Author: Serkadis

If proved to be true, the following story may turn out to be one of the final nails in Toyota’s coffin: in the Japan and the US, over 100 Toyota Prius owners filed complaints about the vehicles brakes. The Prius, one of the leading vehicles in Toyota’s line-up, has so far escaped the recall which battered Toyota in the last months.

According to DetNews, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has received about 100 complaints involving the brakes of the Prius, with at least two of … (read more)

American artist Jeff Koons is to be involved in creating the 17th BMW Art Car in the 35th anniversary year of the program. The artist made the announcement together with Jim O’Donnell, President of BMW North America. Other artists such as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, and Alexander Calder, are all involved in the same project.

"I always thought it would be an honor to work on a BMW Art Car," said Jeff Koons. "I lo… (read more)

Nico Rosberg did not take too long answer Rubens Barrichello for his piece of advice earlier this week. And it wasn’t exactly a thank you note from the German driver, as Rosberg insisted he has no problem being Michael Schumacher’s teammate at Mercedes GP.

After the first day of testing, in which Rosberg was given the first shot at trying out the new Mercedes W01, Schumacher finished the day higher on the timing reports than the German driver. When asked by the reporters what would be a decen… (read more)

Looking to take advantage from the stir in which Toyota finds itself for a while now, a group of Honda dealers have created the Recall Replacement Program, targeting Toyota owners concerned with their personal safety. Moreover, these potential customers are also afraid the massive safety recall might affect the resale value of their cars.

Honda has the highest resale value of any car sold in America and no serious safety issues, so Toyota owners are invading dealers to trade in problematic c… (read more)

Article Tags: Editorial

Discredited climate theories make strange bedfellows

In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama said there was “overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change.” In his most recent message to the world, Osama bin Laden said that climate change “is not an intellectual luxury but an actual fact.” It’s nice to see these two leaders can agree on something.

The hitch is that the man-caused catastrophic global warming theory is dead, and it needs to be buried. Evidence had been mounting for years that there were problems with the global warming model; most telling was that the globe refused to warm up. Carbon emissions continued apace, but the world began cooling. This is why true believers abandoned the “global warming” brand name and tried to shift the debate to the more ambiguous label “climate change,” which is something the rest of us like to refer to as “weather.”

The dam broke with Climategate when hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit revealed that global warming advocates had for years attempted to hide conflicting data and silence their professional critics. British authorities have determined that the university broke freedom-of-information laws by denying information to scientists seeking to check claims that global warming was caused by human activity.

Source: washingtontimes.com

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As you’ve probably realized, local news is undergoing a massive transformation. The rapid demise of “old media” has resulted in fewer local publications, and it’s likely that in a few months your local paper may no longer exist. As “new media” takes over, users will be faced with a plethora of choices to consume local news. This is great news for most (no pun intended), but it comes at a price: the vast network of local blogs and news sites is difficult to navigate and peruse. Enter Fwix, a real-time local news aggregator that automatically curates news from a multitude of sources and delivers them to you via their website, Fwix.com. Fwix, which has seen over 100% monthly growth from November to December, is now bringing their solution to mobile.

Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >>

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After a series of leaks brought us the news of the E-PL1 early we were concerned that the new member of Olympus’ PEN family would be a clunker. We were wrong.

This new model looks “cheaper” than the EP-1 and EP-2 simply because it is clad in aluminum up front and polycarbonate in the back. This makes the camera considerably lighter than its predecessors. We saw the grey and silver models although the black model is said to look the nicest. I also had a quick hands on with the entry-level point and shoots they announced today.

Here are the direct changes to the EP line:

Built in flash with manual flash controls.

12.3-megapixel 4/3s sensor.

Single microphone – no more stereo recording except with an add-on.

Direct “hot button” for HD 720p video recording. You can change this button to any other feature in the menus.

Live Guide – In auto mode you can select a number of general settings or tasks. If you want to get motion blur, for example, you can move a slider up and down to increase or decrease blur. Want bokeh? There’s a slider that controls aperture. You don’t have to know anything about anything to change these settings.

The lenses grab focus and move more quietly than previous versions.

In my brief tests I found the E-PL1 to be nigh on exactly what we’ve all been looking for in a micro 4/3s. The Live Guide – complete with tips on shooting animals, kids, and food – is great for beginners while more advanced shooters will like the focus time and the weight and side of the new camera.

At $599.99 for a Body, 14-42mm f3.5/5.6 Zoom lens, and battery pack you’re looking at quite a capable shooter at under what other folks are asking for their high-level point and shoots.

I also saw the Tough 8010, a tough, waterproof camera. The 30x 800UZ is also pretty cool. Nothing amazing except for Ah-Ha mode which creates a “drawing” of the scene in front of you. Fun times.

