k_nitin_r

If it helps, I'll be on the forum every now and then posting too, so you will have a lot of new stuff coming up on the forum. After most of my domains were deactivated, I do not really have much of a problem with keeping up with the postings. I still post to the forum anyway because it is fun to do. I'd love to be able to come over and spend a couple of months helping you with work around the kennels and fix the trailer, but the US government does not really want people from other parts of the world doing what an American could get paid to do, even if it is at the expense of small business owners. However, there is a website for you to find people from parts of Europe where they do not need visas or work authorization, or the United States to come over and volunteer up to five hours of their time every day to help out. I have the URL to the website on the browser of my other computer, but I can get it for you. Basically, whoever wants to volunteer would pay to get themselves registered on the website and they would be able to see volunteering opportunities. People who are in need of volunteers can list their volunteering opportunities for free. I know, the idea seems weird - why would a website charge potential volunteers for leading them to volunteering opportunities. The volunteers would need to have their food and accomodation needs taken care of while they are volunteering, but they would be able to arrange for their own travel expenses. By the way, I thought the trailer was burned down so there was nothing to fix up after the thief decided to get back at you with arson for trying to evict him. I am imagining the scene from a car crash where a vehicle goes up in flames and there is almost nothing remaining apart from the mangled metal and ashes of seats and plastics. The trailer fire may not have been as bad, if you are trying to get it fixed. In Dubai, anything that gets rebuilt after a fire is supposed to bring good luck. It happened with a mall called the Oasis Center. Before the fire, they had almost nobody visiting the mall but after the fire, their luck turned and they are now seeing lots and lots of people and occasionally some celebrities visiting the mall. One way to judge the success of a mall is to look at how many people are in the food court - the food court caters to a basic need of people and if you can get people in there, that's easy money in the bag for everyone renting space in the food court. With all the other stores, it is a hit or a miss because when selling premium luxury products, the need to make a sale is not as much as making the brand presence known by setting up a store. It's along the lines of how the Ferrari vehicle stores barely sell any when compared to Toyota dealerships. A Ferrari salesman would literally go, "Whoa!," on seeing a typical day at a Toyota dealership with the salesman selling cars like crazy with everything from a Toyota Yaris to rental agencies as institutional sales and Toyota Camries (Camry in plural ought to be Camries) to the average folk, and Lexus vehicles to people desiring performance or luxury.

I am always sceptical whenever somebody mentions about a game studio or game engine that lets people develop their own game without knowing even a thing about programming. I tried a software product that made such a claim in the late nineties and was rather disappointed. Ever since, I have been questioning the ability of any program to be able to create games without the user being able to do any kind of programming. Being a programmer, I find some of these game-creating software products to be more complicated than actually programming a game, or to be far too limited to create anything interesting. If there were a website or software product that was solely targeting role playing games, then I would be interested to try it out. Sure, not everybody loves those games, but consider how much fun the Monkey Island series from Lucas Arts was. Day of the Tentacle was also worth the countless hours spent playing it, although initially the idea of a tentacle taking over the world seemed to take it a bit too far but later the story kind of grows on you because the game creates an immersive experience for anyone playing it because of the level of detail in the storyline and game play.

I just wanted to mention that I found the web hosting at Xisto better than the one at GoDaddy. A common issue with GoDaddy is that the database gets really slow on the shared web hosting packages. 1&1 offers pretty good web hosting packages, but the SMTP email server (the server that is used for sending out email) sometimes goes offline and the mail is not delivered. With Xisto, I have never really had any problems with the web hosting. The only issue is with a downtime of 2 days in a while year, which is reasonable for the price paid, and some follow-up during domain renewal. Even the bigger web hosts have down time so it is no biggie and you always get a response to the support tickets within 24 hours.

It is possible to make an Internet connection seem faster than it really is by caching data and by prefetching data. Data can be cached by means of using a proxy server. Polipo is a pretty decent web proxy that can be used on a single-user system, though it can be used on a network with under a dozen users as well. The Apache web server has a module that can enable it to act as a proxy server, so that is another possibility. Both Polipo and Apache can run on Windows, Linux, Unix, and BSD systems. You can also install Squid, which is a full-scale proxy server that is typically found on Linux, BSD, and Unix systems. There is a build available for Windows as well, but I think it would be harder for you to get community support for the setup. It's easy to just create a virtual machine to run Linux if you don't want to dedicate a server to running it. There are plugins available for Firefox to force your web browser to cache web pages too, though you might want to 'whitelist' the pages that the caching applies to or you would be served stale content from the Internet. Firefox and Chrome can probably also engage in predictive fetching of web pages, and Opera can probably do it too. The option to enable or disable it is usually present in the advanced settings or under-the-hood flags that are accessed through the about:config URL.

