Chad's News

With winter on the way for those of us in the northern hemisphere, here’s the last windshield scraper you’ll ever need:

http://store.yahoo.com/…

Weird… This is a car advertisement from the UK. When they finished
filming the ad, the film editor noticed something moving along the side of the car, like a ghostly white mist. They found out that a person had been killed a year earlier in that exact same spot. The ad was never put on TV because of the unexplained ghostly phenomenon. Watch the front end of the car as it clears the trees in the middle of the screen and you’ll see. The download is a 780KB Windows Media file (for those without Windows, it also plays in VLC).

Ghostly Car Ad (780KB)

Note: the movie will be available until the 7th of November, 2005, at which time I’ll remove it from my web site.

This is really bizarre, especially since the reporter went through the process himself. By messing with his sense of balance, the researchers were able to control his movements—even against his will.

http://www.sfgate.com/…

This is just amazing. A “botnet” of 50,000 zombie PCs is considered a very large number, and is more than enough to bring down nearly any site via a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. The goal is to extort sites for money by threatening to take them down. There are firms that specialize in helping you survive a DDOS attack, but these guys had 1.5 million zombies. I’m not anyone could weather something like that (except perhaps sites like Windows Update).

http://www.vnunet.com/…

I’ve been hearing bits and pieces about LED lights replacing various types of conventional lights, because the LEDs are cheaper to operate and last longer. This accidental invention by a student, however, may signal the death toll for standard light bulbs.

http://msnbc.msn.com/…

There’s also a really good slashdot discussion on the relative merits of LED vs. fluorescent vs. incandescent lights.

No, no, no… Some things were not meant to be!

http://www.scifi.com/…

Here’s a link to the original article, and there’s even an entry at countingdown.com.

Anything printed on a color laser printer these days includes a barely-visible “watermark” intended to help determine when and where the document was printed. This, in addition to the fact that some of the popular image-processing programs now censor out images of currency. While I’m not a hard-core privacy advocate (I’ll leave that to others), I still think it’s good to know about this type of stuff.

http://arstechnica.com/…

First flip-phones, and now transparent aluminum—Star Trek is getting better and better at predicting new technologies. Apparently this stuff is superior to regular (and bullet-proof) glass in nearly every manner except price. If they can get the cost down to reasonable levels, we may see it become ubiquitous.

http://science.slashdot.org/…

The following is from an email newletter I receive (reprinted with permission).

How are recordable CDs burned?

By Kim Komando

CDs are a great example of how fast technology moves. Ten years ago, CDs were high technology. I remember buying an expensive computer just to get a CD player (CD-ROM). Today, we burn CDs at the drop of a hat, to play in our cars. But it’s still good to know how this stuff works. The technology is pretty cool.

Digital information, including music, is stored in binary (1’s and 0’s). To represent all those 1’s and 0’s, a CD contains tiny spots that are highly reflective or poorly reflective. A laser is used to read the sequence of spots. The sequence can then be interpreted as sounds.

A CD-R disc has two important layers of material sandwiched between plastic. One is a layer of metal, typically aluminum. In front of that is the other layer, a special dye. The aluminum layer is highly reflective. The dye is mostly transparent, so overall the disc is completely reflective. But the dye can be changed by the laser in your CD-R drive.

The laser heats and burns tiny spots on the dye layer. The burned spots become nontransparent. They block light from reaching the aluminum layer. So a finished CD-R ends up with both highly reflective and poorly reflective spots. These are the 1’s and 0’s, respectively.

Your CD-R drive uses a strong laser to burn a disc’s dye layer. Typically, CD-Rs have a second, weaker laser, used for playing. It is too weak to affect the dye’s transparency. CD-ROMs also have only a weak laser.

The chemicals used for the dye layer eventually degrade, ruining the disc. Disc manufacturers use various dye formulas, some sturdier than others. But the cheapest last only a couple years. And price tag aside, it’s difficult to discern the quality of CD-R brands. I always buy name brands.

Rewritable discs use a layer of crystallized material instead of a dye. A CD-RW drive’s laser melts tiny spots of the layer. The spots cool too fast to re-crystallize; that makes them opaque. Those spots are 0’s, because they do not reflect light. Crystallized spots, which are transparent, are 1’s.

When data is erased on a CD-RW, the spots are melted again. But they’re heated to a lower temperature and cool slowly enough to re-crystallize.

Commercially produced discs like software or music albums (and my books) are not burned. They use tiny bumps or dips to represent 1’s and 0’s. The dips and bumps are molded directly into a disc’s plastic. The sequence is then coated by a layer of metal, usually aluminum. These discs can last for decades.

Copyright © 2005 WestStar TalkRadio Network. Subscribe to Kim Komando’s free e-mail newsletters at: www.komando.com

Microsoft released another round of Windows security updates on Tuesday, and within hours a security company developed a workable exploit. I doubt it’ll be long before hackers do the same. Time to update if you haven’t already done so.

http://www.computerworld.com/…

The bird flu has been in the news lately. I’ve been following it for nearly a year now (some of you may remember my mass email on the topic that I sent last February), and I’ve written an article discussing flu pandemics in general and the bird flu specifically. It contains important information that I think everyone should know, as well as the latest news on the subject. So check it out and let me know what you think.

http://www.sciscoop.com/…

This may actually be worth paying money to see, if they do it right:

http://www.playbill.com/…