Author: Serkadis

It has been reported that Infiniti is set to expand their line of ‘G’ sedans with the introduction of the G25. The entry-level sedan will sport the same turbocharged 2.5 liter V6 engine that Japanese-market Nissan Skyline 250 GT uses.

The turbo is not set to be offered in the G37 – that will remain naturally aspirated. The purpose here is to offer a lower-priced entry-level sedan with better fuel economy to compete head-to-head with the BMW 328i.

The engine currently in use in Japan puts put out the power of 210 horses and 195 lb.-ft. of torque, compared to the 3.0-liter inline-6 that the 328i draws power from, which puts out 230 hp and 200 lb-ft. of torque.

The sedan is the only model slated for production as of now, but brisk sales will change that.

2010 Infiniti G37 Sedan:

– By: Stephen Calogera

Source: Edmunds

Facebook has finally relented and introduced a feature that many of its users have been clamoring for, replying to a comment by email. Now, every time you receive an email notification of a comment on your profile or a photo, you will be able to reply to it from your email account without having to visit the site. As Facebook itself points out, this co… (read more)

Agriprocessors’ Operations Manager Pleads Guilty to Document Fraud Conspiracy

Guilty Plea Follows Last Week’s Sentencing of Human Resources Manager and Assistant

A top manger at Agriprocessors who participated in a conspiracy to obtain fake documents for workers pled guilty today in federal court in Cedar Rapids.

Brent Beebe, age 52, from Postville, Iowa, was convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit document fraud. Beebe had been scheduled for trial on Jan. 19, 2010.

In a plea agreement, Beebe admitted he was one of two operations managers at Agriprocessors, Inc., in Postville and oversaw the beef-side production at the facility.

The week prior to a May 12, 2008, immigration enforcement action, Beebe conspired with an Agriprocessors vice-president and others to help several employees obtain new fake identification documents.

Beebe obtained $4,500 in cash from the Agriprocessors vice-president to be loaned to approximately 19 beef production employees to pay for new fake documents.

A line supervisor used the money to obtain fake documents and then delivered the fake documents to Agriprocessors on Sunday, May 11, 2008. The documents were then used to complete new application paperwork for several employees.

Sentencing before United States District Court Chief Judge Linda R. Reade will be set after a presentence report is prepared.

Beebe remains free on bond previously set pending sentencing. Beebe faces a possible maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment, a $250,000 fine, a $100 special assessment, and three years of supervised release following any imprisonment.

On Thursday, Jan. 7, 2010, Chief Judge Reade sentenced two former Agriprocessors human resources employees.

Former Agriprocessors human resources manager Elizabeth Billmeyer was sentenced to one year and one day imprisonment to be followed by two years’ supervised release. Former Agriprocessors human resources assistant Penny Hanson was sentenced to two years’ probation.

Only two defendants in the case remain to be prosecuted—Hosam Amara and Zeev Levi, who are fugitives. The investigation began in October 2007 and has continued since the execution of search warrants at Agriprocessors on May 12, 2008. The investigation is ongoing.

The case is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Peter Deegan, C.J. Williams, and Matthew Cole, and the investigation has been led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement with assistance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Prior assistance was provided by the United States Marshals Service, United States Postal Inspections Service, Iowa Department of Public Safety, Iowa Department of Transportation, Federal Protective Service, Internal Revenue Service – Criminal Investigations, United States Department of Labor, Public Health Service, United States Department of Agriculture, United States Environmental Protection Agency, Iowa Department of Natural Resources, Drug Enforcement Administration, Waterloo Police Department, and Postville Police Department.

Court file information is available at ecf.iand.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/login.pl.

The case file number is 08-1324.

Square Enix has released a new international trailer for Final Fantasy XIII. This one’s got English voice acting set against that Leona Lewis song “My Hands”. Oh, and drama. Lots of drama.

Filed under: Detroit Auto Show, Etc., Celebrities, Humor

Bob Lutz has been an important guy in the auto industry since before most of us were born. Elon Musk is the reason your eBay transactions go so smoothly (he was the co-creator of PayPal). Together, they don’t seem to make much of a team. Well, they wouldn’t make much of a match if Musk weren’t the CEO of Tesla Motors. Elon makes electric cars. Bob wants to make electric cars. Both are (*ahem*) outspoken and give good soundbites. Upon further review, it makes perfect sense that the two men were hanging out at the Detroit Auto Show. But what were they talking about?

We have some ideas, but they probably aren’t as creative as yours. We’ll get you started with some appetizers, but we’re really just looking for you to provide the main course:

Lutz to Musk: “You think you’re nervous right now, but you really just have range anxiety”
Musk to Lutz: “We have more batteries in one car than you have in 500 Volts”
Lutz to Musk: “$500 million? $50 billion!”

