Month: May 2019

Enlarge (credit: Getty / Aurich Lawson)

The final weekend in May marks the unofficial start of summer (at least at the Orbiting HQ, where our season simulator is aligned with the Northern Hemisphere). It's a time for farmers' markets, parades, and cookouts, if you're into those sorts of things. But who would want to spend time out under the Daystar absorbing UV radiation and swatting away flying disease vectors when you could be reading the latest from your favorite website?

We've got some improvements to Ars in the works. We plan to tweak the commenting system and are working on a complete overhaul of our mobile site. Part of what makes these improvements—and indeed, all of our work—possible is the support of our readers. To make that more enticing, we are offering 20% off any subscription to Ars Technica. Ars Pro is discounted to $20 from $25 and Ars Pro++ is just $40.

In addition to supporting our mission of bringing you the smart reporting Ars readers have come to love, subscribing to Ars comes with a bunch of other perks. All Ars Pro and Ars Pro++ subscribers get a completely ad-free experience. Based on reader feedback, we also removed all tracking scripts for subscribers. Beyond that, subscribers get Classic View (a throwback to the old-school Ars experience), full-text RSS feeds, premium forum access, and PDFs of all our stories.

Enlarge / Little. Yellow. Different.

Remember microconsoles? Years before "the streaming era" that Sony now says is upon us, there was a period there where the conventional wisdom was that traditional consoles were dead and lower-priced microconsoles were the wave of the future.

In that time, upstarts like Ouya and established brands like Sony, Nvidia, Mad Catz, Apple, Amazon, and more jumped into the microconsole gaming market in one form or another.

Their bet was that there was an audience who wanted to play games on the TV but didn't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a full-fledged console that was overkill for the large flood of indie games out there. But then tens of millions of people bought the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (and later the Nintendo Switch) and the bottom largely fell out of the microconsole market (though no one has told Atari, apparently).

Enlarge / A view of the exit of The Boring Company's test tunnel in Hawthorne. (credit: The Boring Company)

On Wednesday, the board of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) voted to grant The Boring Company—Elon Musk's private tunneling venture—a $48.6 million contract to build a two-mile Loop at the expanding Las Vegas Convention Center.

LVCVA officials recommended The Boring Company's proposal to the board back in March, saying that it had the most competitive price among the transportation companies that submitted proposals. At the time, Boring Company officials said they could build the Convention Center's transportation system for between $33 million and $55 million. According to the Las Vegas Sun, the final cost for the project is expected to be $52.5 million.

Elon Musk's Boring Company wants to ameliorate traffic by moving people through tunnels on electric cars or electric skates at speeds of up to 155 miles per hour. Musk has said he can significantly reduce the cost of tunneling through the company's technical improvements to boring machines, the reuse of dirt to create concrete reinforcement, the use of continuous tunneling and reinforcing operations, and by digging smaller tunnels that don't need to accommodate internal combustion engines.

Linda Hamilton is back as Sarah Connor, as tough and distrustful of time-traveling sentient machines as ever, in the first trailer for Terminator: Dark Fate, the sixth installment in hugely influential franchise.

(Mild spoilers for original Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day below.)

The entire franchise is premised on the notion that sentient killing machines from the future can be sent back in time to take out key human figures destined to lead the resistance against the self-aware AI network known as Skynet, thereby preventing a nuclear holocaust that wipes out the human race. In the original Terminator film, the target was a young and innocent Sarah Connor, future mother to resistance leader John Connor. Then came Terminator 2: Judgement Day, or as I like to call it, The Best Damn Sequel of All Time. A second Terminator is sent to take out a teenaged John—with the twist that Schwarzenegger's original Terminator has been reprogrammed as his protector against a newer model known as the T-1000.