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While the tendency for most people is to run from a hurricane, the folks at NASA don’t appear to share that sentiment.

NASA sent a robotic plane into the eye of Hurricane Earl, which is moving toward the East Coast.

The unmanned spy plane, called the Global Hawk, took photos both outside and inside the hurricane. The plane also collected data from several of its remote-sensing instruments, such as radar, and transmitted it back to NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in the Mojave Desert, where the plane took off Thursday morning.

The Global Hawk is one of three aircraft being used by NASA in its Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes experiment. GRIP is a NASA Earth science field experiment that runs from Aug. 15 to Sept. 30 to better understand how tropical storms form and develop into hurricanes.

The Global Hawk is typically used in Iraq and Afghanistan for reconnaissance to find insurgents and weapons depots. It takes off and lands without the need of a pilot's hand. Instead, NASA pilots simply design a flight path on a computer and sent it on its way.

Built by Northrop Grumman Corp. in its manufacturing facilities in Palmdale, the Global Hawk flies high above the clouds at 60,000 feet — almost twice as high as commercial airliners. The plane has a flight range of 11,000 nautical miles, or half the circumference of Earth.

– W.J. Hennigan

Photo credit: NASA/NOAA

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Ding ding ding!

The Ping-Bing coincidence is surely one of those happenstances of this fast-changing and multifarious world — one in which many things occur at once and unrelated events often appear connected.

But isn't it tempting to think that at some point, in some Apple meeting during which Steve Jobs and company were choosing the name for their new social music service, some smart fellow brought up the major similarity between the working favorite name, Ping, and blood rival Microsoft's upstart search engine, Bing?

And that, at that moment, Jobs paused to think, smiled, and said, "All the better!"

(Apple declined to comment for this post; Microsoft has not yet responded to a request.)

As far as names go, you can't get any closer to Bing than Ping.  For starters, "bing" and "ping" are both onomatopoetic words for short little chime sounds. 

And the letters P and B are very close, both phonetically and orthographically. B is just a P with an extra curl on the bottom. And the B and P sounds are the English language's only two "bilabial plosives": speech sounds that use both lips and are created by stopping the airflow when you're speaking. (The M sound is bilabial but you don't have to stop the airflow — try making the sounds and you'll hear/feel the difference).

Even Microsoft likes the similarity of the word "ping": It looks like the Bing team was actually planning a feature called "Bing & Ping," which would help Bing users send search results to friends. Not clear whether Bing will be going forward with this.

Whether the naming similarity matters will depend on which service succeeds — and which fails.  Bing has increased its share of the search market more than 50% since last year. But it's had trouble stealing share from Google, which commands close to 65% of the market to Bing's 13.6%, according to Nielsen's July numbers.

Meanwhile, Ping is an upstart in the supersaturated social networking space, and it remains to be seen whether its rather baldly commercial aims will make it a strong Facebook competitor.

As far as which one is a better name? Well, Ping has several connotations that match with its underlying service. First, the musicality of the word itself, and second, the sense of connecting over a network that comes from the word's other, more technical meaning. Doesn't seem like "Bing" has much to do with searching, but I could be wrong.

Still, if Ping manages to become bigger than Bing, it will be a memorable zinger in the long battle between Apple and Microsoft.

– David Sarno

Image: A mash-up of the Bing and Ping logos. Credit: David Sarno / Los Angeles Times

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HP's final bid — which values the Fremont, Calif., company at $2.4 billion — came early Thursday. Dell wasted little time responding: An hour later, it threw in the towel.

The bidding started Aug. 16 with Dell's initial offer of $18 a share, or about $1.13 billion. Several more bids came in rapid succession from both companies, and 3PAR was a sudden sweetheart.

With barely $200 million in annual sales, losses in each of its three years as a public company and a stock price stuck below $10 a share, 3Par seemed an unlikely prize. But each bidder saw its operations as a way to help provide less-expensive data storage and to build up the cloud computing business, which gives customers software, data storage and other services over the Internet.

3Par also has $104 million in cash and short-term investments, which will fall into HP's balance sheet.

For HP, the premium was apparently worth it.  The company has endured falling prices for personal computers — though it remains the world's leading PC manufacturer — and was looking to branch out in a technology world that increasingly relies on fast, Internet-based services.

"It looks like an extremely expensive acquisition," said Aaron Rakers, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co.  "But at the end of that day, neither HP nor Dell had products in this category, and it fits."

3Par's revenue grew slightly, to $203 million, in the most recent four-quarter period, but that barely registers on HP's bottom line: The computer giant takes in close to $30 billion a quarter. 

Still, the move was seen as a way for HP to use its marketing muscle to boost sales for the small company, which builds server-level computers that can host the huge amounts of data and heavy-duty online services that power big Internet companies.

Dell, also looking to jump into that market, will have to keep looking.

“We took a measured approach throughout the process and have decided to end these discussions,” said Dave Johnson, Dell's senior vice president for corporate strategy.

Shares of 3Par rose 80 cents, or 2.5%, to $32.88. HP shares rose 47 cents to $39.68, and Dell shares were up 24 cents, or 2% to $12.36.

– David Sarno

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