Help us out with some better captions by leaving some tender verbal vittles in Comments.

Detroit 2010: Caption Contest – What the heck are Bob Lutz and Elon Musk talking about? originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft issued a single security bulletin that addressed just one vulnerability on Tuesday. However, Microsoft rated the vulnerability as critical. Meanwhile, Oracle and Adobe put out patches of their own, making it a busy week for IT administrators.

“The lone Microsoft vulnerability affects everything from Windows 2000 to Windows 7, but is only rated critical for Windows 2000,” said Ben Greenbaum, senior research manager for Symantec Security Response. “From XP SP2 onward, Microsoft hardened heap memory with heap memory protection strategies; this makes the vulnerability less of an issue for the later systems.”

A Belated Christmas Gift

With only one bulletin, Microsoft is bringing a belated Christmas present to all IT admins in the form of the lightest Patch Tuesday we’ve seen in years, said Paul Henry, Lumension security and forensic analyst.

“Let’s hope that IT admins can savor this unusually reduced patch release as they kick off the new year and use the time to prepare for the numerous updates and patches that are being released this month from other vendors, including Adobe and Oracle,” Henry said.

“We also can’t forget the patches yet to come to resolve the current SMB denial-of-service problems, the MySQL zero-day rumors, the Adobe PDF issue, and the Apple zero-day that has recently had proof-of-concept code released in to the wild. Just because these flaws aren’t being addressed with the first patch bulletin of the year doesn’t mean that IT admins should not keep a close eye out for them in the near future.”

Microsoft’s Missing Patch

This is a very light Patch Tuesday from Microsoft and IT security teams should be taking advantage of the situation to address housekeeping items, according to Andrews Storms, director of security operations at nCircle. He suggested IT admins take the time this month to find every out-of-date Microsoft system and…

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Idol’s still tops on the tube. Tuesday night’s return American Idol, now in its ninth season, pulled in 29.8 million viewers between 8pm and 10pm last night, according to early estimates.

This year’s Boston auditions, which featured former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham as a guest judge, peaked with 32.32m in the half hour from 9 PM. Overall, the audience was almost in line with last year’s Jan. 13 opener, which drew 30.4 million.

The new season of FOX’s Idol will be the series’ first without veteran judge Paula Abdul and the last with acid-tongued Brit Simon Cowell. Cowell will leave the program in May to develop an American adaptation of his UK talent show, The X Factor.

Netbooks are a great compromise between pecking away a smartphone keyboard or hauling a tank-size laptop around—but they aren’t without shortcomings. Make the most of your netbook with these netbook-friendly tips, tricks, and applications.

Although often derided for being under-powered and a poor substitute for a full laptop, netbooks fill a nice niche. They’re tough to beat for portable browsing, note taking, and mobile computing when a laptop is over kill, the battery life is too short, and using your phone is impractical or uncomfortable. Still, you can do a lot to make life with a netbook easier.

Accept the Hardware Limitations and Tweak When Possible

Netbooks are limited and you can’t be happy using one unless you accept that. Watching video on it won’t be like watching video on a 24″ widescreen monitor. It won’t run Crysis. You’re not going to be single-handedly solving complex protein-folding operations on it and curing cancer. Nearly every netbook has a fairly standard cookie-cutter spec sheet of a 1024×600 pixel screen, a 160GB HDD, 1GB of RAM, and a modest mobile processor.

If you already own a netbook, the best thing you can do is shell out $30-60 and upgrade the 1GB of RAM to 2GB of RAM. It’s a cheap enough upgrade and it provides a significant performance boost. If you’re shopping for a netbook, the best advice we can give is to focus on two things: battery life and the physical inputs, like the spacing of the keyboard and arrangement of secondary buttons—physical design is about the only thing distinguishing one netbook from another these days.

Strip Your Netbook of Bloat and Crapware

Computer manufacturers love to stockpile their pristine machines with all sorts of crapware. Fortunately, for the most part, netbook manufacturers aren’t too extreme with this practice. Given the already unpowered nature of the machines they sell, we’d imagine they’re paranoid about bogging it down with too much crapware. Nonetheless, it’s still worth your time to give your netbook a solid run through the decrapification-gaunlet. Photo by Fabio Bruna.

You can dig through the bloatware and delete it manually, but some bloatware—we’re looking at you Norton Anti-Virus trial!—is a huge pain to remove by hand. Fortunately applications have been created that are specifically tailored to giving bloatware the boot, like PC Decrapifier—seen in the screenshot above. PC Decrapifier is great for any new computer including netbooks and will help you get ride of applications like Norton Anti-Virus, Microsoft Office Trial Edition, and other annoyances.

