Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch Review |

2011’s refresh of Apple’s MacBook Pro line-up has been quite a significant one, as far as processing power is concerned, since it finally brings Intel’s most awaited Sandy Bridge to the Mac platform. It also marks the point where Apple have switched to AMD from their long standing graphics partner, Nvidia. The second highlighted feature in the refreshed models is Thunderbolt, which is Apple’s answer to USB 3.0. Well, technically it’s Intel’s technology, but we’ll get more into that later.

Now, the model we are reviewing today is the ‘Early 2011’ series of the MacBook 15-inch and yes, we do realize it’s a bit old, but the ‘Late 2011’ merely brings with it a slight change in the CPU and GPU, while everything else remains the same, so this is just as good as a new one. We’ll be reviewing the ‘Late 2011’ models as well, but that’s another time, for now let’s focus on this.

DESIGN AND BUILD

Apple has barely made any changes to the chassis as it still uses the unibody aluminium construction. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ , right? Apple already have a good thing going with this design, which they introduced in 2008 and we’d be hard pressed to find any other notebook manufacturer who can come close to the fit and finish of the MacBook Pro. The notebook feels extremely sturdy and well built, which is not surprising, since it’s made from a single block of aluminium.

All the ports are where we left them last. On the left, we have a Gigabit Ethernet jack, Firewire 800, Thunderbolt, two USB 2.0, SDHC slot, audio in/out jacks, while on the right we have the slot-loading DVD burner.

Coming to the keyboard and track pad, it’s the same chic let styled back lit keyboard and a massive glass track pad with 5-finger gesture support. You can now Face Time on the MacBook Pro in HD as the webcam supports 720p video.

FEATURES
Our review unit came with the current version of OS X Lion 10.7.1 along with the base configuration for the 15-inch model. Whether you like it or not, all the 15-inch and 17- inch MacBook Pros come with quad-core CPUs. Our unit was powered by an Intel Core i7 running at 2.2GHz, which is essentially a Core i7-2720QM with a max Turbo frequency of 3.3GHz, but only when one core is being used. The TDP has gone up a bit from 35W to 45W from last year models, mostly due to the two extra cores. To complement this, we have 4GB of DDR3 RAM at 1333MHz, 750GB hard drive and an AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 1GB of video memory. Apple supports dynamic switching between the on board HD 3000 GPU and the discrete card depending on the activity being done.

The 15.4-inch screen sports the same 1440 x 900 resolution, which is really good. At moderate brightness levels, reflections can be a bit of a problem, but you can opt for an anti-glare screen as well. Just like their earlier models, the screen offers good viewing angles and the color reproduction is spot on. Now coming to Thunderbolt, this is Apple’s take on Intel’s Light Peak technology sans the light. It’s capable of two channels of full duplex 10Gbps traffic, but here’s the problem, there just aren’t enough storage devices that use Thunderbolt, yet and those that do exist, don’t come cheap.

PERFORMANCE To see just how good Sandy Bridge performs on the Mac, we ran Cinebench R11.5, which gave us a CPU score of 4.42pts. When we compared this to a similar high-end Windows notebook with a Core i7-2630QM, which scored 5pts, we found the new MacBook Pro to be perfectly in tune with the times and it can take on other notebooks in this price range with ease. Our OpenGL score was 35.41fps, which is slightly lower compared to an Nvidia GTX 560M with a score of 39.2fps. It’s still faster compared to last year’s MacBook Pro 17- inch (Core i5 @ 2.5GHz, 4GB RAM, Nvidia GT 330M), which scored 17.25fps in the OpenGL test and 2.31pts in the CPU test.

OS X Lion is super smooth with barely any noticeable lags or freezes. The new OS brings with it new features like Face Time, Launchpad, etc along with some new multi- touch gestures that make it even easier to switch between applications. When stressed, though, the notebook does tend to heat up, which makes it a bit uncomfortable to use on your lap after a while. This mainly happens due to the fact that the discrete GPU kicks in as soon as it encounters say, a Flash video in a browser. Normally, the GPU inside Sandy Bridge is more than capable of handling Flash video, but there isn’t any way for you to tell the OS not to use it like you can in Windows. The notebook remains silent for the most part with just a faint whirring sound when playing a video or doing anything graphically intensive.

