■ editorial

Following the Tech Rainbow

E very new piece of technology that comes to the fore today claims to be able
to improve our lives for the better. It promises to increase our productivity lev-
els with greater speed, the quality of our work through greater intelligence, and
eventually promises a complete transformation of our lives.
Quite obviously this isn’t something that is always true. However, this is some-
thing that we seem to have grown to expect.
But is this expectation realistic? Or are we now just willing to accept any pipe
dream that is dressed as a technological advancement?
Has the technology that lies within each of our desktops today actually
improved the quality of work that we are producing? And do we now really have
more time to devote to our hobbies, friends and personal lives outside our
workplace?
Many of us feel the need to upgrade to the latest version of applications like
“It is necessary for us Microsoft Word but many choose to ignore something as basic as the Template
to be more realistic functions in existing versions that could help us to organise ourselves better? Or
the Commenting feature which can make collaboration between people who
about what we expect share documents so much easier. We use software like Microsoft Outlook as an
from technology” e-mail client, but choose to completely ignore the contact and time management
utilities, filtering features and the unified messaging platform that it provides.
To really unleash the potential of technology, it is necessary for us to be more
realistic about what we expect from it. We need to look at it as something that
can create opportunities, instead of expecting a magical packaged solution to all
our problems. Technology can help make our tasks easier, but it is too much to
expect it to provide us with a replacement for intelligence.
We need to look for smarter ways to utilise the technology that is already
available to us.

Karan Manral
Assistant Editor
[email protected]
CgNTENTS N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 1

EDITORIAL 3
CONTENTS 6
COLOPHON 10
PULSE 14
Disposable digital camera
Full blast with inflatable
speakers
New look MSN messenger
Projecting images mid air
Robots come to the rescue at
WTC
Hypethesis: Microsoft’s .Net
Quicktake: Govind Misir,
46
Addicted to chat?
Chairman and CEO, SLM-
soft.com Inc.
Whois?: Carly Fiorina DROOLMAAL SELECT
Tomorrow’s Technology: Stop awhile and feast your TEST DRIVE
Biometric ATMs eyes! 32 15 IDE hard disks 106
Products 10 CD-ROM drives 114
reviewed DIALOG 22 WIDEANGLE 5 Page layout software 122
15 IDE HARD DISKS Human Genome
10 CD-ROM DRIVES CONNECT Project: the key to the INSIGHT
Acer CD652P (52x), Acer CD SPOTLIGHT 24 genetic code 36 What’s up with Audio
656P (56x), Apex CHI-56 (56x), Get into the gaming zone formats? 130
ASUS CD-S500/G, ASUS CD-
S525/G/A, Creative Digital iR
with TUA—The Unholy PASSPORT
52x, Krypton 52x, LG CRD-8522B Alliance Chart your career course Hypertransport
(52x), Plextor PX-40TSi, with GIS 38 vs 3GIO 136
Samsung SC-152 (52x) FACE-OFF
5 PAGE LAYOUT PACKAGES Windows Product Activation: NETRETURN REPORT CARD
Adobe Pagemaker7.0, Adobe
InDesign 1.5.2, Adobe Frame
the pros and cons 26 Call it like you see it with Radar: Tested products 140
Maker 6.0, Microsoft Publisher videoconferences 42 Reviews: The latest
2000, QuarkXPpress 4.1 TECHNOLOGY NEXT books on review 144
The big and small of FIRSTHAND Undercover: Agent 001
things: Nanotechnology 28 The pains of chat looks for the best deal in
addiction 46 modems 145
A-List 146
BEST OF THE WEB
The best Indian sites 52 DIGIT DIARY 148
BACKBYTE 150
RESOLVE
WIRED
A guide to StarOffice 6 70

UNWIRED
Outliners for the Palm 76

S.O.S.
The fix for your PC 78

122 TIPS & TRICKS

Page layout software:
which is the best?
Improving Internet
productivity 83 28
Trends: Nanotechnology

6 November 2001
 Mindmatters
Enjoy eBooks and
whitepapers

52
Digit Web
Awards

Arena
Check out
cool games 46
Is there something like
too much chat?

28 114, 122
10 CD-ROM drives and
The future is in
small things: the 5 page layout software
trends in tested
Nanotechnology

Software on CD
ON THE CD
Mindware
SOFTWARE OF THE MONTH
Borland Delphi 6
CONCEPTDRAW V1.61
Mindware Provides easy illustration for DEVELOPER TOOLS
your documents with dia- Etv Library (Shareware),
RESOLVE grams, hyperlinks and OptiPerl (Shareware),
TROUBLESHOOTING schemes Virtual X Class Library
FAQs on understanding (Freeware), Visual SQL-
Memory CRESTOTECH PHOTOPOINT Designer (Shareware), Web
V1.1.0.17 Chart Creator (Shareware)
WORKSHOP This user-friendly software
Hands-on: A video workshop behaviours such as colour, lets you create powerful GRAPHICS
on tweaking your system depth, transparency, AU and image presentations with 150 PolyView (Shareware),
WAV sounds and more special effects SmartCapture (Shareware),
E-PAPERS Swish (Demo), Ulead Photo
Working with PDFs and GRAPHICS HOME Explorer Pro (Demo)
eBooks ALCHEMY GIF ANIMATOR V2.3.1 ADVANCED DISK CATALOG V1.46
Create animated GIF images This program has an interface HOME
SOFTWARE for the Web or even movies similar to Explorer and lets Diary Keeper (Shareware),
DEVELOPERS you catalog media such MemoirTracker (Shareware),
CRT 32 3.4 BETA 2 as CD-Roms, floppies, Zip MIDI 2000 (Freeware), PCDJ
This Winsock terminal emu- disks etc. Silver (Freeware),
lator supports both Telnet Phonecomm. Pro (Freeware)
and remote login protocols BLAZE MEDIA PRO V2002
An all in one multimedia INTERNET
1 COOL BUTTON TOOL 4.1 program, which features a Download Wonder 1.55,
This cool tool lets you create playback combination of (Freeware), GuildFTPd 0.992
numerous button styles and audio and video, generates Contd on page 8…

7
■ contents

…Contd from page 7 advanced playlist features and

(Freeware), ModemLog more
(Freeware), NewsBin Pro (10-
Day Trial), Stat ‘n’ Perf CDEX 1.40 BETA 8
(Shareware), Surfers xten- This freeware application fea-
sion (Freeware), VisualPulse tures an MP3 decoder and a
(Shareware), Web Publisher new LAME encoder
(Shareware) DRIVER
...then get behind the wheel
OFFICE UTILITIES of the most wanted getaway
Bulkmail III (Shareware), ACTIVE KEY V1.0B3 car for a Hollywood style car
Cash Flow (Shareware), Create and manage your key- chase!
CyberCafePro 3.7 (Demo), board shortcuts for CD
LanTalk Pro 2.6 (Shareware), audio, Winamp, Media Player
Personal Stock Monitor Gold and more
(Shareware), The Inventory
Keeper (Shareware) IN PRINT
INTERNET TEST DRIVE
RESOURCES Reviews of tested products
Adobe Acrobat Reader
(Freeware), RealPlayer 8 PRICEWATCH SURGE
Basic bundled with Spinner COOKIE EATER PC component prices Music from Double Star,
(Freeware), Shockwave and This utility shows all the Gulit and Mental Sky and
Flash Player (32-bit) cookies in your UNDERSTAND feast your eyes on the
(Freeware), WinRAR Beta 4 Internet cache and allows you RDBMS—CON- latest trailers
(Shareware), Winzip to select and delete those you CEPTS AND
(Evaluation) don’t want OVERVIEW CONNECT
Tutorial for end-users
UPDATES IN MAGAZINE Complete, free course from
McAfee VirusScan Upgrade ADOBE INDESIGN 1.5.2
(Freeware), NetCaptor (30- This software works well with
Day Trial), pcAnywhere Adobe pagemaker and SITEMAP
(Demo), Trial PrivacyMaker MINDMATTERS Surf on indolink.com
Version (Trial version), EBOOKS
At the Earth’s core and more INDIA SITES
UTILITIES eBooks Some new Indian sites and ISP
Active Key (Shareware), news
ApacheTray (Shareware), WHITEPAPERS
Ashampoo PowerUp Deluxe Whitepapers on RAID BOOKMARKS
(Shareware), CD-ROM Photoshop files and even Brush up your vocabulary
Cataloger (Freeware), opens QuarkXPress files TIPS & TRICKS with online dictionaries
Clipboard Express Pro Tips and Tricks Sponsored by
(Shareware), Panda Antivirus OFFICE database NEWSLETTERS
Platinum (30 day trial), 602 PRO PC SUITE 2001 Newsletters on download sites
ViewletBuilder2 (Freeware), This integrated Office suite
ProtectorPlus (Evaluation) includes a Word processor, Playware DROOLMAAL
spreadsheets, a graphics edi- Time once again to feast your
Playware tor and a visual desktop GALLERY eyes on Sponsored by
ARENA Desktop delight: decorate your some hunky
TrickStyle (Racing), Xonix32 ADVANCED OFFICE 2000 PASS - PC with these wallpapers, dory stuff
(Strategy), Align it (Strategy), WORD RECOVERY (PRO) V1.02 themes and Winamp skins
Magic mayhem: the art of A program that recovers lost
magic (Strategy/Role play- or forgotten passwords for files ARENA
ing), South Park Mario Bros created in Office applications
(Arcade) GAMES
UPDATES MAX PAYNE
GALLERY ACDSEE V4.0 Step into the shoes of a fugi-
Wallpapers, screensavers, A fast image viewer, browser tive, undercover cop framed
skins and themes and multimedia management for killing his boss and best
application that lets you friend in this action packed
browse and organise images game...

8 November 2001
■ service~ colophon

VOLUME 1, ISSUE 7
◆ How to contact us ◆ Advertisers index
Chairman and Publisher Jasu Shah
Associate Publisher and
Editor Maulik Jasubhai EDITORIAL and e-mail of the developer.
Assistant Editor Karan Manral
CLIENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .PAGE
Products for Test/Review
Send a complete working copy CUSTOMER/ SUBSCRIPTION Amkette . . . .Inside Back Cover
Editorial
Writers Anil Patrick R., Vidyaramanan S., of the product (not a ‘trial’ or SERVICES Apple . . . . . . . . . . . .Back Cover
Sriram Sharma, Avina Lobo, Prashant ‘demo’ version) to the Digit E-mail: Any queries or problems
Masrani Test Centre. Only products that regarding Digit Interactive, sub- Borland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53,55
Features Editor Sveta Basraon are currently available in the scriptions or other problems Capital Technologies . . . . . .121
Copy Editors Anshul Chauhan,
Indian market will be consid- can be mailed to
Julian Vongeyer, Roopa Sukumaran Cdac . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34,35
Design ered. The products must have [email protected]
Consultant G.V. Sreekumar the complete name of the man- Post: If sent by post, please Gigabyte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27
Art Director Marshall Mascarenhas ufacturer or developer, details
Pager: 9623-987273 at Mumbai
Hi-Tech Printer
Visualisers V. Jeevanand, Shyam regarding the name of the
Shirsekar Pager: 9624-329229 at Ribbons Pvt. Ltd. . . . . . . . . . .113
Senior Designer Shivasankaran C. Pillai,
model and its type and the end-
user price. Product brochure Pune, Hyderabad and Bangalore
Graphics Solomon Lewis, Jaya Shetty HP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .109
Digital Imaging Artist Neeta Wadiker and a complete specification mark ‘Customer Service’. In
Photographers Rahul Sharma,
Intel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12,13
sheet must be included, along case of subscription problems,
Mexi Xavier please mention the subscription IT.Com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .129
with the name of a person to be
Illustrator Mahesh Benkar, Ram
Contributing Illustrator Farzana
contacted for information. particulars. Kobian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .115
Cooper
Test Centre DIGIT INTERACTIVE MARKETING SERVICES Microsoft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .81
Head Marco D’Souza Contact Vaibhav Kapoor, Con- IT companies whose products Microstar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25
Deputy Head Hatim Kantawalla
tent Co-ordinator, Multimedia have been declared winners in a
Reviewers Dipayan Choudhury, Aliasgar Net Varsity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9
Pardawala, Yatish Suvarna, Mitul Mehta ([email protected]) for Digit Test
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Multimedia Interactive. A write-up detailing Digit Test Rashi Peripherals . . . . . . .11,21
Co-ordinator V. Ravi Shankar the features of the software, Centre logo.
Designer Kabir Malkani, Jo-Ann Samsung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4,5
complete loading instructions They must
Rodricks,Priyamvada K.K.
Programmers Liu Ai Chin and a letter certifying that the address Sap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .125,127
Content Vaibhav Kapoor product is origi- their
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Co-ordinator Bimal Unnikrishnan pany the soft- and bulk orders of Digit to Trend Micro . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19
Producer Priya Ramanathan
ware. The soft- Navin Sahni (navin_sahni
Editor Afzal Mazgaonkar Trifin Technologies . . . . . . . . .41
Production Manager Prasanth Uyyul ware must also have the com- @jasubhai.com), at our Nerul
Production plete address, telephone number office in Navi Mumbai.
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Operations
Manager Shailesh Iyer HEAD OFFICE MUMBAI
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Circulation and Logistics Sandip Maiti Ad Sales Manager
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HEAD OFFICE:
Brand Manager Louis D’Mello NEW DELHI Phone: + 91 40 6329190/6329181
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Audience Development Sahayaraj Prabhu Plot No D-222/2,
Head Sarang Dash Koshy Thomas Phone: +91 44 8235186-89
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Consumer Marketing Fax: +91 44 8230731
Arvind Prabhakar Nerul, Navi Mumbai 400 706
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Customer Service Namita Shetty, Fax: +91 11 6445321 Phone: +91 20 4482059, 4494572 Printed and published by Jasu R. Shah on
Reema Sadarangani, Roshan Jeypaul, Tele-Fax: +91 20 4482059
BANGALORE behalf of Jasubhai Digital Media Pvt Ltd, 26
Ronny Joseph S. Saikumar CALCUTTA Maker Chambers VI, 2nd Floor, Nariman
Ad Sales Manager Jayanta Bhattacharya Point, Mumbai 400 021, India.
Cover Photograph: Colston Julian, Raghu Pillai Phone: +91 33 2822183, 2827842, Editor: Maulik Jasubhai
assisted by Bajirao Pawar Kiran Karri 2828016
Printed at Tata Infomedia Limited,
Model: Maushmi Udeshi Phone: +91 80 5325670/88, 2899287 Fax: +91 33 2827673
Prabhadevi, Mumbai 400 025
Tele-Fax: +91 80 5098717

10 November 2001
 ■ pulse

NEWS PULSE DIGIT NOVEMBER 2001

hypethesis Pump up the volume! Diposable

Microsoft .Net
▲ What is it? Loudspeakers conventionally
come in heavy, cumbersome
that bands can carry flat and
inflate when they arrive at the
Digital Camera
Microsoft is building a com-
plete solution with .Net, boxes that provide an air enclo- venue. You don’t have to drop the
which transcends Web serv- sure to absorb unwanted vibra- A Loughborough Universi- camera roll at the photo shop
ices to deliver an Internet tion and give a fuller ty’s student spin anymore. Just drop the entire
experience, from desktop sound. But now out company, camera. Three Japanese com-
and desktop services to con- UK-based Ellula Ellula Sounds panies have decided to come
tent providers, Internet serv- Sounds and US- has won the Best up with an experimental com-
ices and ultimately, payment. based SoundTube Innovative mercial service involving dis-
Enter tainment, Product prize at posable digital cameras. Pentax
▲ What is the technology? reckon an inflat- the National cameras, Sanyo Electric and
The new .Net strategy aims able box will do the Incentive Show in Altech have announced the
to revolutionise the way job. SoundTube is UK for the new three-month trial.
Microsoft and developers, developing inflatable speakers speakers.
who work on Microsoft plat-
forms, deliver software.
Microsoft aims to phase out Adbusters get busted
delivering software per se,
and instead will deliver Web site operators will soon AdKey comes in. This software,
these as Web services over have a new tool to block the developed by MediaBEAM, is
the Internet. Consumers of blockers. Many Web surfers currently in the beta testing
those services will license it have been weeding out banner stage.
as an on-demand service and pop-up ads by resorting to AdKey will allow operators
Illustrations: Farzana Cooper
and the software will, at software such as AdKiller, to deny access to users who
least theoretically, be AdSubtract, and Proxy. have installed ad filters. Such The service lets users pick
installed automatically. Web site operators depend- users will will get a message up a 310,000-pixel Pentax
ent on ads for revenue are now stating that they can either digital still camera, take their
▲ Should I care? changing their act to counter switch off the filter or pay a fee photos, and then return the
Microsoft’s desktop monop- these filters. And here’s where for advertising-free services. camera to the store they
oly governs how over 96 per picked it up from. At the
cent of the people world- store, they can view all the
wide access the Internet. If
it successfully ties the desk-
Microsoft opens Passport ... a photo images on a display
screen and choose the ones to
top monopoly to Microsoft-
held Internet properties, wee bit be printed.
These companies collect
.Net will be a major force to the used cameras from the
reckon with. Microsoft is being use Passport to stores, delete the image data,
criticised for using offer a login for and repack the cameras for use
its might to get users their users. again. Customers are under no
SNAPSHOT to sign up for its Pass- A ‘federated’ model obligation to return the cam-
70 per cent port service. The idea for Passport was era to the store or collect their
of all Internet porn traffic
behind Passport is that users announced by Microsoft with prints, once the service fee is
occurs during the 9-to-5
can use it to have a unified the goal being, “…to build an paid. With the manufacturing
workday (SexTracker)
login to sites across the Web Internet ‘trust network,’ where a cost of the camera more than
The average time spent
instead of having five, 10, or 20 single, common authentication the service fee, profitability
online by workers at the
different usernames and pass- system [is] to be used across relies on how many cameras
office (compared to average
words across a variety of Web enterprise systems, Web sites can be collected and recycled.
9.5 hours at home) is
properties. To get the unifica- and services.” With this, users The companies plan to
tion benefit, users must put will be able to choose a third- expand the services to the
21 hours their information into Pass- party ‘Internet trust network Internet for data distributing
Source: www.nielsen-netratings.com port, and Web sites must also provider’ to store the data. and printing.

◆ Salon.com begins charging ◆ Nero enables DVD creation, uses MP3PRO ◆ Sony unveils DVD Walkman ◆ Yahoo! to start charging for

14 November 2001
 Can you feel my And now MSN with vitamins! Redalert
KaZaA, the virus desktop
heartbeat, baby? Windows XP’s messaging Call Serve, Deltathree, Dialpad KaZaA, a file swapping appli-
The Food and Drug Adminis- technology will undergo cos- Communications, Net2Phone cation, that is number three
tration in the US has approved metic changes, allowing a and Telus to offer peo- on CNET for most popular
a new type of pacemaker capa- full range of emoti- ple equipped with downloads, is quite likely to
ble of sending cardiac infor- cons, from the tradi- Windows Messen- infect your PC with a virus. In
mation via remote tional smiley faces to ger, the ability to fact, 6 per cent of all music
transmission. The first of its cats and coffee cups. make Net-based phone downloaded from KaZaA is
kind, Biotronik’s Home System Windows Messenger users calls over their PCs. It has not music at all, but a virus.
can help doctors monitor a will be able to organise con- also decided to collaborate Due to poor filtering, a file
tacts by groups. Microsoft has with Groove Networks. These like ‘I hate celine
also increased the number of services will also be added to dion.mp3.vbs.’ would be dis-
contacts accepted by the mes- MSN Messenger, which will be played as ‘I hate celine
saging client from 75 to 150. available for download with dion.mp3’ without displaying
Microsoft has signed on the XP messaging client. the .vbs extension. Viruses
can be disguised as videos,
images and executables in a
Agile in a Crisis, Robots shows their mettle similar fashion.
The FAQ for KaZaA says
patient’s condition between Robots are proving their met- themselves to squeeze through “Not all file types can con-
office visits. A short-range tle at the WTC blast zone. tight spaces or position them- tain viruses or Trojans.
radio frequency transmitter Their immunity to fatigue selves upright to look over Music, video, and picture
sends data to a cell phone-like means they can work longer objects. Some have infrared files are generally safe—that
device that patients carry with than even the most dedicated cameras and all have video includes files with the
them. The phone transmits the rescue worker. Some of the cameras, with images sent to extensions .mp3, .wav,
information to a company robots are small and compact rescue workers on the surface .mpg, .avi, .mov, .bmp and
service centre, which correlates enough to go down sewage through a cable or wirelessly. .jpg. PDF documents (.pdf)
the data and sends it to the pipes that are less than a foot Most of the robots are and text files (.txt) are also
patient’s physician. in diameter. Others can flatten experimental prototypes. generally safe. You should
be cautious of executable
quicktake files (.exe) and Microsoft
Word and Excel documents
Govind Misir, chairman and CEO, SLMSoft.com, talks about the (.doc and .xls). These files
company’s e-commerce products are specified with an icon in
the search results on
▲ What is SLMsoft.com? Our end-to-end transaction breadth and convenience of KaZaA.com.”
It is a leading Canadian global management solution, ESP-Link, SLMsoft.com’s electronic bank-
provider of electronic financial empowers over 1,100 cus- ing and online transaction sys- BackdoorSlackbot.B
transaction solutions for the tems, enabling them to build Backdoor.Slackbot.B is a
e-commerce market. We pro- rewarding relationships with backdoor Trojan that allows
vide e-commerce tools and their customers and thrive in a hacker to control your
transaction management prod- today’s wired marketplace. computer using Internet
ucts and services. Relay Chat (IRC). It can
▲ What are the voice recognition update itself by checking for
▲ What is SLMsoft’s plan for solutions you are planning to newer versions over the
India in the long run? introduce in India? Internet. This backdoor Tro-
We plan to take Design Expo’s Right now, we are working on jan contains its own IRC
revenues to $5 million from Govind Misir different e-transaction products client, which allows it to
$1.9 million in the next 12 Chairman and CEO like Smart Cards, and the new connect to an IRC channel
months. The first task is to SLMSoft.com Inc products might use new tech- coded into it by its creator.
enhance our existing products nologies such as voice recogni- Use updated anti-virus
through R&D. tomers in 55 countries. Financial tion solutions to enhance software to delete all files
institutions, retailers, govern- user-friendliness, efficiency and detected as Backdoor.Slack-
▲ What other technology solu- ment agencies and healthcare effectiveness of particular bot.B and remove the value
tions is SLMsoft introducing? providers benefit from the products. that it adds to the registry.
➜

online dating service ◆ Samsung cranks up RDRAM chip speed by four times ◆ Sanyo develops CD-ROM copy-protection system to

15
 ■ pulse

realitybites “Call ya later,

“A bsolute anonymity breeds absolute
irresponsibility. We need a
Sue-age I’m outta gas!”
thumbprint Java card in the hand of Last month Intel sued Via, fol-
everybody in the country” Yeah JAVA! Not lowed by Via counter-suing Researchers at Motorola have
Microsoft! Intel, but October saw a lot demonstrated a methane gas-
Scott McNealy, chairman and more action. powered fuel cell, which can
CEO, Sun Microsystems, voicing Imation filed a $450 mil- provide enough juice between
his long-held belief that the US lion suit against storage rival two successive chargings for a
needs a national identity system Quantum, accusing the latter month of cell phone calls. The
of monopolising the market fuel cell is essentially a minia-
for the digital tape used in its ture electrochemical plant
DLT drives. Daum Communi- where methane is stored for
think the Sun thing has absolutely cations, Korea’s biggest Inter- producing electricity to power
“I no probability of mattering to the
world. That’s my non-emotional view”
net portal, is seeking to ban
the sale of Microsoft’s new
the cell phone. Consumer
electronics giants NEC and
And my emotion- Windows XP operating sys- Sony are developing similar
Steve Ballmer, outspoken president and CEO of al view is: I WANT tem in South Korea, arguing batteries. Motorola isn’t pre-
Microsoft Corporation, dismissing Sun Microsys- YOUR MONEY! that it will stifle its own Inter- dicting when it will sell the
tems’ efforts to compete with his company’s Pass- net messaging product. Music batteries on a wide scale. NEC
port identity service as ‘’craziness’’ built on a and film studios in the US expects to begin production
“weak foundation’’ have filed a lawsuit against between 2003 and 2005.
three file-swapping Web sites
that enable users to download thermometer
copyrighted music and films
e are delivering twice the per- for free—MusicCity.com Inc., Hot
“W formance at every price point” This new tech-
nology won’t
MusicCity Networks Inc and
Consumer Empowerment BV,
MusicCity
Morpheus
Jen-Hsun Huang, president and remove lag or are in the line of fire. Novell This P2P network
CEO at nVidia, after announcing make the story- Inc filed suit in federal court grabs top spot in
three new graphics chips: the line any more to stop competitor Microsoft RIAA’s hit list as
GeForce 3 Ti 500, GeForce 3 Ti 200, interesting for Corp from spreading “false Napster is crushed
and the GeForce2 Ti 200 FPS games and misleading” statements
that Novell was shifting away Gprshot
from software development to It seems to be
consulting services. going far
stronger than 3G

thumbnail as of now

Streaming Media: Cost and Applications Cold

Various uses of streaming media in an enterprise setting versus Transmeta
consumer willingness to pay for online music services It’s expecting
lower sales for its
third quarter and
is having trouble
getting a new
Crusoe chip out
Source: www.redherring.com

E-books
The industry
admits most
readers would
still rather curl up
with a book

➜
prevent burning onto CD-RWs ◆ Intel to offer Pentium 4-based Celeron next year ◆ US government mulls over Internet of its own

18 November 2001
■ pulse

metrics In your face, dude!

Shoppers may soon be assaulted with definition colour images can be seen

$92.6875
▲

the digital equivalent of mid-air only at certain angles in front of

blimps, thanks to a Hun- the projection device.
Microsoft’s stock price garian-US firm that The long-term plan is to
plans to manufacture have many of these ter-
a new type of pro- minals installed and
Bill Gates’ wealth jection device. An managed by central
appliance the size servers and with thou-

$105 billion of a vending sands of such termi-

▲

machine will nals installed it could

project still or bring in a lot of marketing
moving images dollars. The terminals will be
about 16 inches in size, which the installed in shopping centres and will
human eye will perceive as floating in sell airtime rather than the appliances
mid-air. The two-dimensional, high- themselves.

Mitnick warns fellow hackers against Who is?

Carleton S. (Carly) Fiorina
‘Scapegoat sweepstakes’ ▲ Who is she?
One of the few women to
The world’s most notorious hacker says the US Mitnick calls the Patriot Act ludicrious, say- hold a top post in the tech
government should focus on securing its com- ing, “Terrorists have proved that they are inter- industry—or in corporate
puter systems rather than snooping on citizens. ested in total genocide, not subtle little hacks of America, The Sunday Times
Kevin Mitnick stresses that hackers should take the US infrastructure. Yet the government wants called her “the most suc-
extreme care given the sensitive political envi- a blank search warrant to spy and snoop on cessful American woman of
ronment and the new laws defining hacks as acts everyone’s communications. The government the decade”.
of terrorism. He also warned that any hacker does things like insisting that all encryption
could win the ‘scapegoat sweepstakes’ at any programs should have a backdoor. But surely no ▲ Why is she in the news?
time, receiving a harsh sentence to serve as an one is stupid enough to think the terrorists A while ago industry experts
example to other hackers. are going to use encryption systems with a were speculating whether
Mitnick firmly believes the newly proposed backdoor. The terrorists will simply hire a Fiorina would be dismissed
Patriot Act is just an excuse for law enforcement programmer to come up with a secure encryp- as chief executive of
to further its own agenda. tion scheme.” Hewlett-Packard. In an
apparent vote of confidence,

tomorrowstechnology less than two weeks after

the announcement of the
acquisition of Compaq, Fior-
Biometric ATMs ina was elected to H-P’s
board of directors. Now she
The analysis of certain unique reducing personal identification requires the user’s cooperation is handling the second-
body ‘signatures’, such as fin- overheads drastically. while being recognised and largest computer company
gerprints and retina scanning— BioID is a relatively cheaper doesn’t need him to give away after IBM.
known as biometric technolo- option as compared to hard- any information. In compari-
gy—could soon be put to use in ware-dependent biometrics son, fingerprint scanning ▲ What’s her new role now?
ATMs for security purposes. The requiring expensive hardware, means a user’s fingerprints can Her task now is to follow
idea has for long been consid- as it just involves installing a be used and recognised with- through with the Compaq
ered a viable option to person- regular Web camera and micro- out him actually being present. takeover. The key would be
al identification numbers phone. BioID 3.0 uses face, There are already quite a if the merger exploits cost-
(PINs). Such ATMs, powered by voice and lip-movement recog- few installations of biometric- savings and service
BioID, could soon be providing nition for identification and enabled ATMs in the US and enhancements at the $87
service to Australian bank cus- authorisation. Europe that use fingerprint and billion merged company.
tomers, with a promise of The technology only iris recognition.

◆ B2B to reach $4.3 trillion ◆ Qualcomm ships its first Bluetooth-ready chipset ◆ Microsoft phases out Windows NT 4.0 ◆

20 November 2001
 ■ pulse~ dialog

Missed take
am quite
yderabad. I Dear Sir,
re
Gimme mo of a BC A course in H Cen tr e. Over the past
cond year your Test few months Di
en t st ud ying in the se e te sts ca rried out by of information git has been pr
I am a stud ar oviding us with
e and softw through the co a staggering am
the hardwar graphics card mparison test
interested in u do an article in s and more. It
is based on all th
s of MP3 play
ers, digital ca
ount
at yo that I plan to
I request th to the upgrade my co ese comparis
on tests and ar
meras,
ine related However, one mputer and bu ticles
your magaz of ha rd - category of pr y new hardwar
e in the future
nents is the digital ca oducts that yo
basic compo mcorder. So fa u seem to have .
e un its , su ch as moth- haven’t been
any articles th
r, in all the iss
ues of Digit th missed out on
war at I have seen
. Pe rhaps in digital camco at provide me
with informat , there
erboards rders. ion or test resu
uld explain Please consid lts for
these you co er including th
ar e th e various ARIEZ RAV is in your forth
coming issues.
which I THOMAS
formats) of Via e-mail
types (or e,
rb oa rds availabl
mothe ns of the
fu nc tio
explain the th e di fferent
re
slots, compa ould also
, etc. This sh AM.
architectures r co m po nents like R Dear Ariez,
fo r ot he nts.
be do ne ese compone Guess we did manage to miss something out.
e a bit of history on th
clud We find that getting buying advice on certain product cat-
could also in
Perhaps you L LO egories is of more importance to the majority of our readers.
D ’M E
ASHLYN These categories usually also feature a larger range of products
Via e-mail for us to compare.
At this point in time, since there are several other cate-
gories that we feel meet these criteria better, we have not
planned for a digital camcorder comparison test.
However, look out for reviews of these products in our
Dear Ashlyn,
stand-alone product review section (Radar).
If you consider the October issue of Digit in particular, you would
find that we already do a lot of what you have requested for.
If, for instance, you’re looking to understand the choices available
in motherboards, then just refer to the special Smart Buyer’s Guide
in the October issue. If you need more detailed information, howev-
er, then refer to the comparison tests in the Test Drive section, or
lue
some of the Insight articles.
Also keep an eye out for our workshops in the Wired section or Of greater va t the best prod
ucts and their
prices.
Hello, fo rm s us ab ou th e prod ucts that
the Hands-on video workshops that are included in the Digit Inter-
A- List sect ion in Digit in e. W hy do n’t you also list
Th e expensiv
active Mindware CDs. em are pretty
But most of th ey? tion for us. I lo
ok
fer th e be st va lue fo r m on
uc t isn ’t alw ays the best op pp ointing
of
t expensive pr
od , but it is disa
Buying the mos of th e A- Li st in every issue
n ted in there.
e latest versio e’ products lis
forward to th ite ‘great valu
e m y favo ur s of th e A-List.
not to se an ging the focu
Safety first
ns id er ch
So please co
NDIT
for Safety’. up their CHINMAY PA
Hi ing Freedom willing to give via e-mail
your ed ito rial titled ‘Trad , m os t pe ople seem to be su ch danger.
I read e Net tacks or any
ve read on th re terrorist at meone sits
From what I ha otec t fro m fu tu t m in d if so
n help them pr he doesn’
privacy if it ca of saying that
th em w en t to the extent king them. Indians Dear Chinmay,
One of ail as he is ch
ec ink that most
e him an d reads his e-m ac y is such a big deal. I th s fro m ha ppen- As you mention, the A-List is about the best performing prod-
besid iv terrorist attack
frank , I do n’t see why pr prev ent an y uct that we have tested up to a particular time.
To be ilar if it could
something sim The problem is that the perception of value is something
would accept of a small issue
.
ing here. ju st m ak in g a big deal out that can differ according to the personal preferences or
like we are
Seems to me requirements of an individual. So even though we think that
T H a 100 GB disk drive that costs Rs 14,000 is a great value offer-
PRASAN
ing (considering the low cost per megabyte), this might not be
Via e-mail true for someone who is quite happy with the 20 GB of disk
space that a drive costing Rs 5,000 would give him. Basically,
whether a product offers great value depends on the user’s
Dear Prasanth, specific needs. This is something that can be explained in
Most of us are willing to give up certain liberties that are otherwise taken for detail in the course of a comparison test, as we do using the
granted because we feel insecure. While this is especially true in the United States Decision Maker, but is not possible in a product listing.
at this point in time, there are many others in that country who consider this a Performance on the othr hand, is something that can be
mistake. objectively calculated and compared, which is why it will
This is because while an environment like this might seem acceptable now, remain the focus of our A-List.
eventually it leads to an atmosphere devoid of trust and is not something that
people in normal times will reconcile themselves to.

22 November 2001
 IE, IE, ya…s
Hi, uku suku!
I have a com
plaint about th
e browser test
Goof Ups
browsers wer (‘Surf Wars’)
e not properly in your Octob
download man categorised. O er issue. Firstly
ager, instant m pera, which ha , the ■ Jadesh R. has rightly point-
should have essenger (ICQ s its own engi
been placed ) as well as an ne, ed out that the price of the
category. in the Intern e-mail client,
et Communic Intel Pentium 4 1.8 GHz
ation Suites
Secondly, you processor is Rs 26,668 as
have over-hyp
6.1. All your be ed the perform mentioned in the A-List and
nchmarks indi ance of Netscap
performing br cated Internet e not Rs 11,868 as mentioned in
owser. The on Explorer as th
out were in te ly areas that I e best
rms of installa can see where Radar (Hardware).
Editor, which tion size and it lost
is not too impo the lack of an
like Hotbar th rtant. Also, th HTML ■ In the browsers’ compari-
at allow you to ere are progra
I have used al skin Internet ms son test (October issue of
most all the br Explorer.
well acquaint owsers you te Digit), Arun Das has pointed
ed with their sted and am
6, without a do performances. out that on page 146, in the
ubt, should be Internet Explor
GURU SABH adjudged best er table, we have indicated the
ARWAL browser. installation size of Opera 5.12
Via e-mail
as 36 MB and in the write up
below as 39 MB. The correct
installation size is 36 MB.

Notice any goof-ups? Write

to [email protected]
Dear Guru, performance, then it doesn’t really make sense to give an
Let’s start with your point about Opera. While as you say extremely high weightage just to the performance in the
all of those features (e-mail client, instant messenger, etc) rendering speed tests.
have been included in new versions of Opera, it just has The skinning feature in IE, even using Hotbar, is Short Bytes
a fraction of the functionality that is offered by similar limited to being a simple background for the toolbar, Diverse drivers
components in other programs. In addition to just whereas Netscape 6.1 lets you modify the appearance Dear Karan,
checking whether a feature is present, it is important to of everything ranging from the icons, the mail client, It would be nice if you could
consider whether it is implemented well enough for you the menus and even the progress-indicator bar. Thus include the latest versions of
to consider shifting over to it. In that sense Opera does the customisation can give the browser a completely popular hardware drivers on
not challenge the likes of Internet Explorer and Netscape, new look and feel. the Digit CDs once in a while.
at least not yet. And let’s not turn a blind eye to the security issues I am certain this will be wel-
We believe Opera is a really neat piece of software that IE and Outlook come with. Vulnerabilities in these
comed and appreciated by
that excels as a standalone browser. This is the reason that have been repeatedly exploited by a variety of worms and
many readers.
it ended up winning in the other category. viruses. Also, IE uses a crippled version of the JVM, and
T. Chinnadurai
As you mentioned, Netscape 6.1 took nearly twice as doesn’t entirely comply to W3C specifications when it
Via e-mail
long as IE to render Web pages. However, if you consid- comes to HTML rendering.
er that most of us use dial-up connections where the So…we know that Netscape 6.1 is the best browser
availability of bandwidth is what eventually determines around, at least for now. Peek-a-boo
Hi Digit,
You guys have really improved
on this magazine since the
first issue of Digit. The CD
contents have improved
To Agent 001
Hi, , with love remarkably and the new look
in October is phenomenal. It
The Undercov
er article in th would be nice to receive
talked about e August issue
Agent 001’s ex (‘The Perfect Dera Billi, information on the forthcom-
price/perform periences whi Match’)
ance deal on le trying to ge Agent 001 would have loved to have answered ing issue of Digit via e-mail
This inspired a motherboa t a great
me to sell off rd and CP U co your question himself but was called away on every month.
new Duron 85 my AMD 450 mbination.
0 MHz system MHz processo another assignment. But he did ask us to say
. r and build a Anshul
However, whe that it’s great to hear that you got what you
n I got to Mum Via e-mail
Road, I got in bai’s hardwar
to a bit of a ja e Mecca, Lam wanted for your PC. Anytime that you find
of-stock, and m. The prescr ington
the several (p ibed motherb yourself in a situation like this again and need
confused. retty expensiv oard was out- If you have suggestions on how to
e) alternatives advice on how to get a good deal, just flip to the
had me pretty make Digit better, come partici-
Which is whe
n I had a brai Undercover article in the magazine for Agent
“Hello, Digit? nw ave! pate in the reader survey at
Can I speak to 001’s take. And if you still can’t make head or
“undercover” Agent 001 plea http://www.thinkdigit.com/sur-
but transferred se?” They told tail of the situation, we’re just an e-mail away.
discussed som me to someo me he was vey/betterdigit
e options with ne in the Test
Then he went the vendor an Centre who
ahead and he d helped me se
utes later I was lped me bring lect a model.
dashing back the price dow
You guys will home to asse n and 10 min Send your letters marked ‘Readers Letters’ to the Digit office:
be glad to know mble my new -
Digit fan, I am that my PC is PC! D-222/2, MIDC, TTC Industrial Estate, Om Sagar Building, Nerul,
delighted that working grea Navi Mumbai 400 706, Phone: 022-7629191/9200; Fax: 022-7629224
So, here’s a sp you have such t and as a
ecial thanks to helpful guys on E-mail: [email protected]
BILLI KASH the Test Centre your team.
, and to Agen
Via e-mail t 001!

23
■ connect~ spotlight

A deadly gang
They’ve got a PhD in pain and a Masters in disaster. Quake masters and
quad gods—that’s The Unholy Alliance in a nutshell
SRIRAM SHARMA every night, the rest of Kawabonka quickly
aturday afternoon. Semi-finals at the realised what TUA was all about. They were

S Counter-Strike (CS) tourney at Surf ’s Up. In

progress is one of the most exciting CS
games ever played. The map is de_dust.
(TUA) Wile is the last man standing from the
Terrorists camp. All the CTs (Counter-Terror-
beating the living daylights out of the opposi-
tion and they were here to stay. A few members
of the initial line-up dropped out and new
members came in. Today the TUA stands as
Wile (Dhruv Parpia, Pune), JBI (Rahul Rohira,
ists) are storming the bomb defusal spot. Wile Mumbai), Strider (Siddharth Seth, Delhi),
snipes a CT 100 feet away, switches to his pistol, Fragbait (Sameer Shetty, Mumbai), CyAnide
guns down another CT at close range, grabs his (Prashanth Raju, Chennai), Mad_Toothbrush
assault rifle, and shoots another CT with it. He (Ram Balmur, Pune), Ricky (Ricky Kapur,
throws the rifle and picks his AWM back again Delhi).
to snipe another CT. Four dead bodies in less Geographically far apart, the members come
than three seconds. Terrorists win. together at kawabonka.com to practice. And
No other gaming clan elicits so much fear, each one brings along his own flavour. Wile used
admiration and respect as TUA—The Unholy to lead ‘Massive Destruction’, the best Quake III
CTF clan in the world while he was in the US.
“We’ve been Mad_Toothbrush is another Quake master, who
gets calls to join foreign clans every time he
watching and cleans base with a 150 ping on foreign servers. A
natural leader, he comes up with the TUA calls
studying matches and strategies. Ricky, who runs kawabonka.com,
is versatile with all weapons, while JBI aka Chief
played at most large has a ‘take no prisoners’ attitude. Strider is the
silent sniper, CyAnide, the elite-speak techie and
international meets Fragbait is the wisecracking smart guy. Individ-
ually they are powerful, but as a team they’re
and feel that we do invincible.
The TUA is a generation weaned on Ataris
match standards and Spectrums. They know their PCs like the
back of their hands and their gaming arsenal
favourably” includes special configurations, binds, over-
clocked PCs, and gaming mice and they are pas-
The Unholy Alliance: sionate about graphics cards and bandwidth. As
(L to R) CyAnide, Alliance. To the FPS far as their game is concerned, Mad_Toothbrush
Strider, Wile, JBI,
clique at Kawabonka, says, “It’s practice, practice and more practice.
Fragbait,
Mad_Toothbrush
they are gods. Nothing is easy.”
TUA started off as a TUA is all set to take the step from being an
UT CTF/DM (Unreal elite clan to pro-gaming. World Cyber Games,
Tournament Capture the the gaming Olympics, will begin in Korea in
Flag /Deathmatch) clan December 2001, and TUA will be there to find
on Kawabonka.com in out where they stand. Wile is optimistic about
late 2000 when Kawabon- their chances: “We’ve been watching and study-
ka.com was only a few months old and UT was ing matches played at most large international
the game to play. The name ‘The Unholy meets. I have played in Singapore, and feel that
Alliance’ was suggested by CyAnide, a TUA we do match standards favourably.” Right now
member and picked from an old strategy game TUA is busy getting more proficient in CS and
called Dominus—“Deep within the craggy preparing to take part in the Games. “The
mountains of Kplithor, an Unholy Alliance was future’s bright, the future’s definitely
forged.…” not orange,” quips Mad_Toothbrush. Way to
Seeing them dominating the UT CTF scene go, TUA!

