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ad Re Y st OG Mo OLZINE s a’ N di CH GA In TE MA

CAT 2011

ASSOCIATION OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING STUDENTS SOE. CUSAT PRESENTS

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______MAGAZINE TEAM______ EDITING: Gibu Thomas Mathew Akshita K A Prashant Kumar Kanika Singh

Chithira Sajeev Vinesh Balan Nevin Thomas Manisha Sinha

DESIGN:

SPONSORSHIP:

Renjith P R Aravind Dath Sachin R P

Kishor Kunal Nijil Y Apoorva Gaurava

ACES HEADS: President: Sunny Kumar Aditya Secretary: Nawal Kishore Kundan Manager: Ritesh Kumar Treasurer: Jiju Dasan

CONTENTS Message from Principal____________________3 Editorial___________________________________4 Stay hungry stay foolish____________________5 From then till now_________________________7 And the four years passed_________________9 My life at CUSAT_________________________10 Happiness is a voyage, not a destination___11 Memoirs of a sullen kid___________________12 Apple is no false fruit_____________________14 The obstinate piece of technology________16 Art in Motion_____________________________18

Turing_____________________________________24 Intel’s latest server processor - Tukwilla____26 Writing cross-platform code ______________28 Sixth sense technology____________________32 I am on the clock__________________________34 HAM radio________________________________35 PC components Guide ____________________38 Myth Busters______________________________41 Whims of the virtual world________________42 Halo______________________________________44 Diablo II__________________________________46 COD4 modern warfare.___________________47 Batch photos_____________________________ 48 Sponsor ads______________________________ 50

MESSAGE It gives me great pleasure to note that the Association of Computer Engineering Students is publishing an in house magazine REBOOT. Education besides imparting knowledge and professional skills should play a vital role in developing moral and spiritual values in the student. It should ultimately result in the formation of character in them, so that they can become better citizens striving for the overall development of our society.

REBOOT is a positive step towards achieving that goal. I understand that this magazine includes articles of latest technological trends, scientific development as well as literature. I am sure that this will enhance both wisdom and knowledge of its readers.

Best wishes Dr. David Peter S Principal

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ime is relative, like many other quantities out there. What you see as seven months, was actually only a month for the Editorial Team! This was what my response should have been to people enquiring about why the magazine took so long to be printed. As the saying goes: “Confuse them if you can’t convince them!” So after much delay, I present to you the first edition of our branch magazine ‘R3B00T’ (read as REBOOT).

The road to this point was not an easy one; we had problems ranging from budget limitations to hierarchs deluding us that sponsor hunting was easier than blinking your eyes.

Basically we were a bunch of people with a lot of ideas and no experience; yet here we are with a printed magazine. Our main focus was to skip the slightly docile demeanor of Audeumus and go for a fresh new perspective which students wouldn’t mind reading. To keep us motivated and entertained during our editing, three mascots were hired on a permanent basis viz. CS Ghost, The Invisible Elephant and The Banshee. Ironically they were rarely seen during the editing phases. During the initial stages of editing, everything aside from editing took place. Editorial meeting were officially gossip corners and more importantly a free for all insult session. Looking back, I can’t figure out how we managed to get any work done with all the rampant pandemonium. Earlier on we had decided that we would divide the magazine on 60-40 percentage [Tech-Non Tech] basis rather than a complete technical magazine, so everybody would have a say. True to this we have a variety of articles that start from next generation technology to one of our very own editor’s personal memoirs. Getting these articles was an entirely different story in itself.

The deadline for submitting articles had been extended so many times that at one point it became a synonym for procrastination. In

the four years I have studied in CUSAT, I’ve never seen more support from juniors, and it was a true pleasure working with them.

After all it was a change of pace from the mindless monkey training we call classes.

In addition to the printed magazine we are simultaneously launching the E- Version counterpart which will be hosted at our domain http://aces.cusat.ac.in/ designed by our very own ACES members.

Before signing off, we’d like to thank the sponsors for supporting us in our initiative.

Lastly I’d like to thank Mr. Praseed Pai, our guest writer and the ACES members whose contribution have been invaluable, especially the treasurer for his awesome number crunching skills. God Speed! ~ Gibu Thomas Mathew Editor

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Stay Hungry .....Stay Foolish First of all, congrats to you guys for the reincarnation of CSE souvenir.

There is nothing much to write about the software industry (mainly because it’s discussed at every nook and corner, so everybody more or less knows about it). But here are my views on it (my short journey into this new world). I was ecstatic when I got selected for CSC on 21st September 2008 (having got this birthday gift in advance, while my birthday is on 23rd September) and was at the recieving end of a lot of bumps from my friends. Hence, I couldn’t get any sleep that night and enjoyed the whole night with my friends.

After completing my Degree; I was enjoying my stay at home hanging out with my local pals. I was also trying to remain in touch with books and so got myself started with LINUX and JAVA. On 26th October 2009, I got the news that CSC had started sending call letters to the students , but then again I didn’t get any confirmation mail . So I was a bit worried, and talked to Ritesh (a friend), about my worries. Finally, I ended up contacting the HR of CSC directly. It was only then I came to know that although I hadn’t recieved a mail, I had been called too. On 9th November I was supposed to join CSC in Chennai. I just wanted to leave Dhanbad (my hometown) as soon as possible, not because I had to join CSC or that I hated Dhanbad but because everyone except my family members were probing about my joining dates and questions like:- 1.

“Are you really selected?” 2. “Will they call you?” were repeated so many times that I couldn’t possibly unravel the frustration i had

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to deal with, at that time. I was in a hurry and waiting for that day only. And finally after all the formalities , joined CSC. We got selected in Remote Infrastructure Management under GST (Global Solutions Technology)-Service Model Team and our technical training started from the very first day. We went through Computer Network, UNIX, MSWORD, PowerPoint, Excel, ITIL training and then we got introduced to Mr. Raghu - the Corporate HR and he introduced us to Corporate training that lasted five days (this was the toughest and the most dreadful training I have ever faced). We were told that it was a decisive training which would decide the project you would be assigned to, and hence it was vital to score good marks in it. During his class we learned many things like email etiquette, interpersonal skills and the three of us (I, Ritesh and Deepesh) ended up as his prime targets. Thankfully, we crossed the cut-off marks. We would have been

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ACES laid off otherwise. (I always wonder if we were selected for a technical purpose or just for a call center. Why the hell were they emphasizing so much on Communication skills?). Although it was necessary for the GST team to have very good communication skills as it involved dealing with clients who are abroad (Australia, EMEA, America and so on), what happened with our friends, should have never happened for such phony reasons, but that’s what we call ‘life’ and ‘experience’!

Eventually we learned an invaluable lesson viz. whatever be the matter, give your 100% and never dream about the best things in life alone but be prepared for the worst too. Rightly said by Narayan Murthy “Love your job, not your company”. Come mid January, we were assigned our respective projects and teams. I, Ritesh and Sujit were selected for Network System Management (NSM). It was a dream come true for me to be able to work in UNIX and PERL environments and finally luck was on my side. Initially, my caliber was tested where I had to make a website for our whole team - GST. I worked diligently with utmost dedication and completed the website well before the deadline and was rewarded a T-shirt from our GM. Currently, I am working on NetEISS (Network Engineer Information System & Support) which is again based on PERL, Apache and Solaris Environment .

So far, things have been going smoothly for me and for all my friends in this company. The work environment here is pretty cool, compared to other companies here (as far as I have heard).

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REBOOT Being a proud Alumni, I wish to convey this message to all “Have confidence in yourself.

Never Give Up.” You’ll have to face many odds and this is just the beginning of a hard life; worse things are yet too come. My advice to you is to study well and to keep yourself informed and confident, so that you’re always the perfect man for the job to any interviewer.

Never compare yourself with others, always learn from your mistakes and remember that life is too short, so pick up things as fast as you can (Only if you want to compete in this competitive world). Never get satisfied with your work, always have the zeal to learn more.

“Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”.

The Software Industry lives on this motto. If you do a great job they will praise you, if not you will be cut off. It has its own glory and pride.

Being a computer science graduate I suggest keen readers to learn programming methodology, experiment with an Operating System as much as possible, gain expertise in any one of the technologies like web world, DBMS, any programming language. Lastly, I’d say that I feel proud to be called as a Software Engineer.

Those who wish to contact me can do so at +919543424875.

Email: jassics@gmail.com.

Website: http://www.aliencoders.com ~ Sanjeev Kumar Jaiswal Alumni (2005-2009)

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FROM THEN.............. ......................................... ......................................... ......................................... ......................................... ................. TILL NOW In life, everyone reaches a point of time where he/she sits all alone and is ready to enter a new life. A life, everyone of us has been dreaming about and preparing ourselves for. A life, where we would get to see the world from a different angle - an angle; which we are yet to witness, an angle; we want to explore now, an angle; which will be entirely new to us and an angle ;that will be our own way to face the world, to understand the world and moreover, the one that will help us find our own place in the world.

to do. Thanks to our elders, we had a smooth journey. But then we reach a stage where the very same people would say, that the time has come for you to take your own decisions, after all it’s your life and you should be capable enough. And at that instant, we see our once familiar world in an entirely different shade.

From childhood we have been abiding by whatever our elders have told us, most of the time we never even got a chance to question - ‘what ?’ or ‘why ?‘. We just loved following the footsteps of the people we adored, sometimes that of our father’s, our brothers’, our teachers’ or anyone whom we loved and wanted to be like. The reason we were so comfortable doing this, was because deep down we always knew that if we didn’t succeed or if we didn’t do well, there were people to help and support us and all we had to do was to follow their guidance.

This is exactly where I stand now!

We grew up doing exactly that and were indeed fortunate that we did not have much

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We think we know everything and then some; but eventually we resign ourselves to the fact that whatever we knew was just a very small portion of what the whole world had to offer.

Whenever I recall the past, the first thing that comes to my mind is being with Mom and Dad; asking them everything that came to the mind and how they always had an answer, they taught us how to talk, walk, behave, basically everything necessary for life. I’m sure most of you have gone through a phase where you wished for a job like your dad’s; it would have been exactly what you wanted back then, and you’d have loved to lead a life exactly like the one he led (to be honest, even I wanted the same). Then came the second phase, where I went to school; Here I made new friends, learnt plenty of new things and whenever I

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ACES faced a problem I had my teachers to look up to. I found my niche in it. After school came college, once again I made a lot of friends and met some knowledgeable professors. These are the the chronicles of what happened to me, but what does the future have in store for me?

From where I stand now, my perception has changed; I see the world in a different light. I know that a few months from now, all the friends that I have made in these four years would scatter like cockroaches under light, just the way all the friends from my school days and from my neighborhood have taken off. Now, I get the chance to do everything I’ve dreamt of, the way I wanted to.

A new place, a new life, some new people; most of whom would turn into new friends, new challenges, new responsibilities and basically everything will be new.

However, I know I’m not the only one stranded in this situation. In today’s world there are a lot of people who leave their hometown for a better education and a good career. They would have all gone through the same trials, at some point in their life.

So let’s not fret over it and instead lets brace ourselves to face the new world. I would say ‘enjoying’ the new world rather than ‘facing’ it.

A word to the wise:- you’ll be inclined to think similarly, once you reach my position, so sit

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back and chill out because the one consistent thing in this world, is Change. Keep those dreams alive, keep expecting from life; and remember -“You can never go wrong with low expectations”, and keep up the good work and as it is said- “One good deed erases all bad deeds.” Be ready for change, be open for new challenges, be open to learn from life and you’ll enjoy life as I do. Go out, win the world, the whole world’s yours. Prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

And one very important thing KEEP SMILING, it’s the cheapest medicine one could have, but hard to find! Make it easily available to the world. ~ Anshuman Pandey Alumni (2006-2010)

Alan J. Perlis

Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?

