NASA plans to hand over the ISS to a private corporation

NASA is dead set on leaving Low-Earth Orbit to go to the moon, Mars and other farther destinations. That means extending the space station’s funding beyond 2024 is out of the question. Now, NASA Deputy Associate Administrator Bill Hill has revealed what the agency wants to do with the ISS once astronauts move out. Instead of deorbiting it and sinking it into the ocean or breaking it apart to sell piece by piece, it apparently wants to hand the spacecraft over to a private corporation.

According to TechCrunch, Hill said during the Journey to Mars event:

“NASA’s trying to develop economic development in low-earth orbit. Ultimately, our desire is to hand the space station over to either a commercial entity or some other commercial capability so that research can continue in low-earth orbit.”

The agency did say in the past that it plans to leave LEO in the hands of private space corporations, but it originally envisioned them building their own smaller successor to the ISS. Hill didn’t explain things in detail — he also didn’t confirm whether NASA’s partner agencies share its desire to leave the ISS to the private sector — but it’s going to be tough renting out the station or selling it for how much it’s actually worth. The ISS is an international collaboration between NASA, Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe) and CSA (Canada), and they’ve all been sinking billions into its yearly maintenance and operations.

Source: TechCrunch

Watch astronauts install a space taxi dock on the ISS

Boeing and SpaceX are working on manned spacecraft that will send astronauts to the International Space Station as early as 2017, but before that happens, they need a place to dock. Crew aboard the space station are about to install the first of two international docking adapters that will let the taxis link up to the station. The six hour-plus mission, being livestreamed by NASA, will be performed by astronauts Kate Rubins and Jeff Williams, with a big mechanical assist from the Candarm2.

Yesterday, the Canadian Space Agency’s mechanical arm extracted the dock from SpaceX’s Dragon capsule and placed it close to the mating port. After the crew dock is depressurized, Rubins and Williams will complete the connection to the station, install cables and ready the port for the new modules. If all goes well, the installation should take under 6.5 hours. For more, check out the video below or go to NASA Live for more information.

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

Source: NASA Live

Taiwan Component Makers Refuse to Lower Quotes For iPhone 7 Parts

Apple’s demand that overseas suppliers lower their quotes for iPhone 7 parts and components has been met with resistance from makers, according to Taiwanese website DigiTimes.

Apple is said to have asked downstream part and component suppliers, excluding TSMC and Largan Precision, to reduce their quotes for iPhone 7 devices by as much as 20 percent, even though order volumes for new phones are reportedly 30 percent lower than those placed a year earlier.

Apple is reportedly using the rising handset supply chain in China to force Taiwan-based companies to make their quotes more competitive. However, DigiTimes suggests Apple’s policy of squeezing out profits from Taiwan suppliers “makes no sense” because “the quality of products rolled out by Taiwan- and China-based suppliers is standing at different levels”.

Whether or not quality is an issue, major downstream suppliers including Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE) and associated companies under the Foxconn Group have told Apple that they cannot accept orders without reasonable profits.

Apple reportedly chose to exclude TSMC and Largan from its demands because the company is finding it hard to find alternatives that offer foundry services or high-end camera modules, respectively.

Meanwhile, ASE has seen its business grow steadily in recent years and optimized its advanced packaging technology by expanding its client base through a merger agreement with fellow company Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL).

Foxconn Group, for its part, has acquired Japan-based Sharp, which will reportedly keep its production facilities busy, meaning there’s no inclination for the electronic manufacturing subcontractor to sacrifice its margins to work for Apple.

Apple accounted for a 17.2 percent share of the global smartphone market in terms of shipment volume, but took as high as 91 percent of the industry’s profits in 2015, according to data compiled by Canaccord Genuity.

Apple is expected to reveal the iPhone 7 at an event on September 7, and open up pre-orders on September 9. The specific launch date remains ambiguous, with both September 16 and September 23 mooted as potential options.

