k_nitin_r

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.

The Zend Framework for developing PHP applications isn't one of the more popular ones out there - the pack seems to be led by Codeigniter and CakePHP, but the Zend Framework comes from one of the most committed contributors to the PHP development platform.The Model-View-Controller pattern caught on as a means of separating code and to avoid to code spaghetti that most software was developed back in the day, but that does not make it more efficient. Try writing a plain and simple PHP application with the plain vanilla features that PHP has to offer and compare that against the performance of an application that uses Code Igniter, CakePHP, or even the Zend Framework. The plain-vanilla PHP code with no frameworks backing it up will get you quicker responses and lesser processing load on the server. However, if you consider the number of components provided by the frameworks, you would still want to use a framework because of the amount of effort that you would save from using something that is already out there versus building something from scratch for every project that you develop. To find components for frameworks, I would stick to the most popular framework out there, which would be Code Igniter, which has displaced CakePHP from the top spot. CakePHP is a great way to get started programming too because of the amount of documentation that is available out there, being one of the oldies that ruled the roost for quite some time.

I have two different Internet Service Providers. The fixed-line Internet Connection that I use is a 256 kilobits per second broadband connection and it gives me a decent 256 kilobits per second downstream and a 128 kilobits per second upstream link. Before a recent upgrade by my Internet Service Provider, I did get a 256 kilobits per second downstream and a 1,024 kilobits per second upstream link - apparently, they did not think that anyone would be uploading much till peer-to-peer file sharing services came along and they did not really account for the amount of traffic they were getting. The original poster for the topic seems to have a really good deal - paying for a 2 megabits per second connection and getting 45 megabits per second of downstream transfers and paying for a 256 kilobits per second and geting 1025 kilobits per second of upstream transfers on it. If any Internet Service Provider did offer such a package, there is no reason why people would not go flocking to that Internet Service Provider. However, why would the Internet Service Provider not want to boast about the speeds that it offers and get more users? These days Internet Service Providers would talk about just about anything that can differentiate their Internet services, from free trials of Antivirus software packages to free webcams and headsets that they give away to subscribers.PS: My bad.... it wasn't the original poster - it was a post on top of the second page of the discussion thread.

I have a Seagate external hard disk drive that is pretty much dead. It does show up in Windows and can browse through some of the folders on the disk, but it causes Windows Explorer to hang when browsing some of the inaccessible folders. I did run CheckDisk on it, which found absolutely no errors except that it took an eternity to run. Perhaps I should just stick the drive into a Linux box and get it to copy the files across. I imagine it would take over a month to get all the data across from the terabyte drive at the rate at which it is accessing the data on the disk. Freezing the drive did nothing except make it colder to touch but fortunately it did not damage the drive.I sometimes compare my Seagate disk drive to the Western Digital drive that I got before it. Western Digital's MyBook (the 500GB single drive edition without network support) lasted much longer and didn't seem to have any issues at all so far - it's a whole year older than the Seagate disk drive and both are connected all day to a computer that is turned on twenty four hours a day and seven days a week. I have to try running another Seagate disk drive to be able to say that Western Digital makes better stuff than Seagate does, so this time I would be getting another Seagate disk drive, just to be able to tell if the disk failure was due to inferior components being used to make the disk drive or if it was just one of those one-off disk drive failures that occurs when the gremlins take over and destroy the drive.TLDR: Freezing had no effect on my almost-dead disk drive - it still takes almost forever to read certain folders, which unfortunately contain most of my files.

Changing the keyboard of the computer is a common activity at the server centers and the technicians have a service manual on how to change it. You may be able to find the service manual online; I believe Dell provides the service manuals on its website.@IniyilaI'm not really sure of why the service center offered you a keyboard of an unknown brand for the Dell Vostro 1500 because Dell authorized service centers are paid by Dell for the replacement of parts under warranty so they always fit the genuine Dell parts. When you went in for the Dell XPS L501, the service center staff did what they were supposed to - they offered you a genuine Dell keyboard replacement.If you are looking for good laptop keyboards, take a look at Lenovo Thinkpads. They are well-known for their keyboards and trackpoints. It may not win you any awards for its looks, but that's where AlienWare and its likes make their mark.I haven't had to clean a keyboard everyday - all I do is clean up the screen whenever it gets dusty. Occasionally, I hold the keyboard upside-down (along with the rest of the laptop, of course) but that still doesn't get everything out of there - I know there's enough to feed an ant colony but as long as it does not affect the functionality of the keyboard, it should be pkay. Using an external USB keyboard ought to help if the functionality of the keyboard is being affected by objects obstructing the motion of the keys on the keyboard.

