Find the soul

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):