NEWS
Amazon Chime, hopefully a better version of WebEx
Amazon has a new thing running off its Web Service juggernaut - Chime. (here's the press release) Designed to be a much nicer WebEx or GoToMeeting, Chime lets ya group chat to all your business buddies and do business together, without the fucking around involved in most corporate internet meetings. There's smartphone apps, as well as apps for Windows and macOS. I really have no idea if it's any good or not and I hope I never have to use it, as if I did, it means I'm wearing pants and I hate that. But maybe a few of you who do have to wear pants, or maybe even enjoy wearing pants, can use it instead of whatever probably horrible web conferencing system you're using now.
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Microsoft wants to make a digital Geneva Convention
Microsoft's head lawyer, Brad Smith, wants to make a Digital Geneva Convention. With all these cyber attacks, skirmishes and wars going on, Microsoft thinks its about time we laid out some ground rules for what is and what isn't cool when hacking your adversary. Pointing to the looming threat of Russia and North Korea as an example of why we need it and to the agreement made between the USA and China not to hack each other into oblivion as proof it works. An interesting concept - not that the current US President thinks much of the traditional Geneva convention, but still, admirable aim there Brad.
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Trailers for Apple's new cringeworthy TV shows
Apple has given us a glimpse into what they see as the future of their music subscription service, releasing trailers for its Planet of the Apps reality show and Carpool Karaoke. They are awful, but the Planet of the Apps show is particularly grotesque - it's basically Shark Tank for 20-something app developers with village idiot will.i.am and once a good actor, now a woo woo garbage saleswoman, Gwyneth Paltrow. Apple says it'll use these shows as a way to differentiate it from Spotify and to lure people in to subscribing to Apple Music. Apple's stock is at an all-time high right now, so maybe, these shows are actually good? Well, some bean counter in Wall Street (or Omaha) thinks its good.
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ABC iView to go HD soon!
Here's a piping hot, fresh exclusive from TV Tonight via the ABC's head of programming - ABC iView is going HD "in the first half of this year"! Release the fireworks! Start the choir! HD iView is finally going to be a thing! Hang on a second, what's this? "it won’t quite be a true 1080p resolution due to costs", it's not 1080p? Argh. It should be 4K ya mongrel fucks. Oh well, not like we have internet speeds fast enough even for 1080p.
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Bill Morrow tries to explain why he's so dumb but ends up showing us how dumb he really is
On the topic of slow internet, the CEO of the NBN has climbed up on his high horse to yell at us misinformed plebs that we're the problem, not him. In what could only be described as a rant penned after a few scotches, concluding a long day pleasuring his government masters, then cleaned up the next morning by the army of PR spin doctors stationed within the NBN - Bill Morrow sloppily attempts to explains his "even if it was free, nobody would use gigabit speed internet" brainfart from yesterday. Read it with a bucket close by, it's that horrible. A disgusting insight into the cretinous minds lodged in the craniums of the fuckwits in charge of our country. Gonna rip this thing to shreds on the Sizzle blog once I'm done writing today's issue.
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COOL SHIT
Telstra's got a router with free 4G failover
Telstra has a new router that includes a 4G modem that works if your fixed line internet shits the bed. That alone is nothing new, I have one of those modems that does auto fail-over to a USB modem. What's unique about the "Gateway Frontier" is that the SIM in the modem is linked to your fixed line data cap, and costs no extra. So if your internet is down for say, 3 days, you can use Telstra 4G (capped at 6mbit), at no extra cost, with the same 250GB, 500GB, 1000GB data limit. Nice! This is something the big 4 telcos should leverage as an advantage over smaller ones. Optus, Vodafone and TPG, ya listening?
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US price of the Hyundai Ioniq EV is very low
You know that Hyundai Ioniq electric car I've been breathlessly banging on about lately? And how it came out in NZ last week but costs over $60,000? Well it's out in the USA now and damn, it's cheap there. The sticker price for one of these in the US is just USD$29,500, a smidge under AU$43,000 when you include GST - probably more like $44,990 drive away with rego and stamp duty and shit. I hope they decide to sell it for that sort of price here in Australia. I reckon it'd be north of $50k though, making it relatively unaffordable compared to a petrol car of similar quality.
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Instapaper explains why it was down for so long lately
Instapaper had a huge outage a little while ago, temporarily losing people's cherished archives of saved articles. Like all good companies wanting to save face, they did a nice technical run through of what the hell happened. How does a relatively well skilled business like Instapaper just lose its shit for a few weeks? It all came down to a 2TB file size limit in the filesystem of an an AWS database instance. Of course it took much longer than that to realise this, so some poor engineer had to live through a series of stressful events until it was fixed. This story is the exact reason why I write this stupid newsletter instead of working in IT like I'm supposed to be - shit like that does not make me feel good, at all.
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Here endeth the sizzle (until tomorrow!)
--Anthony
The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Like The Sizzle? Like it on Facebook!