Month: April 2021

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  Behold: the all-important top-down keyboard view. [credit: Dell ]

This time last year, we covered one of the first Ryzen 9 gaming laptops—Asus' ROG Zephyrus G14. A year later, Dell is joining the Ryzen-powered gaming laptop party with its new Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition.

Last year, the Achilles heel of Ryzen-powered gaming laptops was mediocre GPU selection—for whatever reason, most manufacturers didn't spec RTX 3000-series GPUs along with Ryzen processors. That's thankfully no longer the case in 2021—the new Alienware m15 pairs Ryzen 7 5800H or Ryzen 9 4900HX with up to 32GiB RAM and a choice of RTX 3060 or RTX 3070 graphics. (Asus is also offering high-end GPUs this year—we're in the process of hands-on testing a ROG Zephyrus G15 with Ryzen 9 5900HS and RTX 3070 this week.)

The new m15 offers three display choices—1080 p at 165 Hz or 360 Hz, or 1440 p at 240 Hz—and an optional keyboard upgrade to Cherry MX. There's a standard 2.5Gbps wired Ethernet adapter to go with the Killer AX1650 Wi-Fi 6—and unlike the ROG Zephyrus gaming laptops, the Alienware m15 has an integrated 720 p webcam.

Enlarge / SpaceX Starlink logo. (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images )

The Starlink broadband network will probably stick with one price instead of offering different tiers of service, SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell said yesterday.

"I don't think we're going to do tiered pricing to consumers. We're going to try to keep it as simple as possible and transparent as possible, so right now there are no plans to tier for consumers," Shotwell said, according to a CNBC article. Shotwell spoke during a panel discussion at the Satellite 2021 conference.

SpaceX has been charging $99 a month for the Starlink beta service, plus $499 upfront for the user terminal/satellite dish, mounting tripod, and router. Other satellite and terrestrial broadband services typically charge different prices for different speeds, and many of them impose a data cap and charge extra fees to those who exceed the limit.

Enlarge / It's resurrected. But is it good? Find out in real time as I get world-premiere access to unrestricted gameplay via Ars' Twitch channel on Thursday, April 8. (credit: Blizzard)

A lot is riding on Blizzard's next remaster project, Diablo II Resurrected.

After successfully spit-shining StarCraft Remastered in 2016, the Blizzard Classic team followed with the unforgivable milkweed that is WarCraft III: Reforged—and I say "unforgivable" because we're currently eight unfulfilled months beyond that game's last tease of highly demanded features. That's harsh stuff for anyone who chose to spend $30 (or more) on Reforged, so it still needs fixing before we can pretend the company's shaky reputation is anywhere near restored. (Representatives for multiple Activision and Blizzard projects have still yet to respond to my ongoing questions about WC3R. After a no-show at BlizzCon 2021, the developer blamed "the nature of the world today" in March for a lack of updates, even though fans had created their own grassroots WC3R solutions in that same span of time.)

Having said that, there's arguably a larger audience in the world that has moved on from WarCraft III yet still has a soft spot for one of Blizzard's most enduring classic games: Diablo II. Twenty-one years later, Diablo II's gameplay core holds up remarkably well and certainly more so than the original, genius-yet-clunky Diablo. I love Diablo II, and I love the idea of a refreshed, allegiant Diablo II.

Enlarge (credit: Ron Amadeo/Google/Rust)

Just last month, we saw the first baby steps toward the adoption of the memory-managed Rust programming language into the Linux kernel. Google has apparently been thinking along the same lines, and in a lengthy blog post Tuesday, the company announced that the Android Open Source Project now supports Rust for low-level OS components.

The Android team does a ton of work pushing Kotlin and Java for app developers, but those languages rely on the Android Runtime (ART) in order to function. You can't write anything lower-level than ART in Java, since there would be no runtime environment to run it on. In the past, Google has typically used C or C++, but neither of these are memory-managed languages, and that opens Android up to memory leaks and buffer overflows.

Google lays out the benefits of Rust over C/C++, saying, "Rust provides memory safety guarantees by using a combination of compile-time checks to enforce object lifetime/ownership and runtime checks to ensure that memory accesses are valid. This safety is achieved while providing equivalent performance to C and C++." In line with similar stats that Microsoft has published, Google's blog post says that "memory safety bugs continue to be a top contributor of stability issues, and consistently represent ~70% of Android’s high severity security vulnerabilities."

Enlarge / The Muon g-2 particle storage ring, now housed at Fermilab. (credit: Cindy Arnold/Fermilab)

The Muon g-2 experiment (pronounced “gee minus two”) is designed to look for tantalizing hints of physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. It does this by measuring the magnetic field (aka the magnetic moment) generated by a subatomic particle known as the muon. Back in 2001, an earlier run of the experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a slight discrepancy, hinting at possible new physics, but that controversial result fell short of the critical threshold required to claim discovery.

Now, Fermilab physicists have completed their initial analysis of data from the updated Muon g-2 experiment, showing "excellent agreement" with the discrepancy Brookhaven recorded. The results were announced today in a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

As I wrote at Nautilus in 2013, before the muon was first discovered in 1936, physicists thought their model of particle physics was pretty much complete. Then Caltech physicists Carl Anderson and Seth Neddermeyer, who were studying cosmic rays, noticed that some particles didn’t curve as expected when they passed through a magnetic field. A year later, cloud chamber experiments confirmed that these particles were, indeed, new. It was such a surprising development that I.I. Rabi famously declared, “Who ordered that?”

Enlarge / We don't have any leaked images of the new Surface models, so you'll have to make do with this 2019 stock photo of Surface models at a Microsoft store in Guangzhou. (credit: SOPA Images via Getty Images)

Earlier today, Microsoft support placeholders briefly appeared for two upcoming Surface Laptop 4 models—one AMD, and one Intel. The placeholders were spotted by @walkingcat:

The placeholders are already gone, but German news site WinFuture provided more details last month. The AMD models will feature last-gen models Ryzen 5 4680U and Ryzen 7 4980U, while the Intel models feature the brand-new Core i5-1145G7 and Core i7-1185G7.

According to that WinFuture report, the AMD models will once again only be offered at lower specifications. Intel models will go up to 32GiB RAM and 1TB storage; the AMD models will be capped at maximums of 16GiB and 512GB, respectively. On the plus side, the AMD models are rumored to be available with 13.5-inch screens for the first time this year.

Enlarge / The line down the middle is where the trapped ions reside. (credit: Honeywell)

About a year ago, Honeywell announced that it had entered the quantum computing race with a technology that was different from anything else on the market. The company claimed that because the performance of its qubits was so superior to those of its competitors, its computer could do better on a key quantum computing benchmark than quantum computers with far more qubits.

Now, roughly a year later, the company finally released a paper describing the feat in detail. But in the meantime, the competitive landscape has shifted considerably.

It’s a trap!

In contrast to companies like IBM and Google, Honeywell has decided against using superconducting circuitry and in favor of using a technology called "trapped ions." In general, these use a single ion as a qubit and manipulate its state using lasers. There are different ways to create ion trap computers, however, and Honeywell's version is distinct from another on the market, made by a competitor called IonQ (which we'll come back to).