Month: June 2022

Enlarge / SpaceX's next rocket on site at Boca Chica. (credit: Getty Images / Washington Post)

On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave SpaceX one of several approvals that will be needed before the company can launch its Starship from the Boca Chica site in South Texas. The environmental approval comes in part because technology developments have allowed the company to eliminate some of the facilities initially planned for the location, greatly reducing its footprint and impacts.

Still, the company will face restrictions within the site and timing of the launches; it will also be expected to support some environmental and historical interests. The company will still need the FAA's approval regarding safety and risks before it can begin operations.

Less is more

SpaceX has been pursuing atmospheric testing of its hardware at Boca Chica. Ultimately, it plans to turn this into the main launch site for the Falcon Superheavy vehicles that will loft its Starship vehicle into orbit, along with potential commercial cargo. The booster would also potentially return to the site or land offshore and be ferried back.

Enlarge / K-9 Mail will become Thunderbird for Android in time. (credit: Mozilla)

The open source Thunderbird email client has a long and storied history, but until now, that history has been limited to the desktop. That's about to change, according to a post on the Thunderbird blog. Thunderbird will be coming to Android through the popular open source mobile email client K-9 Mail.

According to Thunderbird's Jason Evangelho, the Thunderbird team has acquired the source code and naming rights to K-9 Mail. K-9 Mail project maintainer Christian Ketterer (who goes by "cketti" in the OSS community) will join the Thunderbird team, and over time, K-9 Mail will become Thunderbird for Android.

Thunderbird's team will invest finance and development time in K-9 to add several features and quality-of-life enhancements before that happens, though. The blog post lists these bullets on the features road map:

Enlarge / Oft-tested and never released, tabs could be coming to Windows Explorer soon. (credit: Microsoft)

Browser tabs have been a thing for decades, but the file explorers you use to navigate your computer's storage have been slow to follow suit. The macOS Finder picked up tabs in 2013, and now Windows 11's File Explorer is getting them too. Microsoft released a new build of Windows 11 (version 22621.160) to testers in the Windows Insider Beta channel, adding tabs to the File Explorer and relabeling and reorganizing the left-hand navigation bar.

Microsoft says that the new File Explorer may not be available to all testers yet, and it's waiting to receive feedback on the changes before making it accessible to everyone.

Testers initially unearthed this File Explorer redesign a few months ago, but Microsoft has been testing a tabbed version of the File Explorer on and off for years. It was briefly included in a Windows 10 build in 2018, but the feature was removed before that version of Windows 10 was released later that year.

(credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Intel's chip manufacturing technology has been outpaced by rivals like TSMC and Samsung in recent years, but the company is looking to put its troubles behind it. The first step forward will be the Intel 4 manufacturing process, which Intel has shared more details about at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' annual VLSI Technology Symposium (as reported by AnandTech and Tom's Hardware). The new manufacturing tech is on track to be used in consumer chips starting in 2023, starting with Intel's "Meteor Lake" CPU architecture. Meteor Lake will likely come to market as Intel's 14th-generation Core CPU sometime next year.

Intel 4's biggest improvement is its integration of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, which uses short-wavelength ultraviolet light to etch tiny patterns into silicon wafers. TSMC and Samsung use EUV technology in their most advanced manufacturing processes. Intel says that compared to the Intel 7 process, Intel 4 will enable either 21.5 percent better clock speeds using the same amount of power or the same speeds using 40 percent less power.

After Intel 4, Intel will move on to Intel 3, which is a higher-density iteration of Intel 4 using the same EUV technology. Notably, chipmakers will be able to port designs made for Intel 4 directly to Intel 3 without having to make changes, which will hopefully allow both Intel and third-party chip designers to start using it quickly (Intel 3 will be offered to third parties through Intel Foundry Services). By making smaller jumps between process technologies—introducing EUV lithography in Intel 4 and then optimizing for maximum density in Intel 3, rather than trying to do both at once—Intel hopes to avoid the delays and yield problems that held the 10nm/Intel 7 process back for so many years.

Enlarge / Google's new Bay View campus in Mountain View, California, on Monday, May 16, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Google has agreed to pay $118 million to settle a class action lawsuit that alleges the company underpaid female employees. The agreement will release Google from claims that it "paid women in Covered Positions less than it paid men for substantially similar work, that Google assigned women to lower levels than it assigned men, and that Google failed to pay all wages due to employees upon their separation of employment," the settlement says.

The settlement covers about 15,500 women who have worked for Google in California since 2013, the plaintiffs' law firm said in an announcement on Saturday. Four named plaintiffs will get separate payouts: $75,000 for lead plaintiff Kelly Ellis and $50,000 each for the other three, in addition to their regular share from the net settlement fund. The settlement class covers a wide range of workers with 236 job titles.

The net settlement fund will have about $86 million after attorneys' fees and other deductions, providing an average of about $5,500 for each class member. The lawsuit alleged that "Google paid women, on average, approximately $16,794 less per year than similarly situated men, in base pay, bonus, and stock."

When Sony announced its new tiered PlayStation Plus program back in March, it promised that the most expensive Premium tier would include "up to" 740 games from across all five PlayStation consoles (and the PlayStation Portable). As recently as last month, the company had only revealed a bit over 100 of the games that would be included in its top-tier subscription plan.

With today's launch of the new PlayStation Plus in the US, though, we can now see the full catalog of titles Sony is making available to subscribers for download and/or streaming. And that launch list actually surpasses Sony's promises, including nearly 400 PS4/PS5 games (available on the "Extra" tier or above) and over 460 games from earlier console generations (available on the "Premium" tier).

In terms of recent-generation games, PlayStation Plus includes 34 that also offer an "enhanced" PS5 version, alongside a handful of PS5 exclusives like Returnal and Demon's Souls. That list also includes 27 games from "Ubisoft Plus Classics" provided by the major third-party publisher.

Enlarge (credit: Astra)

On Sunday, the launch of two CubeSats on an Astra rocket failed to go as planned, with the rocket's second stage cutting out prematurely. The loss cost NASA two CubeSats that were meant to be part of a small constellation that would track the development of tropical storms. The failure represents yet another setback for a rocket company that has emphasized rapid development and testing-by-launching.

The lost CubeSats were intended to be part of a six-satellite series called TROPICS. With six satellites in three different orbital planes, TROPICS was designed to provide detailed temporal and spatial imaging of precipitation in tropical storms. NASA's statement on the loss indicates that the agency will still be able to pursue the mission with just four satellites.

As for the failure itself, NASA indicates that this launch was part of a program that tolerated greater risks: