For years, George Lucas has been saying he has a bunch of independent features he has wanted to make, as soon as he was free of the 'Star Wars' shackles, but who would have thought one of the first would be a fantasy animated musical?

According to industry bible Variety, Lucasfilm owner Disney, through it's Touchstone label will release 'Strange Magic' in January 2015, a animated fantasy musical directed by sound designer turned director Gary Rydstrom and featuring the voices of Alan Cumming, Evan Rachel Wood, Kristin Chenoweth, Maya Rudolph, Sam Palladio and Alfred Molina, with a story penned by George Lucas.

'Strange Magic' was already in production when Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012. Lucasfilm Animation Singapore and Industrial Light & Magic, have produced the CG animation.

The Pentagon has tasked the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) with finding new methods for drones to be able to launch from aircraft, including the B-1, B-52, C-130, and other large aircraft. Drones would be able to launch from aircraft, conduct their missions, and return to the aircraft so the host plane can fly away from potentially dangerous airspace.

Here is what the DARPA request says: "The agency envisions a large aircraft that, with minimal modification, could launch and recover multiple small unmanned systems from a standoff distance."

"We want to find ways to make smaller aircraft more effective, and one promising idea is enabling existing large aircraft, with minimal modification, to become 'aircraft carriers in the sky,'" said Dan Patt, DARPA program manager. "We envision innovative launch and recovery concepts for new [unmanned aerial system] designs that would couple with recent advances in small payload design and collaborative technologies."

OWC has built a reputation around offering a wide assortment of Apple-related products, perhaps most notably SSD upgrade kits. The latest upgrade bundle from OWC features a 1TB Aura or Aura Pro SSD (960GB user-addressable) for MacBook Air users with 2010, 2011, and 2012 models. The large capacity provides double the maximum storage offered by Apple.

OWC includes several items in the kit. All of the tools necessary for dissembling and reassembling the laptop are included, along with an Envoy USB 3.0 external enclosure. After installing the new SSD the external enclosure allows users to clone over their previous install, or copy files back and forth. The external enclosure also affords users the ability to continue to use the old SSD from their MacBook.

The Aura Pro SSD features the tried-and-true SF-2200 controller, which still manages to deliver solid performance for most consumer workloads. The SandForce controllers also offer low power consumption, which extends battery life, and AES-256 encryption for the security conscious. The entire package is covered by a five-year warranty. The bundle price for a 1TB SSD is $579.00, for 480GB it is $329.00, 240GB for $189.00, and a 120GB kit weighs in at $119.00.

Microsoft took a major step forward after releasing the Lumia 535 smartphone, its first handset without Nokia branding. The device is powered by Windows Phone 8.1 and will cost around $137, featuring a 5-inch qHD display screen, and a 5-megapixel front-facing camera.

Microsoft purchased Nokia in April for $7.2 billion and wanted to move ahead without the Nokia branding - recently confirming that devices would be known as Microsoft Lumia.

Even if the company is able to release affordable, appealing smartphones, trying to compete against the Apple iPhone and Google Android smartphones will remain an uphill battle. Windows-powered smartphones only have 2.7 percent of the global smartphone market, according to Strategy Analytics, as its market share continues to drop.

The Intel DC S3500 series competes in the price-sensitive segment and is geared for read-intensive and mixed workloads. The DC S3500 (evaluated here) doesn't sport quite the performance of its older brother, the DC S3700 (evaluated here), but provides plenty of performance and endurance for many workloads. Today Intel is announcing the release of 1.2 and 1.6TB variants, along with a new M.2 design. Expanded capacity is coupled with low power consumption that delivers reduced TCO. The DC S3500 has an active read power below 1.3 Watts. A sprinkling of other datacenter-specific technologies provide resiliency and a 0.3DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day) endurance limitation. End-to-end data protection, data redundancy technology, AES encryption, and power loss protection, ensure data safety.

Intel 20nm MLC NAND and a new 8-channel controller drive the DC S3500 models. Details are scant on the new Intel-proprietary controllers, but we will update readers as more information becomes available. We can expect to see the same consistent performance from the new drives, with a .5ms latency maximum for 99.9% of 4k random read IOPS. There are 10 capacity points available for the 2.5 drives, allowing users to tailor capacity for their specific needs. The high-capacity 2.5" variants feature up to 500/460 MB/s of sequential read/write speed and up to 65,000/18,500 random read/write IOPS. The larger pool of flash provides a bit more performance for the high-capacity variants, but the entire DC S3500 range features varying speeds based upon capacity.

