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OCAU News |
Tuesday Afternoon
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Tuesday, 21-February-2012 13:50:20 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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ABCNews took a tour of Foxconn's factory, apparently the first time any reporter has done so. That link isn't to the full story, but hopefully it will become available on the net soon after it broadcasts today USA time. It was around this time when Apple called me. They wondered if "Nightline" was interested in seeing their iPhone, iPad and MacBook final assembly lines at Foxconn during a first-ever audit by the Fair Labor Association. I said yes, very much, and immediately started imaging the reasons why they were offering such a scoop to me, of all people.
Australian Popular Science report on the US Toy Fair 2012. Half of the playthings that caught our attention require an iOS or Android device to do anything. But, in adapting an already-powerful handset as the brains behind anything from a toy gun to a board game, today's crop of toys are able to become more capable and more immersive than anything that's come before.
Microsoft have extended support for Win7 and Vista. Microsoft has quietly extended support for the consumer versions of Windows 7 and Windows Vista by five years, syncing them with the lifespan of enterprise editions. The move is part of a revamp of the company's support policies for its operating systems, Microsoft said.
TheAtlantic have an interesting article about living a disconnected life. The call to disconnect was found in several best sellers of 2011 from Sherry Turkle's Alone Together to William Powers' Hamlet's Blackberry. Powers has since become emblematic of a movement called the "Digital Sabbath." Each Friday night, he and his family disconnect their computers from the internet for the weekend as a means to curb an ever-growing sense of information overload.
HotHardware looked at a DIY PC kit from Maingear. Recently Maingear announced that they'd be offering a DIY SHIFT chassis and cooling system kit for a limited time, to folks that might want to try their hand at building a SHIFT-infused PC for themselves. At $899 for the case, Maingear's integrated Aphex audio enhancement solution, and a Maingear Epic 180 close-looped water cooler, this DIY kit isn't for the weekend warrior, but rather for the elite power user looking to build something special.
TheConversation consider IP, patents and copyright in Australia. As with copyright, patent law involves a balance between respect, incentives and social needs. It is contentious because some people consider the balance is overly weighted towards large corporate interests.
It seems Google (among others) are tricking browsers into accepting cookies even when configured not to. It turns out Facebook and many other sites are using an almost identical scheme to override Internet Explorer's privacy setting, according to a privacy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. "Companies have discovered that they can lie in their [P3P policies] and nobody bothers to do anything about it," the researcher writes.
Alan Turing would have turned 100 this year, and his influence is still felt even outside the world of computers. The findings provide evidence to support a theory first suggested in the 1950s by famous code-breaker and mathematician Alan Turing, whose centenary falls this year. He put forward the idea that regular repeating patterns in biological systems are generated by a pair of morphogens that work together as an 'activator' and 'inhibitor'.
Speaking of anniversaries, NASA are celebrating 50 years since the first American in orbit. On Feb. 20, 1962, an Atlas rocket successfully carried John Glenn and the hopes of an entire nation into aboard Friendship 7, a flight that ushered in a new era of space travel that eventually led to Americans walking on the moon by the end of the 1960s. Of course, it's worth noting that Alan Shepard had previously been into space (but not completing an orbit) and, nearly a year earlier than Glenn in April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first person into space AND the first person to complete an orbit.
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