k_nitin_r

The Lenovo IdeaPad B570 retails for around US dollars 540. The price in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, is Dirhams 2,000 so I worked out the US dollar equivalent using the fixed currency conversion rate of 1 US dollar = 3.67 Dirhams. You may be able to get it for cheaper or slightly more expensive, depending on which part of the world you are in.The Lenovo IdeaPad B570 comes with a second generation Intel Core i3 processor clocked at 2.1 GHz with 2 gigabytes of memory, 500 gigabyte hard disk drive, and a 15.6-inch display screen. If you are looking for a cheap notebook computer that you can do some software development or web designing with, then the Intel Core i3 second generation is pretty much the minimum that you should settle for. Sure, there is the Intel Atom processor that is a power sipper and can give you about twelve hours of battery life on some models, with the average being about ten hours of battery life promised by most vendors. However, the Intel Atom processor is for netbooks and nettops. You will not find the Intel Atom processor in laptops with a 14-inch, 15-inch, 17-inch or larger screen size primarily because of the terms of Intel Corporations's sale of the Intel Atom processor to the original equipment manufacturers who agree to not use the processor in laptops and mobile computing devices with a screen size over 11 inches. It is Intel's strategy to prevent the Intel Atom netbook sales from cannibalizing the sales of the Intel Core powered laptops, considering how little the Intel Atom powered netbooks cost when compared to their Intel Core powered laptop counter parts.Lenovo's offerings in the laptop lineup also contains laptop models that are powered by the first generation of Intel Core i3 processors, so do make sure that you look out for the second generation processor as it gets you more bang for the buck that its predecessor, a similar model from the Intel Core i3 first generation line-up of microprocessors.The Lenovo IdeaPad B570 contains only 2 gigabytes of memory, so you might want to get an extra stick of 2 gigabytes of memory, or better yet, you can get a Lenovo IdeaPad G570 that matches the Lenovo IdeaPad B570 in every aspect, except that it comes with 4 gigabytes of memory instead of only 2 gigabytes of memory, and the only difference that you pay over the price of the Lenovo IdeaPad B570 to get the Lenovo IdeaPaf G570 is US dollars 30 (converted from 100 UAE dirhams).Both the Lenovo IdeaPad B570 and the Lenovo Ideapad G570 should fit into your budget of US dollars 650.Although the Lenovo IdeaPad B570 or the Lenovo Ideapad G570 would be my preferred new laptop for under US dollars 650, I would pick a Lenovo Thinkpad over a Lenovo IdeaPad if you also had the option of buying from the Lenovo Factory Outlet store in the United States. You can get a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad for a good deal off the retail price of the unit, if you do not mind a couple of cosmetic blemishes on the body of the laptop. The refurbished Lenovo Thinkpads come with a guarantee, so Lenovo will replace anything that you find faulty on the laptop that they send you. You do, however, have to come up with a convincing case that points at a manufacturing defect as the cause of failure rather than mishandling during shipping or damaged or wear-and-tear caused because of the use of the product. In either case, the Lenovo Thinkpads purchased from the Lenovo Factory Outlet website are a great bargain and if you do live in the United States and have a shipping address that Lenovo can ship to, the Lenovo Factory Outlet website is better of the two - a brand new Lenovo IdeaPad B570/G570 and a slightly blemished Lenovo ThinkPad with a more solid build and better technical specifications.

Hey iAssistant!Welcome (back) to Xisto! A lot of people here are a busy bunch and know exactly what you mean when you mention the busy schedule and being unable to post. A lot of the forum regulars here graduated, got full-time jobs, have families to feed, and errands to run.BTW, you have an outsourced customer support service link in your signature. Do you work with a customer support and service firm, or do you run your own customer support and service firm? I've always wondered what customer support firms use to get the in-bound calls routed through a PABX system and controlled by a computer. The IVR systems puzzle me too - if they were hooked up through phone lines to modems, that would be easy to figure out, but I'm sure that isn't how most customer support and service firms operate.Anyway, hope you have a good time here at Xisto. Happy posting!

