Hasta La Gadget!

Chinese carmaker Geely is no stranger to building derivative designs, and its latest PHEV effort takes so much inspiration from Volkswagen’s Beetle that even the press release begins with a metaphor about caterpillars flourishing into butterflies. That’s also a little nod to the car’s development, which has seen its initial design overhauled into the four-seater, photovoltaic cell-laden transporter you see above. The powertrain is still a hybrid number and not entirely electric, but seagull-wing doors have been added for some extra flair. Geely’s IG is currently on display at the Beijing Auto Show, alongside its all-electric EK-1 and EK-2 brethren, the latter of which is promised to deliver 150kmph top speeds together with 180km cruising ranges and an 18-minute recharge time for 80 percent of the battery capacity. We’ll believe it when we see it. This trifecta, along with a pair of other alternative fuel vehicles, is slated to “be marketed” in two years’ time. You can wait that long, can’t you?

Continue reading Geely IG is covered in solar cells, two years away from marketability

Geely IG is covered in solar cells, two years away from marketability originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We can’t officially confirm this yet but, We’re hearing from all over that a bad McAfee for Windows XP update is causing computers worldwide to shut down. Apparently DAT update 5958 deletes the svchost.exe file, which then triggers a false-positive in McAfee itself and sets off a chain of uncontrolled restarts and loss of networking functionality. Yeah, wild — Twitter is basically going nuts, and McAfee’s support site appears to be down. There are some fixes floating around out there, but it may be too late — the final tally of borked PCs today may reach into the millions. We’ve already heard anecdotally that an Intel facility has been affected, as well as Dish Network call centers, and we’re sure there are going to be more reports as the day wears on.

Update: McAfee just sent us a statement — they’ve pulled the update from their corporate download servers, and consumers shouldn’t be affected.

McAfee is aware that a number of customers have incurred a false positive error due to incorrect malware alerts on Wednesday, April 21. The problem occurs with the 5958 virus definition file (DAT) that was released on April 21 at 2.00 PM GMT+1 (6am Pacific Time).

Our initial investigation indicates that the error can result in moderate to significant performance issues on systems running Windows XP Service Pack 3.

The faulty update has been removed from McAfee download servers for corporate users, preventing any further impact on those customers. We are not aware of significant impact on consumer customers and believe we have effectively limited such occurrence.

McAfee teams are working with the highest priority to support impacted customers and plan to provide an update virus definition file shortly. McAfee apologizes for any inconvenience to our customers

Ouch — that might be the understatement of the year. We’ve definitely hearing this affects SP2 as well, we’ll keep looking for more.

Update 2: The anecdotal numbers keep rolling in, and they’re not small — 30,000 machines are knocked out here, 60,000 there. Given that the only fixes right now involve techs spending time with each affected machine individually, things could get seriously messy. We’ll keep you updated if you keep us updated, okay?

Update 3: Here’s an official McAfee fix, although like we said, it requires tech to hit each machine in person. We’ll see what the story is for bigger institutions with tens of thousands of seats.

Update 4: We’re told the official fix only helps those who haven’t been hit with the bug yet, so there’s obviously still issues to be sorted out. [Thanks, Tyler.]

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Developing…

Botched McAfee update shutting down corporate XP machines worldwide originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Apr 2010 13:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Uh, wow. That PlayStation Network issue that struck late last night has officially ballooned into a full-on PlayStation disaster: Sony is now saying you shouldn’t use “fat” PS3 models at all, since a clock-related bug might cause data loss. The PS3 slim isn’t affected, however — which explains some of the conflicting reports we heard last night. Sony says they’re working to get this fixed in the next 24 hours, but for now it looks like older PS3 owners are out of luck — we’ll do our best to keep you entertained, guys.

Sony: Don’t turn on your PS3 until PSN bug is fixed originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Haven’t willfully submitted to the CLIQ’s new update yet? Well, you might want to hold off, because it looks like the new code is causing more heartache than good. A variety of reports on T-Mobile’s official support forums echo the same overarching complaint, which is that messaging is a disaster zone ever since version 1.3.18 took hold — long freezes when using the messaging app or widget, messages not getting sent or being sent multiple times — basically all the things you really don’t want to happen on a device that touts its social connectedness. For what it’s worth, we’ve personally seen this happen on a CLIQ since the update, so we know there’s something going on here; T-Mobile says that the complaints have been “forwarded… to the appropriate people,” so hopefully we’ll see some resolution soon. In the meantime, users experiencing issues are advised to not perform a master reset — important advice, considering that’s one of the first fixes many users might entertain.

Update: Follow the break for the full details from Motorola — it looks like a date issue where the year gets stuck on 1969 is priority one for them, but they’ve got a workaround set up until a new OTA update’s ready. Messaging issues may be alleviated by clearing out your backlogs — if you’ve got too many old messages, it sounds like this could be bogging things down.

Continue reading Motorola CLIQs falling victim to latest firmware? (updated with official statement)

Motorola CLIQs falling victim to latest firmware? (updated with official statement) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tired of your BUGBase lagging out while you’re trying to set up that crazy homebrew alarm system? Hope is on the way in the form of BUG 2.0, Bug Labs’ next-gen development platform that moves up to a Cortex A8-based OMAP3 core from the original BUGBase’s ARM11. The processor bump isn’t the only change, though: they’re announcing full support for running BeagleBoard apps and — get this — Android. That means that you won’t necessarily need to be locked into Bug’s own development environment for doing your thing, and obviously, folks already familiar with Android development should have a much easier time making the transition. Even better, the base maintains backward compatibility with existing BUGmodules, so most of your current investment won’t be for naught — save the old base, of course. Price and availability are yet to be announced.

Continue reading Bug Labs intros BUG 2.0 platform with faster processor, Android support

Bug Labs intros BUG 2.0 platform with faster processor, Android support originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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