The Reader (not the Oscar nominated Movie)

Reading RSS News feeds daily is a habit of mine that I like. The feeds vary from BBC News & technology to gaming & blogs. But I don’t spend too much time in them coz I’ll usually feel sleepy after an hour of reading. I rarely spend more than an hour at a stretch. But today, I believe I read the longest article I’ve ever read in my life. It was 31 pages long & was about SSD technology. Computers always fascinate me & the latest in computer tech is something that I try to keep in touch with. But this article was different. Though it was a technical article, it seemed to have a soul.

The article in question here is ‘The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ’ by Anand Lal Shimpi in the famous www.anandtech.com. SSD is the latest technology in Hard Disk Drives. In lay-man’s language, you could say, it is flash drive technology used to create hard disks. If you are a passionate 24x7 PC user like me, then your primary hardware related concern about your system would be your hard drive. It has all your data but it is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode, sending all your precious data to oblivion. If you are skeptical about the last statement, then ask me about my 250GB drive that stopped working a week ago with almost 240GB of data (including some files that I use on a daily basis) in it.

Fear not, as SSD technology is here to the rescue. SSD is not only more reliable, but also much faster. Not just an increase in speed to help you play the high-end computer games, but an increase in speed that you’ll notice in your daily life. It radically improves everything from the OS boot speed to application start speeds & multitasking. It doesn’t make noise, it is cooler than our normal HDD & has no moving parts inside it. The only flip side is probably that the technology is in its infant stages & so, it comes with high price. But this is one technology that I’m really looking forward to.

Now, if that last paragraph seemed interesting to you, then you definitely should go read that article. I’ve always believed in knowing the history behind things that affect our daily lives. History of the world like the World War and the discovery of America are taught in our school history books. But what isn’t taught is the history of internet. Don’t tell me that they teach about Tim and ARPANET, coz I’m talking about the actual history of how internet grew from being a geek’s world to a common man’s world, how every company tried to claim internet as their own & how the dotcom bubble actually burst. This is the history that happened in the past decade. This is what we should know to understand what is happening right now in this world.

The article by Anand is a mix of both the history behind SSD and the technical understanding of the technology for a lay-user. This is probably what gives the article, its soul. The article not only introduces you to the technology, it gives the background of the creation of the technology, it explains the current stance of the technology & explains what you can expect from the technology in the near future. I will confess that I didn’t read every word of the article coz I skipped some technical benchmarks & stuff that didn’t interest me. But I did read the most of that article which I didn’t realize until the end that it had taken me around one and a half hours.

GTA IV - First Impressions

I tried my hands at GTA IV today. I didn’t play it for long & maybe that is why I’m not able to come to a conclusion on whether I like it or not. I loved spending hours together in the old GTA III. I even loved the top-view GTA II. But when it came to San Andreas, I simply couldn’t find it in me to finish even the first mission where they give you a cycle to outrun a car. I don’t know why, but I simply didn’t fancy that game. So, I didn’t have high hopes for this one.

A friend of mine was playing the game & I took over simply to check out the car control. Weirdly enough, I loved it. The car behaves like a real car in the sense, it simply wouldn’t turn as it used to in the earlier versions. The car control was kind of addictive, but tough at the same time. The game has the old storyline, similar missions, same cops roaming randomly & the same ambulances that come to the rescue of injured people. None of that was either new or interesting.

There was a mobile which was supposed to give us some options & then, I was asked to choose between two options at times like for example, when I was about to drop my date, I could ask her whether I could come in or I could just say goodbye. I don’t think it would alter the story, but it was good to have a pseudo feeling of being in control of the story. Besides that, the physics in the game is probably the most note-worthy part of the game.

Though driving the car is a lot tougher now, it is also a lot of fun. Sadly though, there are some catches in that too. The controls are in ‘wasd’, which for a guy like me who plays the game simply to drive the cars & bikes, is stupid. We could probably change the controls but I didn’t want to mess around with it since ‘up/down’ were used for the mobile and I wouldn’t be playing for long anyway. If this wasn’t bad enough, the camera takes a long time to get back into position when we reverse or slide. Basically, we have to move the mouse to look at where we are going during turns. I have no idea how this is supposed to be fun!

The game is probably good enough to at least finish it once, but then again, I’m not completely convinced yet. The Rs.500/- price tag in India is very impressive, but the rumours I’ve heard about the problems of installing this game, have kept me away from it. I believe we need XP SP3 or Vista to install this game. I’m not sure about it, but I have neither of those. For the gamers who love the free-roam games, this is a must try coz the map is definitely huge & the various objects on the road are very real.