k_nitin_r

Last week, I was provided with the challenge of finding a notebook for INR.30,000 (INR is the abbreviation for Indian Rupee) in India. Of course, there's a list of 'desirable' features and 'must haves' that were handed to me. A Core i3 processor was one of the key features requested and was the one I found hardest to meet. 2GB of RAM was pretty much the standard must-have and a 15" screen was quite high on the desirable list.I began my search with all of the value-for-money brands that I was familiar with in UAE, searching for the product offerings from Lenovo, Acer, and Dell. Lenovo did have something that fit pretty close to the price range. For about INR.34,000 there is a pretty decent Lenovo Thinkpad Edge E420. It has a Core i3 processor too. During my search, I found many notebook PCs sold with FreeDOS instead of Windows and it did reduce the price by about INR.2,000. I might as well stick Ubuntu Linux on it if I don't get Windows, was my reaction. Pretty much every Core i3 processor notebook I found was over INR.30,000 and just when I was about to settle for an AMD processor or even an Intel Atom, I found one that seemed just right.After much searching among the value brands, I decided to take a peek at Sony's offerings. Sony usually charges a high premium for the design and brand name but this time, it seemed to surprise with its Core i3 notebook that had a lower price tag that either Lenovo or Dell. The Sony Vaio VPCEH15EN/W offers a second generation Intel Core i3 2310M processor, 15.5" WXGA display, Microsoft Windows 7 Home Basic 64-bit, 2GB RAM, 320GB hard drive, DVD-RW drive, HDMI output, SD and Memory Card reader, VGA camera, and even a numeric keypad for INR.29,990 (yes, that's inclusive of taxes).Sony is even tossing in Microsoft Office 2010 Starter edition with the Vaio VPCEH15EN/W. Most people hardly ever use anything other than Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel so it's good to know you can edit documents instead of just viewing them with the free Word and Excel viewers. Officer Starter, however, does not include Powerpoint so you'll have to still get a Powerpoint viewer for making presentations or looking up some reference slides. Microsoft did intend to include advertising as a means of additional revenue from the users of the Office Starter edition, as is included in their license agreement. When you do use Microsoft Word in the Office Starter edition, you would notice that the track changes feature for multiple authors, comments, and the automatic table of contents feature are missing. Microsoft Excel too is limited by the no-comments, no pivot tables, and no external sources limitations. A feature of Office Starter is that you can create a portable version of it using the Office Starter To-Go onto a USB disk drive letting you use Office Starter on guest PCs.Sony Vaio's offering certainly changes its image from the vendor of overpriced notebooks as we have come to think of it. It's entry-level notebook certainly delivers value for money and they have managed to undercut their rivals who seem to have turned a blind eye to their aggressive pricing.

Between ASP and PHP, I would choose PHP because ASP is based on Visual Basic 6 and is considered legacy technology. However, given the choice between PHP and ASP.NET, I would choose ASP.NET for scalability and PHP for low cost. ASP.NET is pretty easy to work with because of the Visual Studio IDE and you can create Windows Services to achieve persistent state information and caching between separate user requests. ASP.NET contractors and component developers are easy to find and several Microsoft backed open source projects are around to build upon, though they aren't as many as you would find with an open source technology.PHP is quite popular in the open source community and you can find IDEs and open source projects to build upon. If you are looking out for an IDE for PHP development, Eclipse and NetBeans are free as well as open source and NuSphere PhpEd is a pretty good commercial IDE. Zend provides an Eclipse based IDE for PHP development too. All of these IDEs provided source control support for SubVersion repositories and you can build or procure plugins for the IDEs to provide added functionality. If you are looking for a web hosting service, you can find services for as cheap as $3 per month, and perhaps even cheaper if you go around bargain hunting.

