Daily Archives: 2021-10-28

Facebook who? Zuckerberg announces rebranding as Meta

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Rename to confuse the waters because your brand has become so toxic that the name recognition is of negative value. Like Comcast calling itself "Xfinity."
Mark Zuckerberg speaks in front of a monitor that says Meta.

Enlarge / Facebook? Who is Facebook? My name is Meta! (credit: Facebook / YouTube)

As part of a Connect 2021 keynote presentation today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rolled out the name "Meta" as a new corporate identity reflecting the company's "new north star—to help bring the metaverse to life."

The name, which Zuckerberg noted comes from the Greek word for "beyond," is "a new company brand to encompass everything that we do." That means the company will be "looking at and reporting on our business as two different segments, one for a family of apps and one for work on future platforms," he said.

The name "Facebook," Zuckerberg said, "just doesn't encompass everything we do" anymore. While social media apps will "always" be a focus for Meta, it has been limiting to have a "brand that is so tightly linked to one product that it can't possibly represent everything we're doing today, let alone in the future," he said.

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The main thing about Phenylacetone meth is that there’s so much of it

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Huh, I'd never read what the post-pseudoephedrine-restriction meth synthesis methods were, the chemistry alone in this article is interesting. The apparently-in-vogue methods are a little less attractive-nuisance easy looking, but not exactly difficult, and starting with pretty common stock. Also, holy shit there is a lot of meth being made and consumed.
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Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W: 5x faster than the original for $5 more

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Oh man, that's a lot of utility in a tiny $15 package.
The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W.

Enlarge / The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. (credit: Raspberry Pi Foundation)

The diminutive Raspberry Pi Zero is getting its first upgrade in nearly five years. Today, Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton announced the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, a new $15 product that puts the processor from the Raspberry Pi 3 into a board the exact same size as the original Zero.

The new board swaps the old Zero's 1 GHz single-core ARM11 processor for a quad-core Cortex A53-based Broadcom BCM2710A1 processor, also clocked at 1 GHz—the same processor used in the original Raspberry Pi 3 released back in 2016, albeit clocked slightly lower. This is a substantial increase in power and capability for the Pi Zero, going from one core to four and from 32 bits to 64.

Upton said that the performance increase over the original Zero "varies across workloads" but that for multithreaded tasks like those simulated by sysbench, "it is almost exactly five times faster." Heat dissipation is provided by "thick internal copper layers" in the board, which should help prevent thermal throttling without the use of additional fans or heatsinks.

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