Knewz is News Corp’s attempt to take on Google News
No more food related codenames for Android
Apple rumour dumping ground for a slow news day
You don’t realise how nice electric cars are until you own one
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For years News Corp has whinged the algorithms Google, Apple and Facebook use to promote articles is unfair and damaging their business and democracy - so much so that they've convinced governments around the world (including Australia) to investigate or regulate "digital platforms". The government lobbying approach isn't going too well, so News Corp is building their own online news aggregation alternative called Knewz. This stupidly named service will give higher prominence to original reporting, equal weight to subscription and non-subscription content and include a "variety of national outlets such as The New York Times and NBC News, as well as more partisan news sites like The Daily Caller and ThinkProgress". God speed Mr. Murdoch.
Google will stop giving Android cute snack food related names like Kit Kat, Oreo or Pie, ending a tradition that goes back to 2009. The next version of Android will simply be known as Android 10. Apparently Google has "heard feedback over the years that the names weren’t always understood by everyone in the global community. For example, L and R are not distinguishable when spoken in some languages. So when some people heard us say Android Lollipop out loud, it wasn’t intuitively clear that it referred to the version after KitKat". I know it's silly and serves no practical purpose, but I liked the snack food names. RIP the good times in Mountain View.
Because it's a slow news day, let's dig in to Bloomberg’s summary of all the Apple rumours floating around. The iPhone XS and XS Max successors will be called the iPhone Pro when they're announced in September and will have features such as 3rd camera with a 3D scanner (like Huawei), reverse charging (like Samsung), remove 3D Touch (replaced with Haptic Touch from the XR) and an obligatory faster SoC. iPads will get some spec bumps, there might be a titanium cased Apple Watch, fanicer water resistant AirPods, a cheaper HomePod and a 16" MacBook Pro. All of this to come prior to Christmas according to Bloomberg.
Jeff Attwood (the guy that started Stack Exchange) got his first electric car and wrote a nice blog post about how great they are - "I was expecting "yet another car", but what I got instead was a new, radical worldview. Driving a car powered by barely controlled liquid fuel detonations used to be normal. But in an world of more and more viable electric vehicles this status quo increasingly starts to feel... deeply unnatural. Electric is so much better of an overall experience that you begin to wonder: why did we ever do it that way? Gas cars seem, for lack of a better word, obsolete" - amen brother, I love my EV too (but I don't love the lack of EV infrastructure in Australia).
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🎶 Mixed Bizness - Beck
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