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OCAU News |
Wednesday Afternoon
(4 Comments)
(link) Wednesday, 7-October-2015 17:54:58 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Australia, with 11 other countries, reached agreement on the long-negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade deal, details of which are still unclear to the general public. The TPP countries - Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam - will have to lift tariffs and taxes on a range of imports once the agreement is ratified. The controversial free trade deal has been has been negotiated in full secrecy, with the only insight into what the countries were planning provided by leaked texts. Discussion here.
Apple Maps has expanded its public transportation coverage to include Sydney. The lack of transit directions was a gaping hole in Apple's map offerings, giving city-dwelling smartphone owners another reason to use Google Maps. Apple added the much-needed feature in its iOS 9 software update released this month. Initial launch cities included Baltimore, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, as well as international support for London, Toronto, Berlin, Mexico City, and hundreds of Chinese cities.
Microsoft have released a new surface tablet and, more significantly, a Surface Book that has people talking. The Surface Book should offer another feature found in laptops: better performance. The keyboard unit can include a discrete NVIDIA GPU. That's only usable when the tablet is docked, of course. The keyboard also includes an extra battery; the system as a whole can manage a 12 hour battery life, Microsoft says, but that's only when using both batteries. The tablet itself has much less battery life.
There's a heap of new high-resolution Apollo photos online. Space fans, rejoice: today, just about every image captured by Apollo astronauts on lunar missions is now on the Project Apollo Archive Flickr account. There are some 8,400 photographs in all at a resolution of 1800 dpi, and they're sorted by the roll of film they were on.
Australian scientists have made another quantum computing breakthrough. Until now, they have largely relied on "exotic" materials to construct quantum computers, making them unsuitable for commercial production. But researchers at the University of New South Wales have patented a new design, published in the scientific journal Nature on Tuesday, created specifically with computer industry manufacturing standards in mind and using affordable silicon, which is found in regular computer chips like those we use every day in smartphones or tablets.
Hackers have stolen data from David Jones's website, as well as from Kmart Australia. Kmart emailed customers who had their information stolen from its online product order system on Tuesday to inform them of the situation. If a specific customer did not receive the email, Kmart said, their information had likely not been impacted.
Quartz report on another free online encyclopaedia to challenge Wikipedia, in a way. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy may be the most interesting website on the internet. Not because of the content—which includes fascinating entries on everything from ambiguity to zombies—but because of the site itself.
Check out this cool ferro-fluid alarm clock!
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All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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