k_nitin_r

Alicia,I do not have a Dish Network subscription but with all the negative posts about experiences that people have had with Dish Network, I am probably not someone who would want to take up the service either.There are however a couple of things I do need to mention, in fairness to Dish Network:Firstly, when a receiver has not been returned to Dish Network after the cancellation of the account, Dish Network can legally collect the rental for the receiver. Think of the case when you lease your car to somebody and they return it a month late - you are legally entitled to the rental for the additional month. The same applies to the received from Dish Network as well. By delaying the return of the receiver, the (former) customer causes lost revenue for the firm and is therefore liable to Dish Network. However, the customer has to be informed of how to return the receivers - if the boxes are shipped automatically and the customer receives them, there is an obligation for the customer to send the receivers back. Some posts to this thread indicate that the customers didn't receive the boxes so were unaware of how to send the receivers back.I do not agree with the other practices by Dish Network, such as increasing prices without notifying the customer especially when the customer has cancelled his or her subscription, as mentioned in the first post in this thread by kvonarya (dated 22nd April, 2008).Signing up customers for a contract without informing them about the existence of the contract or that they are bound to the contract is not something Dish Network can legally do because there was no consent between the two parties. The customer should have had an opportunity to refuse the contract or should have had the ability to agree to the contract for the contract to be valid. Refer to the post by iGuest (posted on 23rd March, 2009) for the mention about the two year contract. Also, I would add that deliver firms often obtain customer signatures on PDAs to indicate that they have received goods or the equipment has been setup by a representative of the firm. However, the legality of the use of a signature on a PDA does seem questionable in the event of a law suit because the representative can state anything while obtaining the signature of the customer therefore there is no indication of the terms that the customer agreed to when signing a PDA. When signing a paper, the terms that the customer agrees to are right there on the paper.In cases when a box has been ordered from Dish Network and the customer has not received the box, I would expect Dish Network to provide the customer with an alternative means of sending the receiver - either inform them of an address that the customer can send the receiver to by a courier service, at the customer's expense, or to drive over to the Dish Network office and hand over the receiver. It may also be possible for Dish Network to offer to send across a representative to pick up the receiver, either at the customer's expense or at Dish Network's expense if the customer is not located too far away.I am not sure if Dish Network provides customers with the option of buying the receiver rather than providing them with the receiver for the duration of the service. The network I currently subscribe to has me buying a receiver and I do not have a contract - I can get a month's subscription whenever I come to stay and when I'm away, my subscription lapses and my provider simply turns off the service. I own the receiver so the provider does not require the receiver to be returned so it is less risk for them and more flexibility in terms of subscription for me. I believe it is common practice for the network to ask for their receivers when the service has been cancelled - charging the customer for the receivers without asking them to return them is unethical as well because as far as I know, most agreements only state that the provider owns the receivers and is entitled to ask for them to be returned at any time. The agreement with Dish Network may be different but if those are terms that the customer agreed to (legally, the customer agrees to the provider's terms by signing up if any of the forms say in print that the customer agrees to the provider's terms - he or she either has to ask the provider what the its terms are when subscribing or the provider has to state the terms, either of which would seem acceptable).

Abhishek,If you are applying to an MBA program, do make sure that you have a strong statement of purpose and get a good GMAT score (assuming that you are applying to a university in the United States).The statement of purpose is where you would highlight aspects of your resume that you think would give you an edge over other applicants. It also conveys your personality to the evaluators because you can express your thoughts, motivations, and feelings and present your circumstances within a statement of purpose. You can draw references to the incident that got you thinking about business administration, instances where you would think out of the box, success that you had in management and business administration, suggestions that you made to organizations either through contests or by writing to them as a concerned customer, taking the initiative to create change for a cause that you support, or even summer internships that changes your perspective about running a business. You can include positive comments and remarks that you get from your employers regarding your time management, resource management, presentation and communication abilities as well as your ability to organize your work and improve your efficiency or the efficiency of your team.Academic institutions are always on the lookout for students who would have an active role within the research community at the university so any research papers that were published in journals would be a definite plus when applying at any academic institution of higher learning.Moving between different fields of study is usually a good thing - you can draw upon your knowledge in both fields and can manage to synthesize your learning from different disciplines.

