How Much Does an Amber Cost?

The price of amber is determined by the different life forms which are found in the stone. Intact insects, plants, flowers etc. will increase the value of amber and these stones will be highly priced. Typically, an amber necklace with say, a trapped dragonfly, will have a high price and will enjoy a heavy demand in the market.

The prices of these gems can vary depending upon the clarity, color, polish and size of the piece. The prices mentioned in this article are in general for gems of fairly good color and good clarity. Opaque pieces of amber can usually be bought quite cheap - for as much as $ 0.10 to $ 1 for a carat or less. For pieces around an inch in size and with insect inclusions, the prices can range from $ 50 to $ 60. An average stone of a good size and with inclusions would cost around $ 195.

Good wholesale quality beads can also be purchased for as low as $ 15. Shapeless and uneven pieces without any fossil inclusions ranged from 1 to 1.5 inches in size and weighing around 10 to 12 carats would cost anywhere between $ 30 to $ 40. Polished beads without any inclusions of about 1 centimeter usually cost from $ 1 to $ 2 per carat.

Many a times, this gem is heated to give it an old or aged look. These pieces usually cost less compared to a similar piece having the original color.

Amber pieces with unusual flora and fauna are a collector's item. Fossils in this gem always increase its value and beauty. A pendant with inclusions is guaranteed to get a good price in the market. A carved ring is also very highly priced in the market.

A significant difference in the price of the amber is made depending on the period from which the amber originates from. The older the gemstone, the higher is its price. However, it is not easy to identify the age of the stone. Most gemological laboratories also do not often certify amber gemstones. The process of finding out the age of the amber stone involves identifying the inclusions introduced in the stone and estimating the period in which it exists.

There is an interesting piece of news about a piece of Dominican amber with inclusions. Recently, such a piece with a large lizard trapped inside it was sold for $ 75000. This figure can not really give us a hint of how high a price this gemstone can fetch.

In fact, the amount of history associated with amber jewelry would only serve to increase its market value. Similarly, antique jewelry or a pendant with insect is very highly valued in the market.

There are frequent attempts made in the market to sell amber 'simulants' as genuine amber. Simulants of this gem include ambid, copal resin, kauri gum, dammar, celluloid and plastic. These simulants would normally cost a fraction of what a real stone costs.

Thus, we can see that the price of this gemstone mostly depends upon factors such as age, inclusions, quality and size.

USB Virus Removal How-To

As more and more computer users carry USB sticks with them to store and transfer their data, it was only a matter of time before virus writers targeted these devices as a delivery mechanism. This is done through the use of an autorun.ini file. This type of file is basically just a text file with instructions to execute other files. The other files are the actual virus payload. They may have names like Ravmon.exe, New Folder.exe, svchost.exe, and possibly another files with a.dll extension.

Manual USB virus removal can be very tricky and it is suggested that you use a good antivirus / spyware removal tool to prevent and remove risks automatically. The first thing to do is make sure you have a good backup of your files on the USB stick. Offsite backups allow for greater peace-of-mind. Next, you'll want to make sure your computer is not set to automatically run CDs and removable devices. Microsoft has a one-click solution located in their knowledge base (967715) to disable autorun.

It's best to attempt removal of infected files through the operating system's command prompt. Simply click Start, Run (or Search programs and files) and type cmd, Enter. Enter the drive letter your USB stick is using. If you need to check, go to My Computer (or Computer) and see what drive letter has been assigned to the USB device. Next, in the command prompt type that drive's letter, eg, if it's E, type e: to switch to the E-drive).

Then, make sure all files, including hidden and system files, are showing. So, type attrib -rsh. This will ensure the files are not read-only and that system and hidden files are showing. Delete the autorun.ini file and any.exe and / or.dll files that look like they do not belong. The key thing is to make sure the autorun.ini file is gone. This will keep the virus from replicating again.

It's potentially impossible to keep your USB memory device free of viruses when it gets used in other computers; however, as long as you have autorun disabled on all of your computers and use up-to-date virus protection software, you will less the chances of becoming infected.

Start a Home Internet Business and Make Money Online

There are lots of ways to start a home internet business and the golden rule is to find a way to do it that does not cost you money. You want to make money online, not waste it buying things like advertising.

