Category: News

Filed under: Coupe, Performance, Recalls, Safety, Chevrolet

Do you own a Chevrolet Corvette? If so, is it a 2005 to 2007 model? If you answered “yes,” does your ‘Vette have a removable top? If (again) yes, have you noticed a snapping noise while driving over speed bumps? What about extra wind noise? Does your roof panel move when you slam the door or rear hatch? Have you noticed water beading down on your head during wet weather even though the removable roof is in place? If you answered “yes” to three or more of these questions, Chevrolet has a recall for you.

Seems as if the glue holding that holds the outer portion of the panel to the Corvette’s roof frame has been failing. Full, worst case scenario consequence would be the outer part of the panel separating completely and flying away where it “could strike a following vehicle and cause injury and/or property damage.” Seems as if we’ve heard something about this adhesive problem before… way back in April of 2006.

According to General Motors and the National Highway Traffic Safety Adminstration, all 22,090 2005-2007 removable roof Corvette owners would be well advised to go down to their local dealer and get a new roof, gratis. Also: special bonus props to whomever can name the special edition Corvette pictured above. There are a couple of clues if you look hard enough.

[Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration]

Chevy recalls 2005-2007 Corvettes over possible roof panel separation originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 09:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The following Xbox 360 games are now ready for direct download from the Xbox LIVE Marketplace:

Content: Gears of War
Price: Check pricing for your region
Availability: Not available in Japan
Dash Text: (Online Interactions Not Rated by the ESRB) This game supports English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Chinese. Download the manual for this game by locating the game on http://marketplace.xbox.com and selecting “See Game Manual". A Nightmare from Below. A Hero from Within. The planet lies in ruin – cities crumbling, Man’s greatest works fallen. Humanity is cornered, nowhere to run. The Locust Horde has risen, and they won’t stop coming. They won’t stop killing. The Coalition is desperate for soldiers. The sick, the wounded, the imprisoned are all that remain. An inmate named Marcus Fenix, once left to die, is now charged with keeping humanity alive. He can take comfort in but one fact: The human race isn’t extinct. Yet. Features – “Take cover and return fire!” with the intuitive one – button cover system to blind fire, evade, flank, and ultimately destroy the nightmarish Locust Horde.

Add Gears of War to your Xbox 360 download queue

Also, Xbox LIVE members in Japan, can now purchase THE CONVENI 200X

Engadget has found a Palm model number on the WiFi Certification Database quite similar to a number we’ve seen before, the Palm P101EWW. Previously we’ve seen the P101VZW pop up in Verizon inventory screens, and judging by the number used here (and the fact that they call it the Pre), we’re tempted to call this the previously rumored Pre Plus.

Is it the Verizon Pre? We’d love to think so. Oh, and let us not forget the P121EWW that was found a few weeks ago – that’s the Pixi on Verizon, complete with WiFi.

No doubt there are a lot of new Kindle owners after the holidays, and Amazon is happy about the number of Kindle e-books that are flying off the shelves. Amazon has a list of the top 100 best-selling e-books, and the majority of them are top sellers because they don’t cost a cent. That’s right, over 60 percent of the top 100 e-books on Amazon are absolutely free.

A quick check of the list shows the classics you expect to be there, but what’s surprising is there are quite a few other books that for some reason or another cost $0.00. If you were nice enough to get a new Kindle, you may want to check out the list and get a bunch of free books. I just got 15 free books for my Kindle 2, including a free James Patterson novel and a “Star Wars” short story.

Horizon Wind Energy, the U.S. unit of Portuguese clean energy company EDP Renováveis (EDPR), has secured a $90 million equity financing from Dallas-based JPM Capital for an undisclosed stake in Horizon’s 101 megawatts Lost Lakes Wind Farm, which went live this month in Dickinson County, Iowa.

With this investment JPM Capital will access the stimulus-funded cash grants that the farm is expected to receive in lieu of tax credits, in effect securing a lump of cash backed by the U.S. government.

This is the second such deal between JPM Capital and Horizon. In September the Dallas investment fund paid Horizon a little more than a $100 million for a stake in the 100.5-megawatt Rail Splitter wind farm in central Illinois.

In the U.S. Horizon oversees 3.4 gigawatts of wind development. In November, parent company Energias de Portugal (EDP) pledged a $4bn investment in new US wind projects over the next two years.

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Kolkata, Dec 28 : West Bengal is facing difficulty to get the required technologies essential for producing renewable energy which is necessary to reduce the emission level of green house gasses, state Information Technology Minister Debesh Das said …

This doesn’t look dangerous

As more people move away from lucrative Windows desktops (OK, more is a relative term, but it’s definitely a countable number) folks like McAfee have to find new threats for us to fear in order to ensure that we purchase their products.