Velma,I have heard quite a bit about God of War, mostly because the UAE government had banned it and taken it off store shelves in the interest of younger computer gamers. In the UAE, computer game ratings are not really a concern as long as the game does not include sexual references or references to religion. Violence in computer games is tolerated because its influence is much debated. Some people claim that the violence in computer games keeps people from getting violent in real life whereas other people claim that it is the violence in media and computer games that makes children violent.I did get to catch the God of War trailer on YouTube and read the story line on the first two in the God of War computer game series and did find a rather interesting story line to follow. Having played many games along the lines of Doom and Wolfenstein where one has to find his or her way through a maze while shooting computer controlled 'enemies', I look for something new in computer games to keep me hooked. I like the sandbox style gaming in Grand Theft Auto and Mafia, and although I have not really had a chance to try Saint Row yet, I'm pretty sure I will like it as it is in the same genre. The story line plays a part in getting my interest too.

SheepDog,If you would like help with using an image editing software program and are on the lookout for a tutor, I'm available. There is plenty of free software around so you do not have to go out and get yourself commercial software if all you plan to do is edit images occasionally. Paint.NET and Gimp are the two most popular software programs that are free and they even let you keep the source code so if you want something to work differently, you can hire a software programmer and they can alter the software to suit your style of working.Among the popular software out there are the Adobe Photoshop, Adobe FireWorks (formerly known as Macromedia FireWorks), Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, and Corel Paint Shop Pro (formerly known as Jasc Paint Shop Pro). You could get copies of these software if you plan to go about creating posters, editing pictures of the puppies that you plan to put up on your website for sale, and doing some image editing stuff as a freelancer.Lots of folks on this forum would be willing to help out with image editing if you do not want to do it yourself, so you could also post a thread and you will most probably get some help with image editing.

Velma,Asta Host sounds like a good place to hang out to pick up some mad techie skills but I guess it is more of a place for people who live with a particular technology day in and day out so I'll probably get started on Xisto.I'm not too particular about getting a new theme for the forum because I kinda like the default that is included with the forum.Mahesh,Remember when we had a toolbar at the bottom of the page consisting of games? The toolbar increased loading time quite a bit.BTW, I used my phone, the Nokia E72, to access Xisto and it didn't quite fit the screen width so I imagine you must be using an iPad or a tablet to access the forums.I haven't compared vBulletin with Invision Power Board but I did have a look at phpBB and bbPress, both of which are free, and bbPress seemed to have a better plugin architecture than phpBB but I imagine phpBB would be quicker than bbPress because of the lack of a plugin architecture.Quatrux,If you are planning on changing something yourself, you should consider using a web monkey script. You can use web monkey to alter the markup of the page and perhaps add some CSS styling to the elements too.

UPDATE: I just got the MyCENTs email. The script is running as expected. BTW, the "My Status" feature wasn't working earlier but is working perfectly right now.

Mahesh,I did not get my MyCENTs credited for yesterday's posts so I am guessing that the MyCENTs script may be offline though I cannot tell for sure because at times the MyCENTs script can take as long as two days to credit the MyCENTs.The upgraded forum is slower than it was before the upgrade but it does display a progress bar so the wait does not seem too long.

Velma,I must admit that I am at the exact opposite site of the Corel Draw-Illustrator debate from where you are. I have used Adobe Illustrator and have not used Corel Draw. I did try an old version of Corel Draw sometime in 1999 so that does not really count. The vector smoothing in Corel Draw was rather good at the time compared to Adobe Illustrator when creating hand-drawn (or rather cursor-drawn free form drawings) whereas Adobe Illustrator is the tool of choice when primarily working with the pen tool and creating vector graphics as a part of a work flow that involves other Adobe graphics editing tools.You should also try Adobe Fireworks, which became a part of Adobe's offering after Macromedia's acquisition by Adobe. Fireworks is a good alternative to Adobe Illustrator and provides easy access to the gradient tools. I typically build my vector shapes in Adobe Illustrator and color them using Fireworks.

