NEWS
Time Inc buys MySpace. In 2016. In a delicious piece of fate, Time Inc, once part of Time Warner AOL - an epic failure - now owns MySpace (another epic failure) via its purchase of Viant, some useless adtech company who happened to own MySpace. Viant probably bought it off News Corp at a garage sale or begrudgingly won it in a poker game off Lachlan Murdoch. Anyways, now it's part of Time along with a bunch of other junk and there you go. MySpace. What a thing.
Local council wants refund from NBN for shitty fibre upgrade plan If a local council isn't full of morons and self-interested grubs, they can ask the NBN to upgrade their area to FTTP if they're slated to get FTTN. The council kicks in the cost for what it'd be over copper, but NBN does all the design work and offers a quote. Meander Valley council in Tasmania was so pissed off with the shit design NBN charged them $11,000 for, that it's asking for their money back. Good on 'em!
A new streaming service to launch in Australia - Hayu Player 4 (or 5?) enters the arena! Hayu, owned by NBCUniversal, is a new streaming service launching in Australia in March. It's focussed on reality trash TV like Keeping up With the Kardashians, Real Housewives of (every fucking city in America), Made in Chelsea and dozens more programmes designed to rot your brain. It'll only be $6/month, a value appropriate for what you're getting.
Optus makes a profit, yay? I'm not a fan of Optus and their generally under-provisioned network, be it fixed line or mobile, but they did manage to make a $227m quarterly profit, an increase of 9.1% from last quarter. This is good because if they aren't making a profit, they'll eventually shut down and telco competition in Australia would take a massive hit. Without at least 3 healthy telcos that own their own infrastructure, we'll be back in the bad old days of Telstra being the only choice. The all important average revenue per user (ARPU) was down 2% tho, but pre-paid ARPU was up 3%.
ACCC investigating Apple over Error 53 & 3rd party repairs The ACCC is apparently going to "write to Apple" about its concerns with iPhone ending up as bricks once you fiddle with the Touch ID sensor, a by-product of replacing the screen. This is just the ACCC flexing its muscle, nothing to see here really. Meanwhile, a law firm in the USA is getting a class action suit ready against Apple, which is to be 100% expected.
COOL SHIT
Blizzard are still a thing, a big thing, 25 years on Most gaming companies fizzle out and die or crash hard and leave a beautiful corpse. Blizzard however, the creators of World of Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft, are still kicking on, making the big bucks and releasing games people fucking adore. This story on VentureBeat explores Blizzard's history for clues as to what makes Blizzard so damn good.
Some dork talking about how much he loves his watch Old mate James Croft liked his Apple Watch but decided he likes his mechanical watch even more and has the Apple Watch to thank. It's so weird that it's taking the Apple Watch to make nerds discover fancy watches - something most people have been into for practically hundreds of years. If I was gonna bother wearing a watch (which I don't particularly like doing - I don't even wear my wedding ring, jewellery bothers me that much), it'd be a smartwatch. But hey, if mechanical watches give you joy, I say go for it.
Telstra threw that network engineer under the bus really damn quick, didn't they? That Telstra outage a few days ago was apparently the fault of one solitary network engineering who slipped up in a config somewhere. Or so it was according to Telstra's Chief Operating Officer who went on the PR offensive in the media post-fuckup. Sam Newman (not the dribbling fuckwit ex-AFL player Sam Newman) writes eloquently about how wrong it was for Telstra to pin the blame for everything, on this one person, when it's a failure of their system. What sort of toxic culture exists there when the first thing they do is make this engineer a scapegoat?
Here endeth the sizzle (until Monday!) --Anthony
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