The JavaScript Engine war has started, the WebKit team wants to apol­o­gize for toast­ing V8 (Google Chrome) in public. With SFX (Squir­relFish Extreme) the WebKit team has taken the com­pet­i­tive lead with their highly advanced JavaScript Engine, which is fea­tur­ing a high-​performance byte­code inter­preter. It’s nice for us tech-​heads but also for con­sumers. The web is finally evolv­ing again…
26-09-2008: WebKit is the first browser engine to fully pass Acid3. A while back, it scored 100/100 and matched the ref­er­ence ren­der­ing. Now, thanks to recent speedups in JavaScript, DOM and ren­der­ing, it passed the third con­di­tion, smooth ani­ma­tion on ref­er­ence hardware.

Hank Moody is back, ladies and gen­tle­men! Well almost, on Sunday Sep­tem­ber 28 at 10 PM ET/PT you can watch the season pre­miere “Slip of the Tongue”. Better yet set it as it a reminder

iRobot, no not the movie with Will Smith, has released it’s new line-​up of ser­vant­bots (sounds nice… eh?). This ulti­mate PA sets you only back $350, but then again you’ll have the top notch model. iRobot is tout­ing these new Room­bas as being “totally redesigned” from the ground up. The new vacuum system is sup­pos­edly 100% more effec­tive at pick­ing up the grime on your floors. The 560 fea­tures 2.4GHz RF that acti­vates its new Vir­tual Wall Light­house system, the 530 doesn’t have RF. Sched­ul­ing is now built into the robot, so you can go on vac­tion all week The new Room­bas have IR sen­sors built into the bumper, and have a second, slower run­ning speed. When Roomba is approach­ing an object, it slows down so as not to bump it so hard.
Light­houses are Roomba’s new RF-​based progress track­ing system. Place one in each door­way, and they switch on via RF when your Roomba does. When Roomba’s done with a room, it won’t re-​enter until the next time it runs. The bat­tery is still remov­able, but you have to unscrew the bottom plate to get it out. Oh, and now you can add face­plates. The system is far better sealed off, so most of the crap you’re vac­u­um­ing up sup­pos­edly won’t actu­ally get inside the robot any­more. Extra bonus: that black arc between the bumper and but­tons is a handle that lies flush. The 560 goes on sale for $350, the 530 goes on sale for $300.

As anyone knows, I am not a huge fan of Adobe Flash, but I had to share this with you guys, in case you’ve missed this! One of my favorite TV per­son­al­i­ties is co-​host Adam Savage from the pop­u­lar Dis­cov­ery sci­ence tele­vi­sion show Myth­busters. Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel pre­vented the explo­ration of RFID secu­rity by Myth­busters, after allegedly coming under pres­sure from credit card com­pa­nies. Adam Savage said a planned seg­ment of the pro­gram was going to look at how hack­able, reli­able and track­able RFID tech­nol­ogy might be. A researcher for the show called up Texas Instru­ments to arrange a con­fer­ence call to talk about the tech­nol­ogy. But when the call took place, Texas Instru­ments brought along big legal guns from the credit card indus­try.
“Texas Instru­ments comes on along with chief legal coun­sel for Amer­i­can Express, Visa, Dis­cover, and every­body else,” Savage told del­e­gates at the recent HOPE (Hack­ers on Planet Earth) con­fer­ence.

“The Myth­Busters pro­duc­tion team were way, way out­gunned and their lawyers made it really clear to Dis­cov­ery that they were not going to air this episode talk­ing about how hack­able this stuff was. Dis­cov­ery backed down being a large cor­po­ra­tion that depends upon the rev­enue of the adver­tis­ers. Now it’s on Discovery’s radar and they won’t let us go near it.”
Texas Instru­ments has responded to these accu­sa­tions by saying that only one lawyer took part in the con­fer­ence call, and that tech­ni­cal ques­tions were explored. It said that it wasn’t involved in putting pres­sure on Myth­busters or Dis­cov­ery to drop the seg­ment, sug­gest­ing it got credit card firms involved because they were more famil­iar with con­tact­less pay­ment tech­nolo­gies.
“Technical ques­tions were asked and answered and we were to wait for Myth­Busters to let us know when they were plan­ning on show­ing the seg­ment. A few weeks later, Texas Instru­ments was told by Myth­Busters that the sto­ry­line had changed and they were pur­su­ing a dif­fer­ent angle which did not require our help. Savage’s com­pletely dif­fer­ent take on this con­ver­sa­tion can be found in a clip posted above. Weird part of the story is that hack­ing guides are freely avail­able all over the inter­net. So as they say at Myth­busters: this myth is busted!

