Daily Tech News 8 Centaurus 2023

• The FAA has grounded 170 Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft after important bits fell off one of them. (MSN)
  
  Nobody was killed, but this is what is referred to in the industry as "not a good look".
  
  Maybe we should wait for the Apple iPlane. (Twitter)
  
  Sure they're shiny overpriced toys, but the thing fell 16,000 feet to the ground and it's not even scratched.

• The East Coast is sinking at a worrying rate, by which they apparently mean, not nearly fast enough. (Ars Technica)
  
  By 2mm per year. Where I live, that would have the waves lapping at the bottom of the hill I'm near the top of in just, oh, half a million years, give or take.
  
  I had to hike up that hill today carrying the full set of The Art of Computer Programming, because while the post office is fine with leaving packages sent through the mail, here in the middle of nowhere they also handle the last mile (really, the last 60 to 200 miles) for a lot of the big parcel services.
  
  So if I just order stuff normally, they leave it on my front porch if I can't come to the door. But if I pay for expedited delivery so it goes via UPS rather than through the mail, they're not permitted to do so.
  
  Meanwhile parts of Jakarta are sinking by up to 10 inches per year. (Wired) (archive site)
  
  I love how they breathlessly segue from Jakarta rapidly sinking into the mud to San Francisco sinking by 0.07 inches a year - 140 times slower, and a little less than the 2mm mentioned above for the Eastern seaboard.
  
  
  
• Acer has shown off a new 7680x2160 57" curved monitor. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's just what I'm looking for. With two 4K monitors, you have a gap in the middle, and with three it's too wide to see everything. With this thing you can divide the space into three 2560x2160 sections, have your IDE in front of you, SSH sessions on the left, and the actual application you are developing on the right.
  
  Perfect, except that it costs $2499. For that price you could easily get eight good 27" 4K monitors - 95% DCI-P3, USB-C, tilt and pivot stands, all of that. (Which I currently have three of.)
  
  So nice try, but no.
  
  
  
• Samsung has announced the 990 Evo SSD range, with half support for PCIe 5.0. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is interesting and not pointless. The drive can either run with 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0 or two lanes of PCIe 5.0. Both deliver a maximum of 8GB per second, and the drive itself runs at 5GB per second. It's not the fastest SSD in the world but that's perfectly acceptable.
  
  One thing that PCIe 5 offers that hardly any manufacturers have adopted is that instead of giving you the same number of slots at twice the speed, you can effectively have twice as many slots as before at the same speed. Most of us don't need 15GB per second SSDs, but an extra M.2 or PCIe slot would be welcome in many computers.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is killing Wordpad. (The Register)
  
  It had no room the shovel in ads or AI, so it had to go.
  
  
  
• I see the problem, Mrs. Cleaver. It appears little Theodore is a robot you bought at Ikea, and your husband put the head on backwards. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Withings' "BeamO" multiscope is supposedly a digital thermometer (sure), pulse oximeter (maybe), stethoscope (I guess), and "medical-grade" ECG (horseshit).
  
  (Check out the photo.)
  
  
  
• Tulsa's tech scene remains resilient despite (checks notes) the state government's moves to stamp out illegal racism in hiring practices. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Huh.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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