Android mini pc: The $50 tablet

I was thinking about getting a Raspberry Pi for some tinkering at home. While looking for it, I stumbled upon the China mass market made "android sticks" which sell for $50 round about. I decided to give it a shot - expecting hardly anything. The only thing I knew was that the hardware of these sticks was better than the Raspberry Pi. So I took the plunge, and boy was I surprised.

First the specs. For $50 you get lot of value for your money. Dual core 1.6Ghz Rockchip RK3066 SOC, 1G ram and 8g of storage. Add micro sd card slot, HDMI connector and USB OTG cable. Benchmarks put the Rockchip's ARM processor equivalent to Tegra 3 if not better. So this is basically a Nexus 7 equivalent, which you can directly connect to your HDTV. And voila, we have a 46in Android tablet running Jelly Bean.

Functionality wise this thing flat out delivers the kitchen sink and more. It does HD display output without a hitch. Netflix, Hulu Plus videos play like a champ, and you get good UI to play with, instead of the rusty and not so often updated UI for these apps on other smart devices like TVs and blu-ray players. It also comes with flash support, so you can play the "watch movie online free" searches natively ;) No need to keep messing around with the PC/TV connectivity.

And then there's the basic Android customization and playfullness that comes with it inherently. You can change launchers, backgrounds, icons, apps; stream music using different services, get notifications, weather - everthing. Much smarter than your smart TV.

The only catch that I saw was the lack of touch UI. A wireless keyboard/mouse combo works fine for almost all apps, but you might miss touch for playing some games and such.

Well there is a fix for that too, Rockchip has written an app that you can run on your phone and provide touch/accelerometer input remotely. With this app you don't need any other controlling device, but this keyboard/mouse thing is way more easily usable than unlocking your phone all the time.

There are Linux distributions that you can install on this too, like PicUntu. All in all, it's super bang for the buck at $50. Guaranteed to make your gadget thirsty soul happy :)

Asus X401a - the affordable ultrabook

My laptop of five years, the 2007 13 incher macbook has taken a hit. Fixing it is costly enough to warrant buying a new machine instead. So I decided to go shopping.

No Apple machines this time though. It made sense to cough up a grand when the competition cost only $200 less, and owning a macbook felt quite elite for a grad student. Not anymore. Laptop prices for the entry level ones have come down to less than half of what they were just 3-4 years ago. And what the OEMs call entry level, are by no standards entry level either, they just want you to buy a fancy spec-ed configuration, which you probably don't need.

I started with some market 'survey' so to say, sometimes I think I like doing that more than actually getting the thing I want! Talk about the journey being more interesting than the destination.

Some observations.

- The traditionally good players seem to be losing ground in the market. Dell/HP/Lenovo/Toshiba designs look dated compared to ones from Acer/Asus/Samsung.

- There are way too many CPUs from Intel and AMD available over a wide range of laptops, from  entry level to mid to the ultrabooks/performance machines. The problem with that is it is difficult to understand - for most buyers, even the 'serious' ones, which CPUs are better at what when compared. There's Intel's Pentium B9xx series, i3, i5, i7 and newer architecture Celerons; and AMD's C series, E series, A4, A6, A8 and some Athlon's still hanging around. It's a crowded market with not so obvious boundaries. So do your homework.

- Most entry level laptops are more than good enough for almost everyone, keeping gamers aside. Offcourse not including netbooks, which ship with the underwhelming Intel Atom, skip that.

- AMD's APU processors totally rock the graphics scene on laptops.

- Some in store models are absolutely not available online. Read that again. 

With all this in mind I was hunting for a reasonably priced machine. And just like that I stumbled across a machine just unveiled at Computex 2012, and it was sitting on a BestBuy shelf, exclusively, not available anywhere else, including Newegg and Amazon. 

It was love at first sight :D

The Asus X401a. It's slim, almost like an ultrabook. Weighs less than many ultrabooks. Plays 1080p on my TV without missing a pixel, while running cool. Runs Gimp like a champ.

Specs - Asus X401a, 14 in, Pentium B970(dual core), 4G RAM, 320GB HDD, USB 3.0, HDMI, 4lbs, $350

And you can buy three of these in the cost of a macbook air, and still save money for a Nexus tablet.

Like some other early reviewer said, this machine is a category in itself. And I'm impressed with the build quality and design by Asus, at this price. It even comes with a collapsible ethernet port to keep the design slim. Lenovo and Apple should learn from this. I'm sure Asus will sell a ton of these.

The future of DSLR

There are fewer times I get this excited.

This is one of them.

