Karan Gulati :: Blog

The solution I am presenting is for those who have both the OS, Linux as well as Windows. Though this will be a common knowledge for those who have worked on linux, but for the hardcore windows lover this might be information.

I would advice people running windows to install linux (preferablly ubuntu as it is developing at a good rate). Now then, whenever you encounter any virus then most of the timeyou would be atleast able to know which files the virus has created (the ones which keep on coming back even after deleting them). So once you know the file what you need to do is, restart your system and log on to linux, here you would be easily able to delete those files (provided you use the right access permissions to delete the files) and they wont come back.

these days i prefer to first insert my USB drive while i am logged onto linux , coz linux cannot be affected by viruses hence if there is some onknown file in the usb i first delete it and then go to windows......

I have been procrastinating writing this post for a long time now. And now its seriously a long time. I took my GRE exam on 15th september 2008 and with a score of 1540, I think I was well rewarded.

You will find a lot of blogs where people tell you how to study, what to do and bla bla bla..... But here I will tell you what not to do.

What NOT to Do's:

1) Never copy anyone else's style of studying.

2) Never think that learning the word list is the whole and sole of GRE (though it is pretty important but I have seen people with great vocab, faiiing miserably in gre)

3) Never follow an irregular study pattern (for gre unfortunately you have to be regular even if its for 6 weeks).

4) Never ponder upon advices from 100 people. Just get briefed up about the pattern of gre and some important tips, after that its only you who will have to take care of yourself. Advices from the so called champions might take you to your bottom-most level.

Even after telling you the list of dont's, i still think you would be looking for list of do's , but keep in mind these do's will be what i did, so they might not work for you. So here it goes:

I had been long delaying studying for gre and was really irregular. In the beginning I was concentrating only on the wordlist. Anyhow, in the month of june i realized that this is not working; hence I joined a coaching institute just for the sake of regularity (these institutes will not add up to your learning, its just that if you are my kind who cannot study unless he/she has a stick in his/her ass then you must join one). The first plan of action i took was to finish the wordlist the institute provided in 1 month, which I was able to do.

My word remebering pattern was based on the synonym antonym approach i.e. I used to learn a word and then all its synonyms and antonyms (this is one good thing which was taught by the institute). Now to learn a word you need to pay attention to its phonetics and visualize things (its really good for you if you know more than 1 language, so you can have more situations resembling the sound of the word) for eg i know hindi english and a lil bit of punjabi, so i got a word jalopi ... now i broke it into Jal(water) + pi( to piss, to urinate) Now i imagined a small wretched car which is in a broken condition and i have to dump it, so what do i do? I throw it in jal (water) and pi on top of it (and i imagined me doing that) so here it is jalopi means a small wretched broken down car. Remember you can be as imaginative as you like to be ;). GOt my point.

Next thing is analogies...... Now they gave me a hard time...... initially i was getting only 50 % right, but the best part about analogies is that there are too few analogies where the 4 out of five option will be so incorrect that no one can raise an objection on the answer given by ETS. So i practiced and i practiced more and then after solving about 1000 analogies whoaaaaaaa.... i eas getting more than 90% correct. But dude you need to work on analogies if you are my type.

Antonyms were covered by the approach to learnt the wordlist. Reading comprehension was an area which i hated. I mean who can spend so much time reading idiotic passages. Anyhow i still managed to do around 10-15 RC's. There is no clear cut method to solve an RC... Some say that just give it a superficial reading, some say read it completely once without break... bla bla bla....... i say try different technique and then make your own technique that suits you the best.

Next was sentence completion..... Now this is the trickiest part according to me because 95% of the sentence completions are straightfoward but keep in mind that sentence completion is usually the 1st question you encounter in the test and if you get this wrong then it would be really hard for you to get a high score. I practiced around 1000 sentence completions also.

Now there is a lot of matter available on the net.......  I say use it but dont feel too disheartened if you are not able to correctly answer them according to their answer scheme coz many are wrong........

And lastly, i got many advices from the so called experts that "hey dude! do not study in the last week of gre and never a day before gre".... I said "F*** you".... its my belief that any abrupt break in any regime leadds to unwanted results... hence i continued studying the same until it was the exam day (except the fact that instead of sleeping at 4am in the morning i tried to start sleeping at 12 from a week before the exam)

So here i tell you some books to follow:

1) Barron

2) Big Book (dont do the book but the tests it contain are a must........)

