k_nitin_r
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Posts posted by k_nitin_r
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While on the subject of house payments and rent, I was wondering if anyone on the forum lived in an RV or trailer. Apparently, they say that living in a trailer part is a great way to save on cash. I think you would need some really good weather to get by without air conditioning because whatever one would save on rent would be spent by having to generate one's own electricity by getting a diesel generator and burning lots and lots of diesel. In one report, it is said that leaving a car engine running for ten to fifteen minutes is just about as much as what you would need to drive for a distance of two kilometers (of course, they assume you would be driving something like a Suzuki Swift with a diesel engine of under two litres generating about eighty horse power). Given that a fuel tank capacity is around twenty five for smaller cars and it consumes a tenth of a litre of fuel in ten to fifteen minutes, one would be using up less than a liter of fuel in an hour so eight litres of fuel should get one through the night and that would be followed by a trip to the office or to the mall. Having to fill up half the fuel tank on every single day and having to pay for more frequent oil changes because of the longer running of the vehicle's engine is bound to cost more than the rent for a small apartment. In a way, you could say that being home-less costs you more than if you had a home. There is the possibility of living in a space where you get electricity off the city's electric grid and that would definitely make it a whole lot cheaper because you can hook up to the power supply whenever you are parked and can pay regular subsidized electricity rates for electricity generated from coal powered power stations instead of burning diesel in a portable diesel generator.
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Whenever I visit the United States, I find either a Lincoln town car or a Toyota Prius as a taxi. The Prius taxis are usually newer and they probably make up for the price difference in gas mileage in a few years, especially if they are driven around the clock with multiple drivers to cover different shifts.Speaking of Luxury cars, Chinese manufacturers have some really impressive rip-offs of many luxury vehicles, with replicas of popular Rolls Royce, Mercedes, and BMW models available for a fraction of the price. Knowing Chinese phone manufacturers, I'm sure the vehicle manufacturers would have tossed in some electronic goodies that the original vehicles lack, making them improvements over the original vehicle models.BTW, if you do visit Australia, you are likely to find a lot of the Pontiac cars you are familiar with being sold with the Holden badge. Holden is owned by General Motors and sells re-badged Chevrolet, Nissan, Toyota, Vauxhall, and Suzuki vehicles. Holden has manufacturing facilities in Australia, so it is cheaper for vehicle manufacturers to license their designs to Holden rather than attempt to introduce their models independently. -
Every person dreams of meeting that one person that he or she can spend the rest of their lives with. Your husband's friend actually lived that dream. He found the perfect companion who was by his side for half a century! Many marriages do not last as long, with most unsuccessful marriages ending within the first five years. Your husband's friend would be in tears but he will feel much better knowing that he had met somebody special and he would be thankful for having had the good fortune of being able to make her a part of his life.It is hard for one to imagine that somebody who makes it out of a coma can begin to show signs of recovery and seem perfectly fine before passing away. Hospitals have a lot of such tragedies and it must be a reality for new interns who begin to work in the healthcare industry to accept when they meet someone on one day and see them gone the next day. -
Navin,HCL offers great value for laptops in India, but the two that I have been able to try were defective - whenever they were shut down, the clocks would stop too. I'm sure they would have fixed the problem by now but the exact same problem in two different laptops is a bit more than just coincidence.Kraljica,I've seen some excellent value in a Toshiba. I'm not sure if their customer service is good because I've hardly had problem with them and I did get a replacement battery for a laptop when the battery died outside the warranty period. If there's one brand that offers laptops with a decent build quality and a price low enough to match Lenovo's, it's a Toshiba. If you do want to buy a budget laptop, Lenovo and Toshiba are the ones to look at.Stonefly,Apple and Sony are great for the higher-end models. I've not really used a Sony budget laptop so I can't tell you about how good they would be but they do seem well-designed. Among ultra-high performance laptops, Alienware laptops are good too. There are cheaper brands that make specialty laptops that are comparable to Alienware but they aren't widely available outside the United States or Europe. -
