Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehana (KANK) Story line

CHARACTERS: BOY1, BOY2, GIRL1, GIRL2, PARENTS

BOY 1 loves GIRL 1.
BOY 2 loves GIRL 2.

PARENTS MAKE THE DECISION.

BOY 1 MARRIES GIRL 2.
BOY 2 MARRIES GIRL 1.

BOY 1 ? GIRL 2 ? UNHAPPY
BOY 2 ? GIRL 1 ? UNHAPPY

BOY 1 still loves GIRL 1
BOY 2 still loves GIRL 2

PARENTS COME TO KNOW AGAIN. DECISION MADE.

BOY 1 MARRIES GIRL 1.
BOY 2 MARRIES GIRL 2.

HAPPY ENDING!!!

NAME OF THE STORY: KABHI ALVIDA NA KEHNA.

BOY 1: SHAHRUKH KHAN
BOY 2: ABHISHEK BACCHAN
GIRL 1: PRIETY ZINTA
GIRL 2: RANI MUKHERJEE

Viewers: $%^$%^$@%^^$^$!!!!!!

Need i say more? :P

Amd+Ati = Trouble for Intel+Nvidia??

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past 2 weeks, you would have probably heard or read about the deal. Amd has announced a take over/acquistion of ATi for approximately 5.2 billion US dollars. As im in no position to discuss technical details of the deeal (im not a management student :P ), ill just keep it to a technological and consumer point of view..

Quite frankly, the deal had to happen. I expected something of this kind. AMD has been at the top for almost 3 years now(which is quite a long time in technology), leaving the big bro Intel to completely rot (lets face it, prescott was a complete failure). When Conroe started showing promising figures early this year, suddenly everyone was interested in intel. Amd on the other hand, had to convince everyone that AM2 was really a big leap forward - although the only noticable improvements were a different socket and DDR2. Things got worse for Amd when the cheapest conroe started steamrolling the costliest processor that AMD has right now, the FX-62 (okay, the E6300 was overclocked, but that itself is a piece of cake). Also, AM2 isnt showing the performance increase that AMD promised. Now that is where it can get really messy.

On the other hand, the Graphics battle has more or less been equal - Ati and Nvidia fighting over each other with a completely new Marchitecture every 2 years or so (i hope im correct). And it hasnt been a complete domination like AMD’s. Every new chipset that came out from ATi was matched by a competing one from Nvidia. So that part of the story has been pretty balanced.

Now the reason why i think this deal would come through was AMD’s position. Although im a AMD fanboy, i will NOT be getting a AM2. Conroe has just kicked its ass fair and square. The next 2 years or so definitely belongs to intel. i see no reason why not to get a conroe. Amd has to live with this, and unfortunately it cannot. It simply doesnt have the financial power of Intel to survive in the market without selling much chips for more than 2 years. That is where this deal can work to its advantage. Ati has been doing pretty well itself - the X1900XT is a big hit, and with its Much awaited and hyped R600 coming out sometime this year or Q1 2007, it will have a pretty nice position in the market. Amd can use this to try and minimise the poor performance of AM2.

Another area which will be interesting to watch is the combined platform based performance of AMD+ATI. They can really turn the tables on other chip makers by developing a Processor+Chipset+Graphics platform that can crush competition. Joint development doesnt hurt in technology. Amd has announced that joint development can probably start in 2008, which is not too far away. Also the prospect of AMD fabs producing the complex ATI chips will definitely bring down the production costs.

So does this spell doom for either intel or nvidia. The answer unforunately is NO. Intel isnt your typical upcoming company that is afraid of competition. They literally brought about the microprocessor revolution single handly in the common consumer market. They have survived the worst disaster - prescott and still have come out with their best success story till date - the conroe. And nvidia too isnt going to be shaken - they are valued at approx 10 billion dollars, twice that of ATI’s. So this merger will not affect the two companies anytime soon. Maybe when AMD+ATi start their joint development things will get interesting….

And as for the big question - will intel buy nvidia? The answer is probably no. At least thats what everyone is hoping. But you can never predict the Big Bad Intel ;)

For more info and technical commentry head to Anandtech

getting a wordpress blog...

so ive created a wordpress blog with the same name. reason is that its far more customizable, and i like wordpress :p ive imported everything there too. and i plan to keep this blog so that i can learn a bit of php designing :p

http://restlesschatter.wordpress.com

Music ahoye!!

With nothing else to do, ive been working hard on my music collection. For the past week, ive been downloading like crazy - everything from metal, trance, techno, OSTs etc. I figured out this would be the perfect time to diversify my music taste (which is pretty limited by the way).

