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Dell's margins in spotlight, Wall Street waits and sees

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Investors will scrutinize Dell Inc's (DELL.O) quarterly earnings for signs that healthy business spending and lower component costs are shoring up margins, a top priority for the world's No. 2 personal computer maker.

Wall Street has criticized Dell for its choppy execution on that front, and the company is keen to demonstrate that efforts to improve profitability by moving into new and higher-margin markets are bearing fruit.

Dell's shares often trade below its gross margin, but the company has missed Wall Street's target in six of the past eight quarters. Analysts, on average, are predicting a margin of 18.6 percent for the fourth quarter.

Investors have adopted a wait-and-see attitude. The company's stock is flat from a year ago, versus a roughly 30 percent gain in the Nasdaq composite index.

Last quarter, Dell surprised Wall Street as earnings and margins blew past expectations, and the company raised its yearly forecast.

For its fiscal fourth quarter, Dell is expected to earn 37 cents a share on revenue of $15.7 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Dell is scheduled to report fiscal fourth-quarter earnings after the market closes on Tuesday.

The bulk of Dell's revenue comes from low-margin PCs, but the company has been working for years to diversify its revenue base and move deeper into more-profitable data center equipment and the mobile market.

With $14 billion in cash, the company plans to be an aggressive acquirer as it battles foes such as International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N) and Hewlett-Packard Co (HPQ.N).

The company has also made plenty of noise in the mobile market of late, launching tablets and smartphones, but the reception has been lukewarm.

Dell trades at near 10 times forward earnings, a bit better than rival HP, but a lower valuation than IBM.

For a graphic comparing Dell and its rivals, click here: http://link.reuters.com/zuf97r

(Reporting by Gabriel Madway; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Richard Chang)

Post-handgun ban, wealthy D.C. residents stock up on firepower

Washington, D.C.’s well-to-do residents have armed themselves at a greater rate than residents of poorer, more crime-ridden areas in the two years sincethe Supreme Court ended D.C.’s ban on handguns.

According to D.C. police data, more than 1,400 firearms have been registered since the Court’s ruling in June 2008, and most of these in the western half of the District. Nearly 300 of the guns are registered in high-income, low-crime areas of Northwest such as Georgetown, Palisades, and Chevy Chase,the Washington Post.But in all of the neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River—areas beset by poverty and crime—only 240 guns have been registered.

One gun owner in the 20016 zip code told the Washington Post that “crime is down to the lowest level, but people always feel insecure. And when you have responsibility for your family, you have to be prepared.”

This resident’s zip code, which includes some of the wealthiest neighborhoods of upper Northwest, saw the biggest increase in legal guns. An area of about 14,000 households, it accounts for more than 10 percent of the city’s gun total.

One 69-year-old resident of the Chillum area of Northeast says he feels much safer now that he has purchased three semiautomatic handguns.

“I don’t have confidence in the police in terms of response time,” he said. “If we are unarmed citizens, then we have no protection, and we are automatic victims.”

Read more stories from The Daily Caller

Sal Masekela Announces TSO Studios, Signs Paul Rodriguez

X Games host signs top action sports talent to new media company specializing in how-to video apps for mobile devices.

(Vocus/PRWEB) February 08, 2011

ESPN X Games host Sal Masekela today announces the launch of TSO Studios, a new media company specializing in action sports how-to video apps for mobile devices.

Masekela also announced that TSO has added skateboarding icon and 3-time X Games Gold medalist Paul Rodriguez to their rapidly expanding roster of athletes. “We’re setting the bar as high as we can by signing athletes like P Rod. Riders that aren’t just the best in the world, but that also really want to give hands-on, personal instruction to help riders at all levels progress,” said Masekela. TSO and ROAR, a Beverly Hills based talent and brand management company that represents both Masekela and TSO, are aggressively pursuing world class talent to join Rodriguez on the TSO team in everything from skateboarding and snowboarding to surfing, motocross, and BMX.

Each TSO instructional app will include preloaded beginner, intermediate, and advanced tricks by a featured TSO team rider as well as additional Pro Sets from other TSO pros that can be purchased via an in-app store. The store is built directly into the app and will be updated monthly with Pro Sets from the best riders in the world.

