After more than six months of no updates, Google has finally updated its Android distribution data. Android Pie, the latest version of Google's mobile operating system, has passed the 10% adoption mark. VentureBeat reports: The Android developer website hosts a distribution dashboard that details the adoption of Google's mobile operating system versions. With over 2.5 billion active Android devices out there, this is useful information that Google used to update on a monthly cadence. For anyone who makes decisions regarding Android, it's incredibly valuable to know how widely (or narrowly) an Android version -- or more importantly, an API level -- has been adopted.

The distribution numbers were last updated in October 2018. In early December, Google added a small note below the chart: "(update coming soon: data feed under maintenance)." Months passed and the company would not explain what was going on, until today, when it finally updated the numbers. In short, Google is blaming a technical glitch, says it has resolved the issue, and is promising to keep the dashboard updated again. But those updates won't come on a monthly cadence anymore -- about quarterly is more likely, Google told VentureBeat. The Android adoption order now stands as follows: Oreo in first place, Nougat in second place, Marshmallow in third, Lollipop in fourth, Pie in fifth, KitKat in sixth, Jelly Bean in seventh, ICS in eighth, and Gingerbread in last. It will be a few more months before Pie can break into the top three.

At its annual I/O developer event, Google announced a bunch of new features available in the latest Android Q beta. Engadget reports: The most obvious new feature is dark mode, which will be released system-wide in Android Q. It's accessible via a toggle switch in the quick settings area and it'll also be activated when you turn on battery saver mode. We just saw a quick screenshot of it, but it looks like it'll apply to any apps you're using regardless of whether they're Google-made or from other developers. Another notable new feature is called Live Caption. If you're watching a video, Google's machine-learning algorithms can now add captions on the fly by just pressing the volume button and then a "live caption" button that'll show up on on the onscreen volume slider. From there, you can expand and contract the panel as you see fit, and move it up and down on the screen so it doesn't obscure your video. Google is also able to do all of this on-device, so it's more secure and also doesn't need a network connection.

[T]he company says that there are 50 new privacy and security settings in Android Q. Perhaps most notable are new location services settings that let you limit location tracking to only when the app is running. It'll also give you notifications to let users see when apps are using your location in the background. New settings also let you keep apps from accessing media on your phone and collecting information about your device like its IMEI and serial number. [...] Google's adding a new "focus mode" to help shut down various distractions. It'll block most app alerts and notifications while allowing important contacts like your family members to reach you. There are also more tools for parents to manage their kids' phone time -- it'll let you review how they're using their phone from your own device, set daily time limits, review app requests and more. There are also tweaks to the gesture-based navigation bar to make it more closely resemble the navigation gestures first introduced in the iPhone X. Google's also adding a new chat-focused interface called "bubbles" that lets users keep messaging conversations accessible regardless of what they're doing with the phone.

We can expect the final desert-themed name and release date later in the summer. The Q beta 3 is currently available on 21 devices, including all Pixel devices.

In a blog post detailing new features coming to Edge, Microsoft has started teasing what Edge will look like on macOS. The Verge reports: During the company's Build 2019 developer conference, Microsoft is announcing new features for Edge on Windows and teasing the upcoming macOS release. We understand that the release will be available very soon, and Mac users should be able to access both the Canary and Dev builds of Edge just like Windows. Microsoft's implementation of Chromium on Edge has so far seen good performance improvements and reliability on Windows. It's not clear if we'll see similar improvements on the macOS side versus Chrome, but at least it gives Mac users another Chromium option with some Microsoft services and sync integration. MacRumors notes that Edge "will be Microsoft's first web browser on the Mac since Internet Explorer received its last feature update nearly 16 years ago."