It's not really difficult to start an home business online and the good thing is that you can do it without all the expense of a traditional type of business. You do not have to rent a shop and buy lots of expensive stock. You can get up and running for zero dollars and that is important.

If you do not know exactly what you would like to do online then it's a good idea just to start selling other peoples products. This is called Affiliate Marketing and you get paid a percentage of each sale. It is a great way to start making some money online and there's lots of things to sell.

It's best to start with digital products that people can download to their own computer and you can earn a lot, sometimes up to 75% in commission.

There are quite a lot of things to learn but it's fun and when that first check comes it's a great feeling. Knowing what to do and what not to do is what makes the difference. If you learn the process you can just repeat it time and time again. Soon those checks can grow to $ 200 or $ 500 a day. Is not that worth a little work?

As long as you want to succeed and decide to spend some time working as an affiliate marketer you can make your own job at home and the profits can come in every week.

Top 7 Ways to Motivate Your Team

1. Involve them. Many employees want to be involved in the ongoing development and progress of their company. Plus, they often have insightful ideas that can make a significant difference in the company.

2. Communicate. A frequent axiom in business is, "No news is good news." However, employees want regular updates on the progress of the business and their personal performance. Use memos, email, telephone, and one-on-one and group meetings to keep your team apprised of changes, updates, new products, etc.

3. Celebrate individual and team performance. Catch people doing something right and focus on recognizing excellent performance. Provide positive reinforcement, issue awards, use a corporate newsletter to highlight specific achievements. Send thank-you cards and congratulatory notes, make phone calls, and send emails.

4. Set challenging goals. My experience has taught me that people strive to achieve what is expected of them. If you set challenging goals your team will work hard to accomplish them, providing of course, they are realistically attainable.

5. Give them the tools to succeed. No team will stay motivated if they do not have the necessary tools required to do their job. This includes; equipment, internal support, inventory, marketing materials, training, etc.

6. Manage poor performance. Your team expects you to manage individuals who do not perform to standard. However, many managers ignore these situations because they are afraid to deal with them, hoping instead that the situation will resolve itself. It never does and this "blind" approach affects profitability, causes higher turnover, and generates low morale.

7. Believe in your people. The majority of people want to do well - very few individuals approach a job with the intent of screwing up. Yet, many managers run their business thinking that employees must be treated with a "watchdog" mentality. They install hidden cameras, monitor email, and set up procedures that require employees to get multiple approval signatures for decisions.

Copyright 2004 Kelley Robertson. All rights reserved

4 Steps on How to Make Money on YouTube!

Making money online is becoming increasing exponentially easier in this day and age. There are literally thousands of ways you can make money online with very little experience. One of the best ways is through YouTube. You will not need to be a computer expert or website designer. All you need is a creativity and persistence.

Here are 4 steps that will get you on the right track to success.

1. Be original

You need to make videos that the public wants to watch. And nobody wanted to watch the same old ideas, that everyone copies from each other.

Nobody in this world is like you, so the best way to originality is by letting your personality show in your videos.

So try and find a topic / niche you're well versed in, and give something of value. Something that will entertain, make people laugh or cry, or simply learn, etc.

2. Keep at it

"Nothing worth having come easy."

Persistence is key. After you found a topic / niche of your interest, it's time to start making videos. It's up to you to decide how many videos you should produce each day, but a general starting rule is about 2-3 videos per week. This will be enough videos to keep your subscribers happy but it will not be so many that it overloads your workload which would cause your video quality to suffer.

3. Promote yourself

After you have started to produce your videos, you need to work on promoting them. Promoting your videos is essential to getting views and in turn getting more revenue from the ads that you place.

The best method for getting substantial video views time and time again is to attract as many subscribers as possible. A subscriber is a person who will be notified via email and their YouTube page whenever you upload a new video.

4. Get your reward!

After creating your videos, uploading your videos, and promoting them, it's time to start reaping the fruits of your labor. You must usually go through each of your videos and set them up to start generating revenue.

To do this, you must first establish a Google AdSense.

Next, you need to get accepted as a YouTube partner. Only then will you be able to link your accounts together and start placing ads on your videos, and in turn, start making money!

