between a Toyota Corolla and a Lexus CT200h.

As sheepdog suggests, the crew know where the life jackets are so if they've got two seconds before the ship sinks and it would take two minutes to get passengers into the life boats, guess what they would do. I doubt the captain would go down with the ship. Remember the Pirates of the Caribbean when the Black Pearl was sunk despite Captain Barbosa's best effort? Okay, so maybe he just talked about it in the dialogue. If the ship was sunk, one question that I am sure that a lot of people would have is why was the Black Pearl in a bottle on Black Beard's ship? And what is with Jack Sparrow's obsession with the Black Pearl?One of the problems with hopping into a life raft and attempting to get away from a sinking ship is that the inflow of water into the sinking ship would create a suction that threatens to sink the life raft, unless the life raft is far enough from the sinking ship. When given the choice of waiting for the ship to sink and hopping onto the life raft, perhaps hanging on to the highest part of the ship would be a better choice because when the ship has been submerged, it would have taken in as much water as it can to create a powerful suction and when the ship is going downward, the area affected by the suction goes downward too. Then again, there's the storm that the little life raft has to weather out. What are the odds of making it to safety in a life raft? If you are in equatorial waters, perhaps having a life jacket would be enough to get to land - the water is not freezing enough to cause hypothermia.

Hi!It's good to have you finally back here on Xisto. Typically, people who have not logged in for over a year are not very likely to come back, but you did! I joined Xisto when it was called Xisto and as I did not log in for a few months, I found Xisto missing and realised it had been renamed to Xisto. The best part about being with Xisto is that it keep running, despite all odds. There are times when the forum is very quiet but then again, the members return to the forum to post. We even had an upgrade recently, and you can tell because the logo on the forum still has the Invision Power Board logo, which replaced the Xisto logo during the upgrade. The most important bit, the MyCENT calculation script is still running though so you can continue to take advantage of the post-to-host service here at Xisto.I have heard of Tripura in the past and it is popular for its crafts. Perhaps what it needs is a representation at international trade fairs because some people would like to use the artistic designs for the interior decoration within their homes. Diwali is a good time for putting up the traditional decorations too - a false thatch roof and bamboo poles by the sidewalk give any house a more festive look when everywhere else it is just concrete and bricks.A lot of people make do without a college degree because of their I.T. skills, so although you have not been able to take up an engineering degree, I would encourage you to not give up on your dreams. You can learn quite a bit from Xisto to get you by and find work in the I.T. industry. If you have your website up and running, you can also use your website to showcase your work to potential employers.

I have seen fast food outlets in India where the premises are not clean but they get customers because of the taste of their products or because of their low prices. Dominos pizza in India typically has the image of being the go-to place for pizza. Their prices are high, their tables are usually greasy, their outlets usually have flies bothering customers, they do not provide table cutlery or plates (it is provided as a take-away packaged in a cardboard box with oregano and chilli flakes except they don't put it in a bag if you are an eat-in customer), but people still eat-in or order take-out. In fact, Dominos pizza is more of a take-out pizza outlet that provides tables and chains - the customers have to walk up to a counter, place an order, and take their food back to their tables (although sometimes there is staff that helps take food back to the table when it is a slow day for business).On the other hand, there is McDonalds, which is almost spotlessly clean. I do not really think McDonalds has higher sales than Dominos despite McDonalds charging less than Dominoes does. How does that logic work? Beat me, but is human behavior so it is meant to be irrrational and characterized by group-think. Perhaps it is because I am comparing apples and oranges. The demand for pizzas perhaps outweighs the demand for burgers. Or perhaps the appearance of the filling on the food gives a better sense of satisfaction than when the filling is covered by bread. In either case, both Dominoes and McDonalds have spent heavily on marketing (primarily television commercials for advertising their products) so it is unlikely that it is the advertising that accounts for the difference.If you were to compare two different fast food pizza outlets, Pizza Hut most likely does better than Dominoes. There are times when you would be hard pressed to find a table at Pizza Hut but you know you can always get a table at Dominoes. Pizza Hut's prices are at-par with Dominoes so there's very minimal price difference there. Pizza Hut does, however, offer at-table service which is what probably accounts for most of the differences in demand between Dominoes and Pizza Huts sales but it is difficult to tell conclusively because we do not negate the effect of the cleanliness maintained at Pizza Hut in comparison to Dominoes. Also, Pizza Hut does not advertise as much as Dominoes does so that is another factor to consider.Comparing two different outlets from two different fast food chains is difficult unless they have the exact same rating for the flavor, they have the same type of product, they have the same type of service (i.e. server-at-table versus self-service at a counter), they have similar levels of cleanliness, and they spend roughly the same on advertising. If all the factors are the same, except for one factor, it is possible for us to compare the two outlets to determine the effect of that one factor. In the absence of such an ideal case, it is difficult to determine if that particular factor is responsible for the difference in sales. Then again, there's the feeling of nationalism or the feeling of the superiority of a foreign brand so even with all things being the same, the brand perception can influence the findings too.

