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OCAU News |
Wednesday Evening News
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Wednesday, 17-January-2024 23:07:40 (GMT +10) - by MUTMAN
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The phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" is a metaphor to "using the understanding gained by major thinkers who have gone before in order to make intellectual progress". I feel like battery chemistry is one of those giants.
Fifty years after the birth of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery, it’s easy to see its value. It’s used in billions of laptops, cellphones, power tools, and cars. Global sales top US $45 billion a year, predicted to be more than $100 billion in the coming decade. This transformative invention took nearly two decades to make it out of the lab, first developed by M. Stanley Whittingham at Exxon in 1972, it didn’t get far. It was manufactured in small volumes by Exxon, appeared at an electric vehicle show in Chicago in 1977, and served briefly as a coin cell battery. But then Exxon dropped it.
2024 and we still tick boxes on paper to vote. For vision impaired this is a bit of an inconvenience and electronic voting might be much more user friendly. NSW tried this before in 2021 and had some issues, but looks like they might be willing to try again.
The commission wants to “ascertain the availability, suitability and viability of a potential internet voting solution for use by electors who are blind or have low vision at the NSW state general election in 2027”. The RFI document notes that internet voting "appears to be the preferred way for electors who are blind or have low vision to cast their votes independently and in secret”, and that feasibility of internet voting “is contingent on the availability of suitable market solutions, adequate government funding and legislative reform.”
NBN Co turns to AI to improve network management. No wise cracks from me, not a word.
The company’s executive general manager for technology transformation Jo Dutton said AI is a useful technology for improving network management thanks to its ability to make use of the terabytes of data that the NBN network generated each day. “What people expect from us is a reliable network that really allows them to do what they want to do and when they want to do it, so they just want it to work,” Dutton said. “And that's why we see assurance of the network moving from transactional processes to proactive ones.
CES was packed to the eyeballs with "AI", consumer tech was "AI everywhere, AI everything". Toms Hardware have an article on enthusiast tech and were surprised by the AI. They go on to list their favourite products from the show.
Instead, we were excited to see a number of products that really moved the ball forward in ways that were more evolutionary than revolutionary: new graphics cards and CPUs that add more performance for the money, a high-end 3D printer that zooms along at 600 mm/s and works with carbon fiber or a gorgeous OLED monitor that can run at up to 480 Hz at 1080p or 240 Hz at 4K.
IntelInside sent word on an interesting story of an iPhone surviving quite a ‘drop test’. Airplane mode indeed.
We've all heard of the terrifying story of Alaska Airlines flight 1282 when a door plug on a Boeing 737 Max 9 suddenly flew open minutes after the flight took off on January 5. Everyone on board was safe, but several objects were sucked out of the aircraft and fell roughly 16,000 feet – including an iPhone. Sean Bates, a Washington resident, took to X revealing that he had found a fully intact phone and that it was still in "airplane mode and with half battery."
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All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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