And in other news, i will be off holidaying for about a week. Since college is delayed, this is the perfect time to roam about and have fun. Probably the last time i can holiday without any worries...

Aint she a beauty!!

The SAMSUNG 940bw - Widescreen 19" LCD panel :) got it yesterday, and im absolutely loving it!!! After seeing this, im not going back to CRT's ever again :P

Album Collection - 1

i guess the pic is self explanatory :p anyway, ive been hooked on to trance/electonic/ambient music for the past one month... and ive goto say i love it. ive got about 12 albums of depeche mode, and they are legendary!! id recommend everyone listens to "Playing the Angel" - its an instrumental, and it just blows me away!! never have i been addicted to one particular album for a long time... listen to it twice a day :)

Indian ISPs suck!

im pissed off!! really. how can the ISPs block popular domains like blogspot, geocities, etc when the government asked them to block a few particular blogs. and that too wasnt right! whatever happened to the democratic "free" country where everyone can express their thoughts freely?? i can understand that the govt is under tremendous pressure to keep terrorism under control, but claiming that many terrorist outfits use public blogs to communicate just makes me laugh my ass off! they should know better, and get their facts right rather than going about blocking sites that normal people use daily....

and the accusation wars will begin now. the ISPs have already claimed that the govt had directed them to block the complete domains, something that the govt obviously refuses. who was actually behind this will never be known (so much for the right to information act :p)

on the brighter side, they are back again!! so im not complaining :p like i said, im more bothered about people's right to free speech, the right to information etc rather than keep blabbering about this episode. and blocking content in the internet isnt something that should be done! i feel its an invation of privacy, and a direct curb of people's freedom of speech. sadly, nothing will be done about it :(

lets just hope something stupid like this doesnt happen again.

Im back

after some time away from my computer and my blog, im back again... lots have happened in the past 2 weeks and i would like to keep in touch :p anway, the most important thing is i have been admitted to MCA program in SSN college , chennai. im quite happy with it. And SSN has been doing extremely well in Anna university for the past 3 years.

Also, i did receive a call letter from anna univ, but only after i paid the fee in SSN. but i have no regrets whatsoever. What happened, was the best that could happen. I was pretty sure id get into PSG in coimbatore, but then didnt want to leave my dad alone... so here im again for the next 3 years in my life!!

ive been watching quite a few movies recently, and intend to write reviews for superman returs, Click, Cars and others. Lets see how fast i can get down to that

Away....

yup, thats right! my neck pain just got worse and ive decided to stay away from my computer until it gets better. Most probablly it will last a week, but hope to be back at the earliest .... till then goodbye :((

Football Fever

well, football is the flavor of the season, and i dont miss out on that. been following the world cup right from the start, and ive goto say there have been a few good matches. most of the heavy weight teams that were expected to go thru to the round of 16 have not diasppointed, except for france. what they really think is a question that the french coach can answer best...

brazil do seem to the favourtites to win the cup yet again. but they havent been performing to their level yet. ronaldo seems to be in trouble regarding his weight and his pre world cup preparation. but the great player must be ready to silence his critics once and for all in what may be his last world cup.

and england - what can i say?? they just suck!! for the potential they have, they should have steam rolled the opposition they played so far. but in both matches, they just managed to get thru in the last minutes. and the 2-2 draw against sweden puts extra pressure on them to perform well in the next round...

lets see how the teams perform in the second round.

Im officially a graduate now

My Bsc degree results are out - and i managed 82% overall. Pretty ok i guess, although i could have done much better. The funny thing in life is, we study only after the mistakes are made. But i have no regrets whatsoever and only hope i dont repeat this in my post grad.

And my admission into post grad degree (MCA) is , hmm lets say not clear at the moment. I have applied to a few top colleges and can only hope i get in.

Going Open Source

This is an article that i wrote for another forum. Absolute newbie stuff. Couldnt resist posting it here ;)

p.s: i did it in 1 hr so its bound to be sloppy :p

In this article, i attempt to give a short introduction to open source software.

What is this open source that eveyone is talking about?

Open Source refers to a methodology where the product, its source, processes, etc are made available to the end user. This means that the user will have the ability and means to study, modify, distribute the product. Another major point of open source is that it always remains free. Although open source is evident in many industries, the rest of the article will focus on open source software only.

So you mean to say that open source software is free?

Yes it is. But its also much more than just being "free" . The source code of the s/w will be available too. And this is the basic principle of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The ability of the users to modify the source code to suite their needs, and to distribute the software freely through any means, is what makes it interesting.

There are softwares that are free but not open source. Popular examples would include winamp, bitcomet,utorrent etc which are free, but their source code is not available for the community. These are generally called "closed source" software.

