NEWS
New Star Wars movie trailer - Star Wars: Rogue One
A teaser trailer for Star Wars: Rogue One is now out for your viewing pleasure. That's all you need to know. Watch it.
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Semi-autonomous trucks travelled across Europe and nobody died
DAF, Daimler, Iveco, MAN, Scania and Volvo have conducted a "truck platooning" test across Europe, the first of its kind. What the shit is truck platooning? Basically it's one truck leading the other trucks in a convoy, but this time, it was done fully by computers. The person in the drivers seat was more of a meatbag supervisor than a driver. The goal is to have all the trucks in Europe following each other around in a single lane, driving smoothly and safely, reducing congestion on Europe's highways. We can use some of this magic on the Westgate Freeway, fucking trucks make it a pain to drive on.
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Reddit has an official smartphone app now
People are excited that Reddit, the Internet's home for offensive behaviour and occasional interesting comment thread (like the one about our superior Australian dunnies I found last night), now has an official app on Android and iOS. I've used clients like Alien Blue and Narwhal, but this new official one is apparently the spiritual successor to Alien Blue, as Reddit "acquired" Alien Blue and I think got Jason Morrissey (Melbourne guy who spoke at One More Thing once!) with it. I don't know if he worked on this new Reddit app though. Maybe he just cashed out and is relaxing somewhere. That's what I'd like to imagine anyways.
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Guy who leeched 1TB off Telstra 4G last weekend is now working for Telstra
John Szaszvari, who downloaded a terabyte of mainly copyright infringing media on Telstra's free leech day, then talked to the press about his heroic feat, now has a gig (heh, get it, a gig?) at Telstra. For some reason they thought it'd be ok to chuck some new wireless modem at him, that's apparently a world first and a game changer negating the need for the NBN (*cough* yeahrightmate *cough*), to test. I guess the bar has been lowered at Telstra.
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Nvidia unveils a mega powerful high performance computing server
In Nvidia's new 3U rackmount server, there's two E5-2698 v3 Xeon CPUs, 512GB of DDR4 RAM, some SSDs, Infiniband and 10GigE network connections. Nothing too unusual here, but this is Nvidia, so they chucked in 8 of their brand new Tesla P100 GPUs, designed for doing math like it's nobody's business. A total 3584 CUDA cores means it is a fucking hashcat monster that will shred your weak passwords into useless little pieces. I'm sure it'll do some cancer research deep learning shit too, but damn, what a sweet box to have to crack passwords with. The Nvidia DGX-1 server is yours for US$129,000.
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COOL SHIT
Excellent price for a Ubiquiti Unifi 802.11AC Pro access point
I love Ubiquiti gear, so when I saw this pop up on OzBargain, I just had to indulge. My IT Hub are selling the UAP-AC-PRO for $226.36 + $16 for shipping - cheaper than anywhere else in Australia for this excellent wireless access point. Here's Arstechnica's take on why Ubiquiti gear is so nice. I'm looking forward to upgrading from my 1st gen 802.11n base model UAP to this fancy 802.11ac unit (I also purchased an EdgeRouter to go with it - see you in hell Optus supplied Sagemcom turd!).
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South Koreans make a smart watch app to improve CPR quality
A South Korean study at the Hanyang University Hospital has developed a smart watch app to guide laypeople through the CPR process, enabling better quality chest compressions than without them. Utilising the accelerometer in a smart watch, the app is able to tell you if you're pushing too hard or not pushing hard enough, in order to keep someone's heart pumping until trained help arrives. Such a nifty idea I reckon - the Red Cross should be all over this.
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ISPs complain that the NBN's transit pricing is way too high
The NBN's main reason for existing to install and operate the "last mile" of an Internet connection. ISPs pay NBN for access to this and it's called a connectivity virtual circuit (aka CVC). NBN recently changed the CVC fees after ISP argued it was unsustainable at the current pricing. The new pricing however, still has ISPs upset and unable to profitably provision bandwidth accurately during peak times. If an ISP wanted to give a user 5mbit of dedicated NBN bandwidth, they'd have to pay NBN $87.50. According to one telco CEO, it's cheaper to send data across the Pacific Ocean than it is across a city utilising NBN's network.
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Here endeth the sizzle (until Monday!)
--Anthony
The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Like The Sizzle? Tell your friends!