Month: November 2021

Enlarge / A man walks through "In America: Remember," a public art installation commemorating all the Americans who have died due to COVID-19, on the National Mall September 21, 2021, in Washington, DC. The concept of artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg, the installation includes more than 660,000 small plastic flags, some with personal messages to those who have died, planted in 20 acres of the National Mall. (credit: Getty Images / Drew Angerer)

More than 5 million people worldwide have now died from COVID-19, according to data tracking by Johns Hopkins University. The global case count is nearly 250 million.

The official death tally reached 5,004,524 million as of late Monday, but that number is certainly an undercount. Some experts suspect the actual death toll may be as high as 10 million.

The milestone comes as cases and deaths are on the decline in the US. This summer's wave of cases driven by the hypertransmissible delta variant is finally subsiding. But cases are still quite high and now hovering around 73,000 a day.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Update (11/6/21 9:00am EDT): For this weekend's Dealmaster roundup, we've updated our list of the best offers we can find from the various "early Black Friday" sales going on at Amazon, Best Buy, Target, and other retailers this week. We've ensured that the prices of our curated picks are all up to date, and we've added a few new offers, marked below by the "NEW" tag.

Our additions include a joint-lowest price on Amazon's latest Fire HD 10 tablet, which we recommend for those on a budget who want a large-screen tablet for casual media consumption. It's down to $100. Meanwhile, the PS5 and PS4 versions of Hades, our 2020 game of the year, are available for a new low of $20. A couple of HyperX gaming headsets we like, the Cloud Alpha and budget-friendly Cloud Stinger, are also down to lower-than-usual prices at $60 and $30, respectively. We've also got an all-time low on the Sky Blue version of Apple's high-performing AirPods Max noise-canceling headphones, discounts on Amazon's Kindle Unlimited and Music Unlimited services, a good price on a well-reviewed Lenovo Chromebook, and a new low on an excellent gaming chair from AndaSeat. You can find all these offers, along with a refreshed version of our original roundup, below.

Original post (11/1/2021 6:30pm EDT): With each passing year, "Black Friday" becomes more and more like "Black November." What used to be a single weekend of sales has increasingly stretched out to weeks of breathless promotions. Much to the dismay of the Dealmaster's work-life balance, this trend is not stopping any time soon. So, right on cue, retailers such as Amazon and Best Buy have already started to roll out so-called "early Black Friday" events that promise to offer the same discounts that'll be available at the end of the month.

Enlarge / Building a lot of these would pay for itself, albeit indirectly. (credit: Picture Alliance / Getty Images)

The use of fossil fuels comes with a wide variety of externalized costs. The big focus tends to be on the carbon dioxide fossil fuel produces and its role in warming the climate. But fossil fuels also cause environmental damage when they're extracted, and burning them produces particulate pollution and ozone. Those substances have downstream effects on human health and agriculture. If all of these costs were included in the price of fossil fuels, then alternatives would be far more competitive.

There have been numerous attempts over the years to quantify these externalized costs. Some look at the issue from a purely economic perspective, and others look at efforts to inform policy. These efforts tend to be based on our best understanding at the time, however; as our knowledge improves, the figures can be worth revisiting. That's exactly what's been done by a team of researchers at Columbia and Duke Universities who use current climate scenarios and updated health data.

The researchers' results say that, even if you ignore the climate benefits, moving away from fossil fuels rapidly would lead to benefits that, in the US alone, can add up to trillions of dollars before the century is over.

Enlarge / An augmented reality demo by Apple. (credit: Apple)

In the past few days, two new reports have shed light on the specifications and strategy behind Apple's upcoming mixed reality headset. Both claim that Apple is on a path to launching its first augmented reality/virtual reality headset as soon as next year and that the product will feature ultrahigh-end specifications and technologies.

Writing in his weekly Bloomberg newsletter, reporter Mark Gurman says the new headset will feature "advanced" chips, displays, and sensors and that it will have "avatar-based features." That latter point indicates that Apple has a similar vision for how the headset could be used to that of Meta, whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been declaring a vision of social interconnectedness through AR and VR experiences.

Gurman also writes that Apple's first headset will be a mixed reality one, supporting both VR and AR applications. The long-rumored consumer AR glasses will come much later, "years down the road." While investment has been pouring into research on AR technology, there remain numerous major technological roadblocks to mass-market consumer AR glasses, and it is unclear when all that investment might translate into a viable, mainstream product.

Anyone who follows online gaming knows that new titles often have a few issues at launch and that those issues can need a few post-launch updates to iron them out. Still, Amazon's long-delayed New World has played host to some surprising bugs, security issues, and exploits in recent weeks.

This weekend, reports started filtering in from players who had discovered how to insert and process their own HTML code inside New World's chat box (thanks, apparently, to some improper input scrubbing). This resulted in some amusing visual trolling, as players could use specific HTML to spam giant pictures of in-game sausages or even display large yellow boxes above their characters to block the other players' in-game view. Other trolling was more severe, like gold duplication exploits and HTML code that could crash the game if a player hovers over a certain bit of text.

On Friday, New World Community Manager Luxendra posted that the team had just that day "discovered an issue where players were able to post images and other links in the chat that resulted in unsavory behaviour." Luxendra added that the developers "have enabled a fix that should resolve this issue and prevent players from abusing and exploiting this feature."

Enlarge / Illustration of an ABL RS1 rocket that will carry Amazon broadband satellites. (credit: Amazon)

Amazon plans to launch its first prototype broadband satellites in Q4 2022, which would be nearly four years after SpaceX launched its first prototype Starlink satellites.

"This morning, we filed an experimental license application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch, deploy, and operate two prototype satellites for Project Kuiper," Amazon said in a blog post. "These satellites—KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2—are an important step in the development process. They allow us to test the communications and networking technology that will be used in our final satellite design, and help us validate launch operations and mission management procedures that will be used when deploying our full constellation."

Amazon said it will launch the satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on ABL Space Systems' RS1 rocket, as part of a multilaunch deal the companies announced today. Amazon's prototype satellites will operate at an altitude of 590 km.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

Anecdotal reports from over the weekend indicate that the macOS Monterey update may be bricking some Macs during installation, leaving the machines unresponsive. MacRumors has rounded up a representative swath of complaints from the Apple Support Communities forums and Twitter, mostly describing the same symptoms: unresponsive Macs that can't be revived using the typical SMC and NVRAM diagnostic catch-alls.

The reports rounded up by MacRumors mention multiple Intel Mac models, ranging from the 2015 model year all the way up to 2020, but don't mention Apple Silicon models—this makes some sense, since they update a bit differently than Intel Macs and may not be susceptible to the same problems.

We've asked Apple about these anecdotal reports to see if there are any issues the company is aware of or guidance it has for people whose hardware stops responding to input after a software update. We also have our own recommendations, as well as some hypotheses about why these major updates sometimes seem to cause a higher-than-usual number of hardware problems.