k_nitin_r

Hi!I had a Compaq Presario 1600EA that came with a pair of JBL speakers. They were simply amazing! HPQ (the HP and Compaq conglomerate) continues to sell notebook PCs that are equipped with JBL speakers and they are just as amazing as the Presario 1600EA.I would not expect to get very high quality out of a laptop sound system, but JBL-equipped laptops seems to simply blow away the competition. I wonder if any other popular brands fit their speakers into laptops.

Hi! You have not seen unusual till you've looked at this page: http://www.foodreference.com/html/artunusualdelicacies.html Some of the items that the page mentions about are hedgehogs, fried grasshoppers, chocolate-dipped ants, snails, and elephant trunks. When somebody compares locusts to shrimps, that kind of makes your tummy feel funny

Hi!@Ridwan SameerWelcome back. You must have been pretty active back in the day when you were on the forum - you've got quite a bit of posts there!By the way, your signature block has an image that reads "Account inactive" from PhotoBucket so you might want to update your signature.

Hi!@AbhayThe Internet actually just a computer network and by taking away DNS, you can't reach computers by name but you still can connect by IP address so you haven't really destroyed the Internet.Hey, did you catch the Terminator series? Apparently, even after they repeatedly try destroying SkyNet, they can't seem to put an end to it permanently :-)

Hi!Skipping class is not necessarily something bad. You might just have to prioritize things and sometimes a class just isn't it. I have had to skip class to finish an assignment from another class. On another occasion, the instructor gave me the option to skip class to prepare for the exam because I covered the topic of that class for a project and was well-versed with it. I have had classmates who had to skip class to participate in charity events so you could think of it as the greater good, but they did have to work harder to make up for not having attended the class.Many schools set policies on how many classes you can skip before you lose a grade or points. It builds in a sense of having a certain number to use so you can use them in the last week of class while you work on projects or prepare for exams.

Hi!I've noticed that a lot of posters seem to emphasize on the fact that he dipped his gum in citric acid. I'm pretty sure that citric acid and gum by themselves did not cause the explosion unless the gum contained something unusual. Citric acid is that same stuff that you find in orange juice or lemon juice. It adds that sour taste to both.

Hi!I have found Epson catridges to cost more than their HP counterparts. The cost of an Epson printer is lower than an HP printer though. I guess their marketing strategy is to make a cheaper printer and then cash in on the catridge sales. If I were printing just once or twice in a month, I would just get a cheap Epson printer. However, I would invest in a black-and-white HP laser printer if I had to print lots of pages.If you simply want a printer that has a long-running catridge so you don't have to change the catridge often but don't mind the costs, I would imagine an HP LaserJet 8100 series printer would cater to the needs of a large office. The printer is capable of printing 32 (yes, that's thirty two!) pages per minute, which is more than a page every two seconds, and has multiple (at least three that I know of) paper feeders. If you've got an office that has lots of employees printing at the same time, the LaserJet 8100 is what you need to avoid having to visit the printer every other hour.Although printers have become really quick over the years, it is necessary that we remind people of the trees that have to be cut down to cater to their paper needs. I would think that with digital picture frames, smart boards, smart phones, and LCD screens becoming very common today, the dependency on paper should have reduced. If our paper consumption does not decrease, the rising population would see offices in huge corporations with an HP LaserJet 9990 on one side of the wall, and a tree crusher on the other side.

Hi!@retry56A supercomputer is a very very high end server. Perhaps I should add another "very" into my last sentence. Unlike your computer or mine, which has a single processor with perhaps two or four cores working together to deliver the computing power, supercomputers have thousands processors. The peripherals (monitor, input devices etc) connected to a computer do not really determine whether a computing device is a supercomputer because they are essentially about computational power and not about capabilities.The biggest and the baddest that I've had the good fortune to see about three years ago was a digital library setup that consisted of about a dozen storage devices with about a terabyte of disk space each connected to a single server that had four processors and 8GB of RAM. It was a high-end server but by no means a supercomputer. Back then, it was a beast but you can get a desktop computer to come close, if not match the performance. Think of a desktop with an Intel Core i7 processor, 8GB RAM, 4x 1TB disk drives with a few more connected through the USB 3.0 interfaces.A problem with maintaining a supercomputer is dealing with the heat dissipation and energy consumption. If you did manage to work that out, you would have the issue of splitting up a job into thousands of threads that could work in parallel.

