engineers

Mazda Motor Corp. has canceled production of its RX-8 rotary engine sports car, citing falling sales and stringent global emissions standards.

Production in Hiroshima, Japan, ended in early July and global sales of the car will conclude later this year.

The RX-8 and the three generations of the RX-7 that preceded it have long been the foundation the brand's fun-to-drive aura. The car's high-revving 1.3-liter, twin-rotor rotary engine produces 232 hp at 8,500 rpm -- a big punch in a relatively small package.

But Mazda sold just 1,134 RX-8s last year, a 49 percent decline … Read more

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and any business concerned with its bottom line takes this to heart in the form of preventative maintenance. Whether you're using computers, vehicles, or other kinds of machinery, following a regular maintenance schedule can prevent future problems and save serious money. PM Master is an easy-to-use program that helps schedule and assign maintenance tasks, ensuring that these important jobs get done when they're supposed to.

The program's interface is utilitarian and easy to navigate, with clearly labeled buttons and menus across the top. The program supports the … Read more

VANCOUVER--You can't say Mazda's new Skyactiv technology lacks ambition. The comprehensive engineering effort looks to set a new standard for performance and fuel efficiency in a consumer-accessible combustion engine.

While Toyota, Honda, Ford, and other automakers spent billions of dollars researching, developing, and building hybrids and electric cars, Mazda directed the bulk of its new engineering into new car designs that provide reliability and performance while serving up a magic number of 40 mpg in highway driving.

In a special media event in downtown Vancouver, Mazda debuted the new Skyactiv-G (a high-efficiency, direct-injection gasoline engine with the world's highest compression ratio of 14.0:1) and Skyactiv-D (a clean diesel engine with that same prime compression ratio). Journalists had an opportunity to drive last year's, pre-Skyactiv Mazda models and new prototype test cars with both engines to prove how much quicker and more efficient each 2012 model-to-be is. … Read more

Microsoft's Bing is hanging onto its 14.4 percent of the search engine market, according to new data out yesterday from ComScore.

Looking at ComScore's U.S. search engine rankings for July, Bing stayed flat, Google lost just 0.4 of a percentage point, and Yahoo climbed slightly by 0.2 points. Overall, Google still led the way with an overwhelming 65.1 percent market share, leaving Yahoo in second place with 16.1 percent.

Drilling down to the actual number of searches conducted in the U.S. last month, Google took home 11.2 billion in total, … Read more

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Health Canada yesterday issued a formal voluntary recall notice for Cloud Engines' Pogoplug Video media streaming device.

CNET originally reported the problem in mid-June after the San Francisco-based company sent an e-mail to media outlets and wrote a blog entry detailing an overheating issue with Pogo-11, -12, -13, and -14 devices. The CPSC has fully detailed the extent of the issue, indicating that 11,000 Pogoplug products are suspect, affecting 9,500 units in the United States and 1,500 in Canada.

Cloud Engines received three reports of the device overheating, prompting … Read more

Microsoft should consider selling Bing, says a Reuters opinion piece that's gained attention in the last day or so, after being published last Friday.

Though the search engine has grown in market share and popularity since its debut in 2009, it's still a money-losing proposition and a distraction for its parent, claims Reuters columnist Robert Cyran. Despite the flush of cash that Microsoft has poured into Bing, the search's engine's online services division lost $2.6 billion in the company's latest fiscal year, he says.

Microsoft believes Bing provides a boost to some of its … Read more

Facebook may be one of the most popular Web sites around, but it doesn't seem to be one of the most loved.

The social network scored dead last in a new study out today that tracked customer satisfaction among a variety of Web sites and companies. Produced in partnership with analytics firm ForeSee Results, the 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index E-Business Report analyzed how users feel about news sites, search engines, and social networks.

Although Facebook's reputation actually grew 3 percent from last year to reach 66 out of 100, the site was at the bottom of the … Read more

Nice financial results notwithstanding, Google had some trouble late today with its App Engine service for online applications.

Overall availability of the cloud-computing foundation, which can run online applications written in Python or Java, dropped at least as low as 88.1 percent, according to the Google App Engine status dashboard.

The dashboard showed problems serving Java programs--more than half of attempts to request an app's Web page resources produced errors at one point. There also were delays in using a programming interface to manage tasks.

In Google's postmortem analysis, the company determined that there was an overall … Read more

What's interesting about the release accompanying the announcement of Toyota's latest hybrid concept is that there's absolutely no mention of the terms efficient, mpg, or eco. No, when Toyota talks about the GRMN Sports Hybrid Concept II, it uses words like maneuverability, stability, and enjoyment. Just what's gotten into boring old Toyota these days?

Set to be revealed to the public at this weekend's Nurburgring 24-hour endurance race, in Nurburg, Germany, the Toyota's concept is a sporty convertible that's powered by a gasoline-electric hybrid drivetrain. GRMN stands for "Gazoo Racing tuned by … Read more