k_nitin_r

I came across a pneumetic material transport system at a hospital. It reduces the amount of handling of pathogenic blood samples and therefore reduces the risk of infection. Blood sample vials are placed within what looks like a time capsule. A vacuum tube delivers the capsule through a tube network to the destination terminal. The capsules absorb the shock of dropping down the tubes and the restriction on the radius of curvature of the tubes specified by the manufacturer on the installation of the system prevents the capsules from clogging the tubes. The setup is perhaps quite expensive and can only be afforded by corporation-hospitals but the ability of the system to reduce pathogen transfers and mixups due to handling problems justifies the cost. The ability of the sending/receiving stations to route packages through the tube network is rather remarkable. Just as you would enter the intercom number on an office telephone network, you can enter the sending/receiving station number when sending across a capsule.

This year, our family saw a new car purchase. We have had a Toyota Avalon since 2000 and although the car still ran perfectly well, it was time for trading in our old car for a new one.We looked at Toyota's offerings, which were the new Toyota Avalon and the Toyota Aurion, and as the Toyota and Lexus cars share the same showroom space, we ventured into the Lexus display area and looked at the Lexus IS and Lexus ES as well. We finally made our decision to buy the Lexus ES350, which was the featured vehicle among the other Lexus vehicles at the showroom (it took the center spot). The vehicle is supposedly an upmarket choice compared to a Toyota Avalon because of its Lexus badging but it definitely was smaller than the Toyota Avalon 2000. The newer Toyota Avalons on sale, however, were the same size as the Lexus ES350 so it was apparent that Toyota shortened its platform for models sold after 2004 (or was it 2006?). The only vehicle the retained the long wheel base of the Toyota Avalon 2000 was the Lexus LS460 and the Lexus LS600hl.The Lexus ES350 is based on the Toyota Camry platform, unlike older Lexus models that were completely designed from ground-up. Although the perceived value of the Lexus ES350 among potential buyers does seem lower because of its similarity with the Toyota Camry, when you get into a Lexus ES350 it is a completely difference experience. The sound levels are much lower and the vehicle is equipped with more comfort and safety features. A rear-viewing camera helps in parking in those difficult spaces and the parktronic sensors alert you to obstacles nearby.The In-Car Entertainment features a 14-speaker Mark Levinson sound system with a 6-disc changer. The safety features prevent the use of the DVD player while the car is in motion and the bluetooth phone integration also refuses to display the phone number of the caller or allow you to dial out while driving but it does let you answer and hang up calls.For buyers who are considering the Lexus ES350, I can tell you from first hand experience that the car is built for comfort and has been equipped with all kinds of safety equipment and the sound system fails to disappoint. If you've got your heart set on the car, go order it and do share your views on the vehicle.

Hi Vicky!Good to have you on-board. You'll find people on the forum interesting in all sorts of stuff, and always willing to hand out advice. While participating, you would also get to earn credits that you can redeem for web hosting packages from Xisto - Web Hosting/Xisto so that's a definite plus.While you are new to the forum, do check out the rules. The forum encourages unique content and copy-pasting is a definite no-no. Also, you can't put your sign off within the message body but instead it has to be in your forum signature (see your profile page for editing your signature). If you are ever in violation of the rules, a friendly moderator will drop you a message and remind you about the rule book.I see you do not have a myCENT counter on your PMB yet. When you sign up on the forum and post messages, your messages appear on the forum but they are not accounted for till you sign up on the Xisto - Support and billing site with the same username/email address. As soon as you sign up, you will get credits for all of the posts that you make, including the ones that you have made between the time that you signed up on Xisto and the time that you signed up on the Xisto - Support and billing site. Do make sure that you use the same username when you sign up because the system would have no way of telling you're the same person on both accounts.There's a sub-forum for almost everything and the Computing sub-forum is where all the activity about web development and design happens.You may want to take a look at the web hosting packages on the Xisto - Support and billing site. It features the Logic basic package for about $3 per month and a domain name at $13 per year so as soon as you come up with the credits or cash to pay for it all, you can subscribe to a hosting package. It will take you a while to collect the credits to order a hosting package and a domain name. The myCENT counter appears next to each of your messages and as soon as the myCENTs counter goes over one hundred, it drops a dollar (call it a myDOLLAR, if you will) into your Xisto - Support and billing account balance and the remaining myCENTs are returned to your myCENT counter and keep adding up till you can make up another hundred. The myCENT credits take a while to appear while the script accounts for your postings to the forum so give it a day or two and you should receive an email telling you when you go over one hundred myCENTs.As always, if you have any questions, feel free to ask and I or one of the other members of the forum would be glad to reply to you and offer you our assistance.