Windows 10 is getting a new terminal for command-line users, Microsoft announced at its Build developer conference today. The new so-called "Windows Terminal" will launch in mid-June and promises to be a major update of the existing Windows Command Prompt and PowerShell experience. From a report: Indeed, it seems like the Terminal will essentially become the default environment for PowerShell, Command Prompt and Windows Subsystem for Linux users going forward. The new terminal will feature faster GPU-accelerated text rending and "emoji-rich" fonts, because everything these days needs to support emojis, and those will sure help lighten up the command-line user experience. More importantly, though, the Windows Terminal will also support shortcuts, tabs, tear-away windows and theming, as well as extensions. It also will natively support Unicode and East Asian fonts. Microsoft also unveiled a new update to WSL, a compatibility layer for running Linux binary executables natively on Windows. From a report: WSL 2 is based on a Linux 4.19 kernel coming soon to Windows. This kernel uses technology built for Azure. In both cases, it helps to reduce Linux boot time and streamline memory use. In fact, Microsoft is promising developers "twice as much speed for file-system heavy operations, such as Node Package Manager install." WSL 2 will also support running Linux Docker containers natively, so that VMs are no longer required. WSL 2, like Windows Terminal, is coming in mid-June.

Krystalo writes: At its developer conference Build today, Microsoft previewed new Visual Studio features for remote work, the .NET roadmap, and launched ML.NET 1.0. In April, Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2019 for Windows and Mac. Two notable features were Visual Studio Live Share, a real-time collaboration tool included with Visual Studio 2019, and Visual Studio IntelliCode, an extension offering AI-assisted code completion. At Build 2019, Microsoft shared that IntelliCode's capabilities are now generally available for C# and XAML in Visual Studio 2019 and for Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python in Visual Studio Code. And IntelliCode is now included by default in Visual Studio 2019, starting in version 16.1 Preview 2. The company also previewed an algorithm that can locally track your edits -- repeated edit detection -- and suggest other places where you need that same change. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft is experimenting with features that let developers work from anywhere, on any device. The company today announced a private preview for three such new capabilities: Remote-powered developer tools, cloud-hosted developer environments, and a browser-based web companion tool. If the future of work is remote, Microsoft wants to be ready.

[...] Microsoft also announced that it is skipping .NET 4 to avoid confusion with the .NET Framework, which has been on version 4 for years. Going forward, developers will be able to use .NET to target Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS, WebAssembly, and more. .NET Core 3 will be succeeded by .NET 5, featuring new .NET APIs, runtime capabilities, and language features. Calling it .NET 5 makes it the highest version Microsoft has ever shipped and indicates that the company hopes it is the future for the .NET platform. .NET Core 3 closes much of the remaining capability gap with .NET Framework 4.8, enabling Windows Forms, WPF, and Entity Framework 6. .NET 5 will build on this work, Microsoft says, combining .NET Core, .NET Framework, Xamarin, and Mono (the original cross-platform implementation of .NET) into a single platform. .NET 5 will provide both Just-in-Time (JIT) and Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation models. JIT has better performance for desktop/server workloads and development environments. AOT has a faster startup and a small footprint, which is required for mobile and IoT devices. .NET 5 will offer one unified toolchain supported by new SDK project types and a flexible deployment model (side-by-side and self-contained EXEs).

Stefan Nilsson, a computer science professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, recently explained "why I prefer Go to Java or Python," arguing that Go "makes it much easier for me to write good code." Go is a minimalist language, and that's (mostly) a blessing. The formal Go language specification is only 50 pages, has plenty of examples, and is fairly easy to read. A skilled programmer could probably learn Go from the specification alone. The core language consists of a few simple, orthogonal features that can be combined in a relatively small number of ways. This makes it easier to learn the language, and to read and write programs. When you add new features to a language, the complexity doesn't just add up, it often multiplies: language features can interact in many ways. This is a significant problem -- language complexity affects all developers (not just the ones writing the spec and implementing the compiler).

Here are some core Go features:

- The built-in frameworks for testing and profiling are small and easy to learn, but still fully functional. There are plenty of third-party add-ons, but chances are you won't need them.

