You take snaps using your digital camera. Now you wish to transfer them to your computer and upload them on the web. But there is a small hitch : each image is almost 1.5 MB in size. What do you do now ?
Here are a few tips :
For image play, I would recommend the immensely popular Irfan View
Check it out !
posted by Anshuman @ 6:54 AM
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1 comments
Orkut, a online social networking site and an innovation by Google, which has surpassed many of it's rivals(like hi5, Friendster) by a big margin is the latest buzz word of today. First and the foremost reason why it's the No. 1(or maybe no. 2, next to MySpace) is obviosly, speed. It's much faster and simpler than hi5. You have all the tools that you need to stay in touch, make new friends or just pass the time. And that's why I call it a "complete" social networking service. Let's check it out.
Signing-Up:
It's easy. If you've got a gmail account(which almost everyone has), no problems, get going. If not, create one first, and that'll be the username-password for your orkut account too. Next, complete your profile and you're a member of the growing orkut community.
This integration, I'll say, is kind of uncool as signing out from either of them will result in a sign-out from both of them.
Finding Friends:
Check your inbox. There must be many a mails inviting you to join orkut/become friends. Accept them. Now you've some friends. Check their friends network and expand. In the rare case that you don't have any invitations, use their "search" option which is, in my opinion, is useless. Mostly, there are no donuts for us(that means search could not be performed at that moment). Hopes are on that Orkut will fix it ASAP. Anyway, one friend is enough to expand your friends list to several thousand. So, don't worry about that.
Scrapping:
Scrapping, the very "essence" of Orkut, is actually, chatting, with a few differences
- There's only one "window" for all conversations
- It's not private i.e. all the people can view what you and the other person is writing
- All the conversations are saved
- It's fun
Describing friends:
There are two ways to do so. Firstly, you can give them a fan, trusty, cool and/or sexy status. Alternately, or contemporarily, you can also write a testimonial for your friend which is second option.
Communities:
There are so many people on Orkut. Hence, wavelengths and interests are sure to match. To cater to the need of common interests and providing a platform, Orkut has provided an option for communities. A person can create or join a community, and therefore can communicate his/her ideas. You can be part of as many communities as you want. I'm a part of 74 of them!
Photos:
Upload your photo so that the world can see you, and leave comment(s) too. Same as hi5. Notable problem is, once you define a primary photo, or delete one, it takes 1-2 days for the changes to take effect.
Total Fun:
Join Orkut. You're gonna have the blast of a time. If you've ever been on hi5 and loved it, Orkut will be god-like for you. It's addictive.
Like everything else, this service also has it's share of Con's. As said earlier, it's "search" feature is not of much use. Also, changes in photo album take effect after a day or two.
It's "news" and "media" options don't make up for interesting matter and the worst about it is, you can only delete 10 messages at one time, a bane for those(which includes me), who have more than 1000 unread messages in their message box and want to get rid of them. Figuring out who's online and who's not is also a difficult task. Trend is, the person appearing first in the square friends list is online, but then, that's not a sure shot method.
But all said and done, Orkut deserves a 9 out of 10.
Regards
(Siddharth Razdan)
posted by Siddharth Razdan @ 11:10 PM
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1 comments
It's impossible for me to cover this topic in great detail, so I will hit the key points only.
AMD64 Instruction set
In Feburary 2003, on the eve of AMD's launch of the AMD64 family CPUs, INTEL expressed its disblief. According to Richard Wirt, an INTEL senior fellow, four separate design teams at Intel had examined how the company could take one of its 32-bit chips and transform it into a 64-bit machine, all four Intel teams concluded that such a feat was not doable.
INTEL did try hard to do 64 bit on x86, but their engineering didn't know how.
But the grand masters at AMD did what INTEL thought was impossible. Opteron 64 hit the market in April 2003 and quickly won almost all performance benchmarks.
Seeing is believing, INTEL tried to reverse engineer AMD's instruction set onto Pentium IV and Pentium 4 based Xeon. Emulating AMD64 instruction set was easier on Pentium IV, because it had a 36 bit physical address. However, benchmarks show INTEL's EM64T runs slower under 64 bit mode than 32 bit mode. Moreover, INTEL used some old AMD PDF files, and did a bad job, some Microsoft and Linux code developed on AMD64 failed on run on INTEL's clone. As of today, INTEL's EM64T is still missing some crucial capabilities of AMD64.
But running AMD64 instructions on Pentium III proves to be much harder, as of today, INTEL hasn't yet figured out how to do 64 bit on Pentium M and Core Duo.
And AMD is not sitting idle, it's adding a new set of instructions to the AMD64. INTEL engineers will have more sleepless nights digesting AMD PDFs.
True Multi-core
AMD64 architecture was designed to be true multi-core from the ground up. A multi-core CPU is much like a multi processor system, the cores must communicate with each other to maintain consistency. Inside the AMD64 CPU, there is a crossbar switch that connects the multiple cores together, so they communicate internally and at extremely high speed. We see from benchmarks that dual core Opteron is almost twice as fast as a single core Opteron at the same clock speed.
In comparison, INTEL's dual core implementation is a kludge. In INTEL's design, the two cores share the same FSB, when they need to communicate, they first go out to FSB and come back again, without knowing they are sitting next to each other. The result? Poor performance .
This AnandTech article provides good explanation of the dual core designs.