Hi!@contactsknReleasing animals back into the wild is not really as simple as it sounds. Many of these animals have been raised in captivity and therefore lack the survival skills that their 'wild' counterparts have. Animal rights agencies go as far as to say that you should not feed the stray cat or dog that comes by your house because if you did decide to move away, the strays would have not have their scavenging abilities (or hunting abilities, if there are other smaller animals that they can feed on) to help them find food.There have been instances of animals being successfully re-introduced into the wild but that has only occurred after the animals were rehabilitated for a certain period of time and weaned from human care.Another issue that remains even for animals that have been successfully released into their natural habitats is that they would not be able to recognize humans as hunters due to their familiarity with being around humans who were their care-givers.

Hi!@webmaster5526If you are using WordPress or Joomla!, there are plugins available for creating forms. If you are not using a content management system (CMS), this might be a good time for you to consider moving. The benefit of a content management system is that you can post content to your website using Windows Live! Writer or even your standard Microsoft Office Word 2007. Content management systems also provide you with a web-based interface for posting your content. The additional functionalities that comes with a content management system are that of enabling user registration, commenting on articles, a choice of a wide variety of themes, and tons and tons of plugins/modules/components (whatever terminology the content management system uses to describe extensions to the core system).WordPress has the Contact Form 7 plugin that enables you to create a form that simply emails you the entered content. Joomla! has JForms and ChronoForms, which are rather quite popular. The plugin directory for the content management system that you are using ought to have a search feature that you can use to find more plugins.

Hi!@shadowxI'm not really sure if 7zip can burn an ISO image to a CD or to a DVD. It can, however, extract ISO disk images, which is not what you would want to do if you want to create a bootable CD or a bootable DVD with an ISO image. Microsoft Windows 7 has the built-in ability to write ISO images to CD or DVD. If you don't have Windows 7, you would need software to write the ISO image to CD - either Nero, Roxio, Alcohol, PowerISO, or something similar.@My2biglefttoesI'm sorry for your loss. I am guessing that you do not have a CMOS password, since you mention that you tried using the Administrator account on Windows (or at least that's what I think you have mentioned in your post). If you would like to retrieve files that are present in the computer, you can boot up the computer with a Linux LiveCD (Knoppix, Ubuntu, Fedora LiveCD etc) and transfer the files either via a USB disk, or over the network. You can even send the files to yourself via email! I believe there are torrents for Windows LiveCDs too, so if you are more familiar with Microsoft Windows and feel adventurous, you can go that route.Get a USB hard drive bay will enable you to unscrew a couple of screws on the laptop case, slide out the laptop's hard disk drive, insert it into the USB hard drive bay, and plug it into any other computer as a standard USB external hard disk drive. You can also get a kit to fit the drive into your desktop. Tthe kit merely lets you fit the smaller disk drive into the larger bay of your desktop.If you do not need any of the files that are present on the computer, you can go with trying to restore the operating system and factory-installed program files using the recovery partition on the hard disk drive - most computers these days have one. If you do not have a recovery partition, or any of the operating system CDs that came with the computer, you can purchase a copy of Microsoft Windows 7 from a store and install it on the computer by booting up from the CD. You might have to download the software drivers from the Internet and install them after getting Windows up and running.@BuffaloHelpDid HP charge you $50 for a set of restore disks? I'm guessing they charge 50 in whatever the local currency is so if you happen to be in a part of the world where the currency doesn't have a high value, you just might end up getting the restore disks for cheaper. I'm not entirely sure but they charged me 50 in my local currency and they charged you 50 in US dollars, so it's worth trying to get a set of disks while holidaying some place.@truefusionI would have been curious about why you mention an "if required" when you instruct My2biglefttoes to restart the computer, but I tried a Ubuntu install that started from within Microsoft Windows and was quite impressed with how far Linux has come so far. It would help if Ubuntu could also add a Windows-based installed for a co-operative Linux (coLinux) setup... but there still is the option of using the cooperative Linux installer to download Ubuntu off the Internet through the installer.

