Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Aug
Aug
Shut Up!
T
THAT’S WHAT THE Government said last month to
the Indian blogging community. In a knee-jerk reac-
tion to the Mumbai blasts, the Computer Emergency
Response Team of India (CERT-IN) instructed all
Internet Service Providers to ban a select 17 sites that
might (as per the Government’s belief) help terrorists
communicate with each other. Unfortunately for the
blogging community, some of these were on free blog
hosting providers — TypePad and Blogspot — while
some were on Geocities, a free service. As a result of
the gag order, the ISPs banned the two blog domains
as well as Geocities in their entirety!
Did they do this because they didn’t know how to
block specific sites? If that’s the case then this move
surely reflects the lack of understanding about IT
amongst both ISPs and the Government. It also
smacks of covert attempts at Internet censorship—
because all this happened discreetly, without any
prior notice or a public announcement.
Deepak Ajwani Executive Editor
Indian bloggers gradually discovered, to their
dismay (after having exchanged notes—on the
phone for a change), that access to their blogs had
been blocked. Worse still, the director of CERT
“Internet might not remain the
feigned cluelessness when asked about the drastic ultimate enabler of democracy”
move. His initial response when asked about the
ban: “Somebody must have blocked some sites. One blogger pointedly asked, “Will the Indian
What is your problem?” Government turn off the water supply to the nation
Knives were out immediately, and bloggers if they discover terrorists use water to live?”
around the world united to start a site where cen- This act of censorship is as futile as it is self-
sorship on the Net was discussed threadbare, and defeating. But it also ends up setting a dangerous
where details on how to circumvent the ban were precedent that any speech, online or otherwise, can
given out. A majority of Indian dailies reported the be stifled if found anti-governmental.
incident and printed the entire list of the 17 The Government had earlier announced its inten-
banned sites. As a result, these very sites, which tion to introduce a Broadcast Bill to muzzle the tele-
were possibly nondescript till now had been made vision media — apparently an attempt to arrest the
famous thanks to the ban, and their traffic shot series of sting operations on politicians. Then they
up. “It thrills me to death that my little online made an amendment to the Right to Information Act
journal has been noticed by the wonderfully tol- that excluded, from public purview, bureaucrats’ file
erant Government of India,” said one blog carrying notings. And now this Web site ban.
political propaganda. It suddenly seems that the Internet might not
What also happened as a result of this ban is that remain the ultimate enabler of democracy.
genuine and resourceful blogs such as mumbai- I’m appalled. These are precedents, and a possible
help.blogspot.com set up to disseminate vital infor- sign of more smothering censorship to come.
mation during emergencies in Mumbai—such as the
recent blasts—were shut down. It is these blogs that
come to the rescue if and when cell phone networks
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Enter Digital Passion 36 Memoirs Of Memory
All you wanted to know about DDR, DDR2,
29 Studio 64 DDR vs. DDR2, and were not afraid to ask;
64-bit computing—what is it, anyway? here’s the dope if you asked and didn’t get
What is it good for? What software is the answers
available for your 64-bit rig right now?
16 Should you make the switch? (You will,
Director Sudhir eventually, of course.)
Mishra would
like to use
technology to
put actors and 32 All-Round Joy
singers out of A Digit exclusive, and our cover story. We
business took a good, hard look at the Xbox 360. Our
verdict? Turn to the page!
16
Search is
always a hot
topic, and
social search is
getting hotter
28
Everyone’s 41 Antelligence!
waiting for
Office 2007!
Researchers are figuring out how to use
Why the “X” in large numbers of little robots to do stuff
Office 2K7 file not possible with monolithic structures.
extensions? We report from the intersection of the
robotics and nanotech worlds
Contents Magazine
Digital Tools 66 Boxes For
Your Bytes
51 One For External hard
The Road drives are a luxury
Reviewed: lots of neat for some and a
little apps for popular necessity for
Mobile platforms. Pack others. If you want
some extra power into or need one
your phone—smart or respectively, here
otherwise! are the results of
our tests
August 2006
Digital Leisure Escape
127
David Huffman,
our informal
Man of the
Month, invented
117 Timepass Tips something we’re
If you didn’t already know, find out what dependant on—
kinds of inane stuff people do with their every single day
broadband connections. Sorry dial-uppers! 127
Some gamers are
140 Tabloid Tech 120 Game On so hooked they
Women in IT bring out a calendar in an “The best-looking Racer on any need detox. They
attempt to change the perception of the platform. Ever.” Don’t you feel like now have a home
field. But why the bikinis? flipping through the pages already? away from den
Three Incredibly Useful Sites ..........20 Take A Crack....................................48 Tech Quiz ........................................125
REGULARS
The Digital World ............................20 Geek Dreams ..................................50 Bluff Your Way Through ................128
Beat That ........................................22 Tips & Tricks ....................................87 Digit Diary......................................129
Gender Benders ..............................26 Q&A ................................................96 Blogwatch ......................................129
Buzzword Of The Month ..................26 Agent 001 ......................................100 Inbox ..............................................138
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DIGITAL PASSION DIGITAL TOOLS DIGITAL BUSINESS DIGITAL LEISURE
For any queries regarding the CD or DVD, e-mail help@jasubhai.com with “CD/DVD” as the subject. DIGIT AUGUST 2006 11
If the subject is not mentioned, your mail might not reach the right person.
Online
taste technology at
www.thinkdigit.com
FEATURED TUTORIAL FROM DIGIT FORUM (www.thinkdigit.com/forum)
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d.php?t=32416
AMD Buys ATI Rumour: Intel To Add 3G To Next-Gen Centrino
The processor giant and the graphics goliath The next generation of Intel’s Centrino platform,
confirmed increasingly heating rumours on July code-named “Santa Rosa,” may well include 3G
24, announcing their plans to join forces mobile phone network connectivity as well as the
following a $5.4 billion deal. Prepare yourself, standard Wi-Fi, if allegedly leaked company roadmaps
world, for some incredible products in the future! are to be believed
Enter
Sudhir Mishra BEYOND ALGORITHMS
Director
Sandudhir Mishra is a
director, of Chameli
Search Vistas
Calcutta Mail fame.
He has been a producer,
story writer, dialogue
writer, and also a S earch need not mean just
Google or Yahoo! or MSN
or any of the biggies. There
Yahoo!—are listening, and
with attention.
Del.icio.us is a site where
methodology. At Eurekster,
results are weighted based
on how many users click to
screenplay writer.
exists no ideal search you share bookmarks and a given site.
Technology to engine. For finding a quote thus discover new sites. Then there’s
you is… by Winston Churchill, Flickr is a photo-sharing site StumbleUpon, where one
… a means by you’re best off using where you tag your pictures types in any topic of interest
which you can something like Google. But and contribute to the pool and clicks to find a random
express your for finding “deep” of photos people worldwide page of interest. Digg.com
thoughts and put your information on a subject can search for and discover. and Netscape.com invite
ideas across. like Bach’s music, you might And Yahoo! bought both visitors to recommend and
What gadgets do you use? or might not be. vote on which items get to
I have a computer at home, a Consider a search the top of the search list.
laptop, a mobile, an iPod, and site called Where search involves
a DV camcorder. PreFound.com, finding answers to
which explains the specific questions, we
What would be your dream
following about have Yahoo! Answers,
gadget, and why?
itself. We quote it and the paid-for Google
A gadget by which you could
because it is Answers. Microsoft is
do away with actors, singers
representative of working on something
and all… It ideally would be a
“social” search in similar.
combination of hardware and
general: Chris Sherman,
software, where I can pick a
“PreFound.com executive editor of Search
face and voice and then write
allows users to see what Engine Watch, has said
the screenplay, select the
others have gathered by there’s room for lots of
scene, and do the whole movie
hand from the Web. players in the search race:
sitting at home! Something
Knowledgeable, “We’ve got the major players
like in an animation…
interested people can out there, but as people get
What do you do online? identify relevant sites better at learning how to
I search for information. with greater accuracy navigate the Internet,
Yesterday, I happened to have than a search engine. they’re not going to
been searching for a speech You can leverage the necessarily be looking for
by William Faulkner—a work already done by an answer from the titans
literature Nobel Laureate. The others and build on that anymore. They’re going to
Internet is a vast storehouse base. So search what has these start- be looking for more
of information and you tend already been found on the ups—which says something specialised or personalised
to waste time if you don’t Web! PreFound.com can cut about the gaining information.” But Shashi
know where to search for through the clutter a typical importance of social search. Seth, product manager for
what you want. I also check Google search might return Part of Google’s foray into Google Co-op, has said
my mails regularly. by adding the human social-search territory has specialisation will never
Any instance where element.” Essentially, after been its launch of Google take away much business
technology has really you’ve found a bunch of Co-op, an information- from the major companies.
helped you? useful links on a topic, you sharing feature. “They’re all very niche
In 1998, when my wife was on share that with the According to reports in players in the area of
a visit to Rishikesh, there was a community. the media, Steven Marder, search,” Seth said. “We still
landslide… If not for the One can’t yet say how co-founder of Eurekster Inc, believe people will find core
mobile, it wouldn’t have been far such search will catch said Yahoo!’s and Google’s search fulfilling the bulk of
easy to find out what was on, but the traditional- entry into social search their needs.”
going on there. search companies— validated their (Eurekster’s) The “problem” is that so
including Google and philosophy and much of the information
One Silly Question “You’re playing an FPS. Whom would you shoot?”
“Whoever mad
e the game!"” og!!!”
Amarjeet Sin lecturer
!” “My boyfriend!” our’s d
gh Arora “My brother…” ass neighb
ition cl Vrushali Pawar
“Bosco
, my
Amruta Dhanawade
“My tu ar
atil Khedk
Rohit P Tanul
UNITED STATES
Steps have been taken to CHINA
MEXICO largely ban Internet
The country is now Pirate gambling. A bill now The country is further
Heaven. For instance, in makes it illegal for banks increasing its grip on
some Internet cafes, and credit card companies the Internet.
customers fill blank discs to make payments to Supervision of blogs
with illegally downloaded gambling sites will be tightened; a
songs for about Rs 70 popular chat-room
forum has been told to
tone down comments
on sensitive topics
AUSTRALIA
The country is getting tough on
sexual predators. A 55-year-old
man who wooed a teenage girl
on the Net in an attempt to lure
her into a sexual relationship
has been jailed, without him
having done anything offline
Digit Caption
“Tech Bed”
700 of her students had rather unlikely to show off What is special about
signed up with Bebo, semi-nude pictures of MRAM, or Magnetoresistive
and that some were herself online. But that’s as RAM, is that it’s a sort of
displaying indecent of now. Who is to say what cross between a hard disk
images. She wrote to it will be like in urban and Flash; it’s fast, like other
parents about her India five years from now? magnetic storage, and is non-
concerns: “Most girls This issue, like many volatile, like Flash. It’s better
who have registered others, highlights the fact than Flash because it’s faster
have included a that there’s more than just a and doesn’t degrade over
potentially dangerous generation gap between time. MRAM uses magnetic
amount of personal parents and today’s children. materials combined with
detail. Some girls’ This is a transitional time— conventional silicon circuitry.
photographs could only between the offline and the In fact, it is referred to as
be described as soft connected worlds. We can “universal memory,” and
pornography.” only suppose that things will could potentially take over
In Australia, the iron themselves out as and the role of chips found in
New South Wales when the transition is nearly every electronic device
Police are said to be complete. from PCs to cell phones.
keeping an eye on the “The older memory
sites. According to media BETTER THAN FLASH technologies are awkward to
reports, the Internet unit is generations couldn’t, and it work with in a mobile
dealing with more and
more reports from parents
does look like at least some
of them aren’t aware of the
MRAM computing environment,”
said Bob Merritt, an analyst
worried that their children
had been approached
dangers. Naturally, education
and open discussion are the
Finally Out with Semico Research. “This
is a significant step forward
online. answers, but there’s a and absolutely critical for
“You can’t tell kids not
to go online. It’s part of
their lives now,” Sergeant
growing disconnect between
old-school parents and tech-
savvy kids. Protecting
M RAM has been in the
news off and on in the
past couple of years, with
moving into the smaller
forms that consumers and
industry want.”
Richard Long said. “But they children from pornography several chipmakers pursuing In fact, Will Strauss, an
need to be aware that… is one thing, but what is to the technology—including analyst with research firm
people can look in and see be done when the kids IBM. Now Freescale Forward Concepts, said this
exactly what they’re doing.” actually want to be perceived Semiconductor has was the “most significant
It’s tough on the kids of as sexy? announced the commercial memory introduction in
this, the Internet generation. There’s not really much availability of an MRAM this decade.” He added,
Technology is enabling them cause for concern in India: a chip—getting to the finish “MRAM, in theory, is the
to do things earlier 15-year-old girl here is line first, as it were. holy grail of memory.”
I M interoperability is quite
the buzzword right now,
but the idea is not new:
testing period, all users
across both networks will be
able to cross-IM. Voice chat
Struggling to find the button that unlocks the theme options, Swaradhnyee clicked
all the buttons in order. This took some time, but with her fool-proof way of doing interoperability between IM is, however, not on the list
things, she eventually found the button. The selection of a suitable theme got her services has consistently of features for the beta.
thinking a little too much, we feel. (Go on, girl—just choose one!) At the end, a
combination of green and yellow it was. (Flowers and leaves?) Probably because
topped users’ wish lists. In Delivering a larger,
she’d already spent so much time, a harried Swaradhnyee skipped the colour and October 2005, Microsoft and combined user base, says
Widget selection entirely. Then she fumbled a couple of times with other sections Yahoo! had announced that Laura Martin, an analyst at
(Manage, Blogroll, and Options). No widgets and not much customisation, and to with the release of the next Soleil-Fulcrum Research,
top it off, she couldn’t figure how to view the blog she’d made!
versions of their IM should give Yahoo! and
products, their users would Microsoft “more clout in
be able to talk to each other. attracting online advertising
That announcement, dollars.” She went on to add,
tellingly, followed Google’s “Combining users creates
launch of Google Talk. And loyalty. Strategically, it
now, the walls have been torn becomes best to partner with
down: the latest versions of a competitor,” Martin said.
MSN Messenger (called It looks like partnerships
Windows Live Messenger) and joint ventures are being
and Yahoo! Messenger with increasingly resorted to by
00:13:32:09 Voice can communicate with Internet tech companies:
Mohnish oozed confidence and zest when we told him how simple—and fun—our set each other. “The enemy of my enemy is
task was. He was soon looking at how to choose a theme, but missed the button. He There exist third-party now my friend,” said
then navigated to a section called Manage, but didn’t find the theme layout option software such as Gaim and Michael Gartenberg, vice
there either. And then it happened: his cursor jumped to Presentation, where all Trillian, which allow one to president and research
the layout options are. Whew! Zooming through the themes, he selected a
distinctive black. Selecting the Widgets was just a matter of some juggling. Content connect to more than one director at Jupiter Research
with his efforts, Mohnish selected View Site, and sat up grinning at the monitor. OK, IM service at the same time, (www.jupiterresearch.com).
it needn’t have taken as long as it did, but the layout is a little confusing! but the problem is that the “With new services coming
IM services don’t support to market, such as Skype and
MRAM will likely be to $50 (Rs 2,200) per such clients—meaning users Google Talk, the ability to
used in embedded devices, megabyte! Clearly, it isn’t could experience difficulties maintain interoperability is
says Saied Tehrani, Freescale going to replace Flash—or when the IM services tweak another reason to remain
director of MRAM and hard disks—in commercial certain features. In addition, open and form these types
smartmos technology. The devices anytime soon. they don’t support audio of partnerships.”
first markets for MRAM are Freescale selling MRAM or video chats, which the Joe Wilcox, senior analyst
likely to be in settings where right now is more about new Microsoft/Yahoo! at Jupiter Research, said the
durability is critical, such as potential than profit. The network might. new relationship would open
in automotive and fact is, like we hinted at, This is a partnered the door for cross-
industrial settings. that it’s been difficult to public beta testing of advertising. And, “If they’re
But then there’s the bring to market. Freescale interoperability between the thinking about their future,
issue of price: a 4-Mbit chip thinks being the first to sell two IM services—meaning the integration is just the
costs $25, which translates MRAM will give it an the test is to ensure that the first step to other things.”
