Workhorse Vs. Powerhorse

One of the questions that I am frequently asked is “Should I buy a Quadro or GeForce graphic card?”. In this post I will answer this question. Both are graphic card families from NVIDIA. Quadro is a workstation-class solution aimed at CAD (Computer Aided Design) and DCC (Digital Content Creation) professionals where as GeForce is a consumer-level solution aimed at gamers and home users. ATI has a competing product family called FirePRO 3D.

Quadro uses almost the same hardware as GeForce at the core. The hardware is tweaked a little bit to provide features and optimizations for the professional user and Quadro uses a different firmware. In fact it is possible to mod a GeForce to work with Quadro drivers. However, being a workstation level graphic card means that it should meet high quality and reliability standards. When you are working on a highly critical car design or a movie scene the last thing you want is a hardware failure or a system crash. Quadro's are built for that kind of quality and reliability.

The Major difference comes in the form of software. NVIDIA backs Quadro with high quality driver, middle ware and application support. There are Quadro solutions that are tailor made for certain applications like the Quadro CX designed for Adobe Creative Suite 4.

Now lets talk about performance and price. These hardware features and optimizations along with software give Quadro an edge over GeForce in CAD/DCC and the performance is a lot better then equivalent GeForce card. Quadro also has features that make working with CAD/DCC applications more efficient and precise. When it comes to gaming GeForce performs a lot better than an equivalent Quadro. Price is another important factor. Quadro comes at a premium. A Quadro costs upto 3 times the cost of an equivalent GeForce, they are very expensive.

So the conclusion is if you are a buying a graphic card for gaming with some CAD/DCC, GeForce is the way to go. For serious CAD/CAM and casual gaming, go for a Quadro.

Limited is the new unlimited

About a month back one of my friends got a call from Airtel customer care. It was to inform him that he has exceeded the download limit on his unlimited Airtel broadband plan and the download speed will be reduced to half the speed of his plan. Now wait a minute, what the hell is going on. That's right limit on unlimited.

The fact is that Airtel has put a download cap on users of unlimited data plans citing "fair use policy". This applies to all existing users since they would have signed Airtel's terms and conditions before taking the connection. After reaching the data cap download speed will be halved. On a 256 Kbps unlimited (oops T&C apply) connection the cap is 15GB(download cap varies with plan) after which speed is reduced to 128 Kbps. This is not new in the US, but Airtel is the first to implement it in India. This may influence other broadband operators in India to implement similar caps on their plans.

iPhone tips and tricks

1. Double clicking the home button opens phone app and displays your favourite tab. When using ipod app double tapping the home button will show ipod controls (to play/pause the track that is playing, skip to next/prev track or go to ipod app). You can customise this behaviour at settings>general>home button.

2. If you want to quickly delete a mail a quick horizontal swipe on the mail shows a delete button. The mail app supports this, it doesn't work on your contacts & calender, some third party apps support this.

3. This is something i found out of neccessity. One thing that was bugging me was "How to pause/skip tracks when the iPhone is in my pocket ?". Now with my iPod nano i can do that by clicking on the pocket by feeling for the right button. With the iphone doing this will be pretty tough because there are no buttons to feel. I have to remove the phone from my pocket and either unlock the phone or duble click the home button (refer Tip 1). So i just googled and found this. This only works with the bundled earbuds or third party earbuds/headphones that are designed with a mic and Accept/reject call button. When listening to a song single click the button on earbuds to Play/Pause the current playing track. Double click the skip to the next track. Looks like there is no way to skip to the prev track. Strange that apple does not market this as a feature (may be i'm missing some thing). I can atleast enjoy this when i am using the bundled earbuds, its pretty useful.

4. When using the calculator app (OS 2.0 and later) hold ur phone in landscape mode to access scientific calculator.

5. Thanks to Tarun for this one. Very Helpful. Tarun's comment lifted,
"In any page or app, touch on the top status bar takes you to the top of that page.
This works in all the native apps and most if the 3rd party apps too."