Hi!Doesn't the car remind you of horse-driven carriages? Those were cheap, eco-friendly means of transportation. With the kind of roads built today, horse-driven carriages (or carriages driven by any of the other animals that pull carts) would actually be a lot more comfortable today.BTW, if you were to go to Bengal (in the East of India), you would still see three-wheeled cycles that had a rider sitting on the front and two (or perhaps even three) passengers on the back. A flat-bed version of the cycle exists that can transport about six passengers, which makes it seven people on a single three-wheeled human-powered vehicle!@networkerIt isn't possible to make an engine out of wood, though it is possible to make fuel out of wood ;-)

Hi!The wooden car is amazing.@Ridwan SameerThe price on the car is not for its speed but for the craftsmanship. There are some vehicles out there that are not street legal but they are still sold for exorbitant prices because somebody somewhere wants to own a unique work of engineering and art. Compare them to vintage cars, for example. Those cars neither get good mileage, nor are they easy to maintain due to the unavailability of spare parts but you still have collectors buying the cars at huge prices.@retry56Just out of curiosity, what do you mean by the text in your signature image - "Are Ubuntu"?

Do I like PHP? I love PHP!!!I know it's odd coming from a software programmer who works for an organizations that builds all of its software on the Microsoft .NET platform using C# as the programming language and ASP.NET as the web development framework, but I really have got to admit that the development of software with PHP is so much quicker than the development of software with ASP.NET and C# (or even ASP.NET and Visual Basic.NET for that matter). Unfortunately, all of the other programmers in the firm tend to think that developing anyhthing that does not have a drag-and-drop interface, can run with Windows, or is not from Microsoft is difficult and it is pretty difficult to change that ideology.I did some custom PHP development initially and then switched to developing for WordPress. I did expand into Joomla! too but so far my work with it is only limited to themes and modules.PHP is not without its faults though. The web services API provided by PHP does require a bit of work though. I started off with PHP-SOAP and then moved to NuSOAP. Also, when running PHP 5.3, I've noticed that a lot of existing software displays warnings. It is almost as though the developers of PHP have changed too much at once but we would rather have a big-bang release rather than having something broken every month due to frequent PHP releases.The re-usability of existing PHP code is a major benefit of developing with PHP. Building upon WordPress as a CMS or a blog engine, with tons of plugins, cuts down development time from months to weeks!

Hi!If you are willing to do some graphics programming, you could create a futuristic view of the country in 2020. It ought to be lots of fun - computer graphics always is!As a plan B, you could create a couple of PHP extension modules for things like maintaining a cache between requests or having a scheduler run independent of the operating system. Learning a couple of additional concepts would probably help you score a couple of extra points on the project.

Hi!@inverse_bloomWhen you mention that replacing the RAM in the Thinkpads is easy, are you referring to the Thinkpads built before Lenovo took over? On the IBM-Lenovo Thinkpad T60, replacing the memory involves taking out a couple of screws, pulling out the palm rest, and disconnecting the touch pad before finally being able to get to the memory sticks. I didn't really want to do it the first time due to the risk of damaging something but the second time, it was a breeze (call it experience!). I do, however, have a problem with tightening one of the screws on the Thinkpad T60 that left the keyboard a little wobbly after the memory upgrade though. That, and trying to get the palm rest to snap into place takes me a lot of patience. This could be one of those things that seems evil but is good for the computer service businesses :-)I do have to mention that on some laptops, the screws are probably made of some kind of really cheap material - using a screw driver grinds into the screw head making them impossible to remove. I'm glad the Thinkpads have a decent set of screws to hold the entire notebook together.

