crashing

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety said today that the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf performed quite well in its first-ever crash tests on "mainstream" electric cars.

According to the IIHS, the Volt and Leaf earned the highest rating of "good" for front, side, rear, and rollover crashes. Both vehicles qualified for the organization's Top Safety Pick award, given to vehicles that deliver "state-of-the-art crash protection."

"The milestone demonstrates that automakers are using the same safety engineering in new electric cars as they do in gasoline-powered vehicles," the IIHS said in … Read more

There may be times when using your Mac where you might have suggestions or other feedback for Apple's engineers. Perhaps a system feature could be used in a different manner, or you would like to see a particular window be resizable, or you have noticed a bug where a program does not behave the way you think it should.

Apple has a number of methods to submit feedback, so if you have suggestions you would like to submit there are several ways to do it. Keep in mind that Apple will likely not contact you back, but submissions are … Read more

A few people have reported that when using the latest version of iTunes in OS X 10.6.7 they experience errors in which the program immediately crashes when launched. When this happens, the program displays a message that states, "You do not have enough access privileges for this operation" and then quits followed by the OS X crash reporter.

As with most application crashes, people experiencing this problem have tried numerous approaches, including running in Safe Mode, removing the iTunes preferences files, loading a new user account, and deleting system caches with various maintenance programs; however, in … Read more

Depending on your Web uses, you may have multiple browser windows open, and if you make use of tabbed browsing you can easily find yourself having multiple tabs on multiple windows, resulting in a large number of pages being loaded at once. While this can potentially make your browser hog RAM and CPU cycles, overall having numerous pages loaded should not be a problem for the browser or system. It does, however, pose a problem if the browser is quit or unexpectedly crashes, since opening and organizing all the windows again can be an exercise in frustration.

To get around … Read more

The Mitsubishi i, powered by Miev (Mitsubishi Innovative Electric Vehicle) technology, will be arriving in the United States in the fall.

The subcompact urban car boasts 63 horsepower and 133 pound-feet of torque. The Japanese-made car runs on an lithium ion battery packs and has an expected range of 85 miles.

Here's a 50-second frontal crash test (after the jump) at about 40 mph.

The crash test shows that the Mitsubishi i offers good protection to the driver and passenger, similar to cars with traditional front-end, gas-powered engines.… Read more

A few people on the Apple Discussion boards have described an issue that seems to have cropped up in OS X 10.6.5, where the system may force-quit the log-in session when attempting to play video.

This is not a widespread problem, but has affected a few people and seems to happen when they use certain media players that support hardware-accelerated video playback. When the crash occurs, the system may flash a blue or black screen and then present the log-in window, quitting all user applications and unsaved data. Not all video players spur this behavior, and the problem … Read more

Usually when troubleshooting problems there is some logical reasoning behind the issue that can be readily tackled, which is indicated by a steady, observable problem with the system. Even if the solution to the problem is a broad approach, such as reinstalling the operating system or replacing a hard drive, the reconfiguration usually clears the issue and the problem goes away. Despite this, every now and then a problem will crop up that is fairly perplexing.

We were recently contacted by MacFixIt reader Alan, who had a relatively minor though annoying problem where his system would crash under specific conditions … Read more

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) released a joint report Friday that detailed the cause of the "flash crash" on May 6 that triggered the Dow Jones Industrial Average to plummet almost 1,000 points in the course of a half hour. The culprit, the report found, was a single $4.1 billion trade carried out by a computer-based sell order.

"This report identifies what happened and reaffirms the importance of a number of the actions we have taken since that day. We now must consider what other investor-focused … Read more

One of the latest and popular game titles from Blizzard Entertainment is StarCraft 2, which was released about two months ago. As with many modern games, this title has some advanced graphics that may at times be demanding on video cards, which in turn causes them to heat up. Heat generation is the nature of anything that demands processing power, but with StarCraft a couple of people have reported the game causing their hardware to overheat and fail.

Recently we were contacted by a MacFixIt reader and StarCraft player "Ricardo" who mentioned that the game ran only a … Read more