Month: June 2017

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One of the big benefits of the Ars Technica UK office is that it's right next to Wired UK. It means that, aside from chastising Wired over its 9-out-of-10 LG G6 review, we can work together on projects that otherwise wouldn't be possible. The first of those projects, Kelly and Rowland's excellent political podcast UpVote, launched alongside Theresa May's call for a snap general election. The second, an all-new podcast devoted to the latest technological gear and gadgetry, launches today.

The Gearhead podcast, hosted by myself, Wired product editor Jeremy White, and Wired senior editor Victoria Turk, is a monthly (maybe even more often!) deep dive into what's hot in tech. Gearhead isn't a news show—we won't be reading out the headlines—but rather wrangling over new tech purchases, nonsense announcements, and how tech fits into our daily lives.

Episode one is all about digital assistants. Amazon's Alexa—which lives in devices like the Echo and Echo Dot—was the talk of this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, showing up in everything from smart fridges to wireless headphones. Since then, Alexa has found new homes inside the camera-based Echo Look, and the touchscreen-equipped Echo Show, as well as phones like the Huawei Mate 9 and HTC U11.

In an interview with Time earlier this week, Sony Head of Global Marketing and Sales Jim Ryan said that "when we've dabbled with backwards compatibility, I can say it is one of those features that is much requested, but not actually used much." An in-depth Ars Technica analysis of Xbox Live user data shows that sentiment is definitely true, at least when it comes to Microsoft's competing consoles.

Our analysis used a third-party API to randomly sample usage data from nearly one million active Xbox One Gamertags over a period of nearly five months starting last September (read the introductory piece for much more about the data and methodology). In the end, only about 1.5 percent of the more than 1.65 billion minutes of Xbox One usage time we tracked was spent on the 300+ backward-compatible Xbox 360 games, in aggregate. That translates to an average of just 23.9 minutes per sampled active Xbox One user spent on Xbox 360 games out of 1,526 average minutes of Xbox One usage during the sampling period.

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While AFR tech has been trialled by a number of UK police forces, this appears to be the first time it has led to an arrest.

South Wales Police didn't provide details about the nature of the arrest, presumably because it's an ongoing case.

Enlarge / Railroad tracks sit in front of mounds of coking coal piled behind a barbed wire fence at the AK Steel Holding Corp. mill in Middletown, Ohio, U.S., on Friday, Sept. 23, 2016. Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images (credit: Getty Images)

On Friday, just a day after President Trump announced his intention to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, Kansas City Power & Light (KCPL) said that it would retire five coal-burning electricity generating units and one natural gas-burning unit (the natural gas unit originally burned coal but had been converted). The generating units, all of which are more than 50 years old, are spread among three different power plants and constitute 900 MW of capacity, according to E&E News. The coal-fired units will all be retired by December 31, 2018, and the natural gas-fired one will be retired by December 31, 2019.

In its press release announcing the decision, KCPL said it didn’t anticipate needing any new capacity for several years, and renewable energy is cheaper.

The company wrote: