Chad's News

[EDIT: Yes, this is a duplicate article. My bad.]

While it hasn’t actually happened yet, plans are underfoot to capture a near-Earth asteroid and mine it for precious metals. Asteroid mining was a staple of ’50s science fiction, and now we have people putting up money to make it happen. Should it prove feasible, it will also give us more resources and stave off the catastrophes predicted by limited-resource doomsayers.

Link: http://www.reuters.com/…
(via Kim Komando)

I’ve been hearing some good things about the Google Nexus 7 tablet computer. At $200 for the 8GB model, its price is comparable to the Amazon Kindle Fire, but the features and specifications are much better. The 16GB model, at $250, is so popular that it quickly sold out, but only for a week or so. Here at the Chad’s News Network Command Center, however, I still prefer my Kindle because of its tight integration with Amazon.

Link #1: http://arstechnica.com/…

Link #2: http://www.komando.com/…

The video in the linked article details how much of the work for Toy Story 2 was almost permanently erased. Someone ran a delete command on the root directory of the computer containing the movie’s CGI work, and the backup was corrupted. The only reason they didn’t lose all their data was because one employee had made a recent copy of the files so she could work from home. Seriously… that’s what happened during the production of a multi-million dollar Pixar movie.

Now on to a technical explanation of how the article and video are wrong. First, the article says it only took three characters, referring to “rm/“. This is incorrect because there’s a space between the “rm” and the “/“, making it four characters instead of three.

And the video is wrong when it says the command used to delete the files was “rm /. In order to delete directories, subdirectories, and their contents, the rm command requires you to supply the -r parameter. And to suppress prompts and warning messages, you would need to speicfy the -f parameter. Thus, the command that was most likely run was “rm -rf /“.

Now don’t I feel like a total geek after that rant.

Link: http://www.tor.com/…

The linked article is a glowing review of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. If the plane lives up to all the praise being heaped on it, we’ll have the fighter jet equivalent of a grand slam home run. It’s something of a technological marvel.

Link: http://dailycaller.com/…

The linked article discusses whether you should type one or two spaces after a period, before starting the next sentence. The correct method is to use one space. The author covers why two spaces were once used (because of typewriters with fixed-width characters), and why this is no longer necessary for documents written on today’s computers.

Link: http://www.slate.com/…
(via Neatorama)

Researchers in California have developed sheets of piezoelectric viruses that, when pressure is applied, generate an electrical current. In one experiment, the viruses power a small LCD.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Phone companies tend to throw the term “4G” around pretty loosely. What does it mean? And how is 4G LTE different from regular 4G (or is it the same)? The linked article answers these questions and more.

Link: http://www.usatoday.com/…

This gold ring includes a band made from a meteorite, with embedded gems representing the nine planets (yeah, yeah, I know). Way cool! And it can be yours for only $4200.

Link: http://www.jewelrydesignsformen.com/…
(via Neatorama)

Professor Kosuke Heki of Hokkaido University in Japan may have found a way to predict earthquakes. The upper atmosphere is disrupted by the long-wave sounds associated with an earthquake, and this disruption can be measured by changes in GPS signals. Professor Heki noticed, however, that the disruption begins about an hour before many earthquakes, thus providing the ability to predict them.

Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/…
(via Kim Komando)

Cancer researchers used the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud to create a virtual, 50,000-core supercomputer that ran a complicated simulation for the low, low price of $14,486. The neat thing is that they were able to perform a more detailed and realistic simulation on the cloud-based system than they would have on the supercomputer they actually own.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Ever wonder what the all-time bestselling video game is, not counting the ones that were bundled with gaming systems? Turns out it’s Tetris. I purchased a copy back in the late ’80s, and the linked article prompted me to buy the Tetris app for my Kindle Fire.

Link: http://www.techrepublic.com/…

Brenda Hewlett made a 114 foot hockey shot, into an opening that couldn’t have been more than an inch wider than the puck. For her efforts, she won a new Ford F-150.

Link: http://vimeo.com/…
(via Kim Komando)