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Utility-scale solar costs down by half in last five years alone

Earlier this week, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs released a report on the state of utility-scale solar installations in the US. Just about everything in the report is remarkable for anyone who’s followed the solar market closely. Over the past five years, prices have dropped by half, while the capacity factors are approaching that of wind. As a result, the most recent installations are offering power at prices that are competitive with natural gas—not the cost of the plant and fuel, but the fuel alone. In 2014, utility-scale solar projects added about 4GW of capacity to the US grid. Slightly more than 6GW of solar capacity was added in total, with the remainder split between commercial and residential installs. Due to the rapid drop in prices, the majority of this capacity is in the form of photovoltaic panels. One of the issues with utility-scale solar has been that some of the earlier plants were built outside the Southwest. This has meant less overall generation and a lower capacity factor, meaning that the panels are only producing power at a fraction of their maximal rate. Both of these raise the cost of the electricity generated. But installations in the Southwest have boomed to over 90 percent of the total installed hardware. This has capacity factors up and costs down. More recently, large projects have been getting more popular in the Southeast, which may change this dynamic in the future. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Utility-scale solar costs down by half in last five years alone

Sprint offers $2.1 billion to acquire the rest of Clearwire

As most observers expected , Sprint has finally made a formal offer to acquire the rest of Clearwire. On Thursday, Sprint said it would pay $2.1 billion for the remaining 49.7 percent of Clearwire that it does not currently control. As we reported yesterday , the move is widely seen as a play for Sprint to acquire Clearwire’s valuable 2.5 GHz spectrum, which it would use to offer LTE and strengthen its position against Verizon and AT&T. The bid works out to $2.90 per share—higher than the company’s closing price on Wednesday—but analysts say the offer may not be good enough. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Los Angeles schools reach $6.4 million settlement with Apple, Lenovo

(credit: Brad Flickinger ) Last week, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) reached a settlement with Apple and Lenovo over a conflict involving software from curriculum provider Pearson. Although the conflict involves Pearson and LAUSD primarily, the curriculum provider was a subcontractor under Apple and Lenovo, so the settlement is between the hardware companies and LAUSD, the Los Angeles Times reports . Apple has agreed to pay LAUSD $4.2 million for the Pearson curriculum, and Lenovo, which also charged the school district for Pearson curriculum, will give the school district $2.2 million in credit for its purchase of laptops. Last year, LAUSD halted the $1.3 billion project to give every student in the massive district an iPad loaded with Pearson’s educational material. The about-face was announced after the Los Angeles Times reported that there had been improprieties in the bidding process for the contract with the school district. In December, the FBI opened an investigation into the iPad program and seized 20 boxes of documents from the LAUSD, just as the school district’s superintendent resigned. Four months later, LAUSD said it would no longer accept shipments of Pearson’s curriculum, and it added that it wanted a “multi-million dollar refund” for copies of Pearson’s software that had already been delivered. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Los Angeles schools reach $6.4 million settlement with Apple, Lenovo

iOS 9’s space-saving “app slicing” disabled for now, will return in future update

Enlarge / Apple’s sample universal binary here is just 60 percent of its original size when downloaded to an iPad or iPhone. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Back in June, we wrote a bit about App Thinning , a collection of iOS 9 features that are supposed to make iOS 9 apps take up less space on iDevices. Apple has just announced to developers that one of those features, “app slicing,” is not available in current iOS 9 versions due to an iCloud bug. It will be re-enabled in a future iOS update after the bug has been resolved. App slicing ensures that your iDevice only downloads the app assets it needs to work. In older versions of iOS, all devices downloaded “universal” versions of apps that included all of the assets those apps needed to work on each and every targeted iDevice. If you downloaded an app to your iPhone 5, for example, it could include larger image assets made for the larger-screened iPhones 6 and 6 Plus, 64-bit code that its 32-bit processor couldn’t use, and Metal graphics code that its GPU didn’t support. That’s all wasted space, a problem app slicing was designed to resolve. Apple says the iCloud bug affects users who are restoring backups to new devices—if you moved from that iPhone 5 to a new iPhone 6S, for example, iCloud would restore iPhone 5-compatible versions of some apps without the assets required by the newer, larger device. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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iOS 9’s space-saving “app slicing” disabled for now, will return in future update

Finally, game cartridges you can plug in to your smart phone

Downloading games directly to your smartphone and playing them immediately is convenient, I suppose. But this ephemeral, bloodless process is missing a familiar tangibility gamers might remember warmly from the last millennium: that comforting, solid, life-affirming feeling of jamming a game cartridge into a console slot. Enter Pico Cassette , a Japanese outfit that says it’s bringing back “the next retro” with tiny game cartridges that plug in to a smartphone’s headphone jack. The tiny “cassettes” (the general Japanese term for cartridges) are built on PlugAir technology , which uses a specially designed iPhone or Android app to draw power from the headphone jack and send data using specially modulated sound waves. Those coded sound waves are then used to unlock access to content that’s stored in the cloud, according to a PlugAir explanation video . That would seem to remove one of the main conveniences of the physical cartridge format—namely, distributing and storing data permanently without an Internet connection—but there’s nothing technical preventing the actual game data from being stored on the cartridges as well. In any case, there’s something about the simplicity of being able to share a game with a friend simply by handing them a physical thing that plugs in to the phone (though the need for a special app is a bit of an impediment to immediate ad-hoc sharing). Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Backblaze to sell cloud storage for a quarter the price of Azure, Amazon S3

