Roy Mark

NASA Outsourcing Space Station Transport to SpaceX by Roy Mark The SpaceX Launch Vehicle The Falcon is a two-stage, liquid oxygen and rocket-grade kerosene powered launch vehicle. The Falcon’s tank walls and domes are made from aluminum lithium alloy. The interstage, which connects the upper and lower stage for Falcon, is a carbon fiber aluminum […]

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded Sprint $7.3 million in funding for fuel cell technology. The grant funding will be used to expand the number of Sprint cell sites that rely on hydrogen fuel cells for backup power.The April 17 funding was the largest single grant awarded by the Department of Energy under a […]

Motorola’s on again, off again spin-off of its troubled handset unit might be on again, according to Oppenheimer analyst Ittai Kidron.In a research note published April 17, Kidron speculated that “management could revisit the planning process for the Mobile Device spin off in the near future, which would signal growing confidence in the upcoming [handset] […]

Nokia reported April 16 its worst quarterly performance in more than a decade. Slammed by plunging sales as consumers continue to cut spending, the world’s largest cell phone maker saw a 90 percent drop in first-quarter net profits as unit sales declined 18 percent from the fourth quarter.“The lower sales volumes for Nokia and the […]

Caving under pressure from consumers and Congress alike, Time Warner Cable said April 16 it would drop plans to begin consumption-based broadband billing trials in summer 2009 in four U.S. markets.“It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll […]

The cable industry stepped forward April 15 and defended Time Warner Cable’s proposed tiered and metered Internet pricing scheme. Kyle McSlarrow, president and CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, cable’s principal trade group, made a CableTechTalk blog post supporting the idea of consumption-based broadband billing. Time Warner is planning a four-city test of […]

Organized crime successfully cranked up its data breaching efforts in 2008, and it paid off: More electronic records were breached last year than the previous four years combined, according to a new report from Verizon Business Security. The primary target of the thieves was the financial services industry, accounting for 93 percent of all such […]

NASA, it turns out, does have a sense of humor. Well, sort of.The space agency announced April 14 it will not be naming a new node on the International Space Station after comedian Stephen Colbert, who used his TV show, “The Colbert Report,” to urge viewers to jam the NASA mailbox and suggest his name […]

Alaska Airlines is evaluating pricing models for its in-flight Wi-Fi service after a successful trial run that offered free wireless Internet connections on flights between Seattle and San Jose, Calif. Since the Feb. 26 Wi-Fi launch on a handful of Boeing 737-700s, more than 2,100 customers have logged on to the service.According to Alaska Airline […]

A Time Warner official said April 13 the company plans to delay implementing its controversial broadband pricing plan in San Antonio and Austin, Texas, until at least October, with actual billing being pushed into 2010. The cable broadband provider still plans to launch the new pricing scheme in August in Rochester, N.Y., and Greensboro, N.C., […]

Time Warner’s broadband cap plan may result in federal legislation aimed at unfair tiered price structures from Internet providers. Angered over Time Warner’s pricing plans, U.S. Rep. Eric Massa of New York says that’s exactly what he has in mind, promising a bill to curb tiers, particularly in areas where a broadband provider owns a […]

STRIKE ONE: “Crash after crash. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.” STRIKE TWO: “The audio drops about once per inning and stays dropped for quite some time.”STRIKE THREE: “I’ve got hundreds of apps…and this is by far the worst. All in all, this app is crap.”So go the reviews for MLB.com’s effort to bring […]