The Echo For The Rest Of The World

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The Echo For The Rest Of The World
Number 2766
Broadcast Date MAY 22, 2016
Episode Length 53:59
Hosts Peter Wells
Guests James Croft

Apple Bricking iPads, The NBN Police Rids, and Google Prepares to Ship The Echo to the Rest of the world.

Guest

Headlines

Apple has pulled the iOS 9.3.2 update for the 9.7-inch iPad Pro and is working on a fix. Update 9.3.2 reportedly 'bricked' some iPad Pro's out in the wild, including the iPad Pro of a friend of mine - although my iPad took the update without issue.
The Facebook trending timeline story refuses to die, this time the New York Times joins the discussion, interviewing a few former Facebook engineers, who said human intervention over the algorithm was needed. Quote "Facebook’s trending algorithms, which identify the most-talked-about terms, were not very good at discerning what was and was not news. Left to their own devices, roughly 40 percent of what Facebook’s algorithms dug up would be junk or “noise,” a result of many people using the same word at the same time across the network. The algorithm might pick up a sharp rise in the word “Skittles” and deem it a trending topic — not exactly the events Facebook had in mind. That is where humans came in. Facebook enlisted a set of 20-somethings as curators, copy editors and team leads, charged with sifting through the material the algorithms unearthed. They were crucial, they were told, to improving Facebook’s ability to discern, over time, what constitutes news.
Boing Boing reports the Oculus has changed its DRM to exclude Revive, a "proof-of-concept compatibility layer between the Oculus SDK (software development kit) and OpenVR," that let players buy software in the Oculus store and run it on competing hardware.
The last few days people have been sharing the story that Uber can see if your phone battery is low (of course they can!) and that Uber users will pay surge pricing if their battery is low - but that these two factoids are totally unrelated and Uber would never use this information to show low battery users surge pricing.
The NBN - Australia's National Broadband Network, has been the biggest tech story in this country for a number of years. The story took an interesting turn on Thursday night, when the Australian Federal Police raided the Melbourne office of former communications minister Senator Stephen Conroy and the home of a Labor staffer, over documents that were leaked to the media earlier in the year. The documents explain the HFC Network the NBN was hoping to use was in such disrepair, much of the network would need replacing. Senator Conroy, who's offices were raided by the police, was the original father of the NBN, and wanted a Fibre to the home network, rather than mixed mode HFC and fibre rollout. He was replaced as communications minister by Macolm Turnbull, who is now Prime Minister of the country and two weeks into an election campaign. I find it amazing that the AFP would consider the leaked documents of such national importance that it would mount a raid on a politician's office in the middle of an election campaign. The Sydney Morning Herald has a great explainer of what has happened so far.
Staying in Australia, the ABC reports the Transport Accident Commission of Victoria wants to install alcohol breath test machines at the boom gates of carparks of licensed venues. If a motorist is over the legal limit, the boom gate will not let them drive home.

Weekend Rewind

Discussion

Sunday Stars

Peter's Star
James's Star

Links



Preceded by:
"It’s not a bar, it’s a grove!" 		The Echo For The Rest Of The World
 Followed by:
"Beating the Self Driving Horse"
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