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Windows Home Server is a great product that provides users a simple way to centralize all of their files and provide easier ways to back up and restore that data when needed.  But one of the things it would be perfect for is something Microsoft hasn’t offered to MediaCenter users.  Thankfully SageTV has had WHS support for quite a while now and provides a solid, robust solution for serving your media to the TVs in your home via WHS.

Jason Smith is a new blogger on the Home Server Show and has a great writeup on “SageTV on the Windows Home Server”

If you’re a Windows Home Server user, a SageTV user or even a Windows MediaCenter user this is a must read.  Jason is mostly complementary to SageTV, but he’s very fair as this quote from the article proves:

“Obviously SageTV isn’t all sunshine and roses with puppy dogs smiling at happy babies. There are a few issues with Sage that would need to be considered."

I loved that quote.  Be sure and stop over at the HomeServerShow and check out the full article

It certainly took them long enough, but Olympus has finally (finally!) introduced a Micro Four Thirds camera with a price tag that’s a little closer to earth. If you’ll recall, both of the previous PENs cost upwards of $750, but the E-PL1 touts a much more reasonable MSRP of $599.99. And that doesn’t mean Olympus has been stingy on features. Nope, quite the contrary as the the minuscule body is packed with the same 12.3 megapixel image sensor as the E-30 and E-620 (check the images in the gallery to see a size comparison of the actual sensors), in-body image stabilization, continuous autofocus, a 2.7-inch rear LCD, HD movie mode, in-camera “art filters” and a bundled ED 14-42mm f3.5/5.6 zoom lens (28-84mm equivalent in 35mm cameras). Oh and don’t forget the addition of the pop-up flash which just reminds us of E.T. You won’t be able to nab a E-PL1 until next month, but hit the break for some of our hands-on impressions.

Continue reading Olympus intros $600 12.3 megapixel PEN E-PL1 Micro Four Thirds camera

Olympus intros $600 12.3 megapixel PEN E-PL1 Micro Four Thirds camera originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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January U.S. auto sales beat analyst expectations by 10.8 million units on a seasonally-adjusted-annual-selling-rate (SAAR) basis according to Goldman Sachs.

Ford and GM in particular are killing it, clobbering Toyota with 34.4% and 23.5% year over year sales growth while the Japanese automaker's sales fell 8.7%.

Moreover, as shown below, Goldman expects substantial production increases for U.S. automakers both in 2010 (FY10E) with Ford, GM, and Chrysler ramping up output by 19 - 31%. Production growth will then continue into 2011 (FY11E). Toyota's own-goal may have jump started a U.S. auto recovery.

Brian Jacoby @ Goldman: Ford stated that most Toyota customers tend to cross-shop Honda; however, we believe that Ford and GM may see some sales benefit in coming months associated with the Toyota recall. We maintain our US light vehicle SAAR forecast of 12.0 and 13.0 million units in 2010 and 2011, respectively. Ford expects a US SAAR of approximately 11.5-12.5 million units in 2010, and GM revised their 2010 SAAR estimate to 11.5-12.0 million units from 11.0-12.0 million.

For a cut of analysis-only like this, add my twitter: @vincefernando

(Via Goldman Sachs, Credit Research: January US Auto Sales, Brian Jacoby, CFA, 2 February 2010)

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See Also:

• Ford Back From The Dead: Reports $2.7B 2009 Profit
• Battered Toyota Reports 8.7% Sales Decline From Last Year's Horrible Numbers
• Toyota's Death Pedal Disaster Bleeding $155 Million A Week, Will Stretch For Years

Asana, the workplace productivity startup from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, just released a sneak peek at the new programming system underlying its product, called Lunascript.

It’s an in-house programming language, named after Moskovitz’ cat, that the company claims will cut 90 percent of the time needed to code rich web applications. (You can check out a video here.) Asana co-founder Justin Rosenstein explained to us when we covered Asana’s $9 million round of funding that programming for the web requires a lot of rote and repetitive grunt work:

“We’ve been continually frustrated by how long it takes to write software, and by a nagging feeling that in some deep sense we’ve been writing the same code over and over,” the company said today. “Even when using the latest and greatest frameworks and disciplines, writing fast, highly interacting web applications involves a lot of accidental complexity.”

Lunascript eliminates the need to write separate code to help the server figure out which values need to be sent to the client. The server actually simulates the user interface. The compiler can produce a functioning web application that handles both the client-side JavaScript, and the server-side SQL.

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BrightRoll co-founder and CEO Tod Sacerdoti — pronounced “satch er DOH tee” if you don’t speak Italian — has three reasons to be happy this week. First, video advertising network BrightRoll is, according to Quantcast’s stats, now bigger than Hulu in terms of reach to Internet-using humans. BrightRoll’s ads reach 53.3 million unique viewers a month, compared to the Hulu Network’s 31.6 million. (The Hulu.com site draws 20.7 million.)