- It's possible to debug and profile an optimized binary running in production through an HTTP server.

- Go has automatically generated documentation with testable examples. Once again, the interface is minimal, and there is very little to learn.

- Go is strongly and statically typed with no implicit conversions, but the syntactic overhead is still surprisingly small. This is achieved by simple type inference in assignments together with untyped numeric constants. This gives Go stronger type safety than Java (which has implicit conversions), but the code reads more like Python (which has untyped variables).

- Programs are constructed from packages that offer clear code separation and allow efficient management of dependencies. The package mechanism is perhaps the single most well-designed feature of the language, and certainly one of the most overlooked.

- Structurally typed interfaces provide runtime polymorphism through dynamic dispatch.

- Concurrency is an integral part of Go, supported by goroutines, channels and the select statement.
The professor points out that the Java® Language Specification is 750 pages, and blames much of its complexity on feature creep (for example, inner classes, generics, and enum). And he also applauds the strict compatibility guarantees of Go 1 for the core language and standard packages, as well as its open source, BSD-style license, and Go's code transparency.

"There is one standard code format, automatically generated by the fmt tool," he writes, arguing that "Your project is doomed if you can't read and understand your code."

"Swapnil Bhartiya, the founder of TFIR, sat down with Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, to talk about the origin of the language and why he stepped down from the leadership of the very project he created," writes sfcrazy.

In the interview, van Rossum emphasizes that he still remains one of the core developers, and provides this update: "We're going to set up a new form of governance. We haven't decided yet what that will be. There is actually an interesting time ahead where we currently have about five of six different proposals for new governance systems, and in November there's going to be a vote among the core developers about that. And then there will be another vote that will actually determine specifically who is going to form the leadership. So we're starting out by choosing a constitution, and then using the rules set out in the selected constitution, we're going to vote for a leadership..."
He talks more about his resignation when asked if there's ever been an after-the-fact debate about decisions he's made: "Well, that certainly happens too. What led to my resignation was a form of that, where on social media -- and I've got a feeling that social media are sort of getting out of hand... But for me personally, social media definitely sort of caused additional stress. And I did not enjoy it when core developers were sort of sending tweets where they were questioning my authority or the wisdom of my decisions, rather than saying it to my face and having an honest debate about things...

"It might just have to do with the fact that I've had this role for 28 years... And all that time, I've been sort of the final decider, the final arbiter. I'm getting older, I'm not always available... I just want to spend less time feeling stressed about what is the community -- I have this attitude where everything that was being said on some of the mailing lists, python-ideas, python-dev, touched me. I felt involved in everything, because ultimately every idea would end on my desk for deciding. And I just thought that that should be a responsibiity that should either be shared or transferred... Given that I've been on the project for such a long time, and some of the currently active core developers are good personal friends that I've known for 20 years or more, I am completely confident that the more experienced core developers that we currently have, plus the newer core developers that we have, together will be able to weather any kind of storm that might come Python's way. Yes I resigned from the title suddenly, but there were a lot of responsibilities that I had already completely delegated. I mean, I barely touch the code base, I barely reviewed submissions.
At one point van Rossum compares the future of Python to that of a grown-up child, in that "You're supposed to raise your child for independence..."

So what's he doing now? " I was and still am a principal engineer at Dropbox, which is actually where I spend most of my time."

"Whether it is consumers' data or competitors' code, Google's view seems to be the same: What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine," argues Oracle executive vice president Kenneth Glueck.

Google had urged America's Supreme Court to rule in their ongoing legal case about access to Java's APIs, a case which Google says hinges on "whether developers should be able to create new applications using standard ways of accessing common functions. Those functions are the building blocks of computer programming, letting developers easily assemble the range of applications and tools we all use every day. Making it harder to connect with those functions would lock developers into existing platforms, thus reducing competition and, ultimately, hurting consumers. Access to software interfaces like these is the key to interoperability, the foundation of great software development."

