Apart from lawyers, very few people like to discuss about law. Law is essentially a set of rules. However, it forms the foundation on which any civilized society is based today.

According to WikiAnswers, law is important because it acts as a guideline as to what is accepted in society. Without law there would be chaos and conflicts between social groups, society, construction, etc. Laws are everywhere and it is pivotal that we follow them. Law allows for easy adoption to change that occur in society.

Getting quality legal service is a costly affair and it needs lot of follow-up too. If a person lacks the basic legal knowledge, he may have to sacrifice his interests and may sustain huge loss in the course. Today’s professionals and educated should possess the basic legal knowledge as they may not know as to when they get an idea or opportunity to start their own organization.

Basic legal knowledge and expertise not only essential to entrepreneurs and business people, but also any individual. Various aspects of a business, such as setting up the business, buying or leasing a place for the business, hiring employees for the business, involve legal implications. As such, while lawyers may be sought for legal advice in respect of legal matters, it is important for an entrepreneur to know the basic legal things like what is law, what is court, the difference between contract and agreement, what is company law, what are the features of company, what is tax, how is tax computed, the legal procedure, the practice and etc.

Businessmen with a better understanding of what the law does and does not require, could relax and might be able to prevent at least some basic problems from arising in the first place. However, learning law is not an easy task! Having good reference books on law is important in mastering this arena.

ShopWiki is a site I newly found in the Internet.

This is another shopping search engine that is designed to help consumers find specific products on the Internet. However, the best thing about this site is it try to ensure shopper getting the best deal!

According to the policy in ShopWiki, they never charge retailers to include their products in the search results. For example, the Lamps page show us not only the buying guide and lamp stores that never paid for a placement on the page. Similarly the organic food page give us the list of organic food information.

The wiki buying guides help shopper to decide the best products to buy and where to buy them. For example, the Desk Lamps buying guides give us some useful information related to buying this product. If you are interested in computer hard drive, there is a Hard Drives Buying Guide for you too!

This is a site worth visiting!

Green is everywhere these days — in the news, politics, fashion, and even technology. As globalization makes the world become smaller, it becomes increasingly easy to see how the lives of people, plants and animals are closely synced up with one another.

More and more people are beginning to understand the impact of going green by adopting energy saving measures recycling or consuming only organic products to save our planet. Environmental consciousness is even beginning to extend into the business environment and having an environmentally friendly workplace is becoming more than just a trend today.

It is the time that each individual takes up the cause personally and works towards saving the environment. We have the power to control most of our choices and, therefore, the impact we create: from where we live to what we buy, eat, and use to light our home to where and how we vacation. All these activities can have global impact. Although there are small but valuable contributors we can make individually towards creating an eco-friendly environment and make this world a better place to live in.

As for example, we can eat more organic foods to decrease the amount of pesticides we consume. Choosing organic foods means helping promote organic agriculture and responsible land use. It helps protect the environment from overloading with toxic chemicals. We can also grow our own delicious, healthful organic food. Start small, even with just a single plant or two. Buying local means supporting the local economy and reducing the greenhouse gas emissions required to get food from its origin to your plate.

In the workplace, set computers to energy-saving settings and make sure to shut them down when leaving for the day. Lights and projector should also be switched off after attending a meeting at the meeting room. Installing efficient light bulbs is just one way to cut down on energy consumption and costs. It has been observed various times that a lot of unattended papers are lying next to the printers. As such, try only to print the most necessary documents / mails at work. Place recycle bins in high-traffic areas, such as copy or lunch rooms, to promote recycling of paper, plastics, bottles and cans.

Better transportation means less global warming. Try to take alternative methods of transportation (walk, ride a bike, or take public transportation) or organize an internal carpool. This will help slow global warming and help stave off our date with peak oil.

“Going green” means to pursue knowledge and practices that can lead to more environmental friendly and ecologically responsible decisions and lifestyles, which can help protect the environment and sustain its natural resources for current and future generations. If we intend to leave our future generation with the same standard of living we have enjoyed, we must preserve the foundation of that standard of living. Remember, every single thing we do every day has an impact on the planet — good or bad. It is your choice to select what action to take. Make sure we minimize our impact on the Earth’s climate & environment.

Don’t forget to take a moment today to think about how we can contribute to make our planet a little more healthy.

Digitizing a magazine article or a printed contract is often a common needs. We could either spend hours retyping and then correcting misprints or we could convert all the required materials into digital format in several minutes using a scanner and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. Although scanning pages would be an expensive and time-consuming undertaking, the benefits are huge.

OCR is a process of converting different types of documents, such as scanned paper documents, PDF files or images captured by a digital camera into text or word processing files that can be easily edited and stored.

OCR is a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and machine vision. It has been used to enter data automatically into a computer for dissemination and processing. This technology has enabled such materials to be stored using much less storage space than the hard copy materials. OCR technology has made a huge impact on the way information is stored, shared and edited. Prior to Optical Character Recognition, if someone wanted to turn a book into a word processing file, each page would have to be typed word for word.