Digital
Lead Feature
Enter the
Studio 64
Nimish Chandiramani
64-bit in processor-talk signify the number of
bits that the processor uses when it talks to the
psychedelic system memory. Each byte in memory has a
ou probably felt special when you unique address, denoted by a number that is 32
world of the
all-64-bit PC Y bought that new AMD64. Thirty-two
extra bits to play with! The sun shone
bits long for a 32-bit processor, and 64 bits long
for a 64-bit processor. With two possibilities for
brighter, the sky cleared up, and the heavens each of the 32 bits (0 or 1), 32-bit processors
smiled upon you as you transcended the dregs have the ability to access 232 memory loca-
of the 32-bit x86 world to new heights of über- tions, each a byte in size—totalling up to
geekdom. Your 64-bit desktop would be the just 4 GB of memory. This means it can
Ferrari to your neighbour’s bullock cart. load 4 GB of code and/or data into
Or would it? your system’s RAM (assuming you
For all the hype that surrounded the launch have that much) and take advan-
in 2003 of affordable 64-bit processors for the tage of the much higher
desktop, all it turned out to be was little more speeds that it offers when
than a big tease. Developments in software have compared to hard disks.
notoriously lagged behind those in hardware, Now before you say “But 4
so while we rubbed our hands in glee at the GB ought to be
Illustration Chaitanya Surpur
W hile 64-bit computing reached our desktops only in 2003, it’s been a good
15 years since the first 64-bit processor was used—the MIPS R4000, which
was used to power high-end Silicon Graphics workstations that produced movie
hits when compared to their performance
under plain old 32-bit Windows.
special effects. By this time, Intel’s x86 platform had established a firm death- The Penguin And Its Wings
grip on the desktop PC, supported by the accelerating popularity of Microsoft If you really want a completely 64-bit PC, you
Windows. A ridiculous number of applications were written for x86 (as is true should start window-shopping for Linux distri-
today), and to try and introduce a whole new butions. All of them are available in 64-bit ver-
processor architecture into the desktop market was sions, and differ only slightly—if at all—from
unthinkable—who was going to write all those their 32-bit versions (which we’ve tested
applications again? 64-bit computing, then, found this month).
itself in areas like special effects, high-end servers,
and research. Our Guinea Pig:
In 1999, AMD released an extension of the x86 AMD Athlon64 3000+
instruction set, called x86-64, which assumed a 64- ASUS A8N-VM motherboard with on-board sound
bit processor that would run the old x86 instruction and Ethernet
set just as easily as it would a 64-bit instruction. 1 GB RAM
This meant that everything you could run on a The Fuel of The Hype…. 250 GB SATA hard disk
regular old x86 PC would still work flawlessly, and NVIDIA GeForce 6600 with 256 MB RAM
you could also run high-performing 64-bit
applications. Intel’s IA-64 specification was released the same year, but it We’re quite impressed with how much
would run x86 instructions in a compatibility mode, which, well, are two words GNU/Linux distributions have matured in this
you don’t want to say in the same breath as “high performance”. AMD’s department. For example, when we tried
Athlon64 processors hit the market in 2003, and have been showered with Ubuntu 5.04 (Breezy Badger) on this same
much love ever since. machine a few months ago, the only device that
While all of us rejoiced at the idea of moving to a 64-bit home PC with little didn’t show up as “Unknown” was the proces-
or no hassle, much disappointment was expressed by the academic elite, who sor. With their new Dapper Drake release,
have been poking fun at x86 for years—mainly because there were far better 64-bit Ubuntu shines—sound and Ethernet
processors than it, but without the advantage of popularity (must… resist… worked out-of-the-box thanks to some nifty new
drawing… predictable… parallel…). Whether x86-64 was the right way to go is a kernel modules, with only one annoyance:
battle that will rage for a while, but at least now we’ll have 64-bit applications Windows XP doesn’t release the Ethernet card’s
to keep us entertained while we wait. resources even when you shut down your PC, so
to switch from Windows to Linux, you need to
Windows Defender
www.microsoft.com
Now in its second Beta, Windows Defender is a
better “block spyware trying to come in” than
a “clean up spyware that’s already there” tool.
And it’s free. And it’s 64-bit!
All-Round
Joy
Nimish Chandiramani
L
ong, painful months have passed since ole
M-Dollar teased us with the assurance that
the Xbox 360 would indeed make its way
into India—by the legal channels this time.
Meanwhile, gamers in the West indulged in
insane crimes just to get close to one of these.
Finally, now, our tears have paid off—we got us
an exclusive look at said 360—something you
lot will have to wait for till Diwali. {Insert evil
laugh here}
Look At Me!
You can’t deny it—the 360 is the best-looking
thing we’ve seen in a while, and looks like
something that would be preceded with an “i”.
The ring around the power button lights up 90
degrees at a time—one for each controller you
connect—thus completing the 360-degree Ring
of Light (forgive us for being so dramatic). Obvi-
ously, meticulous thought went into making it
a treat for the eye. While it’s smaller than its
predecessor, it’s still bigger than the PS2, and
comes with a huge power brick in tow that
could knock someone’s coconut off if they
didn’t watch it. Its vertical nature will still save
space in your entertainment area, so there’s no
need to worry.
The front panel is neat, and has two
memory card slots in case you opt for the hard
drive-less Core System. As of this review,
Microsoft isn’t planning to release faceplates
for the 360, so if white doesn’t cut if for you
and you want to customise it to your taste, you
will have to settle for bootlegged ones that will
inevitably find their way into the grey market
post-launch. Still, the console looks good
enough without a custom faceplate.
Touch Me
One thing we were quite curious to find out was
how Microsoft was going to improve on its
much-disparaged controller, and we’re quite
In Toto
We’re completely blown away by the Xbox 360
(as if we didn’t expect it)—tremendous perform-
ance, a brilliant controller, and high-definition
eye-candy that will make you shun gaming on
a regular TV.
What concerns us is the money that you’ll
The whole kit and kaboodle—the Xbox 360 System will be shelling out—not just the cost of console
contain all this, sans the game titles itself: you’ll eventually need to spring for an
HDTV and an elaborate surround sound system,
Not that you should waste your 360 playing not to mention the probable bomb (Indian
movies, but it makes for a pretty competent prices for titles haven’t been set yet) that each
DVD player as well. Navigating the various title is going to set you back by.
menus using the controller feels quite strange, The lack of Xbox Live is also quite the disap-
but not too hard to get used to. The Xbox 360 pointment, and we do wish to see it soon after
system will come with a media remote included the launch, if not at launch time itself. If the
for your convenience as well. launch collection is the same as those in the
international launches, there’s little to look
Little Things Matter forward to, but since many more titles have
We’d rather have skipped the little bells and been released since then, we might be in for a
whistles, but small though they are, they can very enticing list—we’ll keep you informed as it
hardly be ignored. The first to earn the favour of unfolds.
our lazy behinds is the fact that you can shut Today, being able to afford the 360 and not
down the console from the controller itself. After going ahead and buying it seems unthinkable,
a hard day’s gaming, the last thing you want to but that might change with the launch of the
waste your time doing is walking over to the box PS3. Even so, you won’t be sorry coughing up
and hitting the button—just shut it down from for this baby.
the comfort of your chair and doze off! nimish_chandiramani@thinkdigit.com
Memoirs Of Memory A look at the past (DDR) and insights into the present (DDR2): how RAM is
shedding the shackles of bandwidth, and more
W
ith AMD’s jump on the DDR2 band- width. The performance of any PC depends
wagon, DDR SDRAM will ultimately upon just five major devices—the CPU, the
find itself on the road to oblivion. Intel chipset/motherboard, the RAM, the graphics
made the transition to DDR2 a few years ago solution and the hard disk(s). It’s a known fact
with their 915/925 chipsets. With the end of that the hard drives are by far the most serious
the road for DDR memory clearly in sight, bottleneck as far as data transmission goes.
it’s time to take a look at it in greater However, the processor and graphics card
detail. While doing so, let’s take a on a PC are fed directly by the system
look at what’s replacing it! memory, and due to the speed limita-
tions that plague RAM (even today)
and latencies, another bottleneck
emerges.
With today’s gigahertz CPUs
and dual and quad cores,
number crunching is never
going to be an issue, and
Memory
The Role Of Latency
I/O Buffers One of the most important characteristics of
Data
Cell memory and a significant performance-affect-
Array ing factor), is latency. Latency can be quite
simply defined as wasted clock cycles. It occurs
since DRAM memory cells have to continually
refresh themselves. Latency, therefore, basi-
DDR 2 data flow diagram: Four tiers of multiplexing at work, I/O Buffer speed cally represents delay; it’s the time taken for
is also twice the DRAM frequency, unlike DDR RAM, which is synchronous the memory to get ready for a fetch or deliver
data transaction. There is also a certain
amount of unavoidable latency that occurs
understand. First we look at the core between the activation of a column or row, due
frequency/clock, which represents the actual to the time required to set up the addresses of
speed of the DRAM chips. In the case of DDR the same. Note that latency is an omnipresent
200 MHz memory, the core speed is 100 MHz; in factor; it can only be minimised, and never
the case of DDR 400 memory, it is 200 MHz. completely done away with.
Then we have the clock frequency, also Now latency is directly proportional to
called frequency of the I/O buffers. For DDR clock speeds, so when a MHz bump occurs, the
memory, the I/O buffer speed is synchronous latency figures also rise. Let’s compare a DDR
with the DRAM frequency. However, for DDR2 400 and a DDR2 400 MHz module. Typical
memory, the I/O buffer speed is twice that of latencies would be 2.5-3-3-6 for a DDR 400 MHz
the core. Therefore the I/O buffers need to be module, while a DDR2 400 MHz would only
supplied with twice the amount of data that manage 3-4-4-8, making it slower as far as data
the DDR memory buffers require, to avoid seri- accessibility goes. So DDR 2 scores bandwidth-
ous latency issues. This is exactly why the wise, but loses out latency-wise. A paradoxical
multiplexing level in the case of DDR 2 situation, with only one solution—bump up the
memory has increased to four, twice that of clock speeds further. And DDR2 has done
DDR. In the case of DDR memory at a core exactly that, delivering 667 MHz and 800 MHz,
speed of 200 MHz, your I/O buffer speed is also with 1066 MHz promised in the near future.
200 MHz, and the data speed becomes 400 With AMD 64’s efficient memory controller
MHz. In the case of DDR2 400 MHz memory, and Intel’s Conroe’s bumped up FSB speeds
the data frequency and the I/O buffer remain (1066 and 1333 MHz), this extra bandwidth will
identical, at 400 MHz and 200 MHz respec- go down real easy!
tively. What changes is the core speed. It’s
down to 100 MHz! Remember what we said What’s New... About DDR2?
about the relationship between core speeds In addition to the additional bandwidth DDR2
and I/O buffer speeds? Well, for a core speed of provides, and its superior technology (TSOP is
200 MHz, the I/O buffer frequency becomes inferior to the FBGA packaging), savings in
G
as well as dire oogle “grey goo”. You’ll find the defini- dumb, but a hive of them can be dangerously
tion, one of which is “Gray goo is a mass co-operative. This we naïvely attribute to
prospects of small, destructive, self-replicating “collective intelligence”. We are re-stressing
nanorobots.” But amongst other things, you’ll our point, but the concept is essential. And “It
find, in the results, “fear of runaway robots”; turns out that what makes sense in the biolog-
“the grey goo threat”; “worse than grey goo”; ical world often makes sense in the computa-
and yes, even “the end of the world may be tional world as well,” confirms Christian
nearer than you think.” Clearly, grey goo is not Jacob, leader of the Evolutionary and Swarm
a thing you’d like to be associated with. Design Research Group at the University of
This variety of goo, according to some, will Calgary, Canada.
be the way the world ends. We’ll have more to So what does all this have to do with
say about grey goo later; for now, we’re hoping computers? Not much as graphics cards go, but
that swarms of nanorobots will remain under it has a lot to do with the idea of swarm intel-
control and do our bidding—exploring plan- ligence (SI). If you like formal definitions, SI is
ets, repairing arteries, and other noble deeds. the property of a system whereby the collec-
So how did we get from ants to nanobots— tive behaviours of unsophisticated agents
robots so tiny they’re measured on the interacting locally with their environment
nanoscale? It’s scientific, as you’ll find out. cause coherent functional global patterns to
Let’s get back to the ant. emerge. In English, SI is the idea that a large
Having no commander, the ant yet gathers number of relatively stupid things can
its food. This is a marvel of nature: does an ant together exhibit useful, intelligent behaviour.
even have a brain? Even if it does, it doesn’t This is a story about how the group behav-
go a long way in helping the ant gather its iour of insects and other fauna led scientists
food. What helps the ant more is the fact that to dream of expansive swarms of tiny robots
it is part of a larger entity called the hive. The doing useful work.
Illustration pravin warhokar
We, Robots
Intelligence emerging from group activities is fine,
but what about the individuals themselves? Leav-
ing behind ants and/or bots for the moment, let’s
just call them “agents.” So each agent’s properties
sheet would read something like the following. A collection of s-bots actually
Alignment: Each agent has the ability to align crossed a ridge in this fashion!
itself with the others: just find all the agents in
the vicinity and average where they’re headed.
Then align yourself in that direction. Except for do something useful. And various uses for robotic
the first agent, who is headed god knows where, swarms have been envisaged, including terrestrial,
every other agent gets aligned because its neigh- outer-space and submarine exploration.
bour is aligned because its neighbour... SWARM-BOTS was a project funded by the
Cohesion: An agent can approach, and form a Future and Emerging Technologies programme of
group with, nearby agents. Find some of your the European Community. Its focus was “self-
neighbours, figure their “average” location, then organising, self-assembling, biologically-inspired
move to that location. robots.” The project calls the swarm itself a
Obstacle avoidance: An obvious requisite. “swarm-bot,” which is an aggregate of s-bots. See
Have you ever seen an ant bump into a wall, then illustration above: the little critters can self-assem-
go back, and bump into the same wall again? Well, ble by connecting and disconnecting from each
it does seem like ants have an inbuilt obstacle- other using their claw-like grippers! The SWARM-
avoidance algorithm, and any agent participating BOTS project hoped to create groups that could
in a swarm needs one. “explore, navigate and transport heavy objects on
Separation: The ability to maintain a distance rough terrains in situations in which a single s-bot
from nearby agents. This prevents crowding, would have problems to achieve the task alone.”
which allows the agents to scout a wider area. Each s-bot itself has limited computational
That’s about behaviour intra-swarm. As for power, but apart from that, the spec-sheet of the
interactions with the environment, if we’re talk- s-bots is impressive. Each has “proximity sensors,
ing about a little robot, it would need equipment light sensors, accelerometers, humidity sensors,
that enables it to take in things from the environ- sound sensors, an omni-directional colour camera,
ment—such as solar cells for power, sensors of vari- force sensors...” The swarm-bot as a whole was
ous kinds, and more—and it needs to be built such designed to reconfigure itself as and when needed:
that it can contribute to the environment: it needs for example, falling into single file to go through
grippers, wheels, and so forth. a narrow passage. The project mandated that the
swarm-bot aggregate should form as a result of the
Born To Bond collective intelligence of the s-bots, rather than
Summing up what we’ve said thus far: each robot hard-coded rules.
needs to have some means and characteristics by Potential applications for the s-bots include
which it can act as part of a swarm. Intelligence space exploration, rescue searches, and underwa-
and useful behaviour can emerge from the swarm, ter exploration. The project ended in March of last
and what kind of behaviour emerges depends on year; what came of it? Did the s-bots form swarms
the properties of each member. The idea is to and explore Mars? Of course they didn’t, because
design little bots such that a swarm of them can they were never sent there. One of the things that
Navigate to a location
using a picture of it? T he marriage of GPS units and digicams is a
nice innovation that finds use in the
Navman iCN 750—a godsend to the absent-
location within their range, using the 4-inch
high-visibility LCD screen. These maps are 3D,
which can be tilted and zoomed to 2D as well.
That, and more, is
possible with the minded geek! A 1.3 Megapixel camera allows With Navpix, a service offered by Navman,
coolest GPS naviga- you to take geo-tagged photos: they hold one can even download geo-tagged images
tion unit yet information about the latitude and longitude from an online album and use them to
of where the photo was shot. And using such navigate to where the image was shot. If you
a photo, the unit can guide you to that take a wrong turn, you are told how to correct
location at a later date! your course; there is voice instruction as well.
