text:
WHEREAS, pursuant to the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and Act 51 of the 1986 Regular Session of the Louisiana Legislature, Executive Order No. MJF 96-25, as amended by Executive Order No. MJF 2000-15, was issued to establish:
(1) a method for allocating bonds subject to private activity bond volume limits, including the method of allocating bonds subject to the private activity bond volume limits for the calendar year of 2004 (hereafter "the 2004 Ceiling");
(2) the procedure for obtaining an allocation of bonds under the 2004 Ceiling; and
(3) a system of central record keeping for such allocations;
WHEREAS, the Louisiana Public Facilities Authority has requested an allocation from the 2004 Ceiling to finance student loans which, if the student meets certain timely payment requirements, will have interest rates below the interest rates established by the United States Department of Education and which
(1) have been made
(a) to residents of the state of Louisiana attending a post-secondary school located within or without the state of Louisiana, or
(b) to an out-of-state resident attending a post-secondary school located within the state of Louisiana;
(2) are guaranteed;
(3) are "eligible student loans" within the meaning of the Higher Education Act of 1965; and
(4) meet certain additional requirements under the financing documents, in accordance with the provisions of Section 146 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended;
WHEREAS, the governor is committed to making education available to all Louisiana citizens throughout their lifetime and is working to establish a comprehensive statewide lifelong learning program in partnership with Louisiana Public Facilities Authority (hereafter "LPFA") and other organizations; and
WHEREAS, it is expected that, as the lifelong learning program is developed, a portion of the LPFA's SuperTop student loan program will be used to offer low interest or no interest loans as part of said program, in addition to the other benefits currently offered to borrowers by the LPFA;
NOW THEREFORE, I, KATHLEEN BABINEAUX BLANCO, Governor of the state of Louisiana, by virtue of the authority vested by the Constitution and the laws of the state of Louisiana, do hereby order and direct as follows:
SECTION 1: The bond issue, as described in this Section, shall be and is hereby granted an allocation from the 2004 Ceiling in the amount shown:
Name of Issuer
Name of Issuer
Louisiana Public Revenue Bonds
SECTION 2: The allocation granted herein shall be used only for the bond issue described in Section 1 and for the general purpose set forth in the "Application for Allocation of a Portion of the State of Louisiana Private Activity Bond Ceiling" submitted in connection with the bond issue described in Section 1.
SECTION 3: The allocation granted herein shall be valid and in full force and effect through December 31, 2004, provided that such bonds are delivered to the initial purchasers thereof on or before September 24, 2004.
SECTION 4: All references in this Order to the singular shall include the plural, and all plural references shall include the singular.
SECTION 5 : The undersigned certifies, under penalty of perjury, that the allocation granted herein was not made in consideration of any bribe, gift, or gratuity, or any direct or indirect contribution to any political campaign. The undersigned also certifies that the granted allocation meets the requirements of Section 146 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended.
SECTION 6: This Order is effective upon signature and shall remain in effect until amended, modified, terminated, or rescinded by the governor, or terminated by operation of law.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have set my hand officially and caused to be affixed the Great Seal of Louisiana, at the Capitol, in the city of Baton Rouge, on this 28th day of June, 2004.
Kathleen Babineaux Blanco
Fox McKeithen
Secretary of State


text:
The Eclipse Foundation now hosts an XMPP server (xmpp.eclipse.org) which you can use to collaborate with your fellow Eclipse committers.
How do I log-in?
All you need is a committer account and access to popular XMPP clients like Adium or Pidgin.
To log-in, use your Eclipse bugzilla id and password. Note, you have to escape the '@' symbol with '\40' in most chat clients. This is because not all chat clients have implemented JEP-0106.
How do I chat with people?
The first step with chatting with someone is to add them to your address book. You can add them manually:
Or, you can add a group that people are part of to see the contacts within that respective group:
For a list of available groups at Eclipse, please see this page.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
WASHINGTON, DC – On July 25, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Rajiv Shah will join former United States Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, as well as Members of Congress and participants from civil society and the research community, to participate in a high-level panel discussing the 2013 Feed the Future Progress Report and continued U.S. engagement on global food security as highlighted by President Barack Obama during his recent visit to Africa. "Feed the Future: Growing Innovation, Harvesting Results" is hosted by the Co-Chairs of the Senate Hunger Caucus, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and USAID through Feed the Future. Co-Chairs of the bipartisan Senate Hunger Caucus include Sens. Jerry Moran (R-KS), John Boozman (R-AR), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Robert P. Casey, Jr. (D-PA) and Dick Durbin (D-IL).
Speakers will discuss the collective action required to achieve food security, address future challenges and highlight successes in advancing global food security, such as those outlined in the new Feed the Future Progress Report. They will also reflect on the leadership, continued engagement and consistent prioritization of food security as a topic of central importance to progress toward a world where hunger, poverty and undernutrition are no longer barriers to global stability, shared prosperity and economic growth.
The Feed the Future Progress Report can be found online at http://www.feedthefuture.gov/progress.
WHAT: Report Launch and Panel Discussion: "Feed the Future: Growing Innovation, Harvesting Results"
WHEN: Thursday, July 25, 2013, 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
WHERE: Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room 562, First and C Streets NE, Washington, DC 20510
This event is open to the press. Administrator Shah and Secretary Glickman will be available for interviews after the event. Interested press should contact the USAID Press Office at firstname.lastname@example.com.


text:
All News Releases By Date
EPA Recognizes 26 Mid-Atlantic Colleges for Food Donation and Waste Diversion Efforts
Release Date: 11/19/2013
Contact Information: Donna Heron 215-814-5113 / firstname.lastname@example.com
PHILADELPHIA (Nov. 19, 2013) – Twenty-six colleges and universities in the Mid-Atlantic Region have joined EPA's Food Recovery Challenge (FRC) to date, including five schools that joined the challenge in the last month: Chatham University, University of Virginia, Towson University, Dickenson College and the University of Pittsburgh.
The Food Recovery Challenge encourages colleges, universities, and other organizations to donate and divert as much of their excess food as possible. Organizations that join EPA's challenge find that they not only save money, but they also feed the needy, and help protect the environment at the same time.
"The food donations to hunger-relief organizations made by colleges and other institutions can help the one in six Americans who don't know where their next meal is coming from," said EPA Regional Administrator Shawn M. Garvin. "In addition to feeding the hungry, the food donations go a long way to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and lowering disposal costs for their campus. The Food Recovery Challenge is truly a win-win situation."
In 2011, the U.S. created more than 36 million tons of food waste, making food waste the #1 material sent to landfills. Once landfilled, food decomposes rapidly and becomes a major source of methane, a powerful and harmful greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Food waste generated by local institutions, hospitals, colleges, universities and restaurants is often actually safe, wholesome food that could feed millions of Americans, according to both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and EPA. EPA is working with institutions and hunger-relief organizations to increase food donations. Composting food waste also leads to important environmental outcomes. Composted food waste creates a valuable soil product that can be used to enhance the quality of soils.
