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Comment not surprised (Score 4, Interesting) 67

Owned a Tesla X for a couple of months.

It has many nice features that other cars should catch up.

However, it also has tons of issues. As a car manufacturer and dealer, I feel that their service level is below the industry average. Any main stream car dealers have more professional on servicing its customer.

And, everything to this car is way more expensive than others. And body collision, even small will cost you $5K+ ~ $10K.

Musk spent too much time on other things. He needs more focus on this factory.

Comment Buyer beware (Score 1) 431

by deconvolution (#47258647) Attached to: Chinese-Built Cars Are Coming To the US Next Year
I think most Chinese manufacturers follow "what you get what you pay for" principle very well . They can produce product from "high quality" (such as iPhone) to "crap quality" depending on what price and strategy the buyers would accept. Walmart is infamous on calling all suppliers in one big conference room and taking a face-to-face auction to find out a fool who would accept a ridiculous low unit price but huge amount offer. The quality is just a matter about customer return percentage, who cares?
Open Source

Aldebaran Robotics To Open Source Nao Robot Control Software 26

Posted by timothy from the raise-eyebrows-not-aibos dept.
mikejuk writes "According to an announcement at a robotics conference this week, Aldebaran Robotics is planning to make a significant portion of its code open source. The NAOqi embedded software is cross-platform and forms a distributed robotics framework. The Nao robot has come from a small start to become one of the standard tools of educational and research robotics and it is also a lot of fun. At the moment a Nao is still a little too expensive to be used as a recreational platform, but who knows? Currently it is claimed that there are over 1500 Nao robots being used in education and research."
Media

Engineering Election Debates With Subtle Cues 105

Posted by timothy from the after-consultation-with-stephen-bury dept.
smolloy writes "A recent innovation in televised election debates is a continuous response measure (the 'worm') that allows viewers to track the response of a sample of undecided voters in real-time. A potential danger of presenting such data is that it may prevent people from making independent evaluations. Researchers from Royal Holloway, University of London, and the University of Bristol, report an experiment with 150 participants in which they manipulated the worm and superimposed it on a live broadcast of a UK election debate. The majority of viewers were unaware that the worm had been manipulated, and yet the researchers were able to influence their perception of who won the debate, their choice of preferred prime minister, and their voting intentions."
Transportation

Nissan Unveils All-Electric LEAF 586

Posted by kdawson from the made-right-here-in-the-U-S-of-A dept.
MojoRilla writes "In Japan, Nissan unveiled their all-electric LEAF (press release, and Flash site). Slated to launch in late 2010 in Japan, the US, and Europe, this car will have a 100-mile range, seats 5, has an advanced computer system with remote control by IPhone, and promises to be competitively priced. While this car's range won't work for everyone, it could be a game changer as a commuter car." Recharge time is 8 hours with a 200-volt power source, and "just under 30 minutes with a quick charger" (no further details given) to charge to 80% of capacity.
Software

VLC 1.0.0 Released 419

Posted by Soulskill from the now-supports-kitchen-sink dept.
rift321 writes "VLC media player, which we all know for simplifying the playback of pretty much any codec out there, has finally released version 1.0.0. Here's a quick list of improvements: live recording, instant pausing and frame-by-frame support, finer speed controls, new HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-Ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0), new formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS) and major improvements in many formats, new Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder, video scaling in fullscreen, RTSP Trickplay support, zipped file playback, customizable toolbars, easier encoding GUI in Qt interface, better integration in Gtk environments, MTP devices on Linux, and AirTunes streaming."
Linux Business

A Trip Down Distro Memory Lane 238

Posted by timothy from the early-nostalgia-is-the-best-kind dept.
M-Saunders writes "What did the Linux world look like back in 2000? TuxRadar has republished a distro roundup from Linux Format issue 1, May 2000. Many distros such as SUSE, Mandrake and Red Hat are still around in various incarnations, but a few such as Corel and Definite have fallen by the wayside."

Comment Cool, but I wont call it "a creation" (Score 1) 448

by deconvolution (#25243719) Attached to: Ultrasound Machine Ages Wine
This gadget looks cool. However, Using ultrasound to improving the taste of wine & spirit like aged ones has been studied for years. It is classified as one of physical aging acceleration approaches and others including microwave, magnetic & electric fields, laser, etc and there is NOT any one approach being approved to improve every products with a general parameter settings. At least I heard of the ultrasound methods have been tested in the spirit produced from my hometown in China and it seems not dramatically improve the taste.

I believe that the major wine & spirit makers HAVE tested & applied for their products by these approaches for many years. In terms of our hometown case, commonly they applied a set of aging acceleration process to all their new products to improve the taste. For example, the one we often drink is mixed by naturally aged spirits with artificial accelerated new spirits in certain percentage. Regarding our experience the taste only has minor differences with the full naturally aged ones.
The Courts

UK's Truphone Wins Injunction Against T-Mobile 46

Posted by kdawson from the let-the-free-bits-flow dept.
An anonymous reader writes "According to CNET.co.uk, the cell-phone VoIP company Truphone has won a temporary court injunction against T-Mobile, who was accused of 'preventing the launch of the Truphone service' and 'abusing its dominant position' by not routing calls to Truphone users. This ruling could have a profound effect on the cell phone industry in the UK, as Truphone CEO James Tagg pointed out in a press release. 'The injunction is good news not only for Truphone but for every company trying to develop Internet-era services and for every consumer wanting freedom of choice and lower prices. We are determined to bring better-value mobile calls, text messages and other innovative services to mobile phone users, and it's right that we should not be prevented from doing so.'" The injunction, which the article calls an "interim judgement," isn't the final word; Truphone and T-Mobile still need to go to trial.

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