Related Roundup: iPhone 7
Tag: digitimes.com
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Lenovo Yoga 11 710 review: Bending the rules and winning

Tech giants have responded to the decline of laptops in a couple of ways. Some companies have backed out altogether, others have simply gritted their teeth and carried on, doing their best to reinvent the laptop. Again.

The Lenovo Yoga 11 710 is a Windows 10 high point in this new laptop era. It offers just about everything you get with the 12-inch MacBook, and a bit more besides, for much less money. What’s not to like?

Lenovo Yoga 11 710 review: Design

The “Yoga” part of the name gives away the device’s top feature. The Yoga 710 is a laptop with a 360-degree hinge, just like every other laptop in the Yoga series. It’s not the only laptop with this silhouette Lenovo has made recently either. The Yoga 700 is less than a year old, but the 710 makes significant improvements to the build.

It may not be as eye-catching as a Lenovo Yoga 900S, but this machine feels as if it’s built to the same standards as the top-end models. It’s mostly aluminium and magnesium – apart from the pane of glass covering the screen, of course.

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The keyboard area gets cool-feeling aluminium, while the lid is magnesium alloy (a mix of magnesium and aluminium). You might mistake it for plastic at first, but it’s something altogether more impressive. Magnesium is very light and durable, it just doesn’t feel quite as flashy as aluminium. The bottom seems to be plastic, but it feels so much like the lid you’d be hard-pressed to notice.

At just a shade over 1kg and 15mm thick, the Lenovo Yoga 11 710 is very easy to lug around. Put it in a rucksack and you could easily convince yourself you’ve left it in a cafe somewhere two hours later. It’s a dream for working on-the-go.

Unless you’re presenting Powerpoint to your boss in a lift, the 360-degree hinge part is much more about the Lenovo Yoga 11 710’s fun side. Flip the screen all the way over and you’ll be prompted to switch to Windows 10’s tablet mode, which tweaks the interface so it’s better-suited to life led by touchscreen.

A 1kg tablet isn’t going to convince anyone to ditch their iPad, but it does make a pretty neat digital comic book if you have both hands to spare, and the hinge can rest at any angle. You can prop the screen up on a table for a bit of bedside table Netflix or, well, whatever you want really.

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We’ve really stopped thinking of this kind of hybrid as any sort of tablet in the traditional sense, though. It’s all about finding when/where the Yoga 11 710’s skills might come in useful. And even if you just want an ultra-portable laptop, it’s not as if Lenovo seems to have added much to the asking price for the 360-degree hinge feature.

Lenovo Yoga 11 710 review: Connectivity

The first sticky point is the Yoga 11 710’s connectivity. You get just the one USB port and a micro HDMI socket.

It fares better than the single USB Type-C port in the 12-inch MacBook. With the Lenovo you can plug in a mouse without a converter, and do so while the laptop is plugged in. But unless you carry around a USB hub in your pocket, this is a strict peripheral monogamist.

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What’s really going to get some of you sighing is the memory card slot. There isn’t one. So that’s a USB hub and a USB card reader you’re going to have to carry around if, like us, you need to juggle camera photos on the regs.

However, for most people the one USB port is much less of an inconvenience than a single USB-C would be, right-here-right-now, even if that newer connector is more forward-looking.

Lenovo Yoga 11 710 review: Keyboard and trackpad

Given the amount of space Lenovo had to work with, the keyboard and trackpad combo are great. There’s no backlight, though, so you’ll be tapping blind if it’s dark.

All the main keys are full-size, with only the ones sprinkled around the edges being cut-down in order to fit in. Typing is a cinch: we’ve written thousands of words with no problems.

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Unlike a 12-inch MacBook, typing doesn’t feel like tapping on pieces of eggshell either. You get proper key feedback; a bit of resistance, but the same sort of travel you’d feel in one of Lenovo’s larger IdeaPad fancy laptops. Not a load, but enough.

The Yoga 11 710 has a slightly squat but long trackpad that, again, feels a lot like that of Lenovo’s larger premium laptops. It’s smooth to the touch and works well.

