Tag: production

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

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

Windows 10 will soon be more environmentally friendly with updated dialog box

Gone, but not forgotten. For the longest time, one of the things that people liked to poke fun at in Windows was a dialog box used to add fonts to the system. The rarely used dialog used Windows 3.1-era icons and fonts, even in Windows Vista, making it a weird anachronism. Microsoft tidied up that bit of Windows legacy in Windows 7 by removing the box entirely, but other relics remain. One of the most annoying is the environment variables dialog. This box hasn’t been updated for what feels like millennia, and it’s cramped and awkward to use as a result. Environment variables can be lengthy, and they almost never fit in the current dialog. This is particularly acute for one of the most important variables, PATH. The PATH variable stores the names of all the directories that the system should search when hunting for executables, and many applications and development tools like to add their directories to the PATH. It quickly gets unwieldy. The current annoying dialog. And unlike the add font dialog, which people only ever looked at just to point and laugh—it was rarely used to actually install fonts—the environment variables box is actually useful, as it’s the easiest and best way of changing Windows environment variables. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 10 will soon be more environmentally friendly with updated dialog box

Supermassive black holes found spiraling in at seven percent light speed

Simulation of the pair of supermassive black hole binary system, PG 1302-102. The smaller shines more brightly because it’s farther from the center of mass, and thus closer to the outer disk of gas. This gas accretes onto the black hole, heating up as it falls in, and thus emits more light. The more massive black hole, therefore, is starved of gas and doesn’t glow as brightly. (credit: Zoltan Haiman, Columbia University ) Data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer ( GALEX ) and the Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed the presence of a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting each other so closely that they’re moving at relativistic speeds—a significant fraction of the speed of light. Supermassive black holes are expected to come in pairs pretty often. That’s because every galaxy has its own supermassive black hole, and galaxies often merge, bringing the two together. These mergers are very slow processes that distort both galaxies until their stars settle into new orbits (a process known as “violent relaxation”). While this is happening, extremely heavy objects, such as supermassive black holes, will tend to move in toward the center of the new galaxy. The new galaxy would end up with two supermassive black holes, one from each original galaxy, orbiting each other at its core. Objects have been observed which look a lot like supermassive black hole binaries, matching the prediction. These objects have a lot of mass—billions of times the mass of the Sun, as we’d expect from a pair of supermassives—and they’re periodic, meaning the amount of light the object produces rises and falls with a predictable time period. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Supermassive black holes found spiraling in at seven percent light speed

Songwriter tells US House he made $5,679 from 178 million Spotify streams

The songwriter who co-wrote Megan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” alleged on Tuesday that he only cleared $5,679 from over 178 million streams of the song on Spotify. (credit: YouTube ) A Tuesday copyright roundtable discussion, hosted by Nashville’s Belmont University and led by the House Judiciary Committee, opened with one of the past year’s most successful songwriters announcing just how little money he’d made from over 178 million streams of a song he co-wrote: $5,679. That means Nashville songwriter Kevin Kadine, the co-writer of the hit 2014 Megan Trainor song “All About That Bass,” made close to $31.90 for every million streams. According to a report by The Tenneseean , Kadine didn’t clarify to the roundtable’s five members of the House of Representatives exactly how the songwriting proceeds were split between himself and Trainor (who shared songwriting credits on “Bass”), but he did allege that the average streaming-service payout for a song’s songwriting team is roughly $90 per million streams. “That’s as big a song as a songwriter can have in their career, and number one in 78 countries,” Kadine said. “But you’re making $5,600. How do you feed your family?” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Songwriter tells US House he made $5,679 from 178 million Spotify streams

Documentarian wipes out Warner’s $2M “Happy Birthday” copyright

(credit: From court records in Good Morning to You v. Warner/Chappell) More than two years after a documentary filmmaker challenged the copyright to the simple lyrics of the song “Happy Birthday,” a federal judge ruled Tuesday that the copyright is invalid . The result could undo Warner/Chappell’s lucrative licensing business around the song, once estimated to be $2 million per year. The company is likely to appeal the ruling to the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. US District Judge George King held  that the two sisters who authored the song, Patty and Mildred Hill, gave the melody and piano arrangements to Summy Co., which was eventually acquired by Warner/Chappell. But King wrote that there’s no evidence they ever transferred a copyright on the words. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Documentarian wipes out Warner’s $2M “Happy Birthday” copyright

