The Cupertino mayor has said this week that there is little to no chance that city officials will reject Apple's plans to build a new 3.1 million square foot "Spaceship" campus.

Says the mayor: "There is no chance that we're saying no."

Jobs appeared before the city council earlier in the week to show off plans for the new campus that will hold 12,000 employees.

The plans will first have to pass environmental checks and pass a public hearing (likely in 2012). Jobs wants to complete the Spaceship by 2015.

Adds Mayor Wong:

In my mind, one of the city council's most important challenges and accomplishments has been to make sure that companies like apple can grow and thrive. While other cities are struggling ... we can grow.

The building will be four stories, be circular in shape and have a large 150-acre interior courtyard. Apple's new architecture will be in addition to the company's main campus.

Permalink | Comments

---

20-year-old Trevor Harwell, a Mac repairman for Rezitech in Orange County, California has been arrested today and charged with installing software on computers he was fixing that would rig the webcams to capture video of the owners.

Harwell would plant software on the computer that would take control of the computers's webcam and send pop up messages reading: "You need to fix your internal sensor soon." A second pop up error then said: "Try putting your laptop near hot steam for several minutes to clean the sensor."

Following the advice of the error messages, some women would take the laptop into the bathroom with them while they showered, letting the hot water run for a few minutes beforehand.

At the time of arrest, Harwell's hard drives had hundreds of thousands of still images and videos, many of which showed the victims naked, showering or changing clothes.

Police were tipped off to the pervert after a customer's father complained that "suspicious" messages were appearing on his daughter's computer.

Permalink | Comments

---

Apple has stepped up to the plate and will put some of its $60 billion in cash to work defending app developers being attacked by "patent troll" company Lodsys.

In May, Lodsys began sending letters to app developers demanding a 0.575 percent cut of all revenue, due to the fact that they own a patent relating to in-app purchases.

Apple has now filed a motion to intervene on behalf of the developers, which may have not had the resources for a court battle. Apple has also filed a counterclaim against Lodsys, saying itself and all developers can use the tech.

Reads the filing:

Apple has an interest in property that is at the center of this dispute, namely, its license to the patents in suit and its business with the developers, which depends on their use of products and services that Apple is expressly licensed under the patents in suit to offer them.

Both Lodsys's complaint and its threats to other Apple developers adversely affect the value of Apple's license and its business with the developers.

Lodsys purchased the patent, which was originally created in 1992, from Intellectual Ventures, another "patent troll" which reportedly has over 30,000 patents.

Permalink | Comments

---

Apple has confirmed today that a small number of Verizon iPad 2 tablets have duplicate mobile equipment identifier (MEID) codes, causing issues with accessing the company's 3G network.

Says the company (via PCM):

Duplicate MEID codes were flashed onto an extremely small number of iPad 2 units for the Verizon 3G network.

Any user having problems accessing the Verizon 3G network are asked to come into Apple stores and replace their defective devices for unaffected ones. Apple seems to be giving $50 store credit as compensation, as well.

Unique MEIDs are harcoded into all smartphones and tablets, so duplications will cause a loss of connectivity to cellular and data networks.

Permalink | Comments

---

IBM has confirmed this week that it will be providing the microprocessors for the upcoming Nintendo Wii U console, and that the technology will be the same used in the "Watson" supercomputer.

Earlier this year, "Watson" defeated the top earners of all-time on Jeopardy (Ken Jennings and Bruce Rutter), handily.

Watson is able to calculate thousands of algorithms at the same time, while searching its massive database for the right answer. The behemoth computer runs on ninety 32-core IBM Power 750 Express servers and has 16TB of memory and was over 20 feet high.

Notes IBM:

The all-new, Power-based microprocessor will pack some of IBM's most advanced technology into an energy-saving silicon package that will power Nintendo's brand new entertainment experience for consumers worldwide. IBM's unique embedded DRAM, for example, is capable of feeding the multi-core processor large chunks of data to make for a smooth entertainment experience.

IBM plans to produce millions of chips for Nintendo featuring IBM Silicon on Insulator (SOI) technology at 45 nanometers (45 billionths of a meter). The custom-designed chips will be made at IBM's state-of-the-art 300mm semiconductor development and manufacturing facility in East Fishkill, N.Y.

Nintendo and IBM have a relationship that started over a decade ago with the GameCube console and has continued since.

The Wii U is set for a 2012 launch.

Permalink | Comments

---

On May 23rd, Lady Gaga released her much-hyped album "Born This Way," and Amazon quickly dropped the price of the digital album to 99 cents, bringing a huge amount of press to the company's MP3 store.

In fact, the deal went so well that "Born This Way" sold 1.1 million units in its first week (massive by 2011 standards) with 662,000 of those copies being digital.

There was so much demand that Amazon's normally unflappable servers experienced some downtime, adding to the media coverage of the promotion.

Amazon and Lady Gaga were certainly happy, but it appears that the labels and some independent distributors were not.

Merchants have already told Gaga's label, Interscope (part of Universal Music Group) that they will need to return physical CDs, and UMG already shipped 2.1 million CDs before the street date. The label will likely see 400,000 returns, says THR, a rather large number given Lady Gaga's popularity.

Says one independent distributor:

This was a really bad move. Ninety-nine cents is almost free.

A UMG exec added:

There are going to be times when music is the toy in the Happy Meal. If Amazon tries to turn 99 cent superstar albums into a regular thing, I would be outraged.

Amazon lost $3.3 million on the promotion but has likely signed up many tens of thousands of new users to its service, which was the point.

Permalink | Comments

---

Damn, somehow it seems that it was only yesterday when we launched our site, but in fact, it has been 12 years since that day. Twelve years is a long time, but in "Internet time", it feels like an eternity -- Facebook, for example, wasn't born until 2004 (and made its breakthrough years later), Google became the most popular search engine 2-3 years after our site's launch, etc.

Of course, our site has gone through tons of changes during all these years, too, but the basic set up is still the same; we aim to provide good quality tech news, along with tech forums and tons of other stuff that should help the average Joe to get a grasp of things like video editing, console technology and more.

The past year has been quite unusual for us, as our site hasn't gone through any dramatic changes recently. Instead, we've focused on making the site more robust, to improve usability, etc. Biggest changes for our company have actually involved "non-English-and-non-Finnish" properties of ours. In February, our Dutch site went properly live, when Plankje joined our ranks and started working for the service. Furthermore, we launched a localized version (courtesy of our licensing deal with Bestofmedia) of Tom's Hardware in Finland.

For the upcoming year, we plan to make quite big changes to our server set up and hope that those changes will boost the site's usability and reliability. Furthermore, we plan to launch localized versions of Tom's Hardware in other Nordic countries and hope to expand AfterDawn's own brand to new markets as well.

Anyway, it is time for me to join my colleagues here in Finland for few drinks :-) As usual, I'd like to thank all of our staff members, moderators and users for keeping this site alive and kicking for all these years. Thank you.

-Petteri Pyyny, CEO
AfterDawn Oy

Permalink | Comments

---