Generally speaking, HP's Mini-Note 2133 is pretty well loved the world over. Sure, there are a few things that could use tweaking, but what good gadget couldn't use even a small dose of overhaul? Nevertheless, a few reports have been trickling in suggesting that HP's netbook is suddenly going dark and refusing to start back up. Folks are apparently being told that it's a motherboard power failure, though it doesn't seem to have become widespread just yet... or has it? Let us know in comments below.

[Via Chris Rue]

Wipe those tears away, budding astronaut. SpaceX's latest failure wasn't completely in vain. According to head honcho Elon Musk, the problem came just after a "picture perfect first stage flight" when a longer than expected thrust decay transient of the new Merlin 1C regeneratively cooled engine became "just enough to overcome the stage separation pusher impulse." You honestly may need to be a rocket scientist to digest all of that, but here's something even the layman can understand: Musk wants flight 4 in the air as early as next month. We're told that the long gap between flights 2 and 3 was simply due to all that engine engineering, but technologically speaking, nothing will change for the next attempt. Godspeed, Falcon 1 (v4).

[Thanks, Kenneth]

Aw man, and we had such high hopes that the third time really would be a charm. SpaceX's third attempt to launch a payload rocket into outer space failed this weekend, with launch control confirming an "anomaly" just five minutes after liftoff. Elon Musk, SpaceX chairman and CEO, did admit that it was "obviously a big disappointment not to reach orbit on this Flight 3 of the Falcon 1," but he has assured the world that his firm won't be wasting any time feeling sorry for itself. The Falcon 1 was carrying a minuscule satellite dubbed Trailblazer for the Pentagon's Operationally Responsive Space Office, though we've no idea how costly the loss was. Thankfully, we can all look forward to SpaceX trying again sometime in the future, but unless the tables turn in a hurry, we'd say the odds are still stacked against it.

[Via Wired]

Hope you weren't really counting on getting yourself one of those Pegasus 210s. In a sudden announcement made today, Dominic Wong and David Langton of Deloitte & Touche LLP were appointed as Joint Administrators of Rock Group Plc. In layman's terms, that means those fellows will be attempting to achieve a sale of the now-defunct company. Reportedly, the failure of Rock is "partly attributed to the cash flow difficulties faced as a result of stock misappropriation by a former employee," though further details were omitted. As it stands, the admins are currently negotiating with potential suitors in order to place the outfit in more capable hands, but there is still a possibility that no one will bite. For more information on how all of this could affect you (you know, things like warranties and whatnot), check out the full release in the read link below. 'Tis a sad day folks -- Rock is dead (at least for the moment).

[Thanks, Peter]

We've always heard that there's no need in regretting, and apparently, Toshiba is following said mantra after the collapse of its beloved high-definition movie format. In an interview with TechRadar, Toshiba's deputy general manager of HD DVD Olivier Van Wynendaele stated that it "wouldn't change anything that it did," and continued on to say that "circumstances saw to it that [Toshiba] had to make the decision not to continue, but that doesn't mean [the company] did anything wrong." Just in case you couldn't already sense the inability to swallow one's pride, Mr. Van Wynendaele also proclaimed that its format was "a finished standard, unlike Blu-ray," and concluded by noting that HD DVD was still "better than Blu-ray." Maybe he really didn't get the memo?

[Image courtesy of Bexhuff, thanks David]

Here's another Apple Support forums conundrum for ya: a small group of users are reporting that their Santa Rosa MacBook Pros are locking up sporadically when attaching or disconnecting a second display or projector. This post is currently being typed on a Santa Rosa MacBook Pro, which is regularly hooked up to a Dell monitor sitting on the desk: no problems here. That said, there are several dozen responses on this one thread, so feel free to weigh in if you're seeing these freezing issues too.

Granted, the original report suggesting that swarms of iPhones actually broke Duke's WiFi network did seem a bit bizarre, and now it appears that the university is freeing Apple's handset from blame. Interestingly, the actual culprit still seems somewhat veiled in secrecy, as we're only informed that "a particular set of conditions made the Duke wireless network experience some minor and temporary disruptions in service," but never do they exaggerate on exactly what caused the hiccups. Still, Duke also stated that it worked in conjunction with Cisco and Apple in order to "identify the network issue that was causing the problem," and since Cisco stepped in and provided a fix, the prpblem has yet to repeat itself. Looks like you're off the hook on this one, iPhone.