Got a Panasonic GF1 recently, and I'm absolutely in love with it. I remember those days when I had a sad analog camera and I had to restrict myself to a max of two film rolls, and then develop-print-digitize them, painful. I used to envy my friends having digital ones. I got my first camera, a $100 point and shoot, some Samsung 5MP and I used to love it alongwith its shortcomings, I had learnt to work around them. Later on, I got a Fuji Finepix with an unheard of 18x optical zoom and okay-ish manual controls. But it had its own shortcomings, and I used to get irritated working around them, because by this time I knew a little more about the pins-and-points of photography and I knew till what limits it could go. A DSLR was an obvious next.

Recently, while casually amazoning(this is a dangerous thing to do by the way, invariably puts a hole in your wallet) I came across micro-four-thirds. Later realized that it was the same technology that I had read about a year ago. I was sold, and decided that a micro-four-third would be my DSLR. As I like to say it, which for some reason some people find funny, I've moved from almost-a-DSLR to the future-of-DSLR.  I'm quite convinced that this is the future, and it looks darn impressive. We'll be looking at even more compact interchangeable lens cameras soon.

You can read some interesting reviews of the GF1 here:
Techradar Craigmod SteveHuff

And like one of the reviewers says

"It'll rekindle your love of photography, and if that's not the hallmark of a fine camera, we don't know what is."

I've been trying to be regular in playing with it, documented here.

Hero

Talking about heroes, I got one of mine :)

HTC Hero. It is the best phone I've ever owned. I'm in simple words amazed by this device. May be its cause I jumped generations of phones, my previous was a shameful Motorola Rokr (even Steve Jobs got pissed at it :P)

You'll find all sorts of superficial and in-depth reviews about this device. But to summarize it has good hardware, has a great UI(HTC Sense), a stable platform(Android) and a great app store (off-course nothing beats Apple's app store).  I was so much sold, I decided to switch to Sprint from AT&T for that, which can now be regarded as a wise move considering Sprint's network and plans.

Recently I wanted couple of things, a GPS, a pocket camera, a portable music player and a new phone, and this sweet device does it all. Why not iPhone you would ask, wouldn't you?

Well, my hatred of iTunes ranks first in the reasons I have. I don't use iTunes even on my Mac, simply don't like it. Secondly, background apps. This phone(Android in general) has background apps that can do magic, like put the phone on vibrate when at work, turn wifi on at home, mute notification sounds in sleep time. And the not so magical but essential things like listen to internet streams while doing other stuff, have notifications for tweets/facebook/whatever-you-want, chat without getting logged off on switching the app, and use a GPS/maps app while using other apps. Thirdly, iPhone is just not cool. There, I said it.

There are fourth, fifth and some more reasons, you may have a look at the fantastic Droid ad to get a hold.

Short attention spans

There is pandemic, and no...its not the flu, its the increasingingly short attention span. I'm finding it more and more difficult to concentrate hard enough for a long time on something. I get distracted and start doing something else pretty soon. But for me, I have the awareness that I'm affected and I have been trying to counter-act it and the endeavors have more or less been successful. I worry about the kids which are growing on this, and who may not be able to fight this with trivial effort.

General discussion among friends, revealed that many others are also affected by this syndrome, if I may call it. The primary culprit in my opinion is the internet. You would say I'm just passing the buck of blame on something that is not-me..but wait, let me explain why.

With internet, we are getting more and more used to "going through" articles and information. We don't "read" them, generally. And this is for articles, for other web pages we don't even glance, there are nice shiny icons and buttons where are attention is, and we hit them. They are designed so that we just hit them, and don't have to go through reading what to do at that point. Most of the web is designed to be come-and-go type, you are not expected to spend a awful lot of time on the page, and which is design-wise perfect.

But then it has fall-outs. Short attention spans. How many of you can survive reading a 5 page article line-by-line even though it seems ice-creamy interesting? Twitter is a living, thriving and running proof of this phenomenon. It is growing like a parasite on people's inability to read "long" stretches of information (like this :P), and feeding them with short, sometimes incoherent and mostly pointless bytes of data. Twitter seems to be a nemesis of blogging, but its not, its the short attention span. And I wouldn't be surprised if this internet addicted race of ours, in not so distant future would be turned into 10-second-Tom-o-sapiens.

EDIT:

AG provided a link to an interesting article related to this.

How to NOT build a PC in 200 bucks!

Something caught onto me, may be some old d-i-y testosterone still lying around. And then I was just infatuated with this idea of building my own PC. The primary reason is that I'm just sick tired of using the macbook, its all shiny and sleek, but you can't tweak. Well that's as bad a reason could be.

