Month: May 2020

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

At today's "Battery Day" event, Tesla is expected to unveil new technologies that will drive the company's products over the next decade. Ahead of the event, we thought readers would enjoy this article, first published in May, about Tesla's role in the falling cost of batteries over the last decade.

In 2010, a lithium-ion battery pack with 1 kWh of capacity—enough to power an electric car for three or four miles—cost more than $1,000. By 2019, the figure had fallen to $156, according to data compiled by BloombergNEF. That's a massive drop, and experts expect continued—though perhaps not as rapid—progress in the coming decade. Several forecasters project the average cost of a kilowatt-hour of lithium-ion battery capacity to fall below $100 by the mid-2020s.

That's the result of a virtuous circle where better, cheaper batteries expand the market, which in turn drives investments that produce further improvements in cost and performance. The trend is hugely significant because cheap batteries will be essential to shifting the world economy away from carbon-intensive energy sources like coal and gasoline.

Enlarge / The Electron launch vehicle is ready to soar. (credit: Rocket Lab)

Welcome to Edition 2.45 of the Rocket Report! We're looking ahead to a monumental week of rocket launches with the first LauncherOne mission potentially taking flight on Sunday and the possible launch of Crew Dragon next Wednesday.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Virgin Orbit announces first launch attempt. On Wednesday, the company that has been developing LauncherOne for most of the last decade said it is ready to make a launch attempt. The rocket, which is dropped from a modified 747 aircraft, will not carry a customer's payload. The mission, which is being classified as a "launch demo," is set to take place between 10am and 2pm PT (17:00-21:00 UTC) on Sunday.

Enlarge / Eye Oh Ess. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Is iOS "eye-oh-ess" or "eye-oss"? Is Linux "Lie-nux" or "Lih-nux?" How about sudo: is it really "sue-doo" for "superuser, do!" or has the more popular "sue-doh" population won out? In this article, you'll find the answers to each of those and several more—along with some perspectives on terms that aren't so clear-cut.

Here's the background: we invited our readers last week to share examples of common tech terms that people frequently pronounce incorrectly or of terms about which there is widespread disagreement regarding the correct pronunciation.

We gave a few examples that came up within the Ars team to get the conversation started and promised a follow-up wherein we'd research the correct pronunciation for each term—including both our examples and reader suggestions—and settle the score.

Enlarge / When faced with uncertainty, people don't make perfectly rational choices. (credit: flickr user: Jacqui Brown)

If you won $100 tomorrow, you’d be pretty happy. And if you lost $100, you’d be less than thrilled. But those two feelings wouldn’t be the same in magnitude: the loss would probably sting far more than the gain would delight.

People don’t approach things like loss and risk as purely rational agents. We weigh losses more heavily than gains. We feel like the difference between 1 percent and 2 percent is bigger than the difference between 50 percent and 51 percent. This observation of our irrationality is one of the most influential concepts in behavioral science: skyscrapers of research have been built on Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s foundational 1979 paper that first described the paradoxes of how people make decisions when faced with uncertainty.

So when researchers raised questions about the foundations of those skyscrapers, it caused alarm. A large team of researchers set out to check whether the results of Kahneman and Tversky’s crucial paper would replicate if the same experiment were conducted now.

Enlarge / This Killer 1650x is really a rebranded Intel AX200 under the hood—but to be fair, Intel put stuff into the AX200 chipset just for Rivet, which only gets enabled on Rivet's version of the card. (credit: Rivet Networks)

On Wednesday, Intel announced its acquisition of Rivet Networks—makers of the Killer AC-brand line of gamer-oriented Wi-Fi gear—for an undisclosed price.

Intel Vice President Chris Walker describes the acquisition as "a terrific complement to our existing Wi-Fi products," going on to praise Rivet's products—the best known of which is the Killer Wireless-AC line of gaming-targeted Wi-Fi cards—and declare its intent to integrate the Killer line into Intel's broader PC Wi-Fi portfolio.

Aside from the branding, the major value Intel acquires with Rivet is far more likely to be software than hardware. When privately testing a Killer Wireless-AC Wi-Fi card in a gaming laptop, the card in the laptop did not distinguish itself above a standard Intel 7265 Wi-Fi interface in a Chromebook—but that was without using the Killer's software stack to specifically prioritize my test traffic.