Category: News

Se acaba de dar a conocer nueva información sobre el próximo modelo de Audi, el Audi R4. Todo apunta a que este vehículo estará basado en el Audi e-tron concept y su lanzamiento esta previsto para el año 2012.

En lo que respecta al exterior, se rumorea que la carrocería de metal podría dejar paso a la fibra de carbono mientras que en el interior se podrían emplear los mismos materiales que en el Audi R8.

Por último, en lo que respecta a la motorización, se expecula que optará por poca cilindrada aunque una gran cantidad de caballos. De esta forma, la opción más lógica sería un motor 2.0 TFSI o el 2.5 de cinco cilindros y 340 CV.

Related posts:

1. Audi A8, nuevos datos
2. Audi Q5 y A4 allroad con nuevos motores
3. Audi R8 e-Tron Concept, imágenes filtradas

The only info we can find about this camcorder comes from the YouTube video and description, which states it’s a first-of-its-kind camcorder attachment using a WVGA DLP pico chipset. We can’t make out the manufacturer and really anything else about the concept. But one thing is clear. We love it.

Pico projectors on cell phones are novel, but how often have you ever wanted to broadcast your phone’s screen on a wall. Once a month? Once a year? Never? It just doesn’t seem like the right platform for a mini projector.

Camcorders, however, would be the perfect platform for these devices though. Instead of trying to hook up your new camcorder to Grandma’s old console TV, just dim the lights and show your home movies on a wall. It still might be a function that only gets used a few times a year, but it’s not like you probably use the camcorder all that often anyway.

We’ll keep our eyes peeled for more info about the camcorder. Chances are though that this was something shown in a CES backroom and isn’t planned for the consumer market for sometime.

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In an aggressive approach to promote mobile WiMAX, Sprint lowered the price of its 3G/4G mobile broadband service to $59.99 monthly.  The price cut was intended to “make it a no brainer for our customers to choose 4G,” spokeswoman Stephanie Vinge told FierceWireless.  She went on to say that the price cut reflects increasing economies of scale as Clearwire launches additional markets across the United States.

With Sprint’s 3G/4G service lowered to $59.99 (thus matching everyone else’s standard 3G mobile broadband plan), it makes sense to consider them for mobile broadband needs.  Sounds like I’ll consider switching my 3G-only Verizon Wireless mobile broadband plan over to Sprint.  With a solid 3G footprint and 4G as an added benefit, it’s quite the deal.  What about you – worth switching, or are you going to wait for the others to roll out LTE?

Via FierceWireless

This model of Dell’s Inspiron 11z series packs a 1.3GHz Intel SU4100 low-voltage CPU for a little more get-up-and-go than your standard Atom chip. It’s also got 4GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, Windows 7 Home Premium, and an 11.6-inch screen at 1366×768 resolution.

Other features include a weight of three pounds, three-cell battery good for up to four hours of use, and HDMI output. This same configuration on Dell’s site goes for $649 but Amazon’s selling it for $475 – not quite sure if this is a “today only” deal or if it’ll last longer.

Dell Inspiron 11z [Amazon.com via dealnews]

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Making a list of the stuff you use every day in the kitchen it just too damn hard, eh? The creator of the Ikan thought so, which is why he created a device that allows you to track what you use on a daily basis. And it runs Android!

The concept is sound. As you finish using a product, before you dispose of if, scan it with the Ikan. The system will then log that you need a new jar of vegamite, and keep a running list of what you ran out of. On a preset day, it’ll email you the list of items that you used up, allowing you to print it out and take the list with you to the store, or read it on your phone as you shop.

You can also use the built in voice recorder to make list of thing that you might have ran out of that don’t have a barcode, such as produce. The Ikan device will then include those items on your generated shopping list as well. The Ikan plans to offer a “HomeGrocer” style system as well, where you can have the device automatically order replacement groceries for you, thus avoiding mingling with the unwashed masses.

Hopefully you have $400 to spend on all the techy goodness. If you do, it’s available now.

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I’m always on the search for tools that will help me to better manage my time, as effective time management is critical to being as productive as possible throughout the day. The use of a superphone smartphone helps to aid in this task and it makes sense – it’s the one device you keep with you nearly 24/7, and its usually the one screen that you check more often than any other.