That is a rather interesting problem. Although it may seem that you are sending information at a speed faster than sound, you have to consider that the parts of the rope move a rather small distance whereas sound or light has to travel from one end of the rope to the other. It is similar to comparing the cases of walking over to push a light switch and using a long stick to flip the light switch - in the first case, you are moving from your seat to the light switch whereas in the second case, your hand moves a small distance, as does the stick (assuming that the stick was at the same level as the switch and placed on a table a little distance away from the switch) so you cannot really say that you have travelled much faster in the second case than you did in the first case.To move a length of rope that is a billion miles long, it would take quite a bit of effort. Consider the weight of a box full of clothes. Now consider several such boxes stacked upon one another. One cannot just pull such a long length of rope by hand as it would be physically impossible for a person to do so.

Hi!I'm planning on starting a site about management theories and techniques and selling books. I'm not too sure if there are many takers because most managers end up learning on the job rather than reading about how it is done while, in the process, putting billions of dollars down the drain. Perhaps I might put a twist to it and write about management information systems because most I.T. folk read a lot of articles on the Internet, especially when there is a problem that they want to solve. The free content would be a bait and hopefully they would want to buy some books while they are on the site. I do not expect much money to come in but as long as it can pay for itself and later make enough to hire an author to keep posting to the site.Wow! You have a website to sell puppies? I'd be glad to lend a hand and help you out with the website if you need any work done on it. And perhaps you could have it linked to your cell phone so you can continue with your business while on the go. Have you considered becoming a pet consultant? You could have a Q&A about pets and share your experience with dog breeding.If you would like to go on a vacation, there are plenty of cheap ways to go on a vacation. You could rent a camper and head out to the woods or go across the state borders and cash in on a cheap hotel offer (most of them offer weekend packages). You could also visit family and they would be glad to have you over for the holiday season and you just might find something under the Christmas tree to cheer you up.The idea of getting online has been around for a long long time but it is only recently that people have decided to make their websites a central part of their businesses and as the sole channel of marketing and sales. Some people use websites to attract people to their exhibitions, such as by reaching out to potential customers on FaceBook and Twitter while other people setup FaceBook pages to sell stuff. Either approach seems to work for them, though it takes a bit of experimenting to figure out which approach would work best as it depends on the audience that you are trying to reach and on the product that you are selling.BTW, the Xisto forum has been upgraded and the sidebar for comments is working now. It does take longer than it used to but hey, it's better than something that does not work at all. The forum also displays a progress bar on top of the screen to indicate that it is working and not simply idling away.

The Intel Atom processor does pretty much anything that your laptop processor can. If you take an Intel Core Duo processor from 2006 you can get almost the same performance from an Intel Atom processor. You can play games on it, but do not expect to play the latest and the greatest of games on it. Many netbooks combine the Intel Atom processor with a dedicated graphics processor so the graphics processing is offloaded and the processor can handle pure computational tasks. The graphics processor is best suited for performing matrix copying and matrix transformations so it can beat even the newest of general purpose processors so if you combine an Intel Atom processor with a dedicated graphics processor, you can play some of the games that you would not be able to play on a computer with a new Intel Core i3 processor alone. However, you do have to consider the advancements in the Sandy Bridge platform that Intel has used for manufacturing the second generation of Intel Core i3 processors so that does narrow the performance gap a bit.If you are planning to do some serious gaming, plan for at least an Intel Core i3 processor and if that is beyond your budget, invest in an AMD E450 processor that does go beyond the performance that an Intel Atom processor has to offer but still does not quite compare to the modern day notebook or desktop processor. If I had to decide between getting a computer with an Intel Atom processor, an AMD E450 processor, or an Intel Core i3 processor, I would get the one with the Intel Core i3 processor because it could handle my general purpose requirements with some light to medium gaming. If I was truly serious about gaming, I would have considered the option of getting a second hand computer with an Intel Core i3 or Intel Core i5 processor from the first generation of Core i3/i5 processors and then getting a dedicated graphics processor to manage the graphics. You would be surprised at how low people are willing to sell their old computers when they have to move away, especially if they have desktop computers.

