Weekly Roundup: Friday, 6 October, 2017
Here are some links I thought were worth sharing this week:
INFRASTRUCTURE
Microsoft and Facebook just laid a 160-terabits-per-second cable 4,100 miles across the Atlantic
"Microsoft, Facebook, and the telecoms infrastructure company Telxius have announced the completion of the highest capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic Ocean. The cable is capable of transmitting 160 terabits of data per second, the equivalent of streaming 71 million HD videos at the same time, and 16 million times faster than an average home internet connection, Microsoft claims. The cable will be operational by early 2018."
FCC will allow Alphabet’s Project Loon to deliver air balloon LTE to Puerto Rico
"The Federal Communications Commission yesterday granted Alphabet-owned Project Loon an experimental license to operate in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands for the purpose of helping the islands regain connectivity. The license extends from October 6th until April 4th, 2018"
Elon Musk says he can rebuild Puerto Rico's power grid with solar
"Renewable energy entrepreneur Elon Musk says he could rebuild Puerto Rico's shattered electrical infrastructure with his solar energy technology."
DEVELOPMENT
Apple open-sourced the kernel of iOS and macOS for ARM processors
"Apple has always shared the kernel of macOS after each major release. This kernel also runs on iOS devices as both macOS and iOS are built on the same foundation. This year, Apple also shared the most recent version of the kernel on GitHub. And you can also find ARM versions of the kernel for the first time."
Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js
"Next week, we are going to relicense our open source projects React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under the MIT license. We're relicensing these projects because React is the foundation of a broad ecosystem of open source software for the web, and we don't want to hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons."
Facebook just changed the license on React. Here’s a 2-minute explanation why.
Interesting to see the timeline of Facebook's change from "BSD+Patents" license to the MIT license over the past few month.
COMPANIES
All the Greatest Gadgets Announced at Google’s Big Show
"GOOGLE HAS BIG dreams for the future. “In an AI first world, computers should adapt to help people live their lives,” said CEO Sundar Pichai at the company’s big hardware event today. No one wants to think about the technology that lets them move from screen to screen, or which phrases Google Assistant can or can’t understand. People just want it to work. That’s the big theme that extends across everything Google announced today, from the brains behind its new generation of Pixel phones to the newly miniaturized and maximized Google Home devices. With a smart combination of hardware, software, and artificial intelligence, it all just works."