NEWS
Govt launches report into creating an Australian space agency Australia's getting its own NASA!! Yiewwwwww, Aussie astronauts going to colonise planets and beating Australian values into extraterrestrial life forms! Oh wait, it's just a review into the possibility of getting some sort of space agency that may or may not launch a rocket or two. The review will be lead by a former CSIRO CEO along with some other space and science nerds and will be complete by March 2018. Then it's up to the government to create a national strategy for how Australia's rather pissweak space industry, compared to other industrialised nation's space industries, can make us all rich and live in the future and shit. Discuss
US websites are protesting net neutrality again If you've visited a any big US websites today, you may have noticed they've had banners or popups or some sort of tweaking of their logos to show support for net neutrality. Again. Trump's regime is gonna make the FCC repeal the Obama administration's agreed upon rules that forbid ISPs from creating special deals with internet services to prioritise the flow of their data. This will ruin the relatively even playing field anyone who wants to create internet service currently enjoys. Net neutrality is good and anyone fucking with it forgets what made their business exist in the first place. Discuss
Hyperloop One successfully conducts a larger scale test Hyperloop One has done its first "full" test. It made a tube, added in a track, sucked all the air out and sent its levitating sled down the tube at a sedate 70 miles per hour with no disasters. This proves that Hyperloop concept more or less works. The next step is getting it to move at 250 mph with a full sized pod a person can travel in. Here's a video of the testing, along with an excited team. I can't wait to ride one from Dubai and Abu Dhabi in 2021. Discuss
NSW govt to spend $35m on yet another startup hub in Sydney The NSW government has thrown a lazy $35mil at another startup hub. The creatively named Sydney Startup Hub will be located at 11-31 York Street in Sydney's CBD and will be a pretty damn huge at 17,000sqm space spread across 11 floors. The government reckons this will create 6500 jobs. From the article: "organisations that are accepted into the hub will have to agree to legally binding KPIs. If organisations fail to meet the KPIs for two consecutive years, they may be asked to leave" - it'll open late 2017. Let a thousand "Uber but for (x)" and "the Australian version of (x)" businesses flourish! Discuss
Kaspersky banned from supplying US government because Russia Kaspersky has been booted off the list of approved vendors for government agencies. The US government thinks that Kaspersky has been infiltrated by Russian spies and its software is nothing but a sieve that drops US secrets into Russian laps. For months there's been rumours about how Kaspersky is in cahoots with Russian intelligence agencies and Kaspersky has constantly denied it. I guess the US government thinks the optics of a Russian software vendor supplying info sec gear whilst the President is under investigation for letting the Russians influence a US election, doesn't look good. Discuss
COOL SHIT
A little low power computer that can be kinda upgraded I wrote about how much I like my little Dell Optiplex FX160 a few weeks ago and since then I've had heaps of people ask me where to buy one from. The eBay seller I linked to in the article ran out of stock ages ago and won't get any more in. Whilst not as cheap as the $50 FX160, if I had to replace it, I'd get this little beast - the Vorke V1 Plus. It's $229, but includes a 64GB mSATA SSD, 4GB of RAM and a low power, but much faster J3455 CPU. What's also nice about it is the 2.5" HDD bay for extra storage and USB 3.0 ports for an external HDD. It'd make an ideal low electricity use (this would use less than 15W I reckon) but decent performing home server. Good for plugging in to the TV too if you're the sort of person who likes doing that. Discuss
What's Nokia up to these days? Ahh Nokia, we all know their story of how they introduced a generation to mobile phones, dropped the ball when it came to smartphones, then got fucked from the inside out by Microsoft. So what are they doing now, post-Microsoft acquisition and dumping? This article from Bloomberg reminds us that Nokia is still a massive company, with over US$26b in revenue, predominately from selling high quality networking and radio kit to telcos. With 5G tech rolling around in the next few years, Nokia is positioning itself to be the company all those telcos around the world call when it's time to upgrade. Nokia can seriously cash in on this if they're smart and fend off stiff opposition from their Scandi mates Ericsson and the Chinese duo of Huawei and ZTE. Discuss
Two videos of a dystopian augmented reality future Do you like Black Mirror? If ya do, this 5 min short about having augmented reality technology embedded in ya eyes might interest you. I thought the ending is bit clichéd, but love how it's set in the near future, using technology that's just on the horizon that makes it seem realistic. Here's another Black Mirror-esque vid with a more dystopian take on augmented reality implants (and what happens when they're hacked). I've linked to this video before, but I really like it and it's in the same style, so why not link to it again? Discuss
Here endeth the sizzle (until tomorrow!) --Anthony
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