I wish the process was transparent enough which unfortunately is NOT. At least there should have been a press release indicating the successful jewels but rather a personal contact intimiating success in “wealthy” commonwealth scholarship was preferred. Ministry of Education website has nothing related to NTS Scholarship but an old link from 2005 Scholarship program, it was when they had not passed the responsibility over to NTS. Here’s the link:

http://www.moe.gov.pk/CommonwlSCh2.htm

So all of you guys who had appeared in the test and are awaiting result, give up the vigil and be at peace.

PS: If a successful candidate gets chance to read this, we’d love to get some tips Cheers!

Critical situations development blog at rent-a-coder published a message saying:

Most parts of Pakistan are experiencing severe electricity rationing, and electricity is unavailable more often than not.

• If you are a buyer working with a Pakistini, please contact them to initiate a dialog on whether and how the two of you wish to continue.
• If you are a Pakistani coder
  • If you started your project before today (10/24/08 8:00:00 AM EST) and are forced to cancel your project, let Rent a Coder know.  Funds will be returned to the buyer and no poor rating will be placed on your record.
  • If you start it after today, make sure to let the buyer know about the electricity situation so that their expectations are in synch with yours.

Such a warning concerning a specific community was bound to raise biasness blames and so it did. Surprisingly though, majority of comments condemned the Rent-a-coder for publishing such news and insisted that the Pakistan community on rent-a-coder was hardworking enough to meet the deadlines. Come on guys! No-one is questioning your skills or efforts you put in. They’re just letting people know about a critical issue and are very right in doing so. You should raise the voice but not against the people indicating the problems, but against the problems. If you’re concerned enough, why don’t you raise your voice to stop electricity load-shedding and put an end to stone-age era in the country?

Before you condemn rent-a-coder, put yourself in their shoes and … think again!

Image Credits: treehugger.com

More than half (58 percent) of the companies that use technology from Microsoft, are persisting with Windows XP, compared to only 4 percent of Vista, according to research at Corporate IT Forum (TIF). TIF also found that 35 percent of organizations as “not interested” in Vista.

Operating System (OS) that most people like to count on or develop is XP, making a comparison of 12 percent of companies using XP with five percent of Vista. Several companies (30 percent) said they will consider and review the next Microsoft operating system, Windows 7, Vista (14 percent). In contrast, seven percent of companies said they are still in the operating system, Windows 2000 or 19 per cent stated that they are into replacing or “sunsetting” it.

In April, the study revealed that Vista had a low adoption rate throughout 2007, but a quarter of businesses stated for a possible upgrade to Vista in 2008. The main reason deemed behind slowed moving to Vista is lack of business need and requirements.

The current version of Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), is also facing a similar adoption struggle for recognition; with one fifth of respondents said they were not yet interested in the application.

Almost two thirds of the companies surveyed (65 percent) indicated that they had IE6 in operation, compared with four percent for IE7. However, 14 said that it is running Internet Explorer 7, the same proportion in isolation. Nearly a quarter (23 percent) said they analyze and investigate IE8, is currently in beta.

These stats show that either Microsoft has failed to ascertain the needs of its customers or they are hitting the market with a combination premature and over-mature products which either don’t fit well with the customers or with the hardware .. and sometimes with both.

Stable

Browser crashes are new to none. Google always seem to have realized the value of saving an email draft from getting vanished due to browser crash by enabling auto save in its Gmail application.

Faster

Google Chrome is always ready to listen to a click. Click it and it open in a blink which proves its minimal memory consumption and fast performance.

Secure

With its built-from-scratch release, Chrome already ensured security being new-to-world technology. There are warnings at every step to make sure that users enter the secure place at their own risks.

Clean

No extras! Google Chrome is clean and has all the space available for web pages. There’s no title bar, no status bar and no toolbars, just one tabs bar that also works as title bar and all of remaining space belongs to the page you’re opening.

Simple

With simplicity transferred straight from Google’s homepage Chrome delivers Google’s trademark simplicity and usability.

Efficient

Whether it’s opening or closing the tabs or opening heavy web applications, Google Chrome is efficient and puts everything in front right when ordered.

