The appearance of a ‘doughnut rock’, named Pinnacle Island, on Mars a few weeks ago caused quite a stir. NASA’s Mars rover, Opportunity, sent photos of the rock which was not there when it had passed that same spot four days earlier. How did the rock get there? NASA nows says that Pinnacle Island is part of a larger rock that Opportunity had run into. The mystery rock broke off and landed away from the original rock. Mystery solved!
Comcast Buying Time Warner
Comcast announced that it has agreed to buy Time Warner for $45 billion. The resulting company would combine the top two cable companies in the United States. The merger is expected to be completed by year end. However, close regulatory scrutiny is expected since this can have significant impact on consumers.
Binge Watchers Wanted ‘House of Cards’ Early
Washington, D.C. was facing a major snowstorm the day before the scheduled launch of Netflix’s ‘House of Cards.’ With much of the capital scheduled to be shut down, fans of the series took to Twitter to see if it could start their binge watching a day earlier. A petition was also started on Change.org. Netflix was having no parts of it. A company spokesman reaffirmed on Thursday that the episodes would still premiere Friday at midnight Pacific time. As a fan and sometimes binge watcher, it was worth the wait.
Windows 8 License Sales Passes $200 Million Mark
While participating in the recent Goldman Sachs Technology & Internet Conference, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of Marketing Tami Reller has dropped an updated figure of 200 million Windows 8 licenses sold . 200 million is a lot of licenses by anyone’s reckoning, equating to a rate of a little over 420,000 licenses per day.
To put things is perspective; Microsoft sold roughly 240 million Windows 7 licenses in a 12 month time period, it has taken Windows 8 15 months to hit the 200 million milestone.
NVIDIA Reports Increased Earnings for Q3 2014
Further evidencing that the desktop PC may not be a dying breed after all, NVIDIA has just announced a better than expected 3rd quarter for the current fiscal year, with revenue increasing by some 9% over the equivalent period for fiscal 2013.
NVIDIA chief Jen-Hsun Huang is quoted as saying… “Quarterly revenue came in well above our outlook, driven by PC gaming, capping an outstanding year for our GPU business. In fact, GeForce GTX video card sales were up almost 50-percent compared to the previous year.”
Judy is a computer veteran with 30 years of experience. She has owned everything from a TRS-80, Apple IIe and various Windows-based PCs. She is currently living in her Apple ecosystem at home consisting of an iPhone, iPad, iMac, MacBook, Apple TV, iPod nano and two Time Capsules. She is a fan of all things mobile since she got her first Palm Pilot in 1999. Check out her iPad app, Number Wizard, in the App Store. Follow her on Twitter @junovotech or at Junovo.com.
