The main reason people go to work for a startup is that you get a chunk of the company and work hard with the aim of making the company so valuable, that when it goes public on the stock exchange, or some big company buys you, your chunk of the company makes you filthy stinking rich. Those who bought into that myth at Tinder, including its founders, think they were deprived of their payday and are suing IAC (the company that bought Tinder a few years ago) for US$2b. They reckon that IAC undervalued Tinder on purpose so that IAC wouldn't have to pay out as much money. Combine that with the fact Tinder was a private company and they had no option but to sell their shares to IAC, the Tinder founders are very, very salty. It'll set an interesting precedent for others who slave away in a startup, only to get fleeced later.
Foxtel has confirmed their 4K broadcast plans. They're gonna be using a massive chunk of satellite bandwidth to beam a single 4K channel to its subscribers across Australia. To receive channel 444, you'll need a brand new Foxtel IQ4 set top box and be hooked up to Foxtel via satellite, not over cable. The focus of this new channel will be to broadcast this summer's cricket, where Foxtel will deliver every ball of every game in Australia, in 4K. When there's no cricket on, it'll show "documentaries, concerts music and selected films". Channel 444 starts broadcasting in October. Fuck I hope they do this for the 2019 AFL season, I'd pay their stupid $68/m for Foxtel's sport package then.
According to Brian Krebs, the FBI sent a heads up to US banks that "cyber criminals are planning to conduct a global ATM cash-out scheme in the coming days". It looks like a bunch of crims hacked or phished their way into a bank or payment card processor and whipped themselves up a bunch of fake cards & PINs that they sent out to some lowlifes that'll drain the accounts at hundreds of ATMs simultaneously. The big withdraw may have already begun, with an Indian bank robbed off US$13.5m from its ATMs around the country. Imagine having that sort of power, like John Connor in Terminator 2, who can stick an Atari computer into an ATM and get any amount of cash he wants out of it. I thought that was the most badass thing ever when I was a kid.
South Australia is getting another big Tesla battery. Infigen Energy is gonna install a 25MW/52MWh battery at the Lake Bonney wind farm. It'll cost $38m and construction will start in a few weeks. There's actually heaps of batteries popping up near wind farms in SA and VIC - 30MW/8MWh in the Yorke Peninsula, 10MW/10MWh in Port Augusta, 21MW/26MWh in Snowtown, 25MW/50MWh in Gannawarra and a 20MW/34MWh battery just outside Stawell. These batteries are used not just to "time-delay" the energy solar & wind generate, but also to sell power at top notch pricing during moments of peak demand and to provide "fast frequency response" when coal plants shit the bed.
The Daily Telegraph dug up some old tweets from Australian gaming YouTubers and esports competitors Alan "ChampChong" Catak and Elliot "Muselk" Watkins, exposing them as dumb kids that like to call people gay, make shitty jokes about Jewish stereotypes and use the word rape as a verb in every day conversation. Gamers being dickheads isn't front page news, what made the Tele splash this on the front page of their rag is that the Air Force gave them $52,500 to make recruitment videos without checking the tone of their posts. Though to be fair to the RAF, finding an online Australian popular with the sorta dudes that would join the military that *doesn't* act like ChampChong (ChampChong??) and Muselk isn't easy. Also a nice reminder to delete your tweets.
Yesterday we saw some benchmarks from AMD's impressive 2nd generation Threadripper CPU. They were nice, but not as fast as everyone hoped based on the CPU's specs. The reason seems to be Windows 10 and its poor support for all those cores. It literally doesn't know how to send tasks around to the 16 or 32 cores Threadripper CPUs have. Phoronix tested Threadripper on some Linux distros and said that "the Linux performance in a majority of these CPU-focused benchmarks were running much faster on the AMD Threadripper 2990WX than Windows 10 Pro when tested with the same hardware in the same configuration". So the moral of the story is, if you wanna do something that spanks heaps of CPU cores, do it in Linux.
There's a long story in Vanity Fair about Amazon's wheeling and dealing to get a massive US$10b contract out of the US Department of Defence. The DoD wants to put all their data in "the cloud" and obviously Amazon wants to be the ones to do it. The story centers around how Amazon acts like pretty much any other company with stacks of lobbyists, insider connections, breaking laws and shit like that. I guess this is news to people who are yet to wake up and realise that these Silicon Valley types aren't special geniuses, they're the same filthy fucker capitalists as the giant companies before them. All the world saving, kumbaya, aren't we different getting around on bikes on campus whilst wearing hoodies bullshit died 15 years ago.
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.
The Sizzle acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia and recognises their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures, and to elders both past and present.
This email was sent to *|EMAIL|*
why did I get this? | unsubscribe from this list | update subscription preferences