Typically, yes, you do need working fans for cooling the components of the computer, but that is not necessarily true. The AMD Geode does not require a cooling fan and can make do with passive cooling by means of a heat sink. Back in the days of the Pentium-I, Compaq would avoid having to use a processor cooling fan by utilizing an oversized heat sink so they only had a case fan for the power supply unit. If we could use something like the AMD Geoge with a laptop power supply, we would have a fan-less computer. All processors come with a rated thermal design power, which is an indication of (but not the sole determinant of) how much heat is generated by the processor. Among the current generation (4th generation) of Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 processors, the Intel Core i3 4010Y processor has a thermal design power of under 12 watts (11.5 watts, to be more precise) and would therefore still need a cooling fan, unless you are using an oversized heat sink, but it may be possible to underclock the processor further to reduce its cooling needs. Mobile device manufacturers state that processors with a thermal design power of 5 watts can be used without cooling fans. Of course, a lot of users would complain about their devices getting hot to touch, like the iPhone 5, but that usually does not damage the devices.

Shared hosting is when the server your website is hosted on is also used by other users. It is the cheapest way to get your website hosted and nothing comes even close when it comes to price. It isn't slow like the concept of sharing would make you believe because for most of the day, the server is just spinning its fans doing nothing - it is unlikely that a website would get a request every second and even if that did occur, each request only takes a fraction of a second to process. If you do want to install custom extensions on the web server or use something like Nginx instead of Apache, you can opt for a VPS instead of shared hosting. There's no real reason to do so unless the application you will be running has specific requirements. The terms typical of any web hosting service is that they cannot host any illegal or copyrighted content and for shared hosting or VPS, if a website makes excessive use of the server's resources, they reserve the right to notify you and take action to avoid affecting the experience of other users on the same server as you.

Infiniband seems like a great way to work with systems that need low latencies. One other feature is that if you think Infiniband is too slow for your needs, despite the 25 Gbps bandwidth, you can combine Infiniband interfaces to work together, just as you would use teaming for network interfaces. With 12 Infiniband ports, you can get 300 Gbps. I wonder if we are likely to see terabits of data being transferred per second with the new technologies being introduced next year. Solid state disks have pushed storage data rates higher so you can do in a mobile server such as an Eurocom Panther what was previously only possible with full-sized servers. Quicker data transfers between components and nodes will enable a network built with multiple cheaper nodes and components, thus reducing costs.

In India, the most-value-for-money are picked as taxis. That means it is usually a Mahindra Verito (formerly called the Mahindra-Renault Logan) or a Tata Indigo. The Tata vehicles are known for lasting quite a while and for costing much less than other vehicles so it is quite surprising for many pople to hear that they are the same folk who own Land Rover and Jaguar. It's like telling people that the most expensive hotels are in China, the same country where the cheapest of everything else in the world is made. The image is changing though because pretty much every major brand is manufacturing in China so it is no longer just the cheap stuff that comes out of China. When you have the Apple iPhone 5S Gold coming out of China, that has got to say something about their quality and manufacturing standards. The Chinese folk also make some of the best cotton products, though we do not get to see much of it these days - either all the farmers turned into industrial workers or they just built factories over farm lands. The focus on construction in India has led to increasing food prices with little farm help available so I would imagine that China must be facing a similar crisis. Bicycles are fun to ride but most parts of the world are not bicycle friendly. Perhaps I can get away with riding a bicycle in one of the smaller towns or the villages of India, but the traffic is just crazy and accidents are fairly common with a lot of vehicles lacking side mirrors or properly functioning brakes. The problem is also because of a lack of facilities to attend to old vehicles - when the parts aren't available, they just have the parts sent to a workshop, and run off the refurbished parts. It isn't cost effective to want to manufacture obsolete parts locally either because a lot of people get rid of their old vehicles, with little interest in running a vintage.