We took a look at the TimeTracker time management application last year in our App Spotlight series, and were thoroughly impressed with how easy it made managing tasks and projects, how it presented the tracked data, and how easy exporting that data for use in spreadsheet programs was. TimeBits ($3.99 in the App Catalog) has been on my radar for awhile now, so it made sense to delve into the other time management/tracking application currently available to webOS to see how it compares to one of our favorites. 

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I really like the idea of a biodegradable doggy bag. I know, that’s a weird thing to like, but I always hated that pretty much the only thing available to us were plastic grocery sacks for cleaning up after our dogs, and though technically we were recycling those instead of tossing them straight into the garbage, you know it’s going to be sticking around a landfill for a while anyway.

I know I’ve already written about dog poop this week, but it got me thinking about how we clean up after our pets, and how glad I am that there are companies who do, too!

With that in mind, I did a little poking around the Internet and found Business Bags, eco-friendly doggy-doo bags made from corn that biodegrade within 45 days (typically this means they have to be exposed to the environment in the form of rain, sun, etc, before biodegrading, so they’re not just going to start breaking down in the box).

Each box contains 40 baggies, and are perfect for taking with you on a daily walk or stashing in a glove box for a car trip or ride to the dog park. They’re available at PlanetDog.com for $5.95.

Post from: Blisstree

Biodegradable Doggy Business Bags

Acquisition Will Transform Federal Signal into a Leader in Intelligent Transport Systems With Portfolio of High Value, Best-in-Class Products

Federal Signal Corporation (NYSE: FSS), a leader in environmental, safety and transportation solutions and Sirit Inc. (TSX: SI), a global provider of radio frequency identification (“RFID”) technology today announced that they have signed a definitive agreement pursuant to which Federal Signal will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Sirit (the “Common Shares”) for cash consideration of CDN$0.30 per share by way of a court approved plan of arrangement under the Business Corporations Act (Ontario) (the “Arrangement”).

The transaction has a total equity value of approximately CDN$49.5 million (US$48.0 million).

The CDN$0.30 per share cash purchase price represents a premium of 37% over Sirit’s 30-day average closing stock price, and a premium of 60% over Sirit’s 60-day average closing stock price.

Sirit is a leading designer, developer and manufacturer of RFID technology for applications such as Tolling, Electronic Vehicle Registration, Parking and Access Control, Asset Management, Cashless Payments and Supply Chain Systems.

The combination of Sirit’s RFID technology with Federal Signal’s detection and classification technology (acquired in the December 2009 purchase of Diamond Consulting Services) and existing PIPS automated license plate recognition technology, immediately transforms Federal Signal into a leader in Intelligent Transport Systems.

“We are excited about this transaction with Sirit, as it further strengthens Federal Signal’s best-in-class product portfolio and advances our stated strategy of driving growth through our Public Safety Systems platform,” said William Osborne, Federal Signal’s President and Chief Executive Officer.

“Sirit, Diamond Consulting Services and PIPS have a proven record of success in jointly delivering superior technology-based client solutions.  We are committed to investment in research and development to maintain Sirit’s reputation for technical excellence and with the addition of Sirit’s talented employees, we look forward to further differentiating Federal Signal’s Public Safety Systems offering.”

“Global market trends for Intelligent Transport Systems are robust and we believe the addition of Sirit will enhance long-term earnings and provide greater revenue visibility through recurring revenues,” Mr. Osborne continued.

“We are confident Federal Signal will be better positioned to help customers capitalize on road-user charging technologies and deliver enhanced value to our stockholders.”

“We are thrilled to be joining Federal Signal and are excited by the opportunities we will have as part of a larger organization with greater financial resources and access to a wider customer base.

The combination of Sirit and Federal Signal creates a superior technology platform and service offering, while providing customers with more complete and fully integrated solutions,” said Norbert Dawalibi, President and Chief Executive Officer of Sirit.

“We look forward to working closely with the Federal Signal team to ensure a smooth transition and complete the transaction as expeditiously as possible,” added Mr. Dawalibi.

Sirit’s board of directors unanimously approved the transaction and determined that it is in the best interests of Sirit and its shareholders (the “Shareholders”).  The board made its decision following the report and favorable recommendation of an independent committee of Sirit’s board of directors.

