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OCAU News |
There's a new Australian Police Child ID Safety App. The Australian Police Child ID App was adapted from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Child ID App in the United States. This collaborative effort has seen the Australian Federal Police (AFP) create a tool that will help parents and guardians more easily collect and send important information about their child/children to authorities in the event of a disappearance or abduction. The application allows families to store photographs and vital information about their children on their mobile phone. In the devastating event that a child goes missing, this information can be immediately provided to authorities.
Nintendo launched the Wii U in Australia last night, with midnight launch parties across the country. When midnight struck, nobody hung about, instead taking Wilson’s advice to hurry home and get the hefty day-one update downloading; in typically Nintendo fashion, attendees were advised to play in the morning, when well-rested, rather than sit up all night. I’m not sure anyone took this sterling advice, although they did take a balloon Mario home with them. Discussion in our Nintendo Consoles forum.
Syria has gone dark, completely disconnecting from the Internet. Looking closely at the continuing Internet blackout in Syria, we can see that traceroutes into Syria are failing, exactly as one would expect for a major outage. The primary autonomous system for Syria is the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment; all of their customer networks are currently unreachable.
Also disconnected recently were Vodaphone customers, who apparently couldn't even dial emergency numbers from their mobiles for several hours. Vodafone network users in Perth have been affected by a meltdown at a major Melbourne switch which has left tens of thousands of customers without mobile phone services. WA police took to Twitter on Thursday to advise Vodafone customers in WA to use a landline or alternative mobile carrier when calling 000 or 131444. They advise people with no alternative to keep trying to get through.
Phoronix compared some mobile CPUs. The Samsung Chromebook is very interesting since it's one of the few readily available computers on the market employing an ARM Cortex-A15 processor rather than Cortex-A9 or other models. The Cortex-A15 found in the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual SoC proved to be very powerful and this Chromebook was quite a good deal with it being trivial to load Ubuntu Linux (and other distributions) while costing only $250 USD for this ARM-based laptop. In the past week I have carried out additional ARM Cortex-A15 benchmarks, including a comparison of its performance the the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core ARM "Cardhu" tablet and several Intel Atom/Core x86 systems.
ArsTechnica are concerned about non-replaceable desktop CPUs becoming the norm. While this move wouldn't have much of an impact on the vast majority of desktop users, most of whom simply don't perform their own processor upgrades, there's been quite a bit of hand wringing among power users who feel that their ability to upgrade and build their own systems is in jeopardy. But are the desktop-as-we-know-it's days really numbered, or is all of this worrying much ado about nothing?
There's new evidence of water on Mercury. Now the newest data from MESSENGER strongly indicate that water ice is the major constituent of Mercury's north polar deposits, that ice is exposed at the surface in the coldest of those deposits, but that the ice is buried beneath an unusually dark material across most of the deposits, areas where temperatures are a bit too warm for ice to be stable at the surface itself.
There's a new Humble Bundle, this time featuring THQ games. If you bought these seven epic games and soundtracks separately, it would cost around $190. But we’re letting you name your price starting at $1! Choose exactly how your purchase is divided: to vital charities, THQ, or even us! Discussion here.
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All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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