Using their proprietary 5 Light Progression System™ with integrated video and step-by-step written instruction, TSO, aka The School Of, will help riders build the proper foundation needed to master tricks at every level across all action sports. All pros have their own techniques and tips for landing tricks and TSO will give users unprecedented mobile access to lessons from the world’s best – at their favorite skate spot, at the beach, or up on the mountain.

An avid rider himself, Masekela said, "We live in an era where every participant in action sports is used to having access to everything right at their fingertips. And that was the driving force behind the creation of TSO – 24/7 access to instruction from the best riders in the world, all in the palm of your hand.”

TSO has also built an impressive team of riders from the wake world including Australian superstar Harley Clifford, TransWorld’s Wakeboarder of the Year in 2010; action sports legend Parks Bonifay; World Champion wakeskater Reed Hansen; World Wakesurf Champion Drew Danielo; TSO partner Corey Bradley; up-and-comer Steel Lafferty; and the always stylish Ben Greenwood. Look for TSO WAKE to drop in mid February.

The School Of is in session. Ride TSO.

For morenformation, please visit tsostudios.com.

ABOUT TSO STUDIOSTSO Studios is a recently formed new media company specializing in action sports how-to video apps for mobile devices. TSO is represented by ROAR, a Beverly Hills-based talent and brand management company with offices in Nashville, Atlanta, and New York.

ABOUT SAL MASEKELAThe often imitated but never duplicated Sal Masekela is the long-time host of both the Summer and Winter X Games on ESPN as well as an avid surfer, skater, and snowboarder. Sal joined Team TSO in the summer of 2010 bringing his vast experience in the action sports world as well as an overwhelming enthusiasm for helping riders improve their skills. Masekela is represented by ROAR, a Beverly Hills-based talent and brand management company with offices in Nashville, Atlanta, and New York.

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Liz NorrisROAR917.755.1005Email Information

Can Russia rival the X-37B space plane with its own robotic spacecraft?

Moscow – Russia's reviving space industry might be working on its own version of the US Air Force's reusable unmanned space plane. After all, Russian space experts seemed surprised, a little alarmed, and possibly in awe of the American X-37B when it was successfully flight-tested from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on April 22.

The head of Russia's Space Forces, Lt. Gen. Oleg Ostapenko, dropped a tantalizing hint last week that suggested that Russian researchers were working on a similar design.

"Something has been done along these lines, but as to whether we will use it, only time will tell," General Ostapenko was quoted by the official RIA-Novosti agency as saying.

IN PICTURES: The X-37 space plane

The American X-37B, which spent seven months in orbit doing secret research before returning last December, is a remotely controlled, scaled-down space shuttle-like craft that appears to be dedicated mainly to military tasks.

Most Russian media coverage about the mini-shuttle was dominated by fear. Would the US use the enhanced orbital capabilities the space plane makes possible to undercut Russia's national security? Would the X-37B threaten Russian satellites or even install space-based antimissile weapons?

"The original idea of this space plane was to destroy the enemy's sputniks," says Vladimir Shcherbakov, deputy editor of Vzlyot (Liftoff), a leading Russian aerospace journal.

"It's a kind of space fighter. If your enemy loses all his sputniks which provide his communication, intelligence, navigation, etc. he will be in a panic, he'll be helpless. So it's critical, if you're going to build one, that you state what it's for and whom it's directed against," he says. "The Americans haven't declared who their X-37 is to be used against. They just say they're developing new technologies."

Mr. Shcherbakov says it's quite likely that Russia is working on its own space plane, since the Kremlin nowadays identifies successful space projects as key to boosting Russia's international prestige and has spent a lot more money on the once-moribund space industry.

"Nowadays there's more financing, so the search for cutting-edge projects that we can accomplish is going on intensively," he says. "When the Boeing X-37 was tested, it raised questions from the bosses about whether we were building one, too. But this is a secret subject in the US, and even more so here. So no one will tell you for sure."

The once-mighty Soviet space program virtually collapsed during the 1990s, and its only big remaining project is to act as a kind of "space taxi" to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.

The USSR built a space shuttle, the Buran, which was modeled on the US version, but only managed to test it twice before the program was scrapped in 1993. The surviving copy of the Buran serves as a children's attraction in Moscow's riverside Gorky Park amusement center.

But with growing financial resources, Russian space scientists have a lot more ideas on their drawing boards these days. These include a nuclear-powered spacecraft that could carry cosmonauts to Mars, and a Pac Man-like nuclear powered space pod that could gobble up space garbage and perhaps be used to protect the Earth from asteroid collisions.

A functioning space plane might be useful for the Russians to service the new Glonass satellite network, Russia's answer to the American GPS system, which is still on track to launch this year despite a disastrous crash that cost the program three satellites last December.

Andrei Ionin, an independent space expert, says that Ostapenko's hint about a Russian version of the X-37B is hard to interpret.

"It is the logic of space research that both Russia and the US usually find themselves doing much the same things," he says. "They built a shuttle, we built a shuttle, and so on. But comments like Ostapenko's should be followed by demonstrations and proper official statements. As things stand, who knows what he meant? Perhaps it was just a bit of PR?"

IN PICTURES: The X-37 space plane

Hunting for Earth-like Alien Planets: Q & A with Astronomer Geoff Marcy

Since astronomers discovered the first planet beyond our own solar system back in 1992, they've been on somewhat of a roll — the tally now tops 500.

And the finds are about to ramp up dramatically. Today (Feb. 1), NASA's planet-hunting Kepler mission will make much of its data public. A press conference will follow tomorrow, during which researchers are expected to announce intriguing new information about many more possible alien planets.

Humanity thus appears poised to enter a productive new era in the study of alien worlds. One man leading the charge is Geoff Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Kepler co-investigator.

Marcy has had a hand in finding more alien planets than anyone else. He helped spot 70 of the first 100. He also found the first multi-planet system around a sun-like star, and he discovered the first planet that transits — or passes in front of — its star from our perspective on Earth.

SPACE.com caught up with Marcy last month in Seattle, at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society, to chat about the accelerating pace of planet discovery, what we still don't know about alien worlds and whether there might be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

SPACE.com: What has led to the recent explosion in alien planet discoveries? Is it primarily better instrumentation, or better techniques?

Marcy: Well, let me give you a different vantage point. There is a bunch of astronomers who've been working really hard, and they're really innovative, pushing on the frontier technically, pushing on the frontier in terms of the science. And basically burning the midnight oil, essentially literally. I'm giving you the human component of all of this, because sometimes you don't get to see it.

What sometimes gets lost in the shuffle when a nice result shows up on all of the Web pages and the newspapers around the world — what you don't realize is to get that result meant that five or 10 people were burning that midnight oil, trimming the errors down to the point that the Earth-size planets are detectable.

It's easy to dismiss the discoveries as, "Oh, it's new computers, or it's new optics." These things happen because amazing people dream and then put their dreams into perspiration-dripping action.

SPACE.com: So if we were to have this conversation in 20 years, where do you think the total exoplanet count would stand?

Marcy: Honestly, Kepler's so good that it's hard to beat it. It gets the numbers. Kepler's going to find thousands. There's going to be another follow-up to Kepler, either from Europe or the U.S. or both. They'll find thousands.

I bet by 2020, there'll be 10,000 planets, and by 2030 there might be another 20,000 or 30,000 more planets. [Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets]

SPACE.com: Will this discovery arc we're on now continue to go up exponentially, or will it plateau?

Marcy:It'll plateau, because you can't do much better than Kepler. But let's be fair here. It's not the number of planets we care about; it's the quality. We want the Earth-size. We want planets in the habitable zone, and ultimately planets that are sending little radio signals to us for some reason or another.

SPACE.com: You've said that, with exoplanets, theory has really struck out. What are some of the things that we thought we knew, but it turns out were totally wrong about?

Marcy: Well, the first thing — I go back to 1996. No one wants to talk about this, because it's so embarrassing. The reason that as a community we struggled to find the first hot Jupiters isn't because we didn't have the technology. It's because the theorists led us astray. I'm speaking slightly jokingly, but not really.

There were theorists who said, "Look at our solar system. Of course the small, rocky planets are close in. The host star burned off the gases, so you're left with rocky planets. And look at the giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn — they had to form farther out, because it's colder, and the gases can gravitationally stick to the planets. Therefore, all planetary systems will have the following architecture: There will be an inner planet. The second planet out will be named Venus. The third planet out will have great lattes." I mean, it was just silly.

