News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
A computer glitch in a Kmart credit card approval system, that approved anyone who applied, led to a riot. The thing I find most interesting, however, is that they considered the credit card to be “free money.”
Link: http://www.wisn.com/…
(via The Consumerist)
Computer retailer CompUSA will be going out of business after the 2007 year-end holiday season. Be on the lookout for discounts and sale prices.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
AT&T has announced its intention to leave the pay phone business by the end of 2008, blaming wireless technology. With 82% of Americans having access to cell phones, and a whopping 3.3 billion mobile phone accounts worldwide, it’s no wonder that the pay phone is going the way of the slide rule.
Link: http://www.att.com/…
(via Consumerist)
I guess this was inevitable, but still…
Link: http://www.reuters.com/…
(via Slashdot)
Apparently the first service pack for Windows Vista does not improve its performance. In related news, Windows XP SP3 will provide a speed boost of about 10%. Both speed tests, however, were done with pre-release versions of the service packs and may not apply to the final releases.
Link: http://pcworld.co.nz/…
(via Slashdot)
My brain can’t handle this image. I can only focus if I cover up part of it. This really shows the difference between sensation (done by the eyes) and perception (done by the brain).
Thanks to computers, most people are now familiar with the mega- and giga- prefixes, as in megabyte and gigabyte. Many know that terabyte comes next, and the chosen few are familiar with petabyte (1015) and exabyte (1018). There are hard drive farms in the low petabyte range, and it’s estimated that the total amount of yearly data creation on the internet is about 161 exabytes. So these prefixes have a practical use. But what comes next? The official SI counting system defines two more powers of 103: zetta- (1021) and yotta- (1024). I’m not making these up. To get an idea of the scale involved here, the distance of the farthest visible star (13.7 light years) is approximately 130 yottameters.
Thanks to Josh for this topic.
