News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
The linked article has some real gems that come from actual job interviews, like “What is your company’s policy on Monday absences?” and “I was fired from my last job because they were forcing me to attend anger management classes.”
Link: http://jobs.aol.com/…
(via The Consumerist)
CERN’s super-expensive Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was shut down last September due to one badly-soldered electrical connection, with the expectation that it would be up and running this September. This will not be the case. After inspecting the entire system, technicians found 5,000 faulty electrical connections, apparently due to poor workmanship. In an effort to get something in the way of results, CERN will run the collider at half-power starting this November. Then in late 2010 it will shut down the system to make the repairs necessary for full-power usage. So it may be years before we see the ground-breaking results that were originally expected.
So you’ve got a brand new bachelors degree but can’t find a job. What do you do? Sue the college, of course! Trina Thompson filed a lawsuit against her alma mater, New York’s Monroe College, for $70,000 to reimburse her tuition and $2,000 to compensate for the stress of her job search.
Link: http://www.cnn.com/…
(via digg)
Here’s a new type of computer attack that could catch the unwary user. The program, called Ippon, scans unsecured wireless traffic for software update requests, many of which are automatically performed by the programs on your computer. It then responds to the update request before the real site does, and your system is updated with malware that can take over your computer, steal personal information, or destroy data. There are ways to defend against this, but it takes a tech-savvy person to use them.
The next step forward in display technology is OLED-based screens. OLED displays are thinner, use less power, and provide better picture quality. The linked article says we’ll see them in small devices in another month or two. It may be a while, however, before we get large-screen OLED televisions. Also, there is a significant difference between LED and OLED televisions. Don’t be fooled by the similarity of the acronyms.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
Long-time Chad’s News readers will recall this article about the extended quest to create viable colored soap bubbles. The product has finally been released and is known as Zubbles.
Link: http://dsc.discovery.com/…
(via naacal)
Criminals placed a fake ATM in a Las Vegas hotel, hoping to skim card and PIN data. Unfortunately for them, the hotel was hosting the Defcon hacker conference. While normal people might not notice a problem, it didn’t take long for attendees to spot the fake ATM and report it to the authorities.
Link: http://www.computerworld.com/…
(via Slashdot)
Interorbital Systems is selling satellite kits for the low, low price of $8000—this includes launching the satellite into a low-Earth orbit that will be maintained for a few weeks. The kit has quite a bit of pre-configured hardware and software, but you can send pretty much whatever you want as long as it meets the size and weight requirements. I’m thinking this would be a great way to make a marriage proposal.
Link #1: http://spacefellowship.com/…
(via Slashdot)
Link #2: http://interorbital.com/…
According to the New York Attorney General, three major banks paid out nearly $18 billion in bonuses, yet only managed to drum up $9.6 billion in revenue. That’s revenue, not profit. They gave bonuses worth almost twice their total income. Seems pretty absurd to me.
Link: http://consumerist.com/…
The linked article has some interesting facts about the US penny. Personally, I’m all for getting rid of them, especially since each penny costs 1.4¢ to create. Pennies account for half of all coins minted in the US, with a total yearly cost of about $75 million. Seems like a practical method of cutting the budget. And it’s not that difficult to implement—prices are simply rounded to the nearest multiple of five. The US military already does this overseas in its AAFES stores.
Link: http://www.time.com/…
(via digg)
While much attention has been going to quantum computers as the replacement for today’s silicon-based computer systems, some research has shown that bacteria and DNA could instead be the future. Chad’s News has previously discussed the possibility of using DNA for encryption—so why not go all the way and have a full-fledged DNA-based computer? Note that both bacterial and DNA computers are in the research phase, however, and we won’t be seeing them in common use any time soon.
Link #1 (DNA): http://news.bbc.co.uk/…
Link #2 (Bacteria): http://www.guardian.co.uk/…
Here at the Chad’s News network command center, we adopted gmail as a central repository for the multitude of email accounts that we use (currently nine of them). The switch was made several years ago, primarily for gmail’s superior spam filtering and the fact that the cloman.com server kept appearing on spam blacklists (one of the downsides of shared hosting). When using gmail to send a message from a non-gmail account, however, it puts your gmail address in the “Sender:” field of the message header. Certain email clients do not handle this well. Some versions of Outlook, for example, will say that the message is from “xyz@gmail.com On Behalf Of xyz@cloman.com”. Even worse some clients use the gmail address as the reply address, which is something I do not want and which defeats the purpose of using the cloman.com account in the first place. Simply put, this feature is annoying.
Google will not remove the “Sender:” field because its use is in accordance with email standards, but they now provide a workaround where you can use gmail to send messages from a different server. Thus I could, for example, use my cloman.com SMTP server from within gmail. In this case the “Sender:” field is omitted, and the problem is solved.
Astute readers will have immediately recognized that this doesn’t solve my core issue, which is that the cloman.com SMTP server appears on some spam blacklists. So I continue to use gmail’s server to send my cloman.com mail. But I have email accounts in other domains for which I am using this new feature.
Link: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/…
(via Lifehacker)