In reaching its recommendation, Sirit’s independent committee considered a fairness opinion from its financial advisor, GMP Securities L.P. A copy of the fairness opinion, the factors considered by the independent committee and the board and other relevant information will be included in the management information circular that will be sent to the Shareholders of Sirit in connection with the special meeting anticipated to be held on or about Feb. 26, 2010 to consider the Arrangement.

The record date for purposes of determining Shareholders entitled to vote at the special meeting has been set as of the close of business on January 25, 2010.

Certain executive officers, directors and Shareholders of Sirit owning approximately 28% of the outstanding common shares have entered into a voting and lock-up agreement with Federal Signal under which they have agreed to vote their shares in favor of the Arrangement.

The arrangement agreement contains customary terms and conditions for a transaction of this nature, including a prohibition upon Sirit from soliciting or initiating any discussion concerning any other business combination or similar transaction, the right of Federal Signal to match any unsolicited superior proposal received by Sirit and a termination fee of CDN$1.5 million payable to Federal Signal by Sirit in certain circumstances.

The closing of the Arrangement is subject to the satisfaction of certain closing conditions, including, among others, obtaining certain court approvals as well as the approval of Sirit’s shareholders.

For the Arrangement to proceed, a special resolution approving the Arrangement must be approved by not less than two-thirds of the votes cast by Sirit’s shareholders. The transaction is not subject to financing.  Federal Signal intends to finance the transaction through cash on hand and existing bank lines of credit.

Upon completion of the transaction, Sirit will operate as part of Federal Signal’s Safety and Security Systems Group.

About Sirit Inc.

Sirit Inc. (TSX: SI) is a leading provider of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology worldwide. Harnessing the power of Sirit’s enabling-RFID technology, customers are able to more rapidly bring high quality RFID solutions to the market with reduced initial engineering costs.

Sirit’s products are built on more than 16 years of RF domain expertise addressing multiple frequencies (LF/HF/UHF), multiple protocols and are compliant with global standards.

Sirit’s broad portfolio of products and capabilities can be customized to address new and traditional RFID market applications including Supply Chain & Logistics, Cashless Payment (including Electronic Tolling), Access Control, Automatic Vehicle Identification, Near Field Communications, Inventory Control & Management, Asset Tracking and Product Authentication.

For more information on Sirit, please visit sirit.com.

About Federal Signal

Federal Signal Corporation (NYSE: FSS) enhances the safety, security and well-being of communities and workplaces around the world.

Founded in 1901, Federal Signal is a leading global designer and manufacturer of products and total solutions that serve municipal, governmental, industrial and institutional customers. Headquartered in Oak Brook, Ill., with manufacturing facilities worldwide, Federal Signal operates three groups: Safety and Security Systems, Environmental Solutions and Fire Rescue.

For more information on Federal Signal, please visit: federalsignal.com.

It’s not only that this yacht has been designed by an Egyptian naval architecture house, it’s that it reminds me of the Egyptian ships of old, rolling up and down the Nile. Except that this 197-foot vessel runs on hydrogen.

Its hydrogen diesel-electric engine can, in theory, give it a range of 13,000 nautical miles at 10 knots—which is mind blowing for a yacht with these features. The axe bow gives it lower resistance. And its general design makes it look like it can kick any other yacht ass. Or a cheese knife. Or a kick yatch ass cheese knife. [JamesList]

With a week left in office, outgoing New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine is leaving behind a string of smart criminal justice reforms. Late, I suppose, is better than never.

Corzine signed a bill on Tuesday that gives discretion back to judges in drug cases for people convicted of certain drug crimes in school zones. It’s a sweeping change, and one that was a long time coming. Now if other states could only follow Jersey’s lead.

Sentencing discretion is important in all types of cases, but it’s especially critical in these school-zone offenses, where studies have shown that broad-brush mandatory minimums completely fail to make schools safer or to prevent kids from buying drugs. The previous law included mandatory sentences of at least a year for marijuana offenses and three years for other drugs. With discretion, a judge can avoid a long sentence for a person caught with a small amount of a drug who happens to be 999 feet from a school. In many urban areas, as the great work of the Prison Policy Initiative has shown, almost everything is within 1,000 feet of a school.

Meanwhile, a judge can still choose to hand down a harsh sentence when evidence shows that a drug dealer was actually targeting middle schoolers as his customers. That kind of activity needs to be prevented, but we don’t need mandatory minimums to stop it. In fact, they don’t work.

(more…)

In the Internet age, betting has become more commonplace than ever, even with the government cracking down on it.