A notchback is a cross between a sedan and a hatchback compact car. If you would like to imagine what it looks like, think of the Lincoln Town car that has been in use by cabbies for ages. It's got a long bonnet, a mid-section, and a trunk - a typical three-box design of a sedan. Now, if you were to cut the trunk to about a third of its size, perhaps the length of the boot of a Toyota Prius, you would have a notch back. It's like the vestigial appendix that humans have in intestines - technically, it's there but it has very little utility, if any. Suzuki has a Swift that is a hatch back. They then produced a sedan named the Suzuki Swift DZire that was criticized for having a bulbous rear end. At the same time, there was a tax subsidy in India for vehicles with a length of under four metres so the boot of the Suzuki Swift DZire was cut down to fit it into the four metre bracket for the tax benefits and it grew popular as a notchback. Surprisingly, the notchback has a lot of popularity because people actually think that it looks better than the older variant, which is still available for sale to commercial buyers.BTW, speaking of re-badged cars from Renault and Nissan, Nissan has recently mentioned about the Nissan Terrano, which is just a re-badged Renault Duster, which in-turn is a re-badged Dacia Duster.Sheepdog, I find it odd that the exact seem chemical substance is sold in the exact same containers and one is prescription-only while the other is sold over-the-counter. I'm guessing that there may have been licensing agreements with different vendors where one vendor agreed to get the approval to sell it over-the-counter and it would have exclusive rights to do so. Either that or the vendor that is selling the drug as a prescription-only drug is trying to avoid possible lawsuits from the consumption of the drug without a medical practitioner's prescription. -
Wire tapping and listening in on conversations seems unethical. However, governments all over the world have wire taps and listen in on communication to track terrorist activity, and in this case it does sound reasonable. However, taking it further by finding and prosecuting whistle blowers, that again seems unethical. Deciding between ethical and unethical is like trying to figure out what's black and what's white on a gradient that makes it hard to do any more than draw a grey line.
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Sheepdog,These days, cars are sold in different variants. You can see the exact same car being available in different parts of the world as a sedan, a hatchback, and a notchback, with the notchback being a cross between the sedan and the hatchback to the extent that it begins to look a bit disproportionate. The Suzuki SX4 is a cross-over but it is sold as a sedan in some developing markets. The Honda Civic was common as a hatchback but they decided to sell it as an entry-level sedan.If variants being sold under the same model name weren't enough, we have re-badging as well. The Nissan Micra hatchback is also sold as the Renault Pulse. The car looks the same, but it bears a different logo and has a higher-end in-car entertainment system with bluetooth for cellular phone integration and on-steering phone and audio controls. Similarly, the Nissan Sunny is sold by Renault as the Renault Scala - the same car, with a different logo and re-worked interiors. I wonder if they also make it possible to drive a Renault Pulse or a Renault Scala into a Nissan workshop considering that they use the exact same parts and have the exact same vehicle body.BTW, Nissan is planning to re-introduce the budget Datsun brand so Nissans are sold under the Nissan brand name, with the premium cars bearing the Infiniti brand name, and their vehicles bear the Renault branding when sold by their partner, and now they're going to have the Datsun brand name for their budget models. Toyota's strategy in Japan is to sell everything under the Toyota brand name - the Lexus brand is only used when selling their premium sedan, SUV, and hatchback vehicles overseas. -
The monsoons this year have just started in India. Bing News India (from Windows 8) reports that the rain has started in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh would be seeing rain over the next two days. Salem, which Wikipedia describes as a place with scanty rainfall and dry weather, has torrential rains as reported by IBNLive.I recall that the rains in Mumbai always cause overflooding as the city's drainage system has always been ill-equipped to deal with the regular rainfall that the city experiences every year. The open-drains in some parts of the city don't make it any better because the drainage water would be more likely to make it to the streets. The underpasses in Mumbai typically have water reaching right up to the ceiling so that's perhaps one time of the year that you could use a submersible or a submarine to get through.There are some vehicles that have snorkels to deal with heavy rainfall and flooding to prevent water from entering the engine intakes and exhaust but there's still the problem of water entering the bearings and causing damage. Some times some of the belts loose traction and can get worn out as they slip over the pulleys. I imagine SUVs like the Hummer H1 are built to deal with flood waters to some extent. -