The brain of the iCN750's is the SIRF Star III Too much guidance may spoil the fun of
chipset, perhaps the most advanced the trip, but
commercial chipset for GPS triangulation right then, for a
now. With good holding ability under low geek, too
signal strengths, the chances of losing tracking many features
under dense trees or high-rises are reduced. can only be a
This smart circuitry is ably supported by a 4 GB good thing!
hard disk, which can be used to store maps as
well as images shot from the camera. The maps
can be used to get route guidance to any
Imaging Sivalal S
Digital
Enhance
W popular
ith powerful operating systems running and Windows Mobile
current phones, you can do more with In today’s connected workspace, you need
them. We take a brief tour of what’s the world at your fingertips. WorldMate 2005 Mobile
available for the most popular mobile operating Professional offers a comprehensive range of fea- operating
systems—Symbian, Palm OS and Windows Mobile. tures for exactly that, delivering key data to trav- systems
elling business people and telecommuters.
Read MS Office Documents On The Go The product can keep a wireless tab on its home
Documents to Go for Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile Web site to offer up-to-date information on items
With wireless e-mail available on your mobile ranging from the weather to currency exchange
device either via GPRS or via local connectivity to rates. For those of us who travel frequently, World-
a central computer, you will run across attach- Mate has comprehensive and reliable flight sched-
ments mailed from office or friends. If your work ules for over 800 routes. Daily and weekly schedules
demands it, you might need to read and evaluate are provided for any selected route. A dynamic con-
attached documents while on the go. The road nection engine provides the 50 fastest connections
warrior might need to not only read office doc- to your destination. Its five-day weather forecasts
uments, but also edit them. cover over 38,000 locations worldwide, and are
Most Palm OS devices ship with a version of updated four times a day. WorldMate also has a
Documents to Go, but the application is also world clock that features full time-zone coverage
available for Symbian and Windows Mobile. It and automatic daylight savings time calculations.
supports native Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF Other features include a satellite image cov-
and TXT files, as well as native JPEG and BMP ering major landmasses and even offering precip-
graphics. You can even use files saved to expan-
sion cards or sent as e-mail attachments directly
on your device without synchronisation. It is
important to note that the program allows for
both viewing and editing of this range of files.
Moreover, the editing done is never destructive,
and is compatible with all major
Microsoft Office formats.
While Windows Mobile devices
bundle native versions of Word and
Excel, the functionality offered by
Documents to Go far exceeds that
of those versions. The Premium ver-
sion of the software, as an example,
supports password-protected files,
charting, pictures, synchronisation
of e-mails with attachments, and
even spell checking.
You can download evaluation
or upgrade versions (if your device
already ships with the product)
from the DataViz Web site:
www.dataviz.com.
Fatter Platters
Desktop hard disks are approaching terabyte territory. Does larger equate to better?
SATA or IDE? What brand? Need answers? Read on!
dictate terms to hard disk manufacturers, not the
Michael Browne other way around. We wanted speed, we needed
storage, and craved reliability, didn’t we? Well,
Q
uick: what’s the slowest device in how does that age-old adage go—“be careful what
your system? Chances are you’d say you ask fo r”?
“my CPU,” or “my DVD-ROM.” If we
were to enquire as to the most impor- Features
tant device in your PC, chances are We received a lot of Serial ATA drives for this test,
you’d say it’s the CPU. all except one of these were SATA 2 compliant. We
Your hard disk is by far the slowest of all your also received a few Parallel ATA drives. Consider
PC components and yet perhaps the most impor- ing the price difference between them, if your
tant device inside your PC. Simple reason: your motherboard supports Serial ATA, simply go for it.
data resides on your hard drive. It’s irreplaceable. The SATA drives from Seagate, Samsung and
Warranties mean nothing: what’s worth more—a Western Digital had pins that could be jumpered
new, empty hard disk, or all the data you’d to force them to operate in SATA 1 mode (150
hoarded and all the programs you’d installed? MBps). This is useful in case your Serial ATA
Now, not only are hard disks faster and bigger— controller is SATA 1; operating without the
much bigger—than they were a couple of years ago, jumper could cause compatibility issues. The WD
prices have fallen so drastically, gigabytes almost drives came with SATA 2 support; no jumpers. The
cost peanuts. So what do you do with all that stor- Hitachi series deserves special mention for the
age? Well, with our games going multi-gigabyte hassle involved with enabling SATA 2 mode.
and entire movies on our disks, it seems no They’re capable of 300 MBps operation, but come
amount of storage space will ever satiate us. with 150 MBps mode enabled.
Remember it’s us, the users, and Enabling SATA 2
our usage patterns that
How We Tested
58 DIGIT AUGUST2006
Digital Tools l Internal Hard Drive
scored low here, with the PATA 40 GB
being the only sub-50 MBps drive. HD Tach Performance
The 32 MB tests saw the same four-
some taking the top four spots. The 44.4
HDS728080PLAT20 49
Seagate Barracuda 750 GB showed an WD800BB
46.9
51.9
inexplicable drop in the Average Write 42.5
part of the 8 MB tests, showing that SP0411N 49.4
47.5
maybe—just maybe—a drive so large isn’t ST3250824AS 57.1
as suitable for writing lots of relatively 54.6
SP2504C 61.2
smaller files. WD2500KS
46.5
55.4
CPU utilisation isn’t a very signifi- 45.4
ST3400832AS 58.8
cant figure today, simply because 4 and 5 53.3
percent of CPU resources is a drop of WD4000KS 64
46.3
water in a rainstorm for today’s multi- HDS725050KLA360 51.3
gigahertz and dual core processors. 34.5
ST3500641AS 51.1
53.1
WD5000KS 62.4
SiSoft Sandra 2007 47.5
SiSoft Sandra’s latest version gives some ST3750640AS 67
nicely detailed scores for individual hard
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70
drives. All SiSoft’s scores, except the
access time, are measured in megabytes Read Write
8 MB Average read/write test (MBps)
per second.
SiSoft Sandra’s Drive Index is an aver-
age of a drive’s scores throughout the gamut of tial or random) is more suitable for storing data
tests it runs, and the highest scorers were once files such as MP3s and AVIs, that is, non-instal-
again from the Seagate and Western Digital lable files. This is because these types of files are
stables (in that order)—namely the 750 GB 7200.10 written only once, but may be read several times.
Seagate and the WD4000KS. In the 250 GB and AUGUST 2006
You listen to your music daily, but don’t neces-
below category we saw the Samsung sarily keep copying it to different locations on
SP2504C lead yet again. your drive partitions, do you?
Besides the drive index, SiSoft A drive that excels at writing operations (to
Sandra also gives figures for Read and find drives suitable for each type of operation, check our
Write operations. These are divided benchmarks in the table) is more suitable to use for
into sequential and random figures. installing Windows and other program files. This
Sequential figures measure the drive’s abil- is because the OS and programs are constantly
ity to read and write data sequentially, that is, performing write operations in their respective
to adjacent areas of the disk. This test largely folders. Such drives are also very suitable for creat-
emulates the performance one can expect from a ing swap files (which are some of the most write-
drive while working with large files. Sequential Hitachi 250 GB intensive areas of your entire disk).
operations are usually done much quicker, and HDT722525DLAT80 The Internal File Transfer involves an intra-
the scores will reflect this. drive transfer, where we copy our test files from
The Random Read and Write scores indicate one partition to another within the same drive.
how well a drive scores when working with scat- Very suitable to test the performance of a hard
tered data, such as small or discontinuous files. In drive under stress, simply because data is being
these tests the 2 heavyweights from Western Digi- read and written simultaneously on the same
tal (the WD4000KS and the WD5000KS), along- drive, without the interface between drives play-
with with the 750 GB Barracuda posted some of ing any significant part. The performance of a hard
the hightest read scores we’ve come across. In the disk is the sum total of its drive mechanics (includ-
smaller drive group, the Samsung SP2504C once ing the spindle speed and platter areal density)
again came out on top. and I/O buffer. The drive is actually stressed as it
Among the PATA drives, yet another Samsung has to perform a read and write operation simul-
drive (for the wrong reasons this time), the 40 GB taneously, not to mention that the buffer is also
SP0411N came in last, with the WD1200BB joining being doubly stressed.
it in the under-50 scores for the Drive Index. This The Assorted Internal Read Test was
is understandable, since the Parallel ATA interface completely dominated by two drives, the Seagate
isn’t (these days) exactly known for speed. The 500 7200.10 750 GB behemoth, and the slightly
GB and 250 GB Hitachi drives did quite well. AUGUST 2006 smaller (and slower by a hairsbreadth) WD5000KS
500 GB. The only other drive that came anywhere
Real-World Tests close (read that as a distant third) was the
We were more interested in the scores the hard Samsung SP2504C. But this drive was in the
drives would put up in the real-world tests, smaller capacity group. In all honesty, we
because these represent actual performance were quite disappointed with the Hitachi
through data transfers both through the bus and Deskstar drives, particularly the 7K and
through the internal drive buffer. T7K series, although no slowcoaches
The file read and file write tests check the I/O they be; a tad more performance we were
performance of a hard drive, as well as its ability hoping to see (if you’ll pardon the horrible
to properly utilise the bandwidth that the bus rhyme!). Among the PATA drives, the WD800BB
(whether SATA or PATA) provides. A drive that Samsung 250 GB from Western Digital stood out: it churned out
performs better at reading data (whether sequen- SP2504C some truly stellar scores, definitely on par with
Decent Decent Performed well Good when Low CPU Fastest of the PATA
performance performance in single file-copy working with utilisation, drives, good for
with larger files, for its price tests large files speedy performer graphic applications
slim design Limited storage Cheaper options 2 MB buffer Lack of 8 MB Costly
Limited storage available in buffer
80 GB segment
60 DIGIT AUGUST2006
AUGUST 2006
Serial ATA Hard Drives (Up to 250 GB)
Hitachi Deskstar Samsung Samsung Western Digital Samsung Western Digital Samsung Western Digital
HDS725050KLAT80 HD040GJ HD080HJ WD800BD HD 120IJ WD1200JS HD160JJ WD1600JS
10.61 4.99 5.48 5.48 5.97 5.97 6.46 6.46
465.76 37.27 74.53 74.53 111.79 111.79 149.05 149.05
Parallel ATA Serial ATA 2 Serial ATA 2 Serial ATA 2 Serial ATA 2 Serial ATA 2 Serial ATA 2 Serial ATA 2
500 40 80 80 120 120 160 160
7200 7200 7200 7200 7200 7200 7200 7200
8 8 8 2 8 8 8 8
✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔
✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔
45.41 44.73 44.02 39.81 44.37 43.13 44.02 45.53
54 53 51 51 52 51 51 52
62 61 58 58 59 58 58 61
45 42 40 41 41 40 40 39
62 62 59 58 61 58 58 61
36 42 40 40 41 39 40 41
6 8 8 8 8 8 8 9
The largest Steady Very good value Scored well in Excellent Steady High performance Extremely low
PATA drive performer, for money synthetic test pricing, good performer, low in intra-drive CPU utilisation
available Large buffer 40 GB sibling Costly for an 80 performence CPU utilisation transfer tests, Expensive
Very expensive Low storage performs better GB drive None in Too costly for a excellent pricing
space paticular 120 GB drive None
Reasonable Fast access time Superb all round Excellent for None
performance for single large performance, working with Mediocre
Costlyest of the files excellent pricing multiple files, performance
160 GB drives High CPU None good overall
utilisation performance
None
62 DIGIT AUGUST2006
AUGUST 2006 AUGUST 2006
Serial ATA Hard Drives ( Above 250 GB)
Western Digital Seagate Western Digital Hitachi Deskstar Seagate Western Digital Seagate
WD2500KS ST3400832AS WD4000KS HDS725050KLA360 ST3500641AS WD5000KS ST3750640AS
7.56 9.39 9.39 8.36 10.61 10.61 13.67
232.88 372.61 372.61 465.76 465.76 465.76 698.63
Serial ATA 2 Serial ATA 1 Serial ATA 2 Serial ATA 2 Serial ATA 2 Serial ATA 2 Serial ATA 2
250 400 400 500 500 500 750
7200 7200 7200 7200 7200 7200 7200
16 8 16 16 16 16 16
✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✖/✖ ✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔
✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔ ✔/✔
46.63 47.88 50.68 48.10 46.13 47.26 53.17
55 58 62 55 51 57 66
62 66 71 62 59 70 76
43 46 49 44 41 33 51
62 66 76 62 55 70 75
45 42 70 47 38 47 49
7 6 6 6 8 16 7
Very low CPU Good performer in Blazing Fair performance Fastest in game High performance Enormous
utilisation, good game load test performance in Extremely costly load test through all the storage, blazingly
performance in Slightly expensive SiSoft bench mark for a 500 GB Highly priced tests, reasonably fast
assorted file write None Drive priced for 500 GB Expensive
test None
None
64 DIGIT AUGUST2006
Digital Tools l Internal Hard Drive
RAID
40
66
implementing RAID and the type of RAID adopted dictates the relative
merits and demerits. Motherboards today come with integrated SATA 4 75
RAID controllers, and feature multiple versions of RAID. 131
We used one of our fastest drives, the 750 GB Seagate Barracuda, 51
and for the RAID array, we used two Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 series 3
69
400 GB drives to show you the performance differences. Although
RAID has many avatars, most home users need to know about only 2 75
130
three of them.
66
1
RAID 0 106
Also called Striping, this setup is for the speed fanatic. Striping
doesn’t have any sort of fault tolerance—a failure in any one of 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140
the striped drives will cause data loss. That said, drives of today Seagate 750 GB RAID ARRAY (Seagate 400 GBx2)
are much less prone to crashes than their predecessors, and
for pure speed, RAID 0 rules! Gamers and hardcore enthusiasts
swear by their RAID 0 arrays. RAID 0+1
RAID 0 needs at least two drives: data is broken down into A combination of striping and mirroring, this features two
blocks, and each block of data is written alternately to a or more clusters of RAID 0 arrays collectively configured as
separate hard drive. The load is, therefore, spread across a a mirrored array. RAID 0+1 requires a minimum of four
number of channels and drives. Another advantage of RAID 0 hard drives to implement. Since this mode contains
is that no parity calculation is involved, since there is no multiple striped segments, the I/O performance is
duplicating of data anywhere—so CPU overhead is minimised. blistering, while the presence of mirroring adds the much-
RAID 0 is highly recommended for gamers, 2D and 3D needed parity to the mix. RAID 0+1 isn’t without it’s
professionals, and anyone who wants greater read/write demerits: it’s very costly to implement, and besides, the
performance from his storage subsystem. failure of a single drive will in essence create a single,
glorified RAID 0 array, and thereby defeat the purpose of
RAID 1 parity completely.
Also called “Mirroring,” RAID 1 offers data security via fault Although implementing RAID seems like a costly affair,
tolerance. It needs a minimum of two drives to implement: there are many users who may have a number of hard disks
during a write operation in RAID 1, the same data is written to installed in their PCs, or even a couple of older hard disks
each of the drives simultaneously, so each drive contains a lying around. With the advancements in today’s onboard
mirror of the data on the other drives. A read operation can be RAID controllers, it’s no longer necessary to have drives of
performed from any of these drives, so if one crashes, data can the same capacity, although “RAIDing” unequal-sized drives
be accessed from the other. means you will lose the extra space the larger drive offers.
The only disadvantage is that I/O performance is slower Those with two or more similar-sized hard disks available
than with a single drive, and the parity computations—and are perfect candidates for experimenting with RAIDing.
therefore the CPU overheads—are much higher than with a Remember, though: make a backup of all your essential
single drive or even with striping. RAID 1 is very useful for data, as setting up a RAID array will destroy any data
users for whom data integrity means everything. present on all the disks being used.
own for two reasons—first, it’s much larger than bank balance, go with our Silver winner—the
the other drives, and second, it uses the smaller Hitachi 250 GB, which, at Rs 5,700,
Perpendicular Recording technology. So we are offers you the best of both worlds.
not giving it the winners title, even though the
scores indicate otherwise. Our Conclusion
Western Digital gets all the accolades in this We tested 26 hard drives this time round. Seven
category: the WD4000KS (400 GB) receives the of these were the older PATA drives. With the
Digit Best Buy Gold, and the WD5000KS (500 GB), majority of drives going SATA, it’s the end of the
the Digit Best Buy Silver. road for PATA. All motherboards sold these days
sport SATA interfaces, and with the possibility of
Parallel ATA AUGUST 2006 CD/DVD drives going SATA, this seems fitting.