Some of Lenovo’s pads suffer from a strange almost “double click” action, with a bit too much give to the pad before you reach the clicker. That’s largely fixed here. There’s is a little bit of occasional erratic behaviour, the driver occasionally firing off a mouse click when you were just trying to scroll across the pad. It’s one of the laptop’s weaker parts, but we’ve used far worse.

Lenovo Yoga 11 710 review: Screen

The Yoga 11 710’s screen is another strong element. It’s 11.6 inches across, which isn’t huge, but if you’re after a giant screen you are obviously in the wrong place. The bezel is neat and trim, which works a treat in terms of design.

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It’s an IPS LCD 1080p-resolution screen with decent sharpness, good contrast and fairly good colour too. Sure, if you spend £1,000 or more you’ll get slightly richer colours and more pixels, but Lenovo doesn’t claim the 710 is a screen tech master.

It’s a glossy screen, so you will see some reflections outdoors or near a window. We’ve been using the Yoga 11 710 outside on a sunny day, though, and you can still see what’s gong on when brightness is maxed out.

Overall it’s a far nicer screen than that of most cheaper hybrids and more-or-less ready for anything.

Lenovo Yoga 11 710 review: Power & specs

The Yoga 11 710’s processor isn’t, though. It uses the Intel Core M3-6y30, the same seen in the lower-end version of the 12-inch MacBook. It gets 8GB RAM and a 128GB SSD – the latter being fast but not quite as fast as the quickest.

This is no power PC, then, but it does have enough power to feel almost as speedy as anything on the market when you’re just pootling about Windows, doing some basic work and browsing the internet.

A couple of things will appear slightly quicker with an Intel Core i7 laptop, but it’s no night and day difference.There is a huge difference when you compare the Lenovo Yoga 11 710 to one of the weakling budget hybrids that uses a Celeron or Atom CPU. This Yoga is light years faster.

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You’ll be able to perform basic photo editing (once you’ve managed to get your shots on the laptop that is), and 95 per cent of the stuff most people use a pricey MacBook to accomplish.

However, the Yoga is almost useless for gaming – but then you probably knew that already. Playing Skyrim at minimum graphics settings and 720p resolution only just reaches a playable speed. And that will dip as the action hots up.

So the Yoga 11 710  is perfect up to the point, for which it’s designed, then falls off a cliff thereafter. But this is what Core M devices are about, and the Lenovo Yoga 11 710 is one of the more affordable M systems around.

Lenovo Yoga 11 710 review: Battery life

Efficiency is the main aim of Core M. This chipset has – geek klaxon alert – a thermal design power (TDP) of 4.5W, which is under a third that of its Core i5 brother (the i5-6200U). Speaking in non-geek this means it’s designed to output a third of the heat. And heat is wasted energy when we’re talking about a laptop.

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Lenovo says the Yoga 11 710 will last for eight hours from a single charge, but we’ve had it lasting even longer. Just using it as our day-to-day work machine we can get almost eight hours with the brightness maxed out half the time. When working indoors with office-style lighting we could keep the screen brightness at just 30 per cent without feeling like you’re scrimping – and like that we’ve been getting over 10-hours of light use from a single charge. 

So where does Lenovo’s eight hour figure actually come from? Its playing back a 1080p movie at 200-nits output, which is fairly bright. It’ll last for a flight to New York playing locally-stored video, and while we wouldn’t recommend being the person that doesn’t use headphones, the speakers aren’t bad either, delivering extra audio weight that you might not expect from a mid-price, skinny hybrid.

Verdict

The Lenovo Yoga 11 710 is a Windows take on the 12in MacBook mould, but at half the price and with a super-flexi hinge for a bit of hybrid flavour.

Build quality is good, the screen is nice, the keyboard fine, and battery life is even better than the company’s claims.

Other than an occasionally fiddly-feeling trackpad and lack of memory card slot, you’ll only encounter issues if you radically overestimate what an Intel Core M laptop like this can do.

