There’s the Top Gear, there’s the Fifth Gear, and now there’s the Top Gear Live. It’s basically the traveling version of the world’s greatest car show, and of course there’s the Stig that will be present during the show. When you go round the world, you can’t have car tracks besides you for the Stig to tear, so what do you do to entertain the crowd? Well, throw the Stiggy with a London taxi and expect him to do donuts with it. And you though those bloody old classic black rides can’t smoke rubbers.
Well, actually beneath the glossy black people-mover body sits a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution, heavily modified. Now this is how Taxi should be done. No fake spoilers and pop-up chargers like how the French and Queen Latifah do it.
P/S: I’m also wondering like you, what on earth is Tiff Needell doing in a Top Gear event? Still bro eh?
Sebastien Thurn is the man behind the magic of Google’s DARPA Challenge-winning driverless car tech developed at Stanford University, and Thurn thinks that his tech not only will save human lives, but also eliminate traffic congestions.
If you think that this driverless tech is some gimmick, well Thurn’s footage of a driverless Toyota Prius is nothing short of incredible, showing the cars successfully navigating deserts, highways and city streets clogged with traffic and pedestrians. So far, the driverless car’s most impressive journey has been from San Francisco to Los Angeles down Highway One. All these are done with no hands on.
But city and highway driving is just the icing of the actual cake. Know what Google driverless cars can do? Well, the driverless Prius and a driverless Volkswagen Passat successfully navigating an autocross-style cones course, proving these cars can handle a wide range of driving styles. The cars function by employing a series of sensors to detect their environment, and use a computer program to respond to what’s going on around them.
Thurn was on hand at this year’s TED Conference to discuss the idea and show footage from 140,000 miles of driverless car tests conducted by Stanford. The TED Conference serves as a forum for innovative ideas, publishing video seminars and ideas year round, and hosting two in-person conferences per year. The foundation has been holding conferences and publishing content on a creative commons license since 1990.
If you were to pass by any Toyota Prius in town, do check if there’s any human in it.
What seem to be an April Fool’s video turned out to be one of the scariest real-life car accident ever caught on video, minus those gory blood and head exploding stuff of course, since there’s no one getting hurt, which is a miracle.
Wendy Cobb of Shelby, North Carolina was driving on April 1 when the accident happened. You might call her an idiot and having immediate road offence for using her cell phone while driving, but sometimes what gives, since you get to film such rare case.
Cobb says she was using her cameraphone to film two trucks who were holding up traffic so she could report the incident. As Cobb turned her phone toward the road in front of her, the truck and trailer in front of her kicked up a 2×4 lying in the road that shattered the windshield of her Kia Sedona minivan and very nearly impaled her. Luckily, Ms. Cobb’s children weren’t with her when the accident happened, or the results may have been far more tragic.
According Cobb, the only injury she received was a tiny glass cut. Damage to her car was limited to the hood and windshield. Cobb says she hasn’t watched the video since the day of the accident, but has received plenty of emails from people who still think it was an April Fool’s prank, calling the laminated glass windshield smash ‘a shortcut photoshop’.
Well, at least this gives us a lesson not to tailgate other vehicles too closely. Last I know, tailgating a truck loaded full with tiny rocks resulted in my windshield shattered due to a tiny rock that fall from the truck. Luckily the glass is laminated.
Usually when you have a new movie coming to the cinema, you just play the trailer, but not from Disney. This time, they go for a slightly ‘adventurous’ method in teasing fans with the upcoming animated movie.
Over the weekend at WonderCon, movie promoters gave some very interested fans a sneak peak at what it’s like to be super sleuths, which jives with the movie’s spies theme. The promoters placed three vehicles outside the convention wearing some crazy decals that directed folks to head to the Twitter account @ChromeLeaks. Once on the Twitter page, a link was provided to the Youtube video of a faux used car dealer commercial. The predictably cheesy commercial for “Cars N’ Deals of Emeryville” was purposely terribly done, but the 57-second mark revealed a very brief surprise. It was a link to a special sneak peak for the new Cars 2 movie.
