Yahoo!'s got the new trailer for Justin Lin's "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" starring Lucas Black, Bow Wow, Brian Tee, Sung Kang, Jason Tobin, and Nathalie Kelley
Set in the sexy(?) and colorful underground world of Japanese drifting, Sean Boswell(Black) is an outsider who attempts to define himself, it doesn't take long for him to find some action when a fellow American buddy, Twinkie(Bow Wow), introduces him to the underground world of drift racing. In theatres June 16. Read more..!
Nissan's distance control assist system w/ pedal feedback
Nissan announced Wednesday the newest development under its "Safety Shield" accident prevention program - an electronic system that helps drivers control the distance between their car and the vehicle in front.
The system uses a front bumper-mounted radar sensor to determine the following distance and the relative speed of both cars. If the driver releases the gas pedal the system automatically applies the brakes. If the system itself determines that braking is required (presumably because the vehicle ahead is slowing), the driver is alerted by a lighted indicator and a buzzer, and the gas pedal automatically moves upward to "assist the driver in switching to the brakes."
Nissan expects the system to be particularly useful in heavy traffic, when frequent braking is required. No word on when (or if) the system will see production.
NexxtDrive CVT concept is a transmission not quite like anything we've seen before. Using a generator and motor to create a controlled secondary energy path, the NexxDrive directs engine torque through three epicyclical gear sets to effectively create a continuously-variable gear ratio.
Despite the use of the motor and generator, the system isn't just for use with hybrids - although it's said to lend itself nicely to that application. The energy developed with the generator system can be directly fed back into the motor, or stored in a battery pack for future use. With a lack of clutches, pulleys, belts, and chains, the current design is said to be suitable for engines up to 270 HP, and there doesn't appear to be any issues with scaling the technology for larger applications. The layout of this gearbox looks to be perfectly suited to longitudinal engine orientations.
This six-minute video is a teaser for an upcoming documentary that examines the practice of hiring low-cost Chinese labor to farm virtual goods for sale in richer nations. It's the newest form of a sweatshop.
Archos AV700 includes dual digital tuners, DVR, 40GB HDD
Archos has upped the ante (and the price) in the PMP race with the AV700, a model that includes two digital tuners (for European terrestrial digital broadcasts), a 40GB hard drive, a 7-inch LCD display, DVR software, PlaysForSure compatibility for both audio and video, and inputs for recording from any analog source. Archos claims that the inclusion of two antennas and "diversity reception" technology allows for better TV tuning on the go. It can also operate in USB host mode to pull pics directly from memory card readers or digicams, allows you to pre-program up to 100 TV channels per location for up to 5 locations, and supports downloadable games. It's expected to be available in Europe in May for about €700 (about $830).
It turns out music blogs are chock-full of great MP3s, but if you're like me you don't have much time for reading music blogs and downloading song files. Enter the Hype Machine, a music blog aggregator. It watches all of the best music blogs and gives you their MP3s in easy-to-digest formats: Podcast, .m3u playlist, or a pop-up Flash player for listening in your browser. I'm partial to the Flash player because it has links to the original blog posts as well as albums for purchase at Amazon.com. There's also a handy search feature, so the next time a friend tells you, "You've got to check out Avant Garde Dark Cabaret Harmonium Quintet of Love!" there's a good chance you find some of their tracks as well as some informative blog commentary.
Iron Sudoku's non-Flash interface (yes, that's AJAX you smell) is easy to use and efficient enough for speed-players. It also has two different color markers, red and green (hold Shift or Ctrl, respectively) and lets you save your progress at any point (and I'm told autosave is coming soon). Most interestingly, Iron Sudoku is social software, so while you're playing you can chat with players around the world who are working on the same puzzle, and sometimes it's nice to know you're not the only one pulling your hair out hunting for hidden subsets. There's one puzzle per day and completing a puzzle wins you points—10 for Expert, 5 for Hard, and so on (but rankings unfortunately won't be enabled until April 1, unless I've been fooled). Signing up for Iron Sudoku is free, but paying members (a one-time $14.95 fee) get a few extra features like a friends list and account customization.
This fascinating thing is the quin.mgx wall sconce designed by bathsheba grossman for materialise. Grossman has degrees in both mathematics and art and designs sculpture digitally. This piece represents the four elements of the natural world and the universe; the "quin" in the name stands for quintrino, the representation of this idea. It is made of stainless steel. The sconce sells for $858 and the pendant lamp is $1984.
We well knew early this morning that the XP-on-an-Intel-Mac bounty was apparently paid out, so sorry if you had your eye on that $11,000$12,000 $13,000 bounty. But what we didn't have was the solution. Well, Colin over at windows.onmac.net still doesn't have anything much to say about it, but we think the file itself should say enough. Grab it below if you want it -- the zip includes a bootloader CD image and a how-to for getting XP on your MacBook Pro, iMac, or mini. Happy Windows-ing.
So Griffin is branching out to make peripherals that aren't for Apple products or based on generic standards, with their new $50 iFM PSP radio tuner / remote, $50 iTrip PSPradio transmitter, and $15 SmartShare PSP headphone splitter. Wouldn't it make more sense to call the first two pFM and pTrip, respectively?
Robert Heron writes about his adventures shopping for an inexpensive LCD TV. The bottom line is don't go to Wal-Mart (big surprise) and keep track of the sales when bargain hunting.
Robert does a good job of getting the word out that LCD TVs are falling in price and provides some good advice, but I think he was a little too kind to these inexpensive LCD TVs. He fails to point out the differences between these and the more expensive options.
Camshaft legend adds another two strokes to the internal combustion cycle
As a hot-rodding legend and inductee into the Drag Racing Hall of Fame, 75-year-old Bruce Crower has finally figured out a way to capture some of an internal combustion engine's wasted heat - a task he'd been trying to wrap his head around for three decades.