I think we need to draw a distinction between a university program and a professional certification here.The difference between a professional certification and a university program becomes clear when you think about the software development/information technology programs that universities offer - just because a university offers a Java course does not mean he or she can get Java certified with what he or she has learned in the course. Instead, the university program offers the basics and the student can choose to learn on his/her own to prepare for the certification exams.Having said that, I should mention that in the software development and information technology programs that most universities offer, not all the students would want to get certified in a particular area. However, if there was a program in, say, IT project management, every student would want to get a PMP certification and it would be appropriate for the university to prepare students for the PMP certification exam. Again, this is something that each of the students in the program should want to take up, rather than students in a particular concentration would want to take up, for such a change in the academic program to be worth the investment for the university.

The Ford Motor Company is known for many firsts in the automobile industry and in the manufacturing business. Mass production was first made popular by Henry Ford, who announced that the Model T Ford was available in any color, as long as it is black. It was an amusing statement to make indeed, but by eliminating the effort involved in customizing the vehicles at the factory and shipping them to the dealers, Ford was able to make its automobile readily available the consumers. The Fordism of the past is less applicable today because it is possible to use machinery to paint an automobile in the desired color and make it available to the consumer within 24 hours by holding off the painting process till a holding area close to the dealer. Such a practice is still uncommon because of the level of management and cost involved in ensuring that the process is handled smoothly and that the quality of the product is maintained. Often, we see car repair workshops and, more specifically, the vehicle body repair shops that spend up to a month trying to get a vehicle back into its original shape after an accident when it is possible to manufacture a vehicle in much less time. It just goes to show you how well a manufacturer has to optimize a process to build a new car when compared to the processes of repairing a vehicle at a workshop.

The tale of Mukesh Ambani and Anil Ambani is perhaps the most interesting of all. The two brothers, sons of Dhirubhai Ambani of the Reliance Group, were so close that you could start a conversation with one of the two Ambani brothers and continue the conversation till its end with the other. Such was the similarity of thought between the two Ambanis. The falling apart of the two brothers also saw the Reliance organization split between them with Mukesh Ambani getting the traditionally profitable cash cows in the energy sector, and Anil Ambani getting the more modern technological parts consisting of telecommunication and electronics. The division matches the managerial approach of each of the two brothers, with Anil Ambani being more of a risk taker and Mukesh Ambani who has a more risk averse approach taking the conservative and proven path.