Participating colleges and universities:
Mercyhurst University
Messiah College
Shippensburg University
Penn State Erie, The Behrend College
Eastern University
Friends ' Central School, Wynnewood (Prep School)
Cabrini College
Keystone College
Millersville University
Ursinus College
Lehigh University
Franklin and Marshall College
University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown
Westminster College
Valley Forge Christian College
Juniata College
Chatham University
University of Virginia
Towson University
Dickenson College
University of Pittsburgh
James Madison University
Howard University
American University
Marshall University
West Virginia University
For more information on EPA's Food Recovery Challenge, go to: https://www.epa.gov/foodrecoverychallenge/
For more information on EPA's Sustainable Materials Management Program, go to: https://www.epa.gov/epawaste/conserve/smm/index.htm
Search this collection of releases | or search all news releases
View selected historical press releases from 1970 to 1998 in the EPA History website.


text:
By DAVID GREEN
More than 700 doses of H1N1 flu vaccine were given Friday in Morenci when the Lenawee County Health Department made its first to a school.
Vaccines will be given to all schools in the county by Nov. 18, and then the process will begin again for second doses to children age nine and younger.
"We thought it went quite well," said coordinator Jane Clark of the health department.
About 42 percent of the student population chose to receive a vaccination, which is above the national average, Clark said.
The late afternoon clinic for adults brought a flood of people from throughout the area.
"We had a really long line," Clark said. "Five nurses were giving shots, but we finished by 7 p.m."
The final adult tally was 420 vaccines.
A few people were from Ohio—out of the Lenawee Health Department's service area—but they were given shots anyway.
"I'm not going to turn people away," Clark said.
The health department reported seven confirmed cases of H1N1 influenza as of Oct. 16, and that figure will be updated this week, said department director Michael Kight. There were 223 cases of people reporting flu-like symptoms, indicating an increased incidence of flu in the area.
Tests for N1H1 are not being undertaken now that the strain's presence in the county is known.
Schools in Hillsdale and Pittsford closed last week due to sickness and many others across the state were taking precautions as absenteeism rose.
A week ago, only around 10 percent of students were absent at Morenci's high school and middle, a figure not much different from normal.


text:
In early 2009, just months after Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi launched Dropbox, a service that promised to sync users' photos, music, and documents across computers, Apple's MobileMe team suggested the pair come by for a chat. The two MIT-schooled twenty-somethings knew they were in for some discussion about how their little startup was competing with the computing giant, but they were not prepared for what was first off the block:
How did you get in there?
The question was about Dropbox's integration into the Finder — something Houston and Ferdowsi accomplished by hacking their way in. In order to get highlighted text to accompany a file that had been updated within Dropbox, the founders had to break into the Finder's processing server and insert their own code.
But despite the breach, the Apple inquiry wasn't an aggressive interrogation. It was actually an honest inquiry. Even though Apple's Finder team was working under the same roof for the same company, MobileMe was refused access. Houston's response came with a smile: "Yeah, it's kind of hard to do."
"We had to solve a lot of pretty tough technical problems," recounts Ferdowsi. Houston is a little more emphatic: "We had to reverse engineer without source code – basically open heart surgery on the Finder to discover the assembly language routine that draws icons – and then squeeze in our little icon. You have to do similar but different things on Tiger, on Leopard, on Snow Leopard, on Lion, thirty-two bit, sixty-four bit – every presentation. It is exhausting."
From the very beginning, the founders of Dropbox knew they needed to tackle a set of massively complicated problems – problems that had flummoxed computer scientists for four decades and complicated the lives of computer users for as long as they'd had access to more than one workstation. Getting a set of files on one computer to match the files on another seems, on the surface, to be a simple enough task. But actually accomplishing it means scaling an established list of academic thought problems and rabbit hole engineering challenges.
For starters, how do you get files to look and act the same on platforms that don't want to work together? Then, how do you make sure all copies of the same file are identical if multiple people are working on it simultaneously? What if there's no internet? How do you get access to files in the cloud when you're not connected to it? And even once you've scaled those significant hurdles, how do you tuck away all that hard work and make the experience nearly invisible for the user?
In just a year and a half of late-night coding in crappy apartments and small, smelly offices, Houston and Ferdowsi had checked off the whole list. By collecting and tweaking existing solutions to a disparate range of computing problems, they created a package that could be bundled into a clean and lean release. The result is a service that has gained 50 million users since its September 2008 launch, providing a solution for people that didn't even realize there was an alternative to packing thumb drives and e-mailing files to oneself.
But Dropbox's success is now at a critical moment. Providing a way to give users access to everything they do on a computer from everywhere has become the brass ring for digital services. And Dropbox is the one to beat. After years of remaining largely below the radar of the world's biggest computing companies, Dropbox is now faced with a host of very prominent competitors. The most immediate, of course, is Apple, whose iCloud service launched in October.
iCloud hits Dropbox hard on the simplicity and ease of use fronts because Apple has been working in this space from the beginning. iCloud may be cross platform averse, but its automatic syncing slices seconds from Dropbox's drag-and-drop approach. And then there's mounting competition from a whole slew of young companies also willing to give up sleep and a social life for a piece of Dropbox's $4 billion valuation.
Dropbox can credit its success to a lot of hard work, certainly, but Houston and Ferdowsi also stepped into the game at a crucial moment. Houston started coding his software on a bus from Boston to New York in November of 2006. Just two months later Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, a device that would put a computer in the hands people never tempted by a smart phone before. For those who already worked from both a home and a work computer, the iPhone made three. Today over a third of American adults own a smartphone, according to Pew Internet – a number that will only get bigger.
Other things fell into place, too. By the fall of 2008, almost every major computer manufacturer had a netbook on the market for $400 or less. Smartphones made thumb drives an inadequate solution, and e-mail wasn't set up for the kind of heavy lifting the new computing landscape required. Benjamin Pierce, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania explains, "The need for replication technology has gotten absolutely urgent."
Dropbox found a wide audience just beginning to understand that they required something better. Dropbox snagged 70,000 signups overnight when they posted a video demo to Digg in March 2008. "Arash and I were sitting across from each other doing database queries, and there were hundreds of people signing up per minute," says Houston. "We watched it hit the front page of Digg. Then the top 10. We were thinking, holy shit, what did we do here?"
By their launch six months later, they had 100,000 users had signed up. What had happened was that the first wave started sharing Dropbox files with their coworkers, friends, and family, hooking an extended network into the service. Almost immediately, those who didn't actively search out the solution outnumbered early adopters.
Growth continued to ramp up exponentially. Fifteen months later they had 4 million registered, and 15 after that they had 25 million.
The users had declared a solution.
