Month: January 2018

A press photo of black glass tiles. (credit: Tesla)

Tesla began manufacturing solar tiles for solar roof installations in December at the Buffalo, New York, factory that it acquired when it purchased SolarCity in 2016, and the electric vehicle and energy company said it will start installing the tiles on the homes of reservation holders today.

Up until now, solar roof installations have only been available for Tesla employees. In an e-mail, Tesla said that it had completed its pilot installation program, which helped to validate reliability and weatherization testing.

Tesla opened up reservations to the general public last May, which required a $1,000 deposit. The company says it will survey, design, and identify permitting issues for each customer individually, so roof costs will vary widely. In May, SolarCity co-founder and CTO Peter Rive said that inactive tiles would cost about $11 per tile, and active (that is, solar) tiles would cost about $42 per tile. Tesla says it will optimize the mixture of inactive to active tiles based on the amount of sun each section of a roof will receive. The company estimated its solar roof to cost about $21.85 per square foot, if 35 percent of the panels are active and the rest are inactive.

Enlarge / It takes good money (or good luck) to look this good.

It's not a huge surprise that the latest test server update for the insanely popular PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds on PC expands the game's free and paid loot crate system. Despite recent controversy over the practice, loot crates remain one of the most efficient ways to monetize a huge player base and encourage players to keep coming back for a regular drip of Skinner box rewards.

What is surprising is just how uncommon some of these new cosmetic items are. In fact, the rarest free items in PUBG's new crates will only show up for the average serious player once every 80 years, while the rarest paid items will require an average of nearly $1,600 (and five years of dedicated play time) to unlock.

The numbers

We know this because PUBG is being refreshingly upfront about the chances of acquiring specific items in the game's new Desperado and Biker loot crates, which are now available on the game's test server. The fact that platforms like Apple's App Store and countries like China are now requiring such drop rates to be published could have something to do with that transparency, or it could be a coincidence.

Valentina Palladino

Large, 15-inch two-in-ones can be unwieldy devices, but that isn't stopping manufacturers from making them. Dell unveiled the new XPS 15 convertible at CES, complete with a design that resembles the original 15-inch XPS laptop while including upgraded processors and graphics chips. The new XPS also has a stylus that works with the device's touchscreen.

Dell didn't radically change the design of the bigger XPS, but it did manage to stuff a lot of power into its 16mm-thick, 4.3-pound frame. Inside are 8th-generation Intel CPUs, and each model comes with Radeon RX Vega M GL graphics with 4GB of high bandwidth memory. The XPS 15 laptop has an optional Nvidia GPU (Intel HD Graphics 630 comes standard), so the new convertible is a better option if you want discrete graphics in a default configuration. The XPS 15 convertible will also support up to 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB SSD.