The M.2 design relies upon the SATA interface and comes in 80, 120, and 340GB capacities. The performance of the M.2 variant seems tuned for slightly more random write speed than the similar capacity 2.5" variants, but slightly lower read speed. Intel is expecting the compact M.2 design to make a big splash in embedded applications, such as digital signage and slot machines. The M.2 design will also work well for server boot volumes. The ultra-dense design is particularly well-suited for blade and microserver designs, and some OEMs are in the process of developing systems with multiple M.2 connectors.

SMART Modular Technologies has announced the new M.2 SATA XR+ with SafeDATA power loss protection technology. SMART Modular Technologies, part of the larger SMART consortium of companies, is a privately-held company that has been in the electronics industry for over 25 years. Their products are usually confined to the OEM market, where they create custom designs for varying applications. The double-sided M.2 design is available in capacities from 32 to 512GB. These SSDs are designed to meet the needs of Tier 1 OEM customers and sport sequential read/write speeds of 540/320 MB/s.

SafeDATA consists of power loss detection and hold-up circuitry, in addition to advanced controller firmware, to flush all data to the underlying NAND in the event of a host power loss event. Power loss protection is a critical requirement in enterprise and embedded applications, and fusing that functionality onto a slim M.2 design opens up new applications for the dense design. The product is sampling now, and volume production begins in Q1 of 2015.

M.2 designs avail themselves well to several applications, and datacenter-centric models are appearing with more frequency. We expect to have samples of data-centric M.2 designs soon, and in the interim check out our library of competitive performance analysis of the latest and greatest enterprise storage technology in our IT/Datacenter section.

HGST is now shipping its helium-filled 8TB HDDs to retailers, with both Amazon and Newegg now listing them. Newegg is listing the HGST Ultrastar He8 8TB 3.5-inch HDD for $899, while Amazon is slightly more expensive at $933.

The HGST Ultrastar He8 8TB drive is a 7200RPM HDD with 128MB of DRAM buffer, and three interfaces: SAS-6Gbps, SAS-12Gbps and SATA-6Gbps. The 8TB HDD is based off of seven 1.2TB PMR platters, which are filled with helium which shrinks the distance between the platters, without increasing the risk and sacrifice of performance. HGST promises 205MB/sec maximum sustained transfer rates, with a 4.16ms typical latency.

The drive is also available in Japan, cheaper than it is in the US, at around $695 after conversion. The drives aren't aimed at the consumer, so we should expect these prices to not drop quickly, for now.

Far Cry 4's Creative Director, Alex Hutchinson, is making headlines again today - but not for the argument that resolution is "certainly not something" he cares about in a game, but that there will not be a sequel to the surprise-hit Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.

The announcement happened during the IGN Pubcast, where Hutchinson said: "The cool thing about Blood Dragon was that it was a surprise. It was a great use of the Far Cry 3 base, and had an awesome soundtrack. So the answer is no, you won't be getting another one of those. Hopefully we can come up with something that surprises you as much as the original Blood Dragon".

He did add that the company will get pounded about it, where he added: "And if we did make one, I'd probably get told on Twitter 'are we going to get a Blood Dragon every year? You're just in a factory churning things out'".

The upcoming 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens', marks the first time that a 'Star Wars' movie had been filmed in the United Kingdom since principal photography completed on 'The Phantom Menace' in 1998, with Pinewood Studios serving as the films set base. George Lucas completed principal photography of its two prequel-sequels 'Attack of the Clones' and 'Revenge of the Sith' at Fox Studios in Sydney, Australia.

Now, according to the BBC, Pinewood Studios CEO Ivan Dunleavy has confirmed that the as-yet untitled 'Episode VIII' will return to the UK studio, continuing the trend of the original 'Star Wars' trilogy.

To be directed by Rian Johnson of 'Looper' fame, 'Episode VIII' is scheduled to be released sometime in 2017.

We can't let NVIDIA have all the next-gen GPU fun, can we? AMD has reportedly kicked off internal testing of its next-generation GPU, known as Fiji XT.

The news is coming from the Zauba.com database, which "monitors imports and exports to and from India, where high-tech companies employ many engineers" according to KitGuru. AMD's Indian office received a "printed circuit board assembly (video video card) C880 Fiji XT P/N.102-C88001-00" which could be the company's new GPU.

VideoCardz.com is also reporting that the Fiji XT architecture will arrive to us as the Radeon R9 390X, and could use the 28nm process (which is what the R9 290X is built on) or the smaller, more power-efficient 20nm process. We should expect a new GPU from AMD in the next six months or so. The last time we heard about the Radeon R9 390X, we heard it would arrive with HBM memory and baked onto the 20nm process.