industries

Hon Hai Precision Industry is considering chopping the part of its business that gave Foxconn its name.

Hon Hai is planning to spin off its Network Interconnection Business Group next month, Reuters reported Thursday, citing people who claim to have knowledge of its plans. The business group makes connectors and cables for the PC industry, but due to the recent downturn in the PC market, has become a big of a drain on Hon Hai's otherwise strong operation.

At one time, the connector business was such an integral component in Hon Hai's business that it helped form its … Read more

There's a special place 200 miles south of where I live. It's a place of legend, an ancient burial ground. Supposedly, a stretch of land near Alamogordo, N.M., is the final resting place for one of the most infamous disasters in gaming history: the Atari E.T. game.

According to a New York Times report from 1983, Atari dumped 14 truckloads of unsold game cartridges and other detritus into a landfill. "Guards kept reporters and spectators away from the area yesterday as workers poured concrete over the dumped merchandise," it reads.

The E.T. game earned its status as one of gaming's biggest bombs by pretty much stinking up the entire video game industry at the time. Critics and gamers alike hated the plot, the way it looked, and just about everything else about it. That's why Atari got stuck with several million unsold copies.… Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Film crew to dig up Atari landfill site, maybe score 3.5 million copies of E.T.

- The opposite of standing desks: the computer workstation for the person with everything.

- Unlocking The Truth is the most brutal sixth grade metal band ever.

- Hatebeak: a death metal band fronted by a parrot.

- Ex-military snipers called into shoot feral goats from helicopters to protect Galapagos Tortoise population.… Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Steve endorses the VPI Industries turntables built in Cliffwood, N.J., and the VTF-3 MK4 subwoofer from HSU Research.

- Sony MDR-R10: The world's best headphone?

- The top 10 reasons why music is compressed.

- Compare your favorite albums in the Dynamic Range Database.

- Catch Steve on a panel with Avery Lipman, COO of Republic Records, at the New Music Seminar 2013.

- Follow Steve "Sphere" Guttenberg on Twitter.… Read more

Big rockets like the SpaceX Grasshopper and the Orbital Antares have been in the news lately, but those are a little out of reach for the average student. That's why the Aerospace Industries Association's Team America Rocketry Challenge exists. It fans the maker flames by challenging kids to design, build, and launch model rockets.

The rocket challenge finals took place over the weekend. It was a record year for the competition's turnout, with 725 teams battling through the initial rounds. The top 100 teams participated in the final fly-off in Virginia, representing 29 states with teams from schools, 4-H clubs, and even a team made up of Civil Air Patrol volunteers.

The competition was open to students in grades 7 through 12. All the teams had one goal: build the best model rocket. The challenge was to fly an egg to 750 feet up in the air, and then parachute it back to the ground with no damage. That's even harder than it sounds.… Read more

MakerBot and open-source hardware pioneers Adafruit Industries have partnered to produce a limited edition Adafruit Replicator 2 3D Printer bundle.

For $2,295, buyers get a Replicator 2 -- one of the hottest consumer-grade 3D printers on the market today -- and three of Adafruit's most-popular kits. A Replicator 2 normally sells for $2,200.

The three kits included in the package are Adafruit's MintyBoost V3.0, an open-source hardware charger; a 512MB RAM Raspberry Pi Model B; and a Timesquare do-it-yourself watch kit with a red display matrix. … Read more

Talk about a shift in behavior -- or maybe that should be text about a shift.

It seemed only a matter of time, but today the Telecommunication Industry Association (TIA) said that 2012 marked the first time that U.S. wireless data spending topped voice spending. Also, according to the association's 2013 ICT Market Review & Forecast report, there are more wireless subscriptions than there are adults in the country.

The "industry is squarely in the middle of an historic transition," said Grant Seiffert, president of the association that represents high-tech manufacturers and suppliers of communications technology. &… Read more

I'm in search of a new phrase to replace "pie in the sky" to describe the latest ambitious space mining startup. On its face, the notion of 3D printers on asteroids seems more ridiculous to me than a simple lemon meringue in the clouds, and yet that is exactly what the just-launched venture Deep Space Industries (DSI) proposes to do.

Less than a year after Planetary Resources announced its own plans to mine asteroids in space, DSI is upping the ante with its own vision for zero-gravity resource extraction that goes one step further to include actually producing things in space using the company's "MicroGravity Foundry... a patent-pending breakthrough in 3D printers able to output complex metal components using a simple process with few moving parts."

The idea is that it should be much cheaper and more efficient to build what's needed to further space exploration using resources extracted from asteroids than shuttling materials from Earth. Imagine sending a robot into a mountain with some mining tools and a 3D printer. The robot mines material to feed into the 3D printer, which prints up more robots and supplies to build a smelter at the mouth of the mine, which is then used to build even bigger things. You get the idea.… Read more

It was one year ago today that an unprecedented outcry against the Stop Online Piracy Act proved to Washington officialdom that sufficiently irritated Internet users are a potent political force. After Wikipedia, Google, Craigslist and other major sites asked their users to contact their representatives, the deluge of traffic knocked some Senate Web sites offline, and votes on both bills were indefinitely postponed.

The massive public outcry that, by some counts, involved more than 10 million Internet users concerned about the proposals' impact on free expression has turned the protests into a cautionary tale on Capitol Hill. Aides now worry … Read more