Maruti Suzuki acquired a license to manufacture Fiat's 1.2 litre multijet diesel engine in India for its own vehicles. It beats having to develop an engine by itself and the Fiat engine has been used by Tata and Fiat for long enough for it to have proven itself. The Fiat 1.2 litre engine is a 4-cylinder engine, which means less vibration than comparable diesel engines in vehicles sold in India that have 3-cylinder engines (although Nissan claims to have solved the vibration issue associated with 3-cylinder engines in its Nissan Micra, which is also sold under a Renault badge as the Renault Pulse).Although the Fiat 1.2 litre multijet diesel engine is a rather good engine, Maruti Suzuki is using the engine to power all of its diesel vehicles from the Maruti Swift and Maruti Ritz hatchbacks to the Maruti Swift DZire and Maruti SX4 sedans, and may use it in the Maruti Ertiga minivan/MUV too. This does get buyers of the higher-end Maruti sedans thinking because when they pay up to twice as much as the Ritz hatchback when buying an SX4, they get the exact same engine so would have a car that feels underpowered. Their vehicles are still selling like hot cakes with long waiting periods (the long waiting periods owing mostly to the labor disputes that they have had to solve at their Manesar and Gurgaon manufacturing plants) but the fact that the engine for higher-priced vehicles is also used in cheaper vehicles would have at least dented the sales of the SX4 sedan a bit.Comparing the Maruti Swift DZire and the Maruti SX4, the two seem to differ only in shape and ground clearance. Both are sedans and when the SX4 has no distinct advantage over the Swift DZire, at least some of Maruti's customers would have considered a shift from purchasing an SX4 to purchasing a Swift DZire.If you look at Lexus's strategy in the middle east, they may have offered the 3.5-litre engine in their IS and ES vehicles, but the LS bears a 4.5-litre engine (or is it a 4.7-litre engine?) to distinguish itself and to justify the price tag associated with the LS sedan. The LS is not a hot-seller and isn't featured by Lexus either (determined by its position in the showroom - the other models are placed toward the windows for a greater visibility but the LS lies chucked away in a corner) but for people who want that extra exclusivity, they do have the LS sedan as an offering. That's besides the point though - if Maruti wants to boost the sales of its higher-end sedans, it ought to offer a better engine than its other sedan.

I had the problem of not being able to post comments in reply to other users' status updates when the forum was last updated. Then, the feature started working, perhaps as a result of a bug-fix or a patch being applied. I then noticed that the problem cropped up again when I tried replying to a status update but I believe it does work most of the time. If you do want to reply to someone when the right sidebar doesn't let you reply to the comment, go to that user's profile page and reply to the comment from there. That should work because it's been working reliable for me, irrespective of whether the right sidebar widget works.Opaque did mention that they intend to upgrade the forum software to the latest release of Invision Power Board so the new version should fix some of the problems of the old if the problem is related to the forum software itself. If, instead, the problem is related to a plugin, we might get Opaque to make a fix to the plugin after the upgrade so we can be sure that the problem does not originate from the forum software itself. I would try to offer a fix, but I haven't been able to get Invision to let me have a copy for development and personal use (and I might add that I couldn't get vBulletin to give me a copy of their software either, so I can't say it isn't common in the commercial world to refuse discounts for software developers).

There are a couple of free image editing programs available online that you can download and install on your computer. The most popular image editing software on Linux is Gimp. It works on Windows too and although it cannot do everything that Adobe Photoshop can do, it does come quite close. The interface is slightly difficult to use, but the developers plan on changing that with the new version to make the software look like just about any other application, and perhaps more like Photoshop. On Windows, "Paint.NET" is quite popular as a replacement for the Paintbrush software included with Microsoft Windows. If you run Windows XP or older, "Paint.NET" is a huge improvement over the Paintbrush included with Windows, though Microsoft Windows Vista/7 adds additional capabilities to Paintbrush.Paint Shop Pro was quite popular in the old days as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop and you just might be able to get a used copy of it for really cheap. There are also plenty of old Adobe Photoshop copies being sold for cheap or given away for free as organizations upgrade to newer versions of the software. As they say, one man's junk is another man's treasure. I'm still running off the Adobe CS3 suite for some of my web design and development needs though the latest out there is Adobe CS5.5. It's enough to scratch my itch and although I would like to take up the newest versions that Adobe has stocked store shelves with, they simply cost too much to purchase unless I plan on using them for providing commercial services.

Putting kids through public school helps in social development because the children would be able to learn to deal with different kinds of people. Children are put through different kinds of situations but they do not necessarily have to face them alone - they still have their parents to consult when they get back home. Just as the iron is strengthened by putting it through fire, children develop a strong sense of morals by dealing with the evils that surround them when they gain interactions with other people with varying morals.