Has anyone seen the new 2014 Toyota Yaris sedan? With the existing Toyota Yaris design that is on sale, they have what looks like a cut-price model just as the Nissan Tiida, but for Nissan, the Tiida is their entry level model so they have been raking in the sales while Toyota has not been doing too well with their Yaris models. The new look and lower price should help Toyota bring back customers to their stores. The car doesn't look like a cut-price model any more and bears the front grille of the Avalon and Camry, and also the 2013 Corolla. The 1.5-litre engine of the Toyota Yaris makes it feel less underpowered. The Yaris still has a 4-speed automatic transmission, but that's not much to complain about considering the price at which the new Yaris is offered.

Next year, we'll probably be seeing the return of fan-less computing so if you can hold out till July next year, you'll be able to get a computer with no moving parts - a solid state disk drive instead of a conventional hard disk drive, and a processor that does not require a fan. If you are planning on getting a desktop, you can probably swap out the power unit for a fanless unit too, though the all-in-one units have laptop-like power bricks too.

What you need is a Canon Eos camera. Those cameras cost an arm and a leg, but you can get Eos cameras that can keep taking pictures while you have your finger pushing down the button with a configurable delay running from ten photographs in a second to two photographs in a second. They let you shoot the American way - at least that's how Sean Connery described it in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Keep shooting all over the place till you get what you want. Photographing black dogs requires brighter light to make sure that you are able to capture the detail in the photograph. You could apply something to make their coats shine if you do not have enough light, or you could set your camera to use longer exposures or higher ISO settings. Higher ISO settings almost always cause grains in the photographs, which is why I find it surprising to see cameras providing very high ISO settings. With longer exposures, you would need the dogs to stay still to avoid blurry shots. It's a three-way triangle with light on one end, ISO settings on the second, and exposure length on the third, so you have to balance the three to get the perfect shot. What you are experiencing with photographs of the white dogs is white balance. White colors can either be balanced toward yellow or toward blue. Most people prefer the yellowish colors because they create softer tones. There's even a sepia camera filter for creating yellow shots. The camera would have a setting to change the white balance to reduce the yellowish color and make it seem like a more natural white.

Whenever I had to get a set of tyres, I would drive to a street with automotive accessory stores right from one of the street to the other and there are three consecutive tyre stores owned by the same individual but sellin different brands of tyres - one sold Bridgestone, the other had Michellin, and yet another had Apollo. They actually needed the space because they provided wheel balancing services and their staff is quite sluggish. They would have been able to make do with lesser space if they managed to train and motivate their staff to get the job done sooner. When buying tyres, I always manage to get Bridgestone to drive on rough roads. Apparently, Michellin makes their tyres of a compound that provides better grip but their tyres have thinner sidewalls when compared to Bridgestone so if you were to drive on roads that seem like they are built for SUVs instead of sedans, you ought to get a set of Bridgestone tyres. Common tyres sizes are for 13, 14, and 15 inch rims. Many cars are sold in different parts of the world with one size larger rim sizes as the top-end variant so it is possible to fit a rim and tyre that is a size larger than that used on the base variant, depending on whether the vehicle was bought. The recommended approach is to replace tyres in pairs so you can get both front tyres with the same level of wear and use the old front tyres for the rear. Some people question the convention wisdom and suggest using the newer tyres on the rear instead, but having the wheels used for steering continue to function was the intended goal. The wisdom of newer rear tyres comes from the specific scenario when cornering on ice or slippery roads but what's the likelihood of a tyre bursting at that exact moment? Most of the driving is on straight roads and having the front tyres intact would help avoid spinning off the road.

I think I know what you are talking about. If I were to visit Google.com, then go to Yahoo.com, and end up on Bing.com, I used to be able to click on a dropdown next to the back button to go directly from Bing.com to Google.com without going to Yahoo.com. They still have that feature, but it is now operated by holding the mouse button down on the back button for about a second for the dropdown list to appear. It's a context menu invoked by a long mouse down operation. They wanted to save a few pixels so they decided to change the way that it works. I'm pretty sure they got the idea from observing Apple and Android devices where you have to hold your finger down to get a context menu.