I gave the scenario of no-brakes a thought, and among other unconventional ideas, thought the driver could keep the front windows open while keeping the rear windows closed, creating a kind of a parachute effect to use air resistance to slow down the vehicle. For cars that have doors that open in reverse, opening the doors would have a greater effect, but is quite risky because that reduces the resistance of the vehicle body to crumpling with the removal of the side beams, present in the doors, from the body frame when the door is opened.I have used a combination of engine braking and the gentle use of the hand brake to stop, but with most newer luxury sedans lacking a hand brake but instead using a foot pedal, with one step to set the brake and another step to take off the brake, the driver would have less control of how much braking is applied with the parking brake. In an automatic transmission vehicle with no hand brake, the best bet would be to set the transmission to neutral and have the car slow down sufficiently to be able to safely apply the parking brake. Switching off the engine has no effect when the vehicle is in neutral and the transmission is disengaged from the engine when the engine is turned off so turning off the engine would have no benefit and would instead lead to a loss of power steering. Vehicles without power steering usually do not have automatic transmission either so using engine braking would be the best way to stop.One case in which brakes do stop working is when the vehicle enters a puddle. Some vehicles, by design, have water enter the braking system and prevent the brake pads from gaining enough friction to stop the vehicle within a safe distance. The Suzuki Cultus is one popular vehicle with brakes that are affected by driving in water, despite having been used as a rally car.

Raising the debt ceiling is never a good thing - if the debt just keeps spiraling upwards, eventually somebody is going to announce that they are unable to honor the debt payments and, before we know it, we will be re-living the economic crisis all over again. Perhaps if there was a greater focus on exports, they would be able to raise more money without increasing the debt ceiling.The government can do one of two things to make money - it can either offer goods and services, or it can collect taxes. In Dubai, the government owns a major stake in the telecommunication and utilities firms and so does not impose any income tax. Even after having a government-owned entity default on its loan payment, the government still has not had to impose income taxes. Apart from duties imposed on goods to prevent cheap rip-offs of successful products, the government is able to provide social security for a large proportion of its national population without any taxes at all.If the government really did want to reduce taxes without having to impose some other form of tax on the people, it would have to invest in new government-owned organizations to bring in profits.

The end of the space shuttle program at NASA is an attempt to cut costs and therefore raise funds for the research and development of a new spacecraft development program that is more capable and efficient than the present-day space shuttle. The space shuttle was unique in that it could take off like a rocket and then land as a plane, providing a much softer landing than previous spacecrafts that would land in the ocean and use the water resistance to slow down and buoyancy to stay afloat.The scientists from the space shuttle program would no doubt have a role to play in the development of the new space craft and therefore would get to keep their jobs. They just might find their new roles more motivating and interesting - any kind of new development is more interesting than the maintenance of existing, aging projects for most engineers.By privatizing space travel, organizations would be able to form cheaper and more efficient means of sending people and equipment into space. With the way things run in corporations, they try to find cheaper and more efficient ways to do things. They hire the best of engineers, and might even hire away from NASA by offering higher pay packages.The budget deficit and financial trouble caused by the economic downturn creates a need for the government to form new initiatives to kick-start the economy yet again and it would take something huge, perhaps even the privatization of space travel and transport, and the research and development effort into a new space craft might be a step in that direction.

Jori,You are right - it is hard to determine who is a millionaire unless you first lay down some way of measuring their worth. Cash is rarely used as a measure because somebody could have lots of money in the pocket and it just stays there, but for someone else who bought gold with the money is still worth the same as the guy with the cash. Now, you have to consider the fluctuations in the gold prices when you say that the two people in question really are worth the same. This is still keeping it simple because when somebody buys a car, do you look at the value of the car a year down the line as the part of what the person is worth? Okay, suppose you do - then how can you determine the value of the car; do you look at the price of purchase, do you depreciate the car based on a useful life of 8 years, do you depreciate the car based on a life of 3 years considering that it has not had its periodic oil change, or do you depreciate the car considering that it has been in an accident and has been repaired once? And just because the value of the car is estimated to be a certain amount, can you be sure that the car will sell for that amount? What about considering the potential to make money in future? That certainly makes a guy with a job worth more than a guy who just inherited plain cash and is just sitting on it (I mean not investing it or anything).Variables that you can consider when determining the net worth of a person would be (a) the cash and an evaluation of all property he or she owns, after depreciation, ( potential for future earnings, and © potential for future liabilities. You may find some other way to evaluate a person, but that's just it - evaluations are subjective and your list of top 5 richest people may not match my list.