Both WordPress.com and Blogspot (aka Blogger) have their pros and cons. WordPress.com provides you with a huge selection of themes and widgets. Blogger does not have as many themes but is integrated with Google accounts so visitors can use their Google accounts to comment on your posts. Both WordPress.com and Blogspot have the ability to include some HTML content, which is how you can insert advertisements on your blog.If you want a self-hosted blog, you should take a look at WordPress.org, MoveableType, Drupal, and Joomla. If you are a programmer, you might even want to give Habari a try because whatever you build for your blog can be contributed to the Habari project and open source projects grow with such contributions.Irrespective of which blogging site or platform you choose, you have the ability to use third party software for performing a backup of all your posts, although most software is limited to only the textual content; some tools can put up the content onto your blog if you decide to have a fresh start. Offline site navigation software downloads pretty much everything you have linked on your blog so you can get all of your content, including the images and other multimedia content, but putting all of the content back onto your blog is time consuming.Monetizing your blog can be either through advertisements, referral traffic, or through direct selling. A preference to use one of the the other is typically because of the features that bloggers tend to use. If you have multiple blogs or need the email-to-blog feature, Blogspot tends to be the preferred choise, while widget-heavy blogs and those wanting a greater variety of themes tend to prefer WordPress.

Knowledge Sutra does have an option to view the new content on the forum through a feed and that should help you get only the latests posts on your phone. If you can provide more information about the model and capabilities of your phone, I may be able to work up a better solution.WordPress does have an option to receive posts through email but with a forum, such a feature would be difficult to use because you can't really tell the forum which thread you are replying to but you can create new threads with a different email address for each sub-forum. Would you really want to have the limited ability to create new threads without replying to an existing thread? For posting new threads, we can have a mod to the forum scheduled through a cron job (that's another disadvantage of having an email to forum mod - your post would not appear instantaneously).BTW, you would be surprised at the capabilities of even older phones at handling a large amount of textual content. Text uses much less space than images, especially when compressed and if you do not need support for languages other than English.

A non-profit organization should ideally have a focus on addressing social needs based on priority. When a non-profit organization is formed with the purpose of ensuring the ethical treatment of animals, the balance in addressing social issues is lost. The principles that apply to businesses do not necessarily apply in a similar fashion to non-profit organizations because businesses are out there to make money and by offering a niche product through its narrow focus works for its purpose. However, a narrow focus does not help society as a whole.The idea of a narrow focus is clearly observed in the quota reservations in the educational system and in government employment in India. The idea of the quota system was to provide an advantage to backward sections of society but when the system benefits the rich instead of the poor who do not belong to what is classified as a backward section, the focus becomes too narrow to do any good.The same idea of a narrow focus can be observed when non-profit organizations seeking the ethical treatment of animals go after dogs owned by the homeless and by cart-pulling animals used by people who eat out of dumpsters. Instead of providing the ability to improve their living standards and that of the animals that they own, the non-profit organizations simply want to get the animals transferred into a better home. What good does that do for an animal that is attached to its owner other than addressing its comforts - they are probably using a scientific approach by considering Maslow's hierarchy of needs without considering the approach that in some cases emotional needs exceed basic needs.

I always thought that the non-profit organizations were not allowed to sell the dogs, just as individuals cannot place advertisements in classifieds to sell any kind of animals. I believe previously the legal system only prevented the sale of certain restricted species of animals but now that has extended to all kinds of animals including pet dogs and gold fish?The Blue Cross (the animal protection agency, not the insurance agency) requires volunteers to pay to become members of the association, which I find unusual - I've never seen an organization that charges people money if they want to volunteer. Then, there's the part where you have to provide a monetary gift for an animal within the shelter if you want to adopt an animal. To me, that's similar to selling except that you do not place a price tag and simply want to keep your price range open to whatever you can get.Finding veterinary services is quite hard when compared to finding medical doctors' services because not many people opt to take up caring for animals as a profession. Besides, there's a great deal of risk involved with caring for animals when compared to caring for humans. I wonder how veterinary dentists care for lions with tooth decays... they would probably be nervous about the animal snapping its jaws after getting a whiff of their perfume.

Hey Dyson!Glad to have you onboard with us at Xisto. We look forward to seeing lots of posts from you and we welcome you to become a part of the Xisto community.There are lots of folks around here to help out if you are having any problems, and I see that you have yet to sign up at the Xisto - Support and Billing site but not to worry, it does not mean that you lose any posting credit. As soon as you sign up on the Xisto - Support and Billing site (with the same username as you have here on this forum), your myCENT counter will appear in your PMB next to every post that you make s you can look up the myCENTs that you have earned. Each time the myCENT counter goes up to 100, you get a Xisto dollar (myDOLLAR?) credited to your account and you can use it for ordering hosting packages. You will most probably be starting off with one of the basic packages and probably a domain name too and will be going forward from that point on. There's a Logic Basic package for about $3 per month, and the domain names are usually for $13 a year so you ought to get started writing something to post onto the forum to accumulate the myCENTs that you need to order a hosting package.Happy posting!

