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FRAME ‘N’ TOUCH
Apr 3rd
FRAME ‘N’ TOUCH
If you have loads of photos stored on your PC, getting a digital photo frame makes sense. After all, it’s better to display your pix than lock them away in your hard disk. Transcend’s PF810 Digital Frames feature an LED-lit touch-sensitive menu interface built into a lustrous outer frame adorned with an elegant interlocking pattern. It sports an 8”TFT LCD display and 2 GB of built-in flash memory. Click away and show ‘em off!
Source ~ Times Of India
EAR ME OUT!
Apr 3rd
Bluetooth headsets are cool but background blabber is not! What we need is some noise cancellation. Exactly what Jabra offers in the BT530 USB Headset. This multiuse headset can simultaneously connect to a PC and a mobile phone and is the first in its category to use noise cancellation technology. It has a 5½ hour talk time and works up to a range of 10 m.
Price: Rs 6,350
Source ~ Times Of India
Epson’s PRINT PRO
Apr 3rd
If you’re one of those small-time business world czars,Epson’s Stylus Office TX600FW is a pretty crown for your workplace! With its ability to churn out 27 pages of crisp laser-like black text printouts in under a minute, it’s an ideal alternative to laser printers. Prefer colourful pages? Even those can be arranged at 19 pages per minute. Its wireless connectivity reduces clutter in your space and the 30-sheet Automatic Document Feeder feature lets you fax, copy and scan stacks of important documents in s e c o n d s . Zap ‘em all!
Price:Rs 14,999
Source ~ Times Of India
NIKON D90 GO PRO
Apr 3rd
FEATURES
12.3 meg sensor Live view, 3” LCD 720p 24-fps HD video capture
The obvious choice for anyone serious
about photography would be an entry-level
DSLR. But if you can up your budget a bit, we suggest the mid-level Nikon D90. Our hands-on showed better, high-quality results, even in tough shooting conditions. Usually, night or low-light photos are quite dark, unless clicked on a very high ISO (determines how sensitive the image sensor is to light). But the higher the ISO, the grainier the pictures—that means bad normal prints, forget blow-ups! Nikon’s worked around this, and the D90 clicks much higher quality pictures even on ISOs as high as 3200. And it marks a first in DSLRs with its high-def video capture function, which works fine except that the focus is manual (not auto) as you shoot and the sound recording is mono (not stereo). But then SLRs are for hardcore photography not videos, right?
Price: Rs 81,900
HOT VERDICT
A featurepacked DSLR that delivers quality outputs… For those who want to upgrade from entry-level SLRs or skip them altogether!
Source ~Times Of India
In space Russian & US satellites smashed together
Feb 13th
On Wednesday 2 satellites smashed together in space hundreds of miles (kilometers) above Earth, destroying an Iridium commercial satellite in a collapse that may result in disturbance of service, the US Company said.
The Bethesda, Maryland-based company said it “lost an operational satellite” after it was struck Tuesday by a spent Russian satellite, in what is being described as the first foremost collision of its kind in space.
US space agency NASA apparently was tracking hundreds of particles of debris from the collision, and said that the orbiting International Space Station (ISS) faced an “elevated” but small risk of being struck.
“While this is an extremely unusual, very low-probability event, the Iridium constellation is uniquely designed to withstand such an event, and the company is taking the necessary steps to replace the lost satellite with one of its in-orbit spare satellites,” the company said in a statement.
The privately-held Iridium Satellite, which says its network comprises 66 communication satellites plus in-orbit spares, stressed the mishap was not the effect of a breakdown of technology or the company’s fault.
“This satellite loss may result in very limited service disruption in the form of brief, occasional outages,” it said, adding that the company expects to apply a network solution by Friday, and move one of its in-orbit spares in place to eternally replace the shattered satellite within 30 days.
According to Space News, the US space agency NASA issued an alert Tuesday saying Russia’s 900-kilogram (1,980-pound) Cosmos 2251 satellite collided with Iridium’s 560-kilogram (1,232-pound) craft at 16:55 GMT, some 790 kilometers (490 miles) above Siberia.
It said NASA was tracking two large clouds of debris.
The Washington Post quoted a NASA memo about the occurrence, saying officials “have determined that the risk to the space station is elevated, and they estimate the risk to be very small and within acceptable limits.”
There is little risk the space station will enter the debris clouds, however, as the ISS is orbiting about 354 kilometers (220 miles) above earth, some 436 kilometers (270 miles) below the collision orbit.
Cosmic collisions of space junk are not unheard of, but NASA officials said it was the first linking a pair of intact satellites, the Post reported.
NASA spokesman John Yembrick said the collision debris would persist to spread and could end up forcing the space station into elusive maneuvers.
“The space station does have the capability of doing a debris-avoidance maneuver if necessary,” and has done so on eight occasions, he said.
Some 6,000 satellites have been sent into space since the Soviet Union launched the first man-made orbiter, Sputnik 1, in 1957. About 3,000 satellites remain in operation, according to NASA.
NASA’s space shuttle Discovery is planned to launch from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on February 22 at the earliest, on a mission to the ISS.
‘Cancer no more same as death’
Feb 5th
New Delhi: Through new technologies and targeted drugs, cancer if treated in the early on stages is no longer synonymous with death, say doctors. At any given time, there are about 2.5 million patients living with cancer in India.
In India, one million fresh cases of cancer are reported every year. In spite of these figures, doctors are hopeful about the cure and treatment prospects of cancer patients.
Ashok Vaid, a most important oncologist in the capital, who was recently conferred the Padma Shri, said: “With new drugs and technology coming in to treat, and cure, cancer, at least in the early stages – is no longer synonymous with death.”
