Latest News - Page 4126

It appears to be all good news for space enthusiasts today especially for those who want to go into space eventually. SpaceX has filed a notice of intent with the FAA regarding building a new spaceport in Cameron County, Texas. Cameron County, Texas is very close to the Mexican border and is right on the Gulf of Mexico.

The filing reads:

Under the Proposed Action, SpaceX proposes to construct a vertical launch area and a control center area to support up to 12 commercial launches per year. The vehicles to be launched include the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy (up to two per year), and a variety of smaller reusable suborbital launch vehicles...All launch trajectories would be to the east over the Gulf of Mexico.

SpaceX currently uses NASA's Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral for its Falcon 9 rocket. They have also been interested in gaining access to NASA's Complex 39A for heavy loads, although it's unclear whether or not they are still interested in that.

The founder of SpaceX spoke last year about this "commercial Cape Canaveral" and would like to launch 4 Falcon Heavies a year in order to keep the price below $1000 per pound, a price that China has said they can't beat. However, Congressional support may not be behind the effort and could possibly delay the construction. More as it comes.

The economy can not still be as bad as every seems to think it is. Apple's building a new data center and even spending the extra cash to power it with an alternative fuel. Now, Microsoft has joined into the party. Microsoft is building a new data center in Wyoming at a cost north of $100 million.

Wyoming is hoping that this new project will bring other new data centers to the state. Microsoft has been quite busy with its construction projects as of late. Just recently, Microsoft has turned on two new data centers for its cloud service Azure. It's not clear if this new data center is for Azure or not.

Microsoft announced the construction this way:

To keep pace with growing demand, we are announcing two new datacenter options for Windows Azure. Effective immediately, compute and storage resources are now available in "West US" and "East US", with SQL Azure coming online in the coming months. These new options add to our worldwide presence and significantly expand our US footprint.

It's been floating around that Microsoft is trying to find customers to fill its capacity, but it could be that Microsoft has found enough demand to warrant the continued roll out of. For right now, it's clear that Microsoft is laying out some serious capacity and betting on cloud computing continuing to grow. And I think that's a pretty good bet.

"We (Microsoft) know we don't have anything to lose. But, our competitors have a whole lot (to lose)." Apparently, Microsoft has been backed into a corner and, like an animal backed into a corner, is going to fight. This rumor says that Microsoft is trying to bring Kinect UI to Windows Phone 8 at launch, or shortly there after.

Right now, bringing Kinect UI to Windows Phone is purely a developmental effort, however, it has been receiving more and more resources as time has passed. Company execs have been encouraged by the massive support for Apple's Siri, even though it's only in beta stage. People seem to like the idea of talking to a phone.

However, before this can be brought to the mainstream, several challenges still await Microsoft such as where to place the 3 cameras required. "Kinect has three cameras, one of which his infrared. We can't put an IR camera on a smartphone, and without it, NUI won't work in dark." So Kinect UI could end up being a daytime toy only.

Kinect NUI is going to be closely tied to Microsoft's TellMe since Kinect can already, allegedly, understand more voice patterns than the competing Siri. If Microsoft pulls this off, they will receive massive amounts of attention, even if it is only daylight capable. Time to play the waiting game and see what happens. More as it comes.

I always love new product announcements because they give me something to look forward to. Tuesday, Toshiba obliged me by announcing a new line of tablets dubbed the "Excite" family. These new tablets will come in 7.7-inch, 10-inch, and 13-inch sizes, and all will have Tegra 3 quad-core processors.

All of the WiFi-only Excite tablets will sport 1GB of RAM. They will come with the now common place front and rear camera, which are 2-megapixels and 5-megapixels, respectively. The 13-inch tablet will weigh in at 2.2 pounds and feature a 1600x900 screen and provide a respectable 13 hours of battery life. It is only 0.4-inches thick.

The lesser Excite 10 will sport a 1280x800 screen, weigh in at 1.32 pounds, and is only 0.35-inches thick. It is said that it will get 10 hours of battery life, but we all know how those rated times go. The two bigger tablets will both get an SD card slot and the smallest will get a microSD slot.

The Excite 7.7 will start at $499.99, the Excite 10 at $449.99, and the Excite 13 at $649.99, all for 16GB of storage. The Excite 10 will launch first on May 6, followed by the Excites 7.7 and 13 on June 10. It will be interesting to see how it stacks up against the competition. More as it comes.

Apple are definitely on their way toward quite an amazing milestone: becoming the world's first $1 trillion company, according to a Wall Street analyst. Brian White from Topeka Capital Markets recently predicted that Apple stock would push past the $1,000 per share barrier in the next twelve months, which would tip the company very close to the $1 trillion mark.

Apple stock has been quite popular over the last few years, with no signs of it stopping. Share prices topped Google's for the first time last week, a milestone that the late Steve Jobs was rumored to be working toward. How could Apple hit $1,000 in share value? Well, it's not that hard at all, really.

Apple's new iPhone could really boost their value, a new iPad that smashes the previous third-gen iPad, iOS 6.0, new MacBooks, iMacs, they're all coming this year alone. On top of this, Apple is opening up in the Chinese market, which is until now, nearly untapped for Apple. It's a huge market, and sure to boost their share prices considerably as iDevices start flooding into the hands of China-based customers.

