Chad's News

This man traded 2 million frequent flier miles for an upcoming Virgin Galactic spaceflight in 2009.

http://www.upi.com/…
(via slashdot)

In an update to an earlier post on fires caused by defective laptop batteries, Sony has finally decided to do a recall. This makes sense, as Sony is the battery supplier for the laptop manufactuers that are experiencing problems—it’s really been Sony’s fault from the beginning.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/…

Microsoft has released an out-of-cycle security update for Internet Explorer 6. The real problem is that malicious people are hacking legitimate websites and adding pictures that, when viewed, will give them control of your computer. Outlook is also affected, so viewing spam email could do it as well. Run Windows Update.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/…

http://www.microsoft.com/…

Charles Krauthammer, a columnist for The Washington Post, has written an op-ed piece on the Islamic response to Pope Benedict’s speech. Here’s an exerpt from the article:

“‘How dare you say Islam is a violent religion? I’ll kill you for it’ is not exactly the best way to go about refuting the charge.”

I cannot agree with him more. The main defense I’ve heard of the violent reactions to the Pope’s speech is that these people only represent a tiny minority of the Islamic community. Baloney! The vast majority of Muslims still allow the violence by not condemning it. If mainstream Islam truly opposed the activities of this “fringe minority”, the extremists would be arrested and charged with crimes—just as we do with “Christian” abortion activists who firebomb clinics and try to kill the doctors.

And the weirdest thing is that the Islamic community does not appear to see the inconsistency between their words and actions. That’s the irony of Islam.

Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/…

UPDATE: Just to be fair, here is a differing opinion.

The “Any” key has been a tech support legend for quite some time now, right up there with the CD drive as a drink holder. Some people have made fake images, and at least one company sells them. What I find most surprising, however, is that Compaq actually has a FAQ entry on the subject.

http://www29.compaq.com/…
(via digg)

Can’t decide between DVD, Blu-Ray, or HD-DVD? Researchers have developed technology that can combine all three on one disc.

http://today.reuters.com/…

In the first week or so after making 75 of its movies available on iTunes, Disney sold an impressive 125,000 copies. Total revenue was $1 million.

http://playlistmag.com/…

Video of an Iraqi sandstorm. Wow.

http://video.google.com/…
(via digg)

The linked web site has a nicely categorized list of freeware utilities.

http://www.techsupportalert.com/…

This is an interesting table, but wouldn’t it be easier just to keep a gun in the drawer? That’s what my parents did when we lived in Wyoming.

http://www.neatorama.com/…

Dr. Seuss made authentic-looking taxidermy sculptures of some of his creations. He used real animal parts to make them realistic. The Blue Green Abelard is my favorite.

http://www.drseussart.com/…
(via Neatorama)

A web application is a program run over the internet via a browser. So, for example, Writely is a full-featured word processor accessible via the web. The advantage of Writely, as with all web applications, is that you can use the program and access your data from anywhere in the world and on any computer.

An early type of web application was web-based email. Yahoo! Mail, MSN Hotmail, and GMail are examples. But recently we’ve seen the advent of full office suites. In addition to Writely there are Thinkfree, Zoho Writer, Google Spreadsheets, Picasa Photo Editor, Google Calendar, and Google Base (among others). Microsoft, obviously a bit worried about this competition, is planning to make their Works office suite available via the web.

Web applications are catching on—even in the Chad’s News household. I’ve switched mail programs from Outlook Express to Gmail. I did it for the spam filtering, but it’s also nice to be able to check email whenever I’m out of town. I also switched RSS readers from Habari Xenu to Bloglines.

One of the big negatives for web applications is that you’re trusting precious data to a third party. Using Gmail, for example, I have no way of backing up my email data and I’m trusting Google to maintain it in perpetuity. I’m also trusting Google to not go out of business. (This can be a real issue. I have a friend who hosted digital photos in an online repository that went out of business with almost no notice. He happened to be offline for a few weeks, and by the time he got back online it was too late to retrieve his data.) There are also privacy concerns when using a web service for confidential data.

Another negative is that web applications rarely have all of the features found in a dedicated program. For most people this will not be a issue, but power users may run into problems.

Web applications are here to stay, and they’re gaining in popularity. Expect to see them used more frequently.

(Thanks to Josh for the idea behind this article.)
Copyright © 2006 by Chad Cloman