In case it’s got to be PATA for you, look no Much like how SATA debuted some years
further than the Hitachi siblings, the ago, Perpendicular Recording makes its way
Deskstar HDT722525DLAT80 and the into the drive market, with the promise of
Deskstar HDS725050KLAT80 (250 GB larger density drives, equating to greater stor-
and 500 GB respectively). Bear in mind age that you won’t pay a premium for.
that the 500 GB Hitachi—our Gold award With Serial ATA promising as much as 600
winner—maybe the best of the PATA drives, MBps in the near future, the storage horizons
performance-wise, it is expensive at Rs 20,000. seem promising indeed. As there is much good
Go for it only if you simply must have the that has come before us, let there be more of
largest and fastest PATA drive out there. For Western Digital 500 GB the same!
just as much bang without a steep drop in your WD5000KS michael_browne@thinkdigit.com
Boxes For
Your Bytes
Opening up a PC is not child's play
for everyone. External hard drives
give you the convenience and ease
of moving data—just plug ’n’ play!
Jayesh Limaye
H
ard drives were initially manufac-
tured exclusively for research and
development institutes and main-
frames. Now they are, of course,
mass-produced for our computers,
and today, hard drives come under the
consumer electronics segment. According to
CNET, hard drive shipments for consumer elec-
tronics worldwide will grow by about 35 per
cent this year—a huge increase from last year.
The overall hard drive market is projected to
increase by 18 per cent by the end of this year.
A few months ago, we reviewed DVD-Writ-
ers, which are the most popular data backup
devices. But DVDs are limited in terms of capac-
ity, so backing up a large hard disk using these
is extremely difficult. Now, you could, of
course, use another hard disk to back up your
data, but then, what if you don’t have free bays
in your cabinet? What if you need to synchro-
nise data between home and office?
Enter portable hard drives. These devices
today have capacities on par with those of their
internal counterparts. External hard drives
allow you to exchange games, movies, music
and other stuff with friends. Besides, not every-
one is comfortable with opening up the PC cabi-
net and connecting an internal hard drive to
swap data. An external drive spells convenience.
As hard drives celebrate their 50th birthday,
we bring you a shootout of external hard drives
available in the Indian market. We received a
total of 18 external drives from Freecom,
Iomega, LaCie, Qrisma, Seagate, Transcend and
Western Digital. We divided these into three
categories: portable hard drives, desktop
replacement / backup drives, and microdrive-
based hard drives.
The first segment—Portable hard drives—
comprises the drives with a capacity of 120 GB
or less. Drives with more features, and larger
than 120 GB, comprised the second segment—
Desktop replacement / backup drives. And three very
compact drives—something like larger versions
Illustration Pravin Warhokar
Digital Tools l External Hard Drive Test
of USB sticks—fell in the third category, Micro- imaging software, which has simple Wizards
drive-based hard drives. that first-time users will find easy to use—also
What’s to be tested in an external hard came bundled with these drives. The LaCie
drive? After all, they’re just boxes for your data, drives came with 1-Click, another
right? Well, they can be differentiated accord- good backup software. The
ing to their targeted consumer segment. There WD Passport box was
are large differences, such as their interface, marked “WD Sync soft-
whether there are dedicated buttons to back ware included”, but
up data, how sleek they are, the software they there was no CD
come bundled with, as well as their speeds and inside; we later
prices—amongst other variables. found that the
So we tested them, and here’s what we found. software was on
the drive. If you
PORTABLE HARD DRIVES purchase the WD Pass-
The drives in this category target the con- port, back up the software
sumer who does not need to use the drive on before you start using the drive—it is
a regular basis, such as a home user who only a file synchronisation software. Freecom
needs to back up data occasionally. Such a The Iomega came with FolderShare, a FHD-XS
user might also find an external disk useful synchronisation software that allows you to
when he wishes to swap music and movies synchronise your data over the Internet! You’d
with friends and doesn’t want to open—or want to use this feature to, say, synchronise
doesn’t feel like opening—his cabinet. data on a daily basis between your office and
Naturally, these drives do not include high- home computers.
end features such as FireWire ports. The StoreJet suite software bundled with
A bulk of the drives we received—10 drives the Transcend drives consists of several utili-
out of the 18—come under this segment. Of ties. The StoreJet PC Lock software can be used
these, two were from Freecom, one from to securely lock your OS: it gets locked when
Iomega, three from LaCie, one from Seagate, the drive is unplugged, and you unlock your
two from Transcend, and one from Western OS when you plug the drive back in. Security
Digital (WD). HDD is an Explorer-like file manager that
stores files on these drives by compressing and
Features encrypting them. Mobile Internet Explorer,
Capacities And RPM Mobile Outlook Express and Mobile Address
Capacities range from a modest 30 GB to a good Book let you get online from any computer
120 GB. The LaCie Skwarim is 30 GB, which is using your customisations such as bookmarks,
internally a Hitachi HTC42603 Travelstar C4K60 e-mail accounts, etc., and all these can be
drive. There were two 120 GB hard drives—the stored on the drives. The applications—Mobile
LaCie Rugged RUG U2 and the WD Passport. Internet Explorer and so on—appear on
The rotational speeds, or rpm, of the drives the Device Desktop panel, which is
is 4200 rpm for Freecom FHD-XS, Freecom FHD- something like a toolbar. This lets you carry
2 PRO, LaCie Skwarim 30 GB and Transcend your Desktop anywhere.
StoreJet 40 GB; 5400 rpm for the Iomega 80 GB,
LaCie Rugged RUG U2, LaCie Design by F. A. Cables And Accessories
Porsche 40 GB, Seagate 40 GB, Transcend Store- All the drives came with regular USB cables,
Jet 80 GB, and the Western Digital Passport 120 except those that had retractable ones—the
GB. The higher the rpm, the higher the data Freecom FHD-XS and the LaCie Skwarim. The
tread and write speeds, at least theoretically. retractable cables sit inside the drive case, and
can be pulled out when the drive needs to be
Interfaces connected. The above two drives’ extension
The interface is USB 2.0 with all these drives. cables are required because the length of
All computers these days come with mother- the retractable cable is not more than an
boards with USB 2.0 ports, which support a inch, and it can be difficult to connect them
peak data throughput of 480 Mbps—fast to a PC.
enough to back up your data: for example, The Freecom FHD-2 PRO, LaCie Rugged
theoretically, a 700 MB DivX movie can be RUG U2, LaCie Design by F. A.
transferred in around 12 seconds, though in Porsche 40 GB, and the Tran-
reality the figures are different. These drives scend StoreJet 2.5 80 GB
are backwards-compatible with USB 1.1, come with a separate power
which means you can use them with older cable that connects to an
computers. Of course, data transfer will be additional USB port:
much slower. normally, these USB drives
draw power from the USB
Bundled Software data cable, that is, a single
All the drives came bundled with some kind of port. But in some systems, the
backup or data synchronisation software. The power that the port can supply is
Freecom drives came with the Personal Media limited, and the power required to run
Suite, which synchronises your data at the the hard drive may be insufficient. A separate
press of a button on the drive. Acronis True power connection is therefore required. The
Image—a good and fast data backup and drive Seagate 40 GB drive had a cable with two USB
How We Tested
Test Machine Configuration
1. CPU Utilisation
Our test machine consisted of an Intel Pentium 4 processor running
This benchmark determines the CPU load of the storage device.
at 3.6 GHz on an Intel 925XCV motherboard with 1 GB of Micron
Lower CPU utilisation is better. High CPU utilisation (above 15 per
DDR2 533 MHz RAM and a Seagate Barracuda 120 GB SATA hard
cent) generally indicates that a poor controller is being used, that
drive. A fresh installation of Windows XP with SP2 was done and the
DMA needs to be enabled, or that a driver update is required.
latest versions of the hardware drivers were installed along with
DirectX 9.0c.
2. Random Access Time benchmark
This benchmark determines the random access speed of the device.
Test Procedure
Random access is the average time it takes to retrieve data from a
The performance tests consisted of synthetic tests using
randomly-located sector on the device. Lower random access speeds
benchmarking software and real-world tests where application
mean better application and database performance. Random access
performance and file transfer speeds were tested.
times can also give an insight into the efficiency of the interface a
The synthetic tests were conducted using HD Tach RW 3.0.1.0
device is attached to.
and SiSoft Sandra 2007 Home, which are popular benchmarking
software for storage devices. Their results can be compared with
3. Sequential Read and 4. Sequential Write
benchmarks conducted anywhere with similar versions of these
The maximum sustained speed (lowest speed on the device) is an
software.
important metric for real-time sequential access applications. The
maximum speed may be important to a power user who would like
Features
to partition the drive into a high-speed partition and a low-speed
For features, we noted various aspects of the drives such as the
partition. These were noted and logged.
capacity, dimensions, weight, bundled software, interface type,
cables and accessories, and ruggedness.
Synthetic Test - SiSoft
Sandra 2007 Engineer
Performance
A 20 GB FAT32 partition
Synthetic Test—HD Tach
was created where
RW 3.0.1.0
possible, with the
The fresh hard drive to be
compression turned off, on
tested was connected to
the test hard drive. A
the test machine and was
second partition was
not formatted; it was
created utilising the
allowed to remain raw. HD
remaining capacity. SiSoft
Tach RW 3.0.1.0 was then
Sandra 2007 Engineer was
run and used to evaluate
launched and the File
the hard drive.
System benchmark module was run. The 20 GB partition we created
The scores we noted
was benchmarked using this module. The Sequential Read, Random
were as follows:
Carry Pouch ✖ ✖ ✖ ✖ ✖ ✔
Dimensions (W x D x H) (mm) 85 x 85 x 12 127 x 79 x 15 128 x 74 x 12 145 x 90 x 25 85 x 85 x 13 129 x 76 x 17
Weight (kg) 0.11 0.18 0.16 0.25 0.10 0.18
Cables and Accessories Provided USB extension cable USB power cable, USB USB data cable USB power cable, USB extension cable USB power cable, USB
data cable USB data cable data cable
Miscellaneous Backup button, Backup button USB On/Off switch, Power connector Retractable USB con- Power connector
Retractable USB con- power connector nector
nector
Ruggedness (So5) 4.25 4.25 3.75 4.5 4.5 4
Performance (Out of 40) * 14.22 27.58 26.19 17.25 20.77 26.26
Synthetic Tests
HD Tach RW
CPU Utilisation (%) 3 8 7 4 4 6
Random Access (ms) 20.7 18.9 18.9 17.9 20.8 20.9
Average Read (MB/s) 13.6 24.7 23.6 30.3 19.5 27.1
Average Write (MB/s) 12.9 25.3 22.1 3.9 19.5 25.3
SiSoft Sandra 2007 Engineer
Drive Index (MB/s) 13 25 24 14 20 27
Sequential Read (MB/s) 13 28 27 17 22 31
Random Read (MB/s) 11 21 20 14 17 23
Sequential Write (MB/s) 13 26 25 6.7 22 26
Random Write (MB/s) 13 19 19 9 17 22
Access Time (ms) 14 11 12 12 13 11
Real-World Tests
File Transfer Assorted 1 GB File 93 65 59 110 61 56
To Drive (seconds)
File Transfer Assorted 1 GB File 83 48 47 56 50 44
From Drive (seconds)
File Transfer Assorted 1 GB File 390 89 97 182 302 148
Within Drive (seconds)
File Transfer 1 GB Single File 86 48 48 173 49 40
To Drive (seconds)
File Transfer 1 GB Single File 94 38 49 33 46 33
From Drive (seconds)
File Transfer 1 GB Single File 340 83 98 186 179 186
Within Drive (seconds)
Multitasking Test
Simultaneous 1 GB Assorted Files 365 98 102 184 303 165
To and Fro (seconds)
Warranty (Years) 1 1 1 1 1 1
Price Per MB (Rs) 0.40 0.17 0.12 0.14 0.37 0.13
Price Index (Out of 20) 5.76 5.43 9.55 5.51 8.41 18.10
Price (Rs) 16,500 17,500 9,950 17,250 11,300 5,250
Final Score (Out of 100) 44.64 58.09 58.04 45.90 53.17 67.91
Good bundled Good performance, Good Rugged build Good build quality Inexpensive, good
software, rugged software, rugged performance, quality and overall performance
build quality build sleek Very expensive performance None in particular
Slow performance, Very expensive Average build Expensive
expensive quality
* Higher is better for scores in MBps, while lower is better for scores in millisecons and seconds.
Very good
Good performance, performance and Good performance, Inexpensive; good Good performance, Sleek credit
rugged build price sofware, and build software sofware, and build card-like design
Very expensive No FireWire None in particular A little slow Expensive Expensive
interface
Higher is better for scores in MB/s, while lower is better for scores in milliseconds and seconds.
DNC: Did not complete test.
Other Features
The LaCie Carte Orange drive is credit card-
shaped. It is quite rugged, as is the case with all
the LaCie drives we received. Orange in colour
and with a retractable USB connector, this one
would surely be a hit with the ladies.
Very small form factor Inexpensive; good The Qrisma has a small form factor, and it’s
Extremely slow performance just a bit larger than the LaCie. The body is of
Average build black plastic, but it doesn’t seem strong at all.
quality The retractable USB connector pops out at the
flick of a button at the front of the drive, but
we found doing this a bit tricky—the button is
quite hard to press.
The Seagate 5.0 GB has a completely differ- taking 460 seconds. The LaCie and Seagate
ent design. It is doughnut-shaped, except for drives were faster, taking 287 and 299 seconds
the hole, of course. The retractable USB cable respectively. While copying the assorted files
is wound round the circumference, and the from the drive, the Qrisma was slower than the
mechanism is excellent. A blue LED indicates other two, but not by a large margin.
drive activity. When we transferred the 1 GB sequential
Since these drives are meant to be carried file to the drives (this tests the write perform-
around often, they ought to be light. All the ance of a drive), the Qrisma was again the
drives are, indeed, small enough to easily fit in slowest, taking 229 seconds, while the
a pocket, and weigh very little, too. The Seagate LaCie and Seagate got the job done in 187
5.0 GB, which is quite old, and which was also and 169 seconds respectively. While copying
featured in our external hard the file from the drive, the picture was
drive shootout of last year, completely different: the Qrisma was the
was considered light- fastest at 120 seconds, while the Seagate
weight back then—it took 128. The slowest here was the LaCie
AUGUST 2006 weighs just 63 at 169 seconds.
grams. But this We then performed the internal-transfer
time round, test on the drives. The Qrisma crawled, taking
this was an impossible-sounding 2682 seconds for the
the heaviest assorted file and 2554 for the sequential file
of the drives copy. The LaCie and the Seagate took 539 and
in this cate- 508 seconds respectively in the assorted file
gory! The LaCie copy, and took 512 and 603 seconds respectively
weighs 60 grams, and in the sequential file copy test.
the Qrisma 6 GB is the light- The last test we conducted was the 1 GB
est of them all, tipping the scales assorted data transfer to and from the drive
at just 30 grams! simultaneously, which, as we’ve mentioned
earlier, stresses the drive mechanics to the
LaCie Performance: Synthetic Tests unmost. Here, too, the Qrisma lagged behind
Carte Orange HD Tach RW by miles, taking 3024 seconds to copy the files,
The CPU utilisation of the drives in this cate- whereas the LaCie took 973 seconds and the
gory was very low—practically insignificant. As Seagate took 696.
Random Access time goes, the Qrisma was the The Qrisma is without a doubt the slowest
slowest, scoring 51.4 seconds, while the of the three drives in this category. But if you
Seagate scored 26.1 seconds. want a lightweight drive that’s easy to carry
The Average Read and Write speeds of the around, and can put up with slow transfers,
LaCie and the Seagate drives were almost iden- it’s the drive for you.
tical. The LaCie exhibited peculiar behaviour:
while it scored the highest in the Average Read Our Conclusion
test with 7.4 MBps, it scored the lowest in the As in the earlier two categories, price was
Average Write test with 3.3 MBps. taken into consideration in order to decide the
winners. The Seagate 5.0 GB drive has the best
SiSoft Sandra 2007 Engineer cost per MB at 94 paise. The drive also
The Qrisma drive failed to complete the SiSoft performed better than the other two, and was
Sandra test, and we repeated the test several therefore adjudged the winner of the Digit
times, but with the same result. We therefore Best Buy Gold award.
had to leave it out of this test. The Seagate The LaCie Carte Orange with its better
edged a little ahead of the LaCie drive in all the features, rugged design and good performance
disk read and write tests. The LaCie was better was declared the winner of the Digit Best Buy
by a tiny margin in the access timings. Silver award.
Here Comes
AMD’s Nemesis!
It’s the latest, but is it the best? Will Core 2 really
wipe away the bitter taste Netburst left behind?
