A Tiny, Little “Plug Computer”
March 4th, 2009
The SheevaPlug is definitely the smallest PC I’ve ever seen. It’s literally the size of a power adapter and just plugs in to the wall.
Link: http://www.marvell.com/…
(via engadget)
The Future of Netflix: Streaming Video
March 3rd, 2009
Netflix sees the future, and the future includes on-demand streaming video. Why use snail mail to get Netflix DVDs when you can download the movie right now? Makes sense to me, although I doubt the quality of the streaming video will be as good as that of DVD or Blu-ray.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
I’m a Victim Here! #3
March 3rd, 2009
A new study finds that those horrible, terrible, evil Western societies are to blame for 15 percent of China’s CO2 emissions. Never mind that China might have some responsibility in the matter.
Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/…
(via digg)
Update: It gets even better.
Apple’s Audio Jacks
March 2nd, 2009
Apple has been making changes to the standard 1⁄8” audio jack. Take a look at the picture in the linked article to see what I mean. My (older) iPod came with the normal three-part headphone adapter.
Link: http://www.appleinsider.com/…
(via digg)
US Stamp Prices to Increase
February 28th, 2009
On May 11th, the price of a first-class stamp will rise to 44¢. The linked article suggests that you stock up on forever stamps. As for me, I’m still going through my 41¢ Yoda stamps.
Link: http://consumerist.com/…
Update: The Presurfer clued me in to this site, which simply displays the current price of a USPS first-class stamp.
You Mean Wal-Mart is -NOT- the Embodiment of Evil?
February 28th, 2009
A journalist went “undercover” at a local Wal-Mart to see just how bad of an employer it really was. To his surprise, it was a positive experience. From my time at UPS, I know that labor unions absolutely hate Wal-Mart, so I was a bit surprised as well.
Link: http://www.nypost.com/…
(via Neatorama)
Why the Finance Industry Failed
February 25th, 2009
Wired has a technical-but-understandable explanation of the key factor behind the near-collapse of the banking, mortgage, and investment industries.
Link: http://www.wired.com/…
(via The Consumerist)
Attention RSS Readers
February 25th, 2009Due to changes at FeedBurner, the official URL for the Chad’s News RSS feed has changed. Here is the new address:
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ChadsNews
The old feed will continue to work indefinitely, but you may want to update anyway.
Critical Adobe Reader Exploit
February 24th, 2009
There’s a new, critical flaw in the Adobe Reader software. Be careful about opening untrusted PDF files.
Link: http://www.infoworld.com/…
(via Kim Komando)
Update: The situation is getting even worse. On Windows systems it’s no longer necessary to even open the file.
Update #2: Adobe has released a fix.
Free Quiznos Subs – Today Only
February 23rd, 2009Quiznos is giving out a million coupons for free subs, today. Go to this link to sign up for a coupon.
The Large Hadron Collider and Single Points of Failure
February 22nd, 2009
When I was in the military working with critical systems, we put a lot of emphasis on single points of failure. We dealt with satellites, and it wasn’t unusual for a new spacecraft to have multiple failures caused by the stresses of being launched. Nearly every piece of hardware was redundant, however, so we would just route processing around the failed components.
Apparently the folks at CERN have not learned this lesson. The Large Hadron Collider, a $5.4 billion atom-smasher is expected to be out of commission for a year due to a single, badly soldered electrical connection along its 17-mile length. Repairs will cost about $20 million. Now that is an example of error-intolerant design.
Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…
More Password Insights
February 22nd, 2009From the Neatorama article: “Analyst Robert Graham of Dark Reading, a website dealing with computer security issues, authored a fascinating report on the recent hacking of the popular website phpbb.com. The hacker published approximately 20,000 passwords from the site.” Many of the passwords were blatantly insecure, but who really cares if someone hacks your forum account? I have a standard, throw-away password for things like that. My online banking passwords, on the other hand, are much more complicated.
Link: http://www.darkreading.com/…
(via Neatorama)