But it’s not just sports betting.

Websites like Intrade.com allow people to pretty much bet on any event in the world. You can bet on everything from Osama Bin Laden’s capture to the delivery date of a celebrity’s baby.

Here’s how it works. Each contract asks a simple question, like: “Will Obama be re-elected?” or “Will Israel bomb Iran?”

There’s always a pair of trades, so you can take the affirmative or negative. If you guess trade right, the contract ends at 100. If you’re wrong, the contract ends at 0. In the meantime, the price fluctuates based on supply and demand like any other futures contract.

If a contract is trading at, say, 23, it’s reasonable to say that the market is pricing in a 23% of the event happening.

So let’s see what the future holds ->

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See Also:

• Pennsylvania Governor Rendell: Without Table-Game Gambling, The State Budget Is Ruined
• Delaware Gearing Up To Allow Gambling on Football
• Saving Vegas: Lower The Gambling Age To 18?

JavaScript performance has become the megahertz war of web browsers and each vendor is trying to one up the other in this area. This can be largely attributed to Google’s quest for improved web app performance, which it pursued with its own Chrome web browser. When Google Chrome came out, it left all other browsers in th… (read more)

Claire Messud

When I landed at boarding school in Boston in the fall of 1980—from a public school in Toronto, another world—I assumed the Iranian girls knew the ropes better than I did. Posh New England culture was utterly alien to me; but how much more so must it have been to my fellow boarders lately of Tehran? Aware of the recent revolution—even at fourteen, one couldn’t not be—I nevertheless was unable to relate the girl brushing her teeth beside me in the dorm bathroom to mass demonstrations or the then ongoing hostage crisis half a world away. I never asked the Iranians a single question about their histories: it was tacitly accepted that it was too delicate a subject and, by force of silence, too remote from our placid world of emerald lawns and peeling white columns. What, I now wonder, must the Iranian girls have thought?

As far as I know, they haven’t yet written the novels that might tell us. Others, though, have provided us with powerful reminiscences in the form of memoir: shortly after the turn of the new century, Marjane Satrapi gave us her family’s extraordinary stories of revolutionary times and after, and created, through her iconic graphics, a now-celebrated visual style with which to convey the travails of her native country.

In spite of Satrapi’s triumph and memoirs by other Iranians in exile, not much literary art from within contemporary Iran has yet reached mainstream audiences in the West. The novelist Farnoosh Moshiri’s fictions—including At the Wall of the Almighty and The Bathhouse—have afforded us harrowing accounts of imprisonment and torture under the Islamic regime; but she, older than Satrapi, has also not lived in Iran since the 1980s (she is based in Houston). As we watch Iran’s current political upheavals from afar and try to understand the minds of its citizens today, we might wish for greater literary access: little recent fiction published in Iran is available in translation. The avenues of cultural exchange are not broad.

Early in the last decade, Azar Nafisi’s immensely successful memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) provided a wide American audience with a picture of post-revolutionary Iranian life; but Nafisi’s book is not a novel. Through her account, you glimpse fascinating facets of quotidian life in Tehran over a decade ago, but she doesn’t presume to provide rounded psychological portraits of her students, nor does she alchemically transform her stories in such a way as to create a work of art. As a reader, you learn enthusiastically from, but do not fully inhabit, Nafisi’s world.

Fiction and poetry work differently from history or autobiography, opening to us the interior lives, the unrecorded ephemera and minutiae of people and their places. The Iranian-American writer Dalia Sofer’s first novel The Septembers of Shiraz was published in 2007. Its story is fairly simple: Sofer recounts the incarceration in Evin Prison, not long after the revolution, of a Jewish Iranian paterfamilias, while his wife and young daughter struggle to find information about him and to continue their lives. Meanwhile, the couple’s older child, a son, faces his own challenges in New York City. The book is not elaborate in its telling; but Sofer’s eye for detail and her subtle understanding of character (how much more complicated is such a separation when husband and wife have been progressively more emotionally estranged beforehand?) ensure that the novel is both immediate and deeply affecting.