With each new release, Microsoft Internet Explorer adds new HTML and CSS standards while introducing new objects to the browser Document Object Model. They have also been working on improving their Javascript performance and improving 3D performance within the browser by providing access to the native graphics accelerator performance of the operating system.It's not just the guys at Microsoft who are working feverishly to implement new web standards and squeeze every ounce of performance out of their web browsers. Google has been doing the same with their Google Chrome web browser, while Mozilla has been trying to shed the old-dusty-browser image that it had for the Firefox web browser by making it quick enough to start up on click, and to create an awareness of the plugins that really slow down your browser. Meanwhile, Opera and Safari are not to be left far behind and are just as adept at boosting their browser performance figures. The problem, however, is that you cannot judge the performance of two different browsers using a single piece of code because some browsers would be optimized to excel on that particular code while other browsers would lag big time but would perform extraordinarily well on another piece of code. You can see it all the time, with Google Docs rocking on Google Chrome but sucking on Mozilla Firefox to the extent that it becomes unusable.With most new releases, the vendors try to keep everything looking the same so you will hardly know the different - it will look and feel exactly the same in most cases. With Firefox, you can still get the classic look and if you want it to look more like Google Chrome, you can get rid of the menu bar and have the tabs move into the title bar rather than waste space by having a title bar up there.

Hi!I just got an email yesterday notifying me that I had just earned some myCENTs. In the past, when we were still Xisto and not Xisto, myCENTs would update almost instantly, but then it seemed to run after a couple of hours... if the myCENT script did indeed run without errors then I would believe that my postings were evaluated for myCENTs after a whole day. We do not really have all that many posts on the website to have the postings evaluated after every 24 hours, unless the script is really resource intensive and would slow down the site while it ran. I know I am just speculating because I am not really sure if that is how the myCENT script is actually scheduled to run.There have been posts indicating that the myCENTs that you earn go lower after you cross one thousand posts, but I am not really sure if that is true because I have not reached a thousand posts yet. I think that it is a kind of a dis-incentive for older members to go away. It is like saying, "If you have too many posts, I'm sorry - your brand has been used to promote our forum but now you're getting too old and we need something fresh... and *click* we just took down the value of your stock three notches."BTW, did anyone run out of myCENTs to pay for hosting and then get a loaner to get negative myCENTs in exchange for some dollars to buy web hosting? I was just wondering if it were possible because when the myCENT accounting scripts were taken down for about a month, a noticed a couple of folks on AstraHost (apologies if I have spelled it wrong, but I do not log onto there very often because I'm 'homed' at Xisto) who were from Xisto and they even did mention that they were there for earning some myCENTs to pay for the hosting.

Hi Mr.Dee!I did notice that I did not receive the email from Xisto stating that I got some extra MyCENTs, but I just assumed that they gave me the credit for my posts and just did not email me. Yes, the email does provide more motivation to write and I just did not get it over the past couple of days. I guess it is something for me to investigate. I'm looking at my MyCENTs balance and the MyCENTs that I have already earned till this post and I will be keeping a track to make sure that it really is the MyCENTs that are awarded for a whole lot more than they used to be paid for.If the MyCENTs awarded for posting really is much less than it used to be, then I think it would be a dis-inCENTive (pun unintended) and would turn a lot of people away from the forum. I wonder if it MyCENTs are awarded with the same scripts across all of the sites that participate in the Xisto network. There's the AstraHost that has a set of forums that I do not participate in much... perhaps just once in a blue moon, and I do not see a blue moon all that very often.I have seen some updates to Xisto, such as the Xisto home page and so I am guess that there have been recent updates to the Xisto MyCENT processing scripts too and that may have either credited my while the emails did not go out, or I did not get the MyDollars that I'm supposed to get when the MyCENTs listed on the forum exceeds 100 cents, or maybe even the scripts did hand me my MyCENTs but not as much as they used to hand me. I am going to wait and watch over the next couple of days, but just so that you know, you are not the only one out there with problems in having the MyCENTs credited to you. I am in that exact same boat and have noticed that the MyCENT emails that I was expecting were not in my email mail box.

