Tax Wars: A New Hope
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| Tax Wars: A New Hope | |
| Number | 3603 |
| Broadcast Date | AUGUST 26, 2019 |
| Episode Length | 29:52 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Roger Chang |
CNET’s Patrick Holland posted an impassioned plea Sunday titled “Apple needs to fix the iPhone 11’s buttons so accidental screenshots go away. What other changes would folks like to see Apple fix on the iPhone 11?
Quick Hits
- NASA officially opened the Aitken supercomputer at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. Capable of 3.69 petaflops of theoretical performance, Aitken uses 46,080 2nd generation Intel Xeon cores and 221 TB of storage. Aitken's uses a modular design to save enegry and easily expand compute or data storage capabilities, supporting up to 16 additional modules. An earlier prototype was able to save 2 million kilowatt-hours of power and over 3 million gallons of water in 2018 using a similar design. The supercomputer will first get to work modeling and simulating the entry, descent and landing to the moon for the Artemis project.
- Nvidia and VMware announced a partnership to allow for virtualization of GPUs, either on-premises or in the cloud via VMware Cloud on AWS. Nvidia's vComputeServer will provide the virtualization framework and is optimized to run on VMware's vSphere. This will allow a single GPU to be shared by multiple users, as well as aggregate GPUs for larger tasks. vComputeServer will support Nvidia's data processing and machine learning libraries called Rapids, as well as containerized applications.
Top Stories
- French President Emmanuel Macron announced he and US president Donald Trump have agreed on a compromise regarding French taxation of tech companies. Essentially, France will continue with its current plans to tax tech companies until a new "Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development" (OECD) framework is agreed next year. That framework is meant to tax companies based on where they operate, not where they're headquartered. The current French plan requires that marketplace and advertising companies that generate more than €750 million in global revenue and €25 million in France, to pay 3% of French revenue in taxes. That impacts mostly US tech companies. Tax paid under this French scheme, before the OECD framework is implemented, will be used as credits for the OECD plan and any overpayments will be refunded.
- Chromebooks are getting serious about the workplace. Dell unveiled the Latitude 5400 Chromebook Enterprise and Dell Latitude 5300 2-in-1 Chromebook Enterprise in 13 and 14-inch screen versions. Both laptops will offer 8th-gen Intel processors up to a Core i7, and be the first Chromebooks to offer up to 32GB of RAM. Both include enterprise-grade SSDs up to 1TB, and both offer optional LTE connectivity as well as USB-C docking. Year-round 24/7 Dell ProSupport and Google's Chrome Enterprise support is also available, as is the Google Admin console for managing Linux environments. The Latitude 5400 starts at $699 and the 5300 2-in-1 starts at $819, available August 27th.
- Canalys estimates Baidu is now the world’s number 2 vendor of smart speakers. Baidu claimed 17.3% of the worldwide market, despite only selling in China, with 4.5 million shipments in Q2 of this year. Google shipped 4.3 million units, falling to third. Baidu’s basic speakers start as low as 89 yuan ($12). Canalys attributed Google's fall in the rankings to the change to Nest branding and a focus on smart displays over smart speakers. Amazon leads the world with a 25% share of the market, shipping 6.6 million units. The global market grew 55.4% to 26.1 million units in Q2, though it declined 2.4% in the US.
- Taking part in France's G7 meetings, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced his government will seek to create a framework to block domains hosting extremist material. A 24/7 Crisis Coordination Centre would monitor the Internet and Australia's eSafety Commissioner would determine care-by-case what material should be blocked, though specific criteria have yet to be determined. The Commissioner will work with companies to be able to block content quickly during an attack. Large tech companies and telcos have until the end of September to detail how they would cooperate with the scheme. The Australian government is also considering legislation to force tech companies to improve overall safety.
- Monday, the Google Webmasters Twitter account responded to a post from July 29 by @Suhask93 that asked if referral traffic was considered as a ranking factor in search. The response read, "Hi Suhas! No, traffic to a website isn't a ranking factor. If you're starting to get relevant traffic & users love your site, that's a good start though!" On the Seroundtable.com website, readers have joined in with a range of skepticism, from cogent theories on what Google might actually do like monitoring backlinks, to sarcastic posts like, "Websites themselves are not a ranking factor."
Discussion
Thing of the Day
- The Amateur Traveler Chris Christensen is back with some news on TripAdvisor's newest filter.
Mailbag
- I wanted to tell you my antirobocall strategy. I have an Apple Watch to get all my noncall notifications on so I have my phone set to dnd with contacts and still get all notifications. I call it the nuclear option. I get about 1 per day average over the last month but even that is too many. They seem to have slowed down for me lately.
- Sent by Carol
YouTube
Links
| Preceded by: "Cell Data Is Rotten In Denmark" |
Tax Wars: A New Hope |
Followed by: "Self-Yelp" |