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If you are one of the many long-suffering people who have gone for a coffee break and come back to a computer screen full of gibberish or a crashed system, PawSense is for you! "PawSense is a software utility that helps protect your computer from cats. It quickly detects and blocks cat typing, and also helps train your cat to stay off the computer keyboard" is how BitBoost described the product. Chris Niswander, a graduate in computer science from Arizona State University, is the creator of this path-breaking product. "One day, my sister's cat, Amos, walked across her computer keyboard...

Move over, microchip. A random assembly of gold nanoparticles can perform calculations normally reserved for neatly arranged patterns of silicon. Traditional computers rely on ordered circuits that follow preprogrammed rules, but this strategy limits how efficient they can be. “The best microprocessors you can buy in a store now can do 1011 operations per second and use a few hundred watts,” says Wilfred van der Wiel of the University of Twente in the Netherlands. “The human brain can do orders of magnitude more and uses only 10 to 20 watts. That’s a huge gap.” To close that gap, researchers have...

Stressing on the importance of research and development for creating sustainable practices, Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar today said that India is not an 'IT-superpower' but an 'IT-labour contractor' as it lacks innovation. "We say that we are IT-superpower but we are not. We are IT-labour contractors. We have not come up with Facebook, WhatsApp, Google, any new operating system or real new products." "Indian industries must start investing more in research and development. Unless we research and come out with solutions, we do not get the benefit. Industrial progress should be based on it," the Minister said while speaking at...

Linux is a great operating system. Nobody in the Linux camp will argue about that. There are many articles on the Internet convincing you to try and to switch to Linux. There are also many articles that attempt to show you why you should not switch. Let's look at this question from a slightly different viewpoint today. Say, you are now convinced that you want to switch to Linux. What you should NOT expect from this switch? 1. Linux works much faster than Windows This isn't too far from the truth. Generally speaking, Linux OS is less resource-hungry than Windows....

Question: Does anyone here know of an online map source who provides maps that are better suited for printing on modest price (or even B&W) printers, than the usual Google, Bing, etc., maps? Anyone who's ever printed out a map from the above sources knows what I mean. The printed maps are just too "washed out" or faded looking. I can capture maps from the above and copy them into an image or photo viewer like IrfanView to improve them somewhat, but even then, results are poor, and often one ends up using lots of toner for bodies of water,...

C# is making its way past Java as the most popular programming language in the workplace, according to SD Times readers.While Java sits on top of the TIOBE Programming Community index for August 2015, with C# coming in at No. 4, our latest poll shows C# is the No. 1 language used in the workplace, with Java and C/C++ following.Out of 1,166 votes, 37% of developers voted for C#, 20% voted for Java, and 17% voted for C/C++. The least-popular programming languages used at work, according to the poll, included Python/Ruby/Perl and Objective-C/Swift.A more detailed breakdown of the poll...

Every morning, I fire up my home computer (downloaded Windows 10 last week) and when I go to my Google Chrome icon, it takes me exactly 10 minutes for the Google main page to pop up on my screen. I like Google Chrome because I have GooglePlus and GMail, but it seems that Windows 10 is not supporting it because they want users to jump to Microsoft Edge (their browser) instead. What can I do to correct this? Should I uninstall and then install Google Chrome again? This delay is very frustrating.

“Grandpa is getting pretty old. Out there all alone on that farm, he has no one to look in on him, just to see if he’s ok. He’ll use the landline, but he’s beyond of the range of mobile, and he’s never been really great with computers. No Skype or emails. Grandpa does have internet. So I built this for him.”The girl points down to a small box with a few wires coming out. “I can bring up a web browser, and take photos inside grandpa’s house. Has he moved his coffee cup today? Is the telly on? At least...

Just a quick question to all computer gurus- I have an old Pentium 4 2200, and have to replace the cpu cooler/fan, so I ordered one that is supposed to work with socket 478, but the contact pad that came with it is much smaller than the one that came with the computer's cpu cooler which needs replacing- Can I simply grease the new pad and install it? or will I need to purchase new larger pad?

At the Aspen Security Forum two weeks ago, James Comey (and others) explicitly talked about the "going dark" problem, describing the specific scenario they are concerned about. Maybe others have heard the scenario before, but it was a first for me. It centers around ISIL operatives abroad and ISIL-inspired terrorists here in the US. The FBI knows who the Americans are, can get a court order to carry out surveillance on their communications, but cannot eavesdrop on the conversations, because they are encrypted. They can get the metadata, so they know who is talking to who, but they can't find...

