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...

Fedora Core 5 released

The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of Fedora Core 5.

New desktop applications, advances in security, better localization tools, improved software installation and management facilities and strong Java integration help to make Fedora Core 5 the most innovative Linux distribution ever.

For more information about Fedora Core 5, please see the community release summary.

Fedora Core is an operating system and platform, based on Linux, that is always free for anyone to use, modify and distribute, now and forever. It is developed by a large community of people who strive to provide and maintain the very best in free, open source software and standards. Fedora Core is part of the Fedora Project, sponsored by Red Hat, Inc.
Now available for x86, x86_64 and PPC systems!
Fedora Core 5 Screenshots from OSDir.com

Original fight club

The mundane existence of a product liability evaluator and insomniac, who is addicted to self-help groups, is turned upside down when he meets a sado-masochistic anarchist who is secretly plotting to overthrow civilization. As their friendship grows, they become increasingly involved in a secret society of "fight clubs" where men act out their aggressions and violently beat one another to a pulp. In the meantime, the evaluator falls in love with a woman who is also addicted to self-help groups, but is unable to act on his desire for her.

more details...

Link Partners on MSN

Searching For Link Partners on MSN

MSN has a very cool new feature described at SEOMoz.org that allows you to see whose linking to your competitors but not to you.

For example a search for:
(linkdomain:amazon.com.com linkdomain:bn.com) (-linkdomain:borders.com)
Will provide a list of all sites linking to Amazon.com and BN.com but not to Borders…
This is a great way to find potential link partners, as well as to find areas of the web where your visibility is low compared to your competitors.

Tallest statue of Lord Subramaniya unveiled KUALA LUMPUR

About 30,000 Hindu devotees and visitors came to witness the official unveiling of the country's tallest Lord Murugan statue on Jan 29, 2006 (Sunday) and the garlanding of the golden statue.Temple officials were now hoping to get the 42.7m statue, located at the Sri Subramaniar Temple at the foot of Batu Caves, into the Guinness Book of World Records as the tallest Lord Murugan statue in the world. Hundreds of balloons floated into the air and a shower of flowers fell from a hovering helicopter as Works Minister Datuk Seri S. Samy Vellu officially launched the opening ceremony about 6.15 pm on Jan 29, 2006. A crane lifting the giant chrysanthemum garland to put over the statue of Lord Murugan at the Sri Subramaniar Temple in Batu Caves. As darkness fell, a pectacular 20-minute display of fireworks lit the RM2.5mil statue made of 1,550 cubic metres of concrete, 250 tonnes of steel bars and 300 litres of gold paint brought in from Thailand. Fifteen Indian sculptors had worked on the project for three years. A cultural performance by local artistes and singers from India continued till midnight. Yesterday morning, just as many people turned up again at the temple to witness a giant garland being placed on the statue - two weeks before Thaipusam. The RM15,000 flower garland, which was 43m long and weighed about atonne, was made of chrysanthemums which will last less than a week under the hot sun. "A total of five days without sleep and 18 men was what it took to prepare this enormous garland," said Sri Kertanas Floral manager, Mahendran Shanti. "One hundred and fifty people had to carry the garland to the temple. "We needed another 20 men to help lift it to the crane so it wouldn't sway and hit visitors," said Mahendran, who was among those who had carried the hefty garland. It was a complex operation and it took about an hour to hook the garland to the crane and for the crane to place the garland on the statue. "But all the hard work was worth it as we had hoped to have the statue as well as the garland ready before haipusam," said Mahendran's wife, Shanti. V.Malarvanan, who had sponsored the garland, said the flowers were brought in from Cameron Highlands. "Although I wasn't involved in the making of the garland, I was there the whole five days, to give them a little support so they wouldn't get side-tracked," he joked. "I also hope that this giant garland will make it into the Malaysia Book of Records, following the successful entry of the statue into the archives," he said.

New Top Level Domains Launched by ICANN

ICANN recently released the details of 9 new TLD proposals. The proposals come from all corners of the globe, and all areas of commerce. Derek outlines each in detail, and preempts the potential for an Internet land-grab when the approved names become official...

For more details click: New Top Level Domains Launched by ICANN

WORST VIRUS EVER --- CNN ANNOUNCED

WORST VIRUS EVER --- CNN ANNOUNCED
PLEASE SEND THIS TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT LIST!!

A new virus has just been discovered that has been classified by Microsoft as the most destructive ever. This virus was discovered yesterday afternoon by McAfee . This virus simply destroys Sector Zero from the hard disk, where vital information for its functioning are stored.
This virus acts in the following manner:
It sends itself automatically to all contacts on your list with the title:
"A Card for You".

As soon as the supposed virtual card is opened the computer freezes so that the user has to reboot. When the ctrl+alt+del keys or the reset button are pressed, the virus destroys Sector Zero, thus permanently destroying the hard disk. Yesterday in just a few hours this virus caused panic in New York, according to news broadcast by CNN.