24 November 2001
■ connect~ face-off

Activating products or problems?

Windows Product Activation is the latest implementation by Microsoft against software piracy.
Vidyaramanan S. speaks with industry representatives to gauge if it will be a success
he underlying principles of while building the WPA udos to WPA! The blue installation, you might end up

T Microsoft’s software licens-

ing policy have not
changed. Microsoft’s End
User License Agreement
(EULA) has always stipulated
technology. Under WPA, no
personally identifiable infor-
mation is collected.
Product Activation is not a
single ‘silver bullet’ solution to
K screen of death is now going
to be succeeded by Windows
Product Activation (WPA)
as the most annoying experi-
ence. Most anti-piracy schemes
in quite a tug of war on
installing a RAM module or a
new graphics card.
Piracy is a big threat to any
software company and
the number of PCs that soft- global piracy and is not end up causing problems rather Microsoft is trying to defend
ware can be installed on, and designed to target sophisticated than aiding the consumer and itself by introducing WPA. But
this remains the case for Win- and organised criminal coun- preventing piracy. Microsoft’s it will cause unnecessary hassles
dows Product Activation terfeiters. It is aimed at counter- WPA scheme is also headed the right from getting the product
(WPA) as well. ing casual copying by ensuring same way. Software hackers and registered and all along the
that the copy of the software pirates will always find a way to
Karthik Padmanabhan product is installed on a PC in crack the encryption schemes Mayank Sarup
Marketing Manager, compliance with the EULA. used to protect software. Partner,
Microsoft Corporation India Pvt Ltd Periclestech

“WPA is aimed at “Most anti-piracy

countering casual schemes end up
copying. This simple causing problems
process requires rather than aiding
minimal effort by the the consumer and
end user“ preventing piracy“

What do you think? Come, speak your mind at www.yahoo.co.in

WPA can tolerate a certain The process for Product Activation can be done via course of its use. Every time you
degree of change in hardware Activation is a simple four-step the Internet or the phone. For re-activate your installation,
configuration, which allows procedure that requires mini- this, Microsoft’s activation you have to contact Microsoft.
users to change their hardware mal effort by the end user— servers will have to be accessible Yes, no private information is
without the software believing there is no reason a genuine round the clock. Nothing could transferred but it also means
it is on a different PC from the customer should find it tedious. be more annoying than getting a that any time Microsoft decides
one it was activated on. How- It is unobtrusive, significantly cryptic error without competent not to support XP, you could be
ever, if the hardware is sub- more sophisticated than past help at hand. And if you choose left in the lurch. Corporate cus-
stantially different, reactivation methods and is not easy for to activate the product over a toll tomers are in a two-year loop—
may be required. Reactivation would-be pirates to circumvent. free number, you would have to why not the same for the retail
in this case, is easy and can be Additionally, we have tested read out the key on the CD or customers?
completed by contacting a this technology with our Indi- the accompanying pamphlet People are too comfortable
Microsoft customer service an customers with the launch and there is enough room for with Windows, which is why
representative to obtain anoth- of Office XP, where the product confusion while doing so. A sim- Microsoft is not too worried
er confirmation ID. activation system allows a user ple mistake would force you to about a mass defection to other
Microsoft gives increasing to install a copy of Windows go through the process all over OSs. The way I see things, even-
importance to protecting cus- XP only on one computer, and again. Though Microsoft claims tually people will upgrade to
tomers’ privacy and user priva- haven’t received any negative that minor upgrades will not XP, experience the annoyance
cy was a paramount design goal feedback from them. require you to re-activate the named WPA, sigh and go on.

www.y aho o.c o.in Catch ‘em live on Yahoo!

Karthik Padmanabhan November 10 at 4 p.m.

26 November 2001
 ■ connect ~ t e c h n o l o g y n e x t

Imaging: Ram

The industrial
revolution, electricity,
airplanes, computers,
nuclear power, the
Internet and now the
BE
WITH
YOU
IN A
ANIL PATRICK R.

I
nano
t would help if you’ve seen the movie Inner
Space. Try imagining a small doctor travelling
inside your body fixing up whatever’s wrong.
Or envisage yourself stuck in a traffic jam and
being guided by the computers in your shirt’s
threads to a clear road. Or alternatively, think of
everything we are used to—right from the roads
we walk every evening to the food we eat every
day and down to the clothes that we wear.
Nanotechnology puts the power of creation
into human hands. But contrary to popular per-
ception, the immediate goals of Nanotechnology
are not to further life and conquer death. It is more
chameleon-like soldiers blending in perfectly of a quest for discovering nanostructures that may
next big thing: with their surroundings and sensing all oncom- have excellent electrical, chemical, mechanical or
ing attacks. All these are not mere imagination— optical properties. Don’t wonder too hard about
Nanotechnology. Get they would be realities in the brave new world of what it is. Come take a look.
ready for the atomic Nanotechnology, a technology that would usher
in this and so many more things we haven’t even Small, smaller, smallest…
world dreamed of. All this is going to happen sooner When we think of small things, there is a limit to
than we expect. how small we can think. A speck of dust or
Nanotechnology, which deals with matter at maybe particles, which can be seen only with a
atomic levels, is not just restricted to the field magnifying lens. This is where Nanotechnology
of medicine. In fact, it will change almost differs. It deals with the most basic building

28 November 2001
blocks of matter, at the atomic and molecular of operation of the AFM is called the contact
levels. Think of taking each molecule one by one mode. In addition to this, AFMs also have the On the Nano Path
and arranging it to get what we want—some- ‘tapping’ mode of operation where the tip is low-
thing like Lego. This is exactly what Nanotech- ered to a particular point and then pulled up and The term ‘nanotechnology’
nology can do. Build from the basic building lowered to the next point of the surface. AFMs was popularised by K. Eric
blocks. are used to get the image of non-conducting sur- Drexler in 1986 when he
Nanotechnology deals with particles of size faces such as biological tissues, plastics, glass, etc. came out with a book called
in the nanometer range (10-9 metres). More pre- Now let’s see what’s possible with these tools Engines of Creation in which
cisely, it deals with particles of the size of 1 to at the nanometer level. he described what is possi-
100 nanometers. These particles are manipulat- ble with nanotechnology.
ed and controlled to build materials to the stan- Nanocomputers However, one of the first
dards we need. As of now, Nanotechnology is focusing on proj- practical nanotechnological
This means that many of the micron level ects which can be implemented in bettering our advances can be traced back
technologies being called Nanotechnology do lives. Pervasive computing is an area where a lot to 1968, when Bell Laborato-
not really fall into this group at all. When com- of Nanotechnology projects are currently active. ries developed molecular
pared to a nano-sized particle, a particle of For example, if you want to design a chip to fit epitaxy, a technique to
micron size is nearly 1000 times larger. That’s into your fingertip for controlling a music sys- deposit single atomic layers
almost like comparing a 1-metre diameter tem, then the solution lies with Nanotechnology. on a surface. One of the
sphere to one with a diameter of 1 km. Or think While making a microprocessor, we handle most practical ways to effec-
of a nano particle as something solid, which is big groups of semiconductor molecules and tively use nanotechnology
one-billionth of a meter in size. Ergo, think twice structure them into the form we need. This form happened in 1981 when
before reading or listening to someone who is of handling of matter produces severe limita- Gerd Binnig deployed the
talking about Nanotechnology in the micron tions as to how small these circuits can be made. scanning tunnelling micro-
range. Present day lithographic technologies (used in scope to image individual
the latest desktop processors) are at 0.13 atoms. This was followed by
Nano tools microns. After the 0.13-micron limit, it is very the creation of Buckminster-
So how do we get down to the molecular level and difficult to etch the circuits precisely and effec- fullerenes or buckyballs in
tinker around with atoms? Researchers use tools tively on the silicon substrate. This is where Nan- 1985. Buckyballs measure
such as Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (STM) otechnology steps in. Whether it is a matter of about a nanometer in diam-
and the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) for this using DNA for computing or arranging semi- eter and are used widely for
purpose. STMs and AFMs belong to the group conductor atoms to form logic circuits, Nan- nanotechnology applications.
called Scanning Probe Microscopes (SPM). otechnology offers convenience hitherto Sumio Iijima of NEC dis-
The STM has a very fine metal tip, which is unknown to bulk technology (most of today’s covered carbon nanotubes,
used to get the images of surfaces to be scanned technology can be termed as ‘bulk technology’ yet another major nanotech-
by applying voltages. When voltage is applied, as it involves manipulation of atoms and mole- nological advancement, in
electrons jump or ‘tunnel’ across the gap between cules in bulk rather than one by one). 1991 and in 1998 the first
the tip and the surface. This results in a small Computing giant IBM has come up with a transistor was made from a
detectable current. The current will vary as the new kind of memory called ‘Millipede technol- nanotube by Cees Dekker.
distance between the tip and the surface being ogy’, which makes use of an array of AFM probes The fact that single molecules
scanned changes. Researchers get an accurate to make marks on a polymer surface for storing can act as molecular switches
image of the particles (atoms and molecules) data. Each tip writes a ‘bit’ of 50 nanometer on was demonstrated in 1998
that make up the surface, their behaviour and the polymer which stores the data. Reading and according to research held at
properties this way. STM can also move individ- erasing of data is also done by the same arrays. Rice University. The start of
ual atoms and molecules into desired positions. Today’s best storage devices are capable of a 2000 saw a great boost to
There’s a limitation when using STMs: the memory capacity of 2 gigabits per square cen- nanotechnology in the form
surface under study has to be a good conductor timetre, whereas this technology has made pos- of the National Nanotechnol-
of electricity. AFM takes care of this since it sible densities up to 80 gigabits per square ogy Initiative (NNI) in the US.
involves actual contact between the tip and the centimetre using a single AFM tip. This is about NNI aims to provide more
surface for the imaging. Imaging of the surface is 40 times greater than the memory densities funding and greater public
done by measuring the tiny force of contact available now. These devices are not so far away participation in the field of
which has to be kept constant while the tip either. One of the first steps in this direction was nanotechnology.
moves up and down over the surface. This mode the Microdrive from IBM, which has 1 GB mem-

29
■ connect~ t e c h n o l o g y n e x t

other properties of materials made using nan-

Monitoring Malignant Cells otubes can be made to fit precise specifications.
Ethics in This makes it possible to use them for practical
Nanotechnology applications, from clothing to superconductivity
Nanotechnology deals with applications to spacecraft design.
the most basic assembly of Nanotechnology has been in the market for a
matter. This is like delivering while now. Toyota and Nike use Nanotechnology
the power of creation into in some of their products. Toyota started using a
human hands. nanocomposite material early in the 1990s in their
Consider the concept of Nanotechnology engines. This material, made out of reinforced
self-replicating robots that can help monitor nylon, withstands high engine temperatures and
and cure abnor-
traverse the human body is cheaper than other forms of similar plastic. The
mal cell condi-
providing all sorts of cures.
tions using
Nike trainers, which are so commonly available,
The only self-replicating ‘nanorobots’ make use of nanoengineered cushioning materi-
mechanisms we know of which can travel al in the soles of some Nike shoes.
are the reproductive mecha- inside the body
nisms of living cells. Even in Miracle drugs
their case, we are not really We all dread operations, but we might not have
clear about the intricacies ory capacity in a matchbox-sized drive. Big Blue’s to in the near future, not with Nanotechnology.
involved. So it is quite possi- next step is to make gigabyte drives as tiny as one The concept here is Microencapsulation, a
ble that accidental damage square centimetre. This means that music afi- Nanotechnology concept, which will help doc-
could be caused by unleash- cionados can store their entire music collection tors control precisely the rate at which medicines
ing something which we on something the size of a watch a few years from are supplied to the patient’s body. One of the
can’t control, as our under- now. There are also plans to build a smart ver- major medical breakthroughs in this area is a
standing of the complexities sion of Millipede. This will have electronics cou- composite structure of carbon called buckyballs,
involved is limited. pled to the Microdrive so that the whole package or C60 molecules. Buckyballs were discovered by
Chances of a deliberate can act as an independent system on a chip. Richard Smalley of Rice University in Houston
misuse of this technology That was just the tip of the iceberg. Molecular for which he got the Nobel Prize in 1985. The
are even higher. One only switches and transistors were first developed in main advantage of using buckyballs for medical
has to think of the immense 1998. These breakthroughs are showing a path on purposes is that they are extremely small and are
destructive potential that which a completely new kind of computer archi- non-toxic. These spherical particles are a
biotechnology has brought tecture is being developed. This approach makes nanometer long and very smooth. They are eas-
about through weapons of use of objects called Quantum dots for their oper- ily excreted by the body, which makes them per-
biological warfare. ation. (See Box: Quantum dot cell operation for fect as drug delivery mechanisms. Researchers
Some experts have called more information on this new architecture.) have developed a family of structures known as
for banning nanotechnology, The main advantage of using approaches Fullerenes based on buckyballs. These are tube-
but this will be like killing such as the Quantum dot cell, other than the like structures which could turn the entire med-
one of the greatest develop- small sizes, is the power consumption. In an era ical field around because of their immense
ments in technology even where we are strapped for power, nano-powered potential in the way treatment is administered.
before it’s happened. This is devices will be a big help as they consume next Using Fullerenes, medicines could be delivered
where ethics takes the cen- to nothing in terms of power. to the body orally and the body then eliminates
tre stage. the Fullerenes without any side effects. It is possi-
The Foresight Institute Here, there, and everywhere ble to attach the needed drugs on the buckyball
has laid down a set of Materials technology is another major area which structure as required for the particular disease.
guidelines for nanotechnol- will be affected by Nanotechnology. A nanotube is This is much easier and effective than the con-
ogy research and develop- one such innovation which can change almost all ventional capsule approach. In capsules, a mix-
ment. The guidelines are the areas that we are familiar with. These are sin- ture of drugs is delivered into the body, a major
reviewed yearly and new gle walled molecules made from buckyballs. We’ll part of which is eliminated by the body. When
guidelines are formulated as see what buckyballs are in detail later on. The main using mechanisms like buckyballs, it is easy to
research brings up newer advantage of using these nanotubes is that it is pos- ensure that they are tailor-made to deal with the
issues. sible to control the way these crystals are devel- specific cell disorder that the disease causes.
oped for particular applications. Electrical and Drugs that make use of buckyballs for the

30 November 2001
treatment of AIDS could be out by 2003. One of
the daunting challenges faced by researchers in
fighting the HIV virus has been the inability of
Quantum Dot Cell Operation
drugs to attach themselves to the virus and stop Quantum dot cells are basically small proposed by Lent and Porod of Notre
it from reproducing any further. Nanotechnolo- semiconductor or metal boxes that Dame. Now if a signal is applied to the
gy-powered medical techniques like buckyballs hold a defined number of electrons in left end, the signal propagates itself
have the ability to fix themselves to the virus, them. Remember that small means through the wire as shown. It simply
thus preventing further reproduction. cells just a few nanome- passes on through
Yet another exciting (though futuristic) ters across. Electrical each of the cells when
prospect that Nanotechnology presents is the fields or insulation is one cell exerts a force
ability to have minute machines travelling inside used to hold electrons in on its neighbouring
our body protecting us from the inside. These place in these dot cells. one to pass on the
‘nanodoctors’ will be able to find and repair A string of dot cells one signal.
damage at the cellular level. For this to be possi- next to the other is pro- Lent and Porod
ble, molecular assemblers—with better capabil- posed to act as a wire have also come up
ities than the current scanning tunnelling across which data can with an inverter gate
microscopes—are needed. They have to have the be sent. which will produce
capability to move atoms and molecules faster As you can see from the opposite of the
and more precisely than present day STMs. the figure, each cell has input signal as the
However, these nanodoctors won’t be calling on two electrons in them with two of the output. Combining the inverters and
you for the next 15-20 years, to say the least. quantum dot cells left unused. This other forms of gates will eventually
The concept of Nanotechnology-powered arrangement of quantum dot cells was make nanocomputers a reality soon.
doctors inside the human body has a long way to
go before it can become a reality. The Centre of
Biotechnology at the University of Michigan is Life after death?
working on a technology that could diagnose and Did you dismiss Austin Powers coming back to
monitor malignant cancer cells. This is more of a life after 30 frozen years as science fiction that hap-
monitoring use of Nanotechnology for detecting pens only in movies? Welcome back to reality.
and monitoring tumours. (See illustration, ‘Mon- People are already queuing up to have their bod-
itoring of Malignant Cells’ for more details.) The ies frozen in cryonic suspension facilities after they
technology is aimed to target cancer cells and die, hoping they’d be back to see life again in the
sometimes even suggest cures. It will then mon- future. Cryonic suspension basically freezes dead
itor the effect of the medication taken by the bodies to –320o Fahrenheit using liquid Nitrogen.
patient on the cells. The body fluids are replaced by a glycerine-based
One such attempt is being made by IBM’s Dr solution, which protects the body systems from
Christoph Gerber, one of the inventors of AFM damage due to freezing. However, remember that www.foresight.org/
on biological cells. His group makes use of an Nanotechnology won’t be bringing you back to Foresight Institute answers
AFM’s imaging tip along with ultra-small lasers. life anytime soon. all the questions you
The tips are attached to cantilevers, which are Many of the concepts that Nanotechnology might have about Nan-
small springs with movements that help measure presents may look impossible now, but they may otechnology
the force of each atom. Another researcher, Peter not be so far away after all. Could any of you www.techreview.com/nan
Vettiger, from IBM’s Zurich Research who’ve been through the 1970s have predicted otech.asp
Laboratory, believes that this movement can be that the computers of 2001 would have been so Look up Techreview’s Nan-
used to build nanomachines that will be able to powerful? Or would you even have thought of otechnology site for the lat-
act independently. These nanomachines could be something like a television in the 1960s? Like- est in Nanotechnology
used to deliver treatment to cells in the form of wise, Nanotechnology is nearer than you can www.foresight.org/EOC/i
microcapsules. For example, specific proteins of think. The nano-storm will catch you quietly. ndex.html
cancer cells will be producing a certain amount of The only difference being that it will come in a Have a look at the book
force which will help identify that cell. The silent and subdued manner, much like how we which started it all—Eric
nanomachine will detect that cell and attach itself embraced and used artificial fibres over the years Drexler’s Engines of Cre-
to the cell. Then it can release the right amount without knowing it. And it will make a tremen- ation.
of anti-cancer drug to the exact location. dous impact on our lives.

31
■ connect~ droolmaal

SET YOUR
SIG TS
H
ON ‘EM
Welcome to November. This time around, we pick the coolest toys
from the personal tech spectrum. Hot memory-free MP3 players,
shrinking PDAs, portable printers, the works. Go ahead, indulge

➜
Archos Technology MiniCDRW Trium Mondo Pocket PC
The Ultimate in Portability A Cool Combo
The MiniCDRW provides a solution to The Mondo will catch the fancy of those who
store data, music, video or other need a multi-purpose solution. The unit’s
large-capacity files at home or small size disguises what lies within this cell
while on the road. Its flexibility phone-Pocket PC combo. For starters, Pocket
allows it to connect to a variety Explorer and Pocket Outlook, followed by a
of interfaces such as USB, PC WAP 1.1 browser, voice recorder and an MP3
Card, CardBus and Firewire. In player. And in PDA fashion, one can synchro-
addition, you can use MiniCDRW nise data with their desktop PC through a
across platforms, be it the PC or USB cable. GPRS is also available to keep
Mac. The maximum burning speed you on track globally. The Mondo provides
rates are 8x/4x/24x and you can three hours of talk time and 100 hours of
write a maximum of 700 MB standby. This powerful gadget weighs in at a
of data. Adaptec’s Easy CD slight 200 g (including battery).
Creator software is included
Web site: www.trium.net
with this sleek portable
writer weighing 500 grams.

Web site: www.archos.com

32 November 2001
➜
Ricoh RDC-7 Digital Camera
A Visual Treat
This multi-function camera not only takes still pictures but captures
320x200-pixel full motion video as well. And if its 3.3 megapixel reso-
lution isn’t enough, the RDC-7 features a ‘Pro’ resolution mode that
effectively doubles CCD pixel count producing 3072x2304 pixel
images. A 2-inch TFT LCD viewfinder is featured which swivels around
270 degrees. An 8 MB SmartMedia card is included for storage
of images and video and can be upgraded to 128 MB.
Images can be then transferred back to your
PC through USB or serial interfaces. The
RDC-7 can also be connected to a TV in
order to watch captured videos.

Web site:
www.ricohzone.com/Product_RDC7.html

Sensory Science rave:mp 2300 ➜

Something to Rave about
This MP3 player uses Iomega’s Clik! disk to pro-
vide 40 MB of storage on each disk (capable of
storing about 75 minutes of music). This play-
er features a built-in microphone to record
2.5 hours of voice messages. In addition,
you can download MS Outlook names,
phone numbers and e-mail addresses on
to Clik! Media. The rave:mp 2300 offers
USB connectivity and features
upgradeable firmware which provides
support for future music formats.

Web site: www.sensoryscience.com

➜
IBM BlueEyes Emotion Mouse II
Understanding Mice
Can a mouse ever know how you feel? Yes, says IBM. You need to simply
touch the Emotion Mouse II, and the computer will be able to determine your
emotional state, says Big Blue. Sensors in the mouse sense the physiological
attributes, which are correlated to emotions using a correlation model. The
application of this technology in games could help one add personalised
challenges, adding to realism. Automobiles also benefit from this technology
by taking crucial decisions based upon a person’s emotional state.

Web site: www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/blueeyes/mouse.html

33
■ connect~ wideangle

What makes us Tick?

That’s the question scientists are trying to answer while working on the human gene,
aided by supercomputers and biotechniques
he world is filled with nearly 6 billion people, Where does it stand today?

T each different from the other and yet sharing

a lot of traits in common. These traits are
handed down from one generation to the
next through genes, the units of information
inside the cells of your body.
Numerous sections of the genome map have
been completed and an entire human genome
sequence, together with its analysis was released
in February this year. The outcome from HGP
would comprise a resource of detailed informa-
What if we can modify the gene itself for a tion about the structure, organisation and the
stronger build or affect the gene such that it is functionalities of the human DNA. But let’s first
more resistant to diseases? How does a set of understand what a genome is.
instructions work to create humans and other The nucleus of each cell in the human body
forms of life? A quest to the answer of these ques- contains the set of genes that provide a complete
tions led to the formation of the Human Genome set of instructions for making you you—sex,
Project (HGP) in 1990. This project is coordinat- colour of eyes, physical structure and even your
ed by the United States Department of Energy and temperament and talents. This set of codes is the
National Institutes of Health. It was initially sched- genome. The information of the genes is organ-
uled to last for a period of 15 years. ised into strings of DNA called chromosomes.
More than 18 countries are now participating Each chromosome carries several thousand
in this quest which involves identifying genes. Identifying on which chromosome a spe-
the genes that are believed to make cific gene is located and where along that chro-
up the human DNA. The mosome it can be found is called ‘mapping’.
Human Genome Organiza- DNA is made up of four similar chemicals
tion (HUGO) helps to (called bases or nucleotides), which are abbrevi-
coordinate the widespread ated as A, T, C, and G. These bases are repeated
international collaboration millions of times, as combinations, throughout
in the genome project. a genome. The human genome for instance has
3 billion base pairs that are arranged in an order
that’s unique to each individual. The process of
finding out the exact order in which the base
pairs occur is called ‘DNA sequencing’.
As you can imagine, it is a Herculean task. It
is estimated that a hundred thousand patterns of
the DNA would be revealed by simulating the
process of DNA sequencing using the informa-
tion already gathered in the databases.

Computers and biotechnology

Considering the sheer volume of data that
researchers working on the HGP have to deal
with, computers and other advanced electronic
technology are an essential part of the Project.
Laboratory automation involves the use of
robots to handle the genetic material along a
‘production line’. Electro-mechanical systems,
lasers, sensors, and sophisticated computers all
play key roles in analysing and recording the
results. For speed, efficiency and accuracy, com-
puters are used in the process of DNA sequenc-
ing, which involves reassembling small fragments
of DNA into a complete sequence to find the
shortest sequence containing all the fragments.
Illustration: Solomon Lewis Dynamic programming is used during the

36 November 2001
mapping process. First, two DNA sequences Computer scientists from ORNL and IBM are
(fragments) are aligned. Then, to determine the also working on developing new programming DNA Computers
accuracy of the alignment, the computer takes a tools and techniques to support this highly
random alignment of genes at any location, in sophisticated machine. They will also be expand-
and Us
any sequence, and assigns scores to each charac- ing their collaborations in data storage and dig- The need for speed has
ter-to-character comparison. The aligned pair ital libraries to include parallel programming prompted miniaturisation of
with the highest score is then reported. environments and Web-based supercomputing. the conventional silicon
Another aspect of the use of computers in Compaq, Sandia National Laboratories and wafers used in computer
biology-related sciences is the use of informa- Celera Genomics are collaborating on develop- processors and prompted
tion management systems, analysis tools and ing system hardware and software solutions to researchers to look for
communication networks. Collectively known as address the demands of computational biology. materials that could surpass
bioinformation infrastructure, it incorporates The alliance will use Compaq Alpha proces- the existing speed limits.
bioinformatics (the use of huge databases of bio- sors—a family of RISC-based, 64-bit CPUs and Living organisms have
logical information) and computational biology computer systems—connected in a massively millions of supercomput-
(the use of algorithmic tools to facilitate biolog- parallel configuration with extremely high ers—DNA molecules—in
ical analyses). Basically, bioinformation infra- bandwidth and low-latency mesh interconnects. their body. DNA resembles a
structure bridges the gap between observations The goal is to achieve 100 trillion operations per computer’s hard drive in the
(the raw data), the analysis of this data to arrive second (100 TeraOPps). way it stores data. Data
at an understanding (information) of how the transfer using DNA mole-
processes function and finally, the application What next? cules is much faster than
(knowledge) of this information. Put simply, it After the proper sequencing is complete and we that in even the fastest
helps us discover new, hitherto unknown rela- get an actual map of DNA sequences, are we supercomputers.
tionships between data. ready to retell the human story? Not quite. The Adleman, a computer
quest doesn’t end here; mapping the human scientist, was the first to dis-
The tools genome is just the first step. Analysis of the cover the computing poten-
The study of the complex genetic structures that human genome could help scientists in develop- tial of the DNA. He used
living organisms are made up of require special- ing new medicines, crops, materials and solu- DNA to solve the well-
ly developed software tools that would assist in tions to challenges in energy development and known Hamiltonian path
the analysis of the large quantities of biological environmental cleanup. problem. This revealed the
data. Special design tools are required to adapt The information gleaned from HGP can be computational and storage
commercial databases to meet the special needs used to pinpoint the source of the dysfunctions capabilities of DNA mole-
of genome researchers. One such tool is called that cause certain diseases, including cancer. This cules in solving complex
ERDraw, which is a graphical editing program would lay the foundation for enormous advances mathematical problems.
for describing data in biological terms. in diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Logic gates, which form the
The scientists at Lawrence Berkley National Take, for example, the research on drugs. basis of all calculations in a
Laboratory have been engaged in building large- Many drugs used in treatment target the proteins computer, were formed
scale data management systems, of which one of at the cellular level. They bind with certain pro- using DNA molecules.
the first was the Chromosome Information Sys- teins to either enhance or inhibit their activity, Developing microchips
tem (CIS). It works in a manner similar to CAD thus controlling intracellular reactions. embedded with DNA
(computer-aided design) software and lets biol- The effectiveness of a drug depends on its instead of silicon poses
ogists study chromosome maps and related data ability to specifically bind to the target protein in many advantages: they are
with the help of pictures and text. order to minimise undesired side effects. Drug cheap, do not use toxic
In the CIS, data is easy to access and manip- companies are hoping to employ the knowledge compounds, and are abun-
ulate through an interface called GenomeGuide gained about the genetic code to predict which dantly available. Further-
which is shareable through a management sys- protein a particular gene sequence produces and more, using DNA,
tem called GenomeBase. Researchers can trace which drugs or diagnostic tests may be effective. miniaturisation of computer
back information on a map to its experimental Computers are playing an increasingly processors is much more
origins, and get more information about specif- important part in helping researchers use mod- feasible. Unlike the normal
ic entries with this interface. els of the genetic, nucleic and other biological serial computing computers,
Other computer language based tools such as data to simulate the effect that new experimen- DNA computers perform
OML (Ontology Markup Language) are being tal drugs will have. Computers can help find out parallel computations. Soon
developed by open source software groups, uni- about possible biological functions of a protein computers with tens of giga-
versities and software development firms to fur- by comparing it to databases of proteins with bytes of speed would be
ther the research and development on the known function. Understanding the biological available even for home
biological fronts. Big Blue has been making super- or biochemical mechanism of a disease often users.
computers for this effect; the Department of Ener- suggests the types of molecules needed for
gy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has new drugs.
acquired an IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer sys- We still don’t know what makes us tick, but
tem. The initial system, configured to perform 100 computers can help us get mighty close to it.
GigaOPps (1 billion calculations per second), will Till then, let’s be content with what’s in the
later be upgraded to 400 GigaOPps. genes. Us.

37
■ connect~ passport

Are you a whiz at AVINA LOBO to view and a map representing the requisite data
hink maps, and we’ll bet what first pops up in will be generated accordingly. Behind such
processing
information and
visualising graphical
representation of
T your mind are all those humongous, dusty,
tattered maps from your eighth standard
geography class. Most of these paper maps
carry all the information right there on the sur-
face. But now picture a digital map containing all
dynamic and versatile digital maps are program-
mers, data architects and analysts who use GIS or
Geographic Information Systems. GIS is a set of
powerful tools and processes to capture, manip-
ulate, analyse and display spatial or geographi-
necessary information in a database—for cally referenced data. Today, GIS is being
data? A career in GIS instance, a city map packed with information on projected as a field that holds enormous poten-
could be right up its transport network, census information or even tial for growth in the days to come in the Indian
its sewage plan. The digital map integrates all this IT sector.
your street data in different layers within the same map. So
you can do away with hunting for the right map So what’s GIS all about?
to find what you want. Simply select the GIS isn’t simply ‘mapping software’ nor is it the
information you want same as cartography. Cartography has just one
aspect to it—using data to design a map. There
are two distinct aspects to GIS: one has to do
with the graphical output (the map or
screen display) and the other with the data-
base, which contains all the data. A database
used in GIS contains both spatial (geographic)
and attribute (statistical) data. With this data-
base attached to a map, you can generate a map
carrying the information you want based on a
‘geo-query’. A geo-query works like a search
engine, usually involving clicking your mouse
anywhere on a map with all data for that field
instantly popping up.
GIS is flexible enough to map any kind of
terrain, not just physical geography, right from
mapping the human body to a graphical
representation of instructions to assemble
machine parts. And all this on the basis of the
available data.
GIS is a field encompassing various other dis-
ciplines such as cartography, CAD, remote sens-
ing, photogrammetry (aerial photos), operations
research, surveying techniques and other allied
spatial data processing technologies.
There’s no simple or clear-cut methodology
involved in GIS work processes—it differs from

Mapping
your career
the GIS way
Imaging: Solomon Lewis
38 November 2001
project to project and according to the applica- needed. A background in mathematics would
bility of GIS in different industries. Broadly help you with the mathematical analysis in GIS Location-based
speaking, there are three distinct work areas: projects.”
data conversion, GIS Application Development
Services
and GIS Analysis. Let’s look at each stage in rela- Programmed to customise You’re driving through an
tion with the work areas to understand the GIS application developers or programmers of unfamiliar area when your
processes and people responsible for getting a varying skills are required on spatial projects for car suddenly breaks down.
GIS project up and running. coding applications or customisation after a map You get your mobile phone
is digitised by a CAD operator for graphical dis- out and, through the use of
Where’s my data? play. Customisation can be in the form of creat- interactive maps, access a
Data input, both spatial and statistical, for a GIS ing menus or algorithms to find the shortest database which tells you
project varies according to industry require- route between two points to facilitate easy deci- where the nearest service
ments and the company for which the GIS solu- sion making for users. station is. This is one of the
tion is being customised. Data can be sourced To become a developer, you need to have ways in which LBS or Loca-
from existing digital maps, satellite remote a background in computers with thorough tion Based Services work.
knowledge of The elements involved in
software engi- LBS technology include
I T professionals can easily make neering tools and
programming
positioning, GIS and loca-
tion management function.
the transition to IT-enabled GIS. A languages such as The ‘positioning’ element is
fair knowledge of GIS fundamentals Visual Basic, C, similar to GPS, except that
and software will serve as an easy C++, Visual network positioning is used
passport for software professionals C++, COM, EJB to determine the location of
and JSP. For a mobile device.
into GIS complex applica- GIS systems are used to
Yogendran S. tions, you must map the geographical data
GIS analyst, IIC Technologies, Hyderabad have a knowledge around the position of the
of MDL (for user, and to map the loca-
Microstation), tions of the places and serv-
sensing, photogrammetry, purchase of databas- AutoLISP (for Autodesk), Arc Macro Language ices that a user might need.
es from commercial data vendors, surveys or (AML) in ARC/INFO (for ESRI platforms), The location manage-
even paper maps. In India, physical data isn’t Avenue in ArcView XML and GML or software ment function is used to
readily available or accessible. Besides, most of such as MapObjects or ArcSDE. Knowledge of process the location of a
the data is not available in a digitised form. GIS fundamentals and familiarity with spatial mobile device and the GIS
Hence, a chunk of the manpower involved in a databases and database systems is essential as is data around it. It acts as a
GIS project is involved in digitising data and data awareness of algorithms and data structures. gateway between the posi-
conversion—processing and digitising images “GIS application development is getting tioning equipment and the
from remote sensing and aerial photos, map diversified into two areas: Application GIS and LBS infrastructure.
digitisation or digitising manual records. Map IT-enabled GIS,” says Yogendran S., a GIS analyst The LBS application on a
digitisation involves scanning or digitising exist- at IIC Technologies, Hyderabad.“IT profession- user’s handset could work
ing paper maps to a vector or a raster format, als can easily make the transition to IT enabled with other location tech-
which can then be loaded onto a GIS platform. GIS irrespective of their field. A fair knowledge nologies to determine the
Digitisation is a low-end job for which you of GIS fundamentals and software such as user’s location and provide
need proficiency in CAD software such as Auto- ArcInfo, MapInfo and GeoMedia will serve as a list of services within a
Cad, AutoLisp or Microstation. “Map digitisa- an easy passport for software professionals certain proximity to the user.
tion is more labour-intensive and the technical into GIS.” LBS technology is used
skills and domain knowledge required to do the mostly for personalised cus-
job are comparatively limited,” says Maneesh Designs on data tomer service, which could
Prasad, Director of Gisdevelopment.net. “The A GIS closely integrates two databases: a spa- extend into location based
pay is not high and one can become a supervi- tial database containing coordinates related to information and billing—a
sor, a data editor, or be in charge of QC (Quali- location and an attribute (statistical) database user can be charged differ-
ty Control). If you’re involved in digitisation, comprising, for instance, demographic data or ent airtime rates relative to
you should enhance your skills as it will give you statistics about a particular location. Database whether he is at home or
more options for career advancement,” adds design includes the planning and development office. LBS can also be used
Prasad. “Diploma engineers fresh from college of a database for storage of spatial and non- in fleet management sys-
with skills in Microstation, or GIS software such spatial data attributes, data structures, linking tems to track the position of
as Arcinfo or Geomedia can opt for data the database model to the application model, vehicles. Emergency services
conversion,” says Manoj Thakur, president and and so on. Database building involves differ- is another area where
CEO of Nucleus Netsoft & GIS India. “As far as ent spatial database structures (both vector there’s tremendous demand
aptitude is concerned, an analytical mind and and raster), topology, search algorithms and for LBS.
the ability to extract information from maps are trees (binary and spatial). The role of the data

39
■ connect~ passport

architect is to develop, design and maintain Engineering is desirable, supplemented with

GIS Training Courses spatial databases. If you plan to step into the knowledge of CAD and GIS software.
shoes of a data architect, familiarity with spa- Yogendran’s job profile as a GIS analyst in
Indian Institute of Remote tial data models and their architecture is essen- Marine GIS involves project planning, execution,
Sensing (IIRS), Dehra Dun tial. “Since Oracle is a popularly used database, management and client interaction. He works on
Post graduate Diploma proficiency in Oracle is sufficient and knowl- digitisation, data capturing and creation of nau-
courses and short-term edge in the latest version of Oracle Spatial is tical charts using a GIS software called CARIS as
courses in GIS and Remote advantageous,” says Yogendran. Robins John, a well as compatibility of charts with standards
Sensing GIS professional with Speck Systems, says that adopted by the International Hydrographic
www.isro.org/iirs- attribute data linked with spatial data makes Organization.“GIS application development and
training.htm ‘intelligent data’, which aids decision-makers in GIS analysis are the hot and happening areas and
National Remote Sensing promise growth,” he states.
Agency (NRSA), Hyderabad
Courses on Remote Sensing
technology and applications
An analytical mind and Is there a business
opportunity ?
www.nrsa.gov.in
the ability to extract If GIS fascinates you but you
Anna University, Chennai information from maps are don’t want to be involved
Post graduation in Remote essential. A background in with the technical aspects,
Sensing
mathematics would help there’s another avenue
www.annauniv.edu open—business develop-
www.engr.uky.edu/~arunp/ you with the mathematical ment. “Opportunities exist
anna/irs.html analysis in GIS projects for marketing GIS software
Jawaharlal Nehru Universi- Manoj Thakur and ‘concept selling’ of the
ty (JNTU), Hyderabad President and CEO, Nucleus Netsoft & technology and its applica-
Post graduate degree in GIS India tions,” says John. The qualifi-
Spatial Information Technol- cations required would be an
ogy and Doctorate in MBA with sufficient knowl-
Remote sensing querying and analysing information. The edge of the GIS field. John adds, “The career
www.jntu.ac.in/crs.html attribute data related to the spatial data may be advances are like that of any marketing execu-
GIS Institute, NOIDA stored in any RDBMS such as Oracle, MS tive.” He started out in the data conversion field
Short-term courses in GIS Access or mySQL. but is Resident-in-charge of the Botswana office
software and applications. It of Speck Systems, a GIS company based in
is run by the Centre for Spa- Analyse this! Hyderabad.
tial Database Management Data analysis in GIS uses the spatial and non-
and Solution spatial information in a database to answer What must I do to go the GIS way?
www.gisinstitute.net queries and provide solutions. Data analysis is Sufficiently interested to consider GIS as a career
ESRI India done in the following areas: database query option? You can now avail of formal education as
Short-term courses in GIS (selectively retrieving and displaying informa-
software and database tion from a database), overlaying of maps (vec-
design
www.esriindia.com
tor-to-raster and raster-to-vector conversions),
network analysis, surface modelling, geo-calcu-
Tools of the Trade
Pentasoft Education lations, geo-statistics and others. The software and tools used in a GIS system
Short-term courses in GIS GIS analysts or professionals are the ones who range from creating the front end map to GIS
software and database inte- carry out data analysis in a project. “A key software used for data analysis and visualisa-
gration requirement for a GIS analyst is domain expert- tion. For the front end graphical output or the
www.pentasoftech.com ise and the ability to visualise GIS-based struc- maps, CAD software such as Microstation and
tured solutions,” says Prasad.“A crop monitoring Auto CAD Map is used. The most popular GIS
Note: This is a listing, not a system needs an expert in agriculture with a doc- packages are ArcInfo and ArcView GIS from
recommendation. torate in one of its sub-domains and good vendors like ESRI, Geomedia from Intergraph,
knowledge of image processing and GIS,” he CARIS GIS, SICAD, MapInfo, MapObjects and
continues. Strong analytical skills and versatility ArcSDE. The choice of software depends on
to adapt to project requirements on an industry- the industry applications. For instance, CARIS
to-industry basis have to be the strong points of is used for marine GIS and electronic naviga-
a GIS analyst. “Formal qualification definitely tion systems.
comes into the picture with GIS data analysis. ERDAS is the software used for processing
This needs specific educational qualifications satellite remote sensing images and aerial
and experience in the related field,” says John. photographs.
According to him, for analysis, a degree or post GIS data can also be Internet enabled. For
graduation in Geology, Geography, Environ- this the software used are Auto CAD Map
mental Science, Remote Sensing, Geo-Informa- Guide and MapXtreme.
tion Technology, Town planning or Civil

40 November 2001
well as a wide variety of short-term training market in India itself is worth over Rs 750 crore,”
courses in GIS software. The qualifications and says Prasad. But there is a shortage of skilled tech-
training required depends largely on the area nical manpower to execute GIS projects.
you want to work in—application development, Thakur says,“Around 30 to 40 per cent of the
analysis, data conversion, etc. domestic GIS market is concentrated on the sale
Courses offered by most software training of software, applications and hardware and
institutes concentrate more on training in GIS approximately 70 per cent of the business comes
software, rather than on the applications of GIS. from providing services.” He adds that most of
However, some institutes do offer training in the the GIS services in India cater to the overseas
applications of GIS technology. If you’re serious market, particularly the US. “There’s very little
about a career in data analysis then you should work being done for the Indian market and most
consider a formal degree or a post-graduation of the GIS projects are commissioned by the
in earth sciences from a reputed institute. (See government sector.” Prasad, however, estimates
box on GIS training courses) that in India alone over Rs 6,000 crore will be
spent on GIS in the next five to seven years. He
The buzz about GIS says, “Municipal planning, forestry and envi- www.gisdevelopment.net
GIS has been used in India since the mid 1960s ronment, telecommunications and rural land For more information on
primarily by government and research sectors in records are the areas wherein the action is GIS in South Asia
areas such as natural resource management and already on.” The GIS project for Bangalore Water www.csdms.org
environmental planning, urban planning, trans- Supply and Sewerage Board, GPS based trans- Centre for Spatial Database
portation and civil engineering. With data repre- port system for Banaglore, Early Warning Sys- Management and Solution
sented graphically in the form of maps acquiring tem for crop monitoring by the Ministry for www.geocomm.com
importance in many industries as a decision mak- Agriculture, Disaster Management for Delhi are A portal on GIS
ing tool, GIS technology is finding wider accept- some of the examples of projects carried out in www.giscafe.com
ability in many industries—health, business India. Thakur feels that areas such as location- Information on job oppor-
management (where it is used to map existing based services, remote sensing and pho- tunities in this field
and potential clients), assigning sales territories, togrametry are areas in which demand will www.esri.com
distribution facilities and so on. And here’s the outstrip supply and Prasad agrees with this. So For information on GIS
bright side. “The global market for GIS has been what’s holding you back? Get set to ride the software
estimated at over $7 billion and the domestic GIS wave!