Drew Houston was running around Cambridge with two years of startup sweat stored on a thumb drive in his pocket. It was 3 gigabytes' worth of planning and architecture and strategy for an SAT prep service that he started while he was still a computer science student at MIT. It was late nights of reading how-to books on the roof of his fraternity and early mornings coding in his boxers with a friend in the then-Cambridge-based Y Combinator.
Once he'd almost left it at Starbucks. Another time he yanked it from his pocket to find that he'd bent the connector. If it weren't for a flash of panic as he approached the door or a careful bit of manual coaxing, all his work would have vanished with the integrity of the object itself. He was in a precarious situation – basically one spin in the washing machine away from losing his company.
It was a particularly vexing situation for Houston because it was a new one. While at MIT, his stuff was always available to him through Athena, the campus's so-called distributed computing system. All he had to do was log in to any connected workstation (his own included) and every one of his papers and proofs would be there waiting for him. No loading files onto an external thingamabob or e-mailing documents to himself, MIT's goddess of wisdom promised take care of his.
But with a cap and a diploma in 2006, his access to everything from everywhere was gone. Even though Athena was sprouted from a system developed 20 years prior at Carnegie Mellon, it was tied to an institution – and one he was no longer a part of. While Houston was at MIT he had cobbled together some code that would handle his backup needs, but the quick fix wasn't sturdy enough to handle, by this point, years of his work. His best option became physically hauling files from one location to another on a plastic and metal stick – a string tied around the finger as a reminder that there should be a better way.
Fed up with the burden, Houston did what most of us would have done. He Googled it. What he found was a grab bag of semi-solutions. "There were the backup guys. There were other services that let you upload files to a website. There were other tools to sync things across your computers. There were other tools to share files or send big files. What do people use for this? It's a hundred different things." And none met his fledgling company's needs.
At the same time Houston was getting antsy for another reason; despite taking a year off from MIT to work on his SAT prep service and then taking it on like a second full-time job after he graduated, the startup was lacking traction. Y Combinator wasn't interested in funding it. And that friend that he was coding with into the wee hours of the morning? "He got his startup further off the ground in four months than I had in a couple of years."
Houston's earliest memory of job lust was wanting to own a business. He had been coding since he was five. Perhaps, he thought, he could hack his way out of the problem.
In the spring of 2007, after three months of intense focus and fervent coding, Houston submitted his second application to Y Combinator. But there was only one problem: He didn't have a co-founder – a mandatory requirement for gaining entry to the boot camp and funding that would surely follow.
Unbeknown to Houston, a third-year at MIT named Arash Ferdowsi was also antsy to put his coding skills to work on something big. A good friend of his named Kyle Vogt had recently quit MIT, moved to California, and was having tons of success with a video streaming service called Justin.tv. Justin.tv was covered in the San Francisco Chronicle and invited onto the Today show. Meanwhile Ferdowsi was sitting in his MIT dorm room taking a distracted stab at a problem set and wondering what the hell he was doing there.
Cloud-like software trickled to market in the '90s and 2000s, but these tools failed because they were either too complicated to use, tied to a single platform, or bothFerdowsi wanted to get into the details of what happens when services break big – shooting up to tens or hundreds of millions of users. "I was fascinated by the scale that Facebook was operating at, and similarly the things that Kyle was doing at Justin.tv." So he filled schedule with classes about the database management and "making things like distributed systems work well." He'd also lined up an internship at the world's largest social network for the summer after his junior year.
Houston was also watching Vogt's impressive Silicon Valley climb. The two had met a couple of years earlier in an entrepreneur club on campus. When word got out that Houston was in need of a partner, Vogt connected the dots. Houston brought the initial idea, a mockup of the service, and the business experience, and Ferdowsi had the desire and interest in the backend to tackle a problem of scale that had eluded services past.
The match took, and the pair walked into their Y Combinator interview only having met for the first time two weeks prior.
The interview was a slam dunk, largely because Houston's application to the program had laid out a strikingly clear vision for what Dropbox would become – an all-in-one synchronization, backup and collaboration tool that "just works." In fact, it's now the stuff of tech entrepreneur lore, one of the folded and coffee-stained printouts that young founders pin to cheap bulletin boards.
Y Combinator's 2007 demo day delivered Dropbox $1.2 million in funding. Ferdowsi dropped out of MIT with only one semester left until graduation. Now with money and time, the hard work began. They had to find a solution to a problem that had resisted one for decades.
In 1982, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University named Jim Morris wrote a manifesto about connectivity and collaboration. "The primary goal," he wrote, "should be to broaden, deepen, and improve the communication among students." The way to do that was to create a computing environment where information could be shared. So together with IBM, Morris set out to create the kind of network at Carnegie Mellon he predicted would be ubiquitous in the future. By tethering $3,000 workstations together with IBM's state-of-the-art wiring, Morris created the Andrew Project, and within it the Andrew File System, or AFS. AFS was the first safe and efficient distributed computing system, available to both students and professors on campus.
It was a clear precursor to the Dropbox-like software packages today. First, it was a big step toward getting your files to be everywhere at once. Though files were stored on central servers, AFS created the illusion for the user that they were local. The first time a workstation wanted access to an AFS file, the computer would go fetch it from the server. But once retrieved, the computer would cache the file on its local disk, so the next time someone wanted to pull it up from that location, the file would be available locally.
Still, a decade later, students complained that the system was too slow. Part of the problem was that files were sent from server to client and back to the server whole. Every time a file needed updating, even if only a single word had changed, the entire document was re-sent – and sent over a maddeningly slow Ethernet connection. By 1996, Carnegie Mellon had figured that sending only relevant chunks back and forth would save time and bandwidth, but communication speeds had yet to make that change truly valuable.
There were also issues with the way the Andrew File System got along with the software. AFS rendered some Unix applications, like the mail delivery system Sendmail, unreliable. The computer's applications "were not written in the expectation that basic file system operations or close system calls could fail," wrote Nathaniel Borenstein, one of Andrew's principle designers. And when they did fail, the programs couldn't rebound.
Nonetheless, AFS made massive leaps in distributed computing. Over the course of its 30 years, it was tweaked and streamlined and revamped a hundred times over. MIT picked it up for its distributed computing network not long after AFS got up and running. MIT's version, called Athena, allowed students (like Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi) access to all their stuff from any connected computer.
Good for those institutions, but not for the rest of us. Until recently, distributed computer clusters have huddled around a central server managed by an organization. Companies and universities maintained their own server space and dedicated IT team to manage it. That works well internally, but getting files to a machine outside the network turned basic computing into a key-fob initiated, slow-motion train wreck.
Decade depending, the floppy disk, CD or thumb drive were tasked with picking up the slack. They didn't provide the most elegant fix, but they were an effective way to port data from one station to the next. But for figuring out what version of a document was last updated and by whom, you were on your own.