I know it as been a while since this thread has been created and there hasn't been much activity on this thread but I was thinking about company names for the original poster and could think of: (i) RxPeople - the Rx suggests pharmaceutical and the People stands for staffing and recruitment, (ii) MediPeople - similar to RxPeople but with a different prefix, (iii) HealthCare Staffing Solutions - the company name says it all, (iv) Place_Name Business Solutions - this tells clients that you belong to the region where you are established and the name is a match for a general recruitment firm, (v) Excellence Recruitment - this again says that you help recruit the best in the industry and doesnt specifically limit you to the healthcare and pharmaceuticals industry. If you have a portal for the company, I would suggest looking into the domain names that are available. Now that the top level domains can be registered by the firm too, that could help look into non-conventional domain names that do not end in a .com. Sure, there's .biz, .info, and maybe even .jobs but it helps to have more of them to choose from.
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This upgrade brought no downtime for me - I was able to access the forums just fine. Seems to me that either the folks at Invision are making the upgrades easier to perform or we have been getting better at keeping track of what sections of code need modification. From the modules that have to be re-configured, the shoutbox is the only thing that I miss -
But my dream car is the '67 Impala.
The 1967 Impala is quite a classic. I imagine that it would be hard to find one with a body solid enough to become a daily ride - rust and metal fatigue makes driving old vehicles unsafe, apart from other mechanical concerns that may have been left unattended. Replicas of classics being built ought to be safe because they have been built with modern safety standards. PGO (not Peugeot) builds cars that look like replicas of classics and the PGO Speedster reminds me of an early Porsche. Then there are cars with a retro styling, such as the Dodge Challenger that made it into production and are quite popular too.
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Driving without being able to reach the pedals is dangerous. I tried driving a Suzuki Celerio and I was barely able to reach the brake pedal because the car was too small for me to fit. My training was in a Nissan Sunny, which was also too small for me to reach the brake with and at one point a accident was avoided by the driving instructor flooring the brake pedal (a crazy driver turned into my lane and slammed his brakes). Following the incident, I got into a de-badged Nissan sports car and decided not to drive because I couldn't reach the pedals as there wasn't enough space between the seat and the steering wheel/dashboard. Some cars are built for people of a specific height range and it is unlikely that a Ferrari was designed considering the height of a 10-year-old, unless they had plans to sell one to Macaulay Culkin on his 10th birthday or had some equally successful child actor who could afford to own the car and buy a private track to drive it on.
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Hello there!I've not been able to head out to the beach much but we had rain in Dubai a few days ago and I got to head out with my camera. For folks in Dubai, rain is a rare occurrence. The folks in Seattle would probably be less excited about the mention of rain. My photography is a hobby that I don't actively pursue. When the moment presents itself, I've got a pair of cameras packed away and another camera for videos. If there were a small event, I have enough cameras to get the whole coverage!BTW, does the hospital use tablets or handheld computing devices, now that they are more ubiquitous than ever?
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I haven't been making large posts, but all the smaller ones added up, and I got my MyCENTs updated. If you haven't seen any updates, give it a few days and check back.
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There's a video (click to follow the link) of a 10-year-old Indian driving a Ferrari. Obviously, it's without a license, and he drives it around with another child. Apparently, it is in Sobha City, Trissur, in the Indian state of Kerala. This isn't in an isolated area, but rather in a residential area where there are other kids playing on the streets too. The height of being filthy rich is when you hand over the keys of your Ferrari to a 10-year-old so he can drive it around.