That editorial -- written by Google's senior vice president for global affairs, Kent Walker, notes that 175 startups, developers, academics and other tech companies (including Microsoft) are also asking the Supreme Court to hear this case. Google warns of a risk to innovation posed if companies like Oracle become "gatekeepers to interoperability," calling it "a defining battle of the digital era."

Oracle's executive responds that "There are many 'defining battles' of the digital era -- 5G, Artificial Intelligence, autonomous devices -- but Oracle v. Google is surely not among them." Only in Google's world does weaker intellectual property protection lead to more innovation. It is settled in law and in economics that the opposite is true. And at a time when the U.S. is circling the globe to enhance the protection of U.S. intellectual property -- including strong copyright protection -- Google takes the opposite view...

In a stunning what's-up-is-down and down-is-up statement, Walker attempts to wrap Google in the cloak of interoperability. Java defined the era of interoperability with its "write once, run everywhere" architecture. It was Google that copied Java, built Android around it, and altered it so it was only interoperable with itself (i.e., write once, run only on Google). Android killed Java interoperability, and now Google argues that killing interoperability is good for interoperability?

Those facts are not in dispute. The only issue in dispute is Google's assertion that its actions were all "fair." On this point, the federal circuit court clearly analyzed and methodically decided against Google's fair-use defense. This makes sense because, under no interpretation of fair use, may you copy a competitor's software code and turn around and compete against that competitor in the marketplace. Hard stop... There is no matter of law in question, nor is there a conflict among circuit courts. Google was caught killing interoperability and is now trying to concoct a new "we are too important" legal defense.
Reuters reports that this week the Supreme Court asked the White House "to offer its views on whether it should hear Google's bid to end Oracle's copyright infringement lawsuit."

ZDNet asked the question -- pointing to a RedMonk survey which found TypeScript jumped in popularity from #16 to #12 over the last six months (based on its usage in GitHub projects and in questions on Stack Overflow). The reason for this rise can be found in the latest survey of 33,000 developers from 156 countries who use npm, a hugely popular Node.js JavaScript package manager that's traditionally used to build website features... As per npm developers, a big surprise in last year's survey was that 46 percent of respondents said they used TypeScript. Today, the proportion of developers who use Microsoft's open-source take on JavaScript has ballooned to 62 percent... "Overall, 36 percent of npm users are writing TypeScript some or most of the time. That a third of the users in the JavaScript community are writing a totally new flavor of JavaScript should make everyone sit up and take notice" [according to npm Inc's report]. In other words, TypeScript should be on the list of languages to understand. As RedMonk noted in March, the growing number of projects helps explain why TypeScript's "trajectory is significant and sustainable" and won't just fade away like many other languages.
The article also argues that Microsoft's hit with TypeScript "comes as its open-source cross-platform code editor Visual Studio Code, or VS Code, finds a sweet spot with developers across the world, rising from being used by 500,000 developers in 2016 to 4.5 million in 2019. "

Meanwhile npm Inc. also points out that Slack's desktop application was written in JavaScript, pointing to this as evidence that JavaScript itself "has broken out of the browser and become a general-purpose programming language, put to all the same uses as other programming languages."

An anonymous reader writes: A couple of years ago, Microsoft and Epic Games executives were mad at each other. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney called out Microsoft because he saw it making moves to close off the Windows 10 store and hurt the openness of the PC. Sweeney spoke up because he foresaw the arrival of new computing platforms like augmented reality and virtual reality, and he wanted those platforms to remain open. And now Sweeney has changed his tune, throwing Epic Games' support behind Microsoft's HoloLens 2 Development Edition, which will begin selling for $3,500 later this year.