One caveat regarding gutting the crapware from your new netbook: Although 90 percent of the junk that is installed is in fact junk, be careful not to delete software that actually does something useful. For example, on my Asus Eee netbook there were two very similar programs with similar Eee branded names. One was a useful aggressive battery monitoring application designed to squeeze even more life out of my 6-cell battery and the other was a fairly useless application dock only for Eee netbook apps. Had I blanket nuked all the installed apps, I’d have kicked out the useful battery tool with the rest of the junk.

Once you’ve booted the factory-fresh crapware off your netbook, it’s really important to keep things clean for optimal future performance. If a little bit of crapware and software creep slows down your beefy desktop a tiny bit, a little on your netbook will definitely gum up the works. Make sure to install an application like CCleaner—a favorite among Lifehacker readers—and run it on a schedule to keep things clean.

Learn to Love Full-Screen Mode and Keyboard Shortcuts

You might have a nice spacious monitor at home and never even think to switch to full screen mode, but on a netbook using full screen mode is an absolute must. The screenshot above shows a comparison between running Firefox in regular mode and running Firefox in fullscreen mode, displaying the Lifehacker homepage. Between the title bar, menu bar, tabbed sites, and the Windows start bar, around 40% of the screen gets chewed up. The same kind of situation exists when you load popular word processors like Microsoft Word and other office applications. Most software designers are simply not designing for small screens anymore; netbooks generally have a 1024×600 resolution, which is nearly 200 pixels shorter than the already quite small 1024×768 standard monitor size that most designers keep in mind when creating toolbar and site layouts.

Unfortunately no standard exists for which a keyboard shortcut will switch an application to full screen mode. Check the menu bar in your application or hit up Google with a “myapplication fullscreen shortcut” query to find it. The full-screen shortcuts for a few common applications are: Firefox/IE/Opera/Chrome – F11 (press again to return to normal view) and Microsoft Office – ALT+V+U (press ESC to return to normal view).

In addition to searching for individual and specific keyboard shortcuts to help with things like full-screen mode, it’s worthwhile to extend your knowledge of shortcuts even further—typing on a reduced size keyboard and mousing on a small trackpad can be rough on your hands. If you extend the range of your Google queries from just the keyboard shortcut to something like “myapplication without a mouse” or “myapplication keyboard shortcut guide” you’ll find gems like this guide to using the Opera web browser completely sans-mouse—or our own guide to mouse-less Firefox. Photo by Declan TM.

The best thing about improving your keyboard chops with the netbook is that all the new shortcuts you learn are transferable to your main workstation. For more information on handy keyboard shortcuts, application tricks involving keyboard shortcuts, and how to make them if your application lacks for them, take a stroll through the archives of the keyboard shortcuts tag here at Lifehacker.

Select Applications with a Netbook-Centric Attitude

Selecting applications for a netbook is a lot like packing for a camping trip. When you pack for a camping trip you select things for your pack that are efficient and lightweight versions of things you use every day at home, and you also pack things that are distinctly related to camping that you’d never use at home. Photo by 玩具王 the Nictoyking.

For example, you may use Firefox loaded down with 1,0001 extensions on your quad-core home computer but opt to run Firefox with only one or two critical extensions or Google Chrome on your netbook. Also, just like with camping, selecting lightweight tools that are multifunction is valuable. Why use a bloated media application when something snappy and light like open-source VLC can take care of all your movie and music needs? In the same vein, look for ways to ditch software that is known for being bloated and resource hungry, like swapping out Adobe-gonna-eat-all-y’RAMs-Reader with FoxIt Reader. If you’re unsure where to start when it comes to selecting lightweight software, you might want to check out past Lifehacker Hive Five topics. Lifehacker readers tend to gravitate towards the fastest and lightest-weight solutions even when constraints like using a netbook aren’t brought into the equation.

Aside from searching out lightweight versions of applications your normally use, the netbook also benefits from applications you’d likely never use on a desktop computer.

Netbooks, for example, make pretty handy ebooks. They’re full color, they have no annoying DRM or restrictions, and they’re lightweight with a long battery life. I’ve been experimenting with using my netbook as an ebook reader and don’t have any complaints to log. If your netbook doesn’t already support screen rotation, you can easily remedy that situation by downloading EeeRotate—in use in the screenshot above. The tiny application allows you to rotate your screen using CTRL+ALT+RIGHT (you can rotate it so that you hold the netbook with the screen on your right or left hand side) and it reverses the axis of the mouse so you can still use your mouse without hassle. Pressing CTRL+ALT+UP will return the screen to normal.

