The world's most expensive cities

London is the most expensive city in the world due to the UK capital’s high cost of renting accommodation. If rents are excluded, Oslo, Copenhagen, Tokyo and Zurich are among the most costly cities in the world. In terms of living costs, Oslo remains the most expensive of the 71 cities surveyed, now followed by Copenhagen, Tokyo, Zurich and London. A basket of goods and services assembled in line with western European consumer habits (excluding rents) costs 15.5 per cent more in Oslo than it does in Zurich – over two-thirds more than the global average. If we include rents in the comparison, the differences from city to city are even more pronounced. The most expensive places to live in this respect are London, Oslo and New York. There have been some significant shifts in the top places since the 2003 edition: Copenhagen has gone from sixth to second-most expensive city, while Hong Kong has fallen from second spot and no longer ranks among the world’s most expensive cities. Our basket is still cheapest in Mumbai, Karachi, Buenos Aires and the eastern European cities of Kiev, Bucharest and Sofia. The cost in these cities is a third or less of the price in Zurich.

Rank	Cities	Index (incl rents)
1	London	122.4
2	Oslo	109.4
3	New York	105.0
4	Tokyo	104.6
5	Copenhagen	104.1
6	Hong Kong	100.6
7	Zurich	100.0
8	Paris	99.3
9	Chicago	99.1
10	Geneva	98.2
11	Dublin	97.5
12	Stockholm	95.2
13	Basel	92.8
14	Helsinki	91.8
15	Vienna	90.8
16	Lugano	90.3
17	Milan	89.5
18	Istanbul	89.4
19	Amsterdam	86.4
20	Rome	86.2
21	Nicosia	85.7
22	Frankfurt	82.6
23	Luxembourg	81.0
24	Brussels	80.9
25	Athens	79.1
26	Sydney	77.9
27	Seoul	77.7
28	Los Angeles	76.8
29	Taipei	76.6
30	Berlin	76.2
31	Lisbon	74.5
32	Toronto	74.3
33	Madrid	73.9
34	Auckland	71.7
35	Singapore	71.2
36	Barcelona	67.7
37	Montreal	66.7
38	Moscow	66.2
39	Tel Aviv	65.4
40	Miami	65.3
41	Budapest	65.3
42	Dubai	65.3
43	Ljubljana	64.6
44	Shanghai	63.5
45	Johannesburg	62.7
46	Caracas	60.8
47	Manama	58.2
48	Warsaw	55.5
49	Lagos	55.3
50	Jakarta	55.0
51	Mexico City	54.9
52	Tallinn	52.7
53	São Paulo	51.8
54	Bratislava	49.9
55	Vilnius	48.2
56	Nairobi	47.6
57	Rio de Janeiro	46.0
58	Santiago de Chile	45.8
59	Prague	45.2
60	Bangkok	41.9
61	Bogotá	38.8
62	Riga	37.7
63	Manila	37.5
64	Kuala Lumpur	36.5
65	Sofia	36.4
66	Lima	32.7
67	Kiev	32.7
68	Bucharest	32.2
69	Karachi	29.1
70	Buenos Aires	27.8
71	Mumbai	27.8

The Marine Drive Refurbishmentation

Hello friends,
Last saturday I visit MarineDrive, and found that it was not the good time to visit it. the reason is as explained below:

Click here to enjoy a Flyby video of Marine Drive!
(For Broadband users)

The Task

REFURBISHMENT OF MARINE DRIVE with the intent to Brand & propagate the ‘place’ as a landmark

The Approach

ARC-CGL believes that Place Architecture is too important to be left only to the architects!

It believes that place architecture must go beyond function, aesthetics and beauty into creating true landmarks with cultural & economic overlays.
It is with this philosophy that ARC-CGL has approached this project of national importance that is significant to Mumbai and, in turn, to other metros of the country.
Our endeavor is to take the project ‘beyond beauty’ and have it transform Marine Drive into being a global landmark. This can be achieved through place branding by creating ‘experiences’ within the project scope.

Why the name : Rang De Basanti

Actually, reporters asked this question to Aamir in a press conference. What he told was pretty interesting...

In the crew of the film unit, there was a person called GNAR (Russian Artist). He was a giant of 8'2" in height and 130 kilos of weight. He was the person, who lifted and threw Aamir, in the title song.

The producer of the movie asked by some pundit to name his film after 11 days of shooting is completed. On 11th day of shoot, all crew had a heated discussion and argument on what should be the name of the movie. They decide to put chits and all stuff, but nobody agreed to one name. At that time Gnar was not feeling well and he was sleeping in his camp tomb (It was an outdoor shoot on the mountains). The pundit was on sets and they suggested that the crew will visit Gnar and whatever will be first word(s) every person will speak after entering his camp - will be the name of movie. If more than one choice then the word(s) mostly spoken will be selected. And that will be the last chance of titling the movie.

Scene-2: All of the crew people walking towards GNAR's tent and opens the veil and ... All of them were surprised... Gnar twirling and trying to sleep on a 4 feet long bed. Everyone was shocked and in unison they shouted "ITNA SA BED GNAR"..... silence...long silence.... It was said... and by all... They had to keep this name of the movie.

But the producer and Director were very upset over the kind of name finalized. They lost all enthusiasm and even thought of dumping the project...Then came the advice from the great GNAR... The advice which was accepted by the producer with most happiness... He Said, "Why don't you reverse the title text....

Software servicing will soon attract tax

Seeking professional help to fix a software bug is set to become an expensive jot. The government is set to bring maintenance, repair and servicing of all computer software under the service tax net. The revenue department today informed the industry chambers of its intention to levy tax on this service. A circular to this effect would be issued soon after consultation with the industry.

At present, maintenance and repair of software products, branded or otherwise, does not attract service tax. A revenue department notification of August 21, ’03, had exempted the maintenance or repair of computers, computer systems or computer peripherals from tax.

The change in position follows a Supreme Court ruling last year in the case of Tata Consultancy Services where the apex court said that sales tax would have to be paid on off-the-shelf software products. The apex court had upheld an Andhra Pradesh HC order classifying such software as “goods” under the Sales Tax Act.

More specifically, SC had said that software and the media that holds it cannot be split. Software is transferred in a floppy disk or CD, and sold like a branded product. Where it was an unbranded or customised software, the supplier needed to use a media to transfer the intellectual property and upload it on the customer’s system.

The revenue department has taken advantage of this ruling which classifies software as goods to bring repair and maintenance under the purview of the 10.2% service tax levy. The tax on software maintenance would prove to be a growing stream of service tax revenue given the rising penetration of computers in homes.

Notepad user

This is really cool for people who use notepad to write down any info on day to day basis...
In Notepad -
Create a blank text file with .LOG as the first line of the file, followed by a carriage return. Save the file with any .txt extension.
Double-click the file to open it and notice that Notepad appends the current date and time to the end of the file and places the cursor on the line after.
Type your notes and then save and close the file.

Each time you open the file, Notepad repeats the process, appending the time and date to the end of the file and placing the cursor below it.

Hope this helps some of you!!!

PHP6 gets a COMEFROM statement

One of the more controversial additions to PHP6 is the GOTO . Some have argued it flys in the face of many years good programming sense but there are valid use cases, when running performance critical operations such as parsing, where the overhead of making PHP user function calls becomes significant. Anyway GOTO seems to have opened the gates to some more radical language modifications and recent discussion a revolved around adding a COMEFROM statement to PHP, which led to an initial patch...

Details...