1/2 page H AD

41
■ connect~ netreturn

LOOK
who’s talking!

Ill
us
tra
tio
n:
Ma
he
sh
Be
nk
ar

There are certain tweaks that could help your

Don’t reach for the VIDYARAMANAN S.
he telephone was a milestone in the field of camera take better pictures, but tweaks don’t
phone the next time
you want to call a
friend—instead just
T communication, but it has now been over-
shadowed by Internet chat. Voice over Inter-
net, although illegal, gives you a minimal bill
for frequent overseas calls. But now you no
longer have to be content with just listening to
always work. A cheaper camera wouldn’t deliver
a good image to the recipient and you would just
be adding another piece of hardware to your col-
lection. Opt for a better camera, though such a
camera would be priced higher.
get out your headset the voices of your near and dear ones—thanks to After you’ve arranged for all the hardware
and start videoconferencing, you can see and talk with requisites to start a videoconference session,
your son or daughter settled abroad, over the what you need is software that will help you use
videoconferencing Internet, right there on your PC. all of these gadgets together and talk with a per-
son in another corner of the world. A search on
The right gear the Internet can get you a good number of video
The first thing that you need to do is check the chatting software.
hardware. The bare essentials you would need Videoconferencing software can broadly be
are a PC, an Internet connection, a Web camera classified into two categories: software that
and a speaker-microphone combination. evolved from Instant Messengers and programs
Choose a camera that would give you the best that started off as a video chat client itself. Yahoo!
performance (see box, ‘Buying a Web cam?’). and MSN messengers fall into the former

42 November 2001
category while other software such as Eyeball, might come across while videoconferencing by
Im4cam, Paltalk and the like fall into the latter. simply clicking on the Report Abuse option in Video Broadcasting
Though all these software integrate text, voice the video window of any person who is trying to
and video, they differ in the balance of the fea- send you objectionable material. Video broadcast over the
tures that they offer. Netmeeting is Microsoft’s proprietary soft- Net has been made much
ware for videoconferencing. MSN uses Net- simpler for home users.
Go fishing on the Web meeting, which is a separate program that There are lots of free servic-
First up, the chat tools that we are familiar with. launches when you start videoconferencing. You es on the Net, which allow
Yahoo! and MSN both provide the facility for you to stream or broadcast
video and voice chat. You can choose either of video. These are basic serv-
these conventional clients depending on which ices that you can use as an
one you are more used to. All chat software evaluation before upgrading
recognise the default video input device and yourself to the premium
auto-configure themselves to the available input services offered by these
device. companies.
Installation isn’t a major hassle with Yahoo!. www.webcamnow.com provides
It has an easy-to-grasp interface, which doesn’t Yahoo! video you software that is free for
confuse you with too many options to choose chat window download, with the aid of
from. To enable video chatting, all you have to do along with which you could broadcast
is plug your camera into the appropriate socket Web cam live video over the Net. Go
in your computer and choose ‘Start Web cam’ settings to the site, create an ID and
from the Tools menu. A small window pops up download the broadcast
in which you can see the image captured by the can download Netmeeting from Microsoft’s site. software. Install the soft-
camera. Camera adjustments such as brightness, You don’t need any additional installations to use ware and login with the ID
contrast, gamma, saturation, etc can be done this program, except for a one-time configura- you created, and you are
from the Preferences option in the Tools menu. tion, which might require you to fill in a regis- ready to broadcast. You can
Once your camera is all set up, you will see tration form, certain details regarding your see your broadcast in the
two buttons pop up in the window. If you want connectivity and related information. community area you joined
your friends to see you on the Web cam, click on After launching the software, enter the MSN while creating the ID. The
the broadcast button and the messenger con- passport of the person you would like to confer- site hosts livecams, which
nects you to Yahoo! video server, which delivers ence with and click on the Call button. Once the can be viewed from any
the video directly to the person who requests to connection is established, the person’s picture Java enabled browser.
see your camera. Viewing privileges can be set in will be visible on the right-hand window. You can use the iClips
the same Preferences option as above. service (www.iclips.com) to
Once you start broadcasting, your status mes- Others in the Net create and upload stream-
sage automatically changes to the default mes- Now on to video chat clients. Installing Eyeballs ing movies on your Yahoo!
sage, ‘View my Web cam’. This message can be software is very simple. Register with the Eyeball profiles. A free registration,
changed or disabled from the Preferences for the service and login with your ID and password. and you are entitled to 20
Web cam. Disabling the status messages while on Eyeball has a glamorous, graphics-rich and com- MB of free space on the
camera helps you avoid unwanted peeping toms. plex interface. You can add friends as in any iClips streaming servers. You
Yahoo! also lets you report any abuse that you instant messenger and also search for chat could request for more
space and streaming fea-
tures by contacting iClips.
Buying a Web cam? Share a preview of your new
house or your baby walking,
Be smart. Apart from good looks you should resolutions. This is important as otherwise the with friends all over the
check out other features while purchasing your video quality would be poor when in high-reso- world. You could even put
Web cam. The list given below will give you an lution mode—15 fps is a good frame rate for up an advertisement for
idea of what kind of Web cam you should videoconferencing. your product with a small
opt for: Software and drivers: You might get a bet- video on your profile.
Resolution: A camera’s quality is weighed ter deal for a cheaper price but may not be able
against the resolution that it supports and to get the accompanying drivers and software.
offers. So choose one that offers a good resolu- You would do better to buy a camera that
tion. Look for one that offers the capability of comes with software drivers, which would
capturing images at 640x480, at the very least. reduce the headache of hunting the Net for the
Connectivity: Check for USB connectivity as desired drivers.
USB is faster and is far easier to configure than Price: Needless to say, buy something that
other interfaces. suits your pocket but keep the above points in
FPS at high resolution: Watch out for the mind while making an investment so that you
frame rates that the camera supports at high get your money’s worth.

43
■ connect~ netreturn

groups at www.eyeball.com. Clicking on the Groups

button in the interface takes you to the site where
groups are listed. You can enter any of these chat
groups and start video chatting with people
instantaneously. The site tells you a user’s status,
using different colours in the displayed names.
For example, a name displayed in orange would
indicate that the person is in a videoconferenc-
ing conference with another user, blue indicates
that the person is logged onto the Eyeball soft-
ware and is available for video chat and grey
indicates that the person has just come to the site
to chat but is not logged on to the software. You
can browse the room and if you wish to video
chat with a particular user, click on the video Collaborative use of Im4cam
button and the software automatically launches
from your computer. Once you log in , a request general chat room, it automatically boots
is sent to the user you want to chat with and if him/her from that room. This is a good feature
the user accepts, a chat window pops up and you if your children use Paltalk to talk to their friends
can see him/her. or relatives. If you subscribe for Paltalk’s premi-
um services, you can see the video in the main
All at once! window, which reduces the hassles of going to
Im4cam stands apart from the conventional private chat to see a person’s cam. This software
videoconferencing software. It isn’t a one-to-one also lets you create locked rooms and you can
videoconferencing software; instead, it is more choose to invite people to join your group. There
like entering a video chat room. It has an array are other benefits that you could gain if you
of 10 windows, which help you see the people in become a premium services member by paying
an amount upfront.

How to pick?
So how do you go about picking the best? Some
software boast distinct features but lack in cer-
tain aspects. For example, Im4cam lets you have
multiple people in a conference but lags in speed
of text delivery and is also prone to crashes.
While choosing a videoconferencing software,
you should base your judgement on your
requirements and certain other parameters. For
Colour differences in Eyeball show user status example, if you want ease of control and also the
ability to hold multiple one-to-one conferences
a particular room. You could either use the com- simultaneously, then Yahoo! serves the purpose
mon window to send messages or right-click the quite well. Netmeeting doesn’t allow you to have
user name to send a personal message. What’s multiple video exchanges simultaneously but it
different about this software is that each user can has a unique ‘picture in picture’ feature that is
hear all the others. This is an excellent piece of missing in the others.
software for personal videoconferences and Organisation-based videoconferences can be
http://www.im.co.kr/Eng- could prove useful to an organisation which held using the Im4cam multiple window soft-
lish/index.htm requires its personnel from various parts of the ware. Voice and video can be exchanged simul-
Gives you all the services world to collaborate. You can create a personal taneously between 10 people at a maximum.
offered by Im4cam room, and you could restrict access to a chosen But, neither of these software has the facility to
www.iclips.com few by applying a password. You can get togeth- report abuse on the usage of Web cams, except
Download software for cre- er with relatives or even your girlfriend abroad, for Yahoo!.
ating and streaming video without anyone else butting in! Videoconferencing is a huge tidal wave
www.eyeball.com engulfing people all over the world. Choose the
Download the software Let’s get pally! software that suits your purpose, get the basic
and check out other offers While Paltalk functions similar to Im4cam, it gear in place and start conferencing with your
www.paltalk.com doesn’t have a multi window display. This, again, pals and peers, one-to-one or one-to-many. The
Download the Paltalk is a chat room setup where you can click on any best part is it doesn’t leave much room for para-
videoconferencing software user and initiate a chat. The best thing about noia; so the next time you’re chatting with foxy-
for free Paltalk is that it has child protection enabled. chick_22, you can find out for certain if the
Hence, if someone types an obscene word in a person belongs to the female species!

44 November 2001
■ connect~ firsthand
Illustration: Mahesh Benkar

Trapped in the Web

Instant Messengers: a SRIRAM SHARMA Bookitty: I m new here don t borg me o
t’s 1.00 in the night, and you meet the same

I
sages of lotekville.
boon or a bane? bunch of anonymous names at IRC. Behind Topgun: Hey, poots! You still here? Get a
the pixelated glare of the screen, the distinc- life!
tion between inner and outer worlds almost Poots: I don t have one, tops!
disappears. You sit almost motionless, your Necromancer: Hiya Smokey! You back
hands typing away to cryptic names who are as again? I saw you this morning.
immersed in this world as you are. Sir Smokalot: I needed another fix... LOL!
(Writer s note: sic sic sic!)
Topgun: Hey look guys we got a newbie in
our midst! Studies conducted of late seem to confirm
Necromancer: How often do you come various anecdotal accounts of people being
here bookitty? ‘hooked’ to the life online, at the cost of their

46 November 2001
personal or professional life. The sweet lure of the workplace where professionals swap industry
instant communication technology is stimulat- information and gossip—all in the blink of an Get a Life!
ing, hard to resist, rewarding and thrives on the eye. Instead of traipsing down the hall, making a
fact that most people don’t know when to stop. phone call, or waiting for an e-mailed response, A 10-step recovery program
What was once considered a disorder for com- employees can communicate with one another for online addiction
puter enthusiasts and college kids high on band- via online text,‘pinging’ each other questions and ■ Use a timer or alarm
width is now a widespread social phenomenon. A requests, speeding up reaction rate and increas- clock. Use software that
report, ‘Teenage Life Online’, details the rise of ing productivity. According to a recent Jupiter keeps track of online time
what it calls “the instant-messaging generation”. Media Metrix report, more than 11 million peo- and Net usage.
Internet usage has multiplied many times ple use instant messaging services at work. For ■ If possible, make sure
over with the rise of instant messengers or IMs. employees working on location and supervisors your computer is not in an
It all began as a simple, quick way for teenagers stationed outside of home offices, instant mes- isolated room.
to swap brief, synchronous messages over the saging is rapidly becoming indispensable. ■ Rearrange furniture, set
Internet—make small talk, crib, complain, and Using IM at the office does have significant things up so it’s not so easy
flirt. But in four years, instant messaging has advantages, as long as it’s a planned part of your to lose track of time while
grown to become the biggest ‘killer app’ of the infrastructure. For brief, immediate communi- using the computer.
Internet after e-mail. And the market is growing cation, it beats a phone call or e-mail. So what’s ■ Have the radio on, per-
every day: AOL’s IM and ICQ services alone the problem with free IM programs? Productiv- haps a TV program that
account for about 750 million messages each day. ity, for starters. Are your employees gossiping regularly mentions the time
AOL’s AIM and ICQ software claim to have 130 with their friends or using IM strictly as a means of day.
million users, while Microsoft reports 18 million of business communication? ■ Change your habits. If you
users. Yahoo!, another leader in the field, declines Tripti Awade, CEO of Alnishsoft, feels that tend to get online first thing
to reveal its total instant messaging user base. IMs have extended the professional grounds for upon awakening, choose
For the uninitiated, instant messaging allows her business contacts and considers it a wonder- something else to do first.
you to maintain a list of people you wish to inter- ful CRM tool. But she remains sceptical about ■ Try taking a holiday,
act with. You can send messages to any of the its purpose.“Chat should be banned in the work- unplug every now and then
people in your list, often called a buddy list or place as it hampers productivity and slows down and use that time to sort
contact list. Sending a message opens up a small work, especially among junior members who out priorities and goals.
window where you and your friend can type in tend to use it for whiling away time.” ■ Make sure you finish all
messages that both of you can see. your important chores first,
IMs allow you immediate, quick-hit commu- Picking favourites and then perhaps allow
nication, just like a phone conversation, and pro- The spillovers in the battle for the instant mes- yourself some online time
vide ability to converse with many people at the saging market have left many users confused with as a reward.
same time. IMs bring the best of both worlds, a range of software applications. Yahoo! and MSN ■ Cultivate other interests,
the expanse of the Web and the instantaneous- were clear favourites; many people loved Yahoo!’s hobbies, and passions.
ness of the phone. This is why instant messaging feature of leaving offline messages and MSN for ■ Take a walk rather than sit
has gained such unprecedented popularity. its simplicity. The early adopters, however, down and log on.
Raahila, an Internet veteran, who started depend on ICQ because of the sheer number of ■ Turn off auto sign-ins, use
using messengers about two-and-a-half years contacts and applications possible. But heavy busy signals, and don’t be
ago to chat with friends abroad says it has Internet users pick no favourites among messen- afraid to delete and block
become an indispensable part of her daily rou- gers; they just turn them all on. Companies like people.
tine now: “My friends abroad don’t seem so far Trillian, Jabber and Odigo provide some relief by
away and that includes online friends too since making instant messengers interoperable.
they’ve become a part of my everyday life. It’s an Chandrashekhar, an avid Linux enthusiast and
easy and cheap way to keep in touch.” long time netizen, uses GAIM when he’s on Linux
Humans have an intrinsic ability to multitask; and Jabber when he’s on Windows. Laila, on the
it’s no surprise this seemingly benign technology other hand pledges her loyalty to ICQ because, as
has enmeshed itself into our lives. Rukmani she says,“with ICQ you can see exact-
Saradha, an EEE student, always keeps her mes- ly what the person types without any
senger on whenever she surfs, be it for fun or aca- corrections, it has a history log, and
demics. She feels that chatting has helped her it’s the closest you can get without
know a lot about people. “I’ve got so many new actually being face to face. Yahoo!’s
friends—people who study in my college. I was beta version is cool too”. She was not
not so close with them earlier, but after chatting too keen on chatting in public chat
I’ve come to understand a lot more about them. rooms though: “You hardly find any
It’s not just the matter of getting new friends, you interesting people. It’s like a free-for-
learn facets about people you didn’t know before.” all”.
Messengers are getting more
Chat in the workplace indispensable thanks to connectivi-
No longer just a tool for exchanging information ty on mobile devices like cellular Habbo Hotel: a virtual five-star hotel
and interacting, instant messaging has swamped phones and PDAs. It won’t be long for teenagers

47
■ connect~ firsthand

before instant messengers start to offer seamless nologies (telephones, mail, fax) is that the Inter-
Are you Addicted? connectivity. Platform, software and connectiv- net allows for, and even encourages contact with,
ity are all issues, which will sort themselves out relative strangers. The probability of any real-life
Internet Addiction Disorder soon. It’s only a matter of time before computer, repercussions for online social activity is very low,
(IAD) refers to pathological, telephone and video technology will merge into and that makes people feel free to express them-
compulsive Internet usage. one—perhaps highly addictive—beast. selves in an unrestrained manner. This is a natu-
The criteria for this disorder rally exciting, stimulating and reinforcing aspect
are similar to those for sub- Why the addiction of the Internet.
stance abuse disorders. E-mail discussion groups, chat rooms, bulletin However, finding regular escape in cyber-
IAD is different from boards and MOOs (Object Oriented Multi User space also has side effects—missed deadlines, lost
Pathological Computer Use Dungeons) offer people an opportunity to expe- jobs, low grades and loss of weight. It’s only after
(PCU), a condition where rience a form of social contact and make virtual you get unplugged that you realise the ramifica-
someone is pathological friends. But none of them match the industrial tions of this addiction, especially when they
about any aspect of com- strength addictiveness of the GMUKS (graphical manifest themselves in the form of phone bills.
puters, and includes uses multi-user konversations). GMUKS, or visual John Suler, PhD and faculty member in the
that are not social in their chat in simple terms, are something of a cross Rider University Psychology department, has
nature. between a MOO and a traditional chat room. written some extensive papers on the psychology
The following criteria As social environments, GMUKS are unique in of cyberspace relationships. In his papers on
were used for assessing IAD that they are graphical. Rather than limiting users Computer and Cyberspace Addiction, he writes,
in a large initial study of this to text-only communications as in most chat “A teenager who plays hooky from school in
problem. If a person meets rooms, multimedia programs add a visual element order to master the next level of Donkey Kong
four or more of the 10 crite- that creates the illusion of movement, space, and may be a very different person from the middle
ria, he can be diagnosed as physicality. It allows people to express themselves aged housewife who spends $500 a month in
suffering from IAD. visually, rather than just through written words. AOL chat rooms—who in turn may be very dif-
■ Do you feel preoccupied The opportunities for self-expression and social ferent from the businessman who can’t tear him-
with the Internet or online interaction are much better, giving room for sub- self away from his finance programs and
services and think about it tleties and complexities not seen in text-only chat continuous Internet access to stock quotes. Some
while offline? rooms. One such haunt is the online multimedia cyberspace addictions are game and competition
■ Do you feel a need to community known as the ‘Palace’. Combining fea- oriented, some fulfil more social needs, and some
spend more and more time tures of MOOs and chat rooms, the Palace is a simply may be an extension of workaholicism.”
online to achieve satisfac- visual and spatial environment where members A person by the name Solz in #bookwarez (a
tion? channel in IRC) spoke at
■ Are you unable to control length about being a chat
your online usage? Invisible says: addict.“It’s a wolf in sheep’s
■ Do you feel restless when
well, it wasn’t really bad, clothing, really. Sure, it’s
attempting to cut down or fast. It’s free. It’s easy. You
it just prevents you from
stop your online usage? can leave it on all day if you
■ Do you go online to
having a real life have cable Internet like I
escape problems or relieve Invisible says: do. Everyday, I wake up, I
feelings such as helpless- if you do it too much turn on my computer, I
ness, guilt, anxiety or invisible says: check my e-mail, and I sign
depression? Chandrasekhar but that applies to most onto Instant Messenger.
■ Do you lie to conceal how Pathological Net addict things Then I start chatting. It’s
often and how long you stay an addiction, really. I have
online? to, almost need to, be at my
■ Do you risk losing a signif- interact with text, sounds, and graphical represen- computer when in its presence.”
icant relationship, job, or tations of themselves called ‘avatars’. Chandrasekhar messages me in the wee hours
educational or career oppor- GMUKS have had a huge impact on of the night as I write, “You know what really
tunity because of your MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role sucks? You can’t really make out anything about
online use? Playing Games) like Everquest, Ultima Online, and the person on the other end when you really
■ Do you keep returning Asheron’s Call. These games focus entirely on the want to, and you don’t know if any of it is true.
even after spending too social aspect of multiplayer gaming, and most of It freaks out paranoid people like me .”
much money on online the time is passed making acquaintances and Net evangelist Howard Rheingold makes a
fees? socialising. The team element is extremely vital to good defence: “One might think the Net a cold
■ Do you go through with- getting ahead; you have to partner up to destroy place, and yet it need not be. In the impersonal
drawal when offline, such as fire breathing dragons and monsters. It’s the social isolation of our large cities, where people often
increased depression, aspect that makes the games so addictive. live separated from kin or lonely amid the mul-
moodiness, or irritability? titudes, the Net can become a surrogate social-
■ Do you stay online longer Is the Web addictive or do addicts use the Web? life—a vital source of interpersonal contact
than originally intended? The significant difference between Net relation- despite its non-physical nature.
ships and ones maintained by other existing tech-

48 November 2001
■ select~ s m a r t b u y e r s

The best Indian dotcoms

ying dotcoms, flagging e-commerce sites—they’re all around Shopping & Auction, Sports, E-learning & Education, Search

D us. So does the Internet still make a difference? Or have peo-

ple given up hope in the Internet as a medium that can make
our life easier, enabling us to take care of tasks that used to
be expensive and time-consuming? Wrong! If you look beyond
the R.I.P signs in the dotcom graveyard and the ‘not-so-sunny’
Engines, Information & portals, Communication & Mail, Jobs &
Careers, Travel, News & Analysis, and Banking & Finance.
These sites have been picked by our editorial team from the
plethora of popular Indian sites keeping in mind parameters like
content, aesthetics and usability. ‘Made in India’ is the most
outlook for anything online, you’ll realize that the Internet is important criteria to make it to this space; hence the absence of
growing and maturing. People in India and across the globe are Indian versions of prominent International Web sites like
using the Internet more than ever, not just for information and msn.co.in or monster.co.in.
communication, but also for education and entertainment. This
is corroborated by numerous Internet surveys conducted by firms The judging process
such as Gartner and IDC, as well as by online polls conducted by The final judging process to select the winners of the Digit Web
us for the Popular Choice Awards, which saw an unprecedented Awards involved the examination and evaluation of all the nom-
number of Internet users voting for their favourite sites. inated sites—a total of five in each of the categories—across
parameters like Quality of Content, Ease of Navigation, Aesthet-
What are Web Awards 2001? ics and Design. The judges were in-house and selected by the
The Digit Web Awards 2001 confer hon- Digit editorial panel.
ours on the most popular Indian Web
sites—those sites which have kept their Popular Choice Awards
promise of delivering quality to the Almost 10,000 Internet users voted for their
audience—from fields as wide as infor- favourite Web sites during the course of our
mation, aesthetics and usability to serv- online polls for the Digit Popular Choice Awards.
ices like shopping, education and travel. The voting, which took place over a period of 15
Digit Web Awards 2001 acknowledge days beginning from the 1st of October 2001, saw
these achievements, tell what’s really close to 10,000 people vote. While some cate-
good in the various sites, and try to bring gories like Information & Portals and Jobs &
the masses closer to the Internet. Careers witnessed really close battles, others
The Digit Web Awards 2001 like Communication & Mail and Sports had
have nominations in 12 cate- the popular sites winning by a consid-
gories: Health, Entertainment, erable margin.

52 November 2001
 ■ connect~ web awards

hether you’re a newcomer to the complex world detailed and reliable research on securities and mar-

W of finance and money management or a seasoned

hand at trading, these sites can offer you value for
money. They pack in useful tips on how to put your
kets, and insurance and portfolio management. No
more standing in queues to pay your bills or to file
your taxes or visiting banks endlessly to procure loans.
money in the right places, tutorials on the basics of From online loan approval to bill payment to filing tax
insurance, tax planning, shares and stocks, mutual returns online, these sites will get it all done for you
funds and so on. For the more experienced, they offer online.

www.kotakstreet.com www.personalfn.com
THE ABSOLUTE WINNER
JUDGES CHOICE & POPULAR CHOICE Kotakstreet offers online trading Personalfn has information,
services as well as news and news and services on everything
information about the stock mar- to do with personal finance—
www.timesofmoney.com
kets. The site provides market insurance, mutual funds, loans,
commentary, in-depth analyses, housing, credit cards and so on.
stock trading tips and company The content on the site is com-
Scout for the research. You can trade, buy and prehensive and every subject is
best personal sell stocks and make payments explained in a manner that’s easy
online. It has tools to manage to understand. You can shop
finance options your portfolio and keep track of around for the best options as
with Click and the buying and selling record in well as apply online for loans,
Compare your online account. Sign up for credit cards and insurance. Per-
Kotakstreet’s daily bulletin to be sonalfn has handy tools such as
updated with the latest happen- loan calculators, marriage plan-
ings in the ring and hot juicy tips ners, education, retirement and
THE OTHER NOMINEES

on what stock to pick up. PPF calculators.

Does talk about NAVs, equity or insurance befuddle you? If you need
to learn more about investing and where to put your money then Time-
sofmoney.com is a great place to start. The site is divided into sections
such as consumer finance, investment and an NRI centre. Scouting
around for information on where to get loans at attractive interest www.equitymaster.com www.apnaloan.com
rates? The consumer finance section has all the dope—from personal
loans, home loans and auto finance to applying for a credit card Think stocks and equity and Apnaloan is perhaps the best bet
online. You can also read up on the basics of how to apply for loans, Equitymaster is what comes to if you are seeking to satisfy your
compare loans and read tips and handy pointers on shopping for the mind. This site is one of the best personal finance needs. The site
best deal and what to look for in the fine print before you sign on the online resources for research has tie-ups with some of the
dotted line. on stocks and equity. It has biggest banks and financial insti-
If you want to make your money grow, then you should head to detailed stock quotes and online tutions in the country in order to
the investments section which has information on how to put your trading, besides detailed market bring you loans at reduced rates
money in mutual funds, apply for insurance, stocks and bank reports, graphs and analyses to for a variety of purposes—
deposits. The site has tutorials on how to get started that function help you make all the right deci- homes, automobiles, household
like a ‘how-to’ of investing in mutual funds and shares. It also has sions. Trade online from the goods, for the purchase of land
stock quotes, fund search, fund analysers, market commentary and convenience of your desktop and for travel. You can apply for
hot trading tips. and keep track of your choicest a loan online (which is sanc-
Top of the Web (% votes) You can buy and sell stocks through Equitymaster tioned after furnishing the
Timesofmoney 34 shares online and manage Portfolio Tracker. The site also relevant documents) and you
Apnaloan 22 your portfolio too. Besides keps you updated with stock can even check your loan
this, Timesofmoney also has tickers status online.
Kotakstreet 15
online bill payment, tax
Equitymaster 15
planning and ‘Remit to India’
Personalfn 14 services.

54 November 2001
■ connect~ web awards

-mail has transformed communication in the are reliable and, more importantly, fast. Message

E twenty-first century. And the Indian sites offer-

ing e-mail services have held their own against
the mighty ‘foreign’ sites and created a decent num-
composing options, advanced folder management,
mail filtering, and integration with your other mail
accounts are just few of the services that they
ber of user base. These sites offer more just an e-mail provide, besides the ability to send mails in any
services; they present communication solutions that language.

mail.sify.com mail.indiatimes.com
THE ABSOLUTE WINNER
JUDGES CHOICE & POPULAR CHOICE Sifymail has helped bring e-mail Indiatimes offers 10 MB of free
to a wider Indian audience. space and a whole host of inno-
www.rediffmail.com Apart from English, it supports vative features and services. The
mail in eight Indian languages. latest is the ‘Videsh se Sandesh
The interface is intuitive and has Seva’ for NRIs in the US who can
Use voicemail; options for you to customize the send letters anywhere in India
appearance of your inbox by through their Indiatimes mail.
grab a mike, hit using different colour schemes. Indiatimes also has calendars,
‘record’ and It has an address book and set- appointments, reminders and a
attach a voice tings for signatures as well as briefcase where you can store
message to your mail filters and the mail search your files online. Indiatimes mail
option. You can also access your composer is really good with for-
e-mails POP3 mail account through matting options for your mes-
Sifymail. sage text like background, fonts,
etc and you can send HTML mail
THE OTHER NOMINEES

through your Indiatimes account.

Lightning fast e-mail that reaches its destination seconds after you
Hit ‘Send’. That’s Rediffmail. The inbox has an uncluttered design and
a neat layout. The pages are light and don’t take forever to download
into your browser.
Rediffmail offers folder management to store your mail. You can www.epatra.com mail.indya.com
also create your own folders. The address book has options to store
mails of individuals or groups so that one can send out group e- Epatra is a multilingual e-mail The e-mail service at Indya
mails. You can change your display name in messages according to service that supports Hindi, looks like just another e-mail
your preference—it doesn’t depend on what name you entered in Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, service with the usual features,
the registration form. You can also add your signature to e-mail Malayalam, Assamese, Bengali, but it’s not. It comes packed
messages. Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and with an address book, a calen-
Rediff has a mail filtering option which lets you block senders by Oriya, besides English. Even if dar, a To Do list with features
entering their e-mail address. In case you are going on vacation or you use another e-mail service, like spam filter, safety filter,
are so swamped with work that you can’t reply for a while, set your you don’t need to download Indi- vacation reply, automatic filing,
vacation mail to notify your friends. an language fonts to read a mail and tools to manage your mail-
You can also send voicemail from Rediffmail. All you need is a sent through Epatra. It lets you box better. Indya mail has some
microphone and a couple of clicks and in seconds a voice message choose the language you are pretty good external mail set-
will reach your friends. comfortable with as your default tings—you can activate up to
Top of the Web (% votes) You can use Rediffmail to language, and you can use other three POP3 mail accounts and
Rediffmail 51 download mails from other languages as well. It also has a assign a colour to them to know
Indiatimes 22 POP3 accounts. Just add in post-a-mail option that lets you instantly which mailbox the mail
the settings and you’ll be able send a mail by post. is from.
Epatra 10
to keep track of multiple
Indya 9
accounts through one
Sify 8 account.

56 November 2001
 www.zeelearn.com

Zeelearn brings together some of

oing homework certainly has sites do a great job of networking

D
the best educational resources on
changed, thanks to the Net. teachers, parents and students. the Web like Campusmatters.com,
Education and e-learning sites They also make education fun schoolsahead.com and e-learning
leverage the power of the Web to and provide aid for college stu- from Zeduniv which has courses
enrich the learning environment dents to pursue studies further. and modules on IT learning—all in
of students in schools and col- They also facilitate professionals one window. The link to Campus-
leges. Utilising study tools like to get a shot at continuing educa- matters displays information on
online encyclopedias, tutorials, tion and upgrading their skills universities in India and abroad;
and informative articles, these online at affordable rates. Schoolsahead has online tutorials
and learning aids. Zeelearn has a
section on offbeat careers and
WINNER — JUDGES CHOICE offers the facility to chat with
career advisors.
Is your day so busy that you can’t make time for a full time
www.netvarsity.com course or even spare a couple of hours a day to upgrade your
IT skills?
Netvarsity is the perfect place to learn at your own pace.
www.schoolnetindia.com
It has a wide range of both short and long-term courses as Homework will never be boring
well as IT certifications like MCSE and MCSD at affordable again, not if you get it done at
rates. Netvarsity also has online tests to help you test your Schoolnetindia. This site makes
understanding of subjects. The site offers tips on e-learning learning fun with projects,

THE OTHER NOMINEES

which helps you get accustomed to learning on your own. quizzes, interactive tools and
Chill out at Netvarsity’s ‘Coffee Shop’ where you can try your utilities, online tests, tutorials
hand at fun tests, post graffiti on the Wallmag, read up on and links to sites that aid learn-
book reviews and bond with other students at Netvarsity. ing. There’s a section for parents
Techrag helps you catch up with the latest news and updates with articles and ways on how to
on what’s happening in the IT world, while you can read up on help their kids enhance their
Test your knowledge how to make the right career choices at ‘Career Post’. education online. You’ll also find
directories and Web pages of
with online tests and schools, e-dictionaries and
then read up in the online encyclopedias.
library
www.gurukulonline.com
Top of the Web (% votes) WINNER — POPULAR CHOICE Gurukulonline provides interac-
tive e-learning solutions for IT
Egurucool 36
skills and online training for the
Netvarsity 27 www.egurucool.com corporate sector. The site has a
Gurukulonline 16 wide range of courses, from
Schoolnetindia 11 computer basics to solution
Zeelearn 10 architecture. Gurukulonline
online courseware is compre-
eGurucool leverages the Net to enhance your educa- hensive and supported by graph-
tion and learning experience. The site’s ‘Smartstudy’ ics for comprehension. Virtual
has e-courses to match the requirements of different classrooms ensure that your
school education boards like ICSE and CBSE. Smart- online experience is fruitful. You
study is available for schools in India and in the Gulf. can download applications like
You can pay for the course and get it activated online. the Gurukulonline e-learning
The site also has resources to help students prepare for assistant to aid learning.
entrance exams like test papers for medical entrance
exams. It has a wide network of learning centres all eConnect service connects teachers, students and par-
over India to supplement online courses. The site’s ents with services like eAssignments and eClassnotes.

57
■ connect~ web awards

www.glamsham.com
Tinsel town, glamour, music, and
f you think there’s not enough music, and theatre—with news,

I
theatre—that’s what Glamsham
entertainment online, these sites views, reviews and interviews. You is all about. The movies section of
will prove you wrong with online can also catch up on movie release the site has reviews, previews,
games, contests and promos, and of dates and trailers, and sing along to trailers, news snippets and links
course, the added lure of prizes. hip new numbers as well as golden to movie sites. It also has a list of
These entertainment sites keep you oldies. For the couch potatoes, star birthdays and interviews. If
in touch with the latest buzz in the there’s news on the hottest soaps you’re a theatre buff, there’s plen-
entertainment industry—movies, and movies on the boob tube. ty happening in English, Marathi,
Hindi and Gujarati drama, includ-
ing a listing of schedules and
reviews. Glamsham also has
WINNER — JUDGES CHOICE music charts, lyrics and audio
files of popular songs.
You’ll never get tired of freaking out at Hungama. This site has
www.hungama.com loads of attitude. Cool contests and promos which get updat-
ed on a regular basis give you a shot at winning some great
prizes. Hungama’s Trivia section has questions on Bollywood, www.contests2win.com
business, sports, movies, and history. Questions are updated
several times a day to give you a chance to win Hungama This is the place to try your luck
points, besides preparing you for the ‘hotseat’ at KBC. If triv- at winning prizes. Contests2win
ia’s not enough for you, chill out and win loads of points at the hosts some well designed inter-
Hungama Gaming Zone. You can redeem your points at the active promos and contests and

THE OTHER NOMINEES

Redemption Centre or enter the Hungama Sweepstakes and lets you keep track of points and
bid for stuff like cell phones and music systems with your credits that you win while partic-
Hungama ‘Cyberpoints’. Hungama also has sections where ipating. From the Contests2win
you can catch up on Hollywood and Bollywood buzz. Read up family come sites like Quiz2win
on book reviews at the Hungama Bookshelf and buy some of and Polls2win where you can
Win cool stuff like your favourite titles. You can also send e-greetings and buy answer trivia questions and win
music and CD titles. prizes.
mobile phones at
the Hungama
sweepstakes

www.indiagames.com
Top of the Web (% votes) WINNER — POPULAR CHOICE Indiagames’ genre lies in videshi
Indiafm 63 action games with an exclusive
Hungama 18 www.indiafm.com ‘made in India’ tag. Examples are
Contests2win 11 Yoddha (the warrior) and Aakra-
Indiagames 5 man (attack) and several multi-
Glamsham 3 media games with a Bollywood
or a festival theme. The site has
This site has the juiciest gossip in tinsel town, plus games for kids as well. You can
reviews, news, trailers, and movie stills of the latest sign up, create your profile, and
flicks. A watering hole for the star-struck and the gog- keep track of your scores. The
gle-eyed—one can read and listen to interviews, catch site also facilitates interaction
up on favourite actor’s birthday and head for links to with other online gamers through
Web sites on stars in the film industry. message boards and instant
The online jukebox at Indiafm has clips of the latest messaging.
Indipop songs. The site also has lyrics to sing along
with the audio clips, in addition to downloads, wallpa-
pers and screensavers of the latest Hindi flicks.

58 November 2001
 www.doctorsaab.com
This site takes care of questions
portal a day keeps the doctor people-friendly. What used to be a

A
you wanted to ask but didn’t
away. You might still need a nervous visit to the family doctor know whom to approach. From
doctor in real life but updating to settle anxieties or minor queries human health and diseases to fit-
yourself on health and fitness will is now supplemented by online ness and nutrition, and from the
ensure that you maintain a well- heath portals which update you basics of medicine to applying
balanced lifestyle. about ailments, solutions available, first aid, Doctorsaab explains
Online portals have demystified and how to contact doctors everything simply and clearly.
medicine by making it more for help. Don’t miss the ‘Home remedies’
section which lists panaceas for
common disorders and illnesses.
‘Doctor’s corner’ is a place
WINNER — JUDGES CHOICE where doctors can exchange
views and information.
Everything you ever wanted to know about Ayurveda and how
www.allayurveda.com it can help you live longer is present in Allayurveda. The
ayurvedic approach to diagnosis and treatment of ailments
and diseases helps you understand your body and incorporate
www.apollolife.com
this ancient Hindu science of health and medicine in your Apollolife caters to people seek-
lifestyle through food and diet planning, Vastu Shastra, medi- ing medical information as well
tation and spiritual remedies like mantras and music therapy. as doctors, hospitals, and NRIs.
The different sections of the site contain Ayurvedic solu- The homepage lists information

THE OTHER NOMINEES

tions for common ailments, home remedies, health tip of the of health and diseases while
week and recipes for eating healthy. Allayurveda has a Herb links on the homepage take you
dictionary listing the A to Z of herbs used in Ayurvedic treat- to separate sections for the rele-
ment. You can also buy herbal products at Allayurveda. The vant target audience. Navigate
site has alternative treatments like Acupressure, Reiki, Aro- through the Cancer or the Aller-
matherapy and even Laughter Therapy. gy Centre or read up on Ayurve-
The site which Then, you can keep yourself updated on the latest da. Apart from information,
can help you research findings of ayurvedic physicians and institutions in Apollolife has useful health tools
India and abroad. like a calcium calculator or a
adopt Ayurveda diabetes risk test.
in your life

www.askdrshah.com
For those who prefer to take an
Top of the Web (% votes) WINNER — POPULAR CHOICE
alternative path to medicine,
Healthlibrary 27 AskDrShah is all about the use of
Apollolife 26 www.healthlibrary.com homoeopathy to cure illnesses
Doctorsaab 23 and staying healthy. The site has
Allayurveda 14 information about homoeopathy
Askdrshah 10 and its advantages, and strives
to provide a better understand-
The virtual medical library at Healthlibrary.com is a one- ing of the science through FAQs,
stop resource for information on health and medicine. myth-busters and information on
The site has the world’s largest consumer heath library sources of homoeopathic medi-
online as well as fully unabridged medical textbooks and cine. It displays information on
health magazines available absolutely free for reference. health and diseases and how
Healthlibrary has reading rooms that you can enter homoeopathy can be a panacea
to research specific topics on ailments and diseases. for bodily disorders.
The library also contains directories of hospitals and
doctors in India as well as medical equipment manu- medical bookstores and libraries and medical associa-
facturers, pharmaceutical companies and blood banks, tions in India.

