Author: Jeff Morgan (Page 64 of 168)

2,752 MPG – Yes, please!

Cal Poly's Black Widow.Next time your friend brags about his Prius, show him this bad boy. It’s easily as ugly and gets roughly 50 times the gas mileage of Toyota’s latest headache. Of course, it only goes 30 miles an hour.

The car is the brainchild of the Cal Poly Supermileage Team, a group of engineering students who manufacture supermileage vehicles for competition. The team has been developing the car, called the Black Widow, since 2005, working down the weight and cranking up the mileage. The car weighs a svelte 6 pounds and runs on a Honda 50cc engine.

The Cal Poly team will enter Black Widow in competition at the end of March at the Shell Eco-Marathon. The car has placed first or second every year it has entered.

Source: Wired

iPhone 3G download cap doubled

iPhone wi-fi network connection.If you’ve ever tried to download a podcast or a lot of applications, you know how frustrating that 10MB 3G cap can be on the iPhone. For those who don’t know, any time you try to download something larger than 10MB over a 3G connection, you get a message asking you to connect to a Wi-Fi network before you continue with the download. Along with the changes Apple made to iPhone policies this week, it also doubled the download cap, from 10MB to 20MB.

The change was most likely to accommodate the difference in file size between iPhone and iPad applications. It is nice, though, to be able to pick up some shorter podcasts and whatnot on the go, even if my This American Life downloads tend to be a bit bigger.

The change is effective immediately – I was able to pick up a 15MB app no problem this morning.

Foxconn workers burn down a factory

Foxconn truck.No one likes to be lied to by an employer, though few ever take that dislike as far as Foxconn workers in Mexico. Apparently a group of Foxconn employees set fire to their factory after management attempted to coerce workers into overtime labor without compensation.

Foxconn’s Juarez, Mexico facility uses transportation trucks to ferry workers to and from the plant every day. Yesterday, supervisors at the plant told workers that the trucks had been delayed at a military checkpoint and instructed the employees to continue working until the trucks arrived. As it turns out, the trucks were sitting in the parking lot, presumably parked-in on purpose. It wasn’t the first time the factory had pulled a stunt like this, so the workers decided to get even. They torched the gymnasium, which is where the plant keeps all of its finished cell phones and computers.

Don’t be surprised if there’s suddenly a bit of an iPhone shortage in certain parts of the country.

Source: Gizmodo

The light speed dream is dead…for now

Hyperspace travel.I spent a lot of my time as a child reading and dreaming about space and space travel. As with most geeky males my age, Star Wars pretty much defined my existence from the time I first saw it (I think I was seven) right up through, well, today. Part of that existence died today when some dirtbag radiologist at Johns Hopkins said light speed travel would never be possible because it would kill everyone inside whatever space craft they were using and short-circuit the entire vessel.

William Edstein says the problem lies in the small amount of hydrogen gas that exists in space. When you’re traveling close to the speed of light, say at 98% or so, that hydrogen becomes a friction bomb from hell. The hydrogen would release 7 teraelectron volts, which is essentially the equivalent of standing in the LHC when it’s running full steam. Obviously, that makes people dead, and it would pretty much trash any piece of electronic equipment in the area.

Edstein’s final thought? “Hydrogen atoms are unavoidable space mines.” Sure, until we find a way to avoid them.

Source: New Scientist

Kindle heads to Blackberry

Blackberry gets Kindle.Amazon is starting to see the writing on the wall, it seems. There isn’t a compelling reason for people to buy a Kindle anymore. Other ereaders offer the same price on books with more features and the latest wave of tablet PCs make the hardware look obsolete. So what does Bezos do? He releases a Kindle app for yet another piece of hardware: the Blackberry.

Amazon recently opened the floodgates with Kindle support for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Windows machines. Today we get Blackberry support and the company says it’s headed for Macs and iPads next. If that doesn’t sound like admitted defeat, I don’t know what does. It’s funny too, considering the publisher problems Amazon has had since the iPad announcement.

“Since the launch of our popular Kindle for iPhone app last year, customers have been asking us to bring a similar experience to the BlackBerry, and we are thrilled to make it available today,” said Amazon’s Kindle VP, Ian Freed. There is at least one difference between the two; the Blackberry version doesn’t support creating annotations from within the app.

Official Site

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