Although HTML and Cascading Style Sheets are standards defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (the W3C), the standards are loosely defined such that browser vendors, Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, and the like, implement the standards differently.The HR tag is one such element that is implemented differently in different browsers. The HR tag specifies a horizontal rule, typically in black or with a 3D appearance, that goes across from one side of the page to the other. Setting the color of the horizontal rule is something that 'modern' web designers tend to discourage, because of the 'best practice' of separating markup from presentation appearance. The advantage of this separation enables the web designers to change the appearance of the web page by changing only the cascading style sheet file and without having to modify any of the markup. When you consider the development cycle of most web applications, this does make sense because the web designers make the markup for the application and send it across to the developers who break up the markup into various sections so tracing a particular tag or a div by browsing through several files can get tedious for the web designer, and there's the difficulty in being able to modify the markup and view the results in the browser because that would require setting up a test environment with a running webserver and database. By modifying only the cascading style sheet file, which is typically just a single file in a small web application, the web designer can easily change the look of the web site without requiring extensive knowledge of how the application is structured.When you, however, want to use the horizontal rule tag within your design, you can typically set the color of the horizontal rule using the color CSS property. When I use the word "typically", what I mean is that the color property works in almost all web browsers, except for Microsoft Internet Explorer. To get the horizontal rule to appear in a different color in Microsoft Internet Explorer, you have to set the background-color CSS attribute instead of the color attribute (though you can set both to set the colors across multiple browsers). However, the differences in HTML and cascading stylesheet implementations does not end there - there also exists a difference in the way different versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer implement the HTML and cascading stylesheet standards, so while the background-color attribute sets the color of the horizontal rule in older versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 8 will not display a colored horizontal rule with either the color CSS attribute or the background-color CSS attribute. Internet Explorer 8 instead requires the border-color attribute to be specified. Frustrated? Well, perhaps that's why most folks decided to go the way of implementing a horizontal rule by means of creating a div instead of styling the horizontal rule. Despite having set the border color CSS attribute of the horizontal rule in Internet Explorer 8, the background color CSS attribute of the horizontal rule in older versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, and the color CSS attribute of the horizontal rule in other web browsers, do not expect to have the horizontal rule look the same in all browsers or across browser versions because they may still be a difference between the way browsers render the markup and cascading style sheets. Internet Explorer 8, for example, displays the horizontal rule as a 3D line and this becomes more prominent when you set a color and compare the appearance of the horizontal rule across web browsers.Another difference between the implementation of the cascading stylesheets for the horizontal rule is in the positioning of the horizontal rule. Typically, you would want to have the horizontal rule positioned in the center and you would not have to change a thing to achieve the centering. However, when you do want the horizontal rule to appear to the left or to the right (perhaps to get a better formatted output when printing a page), you have to set the margin CSS property for most web browsers, but for Microsoft Internet Explorer you would have to set the text-align CSS property, just as you would set it for a paragraph tag.Having worked with the horizontal rule using cascading style sheets in different browsers, would you even bother with the horizontal rule? Browser makers and modern web designers want to discourage the use of the horizontal rule so it is unlikely that we would have many supporters as we petition for stricter standards defining the implementation of the horizontal rule in different browsers.

Software compilers can be written in any language. For example a C compiler may be written in assembly language, C, or even Pascal! From a software developer's perspective, a software compiler is just another program. You can even write a software compiler for C using Visual Basic, though that's fairly uncommon.Typically, the compiler of a new language is written in its prevailing predecessor and as new compilers are developed, the compilers are developed in the language itself. What I mean to say is that the first GW-BASIC compiler would not have been written in GW-BASIC because GW-BASIC did not exist back then. However, somebody may have written a GW-BASIC compiler in GW-BASIC compiler later, perhaps as an academic project. Academic projects tend to die-out after they have been turned in for grades due to a lack of time and due to more interesting pursuits for the original developer, which is why we rarely even hear about most of them. Academic projects are, however, quite interesting and aren't always the usual business process automation applications.

Hi!I had an old Compaq Presario 2132EA laptop with keys that went dead and no amount of cleaning, prodding, or shaking would get the 'B' key working again. Eventually, the problem extended to the spacebar too. The laptop was about 6 years old so it did live its lifetime. I would have got an external USB keyboard, but I thought it wasn't worth it - I used it as a terminal server and would connect to it from a newer laptop to run some stuff on it. Eventually, the power connector on the motherboard went loose so it would occasionally turn itself off. It would also, at times, overheat and the fail-safe would kick in and shut it off. The laptop has since been retired, but it may rise again if it sees any practical use in an electronics project somewhere.I have another laptop, the IBM Thinkpad T60 that had rice fall into it and, as you know, rice has a tendency to become as solid as a rock when it dries up. When you drop cookie crumbles into a computer, the crumbles do eventually break up, but the rice stays as-is. I haven't been able to shake it out, but whenever I do pack up my laptop and carry it around, the rice does move around so the 'dead keys' tend to shift too. When the problem first started off, the 'E' key wouldn't work. Then, it shifted to under the '9' key. I managed to get out the larger pieces that prevent keys from working entirely, but I think there are still tiny bits that sometimes make keys harder to push or require more than one keystroke to press although it is quite rare now... either the rice managed to get lodged in some corner where it won't mess with the normal operation of the keyboard or there's bacteria in there that disintegrated it. In either case, I'm glad it's working well again. Those folks at IBM sure did design some solid stuff while they owned the Thinkpad line and Lenovo continues to do so in the T-series of Thinkpads.I did come across some strange keyboard problems in Dell laptops that were under 2 years old. Perhaps Dell computers had quality issues around 2000-2001 because it would be odd if five different computers used by five different people would have keyboard problems within two years of purchase. The problems always seemed to be around the Delete key, and back them Windows 2000 made it necessary to press Control, Alt, and DELETE to log into Windows. The problem was solved by 'borrowing' (read: stealing!) an external USB keyboard that belonged to one of the desktops whenever the computers had to be booted up. As soon as Windows would log them in, the keyboard would go around till all of the Dell laptops had been started up, and then the keyboard would be returned to its rightful owner, a Dell Slimline desktop PC (ironic, isn't it! Apparently, the owners of the Dell laptops failed to see the irony in the situation).For most keyboard problems, laptops just have one pricey solution - go back to the service center and get your keyboard replaced. Since the keyboards are proprietary, they are sold at a premium and the service center insists on charging a heavy fee as the service charge too. Shuttle PC, apparently, wants to change that by coming up with a line of laptops that are built from standardized parts so they would use the exact same or interchangeable components between laptop models. How do they hope to accomplish that? Go figure! With desktop keyboards, you might as well just toss away they keyboard away and get a new one. There are so many economically priced desktop computer keyboards from China that you can afford to get a new keyboard every few months and can open up your closet to find half a dozen keyboards at the end of the year. Man, those manufacturing companies in China seem to have got a magical thing going on there!