He did that because Microsoft did a turnabout and approached HoloLens 2 as an open platform. And Epic Games will launch Unreal Engine 4 support for the hardware by the end of May. In an interview this week with GamesBeat, Sweeney said the companies had largely solved their differences with it comes to making choices in support of openness. "Epic loves Microsoft," he said. "Epic hearts Microsoft."

An anonymous reader writes: Hundreds of developers have had had Git source code repositories wiped and replaced with a ransom demand. The hacker removes all source code and recent commits from vitcims' Git repositories, and leaves a ransom note behind that asks for a payment of 0.1 Bitcoin (~$570). The hacker claims all source code has been downloaded and stored on one of their servers, and gives the victim ten days to pay the ransom; otherwise, they'll make the code public.

Hundreds of users have had code repositories wiped and replaced with ransom notes. The coordinated attack has hit Git repositories stored across multiple platforms, such as GitHub, GitLab,and Bitbucket. Some users who fell victim to this hacker have admitted to using weak passwords for their GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket accounts, and forgetting to remove access tokens for old apps they haven't used for months --both of which are very common ways in which online accounts usually get compromised. Several users also tried to pin the issue on the hacker using an exploit in SourceTree, a Git GUI app for Mac and Windows made by Atlassian; however, there is no evidence to support this theory, for the time being.

The next time you're streaming on Netflix, you can thank popular programming language Python and the developers who use it for much of the experience. From a report: According to Python developers at Netflix, the language is used through the "full content lifecycle", from security tools, to its recommendation algorithms, and its proprietary content distribution network (CDN) Open Connect, which ensures that content is streamed from network devices that are as close as possible to end users. Ahead of the Python Software Foundation's PyCon conference next week in Cleveland, the streaming giant has been detailing how it uses the open-source language.

To not a lot of surprise compared to the world of proprietary graphics drivers on Windows where once the support is retired the driver releases stop, old open-source Linux OpenGL drivers are found to be better maintained. From a report: Blender developers working on shipping Blender 2.80 this July as the big update to this open-source 3D modeling software today rolled out the Linux GPU requirements for this next release. The requirements themselves aren't too surprising and cover NVIDIA GPUs released in the last ten years, AMD GCN for best support, and Intel Haswell graphics or newer. In the case of NVIDIA graphics they tend to do a good job maintaining their legacy driver branches. With the AMD Radeon and Intel graphics, Blender developers acknowledge older hardware may work better on Linux.

Hackers have broken into an internet infrastructure firm that provides services to dozens of the world's largest and most valuable companies, including Oracle, Volkswagen, Airbus, and many more as part of an extortion attempt, Motherboard reported Tuesday. From the report: The attackers have also threatened to release data from all of those companies, according to a website seemingly set up by the hackers to distribute the stolen material. Citycomp, the impacted Germany-based firm, provides servers, storage, and other computer equipment to large companies, according to the company's website. Michael Bartsch, executive director of Deutor Cyber Security Solutions, a firm Citycomp said was authorized to speak about the case, confirmed the breach to Motherboard in an email Tuesday. "Citycomp has been hacked and blackmailed and the attack is ongoing," Bartsch wrote. "We have to be careful as the whole case is under police investigation and the attacker is trying all tricks."

Apple has issued a rare public statement following a report by the New York Times on Saturday that alleged Apple was cracking down on apps that its Screen Time feature emulates. From a report: The Times story says that over the past year, Apple has removed or restricted at least 11 of the 17 apps that offer Screen Time-like features. Screen Time is a feature on iOS 12 and later that allows a user to see how much time they spend on their iPhone, what apps they use the most, and the ability for the user or parents of the users to set limitations on the apps. While it's true that Apple has removed some of the apps from the App Store since the company introduced its Screen Time software, the company's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, said the Times did not publish the full reason Apple gave them as to why some of the competing apps were pulled. From Apple's response: Over the last year, we became aware that several of these parental control apps were using a highly invasive technology called Mobile Device Management, or MDM. MDM gives a third party control and access over a device and its most sensitive information including user location, app use, email accounts, camera permissions, and browsing history. We started exploring this use of MDM by non-enterprise developers back in early 2017 and updated our guidelines based on that work in mid-2017.