We dug for the truth, sorted through the hype,
and tested Intel’s Conroe
W
ith Intel’s Core 2 Duo terms, it’s Top Of The Line! The were termed “mini nuclear reac-
having been officially Intel 975XBX is, of course, some- tors” for the amount of power
released, it’s time to put what a known identity: the board they consumed, while AMD 64s
all the rumours floating around has been around for some and the X2 dual-cores were a run-
to rest—rumours of how Core 2 months now. away success in 90 per cent of the
Duo a.k.a. Conroe, leaves even benchmarks we used.
AM2 processors chewing the dust, Combination, Innovation, Conroe represents not just a
while consuming less power. Redefinition change in architecture but a
More for less? We’re a sceptical lot Intel had some serious thermal redesign from scratch. The
at Digit, and are not given to issues with their Netburst archi- Conroe incorporates the best ele-
believing rumours concerning tecture, and this pervaded right ments of the Netburst architec-
anything in the PC realm until we through their dual-core series as ture, and combines the winning
get down and dirty with it our- well. AMD was relatively well-off: features of Intel’s Pentium M and
selves. Seeing is, after all, believ-
ing; and we just had to see this! FARCRY
Having just gotten our greedy
paws on (and off) the AM2 5000+,
we were somewhat dissatisfied. 94.8
1024X768
Performance was at best, just a 101.06
2
tad ahead of what 939 AMD64
dual cores delivered. The 75.14
switchover to a new platform 1600X1200
86.62
didn’t affect much of anything as 1
far as the AMD corner goes.
Imagine our excitement 0 20 40 60 80 100 120
when we received a shiny new AMD 5000+ INTEL X6800
Conroe—the X6800, no less—and
A
MD has moved to the Feature-wise, this very decent memory
newer DDR2 memory motherboard has nearly bandwidth score of 7294 demand from you, our
with its 90 nm, Fab 30 everything needed to keep MBps. This Science Mark dear readers!
plant in Dresden, Germany. you future-proof for at least score is encouraging, For those of you who
The new AM2s a couple of years. because there was have been with us for some
are 940-pin processors, up Our memory subsystem scepticism about whether time, the section remains
one pin from the older consisted of 2 GB of the additional bandwidth the same: this space is
939 series. Corsair’s high performance that the DDR2 memory devoted to reviews of the
We got an AM2 5000+ XMS 2 series DDR2 800 provided would be utilised latest hardware and
CPU, an ASUS M2N 32 SLI, MHz memory. The memory or not. software to have hit the
and a dual-channel 2 GB kit is timed at 4-4-4-12, which Future revisions will market—some great,
of Corsair DDR2 800 MHz is sufficiently low for the only see this figure go up. some average.
RAM. The AM2 5000+ is a gamer audience. To test Even in its current avatar, We trust the reviews
top-of-the-line CPU clocked such a setup you should it’s much more than the here will help you make
at 2.6 GHz. It features a have the best graphics theoretical cap of 6400 better, more informed
humongous 256 KB of L1 card out there as well, MBps that DDR limits purchase decisions—
cache (128 KB for each so we used two XFX 7900 memory bandwidth to, besides bringing new
core), and 1 MB of L2 cache GTX graphics cards in although on the negative products to your notice.
(512 KB for each core). SLI mode. side, it’s still short of the
12.8 GBps that DDR2 800 in benchmarks, the CPU and
dual-channel mode is memory subsystems do play
capable of. a significant role here, and
For some real-world the AM2 5000+ quite simply
testing, we decided to fire blew us away!
up a few games on this This was a sneak peak
monster. Running for us as well as to what the
F.E.A.R. (the latest next generation of CPUs
card killer from and platforms in general
Monolith), we got an are capable of, and we
average fps score of weren’t disappointed. AM2s
119— this at 1024 x 768 cost a bomb right now; ditto
with 4x Anti-Aliasing and the nForce 5 series of
8x Anisotropic Filtering motherboards. However,
enabled. Soft Shadows were with Intel’s Conroe round
kept on. The game looked the corner, it makes sense
surreal, and the visuals to hold on to your wallet
excellent! just that bit longer!
There is a 2 MB L2 cache Once set up, the rig We tried various
version available as well, looked mean, with the CPU resolutions and just Specifications
the 5200+, which is clocked heat sink’s copper pipes couldn’t get this rig to slow AMD AM2 5000+
identically. blending in well with all the down. Even at 2048 x 1536, Dual-core, 2.6 GHz, 512 KB x 2
ASUS, whose enthusiast copper ASUS crammed onto with 16x AF and 4x AA as L2 cache, 90 nm fab
boards are well-known, the board. The two huge XFX well as all the eye candy process, 2000 MHz system
have delivered another 7900 GTX cards added to the enabled, the 7900GTX duo bus speed
beauty in the M2N32-SLI monster look. hardly seemed to sweat,
Deluxe. It’s based on Super Pi gave us a 1M with an average fps of 51. ASUS M5N SLI 32
NVIDIA’s latest nForce 590 score of 33.110, which is on 3D Mark 06 & 05 returned nForce 590SLI chipset, Socket
SLI MCP, and features top- par with the earlier 939 blazing scores of 8847 and AM2 (940 pin), 2 x 16 PCIe
end enthusiast features processors of a similar clock 12246 respectively. lane graphics slots (SLI-ready),
such as two x16 PCI express speed. Considering that the Although these are passive heat-pipe cooling
slots, a unique 8-phase AM2 platform is new and strictly graphics
power design, e-SATA that future refinements can Contact: AMD India Ltd
(external SATA), and only improve performance, RATINGS Phone: 080-41372400
complete silence via a this score is great. Performance E-mail: deepanshu.
single-piece copper heat PC Mark 05 gave a CPU Features sharma@amd.com
pipe setup, which looks score of 5348—very decent— Build quality Web site: www.amd.com
cool while keeping and a memory score of Value for money
Price: Rs 32,000 (processor);
components 4886, which seemed a tad Rs 46,000 (processor +
Overall
that way! low. Science Mark 2.0 gave a motherboard)
Specifications Specifications
NVIDIA GeForce 7600GS chipset, 256 MB DDR2 memory, core 6 W neodymium speakers and tweeters, universal iPod dock,
speed 400 MHz, SM 3.0 support, NVIDIA’s Cine FX 4.0 3.5 mm mini stereo auxiliary jack, sub-woofer out, and frequency
response of 70 Hz - 20 KHz
RATINGS Contact: Shree Sagarmatha RATINGS
Performance Pvt Ltd Performance
Features Phone: 022-23065114 / 23200032 Ease of use Contact: Shahil International
Package contents E-mail: sagarmatha_mumbai@ Build quality Phone: 022-30912565 / 23862345
mtnl.net.in E-mail: firoz@fxaudio.com
Value for money Value for money
Web site: www.techcomindia.com Web site: www.fxaudio.com
Overall Overall
Price: Rs 6,700 Price: 17,990
Gigabyte GV-NX76G256D-RH
A bundle of joy
the discerning buyer who par or slightly better than
wants a clear combination those of other 7600GS-
of value and performance based cards.
without compromise. This card comes with a
The graphics core and three-year warranty, costs
memory modules are Rs 10,000, and comes
passively cooled, that is, bundled with Serious Sam 2
with only a heat sink, no and Power DVD 6—very
fan, and a metal plate on nice. You will also find all
the back to aid cooling. the connectors you need,
The heat sink has a heat and good-quality ones!
pipe attachment, and the
heat sink is buff-finished, Specifications
which aids in dissipation— NVIDIA GeForce 7600GS
unlike powder-coated heat chipset, 256 MB DDR2
sinks, which trap heat memory, core speed 400 MHz,
instead. SM 3.0 support, NVIDIA’s Cine
Needless to say, we FX 4.0
RATINGS
Performance H ere’s another card
based on NVIDIA’s
7600GS chipset, with 256
didn’t find any stability
issues due to heat through
our barrage of tests.
Contact: Gigabyte Technology
India Ltd
Features
Package contents megabytes of video The Gigabyte 7600GS Phone: 022-26526696 / 56902210
Value for money memory onboard. The turned out to be a good E-mail: sales@dlink.co.in
Gigabyte GV-NX76G256D- performer, and returned Web site: www.gigabyte.com.tw
Overall
RH is clearly positioned at scores that were either on Price: Rs 10,000
I
t’s a pen, it’s a pen- it insert a clip from one side to show off.
knife, with a nail file into the small orifice on the
and screwdriver all side, and the battery slides Specifications
bundled into one! And it’s out from the opposite side. 128 MB, USB 2.0 interface,
from the same world- In order to clean the contains utility tools—pen-
renowned manufacturer device, you can remove the knife, screwdriver-cum-nail-
(Victorinox) of Swiss pen drive and battery file, scissors, LED light with
RATINGS Army knives. components, and then dip swappable battery
Performance The Victorinox pen drive the rest in warm water—
Features is excellently built, and the this is actually Contact: J. S. Equipments
Build quality fit and finish is top-of-the- recommended in the Phone: 022-23810713 / 23810718
Value for money
line. Not only is the pen manual, and speaks volumes E-mail: jse@vsnl.com
drive extremely well built, about the build quality. Web site: www.jseindia.com
Overall
the other accessories retain Coming to performance, Price: Rs 3,250
Y et another 7600GS-based
card! This Xtreme
Edition card comes with
nothing getting in the way
of cooling. It managed a
good job at cooling, and we
commendable 55.75 fps. At
normal settings, F.E.A.R saw
62 fps—very, very playable
256 MB of VRAM, and is never saw the temperature for a mid-range card.
XFX’s latest offering to the climb beyond the late 50s. The card comes with a
mid-range market. The core The heat sink itself, decent bundle: Starship
has been factory- however, gets much hotter Troopers (a mediocre game),
tweaked—hence the than the two cards two DVI to D-Sub converters,
“Xtreme” tag—to 500 reviewed earlier. and all the cables necessary
MHz, making it Owing to the faster to get you going.
identical to the faster but core, this card was
architecturally similar expected to perform better Specifications
7600GT. than the other 7600GS NVIDIA GeForce 7600GS
This is one cool looking cards, and it didn’t chipset, 256 MB DDR2 RAM,
card: the PCB has a matte disappoint: it led the other core speed 500 MHz, SM 3.0
RATINGS black finish, and both DVI two cards by a minimum of support, NVIDIA’s Cine FX 4.0
Performance connectors are a 10 fps in our tests. The card
Features fluorescent green, also handled Far Cry Contact: Rashi Peripherals
Package contents matching XFX’s brand beautifully with HDR off. Phone: 022-67090909
colours (green and black). At a resolution of 1600 x E-mail: navinderc@rptechindia.com
Value for money
The black heat-sink is 1200 with 8x AF and 8x AA, Web site: www.rptechindia.com
Overall
powder coated, with the card managed a Price: Rs 7,500
A
lot of Firefox’s behaviour is updated—ensuring you’ll almost never see when the last application window closes).
controlled by typing in “about: an ad again! 1: Check for a new version every time
config” into the title bar and a page is loaded.
modifying the values you see there. In the And A Flavour Of Opera… 2: Never check for a new version—
following, we’ll be referring extensively to The third extension you can’t live always load the page from cache.
these values. Modifying them is a right- without is SessionSaver. It does just that— 3: Check for a new version when the
click away. Just open the about:config you close Firefox with ten tabs open, and page is out of date.
page once, and you’ll get the idea! In the the next time you start up Firefox—even 3 happens to be the default; you can
following, when we talk about something after a system restart—all the tabs will speed up Firefox a little by changing the
like “browser.xxx. xxx”, we’re talking open up! No more bookmarking tabs value to 0. You’d never want 1, and you
about that value in the about:config page. you’re about to close! Opera users have might want 2 in a few cases. Remember
had this functionality for a long time. that if you use 2, odd behaviour might
We Don’t Like Ads, So… For SessionSaver, visit occur, mostly when the Back and Forward
Before we get into a few Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/436/ buttons come into play.
hacks, there are three extensions we
think are so essential to your Firefox New Tab: In Front Or Behind? Memory Usage
browsing experience, we can’t not For those used to tabbed browsing, Under browser.cache.memory.
mention them. The first of these is it does make a difference whether a tab capacity is specified how much physical
Adblock, which is available from appears in front or opens silently in the memory (in KB) is allocated to the caching
http://adblock.mozdev.org. Adblock background. Even for tabs that open as a of decoded images and chrome
Choose from three workspaces Break text into paragraphs with [Ctrl] + [K]
Create text on a curve
W
hen Blizzard, one of the most
revered names in the RTS As Human you can use peasants to
genre, debuted Warcraft 3 in creep close to your base. Just
2002, and followed up with the convert some of them to militia (keep
expansion pack The Frozen Throne (TFT) a some at resources too), and use the rest.
year later, thousands of players were Your hero will level up faster, simply
bitten by the Warcraft bug (they still because he can attack earlier. Use on
are)! Unlike other RTSes, WC3 is all green-coloured creep camps only!
about attacking and attacking soon,
while building up. Micro-management Build orders are very important, but Use hero powers well! Flame Strike being judi-
is the key here, and most battles don’t can change from opponent to ciously used
last more than 15 minutes, and are opponent. Here’s a sample—as soon as the
finished with Tier 1 units—with a game starts, put four workers on gold,
few Tier 2s thrown in, and a level 2 queue a sixth worker, and put the fifth
(or 3) hero. on your altar (hero production building).
Micro and speed being tantamount, As soon as the second worker appears,
let’s look at some of the most important put him on your primary troop
strategies in the game. Bundled in these production.
tips are some common-to-all-races At the same time, remove one of the
shortcut keys as well. guys tasked on gold, and use him to build
a farm (or your race equivalent structure),
Use the [Shift] key while assigning the seventh worker should be put on
workers (peons too) to build up. wood, while the fifth worker who should
You can queue up multiple buildings have finished the altar—task him back to
this way to be built by a single worker. the gold mine. You now have five gold
Never keep builder units idle! miners, and the rest of your workforce Use powers on buildings with clusters of ene-
should either build or focus on wood. mies close by for greater effect
Don’t hoard gold! If, in the first
five minutes of the game, you When you attack, make sure to
have more than 350 gold, you are not pull back units that are wounded,
rich—you are slow! Tech up the employ hit and run tactics, and you can
research tree, build more buildings keep a couple of powerful summoned
and units. You aren’t earning any units (if your hero is a summoner) just
interest on all that yellow! outside the enemy base. This way, while
retreating, you get some free hits in
Attack and attack early! We can’t case any enemies follow you.
stress on this enough. Don’t let your
opponent build up, research up, and for Even when you must pull back,
God’s sake, don’t let him expand! Keep only do so for a short distance,
harassing his base, all the while regroup, and focus again. Never pull
bolstering your forces, and teching up! back entirely from an enemy base.
Kill off weak enemies first, focus fire at work here
Once you have your first hero, Focus-fire works wonders with
rally your troops to him by setting ranged damage units, like riflemen, take damage, just getting into position to
his portrait as a rally point (by right- archers etc.—but do not use focus-fire attack the unit you focused on.
clicking on it), for all troop production when attacking with melee. Simply
buildings. This way any newly created attack ground: focus firing will waste Don’t lose units, and certainly
units will automatically take off after precious time, as your melee units will don’t lose heroes! Each hero lost is
your hero, irrespective of where he is like minus 1000 gold, not to mention
you stand a good chance of losing the
game!
Tarun Raju
Because of latency issues, a USB cable can
only be 5 metres long. If you need to extend While you might have been lucky that the
the length of the cable, you need a USB repeaters motherboard survived the spill, we have to
or USB relays to reduce signal loss. say that the same is not the case with your
processor. Because the CPU’s thermal spreader is
considered a part of the processor, its getting
Go Away! dislodged from the processor body means that
I have Windows XP, and I installed Windows 98 the processor has been damaged—and this
from the DOS prompt. It started appearing as damage is not repairable. Since this is physical
the first item in the OS choice menu. Later, I deleted damage, you cannot avail of the warranty even if
all the Windows 98 files because I didn’t want it any the processor is under one.
more, but it still appears in the boot menu. How can
I get rid of it?
Via e-mail
Done In A Jiffy!
Whenever I schedule a disk check on Windows
The items that appear in the OS choice XP, the following error comes up at the next
menu at boot time are stored in a file— reboot:
Boot.ini. You can edit this file to remove the “Disk checkup
Windows 98 menu item. Open Control Panel > Checking file system on C:
System. Click on Advanced, and under “Startup The type of the file system is NTFS
and Recovery”, click Settings. In the window Cannot open volume for Direct Access
that opens, you can change the default OS by Windows has finished checking the disk”
choosing Windows XP from the drop-down box. All other partitions are checked normally except the
If you want to stop the item from appearing, you C: partition. I log into Windows as Administrator.
need to click Edit. The Boot.ini file will open in Sandeep Jain
Notepad. Scroll down to the [boot loader]
section, which will look like this: The problem can be resolved by installing
the latest Service Pack and hotfixes for
[boot loader] Windows XP. According to Microsoft, this prob-
timeout=30 lem has been resolved in Service Pack 2.
