You probably already knew this, but Tasmania's telecommunications took a massive hit yesterday as two of its main fibre optic cables to the mainland were damaged. Issues started at around 1:30pm yesterday and according to Telstra, one of its cables was damaged by civil works in Melbourne and another cable had an issue at the landing station in Victoria. It was all restored by 7:07pm. Meanwhile, up north in NSW and QLD, flooding has impacted over 57,000 premises on the NBN network, with the most affected areas being the Sunshine Coast, Gympie, Maryborough and the Greater Brisbane Area. Considering the extent of the flooding, that's not too bad I reckon.
The Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) has submitted 24-policy recommendations to the federal government ahead of the upcoming budget, with the aim of making sure the government meets its goal of Australia being a "leading digital economy" by 2030 and a top 3 digital government by 2025 (lol as if). Some of the things the AIIA want to see include: a National AI Commercialisation Hub, a "Digital Restart Fund to procure Australian innovative unproven solutions", reform of the school curriculum to include more digital skills and "conducting digital inclusion and literacy campaigns". Will be interesting to see if any of this stuff ends up in election campaigns - do voters give a shit?
Anandtech has a full review of AMD's latest mobile CPU - the 6000 series Ryzen. It uses the latest Zen3+ architecture (Zen 3 with a few power mods, a better GPU) and is built on a cutting edge 6nm process by TSMC. The Ryzen 9 6900HS can scale all the way from 15W TDP all the way to 80W TDP if the power and cooling available allow it. It looks like the 6900HS performs around the same, sometimes faster than the Ryzen 5 5600X desktop CPU, but when compared to Intel's 12th-gen mobile CPUs can't match them at the higher TDPs (i.e 45W+). Seems to me that Intel is pick if you need balls to the wall performance in a laptop (and thickness/heat to match), but AMD's Zen3+ is ideal if you want a thinner, cooler laptop.
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