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still remember the day our first department magazine was published by our seniors, and it made my day when I heard that my juniors were planning to do the same. Having only a few last days of the lovely time in this college left I feel nostalgic. The days have passed, but the memories are still there; each and every moment has been recorded by my eye-cam and written in my brain disk permanently.

And the four years passed

The memories of the day I landed here…. the day I went to introduce myself to my seniors….the first year proxies….bunking the classes….the overnight discussion on the placements….a strong grapevine communication system….chasing the girls in a hope that they would at least turn back and give a smile….the birthday bumps which wounded the bums….the hot sunny days and the wet rainy days….the group talks at the workshop….the lab exam frustrations along with the irritating lab-records….the last-night fight for facing the externals…. the late night bike trips to ccd, cocoa tree, and Cherai beach….visits to the evergreen places of Kochi, Pizza Hut….roaming around on the streets when the petrol ran out….Our always caring faculty who kept on motivating us, who taught us what college discipline actually means.….Submitting assignments only after copying each and every word….

payapalli….and the love of all “INSPIRE”, our inspire, the fest that we worked for, day and night….the lovely strikes cherished by all of us….the fresher and the farewell parties…. our lovely juniors who always managed to be our time pass….the counterstrike, fifa and the NFS moments….the placement time thrills…. just everything.

The late night hangouts at salam-gaffur shop….the five minute break between the classes and celebrating the same at

~ Ravi Kant Alumni(2006-2010)

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It is still very hard to accept the fact that we have got to part our ways as these four years come to an end. I have just tried to let you all know, how these years were special to ‘me’ and to ‘all of us’. I will really miss these years like crazy. And the day isn’t far, when we all would be at different places, in different companies, and with tears in our eyes and a sweet smile on our lips we will look outside the window just to watch all these days passing in a flash.

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ACES As the outgoing batch, I could feel the time flying. Recalling about the past four years, so many thoughts flood my mind. At this time, I just can’t express my real idea. The memory is still so vivid and it seems like it happened just yesterday. For years I lived on autopilot. I ate, breathed, shopped, studied and generally went through life without knowing why I had made decisions based on how I felt at the time.

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I used to text my friends inquiring about the syllabus. By midnight i was virtually comatose. Some memories are always invokable. Even though I have much more life ahead of me, but still I would miss my college life.

Four years may seem too small, but for me it was a lifetime. This was not just a mere place, but an inseparable part of my life.

Everything is a flashback. I can see myself standing at the station waving a final goodbye to my family. With tears in my eyes, I dreamt of a place where everything would be alien to me. Right from the dorm rooms to classrooms, from labs to canteen. But as the time passed the exhilaration subdued and things became normal.

Some pictures flash in my mind when I recall my days at CUSAT. Some good, some bad, and some worth remembering. The days at the canteen and the college festivals remind me of all the fun I had. The competitions I participated as a fresher and as a sophomore and later as an organiser reminds me of all the opportunities provided

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Life’s all about making decisions and I made a right one choosing CUSAT as my alma mater. And I would not hesitate to admit that it was more of a co-incidence rather than my calculated decision that I ended up studying in CUSAT. But I’m glad that this stroke of luck took place cause it has changed my life and me as a person.

Everything in this world has to come to an end. Good or bad. And sadly my life at CUSAT ends here.

“Sometimes I wish I could, Turn back time, Impossible as it may seem, But I wish I could.” ~ Kumari Swarnim Alumni (2006-2010)

11 • Name 5 people that you like to spend time with.

More manageable? It’s easier, isn’t it?

The people who mean something to your life are not rated “the best”, don’t have the most money, haven’t won the greatest prizes…

Happiness is a voyage....... not a destination There is no better time to be happy than…

NOW! Think and try to answer these questions:

They are the ones who care about you, take care of you, those who, no matter what, stay close by. Think about it for a moment. Life is very short! And you, in which list are you?

Don’t know?

Happiness is usually a habit that can be cultivated. 25% of which is decided by your genes, 45% by your life experiences. The rest 30% for sure is cultivated by your conscious effort, which means if you are not a happy person still there is a hope! The journey is a bit hard but research shows that still It is possible.

• Name the 5 richest people in the world.

• Name the last 10 Nobel Prize winners.

• Name the last 10 winners of the Best Affirmations are self repeating statements in the mind which people can practice to Actor Oscar. increase their feel of well being. A few of them Can’t do it? Rather difficult, isn’t it? Don’t are given below. The best time to use them is when you are telling something negative to worry, nobody remembers that. your mind, feel stressed or when you are free Applause dies away! Trophies gather dust! like during a travel or waiting for somebody.

Gradually these positive thoughts dig into to Winners are soon forgotten. the subconscious mind and become a reality and a part of your belief system.

Now answer these questions: • Name 3 friends who helped you in your hour of need.

• Name 3 teachers who contributed to your education.

• Think of a few people who made you feel special.

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~ Sudheep Elayidom, M.Tech Senior Lecturer, CS SOE,CUSAT References: • Success Principles-Jack Canfield • The Power of Positive thinking-Norman Vincent Peale • www.thinkexist.com

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Memoirs of a sullen kid

Childhood is “supposedly” the happiest phase of a normal person’s life. Whenever under pressure, facing the music in family or the professional life, no wonder people yearn for the happy halcyon days of their childhood and school life. But there are a “sizable minority“ of people who can be considered exceptions for the fact that their lives are in strict adherence to “Murphy’s law”: if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong”. Some people are born unlucky and some have misfortunes thrust upon them. This is the story of one such kid, quintessential, the second type mentioned.

Our protagonist, let’s call him Morientes, lives in an infernal city of Gaya decaying somewhere in Bihar. A word about Gaya. It holds a very special place in Hinduism and Buddhism and is the place of enlightenment of Buddha. It was famed once. It still is, but for all the wrong reasons.

“Mountains without trees, rivers without water and people without brains” is the latest identity that this “hell town” currently sports. In a nutshell, it’s the closest possible simulation to hell. The budding industry in the town is a “hell goer’s orientation” industry and I have reasons to believe that eternal fear of hell would be a matter of past in the near future.

The tempestuous environment of the city had its effect on the young mind of our protagonist turn-

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ing him into a rustic, ruffian kid. This rustic, ruffian but innocent kid Morientes had his education in a school which only finds its parallel in “Nazi concentration camps“. Still better putif Gaya was considered to be hell, his school would be its headquarters. The principal of the school, holy father (he was the priest of the parish) had a gift with the cane, a gift; the young human race studying there, often felt pangs of.

The school was a bit too strict to be likeable by a sane human being, with the rules of the most stringent nature. The act of punishment was carried out in mafia style. You get called by the boss from your class and you don’t want to go but that never is an option. You walk as slow as possible trying to delay the inevitable, but however slow you walk, at some point of time you are right in front of the office of the gifted man with adrenalin gushing into this blood stream.

Morientes:- “May I come in Father?”

Father:- “Yes, please” “Please”, it was the dreaded word in school, the politer the tone of “please”, the graver the fate of the fledglings. Finally you enter the house of the dragon and you stare death straight in its eyes. In a matter of seconds your whole life flashes in front of your eyes. When you are out of this fix, you carefully inspect all the details

13 of your doom chamber and then the most unnerving moment comes when you see sticks of all types and sizes carefully furnished in the room and that’s the moment you realise, its not a nightmare but reality. And then comes the moment when two long separated lovers in the form of human flesh and cane finally unite. And one thing you can be sure of, like all other trysts, this union of human body and cane is a tempestuous one especially for the human body . But if you think bearing the pain was the most difficult part, hang on. The principal had this propensity of launching into a furious tirade in Hindi to accompany his brutal onslaught.

Being a south Indian, he wasn’t well versed with the language and as a result, made some farcical usage at times.

Something in that grim atmosphere inspired smiles despite the immense pain to which the young fledglings were subjected. What succeeded those smiles?

Don’t ask . Lets just say the “KRAKEN” is unleashed.

But this wasn’t the sole reason why Morientes loathed his school. The reason presented itself to him much later in his school life. It had to do with the skirt size of the girls. He has his doubts whether that would qualify as a skirt for its sheer length. Very easily two normal skirts could be made out of one. Ours is a country where many don’t have proper clothes to cover their body and in such times such profligacy of clothes was indeed condemnable. And when he noticed other schools adhering to proper dress size at

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a time when skirts were scaling new unforeseen heights, such a straitjacket medieval approach towards dresses was indeed unacceptable. The younger generation has a responsibility towards society, don’t they? Well I can see a lopsided disbelieving smile on your faces…no takers for “brevity in dresses”, eh?

After a day of hardship, every being returns to ones home to finds solace in the arms of his loved ones. This was not the case with our protagonist.

Some deformation in the double helical structure of the DNA made sure he was a ruffian. You can’t really blame him for this. After all he was not the one who got to design it. Can you?

Anyways, his mother had a hard time controlling him. His father was a pole bearer of the theory “Importance of thrashing a child in his upbringing” and oh boy, was he was some supporter of the theory!

A restless kid and a relentless father, both of the same genetic composition, meant that they engaged in endless wars of which Morientes was the perennial casualty. Every holiday, our brave protagonist would sound the whistle of dissent against the totalitarian and despotic regime of his father. He fought and fought like a Spartan, many a battles against the tyranny of his father with all the battles knowing only one end; the drubbing of our innocent protagonist. And all this time while the Geneva convention was being torn to shreds, his beloved mother would sit on the couch and watch the proceedings with the equanimity of a sage, the calm of a newborn and

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ACES the interest of a zealot to see who came out victorious – her husband or her precocious brave little firstborn. This calm infuriated him. “Come on mom, I am your son. Aren’t you supposed to get emotional? Aren’t you supposed to help me?”

But the men never got her support openly. Whom she really supported in those battles is still a secret that lies beneath her gentle smile and calm demeanour .

Women, eh? In his twenty two year long stay on this beautiful planet, he is quite sure of one thing about women “You can never be sure of them”. Speaking in the language of algorithms, they would be classified as NP-hard problems; where you are not even sure about the existence of the solution, forget alone the solution. In the language of cryptography they would be the cipher text, the private key of which, has been lost and hence can’t be deciphered. Okay, you must be thinking by now “Isn’t he over reacting”. I too asked myself the same question and I recollected a funny anecdote to buttress his claims.

In his own words “She was the red rose of the school from the arts batch”. Although she was named kayenat, she was better known by the appellation kayamat. The reason you ask? She was the ONE. One day she comes to me and says ”I wanna say three words to you”. I finally felt some respite from Mr. Murphy finally, at last some luck. The world looked so beautiful. Suddenly I didn’t loath the midday sun for pouring fire on the warm summer day, rather it epitomised the hope and the positiveness. The moment of truth arrived and she spoke the three words finally “JAI MATA DI”. Now, you’re going “What the hell?”.

How did I feel? Lets just say I loathed the midday sun. I finally mustered up the courage and asked,” Do they somehow decipher to “I LOVE YOU”. She had this glitter in her eyes and with a grin she said-“ You know they might? But my father is the jailer of the city’s central jail and facilities are not exactly first class out there”. Hell of a way to say ”No”. I don’t know how to conclude the saga of our hero’s childhood . Once I was perus-

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ing through his diary, I found these lines which reflect his ambivalence towards his childhood.

“Some people have a childhood temple covered with a million treasured dreams Some people have childhood temple A sunny Wat of Gods and kings Mine is plain squats in the rain Functional ‘n sane Where childhood memories abound Life flows vividly around Where childhood memories have fled Hearts lie dead “ ~ Prashant Kumar Sem 7 (2007-2011)

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has been more than 15 years since Forrest Gump said “Lieutenant Dan got me invested in some kind of ‘fruit’ company. So then I got a call from him, saying we don’t have to worry about money no more.

And I said, that’s good! One less thing.”Apple Inc. has grown to become more than a ‘fruit’ company! It has become the geek’s Versace or Prada! And Steve Jobs, a friendly, inspirational Miranda Priestly!

