Thoughts after a week in ‘Murica

Posted by shriviews

When life’s too comfortable, and there’s nothing that compels me to write, it’s a bit unsettling.

These smiling, cheerful facades hide a million prejudices. The idea of being a second class citizen plays in my mind constantly. Being compelled or being thrown into social situations, I have to do things, to put it bluntly, in ways I’m not used to. A weird and uncomfortable mix of apathy and cheerfulness is what I find here. Sometimes I feel like it’s better to more careful and simply assume all of it is fake. However, too much of this might even lead to being boxed in, the so called “ghetto mentality” that many seem to accuse Indians like me of having.

I want to come across as a brooding, serious thinker. I’m afraid I’m coming across as a bumbling idiot.

Although me coming across as a bumbling idiot may be hyperbole, it is a possibility.

Being inaudible and incoherent has been an issue I’ve been dealing with for a long time. It isn’t debilitating but it’s very visible to me. I won’t fake an accent and whether that’s for better or for worse, only time will tell.

Get personalized Sports Event Notifications with SlycedIn Sports

Posted by shriviews

These days, there's an app for every conceivable function, be it productivity or entertainment. Sports applications in particular, though, have been limited to providing general updates or notifications, and live news feeds from various websites. But what if you wanted an application that gives you real time contextual notifications of events happening in your immediate vicinity? What if you want an application that helps you schedule, organize events or even challenge other players? That was not possible- until now.

SlycedIn Sports is an upcoming company working on Sports event notification/organization app which will help people to notify them about what's going on around them also help people to challenge each other in friendly environment. This app is still in development, and the devs are working on making this app highly customizable and optimized to suit the user's needs. So, go ahead and fill up this survey, to help them out.

PC gaming 101: Part 2: Knowing what you want

Posted by shriviews

PC gaming is quite big in India. As games become more intense and compelling, gamers find themselves wanting the latest and greatest hardware to run these games smoothly. That being said, the majority of gamers wanting to build or upgrade their machines don’t have much of a clue, and are often at the mercy of vendors and salesmen, due to which, more often than not, they end up making the wrong decisions. This is an attempt to address this lack of information, and help all PC gamers make the best of their resources. This is PC GAMING 101.

Now that we’ve talked about knowing your initial configuration and the PSU, let’s talk about one of the most important component in a gaming PC- the Graphics Processing Unit, or the GPU.

If you’re a PC gamer, you’ve most probably heard the term “GPU”. Commonly called “graphics cards” here in India, every gamer wants the best GPU they can get. But, with a lot of buzzwords and marketing fluff being thrown about these days, it’s easy to get totally confused and lose your way. Here are the things a person wanting to buy a GPU must remember to make the best and most informed choice:

Select a Graphics card based on your usage

The first thing that needs to be considered while buying a graphics card is what the system is going to be used for. This is because there are different kinds of video cards available for different types of users. The cards built for gaming have gaming specific feature sets and hardware, and gamers should be just fine with the usual Nvidia and ATI offerings. However, if the system is to be used for other tasks such as video editing, video recording and 3D modeling, you might want to consider investing in a card that’s specifically designed with these tasks in mind, like the Nvidia Quadro or the ATI FireGL series. But that’s a totally different feature set, a totally different price range and a totally different kind of usage scenario from gaming.

So, bottom line: Gaming: GeForce/Radeon Workstation applications: Quadro/FireGL

Differences between Workstation and Gaming Graphics Cards

You can in fact, use a gaming graphics card for workstation applications- but the gaming card won’t do the processing as fast as a dedicated workstation card would. The math involved in 3D modeling, video rendering and other such content creation is quite different from what’s involved in gaming. So although on the surface a gaming card may appear to have similar or even superior specs than a workstation card, the latter is designed specifically for such CAD applications. So you’re better off getting a workstation card if you’re into digital content creation, as these cards are optimized to run those types of algorithms, that kind of software, and you’ll be able to get work done faster.

In part 3, we'll go further into the details of what the things that every PC gamer should know before purchasing a graphics card.