Of reservations and Arjun Singh

Of all of the reservations proposed and implemented by the honorable HRD minister Arjun Singh, the one I fail to understand at any level is that of faculty in IIT's. I feel kinda sorry for the existing faculty and students at IIT's who I guess are rather pissed with this. Reserving seats for students is one thing but reserving faculty positions is dangerous. By admitting inferior students you really don't compromise any academic opportunities available to students. Yes, things like academic atmosphere and placements do suffer but these are in the "can be handled/absorbed" category. I feel anybody in their right mind cannot sign off on something like this.

By installing inferior faculty you are screwing everybody for very obvious reasons. And I really don't see any benefits of this to anybody. To be a faculty at an IIT you need at least a PhD. Now I think I can safely assume that somebody with a PhD in any engineering or science discipline really doesn't need help in getting a job. The beneficiaries of reservation should be people who are needy or disadvantaged. If you are telling me that somebody with a PhD falls into this category then I think we have much more serious issues with society and our education system, then can be fixed with reservations.

But what is most worrying, is the Ministry for HRD. This decision doesn't help improve any academic standards, does not help any disadvantaged section of society or give the government any political mileage(I would bet less then 0.1% of India understands anything about faculty positions at IIT's or even remotely cares). It worries me that there is no thought behind decision making in India's premier education controlling authority. If there is I would welcome the ministry to share it. Right now Arjun Singh reminds me of a certain Muhammad bin Tuhglaq I had studied about in class 7. This Tughlaq dude did a lot of crazy and whimsical stuff much like Arjun Singh is doing today.

A lot of institutions have had run ins with the government. The Indian Armed forces summarily rejected reservations proposed. Even the IIM boards have resisted reservations and have even tried to get court injunctions if I am not mistaken. Here is where I feel the governing body of the IIT's has let everybody down. They have been silent bystanders to the systematic destruction of the IIT's. They have not spoken up and this is where they are doing more damage to the IIT system then Arjun Singh himself. I hope somebody on the governing body of the IIT's reads this and finds the strength to take on the HRD minister.

Building a Gaming Rig in 60K

I can't play crysis better then medium@1200x800 on my laptop This state of affairs is not limited to crysis and the situation is simply unacceptable. I have decided to purchase a new system. This time I won't go for a laptop. I plan to build a monster desktop. I have 60K in savings and that will be my budget for the new machine. I want to build this desktop without having to sell my laptop. My laptop, having served me very well for almost 2 and a half years now, will retreat onto my dads desk where he will use it for his word-processing needs.

Processor: The 3 contenders
1. Core 2 quad 6600
2. Core 2 quad 9300
3. Core 2 quad 9450

For those wondering where AMD is, there is a simple answer: AMD is totally absent in this segment. Their best processor is in the phenom range and doesn't even come close to the intel ones listed here. After some head-breaking I have decided to go for the 9450. It's damn expensive. But overclocked it comes into the performance range of an stock core 2 extreme processor. Not bad. I don't want my processor to be a bottleneck.

Pehla Jhatka : Intel Core 2 Quad q9450 @ Rs.15,500

Motherboard
1. Intel DP35DP
This was rather straightforward. I want to buy a single card solution. SLI is a pain. You have to buy a higher power supply that will cost a little fortune on it's own. Plus not all games leverage SLI.

Doosra Jhatka : Intel DP35DP @ 5,750

Grafix Card: When I sat down to research the situation on gfx cards I was shocked by how abnormally high these cards are in India. Check this out.

XfX 9800gx2 Price in India 33K. Online price in America converted to rupees: 14K
Xfx gtx280 Price in India 45K. Online price in America converted to rupees: 18.5K

Generally other components like processors and motherboards have a variation of 15~20% from their American prices. But this is fucking insane. The gtx280 and 9800gx2 cost almost 2.5 times their original price. Whats more they come with lifetime warranties in the US as compared to the 3 year warranties here. I will wait for somebody to get me a card from the US. I'm not going to waste money buying them here. As for the card I am going to buy a gtx280. 9800gx2 has outperformed it some games, but not all games are optimized for multiple GPU's and there is also the advantage of higher texture memory and phyXis.