15 From the Lisa and the Macintosh, to the iPhone and the macbook pro, the transition has been nothing short of ‘eye catching’. The iPod has made such a huge impact that the modern day cars all have music systems that is compatible to it! The iPhone and its subsequent 3G version were ‘gold’ [ a very inexpensive one, when you consider what its worth] in the techie market.

What is it that has made ‘Apple’ an integral part of man’s life? It must be the quality, the branding, and the design! The ‘style’ factor associated with it! And hence you find people who are least bothered about what a Nokia 6110 navigator or a Samsung corby can do, use an iPhone and most of all, be happy about it!

Personally, the love for Apple, started with the MTV most wanted and Shehnaz Treasurywala, in the late 90’s. The cute mac she had in her room used to make me wish i had one! Back then I didn’t know whether it was a cute TV or a fancy computer, but it looked great! Life moved on and macs became popular day by day. Soon the iPod reached the Indian markets and one started hearing stories of how you could actually ‘feel’ the song with your iPod on your ears! It took two very popular movies to finally inject the ‘Apple’ extract into my system. The 2004 bollywood movie, Swades.

A great story, a pretty co star, awesome director, and Shah Rukh at his best! People found different things appealing in the movie, but to me Mohan Bhargava, and his picture perfect NRI, NASA,and ivy league look, was the highlight! The full sleeve white shirt, the regular fit faded blue jeans, the caravan, and the ‘macbook’! A year later came the tamil psychological thriller Anniyan! Remember Remo addressing Nandhini ‘apple laptop pennae’?

I’m pretty sure Steve Jobs had no idea he was

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getting free advertisements. But it worked! I was officially an ‘Apple’ lover! And soon I had my first ipod! A silver 1 gb nano. Followed by a pink shuffle from my bro! And it has been ‘iThis’ and ‘iThat’ ever since! As a user I have never had a bad moment with my iPod! The sound quality is awesome and the whole new concept of nike+ has given iPod the freedom that other music players lack!

The iPod has been such a phenomenon that you often find people using the word ‘iPod’ to refer to any music player they come across. A proprietary eponym! As a user you find it very discouraging to see any other music player be called an iPod, but to see a common man using the word shows how big an impact the product from Cupertino has made.

It is impossible to survive in the electronics industry by the design and the appearance alone. You need to back that up with good, upto-date, refreshing technology and Apple has been doing that for a long time now. There is always something new popping up. Add to that the blessed looks and we have a company that is destined to do even better in the future. ~ Nevin Thomas Sem 5 (2008-2012)

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our years into computer engineering and the budding innocent engineer is still fumbled and dazed when asked the trickiest question of all times “How well do you know the computer?”. That’s like asking me whether I can cook. I can cook alright but whether the kitchen would remain in one piece after I’m done depends on what I call “The inextricable call of fate” ( I swear it has very little to do with indifference, which is just a popular myth).

A trip down the memory lane tells me how I have evolved around the times when I had nearly pulled my hairs off my head when this ‘ingenious piece of technology’ refused to budge and what could one amateur little human whose sole computer knowledge remained confined within the uncomplicated world of the ‘minesweeper’ and the colorful world of ‘Paint’ possibly do. Well there was one thing I could always do. Remember the times when your dear old television starts to grumble and the picture goes haywire( I still do this). You go to your TV and bang on the sides, lightly at first and then beat the blues out of it, the intensity raising with every ounce of patience you lose. Unfortunately, the computer appears to be slightly more stubborn than a regular TV ( Still clueless on how this little trick works on a TV!). I move on to the next thing any 10 year old would do. Go up to my dad and say with the kind of innocence acquired over the years, “Dad, the computer is not working and I swear to God I have nothing to do with it”. That took care of it and 30 minutes later I’m spray painting my newly constructed house on ‘Paint’.

Time flies and prying around the boundaries of my “so-called” computer knowledge I realise there’s more to this rectangular box than just paint. School projects end up on “Word”,

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The OBSTINATE piece of

Technology Winamp becomes your blaring friend for life, the enticing world of the Internet ( Google? or googly?Dad!....whats this googly??) and inevitably into every parent’s nightmare: the devious world of social networking and the mindless hours of online chatting. But ALL is not WELL. You have just learnt the magic of multitasking- your head phones are on,and you are fretting your head over some dispute of international concern over messenger when your deceptive friend decides to ignore you and hangs himself. Its more hair out of my head and my finger automatically heads over to the ‘restart’ button over and over again that the computer finally decides

17 to hang every five minutes after restart. I call my dad who is not at home(sadly). Says it might be due to some power-supply problem. “Power” and “supply”- two words that make me go to the main plug and do the inevitable. Remove it and stick it back again with firmness and a silent curse that it works.

But no, the computer is no angel to sympathise with your agony. I’ve clearly found someone to match my obduracy. I follow my own whimsical ways of combating, cause I’m in no way ready to succumb to this non-living thing. I delete some useless and unnecessary software from the hard disks to clear some space(Tons that my dad used, I just took the liberty of defining the “Useless”), but all in vain. Dad is finally back and I’m enlightened by the fact that comes along with him; a 12 volt Mercury power supply unit inside the CPU. (How am I to know this!) and in two minutes a multimeter is out(I have no affinity towards such gadgets but dad made me use it) and it no longer hangs. The 12v case is solved and my obstinate friend continues to live.

Two years into engineering and I am supposed to have gained some insight into the fluctuating lifestyle of my desktop PC and I’m put to test once again. This time dads not even in the country and calling him is out of question (Rs. 10 per minute!). The media player is on but i can hear no audio and I’m back to tightening, plugging in and out the pins and even checking my ears.

Everything I know about the audio system revolves around the innocent looking pink and green pins and nothing more. I catch my dad online and instructions follow, cause a computer without audio is like watching a football game in mute. He says those merciless words “BIOS”, ”reinstall”, ”remove the creative sound card”- enough to bring me

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nightmares for a month cause the blue screen haunts me, previous incidents of installing have taught me never to underestimate the computer and finally removing the card means opening up the CPU, which I find, is equivalent to detonating a live bomb. After a half day of work, the silence is finally broken and the song through the speakers plays like a victory horn(hurray!).

My obstinate friend has taught me a lot of things, the most important being “Never postpone your work” cause a typical computer likes to go on a vacation when you need it the most-right before any kind of deadline you have to meet, be it a project or a seminar submission or like in my case, writing this article for my college magazine. (Yes, my computer is dead at the moment. Sigh). Remember all parts of a computer are vital for its good health and leave any tiny insignificant screw loose, you will end up paying dearly for it, like the time I artfully removed the CPU fan for cleaning (The nightmares have reduced significantly) and forgot about one of the four screws that hold it in position. The computer just refused to liven up and ended up paying Rs. 200 to the mechanic (Dad grumbled”Some Computer Engineer!”).

On to the final year of learning on how this truly mystical thing works and behaves.

I can’t deny, its been a boon all the while, but we have had our ups and downs. (Haven’t we all ?). And now where do i stand? Have I learnt how to tame this OBSTINATE friend of mine?...All I can say is...” I no longer bang my computer as I do the TV”.

Akshita K. A. Sem 7 (2007-2011)

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Cinema

is the central clause of the public media in our contemporary world. It is a significant art form which portrays dissenting human emotions. No other art form in this world has become so popular and universal at the same time. Being a global art; it can adopt any other kind of art. Cinema continues to stretch its influence and touch the lives of human beings. Yet, people aren’t still aware of its significance. For most it’s just a medium for sheer entertainment and for killing time.

Cinema has an overwhelming and immortal existence. Film viewing requires the perfect stimulation of all the senses and never deserves a slothful viewer. Film makers try to convey some central theme through its ‘cinematic language’ to the audience. Even a good comedy or an action movie has a hidden message, but the public usually never get it.

lytically interpret creative concepts and understand both the cinema world as well as other art forms. We often blame filmmakers for the degradation of standard, but the audience themselves should have a serious approach towards cinema. They should realize and accept the truth that they also are a part of such creations.

Understanding a cinema, apart from just gliding through it for the sake of entertainment is through it, involves experiencing it with the awareness about cinematic language and the whole craft of film-making. A film demands its viewers to become constructive critics to arrive at the soul of the movie and come up with their own appraisals or criticisms. Watching a film critically involves experiencing the cinema with a higher degree of appreciation and exploring its language, conventions, context and other parameters. Even the color of the frame indirectly gives you a meaning. Such an approach will unquestionably improve the viewer’s capability to critically and ana-

based on what you have heard about that film. Judging should never be done from any particular scene, until the movie is finished, because sometimes cinema can be a composition of ideas, brilliant in totality but absurd in isolation. Sometimes, an individual scene may be phenomenal, but we should always analyze a film in its entirety and its perfect assembling.

There are no conventional rules to watch a cinema but here are some recommended facts that should be taken in consideration while interpreting a film. First of all, a viewer must have a basic knowledge about the attributes like title, production crew, genre, social and political content of the film. Viewers can even check the controversy surrounding the film and its critic review. But one should always maintain objectivity on what we are going to experience; no pre-judging based on the reputation of actor, director or

Analyzing a cinema is never a walk in the park. Cinema is not just a collection of moving frames of a series of incidents. There are several fragments that add to the totality of a cinema. Observe how the director

19 has shaped the aspect of a film, how the plot has been presented, the central theme, the direct message, the hidden inner-meanings etc.

Does the screenplay effectively communicate the story through its scenes and dialogue? Try to understand the prominent symbols and the metaphors used in it. Pay attention to the structuring used (using normal visuals, by exploring the flashback, with the help of a narrator, chronologically or linearly, character-driven, objectively or subjectively or any other way).

For example, the famous film MEMENTO directed by Christopher Nolan comes under chronological structured film making. Without knowing the basics of this methodology, watching that film will be in vain. One needs to observe whether the parallelism and transition between scenes are perfectly done, like transition of lighting, color and its editing works. You can observe the cinematographic and special effects which created the overall mood of the

scene, and finally how perfectly the film is been concluded. Does it pay resemblance to any previous works in any ways or to any other real incident? How well does it follow the original? If it’s a new idea, how fresh and innovative is the theme?

Acting is another criterion because it’s actually the actors who communicate the film effectively. A perfect casting procedure yields an extremely good output. There are cinemas which do not demand firm watching; they are just to be skimmed. The ulterior motive is to get commercial success. But it’s always good to watch a cinema that is worth a wait, rather than watching the latest blockbuster with no

substance. These entertaining films are to be watched for sheer enjoyment because there exists little room for art in it. However, make sure you choose a film from a list of a wide selection of film genres available so that you can feel the whole spectrum of cinema.

An ideal cinema scrutinizer is one who interprets the film in the way the maker has presented it, at least half the way. As a matter of fact no one can grasp the full theme of a movie, except the creator. But conceiving a movie in an injudicious sense is more shameful than grabbing nothing from it after watching it for two and half hours.

A huge number of movies are being released all over the world every year. But out of this extremely large mess, only a bunch of them come up with their own style and substance of high quality. And still a fewer number get

the honours to be claimed as masterpieces.

Despite the geographical, cultural and linguistic barriers, they remain immortal and conquer the hearts of millions of film lovers all over the world. As we know tastes differ from person to person, so one can never come up with a list of best movies.

The following are some of the best movies, selected from a wide variety of genres, in the history of world cinema. They are arranged in no particular order but has and will remain in the heart of every serious movie buff.