I ran PC-DOS on some really old computers (a 486 desktop that I owned, and a 386 laptop that I still own) but then moved to MS-DOS. I run MS-DOS 5.0 on the 386 and the last version of PC-DOS that I ran on the 486 was MS-DOS 6.22. I used QBasic quite a bit when I learned that there was a variant of it titled QuickBasic that had the ability to generate executable files that could run quicker than the interpreted programs that QBasic was capable of. The code was exactly the same so it made switching between QBasic and QuickBasic rather simple. Both were similar to the Edit.com program that was included with MS-DOS so with similar interfaces, usability was rather simple.Right now, you can find Free-DOS included on some computers that do not have Windows as an operating system. You can get a choice between Ubuntu Linux and Free DOS. Although Free DOS can run pretty much anything that PC-DOS or MS-DOS can run, it also provides a graphical interface, has the ability to connect to TCP/IP networks and the Internet, and has more software available for it than PC-DOS ever did. FreeDOS can run on old hardware and new hardware alike so you can also get out your old desktops and have then running FreeDOS. You can also toss in a network interface card to connect to your router for Internet access and perhaps you can even hook it up to the rest of the computers at home.

Velma,Thank you for posting the announcement. A little over an hour ago, I noticed the change and also found that I couldn't go to the sub-forums by clicking on them - I clicked on "Alerts and Notices" and the page loaded without the CSS and with Javascript errors. I looked up the thread mentioning that Xisto was upgraded to version 3.0 as I could not find a suitable thread at the time and posted about the error to that thread.BTW, did we skip version 3.1 of the Invision Power Board? I found a thread about an upgrade to version 3.0 and here we have a thread about the upgrade to version 3.2. Either we skipped a version, or the odd-numbered decimal of the version number of Invision Power Board indicates a development or a beta release, like they did for RedHat Linux before they branched off into the Fedora project.Speaking of Asta Host, I haven't logged onto the forum in ages because I could not find the link on the Xisto - Web Hosting website and I could not remember the name so finally now that you have posted a link to Asta Host, I was about to visit the forum. I am rather surprised to know that both forums are being managed by Opaque. I wonder why a single organization would want to maintain two competing forums. Perhaps if the target audience and the type of dicussions on the websites were different, it would make sense but I never really compared the two forums based on the content to determine what kind of audience they cater to. I did notice that Asta Host has more sub-forums related to technical issues and a couple of people on Xisto discussed about Asta Host in the past and mentioned that it was more technical than Xisto.Oh, and when I looked at Asta Host, I discovered yet another bug - both Asta Host and Xisto have the same logo, which is the IPS Community. I guess branding and theming weren't done on the new version yet. If either Xisto or Asta Host is looking for volunteers, I would be happy to help out.I sometimes wonder why Xisto / Trap 17 was based on the Invision Power Board software rather that vBulletin, which was more popular at the time, or phpBB which is free (both open-source and available at no cost). I would imagine that Invision Power Board was cheaper than vBulletin or the organization used a copy of Invision Power Board internally and decided to use the software for the public forum as well, or somebody within the organization had experience of working with Invision Power Board (or maybe even Invision Free, which was the free version of Invision Power Board offered at the time but is no longer available) so they decided to cash in on his/her experience and use Invision Power Board to get started quicker.If I were given the choice to select among free and open-source forums, I would choose bbPress simply because it is easier to install and manage plugins. I have looked at the source code within phpBB and plugins are basically just modifications made to the source code - there is even an automated installed that can look up specific lines within your source code and make modifications. I see that as difficult to manage because if you removed a line of code, some updated would not work, while on the other hand the plugins would run quicker because the overhead of managing a plugin framework at runtime would not exist. I did see WordPress run rather slow with a plugin framework so I would imagine that the case is the same with bbPress.

I have had the Nokia E72 for almost a year now and it has been running without a single crash or hang for over a year. Recently, it has started developing electronic glitches - the home screen sometimes goes blank but the menus are still visible. Phone calls aren't hung up while the screen goes blank. It's almost as though someone yanked out the memory card... when that happens, the wallpaper disappears leaving the theme's background color but in this case the background color appear white instead of with the theme's color.The problem only occurred once, but I see my Nokia E72 going the way of my iPhone - the iPhone crashes, hangs, displays the grey apple screen for a couple of minutes, and sometimes even refuses to do anything except answer calls - all of these are fixed by a reboot but it is annoying to have a phone do that to you.So far, all of my phone purchases have been because the phone quits working or stops operating normally so I guess the time has come for a new phone. I might hold on to the Nokia E72 for another few months before putting it in the bin and getting another phone. It feels unethical to sell something that you know does not work perfectly but some people still do it - I'd rather just leave it in the recycling bin for the cell phone company to salvage whatever they can and make a new cell phone.Does anyone else have the year-long expiry of their smart phones or do your phones get lost or trashed long before the electronics within give up?