Very cheesy for Disney to do so, but you don’t have to go through the hassle of those, and just hit the jump to watch the videos. There are lots of cars that will be featured in this movie, and it seems that it’s worth the wait.
When Micron’s RealSSD C300 was launched, there was no competition in the market. Its 355MB/s read speed; coupled with its SATA 6Gbps interface makes it the fastest SSD in the market during its prime time. But now with Intel’s SSD 510 and OCZ’s Vertex 3 having a cat fight, Micron decided to step up the game and bring forward a successor. Though, this new C400 SSD isn’t the top dog from Micron this time, as its performance faired blandly. Reviewers seemed to be happy with its results in benchmarks, but it doesn’t seem to be able to put up a decent fight with the rest of the sprinters in the SSD world. In particular, AnandTech noted that the drive seems to have sacrificed sequential read performance in exchange for faster write speeds — and was worried slightly about Crucial’s delayed garbage collection routine. Of course, this new C400 is using Micron’s 25nm NAND flash memory chips, so the pricing of this new C400 might be able to edge slightly away from its competitors. Will Micron manage to pull out successfully this round?
Transparent displays, how are you going to utilize them in real life application? Well, it seemed that Samsung doesn’t really care about that, as the Korean giant has decided to start the mass production of its 22-inch transparent displays. These transparent panels will be produced in black-and-white and color variants and will have a transparency rate of over 20 percent and 15 percent respectively. Samsung says that its transparent LCD panels are also energy efficient, which consumes 90 percent less power compared to a regular LCD display, which sounds very unbelievable to me. The Samsung 22-inch transparent LCD display supports WSXGA+ (1680×1050) resolution, a contrast ratio of 500:1, HDMI and USB support. Now, where will we see this being use?
When you’ve developed over hundreds of different mouse over decades, how can you perfect a mouse again? Well, ask that to Logitech, and they’ll tell you. This is their latest addition to the gazillion mouse under their brand. Logitech wants your new mouse to withstand even more clicks, and smoother scrolling and mousing experience. This M325 wireless mouse’s new “micro-precise” scroll wheel features 72 tiny ratchets, which makes my gaming mouse looks pathetic. . The rodent’s 18-month battery life won’t quite live up to your 2-year Couch Mouse, but at least they can share a Logitech Unifying Receiver. Your scroll wheel of tomorrow can be had for $40 later this month, or £30 right now for lucky folks in the UK.
Telepathic? Not really, these days motion sensing is the in thing, so we aren’t surprised if anyone managed to pull this off. Gaurav Manek managed to control an RC car with his hands using Microsoft’s Kinect hack with Code Laboratories’ NUI SDK, or using an HTML5 web app on an iPad. Check it out.
Surprise news for us, that all these while it’s been quite tight-lip about, but now Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer ‘accidentally’ said that his company is producing cameras for the next batch of iPhones and iPads during a public interview with the Wall Street Journal. Traditionally, Apple’s sourced its sensors from OmniVision, including the delightfully backside-illuminated 5 megapixel CMOS unit you’ll find in the iPhone 4, but since Sony too has BSI tech and OmniVision has reportedly encountered delays, your next portable Apple product might house a Sony Exmor R sensor like the one found on the Xperia Arc. Great news this is. Of course, there’s a punch line in the article, and that the factory in charge of giving Apple some Alpha-licious camera sensors is affected by the Japanese tsunami disaster, so we might not see it in the next iPhone and the newly launched iPad 2 anyway.
These days we charge almost everything portable with a USB cable, and the creative heads at Yanko Design decided to take things a step further. Guess what, they want to charge batteries with USB cable! The Continuance is a set of batteries with a USB interface on the side. Designed by Haimo Bao, Hailong Piao, Yuancheng, the battery can be recharged via a USB connection. You can also use this battery to recharge your gadgets via a USB port. In addition, the Continuance battery concept is an iF concept design entry for 2011, so you might actually see this sometime in five years from now. Well, at least you don’t have to charge your batteries with bulky and heavy wall chargers anymore.
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