BATTERY LIFE
The battery life is a bit of a mixed bag and it really depends on what you’re doing with the MacBook Pro. In our video drain test, which involved playing a 720p M4V video, we managed a battery life of 4hrs, which is not too bad. Under normal usage, you should be able to pull off about 6hrs, which is good for a notebook packing in a quad- core and a discrete graphics card.

VERDICT
At Rs.1,04,900, it makes a very tempting buy if you’re looking for both battery life and solid performance, which let’s face it, is very difficult to find on a Windows-based notebook. The refresh continues the legacy of the MacBook Pros before it, by delivering excellent build quality, good performance and really good battery life. There’s no point comparing this to a Windows-based notebook, since it’s not targeted at the average Joe anyways, so let’s not even go there. While this is still the early refresh, it’s no slouch and will perform all your tasks just as well as the ‘Late 2011’ model, which we are expecting to get our hands on soon.

India to allocate Rs 6000 Crores to Build Supercomputers as India'sFastest Not Really Fast

The Indian ministers might be embroiled in corruption accusations, yet it does not stop them from making ambitious plans for the country. In one way, that’s actually good. But if you think of it as another scam in the making, then I got a valid point. Okay! So, let me come to the point – India may invest Rs 6,000 Crores (approx $ 1330 Million) for the research and development of supercomputers. That’s what the Minister of State for Science and Technology, Mr. Ashwani Kumar said, according to this report:

This is over and above the Rs 5,000 Crore allocation proposed in the 12th Plan for research and development of supercomputers. There were proposals to double the government expenditure in research and development during the 12th Plan period.

Aah. Now, 5000 Crores is a big number. I hope the minister has his numbers correct. So, why are they going to spend so much? Well, here’s the answer:

The Government wants us to have the best computing, and so wants to spend the money on research and development of supercomputers. And, they might shell the money as well – they are serious about it. A senior official was quoted as saying:

I expect the Rs 5000 crore allocation for supercomputers to get the nod of the Planning Commission but was skeptical on funding for exa-scale computing.

So, we are not going to do exa-scale computing research and still spend Rs 6000 Crores. I wonder!

Supercomputing Research Worth Rs 6000 Crores :O

Recently, ISRO was reported to have built India’s fastest supercomputer known as “SAGA-220” (Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture-220 TeraFLOPS). The supercomputer, which is used by space scientists for solving complex aerospace problems, is at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), and was built at a cost of Rs 14 Crore.

Now, my question is a simple one. Please pardon me if I am wrong, but I feel that if we were able to build India’s fastest supercomputer in just Rs 14 Crores, what kind of research are we going to do with Rs 6000 Crores? Maybe, the ministry has some big plans for the country. Research is for sure needed though, as the fastest supercomputer in India is actually not fast enough. The worlds fastest computer, Tianhe-1A has a peak performance of 2566 TeraFLOPS whereas SAGA-220 gives a peak performance of 172.61 TeraFLOPS.

India Shining: 104 Indian Companies Nominated For the Red Herring 100Asia Awards |

I saw my RSS Feeds (I use Google Reader) and came to know about Red Herring, and that they have a Red Herring 100 List for North America, Europe and Asia respectively. After some scrutiny of their website, I found out an interesting point which the other blogs and media publications seem to have missed while talking about the Asia list:

104 Indian companies were nominated for the Red Herring 100 Asia list: India Startup Scene is Shining

It’s good to see that entrepreneurs here are taking the initiative to dare. We need more such people, after all these startups 5 years down the line will be full-fledged companies giving back a lot to the Indian economy. Out of a total of 227 companies who are going to vie to be in the final 100 at the award ceremony in Hong Kong from 17-19 October, 104 Indian companies will participate – a staggering 46 percent of the total. What happened to China? Perhaps, many startups there did not nominate theselves. Still, India being right on the top shows that we have a glorious future ahead.

