The AEC is getting roasted for giving Fuji Xerox $27m for a system designed to scan in Senate ballot papers for the 2016 federal election that totally didn't work. The system was so bad, that 3 days before the election, the AEC decided to hand-count every single Senate ballot, as well as scanning them in, because they couldn't trust that the system Fuji made would work properly. Typical Australian IT incompetence on display here. I'm not even mad anymore, I'm numb to all this. Hello darkness my old friend.
Sanjeev Gupta might be a name familiar to you, but if he isn't (I wasn't aware until this story popped up), Sanjeev is a UK billionaire that trades commodities around the world. His business purchased OneSteel, keeping a South Australian steelworks in operation last year and plans to add 1GW of solar panels to power it. Now he wants to buy the ex-Holden factory in SA and use it to build electric cars using technology developed by Gordon Murray, the designer of McLaren's dominating F1 cars back in the 80s. The AMWU obviously is keen to see all those workers put to good use building EVs. Shit, turning SA into a hub for EV manufacturing is so obivous, even a dickhead like me can argue coherently for it.
Intel has released advice saying not to install any updates for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. The current one update is causing a big chunk of people's systems to randomly reboot, which is obviously bad. Intel has said they've got a fix coming soon, but for now, don't install anything. Linus Torvalds, in his usual tactless manner, said that Intel's "patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE" and if "anybody talked to them and told them they are f*cking insane?". If you're still confused as to what the hell Spectre and Meltdown mean, The Atlantic has a good primer.
Facebook has made a new measure of time, called a Flick. Nothing at all to do with the amount of time spent on social media, but to do with their VR efforts on the Oculus Rift. A flick is "the smallest time unit which is LARGER than a nanosecond" - 1/705,600,000 of a second. Why do this? "Flicks are designed to help measure individual frame duration for video frame rates. So whether your video is 24hz, 25hz, 30hz, 48hz, 50hz, 60hz, 90hz, 100hz, or 120hz, you’ll be able to use Flicks to ensure that everything is in sync while still using whole integers instead of decimals" - not that interesting, really. But it was mentioned everywhere, so I thought I better mention it too.
Reply All's latest episode (Apocalypse Soon) goes deep, deep into internet culture again, explaining this bizarre meme tweet. This episode explains the Tide pod bullshit, the mess surrounding Logan Paul, the "somebody toucha my spaghett!" meme and something to do with a fucked up looking Knuckles the Echnida that I had no idea about and still don't quite understand (Nigerian low budget action films?!). An excellent way to feel incredibly old.
Lightroom was a turd on Paul Stamatiou's 2-year old iMac and he needed more grunt than anything Apple had on the market, so he spent months researching a move to Windows and a custom built PC. The result is one of the best articles (and longest - 32,000 words!)I've ever read for anyone who's been using a Mac for a long time and wonders what life is like on the other side, particularly "pro" users, where Apple's quite limited set of hardware doesn't keep up with industry trends as quickly as some people would like. If you've been on the fence about switching your workflow from Mac to Windows, this is a must read.
That's it, see ya tomorrow!
--Anthony
The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Join us on Slack and chat with other Sizzle subscribers.
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