The latest scare? McAffee is warning us that HTML5 in Chrome OS will be able to hack us even when we’re not online. They have no proofs of concept, no actual data… it’s just conjecture.

That BusinessWeek picked this up with a delightfully alarmist headline is also a testament to McAffee’s success. Oh well. Folks like McAffee have to eat as well, so stay scared, web users!

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It has been one great year for Twitter with the service seeing huge growth, especially in the first half of the year. It rose from a microblogging service used by the hip, tech-savvy crowd to one used by millions of regular people, as well as the latest trend for celebrities and companies. Lately though, it looks like some of the shine may be fading and traffic numbers have stayed flat since summer. Despite this, cofounder Biz Stone is more confident than ever that the site will continue to grow and that 2010 will see more significant changes for the service, which it now dubs an “information network,” and Twitter will become an essential tool for keeping the world updated with the latest news and trends.

In a piece published by the British newspaper The Times and written by Stone, Twitter’s cofounder looks back at the past year and at what he sees as the company’s promising future. “For us, it has been a year during which we realised that no matter how sophisticated the algorithms get, no matter how many machines we add to the network, our work is not about the triumph of technology, it is about the triumph of humanity,” he writes.

Stone dwells a lot on the Iran elections during which Twitter really came to be known as an information source being used by people in Iran, as well as those outside … (read more)

AT&T (T), O2 feels your pain. It too has seen its network overtaxed by Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, particularly in London where a massive surge in data traffic has been causing network congestion since the summer. In an interview with the Financial Times, O2 CEO Ronan Dunne said the company has seen an 18-fold increase in data traffic since the beginning of the year, most of it driven by super-smartphones like the iPhone. “Where we haven’t met our own high standards then there’s no question, we apologise to customers for that fact,” Dunne said. “But it would be wrong to say O2 has failed its customers en masse.”

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. The thousands of smartphone users who lost data service just a few days ago might see things a bit differently, though. Anyway, O2 — like AT&T in the states — is doing its best to contain the PR damage arising from such outages. Dunne says the carrier has added an additional 200 mobile base stations in London to help it meet data demand and has been working with its infrastructure suppliers on network tweaks to improve data service. A wise move. Best to act quickly and get out ahead of issues like these which can become public relations nightmares very quickly. As AT&T recently learned network congestion issues make great fodder for the advertising campaigns of rivals. Wouldn’t want Vodafone running its own version of Verizon’s nasty “There’s a Map for That” commercials, now would we?

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Well it seems there have been many variations of this Handheld Keyboard and Touchpad that resembles a BlackBerry from 10 years ago…this latest version offers Bluetooth. All previous models have been either wired or wireless but with a dongle or cable required. This version requires no dongle but just a computer or gadget that has Bluetooth connectivity available. The Bluetooth Handheld Keyboard and Touchpad is a palm-sized keyboard which consists of 48 key + touchpad. The Bluetooth feature controls your computer or PS3 with distance about 10M and is available in white or black and retails for $62 bucks.

Pushed by recession and the constant degradation of our planet, most automakers are trying to figure out one of the most complicated questions yet: what to use for replacing the internal combustion engine?

Though most car manufacturer are pushing forward with the research to build electric vehicles, there are still automakers which believe in other possibilities. One of these automakers is Kia, who started in December the testing program for its Mohave FCV model, a vehicle powered… (read more)

The competition for “most open” software platform will always be a fierce one. It all depends on what your definition of “open” is. Do that mean open and easy development, like webOS, or do you mean completely open source, like Android? Our friend Casey Chan over at sister site Android Central last week got his robot paws on webOS in the form of the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi and was tasked with giving the world his impressions of the platform from the Android point of view.

Jumping headfirst into any platform is a new experience, so thankfully we’ve got the PreCentral forums to help out both novices and experts alike. You all in the community stepped up to the plate to give Casey a crash course in webOS 101.

So what did Casey think about webOS? In truth, there’s a lot on paper that seems very similar about the two operating systems. They both support full multitasking, they both have unobtrusive notifications, the both have application stores, and they both work on capacitive multitouch screens (well, Android is a sometimes in that category). But the similarities end there, and Android does have a year’s start on the relatively fresh webOS. We don’t want to give away all of Casey’s thoughts and observations about the first efforts of Palm’s rebirth, so we’ll just give you a link to Android Central where you can check them out for yourself.