59
■ connect~ web awards

ith hundreds of thousands of Web sites floating you all that you need from content to online services

W around in cyberspace, haven’t you wished that

there was a single site through which you could
access the best? That’s what portals do for you. Online
like e-shopping, auctions, as well as communication
tools like e-mail, chat rooms, instant messengers,
forums, message boards, etc. These portals are also
portals are our windows to the Web world. They are popular hubs where surfers can converge together and
single-access points, which help us explore the Net and be a part of an online community where they can
find what we’re looking for. These Indian portals bring exchange ideas and views online.

www.123india.com www.indiatimes.com
THE ABSOLUTE WINNER
JUDGES CHOICE & POPULAR CHOICE 123india.com has a wide variety This portal from the Times Group
of sections—cricket, contests, offers an exhaustive range of
www.rediff.com games, jokes, shopping, movies, sections covering information
music, news, finance, horo- on a variety of topics ranging
scopes and others. The online from entertainment to finance to
With its posi- clubs are an interesting feature services such as shopping, auc-
tioned content, of 123india. They enable you to tions, travel, bill pay and online
services and bond online with people who education. It’s also a great place
share the same interests as you. to hang out, virtually speaking,
communication If clubs aren’t your scene, then and make friends using online
tools, Rediff is find the love of your life at the dating clubs and chat rooms.
India’s ‘Window ‘Love and Romance’ nook. The Play your favourite strategy and
site also offers services like e- word games online and if play-
to the Web’ mail, forums, chat, e-greetings, ing alone bores you, you can
homepages, but you need to pay play games online with your
THE OTHER NOMINEES

to use these services. friends.

Rediff is the undisputed king of Indian portals. It’s probably one of
the few sites to live up to its name in Indian cyberspace in terms of
the quality and services offered to online users. The site is fairly
well laid out. Whether it’s producing content in-house or partnering
with other Web sites, Rediff is constantly innovating to offers users www.sify.com www.indya.com
nothing short of the best, be it news, buying information, finding a
job, making financial decisions or just meeting people. The site also Sify has a large number of sec- Apart from the usual sections
has an online shopping section featuring books, music, apparel, tions in addition to an aggrega- found on a portal, Indya also has
cassettes and CDs. It has services such as e-mail and Rediff ‘Bol’, tion of a number of sites channels such as Law, Health
an instant messenger. belonging to the Sify network. and Art. Couch potatoes will defi-
Rediff has channels on news, finance, money, astrology, contests, The site is quite well laid out and nitely love the TV guide in Indya,
e-cards, movies, women, contests, matrimonials and auctions. Red- doesn’t confuse you. Navigation which features channels from the
iff’s Guide to the Net is a neat tool and so is Rediff Matchmaker. The is a breeze with drop-down Star TV network. Read up on pre-
latter is a great place to find the love in your life. If you are looking for menus and a well-categorised views, schedules and even sign
information on a particular topic and have absolutely no clue as to homepage. It provides services up for reminders for your
where to start, then the Rediff search should be helpful. The search such as search, e-mail, e-greet- favourite ‘not to be missed’ TV
results are fairly accurate and it also has a fairly good Web directory. ings, shopping, news and so on. programs. If you are in search of
And don’t miss Rediff’s ‘hot Check out ‘The Café’, which screensavers or wallpapers or
Top of the Web (% votes) keywords’—use this to locate offers you a medium for commu- would like to take a sneak peek at
Rediff 37 some great sites. nication with people online cricket scores while you’re work-
Indiatimes 34 through clubs, messengers, chat, ing, you’ll get all the necessary
and mail services. tools and utilities at ‘Downloads’
123india 11
Indya 11
Sify 7

62 November 2001
 ime was when one had to scan ‘recruitment’ ads and ple of clicks. These sites make you accessible to thou-

T classifieds in a newspaper, put resume in an envelope,

post it, and then start the wait. Not so with online job
sites. All you need to do is use tools to build your resume,
sands of potential employers all over the world who
might have a dream job for you. For employers, job sites
are a cost effective way for selecting personnel from
browse for lob listings and apply for the job with a cou- thousands of resumes to fit the profiles exactly.

www.careerindia.com www.naukri.com
THE ABSOLUTE WINNER
JUDGES CHOICE & POPULAR CHOICE Search for job openings at Put your resume on Naukri and
Careerindia through a simple you can be pretty sure that it will
search by location, job function be seen. This famous job site has
www.jobsahead.com
or industry. You can create up to a huge database of job vacan-
five resumes, hide or activate cies which can be searched by
your resume or set up job alerts location or a keyword search.
according to your requirements. You can also browse through
Get an instant You can even read up on employ- jobs by category or upload your
job alert as er profiles. CV to the Resume Manager at
soon as a Careerindia has information Naukri which brings you job
and interesting articles on alerts. Want your resume sent
vacancy arises career development and career out to 800 placement agencies?
options in various industries. Sign up for the Resume Zapper.
The site also offers career coun- The site also has career advice
seling and the best ways to for students as well as for
THE OTHER NOMINEES

succeed. professionals.
Jobsahead is the perfect place to drop anchor when it comes to
advertising and searching for jobs. The site has a job search which
helps you look for jobs using a three-criteria approach—location,
function and industry. The search results display a brief description
of the job with links to find out more, as well as a brief description www.people-one.com www.deevajobs.com
about the company. You can also search within results and do a ‘One
click search’ where you just click on a link to view jobs for freshers or People-one has job openings Deevajobs lets jobseekers
even for senior management positions. spanning a number of industries. browse for job openings and
Jobsahead sees itself as more than just a job site—it’s a site It also has resume creation tools. employers find good workers
that makes the entire experience of looking for a job easy. The The site features some insightful with absolute ease. You can
Resume Builder makes creating CVs a breeze. All you need to do is articles on career development, search jobs by category or skill
fill out various fields like personal details, education and work expe- relocating and working abroad, and read guides on how to cre-
rience. Jobsahead also offers services like Right Resume, a profes- interviews with HR managers, ate an e-resume and how to han-
sional resume writing service and Resume Blaster, a resume and tips on job hunting. This site dle interview questions. The
forwarding service. You can track your applications, interview calls also has good articles on what it research desk carries articles on
and rejected applications from ‘Myjobsahead’. You can also sign up takes to get into different companies. The site also has
for Job Alert newsletters which keep you notified about new job careers or lines of work. resume builder and a ‘job flash’
openings, or the Job messen- If you’re confused and can’t for job seekers while employers
Top of the Web (% votes) ger which sends you job figure out a career option, ‘Ask have tools to manage applicants
Jobsahead 36 alerts suited to your skills. Anjali’ and she’ll help you sort and an e-secretary to help
For employers, Jobsahead out your choices and come to a them correspond with job
Naukri 32
provides access to a huge decision. applicants.
Careerindia 14
database as well as ensures
People-one 11
visibility to job seekers
Deevajobs 7 for a fee.

63
 ■ connect~ web awards

www.rediff.com
Which is the place you’re most
f you’re a news junkie who can’t multimedia, infographics, video or

I
likely to head to for to catch the
wait to get your hands on taaza news tickers to give users their dose latest news in India? Rediff’s
khabar as it happens, then your of current affairs, business or opin- news coverage is vast with
doorstep isn’t the only place where ion on what’s happening in the reports, analysis, interviews and
you’ll get it. world. Apart from catching up with commentary on the happening
Online news sites aren’t just news, these sites are a forum for peo- events in India as well as world-
about reporting news. They’re about ple to exchange views and opinions wide. The site has an image
leveraging the versatility of the Web through message boards, chat and gallery with slide shows of the
and using different means such as instant messengers. latest news events. It has a good
archive that you can browse
through to catch up on what
WINNER — JUDGES CHOICE you’ve missed. Rediff’s news spe-
cials are their best feature.
This e-newspaper is truly a great place to catch up on news
www.thenewspapertoday.com updates on politics, business, sports, travel, entertainment,
weather and people. The site is well designed and easy to
browse through, considering the volume of content online.
www.ndtv.com
The layout is attractive and the navigation is well planned to NDTV, better known for its pres-
let you sift through what you want with ease. ence on television, has a fairly
Apart from reports, interviews and exclusives, you’ll find good online presence. It offers
interactive info-graphics, maps and photo-essays. Check out extensive coverage on politics,
the video clips of recent important events that you can stream business, sports and entertain-

THE OTHER NOMINEES

to your desktop. ment. NDTV has video clips and
The Newspapertoday also features live chat with live news broadcasts that you
celebrities, weather updates and polls. You can also sign up can stream to your desktop.
for its newsletter to get news delivered and you may even Check out Photofeatures for
download the news ticker that will run news on your desk- ‘news in pictures’ and videos
Customise your top. Newspapertoday can be customised to your needs— of NDTV special investigations
just sign up and select the topics that you want to keep and exclusives. NDTV.com also
newspaper and yourself informed about. The site also offers tools such has a news ticker that you can
catch news as it as tax planners, portfolio tracker, e-mail and instant download.
happens messenger.

www.tehelka.com
Always in the eye of a storm,
Top of the Web (% votes) WINNER — POPULAR CHOICE Tehelka has marched into areas
Timesofindia 30 where others fear to venture.
NDTV 23 www.timesofindia.com Investigative reporting and news
Rediff 22 analysis is its forte. But Tehelka
Tehelka 13 also has a great lifestyles and
Thenewspapertoday 12 entertainment section covering
the buzz on what’s happening in
If you missed reading your morning newspaper, you can tinsel town, society and travel. If
catch it online and you won’t miss a thing. It’s all here at you love reading you’ll find it
Timesofindia.com. This site isn’t just about articles from hard not to like the literary sec-
the newspaper uploaded on to the Web. It offers you tion on Tehelka with its extracts,
the complete experience of reading a newspaper reviews, profiles on authors, and
online—the interface has a feel similar to a newspaper. essays on the written word.
The news coverage is extensive and it covers the same
sections as in the newspaper.
You can also read the supplements with the news- section. You don’t even need to miss your daily cross-
paper online as well as check out the classifieds word—it’s all there.

64 November 2001
 ow many times have you been on the verge of going tories build huge repositories of Web sites categorised

H crazy hunting for sites on a particular topic? Or

nearly torn your hair out exasperated with search
results that were exactly the opposite of what you were
into different sections that are a ready reference point.
All you need to do is browse through and you’ll find
what you’re looking for. The search engines listed here
looking for? Powerful search engines help us navigate bring you the best of the Indian Web with the least
through the maze of information in cyberspace avoid- effort. They are your ‘compass’, helping you navigate
ing dead ends or dead links. Comprehensive Web direc- through the tangled web of online information.

www.searchindia.com www.123india.com
THE ABSOLUTE WINNER
JUDGES CHOICE & POPULAR CHOICE Searchindia is a good search The search feature at 123india
engine for locating Indian sites. has a simple keyword search.
Although, the homepage has The advanced search option lets
www.khoj.com only a search box with a couple you define how you want the
of links, don’t let that fool you. keyword to be matched and
This site has a Web directory offers case sensitivity too. You
The India that carries some neat sites and can browse through the Web
it offers easy navigation that sites in the directory either by
Directory in helps you ferret out the best category or use the directory
Khoj has a great sites you want. You can choose search—a feature that lets you
selection of to search through the Web direc- search for Web sites through the
indigenous sites tory using the keyword search or directory or even within a partic-
browse by category. The site ular category. If you want to find
also has a city guide, a directory the latest Indian sites, all you
of hotels in India and weather have to do is head for ‘What’s
THE OTHER NOMINEES

forecast for Indian cities. New’ at 123india.com.

Khoj, part of the Sify network of sites, packs in a Web search powered
by Google, a Web page search for Indian sites and a news headlines
search which searches news headlines from Sify. The results are fair-
ly accurate.
But Khoj is best known for its Web directory service. It has has www.bharathseek.com www.appuonline.com
two comprehensive Web directories. The India directory is well cate-
gorised and has a good selection of Indian sites. The categories cover This site contains a search serv- Appuonline is one of the best
government, sports, science, engineering, veterinary science, and ice and a Web Directory. online guides to Indian sites. The
online communities of Indians, to name a few. There’s a brief descrip- Bharathseek search is a key- keyword search throws up
tion of the site with a link that opens up in another window, ensuring word search, but its Web direc- search results containing sites
that you don’t lose track of where you started out. The world directory tory is pretty good, covering a that are both Indian and non-
has a large number of sites categorised alphabetically and subject- variety of categories from enter- Indian. Appuonline’s Web direc-
wise. If you’re simply browsing around and not looking for anything in tainment and culture to science tory is its best feature, providing
particular, check out the site’s ‘what’s hot’ keywords to update and society. These categories links and descriptions of the Web
yourself on what’s new and happening and what everyone else is contain a fairly large number of pages. Another good feature of
looking for. sites (but Indian only) and Web the site is its categorisation of
‘Ask Sify’ question search is another great way to look for informa- pages. You can also use the Web pages from the directory all
tion and sites. This directory has search box to search through the through the site in a manner so
Top of the Web (% votes) more than 10,000 questions for Web directory. The site has as to suit a particular interest
Khoj 42 which you’ll find the answers news, weather as well as links to (such as shopping or travel) or a
123india 31 here. You can either ask Sify a other sites on music, e-greetings certain section of the population
question or browse through and forums. (women, children and so on).
Searchindia 13
sites category-wise. Khoj also
Appuonline 7
has links to the Open Directory
Bharathseek 7 Project at www.dmoz.org.

65
■ connect~ web awards

www.easybuymusic.com
Whatever e-commerce pundits
nline shopping promised a using the Net as a medium to buy

O
had visualised e-shopping would
smooth path from your desk- and sell products and services. be, Easybuymusic seems to have
top to your doorstep. It was Online shopping and auction come the closest to achieving it.
about getting the best deals on sites today have come a long way The site sells cassettes and CD
everything, right from cars to a from being merely Web pages titles of various genres of
pack of detergent, online, in just a with a limited range of products music—reggae, film music, clas-
few clicks without having to and a telephone number to sical, instrumental music—as
elbow your way through crowded online malls which provide you well as movies and CD ROMs.
shops. It was about creating an the best products and brands, Music buffs will enjoy reading
entire community of people convenience, prices and security. the latest on the music scene in
India and abroad. Easybuymusic
WINNER — JUDGES CHOICE also offers excellent discounts
on certain titles on the site.
Slow but steady. The tortoise in the crazy race among the vari-
www.fabmart.com ous shopping and auction sites promises to offer consumers
everything they need online. Fabmart started small, with only an
www.bidorbuyindia.com
online music store, but today has expanded into a number of
categories such as books, computers, jewellery, groceries, Bidorbuyindia has a large num-
movies, toys and watches. On Fabmart, you can find what you ber of categories and products
need quickly with its well-planned navigation and searches. and is always buzzing with activ-
Every product here has extensive information listed, like ity, contests, crazy auctions—a

THE OTHER NOMINEES

reviews on music, songs, or books. Titles in the music store glance at the homepage will tell
have 30-second audio clips so you can sample a song before you that. Navigation is a strong
buying it. This site ranks high on personalisation—you can cre- point here. The City Search fea-
ate and save shopping lists, make wish lists, maintain address ture helps you search for auc-
books or view purchase history. Little extras such as free gift- tions within your city, and the
wrapping for toys make it a delight to shop here. It has a wide efficient site map ensures that
Fabmart couples range of payment options and ships goods to over 850 locations you don’t get lost in Bidorbuy. It
good reviews and India. Efficient customer service is one of Fabmart’s strong also has a gift shop. The best
points. feature of this site is its bargain
a choice of prod- hunter.
ucts with reliable
service
Shopping.rediff.com
Rediff’s vast product range, con-
Top of the Web (% votes) WINNER — POPULAR CHOICE
venient payment options and
Baazee 48 reliability make it an ideal place
Fabmart 18 www.baazee.com for shopping online. You can buy
Rediff 15 music, food, clothes, furniture,
Bidorbuyindia 11 flowers, etc. Rediff also has a
Easybuymusic 8 number on online stores featured
such as The Bombay Store, Nike
Baazee.com is a virtual paradise if you are scouting for and Compaq. Rediff’s gift centre
stuff that you can’t simply enter a store and buy off the has gifts for almost all occa-
rack (alternatively it’s also a great place to get rid of sions. Use the Gift matcher to
stuff you don’t want). Coins and stamps, antique help you make a decision
furniture to second hand cell phones and musical according to the person you
instruments—it’s all here and you can end up buying want to give a gift to and the
something at a throwaway price. occasion.
The bidding process is made easy on Baazee with
features such as Autobid, which you can set to have to manually enter a bid each time. Bazee is a good
increase your bid by a particular amount so you don’t place to shop for that special something.

66 November 2001
■ connect~ web awards

an no one come between you and your television can offer in terms of action, but online sports sites

C on the days there’s a cricket match or a Wimble-

don tournament going on? Are you in heaven
when you see Tendulkar crack the ball way beyond
come pretty close with live updates, scoreboards, play-
er profiles as well as game or match statistics.
So the next time you miss a match on TV while at
the boundary or Kournikova work her magic on work, don’t curse and wring your hands in despair! Just
the courts? log on to your favourite sites and catch some action
The Net can’t really compete with what television online.

www.golfindia.com www.criclive.com
THE ABSOLUTE WINNER
JUDGES CHOICE & POPULAR CHOICE Do you consider golf a boring The homepage contains the
sport? That’s probably because scorecard of big games being
you don’t know much about it. currently played in India. You
www.khel.com Log on to Golfindia.com—it don’t have to visit the site if you
might change your perspective download a desktop score appli-
on the game. cation, which gives you the
With live This site helps you keep up score right away.
score tickers with the golf scene in India with The site features updates on
from Khel, its schedules and details of golf the game, along with inter-
events, information on golf views, a fact file of teams cur-
you won’t courses in India as well as pro- rently playing, player profiles as
miss a four files and statistics of Indian golf well as an image gallery, wall-
again players. papers, and other goodies.
Golfindia also has a newslet- Criclive even has a database of
ter you can subscribe to and past matches that you might
THE OTHER NOMINEES

links to other golf sites. want to catch up on.

Khel, a part of the Sify.com network, is the one-stop guide if you want to
stay tuned to events in the world of sport. It provides excellent coverage
of sports such as cricket, tennis, golf, football, hockey, chess, motor
sports and cue sports such as billiards. All sections on Khel, from tennis
to hockey to Formula One, are filled with news about the tournaments, www.clickcricket.com www.magiccricket.com
news updates, match schedules, photos, columns and several links to
player profiles, statistics, rankings, interviews and quizzes. Clickcricket carries news, inter- Magiccricket has team and play-
The cricket section offers live cricket scores for one dayers as well views, columns, records of previ- er profiles, a database of test
as test matches and is updated every minute. It has a desktop score tick- ous matches and information on records and a ‘Cricket Calendar’,
er which refreshes every 2 minutes to give you the latest scores. Khel forthcoming series. Shop here listing all the one day and test
has a section on golf that not only carries information on the Indian golf for cricket gear or accessories matches played around the
scene, but also covers the origins of the game. The motor sports section at the Shopping Mall or bid for world. Let the scores come to
mostly covers Formula One racing with news on races held around the cricket memorabilia at the Auc- you via the score ticker or sub-
world and in India too. You can sign up for Khel sports updates and tions counter. Other interesting scribe to ‘Score Flash’ and the
download screensavers and wallpapers with sports themes. Khel spe- things you can do is check out newsletter to get updates in your
cials contain polls on your favourite sportsperson, and you can read the height and weight charts at mailbox.
about what it takes to be a sportsperson, and about young and budding the Fitness corner, read Sourav’s Magiccricket has polls and
sportsmen in ‘Little Khiladi’. Don’t thoughts in his Clickcricket Diary chat, along with fun sections
Top of the Web (% votes) forget to check out entertainment and have fun with astrology, such as a ‘Test your CQ’ Caption
Khel 40 hotspots for fun sports such as quotes, Clicketoons and the contest, a ‘Gamezone’ with a
Clickcricket 27 bowling, go-karting and pool in hottest cricket gossip on crossword, and other interesting
major metros in India. And that’s ‘Masala’. cricket games.
Criclive 18
not all. Khel’s photo galleries help
Magiccricket 10
you get a glimpse of the great
Golfindia 5 moments in sport.

68 November 2001
 eaving on a jet plane for your dream holiday isn’t as information, maps and weather to tools such as itin-

L easy as it sounds. Ticket reservations, travel docu-

mentation and all those details associated with even
the simplest of trips can bog you down and rob you of
erary and route planners. These sites also take care of
all your booking and reservations online, travel docu-
mentation such as visas (and applying for them), pass-
the excitement of enjoying your holidays. Here’s where ports, travel insurance, foreign exchange and even
online travel sites step in. They can help you plan your loans and finance for your holiday. You can do all this
trip down to every last detail—from destination online, avoiding travel agents and sleepless nights.

www.makemytrip.com www.travnova.com
THE ABSOLUTE WINNER
JUDGES CHOICE & POPULAR CHOICE Makemytrip is a one-stop travel A well-designed site, Travnova
shop, which takes care of all offers easy navigation though
your travel arrangements— sections on Indian and interna-
www.traveljini.com flights and train tickets, hotel tional destinations, tour pack-
reservations, car rentals and lux- ages, weekend deals, adventure
ury cruises. Read up on destina- tours, etc. Travnova’s destination
tion information as well as check information is among the best
Plan your out video clips on destinations in around with its exhaustive infor-
itinerary in a India and Australia. mation on Indian destinations.
Makemytrip also offers trav- You can search for a flight and
jiffy with el documentation services such book tickets in real-time through
smart finders as obtaining passports, visas an airline central reservation
and insurance. It has a facility system. Interactive tools on the
that helps you apply for a loan if site include currency converter,
you want to travel now and pay distance finder, STD/ISD finder
THE OTHER NOMINEES

later. and passport office finder.

Traveljini comes out the best in Indian travel sites, offering a wide range
of services from domestic and international flight tickets to hotel reser-
vations, domestic and international tour packages, documentation and
so on. It is well structured with sections on flights, hotels, cars, tours
and easily navigable links to services and planners. The search link for www.outlooktraveler.com www.airticketsindia.com
the entire site can help you look for accommodation, shopping, and
hotels either by state or by city. If you’re not in a hurry and want to hold Outlooktraveler is best for afford- Airticketsindia has online air
out for a better deal, you can bid for Traveljini packages and walk away able hotel packages for destina- reservations and Indian and
with a holiday at a throwaway price.Traveljini has an online flight search tions within India and abroad, as world travel guides. You can
for international flights. The Flight Route Finder locates flights within well as packages to theme desti- search for flight availability and
India and the Smart Fare Finder checks international fares for tickets nations—eco-tourism, pilgrim- make online reservations in real-
from India to destinations worldwide. In this section you can also check age and so on. Read up their time. The site also has informa-
for the days on which flights from different airlines operate. destination information, honey- tion on baggage allowance and
The Rail Route Finder helps you with information about train routes moon hideaways, and weekend frequent flier programs offered
within the country, including the arrival and departure time for every sta- getaways. by airlines. It has an India as well
tion it halts at, and the train fare. Traveljini also has an excellent data- The Outlooktraveler Airshop as a world destination guide and
base of domestic and international hotels and packages. It offers offers flight bookings, excursion its travel planner section has
destination information as well as fares, and car rentals among links to international rail sched-
Top of the Web (% votes) information on visa and passport other services. The site also fea- ules, exchange rates, a currency
Traveljini 31 requirements. And if you have a tures a list of restaurants that converter, time zones, and
Outlooktraveler 22 specific query about a place, the you can search for according to weather reports to help you plan
answers to which you can’t find location and cuisine. your holiday effectively.
Makemytrip 16
on the site, just ask a ‘jini’ (expert
Travnova 16
on a particular location) and
Airticketsindia 15 you’ll get your answer.

69
■ r e s o l v e ~ wired

AVINA LOBO Customising StarOffice: Like Office, StarOf-

StarOffice is back with ou’ve been constant companions through fice applications have a common customisation
its ‘new improved’
version. Let’s find out
if it’s worth ditching
Y the years—been together during the good
times and seen each other through the bad.
We’re not talking about your childhood
buddy or your pet dog. For most of us Microsoft
Office is the ‘one and only’ solution to all our
interface that can be accessed from Tools > Options.
Here, apart from the obvious customisation
options such as user information, printer, securi-
ty, language or font settings, you can customise
the look and feel of StarOffice. For instance, you
MS Office yet desktop processing needs, whether it’s that can give StarOffice a Macintosh or an OS/2 look
assignment that’s going to get you a top grade and feel, set mouse scrolling and positioning, get
or a presentation that’s going to help you close the middle button of your mouse to act as a
a deal. scrollbar, etc. Global settings for all StarOffice
But hey, wait! StarOffice is back with its ‘new applications can be done from this one dialog
improved’ version and it’s ready to take on box.
Office! So can StarOffice do all that Office can? Tools > Configure lets you configure the functions

A
Window
to
StarOffice 6.0
Probably not. But the important thing is, can it you want on your menus or change keyboard
do the tasks you most depend on Office for? Let’s shortcut keys and configure your status bar. Tool-
find out. bars can be knocked off in this dialog or through
View > Toolbars and you can also customise the tool-
Kick(Star)ting Office 6.0 bar by clicking on Customise in the same menu
StarOffice is a free office suite from Sun or simply right-click the toolbar and select visible
Microsystems which runs on Windows 9x, Me, buttons to uncheck the buttons you don’t want.
NT, 2000 and XP. It also runs on Linux and You can also view your document as a print lay-
Solaris platforms. If you’ve used StarOffice 5.2 out (that’s the default layout in Writer), online
and often found yourself cursing its ‘inte- layout and a full screen layout.
grated desktop’—well, its long gone. You can even customise toolbar buttons and
StarOffice 6 behaves better and set functions to them. Get rid of those old but-
has as good a design as tons and create your own (make sure they are in
Office. BMP format, sized 30x30 pixels and don’t have
The StarOf- more than 256 colours) and add them to ‘starof-
fice suite fice6.0/share/ config/Icon’ directory—every time
comes packed the Buttons bar is clicked, StarOffice will auto-
with a word processor, matically search for new icons in that folder.
a spreadsheet, an HTML edi- Template management: Like MS Office, StarOf-
tor, presentation and a drawing fice also has a template management interface.
tool. Each application runs separately and This can be started through the Quickstarter in
you can launch them either from the Start menu the system tray. StarOffice doesn’t have as many
Illustration: Mahesh Benkar or Quickstarter in the system tray. readymade template choices as Office but its

70 November 2001
interface is quite easy to navigate and helps you Footer borders is especially neat as you can set
pick the right template for an invoice, fax or the distance to determine the shadowing effect.
presentation. You can open a new document or You can either format footnotes while for-
Say it with XML
template, browse through folders to pick a tem- matting a page or insert it through Insert > Foot- There’s been a lot of talk
plate, preview template details and layout and note. You can set the footnote area, the separator from Sun about a new XML-
open existing documents from your ‘My Docu- line that separates the footnote from the docu- based file format for docu-
ments’ folder right from this one navigation ment and number the footnotes. ments in StarOffice 6.0 and
window. Format > Character is where you set fonts, font the increased functionality
Autopilot in StarOffice is the equivalent of the size and font effects such as embossing and font that it would bring to its
‘Template Wizard’ in Office. It can be found in position (subscript, superscript) while Format > users. So what’s this all
the File menu of all StarOffice applications. Paragraph takes care of formatting blocks of text— about?
Autopilot isn’t as advanced as the wizards in alignment, paragraph indents and spacing, This means that parts of
Office but runs you through the basic steps of hyphenation, border and background for para- an Office document such as
customising templates the way you want them. graphs, drop caps, etc. the content, layout and
Database integration: StarOffice has support for ‘Bullets and numbering’ has some pretty meta information are stored
internal (StarOffice 5.2) as well as external data good styles. The standard bullets are the same as separate XML streams
sources such as Netscape, Mozilla or Windows but there are more options for graphical bullets along with embedded
System Address book. They can be integrated into in Writer. The options to align and control the graphics and objects con-
StarOffice at the time of installation or manually spacing of the bullets are especially good. tained in the document. This
through Autopilot > Address Data Source. This makes The StarOffice Stylist, a window containing a is done so that they can be
mailing out documents to multiple recipients (or library of styles, is present across all applications read, interpreted and modi-
a mail merge) a and provides another fied independently of each
breeze. easy way to format other. This XML format is
text. All you need to commonly used across all
Writing off Word do is select the text StarOffice documents,
The interface of Star and double-click on whether it’s a spreadsheet
Writer, the word the style in the win- or word processor.
processor, does feel a dow to apply it. How does this help the
little different from If you don’t want user? Well, for starters, it
Word but the most to manually format will ensure greater compat-
commonly used text, there’s always ibility and interoperability
functions in Word Autoformat and of StarOffice file formats
are available here as Autocorrect, both in with other operating sys-
well. the same dialog and tems as well as with newer
Writer easily with similar func- versions. With XML, the
imports and handles StarOffice has a neat template management feature tionality as Word. recipient of a StarOffice
different file formats Tools consists of a document will not be
from different versions of Word as well as text spell checker, thesaurus, line numbering and required to have StarOffice
documents for Macintosh and Unix without los- macros. The Insert menu has the same elements installed to view it.
ing out on much of the text formatting. It’s only as Word—Find and Replace, Comments, Book- XML also helps in docu-
while importing StarOffice documents into marks, Footnotes, Captions, Cross-reference and ment archiving and pre-
Word that you might lose some of the format- Hyperlinks. In addition you can also insert serves the longevity of the
ting. To save documents in HTML, go to File > charts, diagrams and images. You can insert spe- document. Being a text-
Send > Create HTML document. cial characters and symbols into the text through based and human readable
Formatting text: If you’re looking for the famil- Insert > Special Characters. format, it allows files to be
iar Format menu options as in Word, you’ll find The comment feature isn’t as good as in read even if the original
them all organised quite neatly in StarOffice. Word. It lets you insert a note at the cursor posi- application or the OS that
Format > Page takes care of your page size, mar- tion, but the note isn’t visible on a mouse over. it ran on is not available
gins and page background. For the background You have to double-click on the note indication anymore.
you can either choose solid colours, images from for the note to pop up. With the XML file for-
the StarOffice clip gallery or your own back- Star Writer has a clip gallery with fairly good mat, the user can inspect
ground. images. You can insert images into the document the content of files being
You can add and set the size (in centimetres) from a file or the StarOffice clip gallery. sent or received through
and the style of different page elements such as Auto abstract is a neat feature packed into the meta information,
headers and footers, borders, columns and foot- Writer that extracts the title, summary and sub- which is stored as plain text
notes. This dialog has a small page preview headings of a long document and saves it to a in the Windows Explorer
option that gives you a glimpse of how these ele- new document. context menu. So the next
ments are going to look against the page. You can create a small table in Writer by time you receive a suspi-
Backgrounds, borders and shadowing effects selecting Insert > Table, selecting the number of cious attachment, you
can be set for Headers and Footers. The shad- rows and columns and entering the data. Alter- know what to do!
owing option for the page and the Header/ natively, you can define table attributes at Tools > ➜

71
■ r e s o l v e ~ wired

Options. Under the Text document heading, select to apply this is to select the textbox and click on
Handy pointers Tables. Formatting a table is simple—just select Effects or Interaction. Impress also has custom
the entire table and click on Format > Autoformat. slide show options.
■ To view a StarImpress Frames don’t mean the same thing as in In addition to this, you can hide slides with-
presentation, you don’t Word. Here a frame is like a box that may con- out deleting them through Show >Hide Slide.
need to start the entire tain text. Insert > Frames gives you the option to You’ll miss the Slide Sorter feature in Power-
application; Starplayer determine size, position and format the frame Point to view thumbnails of all the slides, with
should do the job just fine. and text within it. drag-and-drop to change slide order. StarOffice
■ The StarOffice free version has an alternative—each slide is laid out like
does not come bundled Making ‘Impress’ive presentations worksheets in spreadsheet applications like Star
with e-mail. While installing Need to create snazzy presentations that will Calc and Excel. You can rename each slide or
it detects and integrates floor the clients and clinch the deal? Star Impress drag to change the slide order.
easily into your current can do the job just as well as its Office counter- Impress handles organisation charts and flow
default mail client—whether part, PowerPoint. charts pretty well. You can create them with text
it’s Outlook, Outlook For simple presentations, use a slide template boxes and connectors from the Draw toolbar.
Express or Netscape mail. or customise it using Autopilot. Autopilot will The connectors move along with the boxes and
■ If you’re new to StarOffice run you through the process of selecting your hence managing them and moving the boxes
and find it unfamiliar, just background, slide transition, slide duration and around isn’t difficult.
use context menus to figure output medium such as overhead screen or
out basic commands. paper, in just a couple of steps.
■ Click on the Insert icon at If you want to start out with a blank slide,
the top of the main toolbar Impress still shows you options for slide lay-
(the one that runs down outs, rather like PowerPoint. Choose the appro-
your work area) to work priate layout according to what you want to
faster. display—text, images, animation, charts or dia-
■ The Navigator is a neat grams. Slide background options are few but
tool that displays all the they look good. You can also add your own
objects in a document. Use background through Format > Area through the
the Navigator (the [F5] key) colour palette or insert your own slide back-
to jump directly between ground (Impress supports the most popularly
pages, different headings, used image file formats).
notes or hyperlinks within a You can also add text boxes, resize them and
document. fill in text. The same text and paragraph format The ‘Stylist’ makes formatting text a breeze
■ To quickly open a file options used in Writer apply here. Use the Insert
without using the file menu, menu to insert spreadsheets, charts, diagrams Spreadsheets
type in the path of the file in and images. Star Calc is the spreadsheet application from
the URL bar. While creating a slide, you might constantly the StarOffice family. The worksheet and
■ You can directly copy need to modify the slide layout, insert a new slide workbook options work the same as Word
drawings in StarOffice from or perhaps duplicate slides. Instead of having to as do basic file functions. Calc can import
text, spreadsheet or presen- go to the menu several times, use the floating external data (Import > External Data) and save files
tation files. All you need is window that has all these functions. Slide view created in Calc as Excel, dBase, CSV and Lotus
[Ctrl] + [C] and [Ctrl] + [V]. options are located towards the top right corner 123 files.
of the screen within easy reach so you can change Formatting functions include formatting
slide views constantly. worksheets, rows and columns and cells. The
Format > Font Work lets you play around with font context menu is the easiest to use for inserting,
effects—apply shadows rather like ‘Word Art’ in renaming and deleting sheets or setting width or
Word. You can rotate the font, change the angle height attributes to rows and cells. Format > Cells
or set it to curve in different directions. With For- takes care of the fonts, font effects, worksheet
mat > 3D Effects you can add 3D effects to the font protection, cell border and background options
selected, such as shading illumination, geometry, and merging cells.
textures and material. The delete option in Calc doesn’t just delete
Files created in Impress can be saved as Pow- the cell content. It pulls up a dialog box which
erPoint or StarDraw from File > Save As. If you lets you select what aspect of the cell you want to
want to save the slide as an HTML file, you’ll delete—format, formulae, or just the text.
need to select File > Export. This opens up an You can customise the Autofill option in Calc
Autopilot dialogue, which takes you through as well as use and create your own sort lists to
converting and formatting the slide as a Web sort data alphabetically or as per your preference
page. Use Insert > File to import an HTML page. through Tools > Options under the Spreadsheet
The slide show menu has all the animation, category. Calc also has options to group and out-
slide transition options and settings to help make line cells in the Data menu.
your presentation more interactive. A simple way Calc has Filters and advanced filtering

74 November 2001
 in Excel, which has several formats with
3D effects.
Insert > Function List gives you a list of the func-
tions in Calc. To insert functions, use the
Function Autopilot on the toolbar menu. You
can also use the Autopilot to create your own
formulae.
Insert > Object > Formula activates Star Math.
Once activated, you can use the toolbars in
Star Math to add mathematical formulae to
your spreadsheets.

So what’s it going to be?

The free beta version of StarOffice 6.0 that
Use connectors to make flowcharts easily we’ve looked at here is feature rich and packs
in a lot of functionality, in spite of the fact that www.sun.com/starof-
options to let you filter data and view data for it doesn’t include applications such as Star Mail fice/6.0beta/
certain fields, which is handy with large spread- and Scheduler, which you will find in the paid Download StarOffice 6.0
sheets containing lots of data. The Autofilter CD version of even StarOffice 5.2. Additionally, supportforum.sun.com/star
option works just fine with the entire spread- stability isn’t one of the strong points of the office
sheet or with selected rows or columns. The stan- StarOffice 6.0 beta version, hence you have to Feedback and discussion
dard filter lets you set up to three conditions for keep saving your work periodically. Documen- for StarOffice 6.0
filtering while the advanced filter lets you set up tation for StarOffice, in general, isn’t too good www.staroffice.com
to eight filters. and the Help files aren’t easy to follow. A StarOffice user group
As in Excel, you can represent the cell data in We suggest you wait for the release of the full portal
the form of charts. Selecting Insert > Chart brings up version of StarOffice 6.0 before you decide to www.openoffice.org
the Autoformat Chart dialog, which helps you completely switch over. But till then, have fun Home of the StarOffice
choose between bar charts, pie charts or radar fiddling with this version of StarOffice—try it, Code
charts. There aren’t as many chart options as tweak it and use it.

1/2 page H AD

75
■ resolve~ unwired

PALM Illustration: Mahesh Benkar

O UTLI N E D
Organising your ANIL PATRICK R.
t’s that time of the day when you have to look
at one place, organising turns into an exercise, a
cumbersome one at that. Outliner programs
thoughts (and notes)
on Palm was never so
easy
I up your appointments and tasks. You get your
Palm out, check your To Do list and discover
that you need to call a client. Then you go to
the Address Book to look up the contact details.
There, you discover a note in the Memo about
help you organise things in such a manner that
you get an overview of all that you want to do.
These programs can link with applications such
as Memo Pad and To Do List to give you an
interface which helps you organise the contents
the details of the deal. You click once again to of all of them at a single point. If you’re won-
look up the note. All this takes time. Shouldn’t dering how that’ll help you, here’s how. Let’s
your personal organiser be more organised to assume you’re starting a new project, for
keep you better organised? instance, a research report. You would need an
With all the time and effort spent shuffling overview of the major areas of your research and
between different tools on the Palm, don’t you end also of the subcategories under each area. A To
up wishing there was some way to get all the infor- Do List will not be able to give you an efficient
mation in one place. But hang on; it’s not time to overview. Here’s where outliners can help you by
take refuge in a notepad, not yet at least. Outlin- organising all the information you have and
ers are third-party programs for the Palm. (See placing it at your fingertips.
box, ‘History of Outliners’ to get an idea of how
organiser programs for the Palm evolved.) Hit a Hi-Note
We know that Palm has good organising tools Keep it straight and simple with Hi-Note. This
like Address, Data Book, Memo Pad, Expense, To easy-to-operate organiser allows you to keep Notes
Do List, etc but when you need the information in text form as well as drawings. It is possible to put ➜

76 November 2001
text in the drawings as well.You don’t need to carry doesn’t provide linking to other Palm applica-
notepads around to make presentations, you can tions such as Memo Pad. This is inconvenient if Outliner History
do it all on Hi-Note. you are dealing with projects that rely on data
Install Hi-Note in your Palm using the Palm from these applications. A piece of information for all
Desktop and you are ready. Simple. Start Hi-Note those of you who grew up
by clicking on the icon. Tap on the New button to Arrange(r) thinking God created man,
start a new note. Select the type of note—text or Arranger makes use of a tree-hierarchy for making woman, and PIMs and in
picture. Start entering whatever you want in the outlines. Creating a tree structure in Arranger is that order, the reality is a bit
new note that comes up. It stays simple. You can child’s play. First, different. It’s more like man,
draw your diagrams by choosing the Picture note install Arranger on woman, and outliners. Out-
option. If you want to add a diagram to a note, it’s your Palm using liners were used in personal
as simple as adding a sub-note to it. Just tap on the the Palm desktop. computers for collecting
note to which you want to add a sub-note. Now tap Now click on the pieces of information and
on the New Sub-Note item from the Record menu. Arranger icon to organising them. Believe it
Enter the type of note. Tap on Done and you are open it. Tap on the or not, there was a time
through with the sub-note. From the Options New button to start when Personal Information
menu, set Title (of the note) and Picture Size. If an outline. Enter Managers (PIM) weren’t
you want to look up telephone numbers, do that the information around. But when they
using Phone Lookup in Options. and tap the OK came along, outliners
Hi-Note’s simplicity makes it a must for people button. Specify the became a much lesser force
who like things efficient and easy. You can drag- category of the to reckon with in the desk-
and-drop all the notes to structure them the way outline, if you so top arena.
you want. If you need to import data from the Adding new items to the wish, through Outliners got a new
Memo Pad, use the Import option in Record. Outline Details in Options. avatar with the introduction
Alternately, you can export data from the note you Now that the of the Palm operating sys-
just made into Memo Pad using the Export option. master outline has been made, it is time to add tem. In such systems where
new items to it. For adding new items tap on the space is always a constraint,
Palmy BlackForest Open button. outliners found their own
How do Trees, Branches and Leaves make up an In the drop-down Edit menu, tap on New little nook. They are pre-
outline? No, we’re not joking. A hierarchical item. This brings up the new item, which will be ferred over other kinds of
structure, which has elements called Trees, is added to the outline. Click on OK. You can also organiser programs for the
used for Outlines in BlackForest. Branches and use other options such as New link to Address, Palm system because organ-
Leaves are the sub elements in the outline. Date Book, Memo, Expense, and To Do to add isers designed for a desktop
You can have as many leaves as you want in items to the outline from these utilities. Add all computer can be easily
a branch. the items you want to outline using the same ported to suit the Palm.
To create a Tree, tap on the Create button in method. A plus sign in the box on the left side of They do not consume too
BlackForest after installing it using the Palm the outline shows that items have been added to many resources and offer
Desktop. the outline. You can open the outline by tapping simplicity of usage. Outliner
Name the tree and tap on it to open. Go to the on the plus sign.You can also drag and drop items interfaces usually take up
Tree option in menu and select the New Branch to act as child items of the ones in the outline. the least display space—an
option to create The interface of Arranger is not as user-friend- important feature in
new branches. New ly as that of Hi-Note. It requires some time to get portable devices. Its no-clut-
leaves for branches used to. Importing and exporting of items from ter nature has made it a hit
can be made in and to Memo Pad can be done via Options menu. in the Palm domain.
the same manner. Despite their simple
Notes can be Keep it simple nature, most organisers
attached to the There are some things you need to keep in mind have a lot of power under
branches and leaves when using an outliner program. Firstly, break the hood. Most of them
using the Attach up the task you have in hand into simple steps. allow you to link items from
Note option in the This will help you prepare a better outline. the main Palm applications
Tree menu. Always remember to keep the information in the such as Address, Date Book,
You can set the outline as simple as possible. After all, it doesn’t To Do, Memo Pad and oth-
priority of a branch make sense to write a whole page of information ers. These links can be
and leaves using for a single task, does it? turned into hierarchical out-
Creating a new tree Details. The items Keep these tips in mind and you can make the lines that make sense to
which you have fin- best use of your outliner. Your outliner is like a you. You can manage To Do
ished working on can be marked using the check reliable secretary who can help you breeze items, set alarms and so on,
box next to the leaf or tree. Dragging and drop- through your busy day without your having to straight from the outliner.
ping branches and leaves is a standard feature of juggle between all those to-do lists, memos, proj- Grateful, aren’t you now, for
BlackForest. ect reports and others. So choose the outliner for outliners?
A major drawback of BlackForest is that it you and put it to task right away.

