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OCAU News |
Time to catch up on some news from while I've been away.
Intel rival ARM is being bought for $32B by SoftBank, a Japanese telecom company. ARM designs customizable chip technology licensed for nearly all major smartphones and many tablets, including Samsung's mobile devices and Apple's iPhone and iPad. ARM's success in mobile made it a major threat to Intel, which has been largely shut out of the mobile chip market. Now, ARM is pushing to get into Intel's most profitable business – high-end microprocessors for the servers that run large data centers.
Another telecom has their chequebook out, with Verizon buying Yahoo for $4.8B, if the expected announcement happens later today. Yahoo was the front door to the web for an early generation of internet users, and its services still attract a billion visitors a month. But the internet is an unforgiving place for yesterday’s great idea, and on Sunday, Yahoo reached the end of the line as an independent company.
Also coming to the end of the line is VCR technology, with Japan making the last ever VCR this month. The most surprising part of this is that someone out there is still making VCRs. Funai Electric, the last remaining Japanese company to make the units, has announced that the company will cease production on its VCR units, due to declining sales and difficulty acquiring parts.
The Windows 10 upgrade nagging has reached fever pitch, with only a few days left of the free upgrade offer - but France have warned Microsoft about excessive personal data collection by the OS. After accusations that Windows 10 collects too much data about users, France's National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) has order Microsoft to comply with the French Data Protection Act within three months. The company has been ordered to "stop collecting excessive data and tracking browsing by users without their consent". In addition to this, the chair of CNIL has notified Microsoft that it needs to take "satisfactory measures to ensure the security and confidentiality of user data".
LegitReviews cover a new benchmark, 3DMark Time Spy. This DirectX 12 Feature Level 11_0 benchmark utilizes a pure DirectX 12 game engine that supports features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading! The developers opted to use DirectX 12 Feature Level 11_0 to ensuring wide compatibility with DirectX 11 hardware through DirectX 12 drivers. There are higher DirectX 12 Feature Levels, take a look at the Direct3D Feature Level table, but it appears many game developers are going this route to get a good performance and compatibility mix. PCPerspective explore some possible favouritism in the benchmark.
Telstra are rolling out ADSL again, thanks Callan. Telstra CEO Andy Penn, while promising to spend AU$250 million improving the Telstra network, has, without much fuss, re-started investment in ADSL infrastructure. That announcement is in the context of a National Broadband Network that's supposed to make ADSL obsolete. In this blog post, Penn says the mobile network's $50 million enhancement is proceeding, and there's another $200 million for the core network, and for “increasing current ADSL broadband capacity to meet increasing customer demand”.
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All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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