OCR technology requires both hardware and software. A scanner creates an image or a snapshot of the document that is nothing more than a collection of black and white or color dots, known as a raster image. This image, however, cannot be edited. In order to extract and re-purpose data from scanned documents, camera images or image-only PDFs, you need an OCR software that would single out letters on the image, put them into words and then - words into sentences, thus enabling you to access and edit the content of the original document. This bitmap is then translated into computer text.

OCR has never achieved a read rate that is 100% perfect. While it has made huge advances in recent years, it still does not perform well in recognizing handwriting or fonts that look similar to handwriting. Of even greater concern is the problem of misreading a character. There will continue to
be a need for improvement to increase the accuracy of reading thorough OCR.

Earlier on in history, printers viewed text as text, and graphics as graphics. A page was created from a combination of separate entities. The page images can be created by having raw text like, the word “Hello World”, combined with Escape codes and possibly embedded graphic pictures. Different programs have different file formats.

To overcome this problem, Page Description Language (PDL) is developed. PDL is a language to describe the graphical representation of ink and toner on sheets of paper (or other output devices, like monitors, photo typesetters, etc) in a higher level than an actual output bitmap.

Instead of sending raw text to the printer, a PDL output file is created and sent to the printer. Basically PDL instructs the printing device exactly how to handle text, graphics, and pictures in reproducing the page layout created by a computer user. The ‘page’ could be of any size, color, or resolution the printing device can handle.

By having PDL, an application programmer could concentrate on making his program to output result in a standard PDL - with description of his printable page. The printing device developers could focus on making their devices with related PDL literate.

Various PDL exist. Example of PDL are Adobe Postscript (one of the most popular PDL), PCL (“Print Control Language”, from Hewlett-Packard), “ESC/P” (from Epson) and GDI (“Graphical Device Interface” from Microsoft).

PDL files can be textual or binary data streams. If a printer supported the related PDL, it means that there is a specialized processor within the printer is functions as an interpreter for that particular PDL. This PDL interpreter will processes the supplied file and creates the requested page image. The printer’s drawing engine then takes the image and draws it on the page.

The appearance of these PDL eased life, and facilitated further development for everybody.

There are quite a number of image file types available such as PNG, GIF, JPEG and etc. What does each of these file types mean, and which format should we use especially in web site?

In the case of web site design, in order for users to view an image, they need to download it. In this case, slow internet connection or limitation of mail box size is something to be considered. In the worst case, an email system may reject to receive any email that is too big in size. Graphics in their natural state are too big to be quickly downloaded over the Web, so you have to compress them. As such, file size is usually the most important criteria in choosing a format for the web, or to send images by email.

The other important criterion when choosing an image format is image quality. There is typically a trade off between file size and quality - you can compress an image to a smaller size, however, you may need to sacrifice its quality. So, having a fair balance between loading time and quality of the image is not an easy task.

GIF — Graphics Interchange Format

GIF is an indexed format. This means that it uses a fixed list of colors instead of encoding every color separately.

Graphic images are normally not continuous tone. Graphics are drawings, not photos, and they use relatively few colors, perhaps less than 16 colors in the entire image. GIF is very efficient for images with a small number of colors, like a five-color corporate logo.

GIF files can be saved with a maximum of 256 colors (This is called as 8-bit color - 256 is 2 to the 8th power). Typical photographs have many more colors than that, so saving a photograph in GIF format will usually result in very poor quality. Even worse, with 256 colors, the file will usually be larger than a full-color JPEG version of the same image! The lesson is clear: don’t use GIF for photographs, only for simple icons and logos.

The GIF format offers two very useful features: transparency and animation. With transparency, you can make an icon with a clear background. This means that if you place a transparent GIF in a blue table cell, the background color of that image will turn blue. GIF only allow single-bit transparency. This means it does not allow for partial transparency; a pixel is either fully transparent or not transparent at all.

GIF can be animated - which allows you to create images that move. This is another reason GIF became so successful. Most web browsers support animated GIF images.

GIF can also be interlaced. This is a way of saving a graphic so that it loads progressively — appear first with poor resolution, low-detail version is loaded, and then successive layers of detail are added. This allow the viewer to get a quick idea of what the picture will look like while waiting for the rest. This is beneficial in many situations, as it gives the impression of a speedier download.

JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group

The 16-bit JPEG format was designed with photographs in mind. It is capable of displaying millions of colors at once, without the need for dithering, allowing for the complex blend of hues that occur in photographic images.

Photo images have continuous tones - adjacent pixels often have very similar colors, for example, a blue sky might have many shades of blue in it. Normally this is 24 bit RGB color, or 8 bit grayscale, and a typical color photo may contain perhaps 100,000 colors, out of the possible set of 16 million colors in 24 bit RGB color. As such, for sharing full-color photographs, the best format to use is usually JPEG, not GIF.

A JPEG file is usually having an extension of “.jpg” or “.jpeg”. JPEG images are highly compressed and are encoded in full color, so it’s a very efficient format for photographs or other images with a wide range of colors.

