Exciting news. The Audi A4 3.0 TDI is supposed to be released in the US later this year. Consider this review from 2007:
Executive diesel models have probably progressed further than any other type of car within the last few years. Whereas once being issued with a diesel from your company meant a valid claim for constructive dismissal, things are very different now. Its difficult to understate the importance of the BMW 330d in making paying serious money for a diesel seem an entirely rational course of action and the Audi A4 3.0 TDI Quattro follows in its wheeltracks, offering a range of Quattro four-wheel drive saloon and Avant estate models at prices starting at £27,800.
Nowadays, anybody turning their nose up at this particular oil-burner probably thinks that Skodas are naff and that Rolls Royces are the finest cars in the world. In other words the automotive world may just have passed them by. The A4 3.0 TDI offers all the characteristics that make todays premium diesels such an impressive package.
The automotive world is changing and diesel is the technology to watch. It provides the closest thing to highly resilient and distributed fuel sources. All wheel drive, 40mpg, 0-60 in 6 seconds…awesome.
TDI considered here can produce enough torque to pull a house down, more indeed than a Ferrari 360 Modena.
The diesels produce torque in a way that turns the power model upside down. My VW is a better tow vehicle than most trucks and SUVs, and a better highway performer than most sports cars.
The ZER Customs site provides some interesting detail from an Audi press release:
According to calculations by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the United States could save 1.4 million barrels of crude oil every day if just one third of all passenger cars and light-duty commercial vehicles were equipped with up-to-date diesel engines.
It seems like the vulnerability researchers have gotten over their winter slumber and are back in action. This week has seen a string of critical issues:
Aurigma Image Uploader Control Remote Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities. This impacts Facebook and MySpace users (Facebook Photo Uploader Control Remote Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities)
Nero Media Player M3U File Processing Buffer Overflow Vulnerability
Apple iPhoto Photocast Handling Remote Format String Vulnerability
Sun Java Runtime Environment Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities
Yahoo! Music Jukebox ActiveX Multiple Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities
The interesting thing about this batch is that most of these are likely to be below the radar for most patching systems. Sun’s JRE might be checked, but if users install the others I doubt they’ll notice these alerts on their own.
It would seem we are only steps away from communicating with dogs in their own language through a voice decoder. The Discovery Channel reports on the latest success:
In one experiment, the software correctly classified the barks in 43 percent of cases. “Fight” and “stranger” barks were the easiest to recognize, while “play” barks were more difficult. When matched against a human’s ability to do the same, the computer’s success was about the same.
Pet behavioral analysis? I guess 43 percent is not bad. Now if humans could just understand each other more than 40 percent of the time…
“In the average house you have about 10,000 different objects and right now you have maybe three objects connected to the net – phone, computer and perhaps a rabbit,” he said.
“But we think that more and more objects are going to be connected,” said Mr Kitten.
A rabbit connected to the net? That is Jean-Francois Kitten, a spokesman for Violet, talking about a Nabaztag wi-fi rabbit gadget that can interpret RFID chips. Put a chip in front of the rabbit and it will “read” aloud. For example a book for children, or maybe a recipe for a cook.
The big question, I suppose, is whether Mr. Kitten will be tracking rabbit behavior. Is there a privacy-enabled rabbit?
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995