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(1957)[written and directed by Ingmar Burg- (1948) [directed by Vittorio De Sica][ Italian] man] [Swedish,Latin] The Bicycle Thief is acclaimed to be the best among Italian A Bergman’s masterpiece and one of the magneo­ realism. It nificent works ever seen in world cinema. This is deemed the film splendidly examines and explains the ingreatest movie tricacies of human emotions. The protagonist of all time. The Antonius Block, a knight and his squire Jöns story takes place return after ten years of crusade and find their post Second homeland being ravaged by the plague. The World War, when knight encounters Death, personified by a figthe majority of ure in a black hood. He challenges Death to a Rome’s populagame of chess for his life. Throughout the film, tion was under his quest shows how a normal being exists in misery and deep a world devoid of God and finds no answer and poverty. The stois left nowhere to look. He encounters people ry tells us about of different interests; who lead a normal life Antonio, a proud and exhibit no outbursts on the existence of family man who seeks to possess a bicycle God. The knight eventually looses the game, for getting into his new job of pasting cinema Death finally conquers, and drags them uphill posters. The bicycle, which he manages to purchase with great difficulty, disappears by theft. The film strides along the way through which he goes in search for his lost bicycle.

Finally when he does find the thief, a teenage boy, Antonio is blamed for accusing a small kid without any evidence or witness and he walks away with his son in deep despair. Attacked by despair and anger, Antonio steals a bicycle, but gets caught red handed. Antonio was one who had never committed anything wrong in his life. He merely tries to fix his and his family lives but is brutally defeated by the a scene which has become one of the most fa- economic system that existed. mous images in the history of cinema called the “dance of death”. Bergman’s message through this film is that Death is inevitable whether God RASHOMON exists or not and Death is never pleasant in (1950)[directed by Akira Kurosawa ] [Japathis unpleasant world. It’s an intellectual ap- nese] proach towards the strengths and weaknesses of mankind. The Seventh seal is considered as The movie Rashomon directed and co scripted by the legendary Japanese film a major classic in world cinema.

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21 maker, Akira Kurosawa in 1950, travels through different tracks and deviations to unveil the secret of the murder of a samurai. Kurasawa unequally portrays the incident as narrated to court from the perspective of each character. Each of them tells a story based on their construction of the world, relying on his or her perspective of the world and even the truth seem to be relative. Kurasawa skillfully imprints that every human hides some of the deepest secrets even from himself.

place in his neighborhood by spying through their window. Remarkably, the camera angles are placed such that, a viewer can experience the solving of the murder case as can be seen through the window itself. At times Hitchcock misdirects the audience with some false clues and silently proclaims that he himself looks at the audience from across the screen. He unveils the human trait of peeping into other’s lives

PATHER PANCHALI

(1955) [directed by Satyajith Ray] [Bengali]

REAR WINDOW

(1954) [directed by Alfred Hitchcock] [English] This film is a master piece in all sense. The film revolves around a family of four – mother Alfred Hitchcock Sarbojaya, father Harihar, daughter Durga and who directed son Apu. Harihar is a struggling poet who works Rear window hard to make ends meet. While he is away, Sarbojaya has her hands full running the household showed the smoothly and she takes care of her husband’s world that he just aged aunt Indir Thakrun. The emotional bond needs a room to between Durga and Apu becomes the highlight capture a thrillof the film. One of the most touching and unforer. Actor James gettable moments in the film is when they exStewart, the plore the village and discover a train. The mismain protagonist ery reaches its peak when Durga dies from fever who is confined and the family leaves the village to begin a new to a wheel chair life. The movie is successfully crafted around solves a murthe world of Apu and his childhood days. The der that takes sequel of this movie portrays the rest of his life.

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(1954) [directed by Akira Kurosawa] [Japanese]

REBOOT es. Her husband (Bhupati) is loving but he neglects his wife because of his dedication to this work. Charu’s life changed a lot after the storm heralds the arrival of Amal(husbands brother),a charmingly wayward poet and she slowly falls in love with him. Charulata is both the story of a triangle love and how a traditional family slowly moves towards mordernity. In the climax, bhupati understands about her relation with amal and the movie ends there with a hope that they will re­build the broken cage. This movie is one among the greatest works of the legendary director Satyajith Ray, where his images speak and we listen with our eyes.

This Kurosawa masterpiece takes us to the sixteenth century in Japan. A group of samurai agrees to protect a helpless village from a group of bandits in exchange for food. The samurai thus protect the villagers from one such attack from the bandits. The film’s battle scenes are enigmatic. Though some of the fighters aren’t trained enough they are distinct in character and skills.

It becomes a film about every aspect of the human condition.

Kurosawa shows that even in the climax; even if they win the battle for the villages, it was almost like a defeat 8 1⁄2 for the samurai. Final dialogue is “again we (1963) [directed by Federico Fellini] [Italian] are defeated, the winners are those farmers, not us“ and camera pans to the grave yard of Federico Fellini’s Eight and a half, is the best movie ever dead samurai. made based on film making. A CHARULATHA famous direc(1964) [directed by Satyajith Ray] [Bengali] tor, after giving a big hit, comRay’s Charulata, one of the films of which the mits to another director was most proud of. Its a detailed life project, but finds of a lonely wife adopted from Tagores “brohimself suffering ken cage”.The film opens on Charu, a lonely from a creative 19th century housewife confined inside her block. However big house, viewing the world outside her bedpeople expect room windows through a pair of opera glassmore phenom-

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23 enal works from him. While in a hunt of new stories, he recalls all important incidents in his life including all the women he has loved and left. Fellini showed the inside mind of a man and how a personal life can be truly reflected on the art form of cinema. This is a semi­ autobiography of Fellini himself.

8 1⁄2 is about a director out of his ideas but internally Fellini himself is in such a condition. it ends with a parade of his crew in his planned film, letting us know that life is game in which each of us must take our roles and enjoy each moment as it comes.

innocence from the childhood, which a man can spend his whole life to regain. It is a small story perfectly captured with best dialogues and acting, which eventually became one of the world classic.

Godfather

[1972 ] [directed by Francis Ford Coppola] [English]

Citizen Kane

[1941] [directed by Orson Welles] [English]

Citizen Kane is considered as the best movie ever which brought a different perspective of cinematography to that time. It was the first film which made use of a lot of techniques on the screen. Even if the protagonist was immensely rich and powerful, he was a failure to himself. The film is structured as a flash back from his last word ”Rosebud”.

Media strive to find out the meaning of Rosebud but never reaches near to it.

And the final shot focuses on the word Rosebud on his childhood sledge.

Rosebud is an emblem of hope and

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One of the most popular and a masterpiece film by Coppola, based on the Mario Puzo novel, story happens during 2nd World War, where Vito Corleone (Godfather) rules a powerful mafia family. After his enemies shot him down but fails to kill, his elder son Sonny (James Caan) inherits the legacy, but fails to keep up his father’s dignity, whereas his youngest son, Michael step into his father’s level which Vito never wanted. This transition becomes the highlight of the movie. It is the master of all gangster films because almost all gangster movies after “god father” carried its shades. The sequels that came after this movie also made their signatures on the list of acclaimed movies. ~ Sachin Chandran Sem 7 (2007-2011)

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TURING Most of you, who are now reading this, would be wondering about the tittle of the article. If you do, your train of thought should go like this -”Have heard this somewhere, perhaps last year? Some crazy machine with states and crap!” or “Yes...ha ha found an errata in the title!

It should have been TURNING..turning point?“ Yet for some others the tittle makes perfect sense.

Ok, enough of mind reading. The focus of this article is Alan Turing, one of the greatest minds in Computer Science, aptly regarded as the Father of modern computing. Here I will try to shed some light on the life and work of Alan Turing.

Our first encounter was in +2, while researching for an article for our school magazine - it was a short story based on Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Alan Turing, was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and foremost a computer scientist. He provided the formalism on concepts of algorithms, had his mind on the first stored-program computer, taught the world how to tell a human and computer apart, and during the Second World War worked on cracking German cyphers.

Turing was born in London on 23rd June 1912 to Julius Mathison Turing, a member of the Indian Civil Service, and his wife Sara. At age six he was enrolled in a day school, where his tutors quickly recognized his talent. Later, at age 14 he bicycled his way unaccompanied for 97 kilometers to attend his first day at an inde-

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pendent school at Sherborne! The same day there was a general strike in Britain, but the boy was determined not to miss his first day of school. Turing continued to show his remarkable talent in subjects he loved, solving advanced problems in age 15 without having studied elementary calculus. The following year he started playing with Albert Einstein’s work!

After Sherborne, Turing joined King’s College(Cambridge) as an undergraduate in Mathematics. In 1935 he was elected a fellow at King’s after his dissertation on ‘central limit theorem’. In his momentous paper on Computable numbers he reformulated Kurt Godel’s work and replaced Godel’s universal arithmetic-based formal language with what are now called Turing machines. Turing machines were formal and simple devices, proved to be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm.During 1936 to 1938 he studied pure mathematics and cryp-

25 tology under Alonzo Church at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.

In June 1938 he earned his Ph.D from Princeton and moved on to Cambridge where he started to work part time with the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS).

With the onset of the Second World War Turing joined code-breaking efforts at Bletchley Park, where he worked on German cyphers and contributed in breaking cyphers generated with Enigma Machine and Lorenz machine. Like many other geniuses of past and future, Turing too showed shades of eccentricity. One of his co-workers at Bletchley Park recounts that, Turing had a faulty bicycle that had its chain come off at regular intervals. Turing instead of having it mended would count the the number of times he pedalled and get off the bicycle in time to adjust it by hand.

From 1945 to 1947 he worked at National Physical Laboratory, Hampton. There he made a detailed design of a stored-program computer called ACE (Automatic Computing Engine). Although ACE was a feasible design, the secrecy surrounding wartime work at Bletchley Park delayed the project. While he was away ACE (Pilot ACE) was built and executed its first program on 10th May 1950.

In 1948 he joined Manchester University and worked on MARK 1, one of the earliest stored program computers. Later he started his work on Artificial Intelligence and came up with Turing test.

For all his war time efforts in giving the Allies the upper hand and reducing the period of the war significantly he was repaid with humiliation and disapproval. In 1952, he was charged for having homosexual relationships with Arnold Murray, and was criminally prosecuted. In 1954, weeks before his 42nd birthday Turing dies from cyanide poisoning. Gen-

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erally concluded as a suicide, Turing’s mother claimed his death was an accident; citing the fact that there were always a plethora of chemicals present at his home. Later in September 2009, the British government declares an official posthumous apology for the ill treatment of Turing after the war.

Since 1966 the Turing Award has been given by the Association for Computing Machinery(ACM), to individuals for their unparalleled contributions to the computing community and is considered equivalent to the Nobel Prize. Alan Jay Perlis becomes its first recipient.

Great, now that you know Alan Turing, lets find out some terminologies that sprung from his works.

Turing machine: A turing machine is a theoretical model of a computer. It solves a problem by manipulating symbols on a strip of tape according to some given rules. Any computable problem can be solved by changing these rules.

Turing test: The turing test is used to demonstrate machine intelligence. It proceeds as follows: a human judge communicates in plain text to a human and a machine, placed in isolated locations. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. ’Thinking’ is hard to define, therefore instead of asking whether a machine can think we could ask whether it can pass the turing test. No known machines (computer) has yet completely passed the turing test. CAPTCHA is a reverse turing test.

Turing Completeness: A collection of data-manipulation rules (an instruction set, programming language, or cellular automation) is said to be Turing complete if and only if such system can simulate any single-taped Turing machine.

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ACES For a programming language to be Turing complete, it is enough to have conditional branching (an “if” and “goto” statement), and the ability to change memory.

INTEL'S LATEST SERVER PROCESSOR - TUKWILA

Turing degree : Turing degree or degree of insolvability of a set of natural numbers measures the level of algorithmic insolvability of the set. The Turing degree of a set tells how difficult it is to solve the decision problem associated with the set.

Turing reducible : A Turing reduction from a problem A to a problem B is a reduction which solves A, assuming B is already known. It can be understood as an algorithm that could be used to solve A if a subroutine for solving B was available.