To each his own, as they say. Some folks prefer Dell while other prefer LG. There are some offerings unique to some vendors, such as the 10-point multi-touch screen is only available from 3M so, in the words of Guybrush Threepwood, the self-proclaimed mighty pirate, when there's only one candidate, there's only one choice.I have used Dell and HP, and seem to find the HP ones better. I would like to try out a Lenovo at some point because the LCD display screens on the Thinkpad are pretty good - they seem to minimize eye strain when compared to Dell's screens and HP is somewhere between on the continuum of the two.Lenovo has dealers for its notebooks and desktop across the globe, but I have yet to find a dealer who sells Lenovo peripherals and accessories. The trademark keyboard with TrackPoint is available as a USB keyboard and would make a really good addition to just about any desktop to give it that Thinkpad feel. The docking stations for notebooks provide the ability to leave the desk by simply getting it out of the docking station so you don't have too many wires to hook up and unhook when moving between a desk and computing on the go. The Thinkpad branded mouse is overpriced and I would prefer a Logitech instead because of the programmable buttons but I guess corporate buyers would want one to complete the 'look'. I guess the lack of availability of the Lenovo peripherals and accessories is because of the lack of demand, more than anything else.

The Tata Nano is currently available only with a petrol engine, but a diesel variant is being considered. The diesel variant is expected to deliver 40 kilometres per litre, which would make it more fuel efficient than pretty much all other diesel vehicles. The Nissan Micra gets a fuel efficiency of 23 kilometres per litre and the Suzuki Swift gets a fuel efficiency of 19 kilometres per litre in the old variant and 23 kilometres per litre in the new variant (apparently, they replaced the metal fuel tank with a plastic fuel tank to achieve the higher fuel efficiency).Given the size of the Tata Nano, you fit any small engine in there and as the engine does not have to do a lot of work to power the miniscule body of the vehicle, it can be tuned for fuel efficiency. The drawback of the Tata Nano design is that the engine is fitted at the rear, which makes cooling a challenge for the automobile engineers. The engine fires in the early Tata Nanos were considered to be a result of overheating because of the rear-engine design although the dealers and manufacturer remain tight-lipped about the exact cause of the engine fire.The Tata Nano may be seen as something that adds to pollution, but if the diesel variant were to run on biodiesels, it would be carbon neutral because the carbon dioxide produced from burning the biodiesel would be re-absorbed by the plants used to make the biodiesels.The small size of the Tata Nano makes it possible to fit an electric motor in there too so speculations are not only about the diesel variant but also a possible electric car based on the Tata Nano. Also, if you think the Tata Nano looks like a clown car, there's the Tata Pixel which is of about the same size of the Tata Nano but with improved looks. Though the Tata Pixel is not in production, it is probably a glimpse at what you can do by some serious body mods of a stock Tata Nano.

C programming finds use in performance-oriented computing. If you care more about functionality than about performance, Java and C# are the programming language of choice. If you want to write more manageable code with a little performance trade-off, you can use C++ to write your software. However, you can still find better performance with C++ than with Java or C#.If you are writing computer games, C and C++ should be your programming languages of choice because of the performance. If you write your games in Java and C#, gamers playing your game would require lots of processing power unless you are building something that is not heavy on graphics and processing.BTW, if you have been following the developments in Java, most of them are to simplify the development of business applications. Enterprise Java technologies help in making your application more scalable, more reliable, and more secure. Although Java does have support for 3D graphics, through JOGL, and audio, through features in Java SE, what you do with Java comes at a performance cost because Java performs checking on array bounds, data type size limits, and overflow checks. If you write your code in C or C++, you can write your code without performing any of the checks if you decide that your code does not need them, such as if your application works with values that would not cause overflows or go beyond the limits of a data type. If you do, however, want to perform checks for data type size limits, operator overflow checks, and array bounds.

@johnpitterYou seem to be making a mistake that the original thread poster seems to have made as well. You cannot compare the Pentium 4 line of processors with the AMD brand because they are two different things. You can compare a specific processor from the Intel brand with a specific processor from the AMD brand. Also, there are some types of calculations that AMD processors tend to perform better while there are other types of calculations that Intel prcessors tend to perform better so if you have any code, you can optimize it for a particular processor such that it performs better on one processor rather than on the other.If you are looking at the best performance from a processor, the Intel Core i7 995X can give you unmatched performance and the closest you can get from an AMD processor is with the AMD Opteron 6176 SE.Most processors sold are from Intel as they have a majority of the market share and if you look at the closest that AMD did get to taking away the lead, it would be in 2006. Since 2006, AMD's market share has been declining but continues to remain over 20%.

