Month: January 2016

We've long cried out for laptops with lots of RAM, so that they can handle workloads as varied as hosting development virtual machines or running Chrome, and with Skylakes it looks as if they are arriving in abundance. The updated thin and light X1 range bump RAM up to 16GB, and in the rest of the business laptop range, there are now plenty of options that go even further than that.

Lenovo

Lenovo ThinkPad T460s

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When we reviewed it earlier this year, we felt the T450s was a solid corporate workhorse. Although a little larger than the X1s, it took more memory (up to 12GB), and sported much easier end-user servicing. Its Skylake successor will be available from February with prices starting at $1,059 and it provides more of the same: an Ultrabook built for business. It's still a fairly thin 3lb laptop, but now takes up to 24GB RAM, with optional discrete Nvidia GeForce 930M graphics, up to 512GB PCIe SSD, and a 2560×1440 screen.

At 0.74 inches, it's slightly thicker than the X1 range, but this extra width provides for a full size Ethernet port, full size HDMI, mini-DisplayPort and an optional smartcard reader. Lenovo says that servicing has also been improved: there are 5 captive screws that provide quick access to storage, memory, WWAN and Wi-Fi, and the batteries. Though this means that the machine has shed the VGA port that was included on the T450s, the options and accessibility mean that it packages a lot of power into a small system, without giving up serviceability.

LAS VEGAS—Last year's Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon was a return to form for Lenovo's X1 Ultrabook, with a keyboard to die for, strong performance, and a 14-inch screen in a 13-inch package. This year, Lenovo is taking the X1 branding—light, powerful, high-end machines—and diversifying it. No longer just a laptop, the company is launching a Yoga-brand 360-degree hinge X1 laptop, an X1 tablet, an X1 all-in-one PC, and even an X1 monitor.

Lenovo

2016 ThinkPad X1 Carbon

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Let's start with the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop. It's been bumped to support Intel's latest Skylake processors—and with it, up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of NVMe storage—and made a little slimmer with it, down to 0.65 inches. It's shed a little weight, down to 2.6lbs, while still managing to contain a slightly larger 52 Wh battery. It'll be available in February with prices starting at $1,299.

Lenovo's big novelty with the X1 Carbon is an optional docking station using WiGig. This short range, high speed (4.6 gigabits per second) technology uses 60GHz radios to transmit video, USB 3, and Ethernet data. The X1 WiGig docking station ($250, available this month) sports DisplayPort, HDMI, USB 3, USB 2, audio, and gigabit Ethernet ports, and makes docking as simple as putting the laptop near the docking station.

Twenty years ago this month, RFC 1883 was published: Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification. So what's an Internet Protocol, and what's wrong with the previous five versions? And if version 6 is so great, why has it only been adopted by half a percent of the Internet's users each year over the past two decades?

10 percent!

First the good news. According to Google's statistics, on December 26, the world reached 9.98 percent IPv6 deployment, up from just under 6 percent a year earlier. Google measures IPv6 deployment by having a small fraction of their users execute a Javascript program that tests whether the computer in question can load URLs over IPv6. During weekends, a tenth of Google's users are able to do this, but during weekdays it's less than 8 percent. Apparently more people have IPv6 available at home than at work.

World-wide IPv6 deployment as measured by Google. (credit: Google)

Google also keeps a map of the world with IPv6 deployment numbers per country, handily color-coded for our convenience. More and more countries are turning green, with the US at nearly 25 percent IPv6, and Belgium still leading the world at almost 43 percent. Many other countries in Europe and Latin America and even Canada have turned green in the past year or two, but a lot of others are still stubbornly staying white, with IPv6 deployment figures well below one percent. Some, including China and many African nations, are even turning red or orange, indicating that IPv6 users in those countries experience significantly worse performance than IPv4 users.

(credit: HRL Laboratories, LLC)

Ceramics have many useful properties: they can be extremely durable, and hold up to very high temperatures. Unfortunately simple flaws in the material can leave the door open for catastrophic failures, making manufacturing, especially of complex shapes, challenging.

Now, a team at a company called HRL Laboratories has described a method of 3D printing ceramics. The work, which combines a number of techniques that have already been in use, can create complicated structures that are very robust and able to withstand temperatures of up to 1,700 degrees Celsius.

The foundation of the work actually dates back to the 1960s. That's when researchers developed what are called polymer-derived ceramics. These are standard polymers made of chemicals that incorporate some of the materials that are typically used to make ceramic (such as silicon and nitrogen). Once the polymer is made in the desired shape, it can be heated, which causes it to undergo chemical reactions that decompose the organic portion of the polymer. Those escape as methane or carbon dioxide, leaving behind a ceramic composed of silicon, carbon, and nitrogen.

The coming of the new year gives us an opportunity to both look back wistfully and look forward with hope. It also offers a chance to look back with anger and toward the new year with a sense of cynicism and schadenfreude. So, in the interest of curdling your eggnog a bit, we're dusting off Ars' tech company "Deathwatch" list to see which companies we've tracked in the past have managed to survive, which have slipped into various levels of oblivion, and which companies need to be added to the stack to replace those that have either emerged victorious or have fallen irrevocably into corporate limbo.

First, a clarification of our criteria for what places a company on Deathwatch. To be considered, companies need to have experienced at least one of the following issues:

• An extended period of lost market share in their particular category
• An extended period of financial losses or a pattern of annual losses
• Serious management problems that raise questions about the business model or long-term strategy of the company

The Deathwatch took a holiday last New Year's, but our 2014 picks proved to be good for another 12 months of pain: RadioShack, BlackBerry, Zynga, HTC, and AMD. RadioShack, our most sickly suspect, restructured and then sold some of its stores to Sprint, closing the rest. While it still exists as a brand in some locations, the company has essentially ceased to exist. We rule that RadioShack has earned a toe-tag, while the others…well, they're largely in the same delicate condition they were in when we last did this list.

We test the McLaren 650S Spider. Cinematography by Ivan Flores, editing by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

OK, we'll admit it—there was a lot of excitement in the office leading up to our time with the McLaren 650S Spider. And why not? This is a proper carbon fiber supercar, built in the same factory as one of the most successful and storied Formula 1 teams. It's from the same company that built the legendary McLaren F1, a 240mph three-seater that to many—including yours truly—remains the greatest car ever to turn a wheel. We were the first publication to get any time with McLaren's latest press car, fresh off a boat from the UK with a mere 350 miles on the digital odometer. The following few days were extremely memorable, and the Volcano Red convertible earned its position as our favorite car of 2015.

McLaren has been building road cars for more than 20 years now. We shan't bore you too much with talk of the F1, save to say it was the first completely carbon fiber road car, and it came with a fantastic 6L BMW V12 engine, three seats, and a top speed that wasn't equalled until the Bugatti Veyron appeared with another 400hp. Sadly, just over 100 were ever built (the plan was to make 300), and today you'll need quite a lot of money to buy one. Recently, one sold for $12 million—not bad for a car that was selling for less than list price in the late 1990s.