The main ideology behind OSI is that all software should be free. This particularly is useful to under developed countries. The computer revolution is changing lives in a tremendous way. The hardware prices have come down greatly, and is affordable now. But what is the use of a computer if people cannot afford the software that runs on it? For example, a OEM copy of Windows Xp home edition costs around $100, Microsoft office 2003 basic version costs around $180. This is the absolute minimum s/w for a typical home user. Add other essentials like image editing s/w, cd/dvd writing s/w, etc the cost will exceed the actual cost of the hardware. In under developed countries where a basic PC costs under $250, the cost of s/w is just outrageous.

The alternative is to use open source s/w which is free, comes with no hidden charges (obviously, since its free!). Everything from operating system, office applications, media players, ripping/encoding applications, browsers, compilers, image editing tools etc are available in the open source community. They are able replacement to the typical windows/mac apps, if not even better!


The two main guiding points of the OSI are :

1. Software should always remain free.
2. There should be constant improvement in the software.

The way to achieve this is to involve the community in the development of the software, by making the source code available to all. The open source community consists of Full time developers, Contributing developers, volunteers and end users. Since a large, diverse user base is established, constant improvements are made almost everyday and bugs/errors fixed very quickly. This is one major advantage over closed source software, where the end users have to wait for the software concern to fix the bug. Whereas in open source, if a user encounters an error, he has the freedom to fix it if possible, or report it to the community so that it is fixed immediately.

The development of open source s/w is guided by different licenses. The GPL (GNU public lisense), BSD, MIT, etc are a few popular licenses. Every piece of s/w should be bound by a certain license that the developer decides. The license determines the scope of the s/w, how it can be modified/distributed, and a few other regulating principles.


From where does the money come from?

Since many open source s/w are huge in scale (OS like linux/bsd and s/w like apache/php/mysql) most of them have full time developers. And the added costs of hardware, Website maintainance, patent trademark, advertisment etc, make it virtually impossible to run without an assured source of income. This is where major corporations and the donation from the community comes into play. Most of the big players like Red Hat, SUSE, Novell, etc support the OSI. While they do make money out of their corporate linux sales, they also ensure that the open source version of their OS does keep developing. And donations fromt the community is another major source of income.

But isnt open source sofware difficult to use?

In one word "NO". It is because most of us work only on the windows/mac platform, that we find linux difficult. The learning curve is like any other OS. How many of us got the hang of windows the very first time we used it? and still how many of us know the unlimited hidden settings that windows has? Linux is just like any other OS and with some practise, everyone will find it as easy as windows.

But still there is no disputing the fact that linux isnt entirely GUI driven. The use of the terminal (dos prompt for windows users) is essential to get a few things done. But the commands are in simple english and can be easily learnt, just like DOS commands.

Now that i know something about it, i want to support the open source community. But how?

The best way to help is to start using open source s/w. Try using linux occassionally. There are many flavours of linux specially made for first time users. Even if you want to continue on windows, there are apps like azureus, filezilla, gimp, open office, firefox, etc that are available for windows too. Actively participate in open source forums by asking doubts, contributing articles or how-to's , helping other newbies like you, submitting bug reports and errors and keeping track of latest developments. This is the best way to get started. And donations wouldnt hurt either.

Main Advantages of using Open Source Software :

1. Free
2. Easily Available.
3. Can be modified to suite the need of the user.
4. Very helpful community.
5. Bugs/errors fixed quickly.
6. Exhaustive documentation available on the internet.


Since Open Source is a vast topic, discussion about each and every aspect is not possible and would be out of the scope of this article. For more information visit the following sites :

OpenSource Organization
Free Software Foundation
Source forge - the largest collection of open source software
GNU

I do hope i have covered the important aspects/points. Comments, Criticism, Questions, Suggestions from members always welcome!

P.S : For those who think linux is difficult, this article was typed in Ubuntu linux using openoffice

D-DAY!

Its here finally. My under grad degree results are scheduled to be released today! So have to sit at home and check the website frequently. Not that im afraid though. I have done pretty well and am expecting a good percentage. But as usual, im at the mercy of the professors and hope that they havent messed around with my marks.

I guess my entrance test results would be more important than these..

Wanna get Tranced?

Having become a fan of trance lately, im pretty much trolling the web for anything i can get my hands on. Managed to get "A State of Trance - 250" yup the very best of them all. Although im a bit disappointed to note that not much of them have vocals in it :( would love to listen to some vocal trance if you can call it that way. But yeah, trance does rox! i would say its the best music when your working - not too soft to make you doze off, and definitely not like rock to make ur boss come running for you :p

Would love to get my hands on some vocal trance though...