So here I went off in my pursuit of building a decently powerful machine in as little as 200 bucks. I had few things in mind

1. Small form factor
2. Should not suck on my patience like my laptop

Getting point 2 covered was not much of an effort, at least so I thought. So I went web-shopping to get the nuts and bolts. After spending few hours spread across couple of days I realized three things that you shouldn't miss

a. Keep your configuration which "sounds" like made this year aka bleeding edge
b. Get the cheapest one in that
c. Find the one which comes with free shipping!

Point c is very important, you end up getting better stuff for lesser price overall. So based on this I got a dual core processor, 2 gigs of memory, 320g of hdd and a dvd writer and a motherboard which is reasonable enough. (I'm not a gaming person, so I skipped the graphics card and settled for on-board, otherwise the budget would have been over-board).

Now comes the tough problem of point 1. I wanted my desktop to be portable and not look like hey-I'm-from-the-90's boring box. Small things come at a price and I had to shell out a good 50 bucks for a compact case. A little more could have got me really cute cases, but I wasn't building a Wall-E per se.

After the groceries got home, I started with recipe, which last time I had covered in a flat half an hour. But surprise, this time it took me good 2 weeks to get it to work :( Two of the one-in-10-or-100-thousand things happened, damn two of them, how bad is my luck! The RAM didn't work, cause some pompous companies like Corsair make higher frequency sticks than what the spec says (running at 675Mhz instead of 667Mhz) and I learnt it the hard way. I got a Kingston (1000Mhz) finally which is doing great.

And finally I had a working desktop, or was it...the second coming was the the WD hdd, it was just plain dead, and getting it replaced took ten days.

And finally I had a working desktop, or was it...no the Windows CD was not right. I had to replace it.

And finally I had a working desktop, or was it...no the cheap wifi card that I bought doesn't work. I gave up trying to make it work, and settled for a shared internet connection through my laptop :(

And finally I had a working desktop, yes this time for real, with good old Windows(which has caught a malware and already become unsuable as I write, which made me to write this blog in gmail's composer) and the bling with the greeny Opensuse running KDE 4.2.

If you are interested in the details, the approximate break-up

AMD Athlon X2 4200+ & AM2 socket mobo - 90
2G Kingston - 20
320G WD - 50
Slim case - 50
DVD RW - 25
USB Wifi - 15

Round about 250 bucks..not bad eh? So what if my macbook serves as the router.

Flux Capacitor is now for real!

Just like there are resistors, inductors and capacitors, presence of another element called as memristor was predicted in 1971 by professor Leon Chau. It took 37 years for someone to develop it. HP labs has done this feat. Memristor, in short remembers the current passing through it and accordingly changes it resistance. The greatest thing about it is that it performs better as you scale it down, meaning high density chips will be easier to make as against what happens when transistors are packed together.

By all that it looks like, it seems to be a revolution in electronics and is going to redefine nano-technology. Here is a intriguing statement by professor Chau,

"The situation is analogous to what is called Aristotle's Law of Motion, which was wrong, because he said that force must be proportional to velocity. That misled people for 2000 years until Newton came along and pointed out that Aristotle was using the wrong variables. Newton said that force is proportional to acceleration -- the change in velocity. This is exactly the situation with electronic circuit theory today. All electronic text books have been teaching using the wrong variables -- voltage and charge--explaining away inaccuracies as anomalies. What they should have been teaching is the relationship between changes in voltage, or flux, and charge."

And surprise. Memristor's technically correct name happens to be "Flux Capacitor". You'll know what I mean if you have seen the "Back to the Future" trilogy. And if the science in that was correct(ahem)..which used flux capacitor as the basis for time travel...Wait a minute, Doc...ah

The Pursuit of Snappyness

Ubuntu Feisty had me tamed. My distro hopping was down for few months now. Its a great distro, which gives you that rare to find smooth-ride. But I have a big grudge against Ubuntu due to one single thing. Its all i386 code and doesn't feel snappy enough, particularly when my latpop runs on lower frequency of 800Mhz. At 1600Mhz it feels ok, but still not snappy. So I was looking for a able i686 replacement. And PCLinuxOS fits the bill, its a ultra-polished distro. But it has this problem, since the last 4-5 versions that it never completes a shutdown on my laptop. So it was out of question.

Then I read about Fedora 8 test release. I had given up on Fedora for desktop use long back when it was in versions 2 & 3. Something or the other used to be broken all the time. But this time they have changed their minds. Since last version they have started coming up with live-cds, it took them quite some time to realise that stuff in 4 cds can be packed in a single live-cd. And now they also release "desktop" versions which are i686 optimized. Exactly what I was looking far.

