satellite

With sweeping panoramic views of the Cascade Mountains, Puget Sound, and the Space Needle, Facebook's quickly growing Seattle team is setting up shop in its new high-rise office.

During an open house of the satellite office today, company high-ups and local politicians showed off the new digs and emphasized Facebook's plans to continue expanding past its Silicon Valley home base, according to TechFlash.

Now the social network's Northwest offices are just a stone's throw from Microsoft's and Amazon's headquarters, and eBay, Zynga, and Google's regional offices.

Should you wait to buy a new laptop? If you're looking for a Toshiba Satellite or Qosmio, you'd better prepare to wait until June.

Toshiba unveiled its line of Ivy Bridge-ready laptops for 2012 today. The new Satellite and Qosmio laptops are all non-ultrabooks, and notably absent is any announcement on new Porteges.… Read more

Cutting the cord in hopes of saving money on television programming is often contemplated. But last year, relatively few cable or satellite subscribers in the U.S. actually did it, a new study shows.

The Convergence Consulting Group yesterday released its research on TV cord cutting to see how many people left their cable or satellite plans behind to access all their content over the Web. The firm found that 1.05 million people in the U.S. cut their TV subscriptions last year. Since 2008, 2.65 million people have decided against cable or satellite and gone to alternative … Read more

TomTom sat-navs have been struck down by a "leap year" bug that sees the road-navigating gadgets failing to find their location.

In a statement on its support site, TomTom says the problem is caused by a bug in the GPS receiver's software that has left some devices unable to obtain a GPS position since March 31.

"We are working hard on a permanent solution that we will make available on our website as a downloadable software fix," TomTom assures. The company says a "limited number of models" are suffering from the glitch, so let us know in the comments below if your TomTom is borked.

Symptoms could include a gray screen, or a notice that reads, "Waiting for a valid GPS signal..." or "Poor GPS signal..."

Read more of "TomTom sat-navs broken by 'leap year' bug" at Crave UK. … Read more

PENASCO, N.M. -- After five years of enduring Internet access that provided dial-up speeds for uploading and rarely exceeded 1Mbps down, I now cruise along in my home office on the edge of a wilderness area at 7.5Mbps for downloads. My uploads are 30 times faster at 1.5Mbps.

The path to my recent broadband liberation began on a day last fall when that slow satellite connection went dark for an entire day. A malfunction with the satellite literally caused it to shut down and turn away from the Earth. In the process of reporting the story for CNET, I came across a tangentially related tidbit about the launch of a new satellite, called ViaSat-1, which would soon be in orbit and providing new speed and capacity for my satellite Internet provider (WildBlue, which is a subsidiary of ViaSat).

I shared the good news with my family, but didn't plan to hold my breath for the upgrade to trickle down anytime soon through the layers of middlemen and resellers standing between that beautiful new bird in orbit and my Wi-Fi router. If you've read the rest of this week-long series or live in the sticks yourself, you know how new and exciting infrastructure can remain out of grasp, even when it's physically so close to home.… Read more

As promised at CES 2012, Seagate announced the latest major firmware upgrade for the Seagate GoFlex Satellite today.

When first released almost a year ago, the Satellite was effectively the first wireless storage expander for the iPad as well as other mobile devices, allowing for streaming digital content it stored to up to three mobile devices via its built-in Wi-Fi network. One of the few drawbacks of the device was the fact that it couldn't relay the Internet access from another Wi-Fi network, making mobile devices remain offline when connected to its Wi-Fi network. … Read more

The twin-armed Dextre has managed to retrieve tools and release launch locks on the Robotic Refueling Mission (RRM), an experiment to show that satellites can be refueled by a robot.

Dextre used a wire-cutting tool to sever a wire fastening a mock gas cap to the RRM module, a feat of considerable precision given the fact that Dextre is some 12 feet tall and the wire clearance was only 0.039 inch.

"It's the robotic equivalent of threading a needle while standing on the end of a diving board," the Canadian Space Agency quoted its president, Steve … Read more

Earth's orbit is a very cluttered place. And that makes it dangerous.

The U.S. Air Force is looking to get a better handle on that clutter--from functioning satellites to abandoned rockets and shards of machinery--with something it calls the Space Fence. This isn't a barrier to keep the bric-a-brac at bay, but rather a radar-meets-catalog initiative to keep track of what's where.

Today, Lockheed Martin said it's taken a key step forward with its prototype of a ground-based radar system for the $3.5 billion Air Force Space Fence program: that prototype is now tracking … Read more

Earlier today, scientists at the European Space Agency marked a milestone: On March 1, 2002, the largest Earth observation satellite ever built was launched into orbit. During the course of its (extended) lifetime, the Envisat satellite has circled the Earth more than 50,000 times, providing fodder to scientists publishing their research in an estimated 2,000 scientific journals.

But it's hardly an anomaly. Despite the well-chronicled budgetary problems affecting space programs around the world, space exploration nonetheless continues to extend our understanding of the solar system (and beyond). Just this week, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope took the … Read more