Turing tarpit : A Turing tarpit is a Turing complete programming language whose number of commands, operators, or equivalent objects is very small. This means you can write any kind of program with Turing tarpit but in doing so you will end up going crazy. These include brainFuck (8 commands, all with 0 operands), OISC (1 command, 3 operands), and Thue (1 command, 2 operands). These are designed as a test of the boundaries of computer programming language design, as a proof of concept, or as a joke.

Turing aware: Someone is called Turing aware if he/she has some basic idea about Alan turing and his work. Didn’t quite get it? This last one was a joke :) and this is how the article ends.

Wow, now even you are Turing Aware! ~ Renjith Ravindran Sem 7 (2007-2011) * The base material for this article comes from entries in wikipedia.org on the life and work of Alan Turing.

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ntel’s latest Itanium 9300 series codenamed as Tukwila is the world’s first 2 billion transistor server processor. It is the latest generation processor in the Itanium family of EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) architectures. Unlike the processors core-i3, core-i5, core-i7 which are desktop processors, itanium processors are meant for high performance computing and for handling large workloads needed in business organization and are server processors. It combines four execution cores and their respective cache hierarchies with an integrated crossbar router, two coherency controllers and two memory controllers.

Tukwila is the first Itanium processor to implement Intel’s Quick-Path Interconnect (QPI) [high speed packetized point to point interconnects] as well as the point-to-point Intel Scalable Memory Interconnect (SMI).

The six Intel QPI links provided by Tukwila allow vendors to interconnect multiple Tukwila sockets with each other and with the necessary I/O hubs in a variety of topologies.

27 The Tukwila processor has 4 logical cores in a single physical chip and each of the core has its own dedicated memory from which it can access the data faster and reduce the number of cache misses unlike the previous processor which had l1 and l2 caches on the same chip and the l3 caches were connected through a front side bus which had less speed. Each core can access its dedicated cache in the Tukwila processor using dual integrated memory controllers and if it has to access the dedicated cache of another core it uses the Quick Path Interconnect technology.

Apart from the dedicated caches we have external physical memory. It has up to eight times more physical memory capacity. The Intel Scalable Memory Interconnect and Intel 7500 Scalable Memory Buffer support up to eight times more memory than the previous generation using affordable DDR3 memory components. Tukwila processors also incorporate the hyper threading technology by bringing multithreading in each of the cores, this is done by executing 2 threads per core thus we have 8 threads that are being executed simultaneously.

Tukwila processors have memory and processor RAS features where RAS stands for reliability, availability and serviceability.

Reliability means it must be able to identify the errors that might occur while processing and correct it and if it’s not possible to correct then it must report that there is an error.

Availability means the server must be always on to meet with the needs of an organization. Serviceability means it must be able to correct the errors. It has advanced protective mechanisms which are incorporated on the processor die, in attached components and along the pathways that connect those

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components. Advanced machine check architecture enables coordinated error management across hardware firmware and the operating system to greatly reduce the chance of system crash or contaminated data.

It has enhanced energy efficiency technologies like Demand Based Switching: Reduces the voltage and frequency to lowest state available that does not impair performance and we have Turbo Boost Technology: When high workloads are there it increases the voltage and frequency. The Intel Itanium processor 9300 series supports system portioning with full electrical isolation and dynamic allocation of resources among running partitions. This enables complete workload isolation for mission critical applications, while providing the flexibility to scale resources as needed to deliver consistent and reliable performance. It also enables hardware maintenance without bringing down the system.

These processors are the world’s first 2 billion transistor processors. The two billion transistors are contributed by the 4 cores, 4 dedicated caches and all. It meets all the needs that are required by the organisations and provide high performance computing.

The Next Generation Intel Itanium processor is codenamed as Poulson and it is based on ultra-parallel micro architecture and will be manufactured in Intel’s 32nm process technology. It will include more cores, support more software threads and run at a higher clock frequency. ~ Priyanka Vishwan Sem 7 (2007-2011)

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GUEST ARTICLE

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Welcome to Cross Platform C/C++ Programming

Most college students feel that C/C++ programming language is dying a slow death and there is no point in learning it beyond the academic “compulsions�. To complicate the matter, the venerable Turbo C/ C++ compiler is still the most prominent tool used to teach C/C++ programming in our part of the world.

The problem is that Turbo C/C++ is a 16 bit compiler and world has moved on to 32 bit and 64 bit programming long ago.

To learn the nuances of modern C/C++ programming one should use a modern compiler like Visual C/C++( for Windows ) and GCC ( for MAC OS X and LINUX ). To be a successful C/C++ programmer, he or she should be a platform agnostic person and should be able to write portable code which can be recompiled on various platforms. In this article , I am planning to cover some of the techniques which is in vogue to write cross platform code. The purpose of this article is to teach a useful subset of C/C+ + programming language as well.

Since GCC is used on GNU Linux and MAC OS X , we can treat them as a POSIX based system. There are subtle differences between Windows and POSIX platform. I have written a .h file, which will help us to write the application code in a portable manner.

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REBOOT ////////////////////////// // Example.h // A header file which will help the application // programmer to write code for multiple platform // // #ifndef _EXAMPLE_DOT_H #define _EXAMPLE_DOT_H #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #ifdef _WINDOWS // if we are compiling for Windows #include <windows.h> //////////////////////////////////////////////////////// //Comparison function for qsort under Windows should use //__cdecl calling convention ( The parameters are //pushed from Right to Left and callee pops the stack ) // #define CALL_CONV_FOR_QSORT __cdecl /////////////////////////////// //Functions to be exported should using //__stdcall function ( The parameters are pushed from //Right to Leftand callee pops the stack ) // #define STDCALL_CONV __stdcall /////////////////////////////////// // Directive for Exporting the function from a DLL #define EXPORTED_FUNC __declspec(dllexport) ///////////////////////////////////// // Windows Function for Loading a DLL // LoadLibrary // Windows Function for retrieved a function address // GetProcAddress // Windows Function for Unloading the DLL // FreeLibrary // #define LOAD_DLL(hmodule,str) \ ( ( hmodule = LoadLibrary((str)) ) != INVALID_HANDLE_ VALUE ) #define GET_FUNC_PTR(hmodule,str) \ (GetProcAddress(hmodule,(str))) #define UNLOAD_DLL(hmodule) FreeLibrary(hmodule); #else #include <dlfcn.h> // for GNU Linux and MAC OS X #define CALL_CONV_FOR_QSORT #define EXPORTED_FUNC #define STDCALL_CONV ///////////////////////////////////// // UNIX Function for Loading a DLL // dlopen

29 // UNIX Function for retrieved a function address // dlsym // UNIX Function for Unloading the DLL // dlclose // #define LOAD_DLL(hmodule,str) \ ( ( hmodule = dlopen((str),RTLD_LAZY) ) != 0 ) #define GET_FUNC_PTR(hmodule,str) dlsym(hmodule,(str)); #define UNLOAD_DLL(hmodule) dlclose(hmodule); #endif ////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Function Pointer for our exported function typedef int ( STDCALL_CONV *QSORT_FUNC) (double *,int); #endif

The default calling convention for Windows is __stdcall. In this calling convention , the parameters are pushed from right to left and the callee pops the stack. In the case of __cdecl, the parameters are pushed from right to left and caller pops the stack . This has to be kept in mind while writing code for Windows.

That is why under Windows, we have defined a macro STDCALL_CONV as __stdcall. In the case of Microsoft C run time library, qsort function expects a function which follows __ cdecl calling conventions. The macro CALL_ CONV_FOR_QSORT is defined as __cdecl under Windows.

Given below is the source code of the QSORT library and the code is being compiled on to a DLL or Shared Library (.so ) depending upon the platform. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Qsort.cpp // Written by Praseed Pai K.T. // http://praseedp.blogspot.com // // under Windows @ the Visual C/C++ command prompt // ----------------------------------------------// cl /D_WINDOWS /c Qsort.cpp // link /DLL /out:QSORT.dll /DEF:QSort.def Qsort. obj

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// // under GNU Linux @ the Terminal // -----------------------------// g++ -c -o -fPIC Qsort.o Qsort.cpp // g++ -shared -o libQSORT.so Qsort.o // // under MAC OS X @ the Terminal // -----------------------------// g++ -c -o -fPIC Qsort.o Qsort.cpp // g++ -dynamiclib -o libQSORT.so Qsort.o // #include “EXAMPLE.h” //////////////////////////////////////////////// // Comparison function for qsort ANSI C/C++ // library function. Visual C/C++ mandates that // it should be __cdecl as the default calling // convention is __stdcall // static qualifier is to restrict the visibility // of CmpFn outside this source file. static int CALL_CONV_FOR_QSORT CmpFn(const void *dblone,const void *dbltwo ){ double a = *(double *)dblone; double b = *(double *)dbltwo; return ( a > b ) ? 1 : ( b > a ) ? -1 :0; } //////////////////////////////////////////////////// // QSORT - Sort a double array // It just makes a call to qsort library function // extern “C” EXPORTED_FUNC void STDCALL_CONV QSORT( double *arr , int nelem ) { qsort(arr,nelem,sizeof(double),CmpFn); }

The following module defenition file ( QSORT.def ) file has to be given at the linker command line on Windows.

LIBRARY QSORT EXPORTS

QSORT

The DLL or .SO can be linked statically or we can load them while the program is running. I have shown the latter technique as it is more difficult to get it right.

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Another thing which a programmer should be familiar is function pointers. To execute a function exported from the DLL or .SO at the run time , we need to be familiar with function pointers. Conceptually, a function pointer is a variable which stores the address of a function. The syntax of declaring the function pointers is the thing which confuses beginning students. Suppose there is function by the name Add which is declared as extern “C” int Add( int a , int b ) { return a+b; } The function pointer for this function can be declared as int ( *a ) ( int , int ) = (int ( *) (int , int ) )Add; now the variable a contains the address of Add function , we can invoke the function as (*a) (3,4) . Even a(3,4) would do.

While declaring a function pointer , we need to be careful about the calling convention as well.

If the Add function was following __stdcall calling convention , we should have declared the stuff as int (__stdcall *a) ( int , int ) = (int (__stdcall *) (int , int ) )Add;

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31 if (!LOAD_DLL(hmodule,dllname)) { fprintf(stdout,”Failed to load %s\n”,dllname); return -1; } sorter = (QSORT_FUNC) GET_FUNC_ PTR(hmodule,”QSORT”); if ( sorter == 0 ) { fprintf(stdout,”failed to retrieve function pointer\n”); return -2; } (*sorter)(arr,argc-1); num = 0; while (num < argc-1 ) printf(“%g\n”,arr[num++]); free(arr); UNLOAD_DLL(hmodule); return 0; } }

In the main program, every C/C++ program will have at least one parameter (argc will always be at least one) and that will be the executable file name. We are assuming that rest of the arguments will be numbers to be sorted. We use malloc to allocate the amount of memory depending upon the number of parameters.

Praseed Pai is a renowned software professional from Kochi,India. He is a regular and highly rated speaker at the Microsoft User Groups , BarCamps , OWASP events and the Linux User groups.

He is the founder of slangfordotnet (http://slangfordotnet.codeplex.com) which is widely used by students and academia as a base for their curriculum projects. Praseed’s personal blog can be accessed from http://praseedp.blogspot.com

Finally , qsort is a ANSI C/C++ library function which can sort data by supplying a comparitor function (cmpFn in the Qsort.cpp is the comparator) . If you have followed me this far welcome to the wonderful world of cross-platform C/C++ programming. ~ Praseed Pai KT Guest writer

The argv array elements are of type char * and we use atof (ascii to float) to convert the argument into IEEE 754 floating point number.

The retrieved numbers are passed to QSORT function to get it sorted and the results are dumped on to the console. The QSORT function relies on the qsort library function from the stdlib.h header.

Alan J. Perlis

You think you know when you can learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.

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“H

uman subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.”-Leonardo da Vinci.