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WI
NDOWS
[operating systems]
Call A Rose By Any Other Name…
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS= I want to know what difference setting a hard
”Windows 98” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect disk or an optical drive as Master or Slave would
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS= make. How can I make a drive Primary or Slave?
”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /noexe- What are the advantages and disadvantages of both?
cute=optin /fastdetect Manish Sihotra
A BI-OS Conflict
I have an NForce4 motherboard with 512 MB of
DDR RAM. I want to install Windows XP on it, but
I get error 0x0000007B during installation. The hard
drive is detected by the BIOS but not by the Windows
XP installer CD. I have tried replacing the 250 GB
SATA hard drive with my old 120 GB SATA drive and
even replaced the RAM, but the problem persists.
Manish Paswan
M
ost of us have more data than or not it is copied to the source by
we can mentally keep track of. setting the options under “Advanced”.
Some of this is important There are many options here, but they
enough to warrant a regular backup. are all self-explanatory.
That apart, you may also need to work
on some files at both home and Filtering
office, for example—and therefore If you want only certain file types—or
need to keep them in sync, which you files with a particular name—to be
can do using backup and syncing soft- copied, you can set this in the options
ware. Your backup media can be a pen Choose your backup options under the Filters tab. For example, if
drive or an external hard drive so you you only want to copy .doc and .jpg
can carry data around. Let’s take a give you a description at the bottom files , you can specify these in “Files to
look at backing up and synchronising of the window. Choose either of the copy”, and if you do not want some file
using a free, feature-rich software two—depending on whether you just types copied, then set them under
called SyncBack. need to back up or also need to sync— “Files NOT to copy”.
and continue.
What you need You can set a profile with “rules” Doing A Test Run
Your backup media could be anything— such that the copy happens only if the If you are unsure of the results that
let’s use an external hard drive—and the files are modified or happen irrespec- your settings will produce, you can
Syncback software, which you can tive of modified date or just update simulate a run wherein the files will
download from www.2brightsparks missing files in either or both folder. not be actually moved, but where you
.com/assets/software/SyncBack_Setup.z Next, you select the source folders get a report of what would have
ip. Extract the file and run SyncBack_ (the folders you want to back up or happened had the task been executed.
Setup.exe to install Syncback. synchronise) and the destination folder You can view the results and, if you’re
(where the backup will be stored). satisfied, “Run” the operation.
Sync Vs. Backup
A “backup” just creates a copy of the Using The Sync Feature The Expert Mode
source directory in a destination direc- For the task at hand, which is to update At the bottom of the SyncBack window
tory, irrespective of the time the files the source and destination directories is a button called “Expert”. When you
were created. A sync (synchronisation) such that work done on two different click on this, an array of tabs appear,
process, on the other hand, can computers is “in sync,” you’ll need to which give you more features to fine-
compare the source and destination choose the option “Synchronise source tune your backup process. For exam-
files and update either one of them with directories files and sub directories ple, you can cram your backup into a
the latest copy. Say you take a backup, with the destination directory”. Zip file to save space, or have SyncBack
then go home and work on some files Thus, if you have file1 and file2 in e-mail you a report after an operation,
on the backup drive. When you return the source directory, and your destina- or even have your backup done on an
to work and sync your data, your work tion directory is empty, the files will be FTP site. For most people, the “Easy”
files will be updated with the changes copied to your external hard disk. Now, mode is sufficient.
you made at home. The sync process is let’s say you carry this external drive to
obviously the more intelligent of the another machine and add file3 and Restoring Data
two: it’s the smart way of doing things. file4, and modify file2. When you sync In a situation where you’ve backed up
Using synchronisation, you can ensure again, the contents of the source and something and lose the original, no
that your data is always up to date in fear: just click on the
every place—with all changes being Restore button in the
saved on your home computer, office SyncBack window to move
computer, and also your backup drive. data from the destination
to the source. If files with
Getting Started the same name exist in the
When you open SyncBack for the two folders, the copying of
first time, you will be prompted to those files will be in accor-
create a profile for either synchronis- dance with the setting you
ing or backing up. You can select chose while backing up.
between the backup and synchronise
settings according to your prefer- readersletters@
ence—clicking on any one option will Every backup action is clearly explained thinkdigit.com
The Penny-Pincher
You want to buy a PC. Naturally, you want to spend as little as possible. Agent 001 tells you how
M
onth after month I receive mails asking
about optimal PC configurations. That Configuration 1: A basic computer for general use
“optimal” might as well read “cheapest.” Component Brand / Specifications Cost (Rs)
The performance crown might be high on Intel’s Processor + AMD Sempron 2500+ 4,500
and AMD’s wish-lists, but the ground reality is Motherboard An MSI or Gigabyte board based (for the
quite different. Cheap sells. on a VIA chipset combo)
A few years ago, Rs 25,000 used to be the price RAM Transcend 256 MB DDR 400 1,100
for “a very affordable PC”; today, that figure is Hard Drive Seagate / Samsung / Hitachi / 2,350
something like Rs 10,000. I often come across ads WD 80 GB (give or take Rs 150 here)
Monitor Samsung / LG 15-inch CRT 3,950
offering PCs at around Rs 10K. What kind of
Optical Drive LG combo drive 1,450
components do these PCs come with? Keyboard and Logitech (ball mouse) 500
It’s not possible for me to go about checking Mouse
the hardware components that go into each and Cabinet A cabinet from Frontech, Kobian, 1,000
every brand’s sub-10K offerings—besides, there’s Perx, or other such brands, with a
often fine print involved in those cases—so I 350-watt power supply
decided to do my own investigations and assemble Speakers Stereo desktop speakers from any 300
the cheapest PC remembering not to compromise Taiwanese / Chinese brand
too much on the quality of components. Everyone Total 15,500
wants to strike a deal and get the cheapest possi-
ble rates; however, it shouldn’t come at the Configuration 2
expense of performance. In other words, “the You want: A reasonably powerful, upgradeable,
cheapest PC” should not be defined by cost alone, multimedia PC that’s not too hard on the pocket.
because at the end of the day it’s a utility device—
something you’ll be spending time with every day. My Suggestion: This configuration is based
Assigning some weightage to performance is around an Intel dual-core and a 945 chipset
therefore a must. motherboard. The 945 chipset supports Vista,
“Performance” by itself is a vague term and thus offering headroom for upgrades. It has
has different connotations for different people. So onboard graphics, but can be upgraded for
instead of giving you a magic configuration—a better performance using the PCIe slot. The PC
one-stop solution for everything—I am offering still hovers round the 25K sweet spot.
two different solutions, addressing two different
performance levels. What to expect: Since it’s based on reasonably
good onboard hardware, the PC will allow you to
Configuration 1 play recent games at low resolutions and settings.
You want: A PC for basic Internet usage, word With 512 MB of memory, most multimedia appli-
processing, possibly for accounting, inventory cations won’t bog the system down. The 17-inch
management, or perhaps for programming… monitor ensures a good Internet experience.
My suggestion: Such a PC will be based on the You can, of course, tinker around with these
least expensive hardware available. Prices will configurations, and if you’re wondering about a
vary, but not by much. If you want particular point, just drop in a mail!
an Intel solution, opt for a Celeron
2.1 GHz with an ASRock 845
chipset-based motherboard; Configuration 2: A multimedia computer
this combo will set you Component Brand / Specifications Cost (Rs)
back by another Rs 1,000. Processor Intel Pentium D 805 5,750
Motherboard Intel Original 945GNTL 6,200
What to expect: Since RAM Transcend 512 MB DDR2 667 MHz 2,300
this is based on a VIA Hard Drive Seagate / Samsung / Hitachi / 2,350
chipset, graphics will WD 80 GB (give or take Rs 150 here)
Monitor Samsung / LG 17-inch CRT 5,500
be a sore point, and
Optical Drive LG combo drive 1,450
most games won’t run— Keyboard and Logitech (optical mouse) 800
but routine apps won’t Mouse
suffer. This machine will Cabinet Any decent cabinet with a 400-watt 1,500
be a great beginner’s PC; for power supply
example, if you want to Speakers Creative stereo desktop speakers 500
introduce your kids to the Total 26,350
world of computers without
hurting your wallet, this is Want more of Agent 001? Turn over to read his
what the doctor ordered. answers to your buying questions
Illustration Pradip Ingale
Tech Careers
Upwardly Mobile
The Mobile Vs. The PC Platforms
Kailas Shastry At this point, it is natural to wonder why mobile
Are you up to
application development is viewed differently
creating the apps perating systems and installable software from development for the PC platform—aren’t
that will enhance
increasingly
O are no longer associated with just PCs:
mobile phones have very rapidly evolved
to being computers on the go, with the ability to
they the same, or at least similar? Well, in both
cases, what’s involved is coding, testing, debug-
ging, optimising and such. You need analytical
smart phones? do almost everything a PC can—Internet skills and in-depth knowledge of the development
browsing, word processing, multimedia, games, tool and the target platform. When it comes to
and more. With operators offering more value- mobile devices, however, there are certain con-
added services such as downloadable games, the straints that make writing the software more
demand for mobile applications is growing. challenging.
To cater to this demand, many large software Says Alok Sood, founder and COO of Jivanta,
services companies have a division dedicated to an outsourced game development services com-
the development of applications and / or games pany, “Mobile games impose a lot of constraints—
for the mobile platform. Then there are smaller for example, limited memory and storage space,
game development companies that have a divi- limited processing power, limited controls, small
sion working on games for mobiles (or wireless display sizes, poor resolution, and so
devices as they are called). That’s not all—online on.” Vijay Jain, CEO and CTO
entertainment/content providers are also looking of Astute Systems Tech-
at reaching out to a wider audience through nology, a developer
mobile phones. and publisher of
All these factors mobile
have taken mobile
application devel-
opment from
infancy to adult-
hood with an
ample boost of
hormones.
M ost companies currently look for candidates with a B.E. or B.Tech., and then
train them according to their needs. In most cases, the training comprises one
or more of the following: C++, J2ME, Flash, BREW, programming for Palm OS,
Once candidates are selected by a company,
they are required to undergo training like in any
other software field, where they are taught the
Symbian OS, and even VC++. For game development, an aptitude for mathematics specific development tools they will be using. The
and prior work experience in multimedia is advantageous. training period can vary depending on the com-
Starting salaries are more or less equal to those in any other software stream. pany and the candidate’s background. Sasken has
In an established company it can be upwards of Rs 15,000, while in smaller a three-month training, after which a further
companies, it is around Rs 10,000. three-month period is spent on getting
Besides programmers, the industry also looks out for multimedia designers, acquainted with the works on a live project. Sood,
and in the case of games, script writers. however, feels the training period can be as short
as a month for someone who has earlier worked
in development, such as with Java.
applications, says, “Only about 20 per cent of the The mobile
Java APIs are available on the J2ME (Java 2 Micro gaming market Benefits, Growth, And The Future
Edition), which is for mobile development.” There is a growing interest amongst programmers
Raju Patil, head of mobile games, Dhruva
could expand by to specialise in the mobile platform—some devel-
Interactive, agrees. He goes on to say that game as much as 700 opers in large software companies are requesting
development in particular “involves cohesive per cent by 2010 internal transfers to the divisions working on
team work involving designers, artists, program- as compared to mobile platforms. They realise that their skill sets
mers, testers, sound engineers and, last but not December 2005 will be in even greater demand in a couple of
least, the producer who manages the overall years’ time, and also that the job is more chal-
development.” lenging. Initially, the pay scale is about the same
as that of any other entry-level software engineer;
Skill Sets And Aptitudes it is after about two years’ time that the remu-
So what does it take to be a mobile application neration will exceed that of developers on the PC
developer? platform. The designations here are, however,
Major programming platforms such as Java similar to those in the rest of the software field—
and Flash come with their mobile editions— a Junior Programmer progressing to a Pro-
J2ME and Flash LITE respectively. Hence knowl- grammer, Senior Programmer, Team Leader,
edge of Java, for instance, will help a fresher get Project Manager, Architect, Chief Architect...
familiar with the mobile version. But as one pro- Raghu, a Java professional from Bangalore,
gresses to advanced levels, the advantage of feels, “There is more excitement in writing appli-
knowledge of the PC version diminishes, and it cations for wireless devices than for a full-fledged
takes more or less the same effort to specialise PC platform. Maybe this is because the stream is
later on. However, all the companies we spoke to relatively new, or because we have to work so
agreed that a person with a B.E. or B.Tech. back- much on optimisation for various devices with so
ground is easier to train than others, owing to many constraints. Besides, as one grows, the
their strong fundamentals. money is better!”
Most companies look for candidates with a In an established company, salaries for begin-
B.E. or B.Tech., preferably in electronics. As ners hover around Rs 15,000, and at the end of
Dr Srinivas R Kandula, director, HR, Sasken Com- five years, go up to as high as Rs 60,000. There are
munication Technology Ltd, says, “We hire only several start-ups where you can expect around
electronics engineers, or in rare cases, MCAs. A Rs 10,000, but as in any start-up or small company,
certification in Embedded Systems would give the learning and growth curve is steeper. These
candidates an edge over the others”. For mobile salary figures are only indicative, and depend
game development, there are two other desir- on individual performance—and, of course,
ables. In the words of Jain, “A sound knowledge of the company.
mathematics is essential—to code AI, for instance What is the future for this stream of software
—while a multimedia background gives an edge development? Will it grow into a separate vertical,
over other candidates.” or will it eventually merge into the sea of
While most companies look specifically for “software development” that subsumes all kinds
engineering graduates, they may be forced to of software?
relax this rule when the demand for manpower Srinivas Rao of Sasken avers that with the
increases further. Of course, candidates will need boom in the telecom sector, there will soon be
to have some prior knowledge of the platforms a further need for professionals to program
they will be working on, and may even be mobile applications. According to a research by
required to initially settle for a lower pay package. In-Stat/MDR, the Indian mobile gaming market
One can take up courses in C++, Flash (scripting), is projected to grow to $336 million by 2009.
BREW, and J2ME. Of these, C++ is something one Another study indicates that the mobile gaming
needs to know, no matter what software develop- market could expand by as much as 700 per cent
ment he is interested in. Learning Flash LITE or by 2010 (as compared to December 2005)
J2ME will invariably give you the basics of the We need only look around us—many of us now
main platforms—Flash and Java respectively. use an application or value-added service on our
Of these, Java seems the hot favourite. Avers mobile phones that we didn’t have even a couple
Adithyaa Srikkanth, Director, Krish Infotek, a of years ago. This field is here to stay.
Web and mobile game developer, “Java is the most readersletters@thinkdigit.com
The Net Threat the rise. From eBay clones to banking site rip-
Everyone gets Robert Sovereign-Smith offs, there are thousands of sites that claim to
be what they’re not. Advancements in Web
online from their
I
n a recent survey of a small number of people, coding means that a phisher can even hide the
offices today, but our very own Agent 001 uncovered an address bar of his site, thus making a user believe
doing so appalling truth: many people access the Net they’re really at a bank site.
at work for just the things they do at home! Read Most phishing attacks come via e-mail,
carelessly could more about the fun stuff people do with any where a user is asked to click on a disguised link,
cost your available bandwidth in the Digital Leisure section and then update some information. Now if one
of this issue. What’s dangerous is that they could of these users happens to be an accountant or
business some be doing this in your office. Apart from the legal someone with access to your company bank
serious money ramifications, your security, too, might be unwit- account, you could be in serious trouble. It is of
tingly compromised by an employee who doesn’t utmost importance that you educate your
understand the consequences of his actions. The employees about the phishing threat.
onus is therefore on the company to inform One fix is to make all your employees see
employees about how the Net should be used at their mails in text format, in which case the
work—and possibly even monitor their actions. problem of disguised links is eliminated. If Out-
Most of your employees are getting online, look is the e-mail client you use, go to Tools >
checking e-mail, chatting, surfing, Googling, Options, and under the e-mail header, click on
and playing online games—unless you’ve specif- the “E-mail Options” button. Here, check “Read
ically blocked access. With all this Internet all standard mail in plain text”, and then check
activity going on, you have to think about the the “Read all digitally signed mail in plain text”
threats posed by hackers, crackers, phishers, box. Even if text in an e-mail asks to copy and
and the other “ers” out there. Every second day paste a link into a browser, your employees are
there’s a new exploit, threat, worm and/or probably smart enough to make out, from the
virus detected, which puts your data at risk. text of the link, where they’ll be going!