JPEG permits a greater degree of compression than the GIF alternative, enabling quicker downloading times for larger graphics. However, the drawback to this format is that the compression is lossy. That means that every time you read a JPEG file, make a change, and write the file back to disk, the image quality degrades slightly. Do not use JPEG for images you plan to edit over and over. But as a format for exchanging photographs with other people, JPEG excels. In practical use, a compression setting of about 60% will result in the optimum balance of quality and filesize, without letting the lossy compression do too much damage.

PNG — Portable Network Graphics

PNG(pronounced Ping) is a relatively new format, originally intended as a replacement for GIF because of legal issues regarding the GIF format.

PNG can be used for full-color images, like JPEG, or for indexed images, like GIF. In full-color mode, it is not nearly as efficient as JPEG; a PNG will be much larger than a JPEG of the same image. However, PNG is the only lossless format that web browsers support - if you want to display a photograph exactly without loss on the web, PNG is your choice. This makes full-color PNG a very good format for storing original copies of your own images if you might want to edit them later.

If you have an image with large areas of exactly uniform color, but contains more than 256 colors, PNG is your choice as PNG supports 16 million colors, not just 256. Nearly all web browsers support PNG, so it is safe to use PNG images on web pages. PNG supports transparency, like GIF, and it also supports partial transparency so you can have translucent areas.

However, some browsers (such as Internet Explorer) do not support PNG transparency, so transparent PNG images on a web page may not always display properly.

PNG does not support animation. For animated images, GIF is pretty much the only choice.

Summary

Choosing the right file format to save your images is of vital importance. Each file format is suited to a specific type of image, and matching your image to the correct format should result in a small, fast-loading graphic. Web pages require JPEG or GIF or PNG image types, because that is all that browsers can show. On the web, JPEG is the best choice (smallest file) for photo images, and GIF is most common for graphic images especially if the image is black and white. High quality images and personal artwork that is not black and white should be in PNG.

Majority of people today use a search engine to find what they need. So it is good to have your website indexed in search engine like Google, Yahoo! and MSN. However, getting a web site indexed by search engine is not an easy task for a webmaster.

From my experience so far managing some web sites, following are some of the way you may find useful in getting your site indexed quickly by search engine like Google, Yahoo, MSN and so on.

The basic, but most important is to create a website with good content. The more original it is, the better!

Another important step you should not forget is to use the search engine webmaster tools - Google webmaster, Yahoo! site explorer and so on. This is a service provided by Google & Yahoo! to help index your site. Also, remember to submit your website XML sitemap to these tools.

Popular social bookmark like Stumbleupon and Digg are another good way to have your site indexed by search engine. Search engines robots visit these websites quite often and index new pages. As such, Google and Yahoo will probably know your website link through checking all back links which point to your original sites.

Adding comment on some of the popular blogs with your website link is another way to have your site index quickly in search engine.

Last but not least, do remember to submit your site to the search engine.

According to Napoleon Hill, the author of “Think & Grow Rich!”, the method by which DESIRE for riches can be transmuted into its financial equivalent, consists of six definite, practical actions:

1. Fix in your mind the exact amount of money you desire. It is not sufficient merely to say “I want plenty of money.” Be definite as to the amount. (There is a psychological reason for definiteness which will be described in a subsequent chapter).
2. Determine exactly what you intend to give in return for the money you desire. (There is no such reality as “something for nothing.)
3. Establish a definite date when you intend to possess the money you desire.
4. Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire, and begin at once, whether you are ready or not, to put this plan into action.
5. Write out a clear, concise statement of the amount of money you intend to acquire, name the time limit for its acquisition, state what you intend to give in return for the money, and describe clearly the plan through which you intend to accumulate it.
6. Read your written statement aloud, twice daily, once just before retiring at night, and once after arising in the morning. AS YOU READ— SEE AND FEEL AND BELIEVE YOURSELF ALREADY IN POSSESSION OF THE MONEY.

There is a difference between WISHING for a thing and being READY to receive it. No one is ready for a thing, until he believes he can acquire it.

In his poem “My Wage”, Jessie B. Rittenhouse has stated that:

I bargained with Life for a penny,
And Life would pay no more,
However I begged at evening
When I counted my scanty store.

For Life is a just employer,
He gives you what you ask,
But once you have set the wages,
Why, you must bear the task.

I worked for a menial’s hire,
Only to learn, dismayed,
That any wage I had asked of Life,
Life would have willingly paid.

The greatest achievement was, at first, and for a time, but a dream. To make your dream come true, you need to believe that it will be. The state of mind must be BELIEF, not mere hope or wish.

I upgraded Internet Explorer (IE) in my computer from IE 7 to IE 8 (Beta 2). Everything working fine, until I tried to install Google toolbar.

Somehow, Google toolbar is not able to be installed with IE8. I use the Bookmarks Tools of Google Toolbar so far in managing my favourite site. Having no other choice, I have to uninstalled it and reinstalled IE 7 …

Until Google Toolbar is officially supported, it is good to wait before upgrading your Internet Explorer - this is what I learned yesterday.