Perhaps one of the greatest geniuses our kind has produced has underestimated the abilities of his own.

Starting from mere calculators and arithmetic engines, who could have fathomed that we would reach an age where we could wear computers or literally convert the world into a computer. This surge of confidence which is inspiring the human race to break all barriers and question geniuses of the likes of Da Vinci, is buttressed by a technology called “THE SIXTH SENSE”. Yes friends. Its no more a superstition Sixth Sense Technology: The next BIG or a science fiction concept. The sixth sense technology could actuthing ? ally change our perception of this world. It will bridge the gap between the digital and the physical world and allow the users to access data and information instantly. The name is derived from the fact that the information available in digital format is not naturally perceivable and so we need a sixth sense to interface with that data which is available in huge amount and is increasing day by day.

Developed at MIT by Pranav Mistry, a PhD student from India, the system is rather straightforward. It consists of a camera, a projector and a mirror, mainly referred to as wearable gesture interface. The camera is used to track hand motion and the projector is used to project the image on a surface. It can project information on any surface, be it a wall or a table.

The user is able to interact with the digital world using hand gestures. You heard it right; you neither need a mouse nor do you need to sit in front of a boring screen. The projected image could be anything ranging from your desktop screen to your media library or even your photo album, It could to almost anything that you could do on a normal computer. Just carry it around and use it whenever you need it. In its prototype version the device could recog-

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33 nise colour coded hand gestures. Pretty slick eh? It gets even better. But this is not were the magic lies. It is the software part that makes all these wonders possible.

You can always connect this to a small computing device say a smart phone or a PDA and voila, you are online. It also supports multi touch and multiple user. This device provides us a huge variety of applications much larger than we can imagine. The map application is an alluring implementation of this technology. It lets the user navigate a map using his hand gestures. The drawing application yet again demonstrates the usefulness and viability of this system. It allows the user to draw on any surface by recognizing the movements of his fingertips. Now this is what we can call a technological revolution!

Gone are the days when news papers flavoured our morning tea. Need latest news or have to watch a video? Just put on the specially made goggles and everything will be right infront of the eyes. Just sit back and

relax. But I have my own apprehensions about the technology. Like, I am not sure how my morning tea is going to taste. The whole way we communicate is on the throes of a historical change, a change of epic proportions. Need to make a call just extend your hands in front of camera and click the numbers. It can tell us arrivals, departures and delays of your flight on your tickets. Just look at the objects, hold them in your hand and you will know if it fits your preferences or not.

You just need to hold it and it will work.

Alan J. Perlis

In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can’t.

In a nutshell, the system holds the ability of becoming an ultimate transparent user interface where we would be accessing information from everything in our vicinity. I really believe it has the potential of becoming a technology as pervasive as mobile phones and i-pods in the near future. Infact, the technology has blessed the mankind with an extra sense- “the sixth sense”. Let’s take pleasure in exploring the world around us virtually.

We have depended on our five senses ever since antiquity and the time is nigh to add one more to the kitty and narrow down the gap between man and the almighty. Doesn’t make much sense, eh? Just try “sixth sense” and it will change your perception of the world forever. ~ Poorvank Bhatia Sem 3 (2009-2013)

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ow this is one of the magical inventions of Microsoft I’m writing about. Perhaps the people at Microsoft had the very familiar Weasley’s clock in their minds during the process of creating this awe inspiring device.

Just like the Weasley family clock in the Harry Potter books that could individually monitor each of their whereabouts, the designers at Microsoft, Cambridge have designed the whereabout clock that can show where each member of a group of people is at a given moment.

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Why make it look like a clock though? Well using a clock is easy. Whenever you need to know the whereabouts of your family memThe round face of the clock is divided into areas bers and friends, you just need to give it a for “work”, “home”, “school “ and “out”.The icon glance. Also, the clock can be placed cenon the clock moves from one zone to the other trally such that all members can conveniently as the location of a member of the group chang- and frequently look at it. The clock is sure es, say from home to work or school. Now the to make its users feel more connected with question is how did Microsoft create this “mag- people. The clock also offers a high degree of ic” even though it had to visual enchantment to a workplace that was rely on human technol- otherwise quite ordinary. Further research to ogy? Well, this is why the make this device more user friendly has rebril- vealed that an individual’s location is important but so too is information about what they are doing, where they are going and why.

Consequently, the whereabouts clock is I am on the clock being redesigned to allow users to convey their own text messages. As with the first version of the clock, this too will use cellular network, but will more fully utilize the sms liance of the human channel for this creative content. The testers mind is universally ac- at Microsoft seem to be quite positive about knowledged. The use the feasibility of this project. of cell phones is indeed a major ingredient in the entire process. The So finally we might have a whereabout clock mobile phone can tell the whereabout clock at our homes. As long as we are whipping about its location simply by being plugged into up products based on Harry Potter books, the network. The first step is to register the lets quickly get ourselves working on flying zones when the software is installed. There- broomsticks. after the users need not do anything except ~ Manisha Sinha switch on their phones. When a member’s cell Sem 5 (2008-2012) phone is on, the application continually scans

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ave you seen the movie Terminator Salvation? Eight years from now, machines have destroyed most of the human civilization; the communication infrastructure as we know, has ceased to exist. People who managed to stay alive were left to live without mobile networks, landlines and Internet. So as we see, there is no way to communicate. Then how does John Connor manage to communicate with his resistance army? Yes! there was a small radio set; unlike a common radio set, which is tuned to broadcast radio stations, it was a two way communication system. Has it ever crossed your mind that you too can communicate around the globe as Connor did? Ever imagined that it was entirely plausible to talk to astronauts on a space mission and ask them how they feel up there? Have you ever imagined yourself sitting right there in the balcony and asking a scientist at the north pole what is it he is researching on? Have you ever dreamt of using satellite link for personal communication?

I am not referring to a concept that is possible in the near future or something that only exists in the realm of science fiction. The above mentioned technology is available and has been in use for almost a hundred years now. The most important factor that promotes any invention is its accessibility to the common man, i.e. any simple person like you and me can use this.

Yes indeed, there exists a hobby which gives us the freedom to communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world and even with the space, that too free of cost. The hobby is called Amateur Radio Service, popularly known as HAM radio service. Amateur radio or HAM radio is the hobby of constructing, experimenting and communicating, using radio equipment and radio technologies. It is amateur in the sense that it can be practised only with the personal aim, without any pecuniary interest. An Amateur radio operator or simply a HAM canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be paid for the communication he makes.

HAM RADIO HAM is one of the few hobbies which requires a licence to be practiced. To earn this licence we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need to have any kind of an educational qualification. In our country anyone above the age of 12 can earn this licence by passing the Amateur Station Operatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Certificate (ASOC) Examination conducted by the Ministry of Communication. An amateur radio station is operated under different national and international rules and regulations.

Why is a license needed?

A License is needed for amateur radio service so that no person shall establish, maintain and work on an amateur radio station except under the different national and international rules and regulations. HAM radio is a very strong and efficient means of communication. Licenses are made mandatory to avoid certain situations such as an amateur radio station might interfere with other radio services like police wireless or other private or government broadcast

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ACES radio station and of course there is the threat of Terrorists and anti-social elements.

What can we do with HAM radio?

Apart from just being a hobby, amateur radio service can be used for technical investigation and public service at the same time. HAMs enjoy free communication with other HAMs all over world. They make personal conversation on-the-air, they help make friends around the globe, share their experiences and get technical details. An interesting fact about HAM communication is that they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to pay an authority for the communication they make on-the-air. Each HAM owns his personal radio

station or hand held radio transceiver (a combination of transmitter and receiver) to communicate worldwide. An amateur radio operator or a HAM uses different modes of wireless transmission to communicate, e.g. radio-telephony (just like John Connor!), radiotelegraphy (teletyping), radio facsimile (radio FAX or slow scan television), amateur radio television, digital-computer supported communication. Voice communication or radio-telephony is the most popular mode of transmission among HAM. Digital-communication e.g. VOIP (voice over

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(chip) and the Nobel prize winner Jack S. Kilby credits his achievement to his hobby of HAM radio.

Amateur radio is known for its role in emergency situations. Unlike mobile phone or land lines,HAM radio doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t depend on third party services. Mobile phones and land lines are not reliable means of communication during emergency situations. During war or natural disasters like tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes etc; all the conventional means

37 of communication like the mobile phone network, land lines fails due to power outage or even destruction of telephone lines and mobile towers. HAM radio is free from these demerits. Unlike conventional means of communication HAM radio does not have a choke point. Each HAM radio is an independent unit and a HAM uses his skill to establish communication link across the world. HAM radio is very power efficient and hence it can work on batteries or even solar cell. So there is a popular saying among the HAM that “When all else fails, HAM works”. Whenever government and private links of communication fail HAM operator comes into play and establishes communication channels and conveys necessary messages to the public. They provide coordination among police, medical and other necessary services by interchanging information. So HAM operators have proved their worth during many major disasters like the gulf wars and Tsunamis etc.

Who can go for HAM? Are you wondering what purpose does HAM serve for the common man? HAM is not restricted to radio enthusiasts or people with a flair for experimentation. It goes without saying that some fundamental knowledge in electronics and radios is required to use it, but anyone with half a brain can attempt it.

You will be surprised to know that the Inventor of the IC and Nobel prize winner Jack S. Kilby, Linux kernel developer Ted Ts’o, Former CEO of Apple computer John Sculley, Sonia Gandhi, Amitabh Bachhan and a lot more people from different walks of life are amateur radio hobbyist. Just like we have a user ID to send email or telephone numbers; each HAM operator also has a unique call sign. A call-sign consists of a set of letters and numbers, assigned by the authority.

The first two letters of the call sign denote the country of the HAM operator. For e.g. call

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sign of Amitabh Bachhan is VU2AMY. Here VU is the code of India, all the call sign of Indian HAM begin with VU. How to go for HAM? As mentioned earlier one has to pass the ASOC (Amateur Station Operator’s Certificate) exam to earn a HAM license. This exam is conducted by the Wireless Planning and Coordination (WPC) wing of the Ministry of Communications, New Delhi at the Wireless Monitoring Stations located throughout the country.

There are two grade of license: 1. Restricted Grade and 2. General Grade. A general grade licensee can use satellite links but a restricted grade licensee can’t. Also, a general grade licensee can use mobile or handheld transceivers to communicate in certain conditions but a restricted grade licensee can’t operate a mobile Amateur station.

Epilogue Amateur Radio or HAM radio is such a fruitful and exciting hobby. A HAM radio can save lives in natural calamities and wars. Once you become a HAM you’ll feel the true freedom of communication. Communicating across the globe using a simple radio set is simply fascinating. HAM radio operators have made significant contribution to science, telecommunication, industries and social services. I find Amateur Radio Service as the best hobby that exists.

Amateur radio gives you the power of communication. If you do have a dollop of interest in electronics and computing; why not give HAM a try? ~ Kumar Vimal Sem 3 (2009-2013)

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he year is 2010. Technology has evolved a lot since the days of 386 machines, which had a clock speed of 33 MHz to the preset. Multi cored 3+ GHz processors and SLI’ed graphic cards are the norm of the day. With numerous cores being added to processors faster than bunnies reproducing, memory capacities skyrocketing and hard disk sizes rivaling the area of the Hoover Dam, there are simply too many things happening, combined with many mind boggling offers on them. The end-users end up holding a flash drive, like Hamlet, and asking it ‘To buy or not to buy? That is the question!’. Usually we go ahead and buy something, but end up paying more than what we want or at times not getting enough. So it always pays to know, what really lies under the hood and what exactly we need. Its like a cooking recipe; the more you know about the ingredients and its quantity, the better it tastes. The concept of a ‘Perfect computer for everyone’ doesn’t exist! As I’d like to phrase it YMMV(Your Mileage May Vary).