There are lots of things that cause long-term relationships to end. When people drift apart, such as in long-distance relationships, they tend to forget the good times that they have had together and attempt to fill in the void left in their lives. At other times, it may be a lack of commitment to the relationship. It may even be the realisation that there was nothing between the two but infatuation and a relationship cannot last based on infatuation alone. In a relationship, there is a give and take and when one side feels he/she is being taken advantage of, there's the beginning of the end.A heart break is not necessarily something bad. It gives you the experience that you need to gain maturity. To have maturity means to be the one that works on maintaining and mending the relationship but that too comes with expectations that the other will do the same when the time comes.I would also go as far as to state that if you have never had an argument or a fight in a long relationship, chances are that when you do actually have an argument or a fight, it would take a great deal of understanding from both sides to get through it. A relationships that has gone through the highs and lows is more likely to survive through the challenges than a relationship that has been all roses and goody-goody stuff. Staying together in thick and thin is what makes a relationship between two people worth it.

If someone can get into an arranged marriage and try all that they may to make it work, why can't they take the same effort to work toward something that they already have and make a love marriage work for them? It does hurt a lot more to get into an arranged marriage and realise that it wasn't for you than to get into a love marriage and work against all odds to make it work for you.Think of it this way... would you pick a cellular network provider who has been providing services for a couple of years and has been known for good service, or would you take your chances by getting plan that costs the same from a cellular network provider that has been barely in business for a month and can easily decide to give you a service with phone calls that disconnect every three minutes, dropping cell phone signals, and limited coverage area? Stick to what you have and know that works for you rather than going in for something that you have no idea of.

The way she behaves around you does make it seem that there is some positivity, but I can't really go as far as to say that she really likes you. For some people, it is their nature to help people even if they are complete strangers to the ones that they are helping out so you cannot tell for sure. Making eye contact and playing with one's hair are often behavioral traits and you cannot really jump to conclusions based on those signs alone. There are times when you would sit with one knee over another and your foot would accidentally touch somebody but you would tend to downplay or ignore the incident rather than apologise for it.What I mean to say is that there are some signs that you could draw upon but you cannot tell for sure. Besides, relationships take time to develop and as sheepdog says, you should see where it goes by playing along and not expecting the world out of the relationship.

 

Power is definitely one of those things that you would want to place high on your priority list, but you need to consider if you really need all that power. For instance, when you are on the go, you could have a really powerful notebook drain the battery in an hour but a netbook could get the job done while sipping the battery for about six hours. Netbooks are also a whole lot cheaper than regular notebooks but some low-end notebooks do tend to give netbook manufacturers a run for their money.

Support and maintenance is something that you do not want to see in the lifetime of your computer so if that is a big priority for you, backup often, keep a spare laptop, or invest in something solid like a Lenovo Thinkpad. The reliability comes at a price but if it is really something that matters a lot for you, you can use one of those for a long time to come. A Thinkpad will last you for half a decade with daily use whereas something cheaper would last you for about two years. However, the price difference makes it worth considering if you want to invest in something that last that long considering that you can get something more powerful after two years.

BTW, Velma, speaking of HCL, I have seen some terrible terrible things happen with HCL laptops. With an HCL that I got my hands on, shutting down would also stop the clock and that's simply unacceptable. I would rather get a netbook that something that simply can't keep time. Laptops are, unlike desktops, designed to run with a battery so should be able to keep track of time; desktops on the other hand have to rely on a much smaller CMOS battery. If there's one thing I don't expect from a laptop, it's a clock that can't keep time.

I really do feel sorry for you to have to realise that your boyfriend does not care for you, after you are pregnant. On the contrary, he should be more affectionate toward you and should be prepared to accept that you would be more demanding of him during your pregnancy.I am not really an advocate of break-ups and would advice you to sit down and talk to him, perhaps in a coffee shop or over ice cream or something that you both enjoy having. Use it as an opportunity to bond and re-establish the good times that you had together. Avoid having to say anything negative or responding to anything negative that may come from him. Use it as an opportunity to forgive and forget rather than a moment to resolve past conflict and see how things go if you avoid bringing up discussions about the rocky past for a couple of days.A relationship takes effort to maintain and I know it may seem unfair for you to be putting in the effort, but somebody has got to do it and you should feel good to know that you are the one taking the initiative to make it work.

Even for commercial sites, I don't see much of an issue with using Xisto - Web Hosting. Even recent tickets have been taken care of fairly fast, and despite paying $1.95 a month the quality of the hosting has been great. There is very little downtime except in certain rare cases where it happens multiple times in a row (such as for a 3 hour period having 5 minute outages).

Hi!

I didn't mean to say that the web hosting service is in any way inappropriate for a commercial site but on the contrary, I would say that if you have a rock-bottom budget, Xisto - Web Hosting is the way to go. They give you a hosting package and they also give you a domain name to go with it - all without having to get your credit card out of your pocket or paying a single cent (although you would be using MyCENTs in plenty when managing multiple domain names and one of the higher packages).

