NEWS
Snapchat's IPO went very well
Snap (aka Snapchat) had its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange overnight. Some people got filthy stinking rich as the IPO price of $17 a share rose to $24 at the market's close. Evan Spiegel sold 16 million of those shares at $17, netting a cool US$272m. Miranda Kerr is pleased. While Spiegel and his buddies are over the moon, everyone else is like, "huh? what? Snap makes no money, why are they worth over US$20b?!" and this bloke on Reuters just rips into those buying shares in Snap for being gullible idiots with only themselves to blame when their investment probably bombs.
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S3 went down this week because of a typo
Amazon explained why US-EAST-1 crapped out a few days ago, leaving a large chunk of the internet in limbo - someone typed in the wrong command when trying to remove some servers from S3's billing system that actually took S3 itself off line, which lead to a cascading series of failures in Amazon's other services that use S3 to work. Imagine being the person that made that mistake! I bet a few of you reading this have felt like that. Maybe not on the same level of pain, but similar. Computers are stupid.
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Ryzen benchmarks are in and it's good news
Benchmarks of AMD's new Ryzen CPUs have hit the web and it appears that Ryzen lives up to the hype! There's loads of reviews, but the only one you need to care about is Anandtech's. It's stupidly detailed as usual - pretty much an introductory course into CPUs. While the flagship Ryzen might not beat the flagship Core i7, it gets damn close and costs half. Awesome value for money. The AMD CEO, head of CPU technical marketing and a CPU business development person did a Reddit AMA that's pretty interesting. I found out there that AMD will not gimp the virtualisation features (unlike Intel) on their lower cost CPUs and all the Ryzen CPUs will support ECC RAM (also unlike Intel) - nice.
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One ounce of gold is worth the same as one bitcoin
A Bitcoin is now worth more than an ounce of gold (around US$1260). I don't know why this is important, but it was repeated like a dozen times in my RSS feed, so it must be of interest to someone. Plus there's not a lot of news around today. I guess it's just a sign that Bitcoin can be taken seriously now, just like gold, which all those sane and people hoard in case the apocalypse comes?
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Spotify has 50 million paying subscribers
Look, there really is no news to report, so this is bottom of the barrel stuff so I can get 5 news items in here, but Spotify has 50 million paid subscribers now. Apple has 20 million. Cool. Good to know. Nice work Spotify. I personally use Google Music, as it combines the best of both world by letting me upload songs that it stores in the cloud for me and make available everywhere, just as if it was part of Google's licensed library. It also includes YouTube Red and it's only $10/m.
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COOL SHIT
New Blackmagic devices to gawk at
One of my favourite companies, Blackmagic Design, has some new products. A few weeks ago they showed off the Blackmagic Web Presenter (perfect for Twitch streamers) and a new version of the ATEM Television Studio HD. It's a little box ya plug into your computer, then plug other cameras and computers and stuff into it to do live streaming on the internet. Here's a video of some dude showing off how it all works. Today Blackmagic released a new URSA Mini Pro camera (costs $10,000) that would be a lot of fun to use if I had a reason to actually use one. Full product launch videos are on YouTube, if you're into that sort of thing (I am).
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Microsoft's "game mode" for Windows 10 is nothing fancy
Microsoft has shown off a bit more about Game Mode in an upcoming version of Windows 10. All it will do is reallocate running threads to other cores, or put them to sleep, so that the game you're playing gets more CPU cores for itself. I guess that's nice. Not as exciting as I hoped though. In the upcoming Creator's Update for Win 10, Microsoft added the ability to "snooze" updates, so they don't go rebooting your computer randomly. I get why that was a thing (idiot users that don't install updates that lead to them getting hacked), but come on, interrupting a user's actions to shut the computer down is a dick move.
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I really wanted to know how many times I thrust my pelvis whilst having sex, thanks i.Con
Finally, a way for me to ruin sex even more than I already do! The i.Con Smart Condom (which is more of a cock ring than a condom) can tell you how fast you're thrusting, how many thrusts you do, the size of your engorged member, the skin temp of that body part and keep a log of how many times you have sex. I have no idea who this product appeals to, but there you go. This is way worse than that iPod connector vibrator I got sent years ago to review on MacTalk.
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Here endeth the sizzle (until Monday!)
--Anthony
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