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Submission + - Solar Energy Is Now Same Price As Conventional Power In Germany, Italy, Spain (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: A new study by International consulting firm Eclareon found that the cost of solar- and conventional-powered electricity has the same per kilowatt hour (kWh) price tag in Germany, Italy and Spain. The report covered 19 cities in 10 countries (Australia, Brazil, U.S., Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain and the U.K.). In Latin America, while the cost of renewable energy has gone down, high installation prices still prevent PV technology from being competitive against grid electricity. Meanwhile, in the U.S., there has been a 50% reduction in the cost of renewable energy over the past five years, according to an August 2013 report from global financial adviser and asset manager firm Lazard Freres & Co. In areas of the U.S., the dropping costs of solar, wind and hydroelectric power has spurred utilities to sign contracts to use renewable energy rather than conventional fuels like gas in power plants, according to Cory Honeyman, a solar power analyst with GTM research.

Comment It always amazed me (Score 1) 47

by Lucas123 (#46508761) Attached to: Origins of Blarney Stone Revealed
People are willing to allow a complete stranger to hold them while they slide over the side of a 90-foot wall in order to share in the bacteria and viruses of thousands of others on the oft change they'll be given the ability deceive people without offending them.

Comment The Russian Embassador (Score 3, Funny) 878

by Lucas123 (#46506829) Attached to: Russian State TV Anchor: Russia Could Turn US To "Radioactive Ash"
There were those of us who fought against this. But in the end, we could not keep up with the expense involved in the arms race, the space race, and the peace race. And at the same time, our people grumbled for more nylons and washing machines. Our Doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we'd been spending on defense in a single year. But the deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a Doomsday gap.

Submission + - Elon Musk Addresses New Jersey's Tesla Store Ban (teslamotors.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Tuesday, we discussed news that New Jersey is trying to ban Tesla stores, which would force the company to sell through car dealerships instead. Now, Elon Musk has prepared a response: 'The reason that we did not choose to do this is that the auto dealers have a fundamental conflict of interest between promoting gasoline cars, which constitute virtually all of their revenue, and electric cars, which constitute virtually none. Moreover, it is much harder to sell a new technology car from a new company when people are so used to the old. Inevitably, they revert to selling what’s easy and it is game over for the new company. The evidence is clear: when has an American startup auto company ever succeeded by selling through auto dealers? The last successful American car company was Chrysler, which was founded almost a century ago, and even they went bankrupt a few years ago, along with General Motors. Since the founding of Chrysler, there have been dozens of failures, Tucker and DeLorean being simply the most well-known. In recent years, electric car startups, such as Fisker, Coda, and many others, attempted to use auto dealers and all failed.'

Submission + - Google and Microsoft Both Want To Stop Dual-Boot Windows/Android Devices (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The laptop has undergone many changes over the past decade. At various times, netbooks, ultrabooks, and Chromebooks have been en vogue. Over the past several months, we've seen signs of the next step in the laptop's evolution: Android/Windows dual-boot laptops. Several companies had already announced upcoming models, including Asus and its Transformer Book Duet TD300. However, neither Google nor Microsoft seem to want such an unholy marriage of operating systems, and they've both pressured Asus to kill off the dual-boot product lines. Asus has now complied. 'Google has little incentive to approve dual-OS models, since that could help Microsoft move into mobile devices where Android is dominant. ... Microsoft has its own reasons for not wanting to share space on computers with Google, particularly on business-oriented desktop and laptop PCs that could give the Internet giant an entry point into a Microsoft stronghold. Computer makers that make dual-OS machines risk jeopardizing a flow of marketing funds from Microsoft that are an important economic force in the low-margin PC business.'

