Month: September 2019

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  Bugatti have lightly modified this Chiron from the standard road car. It features an extra 99hp (74kW), a downforce-neutral bodykit from Dallara, and some special tires from Michelin that could withstand being rotated 4,100 times a minute. [credit: Bugatti ]

When it comes to the vital statistics of a modern hypercar, surely none have as little relevance as its top speed. You can make use of a sub three-second 0-60mph time in most parts of the world without causing a ruckus—just find the nearest toll booth on a highway. Pin the throttle flat and for a brief moment, until respect for one's fellow humans or fear of the speeding ticket takes over, and it's possible to experience all of the torque and power. But reaching the Vmax for most of these hand-built exotics remains an abstract idea, even on Germany's derestricted Autobahns.

However, there is one paved road long and flat enough to finally run out of steam. It's at Volkswagen-owned test track in a town called Ehra-Lessien in Germany, located a few miles from the company's Wolfsburg HQ. Among its features are a 12-mile (20km) high-speed circuit that includes a 5.4-mile (8.7km) straight, just the thing for finding out a very fast top speed. In 1998 it's where McLaren found out its F1 road car would reach 240.1mph (386.4km/h), and where Bugatti then beat that production record with the 253.8mph (408.5km/h) Veyron in 2007.

Fast forward another nine years and Bugatti replaced the Veyron with the Chiron, another scarab-like hypercar but this time with even more powerful 8L W16 engine, packing almost 1,500hp (1,103kW). But when the new car arrived, Bugatti revealed that its top speed was actually electronically limited to a maximum of 261mph (420km/h). It could theoretically go faster than that but its specially designed Michelin tires would fail under the extreme forces. Presumably that fact must have been gnawing away at Bugatti's bosses, because the company decided to do something about that.

Personal computing, 1980-style. (credit: Old Computer Museum)

Update: It's Labor Day in the US, which means Ars staff are more likely to be monitoring a grill than breaking news throughout the day. As such, we're resurfacing a few classic stories from the archives, such as this from our old "First Encounter" series, which revisited those moments in which we first came across some new bit of tech that would eventually change our lives. This story originally ran on December 22, 2012, and it appears unchanged below.

I had seen glimpses of it as I walked past on my way to AP Geometry, but now I was about to enter the school computer lab for the first time.

It was September 1980 and my freshman year at Gateway High School had been knocked off-kilter barely a week into the first term. I had signed up for Russian 1, which involved a daily bus ride to the nearby high school in Aurora, Colorado where it was offered. My excitement at learning the language of the enemy during the height of the Cold War dropped considerably when only four students—from across the entire school district—showed up the first day of class. Such low enrollment meant Russian was cancelled a few short days later, forcing me to rework my schedule. I substituted Latin for Russian—which eliminated the need to hop on a bus each day— and that in turn opened a spot on my schedule for Introduction to Computer Programming.

Enlarge / OPINIONS IN MIRROR MAYBE BE MORE ARBITRARY THAN THEY APPEAR (credit: Ethan Trewhitt)

If you’ve spent much time thinking about the political divide in the United States, you’ve hopefully noted how bloody weird it is. Somehow, just about every topic that people want to argue about splits into two camps. If you visualize the vast array of topics you could have an opinion about as a switchboard full of toggles, it seems improbable that so many people in each camp should have nearly identical switchboards, but they do. This can even extend to factual issues, like science—one camp typically does not accept that climate change is real and human-caused.

How in the world do we end up with these opinion sets? And why does something like climate change start an inter-camp argument, while other things like the physics behind airplane design enjoy universal acceptance?

One obvious way to explain these opinions is to look for underlying principles that connect them. Maybe it’s ideologically consistent to oppose both tax increases and extensive government oversight of pesticide products. But can you really draw a straight line from small-government philosophy to immigration attitudes? Or military funding?

Enlarge / Where can we volunteer to be a stock photographer of waffle imagery? "High Angle View Of Waffles On Iron." (credit: Armando Mejía / EyeEm / Getty Images)

Everyone has a bizarre cooking shortcut they love, and its usually a device of some sort. It might be a mango peeler, a multi-edge brownie pan, or an all-in-one egg sandwich device. (Yup, that's a thing.) My guilty pleasure: the waffle maker.

A waffle maker can cook almost anything. National Waffle Day, on August 24, is my favorite made-up holiday. Do waffles need a holiday? No. But it's as good a time as any to tell you how I feel about my waffle maker, which can make everything from burgers to hash browns to chocolate chip cookies. And that's just the beginning.

My waffling origin story

My first encounter with non-standard things in a waffle maker came at a campground. My family and I had recently moved into our 1969 Dodge Travco motorhome to live full time on the road. I gutted and restored the RV, but one thing I never got around to fixing was the oven.

Enlarge / Antonio Neri, president and chief executive officer of Hewitt Packerd Enterprise (HPE), speaks during the HPE Discovery conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., on Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Neri is pivoting HPE toward delivering all its products as a service. (credit: Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

It's been just over two years since Antonio Neri was named President of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), the infrastructure-oriented company that emerged from the 2015 breakup of the legendary but slightly road-worn tech giant Hewlett-Packard.

Since then, Neri has led something of a cultural transformation—along with an acquisition binge that has pulled 14 companies, including Aruba Networks and the supercomputer maker Cray, under the HPE umbrella. And at last month's HPE Discover conference in Las Vegas, Neri announced the next big shift for the company: moving everything that HPE does to an "as-a-service" model. While storage, computing, networking, and everything else HPE does will still be available for the foreseeable future under the current, traditional business model, those offerings will also be made available on a pay-for-what-you-use plan. That way, customers can (within reason) expand and contract their IT infrastructure capacity on demand.

Ars happened to be in Vegas for our annual security conference pilgrimage to Black Hat and DEFCON, and Neri graciously agreed to meet up an interview. The newish company president discussed his admiration for another high profile tech executive, how he's seen HPE transform since taking the helm, and what it will take to get customers to buy into the company's new as-a-service ethos.