Hasta La Gadget!

Google let us all know that it would strip out unneeded WebKit code to make its Blink web engine scream, but it never said exactly what kind of pace we could expect. The answer, it turns out, is “breakneck.” The company’s Alex Komoroske told Google I/O attendees that the Open Web Platform team has already yanked 8.8 million lines of programming from Blink in about a month, with 4.5 million of them scrubbed almost immediately. Removing so much cruft has reportedly improved not just the upcoming engine, but the engineers — they’re far more productive, Komoroske says. The team has already had time to explore new rendering techniques and garner code contribution requests from the likes of Adobe, Intel and even Microsoft. Although we don’t yet know if all the trimming will be noticeable to end users by the time Blink reaches polished Chrome and Chrome OS releases, it’s safe to say that some developers won’t recognize what they see.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

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Source: TechCrunch

EA’s Frostbite 3 engine, which underpins many of the company’s next generation titles, looks like it won’t support Nintendo’s Wii U. Johan Andersson, Technical Director of the Frostbite project at EA DICE, says the company tested Frostbite 2 on the console and found the results to be “not too promising,” to the point where it “chose not to go down [the] path” of porting the next version. Leaked slides from earlier this year revealed that EA has approximately 15 games in development that use Frostbite 3, the implication being that Wii U gamers are going to miss out on some fairly big titles, including Battlefield 4, Star Wars, the next Mass Effect and, as Joystiq pointed out last week, this year’s version of Madden NFL. It all adds up to a notable loss of support for the new console — but hey, EA-style gaming was hardly a core part of the Nintendo experience in the first place.

Filed under: Gaming, Nintendo

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Via: Joystiq

Source: NeoGAF, @repi (Twitter)

It’s a fairly bold claim, but Mozilla and Samsung have announced today that they’re now attempting to “rebuild the web browser from the ground up on modern hardware.” That initiative takes the form of Servo, a new web browser engine designed for Android and ARM and based on Mozilla’s Rust programming language, which itself sees a new release today. Expectedly, details on the browser engine remain light, with Mozilla and Samsung offering no indication of a release schedule or a final product. In the blog post announcing the engine, Mozilla says only that it’ll be “putting more resources into Servo” in the coming year as it also aims to complete the first major revision of Rust, and that it and Samsung will be “increasingly looking at opportunities on mobile platforms.” You can find the full announcement, and the source for both Rust and Servo if you’re so inclined, at the source link below.

Filed under: Internet, Software

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Via: The Next Web

Source: Mozilla

A group of British researchers at a company called Reaction Engines has announced new aircraft technology that could make air travel much faster. The researchers have created what they describe as “the biggest breakthrough in propulsion since the jet engine.” The Sabre engine use a fancy compressed helium cooling system able to cool air entering the engine from 1000°C to -150°C in 1/100 of a second.

The technology is able to cool the incoming air at incredible speed and without creating any ice that could cause problems. The new cooling system could allow jet engines to run at much higher levels of power than is currently possible without overheating. The researchers believe that aircraft using these engines could reach speeds of over 2000 mph, propelling an aircraft from London to Sydney in about 4.5 hours.

The company also believes that these engines might allow aircraft to go from atmospheric flight to space flight in a single stage. The aircraft engines may also be able to gather enough oxygen from air at low altitudes to create their own fuel before switching to internal fuel sources for higher speed travel.

[via Telegraph]

Around these parts, we like gadgets, games, LEGOs, and lots of other geeky crap stuff. But we also like our cars. General Motors put out a press release this week about the engine that will be used in the 2014 Corvette, and the gear-heads around here got all tingly.

The 2014 Corvette will debut as a 2014 model in late 2013. It will have a 6.2-liter V8 engine under the hood providing 450 HP, making it the most powerful base Corvette engine ever offered. The engine will also produce 450 pound-foot of torque and promises performance of 0-to-60 mph in under 4 seconds. Any treehuggers out there might be shaking your fists right now chanting “Prius!… Prius!….”

Before you grab your pitchforks, consider that the engine has an EPA estimated 26 mile-per-gallon rating on the Highway. Considering this is a big and powerful sports car engine, 26 MPG is pretty impressive.

If automakers continue to develop standard gasoline-powered engines with such impressive fuel economy I’m not sure EVs and hybrids will ever go mainstream.