As affordable Windows 10 laptops go, the Yoga 11 710 has got almost everything right. At this price it’s bending the rules and winning.

Uber and Volvo jointly working on autonomous taxis, as test fleet arrives in Pittsburgh

Uber and Volvo have signed an agreement that will lead to a jointly-developed autonomous vehicle, Volvo has announced.

The new vehicle will meet the demands of both companies to develop fully-autonomous driverless cars, the next generation of such vehicles that will move beyond the current assisted driving position. 

Volvo confirms that the agreement will see a new base vehicle developed that uses Volvo’s SPA modular platform that currently underpins the new Volvo XC90 amongst other Volvo models.

• Volvo XC90 review: Setting the SUV standard

With Volvo and Uber investing a combined $300 million in the project, that new base vehicle will then be the platform for Uber to add its own autonomous systems to, while Volvo will use it as the next step in its own autonomous strategy.

That sees Uber getting access to a purpose-built vehicle from a manufacturer with safety as its primary ethos and allows Volvo to continue its own pursuit of safe driverless cars. 

Although Volvo doesn’t confirm a timeline for the delivery of such vehicles, Bloomberg says that the target date is 2021, and confirms the news that the first batch of Uber-Volvo test vehicles has been delivered to Pittsburgh for field testing. Pittsburgh is Uber’s base for autonomous testing.

Volvo

The Pittsburgh vehicles are adapted versions of the new Volvo XC90 and will operate as autonomous taxis, but with Uber engineers in the front seats. The test vehicles will join the Uber fleet, allowing passengers in Pittsburgh to request an Uber as normal; the Uber engineers will ensure the car drives safely. 

The idea is to see how driverless vehicles work as taxis in the real world – fulfilling the vision of Johnny Cab from Total Recall – while Uber monitors exactly what’s happening. Legally you still need a driver at the wheel and we’re not quite at the stage where cars can be fully autonomous.

Bloomberg also reports that this isn’t an exclusive deal and Uber is pursuing a number of avenues in achieving its driverless fleet goal; at the same time, Volvo is aggressively pushing forward with its plans for driverless vehicles too, with trials on the UK’s roads scheduled for 2017. When Volvo confirmed those Drive Me London plans, again the date of 2021 was given for fully-autonomous driving.

Volvo

Volvo has often said that its aim is to reduce the number of deaths causes by Volvo cars to zero and self-driving cars that cut out human error are seen as part of the solution: “Over one million people die in car accidents every year. These are tragedies that self-driving technology can help solve, but we can’t do this alone,” said Travis Kalanick, Uber chief executive. 

“That’s why our partnership with a great manufacturer like Volvo is so important. Volvo is a leader in vehicle development and best-in-class when it comes to safety. By combining the capabilities of Uber and Volvo we will get to the future faster, together.”

Australian Banks Denied Request to Negotiate Over Apple Pay

An Australian antitrust regulator has denied a request from three of the country’s biggest banks to collectively negotiate a deal with Apple over the use of third-party digital wallet software on its iPhones (via AppleInsider).

Last month, Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank (NAB), and Westpac lodged a joint application with the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) to negotiate with Apple over gaining access to its NFC-based mobile payment technology, having so far resisted signing deals to use Apple Pay.

Apple strongly criticized the attempt to negotiate a deal over access to its payment hardware, claiming it would compromise security and dent innovation, and the company asked the ACCC to take the full six-month statutory period to assess the application more thoroughly.

Apple will be encouraged to learn that on Friday the ACCC decided not to grant the banks’ request during this early stage of its assessment process. ACCC chairman Rod Sims said in a statement that the commission requires more time to consult and consider the views of all the parties involved and other interested parties.

The entire ACCC authorization process usually takes up to six months, including the release of a draft decision for consultation before making a final decision. We expect to release a draft decision in October 2016. The ACCC’s decision not to grant interim authorization at this time is not indicative of whether or not a draft or final authorization will be granted.