As a freelancer online, you have to build contacts. Bidding on freelancer.com or similar websites is tough. At times, people just pick something that is neither the cheapest nor the quickest, either because they have worked with someone else in the past or because they see a portfolio that they like better. If you could post a link to your portfolio, perhaps we can get a chance to post some feedback - I'm not saying that your portfolio isn't good, but it would provide another perspective to analyze why you haven't been able to get any responses on freelancer.com. It may have even been an employer who decided to back out of going the freelancer route.To get jobs, you have to do a lot of networking. You have to meet people, go out there and hand people your business card and hope they will call back. You can get a truck load of Twitter followers and get your FaceBook wall buzzing with activity about the services you offer and the designs from your portfolio. If all else fails, you could just begin a job hunt because the market that you are in just does not have enough firms looking around for freelancers because of legal issues involved with hiring freelancers instead of hiring contractors or employees.

Hi!I don't know about the Porsche sales where you are from but here the product lines that Porsche sells are the Boxster, the Cayman, the 911, the Panamera, and the Cayenne. The Porsche Boxster is Porsche's entry-level car. If you want to drive about with the wind in your hair but do not really care as much about really high acceleration, the Boxster is what you would get. Other Porsche owners may not really take you seriously if you are driving about in a Boxster. The Porsche Cayman gives the Porsche Boxster a hard top and apart from that, they look pretty much the same and are pretty much the same performance-wise. The Porsche 911 is where you get the extreme performance. The true Porsche enthusiast would invest in a Porsche 911 and the distinctive style of the Porsche 911 becomes apparent to anyone who is even familiar with the design. The Porsche Panamera is a four door car while the Porsche Cayenne is a sports utility vehicle. The Panamera and Cayenne are built with the intent of providing luxury and practicality rather than for sports performance but you can get Turbo or the Turbo S variants of the Panamera and the Cayenne that are pretty quick and are unmatched by either the Porsche Boxster or the Porsche Cayman.Sports vehicles from Porsche, Ferrari, Maserati, or Aston Martin do not come cheap. If you do think practicality, a Mercedes would probably be a better bet. Mercedes is know to have spares available at about the same price as a Toyota. The maintenance for a Mercedes might even be cheaper than the maintenance for a Toyota if you aren't too particular about going to the dealer and the authorized workshops, though you should ideally stick to the authorized service centers while in the warranty period.

Hi Antennas!I'm Nitin, I am majoring in information sciences and technology and worked as a software developer till the economic downturn. The economic downturn has taken away a lot of the tech jobs while many others pay a lot less than they used to because there are so many people out of work looking for something to do. so employers can get away with paying so much less than they did a couple of years ago.Right now, I am a freelance web designer and web developer. I use the web hosting space at Xisto as my digital playground and, yes, I have loads of unused bandwidth even on the basic web hosting package since I do not really use it for much. I did get a couple of domain names from them, and that's where I'm getting some real value from them. Having a domain name makes it easy to get to your stuff from just about anywhere else on the planet... having to remember your IP address and taking around your stuff with you and setting up the wireless access point and Internet router to direct incoming traffic to your web server can become a hassle if you have to re-locate every few months.Anyway, do tell us more about yourself. What kind of engineering do you do? I'm assuming you are in electronics and communication engineering. Where are you from and what do you do? Do you have any kids in the family? What about pets? What do you drive? Do you love chocolate? What kind of books do you read? What sort of a computer setup do you have out there?

Hi!Iniyila, I stand corrected. Now that I read your post, I realise that the original poster could have asked about selling web design services for lower prices rather than a general question about business management. I would explain it by saying that there are so many web designers out there that unless you have a reputation as the designer who developed websites for a few dozen big players and your customers aren't government entities or huge multinational corporations, you would have to offer lower prices to compete. When you do compare rates, you find some web designers offering their services for less than a quarter of the price of the high priced web designers. Apart from the reputation, quality comes at a premium too. If you want to have better designed websites, you pay more. Well, that need not necessarily be true, but that is pretty much the norm because if you want to have more time put into your website, you would have to pay more because you could have gotten somebody to spend a whole year building somebody's website, but then their wages have to come from out of your pocket.At times, it is just not possible to offer services below costs because you would anticipate other work coming up so what you do is leave the staff idle till they actually do get the job. Now, that may not sound like such a hot strategy because you do need to cut your losses and take whatever you can get but then again, there is a slight chance that you could get something bigger. I would say that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, so what the heck - might as well get the engine running and look at what we do have. If there is a better deal, it can wait or we just call it touch luck because when you have absolutely nothing coming your way, you have to take the bitter pill and can't look at trying to choose from something that you do not even know that you have.

Hi!This question may not be web design related (it is posted under the Web Design forum; I would rather see it under the business forum), but I'll post my reply to it anyway. Goods are sold for a reduced price for lots of reasons. First of all, there's the incentive for customers to buy from you, as you have stated. Then, there could be price reductions from the manufacturer so when you get products for a lower price, you could eithr increase your profits or you could pass on the discounts to your own customers and therefore build a sense of brand loyalty. You could also have a whole load of stuff that expires shortly so instead of tossing them all into the bin, you can try to get as much value as you can by selling the stock for heavily discounted prices. Stuff that is close to expiry is usually available for a real bargain, but you might want to watch what you are buying because it just might make you ill if the products have not been stored appropriately. At times, when you are winding up your business, you just might sell off everything you have got at whatever price you can get and that's again a time when you would just sell everything for a reduced price, perhaps even the sign on the store :-P

Have you heard about the 1928 Roll Royce Picadilly roadster at the Springfield Museum? It was a car Allen Swift got from his father as a graduation present and he drove it for as long as he lived and clocked about a hundred and seventy thousand miles. Yes, that's right, it's 170,000 (four zeroes in there). I'm pretty sure a Rolls Royce is a machine built to perfection. However, it isn't something that you would drive over to run an errand to buy groceries - it has neither the fuel economy nor an affordable price tag, and I am pretty sure the service center charges them a pretty hefty amount too.My experience with a Toyota Avalon 2000 is that it was an amazing car. It ran for a whole decade and continues to run like a finely tuned swiss watch. It never had any breakdowns and the only two times it didn't start were due to a dead battery - a quick jump start and the car was back on its way. Perhaps a more frequent battery change would have prevented that too. It has never been left without being turned on at least once in five days, so it has not been sitting by like your Ford Aspire has been. I'm guess you must have had at least car jacks or cement blocks to keep the tires from going flat. For long term storage, unplugging the battery, having the car up on jacks, getting it a fresh change of oil, and a full tank of fuel should have the car last for at least a couple of years.I have an old Suzuki Esteem that I got as a present from my dad when I got into college and it has been running for seven years. The only breakdown I had was when I got the car back after lending it out for a couple of months and drove it for the first time after starting it up without an oil and filter change in a really long time. I hope to hold on to it for at least another year but it is being ill-maintained right now as I haven't been able to get to it... it's cheaper to get another vehicle than to have one vehicle transported across national boundaries, from registration to import duties and just the whole hassle of dealing with the officials.A recent purchase in the family is a Lexus ES350 2011. I imagine it has the same build quality as the Toyota Avalon 2000, but it is built on a smaller wheelbase than the Toyota Avalon. Perhaps it is a cost cutting measure but once you get used to it, it fits like a glove. This may surprise you, but the Lexus ES350 2011 has a lot in common with the Toyota Camry 2011. The Lexus ES350 shares the same platform as the Toyota Camry but has had the body built to insulate the cabin from the rattles of the engine. Take a test drive in the Lexus ES350 and the Toyota Camry to feel the difference. The Toyota Camry feels a little less refined although it has the same engine while the Lexus ES350 comes with parking sensors, a rear parking camera, a panoramic roof, electric seats, seat ventilation, a global positioning navigation system, and a whole load of other accessories that you would not find on the Toyota Camry. The difference in the price tag comes from all of the goodies that come bundled with the Lexus ES350 and is not from the Lexus badging alone.

Hi!If your laptop does not display anything at all on its LCD panel, then it probably means that the screen is shot. If it does not work with external displays either, then that could mean the problem is not with the LCD panel but rather with the display adapter and can be corrected by hooking it up to a PCMCIA or PCI Express display adapter... those are not very common, so you might as well just use the system as a headless box for connecting to remotely. Having said that, you seem to having a non-responsive system with the toggle keys (the Caps Lock, Num Lock, and Scroll Lock) not lighting up either (assuming that you do have LEDs to display the status of all of them) so you most definitely have a bricked computer. Typically a repair for anything involving the core components of the computer are just not worth it - you can get a whole new computer for a little extra so you might as well salvage whatever you can from your laptop, sell them or trade them in, and get a new laptop. Besides, computers these days are not all that expensive. You can get a second generation Intel Core i3 for less than the price of an older Intel Core i3.Check out what's available and you just might find something that can meet your needs.