Re-birth and the circle of life is discussed in several religions. However, when you do get your re-birth, you would hardly even remember what you did in your previous birth. There is, however, karma that decides what you get re-born as. Some religions state that you can choose to end the cycle of life and death, and you have to surrender to spirituality for such a thing to happen.You should not try to combine spirituality with science because for as long as you accept the scientific theories, laws of physics, and astronomy, your core framework would be incompatible with the spiritual thought processes. The simplest way to understand spirituality is to set aside preconceived notions gained through science and material bonding, and accept the scriptures for what they are. Trying to interpret the applicability of spiritual philosophies to everyday life is harder still and requires that one become an expert in that particular area of spirituality before one can realize the true meaning of the subject simply because the meaning of the text is not usually obvious as soon as you read it.When one does get a sense of a complete disregard for material existence and seeks the means to break the cycle of life and death, he or she achieves what we are all meant to achieve (though do not necessarily achieve) over the thousands and millions of cycles of birth and death.

I was able to name 56 countries. I grew up as an expatriate in the middle east (Dubai!) and I'm originally from India, so I got all of the neighbouring countries. Perhaps after I spend a couple of years on the run from the interpol because of some weird government conspiracy, I'll be able to name all of the countries on the map as well as the small-town cities that nobody would ever bother to look at (just kidding... I've watched U.S. marshals and the Boune trilogy, and think they have way too many far-fetched ideas - if the government wanted to nab somebody, it is hardly all that difficult given the resources that the government has at its disposal).

I like the Knight XV from Conquest because it represents the limits of engineering in protecting the occupants of a vehicle. It comes at a high price and is not affordable to the average vehicle owner so is not something that one would be able to get. It is more of a marvel of engineering that people talk about as the best of vehicles. From an aesthetics perspective, the Lamborghini Diablo had an image that few cars can match. Think of it this way - back in the old days, we had toothbrushes that looked like bristles stuck on the end of a stick. Now, toothbrushes are angular to reach places that are hard to get to. The Lamborghini Diablo represented the angular design of cars during its time, though you wouldn't expect it to get to places that other cars wouldn't :-PAlthough everyone admires a particular vehicle, they would not necessary buy one. Imagine the pollution of all SUV lovers drove Hummer H2s or Ford F150s. The Toyota Prius and the Nissan Leaf are vehicles that more people ought to adopt because of the minimal impact that they have on the environment. If Toyota manages to give the Prius a more attractive design and a lower price tag, more individuals would probably be willing to own one. To avoid the cost of a hybrid system, perhaps vehicle manufacturers can introduce microhybrids - these are not hybrids at all but rather a system that shuts down the engine when the vehicle is stationary while providing a heavy duty starter motor that is built for the additional start-stop cycles that a microhybrid would require. In developing countries such as India, some drivers turn off their engines at traffic lights. The 3-wheeled taxis (autorickshaws) in India are popular for turning off their engines and using a level-based starter. Despite the pollution from their vehicles, the drivers do manually what a microhybrid system would be expected to do in a regular vehicle. Motorcyclists in India are also known to turn off their engines at traffic lights - although they sometimes tend to hold up traffic when they have starting problems (the kick start on Indian motorcycles does not always start the engine on the first kick).

I often use Wikipedia as a reference and, like most other people on this thread mentioned, I verify the information before I assume that it is true. Most of the information posted on Wikipedia is accurate enough to be taken despite the possibility of it being inaccurate but if you find the same information across multiple websites then you could perhaps accept what you read, provided that there is sufficient support for the idea. However, it is likely that the authors of the content put up on other websites got their information from Wikipedia and that could again be the spread of inaccurate information. Ideally, you would want to subscribe to a database that contains articles and content of the type that you are interested in. Most universities provide students with a subscription to the ProQuest, EBSCOhost, or Gale article databases. These databases further provide an option to limit the search to peer-reviewed sources so you can ensure that you get information that is more-or-less accurate by virtue of being published in a peer-reviewed journal or other peer-reviewed publication. There still is always the possibility that information that you read is inaccurate so unless someone sets out to research the existing literature and validate the information provided, it would be difficult to verify if something is true. It is perhaps the reason why something discovered overnight isn't accepted as scientific theory unless there is a body of research that supports the finding.