Online backup provider Backblaze is branching out today with a new business: an infrastructure-as-a-service-style cloud storage API that’s going head to head with Amazon’s S3, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud Storage. But where those services charge 2¢ or more per gigabyte per month, Backblaze is pricing its service at just half a cent per gigabyte per month. Backblaze’s business is cheap storage. We’ve written about the company’s hard disk reliability data a few times over the years ; the company has found that regular consumer hard drives are more than up to the demands of providing cloud storage, though there is substantial variation between the different manufacturers and models. Backblaze has designed (and documented ) its storage hardware for the lowest possible cost, using software to provide the necessary protection against failures. It currently has more than 150 petabytes of storage. This low-cost storage means that the company can offer its $5/month unlimited size backup plan profitably. Now the company plans to sell that same cheap storage to developers. Its new B2 product is very much in the same vein as Amazon’s S3: cloud storage with an API that can be used to build a range of other applications. And the price difference is significant. Amazon S3’s cheapest online storage—reduced redundancy, for customers storing more than 5 petabytes—costs 2.2¢ per gigabyte per month. Backblaze’s B2 storage costs 0.5¢ per gigabyte per month, with the first 10GB free. This is cheaper even than Amazon’s Glacier and Google’s Nearline storage, at 1¢ per gigabyte per month, neither of which supports immediate access to data. Bandwidth costs are the same; inbound bandwidth is free, outbound is charged at 5¢ per gigabyte. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Backblaze to sell cloud storage for a quarter the price of Azure, Amazon S3

Samsung’s 950 Pro M.2 SSD pairs NVMe with V-NAND for eye-popping performance

The Samsung 950 Pro SSD—the follow up to the legendary Samsung 850 Pro SSD—has been unveiled by the company at its annual SSD summit in Seoul, Korea. The 950 Pro will be available at retail in October, with MSRPs of $199.99 (probably ~£150) for the 256GB version, and $349.99 (~£280) for the 512GB version. UK pricing is yet to be confirmed. Based on Samsung’s V-NAND technology and available in 512GB and 256GB capacities, the 950 Pro shuns the common 2.5-inch form factor and SATA interface for cutting-edge M.2 2280 and PCIe 3.0 x4. It also makes use of the Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface, better known as NVMe. Most SSDs still make use of the AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) architecture, which was originally developed for spinning platter SATA hard drives back in 2004. While AHCI works fine for traditional hard drives, it was never designed for low latency NAND chips. As flash speeds have increased, AHCI has become a performance bottleneck. NVMe exploits both the PCIe bus and NAND flash memory to offer higher performance and lower latency. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Valve hits a Linux landmark—1,500 games available on Steam

A few months after Valve officially launched Steam for Linux in 2013, Gabe Newell gave his LinuxCon keynote crowd a bit of music for their ears. “It feels a little bit funny coming here and telling you guys that Linux and open source are the future of gaming,” the Valve head-man said. “It’s sort of like going to Rome and teaching Catholicism to the pope.” Linux gaming was by no means a new endeavor, but 2013 stands as a major year for the open-source platform’s gaming prospects with Valve announcing Linux-based Steam Machines and the arrival of SteamOS . When we looked at the state of Linux gaming after its 12-month Valve anniversary, we found nearly 1,000 professional, commercially distributed games available as of February 2015. But this weekend there’s an even bigger numeric milestone to celebrate according to the Linux site Phoronix —1,500 Linux titles are currently available through Steam. Phoronix notes Steam has been adding roughly 100 Linux titles per month throughout the summer. And while the total number of Steam Linux offerings still pales in comparison to competing platforms—Phoronix cites Windows at 6,464 games and OS X at 2,323—the statistical growth in such a short period of time is undeniable. Anecdotal evidence supporting Steam’s Linux gaming growth looks rosy as well. The five most popular Linux titles for Steam include major developer offerings like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordo r (the rest of the top five according to Phoronix includes ARK: Survival Evolved , Team Fortress 2 , and Dota 2). And this summer, a small indie game called Don’t Be Patchman even became the first Linux-exclusive launch on Steam. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Google Glass now “Project Aura,” ex-Amazon Fire Phone employees hired

Some men wearing Google Glass. Glass Collective The Google Glass team is still alive inside of Google. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the group has a new name, “Project Aura,” and has recently picked up a few engineers from Amazon. That’s “Project Aura,” not to be confused with ” Project Ara ,” another struggling group inside Google that’s trying to build a modular smartphone. “Project Aura” seems to still have all of the previous Google Glass management in place. Ivy Ross, former chief marketing officer of Art.com, is still leading the project. She still reports to Tony Fadell, the CEO of Nest. This group is all part of Google Glass’ “reboot” team. They’re charged with taking the original version of Google’s face-mounted computer and turning it into something appealing; we’ve yet to see a product from this revamped group. According to the report, the group has been hiring engineers, software developers, and project managers from Amazon’s Lab126, a hardware division that was most recently responsible for the Amazon Fire Phone. After the Fire Phone flopped, Amazon fired “dozens” from the Lab126 group, and Google swooped in to pick up some new employees. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google Glass now “Project Aura,” ex-Amazon Fire Phone employees hired

Chicago citizens sue to halt new “Netflix tax,” an increase of 9 percent

michel Six Chicagoans have sued the Windy City over its new 9 percent tax levied as part of the “Amusement Tax Ruling ” that went into effect on September 1. The tax, which the city of Chicago maintains is “not an expansion of the laws,” imposes an additional surcharge on various online services, including Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, Xbox Live, and others. “We will be adding it to the cost we charge subscribers,” Anne Marie Squeo, a Netflix spokeswoman, previously told Ars in a statement. “Jurisdictions around the world, including the US, are trying to figure out ways to tax online services. This is one approach.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chicago citizens sue to halt new “Netflix tax,” an increase of 9 percent

Ken May

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