Once you’re done with that, we’re sure you’ll be on a webOS high, so we want to keep it going by giving you a webOS phone. It’s a giveaway! All you have to do to enter the contest is leave a post in a Smartphone Round Robin thread on the PreCentral forums and once this all wraps up we’ll pick a winner. As always, the rules for these contests are suggested reading. Casey has already passed off the Pre and Pixi to Kevin Michaluk of CrackBerry.com – Kevin’s going to need the ease of webOS after a week with Windows Mobile, while our own Dieter Bohn is about to get some face time with BlackBerry.

So you may recall that last week, the story spread about how Demi Moore’s lawyers flipped out and sent ridiculous (laughably so) legal threats to a few blogs that were discussing whether or not Moore’s photo on the cover of W magazine had been digitally retouched and, if so, how poor a job the retouching was. Most specifically, there was the point that her hip looked out of place. None of the conversation (which had mostly died out a month before Ms. Moore’s lawyers got involved) suggested anything even remotely negative about Ms. Moore herself — but about the potentially poor editing job on the photo itself.

Of course, once the story was pushed back into the news by Moore’s lawyers, a second look at the evidence suggested quite clearly that the image had, in fact, been retouched (not that there’s anything wrong with that). And, now, the story gets even more bizarre. Anthony Citrano, one of the bloggers being threatened by Moore’s lawyers — and who has (reasonably) demanded a complete retraction and apology from Moore’s lawyers — got in touch to let us know that the Korea edition of W magazine just happened to have fixed the hip problem on their cover version of the same photo.

As Citrano points out, this leads to one of two possibilities:

1. Citrano was correct all along that the version with the funky hip a bad image edit or…
2. By Moore’s own lawyer’s explanation, W in Korea had defamed Demi Moore by editing her image (which the lawyers insisted needed no editing)

Either way, at least one of those images was apparently edited, and Citrano’s still waiting for that apology and retraction…

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For the second month in a row, the Case-Shiller numbers came in weaker than expected.

On a year-over-year basis, the 20-city index fell 7.3% in October, a bit worse than the 7.1% analysts had expected.

On a sequential basis, the price index was up .4%, though gains were only seen in 11 of the 20 cities covered.

But maybe there’s a bull case to be made. What we aren’t seeing is the huge drop-off in prices that many had predicted when the summer buying season ended.

Granted, we’re providing unprecedented support to the housing market right now in the form of quantitative easing, the tax credit, and at least 6 other programs. So all that has to be considered. But the index is obviously showing some signs of stabilization, even if our feverish v-shaped dreams from earlier this year aren’t coming to fruition.

Full Case-Shiller October Report –

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Case-Shiller: Home Price Recovery Stumbles, Results Worse Than Expected
• Actually, Case-Shiller Shows That The Housing Crash Has Already Resumed
• Case-Shiller A "Dead Cat Bounce"

James Topper wrote:

1—The development of novel mechanisms and combination therapies in HIV, which have turned a universally fatal disease into a chronic one.

2—Targeted cancer therapies. Novartis’ imatinib (Gleevec) is the poster child for this.

3—Sequencing the human genome, and rapidly expanding the technology to allow the analysis of comparative genomes across species and disease areas (e.g., the cancer genome.)

4—RNA Interference. This is revolutionizing the ability to study the function of individual, and networks of genes, and raising the potential for a whole new class of therapeutics.

5—Stem cells. While still largely a science project, it holds vast potential to impact almost all areas of medicine.

6—Last, but unfortunately not least….the FDA has moved dramatically to a focus on risk as a primary concern, rather than the balance of risk/reward. This has begun to significantly stifle innovation and progress.

[Editor’s Note: As the decade comes to an end, we’ve asked Xconomists and other technology leaders around the country to identify the top innovations they’ve seen in their fields the past 10 years, or predict the top disruptive technologies that will impact the next decade.]

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Filed under: Safety, Technology

With the adoption of front-wheel drive as the mainstream power delivery system of choice, the semi-annual ritual of swapping snow tires has largely disappeared for most Americans. In many northern areas, all-wheel drive has become an increasingly popular choice when offered as an option. But as much help as putting power through all four wheels can be, it simply can’t substitute for a good set of snow tires.

Ultimately, grip comes down to four patches of rubber and if they’re unable to make solid contact, the number of drive wheels becomes irrelevant. This became abundantly clear this past weekend while driving a new 2010 Subaru Legacy. The Legacy is a plush, roomy mid-size sedan with excellent outward visibility and Subaru makes an excellent symmetrical all wheel drive. Unfortunately, its all-season tires lacked traction. Read on after the jump for more.

