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OCAU News |
Wednesday Lunchtime
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Wednesday, 21-November-2012 13:00:13 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Click Frenzy, billed as Australia's largest online sale and "the sale that stops a nation", has had mixed success, with the website being largely unavailable early on due to high demand. The intertubes are abuzz with comments about it, with some retailers discussing refunds. More here and here. "What the data shows is that significant numbers of Australian consumers wanted to take advantage of these sales and they couldn't because the sites couldn't respond; they were either generating errors or just so slow that they were unresponsive." Discussion here.
Also awkward is this video from the bicentennary of Australia, dug up by Sabz. Some of the more painful, cringe-worthy moments from Australia Live, a four-hour program celebrating Australia's bicentennial that aired across three channels on New Years Day, 1988.
There's a new enormous skyscraper on the way in China. Maybe that's not such big news, but they're planning to build it in only 90 days. A 220-story Sky City tower in the Chinese city of Changsha could take the crown as the world's tallest skyscraper next March with an astounding height of 2,749 feet, edging out the mega Burj Khalifa that currently stands 2,722 feet over Dubai. What makes the 11-million-square-foot Sky City so astonishing isn't its height or its appearance but rather the three-month construction plan to create the building that kicks off at the end of the year.
Killer robots may be a genuine concern soon. “Giving machines the power to decide who lives and dies on the battlefield would take technology too far,” said Steve Goose, Arms Division director at Human Rights Watch. “Human control of robotic warfare is essential to minimizing civilian deaths and injuries.”
Something more retro from Callan: The world's oldest original working digital computer is going on display at The National Museum of Computing in Buckinghamshire. The Witch, as the machine is known, has been restored to clattering and flashing life in a three-year effort. In its heyday in the 1950s the machine was the workhorse of the UK's atomic energy research programme.
C|Net list their Top 10 Tech Turkeys of 2012. Welcome to CNET's 2012 Tech Turkeys, from a hyped startup that’s gone nowhere fast to a national intellectual property system that's crushing American innovation.
They list the American patent system as the #1 turkey, and this article shows some of the issues. Trolls are exploiting the flaws in our patent system – especially for software. They shouldn’t be able to use questionable patents to extort productive companies or block products from consumers, but that’s what appears to be happening. Technology companies like Google, Facebook, HP, and Amazon face hundreds of troll lawsuits. Yet these are the companies that are “in the arena,” doing the hard work of creating real products and real services for real people.
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