Second,BrightRoll has scored $10 million in Series C financing led by Scale Venture Partners, bringing the company’s total venture funding to $16 million since its launch in July 2006. Previous investors True Ventures, Adams Street Capital and KPG Ventures also participated in the round. Rob Theis, Managing Director with Scale Venture Partners, has joined BrightRoll’s board of directors.

But wait, there’s more: BrightRoll also announced today that it has been profitable for nearly the entire last 12 months. Sacerdoti had hinted at this last fall, when he told TechCrunch that while video ad rates were dropping, his company’s total revenue was up 84 percent over the previous year. Rather than burning through it, the company will use this round of financing to expand its technology platform, beef up worldwide advertiser and publisher operations, and hopefully increase its leadership position in America.

In the past few months, BrightRoll has added behavioral targeting to its technology platform. The company also added an option for advertisers to only pay for videos that are watched to completion by viewers.

Sacerdoti told me in a long phone call today that it’s not just BrightRoll, it’s video advertising as a whole that’s taking off. “The biggest theme we’ve seen over the past 12 months,” he said, “is that video advertising is being served for any free content, not just video content. Anywhere someone can serve a video ad, you’ll see a video ad. Video ads are going to be much more broad than TV will be.”

That bodes well for video ad networks like BrightRoll, as well as its competitors such as YuMe and Tremor Media. The thing about video ad networks is, as an Internet user, you’re not really aware of their existence. You just see lots of video ads all over the place, without being told who’s serving them. “It’s like when you watch Project Runway,” Sacerdoti said. “You know you’re watching Bravo, but you don’t think about whether or not it’s Bravo that sold the ads. Often it’s not.”

“I think by this time next year the majority of the top five to ten video properties by any measure will be aggregator networks,” he said. “The best example for this is display advertising. They’re by far the largest in reach and spending — Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and 10 ad networks make up the top fourteen. But what we’re seeing pretty clearly from the advertising community is that the preferred ad medium is video. All things considered, advertisers would almost always prefer to run a video to talk to their customers.”

Why is Scale putting $10 million into BrightRoll? “The online video ad market will grow to billions of dollars over the next few years by disrupting the $70 billion television ad market,” Theis said in a prepared statement. That’s three and a half times the size of Google’s annual ad revenue, and more than twice the total $30 billion online ad market. The most strategic Internet investments are those that compete not with other Internet businesses, but with the much larger amount of money still being spent offline.

[Photo: BusinessWeek]

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areview.co.cc: The US space agency awarded $50 million in grants to five private firms in a first step to implement President Barack Obama’s vision of turning over space transportation to the commercial sector. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden also deflected criticism by some US lawmakers that Obama’s proposal would topple the United States from its preeminent role in space exploration. We are not abandoning human space flight by any stretch of the imagination, Bolden said at a news conference. We are probably on a new course, but human space flight is in our DNA. Obama’s budget plan, unveiled on Monday, scuttles the Constellation programme, begun under former President George W Bush to return humans to the moon and spends $6 billion over five years to develop commercial space transportation. Obama’s NASA proposal hands over more space operations to the commercial sector, saying it will create thousands of new jobs and hold costs down. Some members of Congress promised a fight to save the symbolic but costly lunar programme. Senator Richard Shelby, the senior Republican on the appropriations subcommittee handling NASA funding, called the Obama plan a death march for human space flight.

Mozilla announced last week the availability of Firefox for Maemo 1.0, the first official release of Firefox Mobile for Nokia’s Linux-based smartphone operating system. It offers adequate browsing performance, support for add-ons, and a finger-friendly user interface that includes popular Firefox features like the AwesomeBar.

This Firefox variant is based on the Fennec project, which was originally launched in 2007 with the aim of bringing the full Firefox browsing experience to modern handheld devices. In the time that has transpired since the inception of the project, advancements in mobile computing hardware have significantly boosted the performance of smartphones. That factor, coupled with Mozilla’s aggressive optimization efforts, have made it possible for Firefox to become a mobile browser.

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Short version: Gateway’s SX2840 is an ideal computer for someone who needs a good basic computer. It feels fast enough that it’s not annoying, and it’s perfect for pretty much everything except hardcore gaming. I’d even go so far as to say that it’d work great as an HTPC, because it plays back HD video with no problems.

Features: Small form factor, Intel Core i3 530, front panel with built in card reader, USB, and Firewire. Back panel with HDMI and eSATA.

