Month: April 2019

DC Universe has dropped the first teaser for its forthcoming TV adaption of Swamp Thing, and tonally it feels more like a horror film than your standard comic superhero fare. And that makes sense, given that one of the executive producers is Aquaman director James Wan, who brought us The Conjuring and Insidious franchises and (just last week) The Curse of La Llorana.

(Spoilers for the DC character below.)

The original Swamp Thing character was created in 1971 by comics writer Len Wein as he was riding the subway in Queens. ("I didn't have a title for it, so I kept referring to it as 'that swamp thing I'm working on.' And that's how it got its name," he told Wizard Entertainment in 2004.) Swamp Thing has had several human incarnations over the ensuing decades, but the best-known is Alec Holland, a scientist who invents a formula to solve the world's food-shortage problem. A criminal organization sets fire to his secret facility in Louisiana and he runs burning into the swamp, drenched in his own bioreactive formula and presumed dead.

Enlarge / Elon Musk. (credit: DAVID MCNEW/AFP/Getty Images)

After two back-to-back quarters of profits, Tesla lost $702 million in the first quarter of 2019, the company announced on Wednesday.

Tesla has been expected to post a loss for the quarter ever since the company admitted earlier his month that it had suffered a big drop in Model S and Model X deliveries. But the quarter's losses were larger than many Wall Street analysts expected.

Markets weren't fazed by the negative earnings news. After initially falling about 2 percent, Tesla's stock price bounced back and is now about where it was when the earnings numbers were released.

(credit: Julien GONG Min / Flickr)

In the third quarter of its 2019 financial year, which ran up until March 31, 2019, Microsoft's revenue was $30.6 billion, up 14 percent year on year. Operating income was up 25 percent to $10.3 billion, net income up 19 percent to $8.8 billion, and earnings per share up 20 percent to $1.14.

Microsoft has three reporting segments: Productivity and Business Processes (covering Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Skype, Dynamics, and LinkedIn), Intelligent Cloud (including Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, and Enterprise Services), and More Personal Computing (covering Windows, hardware, and Xbox, as well as search and advertising).

Productivity group revenue was up 14 percent to $10.2 billion, with operating income rising 28 percent to $4.0 billion. There's no one standout in the division but, rather, strong growth across the entire division; commercial Office products and service revenue was up 12 percent, consumer revenue up 8 percent, Dynamics revenue up 13 percent, with Dynamics 365 revenue growing by 43 percent, and LinkedIn revenue was up 27 percent. The number of commercial Office 365 seats is up 27 percent with more than 180 million monthly active users, and consumer Office 365 subscribers were up 12 percent to 34.2 million. The transition to the cloud continues to shift where Microsoft makes its money: while commercial Office 365 revenue was up 30 percent, perpetually licensed Office revenue fell by 19 percent.

Enlarge / A rendering of the Vineyard Wind installation. (credit: Vineyard Wind)

Last May, Massachusetts chose companies representing a project called Vineyard Wind to negotiate long-term contracts for an 800 megawatt (MW) offshore wind project that would serve some 400,000 homes. This month, the state approved the negotiated contracts, clearing the way for Vineyard Wind to become the second (and the biggest) offshore wind farm in the United States.

The approval also included a promise from Vineyard Wind to invest $15 million to a fund that will "promote the use of battery storage in low-income communities" and "further the development of energy storage systems across the state."

There's a lot of untapped potential for offshore wind in the US. Currently, the nation only has one offshore wind farm: a 30MW site off of Rhode Island. But in places like Europe, offshore wind makes a significant contribution to energy generation, and the technology is maturing quickly there, with costs falling in tandem.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. (credit: AT&T)

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson today said that 5G will likely be priced similarly to wireline Internet, with customers paying more for faster speeds.

With 5G, "I will be very surprised if... the pricing regime in wireless doesn't look something like the pricing regime you see in fixed line," Stephenson said during an earnings call today. (See transcript.)

Some customers "are willing to pay a premium for 500Mbps to 1Gbps speed and so forth," Stephenson continued. "And so I expect that to be the case. We're two or three years away from seeing that play out."

Enlarge / Trump giving Jack Dorsey advice on how to run Twitter better, April 23. (credit: White House )

On April 23, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had a meeting in the Oval Office with President Donald Trump. According to an email message to Twitter employees from Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's global lead for legal, policy, and trust and safety, the purpose of the meeting was to discuss “the health of the public conversation on Twitter.”

In the email thread, first revealed by Motherboard, Dorsey himself explained, “As you know, I believe that conversation, not silence, bridges gaps and drives towards solutions." Dorsey pointed out that he had met "with every world leader who has extended an invitation to me, and I believe the discussions have been productive, and the outcomes meaningful.” While Dorsey noted that some employees might be less than thrilled with him taking the meeting, "In the end, I believe it’s important to meet heads of state in order to listen, share our principles and our ideas.”

The meeting came just two days after Twitter suspended some 5,000 accounts believed to be "bots" involved in a campaign to boost "#RussiaGate" and other hashtags related to posts critical of the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller—bots that had connections to an account previously used to boost pro-Saudi propaganda.