SPACE.com: And that's based on a sample size of one.

Marcy: It would be like trying to characterize human psychology by going to one distant Indonesian island and interviewing one person, and thinking that that gave you the full range of human psychology. And in 1996, there were papers where they said, Jupiter-sized planets, Saturn-sized planets, will all orbit far from their host star. Well, that of course tells you what to look for. If you write a proposal to try to find anything else, you're flying in the face of wisdom.

And we know now, of course, how near-sighted that was, how parochial that was.

SPACE.com: So do you think we are starting to get a handle on exoplanets now?

Marcy: I think so. We're always a little too confident, so I would hate to say, "Go home, we're all done." We do have these planets we're finding with Doppler work, and now with Kepler, that are five times the size of Earth, three times the size of Earth, 1.4 times the size of the Earth. And I don't think we really know how they formed.

Even the one we announced [the rocky, nearly Earth-size Kepler-10b], there are two main ways it might've formed. It might've formed like the Earth, or it might have formed like Uranus but it got so close to the host star that the gases and the water got evaporated away and left a bare, rocky core remnant.

SPACE.com: What are some of the biggest mysteries that are left?

Marcy: There's one huge one that nobody really wants to talk about. It's the age-old question: Are Earth-like planets common? We know they're out there for sure. I mean, there's too many stars. But there's two parts to the question. What do you mean by "Earth-like?" And then, how common are they?

Basically, we know what we want for Earth-like, so we shouldn't beat around the bush: We would love to know whether there are planets suitable for life as we know it.

And those Earth-like properties are a little bit mysterious, but we have some ideas. You want water in liquid form, you want stable temperatures over the course of millions, preferably billions, of years so that Darwinian evolution can get a good toehold.

You probably want a moon to stabilize the spin axis. You probably want a Jupiter to sweep up the debris. You probably want a stable ocean for a long enough time that it can serve as the solvent for biochemistry.

So that's probably what we mean by "Earth-like." But how common they are, we just don't know.

SPACE.com: Your research suggests that smaller planets may be pretty common — that nearly one in four nearby sun-like stars could host a roughly Earth-size planet.

Marcy: Yeah. But here's the sleeper idea that no one wants to talk about: Because Earth-size planets are so much smaller than the Jupiters, Saturns, Uranuses and Neptunes, and we now know that planets often get thrust into eccentric and misaligned orbits, the Earths are like the Volkswagens on a highway full of 18-wheelers.

The vulnerable planets are the small ones. And so to the extent that planetary systems undergo a billiards era — the Earth would be like putting a small marble on a pool table of 15 billiard balls. As you break, the little planets are going to be the ones slingshot right out of the solar system pool table.

SPACE.com: It's one thing to say they can form. But to say that they'll actually stick around long enough — that's a totally different question.

Marcy: Yeah. And I think they'll form. It's hard to imagine they wouldn't. If you make Jupiters, why wouldn't you make Earth-size planets? But the Earths — and maybe the Volkswagen is giving it too much credit. It's an 18-wheeler and a tricycle. Earth is a tricycle on Highway 5 running up and down the Pacific Coast.

And you don't even have to hit the tricycle. You just have to come close enough that gravity slingshots the poor tricycle right out of the system. So it's possible that Earth-like planets form, they get thrown out into the cold darkness of the galaxy and they have no chance of starting — never mind sustaining — life, because it's too cold out there.

And that's possible. We might be rare.

And by the way: Where are the SETI [search for extraterrestrial intelligence] signals? There is a non-detection that's like the elephant in the room. Forty years of Frank Drake and Carl Sagan looking for SETI signals, and we have precisely zero to show for it. So there's an indication — not definitive — that maybe the Earth is more precious than we had thought.

SPACE.com: Our solar system is so young, compared to the universe. And the universe is so big. So there's been lots of time and opportunity for advanced civilizations to get started, and to try to contact us. Some people think that the fact that we seemingly haven't been contacted means that we may well be alone in the universe.

Marcy: Well, you have to fold it in. The absence of an intelligent radio or television wave from any advanced civilization represents one indication, not a proof, that maybe habitable planets that sustain Darwinian evolution for a billion years —maybe they're rare. Maybe.