So I burnt the stable Fedora 7 desktop live-cd, and took it for a test drive. Liked what I saw, so decided to install it. But I was still skeptical whether it would be good for desktop use. Installation was quick, all hardware running fine, including cpu frequency scaling. I googled how to put multimedia things in place. In a matter of 5 minutes all packages were downloaded and installed by yum ( if there is any contender to apt-get and Debian/Ubuntu's repository size its only yum and Fedora/Redhat). I fired up the browser, flash played fine, so did stage6 divx videos. No copying around plugins or fixing broken symlinks. 5 minutes, and Fedora was running fully loaded! That took more time even on Feisty. I have yet to setup wifi, but with Gnome's Network Manager around its has as easy as it could get. There are some finishing touches that are seen in Ubuntu which are not present, but considering that Fedora has newly ventured into desktop arena, that can be waived.

As for the snappyness, its all there. Nautilus file manager never felt so light nor did the window manager Metacity. Fedora has gained back the lost confidence, and I'm glad. Its nostalgic to see those bluecurve colors once again, which were my very first sights of what Linux looked like way back with Redhat 7. I hope Fedora will soon cater desktop needs better than Ubuntu. But even right now its as good a shining new desktop it can be.

On a side note, with Dell, Acer & Lenovo now shipping Linux installed machines, Linux penetration will definitely soar. And let not those idiots fool you who think you run Linux on desktop just because you want to be different. Tell them to get a better excuse for being out-of-touch with the state-of-art.

Virtual Reality

Its been 2 years...for the blinking cursor, and around 130 posts.

So it seems the "time to post" stat is pretty good. This is a MIS course fallout that I have taken this semester. It keeps talking about "time to market" and stuff :P

In another course we had a paper on Virtual Machines. The concepts mentioned in there are so very relevant even now. In fact many of the suggestions/ideas in that still remain to be implemented. This is probably because the VM related research grew with IBM taking plunge into it years ago...they had systems to handle DOS, OS/(whatever) virtual machines, they even had a firmware to assist in virtualization ! And then somehow the research dwindled.

And its back with a bang...after a long time. As our prof says, in CS things keep moving in circles. Right now its VMs and multi-cores. The virtual machine monitor that was planned, which ran on the hardware and presented an illusion of multiple copies is nowhere to be seen, even after these many years. All we have is a host OS hack, VMWare, Xen, VPC, Qemu anything right now does not run on raw hardware. If somebody manages to do that, I think the best possible performance can be expected out of a VM.

With this all VM thing around, I tried using VMWare Player, its a gem of a VMM. It looks like a Acrobat Reader for the VM appliances, but beware it isn't. Playing with the .vmx file can give you anything you want, right from creation of new appliances. In fact there are online .vmx generators that "manufacture" the hardware you want ! And offcourse since it is meant to be Acrobat Reader type thing its absolutely free!

Maxthon, the power browser

Its been quite some time since i wrote a technical post.

Browsing takes up a sizeable share of the time I spend on my computer. And when I spend so much time on a browser, its my expectation that the application does what it is supposed to do, do it well, and do some more too. There are very few browsers that fit this category...IE and Firefox don't fall here. Firefox doesn't cause its a great browser for me when I put some 10 plugins that I need. And I dont like putting plugins, it costs time....

So the one that fits the bill is Opera. It has everything, by default that I need from a browser, like auto form-fill, RSS feed reader, interface customization. But it falls short of rendering all sites correctly, such as orkut.com, or sites with unicode text, like the regional newspaper site esakal.com. So I tried playing with a different category of browsers...those based on IE. These applications build a lot of functionality expected from a modern browser and use the IE engine for rendering. Most sites are designed to work on IE. So you get perfect rendering, plus loads of featuers no there in IE.

I tried using Avant browser for some time. Its good, its fast, very customizable. But I found it a little buggy (tabs switching use to cease when a tab is loading a heavy site) and cluttered. But till now it was my rank 2 browser, 1 being the indespensable Opera. 2-3 days back I tried Maxthon. And it has been my browser of choice ever since.

Its a IE based browser, supports tabs, RSS feeds etc. Since it uses IE engine the rendering of all sites is flawless. It feels light, the interface can be customized to an insane extent. Like Ctrl+F11 toggles the menu bar! It has these great shortcuts, that you can almost surf without the mouse, and you save a lot of time. It comes with a weather sidebar thats really nice, and you get the Roboform form-filler bundled. The super-drag-drop feature is its USP.The other coolest thing is that it can change the rendering engine itself, it use the Mozilla foundation's Gecko too! You have to use it to believe what it can do.

Maxthon, with unwanted toolbars gone, even the menubar.