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There are some things that it does right and some things that it does. Learning TCP/IP does help to quite some extent and knowing how to use SSL certificates and how other protocols work would give one the foundational skills to setup and configure a firewall. Learning Linux, Unix, and Windows is so that one becomes aware of the various tools that are available with the operating system. A network administrator would be able to determine the IP address of a system and to figure out if DNS is working correctly. There are several cases of DNS poisoning that cause a user to go to a different website than intended. I don't really understand why they expect a programming language that is compatible with all operating systems - you can use just about any programming language and can expect some kind of a bridge or a port that will enable it to work on other operating systems. Also, you often find programming languages that work across multiple operating systems but are limited by the availability of libraries. Consider the C programming language as an example. You would typically find the ncurses library on a Linux or Unix setup, but Windows is not likely to have an up-to-date ncurses implementation so you would have to alter your implementation. Also, you would perhaps use ANSI emulation in Windows but can't expect it to work on Linux or Unix unless you do actually know of an ANSI emulator that is being maintained to work with the current version of the libraries available on the operating system. HTML and a server side scripting language is what you would use if you want to implement phishing attacks. Then again, you would also need to know CSS, Javascript, and Photoshop to make all the pieces fit together. Reverse engineering targets a different kind of security and is typically associated with the serial key generation and acceptance in shareware programs to make them function as fully registered software. Reverse engineering is also used to determine the kind of malware affecting a system. A virus can be examined to determine what exactly it does to the system. If this is not the kind of work that you would be doing as a security expert, you might as well skip this step. I'm barely mid-way down the list, but I've got aching wrists already so I'll just state that although the list is relevant to practitioners of system security, you have to consider the context within which you expect to work to figure out what works best for you.
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sheepdog,You ought to take a look at the newer versions of Paint (included with Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8). They are more capable than the ancient Paint in Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 - back then, Microsoft Paint could not even open JPEG files so all you could do is open and save BMP files. If you aren't going to go over 256 colors, the GIF file format was pretty cool back in the day because it was not a lossy format like JPEG and you could use the GIF file format for creating multiple frames and build animated sequences. The disadvantage was that the GIF file format was the intellectual property of CompuServe. The BMP file format was lossless and simple enough that ab could write the source code to read a BMP format file.There are lots of free utilities out there today so you will most likely never have to use Microsoft Paint. GIMP is a free utility that isn't a powerful as Photoshop but is a good alternative nevertheless. For vector art, you can choose between Adobe's Illustrator or the free Inkscape. Adobe Fireworks is also great for a combination of vector and raster graphics work. I also find Fireworks easier to work with than Illustrator.
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My research is on software adoption within organizations. I intend to look into the organizational factors that affect the decision to use information system. I suppose my research would take at least two more months before I can form a draft that I can hand in to university, though the sooner the better.Today we had yet another sand storm in Dubai. Everything outdoors was looking yellowish, like when applying the Sepia filter on a camera or with Photoshop and you see all photographs the way they had those vintage photographs taken. To me, it looked cloudy except with a different color, and although there was more than a slight breeze, there wasn't any visible sand being blown around. There was what seemed like a cloud burst because there was a sudden incidence of rain that lasted under five minutes and the moisture caused the sand to stick to wet surfaces.
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sheepdog,You should consider going vegetarian (that's vegan, plus dairy products). You'll not only lose weight, but you will also stop accumulating negative karma from eating animals as food. Besides, pretty much every fast food outlet has a veggie burger. Sweet Tomatoes has a rather large salad bar and you can get lots of veggies to eat while you're there. Also, you aren't going to encounter food that has a risk of bird flu, mad cow disease, or anything else of the sort when it comes to veggies. Plus, plant diseases do not affect animals (humans included) and vice versa so that's something. I think it has to do with the cellular differences between plants and animals. Raw foods, however, might pose a risk of causing an infection if they have not been cleaned well enough before consumption.Also, you might want to eat more than you usually do earlier in the day. Start off with a large breakfast, get something to eat every two hours as a snack, and have smaller meals toward the end of the day. Avoid eating food that is rich in fats more often than once a week. You will notice that although you are eating more than you normally would, you would have no weight gain and would feel more energetic through the day.If you want to shed weight and keep it off, the only way to do it is to engage in regular exercise at least four times a week that leaves you short of breath after about fifteen or twenty minutes.