Although I would have loved to write about each Indian company nominated, the list is a little too long (makes me happy though) and this does not seem to be the right place to go telling about each one. You can check the list of companies nominated here.

For our readers, we will try covering one Red Herring nominated startup each day as our Red Herring featured post.

Enough. What is the Red Herring 100 Asia Award?

In case you don’t know, Red Herring is a media company which hosts technology-centric events and publshes a magazine on technology. The Red Herring editorial team has been hosting Red Herring 100 Awards for three different regions – Asia, Europe, North America as well as has a global version of it, for some years now. The award is given to the top 100 companies in their respective regions. The companies are evaluated on the basis of:

• Their financial performance
• Innovative use of technology
• Quality of management
• Execution of strategy
• Disruption into their respective industries

Frankly speaking, there are more than just 104 startups in India who are doing some kind of innovative work or the other – using technology or not, to better the society. Still, the Red Herring recognition is something big. We at Hungry N Foolish will try covering startups (even the ones in colleges of India) so that it could inspire others to start and give back something to the eco-system. We need to provide students with more exposure towards entrepreneurship from an early stage, and that’s what we have set out to do.

If you’re a startup and would like us to review you, get in touch. Even if you just have an idea or a piece of advice for youngsters reading this blog, don’t shy away from sharing it with the world.

Remember Nothing. ZUKMO Everything. |

Oh how wonderful it’d be to live in a cloud. How beautiful the world would be and how easy life would be to all of us. It’d all be so nice up there…

Think this is a dream huh! Well not much since cloud computing came into the scene. And indeed life would be much easy if you had one secure cloud to yourself that would hold all your belongings. Well no one has yet come up with anything to keep the solid stuff, but regarding data cloud… presenting… ZUKMO.com.

Yes it is indeed that awesome. That’s what the tagline to the website says… ‘Remember Nothing… Zukmo Everything‘. You can save all your personal information in zukmo and stay carefree that it is all secure and well protected in safe hands. Much like the bank vaults. Save your information securely to the cloud, share it easily with your contacts, sync it instantly with your devices and access it anytime from anywhere.

You have space to manage all your documents ranging from spreadsheets, photos, pdf files, notes any so much more…Share all your documents, bookmarked content & notes with email recipients and discuss with them in the collaborative work space.

Zukmo provides for a special sync folder in your workstation which will automatically reconcile the subfolders and its content to the website and to any other devices linked to your account as soon as it notices a change in your sync folder. Once your files are synced, you can access them directly from each of your computer’s hard drives or by using your “My Zukmo“ account at the website.

Currently, Zukmo supports adding URLs, importing your bookmarks from other sources (delicious, Google Bookmarks etc.), uploading desktop documents, fetching Google Docs/ Google Apps Docs, fetching Twitter streams, Adding web clippings & Notes, Fetching RSS feeds, embedding Videos from YouTube.com, Vimeo and Presentations from SlideShare.net, Scribd etc.

The best thing about zukmo. is that it gives you such a varied range of services that make it easier to manage your files and data.

But as they say… ‘there are some things money can’t buy’. uh… well… this zukmo thing comes in the other group. to avail the complete facility of this cloud networking storage device there is a very nominal charge that is demanded.

There are two premium plans that zukmo offers

And certainly the free users can always use their 1 GB of storage provided by the people at zukmo. That according to me is a pretty generous freebee.

But the free edition does not cover all the services. So it is wise to use the paid scheme since it is cheap enough for whoever willing to use it and honestly a priceless possession for the user.

