We've been talking about gaming mice a little bit in the past few weeks, and one of the ways gamers judge the quality of their mice is by the DPI: dots per inch. You see a high number, and you think you have a good mouse. Does that number mean anything in terms of actual performance?

"The industry has been highly successful in establishing this number as something highly important, when in reality it doesn't really mean all that much," Kim Rom, the CMO of SteelSeries told Ars.

A major European campaign, Safer Internet Day (SID), kicked off today, with the intent of teaching children aged five and up the importance of protecting their online identity and not talking to strangers.

"This is 'Magic' and this is 'Jack'," the little girl says in the video ad, holding her two cute puppy dogs up to the camera. The girl's father, magicJack inventor Dan Borislow, then asks her, "Kylie, did you know that your dad is going to let everybody try a magicJack in the whole country for free?"

Free for 30 days, that is. magicJack is a popular service comparable to VoIP, except that after you hook its app into a USB port on your broadband connected computer, you plug the USB gadget to the RJ11 slot in your telephone.

Intel has been briefing folks on Westmere, the company's 32nm shrink of the Nehalem architecture, under NDA for some time now. But the big public reveal comes in a Monday session. Westmere is actually more than a straight shrink of Nehalem from 45nm to 32nm—it brings some new features and instructions, all of which Intel will detail in this session.

Note that Intel recently launched the first round of its Westmere products, in the form of the desktop-oriented Clarksdale and the mobile-oriented Arrandale chips.

Heavy Rain is the type of game that we claim to want more of: story-driven, high-concept, and emotionally affecting. We have played a lengthy demo for a preview, and have the final copy in our office right now, but have yet to tackle the final code as we approach the title's release on February 23. What we know about the game however, from interviews and our own hands-on time, leads us to believe that the title has a very rough time ahead of it both critically and at retail.

In many ways, Heavy Rain seems nearly designed to fail.

This is a reminder post for all the Windows 7 users still using the Release Candidate (build 7100) that was released to the public in May 2009. Bi-hourly shutdowns of this build will begin on March 1, 2010, or four weeks from today. This means that the user will be told to install a released version of Windows and their PC will shut down automatically every two hours. On June 1, 2010, if you are still on the Windows 7 RC, your license will expire and the non-genuine experience will be triggered.

At the close of trading Thursday, Microsoft announced the results for its second quarter of fiscal year 2010, which ended December 31, 2009. Revenue of $19.02 billion, a 14 percent increase from the same period of the prior year, set a new a record for the company. The three other financial measures—operating income ($8.51 billion), net income ($6.66 billion), and earnings per share ($0.74)—all were up year-over-year, 43 percent, 60 percent, and 57 percent, respectively.

So what is Microsoft's explanation for the positive growth across the board? Its latest client operating system.

On the first day of CES, I dropped by the Qualcomm booth looking for ARM-based smartbooks to try out. As I poked and prodded the Lenovo Skylight, I pulled out my Nexus One and dropped it on top of the unit for a size reference so that we could snap picture of it. As I stood there looking at the phone laying on top of the smartbook and contemplating the fact that both of these (Android-based) devices had 1GHz, ARM-based Snapdragon processors in them, I glanced across the booth and spotted an ARM-based game console sitting right next to the ARM-based iRex Iliad e-reader.

Less than a month after retroactively declaring that its A+, Network+, and Security+ certifications would expire three years after the testing date, industry group CompTIA has reversed its position. All current holders of A+, Network+, and Security+ certs will remain certified for life, as they were promised when they took the exams.

In addition, anyone who takes those exams during 2010 will remain certified for life. Starting in 2011, however, new certs will expire after three years.

With the current generation of consoles, online play has become ubiquitous, leaving us with systems that are constantly connected to the Internet. This has led to many great things, like the advent of downloadable games, online multiplayer, and quick and easy game updates. But it's not without its drawbacks.

With the seemingly non-stop barrage of new hardware iterations, it's likely that at some point you'll decide to upgrade. But where does that leave your current console? There's all sorts of personal data tucked away that needs to be removed before it can be safely sold.