1

* The nVidia GeForce

9300 GT has a record
542 million transistors.

* Moore’s law : The Track - 05 07 January 2009

number of transistors
Campus Weekly Tech Newsletter — SASTRA University , Srinivasa Ramanujan Centre , Kumbakonam
on a chip will double
every two years

* Ubuntu version num-

BRING IN THE MULTI-TOUCH ERA
bers follow a particular
numbering format. That The one thing you’ll notice about the new MacBook Pro as soon as you see it is that
of the year followed by it’s body is made of just one piece of metal—dubbed the ‘unibody’ design. Build
a dot followed by the quality scores a hundred here. The lid is slightly magnetized and opens easily, yet
month of release. So not too easily so as to open at the merest jerk. As with the usual Apple motto of
8.10 means released on “Beauty isn’t everything, but it still counts for a lot”, the new laptop looks like a mil-
October 2008. lion bucks. The notebook is extremely slim, but thank-
* Ubuntu codenames fully not at the cost of some essential features, unlike
are given by choosing an the MacBook Air. The keypad is a segregated one and
adjective followed by an this proves to be no problem to get used to. With a
animals name starting 15.4” screen and a resolution of 1440*900 pixels
with the same letter. Ca-
(Aspect Ratio-16:10) the display with its beautiful
nonical (the people who
distribute Ubuntu) even
colour richness will have you hooked in no time.
accepts user submis- Perhaps the most unique feature ever
sions. to be introduced is the multi-touch
touchpad. Perfected in the iPhone Apple brings this
glorious feature to notebooks for the first time. Another exclusive feature to the
new notebook is the introduction of Boot Camp. Using this little beauty, users can
now create a partition and dual-boot Windows along with the Mac operating sys-
tem.
SPECS : 15.4” LED screen, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.53 GHz, 320 GB HDD, 4 GB DDR3 RAM,
nVidia GeForce 9600 GT graphics.
BEAT THAT MICROSOFT® !!!

* The Matrix computer

from the Matrix movies
ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD
runs on humans. What
does it feed them? The The mission of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is to em-
pulp of dead humans.
power the children of developing countries to learn
by providing one connected laptop to every school-
* Cortana from the Halo age child. This scheme has been carried out success-
game series was in- fully in some parts of Africa and in selected places of
spired by Queen Nefer-
Mumbai. OLPC’s mission is to provide a means for
titi of Egypt.
learning, self-expression, and exploration to the
nearly two billion children of the developing world
with little or no access to education.
 2

Things that have us stumped this week

Android

Its got finger swiping. It’s Webkit based (like Safari and Chrome). It’s open source. It’s the
only real contender to the iPhone. And it’s Google. Need anything else?

Fastest Supercomputer

IBM’s Roadrunner (clocked at 1.026 petaflops) was just

overtaken by Cray’s Jaguar which clocked an incredible 1.64
petaflops. The Jaguar XT Supercomputer has 284 cabinets
running 45,000 quad-core Opterons. That makes a total of
1,80,000 cores. What is this going to be used for ?
Weather, Nuclear Computing and anything else that is mind
boggling. You can bet Crysis runs on that.

Call of Duty : World at War

Apart from the mouth-watering graphics, this is probably the

only game where an amateur teenager (amateur in real life war-
fare, that is) can wipe out an entire platoon of US marines. And
I’m taking about the real flesh-and-blood-mean-sleek fighting
type.

Top 10 Linux Distros of 2008

1. Ubuntu
2. Linux Mint
3. Open SUSE
4. PCLinuxOS
5. Fedora
6. Mandriva
7. Debian
8. DreamLinux
9. Sabayon
10.Damn Small Linux

Source: Linux Journal website

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/top-
10-linux-distributions-2008

How socialising websites make fools out of us

A few days before, an Aussie took a day off from work on

the pretext of being sick. Now, he didn’t have the good
sense to not banter about this information and proclaimed
this fact loudly on Facebook. It later turned out that his
boss was an online friend of his and was unfortunately
surfing Facebook at that time. We can only assume, that
the guy’s remaining career with the company was not a
happy one.
 3

GAMER WATCH
Ah! Elikaaaaaaaaa!