Next year should see the release of an iTV, with television being a gigantic market in itself, if Apple could do something... magical... or revolutionary... in television, this would surely catapult them past $1,000 per share, and even inching over the $1 trillion value milestone.

'YOUM'. This is the name of Samsung's flexible AMOLED technology, in which both the name and logo have been sent for trademark registration in the United States. This means that YOUM-sporting devices could soon be seen in the wild, and flexed, in the wild.

YOUM is Samsung's next-generation ultra-thin screen technology, with the unique characteristic of being able to be bent, Samsung says its even unbreakable. YOUM was showcased before it had a name at CES last year, where they were teasing a 4.5-inch screen with a thickness of 0.3mm and a resolution of 800x480 (WVGA). Samsung have demonstrated the concept of using it for an e-book reader, camera, video chat and even augmented reality and 3D visuals on tablet PCs.

We should see things like watches, smartphones and tablets built from this technology. A flexible watch connected to the Internet, Facebook, e-mail, etc would be quite cool and would definitely sell to the hipsters, and technology fans alike.

NVIDIA have posted some new 300-series GeForce drivers, with the release of GeForce 301.24 beta. These new drivers are actually compatible with "all GeForce 8-series and later GPUs". Previous 300-series drivers only worked on the new GEFORCE GTX 680 GPU. These new drivers add support for features with the GEFORCE GTX 680, including Adaptive Vsync, NVIDIA's Frame Rate Target scheme, and an option to enable FXAA through the control panel.

The new GeForce 301.24 beta driver also offers performance improvements for single- and multi-GPU setups. Also on offer are new features for NVIDIA Surround Vision setups:

• Add a fourth accessory display for access to email, web, or other applications while you game.
• Maximize an application to a single physical display when in Surround mode.
• Confine the Windows Taskbar to the center display.
• Enable bezel peeking to temporarily peek behind the monitor bezels when using bezel-corrected resolutions.
• Add or remove resolution settings from the list of Surround resolutions.
• Full center display acceleration for single-wide display modes.

The 301.24 beta also adds a bunch of new SLI and 3D Vision profiles. SLI support has been baked in for Alan Wake, and Valve's upcoming Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

You can grab the GeForce 301.24 beta drivers here.

AMD Radeon HD 7970 owner? Lover of overclocking? Been waiting for a waterblock? Well, Swiftech may just have the product for you. Swiftech have released the Komodo HD7970 waterblock for AMD's Radeon HD 7970 GPU.

The waterblock covers the full-length of the card to protect its fragile components, and features an enhanced thermal design, illuminated bridge, and a comprehensive packaging including a single-slot PCI bracket and back-plate, which makes the Komodo HD7970 the most sophisticated full-cover waterblock offered by Swiftech to date.

It doesn't stop there though, there are also companion accessories on offer, where you can grab optional CrossFireX bridges and adjustable connectors for multiple card configurations. Gabrian Rouchon, Swiftech's Chairman & CTA says:

We took our sweet time to release this product, but in the end I think the result was worth the wait!

Biswamohan Pani, a former Intel engineer and newly-hired AMD employee has plead guilty to fraud that is centered around the theft of sensitive Intel documents. The stolen information is considered to be worth approximately $1 billion, which includes chip-related design and manufacturing data.

It's thought that Pani intended to use the information for career advancement, but AMD has denied any knowledge of Pani's wrongdoing, and has fully cooperated with federal investigators. Pani had previously worked at Intel's Hudson-based chip making plant located in Massachusetts before submitting his resignation on May 29, 2008. Pani's last day at Intel was June 11, but little did Intel know he had actually begun working at AMD on June 2, while simultaneously retaining access to Intel's network.

It is thought that during this time, Pani had been downloading sensitive documents that held information on Intel's manufacturing and chip designs. Corporate espionage and intellectual property theft, in the form of trade secrets, schematics, or other proprietary information can be extremely lucrative in the right hands. Investigators have found no links between Pani and AMD.

With all the fanfare that Apple often brings to a financial discussion, it's odd to hear the words "Apple" and "downgrade" in the same sentence. But those two words found themselves together in a sentence released by BTIG Research's Walter Piecyk when he downgraded Apple's rating on the company's shares from "buy" to "neutral."

And why shouldn't he? There is plenty for investors to be worried about in the company. First, they no longer have Steve Jobs. Old news I know, but it still has an effect on the company's future. More importantly, though, is that wireless carriers are getting fed up with the subsidies that they give to new iPhone buyers.

Carriers are taking a cut in their profit margins while Apple continually earns larger and larger portions. Take a look at AT&T: in 2010, AT&T's margin was over 44% but now are hovering around only 30%. "We expect post-paid wireless operators to remain firm in their plan to stunt the pace of phone upgrades in 2012 and we expect to see some initial evidence of their success in the current quarter," Piecyk said.

This would result in lower sales. But how much lower? Says Piecyk, "We expect Apple's iPhone sales to drop to 27.5 million units in Fiscal Q3, resulting in a revenue estimate that is $1 billion below consensus."

Ouch.