Month: September 2017

Enlarge / This is what the Nikola Two will look like. (credit: Nikola Motor Company)

Salt Lake City-based Nikola Motor Company and German auto components giant Bosch are teaming up to build the Nikola One and Nikola Two—a pair of hydrogen-electric, long-haul trucks that will compete with the handful of other low-emissions trucks and powertrains that have been announced in mid-2017.

The Nikola One truck isn’t a new development, but the startup’s partnership with Bosch is. Last December, Nikola Motor Company announced that it would build a hydrogen-electric truck that would be able to travel 1,200 miles on a tank of hydrogen and deliver 1,000 horsepower and 2,000 foot-pounds of torque. The company said at the time that its truck, deemed the Nikola One, would be market-ready by 2020.

Now, that market-ready date has been pushed back to 2021, but adding Bosch’s experience into the mix no doubt helps firm up Nikola Motor Company’s projections. According to a press release from the startup, the class 8 Nikola One and Nikola Two will now be built on Bosch’s eAxle—an integrated unit blending motor, power electronics, and transmission. Bosch's eAxle was only just announced this January.

(credit: Pictures of Money Follow)

A few months ago, Stack Overflow published the terrible news that developers using spaces to indent their code earn more money than those using tabs, based on responses to the company's annual developer survey.

Today, Stack Overflow announced a slightly more useful application for that same data, with the Stack Overflow Salary Calculator. Tell it where you live, how much experience and education you have, and what kind of developer you are, and it WIll tell you the salary range you should expect to make in five national markets (US, Canada, UK, France, Germany) and a handful of cities (New York, San Francisco, Seattle, London, Paris, Berlin, Toronto).

(credit: Stack Overflow)

Some of the broad trends are no big surprise; for example, the chosen cities tend to pay more than their respective nations do, for example, a reflection of both their high demand for developers and their higher living expenses. Similarly, DevOps specialists and data scientists both earn well. This won't surprise anyone who follows the fashionable industry buzzwords; businesses are increasingly working to streamline and integrate their development and operational roles to make regular software deployments easier and more reliable, putting DevOps skills in high demand. Data science is similarly sought after with the growth of machine learning, data mining, and visualization.

Enlarge (credit: Mark Walton)

The Fire HD 10 was always the odd one out in the Amazon Fire tablet line up. Neither premium enough to warrant its £170/$230 price tag, nor cheap enough to excuse cost-cutting concessions like a 1280×800 pixel resolution screen (resulting in a paltry 149 PPI when stretched over 10-inches), there was little reason to recommend the HD 10 over its cheaper and smaller cousins.

I would, however, recommend the new Fire HD 10. Amazon has fixed the tablet's most glaring issues—the most important of which is the introduction of a full HD 1080p IPS display—while reducing the price to an impressive £150/$150. It even features a hands-free integration of Alexa, instead of the touch-to-talk of other Fire devices.

Few tablets boast a quality full HD screen for £150, let alone robust build quality and the backing of one of the biggest names in tech.

Enlarge / The iPhone 5S running iOS 11. Stay gold, phone-y-boy. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

One of my longtime pet projects has been tracking the performance of new iOS versions on the slowest hardware that can run it. I was pleasantly surprised by the iPhone 3GS and iOS 6, but after that I was in for several years of disappointments. The iPhone 4 struggled to run iOS 7 well, and the iPhone 4S only fared a little better with iOS 8 and iOS 9. Then, last year, a reprieve: iOS 10 ran pretty well on the iPhone 5 and 5C, slowing the phone down just a little but remaining totally livable in spite of it.

And now we come to iOS 11 and the iPhone 5S. Apple's transition to all-64-bit hardware and software, begun just four short years ago, has now completed, and the newest iPhones are easily four or five times faster. Does the iOS 11 update leave the original gold iPhone feeling shiny and new, or does it come away feeling tarnished?

What you’re missing

Every time a new iPhone is released, it does some stuff that previous iPhones couldn’t do. Sometimes that just means going faster, and sometimes that means the addition of special hardware like a fingerprint sensor or NFC chip. Here’s a combination of all the hardware and software features the iPhone 5S is missing relative to the iPhone 7, not including processor benchmarks or camera improvements.

Enlarge / Detail from the cover of Autonomous. (credit: Will Staehle)

My first novel, Autonomous, comes out today, and I'd like to share a scene from it that I hope Ars readers will enjoy.

One of the main characters in the novel is a newly made robot named Paladin, a military-grade sentient AI on a mission with a human agent named Eliasz. Part of Paladin's job is to gain intel from both humans and machines—though he finds social engineering far more perplexing than hacking.

In this scene, Paladin and Eliasz are tracking a notorious pharmaceutical pirate named Jack. Jack is an anti-patent activist who has become a kind of medicinal Robin Hood; she reverse-engineers patented drugs and sells them cheaply to people who can't afford medical care. Paladin and Eliasz have figured out that Jack is selling some of her drugs to a group of pirates in Iqaluit, a city on the Arctic Sea. To meet the pirates, Eliasz pretends to be a disgruntled ex-pharma worker who stole some IP from his previous employer and now wants to sell it on the black market. Paladin is pretending to be his damaged bot Xiu, who can't talk. The pirates' lair is hidden in an innocent-looking solar farm.