Last week, Apple lambasted the banks for asking the ACCC for an interim authorization, which would have allowed them to collectively boycott Apple Pay while the negotiations took place.

“These banks want to maintain complete control over their customers. The present application is only the latest tactic employed by these competing banks to blunt Apple’s entry into the Australian market,” the company wrote in a three-page submission to the ACCC. “In Apple’s view, interim authorization of the cartel by the ACCC should be refused.”

ANZ is the only bank in Australia’s “Big Four” that played no part in the original joint application and has agreed to allow its cards to be used via Apple Pay.

ANZ reportedly gave up some of its interchange fee to Apple as part of the deal, but the other big banks appear unwilling to forfeit the millions of dollars they would have earned through the fees.

Related Roundup: Apple Pay
Tag: Australia
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Sea of Thieves preview: Turning you into a software pirate

When we first saw Rare’s massively multiplayer pirate game at E3 in June we wondered if its co-operative teamplay mechanics would work for us. We’ve played many a co-op game before, but were not ones for constant communication throughout.

Yet that’s what we found ourselves doing during a hands-on play of Sea of Thieves at Gamescom. Indeed, you couldn’t shut us up.

That’s because the 2017 title instantly grabs you by the barnacles and you feel compelled to work with friends, new or old – chatting away all the time in order to fulfil your goals. It’s like an team bonding day out, expect with more grog and sea shanties.

• Gamescom 2016: All the launches, games and consoles at the show
• Best games trailers from Gamescom 2016: FIFA 17, Mafia III and more

The premise is that you are a pirate thrust into a persistently online world, with a huge open map full of oceans and islands and adventure and riches await. You have your own small ship and can scoot about on your tod, encountering the game’s missions solo, but the most fun to be had, we feel, is in helping crew larger player-owned vessels and working with other players for maximum booty.

What’s more, the better yield your team missions result in, the more likely you can upgrade and expand your own ship too.

We found out plenty about the game structure at Gamescom. It will have missions and secrets to discover, and treasure to find. However, much of it will also be about huge sea battles, and this was the focus of our gameplay session.

We teamed with four others to man one, huge pirate ship. We took the wheel while our teammates each performed other tasks, such as raise the anchor, the sails and man the cannons.

The game is stunningly simple to pick up and play. There’s no clunky user interface either, with everything in the game visual. Even the map is an actual, rolled-up scroll that you carry around with you. And firing a gun, or using the steering for the ship is as simple as tapping one button to interact with it and moving around the thumbstick. It gives you the freedom to concentrate on barking commands to your teammates or engaging in some pirate banter.

Rare/Microsoft

Of course, actually winning a sea battle isn’t quite so simple. A battleships turns like a, well, battleship. And with two enemy vessels facing us we eventually sunk. That was the end of the demo but far from the end when playing the final game.

In the game itself, you will be able to swim to the depths of the sea for sunken treasure, discover caves to hide your ship, and many other classic pirate film tropes. Even when you die, the game will continue, with you becoming a ghost pirate and taking charge of a ghost ship.

There’s much more to come from Rare about Sea of Thieves, and we’re yet to even find out which quarter of 2017 the developer is aiming for, but even on this early showing it is looking mightily promising.

First Impressions

interaction with others online can often be a disappointing experience, with many seemingly set out to ruin your fun rather than enhance it. But everything we’ve seen and heard so far about Sea of Thieves suggests it could buck that trend.

Certainly, in our gameplay session, which was with a couple of others we knew and a duo we didn’t, we very quickly slotted into roles that aided each other. And surprisingly didn’t just muck around. We soon started chatting and chuckling away as we manoeuvred our ship around.

In many ways it is the totally opposite to No Man’s Sky, which is a very lonely experience. Sea of Thieves offers a fun and friendly one instead, encouraging interaction, and given that there is plenty of time for development yet, we’re looking forward to see the other elements come into the fray.

It will be available for Xbox One and Windows 10 when it releases next year.