3) Powerprep software( from ets website..... do this thoroughly... the score you get here will most of the time reflect your actual score.... remember MOST OF THE TIME NOT ALWAYS...)

4) Kaplan's interactive software

 If you need any material please post your requirement in the comments section, if i have it i would upload it in the GRE community here....

That would be all guys............

take care and all the best

Google may be pitching Chrome as a super-duper browser, but it's really showing off its shiny, new operating system. Remember, each of Chrome's tabs is a separate window--and while you might see each window displaying a Web page, Google's thinking about applications.

This is a direct attack on Microsoft -- and I think Microsoft is worried. That's because a small kernel on your local system could boot you into directly into Chrome, or a server-based operating system, and you could start working sans Windows.

This isn't what happens right now, but I'll bet it's Google's ultimate plan. That's a good thing, because I'm not wild about Chrome as a browser. Read Chrome? I Really Want To Love Ya for my perspective.

Head in the Clouds
The idea is cloud computing, where applications and data reside on servers, and it's taking hold. (See Zoho Adds Google Docs-like File Management and Working with Google Docs, part 1 and part 2.)

I know what you're thinking: Everything online? That's crazy. That's what I used to think, too.

Give Me a Fast Pipe
I remember Microsoft showing off a prerelease version of Windows 95 at a users group I used to manage. The presenter had an intriguing idea: Instead of doing research using Microsoft's CD-based encyclopedia program, Encarta, just reach out to Encarta on the Internet for fresh, dynamic data. Ditto for Word's connection to the Net.

The audience laughed -- so did I -- because few people had broadband; most were still suffering with dialup.

So cloud computing may be pie-in-the-sky right now, but five years down the road, try to visualize everyone having a steady, reliable, and super-fast broadband connection. You might not be laughing.

Worried that you can't work if you're kicked offline? "One important aspect to cloud computing," my buddy Paul Corning, a smart guy, said, "is that Chrome's Gears means you don't have to have continuous broadband access, and you can still work with browser-based applications when the Net's down." That's not new, either. Read Google Gears - Offline Functionality for Web Apps that explains how it works.

Google's OS Announcement
Google all but announced Chrome as an operating system in its recent blog entry, "A fresh take on the browser." In the third paragraph, the writers said:

"We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build." [Emphasis mine.]

  also read Google's Chrome aims to kill Windows, make Web the OS of choice. [Hat tip to WinPatrol's Bill.]

I encourage you to read Google's 38-page, Doonesbury-like comic that describes Chrome. Fair warning: I ran out of steam every so often -- some of the ideas forced me to do a little thinking. But stay with it -- the ideas and concepts pick up speed. And if you read between the lines you'll see where Google's going.

There is a new breakthrough and we can now expect our internet getting 100 times faster. Scientists at University of Sydney have taken four gruesome years to develop it but now, due to a small scratch on a piece of glass they say our internet is going to be faster than current Telstra networks.

The scratch means we will have almost an instantaneous access to the Internet which will be error-free anywhere in the world. 

"This is a critical building block and a fundamental advance on what is already out there. We are talking about networks that are potentially up to 100 times faster without costing the consumer any more," says Federation Fellow Professor Ben Eggleton, Director of CUDOS, based within the School of Physics at the University of Sydney.

Eggleton, whose team beat their deadline by a year, says that up until now information has been moving at a slow rate but optical fibres have a huge capacity to deliver more. "The scratched glass we've developed is actually a Photonic Integrated Circuit," he says.

"This circuit uses the 'scratch' as a guide or a switching path for information - kind of like when trains are switched from one track to another - except this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks. This means that in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million million times. We are talking about photonic technology that has terabit per second capacity."

This initial demonstration proves it is possible to achieve speeds 60 times faster than current Australian Networks. With further development, the process is likely to produce even faster results.

"Currently we use electronics for our switching and that has been OK but as we move toward a more tech-savvy future there is a demand for instant web gratification. Photonic technology delivers what's needed and, more importantly, what's wanted."