SPACE.com: What do you reckon? Do you have a gut feeling about this?

Marcy: I do. If I had to bet — and this is now beyond science — I would say that intelligent, technological critters are rare in the Milky Way galaxy. The evidence mounts. We Homo sapiens didn't arise until some quirk of environment on the East African savannah — so quirky that the hominid paleontologists still can't tell us why the australopithecines somehow evolved big brains and had dexterity that could play piano concertos, and things that make no real honest sense in terms of Darwinian evolution.

Why the high chaparral on the East African savannah would've led to a Tchaikovsky piano concerto, never mind the ability to build rocket ships — there's no evolutionary driver that the australopithecines suffered from that leads to rocket ships. And so that — and the fact that we had to wait four billion years without humans. Four billion years?

SPACE.com: Yes, it took four billion years to get there.

Marcy: Since the Cambrian explosion, we had hundreds of millions of years of multi-cellular, advanced life in which, guess what happened with brain size? Nothing.

You know the greatest species ever to roam the Earth? The dinosaurs — every kid knows this. And why? Well, because for 100 million years, the dinosaurs roamed the Earth. There were big ones, there were small ones. Every generation of baby dinosaurs had to outcompete all of the other dinosaurs. And you would think after 100 million years, each generation of baby dinosaur that was a little smarter would have out-survived the others and thereby slowly but surely increased dinosaur cranial size.

The reality from the paleontological record? Dinosaurs had the brains of chickens, and never got bigger. It shows that braininess is not a primary driver in evolution. We humans came across braininess because of something weird that happened on the East African savannah. And we can't imagine whether that's a common or rare thing.

SPACE.com: People assume evolution is directed, and it's always leading toward higher complexity and greater intelligence, but it's not.

Marcy: It's not. Dinosaurs show this in spades.

SPACE.com: You've said that we're about to enter a golden age of direct exoplanet imaging. Is that what the future holds — getting good, direct looks at alien planets to try to gauge their potential to support life?

Marcy: It is. There's two great things that we should be doing. One is that we should, as a species — and this means ESA [the European Space Agency], Japan, China, India, the United States, Canada — work together internationally to fund a space-borne telescope, probably interferometric, that can take pictures of Earth-size and Earth-like planets. We know how to do it.

Yes, it'll be expensive, but we do expensive things in science, and this is a great quest for humanity: Are there Earth-like and, indeed, habitable planets out there?

But the other thing to do — we should say it right away. We should have a full-fledged, Apollo-like SETI search. Why haven't we coherently gathered our resources and done SETI right?

SPACE.com: Finding alien intelligent life would be such a huge deal. It would change the way we think about ourselves and our place in the universe.

Marcy: Exactly. So why aren't we putting together our resources, nationally and internationally, and constructing a major radio telescope facility — and maybe, if there's money left over, an infrared facility — and sampling the universe for signals?

We know what to look for. That would be the rat-a-tat-tat of a radio signal. We don't know exactly what the code would be, but we'd be looking for pulses in the radio, in the infrared maybe, in the X-ray or UV. We'd have to think broadly. But this is a great quest for humanity.

It's the Armstrong, it's the Columbus of our time, essentially reaching out with radio waves and hunting for alien intelligent life. It would be a marvelous, inspirational effort. And right now we don't have enough going on, in my opinion.

Because it would mean — all 7 billion people on planet Earth would get up in the morning wondering, "Did they find the signal last night?"

SPACE.com: It makes you wonder why nations haven't joined together to do something like this. Economically, it would be a drop in the bucket.

Marcy: It's a drop in the bucket. Frankly, $1 billion would be good. It sounds like $1 billion is a lot of money. But not really. NASA's budget is $19 billion. Nineteen billion dollars every single year. So how about a billion of that for a SETI search? How about one year — 5 percent — to do SETI in a historic, Apollo-like way? I mean, Wow!

It puts Armstrong and the invention of fire sort of on a par. So it's worth one-nineteenth of one year's NASA budget. I think it's a great idea, and we know how to do it.

Yeah, it's a luxury. We need to feed the people on the planet Earth, we need to provide health care, we need to provide better education, we need to make sure that human beings are living. But we're doing that. And a billion is really a teeny fraction of many countries' annual budget.