Hi!@JoshuaThe overdraft protection definitely was a mean trick that Chase, or Bank One, pulled on you. I would think the overdraft protection covers both withdrawals and cheques unless they mentioned it. I've noticed that most organizations tend to offer you some kind of a benefit if you can keep bugging them about trying to reduce the amount you have to pay. Haggle and you can actually save from a couple of dollars to several hundred dollars! In fact, my neighbour managed to talk the real estate agent into giving him the apartment for about half of the rent by just calling up and talking over the phone, though I doubt I'd be able to do that unless I promised to hand the agent a treasure map in exchange for the reduced rent.@anwiiiThat interest rate increase seems like Chase really was in need of your money. I believe getting a credit card with the same bank and the one where you keep your cash is a good idea because they can simply deduct the amount from your account and you can avoid getting into the negative.@kagerioshuA co-worker once went to ABN Amro to get a new bank account and the bank representative mentioned that the minimum balance for opening an account was $6,800. That's almost seven thousand U.S. dollars as a deposit for opening an account when all other banks required merely $1,300. He later ended up going to Barclays Bank which offered a zero-balance account for a fee of $8 per month.Just an off-topic question, but where do all the iGuest posts come from and why aren't there actual user accounts associated with those posts?

Hi!@mahesh2kYou wouldn't want to get an HD-DVD drive right now because they're pretty much out of the format wars. Get a BlueRay drive and ignore HD-DVD because you will not be seeing much of them in the future. I would have felt awful about having to toss away an HD-DVD drive because they simply stopped making them, but as HD-DVD drives can still be used with regular DVDs and CDs, they can probably be recycled in older PCs.@jlhaslipThat's a nice call on the mouse. Apple's single mouse button mouse could've been cool but with only one button, it doesn't serve the Windows world. It's surprising how the high-end gaming mouse manufacturers go up to 8 buttons, but Apple has been true to it's tradition of having exactly one button on there. If they really wanted simplicity, they could have taken away the mouse and moved to touch screen displays, but I guess it's the Apple tradition that has them still sticking with their single-button mice.@SkyI've heard quite a bit about TeamViewer. How does it compare to LogMeIn.com?@Ash-BashI agree with you on that one. Often when you buy a whole system, the manufacturer passes on the discounts from bulk purchases so you actually end up getting a lower price. Upgrading or building a system does feel exciting though, especially when you get to deal with high-end hardware.BTW, when's your monster rig arriving? Can you post pictures of it with the case opened?I really hope you have a good use (Crysis, perhaps? The SETI guys would kill to have that computational power way back in the early days) for all of that power because if it was idling away all the time, it would be a burden on the environment if you leave it switched on all the time the way I leave my PCs running twenty-four-seven (all day!). I got rid of all of the desktops that I've had in the household and all I have right now are notebook PCs due to the need to minimize energy consumption. The smaller carbon footprint is easier on the environment, both in terms of energy used for processing and the savings on air conditioning during the summer due to the minimal heat generation. I sometimes also wonder if it is worth running old hardware because the efficiency is really low.I've got an old Compaq Presario 2132 that runs on Intel's Pentium IV processor and has a minimal 512 megabytes of memory. I use it to provide network connectivity for a black-and-white laser printer (that way, I can have a notebook PC running on the wireless network and can print without having to hook up the cables) while also providing a network file storage. I occasionally connect to it from over the Internet to start a download, such as for getting OpenOffice. It runs Ubuntu Linux 9.10 so security is not as much of a hassle - the separation of user account data from the shared and system files helps for the most part. The stability enables me to run the system all-day without requiring a reboot for more than a few months at a stretch. It sits on a desk next to the printer and so I can't take it around.I have an IBM-Lenovo Thinkpad T60 that runs throughout the day and I use it for checking my email. It is hooked up to the wired LAN and sits on my table top - the wired LAN helps ensure that it remains connected even when the wireless malfunctions, which has been happening more often than not for me lately (it must be time for me to invest in a new wireless ADSL modem-router or at least get an additional wireless access point to hook up to my existing wireless ADSL modem-router). The IBM-Lenovo Thinkpas has an Intel Core processor at its heart, and has 3 gigabytes of memory. It doesn't really do much software or web development but has a basic PHP editor and Notepad++ for the occasional bit of work I have to do along with FileZilla, which I can use to quickly transfer files across. You might have guessed that I run Windows on this notebook. It is Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3, to be more precise. I have pretty much all of the major browsers on here for diagnosing browser incompatibilities, which I occasionally do from here - there's Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox 3.5, Opera 10, and Google Chrome 3.Both the Compaq Presario 2132 and the IBM-Lenovo Thinkpad T60 run all day and use minimal electricity as they have mobile processors and components built for energy efficiency. I suppose a lot of people out there have retired their old laptops and can run them as web servers, printer servers, or file servers. I did feel guilty about running notebooks as though they were netbook PCs powered by the energy-efficient Intel Atom processors but after reading about your rig, I can't really sense the guilt any more. I might get a super-efficient multi-core ARM-powered netbook as soon as they're available though. They may run only Linux at this point but I don't intend to run games on a netbook.

