Chandrayan

Today is a proud day for India. For a country that was incapable of manufacturing pencils 60 years ago, sending probes to the moon as a great acheivement. I salute the people at ISRO.

Jai Hind

The Truth about Pranav Kumar Vasishta

We all know pranav as the elderly IIIT thinker that he is. This post will expose the evil behind the mask of innocence that he puts on.

The victim was mythalez (a.k.a Ramachandra :O )

The year was 2006. Rama had just checked his mail on Dilip(also from ug2k2) room PC. After he checked his mail, he exited the room without logging off. Enter Pranav. Seeing rama's console open, the devil inside Pranav took over. Encouraged by Dilip, pranav  changed the title of the putty window (putty window bar->right click->change settings->window->behaviour->window title) to vasishta@students. This was followed by a change to the prompt(the .bashrc file) to make it look like [vasishta@students ~]:

So we have Ramachandra's putty session looking like pranav's session.

Thus the trap was set for Rama. In some time Rama entered the room and saw a putty session titled vasishta@students . Ramachandra eyes lit up like 1000W bulbs. Encouraged by Dilip and sensing a once in a lifetime opportunity, Rama quickely composed a tullu mail to his batch from that putty session. Rama then went to pranav and with a big smile on his face asked pranav to check his mail. Pranav opened his mail box and lo and behold there was a mail:

Ramachandra  Sub: I am the greatest tullu of IIIT. 

And that is the story of how Ramachandra was *pawnd* by Pranav Kumar Vasishta. I have seen lots of tullu mail in IIIT. But this has to be the mother of all tullu mails.

Rats

Yes Rats.... They chewed up the link between the NBH-GH and the rest of IIIT. 

PS1. At times working in the server room is a real education as to the flexibility of the protocols of TCP/IP and the amount of abuse cisco hardware can take.

PS2. I am happy ganguly and dravid managed to get some runs.

PS3. After a long time(6~7 years) I played four continuous days of badminton. It felt good.

PS4. I saw kulbir saini's cam. The auto click(when you smile) thing either doesn't work or I don't have a happy enough smile :(

ps5. Played far cry all over again. Not in the mood for "research" these days.

ps6. My gfx card(7800gtx) is totally and utterly useless. I need a new machine. Donations please :)

ps7. I think most of your batchmates leaving makes for a very lonely and boring existance. I think the life in the OBH is kinda dull these days. No longer see people out in the corridors BC'ing. 

PS8. Somebody download some good series .............

Arbit Post

I have had to work a lot in the past few days(MS/r) I learned quite a few new things. First that there are more then 15 ways of doing binary multiplication. Second there are at-least 10 ways of doing binary exponentiation!! Boy people do have a lot of time on hand :) And the worst thing to happen was that a conference date was advanced by a full 20 days :( Now I have to work even harder !

The Olympics are over and it's fair to say that none of us expected 3 medals for India. It's an outstanding achievement.On he whole just when we thought that it couldn't get any better then Phelps, along came Usain Bolt. WOW is the only word I have to describe him. He ran the 100m as if it was a morning jog.

This was the first time I really followed the Olympics. I was getting used to life at IIIT when the last Olympics happened and was too ignorant in 2000. I think our generation has seen something of a miracle in the performances of Phelps and Bolt. Odds are we won't see anything as spectacular anytime soon. I'm glad I was around to watch Beijing 2008.


PS: I watched only the last 10 mins of Liverpool vs Boro :) Awesome awesome awesome

Where does nVidia go after the 4870x2?

AMD/ATI recently launched the 4870X2. It's basically two 4870's on one physical card. Benchmarks show that it totally outperforms nVidia's flagship GTX280. Which begs the question: what was nVidia thinking when it launched the GTX280? When launched it was almost always outperformed by the 9800GX2. It only beat the 9800GX2 with AA turned on at high res. Not to mention the initial price of $650. This untimely launch by nVidia has seen it lose the crown to ATI after almost two years. The last I think time ATI was on top was with the x1950XT.

In all this mess, does there lie any salvation for nVidia?? Yes there does. CUDA works amazingly fast with the new GT200 core. CUDA based Applications are springing up pretty fast and they work really well. Also 3 way SLI with GTX280 is still the fastest solution commercially available for gaming.

Where does nVidia go from here? Well I don't see nVidia being able to put anything more on the GTX280. What would be a good idea though would be a 9800gx2 2GB Edition. The main problem with the 9800GX2 is with using AA. This is more of a memory problem then anything else. Doing AA @ 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 with 512 MB of memory is not really feasible. ATI realized this as well and put in extra memory on the 4870x2. I think a 2GB 9800GX2 would really put nVidia back in competition with the 4870X2. At present the 1GB 9800GX2 retails as low as $265. Adding a extra GB of memory will push this upto not more then $350 and still keep it to within 5% of the $570 4870X2.