77
■ r e s o l v e ~ s.o.s.

Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting Trying to retrieve your password, wondering how to uninstall
Understanding Memory, check out
Mindware autodialers, tracing a missing scanner? Go ahead, shoot. You’ll
find all the bullets here
Windows This problem has arisen probably
Of lost passwords because you are not using the original copy
I use MS Office 97 and I had assigned pass- of Adobe PageMaker. The pirated copy,
words to my Excel and Word files through File > which you may be using does not seem to
Save As > Options > Save Options. The problem have copied the software properly and
is that the text file in which I wrote the pass- hence, the appearance of these errors. We
words got deleted. Is it possible to get back the would strongly advise you to purchase the
passwords? original copy of the software.
Rishi
Via e-mail Applications
Uninstalling autodialers
There’s a password recovery solution I have a P-III 866 MHz machine with 128 MB
available for cracking Word and Excel pass- RAM, running Windows 98 SE. I had installed
words. You can get a trial version at www.lost- VSNL Auto Dialer and Satyam Intellidialer on my
password.com/excel.htm. The Hibernate option in Windows computer, but I found them cumbersome to use.
Therefore I deleted the autodialers. However,
Applications the icons of VSNL and Satyam autodialers still
Internet Explorer woes You have probably not enabled your remain on my desktop and I cannot delete them.
I recently installed Internet Explorer 6 from the Hibernate option correctly. In order to How can I get rid of these unwanted icons?
October edition of the Digit Mindware CD, but it enable the Hibernate option, go to Power Nagarajan
doesn’t seem to be working. It says that some options under Control Panel. Select the Via e-mail
components are missing and tries to download Hibernate tab and select OK. You will now
an 11 MB file from the Internet. Please help. be able to see the Hibernate option when- To install or uninstall programs, you
Shankar ever you try to shut down Windows. As must go to the Control Panel and then to
Via e-mail for your second question, there is noth- Add/Remove programs and uninstall
ing to worry about as your system is them. You can then delete the folders of the
It appears that instead of installing the working perfectly fine. When you had programs uninstalled manually. We sug-
program from the CD, you copied the installed Windows 98, the ACPI was not gest that you reinstall the programs and
main installer to the hard drive and then enabled. However, on installation of Win- then uninstall them in the right way.
tried to run it. As the full installer has all dows Me, it gets enabled by default. As a
the components bundled along, try rein- result, the machine will automatically Hardware
stalling from the CD. shut down without you having to manu- So you upgraded your CPU
ally shut it down. and RAM?
Windows I recently exchanged my old PC for a new one.
Shut down queries Applications The old one was a P-III 500 MHz with 128 MB
I own a Celeron 433 MHz system (Windows 98 Erroneously yours RAM and a 10 GB hard disk, while the configu-
preloaded). Its system cabinet is of MicroATX I have recently installed Adobe PageMaker 6.5. ration of my new PC is P-III 800 MHz, 256 MB
type. I recently installed Windows Me. Its Shut I am running Windows 98 SE on a CPU 300A RAM, 40 GB hard disk. Yet, I don’t find much dif-
Down menu does not show the Hibernate option, (Intel) Celeron, with 64 MB RAM and an 8.5 GB ference between the performance of the two
while the MSCONFIG/Advanced menu says that hard disk. However, when I access PageMaker systems. Even while playing Quake III, it does-
the Standby and Hibernate features are enabled. 6.5 it gives an error message: “Cannot start n’t perform any better. On the other hand, it has
Previously, while using Windows 98, pressing the PageMaker. Unable to load icon DLL for this a much lesser frame rate. What’s wrong with
power button on the cabinet resulted in a regu- screen 8027.6623.” In the error message, the my new PC? There was no extra card on my old
lar Windows shutdown. But now it directly shuts reference ‘icon DLL’ is not a file name as I could- PC, nor on this one.
off. Is this due to some utilities that were pre- n’t find it in the CD or the hard disk. This may be Ankit
loaded in the OEM machine? I have updated the a reference to a *.DLL file dealing with the Via e-mail
BIOS, but nothing has happened. Please help me. PageMaker icon. Please help.
Girish V. Ravchandran You seem to be under the false
Via e-mail Via e-mail impression that by upgrading just your

78 November 2001
CPU and RAM you will obtain better per-
formance from your machine. You may see Applications my CD-R/RW says that it is compatible with
improvement in various other applications While the CDs burnt 700 MB CDs. How can I use the full 700 MB
like office suites, but to get optimum per- I have connected my CD-R/RW drive capacity of the CD-R?
formance, all the components such as hard (16x/10x/40x) as the secondary slave. I have Sachin Dalvi
disk, motherboard and graphics card Windows 98 SE installed. I use Via e-mail
should be of good quality. Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4 to
In your case, the graphics card is the burn CDs, which was bun- The problem lies with
bottleneck, not the CPU or the RAM. As dled with the CD-R/RW. I your software and not your
far as gaming is concerned, the improve- have burnt 650 MB CD- CD Writer. Easy CD Cre-
ment in performance is more or less direct- Rs and CD-RWs and ator will burn 700 MB CDs
ly proportional to your graphics card. Even they are working fine, but it will not show the data
a Celeron 400 with a TNT2 card would be though in My Com- to be 700 MB while burn-
able to give 60+ frames per second in low puter it showed the ing, as it cannot natively
to medium resolutions, but a Celeron 400 total size of the blank detect CDs of this kind. To
with a SiS 6326 will not even touch 10 fps, CDs as 648 MB. How- solve this, it would be advis-
making the game practically unplayable. ever, My Computer able to upgrade your soft-
You should upgrade to a better graph- shows the size of blank ware to the latest version or
ics card. We recommend going in for a 700 MB CD-Rs also as 648 shift to another CD burning
GeForce2 MX, an economy-level graphics MB, though the user manual of software such as Nero.
card available for approximately Rs 4,000
or slightly above.
Express and click Tools > Accounts. Select Windows and Internet & Communications
Internet & Communications Satyam and click on Properties. Switch to Of partitions and computers
No go mail the Servers tab and under the Outgoing hanging
I am unable to send mail using Outlook Express. Mail Server area, uncheck the box marked I have a P-III 667 MHz processor, 128 MB
The following error is displayed: “An unknown ‘My server requires authentication’. SDRAM, Intel 810i chipset and Windows 98 SE
error has occurred. Account: ‘satyam’, Server: OS with FAT32 file system. I have three parti-
‘mail.satyam.net.in’, Protocol: SMTP, Server Hardware tions: the primary DOS partition C: (5.16 GB), sec-
Response: ‘502 unimplemented (#5.5.1)’, Port: 25, A reluctant printer ondary DOS partition D: and extended DOS par-
Secure (SSL): Yes, Server Error: 502, Error Num- I have a P-III 600 MHz system with 192 MB titions E: (2.14 GB each). I would like to combine
ber: 0x800CCC64.” However, I am able to SDRAM and Windows 98 SE as the operating the two partitions of 2.14 GB into one. Can I do
receive mail. My ISP is Satyam Online. system. My problem is that my computer hangs this without using third party utilities and without
Frederic St. Andre (and I’m forced to make a hard reboot) when- losing my data on the primary DOS partition?
Via e-mail ever I try to take a printout. It usually hangs after I also have a problem with my 56 KBps V.90
printing two-and-a-half or two-and-three-fourth compliant modem. Whenever I connect to the
The error shows that in the account pages. It occasionally has no problem in print- Net with my Rolta Dialer, the modem connects at
settings, you have SSL enabled for the ing about four pages in economy mode. The a speed between 30-40 KBps. Also, when con-
SMTP server (outgoing server). This needs timeout settings are set to a maximum of 60 sec- nected, my computer hangs. This happens every
to be disabled as the ISP does not support onds each. The printer LPT port properties show time I connect to the Net. My hardware vendor
this kind of mail transfer. Open Outlook basic configuration 0000 with input/output told me that there might be a conflict between
range 0378 - 037F, 0778 - 077B, interrupt request my internal PCI modem and my PS/2 mouse, but
07 and Direct Memory Access 03 with no con- there was none. He then replaced the mother-
flicts. I have tried reformatting and reinstalling board as it might be faulty, but that did not help
the printer from the CD provided with the print- either. Please help.
er and even updating the printer driver from the Pranav Desai
Windows 98 CD and from the Internet. Please Via e-mail
help me.
Jacob George To combine the data of the two parti-
Via e-mail tions of your hard disk, you have to use a
third party utility such as Partition Magic,
Go to your BIOS settings and check which enables you to do this safely with-
whether your parallel port is configured as out losing your data.
ECP mode+EPP mode. Next, check About your second query, the problem
whether your printer is assigned IRQ7 and is not with your motherboard but is most
whether any other hardware is utilising the likely because of conflict with other hard-
same IRQ. ware. Check for any sort of conflicts
In case your printer is not assigned between your internal modem and any
this IRQ, make sure you assign it and other hardware device such as the sound-
change the IRQ of any other hardware that card. If there is no conflict, you can try
Configure your mail settings the right way uses it. changing the PCI slot for your modem. If

79
■ r e s o l v e ~ s.o.s.
that does not help, try updating the driv- completely, your PC wouldn’t boot at all. that your BIOS is corrupt. You will have
ers for your modem from the manufac- However, you can try removing the RAM to flash your BIOS. To do this, find the
turer’s Web site. and installing it in another slot. If this does exact model number of your mother-
not solve your problem then the trouble board.
Internet & Communications could be with your power management. Then go to the manufacturer’s Web
No private key Try disabling power management and site, download the utility and the latest
I recently signed up for a free digital certificate the ACPI from the BIOS. The ACPI can be BIOS and save it on a floppy. Follow the
from www.digicerf.com for encrypting e-mail disabled from the BIOS only if the option instructions given on the Web site with
messages. It was working fine until I had to for- is available. Or you can even try disabling regards to flashing your BIOS. Take great
mat my hard disk. I had taken a backup of the fast shutdown. Go to Start > Programs > Acces- care while doing this as you could severe-
certificate, but when I tried to reinstall it, the sories > System Tools and click on System ly damage your motherboard if you do
message “You don’t have the private key” was Information. In the Tools menu, go to Sys- not flash it the right way.
displayed. Is there any way I can backup a cer- tem Configuration Utility and select
tificate along with its private key? Advanced in the General tab. Here select Windows
Amit Samarth Disable Fast Shutdown, click OK, and then No driver for this one
Via e-mail click OK. Restart the computer. I have four HP brio 410 P-III 933 MHz machines
preloaded with Windows 98. When I uninstalled
When you export a digital certificate, Windows Windows 98 and installed Windows 2000 Pro-
the wizard asks you whether you wish to In a flash fessional on these PCs, I could not change my
I have a PC with a Celeron 800 MHz processor, display settings from 256 colours to 16-bit, 24-bit
an 815e Mercury motherboard, 128 MB RAM, or higher. I have a Matrox - PM133 PS Prosav-
and a 20 GB hard disk. I had kept a password for age Display card. I could not locate the driver
the system, but unfortunately forgot it. To log in for this for Windows 2000.
to the system, I removed the CMOS battery and Nilesh
tried to short it. I then put the battery back in the Via e-mail
machine, but now I get an error message:
“CMOS check sum error. Press F1 to load default Unfortunately the particular display
or Del to enter setup.” What’s wrong? card on your machine does not have any
Raju support for Windows 2000. You will have to
Via e-mail stick to your previous OS or communicate
with H-P directly regarding this matter.
Back up the private key of your digital You get this error message because
certificate your battery has been discharged. You Hardware
should have your battery replaced to clear Misbehaving monitor
include your private key. By default, this this problem. If the problem persists even I have a Celeron 433 MHz system with a 2 GB
option is selected. This will ensure that after changing your battery, go to your hard disk, 64 MB RAM, and an LG Studioworks
your private key is included in the backup. BIOS settings where you will find an 44m monitor. I am using Windows 98 SE as the
Be careful, though. Use this only for back- option to load the default settings. If in OS. My picture tube began to have problems
up purposes. When exporting the certifi- spite of doing this, you continue to get the and so I got it changed. Now it can have
cate for distribution, make sure you don’t error, there could be a high probability 800x600 or 1024x728 resolution but not 640x480.
include the private key.

Windows Applications
Shut down blues Using multilingual fonts
I have machine with a P-III 733 MHz processor, I would like to use multilingual fonts on my
i810e chipset based motherboard, 128 MB RAM, Web pages, for which I want to use dynamic
and 20 GB hard disk (ATX). Recently, I removed fonts. But I’ve heard that only Netscape Nav-
my RAM for cleaning. I placed it again in the igator supports dynamic fonts. What must I
same location on the motherboard. Now, every do to be able to use multilingual fonts that are
time I shut down my computer, it restarts. But also supported by Internet Explorer?
when I shut it down again, it shuts down prop- V. Srinivasa Reddy
erly. I formatted my hard disk and reinstalled all Via e-mail
the components but the problem continues. I am
told that this may be because of a problem with In order to use dynamic fonts that
my motherboard. Please give me a solution. are visible on Internet Explorer you will
Sachin have to save them in .eot format. To do so embedding/weft3/default.htm?fname=%20&fsize=).
Via e-mail you will require a utility called WEFT If you are interested in knowing more
(Windows Embedded Font Technology) about this, you can go to
The problem of the damaged RAM which is available on the Microsoft Web http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/fonte
slot is unrelated to Windows behaving the site (http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/ mbed/font_embed.asp and read the details.
way it is. Had the RAM slot been damaged

80 November 2001
■ r e s o l v e ~ s.o.s.
However, if I start Windows in Safe Mode it (the Umax Astra 2000P) is supported by JPG files. It is the same with PSD files, but there
starts on 640x480. Please help. SANE. If, as you have mentioned, it does is no such problem with GIF and BMP files. Are
Debabrata Das not get detected, you can get a custom there any settings for being able to view JPG,
Via e-mail SANE built for your scanner from PSD, TIF, PNG, TGA, etc files as thumbnails?
http://umax1220p.sourceforge.net/. Ramesh Pradhan
First, go to your system properties and Internet & Communications Via e-mail
check whether your monitor is being
detected correctly. If it shows default mon- Error terror The problem you have mentioned is
itor or shows a monitor other than what When I start Internet Explorer, I get the follow- not related to your graphics files. Inability
you currently have, it means it’s not getting ing error: Please check your Content Advisor to view JPG file thumbnails happens quite
detected correctly. If so, you will have to settings for missing information. I am also often due to problems related to Internet
install the drivers that came along with the unable to view offline Web pages. I had imple- Explorer. Go to Add/Remove programs,
monitor. After this your monitor should be mented a supervisor password for the Content click on Internet Explorer and select
able to show you the option of displaying Advisor and enabled it. How can I remove it? Remove. It will prompt you to Remove or
at a resolution of 640x480. Sawan Gupta Repair the installation of Internet Explor-
Via e-mail er. Select to repair it.
Internet & Communications If the problem persists even after doing
Browser hang-ups This happens if the Ratings.pol file is this, then you should update your browser
I have a P-III 800 MHz machine with 64 MB RAM damaged or corrupted, or if there is more to Internet Explorer 6, the latest version of
and I am using Windows 98. My machine than one Ratings.pol file on the system. IE which is available in the October Digit
restarts when I am browsing. I have only 256 K Make sure that Explorer is set to display Issue CD. This will definitely solve the
cache. Please help me. I use Internet Explorer hidden files, close all browser windows and problem. The other file extensions, howev-
5.0 and Netscape 4.04. check \Windows\System for the file. If there er, cannot be displayed as thumbnails.
S. Sudhakar is one, rename the file with any other name.
Via e-mail Open Internet Explorer and click Cancel Internet & Communications
when the error is displayed. Open Tools > Inter- Browsing blues
To eliminate the possibility of your net Options > Content and click on the Settings I recently went to Microsoft’s Web site
RAM being the cause of your problem, try (www.microsoft.com) for a general Windows
running some games, or some other appli- update and I got an error while viewing the
cations already loaded in your machine site’s content. I then added Microsoft’s Web
such as office application or Photoshop for address in the Internet settings for trusted sites,
at least half an hour and see whether your guided by the error message on the site’s Web
machine hangs or not. If it does not, then page. I was able to view the page after that and
there is no problem whatsoever with your started downloading the updates. Midway
RAM. The 256 K cache that you have men- through this process, however, my connection
tioned refers to the L2 Cache of your came to a standstill and I had to disconnect
processor and has nothing to do with your manually. When I connected to the Net again
machine restarting. The problem obvious- and tried to resume the Windows update, I got
ly lies with the installation of your brows- the message: “The page could not be dis-
er. Reinstall the latest version of the played.” I get this error only when I click on
browser and your problem will be solved. Windows update or support; I can view the
home page and other pages of microsoft.com.
Linux Please provide me with a solution.
Missing devices Via e-mail
I have a P-III 800 MHz system with 128 MB Content Advisor in Internet Explorer
SDRAM with a 40 GB hard disk. I am using Red- Whenever one browses the Internet,
Hat Linux 7.1. I have a scanner (Umax Astra button under Content Advisor. Enter the certain files are stored in the Temp folder
2000P), which is not recognised by running supervisor password, set the ratings accord- and others stored in the cookies folder. The
SANE. It says ‘Device not found’. My scanner is ing to your preferences and click OK. Close problem you have mentioned could be due
connected to the printer port. Help! the browser window and open it again to to the fact that since your previous visit,
Tapas check whether the problem has been solved. there is no newer version of the file stored
Via e-mail in the temporary folder and hence it shows
Windows the previously visited page. Clear your
Go to your BIOS settings and check Where have the thumbnails Internet cache by going to Tools > Options >
whether the printer port is enabled and gone? General where you can delete the cookies
configured as EPP for optimal perform- When I select the View as Web Page mode in and the temporary files. This should solve
ance. The scanner you have mentioned Windows Explorer, I cannot view thumbnails of your problem.

DO YOU NEED HELP? Send an SOS to [email protected]

Or write in to DIGIT, D-222/2, Om Sagar Bldg, MIDC, Nerul-400 706

82 November 2001
■ resolve~ t i p s & t r i c k s

tri
Contents

&
SEARCH TOOLS

tips
Copernic 2001
Exporting your search results................42

ck Box: Copernic 2001 Shortcuts ..........42

Net Snippets
Directly saving snippets ..........................42
Getting snippets from other apps .......42
Atomica 2.0

s Using Atomica with Acrobat Reader ..42

Changing key combinations ................43
Surf Pilot shortcuts................................43
BROWSER COMPANIONS
NetSonic
Browsing pages offline ...........................43
CrystalPort AppCapture
Disabling media ........................................44
Translate Web pages................................44

Improving Box: Shortcuts for CrystalPort ...........44

Importing Netscape favourites .............45
SpeedNet
IP Resolving................................................45
EasyMTU
Box: Shortcuts for SpeedNet..............45

Internet Productivity
Self-tuning for Windows NT users.......45
Refresher
Using Power Search and
Power News ...............................................45
DOWNLOAD MANAGERS
Download Accelerator Plus
Utilise your time on the Internet in the best possible way with search Drag-and-drop files ..................................46
Downloading files with extensions
tools, browser companions, download managers,... unavailable in DAP ...................................46
GetRight
Setting up download times...................46
Box: Shortcuts for GetRight ................47
FlashGet
41
Downloading files as segments ...........47
Box: Shortcuts for FlashGet................47
ONLINE PRIVACY TOOLS
Burnt Cookies
Command line switches.........................48
AdSubtract SE
Configuring filters .....................................48
Pop-up Stopper
Allowing pop-up windows when
block is enabled........................................48
Window Washer
Washing and bleaching files .................48

Tips & Tricks

Compilation of tips
Troubleshooting
Illustration: Ram Understanding Memory, check out,
Mindware

83
 ■ resolve~ t i p s & t r i c k s
SEARCH TOOLS
Demand what you want from the Net! Finding the information you need is
actually as simple as using these tools
Copernic 2001 download. For quicker downloads, leave Add to Net Snippets option and save it.
Empower yourself with simultaneous search the Download Images option unchecked.
over the Web, newsgroups and e-mails. It If you want only the selected documents, Getting Snippets from other
has features to remove duplicate matches, make sure to check the Download Select- applications
eliminate invalid links, translate pages, etc. ed Documents Only option. Net Snippets has a feature called Drop
Spot which allows you to drag-and-drop
Downloading required pages Exporting your search results snippets from applications other than
You can directly save Web pages for brows- It is possible to save search results as Internet Explorer. For enabling the Drop
ing when you are offline. To save the ones HTML, text, XML, CSV (Comma sepa- Spot toolbar, right-click on the Task Bar
you require, simply click on the required rated variables) and dBase files. First,
document while holding the [Ctrl] key. select the search you want to save by
Now press the Download button. Alter- clicking on it. Give the result a name,
nately you can go to Results > Download or select the type of file you want to save it
simply use [Ctrl] + [W] to get the Down- as and mention the path where it has to
load Documents window. Select the be saved. That’s it.
Remove Unreachable option if you
want to skip all unreachable pages in the Net Snippets
With a drag-and-drop interface, this brows-
ing tool allows you to select and save por-
tions of the Web page you need, besides Enable Drop Spot toolbar for other
snippets from other Windows applications. applications

Adding snippets and images and select Net Snippets Drop Spot from
Adding a new snippet from a page is easy. the Toolbars option. This will add a new
42 Make sure that Net Snippets is running toolbar called Drop. Now you can drag-
Select options for the type of download by going to View > Explorer Bar > Net Snippet and-drop snippets from any application
you want option in Internet Explorer. Highlight you want into the Drop toolbar. This will
the snippet or image you want in the help you save that particular snippet in
Web page. Drag and drop the snippet the same manner as with Internet
Copernic 2001 shortcuts into the Net Snippets explorer window Explorer
on the left hand side of the page.
[Ctrl] + [B] – Browse results Atomica 2.0
[Ctrl] + [I] – Validate results Directly saving Snippets Atomica automatically analyses the context
[Ctrl] + [N] – New search You can save Snippets even without of a selected piece of text. It delivers refer-
[Ctrl] + [R] – Refining a search opening the Net Snippets Explorer. Just ence information from a dictionary, the-
[Ctrl] + [T] – Track search highlight the element you want to save sauras, or encyclopaedia.
[Ctrl] + [U] – Update search and right-click. In the menu, select the
[Ctrl] + [W] – Download documents Using Atomica 2.0 with Acrobat
[Ctrl] + [Shift] + [E] – Excerpts Reader
[Ctrl] + [Shift] + [H] – Highlight key- Atomica can be used to look up words
words in Adobe Acrobat Reader. In Acrobat
[Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Z] – Show or hide Reader choose the Text Select tool by
search history clicking on the Text Select icon or by
[F2] – Modify search pressing the [V] key. Now highlight the
[F3] – Next search word or words to be looked up. Press
[F9] – Duplicate search the [Alt] key and right-click to look up
Save the Snippets you want directly the terms.

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84 November 2001
 erences box that opens. You have the [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [D] – Record descriptions
option of changing key settings for [Ctrl] + [1] – Show all records
Atomica. [Ctrl] + [2] – Hide read records
[Ctrl] + [3] – Only parked records
Clearing history in Atomica [Ctrl] + [4] – Show records with reached
To clear the history lists in Atomica, links
right-click the Atomica icon in the sys- [Alt] + [0] – View threads by none
tem tray and select Preferences. If you [Alt] + [1] – View threads by domain
want to clear history of only the present [Alt] + [2] - View threads by title
session, use the Clear History button to [Alt] + [3] - View threads by source
Use text select tool in Acrobat Reader to clear it. Check the Clear History After [Shift] + [0] – Group folders by none
look up words Every Session box if you want the [Shift] + [1] – Group folders by keywords
history to be cleaned each time Atomica [Shift] + [2] – Group folders by category
Changing key combination in is used. [Shift] + [3] – Group folders by package
Atomica [Shift] + [4] – Group folders by date
Don’t want to use the default [Alt] key + Surf Pilot [Shift] + [5] – Group folders by search
Mouse Click combination each time you A browser companion with search capabil- scheme
want to look up something with Atomi- ities, bookmarking features and a built-in [Ctrl] + [W] – View categories bar
ca? Right-click on the Atomica icon in browser. [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [W] – View log
the system tray and change the key com- [Alt] + [V] – Validate links in selected folder
bination to the one you want in the Pref- Shortcuts [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [V] – Validate all links in
[Shift] + [Ctrl] + [N] – New file search session
[Ctrl] + [R] – Refine search [Alt] + [D] – Delete duplicates in selected
[Ctrl] + [O] – Open session folder
[Ctrl] + [S] – Save session [Alt] + [U] – Delete records with unreach-
[Shift] + [Ctrl] + [S] – Save as able links
[F2] – Export HTML report [Shift] + [F4] - Search engine analyser
[Alt] + [M] – Send [Shift] + [Ctrl] + [F4] – Category editor
[Ins] – Create new records [Shift] + [Ctrl] + [M] – Mark records with
[Alt] + [Ins] – Create new folder folder’s keywords
43
[Ctrl] + [J] – Park [F9] – Show Preferences
[Ctrl] + [D] – Unpark [F12] – Search mode switch
[Ctrl] + [M] – Mark as read [Alt] + [Enter] – Show folder / record
Change the default Alt key combination [Ctrl] + [U] – Mark as unread properties

BROWSER COMPANIONS
Programs to help you speed up browsing, disable pop-ups, and search
the Web in a more efficient manner
NetSonic the system tray. just click on the favourites or links in his-
Accelerate browsing by loading previously Launch the tory of the browser to view the pages
accessed Web pages from its cache. It fea- browser and when offline.
tures offline browsing, site exclusion, and make sure that
customised chache locations. the browser’s Excluding sites from acceleration
Work Offline It is better to exclude sites like news from
Browsing pages offline option is not acceleration in Netscape. These sites are
Close all the browser windows you’ve selected. Then updated very rapidly and the cache may
kept opened. Now select the Work show old information. To exclude a site
Offline option from the NetSonic menu from acceleration, go to NetSonic
by right-clicking on the NetSonic icon in Browsing pages while offline options. Now select the Site Exclusion

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 ■ resolve~ t i p s & t r i c k s
ing? CrystalPort AppCapture helps you
disable all of them. In the Tools option, Shortcuts for
CrystalPort
[Ctrl] + [L] – Open link
[Ctrl] + [W] – Close
[Alt] + [Left arrow] – Back
[Alt] + [Right arrow] – Forward
[Esc] – Stop
[Ctrl] + [Tab] – Go forward
Enter the URLs you want to exclude [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Tab] – Go back
[Ctrl] + [H] – History bar
option under the Settings tab. In the Site [Ctrl] + [I] – Favourites bar
Location box feed in the URL of the site Disable media types for faster downloads [Ctrl] + [M] – Multiple search bar
you want to exclude. Click on the Add [Ctrl] + [E] – AppCapture sidebar
button and you are through. untick the required media types you [Ctrl] + [F5] – Auto refresh
want to disable. For example, if you want [Ctrl] + [F7] – Tile mode
Use advanced cache settings to disable sounds, unselect the Play [Alt] + [Enter] – Full screen
The default setting of NetSonic cache Background Sounds option. [Alt] + [Home] – Home page
(memory for storage of Web pages in the [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [P] – Preferences
hard disk) is 200 MB. If you think it is Translate Web pages [Ctrl] + [D] – Add to favourites
taking up too much or too less hard disk Thinking of getting a translator to [Ctrl] + [B] – Organise favourites
space, then you have an option to change translate Web pages? CrystalPort’s Trans- [F2] – Channel bar
it. For this, click on the Advanced cache late function does the job for you. For [F4] – Disable popup windows
button in the Acceleration option. This enabling this function, click on [F9] – Close present tab
can be found under Settings in NetSon- the arrow next to the Go button. Now [F10] – Close all tabs
ic Options. You can select the cache size select the translation you want [F11] – Close all tabs except present
from any capacity between 2 MB and performed.
4294 MB using the slider. It is also pos-
44 sible to change the location using the Set up Paranoia
browse button. Clearing up the cache You can clear your Web history using the
can be done using the Browse button. Paranoia tool in CrystalPort. It is possi-
ble to clear address bar history, search
CrystalPort AppCapture bar history, main history, Recent Docu-
Browse the web faster with this browser ments, and your Temporary Internet files
companion which can manage multiple using Paranoia.
profiles, searches, etc. For setting up the Paranoia tool, go
Use translator to translate Web pages to Tools > Paranoia. In the dialog box, check
Disabling pop-up windows all the boxes for the items you wish to
It is possible to disable pop-up windows Adding search engines clear. Next step is to click on the Clear
in CrystalPort. For this, go to Tools and It is possible to add search engines of Selected Items Now button and click OK.
select the Disable pop-up windows. It is your choice to the custom search engine Paranoia can also be customised to clear
also possible to see one of the disabled list in CrystalPort. For doing this, go to items of your choice. For doing this,
pop-ups. For this, go to Tools > Disabled Pop- the search engine you want to add using check the boxes you want to be cleared.
up Windows and select the window you the browser, and click on the Add Cur- Now check the box next to Clear
want to view from the list of disabled rent Page option. At the Add Custom Selected Items every time the browser is
windows. Search Engine box that opens, click OK closed. This option will clear the brows-
to add the search engine. er history every time you exit it. Click on
Disabling media It is possible to search the site from Apply and then OK again. The items
Don’t want to see all those animations, the Advanced Search Bar after it has been you’ve selected will be cleared every time
images, music, sounds, etc that slow surf- added. you close the browser.

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86 November 2001
 Importing Netscape favourites The check for IP update option checks sure that SpeedCache does not show old
To add IE and Netscape favourites to Internet settings and compares them files stored in it.
CrystalPort, go to Tools > Select Import and with your SpeedResolve settings. If there
Export Favorites. Select the Import Netscape is a change in the IP address, SpeedNet EasyMTU
will accordingly update your settings. Modify your PC’s Windows registry for a
Click on SpeedResolve, add new address, faster Internet conncetion with this brows-
and click Continue. In the location box, ing companion.
enter the URL of the site whose IP has to
be resolved. For example, if you visit Self-tuning for Windows NT
www.rediff.com a lot, enter the URL in this users
box. Click on Finish and you are done. If you are using Windows NT 3.5x/4.0,
the TCP/IP stack is tuned automatically
according to the connection conditions.
If you want to change these and put in
your own settings for DefaultRcvWin-
dow and Default TTL, click on the Win-
Import Netscape favourites into dows NT tab. Now check the Disable
CrystalPort AppCapture automatic settings option and fill in
DefaultRcvWindow and Default TTL
Favourites option from this, choose the values.
folder you want to save, and click Finish.
The bookmarks have been imported. Refresher
Refresh your site automatically at intervals
Allow multiple instances for specified by you without using the Refresh
new sites button . This is very useful when viewing
If you are tired of every new window Just enter the URL to resolve its IP news sites, cricket and other sport sites.
opening as a tab, then you have the option
of multiple instances (open each new link The SpeedResolve wizard will now ask Using Power Search and Power
as separate windows instead of tabs). For you if you want to add another IP. Click News
this, go to Tools > Preferences. Now select the Yes if you want to add more addresses, Go to Power-Tools > Search or Power-Tools >
45
multiple instances check box to have mul- else No. News to get Search and News as different
tiple instances of the browser. tabs in the same window. Now select the
Keeping SpeedCache updated
SpeedNet It’s necessary to make sure that Speed-
Accelerates downloads, resumes interrupt- Cache doesn’t show you content which
ed downloads and resolves IP for faster site was stored earlier. For this, click on the
access. Settings icon. Now select the Accelera-
tion tab and check the ‘Delete files when
IP Resolving I visit a new site’ option. This will make Select News or Search from Power-Tools
You can save time while accessing Web
sites using SpeedNet’s IP resolving fea- search engines and news sites you want
ture. It allows you to enter Web address- Shortcuts for to see. Press the Go! button to view the
es and IP addresses which saves loading SpeedNet different sites as different tabs in the
time while browsing. For setting up IP same window.
resolving, click on the SpeedResolve but- [Shift] + [F1] – SpeedUp
ton or go to View and select SpeedRe- [Shift] + [F2] – SpeedResolve Drag and Drop Links
solve. Now click on the Start Wizard [Shift] + [F3] – SpeedCache You can drag and drop links in Refresh-
button to start IP Resolving. There are [Shift] + [F4] – SpeedRetrieve er by just dragging the link you want to
two options for IP resolving. Select [Ctrl] + [S] – Settings open on to a tab. The tab will be activat-
SpeedResolve with a new address option [Ctrl] + [X] – Exit ed and the link will be dropped in to the
to add IPs of the sites you regularly visit. Explorer window.

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 ■ resolve~ t i p s & t r i c k s
DOWNLOAD MANAGERS
They manage your downloads for you, resume broken downloads and offer
features like management of mulitple downloads
Download Accelerator Plus Schedule DAP to download at box. Now set the maximum number of
Improve download speed, resume broken specified times simultaneous downloads in the Down-
downloads, and find mirror sites. Download Accelerator has a scheduler load queue box near the right hand bot-
function which lets you specify when you tom of the box. Click on Close to
Drag-and-drop files into Down- want to download. complete.
load Accelerator Plus
You can simply drag-and-drop the links Searching for hot downloads
from which you want to download into Click on Select > Hot Downloads. Clicking on
the download basket. For this, enable the Start Search gives you Web sites with
Download Basket option from the downloads—both shareware as well as
Downloads menu. This opens up a small freeware.
window titled Download.
Now click on the link to drag-and- GetRight
drop it into this box. In the Download This utility gives you the ability to resume,
File Info box which pops up, click on the schedule and manage your downloads.
Start Download button if you want the
download to start immediately. Clicking Specify when you want the downloads Setting up download times
on the Download Later button puts the scheduled GetRight can be scheduled to start
download into the queue for download- downloading at fixed times of the day.
ing later on. The scheduler can be accessed from For setting up the scheduler click on the
Using the Advanced button you can the scheduler button or Downloads > Options Schedule Download Start button on the
choose between the various download / Configurations > Scheduler. The scheduler main panel or use Downloads > Schedule
speeds available. can be set to run daily or once a week. Download Start. You can also get it by right
Make sure that the Enable Schedule Start clicking on the GetRight system tray icon
46 Downloading directly without checkbox is ticked. If you want the and selecting from Tools. Choose the
the browser scheduler to run only on specific days of time at which you want to start the
It is possible to download directly with- the week, click on the Choose Days but- downloads and click OK. Downloads
out opening the browser if you know the ton to select the days you want the sched- will be performed at the time(s) you have
URL of the download site. All you have uler to run. Specify the time at which you scheduled.
to do is click on the Add URL button in want the downloads to end by clicking Similarly, the Download ending times
the Download Accelerator main window. on the ‘Always stop downloads at certain can be set using the Schedule Download
Click OK for the download to start time’ checkbox and giving the time. Use
automatically. the HangUp modem, Quit the Down-
load Accelerator, or Shut Down comput-
Downloading files with exten- er options to select the action to be done
sions unavailable in DAP after the downloads stop or are over.
Just press [Ctrl] + [Alt] when clicking in
an HTML link whose extension is not Simultaneous download
available in Download Accelerator. Download Accelerator can simultane-
File extensions available in the Down- ously download any number of files.
load Accelerator Plus configuration are However, you have to define the number
.EXE, .ZIP, .ARJ, .RAR, .LZH, .Z, .GZ, of maximum simultaneous downloads
.GZIP, .TAR, .BIN, .MP3, .AVI, .MPG, to Download Accelerator. To set the
.MPEG, .QT, .PLJ, .ASF, .MOV, .WMA, maximum batch size, go to Downloads >
.WMV, .R0*, .R1*, .A0*, .A1*, .TIF, and Options / Configurations. Select the Connec- Set up your Scheduler for fixed times of
.TIFF. tion option from the left hand side of the the day

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 these files, hold down the [Ctrl] and
Shortcuts for GetRight [Alt] keys together and click on the file
or the link you want to download.
[Ctrl] + [U] - View unfinished down- FlashGet will now get hold of the link
loads which is clicked and will start down-
[Ctrl] + [H] – View history of finished loading it.
downloads
[Ctrl] + [I] – File comment on down- Automatically scanning down-
loads loaded files
[Ctrl] + [G] – Start automatic down- FlashGet can automatically scan all the
loading files you download with it. For setting up
[Ctrl] + [L] – Obey speed limit the automatic scanning feature in
[Ctrl] + [B] – GetRight browser tool FlashGet, go to the tools menu and select
[Ctrl] + [D] – GetRight Dialler tool options from it. Select the File Manager
[F7] – Verify URLs Set the number of segments to be option by clicking on its tab. In the File
[Ctrl] + [F7] – Verify new URLs downloaded Manager check the ‘Use virus scanner to
[Shift] + [F7] – Verify selected down-
loads nections. FlashGet allows files to be
[F8] – GetRight configuration divided up to a maximum of 10 seg-
ments. However, in most of the ordinary
dial-up connections, it is always best to
Stop (Hang up) option in Downloads or keep the number of segments between
the Schedule Download Stop (Hang up) three and five.
button in the main interface.
Downloading files not handled by
Setting up daily downloads FlashGet
You can set up GetRight to download FlashGet does not automatically down-
from a list of download locations at dif- load files like images. For downloading
ferent times on different times of the week.
This is possible using the Daily Down- Give the location for anti-virus using the
47
loads feature in GetRight. Shortcuts for FlashGet Browse button
Set up Daily Downloads using Tools >
Daily Downloads. This brings up the [F4] – New download scan the downloaded file option’ for set-
GetRight Daily Downloads box. Click on [F5] – Start job ting up the automatic scanning feature.
the Add… button to add the download [F6] – Pause job Now give the path to the anti-virus you
details. Enter the download locations of [F8] – Start all jobs use in the text box below it.
the files you want in the URL box of the [F9] – Pause all jobs If you do not know the path of your
Daily Download box. Now set the tim- [Alt] + [S] – Schedule jobs antivirus, then use the Browse button to
ings for downloads, days, and locations [Alt] + [M] – Move to find the location of the .exe file as
to be saved. Click OK and you are done [Alt] + [Del] – Delete job shown. For example, if you use McAfee
with the set up. [Alt] + [Enter] – Properties AntiVirus, it will be having a path of the
[Alt] + [Up arrow] – Move up form C:\Program Files\McAfee\VirusS-
FlashGet [Alt] + [Down arrow] – Move down can95\scan95. Norton AntiVirus will be
Resume, schedule and increase download [Ctrl] + [Enter] – Open destination having a path like C:\Program
speeds by splitting files into smaller directory Files\Norton Antivirus\navw32.exe in
segments. [Alt] + [H] – Hang up when done most cases.
[Alt] + [L] – Obey speed limit If you do not want your antivirus to
Downloading files as segments [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [O] – Default download scan all the files, then you can scan each
It is easier to divide a download into dif- properties file individually by right clicking on the
ferent segments for faster downloading. [Alt] + [O] – Options downloaded file and selecting the Virus
This is especially beneficial in slow con- scan option.