I wrote a PHP script for Captcha just last week. I tried to keep it simple and it will most likely be possible to write a Python script to use popular optical character recognition libraries for obtaining the text from the image, but my point is to keep the weakest spambots away while enabling all users to post comments - not that I get all that many comments on my blog.I also had some spam finding its way into a CodeShare script that I setup, though the spam is negligible at this stage. I think a good way to prevent spam is to display a picture and ask the user a question about the picture, such as "What is the color of the car in the picture?" It would be difficult to create a generic spambot that can get past such a captcha, though if someone were to write a spambot specific to the website, they would be able to eventually get past this variant of captcha.

Nate,I haven't seen you much on the forum and it is probably because you had to sign up with a different account. The Xisto days were definitely a lot of fun because there was so much activity on the forum.However, I would have to disagree with the title of the thread. Xisto isn't dead for as long as there is someone out there who continues to contribute to the forum. The forum has been recently been upgraded too.I have been getting a reasonable response from Xisto - Web Hosting on the tickets that I have created so perhaps the ticket you created was from around the time when there was a transition from Xisto to Xisto or from the time when the forum was being upgraded. A forum upgrade typically means that a lot of the scripts, including the one for calculating MyCENTs has to be re-written to get the script working on the new version of the forum.The forum will be alive and involving for as long as the members stick around on the forum, the community will continue to exist. If you are around, you would be helping keep the forum up too.

The best thing about the good old days is that we had plenty of time. Then, came the advanced degrees at universities that demanded more time, the work at the office where the boss insists on sleeping at the office round the clock even when there's nothing to do. It's a constantly increasing set of demands that people have.Lately, there haven't been many posts on the forum but it's usually a phase that the forum has been going through over the years. There are times when the forum sees no posts at all, then suddenly there's an interest by the members and the forum is buzzing with activity again. There's always something happening on the forum when there are new members signing up, so that's definitely something we ought to encourage.The MyCENTs are fewer than there used to be in the Xisto days. It perhaps is intended to make sure that the old members stay on the forum for long enough to generate interest.

sheepdog,When you mention about things that have a really high demand that the firm is unable to manufacture enough of them to keep up with the demand, the iPhone comes to mind - every time a new one is launched, it gets sold out within the first couple of hours although now it is starting to lose its novelty with so many other smart phones and tablets out there.Many people get attracted to these products despite their high prices. When Blackberry dropped the prices of the PlayBook, that perhaps had other manufacturers figure out what the right price ought to be and Amazon seems to have the pricing of the Kindle Fire just right for the average consumer to want to buy it. iPad still probably makes up for a huge portion of the tablets and they have to keep innovating to keep their lead.

Hi!I have been playing Transport Tycoon (the Open-source variant) a lot lately, and have also been playing FlatOut 2.I really like the Grand Theft Auto series of games, and have played Mafia as well (Mafia tries to add realism to the game to some extent; some bits are fun while other bits are not but the use of cheats does make it playable). I have yet to try Saints Row and I can't comment on it unless I've played it.I have a nephew who is almost nine years old and he isn't good at computer games yet, but he loves to play Robot Arena (Robot Arena is easy; Robot Arena 2 adds a bit more complexity that he can't handle just yet).

I think you could call the company "Right Property". A lot of people try to find homes in good neighbourhoods or property that they can use as an investment to sell a couple of years later at a higher price. If you can match their need to property that is available for sale, you would be getting them what they want rather than simply selling that whatever is up for grabs. A tag line could be "Finding The Right Property For Your Needs".BTW, which part of the world are you setting up in? Do you have a need for any I.T. services?

Hi!I noticed the new forum version only because the logo reads "IPS Community" instead of Xisto. Compared to the effort involved in upgrading WordPress, there's a lot required to upgrade Invision Power Board for Xisto. Perhaps we should try to have a go at using bbPress (the WordPress-based forum software)? It is more modular and it is easier to develop plugins for too (similar to WordPress plugins, you have to code plugins with filters or actions; if you can build WordPress plugins, you should be able to create bbPress plugins too).

