Apple's little "Scary Fast" event this morning ran for 30 minutes and graced us with the M3 SoC. It's available now in the MacBook Pro and iMac. The iMac is still only available in a 24" screen size. There's no longer a 13" MacBook Pro. The M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max SoCs are very fast according to Apple (thanks TSMC and their 3nm fabrication process!), orders of magnitude faster than any Intel CPU MacBook you may still be using - Apple was very insistent on that fact, repeating many times that your obsolete and a pathetic Intel MacBook Pro is an insult to Steve Jobs that should be replaced with a MacBook Pro with an M3 SoC immediately. Oh and the MBPs come in black now. Serve The Home, like me, are a little skeptical of Apple's vague claims of increased performance with the M3. They just throw out percentages but don't outline what benchmarks they're running! Cool, the M3 is 2.5x faster than the M1 in "rendering" - rendering what?? The M3's E-cores are 50% faster than the M1's - 50% faster in which task?!
In order to comply with the EU's "GDPR legal basis of 'Consent' for the purpose of processing data collected on our own platforms for advertising purposes", Meta will "offer people in the EU, EEA and Switzerland the choice to pay a monthly subscription to use Facebook and Instagram without any ads. They can alternatively continue to use these services for free while seeing ads that are relevant to them". It'll cost €9.99/month on the web or €12.99/month on iOS and Android should someone want to use Facebook in this way. As of March 1st 2024, there will be "an additional fee of €6 on the web or €8 on iOS and Android per linked account". Honestly, the ads are the least annoying thing about Facebook these days. Can we pay to get rid of the comments?
A Liberal senator has asked the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water during Senate Estimates, "what is being done to ensure that we have sovereignty and that our sovereign risk is protected when it comes to our energy markets?" - a dog whistle relating to Chinese solar inverters and some perceived cyber security threat that these Chinese made inverters that are connected to the internet could be used against us somehow by the Chinese in a cyber war. In response, the department said that they are "in a position to move forward with a standards development proposal with Standards Australia in terms of additional cyber standards for [rooftop] inverters" and that they are in "early-stage discussions with the Australian Energy Market Operator about a potential technical solution that could be applied in the event that there is a successful cyber attack on rooftop inverters to restore functionality and stability to the grid".
The results of Tesla's Supercharger location votes are in and the winning sites for Asia-Pacific include two in Australia - Mansfield in VIC and Batemans Bay in NSW. Tesla has re-opened voting on where they should install the new batch of Superchargers in Australia, so if you're a Tesla owner or have a Tesla account (so you can use Tesla's Superchargers even if you don't own a Tesla, at select sites), you can vote for the next batch. Currently Rockhampton in QLD is the top result in Australia, with Mildura in VIC not far behind. Meanwhile in the USA, Tesla is planning a "congestion fee" at popular Supercharger locations, where if you set the car to charge over 80% there's an extra fee. I'm not against it, but I did find on my Brisbane road-trip that I had to charge to 90% regularly so I'd arrive at the next Supercharger with at least 20% to act as a peace of mind buffer.
Book for kids about computers. Translated to Russian language from original japan book (Software & Computer Museum / Internet Archive)
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