Wow! Another upgrade to the forum. This upgrade seems to have messed things up. The CSS style sheets aren't loading and the Javascript engine is tossing out a bunch of error messages too. I wonder if message posting works - if it does, you will see this post on the forum. If not, this post will be list in the deep dark outer space never to be seen again.

The Delhi Police in India has decided to replace its Hindustan Motors Ambassador vehicles with the Hyundai Accent sedan and the Maruti Suzuki SX4 sedan, according to the Indian Express in an article dated February 19, 2011. The move will equip the Delhi police officials with quicker vehicles and the vehicles are easier to maintain compared to the Hindustan Motors Ambassador, which is become less common by the day as newer, quicker, and more efficient vehicles replace them.The Maruti Suzuki SX4 is Maruti's premium sedan so people have begun to question the spending on the new vehicles, considering the availability of the Maruti Suzuki Swift DZire and the Maruti Suzuki Swift for less than the price of the Maruti Suzuki SX4.

Hi!Good to know that you have a web store. What do you sell?I haven't been using my website to sell anything but have yet to make any revenue from the websites that I run (or at least used to run). I am hoping to take my website seriously enough to make a living out of it as I am currently unemployed and don't have enough time to take up full-time work alongside my research studies.If business is slow, then perhaps you have found the time to take a vacation! You would not want to go vacationing with orders pending from customers, would you? Besides, with the Christmas spirit and in the spirit of cheer and merry-making, you could go visit family and friends, or have them over to celebrate.The profile comments page works for me flawlessly every time, so you might want to give it a try instead of relying on the sidebar comments feature.

Connecting to an Access database requires you to make a JDBC connection. You can look up articles on using JDBC and can connect to the Access database either by using a JDBC driver specifically for connecting to the Access database or by using a general-purpose ODBC-JDBC driver and having ODBC handle the database-specific connection aspects.If you are planning to develop commercial applications at some point in the future, I would recommend that you consider using another database such as the Microsoft SQL Server or the Oracle database, or perhaps even the MySQL database if you want something that you can use for free, for storing your data.

Hi!I know it has been a long long time (five months, to be more specific) since you have posted but I have recently been able to get out of previous commitments that I had and can help you with learning Java.I have some Java experience though most of my work has been in ASP.NET and PHP development, with some C and C++ development as well. I guess I'm the kind of person that most H.R. folk would stay away from hiring because of my diverse skill set as they are always on the lookout for specialists who know one thing and one thing only.If you need help with a specific project, you can post to the forums with problems that you are having and we can help out. There are not many Java developers out here on the forum so drop me a private message and I will check back to respond to your thread.BTW, how far did you get in developing application programs with JSP? Were you able to setup a server and run some basic code with it? Are you using any frameworks or libraries for web application development?