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 ■ resolve~ t i p s & t r i c k s
ONLINE PRIVACY TOOLS
Preserve your online privacy with the help of these cookie managers and pop-ad blockers
Burnt Cookies enforce. The default option of blocking is [Shift] key when clicking on the link. Set-
Tips on how to keep track of and manage to block all advertisements. ting the sound option each time for pop-
cookies on your machine while surfing. In addition to advertisements you up windows is helpful. If you don’t want
can also block all cookies. For setting sound alerts, just look at the Pop-Up stop-
Making cookies fireproof per icon in the system tray which flashes
There are some cookies which are neces- every time a pop-up is blocked.
sary for proper functioning of your com- Double-clicking the icon can be used
puter. You can protect these cookies from to disable and enable Pop-Up Stopper
getting burnt by putting them in the blocking. The X on the icon will be red
Fireproof list. For example, when a cook- in colour when Pop-Up Stopper is
ie comes in, the program will ask you enabled.
if you want to put that cookie on the
‘Burn List’. Use filters to block and selectively filter Window Washer
If you select No, the next query will sites Tips to clean up your browser’s cache, cook-
be whether you want to add it to the ies, and history. Automatically.
‘Fireproof List’. The cookies on this list up filters click on the Filters tab. Now
are not deleted from the PC. It is possi- check the Cookies option as well if you Washing and bleaching files
ble to view and modify the contents of want AdSubtract to block incoming You can set Window Washer to com-
this list by clicking on the Fireproof cookies. pletely delete files from your PC. Adding
button. One problem with this kind of the Bleach To Wash Items will complete-
blocking is that it tends to block all ly delete the washed files.
Command line switches sites. There are sites (like banking, for
Command line switches help you con- example) which have to place cookies
trol the way Burnt Cookies starts up. The on your PC for security purposes. if
command line switches available for these cookies are removed, you will not
48 Burnt Cookies are given below. be able to use these sites. For this you
/h – Burnt Cookies start up in hidden can put all these needed sites in the
mode. This switch is the same as starting Custom Sites Filter list. For adding a
the program normally and then clicking site to the Custom Sites Filter list, click
the Hide button. on the Add button in the Custom Sites
/newlog – Creates a file called ‘Burnt Filter and add.
Cookies.txt’ in the same folder as the You can also remove the default sites
program executable. This folder contains or those you don’t want to be blocked
a list of all URLs visited during the ses- from this list. Just click on the site in the
sion of Burnt Cookies which has just list and click on the Select button.
ended.
/log – This is similar to ‘/newlog’ Pop-up Stopper Set the number of times data has to be
above but appends a list of all URLs vis- Ban pop-ups and ads to minimise on irri- bleached
ited during the session of Burnt Cookies tating distractions and to retain your surfing
which has just ended to the file. pleasure. To add bleach to washing, click the
Wash Options button. Now click on the
AdSubtract SE Allowing pop-up windows when Info button after checking. This brings
Block ads and cookies by setting up filters. block is enabled up an Information box. In the box, click
Many sites have pop-up windows for dis- Yes. Now enter the number of times you
Configuring filters playing content instead of ads. In these want data to be overwritten. Bleaching a
Filters help you configure AdSubtract SE cases, you can temporarily disable the file about three times ought to take care
as to what kind of blocking you need to blocking by holding down the [Ctrl] or of most of the sensitive data.

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■ select ~ t e s t d r i v e

IN TEST: 15 IDE HARD DISK DRIVES

With hard disks like
these, you can give
Room for
more
your PC all the space
it needs!

DIGITAL MEDIA RESEARCH AND TEST CENTRE

he storehouse of your computer, hard

T disks are marvels of modern engineer-

ing that glean the best from fields such
as mechanical, electronic, aeronautic as
well as chemical engineering. The con-
struction of a hard disk involves very
precise and micron-level tolerances,
which is now possible with the help of
highly sophisticated machinery. Right
from the time the first 20 MB hard disk
made its appearance to the 100 GB hard
drives available today, the increase in
capacity of these is a very accurate indica-
tion of the progress of computing in par-
ticular and technology in general. To
illustrate this, the areal density (the amount of data
that can be packed into a single unit of area on the hard
disk platter’s surface) of the hard disk drive has
increased by around 5 million times. Therefore, mam-
moth devices such as the 100 GB drives are fast becom-
ing commonplace nowadays.
When buying a hard disk, the first and primary con-
cern most users have is whether it will serve their appli-
cations well. Then there’s also cost that plays a role when
determining how large a hard disk you can afford. When
it comes to performance, there are a range of parameters
that dictate the speed at which your applications and pro-
grams will run from your drive. These parameters are specifi-
cations such as sequential and random data transfer rates
during read and write, access time of the hard disk and the CPU
richa

utilisation during operation. The spindle speed of your drive

win Bo

(rotations per minute or rpm) will also play an important role

g: Ash

here, since the faster it spins, the faster will it be able to transfer
data between the platter and the read/write heads. To evaluate
Imagin

the performance of these parameters, we used a selection of

106
 Contents
TEST PROCESS TEST PROCESS . . . . . . .107
The following benchmarks were used to evalu- ■ High-End Disk Winmark 99, which puts the IDE DRIVES . . . . . . . . .107
ate the performance of the IDE hard disk drivesdisk sub-system of the PC under stress 7200-rpm drives
in this shootout: ■ SiSoft Sandra 2001te (Disk benchmark), a IBM Desksta 75GXP 76.8 GB
synthetic benchmark that tests the IBM Deskstar 60 GXP (40
WEIGHTAGE TABLE low level parameters of a hard disk GB)
Benchmark Percent weightage such as sequential and random Samsung SP4004H (40 GB)
High-End Winmark 99 10 read/write speeds, access times, and Seagate Barracuda
SiSoft 2001te score 5 so on. ST320414A (20 GB)
SiSoft sequential read 7 ■ HDTach 2.6, which evaluates the 5400-rpm drives
SiSoft sequential write 7 sequential read/write, read burst Fujitsu MPG3204AT (20 GB)
SiSoft random read 12 speed, average access time and CPU Fujitsu MPG3409AT (40 GB)
SiSoft random write 7 utilisation of the hard disk. Maxtor 536DX (100 GB)
SiSoft access time 10
After running these tests, the over- Maxtor 541DX (20 GB)
HDTach random access time 10
all score of a hard disk drive was cal- Maxtor D540X (80 GB)
HDTach read burst speed 10
culated by applying a set of Samsung SV4084H (40 GB)
HDTach read speed average 8
weightages to the various parameters Samsung SV6004H (60 GB)
HDTach write speed average 8
HDTach CPU utilisation 6 and tests run. The weightages fixed Seagate ST320410A (20 GB)
for the tests are as in the table. Seagate ST340810A (40
GB)
Seagate ST380020A (80
benchmarking programs that test the perform- about 10 minutes on each hard disk and the GB)
ance of each of these sub-systems and also of the strain that the hard disk undergoes is evident Western Digital WA Caviar
hard disk as a whole by using applications such from the sound and heat generated during the WD200 (20 GB)
as office productivity suites, etc. The results ofcourse of the test. BOX
these tests are described below. In the 7200-rpm category, the IBM Deskstar How a Hard Disk
40 GB delivered exemplary performance in the Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . .108
PERFORMANCE DRIVES (7200-RPM) Winmark 99 test, logging a score of 26700. SCORE BOARD . . . . . . .111
When you’re looking for the best in Compare this, for example, to an aver- CONCLUSION . . . . . . . .113
IDE disk drives, look no further age of 7500 logged by a 5400-rpm
than the current breed of 7200- drive of the same capacity.
rpm speedsters. The platters The other drive that gave a
of these drives spin at a good score in this test was
maximum speed of 7200 the Seagate Barracuda
rpm and by virtue of ST320414A 20 GB hard
this, data can be picked drive, which scored
up by the read-write heads 23000. This drive was also
much faster than in the case of very economical considering
a 5400-rpm drive. Also, since data the fact that it’s a 7200-rpm drive.
is read that much faster, high- On the other end of the scale, the
speed interfaces such as ATA/100 Samsung SP4004H, with it’s Spin-
can be properly utilised, which IBM Deskstar 75GXP: this Point technology, did not score
makes the overall performance hard drive is silent and has very well in this test and notched a
and response of the hard disk a very low CPU utilsation score of just 5770.
much faster. Let’s take a look at Over to the actual tests that
More Info on
this crop of hard disks and see which one is best measured the data transfer speeds: SiSoft San-
the test process and the products
suited for your applications. dra 2001te was the program used to evaluate the
tested.
performance of the drives in these low-level
Check out
Application performance and the Winmark 99 tests. Here, we measured the data transfer speed
For evaluating the performance of these drives, and the access times for the hard disk. We specif- Mindware
we used Ziff-Davis High-End Disk Winmark 99. ically noted the sequential and random
This is a benchmarking tool that uses real-world data transfer
applications such as office productivity and mul- speeds dur-
timedia authoring tools, comprising audio and ing reading
video applications that particularly stress the and writing
hard disk sub-system of a computer. operations
These applications are run in a script-driven on the drive.
manner and the index that is returned at the end In the results,
of this test reflects the drive’s performance in we see that
working with similar applications. It runs for the transfer

107
■ select~ t e s t d r i v e

rates in sequential operations are faster access times of the hard disk but which
than that of random operations as the
drive does not have to reposition the read-
affect the overall performance of applica-
tions running on your hard disk. One such
How a Hard Disk
write head each time it accesses a new file. parameter is the CPU utilisation of the Works
Also, the speeds while reading are faster hard disk.
than that obtained when writing to the All hard disks manufactured today use Hard disks are used as a repository in
drive. In this test, the best performer was a technology called DMA (Direct Memo- which vast amounts of information can
once again the 40 GB IBM Deskstar 60 ry Access) which is a mode of data trans- be stored. Unlike RAM, this information
GXP hard disk, which scored a blazing 39 fer where the hard disk orchestrates is permanent in that it is retained even
all data flow after the computer is powered down.
between itself This is done using the principles of
and the rest of the magnetic storage, which is similar to
system—the that used in retrieving and storing infor-
main CPU of mation on conventional tapes. Hard
your system plays disks allow data to be stored at far
little or no part in denser levels and can be accessed very
this. Therefore quickly. The working of a hard disk can
the level to which be understood easily by drawing a par-
the hard disk allel to the conventional audio or video-
depends on the tape. In an audiotape, a special
MBps in sequential read and 7 MBps in the main processor during data transfers magnetic material is coated onto a thin
random read test. When writing, this score would affect the performance of the rest plastic strip whereas in a hard disk, the
dropped to 11 MBps and 9 MBps during of the system when the hard disk is being magnetic material is layered onto an
the sequential and random write test, accessed. This is known as CPU utilisation aluminium or glass platter, which is pol-
respectively. These are very good scores and is expressed as a percentage. ished to mirror smoothness. In an
and indicate a usage of about 40 per cent The CPU utilisation of the drives was audiotape, the reading and recording
of the entire bandwidth available in the measured by a benchmarking program head actually touches the surface
ATA/100 interface. Though this called HDTach, a program which is directly during the read-write process
seems rather low, this is the known to accurately measure but in hard disks, the head actually
practical maximum that this parameter. Here, we ‘flies’ microns above the surface of the
a single 7200-rpm found that these platter and is never really allowed to
hard disk can 7,200-rpm drives touch the surface of the hard disk. Just
achieve. When posted a CPU fathom the speeds at which hard disks
evaluating the utilisation rang- operate: the tape in a cassette recorder
5400-rpm drives, ing between 3.6 moves at a speed of about 2 inches per
the under-utilisa- to 4.9 per cent. second while the platters of the hard
tion of this bandwidth is This indicates that the disk can spin under the head at rates of
far more pronounced due to drives used a very small up to 3,000 inches per second, translat-
the lower spindle speeds. portion of the system proces- ing into a speed of 225 kmph!
The access times sor, which, in turn,
logged by these 7200- Western Digital WA Caviar WD200: implies that the rest of
rpm drives were this 5400-rpm drive carries an amply your system runs placed on data transfer speeds, but on the
between 5 ms and 9 ms large 2 MB buffer onboard smoothly even while amount of storage space available for a
and though this isn’t the hard disk is being given price. Let’s take a look at the drives
much of a variation numerically, it does accessed, as the hard disk uses a very small that proved to be worthy performers here.
translate into the drive taking longer to portion of the main processor’s power.
access a file located on the hard disk. Another interesting point seen in the Application performance
Therefore, in case of the 20 GB Seagate results was that the CPU utilisation post- Here, too, we ran high-end disk Winmark
Barracuda, the access time of 5 ms means ed by SiSoft Sandra was significantly dif- 99 as the primary benchmarking tool for
that it is ideally suited for applications ferent from those logged by HDTach. This evaluating the performance of the drive in
where many files are accessed on the is because different applications write dif- applications such as multimedia author-
drives—applications such as multimedia ferent type of data to the hard disk, which ing and software that especially stress the
authoring, databases, etc. In real world accounts for the variation in the scores
terms, a faster access time means quicker logged by the two programs.
response of the hard disk, which is evident
when applications start up faster and are VALUE DRIVES (5400-RPM)
more responsive when tasks are run. Over to the 5400-rpm category, these
are the hard disks with wide variation,
What other factors affect performance? both, in terms of price as well as capac-
There are other factors that are not direct- ity. These are generally targeted at the
ly related to the data transfer speed and value market where not much stress is ➜
108 November 2001
■ select~ t e s t d r i v e

hard disk sub-system. The hard disk that the Maxtor D540X-
did especially well in this test was the West- 4K080H4, clocking a
ern Digital WA Caviar WD200, clocking a respectable 33 MBps.
very impressive score of 19900. This The drive that trailed
turned out to be higher than even two of here was the 80 GB
the 7200-rpm drives. This implies that the Seagate ST380020A,
hard disk, in spite of the 5400-rpm speed, which clocked a
is still capable of good performance in very disappointing
applications that require intensive access 14 MBps in the
to the drive, such as multimedia author- sequential read test.
ing applications using audio and video. However, this drive
The Fujitsu MPG3409AT came a close sec- posted a very respectable score of 10 MBps trend noted here was that a majority of
ond in this test, trailing slightly behind the in the random read tests, along with the the drives that did well in the sequential
Digital WA Caviar with a score of 18100. 40 GB Samsung SV4084H drive. write tests were those that featured
The drive that delivered a very low per- This could be attributed to the more than one platter. This is
formance in this test was the 40 GB Seagate fact that these hard disks because when there
ST30810A, logging a score of just 7790. also posted very is more than
This implies that it isn’t suited to situations good scores in one platter
where multiple applications would have to the access time available,
be executed at the same time. However, benchmarks. As there are
when it comes to storage space, this drive access time has a multiple
offers 40 GB and therefore imparts a lot of direct bearing on heads writing
value in situations where you just need the random data transfer onto the platters
storage space, with little stress on per- rates, since the read-write heads concurrently, resulting
are constantly actuating in twice as fast sequen-
when accessing the differ- Maxtor 541DX: this 20 GB drive tial write speeds. These
ent parts of the platters, a has a low CPU utilisation and has drives would be ideally
lower access time will help a fast sequential read rate suited for applications
the heads access the data such as amateur audio
faster and subsequently allow for greater and video authoring, where you would be
data transfer rates. These drives are ideal- writing large quantities of data to the
ly suited for applications where data will drive over sustained periods.
be primarily read in a random manner, for As seen from the graphs, the random
example, a storage drive where installa- write scores were expectedly logged as the
tions of applications are stored or data- lowest by these drives, since this test
bases are continually read from. involved writing data on random sections
formance. In the sequential writing tests, the of the hard disk.
In terms of the data transfer speeds, the drive that performed well was the 80 GB The drive that did the best in this test
drive that posted exemplary performance Maxtor D540X-4K080H4 and the 20 GB was the mammoth 100 GB Maxtor
in the sequential read transfer rates was the Western Digital Caviar WD200. In spite 4W100H6 536DX, which logged a good
20 GB Maxtor 541DX, which posted a of them being 5400-rpm drives, they transfer rate of 11 MBps. Coming in sec-
score of 37 MBps. The drive that came in posted very respectable scores of 32 MBps ond were the 40 GB drives, Fujitsu
a close second here was its 80 GB sibling, and 29 MBps, respectively. An interesting MPG3409AT and Samsung SV4084H.

How Much Space is Enough?

Application Recommended capacity Individual file size (Avg. range) Explanation
Word processing, At least 20 GB 20 KB to 200 KB These files are very small and consume least amount of space on your
spreadsheets drive. Go in for an entry-level 20 GB drive.
MP3 audio 20 GB and above, depending on 3 MB to 7 MB The size of hard disk you settle for depends entirely on the total
the number of files number of MP3 files you plan to store
Movies (DivX) 20 GB and above, depending on 400 MB to 700 MB Here again, the size of hard disk you settle for depends entirely on how
the number of movies many movies you need to store
Audio/video Entry level: 20 GB Depending on usage If you're a professional who works on audio/video files, you should opt
editing Professional: 100 GB for the largest and fastest drive you can afford.
Gaming 20 GB and above, depending on Upwards of 20 MB Today's games are huge and often take up to 1 GB on a full install.
the number of games Depending upon whether you're a casual or serious gamer, you should
go in for the largest drive you can afford

110 November 2001

 Specifications
IDE HARD DISKS
7200-rpm Drives 5400-rpm Drives
Brand IBM IBM Samsung Seagate Fujitsu Fujitsu Maxtor Maxtor Maxtor Samsung Samsung Seagate Seagate Seagate Western Digital
Model DeskStar DLTA- DeskStar SP4004H Barracuda MPG3204AT MPG3409AT 2B020H1 541DX 4W100H6 D540X-4K080H4 SV4084H SV6004H ST20410A ST340810A ST380020A WA Caviar
307075 60GXP ST320414A 536DX WD200
Contact Wales Wales Samsung aci bom Apex Apex eSys eSys eSys Samsung Samsung aci bom Visuallan aci bom CYBERSTAR
Technology Technology Electronics Electronics Electronics
Phone 022-3828100 / 022-3828100 / 011-6322517/ 19 022- 8266031/32 022- 8354157 022- 8354157 011-6420450\51 011-6420450\51 011-6420450\51 011-6322517/ 19 011-6322517/ 19 022- 8266031/32 022-8202688 022- 8266031/32 011-6556178\
8200 8200 9\80
Fax 022-3877418 022-3877418 011-6322607 022- 8250674 022-8215152 022-8215152 011-6420452 011-6420452 011-6420452 011-6322607 011-6322607 022-8250674 022-8368514 022-8250674 —
Price (Rs) 14,250 7,300 7,500 4,650 4,500 5,750 4,410 12,800 10,790 6,000 8,000 4,490 5,400 15,660 4,600
E-mail mediaman@bo mediaman@bo marketing@sam abhishek@aci- bomapex@bom bomapex@bom anshuman@kar anshuman@kar anshuman@kar marketing@sam marketing@sam abhishek@aci- sales@visu- abhishek@aci- sushilb@cyber-
m3.vsnl.net.in m3.vsnl.net.in sungindia.com info.com 2.vsnl.net.in 2.vsnl.net.in masg.com masg.com masg.com sungindia.com sungindia.com info.com alanindia.com info.com starin.ne
Web site www.ibm.com www.ibm.com www.sam- www.seagate.c www.fujitsu. www.fujitsu. www.maxtor. www.maxtor. www.maxtor. www.sam- www.sam- www.seagate. www.seagate. www.seagate. www.west-
sungindia.com om com com com com com sungindia.com sungindia.com com com com erndigital.com
Capacity (GB) 76.8 40 40 20 20 40 20 100 80 40.8 60 20 40 80 20
RPM 7200 7200 7200 7200 5400 5400 5400 5400 5400 5400 5400 5400 5400 5400 5400
Cache size (MB) 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 512 KB 512 KB 2 2 2 2
Interface ATA/100 ATA/100 ATA/100 ATA/100 ATA/100 ATA/100 ATA/100 ATA/100 ATA/100 ATA/100 ATA/100 ATA/100 ATA/100 ATA/100 ATA/100
Platters 5 2 2 1 2 4 1 3 2 2 2 1 1 2 1
Benchmarks
High-End Disk 9000 26700 5770 23000 14700 18100 12300 16200 11900 14200 14200 14300 7790 7900 19900
Winmark 99
SiSoft index 17306 26908 22918 26054 19705 20021 21882 17558 22434 15336 20447 14230 11487 12628 20324
Sequential 23 39 33 39 29 29 37 25 33 16 29 21 15 14 30
read (MBps)
Sequential 12 7 7 6 5 5 5 9 6 10 6 7 7 10 5
write (MBps)
Random read 11 39 33 39 29 29 14 11 32 29 29 11 9 16 29
(MBps)
Random write 9 9 6 5 5 8 3 11 7 8 6 6 7 7 7
(MBps)
Average 3 7 8 9 11 10 11 5 9 2 8 6 4 2 11
access time
(ms)
HDTach CPU 4.6 4.9 3.6 4.8 3.5 3.7 2.6 2.9 4 3.4 3.7 12.7 3 10.1 4.2
Utilisation (%)
Overall (%) 68.22 71.26 58.66 69.47 56.41 60.09 54.29 62.87 62.31 65.65 61.21 49.11 50.11 58.78 53.7
Grade B+ B+ B A- B B B B+ B+ B B+ B B B B
■ select~ t e s t d r i v e

how much you intensive gaming, 3D software and sound

want to spend for a and video editing, then you would at least
hard disk: capacity need a 20 GB hard disk. Depending upon
and performance. the volume of files you plan to create, you
When considering could even wind up using all of the space
performance, we on your 40 GB hard disk! (Refer to the
found that the table, ‘How Much Space is Enough?’ high-
40 GB Fujitsu lighting the suggested hard disk sizes in rela-
MPG3409AT and tion to the files and applications you most
the 40 GB Samsung often work with.) As a rule, text documents
SV4084H were both and spreadsheet files require the least
What other factors affect performance? available for up to Rs 6,000, coupled with amount of hard disk space. In the middle
We saw that the drives that posted com- very good performance numbers. This range, there would be files such as Power-
paratively lower scores in the access time makes these drives very well suited to tasks Point presentations, MP3 audio files, etc.
test were also the ones that returned low that need a good level of performance
data transfer scores. Access time affects the while still offering 40 GB capacities.
random access of data, which was If you’re looking for a greater amount
evident in the random data trans- of storage, then the 60 GB Sam-
fer tests. The 20 GB Seagate sung SV6004H hits the
ST20410A posted a score of sweet spot with a
16.6 ms in the access price tag of just Rs
time test. The drive 8,000. This was, in
that posted very fact, the cost of a 40
good access time GB hard disk about four
scores was the 60 GB months ago. If you’re will-
Samsung SV6004H, which ing to shell out a few thou- Finally, if you’re a movie buff and store fea-
posted a good score of 9.5 sand rupees extra, you ture-length movies on your hard disk
ms. Expectedly, this drive Maxtor 536DX: this 100 GB can even get an 80 GB or itself, at the rate of about 700 MB per
exhibited good overall per- drive gives you all the storage a 100 GB hard disk— movie, your hard disk could get filled in
formance in the rest of the space you need these cost between Rs direct proportion to your interest in
data transfer tests. 12,000 and Rs 15,500. Of watching movies!
The CPU utilisation of the hard disk, special mention here is the Maxtor 100 GB Files such as MP3, audio and movies do
though neglected by most of us at times, hard disk (the largest in the country right not really need a high-speed hard disk to
determines the demands that the hard disk now), which is available at Rs 12,800. This work well.
places on T processor during its opera- is definitely a better choice, both in terms Performance hard disks come into play
tions. This is especially significant to 5400- of price and performance, over the 80 GB if you work with audio and video files and
rpm drives, as they do not have the Seagate ST380020A, for example. are involved in multimedia authoring
headroom in terms of data bandwidth as applications that use large files that are
compared to their 7200-rpm counterparts. How big is big? accessed constantly. This would also
These scores were logged by the HDTach When it comes to tasks that require large include Photoshop where average file sizes
benchmark and the drive that posted a files to be written to and read from the would range anywhere between 5 and 50
good score in this test was the 20 GB Max- hard disk, you should opt for one that MB. In these cases, a fast hard disk drive
tor 2B020H1 541DX, which logged just sports high sequential data transfer speeds will ensure that you don’t have to wait long
2.6 per cent of CPU utilisation. On the such as the 40 GB IBM Deskstar or the 20 when working with many such files.
other end of the scale, the drive that GB Seagate Barracuda drives. If, on the
utilised more CPU power was the 20 GB other hand, your job involves working with CONCLUSION
Seagate ST20410A, at a very significant smaller files such as database applications From this roundup, it is apparent that the
12.7 per cent. This means that the Maxtor that access information frequently from array of hard disks available are
drive would be ideally suited for situations the drive, or multimedia and Web author- so wide in terms of capacity,
when you want to use the hard disk in sys- ing tools, then the random data transfer
tems that are powered by an older proces- speed of the drive would play a pivotal role
sor, where any additional strain on it in the performance and response of your
would be very noticeable in terms of over- applications. Here, the drive that excelled
all system performance. The same would was the 76.8 GB IBM Deskstar.
be the case in applications where you Finally, when it comes to applications,
would be using software that are implicit- you would need to decide the size of the
ly demanding on the main processor, such hard disk you’re willing to settle for
as image, sound and video editing, 3D depending on the applications you plan to
authoring, etc. use. For example, if you’re a home user
There are two primary parameters that who’s looking for a performance hard disk
you need to consider when deciding on and you plan to use applications such as IBM Deskstar 60GXP: the performance hero

112 November 2001

 Decision Maker

Performance IBM Deskstar 60GXP (40 GB)

7200-rpm drives
Price Seagate Barracuda (20 GB)

Performance Samsung SV4084H (40 GB)

5400-rpm drives Samsung SV4084H: impressive performance

Fujitsu MPG3204AT (20 GB)
Price

price as well as performance, that choosing formance, the 20 GB Fujitsu MPG3204AT

the best from them is very closely tied in to should suffice, with its reasonable per-
the utilisation. formance and highly affordable price. This
In the 7200-rpm category, the drive that drive is ideal if all you’re looking for is an
bagged the Best Performance award was the economically priced hard disk for running
40 GB IBM DeskStar 60GXP. This drive applications such as word processors,
posted best-of-class performance in virtu- spreadsheets and surfing the Internet.
ally all of the tests it was subjected to and is With hard disk drives pushing the lim- Fujitsu MPG3204AT: an affordable performer
ideally suited for applications that need its of performance and capacities and with
high speed data transfer such as applications getting larger every day, it Until then, the present drives will serve
professional audio and video wouldn’t be surprising if in a few months, you well in whatever application you
editing or even for the you were to settle for a 60 GB or 100 GB might want to throw at them—be it office
hard disk in your new home computer. productivity or serious gaming!

Seagate Barracuda: the value option

demanding home user. The drive bagging 1/4th AD

the Best Value award in this category was
the 20 GB Seagate Barracuda ST320414A.
The drive was priced nearly the same as
most 5400-rpm drives (though offering
only 20 GB of storage space) and if it is per-
formance you’re looking for but don’t need
an overly high amount of storage space,
there’s no other drive that comes close to
the 20 GB Barracuda.
In the 5400-rpm category, the drive that
bagged top honours was the 40 GB Sam -
sung SV4084H. This drive offered a good
amount of storage space for working with
most applications and posted very good
performance characteristics. If you’re look-
ing for good value where you do not need
much storage space or especially high per-

113
■ select ~ t e s t d r i v e

IN TEST: 10 CD-ROM DRIVES

Photograph: Rahul Sharma Imaging: Neeta Wadiker

- ROM D R I V E S

DisKography nowadays boot floppies are so rare—you can

On your way to DIGITAL MEDIA RESEARCH AND TEST CENTRE
e’ve seen the trusty CD-ROM drive grow boot and install operating systems off the CD-
buying a CD-ROM
drive? Our Test
Centre plays the disc
W in terms of importance in a system to
such an extent that it now forms an indis-
pensable part of any PC. This has prima-
rily been fuelled by the fact that software—both
applications as well as operating systems—have
ROM drive itself. While other optical standards
such as DVD-ROMs have also risen and taken
some of the limelight away from the CD-ROM
over the past couple of years, the economical
price and very high availability of software and
jockey and tells also grown exponentially in terms of install sizes. working titles have ensured that the CD drive is
what’s what to help What was once available on sets of floppy disks still widely used, both in new computers as well
as a de facto standard, now comes on CD-ROMs. as standalone purchases.
you make a wise Added to this, the increasing use of multimedia In terms of technology, however, the under-
decision in conventional applications has been a pivotal lying operating principles and mechanisms of
factor in transforming the CD drive into a com- CD drives have remained largely unchanged.
ponent that you can’t do without. The major advancements that we have seen are
Thanks to the Video CD and DivX rage, the the increase in the speeds itself and not the actu-
popularity of movies on CD-ROM, though ille- al read technology.
gal, is a big selling point and forms one of the Looking back, the first conventional CD-
main uses that most home users have for their ROM drive sported a 4x read speed (that’s four
CD-ROM drive. The importance of the CD times the speed of an audio CD, or 150 KBps x
drive is also, in fact, corroborated by the fact that 4 = 600 KBps). Today’s fastest CD-ROM drives ➜

114 November 2001

■ select~ t e s t d r i v e

TEST PROCESS
The tests comprised of a mix of real-
Tests Weightages
world and synthetic benchmarks that
included Ziff-Davis CD Winbench 99, CD Winbench 99 10
SiSoft Sandra 2001, AudioCatalyst SiSoft Sandra 2001te 34
(digital audio encoding). SiSoft index 4
The real world tests included copy- Sequential read (KB/s) 10
ing a single 100 MB file, copying Random read (KB/s) 10
100 MB of assorted smaller files, and Average access time (ms) 10
opening 10 TIFF images through Pho- Audio catalyst 24
toshop 6.0. File copy / access 32
The weightages accorded to these Single 100 MB (sec) 8
tests in determining the overall per-
Assorted files (sec) 12
formance of the drives are given in the
Opening files in Photoshop (sec) 12
adjoining table.

access times).
As this test involves running a variety of
applications such as word processors and
spreadsheets that are run directly from the
Winbench 99 CD, you get a clear indication of
performance while working with these ‘real
world’ applications as well as the actual data
transfer speeds. Since this test continuously
accesses the drive, the operating noise levels of
the drive also becomes evident.
In this test the drive that overtook all others
sport a blazingly fast 72x maximum read speed! was the ASUS CD-S520/G. Though the rated
While these speeds are not sustained through- speed of this drive was just 52x, it outper-
out the entire operation of the drive, the effec- formed other higher rated drives by scoring an
tive read speeds of the CD-ROM drives available index of 2000—the highest in this test. Coming
today will let you, for example, install Windows in a close second to this drive was its sibling,
98SE in about 35 minutes flat on a Pentium III the ASUS CD-S500, which logged a score
More Info on based system, as compared to the leisurely of 1950.
the test process and the products 50 minutes to one hour that it used to take on Of notable mention is the Apex CHI-56,
tested. the 32x and slower drives available just a few which trailed 70 points behind the fastest drive
Check out years ago. in this test. However, the price of this drive is
Mindware To help you better understand the potential a very significant Rs 400 lesser than the
of these bad boys, we’ve put to test some of the 52x ASUS, with performance that closely
best CD-ROM drives available today to help you matches it.
get a good idea of the kind of myriad applica- On the lower side, the drive that didn’t meet
Contents tions each is capable of running. up with our expectations was the 40x Plextor
TEST PROCESS . . . . . . .116 PX-40TSi. Sporting a SCSI interface, this drive
CD-ROM DRIVES . . . . .116 Application tests logged a score of just 1380, which was the
Acer CD652P (52x) CD Winbench 99 is one of the lowest in this roundup. In spite of
Acer CD 656P (56x) best benchmarking software being rated as a 40x drive,
Apex CHI-56 (56X) for testing a CD drive’s this one came with a Rs
ASUS CD-S500/G overall performance. 5,450 price tag because
ASUS CD-S525/G/A This includes of its SCSI interface.
Creative Digital iR 52x measuring the With performance
Krypton 52x CPU power that was just not up to
LG CRD-8522B (52x) utilised while the mark in this test,
Plextor PX-40TSi operating the CD- this drive is not a good
Samsung SC-152 (52x) ROM (that is CPU choice: its price is a constraint
BOX utilisation expressed as and it’s performance is, in fact,
CLV vs CAV . . . . . . . . . . .120 a percentage) and the speed slower than even some of the IDE
SCORE BOARD . . . . . . .117 of the CD-ROM (which is drives tested.
CONCLUSION . . . . . . . .121 expressed in terms of While most scores posted by the
data transfer rates and LG CRD8522B: fast at ripping audio 52x drives ranged from 1500 to

116 November 2001

 Specifications
The CD-ROM Drives at a Glance
Brand Model Speed Contact Phone E-mail Web site Warranty Price Rating
Acer CD652P 52x Acer Peripherals 022-570 5230/31/32 [email protected] www.acercm.com 1 year Rs 1,650 B+
Acer CD 656A 56x Acer Peripherals 022-570 5230/31/32 [email protected] www.acercm.com 1 year Rs 1,850 B+
Apex CHI-56 56x Apex Computers 8354157 [email protected] -- 1 year Rs 1,950 B+
ASUS CD-S500/G 50x Aditya Infotech Ltd 6338555to 61 [email protected] www.adityagroup.com 1 year Rs 2,250 A-
ASUS CD-S520G/A 52x Aditya Infotech Ltd 6338555to 61 [email protected] www.adityagroup.com 1 year Rs 2,350 B+
Creative Digital iR 52x Compuage Infocom ltd 022-8305501/02/03 [email protected] www.compuageindia.com 1 year Rs 2,250 B
Krypton 52x Priya International 022-2663611 [email protected] www.priyagroup.com 1 year Rs 1,740 B+
LG LG CRD-8522B 52x LG Electronics 022-691 0123 [email protected] www.lgindia.com 1 year Rs 2,200 B+
Plextor PX-40TSi 40x Zeta Technology 022-4102288 [email protected] www.zetaindia.com 1 year Rs 5,450 B
Samsung SC-152 52x Savex Computers Ltd 022- 2881616/17 [email protected] www.savexcomputers.com 1 year Rs 2,000 B

2000 points, another drive that delivered ning the test. speed of just 1462 KBps, which is under
below-par performance in this test was the Here too ASUS delivered exemplary par considering that it is a 52x drive. To
Krypton 52x, which just managed a score performance in both, the 52x and 50x add to this, the price of this drive was a
of 1380 in spite of being rated as a 52x drive categories. Results logged by the shade higher than the average pricing in
drive. ASUS CD-S520/G were very impressive the 52x category.
If you more often than not run appli- across the board where it logged a The Creative Digital iR CD drive was
cations from the CD drive directly (as in sequential read speed of 3553 KBps, a another that gave a low result of 2061
games that need the CD to be in the drive random speed of 682 KBps and an access KBps in the sequential read test. Howev-
to be played) and also perform extensive time of 56 ms. These were among the er, this drive did sport some cool features
installations, then the ASUS CD-S520, highest that we’ve seen in a CD-ROM such as an infrared remote control that
which did well in this test, would be your drive. This performance was also repli- can be used to control the functioning of
best choice. If price is a constraint, then cated by its 50x sibling, which the drive if you choose to install the
you could consider the Apex CHI-56, clocked a sequential read application software that is bun-
which delivered performance close to score of 3496 KBps, a dled with it.
the best performer in this test, but was random read Of special men-
priced lower. speed of 688 KBps tion is the per-
and an access time formance of the
Give me raw numbers! of 55ms. drive in the ran-
SiSoft Sandra (System Analyser, Diagnos- Another drive dom read tests.
tic and Reporting Assistant) 2001te is a that also did especially This is a very pivotal
utility that we used to benchmark param- well in this test was the Apex specification in a CD-ROM
eters such as sequential read, which is CHI-56, which scored 3395 KBps drive as it talks about the
important while copying or playing back a in the sequential read test. performance of the drive’s
single large data file, such as an MPG or The random read speed Apex CHI-56: it’s fast in read- data read assembly while
AVI file, from your CD. and the access time of this ing and transferring data accessing information from
The random read, buffer read and the 56x rated drive, which was different parts of the CD-
access time of the CD drive that this test clocked at 764 KBps and 45 ms, respec- ROM media.
measures are also important because tively, turned out to be even faster than While the scores in these tests may not
they reflect the performance while that of ASUS. seem very high as compared to those in the
browsing the contents of a CD. This test On the other side of the spectrum, the sequential read tests, they are a more real-
also logs information such as the maxi- drive that disappointed was the Samsung istic indication of how the drive will per-
mum speed the drive reached while run- SC-152. It managed a sequential read form with day-to-day applications, as
most access to the CD-ROM drive is ran-
dom in nature (such as browsing the con-
tents of a CD-ROM, running multimedia
applications, installing applications etc).
Here, the drive that posted the best
results was the Apex CHI-56, which logged
a transfer rate of 764 KBps with an access
time of just 45 ms.
If your work process predominantly
involves sequential access of large data files
(as in reading big image files and databas- ➜

117
■ select~ t e s t d r i v e

es from CDs), then the ASUS CD-S520 is very well in this test was the Plextor PX-
the best choice. For random data read
applications, the Apex CHI-56 gets top
40Tsi, taking just 27.03 seconds to rip the
innermost track (72.84 MB in size) of the
CLV vs CAV
honours, but if features such as a remote audio CD, making it almost twice as fast CLV (Constant Linear Velocity) is the
that allows you to control drive operations as the slowest performing drive in this method used to access data in almost
test. Surprisingly, we all CD-ROM drives available in the mar-
found that the drive ket today. In this method the variable
which excelled in data speed motor is used to spin the disc.
transfer—the ASUS The reason for this is that while reading
S520G 52x—per- the data available on the innermost
formed slowest in this track, whose circumference is smaller,
test, taking a leisurely the speed at which the disk spins has
73.68 seconds to rip to be higher. On the other hand, when
the innermost track. the head is reading the data from the
This was almost three outermost track, the rotational speed
times more than the (rotation per minute or rpm) of the
is more important to you, then the Cre- fastest drive. drive is much slower. This change in the
ative Digital iR would be a good choice, The Samsung SC-152 also performed rotational speed ensures the constant
provided you’re willing to sacrifice on per- very well in this test, with very good flow of data.
formance. results in spite of not having performed CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) on
too well in the earlier data transfer tests. the other hand follows a different
Audio ripping So, if you are into converting music method of reading the data. Here the
This helps evaluate the ability of the drive on CDs into MP3s or extracting from rpm of the motor spinning the media
to perform error corrections with the help audio CDs, the best drive for you is the remains constant, regardless of where
of better cache synching on the fly, which Acer CD652P 52x, which logged exem- the data is stored on the media. This
results in WAV files devoid of any ‘clicks’ plary results in this test. Do keep in makes the drive using this method
and jitters. This will result in better quali- mind, however, that good performance slower than the drive using the CLV
ty as well as faster conversion of CDA to in DAE and high data transfer perform- method. The advantage of this method
WAV format. ance cannot be directly co-related; there is that it’s simple to design and produce
All you MP3 buffs out there would are drives that deliver very good data the drive because the speed of the
need a drive that works well with applica- transfer performance, but lag in DAE motor is constant and latency time
tions that need audio tracks to be ripped performance. (time wasted while the drive changes
from audio CDs so that they can be its rpm) is eliminated.
worked on and edited or converted to Working with files
another format such as MP3. This process Simply put, this is a set of tests that
is called Digital Audio Extraction (DAE). involves copying different file types from assortment of 10 files totalling 100 MB was
This is a feature that older drives used to be the CD-ROM to the hard disk. This is a transferred to the hard disk from the CD
incapable of supporting but is incorporat- very practical indication of the speed of drive, the Krypton 52x clocked 22.21 sec-
ed into all CD-ROM drives available today. the CD-ROM drive. onds to complete the task. The slowest
Interestingly, this is also a feature that The drive that emerged the drive here turned out to
proves to be very well implemented winner while copying a sin- be the Samsung SC-
in some drives and poorly implemented in gle 100 MB file was 152, which took
others; although the data transfer might Krypton 52x, which 40.13 seconds to
be fast in one, it could have very poor surprisingly out- copy the 100 MB file
DAE speeds. performed all and 34.57 seconds to
The drive that gave good results in this other drives in copy the assorted files.
test was undoubtedly the 52x Acer spite of deliver- The most attractive part
CD652P, which logged a blazing 16.94 ing very average about this drive is its economi-
seconds to rip the middle track—com- performance in the cal price tag. The runner up in
pared to the 43 seconds taken by the synthetic tests. This drive this test was the 50x ASUS
ASUS S520 drive. took only 26.19 seconds CD-S500, which delivered
Another drive that also performed to copy the 100 MB test Acer CD 652P: this drive results that were just a shade
file to the hard drive. The gave above average results below the Krypton drive.
scores in the synthetic in most tests The next real-world test
tests for this drive were that we ran involved opening
not among the highest, but as seen, it did an assortment of 10 TIFF images in Pho-
very well in the real-world test. The run- toshop 6.0 from the CD-ROM drive.
ner-up in this test was the 52x LG CED Since many Web designers, photogra-
8120B, which took 27.58 seconds to copy phers and art professionals extensively
the file to the hard drive. use CDs to store backups of images, this
In the assorted file copy test, where an test was intended to be indicative of the

120 November 2001

drive’s performance with such applications.
Here the 52x ASUS CD-S520G drive fared well, logging 30.12
seconds to open the images, making it 23 seconds faster than the
slowest drive in this test. The second in this test was the 52x
Krypton, which trailed very slightly, taking 34.28 seconds to open
the images from the CD.
The drive that took the most time to complete this test was
the 52x Samsung SC-152, taking a slow 53.56 seconds to open all
the TIFF images.
In summary, we see that the real world performance of
these drives is often different from the synthetic or ‘ideal-con-
ditions’ performance. If you work extensively with applica-
tions where you need to copy and read files from the CD-ROM
drive, then the best choice in this category would be the Kryp-
ton 52x drive as it showed exemplary performance in the file
transfer as well as the Photoshop tests and is also priced quite
competitively. The runner up in this category was the 52x
ASUS CD-S520.