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Hi!I've been around, logging into the forum every once in a while to update my status. I just got the approval on my research proposal after 6 long months so this week has been a pretty busy week. Also, with the sand storms, I've been having to clean up more often to keep my place tidy so that one other thing I've been occupied with. Oh, and the sand storms are nothing like they portray in Mission Impossible. Tom Cruise must have accidentally stepped onto the set of The Mummy to have the sort of sand storm that he was pictured in.
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I've been signing into Xisto recently, but not yesterday so I'm not sure if something specifically went wrong yesterday. I have not been posting much, but I do check the shoutbox every now and then and although there is not a lot going on right now, there is always a slow period before the forum gets buzzing with activity.Over the past couple of weeks, I have been looking at the Laravel framework for PHP, so there just might be something that I can post about to the PHP sub-forum with a thread about using Laravel to put together the MVC structure within an appication. It is quite similar to FuelPHP, a notch above CodeIgniter, and a step down from CakePHP and the Zend Framework.I'm not quite sure of what people really want in software development because earlier we had frameworks that provided the minimum needed to build a web application, then came web application development frameworks that tried to do as much as possible so software developers do not really have to put in much effort into writing applications. Those did seem quite promising but they were difficult to use for people who are trying to develop applications for the first time with the framework, so microframeworks became popular that once again attempt to do as little as possible. I guess the grass is always greener on the other side so there are times when we want something that is feature-rich when all we have is a barren framework that can do very little and there are other times when we have a do-it-all framework for web development and what do programmers demand? They want a barebones framework that does not do much simply because they were using the full-featured framework at the time. In either case, having a lot of different options is the good that comes out of it all.
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Canonical's Ubuntu Linux, which is based on Debian Linux, has been in the limelight for quite some time as it took the top spot from Fedora of RedHat. Right now, if you want to pick a Linux distribution, there's a Ubuntu flavor for every need. If you want a modern tablet-friendly interface, there's the mainstream Ubuntu Linux distribution. If you prefer a KDE interface, there's Kubuntu. If you want something light-weight that does not hog memory, there's Lubuntu. Finally, there's Xubuntu which fits between Lubuntu and Ubuntu/Kubuntu in terms of memory usage and provides a rather traditional XFCE user interface when compared to the Gnome 3 and Unity.Linux Mint is a distribution that is based on Ubuntu Linux and presents a traditional user interface for folks who think that the changes that Canonical has been advocating are too radical for their tastes. Then again, one should look at Windows 8 and then give another look at Ubuntu to think about who's making the more radical changes.
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Hi!Good to have you with us here on Xisto. Do tell more about TechWealth. It sounds like a knowledge-sharing initiative. BTW, I have never really heard of the title Tech Solutions Agent. What is it that you do? Whatever it is, I'm sure it's fun :-)Hope to see more of you on the forums.
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The Laravel framework for PHP has been gaining a lot of popularity lately, and it just might surpass the popularity of Yii and CakePHP by early next year. In the PHP world, there is so much happening that every three years or so, you would find a new major framework that begins to gain massive adoption. In the earlier days, there was CakePHP, then there was CodeIgniter that did gain a greater adoption than CakePHP. CodeIgniter also had a Kohana fork (assuming that it is a fork rather than a clean-room implementation; correct me if I'm wrong). Next, came FuelPHP but it did reach a point when its adoption slowed down and the founding development team moved to the Laravel project. FuelPHP is still in active development and is catching up with version 2.0. However, Laravel is getting more users away from other frameworks and that could just give it the first mover advantage in the area that FuelPHP aims at getting into. I'm still picking up concepts in Laravel so it will be a while before I can post back to the forum about stuff that Laravel introduces, so keep reading to know more.
One Really Huge Mess
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