A typical four-stroke engine operates on the principle of intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust (or, if you prefer, suck-squeeze-bang-blow). After the conclusion of the exhaust cycle, significant amounts of heat remain in the cylinder. Like many other engineers, Crower ruminated on how best to capture the energy, instead of rejecting it to the cooling system as waste.
Crower's development injects water into the cylinder after the exhaust stroke. With both the intake and exhaust valves closed, the water flashes to steam and adds an additional power stroke to the combustion cycle (this is the "fifth" stroke). Upon venting the steam through the exhaust valve (the "sixth" stroke), the cycle starts over again.
The obvious advantage is improved efficiency - a claimed 40-percent, made possible by capturing some of that heat waste. In fact, it's claimed that the engine requires no cooling system whatsoever, and Crower's prototype supposedly is only warm to the touch after running for an hour. The cooling effect of the water could also dramatically improve detonation resistance, which would enable significantly increased compression ratios, potentially ending concern over carbon deposits in the combustion chamber.
Possible drawbacks include increased emissions, as shooting an air-fuel mixture into a cold cylinder will likely not help increase vaporization of the fuel (this concept might be begging for direct fuel injection). There's also a 33-percent decrease in "real" power cycles, which may result in less average torque at a given engine operating speed. All this injected water has to come from somewhere, which means additional weight and packaging volume (water and gasoline would be consumed at roughly the same rate). Finally, it's fair to question the effect of the injected water on engine life (H2O makes for a poor lubricant) and on catalytic converters.
It's far too early in this technology's development process to make a judgment on its effectiveness, but Crower has over a half-century of experience with internal combustion engines, and so we won't place any bets against his success. Read more..!
Ubisoft's MMORPG Shadowbane recently made a fairly subdued announcement regarding customer billing--or, rather, the lack of billing. Shadowbane follows in the footsteps of MMOs like PlanetSide and Anarchy Online, allowing previously paying customers to enjoy the game for free.
The low-key nature of this change means we don't know if the subscription fee will be replaced with other revenue streams such as in-game ads or expansion pack-based charges. For the time being, it seems fairly straightforward: download the game client, activate a free trial, never pay.
For an unknown reason, Adobe has seen fit to remove the ability to view PSD files as thumbnails in Windows Explorer. You may not have noticed this if you upgraded your version of Photoshop from a previous version, as the ability to display PSD files as thumbnails is driven by a DLL file that was distributed previously, but is now strangely absent.
Luckily, Mike Golding noticed that you can download the needed DLL from DLL Dump, and by simply dropping it into the correct folder, resurrect your PSD thumbnails in Windows Explorer.
Now, I don't know who actually owns that DLL, or whether DLL Dump has the right to be offering it. But if you're curious, there it is.
Japanese condo installs "air-shower" for allergy sufferers
A Japanese complex Riche Tamagawa Riverside has had enough of the sneezing, congestion and red noses that must have been running rampant throughout the building, as employees recently installed an "air-shower" near one of the entrances that blows dust, pollen and other allergens right off residents' clothing. Frequent travelers may be familiar with these compressed-air showers from certain airport security screening stations, where the machines are used not to keep your flight sniffle-free but to ensure that you weren't playing around with explosives before boarding. The 12-nozzle system at the Tokyo location has proven so popular that building owners are considering deploying the units to other housing developments as well, causing hay fever sufferers to rejoice.
msystems claims, some people just want something with "storage density higher than floppy diskettes." msystems believes these people are apparently happy to rock 16 or 32MB; we're not entirely sure what they'd be doing with such limited amounts of memory (or why they wouldn't just lay down a couple of bucks more for a cheapie 64 / 128 / 256MB flash drive), and the FlashDisc is not "an exciting new category poised to radically transform the way people share their data." The FlashDisc is just a flash drive -- but relatively small, and presumably pretty cheap -- but unless you're pricing this thing at the present cost of a floppy disc (about $0.25) you're about five or six years too late to be posing a flash drive as their alternative msystems.
Microsof includes a rating system, known as the Windows Performance Rating, in Windows Vista, which will enable PC buyers to see how well a particular model can handle the new operating system. The tool ranks your computer on an overall scale of 1-5, and ranks specific components as well. The tool is likely to benefit PC retailers, who will be able to use a relatively low score as a rationale for selling upgrades, but it could also leave some consumers bewildered by what may seem like mediocre scores for relatively high-end systems. Trying out the new system on a number of PCs, CNET found that a recently purchased Sony Vaio with a 1.83GHz Intel T2400 and 1GB of RAM scored a middling 3, though the rating system gave it a whopping 5.6 for its processor and 5.5 for memory. In the meantime, Microsoft is also preparing another tool, the Windows Upgrade Advisor, which will allow computer owners running Windows XP to find out whether their computers have the right stuff to use Vista.
Panasonic also rolled out a pack of new SD-powered D-Snap models in Japan. The SD770V and SD710 are upgrades to existing models. The other units in the lineup are, the SD310 and SD370 (above left) are squarish players that look a lot like the Qoolqee X with an OLED display tacked on top, while the pendant-like SD570 and SD510 (above right) are dead ringers for the Asono Mica. All players support MP3, AAC and WMA formats.
One of the biggest problem with tiny spy robots and other such entities is a reliable source of power. Some researchers at Rice University and the University of Southern California are looking to solve that with a new kind of fuel cell based on electron spitting bacteria. Apparently the bacteria can eat at about any material -- the target is waste water -- and spit electrons which the researchers hope to harvest and use to power the tiny bots. Luckily the Department of Defense is behind this to the tune of $4.4 million, so we might get some spillover into consumer devices.
-Lytir1