The time this thread was created was when Tata Motors (the Indian folks who own Jaguar and Land Rover) mentioned about their trials with the Tata Nano being powered by compressed air instead of by an internal combustion engine. They never really went about commercializing it, probably because carrying a tank of compressed air means that you would have a dwindling power source. Sure, the pressure gauge would read at a few hundred psi but when the tank is half-empty, the car would struggle to carry to loads that it did when it was full. Think of a family being able to get to the market only to find on half-way back that they would have to toss out their shopping bags to be able to get home. (I'm sure what they decided to put into the car is nothing like this and they'd already have thought about it when they went to trials because of the marvels of mechanical engineering, but for a layman, this is one of the thoughts that comes to mind when thinking about a vehicle powered by compressed air). Recently, Tata Motors did announce the sale of the Tata Nano that would be powered by both petrol and compressed natural gas. By the way, for a car that small, guess where the compressed natural gas tank is - that's right, it's under the passenger seat. It reminds me of the old days when cars were engineered to have the fuel tank located away from the passenger cabin rather than right between the knees of the passengers. PS: The Suzuki Eeco has the engine located under the front passenger seat. Just a fun fact for people who have a fear of being around internal combustion engines or anything to do with fire :-P

I've been looking for a solution to get half a dozen old laptops to do duty as hosts for a virtual machine because they have too little RAM (4GB max, which is the minimum requirement for the app, but it's quite slow) to run an enterprise application on their own. I looked around and the only solution for combining the RAM of host computers to run a single virtual machine is for Unix/Linux only and requires Infiniband to hook up the computers together through low-latency links. Sounds fair enough, but Infiniband is only available for server-grade systems and costs much much more than a new tower server loaded with memory would cost. Virtualization can only cut down larger systems to smaller systems and not the other way around, sadly.

If you are looking for a laptop-tablet-convertible, Toshiba and Asus have been building innovative products. Lenovo has the Ideapad Yoga and the cheaper Ideapad Flex, and they take a different approach to the laptop-tablet-conversion by simply having the keyboard flip over (the Flex doesn't do this all the way - it simply stays up as a 'tent' or has the keyboard act as a stand; it's they way of positioning it as a cheaper variant and preventing it from cannibalizing the sales of the Ideapad Yoga). These convertible units cost only a slightly more than the average laptop so why stick with just a regular laptop with a screen and keyboard? PS: Does anyone remember the Asus AIO Transformer desktop-tablet convertible? That would convert into an 18" tablet! Just perfect for folks who need to read PDFs and find those tablet screens too tiny to read documents.

Kolkata, a city in the North-East of India, just banned bicycles because the were causing traffic congestion. I don't blame them - the folks riding bicycles are careless and are quick to start up a brawl in the hopes of getting paid compensation for no damage at all. Often, the accidents are intentional with the greed of making extra cash off the motor vehicle owners. On the flip side, requiring everyone to own a motor vehicle even for a short trip is like asking people for more smog in an already polluted city. Kolkata has a lot of old taxis, many with rust flaking off the doors, so one can imagine the pollution they must be causing by having the city keep them on the streets. There's another small town a few hours from Kolkata where motor vehicles are discouraged and all the locals have bicycles or use boats instead (not that the boats use clean-burning engines, but they are used to transport many more people).

Cooking seems a whole lot of fun when you see Yan cooking. He had an old cooking show in the 90s and he would always use the tag line, "Yan Can Cook, So Can You." The all-purpose Chinese knives that he uses are a kind of a multi-purpose thing - you can use them for chopping, and you can use them sideways to smack down on the cloves of garlic. Most cooks have such skill with the knife that you always wonder how they manage to do it. I've barely cooked a dozen meals because the seasoning that I add is a hit-or-miss. In recent years, I haven't looked at a recipe book. Pretty much everything is available as a YouTube video and if there isn't, well there's an opportunity to cook something up and put up a video on YouTube.

Howdy demonboy! Long time, no see. I haven't been on the forum much since last month. I've been trying to catch up with technology and it just keeps getting ever more elusive. Things are getting a whole lot cheaper though. With the new Intel Haswell processors around, the older computers are being sold at a clearance. No, I didn't buy anything because I didn't find what I was looking for, but seeing a 6-month-old gaming-class laptop for $700 was quite tempting. Not that I plan on playing games, but they come with enough memory to run 2 virtual machines and have a hard drive RAID setup with high performance drives.