Hi!If your computer tells you that the BOOTMGR is missing, that does not mean that the SATA drive is not being detected by the BIOS, but rather that means that the bootloader is unable to load the files needed to start up the computer. The fact that you got blue screen errors means that you could have problems with the hard drive too. Open up the case and check all the cable connections. If all else fails, then you probably have yourself a bricked hard drive. You may be able to boot up with another medium, perhaps a LiveCD or another hard drive and then copy some of your data across.I have a Western Digital external USB hard drive and it ran for a couple of years and is still running as it should be. Perhaps your drive just lived its life. Most people have hard disk drives that just keep running on and on and on while others have had to replace their disk drives every other year. Typically, a hard drive should last you at least two years before they run out of the warranty period, so any life you get out of the hard drive beyond that point is just about being lucky... and most people I know have been incredibly lucky to not have had even a single hard disk crash. Their hard drives grew obsolete because they were too small or they used a different interface type.There are two different schools of thought about how to get your drives to last longer. One group of people says that you ought to leave the hard disk drive running all day unless you plan to leave it unused for over 6 hours to prevent the wear and tear from affecting it while another group of folks say that you can turn it off unless you plan on using it within the hour to reduce the wear and tear on the bearings. With solid state drives, it depends more on the number of reads and writes than on being turned on and off. I have my computers running all day and they haven't had any real problems yet.

I've had a problem with domain renewals (which did have auto-renew enabled) and I think the response to my ticket is quite slow. I got a response after a day but that didn't solve the problem, so I was hoping to get a quicker response to take the ticket from reporting to closure in a day rather than two or three days. If it does take a day to attend to a ticket and the issue does get closed, that's perfectly okay for web hosting service that I get for free, but if it takes longer, I wouldn't be very happy about it. I have been recommending Xisto - Web Hosting to friends and family to use as a for-pay service if they didn't have the patience to accumulate MyCENTs, especially after the quick resolution of a ticket that I had posted a couple of years ago, but now I wouldn't recommend it because there are other web hosting services that are for-pay and respond quicker to support requests.@EzaSometimes, when there's a problem related to putting up web applications, such as WordPress or Drupal, onto the web server, users may encounter problems that other members of the forum can help in troubleshooting but when there's anything related to domain hosting or web hosting, you are right - other members of the forum cannot help. However, there are folks on the forum who are a part of Xisto - Web Hosting and that helps further the cause of resolving our trouble tickets. Think of it as having the right connections.

Hi Aeternus!Good to have you on-board with us here at Xisto. Xisto is a band of people from different backgrounds and from different parts of the world, all here with one intent - to share their knowledge and seek to liberate fallen souls (okay, okay, so we're all here to write as much as we can, earn MyCENTs, and get the free web hosting, but that makes us sound like we're just plain evil).Dropping out of college to start a business sounds like the classic tale of Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and the whole lot of other folk out there who made it big in the corporate world of technology. While it sounds like a cool thing to do, if you are really close to the end, you might as well go the whole stretch. You have just two semesters to go so even if you do not manage to get yourself an A grade and a cum laude, you could try to get in the assignments on time and pass the exams with whatever grade letter because the grades don't really matter in a couple of years. If you do have attendance and participation requirements at university, that could be tough to meet while you're running your own business, but if you do have the option to schedule classes at night, you could still make it without breaking into a sweat.By the way, what's your business idea? Do you already have clients or would you have to go look for some chaps to trade with... When I give it a thought, I think about providing two guys in suits and shades with a flash drive in one big black briefcase and they hand me a briefcase full on money, the exchange is made in a public place and then they speed away in a Roll Royce Silver Ghost. Sounds all too familiar and if it were to really happen me, I'd open up the briefcase to check if there's something ticking within... you know, the ka-boom types.

When doing business, it is necessary for organizations to consider the implications of their actions within the context of the local culture. This can be as simple as naming a vehicle model or set the company logo and color. When DHL Worldwide Express sets up its international offices, it ensures that it maintains cultural sensitivity by standardizing some functions all across the globe but localizing some other aspects of the business within the context of the local culture. DHL uses the color red, which is a symbol of good luck, but at the same time it should be careful to not write in red ink because it is a practice commonly used to end a romantic relationship. Also, the number four is avoided because the pronunciation of the number four is similar to the word for death. Some governments require that the organizations doing businesses within their country use the national or the official language of communication. The result is that customers do not get the same service everywhere. Organizations such as McDonald's too has had to adapt its business model to maintain cultural sensitivity, such as the elimination of ham and pork from its menus in India.