Teesra Jhatka: XfX gtx280 xxx edition @ 19K

Other stuff:

RAM : 2x2GB @ 4K
HDD : 2x250 WD @ 4.6 K

Stuff I already Have:
Keyboard, Mouse, Speakers, Wireless card, TV tuner, DVD writer.

Lets see where I am in terms of money

15,500 + 5,750 + 19,000 + 4,000 + 4,600 = 48,850

Which leaves me with roughly 12K to buy a cabinet, SMPS and a monitor. I am terribly overshooting!!!

Assuming a basic cabinet costs 2K and a basic 600W power supply would cost 3K, I am now left with 7 K for a monitor.

I am looking cutting costs possibly on the processor. I don't want to fiddle with the rest of the stuff. The next post when I figure out what to cut out!!

What Dual Degree has meant for me

When I first read about the dual degree course at IIIT-H i thought they were referring to a B.tech + M.Tech combo just like you have in the IIT's. What I didn't know was that It was B.Tech + MS/R. The following was a sequence of events that led to the dual degree students slowly, but surely drifting away from the rest of the people.

• Special lunches for dual degree students in our 4th semester. These lunches acted as a medium for formal exposure to the various research centers. I remember some CSE/ECE students also joining us (illegally of course :D ) for these lunches. I remember Sumeet Joon telling me that we were lambs being fed before a slaughter. I now agree
• Then came 5th semester. All DD students were to pursue honors. Even people like me whose CGPA's were barely holding onto 7 mark were plunged into the abyss of research. Honors means extra projects(real projects and not messengers/firewalls) and extra IT electives.
• No BTP. I don't know if this was good or bad, but seeing the kind of arbit grading that was done, I'm sure a BTP would have been a saga of frustration.
• And now finally when everybody has left, here we are spending days in research centers with most people sifting through papers and trying to XoR two papers to get a new one. Further screwed are those people in centers like CSTAR . My guide has made it abundantly clear that the lab has no funds. Boohooo :(

What DD has meant for me personally

I have been a rather ordinary student if CGPA is a good measure. But what CSD did make me do was help put all the mediocrity of my first two years behind me. Here was a new challenge of picking up a stream of CS and excelling in it. I was in my second year amazed by the technology behind video. So I promptly went to Jawahar and expressed my interest in working with video and more specifically with video compression/encryption. The Big 'J' told me to register for DIP and PR. I had no interest in these courses and I made that clear to Jawahar. For those who do not know Jawahar, he has a "It's either my way or the highway" attitude. I left CVIT as fast as I had rushed in. I then thought of approaching stuff from the encryption side of things. In IIIT(unfortunately) crypto == Venkaiah, but(fortunately) as fate would have it, Prashant Jaikumar suggested with a rather grim tone that I should work with K.Srinathan as opposed to Venkaiah. 2 years of work with K.Srinathan have enabled me to excel at crypto and information security, in my own small way. The stuff that I picked up from K.Srinathan helped open a lot of doors for me, including an 6 month internship at RSA labs, the home of cryptography. I would most certainly not have had the urge to study like the way I did, had I not been in dual degree. In a way, if I ever make anything out of myself in the technical sphere in my life, I would say that the pressure of being in CSD was the single most important thing that turned my academic life around in college.

But having said all that, Dual degree should be an M.Tech with an option to go for Ms/R if you want to. The most important thing is that Ms/R has to be driven by self motivation and passion. You can't do Ms/R by default. You can still go through the motions and complete your courses to receive an M.Tech. Dr.Sangal argues that students who have joined the Dual degree program must complete their MS as they have given that commitment while joining the DD course. Anybody with an ounce of intelligence and common sense would agree that it is ludicrous to expect a 12th student to properly understand the concept of MS/R and be committed to it. It is only after 3 semesters that the reality of MS/R starts to sink in. This is not a good arrangement. And how this could escape the scrutiny of the experienced faculty we have, baffles me!

The coming year will be a great challenge for IIIT on many fronts. There will be about 150 Ms/R students all people put together (DD + PG) This is going to stretch resources to the limit. I wonder how defences will be carried out and students will be payed. I sincerely hope for the best.