Ubuntu + XGL = Trouble

XGL is the main reason i jumped to the ubuntu bandwagon. For the uninitiated, XGL is a next gen user interface with catchy effects to rival that of Vista. Ive seen a video of xgl in action and all i could do was sit and stare! Developed by novell and still in its early stages, it has all the potential to outperform vista. And i personally think that is going to happen.Xgl isnt a replacemtent to Gnome or Kde. It resides on top of your current gdm and acts more like a shell extension (i think) .

Ubuntu Dapper Drake (6.06) had built in support for xgl (precomiled packages that is) so i took the plunge. Never being the linux geek, i found it pretty challenging to download and configure the packages. After everything was complete, a hopeful restart, and all i got was the console!! DAMN! 2 hours wasted to mess up my display! What followed was endless editing of configuration files, and i still havent figured it out :( GDM just refuses to run and xserver doesnt start at all! Ill try my hand at it once more, and then comes the favourite task of any windows lover - Reinstalling!! :p

anyone got a clue to start gdm from the console, please leave a comment

Update : Gnome working again!! :)

things i miss in blogger

Blogger obviously has its shortcomings. Most of them are pretty indespensible too. like these

1. Inbuilt smiley support
2. Category/Tag based system
3. Static Pages

Now the last one can be excused, but emoticons and categories cannot be made without. How they managed to miss those two features remains a mystery to me. And i know there are replacements , but most of them arent very smart. Like the need for multiple blogs, or a delicious account to create categories.

So far, ive come across around 6 scripts to create categories, and many ways to embed technorati tags. Have to decide and implement one of those in a few days time.

Life as a series of random events

FOR some strange reason, ive started to think of life as a series of random disconnected events. I being a believer in Karma, destiny and all, ive never thought in these lines before. Maybe its just my mind playing games with me. Or the horrible news that i probably wont manage to get into REC or BITS for my MCA :( . disappointing as it is, i guess nothing can be done about it. i managed to make it into the councelling list for REC, but unfortunately the chances that i get placed is pretty dim. I just see a big ?

Now all i can do is hope and pray that some random event occurs and offers me a seat into the institute. Or that i get good marks in my state entrance and get into a really good college. Whatever happens, one thing is for sure - my career is on the lines! So anyone wishing me a good life - put in a tiny prayer for me to god!

p.s : if this post doesnt make sense, well i know it doesnt. im high without booze :p

linux for human beings

Any self confessed computer geek would probably know what it means! yep im talking about Ubuntu the newest wave in the linux ocean. for an absolute newbie like me, ubuntu tries to bridge the gap between microsoft's super duper piece of garbled code and the eternal os that is linux.

for a distro that is just 4 years old (?) its catching on pretty fast, and is ranked up there with fedora, suse and others that have been in the business for years now... but again, the amount of work the community has put in probably needs some returns. the main selling point being ease of use, ubuntu does try to come close to what it promises. being a light weight distro (taking up just one cd when the likes of fedora can only fit into a dvd) it packs the bare minimum packages and apps. so anyone hoping to fire up their music album right away will be treated to something that windows users are used to (yes, im talking about error messages :P)

needless to say, its still a pretty neat distro. and installing all the packages isnt einsteinian stuff. just a few commands with a package manager, and you should be on your way!!

p.s : hoping to write a detailed review/how-to in the near future. if someone visits this place that is ;)

stoned!!

So ive been sitting at home for about a month now... and now i know how difficult its to just sit with nothing else to do. of course, ive been fiddling with my computer and a few webbies, but thats nothing new. even during my exams, ive tried hard not to stay away from my computer, but my mom always had other plans :p. Those were the days when i used to yearn for lots of free time, to do what i want to all day!! but god i regret that now!

let there be lightbox!

im trying to get a image script to work on this page.. click on the image to see if it works :)

im screwed!!

There are times when you really fell screwed. like waiting for the results after an exam. well to be more accurate, im waiting for 3 results now - one for my degree (im not bothered about that), and the other two for my post grad admissions. now that will probably determine my whole career, and in a sense, even my life. and waiting for the results to your life isnt exactly a nice experience. but i guess everyone goes through it sometime or the other.

anyone who is feeling screwed please leave a comment ;) at least ill know im not alone :p

and so i got a blog...

who cares?? well, i dont for one. all i ever wanted was a place to put up with my thoughts. and thats what this blog is supposed to be. so if anyone comes here expecting anything at all, dont be disappointed! ;)

also wanted to have an address to pass on to my friends. felt like living in the stone age without a blog!! so hope they are happy now..