The point I would like to make is that the resolution of tickets should be quick enough for trouble tickets to be closed (i.e. for the problem to go away, and not to just get a response) within a day. Problems are rare, but can occur and can take down a commercial website with it. Two days of downtime can have visitors seeking other sources of information that they are looking for and if they find something better, they tend to stick with it. I would imagine that the users with a paid package (I mean paid with real cents and not MyCENTs) may get better service than the free web hosting users but that only seems fair considering that paying users are the ones who help pay the wages for employees, keep the company afloat with some profits, and pay for the taxes due.

I have yet to create a ticket in recent times but when I do and I get issues resolved quickly, I'll be singing a different tune to encourage more people to use Xisto - Web Hosting for their commercial websites too. It may seem inappropriate for me to judge Xisto - Web Hosting based on their performance on a ticket in the past but that is all the information that I have to offer.

Velma,I so totally know how it feels to get a SIM card only to figure out that it does not work later. That has happened to me twice, each time with a different cellular service provider. The first time I happened to have that experience with Airtel, a competitor of Aircel. I've seen a couple of Aircel advertisements but have never bothered getting one as they aren't one of the big players in my region so I would not get the benefit of calling someone else on the same network for reduced credit, or perhaps free SMSes, or even simply a clearer phone call. Here is my rather large account of all (and I really mean all) that happened when I got myself an Airtel prepaid SIM card only to figure out that I would be unable to use it and all I could do with it was to put the SIM card, the packaging, and the little promotional pamphlet into the bin.I needed a SIM card because I just dropped off a flight and into the airport and got someone to drive me home. The SIM card I previously had was country-specific and there was no way to get international roaming enabled on it for the plan that I had subscribed to and even if there were international roaming, or if they had the possibility of turning my prepaid package into a postpaid package, the rates would be prohibitively high and the only thing I could use it for would be international SMS (anyone from the country of the carrier could send SMSes at the local SMS rate instead of having to pay for international SMS). Anyway, long story short, I chose not to have an international roaming SIM card because nobody would want to call me at a rate of about two dollars a minute and SIM cards are available for quite cheap anyway.There were lots of different options when it came to choosing a carrier. I did have the option of getting one from Aircel and some of the other new carriers but I preferred to go with a carrier that has been in the business for a while and was large enough to have cellular towers to provide coverage even across highways that run through no-mans-land. I narrowed down my search to four different carriers, namely Airtel (not to be confused with Aircel despite have a similar spelling which in fact differs by just a single letter), Tata Idea Cellular (from the same guys who build the Tata Nano cars for about $3,500 and acquired the Jaguar automobile company), Tata DoCoMo (they already own Idea so why do they run another cellular services firm?), and Vodafone. I've heard about the changing policies of Idea Cellular and they would sometimes deactivate a subscription right out of the blue and on contacting their customer care service, they would request for additional identity proofs, address proofs, proof of residency, recent photographs and all other kinds of stuff. Now I am all for record keeping but this was just excessive. Just because it has been six months since I handed them a photocopy of my identity papers does not mean that I have suddenly adopted a new identity and have a new set of identity papers to furnish them with. If I did, I would have been a major con artist and they would have gotten into trouble for having two different sets of identity papers for the same phone number. I did not opt for DoCoMo at the time because it was one of the smaller players and I did not realise that it was a Tata group company. Even if I did, I would assume that they follow the same practices as Idea cellular when it came to deactivating plans and asking subscribers to hand out additional pieces of paper. I sometimes wonder if they simply collect all of that paper to hand over to the paper recycling firm and cash in on the deal but I guess that is a secret for them to know and some journalist to find out. I did have Vodafone Hutchison and Airtel to select from and having heard that Vodafone's coverage area is not all that great, I decided to go with Airtel.Airtel seemed like a pretty good cellular services provider with its coverage area and having been operating for quite a while and they have their SIM cards available at grocery stores so I went to a grocery store that put up an authorized reseller sign of Airtel and the guy collecting papers said that all I needed was a passport-sized photograph, a passport photocopy, and a photocopy of my electricity bill. Those have three things covered, my photograph, my identity proof, and my address proof. I did have the option of using my driver's license as an identity proof but the ink that the licensing department used on my license wore off within about two years and now I have got one that cannot be photocopied because my picture on it is invisible on the resulting photocopy. So much for the term 'photocopy' as the photo is the one thing that it cannot copy. They did say that I could use a PAN card. Now that has nothing to do with a frying pan or any other sort of cooking utensil. It was a card issued by the government to keep track of tax payments, income tax, and all that sort of stuff. Then, there was the ration card which is pretty much useless in this part of the city because there are grocery stores all around and no ration stores in sight. Besides, the ration cards from the country side can be used to avail free medical treatment except that the folks working at the hospitals are corrupt and take the "free" out of free medical treatment. Then, for the address proof, there's the option of getting a telephone bill. If I am applying for a SIM card that probably means that I do not have a telephone so I wonder why they would state that they accept telephone bills as address proofs. I guess they expect people to move away from competing service providers and make it easier by having you just hand in a copy of the competitor's bill and they take care of the rest. A water or electricity bill would suffice for them too, which does make more sense because those are essentials that just about every house has. There's just one problem though - the water or electricity bill is typically delivered to the owner of the house so if you are renting it from the owner or if the house has been