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By storing solar energy in molten salt, BrightSource Energy can now build one less solar power plant.

The company said today that it is adding energy storage to three planned solar projects that will supply power to utility Southern California Edison.

Instead of building seven power plants to provide about 4 million megawatt-hours per year, BrightSource now expects to be able to meet that with six concentrating solar plants to be built over the next six years, including three that will have storage. It is now constructing its first project, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, which will not have … Read more

Android hackers are working overtime to bring Ice Cream Sandwich into the real world, and early fruits of their labor are starting to emerge--if you have the right phone.

The CyanogenMod project to build unofficial versions of Android is working on CM9, the version based on the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich source code from Google. Early CM9 buildsare available in alpha for the Samsung Nexus S and beta for the Samsung Galaxy S.

"CyanogenMod 9 Alpha 11 for Nexus S is definitely worth checking out," programmer Koushik "Koush" Dutta said on Google+ yesterday. And … Read more

Running a newly released version of Windows or Mac OS X on a 3-year-old personal computer is an unremarkable feat.

But it's a lot more difficult in the smartphone world, where hardware and software have been changing at a breakneck pace. That's why I recommend watching this brief demonstration of Ice Cream Sandwich, aka Android 4.0, on the first-generation Android phone, the T-Mobile G1 from October 2008.

XDA Developers forum member jcarrz1 posted the video and an alpha version of his OS build yesterday, nine days after Google released the Ice Cream Sandwich source code.

As you may expect, the new OS drags on the comparatively ancient hardware, with slow app launches and long lags between a touch action and the phone's response. But all the ICS apps work.

What doesn't work at this stage, jcarrz1 said: Wi-Fi networking, Bluetooth, and screen rotation. … Read more

A treat for modders and developers, Google has released the source code for Ice Cream Sandwich.

The source code for Android 4.0--the latest version of the mobile operating system--was released today as part of the Android Open Source Project, Jean-Baptiste M. "JBQ" Queru, a software engineer in the project, said in a blog post that urged patience.

"Since this is a large push, please be aware that it will take some time to complete," Queru said. "If you sync before it's done, you'll get an incomplete copy that you won't be … Read more

Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of the co-founders of the social network Diaspora, has died at age 22, TechCrunch reported today.

The cause and date of his death were not reported.

Zhitomirskiy was one of four New York University programming students who last year launched Diaspora, which is designed as an open-source alternative to Facebook. Their intention was to build "an open source personal web server that will put individuals in control of their data."

A commercial alpha version was released November 23, 2010. The group has raised more than $200,000 in donations using a fundraising platform start-up called … Read more

Amazon's Kindle Fire continues to rack up impressive preorders, according to a marketing research firm that's been tracking sales of the imminent Amazon tablet.

Direct sales through Amazon are now projected at 500,000 from September 28 through October 28, according to Carter Nicholas, CEO of eDataSource.

But Nicholas is quick to admit that isn't the whole picture. "I'm going to assume that for every unit sold on Amazon.com there's also a unit being sold to a Best Buy or Staples. So maybe 1 million to 1.5 million," he said in a phone interview Thursday.… Read more

Growl, a widely used open-source notification tool that lets Mac OS X applications tell users about events such as incoming instant messages, is no longer free.

And not everybody is happy about that.

Starting with version 1.3, Growl became a $1.99 purchase. Growl developer Chris Forsythe described the changes this way yesterday:

Growl as a paid application allows for good changes. We now have people working on Growl full time. Money earned through purchases in the App Store go directly to benefiting Growl...Without changing to this paid Growl model, Growl would have died off and would no … Read more

Facebook has acquired Strobe, a startup focused on the open-source SproutCore software--but CNET has learned that a new startup called Tilde looks to be picking up where Strobe is leaving off.

SproutCore is a package of prebuilt JavaScript code designed to ease the creation of Web sites and Web apps, including those that work on mobile devices. Charles Jolley has worked on SproutCore for years, including for a period of time at Apple where SproutCore was used in MobileMe services, before striking off on his own to form Strobe.

Several programmers left Strobe in October to begin a new start-up … Read more

Still don't have a Halloween costume? Check out Superpunch's list of downloadable masks--just print and cut them out, add a string or a Popsicle stick if you're extra lazy, and off you go. Happy Halloween!

Vampire power, also known as standby power, is a reference to some electronics sucking up juice even when they're turned off, but it also works for our ongoing Halloween show title theme! Check out this article on the Learning Thermostat to see what Nest Labs is doing to kill vampire power.

The iPhone Dev-Team is already close to finishing a preliminary jailbreak on the iPhone 4S that will eventually work with the iPad 2 as well, but what happened to good old analog piracy? As it happens, Activision Blizzard is knee-deep in pirates already circulating bootleg copies of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.… Read more