Maxthon is a power browser in the true sense, and I can see myself using it for some time, though the latest Opera comes with neon-light features like widgets(mac like) and .torrent handler!

Update:
It seems Maxthon people are working very very hard. I found ver 2.0 (preview version) and its kickass...a snapshot should say all:

Vista...Waste-a

I read on an average 2 stories a day..that in one way or the other say Windows Vista is screwed.

The woes of the Vista Graphical User Interface.

Its got the all ballyhooed Aero interface...that boasts of 3D windows, transparencies shadows...animations etc.Do you need that to increase your productivity...NO. In fact all this eye-candy might get annoying in daily work...but offcourse it must be having controls to tune the eye-candy as the user wants.Is this a pro....well, yes. They are trying to out-do Mac OS X...but they forget that Apple uses their hardware to run their software. M$ doesn't, and they are expecting people to shift to better, newer hardware.You can get some idea from the fact that Vista requires 800MB of memory for itself, and when playing games goes upto to a staggering 2GB, other than a 3D graphics accelerator card....

They have written the OS from scratch....

Now this is a big issue...older software goes through several man months of test phases. Lots of bugs turn-up and get fixed...actually improving the system stability. Writing from scratch is a all new way of inducting new bugs...In fact this guy advises not to write software from scratch, but to improve it to suit the needs. I read somewhere that the Vista release was postponed by 6 months to Jan 07.

Vista to be native 64-bit

M$ is planning to cash in the 64-bit wave that is gaining amplitude recently. Vista is going to be the first M$ OS to have native 64-bit code. But all these plans were heavily dependent upon the now infamous "Wintel" bonding. Intel was to come up with a "performing" 64-bit chip for Vista to ship-on. But Intel has gone late...they were more busy doing the "dual core" hype. Their earlier 64-bit architecture used in the doomed Itanium has been abandoned. The companies that invested in Itanium have dragged in a unwordly $10 billion for market boosting of Itanium.

Meanwhile, the AMD site has been leaps ahead...Their 64-bit horses, the dual core Athlons (named FX) and the dual core Turions (used in laptops) have already debuted. And needless to say, they continue to beat the Intel counterparts in performance. It seems more and more like, prodution quality ( really ? ) Vista-64 will see its first cycle of instructions execute on an AMD.

Will M$ beat the competition once again remains to be seen, this time with Open Source desktops getting the cutting edge and Apple continuing to grow, 2007 may very well begin the decline of the M$ raj.

Category: [ _Tech_ ]

Opera 8.5

I have switched to 64-bit computing completely. SuSE 10 x86_64 works like a charm, KDE is faster and the compilations are fast too. Better part is that ATI provides even 64-bit drivers for Linux...and with 180 FPS i am too happy.

The only thing nagging me was Firefox. The one shipped by SuSE 10 is sluggish, both the 64-bit and 32-bit versions of SuSE have this issue. And startup time is annoying, particularly because Firefox needs to load the gtk libraries too in the all qt KDE environment. I wanted a browser replacement desperately... i spend loads of time on the browser searching and reading, so a good fast browser is a must. I tried the app-of-all-things Konqueror. Its good as a browser too...but not that fast, and definitely not feature packed when it comes to surfing.

Enter Opera. I installed the SuSE 32-bit version, the wise guys still dont ship 64-bit builds. Interestingly neither does Firefox... the reason behind this is flash and java, who dont have 64-bit versions... that is so pathetic. Opera is qt based, ideal for a KDE environment, loads faster and works lightening fast. And i mean fast. The features provided by default in a 3.6 MB download are superb.

* Browser, with all the things a new browser should have
* Feed Reader
* Mail Client
* Download Manager
* Notes ( a nice thing: i am writing this post in the Notes feature, i think they can extend this to blog poster easily)

The UI is good, and leaves a lot of screen space to be used for rendering webpages. It can be skinned and the skins available are impressive. The only thing i found missing was that the feed reader doesnt support Atom feeds, only RSS. But the latest Opera 9, yet to be released has Atom support too. It also has AJAX based widgets... like floating calc, md5 hash, RSS reader etc. which i think are going to rock the browser world. All browsers henceforth will support this widget thing. Opera people know what a browser does and what it will do in the future... and they are already pulling the shoes. Are you Firefox ?

PS: For those who dont know, Opera is completely free and ad-free.
And if you are missing any of the extensions in Firefox...all of them have equivalents in Opera...

PS2: Blogger.com is a pain for all browsers, including Opera and Konqueror except for Firefox... offcourse, afterall Google is investing in Firefox.

Category [ _Tech_ ] [ _Review_ ]

BuddhaPad !

I simply cannot believe this.

