News items and other various tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share with his friends.
McDonalds is testing a system where drive-through orders are taken by employees in Santa Maria, California—even though the person ordering the food may be at a restaurant thousands of miles away.
If you’ve never heard of the “Star Wars kid,” then check out this video before reading the linked article. There are also modified videos, with effects. Leave some comments to let me know what you think of the whole situation.
The US government wants to rebuild the infrastructure necessary to produce nuclear weapons.
Recently Apple shocked the world by announcing they were switching over to Intel processors. Now they’ve released software, dubbed “Boot Camp,” allowing users to run both Windows and OS X on Apple hardware, in dual-boot mode. So we can have the best of both worlds. What would really be nice, though, is if they ported OS X so it could run on regular PCs.
“Everything you wanted to know about installing Windows and running it on a Mac is right here.”
The title to this post is a bit cryptic, but it’s something you should be aware of before purchasing any type of HD-capable television. The downgraded signal is one-fourth the resolution of the full signal.
VoIP is a great way to save a bunch of money on phone services—especially if you make international calls or still pay for long-distance. The simplest way to get started is to install Skype on your computer. To make the process easier, USRobotics has developed an adapter that lets you use your existing land-line phone as a VoIP handset. NETGEAR, going a step further, has announced a wireless Skype phone that can call anyone in the world via Skype (as long as it can make a WiFi connection to the internet).
This article has a bit of the history of duct tape, as well as some of the unusual ways it’s been used. Turns out, however, that the one thing it’s not suited for is duct work.
This one’s a bit technical, but it goes something like this: A company designed a web site such that if you (1) disable javascript, (2) disable cookies, and (3) visit every link on the site… then you will delete all content on the site.
Unfortunately for the site owners, the Google web crawler meets all three of the criteria. And the site content was deleted.
When web server software is first installed, it creates a default page similar to this one. You then have to replace it with the actual source code for your web site. One day the official city web site of Tuttle, Oklahoma was replaced by the default page, but the city manager went absolutely ballistic because he thought it was caused by a hacker. He blamed the maker of the operating system used by the hosting company, and he just would not listen to reason—even threatening to call the FBI. The article in The Register gives a summary, but I found that reading the actual email exchange was much more amusing.
As of this writing the site in question, www.cityoftuttle.org is still showing the default page.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/…
UPDATE: Mr. Taylor complains to The Register, then gets a sympathetic writeup by the local newspaper. In addition, someone has finally fixed the web site, www.cityoftuttle.org.
This guy was testing database software and decided to use the publicly-available .com domain name data as a testbed. He published some of the more interesting results. We can now confidently state, for example, that every single two- and three-letter .com domain is taken.
Despite the fact that today is April 1st, this is not a joke. The Stanley tool company has actually trademarked the word “fubar”. It stands for ‘functional utility bar,’ and it’s a new type of hammer. (I read about this in the March issue of Popular Science.) Apparently, with the advent of nail guns, hammers are being used less for hitting nails and more for general destruction. With this in mind, Stanley has redesigned the hammer to include (1) a head for striking, (2) jaws for prying/ripping, (3) a slot for pulling nails, and (4) a pry bar. And yes, you can still use it to hammer nails.
Chad Cloman
Denver, CO USA
