Month: June 2019

Enlarge / Inland Empire Energy Center outside of Riverside, California. (credit: Oohlongjohnson)

Late last week, General Electric told a California regulator that it would close down a 10-year-old Southern California natural gas plant because it's no longer economically competitive in California's energy market.

The news, first reported by Reuters, is surprising because natural gas plants tend to have 30-year lifespans on average, and natural gas is currently the cheapest fossil fuel on the market today. But the two 376 megawatt (MW) turbines at the Inland Empire Energy Center (IEEC) outside of Riverside, California, are not built to play well with the increasing amount of renewable energy on California's grid. On top of that, renewables' low marginal cost and ubiquity throughout the state mean that during certain times of day, they're often the cheapest energy option.

Natural gas needs quick-start options

GE told the California Energy Commission on Thursday that the natural gas plant is “not designed for the needs of the evolving California market, which requires fast-start capabilities to satisfy peak demand periods.”

Enlarge / Artist's rendering of a NOAA weather satellite. (credit: NOAA/NASA)

Meteorologists and other experts are urging the Federal Communications Commission to drop a spectrum-sharing plan that they say could interfere with transmissions of weather-satellite imagery.

The dispute is over the 1675-1680MHz frequencies and is separate from the other FCC/weather controversy we've been covering, which involves the 24GHz band and has pitted the FCC against NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the US Navy.

The American Geophysical Union (AGU), American Meteorological Society (AMS), and National Weather Association (NWA) told the FCC in a filing last week that its plan for 1675-1680MHz should be scrapped because of the "likelihood of interference with the reception of weather satellite imagery and relayed environmental data to receive-only antennas that members of America's weather, water, and climate enterprise use."

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  Engadget's picture of the Oppo display. It's like a semi-transparent camera notch. [credit: Engdaget ]

Smartphone design is slowly dumping notches, hole punches, and other blemishes that cut into the display to make room for the front camera. Devices like the OnePlus 7 Pro have reached the final form of all-screen front designs thanks to a complicated, motorized pop-up camera, but it would be nice if we could do all-screen phones without all the moving parts. A possible solution is coming in the form of an under-display camera—a camera that sits behind the pixels of your display to take a selfie through the screen.

So far we've seen both Oppo and Xiaomi show off prototypes of this technology in blurry social media phones, but at Mobile World Congress Shanghai, Oppo showed off its prototype to the public for the first time. Engadget attended the show to see the device in person, and well, it looks like this first generation isn't the seamless all-screen camera solution we were hoping for.

With Oppo's prototype, you get a full screen design, but Engadget reports that the display over the camera "appears to be more pixellated" than the rest of the display. Oppo's solution involves making the display over top of the camera transparent with a transparent anode and a "redesigned pixel structure for improved light transmittance." This "redesigned pixel structure" is, well, less dense than the normal screen, so the image over it looks bad. In the pictures it looks like a semi-transparent notch.

About a month ago, Ars posted a couple of calls to action in our forums and on Reddit: we wanted to take your coolest Warframe designs and get them in front of the game's developers at Digital Extremes to see what the company thinks of the community's creations. Digital Extremes told us they don't have a great way of sorting through all the different player designs on the backend, so we asked you to show us what you got.

It took a bit to get things filmed, but this morning we're happy to present Digital Extreme Community Director Rebecca Ford with some analysis of the submissions. We last heard from Rebecca just about a year ago when we ran a video featuring her and game director Steve Sinclair answering questions about Warframe's lore and unsolved mysteries, but this time we had an extra ask for her: after dissecting some community frames and their build strategies, would she be willing to show us what she flies around in? (Spoiler: it's purple. Very, very purple.)

Thanks to Rebecca for being such a good sport and playing along—and also congrats to Warframers RekiSanchez, pacading, rytlocknroll, ninjakivi2, and Bedchuck for being picked. Special shout-out to ninjakivi2 for having an all-around awesome set of customizations—I particularly dug the giant pile of Ayatan sculptures. You're a decorator after my own heart.