CONCLUSION
The performance of a CD drive is not just a function of the
maximum speed it can reach in synthetic tests but also in real
world performance tests and in its ability to support new fea-
tures and formats.
The 50x ASUS S500/G drive proved to the best performer in
these tests, having logged a very impressive set of results and
1/2 Pg V AD
was a good blend of performance in the real-world and low-
level data transfer tests. In fact, despite being a 50x drive it post-
ed results that were a shade ahead of even some of the 52x
drives. It was, however, among the more expensive drives in the
comparison.
The 56x Acer CD 656P bagged the Best Value award.
This drive posted good data transfer speeds and
proved to be an exceptional performer, especially for
audio ripping related
applications. Its per-
formance was just a
shade below that of
the winning CD drive
and it was quite eco-
nomically priced. No
other 52x drive came
close to this one in
terms of price for the
given level of per-
Acer CD 656P: a value buy formance.
Even though CD-
ROM drives are at
threat due to the
aggressive pricing
and speeds of DVD
drives, they still prove
to be worthy per-
formers and it seems
that the continually
falling prices of these
drives will ensure
that the CD-ROM
standard sticks
around for some
ASUS S500/G: it blazes ahead time to come.

121
■ select~ t e s t d r i v e

IN TEST: 5 PAGE LAYOUT SOFTWARE

Imaging: Solomon Lewis

It’s all in the Design

The visual element is DIGITAL MEDIA RESEARCH AND TEST CENTRE functions involved in designing a magazine or
n the print medium, design comes in two a newspaper. It becomes essential for one to
the single most
important thing
when it comes to
presenting
I flavours: imaging and page layout. Page lay-
out software is essentially the tool that allows
a designer to format the images and written
information and place them to fit in whatever
format they are meant for—from a newspaper to
use page layout tools that allow one to handle
text as well as multiple graphics elements. This
is done by giving the user the flexibility to
design everything from simple letterheads,
posters and cards to publishing magazines and
a magazine. Sounds quite like what your MS even newspapers.
information. Ergo Word does for you, doesn’t it? Unlike other software, the market does not
Word processors are good for routine work boast a wide variety of professional page layout
design but when it comes to professional publishing software. Adobe has a range of three different
they simply don’t offer enough flexibility types of software which in itself kill each other
to handle multiple objects besides other on basis of their functions. QuarkXPress had

122 November 2001

 a result what one gets is an extremely function-
al product with an extremely dull interface.
Shortcuts allow for easy access to commonly
used features from the keyboard. A good soft-
ware will not only have the facility of providing
this feature, but also the capability of customis-
ing shortcuts. If a user wants a particular short-
cut through a particular set of keys, he should be
able to do so.
Toolbars are perhaps the most commonly
accessed element in a page layout software. The
toolbar should have the common set of tools so
that the user does not have to access the menu
each time to use the feature. Software developers
have started placing the extra functions of a par-
ticular tool in the toolbar, but in a hidden mode,
which can only be accessed when it is double-
clicked. Users will be more appreciative of the
floating toolbar as it gives them the flexibility of
dragging and dropping.
A common problem with professional soft-
ware available today is too many choices. Users
are often stuck with features they can’t use.
Therefore, it is important for a software to
explain the basic operations through adequate
help and documentation and give in-depth
examples, information which would really be
helpful to new users.
In spite of the release of the new PageMak-
er, the Adobe developers seem to not have
taken many pains to improve the interface. It
looks no different from its previous version
with the exception of a quick access toolbar
under the menu bar, which can be called a nice
addition. QuarkXPress has a simple but not
appealing interface like Adobe InDesign. It too
features a floating toolbar with a common set
of tools like frames, Bezier, selection, type and
drawing tools.
Microsoft Publisher’s interface might not More Info on
appeal to a professional user. It too has a floating
the test process and the
tool palette that, by default, is stuck on the left- products tested.
Photograph: Mexy Xavier Imaging: Neeta Wadiker
hand side of the software. You will not have to Check out
manually pick and drag the bar and place it
wherever you need it. A wizard panel also
Mindware
appears on the left-hand side but it gives the
received a tremendous response when it was impression of the screen being too cramped. You Contents
launched in the late 1990s and continues to be can hide it though. TEST PROCESS . . . . . . . . .124
popular with many publishing houses. Adobe Frame Maker’s interface is shocking; it PAGE LAYOUT SOFTWARE . .123
In this comparison test, we included only is difficult to believe that Adobe has developed Adobe PageMaker7.0
those DTP software that had the functionality this software. This has a highly unintuitive inter- Adobe InDesign 1.5.2
of layers, text wrapping, frames, masking, etc. face and the toolbar looks very dull indeed. One Adobe Frame Maker 6.0
Corel Ventura has been a favourite with many, wonders why this is so after the proven brilliance Microsoft Publisher 2000
but we weren’t able to include it in our com- of other Adobe products such as Photoshop, QuarkXPpress 4.1
parison test because it was unavailable. Illustrator, etc. BOXES
InDesign, with an interface similar to that of What People Use in the
SOFTWARE SPEAK Adobe Illustrator, possesses a common set of tools Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . .125
Interface like the gradient, free transform, text, drawing, PostScript Files . . . . . . . . .127
A reasonably appealing look and feel of the inter- eyedropper, etc, which make it a pleasure to work SCOREBOARD . . . . . . . . . .126
face adds to the tool’s intuitive feel. Software with this software. Both Adobe InDesign and CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . .128
developers conveniently ignore this factor and as Frame Maker boast a good set of help files which

123
■ select~ t e s t d r i v e

TEST PROCESS
We used a 433 Celeron machine with 192 MB RAM running Windows 2000 as a test
bench. We believe Windows 2000/NT is a far more stable OS because of better memory
and disk handling, which is a necessity for page layout tools, as they work with large
images and other such data.
We tested the page layout software for the following features:
■ Memory and hard disk usage
■ Features (auto flow, text editing capabilities, creation of tables, various colour modes
supported, image editing capabilities)
■ Design elements (paragraph style sheets, character style sheets, images, text flow, col- Adobe PageMaker Provides a Story Editor
umn guides, frames, layers, masking, text on path, gradient) to edit text
■ Miscellaneous features (Dictionary, spell check, wizards, templates)
■ Ease of use (look and feel, shortcuts, toolbars, help and documentation, tutorials) adjustments to the images while placing
elements within the layout of the page. If
the software has this capability then it
another page and does not require the user eliminates the need of going back to the
to add one manually. image editing software to perform basic
At some point of time everybody editing.
includes tables in their work. However, it Microsoft Publisher, InDesign, Quark
is rare to find a page layout software with and Frame Maker provide one with basic
a separate program for creating tables. elements such as rotating, cropping and
One normally has to create a table in scaling images, but Adobe PageMaker is
Office suite programs like Excel and place particularly impressive because in addition
it in the page layout program. The prob- to basic editing capabilities, it also lets the
lem here is that the data gets imported user add Photoshop filter effects. Howev-
Extremely intutive interface of InDesign without the horizontal and vertical lines. er, these can be added to only TIFF
These lines would then need to be drawn (Tagged Information File Format) images.
explain all the fundamental operations of manually. Hence it would be better if
the software but what they (and also Quark) the software provides the facility of mak- Design elements
lack is the look and presentation style which ing tables. There are certain design elements which
is Adobe PageMaker’s forte. Adobe PageMaker does provide the layout professionals m2ake use of such as
user with a separate program to generate frames, manipulation of layers, masking,
Features tables but unfortunately one cannot column guides, text on path, paragraph
A page layout professional expects certain directly import them into PageMaker so and character styles, etc.
features—on-the-fly text editing and one will have to place it as an OLE object. Layers: If digital imaging artists can work
image editing capabilities, automatic flow Publisher and Frame Maker have the capa- with layers, then why not page layout pro-
of text from one page to another, and the bility of allowing users to create tables in fessionals? Most software developers have
ability to export to different colour modes the software itself but InDesign and Quark taken this point in consideration and
for pre-press use—to be present in the do not have this capability. Hence one will infused functionality into professional
software. We’ve emphasised these features have to create tables in a different program page layout software. With the help of
and closely examined how the software has and then import them here. multiple layers one can create and edit spe-
bundled them. Who does not make mistakes, especial- cific areas in work without disturbing the
Professionals dealing with huge ly when it comes to typing? Wouldn’t it be rest of the areas. For example, if you’ve
amounts of text find it extremely tedious better if the software provides some easy placed your text on a specific layer and
to manually add and place text on every and quick way of editing the content? your images on another, you can tem-
page. If the software facilitates automatic Some software enable you to edit text by porarily hide the image layer to make
adding of text, it would make their work providing a separate text editor programs proofreading easier.
much easier. Yet, sometimes when the text whereas others provide on-screen text Only Adobe PageMaker and InDesign
has to be flown from one column to anoth- editing. provide this functionality wherein one can
er, the user should have the option of flow- Except for Adobe PageMaker, which place different objects on different layers.
ing text manually. allows the user the option of editing the The layers can be hidden and even locked.
Adobe PageMaker and InDesign do text on-screen or editing it in a separate Frames: This element helps in laying out
have the auto flow feature but one will window by selecting Edit Story, the others content as it can hold content together
have to first manually add pages, whereas only allow one to edit the text on-screen. (text as well as graphics) and serve the pur-
if one is using QuarkXPress, the pages get Though one wouldn’t normally use a pose of a placeholder too. Newspapers and
added automatically. With Publisher it page layout software for editing images, it magazines use this element as it gives the
prompts the user to use the auto flow fea- would be of great help if the software pro- basic layout structure of the content and
ture and then automatically places the text vided the basic facilities of cropping, rotat- one can place empty frames to make it eas-
by adding the pages. Like Quark, Frame ing and transforming the size of the image ier to fit in data at a later stage.
Maker automatically puts the text to as one often finds the need to make some Frame Maker, Publisher and InDesign

124 November 2001

 What People use in the Industry
Ever wondered if you really need to use One of the things that Photoshop Word XP, a part of the recently
these expensive page layout software does lack, however, is the ability to flow released Microsoft Office XP suite, allows
packages? text around the object, etc. Hence if you you to do everything from adding tables,
The newest versions of Microsoft Word want to really do something special with frames and columns to placing images,
and Photoshop are quite proficient when your design you will require the addition- creating table of contents, spell checking,
it comes to handling text and images and al flexibility of a specialist page layout wrapping text around an object and
most of us can churn out pretty decent tool. This is why professional designers adding gradients and all of these can be
looking documents with them. would eventually choose to import the done on the fly.
Even page layout professionals tend to image objects into the page layout soft- The things that are required for profes-
use these to lay out simpler brochures and ware and flow the text and manipulate sional publishing and are missing from
booklets. In the new release of Photoshop elements there. Word are support for CMYK, the ability
one can easily design and create brochures, For most of us, Word is probably a to type text along a randomly drawn
pamphlets, visiting cards, memo’s and also more logical choice since it allows one to path, placement of graphics in frames,
type in large amounts of text. create basic layouts. masking, etc.

not only provide frames where one can most animation and image editing soft- Frame Maker and Publisher have not
add graphics but also text frames for typ- ware and is seeing its place in page layout yet incorporated this feature so one will
ing text. Unlike InDesign and Publisher software as well. Going back to the image have to take the trouble of going back to
where one has to add text frames to start editing software just to mask objects is the image editing software for masking
typing, Frame Maker gives the user the boring and disrupts concentration. Now images. The remaining software do pro-
flexibility to type on-screen as well as in one can easily mask, that is, hide, objects vide this feature.
text frames. PageMaker and Quark allow by either placing them one over another Text on path: Advertisements in news-
the user to type directly without having to or by covering a part of the object with the papers where the text flows throughout the
place text frames. help of various shape tools so that only a page are common. If you think it’s difficult
Masking: This feature is already present in particular portion of that object is visible. to place the text in such as a way, you’d be

1/2 Page AD

125
■ select~ t e s t d r i v e

surprised. It can be done quite easily by flow on a particularly drawn path. A page
drawing a path with the help of the pen or layout software should possess this impor-
pencil tool (depends on what the software tant feature.
The new release of Adobe PageMaker
tested here does not incorporate this feature.
The developers at Adobe don’t seem to be
interested in developing this software, and
are giving more importance to InDesign
which does possess this feature. Unlike Pub-
lisher and Frame Maker, Quark and InDe-
sign include this feature thereby giving the QuarkXPress provides on-screen display of
user the flexibility to type text on paths. linking of various pages
Gradient: It is a blend between two or
more colours or tints of the same colour. while printing, which raises the possibili-
Why would anybody want this element on ty of them appearing dull or shifted.
Layers and Gradient effects in InDesign a page layout software? This is primarily Hence, most designers use this feature in
used by designers in generating two-tone CMYK mode.
provides) and typing the text on to it as effects in text and also in filling up drawn InDesign, Quark and Publisher allow
one would normally do. It is the software objects. One disadvantage here is that the one to add gradients to objects but Pub-
which does the trick by allowing text to colours are converted to CMYK mode lisher does not allow one to add it to text.

The Page Layout Software at a Glance

Adobe Frame Maker Adobe InDesign 1.5.2 Adobe PageMaker 7.0 Microsoft Publisher QuarkXPpress 4.1
+SGML 6.0 2000
Company Tricom International Adobe Systems India Adobe Systems India Trifin Technologies Quark India Pvt Ltd
Pvt Ltd Pvt Ltd
Phone Numbers 022-8942461 0118-4532026 0118-4532026 011-6236061 0172-254412
Fax Numbers 022-8930504 0118-4532010 0118-4532010 011-6436447 0172-254414
E-mail Address [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
Web site www.tricommutimedia. www.adobe.com www.adobe.com om
com www.quarkindia.com
Price (Rs) 90,000 42,946 26,500 4,500 34,000
Hard Disk Space 95 MB 50.6 MB 172 MB 60 MB 22 MB
Memory Usage 16.4 MB 22 MB 31.2 MB 7.6 MB 8.4 MB
Features
Autoflow Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Text Editing Capabilities Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Creation of Tables Yes No Yes Yes No
Various Colour Modes CMYK, RGB, HLS CMYK, RGB, LAB CMYK, RGB, HLS CMYK, RGB CMYK, RGB
Supported
Image Editing Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Capabilities
Design Elements
Paragraph Style Sheets Yes Yes Yes No Yes
Character Style Sheets Yes Yes No Yes Yes
Importing Images Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Column Guides Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Frames Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Layers No Yes Yes No No
Masking No Yes Yes No Yes
Text on Path No Yes No No Yes
Gradient No Yes No Yes Yes
Miscellaneous Features
Dictionary Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Spell Check Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Wizards No No No Yes No
Templates Yes No Yes Yes No
Ratings B- A- B B B+

126 November 2001

Frame Maker and PageMaker are yet to
incorporate this feature. PostScript Files
Styles: Who would want to take the trou-
ble of formatting all the paragraphs in one While working with page layout software, Script files. This will save you from worry-
particular style? With paragraph style one often faces problems when sending ing about which platform or version of
sheets, one can load the predefined set of the final documents to get printed at the system software the service provider has.
styles already provided by the software or press. One usually gets ‘font missing’ errors PostScript files contain all the fonts
save their own styles in case they are going because the font used while designing the used in the document so the fonts will
to be used again. Professionals actually use document may not be installed at the appear correctly even if the output device
this function to a great extent—all it needs printer’s end. To work around this, copy does not have them. Files saved in the
is a click to format paragraphs by select- the fonts along with the documents so PostScript format can even be sent over
ing the appropriate style. Similar to para- that they can be installed before the docu- the Internet to the service provider. How-
graph style sheets, character style sheets ment is finally printed. ever, the large file sizes associated with
allow one to have a particular style of for- In 1985, Adobe developed PostScript PostScript files deter many from sending
matting attributes that can be applied to a which became an industry standard for documents over the Net, especially in India
selection of text. Thus, for example, for printing and imaging. PostScript is basi- where bandwidth is a major problem.
logos or for headlines, you can save such cally a programming language which To reduce the file size one can,
character styles once and then apply them describes the appearance of the page depending on the settings provided by
wherever required by a single click. containing text and graphics to the output the software, omit images (which are
PageMaker and Publisher are disap- device (colour or a black and white print- usually saved in TIFF format) from the
pointing when it comes to styles—Page- er or any other output device). document. These TIFF images can be sent
Maker provides for only character style To eliminate font-related problems, separately and incorporated into the Post-
sheets and Publisher provides only para- you can save your documents as Post- Script file before printing.
graph style sheets.
Importing text: One usually uses some
office program or the other to make text way it was formatted—if one were to Adobe PageMaker shines here as it can
documents and spreadsheets. Hence, if reformat the text after it’s been imported retain the formatting while importing
one wishes to import data into a page lay- into the page layout software, it would just text, though it does lose the font size. InDe-
out program, it should appear exactly the be an unnecessary duplication of work. sign also does a good job of importing text

1/2 Page AD

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■ select~ t e s t d r i v e

but strangely enough, it retains the font of words. It can get pretty irritating if it keeps reportedly nearing completion, the retail
the header but not of the remaining text. on ignoring proper nouns. The software version available in the market as of now is
QuarkXPress was quite bad in this regard— should allow users to manually add names still 4.1.
it doesn’t import text if it is saved in the and not show it as an error the next time Even with PageMaker, the new version
default MS Word format. You can import you run the spell check. fails to impress as the interface and fea-
text only in RTF format, but all the format- All the software that we tested had this tures haven’t changed much. Quark is fea-
ting gets lost. Like PageMaker, Adobe Frame feature and all were equally good. ture rich, but lacks proper importing
Maker, InDesign and Microsoft Publisher Wizards: There are many software which capabilities. Microsoft’s Pub-
maintain the text formatting. provide wizards (step by step guidance) to lisher 2000 offers a simple
PageMaker and InDesign do an excel- create predefined documents. This makes and easy-to-use solution
lent job of importing data as it is from MS the job easier and much faster than the for those not-so-
Excel. Quark again disappoints here. manual process. design-inclined who
Frame Maker does import the Excel sheet Except for Microsoft Publisher 2000, want nothing but basic
but only if it is saved in version 5.0. How- none of the software have wizards for gen-
ever, what you get is a hotch potch of data erating documents. Publisher offers an
which you then have to adjust manually as extensive list of publications such as
the flow of the data is lost upon importing. brochures, catalogues, greeting cards, etc
that can be created very easily even by a
Miscellaneous features novice with the help of wizards.
If a page layout software has features such Templates: A template is a predefined
as spell checker, wizards and templates, it design page which can be used as standard
is a bonus as they add to the software’s document as it contains a set of graphics
functionality. and text in predefined layout. This feature
is commonly use by newspapers and
monthly publications where the template
can consist of text, graphics, layout, place- Adobe InDesign 1.5: the most functional
holders, rulers, grid, etc. Software like and versatile page layout software
Adobe’s PageMaker now come bundled
with sufficient templates to make things design templates to make simple docu-
easier for the user. ments such as letterheads, business cards
PageMaker, Microsoft Publisher and and memos.
Frame Maker provide an extensive list of What really toppled the top ranks was
templates which one can use for his work Adobe’s InDesign, which, with its easy-to-
or rework on them to suit his need. InDe- use interface and a boatload of features
MS Publisher 2000 provides wizards and sign and Quark haven’t implemented this overtook all the oldies. It has an extreme-
templates for ease of use feature yet. ly functional interface that rivals that of
Photoshop. Adobe came out with this ver-
Spell checker: Spelling mistakes are com- CONCLUSION sion a couple of months back, and a new
mon. After laying out the text, we normal- Even though PageMaker and QuarkXPress 2.0 version has already been announced on
ly run the spell checker to see if any have been the all-time favourites, this time Adobe’s Web site. As of now, InDesign
typographical errors are present. The spell the equation changes a bit. Quark hasn’t stands way ahead of all other page layout
checker should be able to detect not only come out with a new version for quite a software in terms of user friendliness,
the spelling mistakes but also the duplicate long time. Even though QuarkXPress 5 is features and usability.

www. think .com

128 November 2001

■ select~ insight
Illustration: Mahesh Benkar

eotes for
ph an
ile Audio-
Notes for an Audiophile
PRASHANT MASRANI won’t be able to tell the difference in audio qual-
A look into the world udio formats have evolved since the early ity between MP3 audio and CD audio.
of audio formats and
what’s happening A days of blips, beeps and first-generation
PCM audio. It was the WAV format, which
finally allowed users to experience CD-qual-
ity audio on their PCs. Though audio reproduc-
tion was remarkable, file sizes of WAV audio clips
How MP3 works
An MP3 file consists of a number of individual
frames. Each frame contains a certain amount of
song data and when grouped together, they make
were huge. A single minute of CD-quality audio up the entire track. In order for these small seg-
occupied approximately 10 MB of space. As an ments of data to exist, a particular song must be
uncompressed audio format, WAV files are diffi- encoded first. The bit rate chosen will directly
cult to share and transport across computers. reflect upon the output file’s size and audio qual-
The need to bring down the size of audio files ity. Essentially, bit rate is a measurement (in bits
was felt and development began on a format, per second) of how much compressed audio data
which not only accomplished smaller audio file flows per second. Higher bit rates yield higher
sizes, but also maintained as much audio integri- quality sounding music as opposed to lower bit
ty as possible. Fraunhofer started it all with their rates. The lower the bit rate, the less space the
revolutionary MP3 format. With MP3, audio file occupies.
clips were cut down in size, in most cases, by a A CD contains data, which is digitally stored
factor of 10 to 14, while maintaining audio qual- in an uncompressed, high-resolution manner.
ity to a great extent. Though audiophiles may not Music is sampled 44,100 times per second and
swear by the MP3 standard, most casual listeners each sample is 16 bits long. Separate samples are

130 November 2001

 Infographics: Jaya Shetty

Lossy Compression
When audio is compressed,
it usually doesn’t mean the
compression of the audio
itself. What really happens is
known as lossy compres-
sion. Lossy compression is
usually used in audio, video
and image files where cer-
MP3PRO is made up of a combination of standard MP3 files supplemented with reconstructed high frequencies using SBR.
tain details can’t be seen or
heard by the human senses
taken for the left and right audio channels. If we less upon the softer one. Using these principles, and thus those areas are not
do the math, we get: MP3 encoding will only include those frequen- included in the compressed
44,100 samples per second x 16 bits per sam- cies, which the human ear ‘prefers’ and excludes file itself. Every human has a
ple x 2 channels = 1,411,200 bits per second or certain parts of the song without significantly hearing range, which means
176,000 bytes per second deteriorating sound quality. that he or she can hear only
So a typical one-minute segment of CD audio With this algorithm of song compression, the a particular range of sounds.
occupies around 1MB of data. What MP3 does is resulting MP3 file is only one-tenth to one- In MP3 compression or
reduce the number of bytes of a song while fourth the size of the original song, giving it most audio format compres-
maintaining a high standard of audio quality. In tremendous portability. What you have left after sions, the frequencies that
order to accomplish this, the MP3 format uses a encoding is a ‘near CD quality’ song as the MP3 cannot be heard are elimi-
compression technique known as perceptual version of the song does not sound exactly like nated from the particular
noise shaping or ‘psychoacoustics’. the original since some parts have been removed. song. However, a good
The principle behind perceptual noise shap- For all practical purposes, the output is very audio compression method
ing is based upon the characteristics of the close. Due to the fact that the MP3 encoding will give the most accurate
human ear. For instance, the human ear is sensi- process eliminates some data from the original results by getting most fre-
tive only to frequencies in the range of 20 Hz to song, this type of compression is known as ‘lossy quencies encoded within
20,000 Hz. Anything below or above this range compression’. the song, giving quality of
cannot be heard. Also, there are certain sounds The MP3 format also supports Variable Bit sound and also giving small
that the human ear can hear much better than Rate, or VBR for short. As mentioned earlier, file sizes.
others. Furthermore, if two sounds of different MP3 files consist of hundreds of smaller chunks
amplitudes (volume levels) are being played called frames. When encoding a VBR file, the
simultaneously, the human ear has a natural ten- encoder decides the bit rate for a particular
dency to pick up on the louder sound and focus frame. A frame’s bit rate can drop down by 32

A Question of St@NdaRDS
Sony, Liquid, Dolby. Three companies with media size is the main priority. Recently, has been created with security of the media
three standards—AC3, ATRAC3, and LQT. with the introduction of DVD, compression as the chief priority. Liquid Audio SP3 is also
Which is the best? and storage of surround sound is now pos- known as Liquid Audio Secure Player Plat-
AC3: Audio Code number 3 is a sound sible. This enables users to listen to Dolby form. The Web site and company offer
compression standard that has been creat- Digit surround sound at home. firmware updates for any later version.
ed by Dolby. In most audio formats, stereo Sony ATRAC3: Sony was the first company Claims have been made that Liquid Audio
sound is the standard. However, in AC3, the to introduce portable music with the unfor- with its technology will be able to protect
aim is to deliver five speaker streams and gettable Walkman. Then came the Memory the copyrights of the artists. There are huge
also a bass channel, which is overall denot- Stick Walkman, which was like a pen and archives and online stores available for the
ed as 5.1 surround sound. This standard is stored songs on the memory. Sony has format where people can use carts and
usually found in cinemas and theatres. AC3 been using its own formats; there were two select songs from the Internet through the
encoding allows sound from the frequency main technologies used—ATRAC and Magic authorised sites. Currently, Liquid Audio has
of 3 Hz to 20 kHz to play on the system, Gate Memory. Later, a software called device partners such as Palm, Sony, and
which is quite over the sounds that a OpenMG was introduced which would con- Toshiba, to name just a few. There is also a
human can hear. The bass that is produced vert the normal MP3 to the Sony format, software player which is available for down-
is between the frequency ranges of 3 Hz to ATRAC3, before copying it to the memory. load from the Liquid Audio site itself. The
120 Hz only. The bit rate at which the audio However, the public wasn’t quite happy free version and the Pro version of the play-
is played at is 640 kbps, which is much with the conversion of formats. er allow you to write CDs and import music
over most audio formats today like MP3, Liquid Audio’s LQT: Liquid Audio SP3 is at high quality. Liquid Audio is also said to
WMA, etc, but here quality and not the the latest of all the formats available, and it use AC3 Dolby digital Codec for its audio.

131
■ select~ insight

kbps to a lower value whenever possible (if there and the high frequency range. The low frequen-
Advanced Audio is not much audio going on) and can accelerate cy range consists of signals below 10 KHz while
Coding the bit rate by 32 kbps as and when required. the high frequency range lies above 10 KHz. This
Essentially, VBR is used to provide for an effi- technique proves to be a more efficient way of
WMA and RealAudio 8 may cient compromise between file size and audio encoding sound into MP3Pro format and also
have the advantage over quality. Whenever a silent period is encountered contributes to increasing overall sound quality.
MP3: Their files are half the during a track, the bit rate can be decreased, thus One problem encountered with the MP3 for-
size at CD-quality rates. conserving on the size of that particular seg- mat is that at low bit rates, MP3 files run out of
However, a newer standard ment. Whenever higher quality is in need, the bit bits to compress the music in full audio band-
called Advanced Audio Cod- rate can increase giving a fuller, more accurate width. That is why at bit rates of around 48 kbps
ing (AAC) may give them a reproduction of the original track, but at the sac- to 64 kbps, MP3 music begins to sound dull as it
run for their money. AAC rifice of space. lacks a good deal of high frequency signals. At
was co-developed by the The problem encountered with VBR is that 64 kbps, MP3 can either produce an audio band-
Fraunhofer IIS-A, Dolby, and as the bit rate is constantly changing from one width of approximately 10 KHz or introduce
AT&T, and it is part of the segment to another, several players have a prob- coding artifacts. Coding artifacts are used to
MPEG-2 specification. AAC’s lem in determining correct track length. Though compensate for the shortage of bits while sam-
algorithm is different from a standard exists where track length is recorded pling at low bit rates in order to attempt to rep-
MP3’s, and AAC incorpo- into the first segment of an MP3 file, not all resent the complete audio bandwidth.
rates additional features that encoders can do this. MP3Pro is a result of combining two com-
boost the efficiency of A negative point from the perspective of the ponents: MP3 and Spectral Band Replication, or
encoding. Basically, AAC recording industry with the MP3 format is that SBR. SBR is a new coding technology which
delivers better-quality audio there are no security features that have been offers FM-quality audio (15 KHz) by increasing
with 30 per cent less data included in the format—it is free for everyone audio bandwidth of a standard MP3 sample.
than MP3. AAC is widely to pirate and share. As for the licensing part of SBR is a new method used in conjunction with
known to be the best when MP3, a company needs to pay $3.75 for each the MP3 format to reproduce high frequencies in
it comes to audio compres- device capable of playing back the MP3 format. low bit rate encoded audio files. When used with
sion, and a number of desk- SBR, the underlying MP3 encoder is responsible
top players, like the new Emerging standards for transmitting frequencies below 10 KHz while
MusicMatch Jukebox 6.0, Though the MP3 format does a satisfactory job SBR reconstructs all frequencies above the 10 KHz
are beginning to incorporate in compressing song data and maintaining a high range. This is a process which occurs during play-
it into the suite of codecs standard of audio quality, recent advents in tech- back of the MP3Pro file. First, the MP3 decoder
they support. As of today, nology permit even further compression of song processes the file (and frequencies below 10 KHz),
there are no portable play- data. Thompson Technologies, the co-creators of then it transmits the decoded portion to SBR for
ers that support AAC, but the MP3 format along with the Fraunhofer Insti- analysis and high frequency enhancement of the
with its upgradable tute, have teamed up with Coding Technologies to decoded portion. In effect, the SBR accurately
firmware, it may just be produce the next-generation MP3 format called represents the original music before the encod-
a matter of time before MP3Pro. MP3Pro operates in a similar fashion to ing process began. This reconstruction is not
AAC becomes as common the MP3 Codec with a few enhancements. A codec only accurate in the frequency domain, but in
as MP3. is analogous to a device driver in that it allows the time domain as well. The end result is full
playback of a particular audio format using spec- bandwidth audio decoding at low data rates and
ified parameters. MP3Pro is completely backward increased compression efficiency.
compatible with the original MP3 standard but The free version of MP3Pro supports a 64
you will not reap the full benefits of this codec kbps bit rate and a maximum sampling rate of
unless the suitable codec or plugin is installed on 44.1 KHz. The official full version of the codec
the computer. will allow a 96 kbps bit rate, which easily rivals
In MP3Pro, the encoder splits up the encod- standard MP3 files encoded at 128 kbps in terms
ing into two main parts: the low frequency range of audio reproduction. Like MP3, MP3Pro does

MP3 compression is done over a finite number of steps. In the first stage, audio in the data stream, the signal then passes through a bit allocation stage. The final
is simultaneously passed through the psychoacoustic stage and a filter bank phase of compression simply organises the data and creates an MP3 encoded
which splits up the sound into subbands of frequency. In order to minimise noise track as output.

132 November 2001

not have any security features to prevent wide-
spread piracy of licensed music.

A completely free alternative

Let’s see what else you can really depend on
for storing and playing your collection of
songs. Ogg Vorbis could be just the thing for
you in case you want quality and, more impor-
tantly, you want it free for distribution. Ogg
Vorbis is open source code, patent free and
you don’t have to pay a penny for giving your Decoding an MP3 starts with feeding the signal through bitstream unpacking where certain bits of informa-
tion regarding the decoding process are read and stored. The audio sample is broken down into chunks,
own songs to anyone. As of now, it is the only
which pass through the Huffman decoder where many tables are used to look up actual values since these
audio format that does this. bits of information are decoded. The decoder’s task is to then requantise the results and transform the sig-
Ogg Vorbis uses different mathematical nals into the time domain so that the resulting audio stream accurately represents the original sound.
principles from MP3 in how it encodes its
music and plays it. The Ogg Vorbis Codec
works on the basis of VBR like MP3 but does it over 56 kbps dial-up connections to high-speed
more efficiently. In the standard MP3 format, DSL and cable modem connections.
VBR allows for a rise and decline of 32 kbps steps. One particular feature incorporated into What to look for in
In Ogg Vorbis, the jump is of 1 kbps, which means WMA 8 that should appeal to the record industry a Protected Player
you get very accurate quality and file sizes are is a technology called Digital Rights Management,
strictly kept to a minimum. Though Ogg Vorbis or DRM for short. DRM is an end-to-end solution With audio standards chang-
files themselves can be encoded between 8 kbps to for encrypting and distributing digital content in ing the way they are today,
512 kbps, the current beta encoder supports 128, a secure manner on the Internet. it would be best to scout for
160, 192, 256 and 350 kbps in mono or stereo. The Windows Media format is a compilation a player that will support a
Since streaming audio is a very important of various components, which is called as a Win- particular format in the
application for these file formats in the future, any dows Media File Container. It contains WMA future. To ensure that your
successful format would need to include support and WMV using the codecs along with DRM digital audio player is
for them. This is natively supported within the technology. Metadata is similar to MP3’s ID3 tag indeed future-proof, pur-
Ogg Vorbis Codec. Currently, the designers of Ogg as it contains information about the artist, song chase a unit equipped with
Vorbis are working with the makers of Icecast, an name, etc. The format also has well integrated upgradable firmware. Be
open source streaming server which will allow voice recognition and text to speech capabilities sure you buy from a reputed
users to enjoy streaming audio. using Microsoft speech engine. company, as the inclusion of
Similar to what MP3’s ID3 tag offers, Ogg upgradable firmware does
Vorbis supports a proprietary comment header What’s your format? not guarantee that the com-
system, which allows you to include various So finally, which is the best format? If you’re pany will provide you with
information about the track such as title, artist, looking at availability, MP3 is no doubt the most an upgrade in the future.
song name, and so on. happening audio format available. MP3Pro has Several memory-based
Ogg Vorbis is patent free, open source and just started and the demo encoder/player does and MP3/CD players are
thus can be distributed and used for personal not have support for encoding audio at full qual- available that permit
and commercial purposes. Similarly, codecs are ity yet. For the time being, one will have to stick firmware updates. Son-
being developed for other operating systems like to encoding at 64 kbps using MP3Pro. icblue’s Rio players (500
Linux, BeOS, etc. Ogg Vorbis files can be played Ogg Vorbis offers high quality audio, thanks and above) support MP3,
back using Winamp and other supportive audio to the optimal VBR encoding and playing fea- WMA and Audible formats. If
players simply by using an Ogg Vorbis plug-in. tures, but availability and widespread industry an MP3 CD player suits your
support still remains a major problem. And fancy, take a look at the AVC
How can we forget Microsoft? without security and encryption, it is difficult for Soul Player which has a very
Microsoft likes doing things its own way. After the record industry to adopt Ogg Vorbis as their good track record of provid-
having taken over the operating system and audio standard du jour. The latest version of the ing constant firmware
office suite market, they’ve set sights upon push- Ogg Vorbis Codec, V1.0, will soon be available updates through their Web
ing their audio formats in a similar fashion with and proper encoders and players should also be site.
their Windows Media Audio. available for the general public to adopt.
What you are about to get is Windows Media Microsoft is doing a splendid job with their
Audio 8—Microsoft’s latest iteration of the WMA 8 standard. With high compression, inte-
WMA standard and their idea of the perfect grated security features and streaming capability,
competition to MP3Pro and Ogg Vorbis. WMA 8 appears to have the most potential to be
The format is similar to MP3Pro in terms of the prominent audio standard in the future. At
size of the file. The bandwidth used is 48 kbps the moment, while WMA is catching ground fast
for near CD-quality and 64 kbps for CD-quality with portable audio player makers’ support in
audio, similar to what MP3Pro offers. The for- their devices, MP3 still remains the format of
mat has been created for streaming of media choice for most device manufacturers and users.