@ramankumarC is not a BASIC programming language. It uses an entirely different syntax and is at a 'lower' level than BASIC. GW-BASIC, QuickBASIC, Q-BASIC, PowerBASIC, VisualBasic, and Turbo BASIC are examples of BASIC programming languages.@NikBASIC can be used for various purposes. If you are a mathematician, you can use BASIC for graphing, although there are other software tools that can meet your need better. For business users, BASIC can provide a means of writing a custom application for storing and retrieving data. Academic users can use BASIC's capabilities for calculations or for quiz engines. BASIC can also be used to write computer games and you can also find a BASIC implementation of Doom. There's a lot that the programming language can do and it can be extended by libraries written in C or assembly language, depending on the type of BASIC you are using.

You ought to look up the Java API documentation to learn to do this. According to the API documentation, the java.util.Date constructor "initializes it so that it represents the time at which it was allocated," which means that you can do something like this: java.util.Date dt1 = new java.util.Date();Put the constructor call in an action handler for a button, declare the variable as a member variable of the class, and if you need to display the date anywhere, call the toString() method on the date object. If you want to have more control over how the date is displayed, take a look at the java.text.DateFormat class and, more specifically, the format method of the DateFormat class. You can also build the date string by obtaining the date parts using the java.util.Calendar class. The Calendar.get method takes a parameter that you can specify as "java.text.Calendar." followed by DAY_OF_MONTH, MONTH, YEAR, HOUR_OF_DAY, MINUTE, SECOND.Use the auto-complete of your Java IDE to help you with finding the other methods for the Date and Calendar classes.

After having driven through flood waters over the past three days, I've had my ride sputter and choke through one huge puddle but didn't leave me stranded and managed to get me all the way back home. I had the air filters and engine dry overnight and the engine runs fine now. There still is a squeaking sound whenever I start it up, which I believe is a belt that may have come loose from driving around on (the lack of) terrain suited for a boat.There are some drivers out there who were stranded in the water and probably are in need of some expensive repairs now. The key thing to remember is that if water does enter the car through the exhaust, it may not reach the engine because it has a long way to travel and has to go through the catalytic converter. The most damage you can cause is a cracked catalytic converter, assuming that you were running hot before you hit the water. Most engine repairs are required after water enters through the air intake of the engine. One way to tell if water entered the engine through the air intakes is to check if the air filters are wet. Even if your air filters are wet, there is a small chance that the flood water merely splashed onto the air intakes and didn't enter all the way into the engine. Next, check the engine oil with the dip stick to check the color of the oil. If the oil is either golden, brown, or black, your engine should be okay but if the oil looks milky or foamy, you should have your car taken to the service center.Repairs for a flood-affected engine involves taking the engine apart and rinsing it with oil to get rid of the water. While you are at it, you might as well get some decarbonizing done if your engine has clocked a considerable mileage on it. The workshop just might be able to cut you a deal since they've got the engine opened up already.If you have flood insurance, you might want to check with your insurance agent if you are covered when the flood damage occurs while you are driving the vehicle. Some insurance firms cover it while others dont under their standard policy and some insurance companies might leave out coverage due to natural calamities entirely to offer a more competitive rate to you for the insurance premium. Also, some insurance surveyors would check to see if the water entered the engine by checking the dipstick for the engine oil and if it does indicate the presence of water, they will not cover the repair charges. At times, all you need is to just let the car dry and it should run just fine. If it does not, you need repairs but it does not hurt to check the air filters and engine oil.

