Month: December 2015

(credit: Ars Technica/Aurich Lawson)

Were you too busy enjoying the pleasures of friends and family to get the lowest-ever official prices on Xbox One and PS4 bundles over Black Friday weekend? Good news, procrastinators: Microsoft and Sony are giving you a second chance at those low prices.

All Xbox One bundles (listed below) are available at $50 off the usual price starting today through December 26, putting them as low as $299. Meanwhile, two PS4 bundles (including either Star Wars: Battlefront or Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection) are back at their $300 sale price through December 19. If you happened to buy either system at regular price in the last week or so... well, we hope you kept the receipt.

Don't be shocked if either Microsoft or Sony pivot from these "limited time offers" for the holidays to a permanent price drop for the consoles going in to next year. In 2014, the Xbox One dropped to $349 as a holiday promotion from November 2 through January 3. Two weeks after that offer expired, the company decided to stick with the $349 price for the longer term (Sony didn't drop the PS4 to $350 until October.)

(credit: D-Wave)

Two years ago Google and NASA went halfsies on a D-Wave quantum computer, mostly to find out whether there are actually any performance gains to be had when using quantum annealing instead of a conventional computer. Recently, Google and NASA received the latest D-Wave 2X quantum computer, which the company says has "over 1000 qubits."

At an event yesterday at the NASA Ames Research Center, where the D-Wave computer is kept, Google and NASA announced their latest findings—and for highly specialised workloads, quantum annealing does appear to offer a truly sensational performance boost. For an optimisation problem involving 945 binary variables, the D-Wave X2 is up to 100 million times faster (10⁸) than the same problem running on a single-core classical (conventional) computer.

Google and NASA also compared the D-Wave X2's quantum annealing against Quantum Monte Carlo, an algorithm that emulates quantum tunnelling on a conventional computer. Again, a speed-up of up to 10⁸ was seen in some cases.

(credit: Parti socialiste)

The European Commission's new "modern, more European" copyright framework, unveiled today, has ruled out a tax on hyperlinks. But it could still lead to the introduction of a Europe-wide ancillary copyright that would require people to pay a licensing fee for the use of short snippets online. This confirms earlier reports that the EU Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, Günther Oettinger, was "open" to the idea of imposing a "Google tax" on the use of snippets.

On the issue of ancillary copyright, also known as a Google tax, the document detailing the European Commission's plans contains the following comment: "the situation raises questions about whether the current set of rights recognised in EU law is sufficient and well-designed. For news aggregators, in particular, solutions have been attempted in certain Member States, but they carry the risk of more fragmentation in the digital single market."

The "solutions" refer to attempts by Germany and Spain to require search engines—particularly Google—to pay publishers for using snippets from their publications in search results. As Ars reported in July, these have been unmitigated failures, and it's troubling to see the European Commission countenance the idea of extending a Google tax to the whole of the EU on the pretext of addressing "fragmentation" in the digital single market.

Spotify may soon allow musicians to reserve their albums for paying subscribers only, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. Currently, music must be made available to both paying subscribers and those using the free ad-supported service, something which has proved to be a sticking point for artists like Taylor Swift, who pulled her entire catalogue from the service last year.

According to Spotify's artist guidelines, the service pays between $0.006 and $0.0084 per stream to rights holders, but notes that "the effective average per-stream payout generated by our Premium subscribers is considerably higher." If artists are able to focus their efforts purely on Spotify's 20 million paying users, the amount they earn per-stream might be reasonable enough to encourage artists like Taylor Swift to re-join the service.

The report adds that Spotify will be implementing the change with one artist initially in order to investigate how the approach might affect usage and subscription sign-ups. Who that artist might be remains up for discussion, but Spotify is said to have been in talks with Coldplay and the album "Head Full of Dreams." The deal fell through because the group's management couldn’t guarantee that it could keep the album off other free sites such as YouTube, according to the WSJ's sources.

Composite image of Abell 2744, with the smaller substructures visible around the larger central mass. (credit: ESA/XMM-Newton (X-rays); ESO/WFI (optical); NASA/ESA & CFHT (dark matter))

The cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) provides a glimpse at the baby Universe, shortly after its birth in the Big Bang. By mapping out the patterns and irregularities in this “baby picture,” researchers can get a rough idea of how much ordinary (baryonic, not dark) matter there should be in the present Universe, with respect to the dark.

The estimate they’ve obtained this way suggests that baryonic matter should account for about five percent of the stuff (energy content) in the Universe. But looking at the nearby Universe, researchers find a baryonic matter distribution that’s about half of this estimate.

One possible solution to this discrepancy is that the local Universe has lower density than elsewhere and that the filaments of the cosmic web have a higher percentage of baryonic matter. This scenario is suggested by computer simulations. Essentially, the idea is that this extra matter would be “warm-hot,” which in space just means the particles are moving around very quickly.