NBN pricing review complete & Malcolm Turnbull legit said he’s proud of the NBN
Uber lost its licence to operate in London (again)
Contract for the Web is Tim Berners-Lee’s latest attempt to wash the stink off
3rd-gen Threadripper and flagship Intel i9 CPU reviews are live
Cheap FIFA20 PS4/XB1, Apple Watch S5 44mm, Google Home Mini, Echo Dot, Google Pixel 3a, Logitech MX Master 2S/Anywhere 2S mice, Bose QC35II headphones, Sony XAV-AX3000 headunit, Logitech MX Keys & 12% off Macs at Harvey Norman
NBN has announced the outcome of its lengthy wholesale pricing review. There will be new weird speed tiers available for ISPs to resell, like 100/20, 250/25 and 1000/50. Don't know what the price point for these would be, but 1000/50 is a weird speed isn't it? Like they acknowledge you might want a gigabit downlink, but only 50mbit up? Can't they do at least 100nmbit up or 1000/1000 on FTTP like most developed goddamn countries? NBN will also "over-dimension" most fixed-line products by mid-2020 so your 100/40 plan will actually be 100/40, not 97/38 or something like that. Also NBN related, Malcolm Turnbull was on stage at a startup conference in Sydney and when the topic of the botched NBN came up, said that he is "really proud of the achievement of the NBN in very, very difficult circumstances".
Get out the microscopic violin for old mate Uber - they've been banned from operating in London by the regulatory body for taxis, Transport for London. Two months ago Uber was put on probation for a bunch of issues (lack of insurance, vehicle quality and more), but mostly due to Uber's poor driver verification process, which allowed people with revoked licences to drive and even "one driver who had been cautioned for distributing indecent images of children". TfL said that they "do not have confidence that similar issues will not reoccur in the future, which has led it to conclude that the company is not fit and proper at this time". Uber is appealing the decision and will continue to operate in the meantime.
Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web Foundation has launched a Contract for the Web - a document that aims to set goals for "governments, companies, civil society and individuals" to commit to in order to "safeguard the future of the Web". 150 organisations have signed the contract, including Microsoft, Google, DuckDuckGo, and Facebook, plus the governments of governments of Germany, France, and Ghana. Good on Tim for trying and all the things in the contract sound nice (Respect privacy! Make the internet affordable! Build strong communities!) but if Google and Facebook have signed it and there's no criminal repurcussions for fucking with the contract, I don't have faith there will be meaningful change from the status quo.
Today's an exciting day for the handful of people that still give a shit about CPU performance (me!), with embargo breaking on reviews of the new AMD Threadripper 3960X/3970X and Intel Core i9-10980XE. This conclusion from Anadtech's review of the 3rd-gen Threadripper CPUs sums it up nicely: "In anything embarrassingly parallel it rules the roost by a large margin (except for our one AVX-512 benchmark). Single threaded performance trails the high-frequency mainstream parts, but it is still very close. Even in memory sensitive workloads, an issue for the previous generation Threadripper parts, the new chiplet design has pushed performance to the next level. These new Threadripper processors win on core count, on high IPC, on high frequency, and on fast memory". Here's some additional benchmarks (Linux-related & compilation) on Phoronix. Linux kernel compilation in 23.84 seconds!
FIFA20 for PS4 or Xbox One - $39 at Big W & JB Hi-Fi
12% off Macs at Harvey Norman until December 3rd
Apple Watch S5 44mm - $643 at Harvey Norman
Google Home Mini - $36 at JB Hi-Fi
Amazon Echo Dot (3rd gen) - $39 at JB Hi-Fi
Google Pixel 3a - $579 at JB Hi-Fi
Logitech MX Master 2S/Anywhere 2S mice - $74/$58
Bose QC35II headphones - $338.40 from VideoPro’s eBay store
Sony XAV-AX3000 headunit & Pioneer RCAM2 reverse camera combo - $349 + delivery from Bankstown Sound
Logitech MX Keys wireless keyboard - $178 at Harvey Norman
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