News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
Sony is discontinuing sales of the cassette Walkman, 31 years after its initial release. For those of us old enough to remember, it was a revolutionary product that ushered in the era of the personal stereo. iPods and such are now taken for granted, but the Walkman was the precursor of them all.
Link: http://www.electronista.com/…
(via Neatorama)
Eight people crammed into an extended-cab pickup, none of whom were wearing seat belts, and with at least one person in the bed of the truck. Driver lost control and rolled the truck. All eight passengers were ejected—two died, two were in serious condition, and the remaining four were all hospitalized. Sigh…. There should be a Darwin Award in there somewhere.
Researchers have discovered some interesting effects of background white noise. First, as the noise increases the perceived taste of food becomes blander and crunchier (which helps explain airplane food). Second, for students with problems focusing, white noise brought their performance level up to that of other students. Unfortunately, the noise worsened the performance of normal students—so there’s not a one-size-fits all solution here.
From personal experience, I like having background noise on all the time. For example, I turn on the radio when I go to bed. And back in my college days I had music playing pretty much 24/7. It seems to help. I know other people, however, who can’t sleep or concentrate when there’s noise in the background.
Link #1: http://www.bbc.co.uk/…
(via Slashdot)
Link #2: http://www.behavioralandbrainfunctions.com/…
(via Ars Technica)
A 20-year old man named John Winkler was being transported in the back seat of a police car on Interstate 25 in Colorado. He managed to free himself from the seat belt, open the door, and jump out of the car while it was traveling at 60 mph. He was still handcuffed with his arms behind his back. He did not survive the escape attempt.
Microsoft says it’s seeing a huge increase in the number of Java-based security exploits. Many if not all of the attack vectors are known bugs that have been fixed in the current Java Runtime Environment (JRE), but non-power users probably don’t think much about keeping Java updated. So it might be a good idea to install the latest version.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
A bit on the pricey side, but this Jedi-styled bathrobe is pretty neat! Wish it had been available when I was purchasing a robe last year. There’s also a Sith version.
As the world comes closer to running out of IP addresses, we’re going to hear more about IPv6 which has more than 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible addresses (versus the piddly 4.3 billion currently allowed by IPv4). TechRepublic explains 10 things you might not know about IPv6 addressing, including just what ::1 means.
In Obion County, Tennessee, residents must pay a $75 yearly fee to receive firefighting services from the city of South Fulton. Homeowner Gene Cranick decided not to make the payment, and then his house caught on fire. The firefighters refused to respond until the fire began to threaten a neighboring house where the owner had paid the fee. Even then, they did nothing in regards to Cranick’s house and let it burn down. Cranick offered to cover whatever it would cost to put out the fire, but the officials refused.
There’s been quite a bit of outrage over this, but I’ve come down on the side of the the city officials. What do you think?
Link: http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/…
(via The Daily Caller)
In this age of Twitter and its 140-character limit on tweets, the most important aspect of URL shorteners is how many characters they use up. But don’t forget to take into account the likelihood of the site staying in business. Libya is the home of the .ly top-level domain, and is the parent of the highly-popular bit.ly URL shortener and others. These domains, however, fall under Libyan law which is based on Islamic law and is more restrictive than the United States concerning what’s objectionable. Take the case of vb.ly, an adult-friendly shortening service shut down by Libyan authorities because its home page included a picture of co-founder Violet Blue, scantily-clad and holding a bottle in her hand. The linked article has more details.
Here at the Chad’s News network command center, we always go with tinyurl.com because it’s a fairly safe bet.
Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/…
(via Slashdot)
Claudia Friedlander is a classically-trained voice teacher who’s had almost zero exposure to heavy metal music. With this in mind she was asked to rate the singing abilities of five male heavy-metal vocalists, including Ronnie James Dio and Ozzy Osbourne. Much to my surprise, she gave high marks to most of them. These guys actually have talent.
Link: http://www.invisibleoranges.com/…
(via Neatorama)
Wi-fi networks have an identifier, known as the SSID. The default setting for many routers is to broadcast the SSID—thus making it easier to find and connect to the network, but most wireless security tutorials recommend disabling the SSID broadcast. Lifehacker, however, suggests this may be more trouble than it’s worth. Any hacker with a minimum amount of knowledge can easily determine the SSID, regardless of whether or not it’s being broadcast.
Link: http://lifehacker.com/…
Windows Phone 7 is Microsoft’s latest entry in the mobile device operating system arena, and it’s a “dramatic departure” from their previous offerings. They hope to be competitive against Android phones, iPhones, and Blackberries. The linked article is fairly optimistic about this being the case, but TechRepublic’s Justin James has a completely different opinion.
Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/…
(via Kim Komando)
