Most countries have one city which is clearly top of the pops. In particular, one city (which may not necessarily be the national capital) is usually the largest population centre and the main economic powerhouse of a given country. Humbly presented here is a quick and not-overly-scientific list of ten countries that are an exception to this rule. That is, countries where two cities (or more!) vie neck-and-neck for the coveted top spot.
Note: all population statistics are the latest numbers on relevant country- or city-level Wikipedia pages, as of writing, and all are for the cities' metropolitan area or closest available equivalent.
The infamous East India Company, "the Company that Owned a Nation", is remembered harshly by history. And rightly so. On the whole, it was an exploitative venture, and the British individuals involved with it were ruthless opportunists. The Company's actions directly resulted in the impoverishment, the subjugation, and in several instances the death of countless citizens of the Indian Subcontinent.
Company rule, and the subsequent rule of the British Raj, are also acknowledged as contributing positively to the shaping of Modern India, having introduced the English language, built the railways, and established political and military unity. But these are overshadowed by its legacy of corporate greed and wholesale plunder, which continues to haunt the region to this day.
I recently read Four Heroes of India (1898), by F.M. Holmes, an antique book that paints a rose-coloured picture of Company (and later British Government) rule on the Subcontinent. To the modern reader, the book is so incredibly biased in favour of British colonialism that it would be hilarious, were it not so alarming. Holmes's four heroes were notable military and government figures of 18th and 19th century British India.
Clive, Hastings, Havelock, Lawrence; with a Concluding Note on the Rule of Lord Mayo. Image source:eBay.
I'd like to present here four alternative heroes: men (yes, sorry, still all men!) who in my opinion represented the British far more nobly, and who left a far more worthwhile legacy in India. All four of these figures were founders or early members of The Asiatic Society (of Bengal), and all were pioneering academics who contributed to linguistics, science, and literature in the context of South Asian studies.
There are several different ways of commonly identifying the "official centre point" of a city. However, there's little international consensus as to the definition of such a point, and in many countries and cities the definition is quite vague.
Most reliable and most common, is to declare a Kilometre Zero marker as a city's (and often a region's or even a country's) official centre. Also popular is the use of a central post office for this purpose. Other traditional centre points include a city's cathedral, its main railway station, its main clock tower (which may be atop the post office / cathedral / railway station), its tallest building, its central square, its seat of government, its main park, its most famous tourist landmark, or the historical spot at which the city was founded.
Satellite photo of Sydney CBD, annotated with locations of "official centre" candidates. Image source:Satellite Imaging Corp.
My home town of Sydney, Australia, is one of a number of cities worldwide that boasts most of the above landmarks, but all in different locations, and without any mandated rule as to which of them constitutes the official city centre. So, where exactly in Sydney does X mark the spot?
And now for something completely different, here's an interesting question. What terra firma places in the world are completely without roads? Where in the world will you find large areas, in which there are absolutely no official vehicle routes?
Naturally, such places also happen to be largely bereft of any other human infrastructure, such as buildings; and to be largely bereft of any human population. These are places where, in general, nothing at all is to be encountered save for sand, ice, and rock. However, that's just coincidental. My only criteria, for the purpose of this article, is a lack of roads.
Having a complete Windows (or Mac) desktop running within Linux has been possible for some time now, thanks to the wonders of Virtual Machine (VM) technology. However, the typical approach is to mount and boot a VM image, where the guest OS and hard disk are just files on the host filesystem. In this case, the guest OS can't be natively booted and run, because it doesn't occupy its own disk or partition on the physical hardware, and therefore it can't be picked up by the BIOS / boot manager.
I've been installing Windows and Linux on the same machine, in a dual-boot setup, for many years now. In this case, I boot natively into either one or the other of the installed OSes. However, I haven't run one "real" OS (i.e. an OS that's installed on a physical disk or partition) inside the other via a VM. At least, not until now.
At my new job this year, I discovered that it's possible to do such a thing, using a feature of VirtualBox called "Raw Disk Access". With surprisingly few hiccups, I got this running with Linux Mint 17.3 as the host, and with Windows 8.1 as the guest. Each OS is installed on a separate physical hard disk. I run Windows inside the VM most of the time, but I can still boot natively into the very same install of Windows at any time, if necessary.
