Month: March 2023

Enlarge / Event display of a W-boson candidate decaying into a muon and a muon neutrino inside the ATLAS experiment. The blue line shows the reconstructed track of the muon, and the red arrow denotes the energy of the undetected muon neutrino. (credit: ATLAS Collaboration/CERN)

It's often said in science that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Recent measurements of the mass of the elementary particle known as the W boson provide a useful case study as to why. Last year, Fermilab physicists caused a stir when they reported a W boson mass measurement that deviated rather significantly from theoretical predictions of the so-called Standard Model of Particle Physics—a tantalizing hint of new physics. Others advised caution, since the measurement contradicted prior measurements.

That caution appears to have been warranted. The ATLAS collaboration at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has announced a new, improved analysis of their own W boson data and found the measured value for its mass was still consistent with Standard Model. Caveat: It's a preliminary result. But it lessens the likelihood of Fermilab's 2022 measurement being correct.

"The W mass measurement is among the most challenging precision measurements performed at hadron colliders," said ATLAS spokesperson Andreas Hoecker. "It requires extremely accurate calibration of the measured particle energies and momenta, and a careful assessment and excellent control of modeling uncertainties. This updated result from ATLAS provides a stringent test, and confirms the consistency of our theoretical understanding of electroweak interactions.”

Enlarge / I mostly recognize this early laptop from its resemblance to a similar-looking computer in the film 2010. It's up for auction along with hundreds of other old Apple computers. (credit: Julien's Auctions)

If you've been thinking your home or workspace is perhaps deficient when it comes to old Apple hardware, then I have some good news for you. Next week, a massive trove of classic Apple computing history goes under the hammer when the auction house Julien's Auctions auctions off the Hanspeter Luzi collection of more than 500 Apple computers, parts, software, and the occasional bit of ephemera.

Ars reported on the auction in February, but Julien's Auctions has posted the full catalog ahead of the March 30 event, and for Apple nerds of a certain age, there will surely be much to catch your eye.

The earliest computers in the collection are a pair of Commodore PET 2001s; anyone looking for a bargain on an Apple 1 will have to keep waiting, unfortunately.

The Pixel 7 in a lovely "hazel" color. (credit: Google)

We have a smorgasbord of discounts ranging from some of the latest Android smartphones to HP's desktop PCs, as well as savings on solid-state drives, headphones, and more. So whether you need to upgrade your storage, or you want to get a new Galaxy or Pixel phone, there's something in there to help you stay productive and entertained.

Android smartphone deals

Samsung's Galaxy S23 launched not too long ago, and we're starting to see discounts on the company's flagship handset series. The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra promises solid photography capabilities, with Samsung's "Nightography" for low-light images and the controversial 100X Space Zoom. Outside of the bump to a 200-megapixel sensor, this year's upgrades are more modest: You still get a similar design to the prior S22 series, and the faster, more efficient processor is considered a nice quality-of-life update. So while it may not be worth it for someone with last year's flagship to upgrade, if you're coming from an older phone, the S23 promises fast speeds, 5G connectivity, and a great camera experience.

• Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra with 256GB storage for $1,100 (was $1,200) at Amazon
• Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra with 512GB storage for $1,280 (was $1,380) at Amazon
• Samsung Galaxy S23+ with 256GB storage for $900 (was $1,000) at Amazon
• Samsung Galaxy S23+ with 512GB storage for $1,020 (was $1,120) at Amazon
• Samsung Galaxy S23 with 128GB storage for $750 (was $800) at Amazon
• Samsung Galaxy S23 with 256GB storage for $810 (was $860) at Amazon

If you prefer Google's Android operating system, the Pixel 7 delivers the purest version of the OS. Though the Pixel 7 doesn't come with the Galaxy's high zoom and megapixel count, Google's investment in AI and computation photography is no slouch, and the Pixel 7 delivers some of the best images captured on a smartphone with its unique camera bar design on the rear, and now you can get all that with up to a 25 percent discount. The larger Pixel 7 Pro has a 5x optical telephoto lens that can capture images with up to 30x Super Res zoom with digital cropping, whereas the non-Pro version lacks the telephoto shooter.

Enlarge (credit: Arm)

What's in store for the future of Arm? The company's owner, Softbank, has been in financial trouble lately, and that has caused Arm to bounce from one dramatic possibility to another. Initially Arm was put up for sale, and Nvidia was the front-runner to buy the company. That plan was shut down by regulators, and now "Plan B" is an IPO, which is supposed to happen on the NYSE sometime this year. If you want to succeed on the stock market, you've got to show revenue, and while Arm enables the sale of billions of dollars of devices around the world, the company's chip licensing scheme only brings in a comparatively small amount of money—around $500 million a quarter.

The Financial Times has a report on Arm's "radical shake-up" of its business model. The new plan is to raise prices across the board and charge "several times more" than it currently does for chip licenses. According to the report, Arm wants to stop charging chip vendors to make Arm chips, and instead wants to charge device makers—especially smartphone manufacturers—a fee based on the overall price of the final product.

Let's say Motorola makes a phone with a Qualcomm Snapdragon Arm chip. Previously, Qualcomm would have signed a deal with Arm for an Arm license, and that license would extend to anyone that buys a Qualcomm Arm chip, like Motorola. Qualcomm contributes a lot to its own chip designs, but when it comes to the Arm license it is basically an Arm reseller. Arm would now want a licensing fee from Motorola (and not Qualcomm?), and it would ask Qualcomm to not sell chips to anyone that doesn't have a licensing agreement with Arm.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Four and a half months after the chaotic rollout of paid checkmarks, Elon Musk's Twitter is following through on a plan to remove verification from individual accounts that don't pay $8 per month for a Twitter Blue subscription.

"Starting April 1, we'll be winding down our legacy Verification program and accounts that were verified under the previous criteria (active, notable, and authentic) will not retain a blue checkmark unless they are subscribed to Twitter Blue," a Twitter FAQ says. Twitter also stopped accepting applications for verification checkmarks under the old criteria.

"To keep your blue checkmark on Twitter, individuals can sign up for Twitter Blue here," Twitter said yesterday. "Organizations can sign up for Verified Organizations here."

Enlarge / Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4080. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

The video encoding hardware built into GeForce GPUs is getting a small boost, according to a quietly updated Nvidia support page (as spotted by Tom's Hardware). Previously, the NVENC encoder built into GeForce GPUs could encode up to three video streams simultaneously. Now, most GPUs supported by Nvidia's current drivers can encode up to five streams of video simultaneously, unlocking capabilities that had always been present in the hardware but that were software-limited in consumer GPUs.

It's unclear exactly when Nvidia made this change, but archival snapshots on the Internet Wayback Machine show the old three-stream limit as recently as March 18, so you may need to install the most recent drivers to unlock the additional encoding capabilities. Your video quality settings may also limit the number of video streams you can encode simultaneously.

Most GeForce GPUs going back to the 2014-era Maxwell architecture now support the extra simultaneous streams, so you don't need a new or powerful video card to benefit from the change (though there are some models, particularly MX-series GPUs for budget laptops, that still don't have any video encoding capabilities, presumably because they're missing the hardware). Models as old as the GeForce 750 Ti are on the list, as are most GeForce 900, 1000, 2000, 3000, and 4000-series cards. The kinds of video you can encode will still come down to what your GPU's hardware encoder actually supports; that Nvidia support document lists supported codecs, color depths, and other specs for each GPU.