Month: June 2022

Enlarge / Firefly’s second Alpha rocket is shipped from its test site in Texas to California in May. (credit: Firefly)

Nine months have passed since Firefly’s Alpha rocket launched for the first time, lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Unfortunately, one of the rocket’s four main engines failed about 15 seconds into the flight, and the rocket was lost about two minutes later.

The period since then has been a difficult one for the company and its founder, Tom Markusic. In addition to dissecting the cause of the Alpha failure, Firefly also ran afoul of rules set by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, CFIUS.

In December, the Air Force blocked Firefly from working at the Vandenberg launch site due to these CFIUS complications with the company’s primary investor, Ukrainian Max Polyakov. Eventually, the issue was resolved this spring after Polyakov sold his interest in Firefly, and Firefly regained access to the launch site. But it was a messy and distracting situation at a time when Firefly needed to focus on reaching orbit.

Enlarge / Given an actual beam of light, a beamsplitter divides it in two. Given individual photons, the behavior becomes more complicated. (credit: Wikipedia)

Ars Technica’s Chris Lee has spent a good portion of his adult life playing with lasers, so he’s a big fan of photon-based quantum computing. Even as various forms of physical hardware like superconducting wires and trapped ions made progress, it was possible to find him gushing about an optical quantum computer put together by a Canadian startup called Xanadu. But, in the year since Xanadu described its hardware, companies using that other technology continued to make progress by cutting down error rates, exploring new technologies, and upping the qubit count.

But the advantage of optical quantum computing didn’t go away, and now Xanadu is back with a reminder that it still hasn’t gone away. Thanks to some tweaks to the design it described a year ago, Xanadu is now able to sometimes perform operations with more than 200 qubits. And it has shown that simulating the behavior of just one of those operations on a supercomputer would take 9,000 years, while its optical quantum computer can do them in just a few-dozen milliseconds.

This is an entirely contrived benchmark: Just as Google’s quantum computer did, the quantum computer is just being itself while the supercomputer is trying to simulate it. The news here is more about the potential of Xanadu’s hardware to scale.

Enlarge / We checked out the Dell UltraSharp U3223QZ in person in January. (credit: Scharon Harding)

On Tuesday, Dell listed the UltraSharp U3223QZ monitor for $1,600. The display would like to justify its price with a generously sized 32-inch IPS panel that claims twice the contrast as typical IPS monitors, an integrated 4K webcam, and 4K resolution. The four-figure asking price, along with the built-in camera, USB-C connectivity, and sleek finish put it in company with Apple’s 27-inch, 5K Studio Display. Both monitors provide unique options for people with larger budgets seeking elevated image quality, particularly Mac owners. But despite identical price tags, their best audiences significantly differ.

Dell UltraSharp U3223QZ vs. Apple Studio Display specs

While appealing to Windows users with ultralight PCs with USB-C power connections, Dell’s UltraSharp monitor line is also popular among Mac owners due to USB-C power delivery (PD), a stylish silver color, and thin bezels that complement the Apple aesthetic.

But a quick overview of the two monitors’ specs already provides insight into the different experiences you can expect from the $1,600 displays (note that all specs are manufacturer claims):

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

It’s Wednesday, which means the time has come for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best deals from around the web includes a bundle at Best Buy that gives you a 128GB SanDisk microSD card at no extra cost when you buy a 12-month Nintendo Switch Online Family Membership at its usual price of $35. We’ve seen this offer a couple of times before, but if you want to top up your subscription and could use more storage space on your Switch anyway, this deal is a roughly $20 savings. You should see the bundle after adding the Switch Online membership to your cart.

As a refresher, Switch Online is Nintendo’s equivalent of Sony’s PlayStation Plus or Microsoft’s Xbox Live Gold. It’s generally not as essential as those services are on their respective consoles—nor is it as generous at doling out bonus perks like free monthly games—but it’s cheaper, it’s required to use the online multiplayer modes of games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons or Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and it still nets you access to a bundle of mostly worthwhile SNES and NES games.

If you only need the service for yourself, you can just get an individual 12-month subscription for about $20, but the Family Membership here covers up to eight different Switch users in a designated “family group,” so it’s a better value for those buying in bulk. It’s also worth noting that this deal does not include the service’s “Expansion Pack” add-on, which starts at $50 a year and includes perks like DLC tracks for Mario Kart 8 and emulation apps for classic Nintendo 64 and Sega Genesis games.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Google TV is taking another step in its takeover of Google Play Movies. The app is rolling out to iOS on Wednesday, where it is an in-place upgrade for Google Play Movies & TV. As announced in March, Play Movies & TV is also losing its spot in the Play Store on Android this week, where it was a top-level tab. There’s now not much left of Play Movies & TV or Google’s original ambitions for the Play brand.

The Google TV app for iOS. (credit: Google)

We can talk about the new thing first: The Google TV app is out on iOS. On Android, the app is part media store, part content-aggregation guide. You might have noticed that there are a lot of streaming services. Google TV is like a modern-day TV guide, letting you know what shows are playing on which apps, and that function is making the jump to iOS. Google says iOS users can “take your library on the go” but only for “movies and shows you have previously rented or purchased with your Google account.” So it sounds like the store part of Google TV is not making the cut. If you have to run the Android TV or Google TV operating systems on your TV, you can also now use your iOS device as a remote control.

Google also finally went ahead with its plan to strip video purchases from the Play Store this week, making Google TV (well, and YouTube, I guess) the primary way to buy video content from Google on Android. Google Play was originally envisioned as an all-encompassing media empire, covering Google Play Music, Google Play Magazines/Newsstand, Google Play Movies & TV, and Google Play Books, all sold inside the Google Play Store. The Play Store ships as the default app store on all of the world’s 3 billion Android devices (“Android” is a registered trademark of Google and does not include forks). Lining Google’s highly trafficked app store with a slew of media content stores seemed (and still seems) like a solid strategy.