Now, the very people you employ could unwit-
tingly turn out to be threats to your company— The Real Threats
if they’re oblivious to the dangers that Internet With Internet penetration increasing by the
Imaging Pradip Ingale, 3D Inputs Vikram Kathare
access brings with it. hour, fewer people are falling prey to human
engineering. More and more hackers and
Human Engineering crackers are therefore focusing their attention
This is a term used to refer to the ploys used by on finding ways and means to infect your com-
attackers to fool people out of money or data. puters with bugs that will allow them to gain
With Internet banking and a host of other online access to your computers and their data.
services being offered by banks, phishing is on For a company, data is money; whether it’s
Digital Business l Smart Busisness
an accountant’s laptop that contains vital com-
pany information, or your browser’s cache which
contains your various passwords, it’s all up for
grabs! Since there are so many ways that people
try and get into PCs, we’ll break them up into
the following categories to give you a general
idea what to look out for.
Adware / Spyware
There’s a fine line between adware and spy-
ware: very often, they go hand in hand, but a lot
of software products are adware-supported and
do not contain spyware. The perfect example
here is the Opera browser—it just displayed ads
from Google, and contained no spyware. How-
ever, many software (especially desktop theme
packs, screensavers and the like), are filled with
spyware. Very often, a smaller software com-
pany will bundle their software with adware or
spyware from a bigger company, because the
former has to cover development costs. In fact,
sadly, a lot of the “freeware” out there is
adware- or spyware-supported.
What you need to do is make sure all your
computers are protected with anti-spyware tools.
Two excellent examples here are Spybot Search
& Destroy, and AdAware. Make it a policy for your
employees to check and clean their PCs fre-
quently using these tools. It’s accomplished at
the press of a button.
You could also make sure that none of your
employees are allowed to install anything
without permission from the system adminis-
trator. The simplest way to do this in Windows
XP is to have your admin password-protect the
Administrator accounts on all PCs, and make
lower-level accounts for employees.
ActiveX
Though a lot of good software uses this Internet
Explorer-based browser installer to integrate its
content or services with Windows, many more
sites try and trick users into installing mali-
cious ActiveX code into their browsers. If ever
there was a software that did more harm than
good, it has to be ActiveX!
Be aware of the fact that many of your
employees probably visit “warez” sites. If you’re in
a position to do so, enforce a policy that dictates
that no employee should visit such sites—your
admin’s logs should tell you who was where on
the Net. We say this because virtually any software
“crack” downloaded from warez sites contains
109
Digital Business l Smart Busisness
E-Mail Attachments
Beware the e-mail attachment! This path into a
computer can be the death of your data…
If your company uses Outlook, ask your
system admin to disable the Preview Pane on
all computers, and to make sure your anti-virus
scanner scans mails as they arrive. Also make
file extensions visible on all your computers:
in Windows Explorer, go to Tools > Folder
Options… > View, and uncheck “Hide exten-
sions for known file types”. This will help pre-
vent users from opening a virus thinking it’s a
Word document!
Passwords
A lot of people use public computer terminals,
such as at cyber cafes. Now, when accessing
office mail using Web mail, if a user checks the
“Remember my username and password” box in
the site or browser preferences, they’re leaving
their inboxes open to anyone else who uses the
computer after them. This can result in secrets
being leaked, especially if the employee is of a Here’s a standard phishing attempt made on your PayPal account—it seems like
high enough rank. someone from the Biotech department of IIT Madras is trying to get rich quick,
or at least someone’s using their computers to do so
Anti-Virus
Make sure you have an anti-virus application that A proxy server solution such as Squid for a
scans both files as well as chat and Internet Linux server will help you keep your employees
traffic. A tool that scans all data that goes to and in check. You will be able to generate logs to find
fro over the Internet, while also scanning the files out who does what and who visits what, and also
being saved on your computers, is a must. A good give you the option to block access via port
anti-virus application should detect malware blocking (effective against P2P) and keyword
before a site or e-mail message even prompts you blocking (effective for blocking words such as
to install the malicious software. porn, xxx, crack, serial, etc.)
Here’s something we can’t stress upon
enough: update your virus definitions regularly. A Final Word
This is very easily achieved: enable automatic Though Digit can advise you on how to battle
updates in your anti-virus software. This will threats that come in the form of data packets,
result in a message popping up once every few there’s no way we can help you protect your data
days saying “An update is available. Do you want from other humans! Make sure important com-
to download and install it?”—or something of pany data is only shared on a need-to-know basis,
that sort. Don’t say No to these messages—just and not openly accessible by anyone.
let the software update itself! If we’ve scared you, we’ve achieved our task,
In addition, your company e-mail server and we hope you will begin looking for more secu-
should have an anti-virus program on the server rity holes into your company and its data, and also
itself to remove malicious software embedded in better solutions to manage its security.
e-mails before they reach your employees’ Inboxes. robert_smith@thinkdigit.com
“W
customers are in Navi Mumbai. e’ve been in business for almost a
decade now. Walk-ins and phone calls
“M
ore than a decade has passed since we are our way of doing business.
began trading our products and “A few competitors maintain Web sites in an
providing services to our clients in Navi attempt to expand their clientele. We have not
Mumbai. We decided to start our own Web site in found any notable increase in their business despite
1998: we felt a Web site was necessary to handle their online presence. Besides this, we do not have
clients’ needs and queries. Since then, we have the staff to maintain and look after a Web site. Also,
observed a notable increase in the number of people customers prefer to come directly to our shop for
approaching us for queries. Most of these people are deals. Since we are in the retail business, we believe
now customers. in bargaining, and definitely don’t want to get
“Basically, through our site, we want to speak involved in bargaining online by stating the price of
about our experience in this business, the variety of our products.
hardware and peripherals we deal in, and the “Today, anybody who is interested in buying a
computer-related services we offer. We also invite computer-related product keeps himself updated
clients to enrol in promotional schemes and offers. about the products available in the market by
“We also provide support for issues relating to means of newspapers, magazines and the Internet.
drivers, by providing direct links to the official Web All our customers are well-informed, and we don’t
sites of all the companies whose products we sell. We think there is any need to inform them about prod-
feel the necessity of a Web site to meet growing ucts or features.
needs and attract more customers. “We don’t recommend a Web site for a small /
“We definitely recommend having a Web site, as medium enterprise, considering the human capital
customers these days are going online for any bit of and monetary resources involved. Even today, a cus-
information. An online presence has become a tomer will buy a product only if he is completely sat-
necessity. The Internet is becoming the primary isfied after having personally looked at it.”
source for information, and will soon be available on
handheld devices and cell phones.”
As told to Samir Makwana
(samir_makwana@thinkdigit.com)
Digital
120 PGR 3
(Xbox 360) 127 Compression
Is Key 140 OfAndBillionaires
Beds
Leisure
Technology Beyond Work
Lead Feature
Timepass Tips
Got time to kill? Got an unlimited-usage broadband connection? Welcome to
Time and Bandwidth Wasting 101…
ica who didn’t have 400 KBps
which was a lot faster than the 16 upload bandwidth back then!
Agent 001 Kbps (2 KBps) I’d become accus- I found myself obsessing
tomed to on dial-up. about my upload capabilities,
B
ack in 1999, I was one of the Because it was 1999, broad- not wanting to let it go to waste!
first few Indians to have an band ISPs were still learning, I I also knew that sooner or later
unlimited, always-on conn- guess, and I soon discovered that some engineer at my ISP would
ection. It was only 64 Kbps, noth- my ISP had limited the download awake from his slumber and
ing to brag about, but at least I speeds, but had forgotten to do the prick my heavenly bubble. As it
didn’t have to worry about same with uploads. The result? A turned out, this scenario lasted
phone bills! For a thousand mere 8 KBps for downloads, and a about six months, and I
rupees a month, I’d managed to whopping 400 KBps upload speed! uploaded more in those six
break free of the shackles of I’m somewhat of an IRC (Inter- months than I’ve downloaded
H ere are some of the wackiest quotes I got when asking how people trash their time and
grab their bandwidth:
“For about a month, it had to be visiting the Digit Forum after its shift to vBulletin,
Broadband connections bring
with them a wonderful “value-
added service”: the local LAN
when you guys didn’t enable gzip compression! 300 KB a page was a real waste of setup you get within your neigh-
bandwidth!” bourhood! With a population den-
All readers should know that this has since been fixed, and it was only for 12 days that sity ants would be proud of,
we had this problem! Indian metros are generally divid-
“I download homosexual porn, zip it, and rename it to one of the latest software ed into areas of dominance by
releases. I then share it on P2P networks—just doing my bit for the fight against piracy.” ISPs. So chances are that the ISP
“All I seem to do online is browse through Amazon.com, looking for good books. When you have a broadband connection
I find one, I head over to my favourite torrent sites or an IRC network and get the e-book!” from is also supplying everyone in
“I use P2P 24x7, and download everything I can. But it’s not what you think… I’m your local area, which translates
actually looking to build a huge repository of viruses, and I get a new one almost every to a nice LAN setup for gaming—
day via P2P, which one day I shall unleash on my college computers. Why? Because they with blazingly fast ping times and
overcharge students, reserve half the seats, and I know more than my computer professor the opportunity to be famous
does about computers!” amongst peers you actually meet!
“When I’m really bored, I open up wikimapia.com and add some bogus and funny
places in India. The most recent one I added was a friend’s house—only I added it in on top Multimedia
of a sewage pipeline!” With broadband, no longer do
we need to avoid pages that con-
Home Ad
Rating: 9/10
Developer:
Red Storm Entertainment / GRIN
Publisher: Ubisoft
Distributor: E-xpress interactive
Contact: 022-28850245
Price: Rs 1299
System Requirements:
P4 1.7 GHz, 512 MB RAM,
Directx 9.0C compatible
128 MB graphics card
At last, the waiting’s over and we find out what happened after that silly
time stopping explosion at the end of Half Life 2
WARNING
If you haven’t played Half Life 2 before reading this review, you haven't lived yet,
and probably won't understand a thing. Make sure you play HL2 before playing HL2:EP1
hate it! This whole episodic release thing, that is. What’s with I had the volume up high and was waiting eagerly for an
this whole Episode 1, 2 and 3 thing? Waiting for Star Wars was explanation of how Alyx Vance and I had survived that time
bad enough, without Valve doing their Lucas impressions! stopping explosion—it never came…
I finished Half Life 2 in two sittings—that’s how much I love this I won’t spoil it for those of you who haven’t played this yet, but
series from Valve. However, at the end of it all, I was left suffice to say, I was more confused about the events of the end of
speechless: “How could they end it like that? What were they Half Life 2 after watching the beginning of Episode 1!
smoking? Arrrrrrgh!” Anyway, on to the game! It’s typical Half Life 2, the only difference
Anyway, rants about the ending of HL2 apart, I had to wait being that you start with the Gravity Gun from the get go. Of course
three days to get my hands on a decent enough graphics card it takes awhile before you get any more weapons, so it’s all defying
before I was willing to fire Half Life 2: Episode 1 (HL2:EP1) up. I the laws of physics till then! The story is spelt out in the many
played it on a AMD Athlon 64 3200+, 1 GB DDR 400 RAM with a ATI screenshots of this review, and it involves some good graphics,
Radeon X1900 XT—told you I waited for a good card! amazing voice acting and very nice looking character models. The
models. The inclusion of HDR (High Dynamic Range) into HL2’s Weapons
Source engine means that the lighting is spectacular. All the same, and you don’t find them all in Episode 1. As I mentioned
earlier, you start with the Gravity Gun (GG), then find the pistol and
Characters submachine guns after you kill a few Combine soldiers. When you
Alyx and Dog (her pet robot) are back with you, and Alyx is a big help finally meet Barney, he hands you the infamous crowbar, making
throughout HL2:EP1. Alyx, as usual, is integral to the storyline, and some really corny, yet hilarious remarks about it. As it turns out, the
you just cannot get past a lot of doors without her and her magic only weapons you need are the GG, the shotgun and the missile
Combine-force-field-door-shorter-outer. She’s not invincible launcher—you can easily finish a game using only these.
though, so don’t leave her standing around fighting Antlions while
you cower in a corner! Story
Towards the end you meet up with Barney again, but only for a To tell you the story, we’ll use screenshots, but you should know that
short while. There are some characters that remind you of Half Life it’s nothing as vast and engrossing as HL2, and is over before you
2, and, in fact, I swear there’s one scene in HL2EP1 that’s identical to know it. It took me 3 hours to finish Episode 1, and it shouldn’t take
a scene in the beginning of HL2—see screenshot 15 and see if it rings even first time Half Lifers more than 6 hours to finish it. But, then
any bells! All the characters are more believable though, but only again, how much more can you expect from a $20 (Rs 900) episode?
because they swear a little every now and then—a lot better than the I was very disappointed by the usage of time though, and I felt a
squeaky-clean HL2 dialog! lot more should have happened in those 3 hours that I was playing.
Overall, just the Ravenholm level in HL2—which sent shivers down
Maps And Graphics my spine the first time I played it—was more entertaining than this
If you’ve played HL2, you’ll remember Ravenholm and Highway 17, entire episode. Overall, I’ll give Episode 1 a rating of 7/10, because it
and also City 17—HL2:EP1 takes place only in City 17. The maps are was way too short and was pale in comparison to Half Life 2.
pretty standard, the secrets and puzzles easy to find and solve, and Of course you should also know that I will be one of the first to
path finding is a snap. The new maps are not nearly as vast as HL2, download and buy Episode 2 when it’s released!
which is a good or bad thing— depending solely on what you prefer.
I just preferred getting lost in the HL2 maps, which made the whole robert_smith@thinkdigit.com
experience more realistic—especially since I’m geographically
challenged in real life anyway! Rating: 7/10
The graphics, however, are superb, and are a lot better than in Developer: Valve
Half Life 2—just the addition of HDR makes a world of a difference. http://ep1.half-life.com
123
Digital Leisure l Game On
S
iN was probably the to the chest to kill them. When
unluckiest game ever. It you seem to be dying too often,
had so much going for it, the game even drops extra
notably its protagonist John health packs and ammo to help
Blade—the John Wayne-meets- you along.
Clint Eastwood-type drawling, While the game is intelli-
wisecracking head of gent enough to offer you this
HardCorps, a private security challenge, the enemies them-
firm in the otherwise lawless selves disappoint in the brain
Freeport City. It also brought to department—they’re not much
the FPS genre the ability to more intelligent than most
drive a number of vehicles, and pumpkins I know. Nonetheless,
the concept of the head shot they come in droves and jump
The game that Half-Life killed now puts itself at doing more damage to the from side to side, which makes
enemy (yes, before Counter- them harder to kill, and they’re
the mercy of Half-Life 2: Episode One. Genius. Strike). Critics praised it, but generally very entertaining
just as its sales were picking when you kill them: “{bang!}
up, the strong, silent Gordon Ack! My knee! I’m down! Send for
Freeman made his debut and ba…{bang!}..ungh”. There isn’t
everyone forgot SiN forever. much variety in the arsenal—
the M90 Magnum, the X380
Out Of The Shadows Scattergun and the M590
SiN Episodes: Emergence opens Assault Rifle—but just saying
with a captured John Blade that does their abilities injus-
(you) lying in a lab of sorts, tice. All weapons are ferocious-
with the evil I-want-to-make- ly deadly and the Scattergun
humans-better-by-mutating-them can even shoot shrapnel which
head of SinTEK, Elexis Sinclair, can bounce off walls and clear
waving her rather large bosom nasty corners in a jiffy.
in your face while drug lord
Victor Radek injects you with Back Into The
some mystery goo. You are Shadows
soon rescued by Jessica It’s odd that Ritual choose to
Cannon—your apprentice and release SiN E at the same time
the most competent digital as Half-Life 2: Episode One—have
desirable since Alyx Vance they learnt nothing from SiN’s
(HL2)—and must now go on a fate? Comparisons to HL2 are
quest to find out what that inevitable, mostly because
slop was. You’ll be fighting they’re in your face. Female
your way through docks, into sidekick with slight crush on
the overturned tanker that you? Check. Physics-oriented
houses the lab where the dead- puzzles? Check. Battle with
ly U4 mutagen is manufac- helicopter/airplane hybrid?
tured, finally ending in Victor Check!
