Friday, April 03
Daily News Stuff 3 April 2026
Problems R Us Edition
Problems R Us Edition
Top Story
- houston@nasa.gov, we have a problem. (Tom's Hardware)
The crew of the Artemis II mission - basically retreading the path of Apollo 10, 97 years ago - ran into an issue that didn't happen last time: The spacecraft's computer has two instances of Microsoft Outlook running, and neither one works.
At least that's better than unidentified floating poop (though we may yet come to that) or a Main B Bus Undervolt.
- Speaking of things not working those new LG-made 1Hz laptop display panels have been put to the test and they don't. Don't not work, that is. They work exceptionally well. (Tom's Hardware)
These displays are designed to automatically lower the refresh rate to as little as 1Hz (from a maximum of 120Hz) when the user is looking at a static screen, since the constant refresh cycle is a major power draw.
Tested in Dell's latest XPS 14 model (which I think is the first laptop shipping with these panels) a battery life test simulating simple web browsing with the screen brightness set to 150 nits saw the laptop lasting 43 hours. That's three times longer than Apple's M5 MacBook Air running with the same settings.
Apple's CPUs are more power-efficient than Intel's so heaver workloads handed the win to the Air, but the new display panel certainly proved itself.
Tech News
- OpenAI has acquired "popular" tech podcast TBPN, which I have never heard of and as far as I can tell nobody else has either. (CNBC)
Gotta burn through that latest $122 billion somehow, and buying a fawning press is one way.
And yes, Sam Altman has appeared multiple time on the show. I checked and the comments were... Not generous.
- A group pushing for age verification legislation to be forced upon AI turns out to be funded by... OpenAI. (Gizmodo)
Regulatory capture is back, baby!
- How Microsoft vaporised a trillion dollars. (Substack)
A six part article by a former Azure team member recounting the remarkable levels of dysfunction within that organisation.
It's amazing anything works at all.
- Everyone's not doing it: Delve, the compliance startup embroiled in endless allegations of not actually doing what they claim to do, is embroiled in further allegations of... Not actually doing what they claimed to do but related to something different this time. (Tech Crunch)
At question here was Delve's software offering Pathways which looked remarkably like open-source solution SimStudio with the numbers filed off. Delve disputed the allegations... And then scrubbed all mention of Pathways from its website.
- If you weren't planning to buy an iPhone, congratulations, now you are. (WCCFTech)
Apple is reportedly buying all the RAM available at inflated prices to force its competitors out of the market.
Samsung's mobile division tried to sign a long-term supply contract with Samsung's memory division last year - and was rebuffed in favour of putting the screws to Apple. A move that reportedly succeeded splendidly... For Samsung's memory division, which is now getting paid twice as much per gigabyte. Not for the rest of us.
- A look at Maxsun's Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G Turbo. (WCCFTech)
Intel's Arc Pro B60 is a professional-level graphics card using the same chip as the company's B580 consumer card, but with twice the memory - 24GB rather than 12GB.
Maxsun's iteration of this puts two B60s on a single card, and it acts... Exactly like two B60s. Exactly like two B60s, because the B60 only uses 8 lanes of PCIe 5.0 (not really a constraint given its healthy allotment of RAM), and this card requires your motherboard to set that slot in x8/x8 bifurcation mode so that the two units on the card are addressed independently.
(If you have something else sharing bandwidth on that slot so that it's already in x8 mode, only half of this card will work.)
Not sure exactly how it performs - the reviewer ran multiple benchmarks but doesn't provide direct comparisons to anything else. But for gaming, it performs exactly like a B580, because games only see one of the two GPUs on the card.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: No, Houston, the poop is not floating. It's worse than that.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:30 PM
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