Here is a bird’s eye view of the components you will need for a desktop, mainly in three categories namely Entry level: A category of computers used generally for web browsing , word processing , movies and music .

Mid range: If you have an obsessive compul-

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sive need for a powerful computer and you game so frequently that you begin to think, your life is a game, then this is definitely your stop. Needless to say, you can do your usual chores too on this. It is a wicked balanced combo of price and performance.

Enthusiast: The people belonging to this category are to computers, what gear-heads are to automobiles. These are the kind of people who spend their money so lavishly that they make the oil rich Arab Sheikhs look like misers. Performance is the sole consideration. Workstation, ultimate frag engines, professionals, designers are the some of the typical people who exhibit this insanity.

Now it is highly recommended to go for an assembled PC rather than a branded one, as your options will be limited since you will have to go with the package, the company provides. Getting an assembled PC is usually more fruitful than a branded one. But that’s an entire discussion for another time. For now lets see what all we need for our PC.

PROCESSOR Earlier, choosing a processor was easy enough. Higher the clock speed, the better was the processor. But the story is pretty dif-

39 ferent now. As processors have more than one core, now it is more about performance/watt. We can roughly say that more the number of cores, the better the processor. For the Intel fans, which is ruling the market at the moment, settle for nothing less than a core 2 series processor will do. The new i series processors are catching up and will eventually replace the core2 line up. Pentiums are out of the picture now(Think of a godfather getting replaced!). For the entry level core i3 350 is a nice option. For the mid range core i5 750 is a good deal that costs around 14k. For the mid range settle for atleast a core i7 860 processor. It offers a good blend of performance and price. If that’s not enough you can go ahead and buy the fastest one on the planet, Intel i7 980. It is a mean beast which easily beats all other processors around. It comes at a hefty price tag of 45k. It also packs in a funky heat sink.

HARD DISK Firstly, resign yourself to the fact that you’ll never have enough space. So get the maximum your pocket can get. The applications and games eat up space, like Godzilla eats up New York and with movies going blue ray, soon you will be craving for more space. But there is a silver lining to this Pandora’s box and that is, the GBs are getting dirt cheap. However this is only true till you reach the 1 TB limit. After that, the cost per Gb increases exponentially. Entry level users settle for at least 300 GB, 7200 rpm hard disk. It should set your wallet back by 2.8k. Midrangers should settle for a minimum of 500 GB hard disk. For the enthusiast, you can go for a 1 TB x 2 RAID 0 configuration, which should give you

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enough speed and performance for a while.

I’m sure you already know that, nevertheless, its always fun to broach the subject.

RAM DDR3 is the new buzzword on the block. They are faster, better and can have higher capacities per stick. As 64 bit computing showed up, the need for a new type of RAM architecture which could provide higher speed and capacity popped up and DDR3 was the glorious answer. DDR3 is getting cheaper by the day and basically all new motherboards have native DDR3 support. However sadly it is not backward compatible with DDR2 slots. So a DDR3 upgrade on an old PC isn’t quite feasible. It will require a complete overhaul.

MOTHERBOARD This is the piece of hardware which connects every other hardware to each other. Keep in mind while you choose a motherboard, choose one that is is upgradable, has enough ports like USB 2.0 (USB 3 is already present in new boards), Ethernet, DVI and/or VGA if you are not planning for a dedicated graphic card to connect to the monitor, enough DDR slots- a minimum of two. Chipsets is another ticky area to lookout for. AMD maintains its consistency by not making much changes to the socket, making most of its motherboards upgrade without a hassle. The AM3 support phenom II. Intel on the other hand has the LGA 775 for the core 2 series, LGA 1156 for i3, i5, i7 (800 series) and LGA 1366 for the core i7 (900 series). Features such as on-board audio, e-SATA etc are pretty standard these days. Finally keep an eye out for the maximum amount of RAM that can be installed on the system.

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POWER-SUPPLY (SMPS) It’s a bit unfortunate to see that one of the most important component is not even taken into account while buying a PC. Most people go with the stock SMPS that accompanies the cabinet of the PC which in most cases, is not up to the mark. SMPS is the one component which provides all the juice for your computer and if you look into the most common computer problems the root case in 6/10 cases will be a screwed up power supply. If it doesn’t provide the adequate amount of power it will affect the performance and life of your computer.

Make sure you go in for at least a 450 watt power supply. For the Mid range, guys it would a good idea if you do away with the stock SMPS and buy a solid one with a 550 and upward rating depending on your PC components and trust me , it is worth the investment. Enthusiasts would have to consider SMPS in the range of 800-1000 watts from Cooler-master or antec, which will be pretty costly but provides rock solid stability and performance even with peak loads. Also make sure that you get a UPS as it helps save your work when the power goes boom and also protects your PC from the spikes and surges from the power outlet .

GRAPHIC CARDS This is what the gamers should be eyeing on.

As suggested in myth busters, a graphics card is not just for game addicts, as more and more OSs and applications (especially High Definition content which work better with a graphic card support), provide all those effects and eye-candy by taking the load off the processor. Nvidia and ATI (now owned by AMD) rule the roost of graphic card market. A basic card will be able to give you HD playback support

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and DVI ports and should be able to take care of your OS demands but don’t expect it to perform in the gaming zone as the new games are simply too demanding and playing a game on it with a descent resolution will be like watching a slide show. It is hard to suggest a graphic card as the market is pretty dynamic. Nvidia 9600GSO or 9600GT is a good bet on the entry level for the Nvidia fans and on the ATI front we have HD 4670.

Both costs around the 4.4k and are getting Alan J. Perlis

Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.

cheaper by the minute. For the mid range we have Nvidia 9800GT and ATI 4850 both costing around 9k, which is the sweet spot as it gives you reasonable performance and bang for the buck. For the high end category we have Nvidia GTX 280 or ATI 4870 which will help you play at high resolution without breaking a sweat. If that’s not enough you can go ahead and make a SLI or crossfire rig (putting more than a graphic card in a motherboard running in parallel). After all, if you have the money why not pamper yourself with the very best?

Now that you have been equipped with the knowledge, get your fanny up off the couch and get yourself a new rig, which is actually worth the money you pay for it. ~ Nijil Yesudasan Sem 7 (2007-2011)

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can arrange for very strong magnets, the kind used in laboratories. As for pendrives there is nothing magnetic about it. A flash drive consists of a small printed circuit board typically in a plastic or metal casing.

Myth: You cannot unplug a usb device unless you “SAFELY REMOVE” it.

Myth: Graphic Card? Why? I’m not a Considering you are not a fool, the only probGamer!

A common myth among newbies is that a Graphic card’s sole purpose is for gaming purposes, which is all out wrong. A GPU(Graphic Processing Unit) helps in running the new high definition video files, it helps in providing the new dynamic looks of windows Aero interface without eating your ram speed or clock speed of your PC. In short your CPU is not ready for the future without a proper graphic card.

Myth: Defragment regularly You don’t need to defragment your hard drive every now and then. Yes, it’ll be faster if you do. But the difference will probably be negligible. Your PC’s performance hardly depends on your hard drive’s defrag condition. It depends to a great extent on the physicsl memory, RAM. This is what makes all the difference.Microsoft claimed for so long that NTFS was immune to fragmentation, and no defrag utility was needed at all!

Myth: A magnet in close proximity to a computer will cause harm Your computer is magnetic field proof. Most people say magnets can damage information on your hard disk or pen drive. This is true to some extent but hardly relevant unless you

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lem you might face is, when you plug it back in a span of few seconds, it might not get recognized. This problem can be solved by waiting a bit or by just restarting. No data is lost by this and no harm done to the system in any way.

Myth: Getting more RAM will increase system performance.

The statement is true until you reach a 4 GB RAM limit. After that, adding more RAM does not make much sense unless you are running a Windows 64 bit version, Server edition or a 64 bit Linux system, and you have 64 bit hardware.

Myth: Refreshing your desktop will get your system back to the normal.

You could not be more mistaken. The refresh option sitting happily in the right-click menu doesn’t do anything more than redrawing your desktop. We tend to do that a lot in frustration when the system does not respond, by which we end up giving more work to the computer, making it slower.

~ Sunny Kumar Aditya Sem 7 (2007-2011)

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Whims of the virtual world An IT professional would come across the word ‘Virtual’ pretty often, everything is virtual in the world of Computers. But I am referring to a world, which has become home for the present generation, the world created by the Internet. People love to live there, rather than head out into the bizarreness of reality. Reminds me of the tag-line of the Hollywood movie “Inception” : The Dream is Real. Yes! Every individual of the present generation wants the Dream to be Real, and the Internet makes it possible virtually.

Without much fuss, I would like to present my own experience in the Virtual World to you. It all began when I joined college. Up till then, the Internet was just a half an hour business daily done for the sake of it. Net was not cheap then, and my parents had an eye on what I did, so Internet never meant much to me. Then I joined college, stayed with friends who insisted on having an Unlimited Internet connection. Back then I was like “Why should we waste so much

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money?” But now, surfing the Internet is like breathing to me. Sort of ‘ Cannot live without’.

I would like to share how I got transformed into this. So I got access to Unlimited Internet, and the social networking sites, Orkut began calling up my attention. Adding up friends and having more number of scraps then became my daily routine. If I ever missed doing this routine one day, I become really anxious the next day and tried to make up for the loss.

But this craze did not really catch up to me until recently. Orkut, though it was interesting, did not have much options. All the while I noticed my friend Gibu still pondering upon Social networking sites, but he was using Facebook. So I thought I’Il give Facebook a try. I made up an account and started working upon it. Sadly the complexity of Facebook discouraged me to delve deeper into it. I began asking Gibu to help me to get up with it, and so he claimed himself my “Guru” to Facebook. And so he was.

I began exploring the wide variety of appli-

43 cation available on Facebook, I understood the concept of a “wall”, how to add up friends, how to connect and finally how to enjoy. I would still say I was not really an addict to these sites, until something else came up.

So from social networking, again my friend Gibu introduced me to a whole new realm of virtuality. Winning prizes online is something every boy craves for. And he opened for me the gates to that world. It came in the form of ‘Lockerz’. Lockerz is a site to win prizes by some simple methods, and my desire to own latest gadgets really pulled me into it. I began spending hours a day finding for referrals, trying to convince others, digging up contacts I never used. I was totally involved in trying to win a prize, and that day came by! I was almost convinced when I won an Apple Itouch.

Dreams began to build upon dreams, Lockerz became something God-like to me. I decided to be a part of it, and thus I started Facebooking seriously. I became a very active member of the Lockerz Facebook community (I mean it!) I used to spent 5-6 hours daily on it, and if anyone asked what I was doing, I had only one answer, Help members of Lockerz. I helped thousands of Lockerz members over Facebook, people began to recognize me, people began respecting me. Along with respect does come criticism. Some would really drag me down the potholes, but nothing stopped me from helping people. Finally Lockerz identified my potential and I officially became a part of the team. I was so excited, but only to know that my Prize was denied due to some technical problems. My friends laughed at me, but I would not stop. It was a passion to me.

I kept helping people and gained a lot of friends all over the world. I got used to the world timing zones, kept track of every development in the site. I proved to become one

REBOOT

of the best members in the team, but over the months I kept getting disappointed on not getting a prize. Finally the disappointment took over me, even though I loved doing the work, I quit the team. I thought I would keep away from the stress, responsibilities and expectations, and spent more time on something creative.

But water always flows into the ocean,and here I was I falling into another trap. Another emerging Tech site namely Take Bigg caught my attention, and I joined the Development Team of the site. A fresh new start, for which I would get paid too.

Dedication is something that flows in me, and I spent hours on this too. I moderated their Facebook community, and gave suggestions for the design of the site. Once the site launched, I was given the responsibility of maintaining the Control Panel of the site. It was a whole new dimension. I learned about how a site works, how the data is maintained etc. It was a Joomla based site, and I did a whole research on it. I began experimenting on several designs, adding modules and making the site interactive. It was a point based site and I had to manage all of it. The development team had another member namely Vivek, who turned out to be a really good online friend of mine. We enjoyed the work on the site, till the payday came over.

