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Hardware

Sony Ericsson Develops Contact Headphones 173

TechnologyResource writes "Sony Ericsson has just introduced the MH907 headphones. The headphones will pause or play your music based on contact; eliminating the use of a pause or stop button. Removing one ear bud will pause the music. Removing both ear buds will stop the music. Both ear buds have to be in your ear to play the music. According to Sony Ericsson, this will allow you to 'play your music and answer phone calls just by inserting the buds into your ear or taking them out.'"
Windows

How To Diagnose a Suddenly Slow Windows Computer? 835

Ensign Taco writes "I'm sure nearly every one of us has had it happen. All of a sudden your Windows PC slows to a crawl for no apparent reason. Yeah, we all like Linux because it doesn't do annoying things like this, but the Windows desktop still reigns supreme in most managed LAN work environments. I'm running XP with 4G of RAM and a decent CPU, and everything was fine, until one day — it wasn't. I've run spybot, antivirus, and looked at proc explorer — no luck. There is no one offending, obvious process. It seems every process decides to spike at once at random intervals. So I'm wondering if there's a few wizards out there that know what to look at. Could this be a very clever virus that doesn't run as a process? Or could this just be some random application error that's causing bad behavior? I've encountered this a few times with Windows PCs, but the solution has always been to just add more hardware. Has anyone ever successfully diagnosed this kind of issue?" And whether such a problem is related to malware or not, what steps would you take next?
Space

First Earth-Sized Exoplanet May Have Been Found 222

Adam Korbitz writes "New Scientist is reporting the extrasolar planet MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb — whose discovery was announced just last summer — may actually be the first truly Earth-sized exoplanet to be identified. A new analysis suggests the planet weighs less than half the original estimate of 3.3 Earth masses; the new estimate pegs the planet's size at 1.4 Earth masses. The planet orbits a small red dwarf star, some 3,000 light-years from here, at an orbital distance of 0.62 astronomical units, about the same distance as Venus from our sun. One significance of the planet's discovery is that it points to the probable ubiquity of smaller terrestrial planets in somewhat Earth-like orbits around red dwarf stars, the oldest and most numerous stars in the galaxy. Here is a video report from the discoverers."

Comment Re:Not enough (Score 0, Offtopic) 134

3 hour bus ride? That's a lot of time taken out of a terrorist plot. Do you have any idea how much evil can HAPPEN in three hours? Hot dang. That's a whole 8th of a season. Just ask Jack Bauer.

3 hours is a lot if this was going to be a hit and run attack like done recently in Taj hotel and elsewhere. But you have the understand the complete context here. India has had attacks which were done much differently. There have been cases when the terrorists were *in* India for days and sometimes months. Some of those attacks have cost more lives (mumbai train blasts come to my mind) than the recent one. And these attacks are much more common.

So, yes, you are right if the cops are only targeting Taj Mahal sort of attacks. But thats 'not enough', as I said.

Comment Not enough (Score 5, Interesting) 134

Unless this policy is applied throughout the country, the city of Mumbai getting rid of unsecured wifi access points will not solve much. A terrorist can take a 3 hour bus ride to Pune to get unsecured wifi access. Mumbai itself is too big, are they talking about only the city or the whole suburbia included? Thane? New Mumbai?

Sounds like a scare tactic to me. A publicity stunt to make people more aware of consequences of unsecured wifi.

Comment Re:India (Score 4, Informative) 386

Just to add, the famed IITs (Indian Institute of Technologies) do have exchange programs. But the living conditions in most IITs will not suit (you might call them appalling by US college standards) most americans. So choose the institute properly (IIT delhi, e.g., might be a better choice than IIT Kharagpur). But, yes, India will be a good economical choice. And almost all institutes in India have english as their medium of teaching, so language won't be a problem at all.

PS: I am from IIT Kharagpur.

Comment Other (non-algorithmic and programming) stuff (Score 1) 517

Computer Science is not just algorithms and programming :). So a list of other important books:

* Introduction to Graph Theory - Douglas B West

* Computer Architecture - John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson

* Switching and Finite Automata Theory - Zvi Kohavi

* Compilers - Aho Ullman and Sethi (the dragon book)

* An Engineering Approach to Computer Networking - Keshav

And if you are going to be writing papers, don't forget to read "The Elements of Style" by William Strunk.
Novell

Novell Cancels BrainShare Conference 102

A.B. VerHausen writes "While OSCON and SCALE organizers ramp up plans for their events, Novell shuts down BrainShare after 20 years, citing travel costs and budget tightening as main concerns. 'Instead of the traditional in-person conference, Novell plans to offer online classes and virtual conferences to make education and training available to more people at a lower per-head cost to companies,' says the news story on OStatic.com."

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