A review, of a mouse pad.....one page long.....avaaaaaara.
"...A nice bonus, it works with not only PC systems, but Macs too! ...." am i still alive.

Q-t-C: (new feature introduced on this blog, meaning Quote-to-Context, like there is reference-to-context)

“Of course life is bizarre, the more bizarre it gets, the more interesting it is. The only way to approach it is to make yourself some popcorn and enjoy the show.”
-Anonymous

I guess the post has become bizarre enough, time to put the full stop.

Category [ _Unfiled_ ]

To tech or not to tech.

Getting old technology to work with new, its a pain...a real pain.

We have this old TV set, some 10 years old. I was attempting to do the impossible. Getting the S-Video output of my machine to work on the TV. This old TV from SHARP takes only antenna input and the old type of VCR input. The VCR port wasn't working, sigh. To use the antenna port, i got a S-Video to single video, two audio out cable. This kind of connector generally works with recent TVs. Then i had to put these wires in a RF converter whose output is the antenna type one. But even after this double level of conversions i couldnt get the TV output to work. It gets real frustrating when something that your trying for half a day doesnt work, damn.

This is the problem when technology progresses at speeds greater than the life of its components. Same is going to happen with DVDs and in recent future i believe to everything. DVD format wars are on with heavy weights supporting both the HD-DVD format and the Blue-ray format. These discs have huge, real huge capacities and support the new age technology like "managed copy". This kind of technology will prevent people from copying stuff from them, much to the pleasure of hollywood studios. They just love that, the ultimate anti-piracy weapon. But the immediate side-effect is that you and me have to get a new DVD player or a DVD-ROM/RW. Technology, is its own enemy. But thats the way it is.

The other thing is the revolution in socket technology, if i may call it that way. Today we use serial ports, parallel ports, 10 types audio-video in/out ports, scsi, rj-xx and what nots. One of the Google founders, it was Larry Page i guess, suggested that why don't we use USB ports for everything or atleast something like it. Nowadays a horde of devices connect using USB ports. The good part is USB ports can also be used to provide power. So if we start using them everywhere, you just have to keep a single type of connector, a USB to USB. And you should be able to use it for your computer, your TV, DVD players, cellphones, battery chargers and any other thing you want it for. Now you know why Google is what it is.

So if somebody says "To tech or not to tech" you know thats its not a choice, there is just a single option.

Category [ _Tech_ ]

Duel with Dual

The battleground is heating up. Each side is putting up newer, better than ever warriors. Its going to be real fun what happens next, and to what levels all this will go to. I am talking about microprocessor manufacturing giants, AMD and Intel.

AMD, was looked for how it would "market perform". But these days its doing more of a "out perform". (that phrase is a rip off) Intel has been a legendary player, right from introducing one of the first chips capable of programmable computing, the 4004 to its evolved successors, the 80x86 series, which still remains the wider base of general purpose computing, the x86 platform. AMD has its own merits, like bringing out the first desktop level 64-bit chips and the world's first dual core chips.

Now both companies seem to have agreed on one thing. There is no point in going behind increasing performance by chasing the clock speed. AMD realised it earlier and they improved their architectures to become more productive, and hence their per watt productivity is high. Both of them have ventured deep into dual and multiple cores. Intel just released the dual-core chips for desktops and laptops. Through 2006-2008, AMD and Intel are all set to introduce quad-core and eight-core chips in the market...

Meanwhile AMD is eating out the PC market, which traditionally was topped by Intel's share. Now for the first time in history, AMD has 49% share in the desktop segment and Intel has 48% in the US. With some marketting this can be replicated over the world. Most importantly AMDs processors have better technology in a given price segment, like say laptops. The Sempron M series is very much evolved compared to the Celeron M series in the same price bracket, so is it for desktops. A 64-bit Athlon-XP is cheaper than a 32-bit P-4, and performs better. Intel has to watch out for itself..it has become vulnerable. Getting a entry in Apple market isnt a big market boost, cause Apple has less than 1% share.

I never really took it from Intel. They think they are the monopoly and price their products insanely. Few years back when i wanted to get a new processor, the 2.4Ghz was 4K costlier than 2Ghz ! Then i had settled for VIA C3...an interesting processor with its own story, i'll discuss it some time. This time i have settled with the AMD Turion ML-30.

Category [ _Tech_ ]

Trysts with nxTECH

My HP nx6125 has a AMD Turion CPU, which has the speedstep technology ( an Intel terminology). Its a wonderful innovation, particularly meant for mobile systems. When the CPU has less load or when the system temperature is above threshold the CPU frequency is scaled down, as low as half of the maximum sometimes. This results in lower power consumption, hence less heat and so the fans keep off. In fact using the system in this mode gives 1 extra hour of battery life.