Painting by Riza Abbasi, c. 1625

Like Satrapi, Sofer left Iran as a child and has lived in exile for most of her life. Her novel, then, describes precisely the Iran from which my classmates had fled; and perhaps this is in part why I find it so moving. Others of the young generation have addressed the situation differently: Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007) is the vital and engaging account of a family of Iranian-Americans following the September 11 attacks. Niloufar Talebi has translated and edited a volume of poetry entitled Belonging: New Poetry By Iranians Around the World, a book remarkable in its breadth and diversity, and in the power of its translations. From formalists to experimentalists, from the epic to the lyric, from the political to the erotic, Talebi’s collection offers us a rich sampling of contemporary Iranian poetry from the diaspora.

Shahriar Mandanipour’s Censoring an Iranian Love Story, published in the United States last year, differs in several ways from these works. For one thing, although Mandanipour has been living in the US since 2006, his literary career has been, until this latest novel, entirely Iranian: this is his first book to appear in English, and while his fiction remained unpublished in Iran for much of the 1990s on account of censorship, he is one of that country’s most celebrated and accomplished contemporary novelists. For another, born in 1957 (and thus a generation older than most of the others), he was an adult when the Islamic Republic was created. He remained in Iran for a quarter century thereafter, and has, consequently, a very different perspective from those who left as children, in the early 1980s.

Mandanipour’s novel is not only directly concerned with contemporary Iran—it’s about a writer trying to write a love story that will satisfy the censors—it is also playfully engaged with Persian literary history, and at the same time, is formally innovative: the influences of Calvino and Kafka are evident in his ironic narrator’s metafictional banter. He both tells us what it is like for his young would-be lovers in Tehran, and, by allusion, by direct conversation with the imagined censor, and by striking out lines and passages of his prose, reveals how much he cannot tell us:

“Sara is studying Iranian literature at Tehran University. However, in compliance with an unwritten law, teaching contemporary Iranian literature is forbidden in Iranian schools and universities…
…when Sara reads a contemporary story, she reads the white between the lines, and wherever a sentence is left incomplete and ends with three dots like this “…,” her mind grows very active and begins to imagine what the eliminated words may be…Sara loves these three dots because they allow her to be a writer too…But she never borrows any contemporary literature from her college library or the central library of Tehran University. Even if she wanted to, I don’t think she would find any books by writers such as me.
Ask me why, so that I can explain. [p. 14]

Playfully and yet with utter seriousness, Mandanipour exposes his constraints, and also the devices by which he might hope to convey his matter indirectly: traditional Iranian poetry; cinema. In so doing, Mandanipour expresses the complexity of his culture—not just of the society of the Islamic Republic, but of the underlying Persian traditions that continue to influence it—through the warp and weft of the text itself. This novel doesn’t offer a conventionally realistic narrative, but to read it—and to appreciate that simply on account of its publication, Mandanipour is henceforth unable to return to Iran—is to understand, by inhabiting rather than by being told, what life there now, and the making of art, might actually be like.

I follow the New Horizons Pluto probe Twitter feed, and recently it linked to a graphic showing where the spacecraft is right now:

Man, is that way out in the black. The probe is now closer to the orbit of Uranus than it is to Saturn, though both planets are over a billion kilometers away from New Horizons right now.

The solar system is frakkin’ BIG (if I may mix my colorful scifi metaphors). If you’re still not sure just how roomy things are out there, even at its current speed of 16.5 km/sec (10 miles/sec) — fast enough to cross the entire United States in five minutes — New Horizons won’t pass the orbit of Uranus until March 18, 2011, more than a year from now. Neptune’s orbit isn’t until August 24, 2014.

One thing to notice: from this point of view, planets revolve around the Sun in a counterclockwise fashion. Given the position of Pluto, you can see the two are heading for a close encounter soon. Well, for a sufficiently broad definition of “soon”: July 14, 2015.

Space is big.

This past CES saw an army of e-book readers in a variety of form factors, all ready to march ashore in the wake of Amazon’s wildly successful Kindle. Not only did commercial models from vendors known and unknown litter the show floor, but many of the major semiconductor manufacturers had prototypes on display, mostly proof-of-concepts which have yet to be picked up by a commercial manufacturer.

The coming crush of e-book readers has two major implications, which I’ll elaborate on in this article: 1) chip vendors like Samsung, Qualcomm, Freescale, and TI are all scrambling to get a piece of this exploding market, and 2) chipmaker competition will quickly turn the e-book reader into a multifunction cloud client much like today’s smartphone, complete with app stores, content stores, and many of the other features of emerging smartphone platforms.

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