Google has blinked first and announced how they'll handle legislation in South Korea that mandates they allow 3rd party payment processors on the Play Store. Everyone assumed that if devs use a 3rd-party to handle payments for an in-app purchase Google wouldn't get a cut at all as the 3rd party handles it all, but that's not what will happen. Instead Google will give the developer a 4% discount off Google's 15% and demand to be paid 11% of the transaction. What a pack of fucken little goblins they are over at Mountain View. Oh, and Apple doesn't plan to change anything, they reckon the current App Store situation is "already in compliance with the new law". What???
Alder Lake, Intel's answer to AMD's Ryzen desktop CPUs is now available and from initial benchmarks is not a total dumpster fire. The 12th-gen Core processors use the "Intel 7" process node, which is roughly equivalent to TSMC's N7 process used by AMD for Ryzen (TSMC has an N5 process now, which Apple has a monopoly on at the moment), can take advantage of currently rare DDR5 RAM and copies the approach used in mobile SoCs by utilising a mix of performance cores (P-cores) and efficiency cores (E-cores). Verdict seems to be that the Core i9-12900K is mostly competitive with the Ryzen 5900X, thrashing it in some areas (particularly single thread performance), but is a bit more power hungry and as a whole platform (new Z690 mainboard, DDR5 RAM and the CPU) is relatively expensive.
Good news for electric vehicle owners, as a raft of new charging network announcements went public the last few days. Engie, a massive French electricity infrastructure company and Vicinity, who own a shitload of shopping centres across Australia said they're gonna install 120kw DC chargers at 30 shopping centers as part of the government's Future Fuels fund. Evie is going to use its share of the Future Fuels fund to install similar DC chargers at over 100 Ampol service stations. Evie is also going to partner with Hungry Jacks to pop a charger at some of their stores (the when, where and how many is TBA) so you can eat a greasy as fuck but somehow delicious Bacon Deluxe while your car tops up. It's taken a while but Australia is finally waking up and rolling out the chargers other developed countries did 5 years ago.
Transport for NSW is gonna dabble in quantum computing early next year. According to the minister, by leveraging quantum computing TfNSW will be able to "solve problems on the network in real time by instantly recalculating timetables and routes" and "give customers personalised, real-time information to make their journeys faster, safer and more reliable". The department will go hunting for private sector partners early next year and will establish a "centre for quantum technology" in Sydney's Tech Central precinct. I don't think you need quantum computing to that, but hey gotta seize upon those buzzwords and at least it's relatively harmless unlike facial recognition or cryptocurrency bullshit.
📻 I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone - Sleater-Kinney
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