MDM does have legitimate uses. Businesses will sometimes install MDM on enterprise devices to keep better control over proprietary data and hardware. But it is incredibly risky -- and a clear violation of App Store policies -- for a private, consumer-focused app business to install MDM control over a customer's device. Beyond the control that the app itself can exert over the user's device, research has shown that MDM profiles could be used by hackers to gain access for malicious purposes.

An anonymous reader quotes TechCrunch: Automotive emissions, nuclear power plants, airplanes, application platforms, and electrical grids all share one thing in common: they are very complex, highly coupled systems... Engineers have matched some of this growing complexity with more sophisticated tools, mostly derived from greater computing power and better modeling. But there are limits to how far the technical tools can help here given our limits of organizational behavior about complexity in these systems. Even if engineers are (potentially) acquiring more sophisticated tools, management itself most definitely is not.... One pattern that binds all of these engineering disasters together is that they all had whistleblowers who were aware of the looming danger before it happened. Someone, somewhere knew what was about to transpire, and couldn't hit the red button to stop the line...

Engineering managers probably have the most challenging role, since they both need to sell upwards and downwards within an organization in order to maintain safety standards. The pattern that I have gleaned from reading many reports on disasters over the years indicates that most safety breakdowns start right here. The eng manager starts to prioritize business concerns from their leadership over the safety of their own product. Resistance of these pecuniary impulses is not enough -- safety has to be the watchword for everyone...

Finally, for individual contributors and employees, the key is to always be observant, to be thinking about safety and security while conducting engineering work, and to bring up any concerns early and often. Safety requires tenacity. And if the organization you are working for is sufficiently corrupt, then frankly, it might be incumbent on you to pull that proverbial red button and whistleblow to stop the madness.... [T]he demise of the ethical engineer doesn't have to be a fait accompli.

dryriver writes: A lot of people seem to believe that computers somehow need polygons, NURBS surfaces, voxels or point clouds "to be able to define and render 3D models to the screen at all." This isn't really true. All a computer needs to light, shade, and display a 3D model is to know the answer to the question "is there a surface point at coordinate XYZ or not." Many different mathematical structures or descriptors can be dreamed up that can tell a computer whether there is indeed a 3D model surface point at coordinate XYZ or behind a given screen pixel XY. Polygons/triangles are a very old approach to 3D graphics that was primarily designed not to overstress the very limited CPU and RAM resources of the first computers capable of displaying raster 3D graphics. The brains who invented the technique back in the late 1960s probably figured that by the 1990s at the latest, their method would be replaced by something better and more clever. Yet here we are in 2019 buying pricey Nvidia, AMD, and other GPUs that are primarily polygon/triangle accelerators.

Why is this? Creating good-looking polygon models is still a slow, difficult, iterative and money intensive task in 2019. A good chunk of the $60 you pay for an AAA PC or console game is the sheer amount of time, manpower and effort required to make everything in a 15-hour-long game experience using unwieldy triangles and polygons. So why still use polygons at all? Why not dream up a completely new "there is a surface point here" technique that makes good 3D models easier to create and may render much, much faster than polygons/triangles on modern hardware to boot? Why use a 50-year-old approach to 3D graphics when new, better approaches can be pioneered?