Continue reading PSA: Proper winter tires are more important than all-wheel drive

PSA: Proper winter tires are more important than all-wheel drive originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 08:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Windows: Yesterday we showed you how to remotely control a computer through Dropbox. Want to further automate your online syncing? MailDrop automatically grabs attachments from a particular email folder or label and stashes them in your cloud-based Dropbox storage.

Why would MailDrop be useful, beyond what a Drobox user can already do with their automatic folders and web access? Because it monitors only a specific label or folder in your email account, MailDrop makes it very easy to back up important files that get sent to your inbox. If you set that folder in your Dropbox account to be shared with others, it’s also a one-click solution for getting important files to collaborators and friends. Finally, if you’re on a device without a decent browser or a native Dropbox client (we’re looking at you, BlackBerry), it’s not too hard to set up a filter or folder rule that automatically shuffles files you mail to yourself into your Dropbox account.

What about the application itself? It’s self-contained and portable, and runs in the Windows system tray, periodically checking an email address, via IMAP connection, for activity in a folder you specify. It’s set up from the get-go for easy Gmail access, but you can manually tweak its server, port, and SSL settings for any IMAP-compatible service. If you find it helpful, you’ll want to add it to your Start menu’s Startup folder and set up your email with a unique folder or label for MailDrop to monitor.

MailDrop is a free download for Windows systems only.

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Filed under: Etc.

With 2009 nearly in our rearview mirror, MotorTrend has put together its annual list of 50 top automotive execs and their fortunes for the coming new year, and it’s a good primer on the industry’s movers and shakers.

It’s unlikely that 2010 will be as tumultuous as 2009, what with two of the world’s largest automakers under the fed’s control and storied marques being killed off faster than a topless chick in a slasher flick, but 2010 has the potential to be a another truly newsworthy year and MotorTrend’s Power List gives you a glimpse into the people behind the action. Make the jump for the top ten entrants and hit up MT for the full list with individual analysis of each exec.

[Source: MotorTrend]

Continue reading Motor Trend uncorks its yearly industry Power List

Motor Trend uncorks its yearly industry Power List originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 08:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Volvo, Geely

Prior to Ford Motor Company’s statement that it had agreed in principal to sell Volvo to China’s Geely, some former Volvo executives wrote a letter to Bill Ford voicing their collective concern with the deal. The former execs felt Geely didn’t have the cash or products to keep Volvo competitive and there was also a sense that Geely would somehow change how Volvo was run.

Reuters reports that Volvo has nothing to worry about, at least according to the head cheese at Geely. Geely founder and chairman Li Shufu reportedly told the official Xinhua news agency “if the deal succeeds, nothing will change for Volvo, except the boss turns to Li Shufu,” adding that Volvo and Geely will be “independently-managed brands.” Besides showing that CEOs can be as good at referring to themselves in the third person as any pro athlete, Shufu also insisted that Volvo’s production, research and development facilities, union agreements and dealer networks will all be left intact.

Reuters estimates that acquiring Volvo will cost Geely about $1.8 billion dollars, though Shufu adds that the complications over intellectual property were much more costly than the final price tag. The Geely chief added that Volvo could help the Chinese automaker move more upscale, including helping the company build what he calls an “energy-powered vehicle.” We’re guessing he’s referring to electric vehicles.

Shufu making such a public statement is likely welcome news to the many workers at Volvo, but there will likely be at least some changes in store for the storied Swedish automaker. For example, Shufu mentioned that Geely could help Volvo lower production costs, which could mean that parts that are currently produced in Europe could instead be made in China where labor is considerably cheaper. Beyond that, who knows what future lies ahead of Volvo. Shufu may be saying all the right things now, but his actions over the next few years will show whether he means what he says.

[Source: Reuters]

REPORT: Geely says it will continue to let Volvo be Volvo originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 07:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AT&T is apparently not alone in struggling to cope with the demand that data hungry devices like the iPhone have placed on its network. Ronan Dunne, CEO of O2 UK, has publicly apologized to Londoners for the poor performance of its network over the past 6 months, blaming the explosion of demand for data by smartphones such an Apple’s iPhone for its woes. Londoners on O2 have struggled with intermittent data outages and occasional periods where they could not make or receive phone calls,  a scenario all too familiar for AT&T customers in the US. To cope with this surge in usage, O2 UK has dumped30 million pounds ($48 million USD) into its network and has added 200 mobile base stations. O2 is also working closely with Nokia Siemens to help better equip its network infrastructure and is in talks with both RIM and Apple to help identify data-intensive applications, a strategy which sounds a bit troubling. With a bit of good news, Mr. Dunne claims O2’s London network has shown improvement in the month of December and that any  “short-term blip” in their network reputation will be ameliorated by these efforts.Read

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