Hillary Clinton is going to prison–or would be, if she were an ordinary person. The FBI has reportedly taken possession of the emails on her home computer server, according to U.S. officials cited by the Associated Press.

The new EcoTank printers cost more up front but can churn for years without running dry Epson's new printers change the ink-onomics of your home office. WSJ's Wilson Rothman explains why paying more will make your ink-cartridge hassles disappear. It was after midnight, and I was facing a ticking-clock real estate transaction. All I had to do was print 15 pages of black-and-white contract, sign it and fax it back. Only halfway through, my printer ran out of ink—magenta ink! Thus began a chain reaction culminating in my nearly throwing the printer out the window. I ended up at Kinko’s....

Ok all my desktop(Gateway) died last week and it will be awhile before I will be able to get a replacement(we are looking a Dell Desktop), anyway we have an ASUS Laptop that will have to do for now and I am looking at either a Print Server for printing or getting a whole new wireless Printer, any suggestions/recommendations?

Typically when referring to electrical current, an image of electrons moving through a metallic wire is conjured. Using the spin Seebeck effect (SSE), it is possible to create a current of pure spin (a quantum property of electrons related to its magnetic moment) in magnetic insulators. However, this work demonstrates that the SSE is not limited to magnetic insulators but also occurs in a class of materials known as paramagnets. Since magnetic moments within paramagnets do not interact with each other like in conventional ferromagnets, and thus do not hold their magnetization when an external magnetic field is removed, this...

Hackers took control of a car and crashed it into a ditch by remotely breaking into its systems from 10 miles away whilst sitting on their sofa. In the first such breach of its kind security experts cut out the engine and applied the brakes on the Jeep Cherokee, sending it into a spin. The US hackers said they used just a laptop and mobile phone to access the Jeep’s on-board systems via its wireless Internet connection. They claim that more than 470,000 cars made by Fiat Chrysler could be at risk of being attacked by similar means - including...

I have recently had the unpleasant experience of having one of the new variants of the cryptolocker malware infect our computer servers at work. In case someone doesn't know, its a computer worm that encrypts all the standard-format files on a system so that the use can't open the file without a "key," supplied by the hacker for a ransom. My question, which I have researched extensively over over the internet, is whether it is advisable consider paying the ransom, if there is enough "honor among thieves" to trust that the files will be unlock if I pay, and if...

I have a laptop with Windows 7 Pro installed and a couple years ago on one of the MS monthly downloads IE 11 was installed. It corrupted my laptop and I had to take it in to where I bought it - got it fixed for $100. I just downloaded the July updates and again did not download IE 11. Is it now safe to download and use? When I had my problem they told me they had seen a number of similar problems with IE 11, and this was not uncommon with IE when the upgrades first come out....

Mozilla blocked Flash by default in its Firefox browser late Monday night, a day after Facebook's (FB, Tech30) security chief called for Adobe to kill Flash once and for all. The Flash-bashing picked up last week after revelations that the spyware giant known as the Hacking Team had been using Flash to remotely take over people's computers and infect them with malware. (That discovery took place after the Hacking Team was itself hacked. Documents revealed in the breach showed that the Hacking Team exploited two critical vulnerabilities in Flash's code.) "It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date...

The apps and games you use every day don't exist in a vacuum — someone, somewhere, wrote the code. That also goes for the underlying platforms and hardware that those apps run on. And the web. And the entire Internet itself. Even the programming languages that people use to build this stuff first had to be written by somebody else. So who's at the top of the programming pyramid? 1) Linus Torvalds created Linux, a free operating system, in his dorm room at the University of Helsinki. Today, Linux is the operating system of choice for data centers, supercomputers, and...

Just when you thought you were safe, a new hacking toy comes along and rocks your world. Imagine a tool exists that lets hackers pluck encryption keys from your laptop right out of the air. You can’t stop it by connecting to protected Wi-Fi networks or even disabling Wi-Fi completely. Turning off Bluetooth also won’t help you protect yourself. Why? Because the tiny device that can easily be hidden in an object or taped to the underside of a table doesn’t use conventional communications to pull off capers. Instead it reads radio waves emitted by your computer’s processor, and there’s...