Here is a list of all the facilities that zukmo offers :

Features	Free Plan	Premium Plan
General
Fulltext search
Tagging
Browser Add-ons
File Synchronization
Windows Desktop Tray App
File & Folder Sharing		Coming in Dec 2011
File Sharing links		Coming in Dec 2011
File Version History & File restore		Coming in Dec 2011
File Collaboration		Coming in Dec 2011
File download, delete
File rename, move, copy, gallery view & New Folder creation		Coming in Dec 2011
File Events registration		Coming in Dec 2011
File Preview		Coming in Dec 2011
Notes
Basic Notes
Notes Collaboration with editing		Coming in Dec 2011
Email Notes into My Zukmo		Coming in Dec 2011
Notebook sharing		Coming in Dec 2011
Bookmarkin
Cached pages
Archive RSS Feeds	3 Months only
Import from Del.icio.us
Embedded Multimedia
Google
Google Docs
Google Calendar	Coming in Dec 2011	Coming in Dec 2011
Google Apps Docs
Google Apps calendar		Coming in Dec 2011
Gmail	Coming in Dec 2011	Coming in Dec 2011
Google Apps Email		Coming in Dec 2011
Twitter
Archive Tweets (only 1500 Following Tweets)	only 1000 User Tweets
Sharing
Sharing Bookmarks & Notes to – Facebook

Sharing Bookmarks & Notes to – Google+ – Stumbleupon – Tumblr – Digg

Coming in Dec 2011CollaborationBasic Collaboration (for Bookmarks & Notes)Collaboration with Annotation Coming in Dec 2011MobileAndroid App Mobile Website coming in Dec 2011SupportPriority Support

And the crunch part… Yes, they have an android app. happy now you smart phone users! you can carry your zukmo to any place you want and you don’t even need a computer.

To me, zukmo is a real winner of a cloud information management device. Don’t forget to comment saying how you liked it.

What matters while hiring in a startup - experience or passion? |

Even though you may not get the perfect hire for your startup, you should try getting the best people possible. Even if you are just a college startup, you shouldn’t just take anyone on your team just for the sake of building an organisation hoping to get the work done. Trust me, not even half of the work will be finished. It’s the team which makes or breaks startups.

Know the following now, and make sure you follow them while hiring people for your startup:

• Compromise on the right things: If a person is perfect, he will not work for you. Perfectionists never work for startups. If they do, they do so in very rare cases. Mr. Dharmesh Shah, CTO of HubSpot says in a blogpost:
  

  Everyone you bring on is a compromise. The trick is to compromise on the right things.

So, when you are about to hire someone, don’t just think that this guy can’t do this, or he doesn’t even know what guerilla marketing is. Relax! Everyone can be taught the tricks. Make sure that he/she has the requisite passion.

• Team Matters: You had the idea. You built the prototype. After the seed funding, things started changing for you. Now, you need to have a team which could work with you. You set your eyes on hiring people – how would you go about it? I’d hire the most talented people. For people with more than one skills, the doors to my startup will always be open. The reason I say this is because accordingto Mr. Mark Suster, VC at GRP Partners:
  

  Startups. We know the mantra: Team matters. Is this philosophy exaggerated? Overrated? Cliché? No. Team is the only thing that matters.

Hiring the best talent is important otherwise the rival company will gain an advantage. To not lose that new lead, you need to have an awesome sales team. To meet deadlines, your developers need to know what they’re doing. Skills and skill-sharing maketh a team.

Attitude or Aptitude??

Both if possible.

I say so because an ideal startup employee for me would be someone who has the passion for building things from scratch and the skill to take it into the startosphere. And, most of the times, the skill is gained through experience. But if I did not get one such guy and can spare some time to train folks, I might also hire someone who does not have much experience but is always ready to explore new things and is sensible.

To put it straight:

If you have time to mentor, then definitely passion. If you need someone to stabilize the ship, then experience.

But, somewhere you need to set a minimum acceptable skill level. If the candidate meets your needs, and there are many who do so, choose the one who is the most passionate about working in a startup – who is ready to tackle failure with the same passion with which he tackles success.

I’d choose passion over experience any given day. If you are still having trouble deciding, have a look at the discussion on Quora.