University-led programs like the Coda File System out of Carnegie Mellon in 1987 aimed for something not so dependent on a single organization. Because Coda was open source, it could be pushed beyond the work of a single design team. Coda was kind with bandwidth before broadband made the client-to-server connection easier, and it was also generous with offline access, providing cached copies of files when the Internet was out of reach. When disagreements between files occurred – a problem that has such deep roots it took a half-hour conversation with Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Coda's project lead, to explain – issues were mediated with a set of application-specific plug-ins, some acrobatic hand waving, and, ultimately, some damage control that looped in the user.
But in the end, Coda was never commercialized. It wasn't a light piece of software that could be sent to the masses. It required substantial work on the users' part to get up and running. Satyanarayanan admits the system is "complex both to implement and for the user to think about." And besides, his job is to lay out a high level proof of concept, not to dig into gritty startup details.
Still, the average computer user was left without an effective way of getting their work from one computer to the next. Software finally aimed at that audience finally trickled to market in the '90s and 2000s, but these tools failed because they were either too complicated to use, tied to a single platform, or both.
Unison, a manual syncing tool developed by Benjamin Pierce at the University of Pennsylvania, was one of the first cross-platform services. "Unison goes through an enormous amount of trouble to do the right thing cross platform," explains Pierce, "but it's extremely hard." The difficulty showed in the software's interactions with the operating systems. And it didn't function in the background, quietly coordinating matching files. If you wanted the software to do its job, you had to prod it to do so. Unison, though on somewhere between 100,000 and a million computers, still needed to be more user friendly to edge out the humble thumb drive.
Commercial applications even five years ago showed some serious character flaws. Halfhearted attempts by Apple and Microsoft refused to cooperate with other operating systems, so Mac users at home who sat at a PC at work were out of luck. And issues with reliability and accessibility blocked widespread adoption.
Other programs were just too clunky and slow to be worth the effort. Backup programs like XDrive were not able to cross the space from client to server gracefully. Their systems transferred data chunk by chunk every time you needed it — something akin to moving across country by driving one box across at a time. The application's protocols — the way the computer talked to the server — were caught off guard by this coast-to-coast trip. The sluggish pace tripped up operating systems not expecting the lag.
A handful of issues made the user experience, in all cases, unbearable. It was high time for someone to swoop in and do syncing right.
Houston can tell the story of his service with any number of creatively mixed metaphors – proof he's still stage testing the simplest way to tell people what Dropbox does and how it got to be so big. Ferdowsi, though, is better at recalling all the stuff that went down behind the scenes because he still exists there. Houston has become the voice of the company – something he had been rehearsing for on his Phi Delta Theta roof years earlier – while Ferdowsi bounces from meeting to meeting, firmly planted on the engineering side.
They're working to move Dropbox forward, which is tricky when Dropbox's success can be largely attributed to the fact that it's pretty feature free. It was launched in the Fall of 2008 as what we're now calling a "lean startup" – a basic service sent out to the masses to be stage tested and tweaked on the go. The enthusiasm for the release was startling. It started with a simple box that users could drop their stuff into so people can access their music, pictures, and documents online and at every connected workstation.
The plan was always to add more features. When early requests revolved around the ability to turn any folder on your computer into a Dropbox folder, the founders resisted. "That sounds like a cool idea but it's really hard to pull off in a way that's easy for people to understand," explains Ferdowsi, who established his status as the gatekeeper of Dropbox's engineering pragmatism early on. "You can imagine installing Dropbox on a home computer and then installing it at work and then all of a sudden your work documents get merged with home documents." So the founders resisted.
Y Combinator's 2007 demo day delivered Dropbox $1.2 million in funding. Ferdowsi dropped out of MIT with only one semester left until graduation. Now with money and time, the hard work began.One reason they decided to keep it simple was that people had a hard time understanding even the simplest parts of their service. Just a few months after their initial launch, the Dropbox team decided to conduct its own usability tests. They dragged a mic – usually clamped to some piece of office music equipment – into their conference room and had people they'd recruited from Craigslist try out the program. On a connected computer stationed in another room they anxiously watched what went down. "The whole team sat there as people bumbled their way through the installation process," says Houston. "They couldn't even get the damn thing on the computer. For everyone in the room, it was an extremely painful experience."
It was a tough moment for the team, but it just ended up confirming what they'd learned from their own experiences: Simplicity is key.
The founders' vision for Dropbox was that it work so quickly and seamlessly and without fanfare that the user barely notice it at all. If your computer rejects software because it's not compatible, the service is not working for you. When files go missing after an upload, the service is not working for you. When your computer slows to process a request, the software responsible is not working for you. Sync programs before had all floundered because they didn't nail one or all of the above. Dropbox learned from the mistakes of others. "What we've always wanted to do is keep finding ways to make Dropbox easier to use," says Ferdowsi.
To accomplish this, Dropbox needed to be on every computer. So when it jumped out of beta and into the mainstream, Houston and Ferdowsi added a Linux client to the existing Mac and Windows version. It may seem an obvious move to net most users, but scores of companies before then had been deterred. The reason is that cross-platform integration is a bitch. Benjamin Pierce, who attempted it for his own sync software, offers a tiny example of the conflicting system slog that starts the moment you hit save. When you save, a record of that action is logged in seconds. But there's a catch. Macs will note the save the second you ask it to, but PCs are only accurate to every other second. "So now imagine trying to write a program that is checking whether the file has the same modification time on all the machines that it lives on," explains Pierce. "You have to realize, wait a minute, this is a Windows machine, so I shouldn't be checking if it's the same modification time, I should be checking whether it's within two seconds."
What makes the process tougher is that obstacles like these are not documented in some Kindle-available book called Cross-Platform 101; issues are uncovered only when engineers smack into them. "This sounds kind of stupid and trivial, and any particular example like this is, but the point is that there are a huge number of these things," says Pierce. Dropbox was dedicated to the discovery.
But cross platform wasn't just an error-prone landmine on the backend, it also needed to be visually consistent on screen. When someone installs Dropbox, the founders wanted it to look as if the service were baked into the operating system from the beginning. Windows and Linux made this easy with an API that allows programmers to integrate in their own icons. Apple, on the other hand, made it obvious – even to their own MobileMe team – that they didn't really want anyone mucking around in their Finder.
MobileMe's failure to integrate turned out to be an issue that ultimately buried it. E-mail outages and sluggish syncing plagued the service. Its sidelined status within the Apple was such a widely regarded misstep that even Steve Jobs admitted, "it wasn't our finest hour."
Dropbox didn't let Apple's resistance to play with others deter them, and eventually they were able to hack their way in. Sure, Dropbox didn't need a highlighting system in the Finder. They didn't need everything to look the same cross platform, either. But to do both meant a cohesive package without asking the user to take any leap in understanding.
