Matroska format is not supported in some TVs. For my bravia i convert mkv to mpeg4 format. Unless you want to encode subtitles it could just be a copy of the video codec in the mpeg4 container. ffmpeg is your friend.

H1B drives foreign student enrollment in STEM in American Universities. In mid-tier schools like SUNY Buffalo most of the professors, graduate students in Computer science are foreign. You can spot an occasional American, but the graduate/research programs are more or less sustained by foreigners. Take away H1B and the students & some of the professors will be gone, the money (either from the foreigners or from the NSF) will dry up and the whole program will just collapse. I don't see how that can be good.

The Princetons & Harvards may not face the problem, but a lot of non-ivy league schools will. H1B sustains an entire academic ecosystem in the U.S. Any reform of the program should consider this aspect for there are entrenched interests in sustaining the status quo.

I do a clean install after I buy a PC. For windows 7 I had to do the following.

1. Get all the drivers from the OEM for the specific model.
2. Get the REAL windows product key (& OEM cert) of your pc. Google is your friend here.
3. Get a Retail windows copy from MSDN or some other legit site.
4. Format the PC, install windows and use slmgr tool to activate it.
5. Now install all the drivers & you are good to go.

No crapware now & it saves me disk space that the OEMs manage to steal in the name of recovery partition.

I have an inkling that Microsoft/OEMs will make the process more onerous going forward but I believe its worth the pain.

Running Microsoft Office in Linux. I had a good experience with codeweaver for linux. I haven't tried wine yet...

In my stint in previous company I was given a machine with 256 mb ram. Running ubuntu was a nightmare & so I installed arch with openbox, feh & rxvt-unicode. I never looked back. The only issue was the hibernate but that never worked for me in ubuntu anyways.

Exactly. Learning to program should not be an end in itself. It should be a path to something tangible - a portfolio of work.

Posted wrong link - intel-3d-transistors

This is an ominous sign of things to come. Intel already has significant advantages in the foundry business. These could be leveraged further to give its x86 chips a boost vis-a-vis ARM. The other players need to pull their act together & pool resources to counter this. If there is no level-playing field because the foundries can't keep up we could well be facing an x86 monopoly in the low-power chip market too.

Google+ is a good place if you know what you are looking for. I like to follow nerds and it just about seems like the "right medium" for that. Family, friends tend to hang around in FB. I see G+ & FB as orthogonal entities catering to different social ecosystems.

I had recently started poking around the lguest hypervisor. From my limited reading I believe 2 of the 3 memory subscription choices mentioned in the article are present in Linux. Existing linux based open source hypervisors like kvm etc use paging/swap mechanism (i,e, for x86 - the paravirt mechanism). Ballooning is possible using the virto_balloon. Kernel shared memory in linux allows dynamic sharing of memory pages between proceses - this probably doesn't apply to virtualization.

I couldn't find any CPU over-subscription thing in open-source hypervisors. It seems to be the only area where open-source hypervisors are lacking.

On an other note, established players like IBM tend to use Type-1 hypervisors (link) for enterprise servers, it would be interesting to see how this company fares against them.

I hate Adobe Reader but in certain situations like docs with two columns of text I prefer it over evince. When I copy text, I expect text to be copied from only that particular column, evince however likes copying from both columns giving me a senseless garbage of text, so I am stuck with Adobe Reader because I happen to clip text from a lot of academic papers for my references. Hope this native PDF Reader takes these nitty-gritties into account.

Absolutely, but I would suggest something a little more sophisticated.

I really hope Bing succeeds. I haven't used it much so far, mostly out of Inertia. But I don't like the idea of placing all my bets with Google. It's very important that an alternate good quality search engine is available. MS is best placed to achieve that for they have the man-power & the money. I hope they succeed.

I saw the Neanderthal series in NatGeo. They only found fossil record of one child that seemed to have traits from both neanderthals as well as modern man (this is not unusual as entire human sub-species have been based on one or two fossils , check the evolution of modern man in wikipedia). On top of that according to the show modern man does not have any traces of neanderthal dna. The picture next to summary features shots from the NatGeo program on Neonderthals.

The article does not seem to mention the impact of the virus on existing treatments. Is the new virus a hiv version of MDR-TB?