Hi freshpub!I could give you a hand with converting the HTML/CSS pages into templates if you wish. I've had some experience with PSD to HTML/CSS conversion and further conversion of the HTML/CSS files into templates.Send me a private message to discuss it further.

Hi InverseBloom!I've noticed that the newer versions of Linux distributions include better support for hardware devices, and if you do perform a dual boot installation on physical hardware rather than within a virtual machine, you can get started with a new operating system much quicker. It's one of the reasons why you ought to keep your old PCs upgraded with the maximum RAM that they can support and have them lying around even when you don't need them. I preach that to people and try to follow it too - I've got a Compaq Presario 2132 notebook PC (powered by an Intel Pentium-4 processor) and although I didn't max out the memory, it runs Ubuntu 9.10 with 512MB RAM. I'm a bit concerned about the environmental burden since the cooling fan turns on whenever I do anything more than simple computation on it but it's better than having a desktop PC running all day. I also have an IBM Thinkpad notebook PC (powered by an Intel Core processor) which I would be retiring pretty soon and I did max out the RAM on it. It runs Microsoft Windows XP and I believe it has the computational ability to run Microsoft Windows 7 too. Although it is branded as an IBM Thinkpad, it's a Lenovo Thinkpad - Lenovo has the right to use the IBM brand name for about five years and perhaps also gets the Thinkpad and ThinkCenter units designed by IBM. It's my secondary PC and I keep it for the times when I need to have a stable work environment rather than a software development environment. My primary work PC is an HP Compaq 6710b (powered by an Intel Core 2 processor). I install software on it if I want to try something out, I re-install the operating system several times, and do my software development on it. I did consider the possibility of running Ubuntu Linux as my primary operating system and running Windows XP over Sun VirtualBox (I'm a fan of VirtualBox too - that's primarily because it's an open-source project!) but for processor intensive operations the Windows XP machine experiences a bottle neck because VirtualBox can only allocate a single core to the virtual machine. In either case, the HP Compaq 6710b comes with pretty modest capabilities and a reasonably spacious hard drive. It may not be the best machine out there, but I take consolation from the fact that it didn't come out of my pocket and when I do get a new job, it gets replaced without having to spend a penny! :-)Anyway, so when I did want to try using Ubuntu Linux, I installed Ubuntu Linux 9.04 on the Compaq Presario 2132EA and the installation went quite smoothly right up to the end. I later installed Ubuntu Linux 9.10 and that went just fine. All the drivers came right out-of-the-box (okay, so I just installed Ubuntu Linux from a CD I burned with a downloaded ISO, but it is just an expression... the drivers worked right off the CD) and I did not have any additional settings to make. I believe the one thing that could have been a problem was the BIOS setting to set the USB and parallel port modes (yes, the Presario 2132EA has a parallel port! It must have been the last generation that got to keep them), which I set before I even started the Linux installation due to my previous experience with incompatibilities that I experienced while running Linux on the hardware.Anyway, now that you do have a VirtualBox install, I believe you would have the ability to access the virtual machine using a remote desktop (on Windows) or the terminal services client (on Linux) to access it without having to configure it in the guest operating system. It's one of the benefits of running the operating system within VirtualBox if you can get all of the virtual hardware detected and running. I believe you could do the same with a physical PC as well but then you would have to buy a IP KVM switch, which does not come cheap but can support up to 4 machines for a basic unit.