It was with that goal in mind that they approached every roadblock – even the ones covered in decades of dissertations and published papers. As every computer scientist in this space will attest, when two people are working on the same document, syncing the versions can get thorny. What happens when tweaks made in tandem force two versions of the same file to disagree? Dropbox decided to handle conflicts like this: If two people update the same file at the same time, Dropbox kicks one version below the other for the user to deal with. The founders knew that losing work would be a deal breaker for most users. They didn't want to lose any data ever, and with this solution, they hadn't.
You could almost hear the forehead slapping when Unison's Pierce describes how intuitive Dropbox's solution is: "I think that's probably a very clever decision on their part because that kind of conflict for most people is rare. And then you haven't bothered to make people learn something in order to use the tool. You can just use the tool and be happy." There's no special alert to bother the user or software-controlled choice between copies, which could erase work. The action that Dropbox requires by a human – a decision about what version to accept – makes for about as little an intrusion as they come.
Dropbox also chipped away at seconds in the same methodical they tackled the problems before it. If everything just works, there should be no aggravated finger tapping as we wait for filed to upload. They were always wary of an XDrive repeat pushing away users, so they spent hours upon hours in their first few years training the service to work faster.
One thing they did was engineer the service to tread lightly on bandwidth and on the computer's operating system – sending as few updates as possible across the client-server divide – which shaves seconds and computing cycles. They do it with a sort of CSI-type approach. The program takes a numerical fingerprint of everything in the folder. If something shifts within a file – something's moved or renamed or even a single letter changes – Dropbox compares the new fingerprint to the old one. "In the event that you have a large Photoshop file and you make one change, Dropbox picks out the part of the file that changes and just uploads that," explains Ferdowsi. "The OS will tell you that one file got deleted and another got added, but we were smarter in noticing that the file is already there."
They were also smarter about handling the distance between computer and server. Instead of that one-box-at-a-time, cross-country haul of programs past, Dropbox created a custom protocol that bundles and compresses files into groups, sending them over in batches. "The protocol was designed differently from what everyone else was doing," says Ferdowsi. Moving items efficiently shaves seconds from the server to client call – the foundation of their business.
They've also taken a load off their servers by trimming them of unnecessary excess. Throw the new Beyoncé single into your Dropbox and the service will upload the song once. But say 1,000 other users are digging the same track, instead of weighing down the back end with lots of repeats, Dropbox practices deduplication. An algorithm sniffs out copies and kicks the extras from the system so they're only storing one version of a file. This is just one glimpse into a reorganized back end, which doesn't just replicate the tree of files on your computer; it splits up and thins out the data to make it easier to retrieve.
But as the service matured, more users trusting it to sync swiftly and securely, they needed to unburden their servers and the users' operating systems. Instead letting the program work to sniff out changes, Dropbox made the changes come to them. The move slashed a ton of time and computing energy. "If you want Dropbox to be pretty responsive, we would probably be checking at least every minute. I guess that would be thousands of times per day per client," explains Ferdowsi, which adds up to a lot of unnecessary bandwidth. The change to a fully event-driven system, by Ferdowsi's back-of-the-envelope calculation, sped up the service by three orders of magnitude.
"I guess we're all sort of very obsessed with milliseconds everywhere," says Ferdowsi, matter of factly. By pulling together a lot of little things, trimming any excesses, and making sure all the solutions were glued together in a way that puts the user first, Dropbox discovered a broad audience. But now that they've captured the attention of millions, the key is to figure out how to hold onto it.
Both Houston and Ferdowsi bristle at the notion that they might have solved the data-sync problem. They're proud of their service, and they know it works well, but there's still a lot more they want to do.
To move forward, they're bringing on new engineers like crazy – expecting to jump from 70 to 200 people on staff by the end of next year. It means their current top-floor Market Street digs are crowded with giant glowing monitors, but not for long. They plan to move to a new space in San Francisco's China Basin at the start of the new year. To top it all off, they've also just gained $250 million of series B funding led by Index Ventures, an impressive amount that will no doubt help with the expansion.
But really, you get the feeling that they're ramping up quickly in preparation for a nasty fight. And with iCloud, Apple's thrown the first major punch. Sure, Apple has stumbled in the space before, but now with a few more years of development under its belt, they're in a good position to snatch the "it just works" catch phrase right from the Dropbox founders' mouths.
There are others gunning for Dropbox, too. A slew of similar start-ups hope to take a slice of their market share, and a Google release, Houston worries, could lure away a significant chunk of users.
In the meantime, Dropbox is trying to make their appeal even stronger. A new feature roll out early in the Spring to make sharing files even easier. With just a link, a gallery of photos will open up in its own webpage. People will no longer have to sign up for the service to access content sent to them by registered Dropbox users.
They also hope to move beyond folders. Eventually Dropbox will automatically split photos into albums based on camera type and event time – something like what iPhoto already does photos dumped from camera to computer. The goal is to save the time users spend organizing their Dropbox into a hierarchy of folders. Automatic uploads, something iCloud is already doing, is also on their list of to dos.
And even further in the future, they hope to expand the pool of devices that can talk to each other – basically eliminating your computer as the middle man. A point-and-shoot, they think, could ship pictures directly to your television and family for big-screen viewing – even before you board the flight back home. "Soon you'll walk into a Best Buy or Fry's and you'll see that little box everywhere," says Houston. "This is the first time I will see my photos or play my music in my living room and it's not going to be a science project."
The more devices with a little box on them, Dropbox hopes, the harder it will be for others to catch up. But it's a gamble. They're gearing up for a massive feature add when the service has so long worked for people because it's stayed simple.
The competition is right on their tail. May the best solution win.
*Photo: Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston. Courtesy DropBox *
Drawings: Hand-drawn artwork seen around Dropbox. Courtesy Dropbox


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Review (-/10)
(By Garth Franklin)
Oliver Stone set himself a real challenge to try and do a biographical drama meets swords-and-sandals epic on one of histories most famous men. The all too over-rated but still well done "Gladiator" could essentially mold the genre around a fictitious crowd-pleasing Hollywood storyline. Earlier this year, the problematic "Troy" tried rewriting one of the great myths in a style exactly like the old 50's bodice-busting epics. Alexander the Great on the other hand was a real man who achieved far more than Maximus and Achilles combined. It was one of the most 'lived' lives in history that still has more than a few lingering questions and is near impossible to summarise let alone shrink into movie-length.
Stone at least tries to do it and "Alexander" is nothing if not ambitious, but in the end he fails. The result is far from the disaster that many other critics seem to feel about the film (haven't they seen those two movies out now with "Christmas" in the title? Now THERE are disasters), but as a film it sadly doesn't work despite a few great moments and willingness to explore territory (however timidly) that's rarely seen in the increasingly safe playing mega-budget movie arena.
