Daily Tech News 23 May 2021

• Several more sources are reporting on the new dual-actuator drive from Seagate. None of them mention the price.
  
  I think it's a pretty safe bet that it costs more than just buying two drives and putting them in RAID-1.
  
  
  
• You own nothing. (Motherboard)
  
  An airbag vest for motorcyclists sounds like a potentially neat idea. This one, though, silently after some warnings - probably - stops working if your monthly payment doesn't go through, which sounds to me like a great way for the manufacturer to get sued out of existence.
  
  Someone arrange the lawyers, I'll bring popcorn.
  
  
  

• AMD's socket AM5 is on its way with 1718 pins. (WCCFTech)
  
  That's about 400 more pins than AM4 but it doesn't sound like it will bring major functional changes. It will support DDR5 RAM, which requires more pins per module than DDR5 - each module provides two 32-bit channels each with independent addressing and ECC, instead of a single 64-bit channel. This adds about 40 signals per module but provides much better support for multi-threaded workloads.
  
  Zen 4 won't be out until next year, so the first parts to use socket AM5 will the upcoming Rembrandt APU with Zen 3 cores and RDNA2 graphics.
  
  (Similarly, the first parts on socket AM4 weren't Zen 1, but an APU built on an older Bulldozer family core. This allowed manufacturers to qualify their boards ready for the arrival of Ryzen.)
  
  
  
• How to disable Windows 10's crappy new newsfeed. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Alternately, install Start10 from Stardock.
  
  
  
• The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano is a 13" thin-and-light laptop with the Four Essential Keys. (Thurrott.com)
  
  The location of the keys is slightly awkward, but they are present, and in a laptop less than twelve inches wide and weighing under two pounds there's just not a whole lot of room for perfect keyboard layouts.
  
  It comes with an 11th gen Intel CPU, up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of NVMe storage, a 2160x1350 screen (a 16:10 ratio), two Thunderbolt ports, and a headphone jack.
  
  So I/O is rather on the light side. It does however have a fingerprint scanner and a physical shutter for the webcam, so when you turn it off, it is off.
  
  
  
• The Indian government has asked that social media companies remove references to "Bombay Bat Soup Death Plague", which is the term that took hold after they previously requested the same firms to remove references to the "Indian variant" of COVID-19. (Reuters)
  
  Slow learners.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:16 AM

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