They paid via Paypal, and for 3 months work, it was a mere 10$. Again disappointment, and it got worse when I came to know that Lockerz was giving away prizes to worthy team members. I would’ve easily won it, but I quit before the opportunity came, and here I am in no man’s land. And as it would have happened, I quit Take Bigg too.

Disappointment over disappointment, for what?

The dreams I built up in the Virtual world. I always believed ‘Never have expectations’, but thought, that would be wrong in the Virtual world which turned out to be a huge mistake.

ACES

I realized reality is here, where I live, and not inside an electronic device. But looking back at all these I would never say it was a complete loss. Yes, I have spent plenty of time for it, none of which I’m going to get back. But looking on the positive side, I built up in me better communication skills. I learned how to handle someone when one is really pissed off.

I learned to get used to the world time zones, earned thousands of wonderful friends all over.

Everyone of them shared their culture and experiences with me. I learned how to manage such a site and now I can even begin on such a project provided I have the funding.

Alan J. Perlis

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

Now comes the conclusion part, which is the difficult one. If you were an IIM-CAT aspirant, you would be wondering what the mood of the author is. Well, this would be a tough one to crack. Being in a virtual world has lots of disadvantages. It eats up your time, it cuts you off from ‘real’ friends and family, and it gives you surreal expectations. But there is a lot to learn from the world; communication, culture, technologies and patience are just a few to name.

Even after saying all this, and experiencing all this, I’m still active in the Virtual world. Its like someone has planted an ‘Inception’ in me. And one question would arise, who is to be blamed?

The sites? Your friends? I would say no to all.

All these have a purpose, but do not go too much into anything. I have realized that, but I still rejoice on the things I got to learn from the period. So, if you are a starter, please be careful and keep in mind “Reality is where you live”. ~ Vinesh Balan Sem 7 (2007-2011)

It

was the summer of ‘05 in the Arabian Desert and I found myself sitting in front of my Dad’s laptop with a brand new game called Halo in my hands. A lot of friends had recommended it and hence I thought I’d give it a try. So here I was, popping the CD into the drive and sending it to Spin-Land. Little did I know that this action cemented the beginning of an affair that would last to this very day.

Now for those of you who haven’t played Halo, here’s the capsule version. Four hundred years into the future humans have finally invented FTL (Faster Than Light) travel and have colonized many planets in the Milky Way galaxy. The player helms Master Chief-117, the leader of a group of government Super soldiers known as the ‘SPARTANS’.

Master Chief is not the character’s name but his rank viz. Master Chief Petty Officer.

Now out of the blue, enters a foe whose technology and sheer number far outweigh anything humans could throw at them. This certain foe is an alliance of many alien races collectively naming themselves as ‘The Covenant’ and apparently their sole objective is to eradicate the so called ‘Human Scum’. Now Master Chief represents the one true hope of Humanity, and while onboard a battle cruiser called the ‘Pillar of Autumn’ they are attacked by the Covenant and they retreat to a random location using their FTL drives. Having arrived at this unknown location they encounter a massive hollowed out ring structure called a ‘Halo’ which featured earth like terrain on the inner side of the ring. The covenant ships follow the Pillar of Autumn to this location and the cruiser is forced to crash land into the Halo. Once on the Halo, Master Chief

45 fights his way through to reconnoiter with the rest of the survivors of the crash. A long story cut short, he encounters a species of parasitic aliens known as ‘The Flood’ who infest sentient species like the humans and the covenant and transform them into zombie like creatures. Think Half-Life meets Resident Evil. This is where I leave you hanging and don’t give any more spoilers.

The game in itself visually stunning; its not as good as Call of Duty – Modern Warfare but still good in its own right. As my roommate always reminds me “Graphics isn’t everything!!”. True to this the gameplay in itself is the best feature of the game. There are many people out there who claim Microsoft is evil and to a certain extent they are true,

Halo Universe which has spawned everything from sequels like Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo: ODST, Halo Wars, Halo Reach to novels, graphic novels, several short animated movies and a Hollywood movie bound to release in 2012. Now put the magazine down, get up and go get a copy of Halo and experience it for yourself. I dare you not to fall in love with it. Hell, I double dare you not to “FINISH THIS FIGHT” !!

~ Gibu Thomas Mathew Sem 7 (2007-2011)

HALO but then are those who claim that Microsoft will never produce anything of quality and this is where I beg to differ. They have done a terrific job with the story, music score and gameplay of Halo. At no stage do you feel it’s overdone.

The mix of the graphics, story, music, gameplay and fun is so perfect that it appeals to almost anyone who plays it. Shortly after its release, it exploded onto the Multiplayer screen and grabbed a lot of followers, In fact the game was so popular and had such a big impact that Microsoft piggybacked the Xbox and Xbox 360 console launches with Halo 2’s and Halo 3’s releases respectively, The initial Halo game opened the gateway to the

O

ne of the most addictive games of the decade, Diablo II from Blizzard Entertainment has been a huge success. We could say, no one would get hooked onto this game on the first shot. Either your friend should force you to play the game, or you should be really into RPG games.

Diablo II

Now what makes Diablo II so addictive? Is it the graphics? No! Reality? No! Its all about the gameplay! Filled with magic, monsters, dungeons, and a never ending weapons and an Item list, you’d keep playing the same act just to collect the items, and gems specifically! (Love the sound of it!) You have 5 Character Classes to chose from, each with its own awesome abilities. We have completed the game with 3 of the classes, and yet haven’t stopped playing it (We guess it has been 5 years since we began playing it!). The five character classes are “Amazon”- you would love her if you like attacking from a distance using Archery, “Sorceress” – as the name suggests, filled with Magic, “Paladin” – concentrates on swords and aura’s, “Necromancer” – with the power to rise the dead and finally “Barbarian” – with brute force to thrash up monsters.

Let us introduce you to the game; if you are an amateur, We’d suggest to begin with “Sorceress”. You begin with literally nothing in your hands, and fight your way through monsters. As the game progress, you collect items, sell them, buy new ones, increase your experience levels in combat and gradually master the unique skills. Now to survive, you need to keep track on the Red and Blue orbs which indicate your Life, and Mana (to use Magic). Further, you get to collect gems, which when combined with weapons and armors give special power to them. For example Ruby adds fire power when combined with weapons, adds fire resistance when combined with armors, Topaz is for lightning, Sapphire for ice and certain other gems as well.

We are not adding any spoilers to this article, the story itself is a charm. Play the game to find it out.

If you were to try out this game (based on this review), as a beginner, the first thing you would think is that we are crazy.

But try on the game for a few days, its guaranteed that you would be addicted to it. You would crave for more powerful and more unique items, and master powerful magical moves. The world is out there, for you to explore. And keep in mind, the world is expanding with Diablo III to be released by 2011.

~ Sajin Shah Anand ~ Nidal Rashid Sem 7 (2007-2011)

47

B

lack Hawk Down. Most of you have seen it, and if not I think you would get a pretty clear idea from watching updates of the Iraq war on the news. Now I’m willing to bet that most of you have secretly desired to gun down bad guys in the Middle East and help them on their way to biting the dust. I’m sure you’ve found the thought so alluring that you went into your room switched off the light, picked up a coat hanger, closed your eyes and imagined yourself as an American soldier in the Middle East. A drastic decrease in this behavior was observed post 2008; the reason you ask? Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

Call of Duty was one of many games that were inspired from the famous Omaha Beach scene from ‘Saving Private Ryan’.

Though now it has grown into a full fledged series based in the World War II era; Modern Warfare explores into previously unventured territory for them.

The plot is set in 2011 and it begins in a Middle Eastern nation facing an uprising. American forces enter the region to bring some much needed stability.

the concept of infinite enemies. This forces a player to push forward again and again in the heat of crossfire to advance ground, just like a real soldier does. It epitomizes the word “Modern” focusing on modern terror issues in Asians countries , political instability and dictatorship in African countries. As an added bonus to all this one get access to modern warfare weapons [names of which, I am too sleepy to search].

Its not only the gameplay that makes this a huge hit, the character development, audio-visual and every aspect of the game has been well developed. Infact, compared to its sequel, Modern Warfare was a better game. With an amazingly knitted story with multiple characters and situations bringing the whole scenario of the game to sense; it keeps you on your toes for the release of its sequel, and even super sequel! Personally I would like to put in a special note for a specific level which has been designed and implemented fantabulously - ‘One Shot One Kill’ literally means that!

COD4

MODERN WARFARE

Now lets step away for a second and think, what makes a movie a ‘Hit’ . A good story backed up by equally good performances by its cast with music and effects to make things appear effortlessly seamless. Now lets take all this and move it to higher paradigm.

The paradigm of gaming and we get games like Half-Life, Red Alert and Modern Warfare.

The game bores in an element of realism, by introducing

In short a first person shooter game loaded with all the coveted or wackiest dream-things in one pack. Modern warfare was followed by followed by a sequel and now its much awaited third part is slated for release in 2011. Pundits have already marked the games as an all time “best war based FPS”.

~ Gibu Thomas Mathew ~ Sunny Kumar Aditya Sem 7 (2007-2011)

49

Message to Alumni You are an inseparable part of ACES community that was founded years ago.

ACES body was dissolved as a concept of combined technical fest for SOE was floated and accepted. Xplendor, a combined technical fest came into existence.In February 2010, we started to work for the reincarnation of ACES and with support from our immediate seniors of 2010 passout batch, we succeeded . In March, ACES executive body was formed. ACES again started different activities related to students of Computer Science and Engineering.

Our dream to have our very own ACES website on CUSAT server was realized on 13th of August . The link is http://aces.cusat.ac.in. at present we are beta phase .We would request you to register on the site and provide us your valuable suggestions and guidance.

We are working to improve the website to look and function better.

And here we are with the ACES magazine, the result of many months of toil. We hope You enjoy the variety and spice of articles in the magazine.

We need your help, support and guidance in every step that we are going to take. We need your suggestions and feedback on every decision that we are going to take and implement. We need your love and affection as we belong to same alma matter.Our standing four batches of ACES would be obliged to you people.

With Regards ACES

NOTE: for certain reasons this and the following page were not added in the print version.

ACES would like to thank the following members of alumni for their gracious monetary support for REBOOT Abhishek Anand (2010) aby.anand@gmail.com Infosys,Reading England Rohan Chatterjee (2007) rohan.chatterjee@gmail.com Bengaluru, India Anurag Ojha (2009) aelien@gmail.com USC CA,CA, USA Sanjeev Kumar Jaiswal (2009) jassics@gmail.com CSC India, Chennai, India Gaurav Nigam (2009) nigamgaurav85@gmail.com CSC India,Noida, India Nitish Kumar (2009) adorablenitish@gmail.com Infosys,Bengaluru, India Ranjan Pandey (2009) ranjanpandey@infosys.com Infosys,Chandigarh, India Aayush Raina (2010) aayush.raina21@gmail.com Huwaei Technologies, Bengaluru, India

Prateek Uniyal (2010) prateekuniyal1@gmail.com TCS, Mumbai, India Prashant Prakash (2010) prashantpacy@gmail.com Infosys, Mysore, India Rajan Kumar Mishra (2010) rajan.mishra9@gmail.com TCS Mumbai, India Ravi Kant (2010) ravi.er.kant@gmail.com Accenture, Bengaluru, India Rishi Kumar (2010) crystal.rishi2@gmail.com Samsung India, Bengaluru, India Vishram Mishra (2010) shredderbond@gmail.com, NTU ,Singapore Kumari Swarnim (2010) swarnim08@gmail.com Motorola Solutions, Bengaluru, India Sharique Shamim Hashmi (2010) TCS, Mumbai, India

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