“New drugs, and targeted treatment in radiotherapy and chemotherapy have evolved and now the scope is multi-pronged and multidimensional,” he said.
According to the Cancer Atlas for India (2004), Delhi has the uppermost occurrence of new cancer between males at 126/100,000, while Bangalore has the lowest at 92/100,000 new cases per year. Among women, the rate is 142/100,000 in Delhi, and the lowest is 107 in Bhopal.
For men, cancer of the lung is very common in places like Bhopal, Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Kolkata. In Bangalore and Chennai, cancer of the stomach is tremendously widespread. Prostate cancer is a new leading cause of cancer among men in India. Among women, the most common types of cancer are of the breast and cervix.
“Forty percent of cancers in our country are tobacco related,” Vaid added.
Mass screening and knowledge of general cancers like of the head, neck and lung, and cervix and breast in women, and tobacco related cancers, play a vital role in the treatment, Vaid explained.
“There is tremendous scope for cure now, unlike early days. In the US, Stage I and II cancers once detected have a 65 percent cure rate, even Stage III and IV cancers can be dealt with.” Vaid said that in India people weren’t conscious of symptoms to identify cancer.
“The motto should be – catch it early, treat it early. Now we focus on two things, mainly to prolong the life, that is add years, and secondly to add quality to life,” Vaid said.
People suffering from cancer in the earlier days would have to be given radiation and chemotherapy, which would often origin side-effects and permanent damage to healthy cells, but the technology has evolved and it now seeks to give soothe to the patient along side treatment.
According to Tejinder Kataria, head radiation-oncology at Artemis Health Institute, “During a radiation treatment session and also from one treatment session to another, tumours can move due to normal internal organ action (digestion, elimination, and breathing). This unplanned position or movement of tumour results in it not receiving the full amount of radiation, and normal tissues may receive more radiation than they can tolerate.”
To conquer this challenge, a number of technological developments have taken place.
In 2007, Image Guided Radiotherapy (IGRT) was introduced at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and Artemis Health Institute here, and Indo American Hospital in Hyderabad and later at other cancer-specialty hospitals across the country.
During this treatment, the tumour bearing area is mapped out by the machine.
“IGRT is best suited for sites where internal organ motion is expected, for example, cancer of lung, breast and liver, stomach and prostate, brain. The use of image guidance not only improves the focus and precise delivery of radiation, it improves upon the cure rates for cancers where the dose delivery is limited with conventional methods of radiotherapy due to proximity of the affected tissues to critical organs like eyes, brain, heart, lungs and spinal cord,” Kataria said.
As compared to straight radiotherapy, the treatment through image supervision also reduces the overall treatment time.
“There are other forms of treatment like targeted drug therapy, treatments wherein the patient needs no injections, just a tablet. For radical treatment, limb-sparing surgeries and keyhole surgeries are options as well. Then there is Brachytherapy, a form of radiotherapy used to treat localized prostate cancer, cervical cancer and cancers of the head and neck – technology has come a long way and will continue to go far,” she added.
Even with newer technology and medicines, experts still feel that prevention is better than cure.
“People should shun tobacco in all forms, they should lead a healthy life, must report symptoms to their doctors and go in for periodic checks,” Vaid said.
Millions affected by Windows worm
Jan 18th
A worm that spreads from low security networks, memory sticks, and PCs lacking the most up-to-date security updates is posturing a rising hazard to users.
The hateful program, identified as Conficker, Downadup, or Kido was first discovered in October 2008.
Even though Microsoft released a patch, it has gone on to infect 3.5m machines.
Experts notify this number might be high and say users must have to up-to-date anti-virus software and install Microsoft’s MS08-067 patch.
According to Microsoft, the worm works by searching for a Windows executable file called “services.exe” and then becomes part of that code.
It then copies itself into the Windows system folder as a random file of a type known as a “dll”. It gives itself a 5-8 character name, such as piftoc.dll, and then modifies the Registry, which lists key Windows settings, to run the infected dll file as a service.
Once the worm is up and running, it creates an HTTP server, resets a machine’s System Restore point (making it far harder to recover the infected system) and then downloads files from the hacker’s web site.
Most malware uses one of a handful of sites to download files from, creating them quite simple to locate, target, and shut down.
But Conficker does things in a different way.
Anti-virus firm F-Secure says that the worm uses a difficult algorithm to produce hundreds of unusual domain names every day, such as mphtfrxs.net, imctaef.cc, and hcweu.org. Only one of these will actually be the site used to download the hackers’ files. On the face of it, tracing this one site is almost impossible.
Speaking to the BBC, Kaspersky Lab’s security analyst, Eddy Willems, said that a new damage of the worm was complicating matters.
“There was a new variant released less than two weeks ago and that’s the one causing most of the problems,” said Mr Willems
“The replication methods are quite good. It’s using multiple mechanisms, including USB sticks, so if someone got an infection from one company and then takes his USB stick to another firm, it could infect that network too. It also downloads lots of content and creating new variants though this mechanism.”
“Of course, the real problem is that people haven’t patched their software. If people do patch their software, they should have little to worry about,” he added.
Technicians have reverse engineered the worm so they can predict one of the likely domain names. This does not help them pinpoint those who formed Downadup, but it does give them the skill to see how many machines are infected.
“Right now, we’re seeing hundreds of thousands of unique IP addresses connecting to the domains we’ve registered,” F-Secure’s Toni Kovunen said in a speech.
“We can see them, but we can’t disinfect them – that would be seen as unauthorised use.”
Microsoft says that the malware has infected computers in many different parts of the world, with machines in China, Brazil, Russia, and India having the largest number of sufferers.