After having to give up driving a cab with a major accident, you sure are in the best of health, managing to tend to the plants, and look after the pets. Some of the youngsters who I know that are still in their twenties don't get as much physical activity as you do. I have been looking into the tech that goes into premium cars (the ones costing over $100,000), and they have a lot in terms of safety that we've been missing out on. When you start thinking about the cheaper stuff, there's the parking sensors, rear view camera, and adaptive cruise control that has been making its way into Ford vehicles. The Chevrolet Impala features blindspot monitoring, and lane departure warning, while still costing under $30,000. Padding along the doors is something that the cheaper cars don't really consider - if somebody bumps his or her head, such as during a sudden maneuver, that could cause an injury and adding padding is something that the cheaper manufacturers ought to do too. The really expensive stuff comes in the form of an additional inch of steel reinforcement of the passenger compartment, the use of a transparent compound instead of glass that can prevent any metal shards from entering the passenger area. Back in the early days, we had 2-point seat belts, which were then replaced by 3-point seat belts, but for greater safety, there's the 4-point 'safety harness' (which they don't want to call a seat belt any more) which fastens a passenger into the seat like the child seats or booster seats do for kids. Reinforcements around the fuel tank and compressed air tanks to keep water out in case the vehicle gets tossed off a bridge go further in passenger safety and are probably if the routes that the vehicles are expected to travel on demand it. When I heard that statement, I started to wonder if they actually would consider buying a different car to travel on a different route. Having one car for the city and one car for the highway is hard enough to find parking for, let alone one for each adult member of the family.

If you are like me, a regular average Joe-Schmoe with a bunch of laptops networked together, then then only way you are sharing files between the computers is with Windows Shared folders (okay, for the technically inclined, it's "SMB shared folders"). Well, some people may be using FTP instead but that and SMB are pretty much it. For folks who can afford to shell out cash for some serious hardware or get to salvage the old equipment from server rooms and network closets, iSCSI storage is one really cool way to get files across computers. iSCSI network attached storage devices act as block-level shared devices unlike SMB shared folders which are simply file-level shared resources. What this means is that you can access the disk, format it, re-partition it, and do pretty much anything that you would do with the disk if it were attached to your computer. You get to have your files in-sync across computers because although you are accessing them from different locations, they are essentially the same files (just like with SMB or FTP, but this is better integrated). Linux can share disk devices as raw storage using the iscsitarget package.

sheepdog, I seem to have been missing out on all the action in this thread. Reading sounds like you have excellent material to start working on a book, with robbers, arsonists, and trailers. The fire department is demanding $350 for looking at and certifying a burned down trailer? Oh, okay, you mean the volunteer fire fighters. That's different. The most you can do is file a lawsuit for arson, if you can find any evidence that the trailer was intentionally burned down, but then again they might just turn around and say that the trailer was never meant to be a place for people to stay. BTW, how are the water supply, sewage, and electricity for the trailer hooked up? Is there anything that you can salvage out of the burned trailer? I would come over to lend you a hand with trying to rebuild the trailer, or turn it into a shed, but hopping over international borders gets complicated - they just don't appreciate hobbyists catching a 14-hour flight to work on something, make a YouTube video out of it, and encourage other folk to do more DIY.

A lot of what we think of as a computer is present in the cars of today. There is an on-screen keypad available with the GPS navigation systems, some vehicles have a trackball-like mouse instead of a touch screen (the Lexus CT200h has one). There's a hard disk drive that stores the maps for the GPS as well as the GPS software itself. Android or a similar touch-interface-friendly operating system is typically included as well. There are after market kits that can install a Windows PC in the dash, though the resolution would be too low and the touch interface on a small screen would be difficult to use in Windows.

Hi! If you are out looking for a new computer, you should get yourself a Windows 8 computer because the interface is here to stay. It is actually pretty good though you have to remind yourself that the Start Menu is now the Home Screen (or at least that's what I like to call it). You could launch applications by clicking on them in the home screen just as you could with the start menu. The difference is that the home screen gives you a lot of information from applications that are not running - they can tell you the temperature, the stock prices, items on your To-Do list, and the news. The old start menu wasn't even close to being able to do that - the nearest thing we had was gadgets in Windows Vista and Windows 7, but Microsoft decided to discontinue support for gadgets. They always get rid of all the cool stuff. You will be able to use most of your old software if it ran on Windows Vista or Windows 7 (make sure it's regular Windows 8 and not "Windows 8 RT"; the RT edition is for smartphone-like devices). I still use the Windows Vista display driver on Windows 8 because my laptop manufacturer decided to not support Windows 7 or Windows 8. You may have to use a newer version of MS Office on Windows 8 (Office 2013 works; I'm not sure if Office 2010 would work; anything older is going to be a write-off). The touch interface is great for working with the Windows 8 home screen, and for some apps that are built for Windows 8 (not too many; it's just the phone-like apps). Instead of an all-in-one, I would choose a laptop because those all-in-one screens are huge, most often with 23" or larger displays. Back in the 90s, we had televisions that were larger than 21" and computer monitors that were about 14"/15".