• The entry-level PC market - systems priced between $500 and $1000 - is predicted to be wiped out by 2028.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The leading cause of this mass extinction is everyone's favourite villain, Sam Altman of OpenAI.  CPU and motherboard prices haven't moved, but RAM prices have increased 300 to 500%, with video cards as collateral damage, and storage prices are heading into the stratosphere as well.
  
  I suspect the video game market will be forced to adjust to lower average specs for the next few years.  Either that or they're going to lose all their remaining customers to indie titles that run fine on ten-year-old hardware.
  
  Hytale recommends a Radeon 400 series, a range that came out in 2016.  Silksong recommends a Radeon 380 from 2015, but will run on a Radeon 7750 from 2012.  And that means it will run on pretty much any laptop's integrated graphics.
  
  Custom PC builders are going to be hurting for years, though.

• We've cured cancer in mice.  Again.  (Science Daily)
  
  The new treatment this time uses a metal-organic framework - iron-based nano-particles - to trigger oxidative stress with the tumour cells while leaving healthy tissue untouched.
  
  
  
• Lenovo has announced a whole bunch of expensive toys at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, including the latest Legion Tab.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The Legion Tab 5 is slightly better and a whole lot more expensive that the Legion Tab 3 I have.  Display resolution is up from the already excellent (for an 8.8" tablet) to 3040x1904, and the CPU has been upgraded from an already fast Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 to a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.
  
  The microSD card slot on earlier models has not returned, nor has the headphone jack.  And the MSRP is two and a half times what I paid for mine, making it an easy upgrade to skip.
  
  
  
• ClawJacked is an attack that lets people break into your local OpenClaw instances by getting you to load a web page.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Because web pages running on your browser are free to access websocket services running on your local PC, which is something OpenClaw does.  OpenClaw is password protected but not rate-limited on its local ports, so code running in your browser can simply keep guessing.
  
  I won't judge OpenClaw harshly on this one.  Too few developers understand that this is even possible, let alone take any measures to guard against it.
  
  
  
• I said I was done buying new computer bits.  I lied.
  
  As I mention on my own blog yesterday, I was wandering around the web looking for specs for something - I've since forgotten what I was looking for - when I noticed that an Aussie online store was selling 4TB SSDs at the 2TB price.
  
  I was very good.  I wanted to buy eight.  I bought two.  About $290 each including tax and shipping, which is a damn good price for a PCIe 4.0 TLC drive right now.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Didn't have anything on my list for today, so here's the opening song for last year's stand-out anime series, Ruri Rocks.  It's the story of Ruri, and rocks.



Yes, the older girl does carry a medieval war hammer on her back.  Gotta carry protection against bears and sudden outcroppings of feldspar.

Bonus: A full-length music video by the vocalist.



Oh, and a trailer for Witch Hat Atelier just popped up.

Despite its looks, this one is not all sweetness and light.  The manga is excellent, though, and I have high hopes for the anime.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 03 2026 01:28 AM (cv9yd)

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