Open Source

Being an open source application, Chrome invites and accepts contribution from global community. So your feedback and contribution is welcome.

Multi-threading

Ever heard of a browser that based on multi-threading? Chrome is the one! With its threaded approach it resolves the issue of browser crashes by keeping heavy applications allocated in a separate thread so that it doesn’t affect overall browser functionality and performance.

Multi-processing

Every window and every tab of Chrome opens as a new process. If you see in task manager, every instance of Chrome, whether a tab or window has a separate process, with different processing and memory allocated to it, and if one process stops responding, it doesn’t affect other processes unlike in legacy browsers.

Got this email regarding NTS Commonwealth Scholarship Test held on Sunday September 21, 2008 from a friend of mine who attended the test and shares his bitter experiences:

It is indeed a regret to say that the standard of NTS has fallen down to the worse. In the “Blue Book” which I took in Common Wealth Scholarship 2009, there were questions wrongly written in the book especially the choices given were blunders especially in Analytical portion.

For instance the reprinting of same choice more than once in the same question and in another question all choices negates the fundamental clause of arguments thus making whole question unanswerable. In Math portion one question states that “If there are 50 students in class, 28 are female and 27 are male…….”

This defies the credibility of NTS of such responsible job. If possible award full marks for all wrongly placed questions/choices in exam sheet.

This addresses one of(many) minor issues that NTS has always found to be incapable of combating with.

Its an honor writing to you on your 61st b’day. I’ve been quite busy but I knew how badly you needed a wish from me so I am here to clap and cheer for you, after all I had my patriotism at sake. I’ve really been excited about the day, I have been riding on one wheel to avoid your roads the friction of second wheel. That way I also managed to browse through you more quickly.

My one-wheel journey was also an attempt to learn horse riding since I’m planning to replace my bike’s engine with a horse’s stomach. I’ve taken this step in inspiration of Government’s campaign to help making the environment green and pollution free. This step will help making things more greener, not only that the roads will get greener as our green-bikes pass over them but we’ll see greenery everywhere. We already drink green water and now will wear green gold.

All these green happenings are meant exclusively for you since you’ve come to your retirement age of 61, we’ve been striving for your peaceful departure from this world and will continue our attempts at that.

May Allah be with us!

Image Courtesy: Dawn

Soo .. here I gotta make some belated wishes, Here’s the list of grown *further* ups:

Ash[3rd Aug] - Have a good one and hope you’d have recovered from the accident. Cheers girl!
Bish[11th Aug] - I remembered! but was nowhere close to networks, so apologies for delayed wish.
President Musharraf[11th Aug] - You remain my favorite leader figure no matter what goes around. I like the way you’re approaching the things, stand tall Mr. President! Hardest day will pass away.
Shoaib Akhtar[13th Aug] - Have a good one. Stream in and blow!

and finally .. Uncle Pakistan .. well not here, you deserve a separate one, an exclusive wish.

Like with every first thing, last things also last, and last longer. If the first breath has a significance, so has the last breath. Have you seen something as it was your last sight of them? It evokes as many sentiments as does the first sight, or even more. If you remember a first meeting, you’d be remembering last one as well. Last match of a tournament indulges as many spectators as does the first match.

One amazing fact about last things is that you never know if that was the last one. You’re never certain of something happening for the last time. Perhaps that is why we believe in things like “first impression is last impression”? Which definitely is true with people whom we don’t expect to meet again. But for the people whom we meet time and again, first impression theory is put in serious doubts as our thoughts and impressions change frequently. What’s important to us is, how someone behaved first time, and how they behaved last time. We draw character of people, not solely but to great extent, based on answers to these two questions.

So the last things are as significant parts of memories as are the first things. Whatever they hold, be it joy or pain, they hold loads of it. And when we know its first and last, its memorable and lasting first thing that we carry and cherish all our life.

It’s strange to hear from a service where people express their plans. Anyways, they told it would take “about an hour”, but that one hour has prolonged itself to 180 minutes by now. I’ll finally come to know today that how long one hour actually is, web hour that is. twit twit twit!