Submission + - How Data Storage Has Grown In the Past 60 years (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Imagine that in 1952, an IBM RAMAC 350 disk drive would have been able to hold only one .MP3 song. Today, a 4TB 3.5-in desktop drive (soon to be 5TB) can hold 760,000 songs. As much data as the digital age creates (2.16 Zettabytes and growing), data storage technology has always found a way to keep up. It is the fastest growing semiconductor technology there is. Consider a microSD card that in 2005 could store 128MB of capacity. Last month, SanDisk launched a 128GB microSD card — 1,000 times the storage in under a decade. While planar NAND flash is running up against a capacity wall, technology such as 3D NAND and Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM) hold the promise of quadrupling of solid state capacity. Here are some photos of what was and what is in data storage.

Submission + - Stanford Researchers Spot Medical Conditions, Guns, and More in Phone Metadata (webpolicy.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Since the NSA's phone metadata program broke last summer, politicians have trivialized the privacy implications. It's 'just metadata,' Dianne Feinstein and others have repeatedly emphasized. That view is no longer tenable: Stanford researchers crowdsourced phone metadata from real users, and easily identified calls to 'Alcoholics Anonymous, gun stores, NARAL Pro-Choice, labor unions, divorce lawyers, sexually transmitted disease clinics, a Canadian import pharmacy, strip clubs, and much more.' Looking at patterns in call metadata, they correctly diagnosed a cardiac condition and outed an assault rifle owner. 'Reasonable minds can disagree about the policy and legal constraints,' the authors conclude. 'The science, however, is clear: phone metadata is highly sensitive.'

Submission + - AT&T, Audi announce in-car 4G LTE plans that start at $99 for six months (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Audi is set to became the first car company to offer native, in-vehicle broadband in its 2015 A3 models through AT&T and it has just listed pricing for the service. Audi and AT&T will offer two data plan options: a 5GB, 6-month plan for $99 and a 30GB, 30-month plan for $499. Audi and GM first announced the upcoming availability of in-car 4G LTE during the CES show this year. GM plans to roll out 4G LTE in vehicles later this year and will eventually have more than 30 models supporting it. Audi said it plans to expand 4G LTE capability across its entire lineup as new or refreshed models come to market.

Submission + - Microsoft Confirms DirectX 12 Is Alive And Well, Demo Coming At GDC (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Buzz has been building for the last week that Microsoft would soon unveil the next version of DirectX at the upcoming Games Developer Conference (GDC). Microsoft has now confirmed that its discussion forums at the show won't just be to discuss updates to DX11, but that the company is putting a full court press behind DirectX 12. The company responded sharply over a year ago, when an AMD executive claimed that future versions of the API were essentially dead, but it has been over four years since DX11 debuted. To date, Microsoft has only revealed a few details of the next-generation API. Like AMD's Mantle, it will focus on giving developers "close-to-metal" GPU resource access and reducing CPU overhead. Like Mantle, the goal of DirectX 12 is to give programmers more control over performance tuning, with an eye towards better multi-threading and multi-GPU scaling. Unlike Mantle, DirectX 12 will undoubtedly support a full range of GPUs from AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm. Qualcomm's presence is interesting. With Windows RT all but moribund, Qualcomm's interest in that market may have seemed incidental. However, the fact that the company is involved with the DX12 standard could mean that the handset and tablet developer is serious about the Windows market in the long term.

Submission + - MirrorLink vs. Apple's CarPlay (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Apple's introduction of its iPhone automotive integration platform, CarPlay, yesterday signaled its entry into in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems — a market that up until now has consisted mainly of proprietary platforms with extremely limited mobile app capabilities. But open software efforts by the Linux Foundation and standards such as the Car Connectivity Consortium's MirrorLink and Google's recently launched Open Automotive Alliance are hoping to open up IVIs to any number of smartphones and related apps. ""The Apple [CarPlay] is just one standard. Right now MirrorLink is not compatible with iPhone..., but it can be," said Mark Boyadjis, manager of Infotainment & HMI systems at IHS Automotive. Alan Ewing, president of the Car Connectivity Consortium said we he first looked at Apple's CarPlay, he thought: "That's what we've been doing for two years. "It really validated the approach we'd already taken. But, we think the best mousetrap should win."

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