@IniyilaThe original topic poster, Michael, did not say that the computer starts to randomly ring when a disk is inserted within the CDROM drive. Michael uses an onomatopea (however that is spelled) to say, the computer goes Rrrrr... (like a car would when you floor the pedal while the transmission is set to neutral, although you could say a puppy dog does that too and the old antique table fans with an all-metal design do that when they have not been lubricated in a while).As far as I know, almost all CDROM drives with a spindle make a whirring noise. Maybe not with all discs, but when you use specific brands of discs, the sound is more prominent. Perhaps it has to do with the quality of the disc with respect to the shape because it may not be perfectly flat so when it rotates, it tends to create a vibration and hence the whirring noise. It does not seem to harm the CDROM drive in any way because I have had discs of the sort used for delivering marketing or promotional material and my CDROM drive still works just the way it did when I first bought it about half a decade ago.

A programmer and a coder are two different titles for the same person. All they do is write source code for programs. Now, when you speak of software engineers, it's different - they are people who incorporate best practices, software development metrics, and stuff of that sort. Software developers are software engineers. Well, it depends on who you ask.Basically, the point is that in any firm, you'll come across:Coders: These are people who write source code for a living. They know the inner stuff of computers. They call it 'The Code'.Programmers: Programmers are down-to-earn folk who write source code for a living. They do not need a fancy job title to boost their egos but they do yearn for the project manager title.Software Engineers: They write source code for a living, but they get a pretty good paycheck because of the word "engineer" in their job title. They are just a bunch of programmers at the end of the day.Software Developers: The term "developer" is typically associated with property development and real estate, but in this case software developers are people who write source code for a living. They consider themselves to be too superior to carry a programmer title and therefore they are developers.Software Architects: Software architects should be writing source code but they do not write as much as they do. If you find any of these folk, they've spent their years of youth writing source code for a living and they've been completely burned out doing it, so they have grey hair or no hair and they tell you tales about the mythical man month and the source code that they wrote for a living.Programmer Analyst: These folks write source code for a living. The human resources personnel think that these guys shouldn't be paid as much as architects do because they still have some youth left in them so they are programmers, yet they are analysts when you look at their job title but that doesn't really matter because they write source code for a living.Project managers: This is one guy who cannot write source code for a living, so simply hangs around the people who can write source code for a living. He or she may or may not have written any code in his or her lifetime but he or she does claim to have had some 'experience' around source code. If these folks start writing source code, run for your life!Yes, a programmer is a coder is a developer is a software engineer is an analyst programmer (or programmer analyst) in most organizations. The job title carries differences but you do not always see them in the real world, just as you would see the title "project manager" but would not really know if the project manager would be overseeing software development teams, looking at real estate projects, or new product launches.PS: By the way, Xarex, hard-coding does not mean what you think it means. Hard-coding is when you assign values to variables in your source code without reading them from a configuration file or receiving it as input from the user interface.

I had been using the Xilisoft Converter for converting my videos across different formats but after a recent re-installation of Windows, I can't seem to find my serial number so I finally decided to look into the free options out there for converting my videos.I have an old iPhone that I occasionally upload videos to using iTunes but iTunes does not support every format under the sun and so it needs a conversion. I have a Nokia E72 that is picky about the formats that it accepts and since most videos out there use H.264, I have to convert them to get them onto the Nokia E72, apart from shrinking them in size for the phone's 600 MHz ARM processor to handle.After some Internet researching, I arrived at two options for free video conversion software, Freemake and Handbrake (they rhyme too). When I looked at the user interface provided by the two, I was quite impressed by Freemake and saw it as a simpler tool but only when I did use it did I figure out that the interface may be cute but it is buggy. I used Handbrake, which had a simple interface unless you wanted to do something other than convert one video at a time, but when you do want to enqueue videos or make your own preset formats, it takes a bit of effort to figure out the user interface but when you do, it just simply works! Freemake provides you with a greater variety of formats for output and the aesthetics of the interface are commendable but it is just not ready for prime time yet. For instance, the dropdown list items in Freemake are displayed below the window instead of at the dropdown and that's one pretty serious usability issue. Then there are many output settings that cannot be modified and that was a pretty major thing that pushed me toward HandBrake. HandBrake is very popular in the open source community and you can even install it using the package manager of most popular Linux distributions. The user interface is pretty basic and it shows that it was developed as a volunteer effort and has room for improvement, but it does its job, provides me with the options that I looked for in the output format settings, and if they can make the queueing use case easier to perform through the user interface, that would have been the icing on top but apart from that, I am pretty satisfied with what I am getting and I would definitely recommend HandBrake to anyone who is out there looking for some free video conversion software tools.