The Embedded Memory Controller
Chip design gurus have long realized that a major bottleneck in system performance is memory latency. Just like memory is much faster than hard disk, the CPU is much faster than memory. When a CPU needs to access memory for instructions or data, it has to wait for the memory content to be retrieved, the time of waiting is the latency. During the waiting period, the CPU can't do anything.
In the old FSB based architecture (all INTEL's), the memory controller is in an external chip called the north bridge, while the CPUs run at 2-3GHZ, the conventional memory controller runs at about 200MHZ. Furthermore, in the old FSB design, the data have to make two hops, from memory to memory controller, then to the CPU. As we can see from this article, memory latency in a Pentium 4 design is between 300 to 400 clock cycles.
In AMD64 design, the memory controller is embedded in the CPU and runs at CPU frequency, the CPU connects directly to the memory without any intermediate. As we can see from this IBM test on single and dual core Opteron, memory latency on the Opteron is only about 50 nano second for local memory access.
Like the Opteron, all modern CPUs, such as Alpha EV7, IBM Power5, SUN UltraSparc T1, AMD Geode LX, Athlon 64, Sempron 64, Turion 64, have embedded memory controller(s).
From INTEL roadmap as far as 2009, we don't see an embedded memory controller design.
Cache Coherent HyperTransport (ccHT)
In a N processor AMD system, since each CPU has its own memory controller and associated banks of memory, there are N memory controllers which provide N times the memory bandwith. To have these N memory controllers act coherently, there are multiple ccHT links between AMD CPUs, which is used for fetching memory from another CPU. As we can see from the IBM document referenced above, in the case of remote memory access, the latency is also quite small.
INTEL is rumored to work on something similar to ccHT called CSI, however, since the cancelation of the Whitefield project, CSI is missing from INTEL's foreseeable roadmap.
Direct Connect Architecture
In FSB based architecture such as INTEL's, the CPU, Memory and I/O share the bandwith of a uni-directional bus, just like many folks share one phone line in a conference call --- only one guy can talk in either direction. In AMD64 architecture (Opteron, Athlon 64, Turion 64, Sempron), there are separate dedicated connections between CPU and Memory, between CPU and I/O, between CPU and CPU, between CPU core and CPU core. In AMD64, there is no crosstalk, and everything is bi-directional--traffic goes both ways the same time.
From INTEL's roadmap, it's stuck with FSB architecture until at least 2009.
Conclusion
INTEL is 5 generations behind AMD, and there are other major areas that INTEL is lacking, such as IOMMU for fast DMA. To match AMD in 2 core performance, INTEL will have to use very large cache size, which will negate its shrink to 65nm. At 4 core and up level, INTEL is simply hopless.
posted by Sanchit Gulati @ 7:59 AM
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0 comments
Thank you!
School Name: Ramjas School
School Email: ramjas.rkp@gmail.com
School Phone Number: 26174676
Quiz Team 1 Member 1: Uma Damle
Quiz Team 1 Member 2: Prashanth Kanduri
Quiz Team 1 Member 3: Sanchit Gulati
Quiz Team 2 Member 1: G. Anirudh
Quiz Team 2 Member 2: Tushar N.
Quiz Team 2 Member 3: Chhayank Singh
Crossword Team 1 Member 1: Uma Damle
Crossword Team 1 Member 2: Prashanth kanduri
Crossword Team 2 Member 1: Sanchit Gulati
Crossword Team 2 Member 2: Tarun Gahlot
Programming Member 1: Siddharth Razdan
Programming Member 2: Ankit Aggarwal
Web Designing Member 1: Tarun Gahlot
Web Designing Member 2: Prashanth kanduri
Gaming: G. Anirudh
NCrypton Member 1: Sanchit Gulati
NCrypton Member 2: Prashanth Kanduri
Digital Imaging: Uma Damle
Media Magnate Member 1: Nitish Jha
Media Magnate Member 2: Tushar N.
Animathlon Member 1: Tarun Gahlot
Animathlon Member 2: Sanchit Gulati
Group Discussion: Shakti Mehra
Number of students Day 1: 9
Number of students Day 2: 9
Teacher Incharge: Pankaj Kumar
Comments: Invitation not send.
posted by Sanchit Gulati @ 8:06 PM
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0 comments
QUIZ
gr. 1
Uma damle
Prashanth
sanchit Gulati( I'LL Improve)
Gr.2
anirudh
decide the rest.
Crossword
Gr.1
Uma Damle
prashanth
Gr.2
sanchit
tarun
GD
Shakti mehra
Gaming
anirudh
Web-D
Tarun
TECHATHLON:
We all are there
Decide something abt
Flash
Photoshop
Programming
http://www.code-warriors.org
posted by Sanchit Gulati @ 1:18 AM
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1 comments
Access 2006 - Modern BK
Submitted by abhishek on November 30, 2006 - 6:59pm.
Start: 21 Dec 2006 - 8:00am
End: 23 Dec 2006 - 6:00pm
The Bits ‘N’ Bytes, Computer Club of Modern School, Barakhamba Road is organizing its annual computer symposium ‘Access 2006’ on the 21st, 22nd and 23rd of December 2006 on the school’s campus. It would give us great pleasure if you could participate in this event by sending your students.
‘Access 2006’ is a two and half day event in which many schools from in and around Delhi participate every year. There are four basic categories in the competition, i.e. the seniors, juniors, sub-juniors & the cadets. The events range from Quizzing, Web designing, Fancy dress, Programming, Gaming and Discussions.
Details!!
posted by Sanchit Gulati @ 12:47 AM
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2 comments
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