133
■ select ~ i n s i g h t

Photograph: Mexy Xavier

Courtesy: Priyadarshini Park

HyperTransport
As the battle for CPU PRASHANT MASRANI
vs3GIO
here is no doubt about it. The escalation seen
3GIO (known as Arapahoe) each proposes to
change one of the most overlooked parts in a PC,
supremacy wages on,
Intel and AMD fight
to promote their
T in today’s CPU speeds is stunning. Hard
disks are buzzing along faster than ever and
the 3D technology that’s available today was
dismissed as fantasy a decade ago. However,
without due consideration, pushing barriers in
the I/O bus.
But before we discuss the technologies
involved in HyperTransport and 3GIO, let’s
rewind a little and see the limitations in the exist-
ing technology.
proposals to rework clock speeds, storage densities and fill-rates will
the innards of be in vain. Tomorrow’s devices are going to need Beyond the confines of the PC
infrastructure suited for their requirements. The components of a PC communicate by send-
computers Without high-bandwidth protocols in place, the ing and receiving data through an interconnect-
new technology is virtually useless. ed network of wires called buses. A bus is
Long-time rivals, Intel and AMD have each essentially a high-speed conduit for digital infor-
introduced blueprints of a new I/O bus—a suc- mation to travel. Several types of buses exist and
cessor to the aging PC architecture, the PCI each operate at a different speed and protocol,
bus—aimed at handling future bandwidth depending upon the standard at which the bus
requirements and which are scalable at the same functions.
time. AMD’s HyperTransport and Intel-backed The PCI bus is responsible for transporting

136 November 2001

data from PCI-based peripherals to and from the bus at 133 MBps. PCI-X, an evolutionary
the memory bus for further processing. This modification of the original PCI bus, runs along Computing at Light
general-purpose bus has been serving well as a at 1 GBps. HyperTransport ups the ante to a sig-
standard for over 10 years, hosting such devices nificantly higher 12.8 GBps. Speed
as soundcards, video cards and storage con- Off the bat, HyperTransport uses a flexible US-based startup, Primarion,
trollers. Now PCI is facing a major strain with bus architecture providing data links in various is currently in the process of
bandwidth-hungry I/O devices on the horizon. widths. Depending on the application, bit developing optical fibers
Products used in applications such as video cap- widths can either be 2, 4, 8, 16 or 32 bits. Each which will serve as the next
ture/editing and other bandwidth-intensive bus line is capable of transferring data at a rate medium for bus data trans-
applications need plenty of room to function. In of 400 MHz in each direction. Since Hyper- fers. Once processors start
order to host a number of components such as Transport provides a dedicated line for both touching speeds in excess of
these, either the entire PCI bus would have to be sending and receiving data, effective through- 10 GHz, industry analysts
reworked or a new standard would have to be put is in the area of 800 MHz with a maximum say that copper would have
built from the ground up. throughput that is over 96 times the bandwidth reached the limit of its
A chipset, or core logic, is responsible for of today’s PCI bus. In situations requiring dif- bandwidth carrying capacity.
directing the control and flow of data across bus ferent upstream and downstream speeds, Optical links pose a number
lines. Generally, it is divided into two distinct HyperTransport is fully capable of asymmetric of advantages over today's
chips, a north bridge and a south bridge. The operation. current carrying materials
term ‘bridge’ comes from a reference to a device Optimising bus topology and reducing the and promise that the dream
that connects multiple buses together. The north number of buses in a system not only stream- of video-on-demand and
bridge connects to the CPU, the memory bus, lines data transfer processes, but also contributes peer-to-peer computing will
the AGP graphics bus and the south bridge. to lower voltage requirements and, therefore, become a reality.
The south bridge connects to the PCI, USB, ATA, lower power consumption. Advances in processor
ISA, etc. HyperTransport is not designed to eliminate technology have surpassed
With current technology, the reservoir of technologies such as USB and FireWire. the seemingly outdated lim-
available bandwidth for these multiple buses is Instead, it was designed to complement them its of Moore’s Law. As tran-
quickly running out, leaving the industry no by acting as an infrastructural backbone sistor counts continue to
other choice but to innovate new ways to replen- between the devices themselves and the rest of skyrocket so does the
ish the bandwidth pool. the system. The fact remains that HyperTrans- amount of voltage required
port was designed to interconnect internal sys- to power them. And high
The answers tem components and not directly connect to amounts of power can do
One answer to bus bandwidth constraints is external technologies. The point of using funny things like causing
HyperTransport, an AMD-led architecture HyperTransport is to provide the bandwidth interference in bus signals
developed with the help of industry partners that FireWire and USB devices will need now and lead to physical damage
such as Cisco, nVidia, Sun Microsystems and 168 and in the future. of components.
other industry influences. HyperTransport is a Unlike PCI, which is a shared bus and allows Optical connections use
bi-directional (send and receive), high perform- multiple devices to be placed on the one bus, pulses of laser beams to
ance packets-based protocol for interconnecting HyperTransport only allows one device to be transmit data as opposed to
various components in a PC. Using packets sim- placed on a bus. However, these busses can be the electromagnetic princi-
ply means sending data in chunks (or packets) chained together to create a multi-device bus. ple used in today’s technol-
and rearranging them to its original form later. ogy. Using optics would not
It was designed for applications such as net- Latencies only eliminate EMI (Electro-
working, telecommunications and other uses Of course, the further devices are chained, the magnetic Interference), but
where scalability, high speeds and low latencies higher latency there will be between a device at would also dramatically
are required while at the same time, remaining the end of the chain and the processor. It bring down power require-
compatible with legacy PC buses such as PCI, is important to design the system so that there ments.
ISA, USB, etc. are at most around three to five elements in
There are several immediate advantages of the chain. The more a component is affected
HyperTransport. While developing specifica- by latency, the higher up the chain of buses it
tions for the protocol, design engineers kept a has to go, otherwise, a bottle-
framework of goals in mind in order to improve neck would be introduced. Likeness in Disparity
system performance. Higher bandwidth bus HyperTransport’s theoretical HyperTransport 3GIO
links and reducing low latency responses across maximum of 12.8 GBps is 96 Bus type Point-to-point Point-to-point
bus points are two direct ways of achieving this. times as fast as a 32-bit, 33 MHz Protocol Packet based Packet based
Being 32-bits wide and running at a speed of PCI bus, and 24 times faster Maximum band- 1.6Gbits/sec 2.5Gbits/sec
33 MHz, the PCI is restricted to a maximum than an expensive 64-bit, 66 width per link
bandwidth of 133 MBps. HyperTransport offers MHz PCI bus. However, the 12.8 Multi-processor Yes Yes
substantially larger bandwidth up to a maximum GBps link is likely to be used support
of 12.8 GBps, a near 100-fold increase over exist- only in processor-north bridge Outside-the-box No Yes
ing technology. and north bridge-north bridge configuration
Current PCI technology transfers data across configurations, and each pin-

137
■ select~ insight

pair can carry 1.6 Gbps (200 MBps) of data. This raises the interesting spectre of a sys-
Other HyperTransport implementations will be tem without any AGP slots, and a lot more inte-
Licensing Scheme using a slower but cheaper HyperTransport IO gration onto the motherboard. Now that
Unlike direct licensing system, at a speed of 800 Mbps (100 MBps) per nVidia are into chipset design, they could very
schemes which require pin pair, which is just under the speed of a 32-bit well decide to drop AGP support and make the
annual payment and at PCI. GPU part of that chipset, connected using HT
times royalties as well, the HyperTransport is a differential bus. This to the north bridge at 1.6 GBps. The standard
HyperTransport licensing means that for each bit of the connection, two specification would mean that any HTIO GPUs
strategy is comparatively wires (and therefore interface pins on a chip) are that ATI or Matrox produced would also work
simplified. Those who want required to carry the signal. Wire one carries the with this chipset, meaning more choice for the
to use the technology may signal and wire two carries the inverse of the sig- consumer.
join the consortium for nal. For each device residing on a bus, there
$5,000 a year, and those needs to be a corresponding number of pins. 3GIO
who also want to contribute This increases the pin count by quite a margin, Intel’s latest initiative to develop a standardised
to the technology develop- so many implementations of this technology will bus transport comes in the form of third-gener-
ment may join for $25,000 a use reduced bus widths to cut costs. ation I/O, or 3GIO for short. Like HyperTrans-
year. There are no royalties port, 3GIO (code named Arapahoe) addresses
or licensing fees beyond this HyperTransport products similar concerns of bandwidth, scalability and
annual membership cost. Products from AMD based upon the Hyper- flexibility in design.
At the moment, licensing Transport protocol are expected to appear in 3GIO is a point-to-point interconnect and
information on 3GIO is not 2002. HyperTransport has the potential to uses a packetised protocol structure. It trans-
available. replace most point-to-point busses in use in ports data at high bandwidths, uses scalable bus
computer systems today. This includes north widths, exhibits low power consumption and is
bridge-south bridge interconnects, the memory hot-pluggable. It was designed for chip-level
bus, AGP, and the front-side-bus. AGP is cur- interconnects, expansion card connections and
rently limited to 4x speed, and 8x speed is not an can act as an I/O bridge for other interconnects
easy task. With nVidia licensing HyperTransport such as USB 2.0, Infiniband, Ethernet, 1394, etc.
for their own use, both within their chipsets and 3GIO is capable of providing interlinks within
between their chipsets and other components, the chipset core but initial proposals state that
the appearance of a HyperTransport graphics initial implementations will focus on the I/O
processor (GPU) is guaranteed. devices and subsequently the AGP bus itself.
The specific workings of
3GIO differ somewhat from
HyperTransport. A funda-
mental 3GIO bus link uses
two low-voltage pairs of sig-
nals, one pair to transmit and
the other to receive. Initial
speeds between pairs is over
300 MBps and this is expect-
ed to increase to 1.25 GBps
(the physical limits for cop-
per interconnects). Once
these limits are reached,
3GIO has made provisions
for a smooth transition from
copper to faster intercon-
nects using optical links.
3GIO also brings forth a
technique to allow itself to
connect to external high-
speed devices such as hard
disks, optical drives and
video cameras. Furthermore,
The north bridge of a chipset maintains control of data between the HyperTransport links are inserted at various points 3GIO can be used to tie
processor, system memory and the video subsection of a computer, within the system bus topology. Inserting
together different PC subsys-
whereas the south bridge serves as a central hub for traffic between HyperTransport links boosts the speed-carrying
power of PCs.
tems that are housed in phys-
I/O devices (called endpoints) and with the rest of the system bus.
ically separated enclosures.
Data paths between a bridge and an endpoint are known as local
buses. A PC consists of several local buses and each has their own
This in itself could be used to
bandwidth requirements and protocols. completely redesign the
‘beige box’ existence of PCs

138 November 2001

today. As 3GIO uses hot-plugging capabilities, chartered to develop and manage the PCI stan-
devices can simply be added and removed with- dard, which will assume further governing
out opening the PC chassis and without power- and development of 3GIO as a standard in
ing down the system first. the future.
Intel is compatible with PCI at the software
layers, so if the software supports PCI, it auto- The last word
matically supports 3GIO too. The initial speed AMD and Intel are both aiming to solve the same
of a single channel or ‘lane’, which is comprised problem with similar constraints. Therefore, it is
of two differentially driven pair of wires (trans- not surprising for them to come up with similar
mit and receive), is 2.5 Gbps in each direction. solutions. Between these two solutions, Hyper-
The lanes will supposedly scale to 10 gigabits per Transport appears to be a faster way to connect
pin and beyond in the future. devices today. Since it uses parallel bus architec-
The PCI bus is parallel in nature. The dif- ture, it should not be very difficult
ference between serial and parallel buses from to quickly implement with existing
a motherboard designer’s standpoint is the technology. The biggest advantage
3GIO Overview
number of traces and routes needed between that HyperTransport has over
the device and core logic. Parallel architectures 3GIO is that it is available now. In
require a significantly higher amount of trace fact, nVidia has already incorporat-
points than serial designs and, thus, the number ed HyperTransport technology in
of pins needed to correspond to these routes their upcoming nForce chipset.
goes up as well. Changes such as these not only Transmeta too has jumped onto the
increase cost, but also cause a rise in signalling bandwagon and grabbed a license
problems due to electromagnetic interference. for the technology. Other propo-
A new type of controller introduced in third nents of this technology such as
generation I/O architecture is the switch. A API Networks announced a chip
switch essentially manages interconnections design that would let computers
streams of data and between attached devices. In use HyperTransport.
the case of the PCI bus, multiple devices share So far, 3GIO can only be con-
the same pathway for data flow. With Hyper- sidered ‘on paper’ since products
Transport and 3GIO, each device receives a ded- supporting Intel’s third generation
icated link from the device to the core logic. This I/O specification will not be seen
setup overcomes some of the problems faced by until 2003.
PCI such as system resource conflicts and ineffi- But before the AMD camp starts
cient use of bandwidth. Since devices reside on cheering, here’s a pause for
independent bus links, each link can be scalable thought: 3GIO has been adopted by
to a higher width if the need arises. the PCI SIG (Special Interest Multiple lanes can be connected between devices,
A key advantage that 3GIO holds over Group), the influential standards chips, etc, and this almost seems like you’d be
HyperTransport is the focus on external body which governs the currently constructing parallel interfaces again, but these
devices. Not only does 3GIO act as a point-to- prevailing PCI bus standards. Con- are independent serial channels. In fact, the physi-
point link between chips, the standard is also sidering how widespread the PCI cal layer of 3GIO supports x1, x2, x4, x8, x12, x16,
explicitly designed to link to external devices. bus is and how comfortable com- and x32 lane widths. A data stream would be
striped across the lanes as in the figure. There
HyperTransport, on the other hand, is more panies are with the group and the
must be some logic to split and reassemble the
focused on connecting the internal devices PCI standard itself, its magic could
streams, of course.
of a PC. easily rub off on 3GIO.
Current implementations of HyperTrans- Surprisingly, nothing is holding
port, such as nVidia’s nForce, focus upon bus back the two competing solutions to work
links between the north and south bridges. together. With HyperTransport at the chip level
HyperTransport has no problem in performing and 3GIO linking external devices, a perfect
as a system-wide bus. blend of complementary technologies would
3GIO, like HyperTransport, can handle bus result. This, however, will most likely not
connections across the system. Interestingly, the happen.
Arapahoe group has opted in favour of posi- Two overlapping standards raise indecision
tioning 3GIO as more of an expansion bus in the for component makers, who must decide
immediate future. A more comprehensive sys- whether to support one standard, the other,
tem-wide approach may be taken in the future. or both.
However, at the moment, nothing has been In the end, Intel just might be a little too late
etched in stone. in getting to the market with 3GIO. Technology
Announced at the spring session of the Intel solutions based upon HyperTransport have
Developer Forum, the Arapahoe architecture already been designed and implemented into sil-
was recently handed over to the PCI SIG (Spe- icon, some of which are very close to being
cial Interest Group), the industry organisation released in the market.

139
■ select~ r e p o r t c a r d

HARDWARE

Radar
All that’s new on the block—Bravish LCD monitor, Iomega Zip
More Info on drive, ASUS TUA 266 motherboard and more
the hardware products tested.
Check out
Mindware

VIA C3 800 MH z SPECIFICATIONS: verdict B

Not too hot 128 KB of L1 cache, 64 KB VIA C3 800 MHz
of L2 cache, 0.13-micron
technology Performance
S porting the Socket 370 inter-
face, this processor comes with
a heatsink alone and no fan. It
Benchmarks:
SiSoft Sandra: 953 Mflops in
Build Quality
Value for Money
CPU Whetstones, 1635 Features
uses the 0.13-micron technology, MIPS in CPU Dhrystones; 7
OVERALL
which consumes little power minutes 18 seconds for
video encoding; 2 minutes
(between 7 to 14 Watts) and heats 49 seconds for audio
+ Does not require a heatsink; Good per-
up considerably lesser than other formance in day-to-day applications
encoding; 64.6 fps (normal
- Comparatively high-priced
processors in its range. It’s target- mode), 63.9 fps (high quali-
Price: Rs 4,000+taxes
ty) and 58.8 fps (max set-
ed at the budget–conscious buyer Contact: eSys Distribution Ltd
tings) in Quake III; 499.17
not looking for top-of-the-class Phone: 011-6420450
seconds in the Photoshop
Fax: 011-6420431-52
performance. test; 19.4 units in Content
E-mail: [email protected]
Creation

Lavish and sleek Bravish LCD Monitor verdict B +

(15-inch) Bravish LCD monitor (15-inch)
Performance

T his stylish 15-inch monitor fea-

tures an easy-to-use onscreen
display and offers flicker-free dis-
Build Quality
Value for Money
Ease of use
play even at the highest resolu- OVERALL
tion. Installation is simple due to
the plug and play feature. It occu- + Stylish design
+ Uses little desktop space
pies very little desktop space and SPECIFICATIONS: - Tricky placement of OSD buttons
can even be swivelled through 360 Supports a maximum Price: Rs 35,000
degrees. The featured pivot makes resolution of 1024x768 Contact: Wales Technologies
Features: Average dot pitch Phone: 022-3828100 Fax: 022-3877418
switching between horizontal or of 0.30 mm, includes 1built- E-mail: [email protected]
vertical display simple. in multimedia speakers Web site: www.walestechnologies.com

ASUS TUA 266 Motherboard verdict B -

An expensive proposition SPECIFICATIONS: ASUS TUA 266 Motherboard
Supports the P-III Copper- Performance

T his socket 370-based mother-

board features five PCI slots
and an AGP Pro slot, which guar-
mine and Tualatin (0.13
micron) processors; ALi
M1651 north bridge and the
Build Quality
Value for Money
ALi M1535+ south bridge Features
antees you high-bandwidth game- chipsets; DDR RAM compati- OVERALL
play when coupled with a ble; five PCI slots; four USB
high-end 3D card. It provides you ports + Five PCI slots; Support for up to 3 GB
Interface: Socket 370 DDR RAM/SD RAM
with four USB slots, so connecting Benchmarks: 1619 in 3D - High price
USB devices to it is no problem. Mark 2001; 15687 in SiSoft Price: Rs 9,500
The board is a good buy as it sup- Sandra; 23 MBps sequential Contact: Rashi Peripherals.
read; 4 MBps random read; Phone: 022- 8260258 Fax: 022- 8221012
ports both SDR and DDR RAM up 20 MBps sequential write; 5 E-mail: [email protected]
to 3 GB. MBps random write; 26.3 in Web site: www.rptechindia.com
Content Creation

140 November 2001

 verdict B -
Smooth operator Iomega Zip drive (250 MB)
Iomega Zip Drive (250 MB)
Performance
T his stylish Zip drive uses the USB
cable for both power as well as
data. Installing the drive is easy—sim-
Build Quality
Value for Money
ply connect the drive to your sys-
Featues
SPECIFICATIONS
tem’s USB port and it automatically Features: USB cable, two man-
OVERALL
gets detected. You don’t even need uals, stand for the drive, driver + Good looks and good bundled soft-
to reboot the system. After connect- CDs, a software for data ware
back up - No superfloppies included
ing the drive, load the drivers provid- Benchmarks: 7 minutes 58 sec- Price: Rs 11,050
ed in the accompanying CD and you onds to copy nine 10-MB files Contact: Neoteric Infomatique Ltd
are ready to transfer data. from hard drive to Zip drive; 1 Phone: 022-4172600 Fax: 022-4185294
minute and 17 seconds to copy E-mail: [email protected]
from Zip drive to hard drive Web site: www.neoteric-info.com

Speedster Pentium 4 2-GHz Processor verdict B

Pentium 4 2-GHz Processor
Performance
T he fastest processor available
in the market today, it uses the
new Socket 478 architecture com-
SPECIFICATIONS
Pin count of 478; 8 KB L1
Cache; 256 KB L2 Cache;
Build Quality
Value for Money
400 MHz system bus (100 Features
prising an arrangement of pins MHz Quad-pumped)
called the micro pin grid array. Benchmarks: 25675 in SiSoft
OVERALL
Due to this, the size of the proces- Sandra; 234.6 fps (at + Fastest processor available in the mar-
sor is drastically reduced. The 320x240 with all effects ket
turned off), 198.3 fps (nor- - Expensive
processor returned excellent mal mode), 182.3 fps (high Price: Rs 28,000
scores in almost all the tests and is quality), 116.6 fps (at maxi- Contact: Ockam Infotech Pvt Ltd
a great buy for those who simply mum settings) in Quake III; Phone: 022-6330375 Fax: 022-6347805
45 units in Content Cre- E-mail: [email protected]
want the best. ation; 3963 in 3D Mark 2001 Web site: www.ockamindia.com

SPECIFICATIONS verdict B
Pricey performer Epox 845-chipset Interface: Socket 478
Epox 845 chipset motherboard
motherboard Features: Features the 845
chipset from Intel, six PCI Performance

T his mainboard supports the

new Intel P4 2 GHz processor
with Socket 478 interface. It has
slots, four USB ports (two
onboard and two through
the add-on card), manual,
Build Quality
Value for Money
Features
driver CD, data cables, con-
onboard audio support through nector for extra USB ports OVERALL
the AC’97 Codec and can support Socket Type: Socket 478
Benchmarks: + Good packaging; six PCI slots and sup-
a maximum of 3 GB of PC 133
3963 in 3D Mark 2001; port for up to 3 GB of RAM
MHz RAM through the three - Rather expensive
25675 in SiSoft Sandra; 38
DIMM slots. A great buy if you MBps sequential read; 7 Price: Rs 9,000
need the power of a Pentium 4 MBps random read; 33 Contact: Rashi Peripherals.
MBps sequential write; 9 Phone: 022-8260258 Fax: 022-8221012
processor but do not want to use E-mail: [email protected]
MBps random write; 45
RDRAM. units in Content Creation Web site: www.rptechindia.com

No magic here Jadoonet Elite Netbox (Ethernet) verdict B

Jadoonet Elite Netbox (Ethernet)
Performance
T he Jadoonet Elite Netbox con-
nects through a cable connec-
tion. The setup lets you configure
Build Quality
Value for Money
connection settings, e-mail set- Features
tings, video and remote control OVERALL
settings and other netbox settings. + Good audio streaming; smart card
SPECIFICATIONS - No video streaming and poor browsing
Although capable of viewing
Features: Smart Card securi- through heavy graphics; no mouse
Flash-enabled sites, it was slow ty, infrared keyboard with a Price: Rs 7,990
and didn’t play any audio on range of approximately 15 Contact: Jadoonet Computers Limited
these sites. While it displayed feet, remote control, built-in Phone: 022-4968892 Fax: 022-4950415
e-mail, option of sending E-Mail: [email protected]
good audio streaming capability, voice messages and even Web site: www.jadoonet.com
it was unable to stream video. videos

141 141
■ select~ r e p o r t c a r d

SOFTWARE

Radar
Zbrush, MAGIC Dance Maker…the latest software in the market tested
More Info on and reviewed
the software products tested.
Check out
Mindware

Just what you need Ibrowser verdict B

Ibrowser
his software supports most of Ease of use
T the popular image formats
available today. In the interface,
Features
Performance
you can choose from different pre-
Value for money
view options such as Details, Large OVERALL
icons, Small icons, or Thumbnail.
The other options included are SPECIFICATIONS
slideshow, full screen view, set as Features: Offers inter- + Good interface
face presets, Visual + Supports large variety of formats
wallpaper, to name a few. The soft- Scrolling which lets you Price: Shareware
ware is available for download for view large images Web site: www.fcodersoft.com
a 30-day trial period. effortlessly, has multi-
language support

Getting arty ZBrush verdict B

ZBrush
Ease of use
t contains a plethora of tools and
I materials to bring your imagina-
tion to reality—a blob of clay or gel
Features
Performance
Value for money
from the materials drop-down list OVERALL
can be carved or stretched to cre-
ate a shape. You can also apply SPECIFICATIONS
some amazing lighting effects. Size: 9 MB + Great interface and tools
Features: 19 palettes, can + Small file size
While you are creating your export only to .bmp and - Exports in just .bmp or .psd formats
model, everything is rendered in .psd format, the fibre Price: $585 (approx Rs 28,080)
real time. brush tool lets you paint Web site: www.pixologic.com
adjustable fibres such as
hair

Child’s play Viewlet Builder 2 verdict B

Viewlet Builder 2
his is a tool for creating Ease of use
T viewlets, which are compact
and visually rich movie files. The
Features
Performance
viewlet opens in its own Java win-
Value for money
dow. You can choose different OVERALL
SPECIFICATIONS
fonts, add balloons, notes and Features: Can select the + Easy to use
sounds to your slide from the tools resolution for capturing + Extremely customisable
screenshots; can choose + Does not require any extra plugins
palette. It is useful for firms spe- from among different Price: Freeware
cialising in software publishing and fonts or font effects, add Contact: ViewFinder
training and home users keen on speech balloons, notes Tel no: 0265-750623
and sounds to your E-mail: [email protected]
making interesting presentations. viewlets Web site: www.qarbon.com

142 November 2001

Dance, baby dance MAGIC Dance Maker verdict B -
MAGIC Dance Maker
ance Maker allows you to cre- Ease of use
D ate original dance tracks
through an intuitive interface. You
Features
Performance
can add music to any of your Value for Money
video clips using it. Creating songs OVERALL
is quite simple due to the drag + Small file size
and drop feature. The accompany- - Low on extra audio effects
SPECIFICATIONS Price: Rs 850
ing CD includes sound files, which Features: Real time mixer Contact: Microsoft Computer Services
can be imported while you are with a five-band equalis- Phone: 022-8729525
creating a song. This version car- er; supports 16 tracks of Fax no: 8727446
ries support for DirectX plugins. audio, MIDI video or E-mail: [email protected]
BMP data Web site: www.mwcprom.com

Old and dependable ZOC 4.02 verdict B +

ZOC 4.02
OC has several configurable
Z options to suit your terminal
emulation needs; from the plain
Ease of use
Features
Performance
Solaris telnet, to Linux with Mid- Value for Money
night commander to BBSes acces- OVERALL
SPECIFICATIONS
sible from telnet. It’s suitable for Features: You can define
modem or shell account/BBS your own custom trans- + REXX Scripting
users and supports secure shell lations for a certain key - Needs extensive keyboard mapping for
phrase, which allows you some terminal types
connections. ZOC supports almost to build any keystroke, or Price: $69 (approximately Rs 3,312)
all protocols used by earlier BBSes break/pause combo Web site: www.emtec.com
even over telnet connections. required in some UNIX
terminals

Musical notes Videolan Client verdict B

Videolan Client
his software for playing MPEGs, Ease of use
T MP2s and DVDs works on
almost every operating system SPECIFICATIONS
Features
Performance
Features: You can stream Value for Money
and has low system requirements.
files through the net- OVERALL
Although Videolan may not match work; the preferences
up to a software such as PowerD- menu gives you a choice
VD, you really mustn’t complain of interface, colour
+ Good features
depth, gamma, and
too much since it is free. Opt for - Needs a better interface
audio options; other
Videolan if you don’t mind the Price: Freeware
options include slow
Web site: www.videolan.org
plain interface and are satisfied motion, chapter, and lan-
guage and subtitle selec-
with the features it provides.
tion

Iconically speaking Articons 3.01 verdict B

SPECIFICATIONS Articons 3.01
rticons allows you to create or
A modify icons in colour depths
of up to 16 million colours. While
Features: You can edit
.bmp or .jpg images up
to a resolution of
Ease of use
Features
Performance
127x127; easy drag-and- Value for Money
modifying images you can give drop of icons between
them gradient or fill shadow or shells and libraries; can OVERALL
mirror effects. You can save your import a variety of image
files for modification and
image as an image file or an icon. export them to a format
You can download the trial version + Good features and tools
of your choice; during
+ Easy-to-use
of the software and use it for a modification, you can
Price: Shareware
zoom in or out, or add
period of 30 days. Web site: www.aha-soft.com
effects such as flip hori-
zontally, roll left and oth-
ers

143
■ select~ r e p o r t c a r d

Reviews
Web Design with
Arena
For game reviews
check out,
Playware
For your first site
HTML/Flash/ Java Script & E-commerce On the Stands
I f you’re looking to get your
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Photosho 6 in an
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novices as well as HTML veter- on text-based instructions,
ans plan and build their own Publisher: IDG Books India takes you through all the func-
site with the help of tools such (P) Ltd tions and features of
Contact: Computer Photoshop with large-
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book opens with a basic tutorial Phone: 022-2070989,
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Fax: 011-3275895
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For more of Flash Flash 5 Studio
Dreamweaver 4 in
T his book is meant for those
familiar with the essentials
of Flash and need to expand
an instant
Get familiar with the essen-
their knowledge. The book cov- tials of Dreamweaver 4 with
ers advanced site design prin- the help of large screenshots
ciples, Flash content creation and direct instructions.
Publisher: Shroff Publishers
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concepts and techniques and Contact: Computer Contact: IDG Books India
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Effective E-mail
Introducing C# Programmers’ introduction to C# Communication
This book helps you send out
more effective mails, and
T his is a comprehensive refer-
ence manual for all C# pro-
grammers. The book has an
make more effective use
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extensive coverage of C#
the origins of e-mail, com-
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posing effective
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Rating: Rating:

144 November 2001

■ select~ r e p o r t c a r d

UNDERCOVER

The right connections

Looking to buy a modem? Agent 001 investigates the relative merits of
internal and external modems
he market seems to be increasingly biased However, the number of internal modems

T towards internal modems, which are sold

more and recommended more than external
modems. So I decided that an investigation
was the need of the hour.
Down to the Mumbai by-lanes. The first ven-
which had to be replaced was significant, said the
vendor. He added that most users were confused
when it came to configuring an internal modem,
but once configured, it was a piece of cake.
Strangely, I found that the only vendor who
dor I approached was an external modem advo- staunchly recommended the external modem was
cate since “they’re much easier to install”. That’s someone who had fried a customer’s PC! He nar-
true; the external modem involves nothing more rated a freak incident when during a thunder-
than getting the cable, plugging it in, and turning storm the internal modem conked out and, in the
it on.You won’t have to bother with IRQ conflicts, process, destroyed the motherboard and a couple
Illustration: Mahesh Benkar DMA channels, and the likes. But the dealer, on of other PCI devices. Whether the story is true or
the contrary, had different statistics in his shop. not is not the point—the fact remains that inter-
The last 20-odd PCs that he had sold were all nal modems are susceptible to freak cases of light-
The best thing about installed with internal modems. His explanation:
internal modems have broken the psychological
ning strikes on local phone lines which can
potentially fry the modem as well as the PC. The
external modems is barrier of Rs 1,000 and they work reasonably well,
so why not?
same could occur with external modems, it’s just
that the modem would be destroyed, not the PC.
that they are easy to Internal modems have become extremely
cheap of late and are popular with system inte-
I then moved on to Santa Cruz where a dealer
proudly mentions that he’s sold quite a few USB
disconnect grators as they don’t add too much to the overall
system’s cost. Consumers don’t have to pay extra
modems. He said that USB modems could work
on any PC, Mac, and even workstations, as long as
for the fancy case and lights. They also save valu- a USB port is present. And one doesn’t need an
able desktop space and there’s no need for cables external power supply as the USB cable powers
and power cords. the modem. However, the dealer added that these
So what kind of internal modems do these modems have certain issues when it comes to
integrators recommend and use themselves? I get transfer speeds.
a view from another shop in Andheri. The ven- Another vendor recommended the US Robot-
dor says that he stocks only Dax internal 56K ics Message modem which he found the most reli-
models. The reason: they are priced at Rs 650. able in terms of speed and connection. This dealer,
AMR modems are available for Rs 350-500, more inclined towards external modems, said the
but then you need an AMR slot on your mother- best thing about them is that they’re easy to dis-
board for them to work. However, these modems connect. On many occasions the modem simply
are generally not recommended by most dealers. stops responding and wastes call time. With an
internal modem, the only solution is to restart the
entire machine (waste more time), while to reset
an external modem, all you need to do is turn it
Modem Hang-ups off and then switch it on again. The dealer rec-
ommended the DFM 560E 56K external modem
Despite the popularity of internal severely impacts the PC’s performance. from D-Link; it gave him the least trouble with
modems there are certain issues that There are some issues with installation driver installation and configuration.
you should be aware of. Internal too. IRQ conflicts are the primary cause Another vendor in the same area espoused
modems use a sizable amount of CPU for problems—if you are using an inter- external modems. His reasoning: since they have
time. They also come with a minimum nal modem, try disabling the serial lights in front, you can tell what’s going on. He
CPU speed requirement and generally ports to free up some IRQs. Apart from recommended the internal modems from Cre-
cannot be installed on systems with these issues, if you’re fairly proficient in ative and said that they were a bit expensive, but
less than 150 MHz processing power. installing drivers and solving minor con- that the component quality was high and the
On occasions, we’ve found CPU util- figuration-related problems, then an brand name respectable.
isation going as high as 50 per cent on internal modem is the best and cheap-
Want to share insights and experiences in buying computer
an underpowered machine, which est way to log on to the Internet. hardware and digital products?
Write in to [email protected]

145
■ s e l e c t ~ a-list

A-List
A listing of the best products in different hardware and software categories
ho’s in, who’s out? The competition’s hot, reviews. Based on these tests, the best products

W but only the winners get to this page—a list-

ing of the best performing hardware and
software that have been tested till date in differ-
have been listed here (detailed reviews in Digit-
Interactive Mindware). As different products get
reviewed over the months, the top products
ent categories. might find themselves slipping out of the charts
Every month, at the Digital Media Test & and replaced by the latest entrants in the market.
Research Centre, we carry out a series of com- So, keep your ears sharp and eyes open and keep
parison tests as well as individual product yourself abreast of the latest cool products.

HARDWARE Graphics card Contact: Compuage Infocom CD drives

Monitors (14 & 15-inch) ASUS V8200 GeForce3 Phone: 022-4913986 ASUS CD-S500
Viewsonic E53 Deluxe Fax: 022-4919069 + Good performance
+ Unsurpassed video quality and Price: Rs 14,625 – Slightly inferior build quality
speed Contact: Rashi Peripherals
– Needs a fast CPU to get maximum Motherboards Phone: 022-8260258
result ASUS P4T Fax: 022-8221012
Contact: Mnemonic Systems + Fits into any ATX cabinet Price: Rs 2,250
Phone: 022-8010871 + Good feature list
Fax: 022-8051761 Contact: Rashi Peripherals CD-RW drives
Price: Rs 29,500 Phone: 022-8260258 Plextor PX-W1610TA
Fax: 022-8221012 + High write and rewrite speeds
+ OSD support Price: Rs 15,500 Contact: Zeta Technologies
+ No message signal if power cut off Phone: 022-4102277
Contact: Roop Technologies Processors Fax: 022-4102288
Phone: 022-6631921/2/3/4 Pentium 4 - 2 GHz Price: Rs 11,500
Fax: 022-6103919
Price: Rs 8,000 DVD drives
Speakers Aopen 1640 Pro DVD
Monitors (17-inch) Creative SoundWorks + 16x DVD speeds; 512 KB cache
ViewSonic PS775 DTT2500 + Good build quality
+ Very good image quality + True Dolby Digital-compliant – Does not support DMA
+ Support for high resolution sound
Contact: Roop Electronics – Too clumsy stand for speakers
Phone: 022-6175213 Contact: Compuage Infocom
Fax: 022-6103919 Phone: 022-4913986
Price: Rs 28,000 Fax: 022-4919069 + Excellent performance
Price: Rs 28,600 + Good packaging
Monitors (19 & 21-inch) Contact: Ockam Infotech Pvt Ltd
Samsung 955DF Phone: 022-6330375/6338764
+ Good build quality Fax: 022-6347805
+ Good colour results Price: Rs 28,000
– Screen clarity test fades out on Contact: Yogi Comp
corners Hard disks (IDE) Phone: 022-8806582
Contact: Samsung IBM Deskstar Fax: 022-8806582
Electronics India IC35L040AVER07-0-41GB Price: Rs 5,650
Information & Soundcards + Silent
Telecommunica- SoundBlaster Live! + Remains cool even during peak Laser Printers
tion Ltd. Platinum 5.1 performance Lexmark Optra M412
Phone: 011- + Dolby Digital AC-3 Contact: Wales Technologies + Good print speeds
6322517/8/9 compliant Phone: 022-3828100 – LCD management screen
Fax: 011-6932607 + High quality sound Fax: 022-3828200 Contact: T.V.S. Electronics
Price: Rs 31,000 processing Price: Rs 7,300 Phone: 044-2325506

146 November 2001

Fax: 044-2327577 Fax: 022-5379719 Pointing devices Fax: 080-6671407
Price: Rs 42,995 Price: Rs 1,19,000 Logitech Cordless Mouse - Price: Rs 3,000
man Wheel
Inkjet Printers External Storage Devices + Good accuracy with features; Web authoring
Epson Stylus Color 880 IOMEGA 2GB Jaz resilient to dirt Macromedia
+ Very quiet; good results + Very good price per MB; hard- + Many extra function keys Dreamweaver4 ver.4.0
+ Print resolution of 2880 dpi disk-class performance Contact: Rashi Peripherals + Extensive feature support
Contact: Epson India Contact: Neoteric Infomatique Phone: 022-8260258 + Integrates with other packages
Phone: 022-8257286 Phone: 022-4172600 Fax: 022-8190766 - Intimidating for first time user
Fax: 022-8267287 Fax: 022-4163679 Price: Rs. 4,500 Contact: Wipro Infotech Enterprise
Price: Rs 18,000 Price: Rs 17,300 Phone: 080-8440011
SOFTWARE Fax: 080-8440187
PCs Handhelds Operating systems (Windows) Price: Rs 14,250
Dell Dimension 8100 Compaq iPAQ H3630 Windows 2000
+ nVidia Geforce3 at work + Very feature packed Professional Firewalls
+ Good build quality and well + Powerful processor, multimedia + Very stable ZoneAlarm Pro 2.6
designed cabinet capable – Heavy on system requirements + Good performance
Contact: RADZ Technologies Contact: Integrated Business – No protection against ActiveX
Phone: 022-3678293/3678297 Solutions controls
Fax: 022-3678193 Phone: 022-8214701 Contact: www.zonelabs.com
Price: Rs 39,000 Fax: 022-8328240 Price: Rs 2,000 (approx)
Price: Rs 8,200
MP3 players Image editing software
Creative NOMAD 2MG Office suites Adobe Photoshop 6.01
+ Excellent build quality Microsoft Office XP
Contact: Dell Computers + Supports WMA format + Rich features
Phone: 1600338044 Toll free and upgradeable – Expensive
Phone: 1600338046 Toll Free (Prod- firmware Contact: Microsoft (India)
uct Specific) - Controls not eas- Phone: 011-6294600
Price: Rs. 98,134/- (varies according ily accessible Price: Rs 19,250
to configuration) Contact: Compuage
Infocom Page layout
Scanners Phone: 022-4913986 Adobe InDesign 1.5.2
Epson Perfection 1640SU Fax: 022-4919069 + Inclusion of vector shapes
+ Transparency unit included as Price: Rs 22,100 + Layers can be grouped and
standard accessory coloured for easier identification of
+ Fast image scanning Digital cameras images
– Too bulky (4.5 kgs) Sony Cybershot DSC-P1 - Too resource hungry
Contact: Epson India + Good features Contact: Adobe Systems India
Phone: 080-5321266 - Limited memory Phone: 0118-4532026
Fax: 080-5581799 Contact: Best International Fax: 0118-4532010
Price: Rs 22,500 + Intuitive Interface Price: Rs. 39,456
+ Supports layers, masking, gradient
Laptops and text on path Voice recognition
Nishubuki 1 GHz Contact: Adobe Systems India Dragon NaturallySpeaking
+ Attractively priced Phone: 0118-4532026 v5.0 (Preferred Edition)
- Low end graphics card Fax: 0118-4532010 + Impressive speech recognition
Contact: Nishubuki Computer Phone: 022-2611050 Price: Rs 42,946 – High on system requirements
Systems Fax: 022-2624795 Contact: HCL Infosystems
Phone: 022-5825965 Email: [email protected] Operating systems Phone: 011-4526518
Price: Rs 49,990 (Linux) Fax: 011-4526579
SuSE Linux Price: Rs 17,995
Keyboards 7.2
Logitech Cordless Freedom + Simple to Accounting software
Navigator install FACT 1.90
+ Very comfortable + Many bundled + Exhaustive feature list
+ Extensive configuration options applications – No security for database
Contact: Rashi Peripherals + Customisable Contact: Vedika Software
Phone: 022-8260258 interface Phone: 022-5006490
Fax: 022-8190766 Contact: G. T. Enterprises Fax: 033-2400824
Price: Rs 7,900 Phone: 080-6606093 Price: Rs 14,500

147
■ digit diary

I am an Indian
or us at the editorial desk at Digit, finding It was late one evening towards the end of the

F
A midnight brush with a
the right stories, testing the latest in digital month, when Akhilesh, our Head of Logis-
law keeper and an technology or finding the right software for tics/Distribution and Ravi decided to hop into
the CD month after month is an exciting an autorickshaw and supervise the dispatch of
exposé on the adventure. An adventure that would start early Digit to the various points in town from the
shenanigans of the every month with long brainstorming sessions, printer. They landed right in the middle of the
chats, meetings, interviews, references and action with copies being printed,
‘news makers’ downloads. The stories and reviews bound, packed, labelled and
would then flow into the loaded into waiting tempo
copydesk for their vans. In an hour the
master strokes vans were ready to
(strikes) before we move with Akhilesh
are ready to go to and Ravi in the
print. There would be driver’s cabin.
heated debates, It was well past
exciting discus- midnight when
sions, flashes of the vans cleared
inspiration the Octroi posts in
and, well, a few New Bombay and
goof ups here wended their way
and there. into town. Just as
After that, they entered
there is a big Mumbai, a cop
Illustration: Mahesh Benkar
sigh of relief stopped the vans
on the day the issue and walked towards them
closes and then we stretch ourselves long enough waving his torch.
before we start with the next issue all over again. He checked the documents that the driver
But as our Multimedia Coordinator, V. Ravi produced. He looked unconvinced. “Packet
Shankar, recently found out, the excitement does Kholke Dikhao,” (Open the packets) he ordered.
not stop there. Akhilesh and Ravi dutifully got out and dug out
a brand new copy of our
Cool Technology magazine
Aaj ki Taazaa khabar... for the cop’s benefit. A big
smile broke across his face.
One of the ways we stay up on our tech toes is (Anyone ordering cakes from Monginis? hehehe “Film magazine hai kya?,”
through newsletters created and circulated internal- ye pet maange more ;-)) (Is this a film magazine?) he
ly by the team. But with most things Digit, these too asked staring at the female
are filled with ‘attitude’. See for yourself… Hi folks, model on the cover. It took
Your Technology take, your Tech lubing, a fresh serv- Akhilesh and Ravi a while to
Hi folks, ing of low cholesterol, fat-free hi-fibre tech tidbits! explain to him that Digit
Nothing exciting happened today. In other non was actually a ‘campooter’
events that could be called ‘news’ comes SLUGBOT. Hi Folks, magazine. He flipped the
No, it’s not a new botpack for CS, but a robot that I’m in no mood for inane banter here, and luckily for pages and seemed con-
hunts over hundred slugs an hour. me, a lot has happened over the weekend. The head- vinced. He let them go and
Your newsletter for the day… lines: Gates still the richest man in the world. Comes they boarded the tempo
as no surprise. with a sigh of relief. But the
Hi, cop still had a quizzical look
The e-mail celebrates its 30th birthday as I send this Hi Folks, on his face and when they
mail. It’s old now but comes to you everyday with a Our ‘old’ pal Patty [Anil Patrick] is infected with were ready to wave him a
new charming feature, a new mail which would Nimda (no not his PC, it’s he who is infected, lol) and friendly good night, he
make your day. With tech takes like this e-mail has retired from the NL service. Now the NL is gonna be asked, “Phoren hai kya?” (Is
a long way to go… Lets sing the song, gang and crisper and better as in the interest of the Junta, I am it foreign?). With a dash of
wish the e-mail a very happy birthday. compiling the NLs, starting today. pride, Akhilesh and Ravi
replied, “No. Indian.”

148 November 2001

■ backbyte

Seen these Technology explains

new movies? modern art RETRO
If appreciating modern art is a problem for you, then
■ Java waale job le jayenge you’ll definitely identify with this cartoon! How Ping Pong came along
■ Aao chat karein Contributed by: Anup Rungta, via e-mail While we may all go gaga over Counter
■ Programmer no. 1 Strike today, we still must pay homage to
■ Memory aur hard disk the game that made it big out there before
■ H1 ko aane do all others. Nolan Bushnell is the man who
■ Mouse ka gulam created the video game version of Ping
■ Skill apna apna Pong, and in order to market it, set up a
■ Hum aapke memory mein small company whose name is a polite
rehte hain samurai warning to his opponent before
■ Do processor barah terminal attacking: Atari!
■ Password Apna Apna While Ping Pong made it really big and
■ Hum Hain Programmer
Oracle ke New way to copy Word? even managed to knock out the then
favourite, Pinball, it wasn’t exactly the first
■ Ek programmer do body game that Bushnell created. In 1971 Bush-
shopper nell and an associate created and sold the
■ H1 se Citizenship tak first coin operated game called Computer
■ Mera code chal gaya Space. But the game bombed in a big way
■ Har Din jo mail Karega because players found the game too com-
■ Mera Resume Kora kagaj plex, what with its ‘thrust’, ‘fire’ and
■ Khel Virus ka ‘rotate’ controls! Go figure!
■ Programmer bane
Bodyshopper
■ Network Ke Us Paar Contributed by: Ankur Raheja, via e-mail
■ Aayi Production Ki Bela
■ Do Gateways
■ Debugging koi Khel nahin
■ Helpdesk ki Aatma (Ramasay
Readers Rants
bandhu ki Horror film)
■ Mera naam developer Copying tracks? Catastrophe in the making
■ Kaho na Bench hai
■ Crash kar di aaapne
■ Pati patni aur computer
Don’t be stupid! No one likes coming across an error when you pop in your
favourite movie CD and are all set to sit back and enjoy the
■ Deployment ki raat All you audio buffs out there will agree that CD ripping
■ Hum WALK-IN ja chuke software is the next best thing since Napster went out of
sanam
■ Jis Desh mein Bill(gates)
rehtaa Hai
■ Hum To US jaayega
■ Aa ab KUCH KAAM kare
Contributed by: Deepak Dhingra
rest of the afternoon. But imagine the angst if you were to
come across an error message like this one!
Contributed by: George V, via e-mail

Your chance to
BACKBYTE!
Confused with time
Back in school, probably the
Highlight the lighter side of most difficult task that a lot of
computing. Mail your contributions us faced was memorising all
to Backbyte those historical dates. While
Digit, Plot D-222/2, service. But a lot of people won’t agree with this point of that’s understandable for us
TTC Industrial Area, MIDC, view, especially the music lables and stars. And Shania humans, it does seem a bit
Shirvane, Nerul, Twain seems to be telling one of our readers here exact- funny when your PC starts hav-
Navi Mumbai 400 706 ly what she thinks as he tries to copy one of her popular ing a problem with dates too!
or send e-mail to tracks! Contributed by: Hussain,
[email protected] Contributed by: Colin D’mello, via e-mail via e-mail

150 November 2001