Month: September 2018

Enlarge / Vogtle unit 3. (credit: Georgia Power)

Two nuclear reactors are under construction at Vogtle's nuclear power plant in Georgia, and they are a lonely pair in a stagnating US nuclear industry. Now, leaders of municipalities and utilities that are on the hook to buy electricity from Vogtle's new reactors are saying they want the project stopped to save their customers from having to shoulder the cost burden.

The three major owners of the construction project are expected to vote on whether to keep it or cut losses in the coming days.

Costs for Vogtle and its sister reactors at the Summer nuclear power plant in South Carolina ballooned to well over their roughly $7 billion estimated cost, and when reactor-maker Westinghouse went bankrupt last year, the projects faced a choice: end construction and move on or keep on trucking in the hopes that further construction costs could be limited.

Enlarge / Bing on a mobile device showing the AMP-powered carousel and an AMP story served from Bing's cache. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft's Bing search engine has started showing AMP pages to mobile searchers in the US. Pages using the proprietary tech will now be prominently displayed in search listings on the mobile website. Previously, Microsoft made limited use of AMP in some of its mobile apps but didn't use it on the Web.

AMP ("Accelerated Mobile Pages") is a project spearheaded by Google to improve the performance and embeddability of mobile content. It imposes tight restrictions on the scripting that pages can use, and it performs special handling of embedded images and media. To do this, Google uses a number of proprietary extensions to HTML, and AMP content all gets cached. Google serves AMP pages from its own servers, Bing uses Microsoft's servers, and Cloudflare also has an AMP caching service.

Though there is widespread acknowledgement that AMP is addressing real problems—the abundance of trackers, advertisements, and client-side scripts makes many webpages bandwidth-heavy and slow to load—many within the industry are unhappy at the proprietary, Google-controlled extensions, regarding them as anathema to the open Web.

Enlarge (credit: TechBargains)

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a set of deals on high-profile Nintendo Switch games at Walmart and Amazon, including The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze, Splatoon 2, Kirby Star Allies, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and Mario Tennis Aces. All of them are 25 percent off, which works out to a $10-15 discount.

Not every game up there will be to everybody's liking—the competitive online focus of Mario Tennis Aces is a far cry from cutesy puzzles of Captain Toad, for instance—and most Switch (or Wii U) owners have probably played at least a few of these already. But if you're in need of something new to play, all the above titles are at least worth checking out. Go have a look at our reviews if you're on the fence about one in particular.

The catch here is that these discounts only apply to the physical copies of each game. That shouldn't be a dealbreaker for most—you'll use up less of the Switch's meager 32GB of internal storage—but it's worth noting that Nintendo just added the ability to share Switch downloads across consoles. Still, given that these games are going for full price in the Nintendo eShop and are tied for new lows here, waiting a couple days and dealing with a cartridge may be worth it.

Enlarge / Just one of the hundreds of "Guitar Hero TV" songs that will no longer be playable in a few months.

A customer who bought Guitar Hero Live late last year has brought a proposed class-action lawsuit against Activision accusing the publisher of false advertising and other violations regarding the coming December shutdown of the game's online streaming "Guitar Hero TV" (GHTV) mode.

Activision announced that shutdown back in June, and we noted at the time that the move will make 92 percent of the game's playable songs permanently inaccessible. In the federal lawsuit, filed this week in Los Angeles, plaintiff Robert Fishel argues Activision's marketing led him to believe the game would be "playable online indefinitely or, at least, for a reasonable length of time from the date of release."

The lawsuit highlights Guitar Hero Live marketing that describes the Guitar Hero TV mode as "an always-on music video network... running 24-hours a day, seven days a week" with "a continuous broadcast of music videos" and "new videos continually added to the line-up." Marketing materials also promise that "you’ll be able to discover and play new songs all the time."