Hi!I have my MyCents being calculated once a day. If I make my posts today, I'll get the email about the MyCents being credited to my account tomorrow. Sometimes, it does get delayed by more than a day. My posts typically get me up to a dollar in MyCents credit and that can go over one or two posts. I do not really know how the algorithm works, but when I do make more posts in a single day, I do not see my MyCents really going up by much. Perhaps the MyCents that we earn goes down by the number of posts we make per day or something similar? That would be one way to keep out spammers, although I wouldn't be in favor of such a 'penalty'.Surprisingly the MyCents email is always sent just when I start wondering what to do with the time that I have to spare. Apparently, they've got some secret tracking software that keeps them informed about the best time to remind me to post to the forum or something of the sort... you never really know because I'm still running Windows XP and Windows XP doesn't have all the fancy security features that Windows 7 has to boast about so somebody could easily hack in, drop some spyware that captures audio, video, keystrokes, and mouse movements. Or perhaps it isn't hi-tech at all - they might have some voodoo or a crystal ball that they gaze into when they decide to click the Send Email button. For a free web hosting provider to stay in business for so long, there has got to be some kind of voodoo, shouldn't it?I post to the forum whenever I can without concerning myself too much about the MyCents but I don't call myself a regular. I don't get the time to catch up on all of the posts, but simply look at the recent threads whenever I do sign in and I'll bet there are a lot of threads that I have been missing. When I do get the time to catch up with threads, I have no idea where to look because the Recent Threads feature can only show so many threads before they get displaced into the 'unnoticed' bin. When I do start whiling away my time, I do have to admit that it is the MyCents email that draw me back to the forum so it does have some part to play in my coming back to the forum.BTW, mrdee, perhaps you should raise a ticket saying that you aren't getting the MyCents credited emails. I get the emails within a day or two of posting and that lets me know that I am getting credits for my posts. Another place to look is the Xisto - Support and billing website that displays your balance when you log in. That balance has been getting ever so low for me and all I have are four domain names and a Logic Basic hosting package (I don't remember what it's called but it is the one above the centennial hosting package and below the Logic Pro hosting package that lets me host up to 5 domains with the hosting account) so I suppose the MyCents do not accumulate as much as they used to when I post to the forum.

I'm not sure if this post should have been in 'Career and Job' or here in 'Opportunities', but this seemed like a more appropriate place as 'Career and Job' is more about career advice.A firm in Ione, California, is hiring a LAMP system administrator to manage Linux-based VPS, dedicated server, and shared hosting accounts. They are looking for skills in monitoring server and database performance, migration of hosting accounts, and in routine administration tasks (cron, scripting, backup and recovery etc.)You can apply by sending your resume to lamp.recruit.2011@gmail.com

Having recently had my car's power steering quit on my during a long drive back from the country side, I have been considering whether the type of power steering would have mattered, seeing how the belt of the hydraulic power steering system came off and I had to drive back without power steering. It wasn't impossible, but is something that would help in avoiding unexpected obstacles - pot holes, small rocks, and maybe even other errant drivers, cyclists and pedestrians.The two types of power steering that you would find in vehicles are either hydraulic power steering or electronic power steering. Hydraulic power steering systems are the only types of power steering that you would find in older automobiles and they run off the engine power. Electronic power steering systems are driven by a motor and they draw their power from the car battery. Different drivers have preferences for different kinds of power steering, with some having a preference for electronic power steering and others having a preference for hydraulic power steering. Hydraulic power steering is supposed to be smoother but not as responsive, however it is less likely to be 'off the center'. Electronic power steering has less mechanical complexity and is supposedly less prone to failure and more reliable, although we do see a high incidence of failed electrical motors in electronic power steering systems. Many newer vehicles are equipped with electronic power steering instead of hydraulic power steering, assuming that you are not in the market looking for used automobiles. Unless you drive a car with the engine located at the back or a small and light sub-compact car, you would find one of the abovementioned types of power steering systems.BTW, newer mechanics don't have much experience with hydraulic power steering systems... I overheard my mechanic ask his supervisor, "Do hydraulic power steering systems have fuses?," as he was noting down my complaint about the power steering system having conked off.

Jori,I last give this thread a thought last September, and I thought of it as a Final Destination kind of thing. After watching a couple of re-runs of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, out of sheer boredom, I think of the issue differently. If you know how, when, and where you were going to die, you would be totally freaked out about having to do it and the thought of having to do it will start to get creepy. If you do continue doing whatever it is that is going to kill you and you internalize it as something you have just got to do, when the actual moment does come to you, however, would you remember that is it the day on your calendar when you would have to not do something, and would you ignore something really compelling that would get you to do it anyway?Firemen, soldiers, air force pilots, sailors in the navy, and just about anybody else in civil defense and the military know that they run against death whenever they face their battles. They have a feeling of a possibility of how they are going to die, but they have no idea when, and so they valiantly face their fears and continue to do what they have got to do. If there is anything else that they could do, would they take it up or would they just keep doing whatever it is that they do and one day meet their end?Most people think that they will die of old age and the far far distant future and if they do meet their death before they grow old, they've lived through life without having a nagging thought in the back of their heads about their death and what they could do to prevent it.

Hi!This is a rant. Counter Strike 1.6 fans, please skip over this post.The problem I have with Counter Strike is in the game play. You can stand right in front of somebody and shoot with absolutely no damage to the other player at all. I mean what kind of a game algorithm is that? Plus, you can shoot through walls in some sections of the maps. Then, there is the problem of cheaters using scripts to have sniper rifles auto-aim and shoot - that takes the fun out of the game when you come across a 'room' of folks who have you die with a shot from a sniper rifle before you can even catch a peek of them.I prefer Smokin Guns to Counter Strike 1.6 because the game does what it is supposed to - give you a fair playing ground against other players. It is realistic - you fire a gun and a bullet is shot, which may strike the other player and causes damage on impact. You cannot shoot through walls. And, best of all, Smokin Guns is free and open source so you do not have to go to a store to buy it or use your credit card to pay online. It is absolutely free.Counter Strike Source is a whole new ball game with the stupendous graphics and that alone is the wow factor to want to go out and buy the game. The game play is quite different from Counter Strike 1.6 and although there are bugs in the game, we don't have anything else that compares to the in-game immersion through the visuals and the other aspects of the gaming experience.If you are trying to get Counter Strike 1.6 running, I'd say ditch it entirely and switch to Smokin Guns - it's set in a western theme and is way more fun if all the Counter Strike 1.6 bugs annoy the fun out of the game play for you and you want something that is more realistic than the less-than-ideal physics/geometry that Counter Strike 1.6 has to throw your way.

ISO files are what you need to create Linux installation CDs or DVDs. If it were not for ISO disc images, pretty much any CD or DVD you make would have been just a set of files for you to access through Windows Explorer, and not a bootable CD. Well, yes, there are other disc image formats, such as NRG, BIN/CUE, IMG and many more, but ISO is the most common file format that there is.If you are looking for a free utility to write ISO images to CD or DVD, try ImgBurn. It is free and it supports a wide variety of disc image formats. If you are already using Linux then you have the dd utility for disc imaging - you can create disc images with ease by specifying the input to be the device and the output to be a file. It is easy to specify the output to be a device so make sure that you double-check what you type to ensure that you are not overwriting a disk drive unless you mean to do so.

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.