If you’re a Gmail user, you’ll definitely want to enable Offline Gmail to allow you to compose emails in Gmail when you’re between wireless hotspots and unable to access the net. If you’re not a Gmail user it’s worth downloading an full-fledged email client like Thunderbird and configuring it to use your web-based email so you can enjoy the same functionality.

Even if your keyboard chops are up to par, it’s still a pain to launch applications on a netbook. Although I’ve yet to install Launchy—as much as I love it!—on my main Windows 7 desktop, most netbooks run Windows XP and Launchy can go a long way towards making application launching pleasant on the tiny keyboard and touchpad. Check out our guide to doing more with Launchy here.

Being able to shuttle files between your main workstation and your netbook, as well as keeping them backed up, is a must. Dropbox is a valuable addition to your netbook for this task. It’s lightweight, it’s fast, and for most users the free account is more than adequate. While writing this article I used Dropbox multiple times to easily toss screenshots and installation files between my netbook and desktop and as I took notes about the netbook—on the netbook!—I saved the .TXT file to Dropbox. Check out how to use Dropbox for more than just file syncing here.

Netbooks serve as an excellent go-between tool for lightweight and portable notetaking and web browsing, especially with the proper tweaking and software selection. While our list of tweaks and software suggestions is long, it’s certainly not exhaustive. If you have a netbook of your own, it’s time to sound off in the comments with your tips, tricks, and favorite applications for maximizing your netbook’s capabilities.

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How did world-famous video game composer Nobuo Uematsu (left) get his start)? What drives him in music creation? What’s he think about games these days? These were a few of the heady topics tackled by Famitsu magazine in a three-part interview with the guy, and the results are more than worth the read.

Some of the highlights:

– Uematsu got his more-or-less official start with playing music at age 12. “My sister was learning how to play the piano, so we had some instruments laying around the fast,” he said. “That was how it began. I eventually learned that guitars have these things called chords, and as I was playing around with tablatures I realized ‘Hey, I could probably play these on a piano too!’ And I could. That was a major shock to me, and really, my piano playing hasn’t evolved any from that point.”

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An interesting rumor making the rounds suggests that Sprint may be leveraging the distribution of Walmart’s 4,200 retail stores to expand its WiMAX footprint. According to the unconfirmed rumor, Sprint would place a WiMAX tower at Walmart locations across the U.S. as a means of easily and inexpensively deploying new towers. No word on whether Walmart is merely giving permission for the towers of is actively investing in the venture. Interestingly enough, the Walmart idea is not new and harkens back to a similar proposal put forth by Bob Cringely six years ago. Is this just an old idea resurfacing as a new rumor or will you really be able to get some WiMAX at Wally World later this year?

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NetDevil has nailed the LEGO feeling in its upcoming MMO LEGO Universe;  you can tell from the character creation screen. You start with a minifig, and you get to choose the eyes, the mouth, different arms, and illustrations on the chest. As you move the pieces around, the arms and legs flail. In the screen where you choose which character to play, the other minifigs look hopeful, although they sometimes swat at the cursor. When you choose one to play, he or she celebrates, and the rest kick the ground, dejected.

“Everything is moderated,” I’m told as we put our name in. We’ll have a generic name until the name is given the thumbs up. The game is aimed at young boys, “but like LEGO itself, we’re really shooting for kids of all ages,” the representative outside the booth tells me. I begin to lope around the world with my newly created character, building things. In a game about Lego bricks, who exactly is the bad guy?

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Comcast wants “clear rules” from the FCC when it comes to network management, and it wants them so badly that it’s even willing to accept network neutrality as the price of getting them. What the huge ISP does not want is the kind of ambiguity that led to so much acrimony about its P2P blocking in 2008, and which is now being hashed out in a DC courtroom.

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Filed under: Video, Odds and ends

It’s Wednesday, which can mean only one thing — it’s time for another hour of fun with TUAW TV Live!

Our midweek adventure into everything about Apple starts at 5 PM ET (2 PM PT) here at TUAW. To join in on the fun, just come on back to the site a couple of minutes before the start of the show. We’ll have a post available with a Ustream viewer screen and a chat tool. At 5 PM, the show goes live, and you can use the chat tool to comment, ask questions, and otherwise just join in on the fun.

If you haven’t watched TUAW TV Live yet, this is your chance. Today’s discussion will include an iPhone accessory you can stand on, rumors about the next generation iPhone’s features and release date, joy in app developer land, and a subwoofer for your MacBook. Of course, it will also include any topics viewers are interested in pursuing.