Google is banning app developer DO Global and removing their apps from the Google Play Store after it discovered the company was committing ad fraud. "As of today, 46 apps from DO Global, which is partly owned by internet giant Baidu, are gone from the Play store," reports BuzzFeed. "BuzzFeed News also found that DO Global apps no longer offer ad inventory for purchase via Google's AdMob network, suggesting the ban has also been extended to the internet giant's ad products." From the report: Prior to the app removals, DO Global had roughly 100 apps in the Play store with over 600 million installs. Their removal from the Play store marks one of the biggest bans, if not the biggest, Google has ever instituted against an app developer. DO Global was a subsidiary of Baidu until it was spun out last summer; Baidu retains a 34% stake. BuzzFeed News reported last week that at least six apps from DO included code that made them fraudulently click on ads even when a user was not using the app. The apps were also listed in the Play store under the generic developer names "Pic Tools Group" and "Photo Artist Studio," hosted their privacy policies on Tumblr, and did not disclose they were owned by DO. It's a violation of Play store policy to conceal ownership information, and to commit ad fraud. The ad fraud was detected by Check Point security, which responded to a request from BuzzFeed News to examine apps uncovered during its investigation.

Google removed those six apps, and claimed its internal systems had also flagged most of them for removal. Another 40 DO apps disappeared from the Play store this week, including 20 using the Do Global Games developer name, and 14 listed under Applecheer Studio. The apps listed different addresses and contact information in the store, making it difficult for the average user to see they were all owned by the same major developer.

UCLA professor Yang Yang's lab chock-full of coffee drinkers spent several years searching for a stability-enhancing additive to turn famously unstable perovskite PV cells into a useful product. Then, on a lark, Yang's graduate student Rui Wang suggested they try adding caffeine to the mix. To the team's surprise, caffeine produced longer lasting and more powerful solar cells. IEEE Spectrum reports: The work, completed with collaborators at Hong Kong-based PV firm Solargiga Energy Holdings and two Chinese universities, appears today in energy research journal Joule. Caffeine's calming effect starts during the creation of perovskite crystals. "Without caffeine, the crystallization process will just take 2 seconds, but with caffeine it will take 1 to 2 minutes," says Yang. The more deliberate growth process yields a perovskite material with larger grains of defect-free crystal. They are more stable mechanically and better at moving the charges created from incoming photons.

Caffeine also stabilizes perovskite PV cells during operation because each caffeine molecule can bind to two lead atoms at the boundaries of the crystal grains. This dual molecular lock ties the grains together and, Yang believes, hinders the movement of ions that threaten to reshape the crystal into a weaker pattern. The lab's best caffeine-treated cell captures incoming light with an efficiency of 19.8 percent, up from 17 percent for untreated cells, and retains 86 percent of its output after operating for 1,300 grueling hours at 85C. That's remarkable endurance compared with that of the lab's untreated cells, whose output plummeted by 40 percent after just 175 hours. Still, Yang says they need materials that hold it together through at least one to two years of accelerated testing to provide confidence that they can pump out power for several decades on a rooftop.

thegarbz writes: Epic games is no stranger to controversy recently. The Fortnight developer late last year launched its own games store in direct competition with Steam. Unlike Steam, however, Epic only claims a 12% fee for hosting a game on their store vs Steam's 30%. What has angered many is not the competition but rather Epic's strategy of nabbing up last minute Epic store exclusives sometimes right before launch even after customers already pre-ordered the game on other platforms. Last night Epic CEO Tim Sweeney tweeted that he will end exclusive agreements if Steam price matched the Epic store. From Kotaku: "If Steam committed to a permanent 88% revenue share for all developers and publishers without major strings attached," Sweeney wrote, "Epic would hastily organize a retreat from exclusives (while honoring our partner commitments) and consider putting our own games on Steam." thegarbz adds: While initially this looks like Epic is playing a good guy, there are many reasons to be skeptical. As covered previously Sweeney has aspirations for Epic to become the next Google or Facebook and it is unlikely that the practice of drawing people to your platform through exclusive agreements would be dropped, especially if Steam drops prices to increase competition. More likely the CEO is attempting to improve his company's image in a gaming community which has seen every Epic store exclusive game review bombed across other platforms, positively in the case of Metro Exodus, and negatively in the case of games like Borderlands 2, the squeal of which will be an Epic store exclusive.