Unlike many films though there's no specific problems which sink everything, rather general mistakes all across the board contribute and reinforce each other to bring it down. The resulting film itself, much like "Troy", will divide audiences with many hating, a few loving, and others feeling indifferent at best. The most jarringly noticable of these is the narrative itself. The movie feels like a six-hour mini-series that's been cut down to three and reassembled with a clumsy voiceover (in this case an all too bland Anthony Hopkins) to try and make sense. It feels like we're essentially watching a rushed Cliff Notes version of Alexander's life, and yet paradoxically it's all too drawn out and glacially paced.
A biographical pic is supposed to follow a person, the main events in their life that shaped them and get us into their mind to try and understand why they did what they did and why they've left such a strong impact on the world. The film never delves deep in its attempts to psychologically profile this man, even if it throws in a variety of juicy and somewhat odd scenes that inexplicably are supposed to explain his persona.
Part of the problem is the sheer jumping about. The first hour is a domestic drama of Alexander being raised by his corrupt parents - a one-eyed libidinous drunk of a father (Val Kilmer) and a cold scheming mother (Angelina Jolie) with a penchant for snakes. The squabbles, the manuevering, etc. is like a simplified "I, Claudius" that's too talky but you eventually get used to both it and the funky variations of accents ranging from the Irish brogue of the Greeks to Jolie's Albanian impersonation. The highlights here are interesting such as Alexander's taming of his horse to a big argument with his father during a feast.
Then all of a sudden we skip ahead several years to the Battle of Gaugamela. It's the first of several jarring time jumps the movie makes that renders much of what we've seen before it utterly useless and makes us as an audience feel like we've missed something important. In fact there's a flashback to Philip's death later on in the movie that feels like a misfired attempt to shore up pacing. From here on in it revolves around the Persian and Indian battles and assorted long-winded speeches and landscape shots of Alexander pushing on with his campaign as his armies become more and more demotivated.
The battles themselves are fine, but the film is all too filled with long-winded speeches and droning on about Alexander's potential and/or flaws rather than actually showing us them in action. The dialogue is much like "Troy" with lots of God references and stilted sentences, but it's the speeches such as the pre-battle motivational bits that seem to drone on forever. So much of this movie talks about things when it should be showing them. Worse still these conversations and moments don't build on anything except themselves, the screwy editing and Hopkins narration ruining much chance of all this forming a cohesive storyline that audiences will get into. And at three hours, this nonlinear technique is draining.
Performances seem to try hard but have little to work with. Farrell goes all out in various scenes with lots of crying and mad flashes of fury, combined with quieter scenes of introspection which he doesn't pull off anywhere near as well as his superb job in "A Home at the End of the World" earlier this year. A heavily eyelinered Leto does the forlorn look well even if his chiseled beauty is hidden behind bad hair and a beard. Dawson gets nothing to do, same with the aforementioned Hopkins who is stuck with the film's dullest role as the dictating Ptolemy (a younger very 70's porn star meets Heath Ledger-looking version appears throughout the film). Alexander's assorted advisors blend into each other so much it's hard to pick any out.
Arguably the strongest work comes from Kilmer's short performance as Phillip - combining dangerous anger and contempt for his wife with a few attempts to impart the wisdom of being a king to his son yields a volatile and interesting role. Jolie hams it up admittedly with the snakes and bile, but lets slip her mothering qualities in her body language quite effectively making her a smidgeon more than a 'Livia' rip-off.
The action, when it happens, is both good and bad. Stone's battle scenes are powerful, blood-filled and in your face rough. Yet they're admittedly confusing and fail to really show off the scale and more importantly the brilliant military strategy tactics that Alexander became famous for - especially his piercing of the hole in the Persian lines at Gaugamela. Each one though has some inventive stuff whether it be the use of the elephants in the second battle or the eagle eye view of the armies in the sand, but that's offset by some stupidity as well like the text labelling of different parts of the army to the red chroma key haze of the second battle's last half.
Then of course comes the gay element. Alexander to this day remains history's most famous lover of men and women, a man who had wives but whose lifelong love and devotion was for his boyhood male friend Hephaestion. Of course this was ancient Greece, the time long before organised religion pushed its moral agenda on the world and turned good old-fashioned man love into something forbidden. Even though the church's influence is near gone these days, sexuality is still very much a difficult thing for many people to handle or even contemplate that there was a time when there literally was 'free love with everyone'.
Stone's film therefore tries to cover it in a way that satisfies all but funnily enough will hardly please any. The gay element of the film is broched upon but never too overtly displayed. Various background characters sit among and occasionally snuggle young toga-clad men, Phillip attempts to rape a male servant (though it's brief and hard to see), and Alexander very briefly pecks a eunuch in drag on the lips and later hops naked into bed whilst looking forlonly at him. It's all implied and hinted at but all in a tame PG-style way. It does at least mention several times the Achilles/Patroclus gay love affair so distinctly absent from "Troy" and in part makes up for that biggest of blunders in Wolfgang Petersen's flick.
The only upfrontness is the almost Mills & Boone style conversations declaring love for each other that Alexander and Hephaestion have on a night time balcony and during the latter's death scene, the pair throw looks at each other and hug a lot but that's it - despite their words they act more like two school buddies than one of histories greatest love matches. Homophobes will snigger or cry out "eeww!!" over these mild moments of implied gaydom, the rest of us will be left befuddled as to why we're left with these endless talks of their love when twenty seconds of french kissing and a quick sex scene in bed would've sufficied.
Even more confusing is the heterosexual elements of this movie. Jolie gets nearly raped at the start, Dawson essentially is portrayed as an animal and the Alexander/Roxanne love scene involves more violence than actual sex. Skin fans should be somewhat satiated by Dawson getting some rather bulbous breasts out and Farrell shows off not only a very well-toned ass but a brief dark flash of his balls.
Production values though are strong with a few glaring exceptions. The city of Babylon and its Hanging Gardens, along with some brief shots of Alexandria's harbour are stunning CG background work. The sets although a little stageish, are lavishly decorated and the costumes exquisitely detailled. Cinematography gets somewhat fuddled in the battle but has some beautiful shots of the Central Asian and Hindu Kush regions. Vangelis' score is all too overbearing and drowns out some already muddled dialogue.
Considering the talent and money he had on hand, this is a big fumble. As a studio movie its a dud, but some great moments and admittedly brave attempts to push into new territory make one wonder why it's getting all the venom it is. There was rumour the rough cut was an hour longer, maybe if that footage were restored and the film underwent a big re-edit it might have worked (esp. in mini-series format) but as a big screen piece it sadly fails to click. "Alexander" was a great man and there's many a fascinating book study of the legend, but on film even a master like Stone can't quite bring him to life.