sublet to you, you have a water or electricity bill without your name printed on it. Well, I was lucky enough to have initials on the electricity bill that I was handing in so I could say, "Yes, that's my electricity bill." If the cellular services company looked at my electricity bill, they would probably think they are getting a rather good deal from their electricity services provider and if I can pay the rather large bill from the electricity service provider, I would have no problem paying off their telephone bills.Anyway, so I run into a store for a photocopy of my passport and electricity bill, then I spend another half hour at a photo studio where they take my picture with a digital camera, have the memory card fed into a computer's memory card reader, use Adobe Photoshop to copy over the photograph seven times, print out a set of eight photographs of me, cut them into individual bits with a scissor, place them into an envelope and then hand them over to me. The whole deal took about forty five minutes after which I got back to the grocery store and filled out their form, which took about ten minutes. I then got to pick from the different phone numbers they had and I looked for anything that would be memorable enough for somebody to be able to call me without having to ask me for a business card, jot down the number in a phone book, or store my phone number in their cellular phones only to lose it later and then never call me. They had eight different prepaid packs to select from and so that was eight different phone numbers. I them paid the guy for the prepaid pack, handed in the photocopies, photographs, electricity bill, and the form and left with the SIM card in hand.After getting the SIM card, it is a waiting game. You have absolutely no idea when the cellular services company gets all of your paperwork and activates your account for you but typically it should take a day. I waited for a whole day checking every other hour if the cellular services were activated. They weren't. I then waited for another day. I picked up the phone, dialed out a number, there was a voice response system that said my cellular services were not yet available and so I waited some more. Four days after having picked up the SIM card, I went over to the Airtel customer care center and asked them about the activation of my services. They then tell me that I have to call up the Airtel customer service center as they only handle sales and problems with the Airtel handsets. They also tell me that the Airtel customer care center is only reachable from another Airtel phone, which I did not have so I asked them, "May I use your phone?" Now being an Airtel customer care center, I would expect them to at least have an Airtel phone on their premises. The sales representative sheepishly replied, "I'm sorry sir but we do not have a phone." There is a saying about people not eating their own dog food but I forget what it is and when the customer care center of an cellular services provider does not get its telephone services from that cellular services provider, I would begin to seriously doubt why that customer care center continues to remain in existence. I visited another Airtel customer care center with absolutely the same response. They take pride in saying that they are an Airtel customer care center but they cannot answer any of my questions or figure out why my cellular services had not been activated because that can only be told by a representative from the Airtel customer care service helpline and they did not have an Airtel phone for me to call up the Airtel customer care service helpline from.I didn't give up on the Airtel SIM card and checked if it had been activation for yet another day but there was again no luck and it simply had me connected to an automated voice response system. I then though that I just might be able to call up the Airtel customer care service helpline from a deactivated SIM card because it still has connectivity and there's an Airtel automated voice response system that tells me that the cellular services on my SIM card have not been activated yet. I dial the Airtel customer care service helpline number and voila! There it was, ringing on the other end. I waited for the automated voice response system to kick in, waited for the option to talk to a human sales representative but there was none so I opted to get value-added services from the cellular service provider. Typically, when you want to buy more services from a company, they decide to have a human flesh-and-blood hydrocarbon-based sales representative mammal for you to talk to and this time was no different. I finally heard a "Hello" from the other end and that was the first "Hello" that the SIM card has ever managed to get across. However, it was soon to be known that it was also the last. I asked the customer service and sales representative about my SIM card, which was obviously deactivated, and there was nothing they could do to activate it. I then pointed out that I had paid for a lifetime prepaid SIM and bought an Airtel prepaid pack at which point the sales representative interrupted me and said, "Oh, I'm sorry, but we do not sell a lifetime prepaid SIM." I looked at the prepaid pack and there it was - "Airtel lifetime prepaid pack" - so I said, "It says so on the pack." The sales representative held onto his ground and said, "I do not know what the pack says but we do not offer lifetime prepaid services. Airtel does not have any such package." Now, coming from a sales representative who sells the services of the cellular services provider, I would imagine that he knows what he is talking about but right there in my hand was the Airtel lifetime prepaid services pack containing the SIM card that I was using to call up the Airtel customer service helpline on a number that was only accessible on an Airtel SIM card and here was the sales representative telling me that such a package does not exist! Anyway, I decided to finally dump the SIM card because a service coming from a company that does not use its own services at its customer service centers, claims that its own services do not exist, and plays hard-to-get when it comes to customer support simply would not be worth it in the long run.If you did manage to read this post all the way from the top to the bottom and are still here composing your reply to this post then let me tell you - getting a prepaid SIM card from a cellular service provider in India is no walk in the park. Velma tried to get a postpaid SIM card while I tried to get a prepaid SIM card and, as it turns out, neither of the SIM cards had their services activated and were later simply dumped into the trash for lack of anything better to do with them. The cellular service providers do not even want to provide services to customers so it makes one wonder - who would opt for their services and where do they make their revenues from? Perhaps their whole operation is a cover-up for something big and they just put them up as services rendered to people who are listed against the various phone numbers that were never activated and that were put in the dumpster by the subscribers for not having anything better to do with them.

