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Opportunity rover is getting reformatted after ten years on Mars
NASA's ironman Mars rover Opportunity, like your five-year-old PC, is about to get reformatted. Problems have been causing the aging vehicle to reboot and scientists suspect that worn-out cells in the flash memory are to blame. Opportunity's been running for 10 years despite an expected mission life of three months, so even having such problems is a bonus -- and its now-defunct twin, Spirit, had a similar procedure in 2009. Scientists will back up the rover's memory, then send a format command to prevent the bad cells from being accessed. They'll use a slower-than-normal data rate to reinstall the software, since Mars is currently 212 million miles away and the signal will take 11.2 minutes just to reach it. NASA said that Martian winds have kept the rover's solar panels surprisingly clean since it hit the ground rolling in 2004 (see the video below). As the picture above from August 10th shows, it's still doing science and exploration like a boss.
HTC explains decision to skip Android 4.0 for Desire HD: we'd rather not wipe your data
HTC dampened a few spirits when it dropped the Desire HD from its Android 4.0 upgrade list. The company might feel your pain, but it claims to have a good reason for denying the update that it's been doling out elsewhere. There's no way to shoehorn a new version into the device like there was for the Desire's leap to Android 2.3, the company says. Fitting all that Ice Cream Sandwich into the Desire HD would require repartitioning the internal space, and repartitioning risks overwriting personal content; needless to say, the company isn't keen on explaining why it might nuke our family photos just so we can run Chrome. Even if that weren't an issue, a nebulous set of "other technical limitations" might not rub upgraders the right way. All of the explanations add up, although it's nonetheless easy to sympathize with Desire HD owners now stuck in Gingerbread land -- especially as owners of the closely related Thunderbolt aren't being held back.