Top SEO Business Strategies |

The real meaning of SEO

If one wishes to see one’s business succeeding then it is very important to know all about SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine optimization. This is the best way one can increase one’s business. Nowadays everything is online and all prefer to do the business the online way. In order to have the website on the high ranking the website should be designed in a proper and friendly manner. SEO is one of the reasons the traffics increases and people surf and visit the website more frequently. People who are surfing the net in order to find out some good website which sells well they put some key words in Google and other search engines.

What are the benefits of SEO?

Few things should be followed in order to increase the traffic. If a person follows that it will surely help in bringing the ranking to the highest possible level. The keywords used in a website should be prominent so that any person is able to find out the relevant things to read. Always try and put the website of your company on the top. All the work is effectively handled by SEO Company and the professionals working there. The SEO team should be competent and hardworking so that the company benefits from their knowledge and experience. More people will only visit the site which is high on the list and is it can only happen if the website is visited by most of the surfers. It is better to insert and add the relevant keywords inside the body of the website so that it helps. The keywords which should be used are to be the one’s which are relevant and not the one’s which irrelevant.

The importance of keywords

There are many search engines and one can put the keyword which one is looking for and the result in displayed on the computer screen within few seconds. One can read the relevant information one is searching. The other advisable thing is that one should also add other website links in the website. This in result increases the traffic on the site and thus the rank of it is increased on the search list. One can also learn all about SEO and do it on own. This can be done by learning and if one has interest in it. Person named Leonardo Wood is the person who helps people learns all about online and SEO. Many people have learnt the main things of SEO by attending his classes online and are really doing well. He is in fact a specialist and teaches in a proper and interesting way.

Few considerations

Just remember one thing that the content is of utmost importance. The better and cool the content it will be definitely beneficial to the company. So it is also better that a company employs a writer who is of good quality and writing amazing articles. Updating should also be done on regular basis in order to maintain the position on the search engines.

This is a guest post by Sarah. She writes for Gamesht which has different Video Game Reviews for e.g. FIFA 2012, etc.

 Ankit is founder of TechDip. A student of Software Engineering. He is a passionate writer who loves writing about anything and everything related to Technology. Ankit aims to be at the top in every field he is involved in.Catch him on Twitter @techpil or Google+

Google Launches Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich |

After a lot of anticipations, Google today unveiled Android 4.0 i.e. Ice Cream Sandwich(code-name) at an event in HongKong.

Android Director Matias Duarte while introducting the OS said:

While people like Android, and while people need Android, people didn’t love Android. We felt a need to change the User Interface as it was not as good looking as it should be.

Following are the major changes:

1. Revamped UI with the new ‘Roboto’ font throughout the OS.
2. Built in Screenshot taking.
3. Face Unlock, where the device will only unlock if it recognizes your face as the owner of the device.
4. Android Beam: Send files, web pages, apps etc via NFC by just touching the devices together.
5. Default resolution of 16:9 1280×720.
6. Hardware Acceleration of the UI promises to greatly smoothen the experience.
7. Data Usage Management so you don’t cross your monthly limit
8. Built in Photo Editing App.
9. One Operating System for both phones and tablets.
10. Virtual Navigation buttons instead of physical keys.
11. All new Web Browser that syncs with your Google Chrome on the desktop.
12. Improved Notifications, Music Controls.
13. Improved keyboard with in-line spell and grammar check.

Availability

Google has confirmed that Nexus S will be the first device with this version and soon many Gingerbread devices get an update. Also dual-core devices like LG Optimus 2X and Galaxy S II will be getting it.

Our Take

With rivals like Apple and Microsoft announcing about Windows 7 based Nokia cellphone and iOS5 respectively, this step was imminent. Although we haven’t yet tried the new OS, the features are worth giving it a try.

Ankit is Co-founder of HungryNfoolish. A student of Software Engineering. He is a passionate writer who loves writing about anything and everything related to Technology. Ankit aims to be at the top in every field he is involved in.Catch him on Twitter @techpil or Google+