Keyword : Eli, Rish, Aming, Super, Hop, Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins, Heath Ledger, Rain, Anne, MEG, Rio, Action, Drama, Across, Upi, BoA, Variety, School, You, IU, Asin, et al, Dev, A Di, Shin, Val Kilmer, Tex, Ant, Animal, Abel, Alexander, Alexandria, All In, Alone, Angel, Arena, Ate, Babylon, Beautiful, Click, Cover, Eagle Eye, EMI, Epic, Eros, Ex, Face, Feast, Felon, Forever, Game, Gone, Good, Haven, Here, Holly, IRIS, Jump, Linger, Look, Love, May, Naked, Out, Pet, Push, Ray, Ready, Red, Rent, Rogue, Ronin, Rough Cut, Run, RV, Screen, Shrink, Special, Stone, Stuck, Style, Take, The Eagle, The Hole, Tron, Troy, Up, Venom, Will, Wolf, FILM, GTH, PTS, Alex, Bi, Now, Ryo, M., Ady, Aris, Cas, Ron, Arin, Baby, Eren, Tere, Tia, Land


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MAC Marine Life Dupes -- Sorry, Keep Looking
MAC Marine Life Dupes — Sorry, Keep Looking
When I think of dupes, I think of something that is pretty close to it — I'm talking 90% or closer — not just similar. There are plenty of similar shades to Marine Life; after all, it's really just a vibrant coral-red with minimal shimmer in it. NARS Deep Throat and MAC Foolish Me come the closest, though the texture of Deep Throat is obviously different and Foolish Me is a little more orange. It's not quite as red/orange and intense as Marine Life, but it's the closest I found of the many shades I do own that were in the running.
- MAC Ripe Peach (Limited Edition) is lighter, more peach-coral than vibrant red-based coral. Verdict: not really a dupe, maybe a cousin.
- Benefit CORALista is a pinker, less distinctly coral version with a significant amount of shimmer in comparison. Verdict: not a dupe, but a good friend.
- MAC Instant Chic (Limited Edition) is much softer pink-coral with a bit of peachiness to it. It has a more powdery look and feel, but it's so, so subtle. Marine Life is like Instant Chic if it took steroids for a year. Verdict: similar color but so, so much lighter–like a fruit picked too early.
- MAC Hipness is much pinker in comparison to Marine Life. It's not quite as intense, and it doesn't have the strength of the redness that Marine Life as. Hipness is a less shimmery, pinker version of CORALista, though. Verdict: not a dupe, too pink.
- Illamasqua Hussy is similar in its intensity, but it's definitely pinker. It's a more pigmented, matte version of Hipness/CORALista. Verdict: not a dupe, too pink.
- NARS Super Orgasm is a peachy-pink concoction that pulls a noticeable gold sheen. It has a lot more shimmer (and even Orgasm, which I don't own, would still be pretty shimmery in comparison). Verdict: not a dupe, too peach, not pink/red enough.
- MAC Springsheen is very similar to Super Orgasm–it's that same mix of peach and pink with a gold shimmer-sheen. Verdict: not a dupe, too peach and shimmery.
- NARS Deep Throat is a pinker version of Super Orgasm/Orgasm, and it's probably the closest to Marine Life, but it's still not quite as red or as intense–plus it has the sheen/shimmer that Marine Life definitely doesn't have. Verdict: almost a dupe, like sisters.
- MAC Dainty is a sheer peach-coral with a smidgen of pink in it. It's way too sheer and light to be a great dupe for Marine Life. Verdict: not a dupe, too light and peach.
- MAC Foolish Me is everything that Marine Life is, except a little more orange. The two are very similar, both in finish and color, but Foolish Me does run a little on the orange side. Plus, it's discontinued, so that sucks. (I thought about this one originally, but it looks so orange in the pan… just swatched it at the last second, and yep, they are indeed surprisingly close.) Verdict: similar, like fraternal twins.
I don't own Fleur Power or Style, but I did swatches here last year, and by referencing those, I can tell you Style is most definitely not a dupe — too orange/peach. Fleur Power comes a little closer, but it seems a bit pinker in comparison to Marine Life.
See swatches…
Ripe Peach | Marine Life | CORALista (Benefit) | Instant Chic
Marine Life | CORALista (Benefit) | Instant Chic | Hipness | Marine Life
Instant Chic | Hipness | Marine Life | Hussy (Illamasqua)
Marine Life | Hussy (Illamasqua) | Super Orgasm (NARS) | Marine Life | Springsheen
Marine Life | Springsheen | Deep Throat (NARS) | Dainty
Foolish Me | Marine Life


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This place is well known for its beaches. Tarkarli is a small village based in Sindhudurg district of Maharashtra. People visit Tarkarli to explore scuba diving. Ramnavami is celebrated with huge pomp and grandeur. Auto rickshaws, mini buses and taxis are the only mode of transport Tarkarli has.
Maharashtra is a state in western India with Mumbai as its capital. Nagpur is the winter capital of the state. Enormous natural resources, fertile black loamy soil and an entrepreneurial inclination make it the most industrialized Indian state. Mumbai is a vibrant, cosmopolitan metropolis. It is one of the wealthiest, most developed and the second-most urbanized state in India.
Bordered by the Arabian Sea to the west, Mumbai shares border with the Indian states of Karnataka, Telangana, Goa, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and the Union Territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli.
The best time to visit Maharashtra is between September and April as it rains like the devil from June to September; the period between September and June is perfect for a trip to the hill stations of Lonavla and Mahabaleshwar. The winter months are pleasant and evenings are cold to chilly. Average summer temperatures through the state hover between 22-39 degrees centigrade.
Maharashtra has endless options for sightseeing; profusion of ancient Hindu, Jain and Buddhist rock-cut monuments lie strewn across the state; the finest of these are located near Aurangabad. It is the ideal base for a visit to the World Heritage cave sites at Ajanta and Ellora. The landscape of western Maharashtra is punctuated with hilltop forts. Visit Mumbai and Pune that pulsate with life and are the industrial, academic and cultural seats of the state. For a cool retreat to beat the summer heat, visit Mahabaleshwar, Panchgani, Matheran, Lonavla and Khandala. If you prefer the sea and sand, besides the much famous Juhu beach in Mumbai, you may check out Murud-janjira, Malvan, Ganapatipule and Kashid for being least frequented and the relative unspoilt beauty of the beaches. Visit the 'orange city' – Nagpur, also the third largest city of the state after Mumbai and Pune. Nashik is the pilgrim city and famous for hosting Kumbh Mela every 12 years other than Haridwar, Allahabad and Ujjain.
You can enjoy paragliding, parasailing and trekking as outdoor activities in the state of Maharashtra. Panchgani is ideal for the adventure freaks.
Shop to your heart's content at an assortment of busy markets which sell hand-woven fabrics and textiles, foreign goods, and knick-knacks at best bargains.
Maharashtra cuisine covers a wide range from mild to very spicy dishes. Wheat, rice, jowar, bajra, vegetables, lentils and fruit form staple food of the Maharashtrian diet. Some of the popular traditional dishes include puran poli, modak and batata vada. Pav bhaji and vada pav are Mumbai street food that became popular in the last fifty years. Meals are served on thali.