The new Prince of Persia seeks to revive the super hit Prince of
Persia (PoP) series which ended with PoP : The Warrior Within.
The series returns with a completely new Prince and a completely
new animation style. Also count the fact that its made by Ubisoft
Montreal, the same people who made ‘Assassin’s Creed’ (AC) and
you’ve got a winner on your hands. It is only to be hoped that Ubi-
soft have learnt from AC. The new sidekick, Elika, is not another
one of those dumb AI types who just go out there and get killed.
She is said to be extremely customizable and has got her own rep-
ertoire of cool moves, some of which even rival that of the
Prince’s. There is also a dedicated ‘Elika key’ which will enable you
to perform combos along with your counterpart. To get a very
light taste of this, download the trailer at http://
www.princeofpersiagame.com. Also the fights are to be more one-
on-one than bring-in-a-bunch-of-bad-guys-and-let-me-rough-
them-up. This evidently is to help the player concentrate more on
the best way to execute his combos than on who to execute them
on. Your task is to reveal the darkness and let in the light.

IOCG Gaming Rig : Rating : ****½ (out of 5)

17” Dell 1708 FP WUXGA
nVidia GeForce 8600—1 GB VRAM
Seagate 7200.11 ST3500320AS
Intel Core 2 Q8200 800MHz
Corsair 2*2GB DDR2 RAM 800 MHz
Cooler Master 690 Tower
Corsair TX 650 SMPS
Asetek Liquid cooling system
Editor’s Suggestion : You need to see the new artwork, the
new Prince, the new demons, and most of all the new side-
kick. It’s Assassin’s Creed meets Prince of Persia meets the ul-
timate in cool moves.
What are you waiting for !
Buy. Now. Period.

ERRORS YOU DIDN'T EXPECT TO SEE DO YOU WANT MONEY FROM HERE !
 4
GREEN OR WHITE
DOWN :
2. Socket Plug-in (5)

3. Binaries (4)

4. The Apple Jobs (5)

6. Securing of data (10)

7. 3.5” and 5.2” types found by (3)

8. Not the original one (8)

9. The Google OS (7)

12. Mentor Graphics’ Real-time Operating Sys-

tem (7)
13. Burn the browser. Go OS. (7)

14. Setup (7)

17. The Apple Touch (6)

19. Beauty is only skin deep. Prime example? (a)

20. Can be internal or external or flash (5)

21. This bought ATI recently (3)

25. Processor + Memory + Storage + Graphics

= ? (3)
26. First language to use begin—end pairs (5)

ACROSS :
1. PDF Pioneer (5) 16. This was purchased by a popular processor company (3)

2. Undefining the sharp edges (4) 18. Playing is meant to be like this (6)

4. Computer GUI Part II (6) 22. Curse you Linux (4)

5. Bit of a bitmap (5) 23. Windows Archiver unlike WinRAR (3)

8. DreamWorks competitor (5) 24. Firefox Co. Browser on the go (6)

10. RSA Encryption (6) 27. Google without the ‘flies’ in Tamil (5)

11. I Go to New york—Gaming (3) RULES :

1. It doesn’t matter if you get all answers. Just send us what you got.
2. Prizes are not guaranteed for people who send only 1 or 2 answers. (No
13. Bits of $ coherency (5)
Halwa)
3. They are guaranteed for people who get the maximum answers right*
15. You are watching this right now (2) 4. Last date : 23 January 2009
5. Contact Mr. Rajakumar of CSE Staff or II B.Tech CSE Students, namely :
Venkatraman, Parthasarathy, Sreenivasan, Prakash, Krishnakumar, Guruprasad
For online viewing visit http://ie-exact.blogspot.com
* Offer valid till stocks last

This has been an official communication from the International Order of Computer Gurus
lead by II B.Tech CSE.

The words Microsoft, Apple, MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, nVidia, Ubisoft, Intel and Linux are the registered
trademarks of those particular companies and we are not to be held responsible for any copyright infringement or
misuse of logos or names of any sort will be dealt with severely by the respective companies themselves. So, any
comments about these should be passed in private. Thank You.
-- You have just viewed the New Year Edition.
Mail us at : ie.exact@gmail.com