Daily Tech News 21 April 2024

• Workers installing a light pole in Missouri dug into a fiber cable and cut off 911 services in Nebraska - I forgot Missouri has a border with Nebraska, South Dakota, which borders on Nebraska, and, somehow, Nevada. (AP News)
  
  Nevada is three states away from Missouri three different ways, and routing your emergency calls that distance to a single service provider is not the way I personally would choose to set things up.
  
  I've seen worse things - like the time a mail server couldn't send emails more than 500 miles - but not many.

• Everything we know about Nvidia's next generation Blackwell graphics cards. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nothing. We know nothing. The article is all speculative, and judging by its length the writer was paid by the word.
  
  
  
• NASA veteran's propellantless propulsion drive that physics said shouldn't work, doesn't. (The Debrief)
  
  This article is even worse nonsense than the previous one.
  
  
  
• The Zilog Z80 is being discontinued after 48 years of production. (Tech Spot)
  
  Order now if you want to stock up.
  
  The eZ80, an updated version that runs up to fifty times faster, will still be available.
  
  
  
• Need more storage? The Highpoint Rocket 1608A lets you install eight M.2 drives in a single PCIe slot. (WCCFTech)
  
  And it's PCIe 5.0, so it delivers up to 56GB of bandwidth per second. Which used to be a lot.
  
  Only downside is that it costs $1500, which also used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• I've started setting up my new laptop. It's a bit involved because I'm swapping out the 512GB SSD for a 2TB one, which means I have to create a recovery drive, and for some reason it really didn't want to do that with the first USB stick I gave it.
  
  Screen is great, keyboard is fine, speakers are, well, laptop speakers. Performance seems to be pretty good. The CPU is a Ryzen 7730U with a top speed of 4.5GHz, and I saw it hitting 4.3GHz while I was doing Windows updates.
  
  That's a problem I have with my current laptop; it's supposed to reach 4.7GHz but I've never seen it exceed 3.6.
  
  Oh, and I did the Shift-F10 / oobe\bypassnro trick to set up Windows without a Microsoft login, and it worked just fine.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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