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OCAU News |
Monday Morning
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Monday, 19-September-2016 10:55:16 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Stephen Conroy has retired from Parliament, claiming the NBN as his greatest contribution to the nation. The 20-year stalwart of the upper house quietly tabled his resignation speech without delivering it to parliament, ending a period of service that saw him fill the roles of Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Digital Productivity.
Meanwhile New Zealand is about to get faster internet than us. Chorus CEO Mark Ratcliffe said by “championing gigabit residential and business services” New Zealand will be “catapulted up the league tables of broadband speed rankings”. The current average download speeds across the Chorus network is 30.5 megabits per second (Mbps) but the upgrade will allow users to achieve download speeds approaching 1000Mbps and uploads of up to 500Mbps.
Nokia are experimenting with terabit-speed fibre. Nokia Bell Labs, Deutsche Telekom T-Labs, and the Technical University of Munich will be showing off how a technique called Probabilistic Constellation Shaping, or PCS, can deliver blistering 1Tbps speeds over a fiber connection. The work provides more momentum behind the push to bring terabit networks to reality. It follows another optical breakthrough earlier this year by researchers at University College London, who achieved speeds of 1.25Tbps. To put that in perspective, they noted it was fast enough to download an entire Games of Thrones series in high definition within one second.
Logitech are acquiring Saitek, makers of flight sim peripherals. PC accessory company Logitech has acquired the Saitek brand and line of flight sim controller assets from MadCatz for $13 million in cash, the company announced today via press release. Saitek is best known for its flight simulator peripherals that are commonly used in games like Elite: Dangerous and Microsoft Flight Simulator X.
VR heads closer to mainstream, with the first million-dollar game being reported. According to Culver City, California-based Survios, Raw Data, available only for HTC’s high-end Vive, has become the first consumer VR game to hit $1 million in sales in a month. In addition, the company said, at least 20% of all Vive owners have purchased the $40 first-person shooter, and it became the first-ever VR game to top the charts at Steam, a leading game platform and ranking site.
DigitalTrends have a flash from the past, looking back at SoftRAM and snake oil. When Windows 95 launched in August 1995, there was only one piece of software available that was specifically written for the brand new operating system. SoftRAM 95 was a utility intended to double a system’s memory without the need for a hardware upgrade, and it was in stock at retail locations around the country as consumers ventured out to make the jump from Windows 3.1. There was only one problem. SoftRAM 95 didn’t work.
If you're after a big read, this ArsTechnica article on how the internet works from a few months ago should keep you busy. We’re not simply talking about the wonders of TCP/IP or pervasive Wi-Fi hotspots, though those are vitally important as well. No, we’re talking about the big infrastructure: the huge submarine cables, the vast landing sites and data centres with their massively redundant power systems, and the elephantine, labyrinthine last-mile networks that actually hook billions of us to the Internet. And perhaps even more importantly, as our reliance on omnipresent connectivity continues to blossom, our connected device numbers swell, and our thirst for bandwidth knows no bounds, how do we keep the Internet running? How do Verizon or Virgin reliably get 100 million bytes of data to your house every second, all day every day? Well, we’re going to tell you over the next 7,000 words.
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All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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