The Konkani and Varadhi varieties use a lot of seafood and coconut in their preparations.
Try some of the following when in Maharashtra – pohey (you'll find many varieties here), misal pav topped with batata bhaji/pohey/chewda/farsaan/raw chopped onions and tomato, pitla bhakri, sabudana ki khichdi, bharli vangi or stuffed eggplant, aamti or maharashtrian lentils, taambda/pandhra/varhadi rassa and chilled mango shrikhand for a tasteful closure to a stomach-filling, impressive meal.
Maharashtra hosts many festivals and special events. For the traveler in pursuit of the out-of-the-ordinary insight into the cultural heritage of Maharashtra, the Ellora festival (Indian classical dance), the Prithvi Theatre Festival, the Sur Singar (Indian classical music) and the Music, Dance, Drama Festival held in Mumbai, as well as religious festivals and fairs like the Kumbha Mela at Nashik; Id, Parsi New Year, Easter, Christmas, and Hindu festivals of Holi, Diwali, and Ganesh Chaturthi showcase the state's multi-cultural diversity. Ganesh Utsav is a big celebration for the Maharashtrians and is a 10-day long festivity; the festival is dedicated to the elephant-headed Lord Ganesh (worshipped for bringing luck and prosperity) and is celebrated with cultural and religious events in the major cities like Mumbai and Pune. On the final day, it culminates in processions to immerse the deity in water. The week-long pageant is particularly worth visiting on the day of immersion at Mumbai in August/September.
The state is a confluence of population movements from within and outside the country; multi-cultural, multi-ethnic Maharashtra represents a mosaic of religions, cultures, and lifestyles not found anywhere else.
Maharashtrian artists have made major contributions to Indian Classical Music. Cities like Kolhapur and Pune have been playing a major role in preservation of music like Bhavageet and Natya Sangeet; vibrant folk forms include Powada, Bharuds and Gondhals.
Marathi dance forms draw from folk traditions; Lavani, Koli dance forms are very popular in the state.
Mumbai is a prominent location for the Indian entertainment industry like films, television series and theatre.
From handloom weavers who create intricate patterns in silks and cottons to leather workers who make the comfortable and ubiquitous 'kolhapuri' slippers, Maharashtra has many crafts to tempt visitors. Silk 'Paithani' sarees take years to make and cost a fortune, but are treasured heirlooms.
The vibrant state of Maharashtra offers a variety of shopping options. All the major cities have something special to offer. From sarees to leather shoes, from souvenir to jewellery, from paintings to attires, Maharashtra presents an array of products to choose from. Head to Kolhapur for Kolhapuri chappals or jewelry; Mumbai and Pune are the two popular shopping destinations – pick anything from brass statues, attires, himroo shawls, beautiful paithani silk sarees, accessories, etc.
Nasik, Pune, Aurangabad are places to buy jewelry. Narayan Peth sarees, Paithani sarees, lacquer ware, Kolhapuri chappals, worli tribal paintings are must-buys.
From malls to local marts, there are a plethora of items and places to shop in Maharashtra.
Pune, Sholapur and Kolhapur are places where the traditional nine-yard sarees are made and can be bought in either silk or cotton. Hand-crafted ceramics, textiles, home-furnishings are good buys too.
Marathi is the official language; Hindi and English are spoken extensively across the state, especially in the cities. The cosmopolitan culture of the place promotes English and Hindi as effective languages for communication. As in other states, in Maharashtra too, many regional dialects are spoken in the rural pockets.
Have a fun-filled, exciting vacation with friends and family in Maharashtra!
By Road: Tarkarli is well connected to Mumbai, Goa, and Pune with regular bus services.
By Train: Kudal railway station is the nearest rail head to this beach town.
By Air: Goa is the nearest airport to Tarkarli.GET DIRECTION
The lip smacking seafood are the specialties of Tarkarli. Mori masala is a famous delicacy of Tarkarli. Though non veg dishes are more dominant, Tarkali restaurants offer veg preparations as well.
October till March
The Tarkarli beach is an important attraction of this place. Travelers come here to explore scuba diving. Sindhudurg Fort – Built by Shivaji, this fort is a must see! Shree ivchhatrapati temple is also quite famous in Tarkarli.
Dhamapur Lake: 21.1 kms, this lake is oft visited to explore boating and enjoy the still nature!
We're not around right now. But you can send us an email and we'll get back to you, asap.


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Why Europe needs Galileo
The European Commission (EC) estimates that 6-7% of European GDP – around 800 billion by value – is already dependent on satellite navigation. But European users have no alternative today other than to take their positions from US GPS or Russian Glonass satellites.
Satellite positioning has already become the standard means of navigating. If the signals were switched off or degraded tomorrow, many ship and aircraft crews would find it inconvenient and difficult to revert to traditional navigation methods.
Many utility networks are also more and more dependant on the precise time synchronisation provided by the satellite navigation systems. As the use of satellite navigation spreads, the implications of a signal failure will be even greater, jeopardising not only the efficient running of transport systems, but also human safety.
As far back as the 1990s, the European Union saw the need for Europe to have its own global satellite navigation system. The conclusion to build one was taken in similar spirit to decisions in the 1970s to embark on other well-known European endeavours, such as the Ariane launcher and Airbus.
The European Commission and European Space Agency joined forces to build Galileo, an independent European system under civilian control.
European independence is the chief reason for taking this major step. However, other subsidiary reasons include:
- By being interoperable with GPS and Glonass, Galileo is set to be a cornerstone of global satellite navigation. The system will be under civilian control and its coming online will allow positions to be determined accurately for most places on Earth, even in high rise cities where buildings obscure signals from satellites low on the horizon. This is because the overall number of satellites available from which to take a position is more than doubled
- By placing satellites in orbits at a greater inclination to the equatorial plane than GPS, Galileo will achieve better coverage at high latitudes. This will make it particularly suitable for operation over northern Europe, an area not well covered by GPS
- With Galileo, Europe will be able to exploit the opportunities provided by satellite navigation to the full extent. Receiver and equipment manufacturers, application providers and service operators will benefit from novel business opportunities.


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Lidocaine topical jelly or ointment is used on different parts of the body to cause numbness or loss of feeling for patients having certain medical procedures. It is also used to relieve pain and itching caused by conditions such as sunburn or other minor burns, insect bites or stings, poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac, minor cuts, or scratches. Xylocaine® jelly is used to treat painful urethritis (inflammation of the urethra). It is also used to prevent and control pain in procedures involving the male and female urethra. Xylocaine® jelly is also used to lubricate the nose, mouth, and throat for intubation.
Lidocaine viscous topical solution is also used to treat sore mouth or throat and also reduce gagging during the taking of X-ray pictures and dental impressions.
Lidocaine skin patch is used to relieve nerve pain caused by herpes zoster or shingles (postherpetic neuralgia).
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