Hi!I think being a house wife is a lot of hard work, but it is not as much hard work as a career woman who has to maintain a work-life balance. In many societies, women who take up a full-time job do not get relieved of their household responsibilities. They are expected to cook breakfast, pack the kids' lunches, get the kids dressed and sent to school, set off for work, return from work and cook dinner, help the kids with their homework, and take care of the laundry and house keeping. There are women who hire a maid and leave all of the household responsibilities and babysitting to the maid, but not all women delegate all of their household responsibilities to the maid.On the other hand, there are home makers who hire a maid to take care of some of their household responsibilities so the extra pair of hands that they get from from domestic helpers definitely makes their jobs a whole lot easier.However, I do agree with some of the posts above that mention that being a home maker is wayyy under-rated and is an un-paid job in terms of monetary emoluments. It is, however, a rewarding job to take care of the kids, the husband, and the pets. If any of them would add a couple of "Thank you"s in the day, that would be the icing on top.

Hi!I have tried scour.com and did think that they would stop paying eventually when they got a certain number of users using the site. However, I did have a feeling that a lot of those users would be gone when the search engine stopped paying for the search. I have not used Scour.com in a while so I was not aware of the fact that they already had stopped paying - I read it on this thread so I guess that keeps me updated on recent happenings at Scour. I visited Scour just to take a look at what they are up to and was surprised that there were over six thousand users online!! I guess they must be the ones who switched from Google to Scour and never moved back. The idea of a social search does sound good. Google has a couple of social search features but they haven't been promoting it actively like Scour has.While on the topic of search engines, is anyone still using Cuil? It was launched as a Google-killer and never really lived up to its expectations. I do, however, like DuckDuckGo.com, which was launched recently. It has a simple interface and returns search engines results even while the search is in progress. It's fun to use and I might add it as my default search engine over the next couple of days because it seems to return rather decent search results.

Hi Sky!It's nice to know that someone is building up a community around my favorite computer game series. Apart from Grand Theft Auto, I also like Monkey Island, which is an adventure game. I like WarCraft III too but the limitation on the number of units gets annoying; the game play is more fun than the Age of Empires; I never made the shift to the World of WarCraft.BTW, have any of you folks tried playing Multi Theft Auto? It is a mod over Grand Theft Auto that enables multi-player game play. The Counter Strike-like gameplay in Multi Theft Auto is fun. You can also roam about in the city in free-play mode but that gets boring after a while when playing on the online servers (try it to figure out what I mean).

Hi!I would like to mention that JavaScript can be used for server side scripting as well as client side scripting, though most people use it only for client side scripting. Netscape's Enterprise server was quite popular for server side Javascript development, though Jaxer seems to have taken over in popularity now. The benefit of using server side Javascript is that you can use the same language for writing both the client side and the server side code. Apart from that, we have the ECMA standard upon which Javascript is based - this provides a vendor neutral implementation of Javascript, be it on the server side or on the client side. Standards usually leave some room for ambiguity so do expect differences between the solutions provided by different vendors. Chances are that we will see the Mozilla Firefox vs Microsoft Internet Explorer scenario re-enacted between two other players in the industry.

Hi!@mahesh2kThe term "closed software" is the opposite of open standards or open source. If you're running Linux, which comes in different distributions such as Ubuntu Linux, Fedora Core, Puppy Linux etc., you're running on open-source software. You can find tons of utilities and software available for open platforms, along with modified versions of the operating system itself.Psystar did a really good job of selling PCs running the Mac OS. You might want to look them up, though I'm not sure if they're still selling any of their systems due to the lawsuit that they are currently engaged in with Apple Inc.