Pros:

• Small form factor ideal for tight spaces, media center
• Processor fast enough, while still cost effective
• Integrated graphics can handle HD video with no problems

Cons:

• Integrated video won’t handle high end games
• For the price, might be more effective to get a laptop/netbook
• limited ability to upgrade hardware

Most people really don’t need the type of computer I typically review. The normal system that I like to take a look at is the “fire breathing monster” computer, the kind that can control a small country and cook eggs on the heatsink. I realize that most people don’t want to spend $5000 on a computer. Heck, they don’t even want to spend $1000. And for students? the cheaper the better, so long as it does everything they need it to do.

The Gateway SX2840 is the ideal computer for most people. Sure, it’s not going to play Crysis at 100FPS, but who cares? Most people don’t want to spend that kind of money. The SX2840 hits that sweet spot of being a fast enough that it’s not annoying, but slow enough that you’re not paying supercomputer prices. It’s hard to quantify this because frame rates and seek times don’t really apply to a computer in this situation. It’s great for browsing the web, writing email, running a word processing program, looking at pictures – all those basic things that most people who use a computer spend the majority of their time doing. It’s an ideal family computer, right down to the built in card reader on the front for downloading pictures from your camera, and plugging the usb cable in to sync up your music player. Admittedly, there’s nothing really noteworthy about this computer, but there isn’t any really negative about it either. It’s just a nice, solid performer that you can feel safe recommending to your grandmother, because you know you won’t have to be coming over every week to fix it for her.

That’s not to suggest that this machine is not capable of gaming, it is. It’s just not idea for the latest greatest FPS games. For the casual gamer, it’ll be ideal. I guess that’s what really defines this system; it’s a good casual machine. It’s not terribly fast, but you don’t expect it to be. You just want it to work and be reliable, and that’s what this machine is all about. Be aware though, that this computer does have one fatal flaw: you won’t be able to upgrade it. There’s just not enough room to add a faster video card, or upgrade the CPU. It’s just not going to happen. But for the $559 price, while I won’t call it disposable, it’s certainly easier to pass on to your sister’s kids that that $5000 supercomputer.

System Specifications:

• CPU: Intel Core i3 530
• Memory: 6GB
• Hard Drive: 1TB
• Video: Intel GMA X4500HD
• Power supply: 220w

The bottom line:
I like the new Gateway. It’s tough to find anything about it that’s particularly noteworthy, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s not an unattractive machine, and the small size of the case would fit well in the corner of the dining room, or in a dorm room. The best part about it is the price: the MSRP of $559 makes it a reasonable purchase for anyone who needs a computer that will cover the basics. The tough part is deciding if you’d be happier with a netbook or inexpensive notebook instead.

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The stage is now set in President Obama’s adopted home state of Illinois for some actual bipartisan competition for the Senate seat he used to occupy himself.

Bye-bye, Burris, as in Roland, the Democrat who was appointed to the seat by bye-bye Blagojevich, as in Rod, the Democratic governor who was impeached for allegedly trying to auction off said nomination to fill bye-bye Barack’s briefly-held Senate chair.

The victor in the state’s once all-important Democratic primary tonight was State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias.

The victor in the Republican primary going-away was Rep. Mark Kirk of the 10th District, an area once represented by John Porter and someone named Donald Rumsfeld.

Voter turnout was light on a snowy day, barely 30% state officials estimated.

A repudiation of the president’s party in the Land of Lincoln come November would be even more embarrassing than the repudiation of the president’s party in Massachusetts recently. There, Bay State voters elected Scott Brown as the first GOP senator from there since 1972, even before Richard Nixon admitted he was not a crook.

On the gubernatorial side, the races were much closer. Former Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, who inherited the job upon Blago’s ouster, was holding a narrow primary lead over Dan Hynes, the state comptroller.

The three-way Republican race was too close to call among two state senators — Bill Brady and Kirk Dillard — and state party Chair Andy McKenna.

In the Senate race, both Kirk and Giannoulias face real challenges.

The five-term Kirk is a 50-year-old Republican who was born in Champaign but grew up in Chicago’s affluent northern suburbs that he now represents.

Kirk must harness the widespread anti-incumbent mood and convince Republican and independent voters statewide to pay more attention to his conservative, strong defense voting record and less to the socially moderate votes that served him well along the Lake Michigan shore.

Proving one’s true conservative credentials and dodging any taint of that new four-letter word — RINO — is fast becoming a crucial GOP litmus test across the country this year.

Kirk’s impressive fundraising skills will serve him well.

From Washington, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele chimed in late Tuesday: “With its unemployment rate among the worst in the nation, Illinois can no longer afford the binge spending and failed leadership of entrenched Democrats.”

Giannoulias will have the full-power of Chicago’s vaunted Democratic machine backing him.

But he comes from a family involved in a business that has become another four-letter word in the last year: bank. And the Giannoulias family’s Broadway Bank has had some trouble with regulators that party opponents used effectively against him.

Kirk may also mention this.

– Andrew Malcolm