While a number of recent space-based experiments have proven quite successful, it must not have been Ted nor Gadget's day. The daring duo that made up the MAST project was supposed to "test the survivability of a thin, braided tether in space," but due to a glitch in the restraint system that "kept Ted from pushing away hard enough to keep unreeling the tether from its spool," the once hopeful mission has come to an ill-fated close. Rather than reaching a full kilometer, the tether was only able to reach a few meters before coming to a stop, but the team at Tethers Unlimited aren't calling it quits just yet. They did admit to not knowing precisely what caused the costly mishap, but the crew also suggested that they'll try to use the small amount of data they did gather to analyze "how a short tether behaves in microgravity." Don't worry fellas, there's always next time.

We already knew that we had to sacrifice our precious holiday decorations in order to get maximum bandwidth and coverage from our WiFi routers, and now it looks like we may have to sweat out the summer months sans air conditioning if an anecdotal, single-source article in Associated Content proves accurate. According to sole interviewee Ben Carmichel of ESS Data Recovery, his company sees "a 20% increase in failed hard drives hitting our lab in the summer as [opposed to] the winter," and believes from surveying customers and the uptick in electronic-related issues that AC-triggered power surges are largely to blame. Of course, this alleged risk is easy enough to minimize by utilizing an uniterrupted power source for your PC and configuring your drives in a RAID 1 or 5, so it doesn't seem too difficult to have your cake and eat it too in this case. Or you could set up shop in Siberia and just avoid this nonsense altogether.

[Via The Inquirer, thanks John K.]

It's probably of little consolation to the addicts among us who spent several terrifying hours in connectivity withdrawal -- and even less consolation, still, to the newly liberated -- but RIM's apparently figured out how its notoriously reliable back end came to a crashing halt this week. The company is now pointing its finger at "the introduction of a new, non-critical system routine" to its caching mechanism as the culprit. "Non-critical," indeed. Anyway, it seems said system routine was not put through enough testing ahead of its deployment to RIM's production systems -- and to make matters worse, its failover setup (hamsters on wheels, perhaps?) didn't pull through, significantly delaying the amount of time to get everything back online. We suspect most users are still a little too shocked at the chain of events to be steamed (yet), so consider this your strike one and two, RIM; just make sure it never happens again.

You know how everyone's talking about how China is going to overtake us in jobs, research, and innovation in the next few decades? Well, allow us to insecurely and self-consciously jab at our friends across the Pacific. See, the Chinese government had this fantastic idea that it was going to provide free satellite TV to every household from Urumqui to Beijing. Except there was one small problem -- the Sinosat II satellite, which was launched late last month, didn't deploy its solar panel nor its antenna properly, basically making it unusable. Of course, the SINO Satellite Communications Co. Ltd. is unwilling to confirm the mechanical failure, even though the problem was reported by the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy. The Agence France Presse reports that SSC is still going forward with the Sinosat III launch sometime in the first six months of 2007. Best of luck with that, guys. Really.

[Via Fark, photo courtesy AFP]

As we recently reported, Nokia's been dabbling with the whole do-it-yourself firmware upgrade phenomenon as of late. We applaud the effort -- in our opinion, getting the latest and greatest software for your devices should never be any more challenging than connecting a cable to your PC. Murphy's Law being what it is, though, initiatives like this are never going to be without their flaws. Many E70 owners who gave the update process a whirl in the past few days (present company included) were horrified to find that the procedure magically transformed their multi-hundred-dollar bundles of S60 joy into paperweights in just a handful of minutes. It happened to us, and it's not pretty; the phone teases you by turning on and dutifully displaying the "Nokia" logo, but that's as far as she goes. Rumor has it Nokia did the right thing by pulling the offending firmware and quickly replacing it with a new one, but that's little consolation for the folks bidding farewell to their handsets as they get shipped off to Nokia service centers around the world. We're going to give the upgrade another shot with our fresh E70 today and we'll pass on the word if we end up with a second brick -- wish us luck.

Update: We've got good news and bad news. The good news is that we don't have another bricked E70 on our hands. The bad news is that the latest and greatest firmware being offered by Nokia isn't yet available for the US-friendly E70-2 variant (which is what we have). Let's go, Nokia! Americans want faster refresh times when switching to landscape mode just as much as Europeans do!