Not surprisingly the Fedora Core 4 which i have put on it supported this using the PowerNow K8 module ( for those who dont know, PowerNow is the AMD name for speedstep, and K8 is the latest architecture seen in Athlons, Turions & Semprons). For Windows which had no knowledge that it running on a very evolved processor the frequency remained at 1.6Ghz and the battery power kept showing to just 3 hours. I had to download the AMD Turion driver for Windows XP and also use the SpeedSwitchXP utility to achieve the same effect. SpeedSwitchXP gives the control of the frequency scaling operations in the hands of the user, and you can run the machine cool-n-quiet(again an AMD term) by running the CPU at lower frequencies most of the time.

And that is very beneficial, cause you dont need high speeds when surfing or working on a word processor. Also the machine feels no way slow or sluggish even with low speeds. With the AMD driver and the speed switch utility now the battery shows full 4 hours.

Then i ran into another issue which still remains to be solved. Most onboard modems available these days are so called WinModems. The term means that most of the functionality of the modem is implemented in software, and the hardware is just basic to talk to the phone line. This reduces the cost substantially. The problem is most of the companies that make such hardware have drivers only for Windows, and its pretty difficult to implement a counterpart open source when hardly anything is known.

The winmodem bundled with the nx6125 is Conexant V90 Fax modem, with no driver for Linux. The one that is there has 14.4kbps limitation, or you to have to buy it. It doesnt come free with the hardware cause its made by some other company called Linuxant, they have a tie-up with Conexant. So now i am left with no internet on Linux.

Its high time hardware companies start making drivers for Linux, some biggies do have drivers for half a dozen OSs, but the small ones need to understand this too.

Category [ _Tech_ ] [ _Linux_ ]

On the vacation

I am on a vacation, had 6 leaves that would have expired...so had to take them. Though i didnt need any vacation as such, i wouldnt say no to a one offered for free :P. Planning is going on for some trips, i hope they materialize, its been a while since i went somewhere with friends.

So my biggest tp right now is my new machine, HP nx6125. It feels just great to use it. I have even setup the finger print based logon...so now just swipe the thumb and you (I actually) go in! Unfortunately HP doesnt provide drivers for Linux...but now theres a well defined biometric fingerprint API library and you can use that to patch the Linux logon managers like XDM, KDM. Some people have successfully done that for the IBM Tseries, i didnt find any attempt for the HP hardware...anyway, that may soon get fixed as HP already has fingerprint drivers for HP-UX.

Playing more with the novel i have, i tried putting up a dual monitor display using my desktop monitor as the second one. It is a matter of few clicks, in XP...have to check this out on Linux too. One thing i didnt get is that if you maximize a window or play a full screen movie all it does is uses up the entire screen space of the current monitor it is on. It doesnt go across like a wallpaper does.

Meanwhile trying for players that can play DVDs effortlessly, i just found out that the best video player around right now is Video LAN VLC, weird name. But in 8MB it has a nice GUI, lots of controls, and can play anything that claims to be a video file, did i say its cross platform. I found its decoders better than widely known mplayer (not the windows default fellow, that sucks). A nice feature i found was that it can play videos in wallpaper mode...yes and it means exactly what you are thinking.

Now that i am at leisure at a stretch, some of us here have just started playing Baddy again. Baddy can get your stamina up in 2 sessions, i love that about the game.

Its not that i am getting bored...but need to spend time with some quality. A waste of time, as is not widely known, is a waste of resources. People can afford to waste time...but what they dont understand is that they also waste away a lot of resources during the process. So till the time i find the quality in time...happy wasting.

Category [ _Tech_ ]

NX6125

Finally...finally i have got a machine i was waiting for, dreaming for since some time.

Now a proud owner of a HP nx6125. Actually, i was initially thinking of getting a nx6110, priced at 34k. It had a Celeron M. People might think what use is a Celeron M, but hey its not the old Celeron it used to be. These new versions are based on Dothan core same as the Pentium M core. So basically both are P4s. Only difference is the cache which is 2MB in the Pentium M against 1MB in the Celeron M and some better power saving.

But till then i hadnt really seen the nx6125. The moment i read its specs for the price it is offered for, i new it was a steal deal. In fact the price of this machine got raised by 1k within last week. Here is the config in detail...

AMD Turion 64 ML-30
1MB integrated cache
256 MB
ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M Chipset
ATI Mobility Radeon X300 Graphics
40 GB(5400rpm)
15" TFT
802.11b/g
Bluetooth
6-in-1 card reader
10/100/1000 Mbps NIC
Express card slot
56k Modem
Biometric Fingerprint ID.
1 yr worldwide warranty
...and to add HP sleek.