Radek’s Supremacy Tower. The Even John Blade seems to
game offers you about five have been hanging out with
hours of play—not unexpected Freeman too much—he’s to
in these episodic times, but have given up his wisecracks
still too short. and fallen silent.
First
Escape
WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES
Whatever
iSaveLives Happened To…
CAS
A
s if we didn’t have
enough iPod
fanboyism to deal
the electric current away
from his vitals. The ‘pod, in a
remarkable act of loyalty and
1. Music players can save
your life (try at own risk)
2. When it rains, stay indoors
D uring mid-2003, there
was big talk of CAS
(Conditional Access System)
with, it turns out that the general unawareness, to be implemented in the
unassuming pod in question sacrificed its life to save its CELLULITE WAR metros and select cities.
can prove to be an essential master’s, ending up with a Had CAS been fully
survival tool as well. This
time, it’s responsible for
hole bored straight through.
It seems to us that
Military Tech implemented, we would
today be having set-top
saving the life of young Jason
Bunch, a resident of
lightning, moving away
from such boring targets as
To Fight New boxes to view pay
channels—and many non-
Colorado, USA. Seventeen-
year-old Bunch was zapped
trees and buildings has
turned to something more
Enemy regional channels today are
paid-for. The set-top box
by the heavens early July as entertaining this year— cost upwards of Rs 3,000.
T
he walked about his young, tech-enabled kids. he battle to look good is Pay channels could be
hometown listening to Young Bunch isn’t the first a long, painful one. Ask unscrambled only with the
Metallica. He did note the teen to face off with these any woman. Well, to be help of a smart card
necessity to take shelter as glorified sparks in the past politically correct, ask anyone. inserted into the box. This
the storm approached, but it few months—not too long We all despise our ungainly meant every viewer who
seems that the clouds were ago, a 19-year old Mumbai flab and will do anything to subscribed to a pay channel
too fast for him. His next girl suffered death by get rid of it. It was only a would be accounted for, and
memory was waking up in lightning, attributed to the matter of time, then, that the Government as well as
bed with bleeding ears and fact that she was carrying cosmetic companies would the channel would be
nausea. He was rushed to the all her friends’ cell phones. turn to new weapons— guaranteed of income from
hospital soon enough. Another case surfaced weapons of war even—to each subscriber.
Bunch’s burns traced the soon—London, this time—of even the ground. In principle this seems
wire running from his ears a cell-toting 15-year old Israeli company Syneron fair—you pay for what you
to his iPod, which was girl, though she lived to Medical, long involved in the watch, and the Government
fastened to the hip. tell the tale. manufacture of machines for doesn’t lose out on tax—this
Apparently, the wire saved Moral of the story aesthetic medical besides bringing in
his life, directing the bulk of (choose one): procedures—vein removal transparency to the cable
TV business. So why didn’t
CAS take off?
My Desktop First off, the initial cost
Haider’s spaced out desktop comes from of the set-top box. Then,
interesting use of ObjectDock and DesktopX the higher, recurring cost of
widgets. He used: subscription. In theory the
The Moon Widget subscriber has the choice of
The Global Clock Widget choosing the channels he
The Planet Icon Pack wants, but more often that
ObjectDock to hide the Start Menu, and not, one had to buy a
A Registry hack to remove the Recycle Bin from package of channels. Cable
the desktop. operators would be able to
Congratulations! charge only for the
infrastructure and not for
Participate in this contest and the channels. Despite the
win next month Government’s push towards
Microsoft 2003 Bible CAS, these and other
All-IP Networks Send your desktop with description of how you made factors prevented this
by Edward C. Willett it to mydesktop@thinkdigit.com with the subject good-on-paper concept
‘My Desktop’; and tell us your postal address, too. from seeing the light.
Published by
W
blemishes, thus defeating e have, in the past (No, silly, that’s not what made contributions in the
the purpose. The VelaSmooth (quite callously, we they really do!) fields of RADAR, design
system uses light to heat up must admit), taken Digit’s top 3 signs to tell if procedures for asynchronous
an area of the skin, and then quite a few digs at gamers you’re a gaming addict logic circuits, signals, and
RF (radio frequency) to act who died at their desks (issued in public interest): properties of zero-curvature
upon that area, to avoid because nobody could 1. Every time you lose, surfaces—which led to the
burning. This system doesn’t wrench them away from you take another stab and concept of computational
really eliminate fat, rather {insert game of your choice say, “This time, I’ll win!” origami (which uses CAD to
moving it around to places here}. Seeing as how gaming 2. You killed someone, determine the various ways
where it would look better, can be as addictive as crack, but they didn’t respawn and in which a material can be
ironing out a few wrinkles in it’s only valid that it should now the cops are after you folded) . Huffman never
the process as well. be treated as such. That’s 3. You don’t remember patented any of his ideas or
The next step for Syneron right—alcohol, drugs, sex— the last meal you had that research: “My products are
is to hit upon a non-invasive such addictions are passé wasn’t a medkit my students,” he said.
TLAs
H o-hum. Weird eBay auc-
tions are a nickel a dozen,
but we liked this one because
world peace is not achieved
before 2021 the world will
destroy itself. ...
Vaastu, of course.
SEO is passé; Indian
cybermystic Dr Smita Narang
Bogged down with TDM the auctioneer seems so sin- has it all worked out in her
TLAs in computing? Have no cere, it’s almost tear-jerking. Virtual Outrage book Web Vaastu. In this must-
clue what that just meant?
We can’t give you a decoder
ring, but we do run this for
This in-all-earnest auctioneer
offered several things in his
listing, courtesy a revelation
I f you’re a little in the fog
about what MMORPGs are,
skip the following. A contingent
have-for-webmasters is advo-
cated the use of Vaastu
Shastra and Feng Shui to cre-
your bluffing benefit from Jesus. So anyway, what of ten thousand virtual Chinese ate harmony between the five
anyway: would the winner win? A hand- folks recently protested against elements of nature to rope in
written journal listing out four a virtual motif resembling
TLA “specific things,” as follows. the Japanese “rising sun”
Well, the mystery needs (Whatever happened to good flag atop a virtual Chinese
solving. “TLA” is a TLA that
describes itself—a Three- old downloadable copies?) government building. The
Letter Acronym, bringing the 1. The cure for cancer. understandably agitated
world to its knees with jargon Some detail is warranted protesters were avatars in
overload. here—“CANCER OCCURS WHEN the online game The
Usage: “There are just TDM WE EAT OUR OWN FLESH. (His Fantasy of the Journey
(too damned many) TLAs in caps; we aren’t shouting.) Two West, hosted by portal
the world today.”
very simple examples of eating NetEase. One placard read
TIC our own flesh are biting our “NetEase, you have even
A Token-ring Interface cuticles or biting our lips. hung out the sanitary nap- Rising sun
Coupler, used in an When a piece of our own flesh kin.” Dirty, dirty. Poor
alternative network protocol, is digested, microscopic frag- Engrish, too. positive energies to the aid of
the DIX Standard of Ethernet. ments of our own DNA enter your site.
Usage: “My network is the bloodstream…” Nuff said. <body> <spirit> We’re terribly sorry we
intermittent!” “Perhaps you
2. The precise location of our Web site isn’t getting as wasted your time with our Fast
have a nervous TIC?”
heaven.
3. A solution for world
Y many hits as you expected.
Naturally, it’s not spiritual
Track that detailed, in a
shamefully inorganic way, how
APL
C is APL. So are Perl, Python peace: something to do with enough. In other words, your to build a Web site, and we
and Java. Asynchronous Pod America being the guardian of earth-bound HTML code does- hope this bit of news will show
Layers? Aggravating Pig the world and all that. n’t have the spiritual touch. It’s you The Path.
Lard? Try the more
unassuming “A Programming
Language”.
Usage: “I want a book on GIT YER MITTS ORF Out of 305 (valid) Sadly, though, everyone
APL.” “Is that a programming responses, an inspiring 197 agreed that till such a thing
language?” “Yes.”
(Caution: Might cause mind-
US Gov’t effectively asked the US
Government, “Who made
happens, the ICANN should
continue its reign of terror
numbing confusion.) Gets Rap On you the boss, anyway?” They
insisted that the US review
democratic administration of
the Internet. So basically,
RDB
Before there was the movie, The Knuckle their self-appointment as the
ultimate authority over all
despite all objections, the
Yanks control the world till
there was the acronym—
Relational Database. Oracle, things online, and move someone else gets up and
MySQL, MS SQL Server—all
E
very time Uncle Sam towards a more global does something about it.
RDBs, sans jingoism and sits up and snatches Internet where other Volunteers, anyone?
dying people. ownership of the countries can play too. The
Usage: “RDB caused a
revolution. In the database Internet, proclaiming his general consensus is that WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!
area.” responsibility to keep it there shouldn’t be a UN
clean, there is little that
anyone can do but watch
body, rather a consortium of
global organisations capable
Women To
COH
Used sometimes in IRC. Every
once in a while, we all end up
and perhaps make a guarded
joke or two about it (you try
of acting swiftly.
One sore point that
Fare Better
looking at new technology
and talking about it like
crossing swords with the
most powerful country in
triggered this indignation
was the refusal of the .xxx
Against
COHs—Cynical Old Hacks.
Usage: “Oh don’t bother
Kumar with good news, he’s
the world). But when the
National Telecommunica-
domain, something the
ICANN has been criticised for
Robots
just a COH.” tions and Information repeatedly. Finally, then,
P
Administration (NITA) took a some admission has been roponents of the male
Next time you’re chatting or
reading an e-mail, remember survey to see people’s made that the Internet is side of the gender war
to add these to your attitude towards ICANN as indeed a global body and have something to feel
vocabulary; for the rest, the Internet’s governing belongs to people in other mighty worried about right
DEB—Don’t Even Bother. body—their contract will end parts of the world too (a fact now. Ian Pearson, noted
on September 30—they were we’ve always known the “Futurologist”, claims that
in for a nasty surprise. Americans to overlook). when the robots come (and
Inbox
late, and to tell you the truth, the perfect that is mainly because of a lack of demand for
solution to this still eludes us. We have always such content. We have also noticed the
Pay, Don’t Pirate
been at the mercy of couriers. With the rains number of people with Macs grow, and with Most of us Indians are
pirates, and some of us Letters
causing even more problems, June, July, and Intel getting into Macs, and ways and means
August have always been the worst months for of making the Mac OS run on PCs and vice are tomorrow’s potential of the
us. versa (although not exactly legal) coming out, customers. But the Month
With newsstand copies, we hand them over we will be looking at an article or two on this buying options are not
to distributors all over India, who then send it to topic on a more regular basis. For now, we’re available widely in India.
all the newsstand dealers and booksellers. Their starting to include Mac-related software on Most of us Indians don’t have
network is so organised, and competition our DVD and CD. Let’s hope the demand access to credit cards or PayPal
between them so strong, that almost all increases, and gives us an excuse to cover the accounts, and can only buy products
newsstand dealers pick up their copies platform in more depth. via demand draft or cheque. Digit can
personally from distributors. There are even — Executive Editor easily solve this problem by selling
fights over who gets delivery first! Added to this the most common software such as
is the fact that they don’t have to hunt for Windows XP, Norton Antivirus,
addresses, and deliver multiple copies to one Hurrah For Open Source Microsoft Office, etc. You can also
location, and you can see why it’s that much Thanks for the fabulous magazines create income or commission from
faster. We’ve changed couriers several times, and Fast Tracks, I am a proud Digit the software vendors by acting as
and found that even the largest companies just subscriber. I have a question. their distributors or retailers. People
cannot compete with the aggressiveness and Recently, the Lucknow Municipal like me will definitely buy software
efficiency of our newsstand distribution Corporation decided to switch over to from you. It will also help in
network. We’re still looking for a way to at least open source software from the decreasing piracy. Surely a person
match them, if not beat them. We’ll try and earlier Windows-based software. They who subscribes to Digit for a year or
minimise the time difference between say the licensing fees and cost of more can easily buy full versions
newsstand and subscriber copies reaching their software prompted this decision— of software.
destinations, though. they reportedly spent Rs 19 lakh only Amandeep Singh
— Executive Editor on software this year. Thus my
question: Why is everybody not doing I read the two letters related to
the same? Are Windows and closed piracy in the July issue. Though the
Missing The Mac source software worth that price? opinions were quite influential, I feel
I was a keen Digit reader for many years, Look at me—even after buying it’s better to use open source or free
until job changes meant that I couldn’t original Windows XP Pro, I spend a software rather than using keygens
keep up the habit for the last couple of third of my bandwidth on automatic and cracks and pirated CDs. The fact
years. I am from a non-IT background (I’m updates, with an infinite number of is, one doesn’t know how effective
a CA + MBA), but was very popular patches to download all the time. the paid software is (for example, a
whenever any computer glitches came up, Shouldn’t all of us give Linux a try? crippled spyware remover) until you
which I attribute to my large collection of Udayan pay for it. And who knows, you
Digit magazines, CDs and DVDs. might have already been fooled by
I have been in London for quite some Dear Udayan, the interactive interface of the
time now and will be returning to India The problem that open source software and software and the list of spyware
next month. I want to share my operating systems face is acceptance. shown by it in order to make you pay
apprehensions about picking up another There are misconceptions about the for it. I have been using Spybot S&D
copy of Digit. This is because in my years security of open source, the services for around a year, and have found it
here in London, I have discovered Mac offered, etc. However, it must be said that to be the best, even better than
OS X. I had heard about it being closed source software developers Spyware doctor. OpenOffice.org is
mentioned in your magazine, but having reportedly provide prompt customer almost a twin of Microsoft Office;
used a Mac, I can say that it has a feel and support, which is essential for large Opera and Firefox are better than
use completely unrivalled by Windows. I companies. For home users, however, this Internet Explorer, and free. Quick
am in touch with a lot of people in India, should not make a difference, and the Heal, Avast, AVG, etc., are better than
and see that the Mac is catching on there. reason for lack of implementation in homes some paid anti-virus software.
I was wondering if you, at Digit, are also is the learning curve, or unlearning curve— The point I am trying to make is
on the bandwagon and provide you’ll have to stop thinking of computer that open source or free software are
information for the Mac user. usage in the way Windows works, and learn as good (if not better) as the paid
If the Mac is not well fairly how Linux and other OSes work before you ones. The only difference is, you need
represented, I would like to be another, if can reach the same comfort levels. With to search for them on the Net or on
not the first, person to ask you to include the level of piracy in India, people the Digit CD and DVD. Still, if people
more information on the Mac in your generally choose closed source software prefer unlocking crippled-software
magazine. because of the familiarity, and the fact that through keygens and cracks and live
Rajat Sharma it comes to them “free” anyway! Stricter with the guilt of doing something
Dear Rajat, punishments for piracy will surely see the illegal, that’s their choice.
We will be the first to admit that we haven’t penetration of open source increase. Kumar Pratik
really covered the Mac platform in Digit, and — Executive Editor Patna
Of Billionaires can’t download music onto his Bimbo Britney probably can.
Ü
berst-Googlers Page and Brin can’t technology.” The prize: the
seem to agree upon what kinds of beds aforementioned calendar! (No, we’re
have a place in their Boeing 767 kidding. It would cost us $19.95 at
corporate jet. They were fighting about it like www.itgoddess.info, and we can’t afford
little children. There was some legal stuff it.) Anyway, if you guessed “IT”, you’re
involved which we didn’t understand, but right. The idea is, the women who
the crux of the dispute was whether or not posed for the calendar did so with the
Sergey should have a California King Size bed noble intention of shaking off the
in the jet. Eric Schmidt had to make the industry’s geeky image, and encouraging
decision: “Sergey, you can have whatever bed young women to consider careers
you want in your room; Larry, you can have in computing.
whatever kind of bed you want in your “Statistics show us that one of the
bedroom. Let’s move on.” biggest barriers to entry is the
There’s more—and it’s appallingly puerile! perception of the industry,” said one
Schmidt referred to the corporate jet as a of those who posed. You can guess all
“party plane” in legal documents. Larry and the rest: (whine) “Why don’t women get
Sergey wanted things like hammocks and into IT?” (moan) “There’s a lack of
cocktail lounges in the jet. And also nubile female talent in the industry!” (grrr)
young women feeding them grapes!! No, we made up that one!! “It’s a man’s world!”
Now every billionaire loves fun and has whims, but tch, tch: Forget the digs, and what you have is some people trying to
inseparable pals bickering over beds. And letting the tasteless promote IT and computers as not geeky. Are we cranially
news spill out onto searchable pages. challenged, or may we ask what, then, is geeky?
140
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