The cheapest tablet in India was for Rs.1,200/- but prices have increased since its introduction. I can't remember if it was MyDrona or the NotionInk Adam but one of the two was sold for Rs.1,200/-. MyDrona was created by the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT - that is three 'I's, not two).The low price comes from government subsidies rather than breakthroughs in manufacturing technologies therefore I can't really speculate on the build quality. The Aakash tablet comes with just 256MB RAM which makes it difficult to 'hack' it to turn it into a cheap laptop replacement. The price does make it a compelling purchase when compared to the Samsung netbook for Rs.16,000/-. Considering that a motorcycle can be bought for Rs.30,000/-, folks who aren't IT-savvy are not very likely to get a netbook or even a regular computer be a desktop or a laptop for that matter.If the display and battery of a cheap netbook are taken off, that might help cut down the price by quite a bit. Hooking up the rest of the netbook to a television set does make the idea seem like it may meet commercial success if it is pitched correctly. The downside is that by using a television, you would be limited to low resolutions and the idea of a nettop has already been tested without much success. The difference between a nettop and the proposed stripped-down netbook is the lower cost in using the infrastructure for existing netbook development and the integration of a keyboard and touchpad within the body that helps save on material costs.

Ip blocks, server downtime, server changes.. Basically anything requiring an admin to login to the server can be sent to Xisto - Support but things where your php isn't working fine or you need help setting up your cron jobs, email and so on would be through the forum. I hope that solves your doubt.

Velma, I thought support tickets were unavailable for the decade plan and therefore I didn't opt for it. Now, it too late for me to change my mind about getting the plan though - the Decade plan is no longer an option and I've got multiple domains that I host on my hosting account, though I don't really use it much.

BTW, with the reduced credits per post on KS, it is getting harder to post enough to upgrade to another plan. If the credits earned per post get any lower, I'm going to have to downgrade :-(

I have the feeling that for most people, this "trick" will do no good. It seems like a lot of the tricks there were back in the dial-up days (sorry for those of you still in that time!) that never worked because you can't increase bandwidth if you're already capped.

With dial-up, there was no capping because you were limited by the speed of the connection so whatever you got was the limit of the technology and the only way to go faster is to wait for the next best thing in modem technology and upgrade to it. However, now we have communication medium capable of 3 Mbps (Internet over cellular networks) or 1000 Mbps (wired LAN) so all you need to do to get a speed upgrade is to get your Internet Service Provider to increase the cap.

However, there still is a lot that you can do in terms of data compression. You can use Opera's Turbo mode to route your traffic through Opera's servers which compress the data before sending it to you, essentially improving the speed of your connection from end-to-end without causing increased traffic along the connection that your modem has to your ISP.

Working with family does have one disadvantage, which is that you can't tell them you don't want to work with them once you sign them up, without some serious fall out and that is what seems to be happening. If you work with total strangers, sure you may not really know how they work and the chemistry may take longer to form, but there still is the fact that when you fire them, there's no harm no foul.A burn out is common among people who stretch themselves but then again, the rewards are plenty for such folk. When managing work, a business, and education, getting low grades is no big deal - how many employers actually check the grades of their recruits when they've got plenty of experience to back them up?Getting one's priorities right is a pretty challenging thing to do because it involves a trade-off so if things do not turn out well, starting up one's own business is not a bad proposition at all. The number of people who have tried and failed may be many but there's more hope when going down trying than to have never tried at all.

