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Apple is escalating its search for people to work at its under-construction Prineville, Oregon datacenter, notes AppleInsider. The company recently posted a job listing for an operations planner, as well as a site services technician. In late March, the company started looking for a chief engineer.
The states of Oregon and New York may be competing for a chip factory under consideration by an Apple supplier, says The Oregonian. Oregon's economic development agency, Business Oregon, says it is trying to recruit a company operating under the codename "Azalea." A non-disclosure agreement is preventing any more details from emerging, though a similar project --tagged with a "Project Azalea" codename -- is being pursued in New York state.
Apple has started construction of two massive buildings that will eventually house its next major datacenter, located in Prineville, Oregon. Following on from the company's first large-scale facility in Maiden, North Carolina, the development will eventually house two buildings of approximately 338,000 square feet -- each about the size of two Costco stores, reports The Oregonian. Together, about 500,000 square feet of the total will be devoted to data halls. The first building alone will cost some $68 million.
Apple has submitted plans for a new datacenter to the city of Prineville, Oregon, says the Associated Press. The complex will include two buildings with over 500,000 square feet of "data halls;" combined with offices, parking lots and loading docks, the facility should span 107 acres across a 160-acre property. The buildings are notably separate from 10,000-square-foot datacenter Apple is already developing on the Prineville land, which it bought in February.
Apple is advertising a new job listing which could be connected to a new data center in Prineville, Oregon, Wired reports. The company is hiring a data center construction project manager, who will nominally be based out of Cupertino, California, but have to travel to a project site. "As Apple’s new products and services expand and grow, so too does the need for more servers and server space to house them, Data Centers," the listing reads. "The candidate selected for this position will become an important part of the Apple team responsible for the design and construction implementation of the next generation of data centers.
Apple is taking steps toward new stores in Portland, Oregon and the Vancouver area in Canada. In Portland, architects working for Apple are said to have submitted plans for a Yamhill Street outlet, between 4th and 5th Avenues at the Pioneer Place shopping center. It would replace the current Pioneer Place shop, located in the basement of the same building. The city of Portland is now taking public comments on the proposed construction.
Oregon has become the first state to use iPads to help disable voters cast their vote. According to Associated Press, election officials are pioneering the use of the iPad for voting where people who would normally find it difficult to cast their vote using paper. The officials have been piloting the use of the iPads in a primary election to replace former U.S. Rep. David Wu, who recently resigned following a sex scandal.
The US government has indicted 27 people suspected of belonging to a fraud ring targeting Apple Stores, reports say. The group is accused of making fake credit cards using stolen data bought from the Internet, and in turn fraudulently buying $1 million or more in goods from Apple Stores in 13 states. Products like Macs and gift cards were fenced to bring in cash.
Apple is once again hiring for a future retail outlet in Reading, England, a report says. Job listings were originally posted nearly four years ago, but then vanished. In particular Apple is now hiring for a store at The Oracle, a shopping center by Kennet River which opened in 1999. The outlet could be one of as little as two stores opening in the UK in 2011, the other being situated in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Two thieves used a full-sized gray pickup truck to ram into MacPac, a popular northeast Portland, Oregon independent Mac dealer Saturday, getting away with thousands of dollars' worth of laptops and iPads -- but the robbery was caught on tape with some clear views of the suspects in surveillance footage, say police.
(Updated with pricing, release dates) Garmin wrapped up its year today with two new Oregon GPS mappers for the outdoors. The Oregon 450 and 450t both replace the older 400 models with a more visible and responsive touchscreen for its navigation. It likewise brings a more accurate 3-axis compass that doesn't need to be level, dashboards to customize the interface, faster USB and much improved navigation of tracks that shows upcoming elevation changes and marks waypoints on the entire route.
Garmin on Wednesday introduced a new Custom Maps capability that lets users take existing paper or digital maps and upload them to their portable Garmin navigators. The free service is compatible with Dakota, Oregon and Colorado outdoor GPS handhelds. Those using Macs and PCs can use the service.
Sprint on Tuesday announced plans to expand its 4G WiMAX service to 17 additional cities in Hawaii, Idaho, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas and Washington. The carrier claims mobile broadband speeds reaching 10 Mb/s while downloading or between 3-6 Mb/s for uploads. The 4G service is said to exceed 3G speeds by a factor of three to five.
Garmin on Friday kicked off the launch of a new outdoors GPS line. The Dakota 10 and 20 are both ruggedized but small and built to to be simple with a touchscreen interface borrowed from the high-end Oregon line. It lacks the earlier model's camera but has 850MB of internal memory to handle both map data as well as waypoints and geocache data synced from a Mac or Windows PC.
Garmin today kicked off the launch of the Oregon series of GPS mappers for outdoors use. All four of the inaugural models are rare for including both a 3-inch touchscreen while still being shock-resistant and waterproof enough to survive harsher conditions. At higher altitudes or in open water, they also have a new HotFix feature that remembers satellite data for a quicker position lock in between uses. A microSD slot gives the devices storage for regional maps.
