News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
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.
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)
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)
Due 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.
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.
Quiznos is giving out a million coupons for free subs, today. Go to this link to sign up for a coupon.
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/…
From 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)
The linked article has a nice selection of geeky t-shirts. I bought “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1” and am leaning towards shirt #2. Now if I only had a girlfriend I could get her shirt #11.
Link: http://www.geeksaresexy.net/…
(via Neatorama)
You never know when you might need an emergency yodel. Click the button multiple times for an even better result.
So you think your encrypted data is safe? Here’s what would really happen.
Link: http://xkcd.com/…
A company named pureSilicon revealed a new line of fast, high-capacity SSDs at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show. The drives, which have storage capacities up to 1TB and a maximum transfer rate of about 300MB/s, are scheduled for release in early 2009. No word on the cost, but it’ll probably be on the high side.
Thanks to Josh for this topic.