Hi!I am not quite sure of what you mean when you refer to machine problem on console application. Some of the problems that you might experience when developing a console application are the inability to use the windowing capabilities provided by Windows so you will have to create your own code for building a user interface framework.For example, suppose you want to display a text-based interface and want to center a string of text on the screen, you would not have the ability to simply create a centered window on the screen and drag-and-drop a label control, with the centered alignment property, onto it. You have to calculate the length of the string, divide the length into half, find the width of the screen in characters (usually about 80 characters, but it may differ), divide the screen width into half, subtract half the length of the string from half the width of the screen, and then display the string.There are libraries such as ncurses that enable you to do a lot more on the Linux platform, such as displaying colored text. You can do the same on the Windows platform with the ANSI.SYS driver (i.e. by using ANSI terminal emulation; there are different kinds of terminals that you can get support for if you use a software such as HyperTerminal but it is for obtaining input and sending output to a serial or parallel port or to a TCP/IP socket - you still can use it but you will have to deal with the added complexity of writing to a socket file descriptor or a port driver rather than to the standard input).If you do have a specific problem that you have, you could probably post back to this thread and I or someone else on this forum can help you out with a solution.

I do like the C programming language because of its simplicity. There is so much that you can do with it and the programs you write using C are more efficient - they run quicker because they don't have all of the runtime checks associated with other programming languages. If you compare C to other programming languages, you will notice that there is very little to learn in comparison. Sure, there's the object oriented development approach that seems to be a better way to structure code, but if you do follow a disciplined approach with structuring your C programs, you can do just about the same with regular C programming by using structures and pointers.C++, on the other hand, is a HUGE language. Firstly, it introduces the concept of inheritance to the C programming language and if that was not enough, there's the standard template library to look up. Also, when you write your programs with C++, they tend to get bloated and it does take longer to run. I believe there was an initial attempt to convert the Linux kernel from C to C++ to take advantage of the object oriented programming paradigm, but it did not quite work out as it was not as responsive as the Linux kernel written in C.The C language is quite powerful, primarily because of the presence of pointers - you can alter the stack or change data in just about any memory location. C++ builds upon C, but you cannot treat it as a perfect superset because there are differences between the C++ and C standards. You can fairly easily tell whether the integrated development environment you are using compiles the code with a C compiler or with a C++ compiler with an understanding of the differences between the standards for C and C++.The advantage that we have with C and C++ is that they are available on just about every platform so you can expect to write a simple C program and re-compile it for a different platform. It is perhaps the reason why we are able to run Linux on multiple platforms by simply re-compiling it.

The sizeof operation does work for arrays in C when you use it in the same scope that the array was declared, but the moment you pass the array as a parameter, the array degrades into a pointer and you won't have any way of determining the size other than by passing in the size of the array as a parameter. I am guessing that the compiler can tell what the size of an array is, but the size is not maintained at run time so you have to define a variable to keep track of the size, if you intend to pass the array to a function at some point.In either case, you could drop the use of arrays entirely and use dynamically allocated memory because arrays are typically of a fixed size (ignoring the extensions that some compilers lend to the C language) and if you allocate too much space for an array, you're either wasting space or you will run out of stack space eventually.

A two dimensional array has a pair of indexes that you can work with so if you have a 3x3 array, you have 9 elements. If you want to turn the 2-dimensional array into a 1-dimensional array, you can either go with the approach in the link posted, or you can treat the 2-dimensional array as a 1-dimensional array assuming that the elements for the 2-dimensional array are stored sequentially.To do this, get a pointer to the first element of the 2-dimensional array. You can then treat the pointer as a 1-dimensional array and copy elements from it to the actual 1-dimensional array. It's one of the advantages of C wherein you can treat one piece of structured data as a totally different structure through casting and pointers.

The advantage I see in driving around an all-terrain vehicle with an enclosure is that you are protected from the elements and you can drive where no car will take you. Perhaps an SUV will, perhaps it won't, but the all-terrain vehicle is built for surfaces that other vehicles cannot go.