If you would like to know more on how to start making money on YouTube please visit YouTube Bling .

A Multilingual Framework For Adding Languages ​​to Your Website

There are a number of approaches to making your website multilingual and as in all design decisions your site's requirements should dictate which way you go in the end analysis. In this article I am not going to survey the pros and cons of each approach, rather we will take a look at a custom built multilingual framework that makes things easy for translators.

All web site text be it a word, sentence, paragraph, link or whatever is stored in a backend database and accessed by a key ie. an integer, and a language identifier, EN for example. So you might have a couple of records like: 1, EN, "Hello" and 1, TU, "Salam" You might also have fields that indicate on what page the text can be found which is useful later in the translation application.

Each web site content page exists one time for multiple languages. There is no need to replicate the source code for each page. Using this approach I built a php based application and everywhere text appeared in the HTML it was replaced with a php function that looked something like this: p ("Hello", 1) The function 'p' prints the word "Hello" in whatever language is active at the time. If English is active the function simply returns the English text that was sent to it. If another language is in use the function looks up that text entry in the required language and returns it. The active language can be stored in a GET or Session variable. An obvious benefit of this approach is that the text "Hello" remains in its rightful place in the page source and is easily readable and maintained. Other approaches sometimes leave you with nothing but a cryptic text key and you have to look up the text manually to be able to read the HTML.

As you probably are not interested in keeping track of a large database of text id's by hand eg Hello, 1, Good bye = 2, there are simple approaches to automation. For example when programmers write "Hello" they simply code p ("Hello"). Later on a utility runs, finds the virgin "Hello", assigns it an id and updates the code to look like p ("Hello", 1). The same utility can check existing text entries to see if the English text (or whatever your base language is) has been updated and then make a note in the database that will alert translators that the translation must also be updated. In our database we keep track of the current English text and the previous English text so that translators can see history of the text change.

What about efficiency you ask? To avoid database lookups for each text display, we load the entire text database for a particular language into a Session array variable whenever a user changes languages. This is quite fast and not noticeable to the user. If you have a large web site you may chose to load only selected portions of the site into the array at any one time. The 'p' function then does a very fast array lookup to return the appropriate text. Of course the base language requires no lookup at all since it is already passed to the function.

With all of the text in a database it is easy to build applications for translators to add a brand new language or update text that has been modified in the source pages. Translators do not need to know html to do their work. One nice feature is to be able to copy a translation for a particular text that is the same on multiple pages. Be cautious about reusing translations as the translation may need to vary based on the page context.

This is by no means an exhaustive description of what has to be done to make your site completely multilingual. There are many issues that range from simple things like date and currency display to more subtle issues driven by culture like what pictures or colors do you use? So now you can visualize at least one design framework option for your multilingual site. Here is a site where this method has been used: www.goodneighboraz.com Good luck going global!

Make Money From Home

More and more people these days are looking for ways to make money from home. You may be a parent that wants to spend more time with your children, a victim of job out sourcing or simply need a second income. The idea of generating income without leaving the comforts of your residence has become very popular as of late. Finding the right vehicle to achieve this can be difficult but is definitely possible.

Whatever business you choose, your ability to effectively market on the Internet will greatly increase your odds of success. I know what you are thinking, advertising on the web would be way to costly. Your thinking is both correct and incorrect, let me explain.

Sure there are forms of paid advertising on the web that are very effective but can also be very expensive. On the other hand, there are free forms of Internet advertising that can be just as effective as the paid counterparts. "Free" always works for me.

Some examples of free advertising that will help you make money from home are as follows:

• Video marketing.







• Article marketing.







• Skype marketing.







• Social network marketing.

Whatever business you decide to get into there are three words that will be instrumental in your success. These three words are Traffic, Traffic and Traffic. You might have the absolute best product or service in the world but if no one knows about it, you will not earn a dime. My suggestion would be to concentrate on several forms of online advertising. Find something that works then do it over and over and over again.

Marketing online is a skill that anyone can learn. If you put forth a persistent consistent effort toward learning this skill you can definitely become successful at it and make money from home. As with anything worth while in life, there will be an investment of both time and capital required on your part. Trust me it is well worth the investment.