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OCAU News |
Tuesday Afternoon
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Tuesday, 15-September-2015 14:52:48 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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I generally avoid politics, but we do have a new Prime Minister, and he did make his fortune in telecommunications and indeed was Communications Minister previous to becoming PM. I am generally optimistic in an "at least he's not the previous guy" kind of way, but I'm also somewhat concerned because, as Delimiter more eloquently express, his technology policies were not exactly great. He might be charismatic, he might be popular, and pretty shortly he might be Prime Minister. But when it comes to technology policy, Malcolm Turnbull has been a disaster. The Member for Wentworth will be remembered as Australia’s worst ever Communications Minister — the man who singlehandedly demolished the NBN and put a polite face on draconian Data Retention and Internet piracy laws. Anyway, discussion of the new PM is well underway in this thread.
An Australian company has made the world's first 3D-printed ribcage for a cancer patient. Suffering from a chest wall sarcoma (a type of cancerous tumour that grows, in this instance, around the rib cage), the 54 year old man needed his sternum and a portion of his rib cage replaced. This part of the chest is notoriously tricky to recreate with prosthetics, due to the complex geometry and design required for each patient. So the patient’s surgical team determined that a fully customisable 3D printed sternum and rib cage was the best option.
People are a bit grumpy that Windows 10 is being automatically downloaded - whether you wanted the upgrade or not. It sounds like it could be a useful move to make updates easier for people who haven’t made the jump yet, but it could also be problematic. Unlike regular Windows Update files, the Windows 10 update is obviously rather large—somewhere in the region of 3GB, which not everyone will have free. Worse still, if a user is on a metered connection and can only download a limited amount of data, then the update could secretly screw up their bandwidth allowance.
The words "Android" and "Microsoft" don't generally go together, but we might be seeing a decent Microsoft Android phone soon. Microsoft could make its own phone without access to the Google Play Store, but that usually ends poorly for everyone involved. In order to have their apps and services installed on something running Google-powered Android, Microsoft needed to go the long way and offer compelling apps that users would want to install and use instead of the pre-loaded Google counterparts. You may not be aware of it, but Microsoft is surprisingly close to making this a reality.
Iain spotted this Agg-approved use for big data number crunching - making better beer. Cohen’s using GPUs for more than just classifying beers. He’s using them to create models that help analyze profiles generated by tasters against the more than 100,000 beer reviews his company has collected. Without the parallel architecture of GPUs, for example, it took Cohen’s team a long time to train deep neural networks with many layers, or random forest models with many trees. Cohen’s team now uses NVIDIA’s CUDA toolkit in R — such as gputools and gmatrix — to boost performance. Now model tuning only takes minutes to complete.
Here's a factory tour with a difference: Logitech's Audio HQ. Logitech recently reached out to us for a tour of their audio headquarters in Camas, Washington, where it spent the last 18 months designing what it believes to be the best sounding, most well-featured headset on the market, gaming or otherwise. In fact, they're so confident in the Artemis Spectrum, it bravely threw its creation to a small pack of skeptical tech journalists in hopes they'd go home impressed. Here are our thoughts.
Charg3r sent in this article about a new technology that could lead to CPUs with thousands of cores. At the International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques in October, MIT researchers unveil the first fundamentally new approach to cache coherence in more than three decades. Whereas with existing techniques, the directory’s memory allotment increases in direct proportion to the number of cores, with the new approach, it increases according to the logarithm of the number of cores.
The MMX Bandits might have some new recruits soon, with some Penrith students in hot water for hax0ring the HSC. Up to 10 Year 12 students at Penrith High School have reportedly been questioned over the security breach, which the NSW Department of Education said occurred when students obtained a teacher's log-in details for the online database that contains student marks. It was not known whether any HSC assessment marks were actually altered.
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