It has been a while since I last did any Java programming so I may be a bit rusty, but I will try my best to help you debug your code. First off, I would suggest you create a simple console application program or at least a basic Swing form that will help you get out all the clutter and display a single value or string. You can use System.out.println in the console application program or create a JLabel and call the setText method on it while using a StringBuilder to accumulate all of your string text.Next, run your application program and check if you get any exceptions. When creating a database application program, problems often begin at the start - when your application program tries to connect to the database. Check if your connection string (the call to the DriverManager.getConnection) has the right syntax and you have the driver classes available to the program. The problem may be with setting the class path to the driver files. Also check the user credentials being passed when forming the connection. If you can open a connection to the database, run a simple SELECT statement using a database connection utility (the MySQL command line utility if you are connecting to a MySQL database, SQL Plus if you are connecting to an Oracle database, or the SQL Server Management Studio if you are connecting to a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database or later, or the SQL Server Query Analyzer if you are connecting to a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database or earlier) with the same user account credentials that you have used for your application program. If it checks out, then you should no longer be getting the exception that prevents your application program from connecting to the database server and executing a simple SELECT query.Next, make sure that you can query the table you need to access from your application program through the database client utility. This helps check for non-existent objects and permission issues when accessing objects. Permission issues are common when accessing information across different schemas or databases. If this works fine, look at the SQL statement being generated in your application program. Initially, try using a simple SELECT statement without any parameters or string concatenation. Often problems occur in string concatenation if SQL string literals are not enclosed within quotes. This can be confusing when developing the application program in a programming language because you have to place quotes for both the programming language string literals and include additional quotes for the database server to read within the SQL statements therefore you may need to escape the inner quotes that are meant for the database server to read rather than the programming language compiler. Also, ensure that the column names being specified in the query exist. If you do a simple SELECT * query with no WHERE or ORDER BY clause, you should be able to perform a basic test within your application program. Also check if values are available within the database table by querying the table using the database client utility.Finally, get your application program to display a value from the first row of the result set returned to the application program from the database server as a result of executing the query. If you are able to access data from the database, you can rule out problems with the database connectivity and can look for a problem in your code specific to handling the result set or displaying the values on the user interface.Using a debugger to step through your source code often makes the process of debugging your application much easier. You will spend a lot of time debugging your code with a debugger unless you use break points at key locations within your source code. Many debuggers support the use of conditional debuggers so you do not have to step through every iteration of a loop or step into the code each time a particular line with a break point executes when a condition has not been met. You may decide to create additional variables within your code to help in setting conditional breakpoints. If your compiler supports conditional compilation (such as the #ifdef used by C and C++) you can define the variables and set their values within conditional compilation blocks rather than have them within the application. Also, consider the use of a logging framework when you have sorted out basic problems with your code. Logging frameworks help in troubleshooting intermittent problems, especially those that occur within a production environment. Logging frameworks often have the ability to send out email or write to a file to notify you of problems during the execution of the application program and are handy in learning about problems within a running application program when you do not have access to a debugger.

In the UAE, there are just two seasons - summer and winter. There are trees with leaves that do not fall off at the change of the season, it may rain in winter but that is rather unpredictable and barely lasts for over a week though we can have rainfall twice or thrice in a season, and there is never any snow because it does not get cold enough. The rain often causes flooding as the city is not prepared to deal with such a large amount of precipitation but they do manage to get water pumps around quickly enough to get rid of the flood waters within six to twelve hours. It helps deal with the floods after the rainfall but during the rainfall you could have traffic congestion and blocked traffic. One thing is for sure though - the summer would be hot and the temperatures can go as high as 48 celcius, which on the fahrenheit scale is about 118 fahrenheit (I used Google to convert celcius to fahrenheit by typing in "48 celcius in fahrenheit" - try it out! Google is rather smart at figuring out the temperature conversions and can convert other types of units too). Needless to say, the summers are more depressing than the winters especially if you are standing outdoors when waiting for someone.In the UAE, Dubai does organize the annual Dubai Shopping Festival around January or February, and the Dubai Summer Surprises around July or August. There is the Global Village which has stalls setup from all across the world and each set of stalls has a theme of a particular nation and performances so it is rather entertaining. It could take you two or three days to explore it all so do plan an early start in the evening if you plan to get there. The Dubai Shopping Festival is what Dubai is popular for - get out there and shop for whatever fancies you at bargain prices while getting a raffle coupon to win a car, gold, or even another vacation! The Dubai Summer Surprises is for the school kids who have time off from school during a month-long summer vacation and so there are lots of activities from face-painting to becoming a part of a kids city, being a part of the largest display of flowers, and meeting various characters amidst performances.

I just checked my website and all is well. I checked both my static home page and my blog, which is powered by the MySQL database, and both are accessible and provide a timely response. Perhaps the issue occurred when you checked and it is back to normal now? Free web hosting comes with its drawbacks but I've learned to live with it - if I'm not paying, I don't really mind if there's some downtime occasionally. I tend to think of how a web hosting service that I paid for would respond if they had some downtime - they most certainly would not part with the money that was paid to them and give me a refund or even credit to make future orders for the duration of the outage so I stand to lose much much less with a free web hosting service.The recent comments on the right side of the Xisto page displays comments that you set or comments that somebody else sets on their profile. Although it is supposed to let you reply to messages from the sidebar, it has some sort of a bug that displays the action failed message. To get around the bug, simply go to your profile page (if you want to post a comment about yourself) or go to the profile page of the user whose message you want to reply to and type in your message there - that works and I always use it when the right sidebar widget quits on me.