Things are looking worse for Maruti Suzuki right now. They had the strike at their plant located in Manesar so they shifted production to their plant located in Gurgaon, and, guess what, the workers at the Gurgaon plant are protesting to support the workers at Manesar (though some say that they are trying to get paid without working because organizations pay staff for the days that they go on strike). When doing business in India, there are some states for organizations to avoid and Tata learned it the hard way when they setup their first plane for the Tata Nano and later had to shutdown the plant before they could even begin production. Meanwhile, Maruti Suzuki's other models, the Ritz (the Maruti Suzuki Ritz is known internationally as the Suzuki Splash), and the Maruti Suzuki Swift DZire (a sedan version of the Suzuki Swift)Coming to the issue about the plastic fuel tank, there are various kinds of plastic. There are the kind of plastics that go into making polythene bags, there are plastics that are used to build vehicle bumpers and mirrors, and there are plastics that flexible flap that covers the sockets on your cellular phone. I guess the term plastic is simply a name for a genre of chemical substances. Plastics differ in their physical properties (and possibly chemical properties too). Some plastics, such as the bags used in hospitals for storing laundry, dissolve in water and thus exhibit properties very different from the plastic bags that you get in supermarkets with your grocery. Bio-degradable plastics exhibit different properties, reacting to enzymes secreted by microorganisms to dissolve or breakdown the plastic thus minimizing the environmental impact of the specific form of plastic.Plastics have their own advantages and disadvantages of their metal equivalents. The first is the weight of the material. Plastic products are considerably lighter than their metal counterparts. A metal container is often heavier than a plastic container as is the case with the old Maruti Suzuki Swift fuel tank, which was made of metal, and the new Maruti Suzuki Swift fuel tank, which is made of plastic. Secondly, plastics do not have the lustre that metal does and therefore they are more pleasing to the eye than are the metal objects when viewed in bright sunlight. In some cases, however, plastics do reflect light and product glare and is therefore an undesirable property of some plastics. Some forms of plastic have a longer life than their metal equivalents because they are unaffected by the corrosive action of water and steam, which is one of the benefits that the engineers at Maruti Suzuki claim for the new Maruti Suzuki Swift's fuel tank. This can be observed in old vehicles that have rusting exteriors but the mirrors, mud guards, bumpers, and interior plastics are unaffected by the environmental corrosive factors. Metals develop stress fatigue cracks that are often not visible at first but only become apparent when the metal section actually collapses due to pressure, as seen on some old aircraft bodies that break apart when in mid-air due to the air pressure different between the interior and the exterior of the aircraft fuselage (I believe the last incident was with a Quanta jet).Sometimes, metals are seen to have its own advantage over plastics. Metals are often stronger than plastics and the dents resulting from impact can be fixed by hammering the metal and leveling the surface with putty. Plastics, on the other hand, have to be replaced though there are some instances of the use of epoxy adhesives for making spot repairs. I have not had much luck with the use of epoxy adhesives but that can be attributed to the inavailability of suitable clamps and stands for setting when I used it for various applications. A glue gun is an alternative which I have not tried yet but for the most part, the automobile workshops simply toss away the old part and fit in a replacement. Metals seem to resist heat better than plastics in the absense of water. Some plastics harden and become extremely brittle due to heat and perhaps due to the age of the plastic (this can be observed on shoes that have been on display at stores).Speaking of Fiat, the Fiat 500 is available in India. The Fiat 500 is priced higher than any of the other offerings from Fiat and therefore is almost non-existent on the streets of India but you could often see the Fiat Palio or the Fiat Grand Punto hatchbacks or the Fiat Linea sedan on the streets sold at the distribution outlets of Tata (Fiat vehicles are serviced at the authorized service centers of Tata too). Fiat is almost non-existent in the United Arab Emirates (Dubai, Sharjah, et al.). In India, Fiat does not sell as many automobiles as most other automobile manufacturers, but most of the diesel powered vehicles sold for under 10 lakh (roughly $22,500) currently being sold in India today, which accounts for most of the vehicles in India, are being powered by a 4-cylinder Fiat diesel engine (Hyundai, Tata, Fiat, and Maruti Suzuki use the 1.3 litre diesel engine from Fiat while the other automobile manufacturers use their own 3-cylinder variant to cut costs yet they are priced higher than the vehicles bearing the 4-cylinder diesel engine from Fiat; the manufacturers generally license the technology for the Fiat diesel engine rather than outsourcing the production to Fiat). The Maruti Suzuki Swift diesel, the Maruti Suzuki Swift DZire diesel, the Maruti Suzuki Ritz diesel, the Maruti Suzuki SX4 diesel, the Fiat Linea, the Tata Indigo eCS, and the Tata Indigo Manza are powered by the Fiat 1.3 litre diesel engine so what Fiat does not have in terms of vehicle market share, it more than makes up for from licensing deals with other automobile manufacturers for its diesel engines.

The MyCENTs system remains a mystery to us just as Google is a mysterious search engine and more of a black box to most people. Yet, there are lots of people who claim to be able to put their websites on top of the Google search results page because of certain guidelines that they follow. The guidelines are often developed through analysis of different websites that appear on top of the search results and the differences from others that did not quite make it to the top.The experiment to write a two hundred word post is an interesting one. It's an attempt to reverse engineer the myCENT system by using the inputs and outputs and attempting to guess what it is that the application or script looks for when it evaluates the input to produce the given output.One thing is for sure though. Word count is definitely one of the metrics that helps in earning myCENTs because if it were not, the one-liners would have received as many myCENTs as the long one-page posts that anwii and some others on the forum are popular for. When accounting for the posts that add to the myCENTs there is no real way to determine which of the posts count toward the the myCENT credits. The myCENT script simply emails the number of posts and the myCENTs received so it would take a period of inactivity after making a post to be able to analyze what really happens behind the scenes. Even if there were someone manually setting the myCENTs against each post, we would not really know.