1
2007
Where people don’t walk, but drive…
I have been wanting to write a post after coming to US but hadn’t got the time to do that. Now that I am in the middle of the semester, I finally got the urge to write about it. partly because there is this Labo( u )r day weekend, when I have almost nothing to do but go through my study notes. A picture that I took just now will tell, how empty the area really looks!
The first thing that struck me about this country was that it is huge. No, wait, everything is huge; buildings, roads, cars, supermarkets, vegetables, Internet connection speeds (yes Europe has more, but they are getting here with fibre-optics) - USA is the place where supersizing started.
Georgia Tech is fine, don’t ask me much about it. I have taken up a course in Computer Graphics (seems a little advanced which is good), course about GPU programming and Multi-core processor programming (cool!, but have yet to start with the fun, I mean, tough part), Software Engineering (yes, I still need to learn how we make software, Microsoft wasn’t good enough 
) and High Performance Computer Architecture (similar to ACA in NSIT but more current). No heavy special projects for me yet, am trying to see how this goes and will definitely work on one next semester.
Found two of my relatives living around Atlanta, have been to their place and enjoyed it! Both have young kids and they got along with me pretty well (or did I get along with them well, dunno).
About the title, yes, you would hardly find anyone walking on the streets except perhaps in the morning when they are out for jogging or when they need to reach their car; rest of the time people drive. Now gas (petrol for Indians 
) is no longer what one would call cheap here but I guess that people have become so used to driving that they cannot seem to do without it. There is a mini public transport system in Atlanta called MARTA but its so small that it would look like a toy train in front of the Delhi Metro. But then Delhi has n times the population of Atlanta and 1/n times the area of the city. So I guess that such a small train would be OK for the city, especially when half the people live miles away from the downtown area where most of the offices are.
Oh yes, I got a new laptop. A Dell Vostro 1500 with GeForce 8400 graphics card (OK so its not a good as the 8800, but I don’t have fat pockets you know!). I got the card just for DirectX 10 support (which I learnt has a programmable graphics pipeline) and I plan to keep the laptop for a pretty long time, at least 3 years if not more.
Will stop here or my post, else it will start looking like an article. Will add more later, till then, I hope this blog will stay alive!
I am jealous of your Laptop
Ah, cool. I’m curious to know the Mac: PC ratio in Georgia Tech. Is yours a Santa Rosa?
You may want to install OS X86, worked really well on an HP laptop I used which had the 8800 card. The good part about the 8 series nvidias is that you can share RAM as part of video memory in addition to the DDR3 that the card gives you.
There are Macs, I don’t know what would be a good ratio but I think it might be just 10% in the labs. Btw most profs use a Mac (at least to carry it in class)
Yes, it has a 800 Mhz FSB so I think it is based on the Santa Rosa platform but it doesn’t mention Centrino Duo, just Core 2 Duo, so maybe not, dunno.
8800
, that’s something, but in a laptop? I got a cheaper version which has just 128 MB, my budget didn’t allow for more.
Why should I get OSX? Is there a good reason, or is it just because of the standard parlance that Apple is cool
I didn’t buy a MacBook Pro because it’s cool. I bought it for productivity. There are so many things which are much easier on Mac OS and because I wasn’t able to get native performance on my PC, I bought the Pro.
Anyway like you my Macbook Pro has a 8600M card and it’s really awesome to say the least. Every game works flawlessly and blender renders stuff in 1/10th the time it used to on my regular PC.