This alert was received by an employee of Microsoft itself.
So don't open any mails with subject: "A Virtual Card for You." As soon as you get the mail, delete it!! Even if you know the sender !!!

Google Site Hosting Swamped, New Signups Put On Hold

Google Site Hosting Swamped, New Signups Put On Hold
Although already limited to current Gmail subscribers, demand forces the company to take a breather and start a waitinglist.
By Antone Gonsalves Courtesy of TechWeb News
Google Inc. on Thursday temporarily suspended signing up new accounts for its Web site hosting service due to heavy demand.
The Mountain View, Calif., search engine, which launched Google Page Creator this week, created a waiting list of people's email addresses.
"Due to heavy demand, we are unable to offer new accounts for today," Google said on the Page Creator site.
The new service includes online tools that can arrange text, images or other types of Web content within pre-built templates in a variety of styles. A person builds the pages within his Web browser in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get environment.
To use the service, a person must have a Google account and a Gmail address. The latter is Google's Webmail service. Pages are uploaded by a single click, and the URL includes a person's Gmail user name, i.e. http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com.
The service has a 100MB limit for pages and uploaded files. The tools are recommended for people who want to build simple, static Web sites, not e-commerce or interactive sites. For people who plan to update their pages regularly, then the company recommends the use of its online blogging service, Blogger.

BEWARE OF Mirrors

Dear All,

Have you seen recent advertisement of M/S SAINT GOBAIN GLASSES
Shown in TELEVISION'S - Then you must have known about 2 Way mirror)

How to determine if a mirror is 2 way or not (Not a Joke!)?
Not to scare you, but to make sure that you aware. Many of the Hotels
And Textile showrooms cheat the customers this way & watch privately.

HOW TO DETECT A 2-WAY MIRROR?
When we visit toilets, bathrooms, hotel rooms, changing rooms, etc.,
How many of you know for sure that the seemingly ordinary mirror
hanging on the wall is a real mirror, or actually a 2-way mirror i.e., they
can
see you, but you can't see them. There have been many cases of people
installing 2-way mirrors in female changing rooms or bathroom or
bedrooms.
It is very difficult to positively identify the surface by just
looking at it. So, how do we determine with any amount of certainty what
type of
mirror we are looking at?

CONDUCT THIS SIMPLE TEST:
Place the tip of your fingernail against the reflective surface and if
there is a GAP between your fingernail and the image of the nail,
then it is a GENUINE mirror.

However, if your fingernail DIRECTLY TOUCHES the image of your nail,
then BEWARE, IT IS A 2-WAY MIRROR! (There is someone seeing you from the
other side). So remember, every time you see a mirror, do the
"fingernail test." It doesn't cost you anything. It is simple to do.

This is a really good thing to do. The reason there is a gap on a real
mirror, is because the silver is on the back of the mirror UNDER the
glass.

Whereas with a two-way mirror, the silver is on the surface. Keep it
in mind! Make sure and check every time you enter in hotel rooms. May be
someone is making a film on you.
Ladies: Share this with your friends.
Men: Share this with your sisters, wives, daughters, friends,
colleagues, etc.
Pass this message to all Ur friends in the Contacts

Take care

--

Regards

Amit Shah

website: www.greetingsncards.net
blog: http://speakin.blogspot.com
'Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live' - Amit

5 Steps To Increase Your Google Page Rank.

Google Page rank is based on back links. Back links are Links pointing to your website from another website. The more back links you have the higher your PR will be.

1. Join forums, forums are a great way to achieve links to your website. In most forums you are allowed to have a signature and in your signature you can put a link to your website. But another important note to look on is making sure the forum is somewhat related to your website. You will still get credit if it's not, but if it's related to your website than you will be accomplishing two tasks at once.

You will be advertising for your website (bringing in targeted traffic) You will also be building your websites presence.

Your websites presence is very important to your survival. The more people see, or hear about your website the more credibility you will have and this increases your chances of having these visitors come back and possibly become leads.

2. Submit to search engine directories. Search engine directories are a good way to get a free link to your website. They also increase your chances at being listed higher on popular search engines like Google, and overture.

Most search engine directories allow you to submit to their website for free. This will allow you to increase your web presence by being listed on another search engine, and it will also be a free link.

Remember the more links you have the higher your PR will be

3. Using ezine ads (or newsletters). Creating an ezine will probably be the most beneficial step you can take to increasing your web presence. When you create an ezine you will be able to keep visitors coming back to your website for more by using signatures and giving special deals.

Ezine's will also allow you to increase your back links. By creating an ezine you can submit your information about your ezine to an ezine directory. This directory will than link to your website(thus giving you a free link).

4. Creating and publishing articles. Articles are an easy source of generating new traffic. You can include your signature in your article. This will bring in more traffic from article submission directories.

Your signature usually consists of 4 to 8 lines. Usually the first line would be the title of the website that you are trying to advertise. The last line would be the link to the website and the lines in between these would be a sales pitch to draw your viewers into your website.

5. Links from related websites. Gaining links from related websites can be one of the most frustrating tasks you can attempt.

