Daily Tech News 17 March 2023

• A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past. (Motherboard)
  
  It doesn't.
  
  
  

• A new treatment for prostate cancer kills the tumour with a nanoknife. (Telegraph)
  
  Which is basically a tiny electrified scalpel, which can kill the cancerous cells while leaving the healthy tissue intact. It's minimally invasive, can be done on an outpatient basis, and early cases indicate it has significantly few side-effects and less chance of infection than even over minimally invasive methods.
  
  
  
• The 2023 version of the Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED is here. (Asus)
  
  This one has a 14.5" 2880x1800 120Hz OLED touchscreen (with 100% of DCI-P3 colour space), a 12.7" 2880x864 IPS display with stylus support, and in the model sold here in Australia, a 14 core Intel 13900H, 32GB of RAM, Nvidia RTX 4050 graphics with 6GB of VRAM, a 1TB SSD, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one regular USB port, HDMI 2.1, a headphone jack, and a microSD slot. Plus a barrel jack for a power supply so you don't need to tie up a Thunderbolt port for charging.
  
  It doesn't have the Four Essential Keys, but that's not a design mistake: There's no room. What it does have is an app that lets you put custom controls on the second screen that can do whatever you want, so you can make your own Four Essential Keys.
  
  The RTX 4050 looks to be somewhere between the performance of the laptop and desktop versions of the 3060, so it's pretty decent for basic gaming. There's also a version of the laptop with an RTX 4060 but it doesn't seem that model has made it to these shores.
  
  It's not cheap, and it's a bit heavy for a 14" laptop at 1.75kg (3.85lb) but it's a very capable little machine.
  
  
  
• The Xerox Alto is 50 years old this month. (The Register)
  
  This is the system that showed off the very first graphical user interface - and had the very first mouse.
  
  This isn't the one that inspired Steve Jobs to create the Macintosh - that was the later Xerox Star - but its direct ancestor.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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