See you at 5 PM ET!

TUAWJoin us this afternoon at 5 PM ET for TUAW TV Live originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Just one week after Google launched the Nexus One, its entry into the smartphone field, the numbers are in and it doesn’t look to be keeping up with the competition. We reviewed the iPhone-competitor the other day and see it as a formidable challenger, but its first week sales numbers fall drastically short of those same numbers for other smartphones during their first week, according to statistics from mobile analytics firm Flurry.

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While Flurry’s own analysis of the numbers makes sure to point out that the statistics may not provide an “apples to apples” comparison, the Nexus One’s first week sales were a fraction of its top three competitors.

Flurry details the methods used to arrive at these numbers in its blog post and is certain to call the data an estimate, but if they are even close to correct, the Droid outsold Nexus One by more than 12 times, myTouch 3G by 3 times and iPhone 3GS by 80 times.

Whether it was Google’s lack of marketing, the fact that the phone was only available for purchase online, or its $500-plus sticker price without a service contract, Flurry identifies a number of reasons for the slow start. The company also points to the post-holiday release date and the fact that Google did little compared to Verizon’s $100 million marketing of the Droid.

We see a few other points that could have contributed to the slow start. For those using AT&T, the Nexus One works in slower EDGE mode, not 3G. And for the contract weary, news about Google charging additional early termination fees certainly holds some scare factor.

We’ll have to keep an eye on these numbers as time goes on, but we’re curious – what, if anything, has kept you from taking the leap?

Discuss

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Big news from Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Microsoft (MSFT) today. The two companies announced a three-year alliance that will see them investing $250 million in a new cloud computing venture. In a buzzword riddled press release, the two companies said they “will collaborate on an engineering roadmap for data management machines; converged, prepackaged application solutions; comprehensive virtualization offerings; and integrated management tools.”

Translation: HP and Microsoft will collaborate on the Windows Azure platform.

“This agreement, which spans hardware, software and services, will enable business customers to optimize performance with push-button simplicity at the lowest possible total cost of ownership,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a statement. “Our extended partnership will transform the way large enterprises deliver services to their customers, and help smaller organizations adopt IT to grow their businesses. Microsoft and HP are betting on each other so our customers don’t have to gamble on IT.”

Under the terms of the deal Microsoft and HP will collaborate on:

• Virtualization:

• Microsoft is now a preferred provider of virtualization solutions for HP, which will make it easier for a broader set of customers to deploy virtualization solutions that can improve server utilization by as much as 10x and reduce provisioning ties from months to minutes.
• Microsoft and HP will deliver ‘Smart Bundles’ for small and medium businesses. These are a combination of hardware and software, including HP server, storage and networking solutions, coupled with Windows Server Hyper-V and HP Insight software, delivered in a single, cost-effective package.

• Management:

• HP now has the rights to resell and ship System Center as part of HP’s solutions. This solution will be tuned, integrated and ready for customers.
• And coming soon, HP’s Insight Software and Business Technology Optimization solutions will begin to integrate and interoperate with Microsoft’s System Center suite of products. This means that customers with heterogeneous computing environments will be able to more easily and more cost-effectively manage hardware and software from Microsoft and non-Microsoft operating systems and applications.

• Business Applications:

• The companies will deliver a set of pre-packaged and pre-configured data management and email solutions (‘machines’) that will deliver data warehousing, business intelligence, online transaction processing (OLTP) and messaging solutions.

• The Cloud:

•HP and Microsoft will collaborate on the Windows Azure platform, with HP offering services, and Microsoft continuing to include HP hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure.

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Filed under: Motorsports, Coupe, Performance, Marketing/Advertising, Russia

Marussia, which was last seen showing a new car and new colors at the Frankfurt Motor Show, has spent the intervening months being quiet and productive. In addition to putting together promotional packages like commercials and rolling footage, the three-year-old Russian company is now an official partner of Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Racing.

The details are scant, but the two parties have signed a multi-year deal with Marussia getting “major on car, driver and team branding.” Taking the Virgin step further, Marussia signed up with Cosworth, Virgin’s engine supplier, and Cosworth will help the Russian company develop gas and diesel engines and drivetrains.

Follow the jump to check out two vids of all three Marussias on track, and the three Marussia commercials along with the official press release. Be sure to watch how the model has to squeeze herself into the cockpit – it looks tiny in there. Hat tip to Greg!

[Sources: YouTube]

Continue reading Video: Marussia shows up on the catwalk, in commercials, and in F1 with Virgin Racing

Video: Marussia shows up on the catwalk, in commercials, and in F1 with Virgin Racing originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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