A recent newspaper article mentions about Nissan's use of the battery technology from the Nissan Leaf in formula one racing vehicles (more specifically, the RedBull Sponsored team - Sebastiel Vettel and his team mate). Formula One racing vehicles are required to adhere to specific weight and engine restrictions and this requires racing vehicle designers to get creative. To enable racing drivers to overtake other vehicles, the cars have batteries that are charged through regenerative braking and can be used for a speed boost for a few seconds through electrical motors that power the wheels.Where Nissan comes in is in the provision of batteries that store the electrical current. Nissan has been able to do one thing incredibly well - develop reliable batteries that do not overheat with repeated use, as can be found on the Nissan Leaf electrical vehicle.The move by Nissan will help in improving battery technologies and their use in hybrid and all-electric vehicles.

The mainstream computers still seem to be stuck on BluRay and the promised release of halographics discs in 2006 simply did not happen. The first of the organizations that support new disc storage technologies are the film production and distribution agencies. Imagine being able to release a whole set of classics on a single disc. The cost of the discs eventually decrease though it could take years.If you consider the number of laptop computers that included BluRay, the sales are a mere fraction of the total number of laptop computers sold. The use of memory cards is pretty much limited to expansion memory devices in smart phones and cameras - it is rarely used as a means of sharing data the way you would give away a floppy disk or a compact disc to your buddies.With Internet access becoming ubiquitous, the use of compact discs has been on the decline. If you have to send across a six megabyte file, you would simply email it across. For anything larger, there are services such as DropBox. If you want to share something publicly, you would use services that provide you with affiliate revenue - they sell subscriptions for offering higher speed downloads or a larger number of concurrent downloads, and you get a percentage of it for having referred clients to them by linking to a file hosted on their service.In either case, there still is room for newer technologies for storage when it comes to computer server - those databases get massive and backups to a single medium would be much easier to manage than a bunch of half a dozen tapes. One can only imagine the number of tapes, catridges, or discs that a service like YouTube would have to maintain to be able to backup all of the data that is stored on its servers.

Hey John!It's good to have you on-board. Xisto is a place where you can share your knowledge with other members of the forum and can in turn hope to have the association with the community make you that much more knowledgeable. In the end, it is a symbiotic collaborative effort that we put into it through a give-and-take relationship though it is more in the spirit of giving than about taking.To promote the giving and taking and sharing of knowledge, the kind folks at Xisto give you points, referred to as myCents that help you purchase web hosting or get yourself a domain name along the lines of first-name last-name.com or whatever else you fancy, but while on the topic, let me go and check.... oh, it's taken. When you get out there looking for a domain name, you figure out how many other people out there have the same name as you do.Anyway, hope you have a good time at Xisto and don't let the underwater Internet cables that keep getting severed keep you from hooking up to a WiFi access point and posting to earn your myCents.

Developers like to use open source software because they can use it on the projects they build without having to run it through the purchasing work flows of the organizations. Requests for software licenses are often declined by software organizations that would rather have their own software developers code a functionality than buy a software component to integrate into their deliverables.Software developers also like to built extensions or patches for open source software because its use is not limited to a single software organization. Besides, writing open source software is a reward in itself - the community recognition and the thank you notes make it worth the effort and it looks good on the resume too.Writing open source software is also a great way to learn to write software for a development platform or extensions for a software system because there are other contributors who would report bugs or send feedback on the application or extension and perhaps even send you a patch. Using or building open source software has its rewards. Sure it's not the same as a pot of Acacia or Black Forest honey for Winnie the Pooh but it comes pretty close.

Sure, I'd work for free if it were for a charitable cause. Volunteering is a good deed in itself, and if any of the United Nations subsidiaries, such as the World Health Organization or the United Nations Childrens Education Fund were to put up volunteering opportunities, it's a dream for just about anyone who grew up watching the flying doctor. Putting a roof on top of somebody's head, treating injuries or illnesses, and feeding the hungry are rewards in themselves. Monetary compensation is not the first thing you think of when you get a smile of thanks from a child, for instance. The Blue Cross offers volunteering opportunities for animal welfare and while the animals receiving the service do not express emotions in the same way as humans do, they do express their gratitude in their own way and we are just paying off society's debt to them.