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

Malicious Cisco router backdoor found on 79 more devices, 25 in the US

ZMap.io The highly clandestine attacks hitting Cisco Systems routers are much more active than previously reported. Infections have hit at least 79 devices in 19 countries, including an ISP in the US that’s hosting 25 boxes running the malicious backdoor. That discovery comes from a team of computer scientists who probed the entire IPv4 address space for infected devices. As Ars reported Tuesday, the so-called SYNful Knock router implant is activated after receiving an unusual series of non-compliant network packets followed by a hardcoded password. By sending only the out-of-sequence TCP packets but not the password to every Internet address and then monitoring the response, the researchers were able to detect which ones were infected by the backdoor. Security firm FireEye surprised the security world on Tuesday when it first reported the active outbreak of SYNful Knock. The implant is precisely the same size as the legitimate Cisco router image, and it’s loaded each time the router is restarted. It supports up to 100 modules that attackers can tailor to the specific target. FireEye found it on 14 servers in India, Mexico, the Philippines, and Ukraine. The finding was significant, because it showed an attack that had long been theorized was in fact being actively used. The new research shows it’s being used much more widely, and it’s been found in countries including the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, and China. The researchers wrote: Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Malicious Cisco router backdoor found on 79 more devices, 25 in the US

New Android lockscreen hack gives attackers full access to locked devices

Software bugs that allow attackers to bypass smartphone lockscreens are common enough for both Android and iOS devices, but like a fender bender on the highway, many of us can’t resist the urge to gawk anyway. There’s a  newly disclosed way  for someone who has a few uninterrupted moments with a handset running most versions of Android 5.x to gain complete control of the device and all the data stored on it. The hack involves dumping an extremely long string into the password field after swiping open the camera from a locked phone. Unless updated in the past few days, devices running 5.0 to 5.1.1 will choke on the unwieldy number of characters and unlock, even though the password is incorrect. From there, the attacker can do anything with the phone the rightful owner can do. The following video demonstrates the attack in action. The technique begins by adding a large number of characters to the emergency call window and then copying them to the Android clipboard. (Presumably, there are other ways besides the emergency number screen to buffer a sufficiently large number of characters.) The hacker then swipes open the camera from the locked phone, accesses the options menu, and pastes the characters into the resulting password prompt. Instead of returning an error message, vulnerable handsets unlock. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New Android lockscreen hack gives attackers full access to locked devices

Xcode’s iOS simulator reports 2GB RAM for iPhone 6S, 4GB for iPad Pro

Developer Hamza Sood built a demo app that would display the amount of memory reported by difference iDevice simulators. Hamza Sood Apple doesn’t talk much about its SoCs beyond basic “chip X is Z percent faster than chip Y” comparisons—this is unfortunate, since Apple’s new chips are typically as fast or faster than the best high-end chips from Qualcomm and Intel when they’re released. One place where Apple has historically been stingy, though, is RAM. Even last year’s iPhone 6 and 6 Plus shipped with 1GB of memory, at a time when comparable Android phones were shipping with 2 or 3GB. That may be changing for the new iPhone 6S and 6S Plus , according to some sleuthing by developer Hamza Sood . Using a custom app and the iPhone 6S simulator included with the Xcode 7.1 beta, Sood has apparently confirmed that the iPhone 6Ses will include 2GB of RAM, and the developer offers more evidence pointing to 4GB of RAM for the iPad Pro. The iPad Air 2 was the first iDevice to ship with 2GB RAM, and since the new iPad Mini 4 supports Split View multitasking we can assume that it includes at least 2GB of RAM as well (Xcode doesn’t included dedicated simulators for the iPad Mini lineup, presumably since any app running on a standard iPad will look and act the same way on an iPad Mini). This isn’t a guarantee that the new iPhones will include 2GB of RAM, but Sood’s tool running in the iPhone 6 simulator does correctly state that last year’s phone has just 1GB of RAM. It’s as close to a confirmation as we can get before we actually have hardware to test with. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Xcode’s iOS simulator reports 2GB RAM for iPhone 6S, 4GB for iPad Pro