They are very easy to find, but can be somewhat difficult to obtain links from.

To find related websites, all you have to do is go to a search engine... say Google... and type in your subject. Maybe your website is based on ford mustangs.

You go to Google and type in ford mustangs, than you look around for pages that are somewhat related to your website. After you have done this (which should be very easy) you have to contact them in some way to get your link posted on their website. This can be the most difficult task because a lot of webmasters ignore e-mail's from people requesting links because they don't see the importance of it at the time. Some other reasons could be that they are rarely online, or they delete spam mail and sometimes delete their important emails in the process.

Important note: When looking for link partners don't just link with websites that have a page rank of 4 or higher. Link with anyone and everyone you get a chance to. If you link to someone that has a page rank of zero, this will not hurt your page rank. It will only increase it because you are getting a link back to your website. Google doesn't look at your back links page ranks to determine what yours is going to be. It simply looks at how many back links you have.

So if Google one day decided to link to a website that was just created and this website has a page rank of 0 and has a domain that goes something like this: mywebsite.geocities.com it's page rank wouldn't increase even though Google's page rank is 10, it's rank would still be zero because it would only have that one back link.

website: www.greetingsncards.net
'Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live' - Amit

Timing Google's Crawl

Timing Google's Crawl Adapted From:

Building Your Business with Google For Dummies Google crawls the Web at varying depths and on more than one schedule. The so-called deep crawl occurs roughly once a month. This extensive reconnaissance of Web content requires more than a week to complete and an undisclosed length of time after completion to build the results into the index. For this reason, it can take up to six weeks for a new page to appear in Google. Brand new sites at new domain addresses that have never been crawled before might not even be indexed at first.

If Google relied entirely on the deep crawl, its index would quickly become outdated in the rapidly shifting Web. To stay current, Google launches various supplemental fresh crawls that skim the Web more shallowly and frequently than the deep crawl. These supplementary spiders (automated software programs that travel from link to link one the Web, collecting content from online pages) do not update the entire index, but they freshen it by updating the content of some sites. Google does not divulge its fresh-crawling schedules or targets, but Webmasters can get an indication of the crawl's frequency through sharp observance.

Google has no obligation to touch any particular URL with a fresh crawl. Sites can increase their chance of being crawled often, however, by changing their content and adding pages frequently. Remember the shallowness aspect of the fresh crawl; Google might dip into the home page of your site (the front page, or index page) but not dive into a deep exploration of the site's inner pages. (You may, for example, notice that a new index page of your site appears in Google within a day of your updates, while a new inner page added at the same time may be missing.) But Google's spider can compare previous crawl results with the current crawl, and if it learns from the top navigation page that new content is added regularly, it might start crawling the entire site during its frequent visits.

The deep crawl is more automatic and mindlessly thorough than the fresh crawl. Chances are good that in a deep crawl cycle, any URL already in the main index will be reassessed down to its last page. However, Google does not necessarily include every page of a site. As usual, the reasons and formulas involved in excluding certain pages are not divulged. The main fact to remember is that Google applies PageRank considerations to every single page, not just to domains and top pages. If a specific page is important to you and is not appearing in Google search results, your task is to apply every networking and optimization tactic you can imagine to that page. You may also manually submit that specific page to Google.

The terms deep crawl and fresh crawl are widely used in the online marketing community to distinguish between the thorough spidering of the Web that Google launches approximately monthly and various intermediate crawls run at Google's discretion. Google itself acknowledges both levels of spider activity, but is secretive about exact schedules, crawl depths, and formulas by which the company chooses crawl targets. To a large extent, targets are determined by automatic processes built into the spider's programming, but humans at Google also direct the spider to specific destinations for various reasons.

Technically, the Google index remains static between crawls. Google matches keywords against the index, not against live Web content, so any pages put online (or modified) between visits from Google's spider remain excluded from (or out of date in) the search results until they are crawled again. But two factors work against the index remaining unchanged for long. First, the frequency of fresh crawls keeps the index evolving in a state that Google-watchers call everflux. Second, some time is required to put crawl results into the index on Google's thousands of servers. The irregular heaving and churning of the index that results from these two factors is called the Google dance.

php vs .net

What is your VOTE ?????

Please reply by posting comments

Making the Choice

Without assuming you've already decided to go with PHP, I'll conclude that its strengths far outweigh its weaknesses. (See the summary in Table 1.) It boils down to price, speed and efficiency, security, cross-platform applicability, and open-source opportunity. Its only weakness is its lack of a pure and perfect OOP implementation; however, this is a minor drawback. Though language constructs do help, ultimately, good coding is a matter of practice, execution, good habits, and discipline.

Table 1

	PHP 4	PHP 5	ASP.NET
Software price	free	free	free
Platform price	free	free	$$
Speed	strong	strong	weak
Efficiency	strong	strong	weak
Security	strong	strong	strong
Platform	strong	strong	weak (IIS only)
Platform	any	any	win32 (IIS only)
Source available	yes	yes	no
Exceptions	no	yes	yes
OOP	weak	strong	strong