Google announced today that they would be releas­ing a new open source web browser called Google Chrome. The new browser will be avail­able for down­load as a beta start­ing tomor­row. Google states that the reason for a new web browser is that the com­pany believes that it “can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive inno­va­tion on the web.” The new browser is said to be “streamlined and simple” and “clean and fast”. The under­ly­ing ren­der­ing engine is based on Webkit which is also used by Apple’s Safari. Under the hood, we were able to build the foun­da­tion of a browser that runs today’s com­plex web appli­ca­tions much better.

By keep­ing each tab in an iso­lated “sand­box“, we were able to pre­vent one tab from crash­ing another and pro­vide improved pro­tec­tion from rogue sites. We improved speed and respon­sive­ness across the board. We also built a more pow­er­ful JavaScript vir­tual machine called V8 (hidden class tran­si­tions, auto­matic memory man­age­ment, native com­piled machine code… among others) to power the next gen­er­a­tion of web appli­ca­tions that aren’t even pos­si­ble in today’s browsers. Just like the Google spirit: “launch early and iterate”.

At The IFA Con­sumer Elec­tronic trade show, TOMTOM and Garmin showed of their new nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems. The TOMTOM Go X40 Live series (940, 740 and 540). Al devices con­tain the HD-​Traffic (High Def­i­n­i­tion Traf­fic), which is being used for up-​to-​date traf­fic infor­ma­tion. More ser­vices like Google Maps inte­gra­tion (Finally!), fuel prices and a brand new user inter­face.
This years inno­va­tion came from Blaupunkt which will release the Trav­elPi­lot 700 and 500 with over­lay nav­i­ga­tion infor­ma­tion on real­time video (dope).

The new inter­face resem­bles (RIPP-​OFF) the Mac OS X icon style, coin­ci­dence? Nope because Ken McAlpine (a bril­liant prod­uct engi­neer) has joined TOMTOM as senior vice pres­i­dent prod­uct design. But again it’s just form over func­tion, it’s not how it looks STUPID it’s how it works! TOMTOM is just the best of the worst for me. So call­ing out Apple, make my iPhone a car nav­i­ga­tion system and put my TOMTOM out of his misery

As I promised ear­lier, I would write a review about TOMTOM. I have had the device now a couple of months, although I find the device the eas­i­est to use cur­rently avail­able in the indus­try, I have some real com­plaints, actu­ally I only have two. On the hard­ware side the bat­tery life, which is really shame­ful! I know I can charge the device with my cig­a­rette lighter but thats not really the point of a portable device. With modern Lithium-​Ion bat­ter­ies nowa­days you can expect bat­tery life of 5 hours or more. While it charges quickly, after less than two hours on the road the little bat­tery indi­ca­tor at the lower right would start to flash yellow… bugger. My second com­plaint is about the soft­ware, I would rather see TOMTOM write a native Cocoa appli­ca­tion, JAVA tech­nol­ogy is okay, but one way or an other, JAVA pro­gram­mers seem only to be able to pro­gram buggy and crappy pro­grams, that’s at least my expe­ri­ence. I have tried mul­ti­ple times using the TOMTOM Home soft­ware, it can brick your TOMTOM (the famous blink­ing red cross)! Luck­ily I had backed-​up my device so it wasn’t a prob­lem. I can repro­duce it every time. The soft­ware really sucks balls big time! SO should you buy a TOMTOM? I would say yes, it’s always right in find­ing my loca­tions, traf­fic infor­ma­tion, is really easy to use and when I buy a new car I don’t have to migrate or redo all my data or settings.