The price i got this for was 41k all inclusive (+free IBM optical mouse). Getting a 64-bit i think is a good enough future provision, armed for coming OS releases, and offcourse a good resale value.

During the research i was doing for this buy there are some things everybody would like to know.

1. The prices the worldover are now same, be it in India, US, UK, Taiwan (i actually checked at these places). Thats probably because of WTO reforms and VAT i guess.

2. AMD beats the pants out off Intel in whatever category, be it budget desktops, high end desktops, budget laptops or high end laptops. AMD simply rocksss. Their processors have better features, perform better and even cost less at the same time.

3. Most brands use barebone models manufactured by firms mostly in Taiwan. Hence you may find laptops of different brands outstandingly similar.

The machine came with FreeDOS, thats the only catch when you buy it here in India, but if it saves 3k why not, and i am least interested in buying a MS OS.

Machinations

I have a simple machine at home. Hmm...that was very modest and polite. Actually its completely outdated. And the kind of processing i try to squeeze out of it always becomes a challenge, and it struggles and wobbles and i stretch it, till it can. After that it freezes. Normal behaviour. Like every other machine on this planet.

But its not it's fault. I mean the processor is a humble VIA C3 800 Mhz, its used in multi-purpose phones these days... And what i do is synologous to driving a Maruti 800 at 80-90 kmph, non-stop K to K.(thats kashmir to kanyakumari). I overwhelm the poor machine with tasks even a mighty AMD 64 would find daunting.

I have this big library of images, its particularly useful for the off-the-shelf work i do like making posters & brochures. Firstly it took the breath out of Picasa2 to index the library, some 2 hours. Then i tried doing batch tasks, like resizing & color adjusting. There are lot of tools you can deploy for that, Picasa2, Irfan View, and offcourse Gimp as well as Photoshop. Irfan view is the fastest while Picasa2 is the coolest, too good GUI. Photoshop & Gimp are better used for better bigger tasks that cant be done in these simple tools.

Newer versions of Photoshop, 6.0 onwards are very heavy. My machine takes 2 min to load them.I use 5.5. Gimp is a different story altogether. It seems to be running slow because of GTK-windows, the Windows port appears heavy & just doesnt feel right.

I tried overclocking my CPU, thats pretty safe if your CPU doesnt generate lot of heat. Mine doesnt, this VIA C3 can run even on a passive heat sink i.e. without a fan. Dont try this if you have high end P4s, it might just fry out. Overclocking has to be done with care, incremetally increasing your clock speed. I increased it from 133 to 150. After that it doesnt boot. So now my 800Mhz runs at 902Mhz. Wow. People have overclocked Celeron in greater ratios.

With all this going on i had a tremedous urge to get a new machine, offcourse not a desk based one. But i gave it up again for the same reasons, not the right time...and the not the right kind of money.

Category [ _Tech_ ]

A state of affairs

There was a lecture arranged at my work place. It was supposedly on Linux internals, but it digressed a lot, upto the the limit that there wasnt anything of Linux discussed. But the points the distinguished speaker made are worth pondering over.

1. Programming is meant to be clean & simple. It allows to be done in a manner that is human readable (meaning better readability). But most code that you see & this includes all the kernel code is highly unreadable. In effect it can be concluded that most programmers & that includes all the system programmers are bad bad programmers.

2. If you look at Linux kernel code, it is neither properly documented nor does it follow the modern OS programming approach. Its like walking through a slum, you have to keep looking here & there...

3. We started off from a 4Mhz processor & these days we have 3ghz ones. But the OSes running on them have become more lousy with time. And this is true if you look at how sadly Linux & Windows use a god damn 3gig processor.

4. Free Software, Open Source hasnt done that good as was expected. Reason, every Tom-Dick-Harry can contribute. The quality suffers, but this doesnt mean closed source did wonders. If you look at computer industry as a whole in the last 30 years of history there havent been ANY worthy innovations. Theres no "Theory of Relativity" counterpart out here.

5. After so many years of using computers we still type in commands to it. The time people spend in pressing the backspace key in a day is not negligible & so isnt the processing power wasted over redundant mouse movement.

6. We are wasting time & computing power with inefficient software. How fast be your processor, it still takes countable time to open office documents.
( I personally feel MS Office beats the pants out of every other counterpart. Its the only thing MS has made really really engineered.)

The speaker has 20 years of experience in the computer industry, is a scientist at IUCAA, teaches at CDAC & is the CTO of our company.His name is Dr Sunu Engineer.

Category [ _Tech_ ]