The RQ-170 is a stealthy unmanned aircraft designed to "provide reconnaissance and surveillance support to forward deployed combat forces." It's flown by the 30th Reconnaissance Squadron at Tonopah Test Range, Nevada, under the Air Combat Command's 432d Wing at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada.

The aircraft has a 65-foot wingspan, with a fat body and a blended wing design. It's unarmed, and—according to David A. Fulghum at Ares—its light color is unusual for high altitude UAV. [Ares]

Circuit City.

That's a pre-holiday consumer downer if I ever heard one, but hey, at least the whole strip mall didn't go down alongside the electronics retailer. Oh wait, it did. [Thanks Kevin!]

Paul Thurrott traces the arc from start to finish:

When Microsoft first briefed me about the Family Pack back in July, I was told that it would be a limited-time offer "until supplies last" (sic) in the United States and "other select markets." I communicated Microsoft plans for the Family Pack in various articles over the next few months, noting that it was a temporary offer only.

Unfortunately, that's just now becoming obvious to potential customers here in the United States, where the Family Pack has apparently completely disappeared. Numerous email messages this week complain that attempts to find the Windows 7 Family Pack online or at brick-and-mortar electronics retailers have proven fruitless, killing plans for planned holiday presents.

In other words, stocks have run dry, as Microsoft said they eventually would. Minor issue! Seeing as Windows 7 is software, any limit on the supply is totally self-enforced. It's possible that they set aside a certain number of licenses at launch, and they've just burned through them faster than planned. It's also possible that they planned this arbitrary supply excuse so they don't look like assholes when the cost of upgrading a household's worth of PCs to Windows 7 suddenly doubles right before Christmas.

How am I supposed to tell my parents I love them this Christmas, if not with a box of vouchers for OS upgrade licenses? [WinInfo]

What do you think the future will hold (i.e.will Google end up creating sentient robots hell bent on destroying mankind)? [Image via BustedTees]

I was at a fraternity house hanging out one night. One of my friends had his iPhone plugged into the speakers so we could have music. We had the usual speaker system, a receiver and some speakers. I was standing near the receiver when All the sudden the iphone cut off and started to smoke. The room filled up with what must have been hazardous smoke. After picking up the iPhone that was still extremely hot, the entire battery had been ejected from the phone and was sitting on the floor. The house smelled like burning electronics for the rest of the night and the iPhone left a square-ish burn mark on the table it was sitting on.

Fortunately, it sounds like the cloud of acrid, poisonous fumes proved to be only a minor inconvenience for the partygoers. Who knows? It might have even enhanced some of their experiences. [Thanks Bobby!]

The regulator is seeking comments "on how to encourage innovation," which basically means how to move past the total failure of the CableCARD system and on to something that will democratize how and where you can access cable video streams. If you're never heard about the CableCARD system, it's effectively the only thing keeping you from using your Xbox 360 as a DVR. A potential change could
open up cable signals to all devices, including your TiVo and Xbox 360.

And until very recently, you couldn't even get your Windows PC to be a DVR unless you bought it OEM from HP or Dell or someone, where they would install the CableCARD for you at the time of purchase. Quite opposite from the way people pictured CableCARDs would work—and how it will work shortly.

Just how bad is it? Ars Technica points out that in the FCC report, a grand total of fourteen non-leased set top boxes were available in the US at retail in 2008. That means that nearly every set-top box in the US is leased by a cable company, allowing them virtually unlimited pricing control and no incentive to innovate. Compare that to the 879 devices for sale in the truly competitive mobile industry, and you can see just how throttled the market is by the cable industry.

There's no telling what exactly is going to happen here, but at the very least it's good to see the FCC continuing their push for openness and sanity. We've waited long enough for something that's really not too much to ask. [ars technica]

A team of scientists from Purdue, Penn State, NASA, and the Air Force have collaborated on the ALICE (ALuminum-ICE) Project, which makes rocket propellant out of a frozen mixture of water and nanoscale aluminum powder. The ultimate goal is for the more environmentally-friendly fuel to be used on long-distance space missions, but for now it's excellent for videos of rockets taking off (starting at 4:00). [Purdue University via MAKE]

This stunning home is embedded in a hill in Vals, Switzerland, but it still has some amazing views. Seriously, you could just grab a chair, a beer and look at it all day. Hit the link to see what I mean. [Iwann Bann via Link]
If there ever was a house that lived up to the name "Universe," this space in Roca Blanca, Mexico would do it. The design is based on the Jantar Mantar Astronomical Observatory, which was built in Jaipur, in 1724. The home has 360 degree open air views of the ocean with swimming pools and hammocks. In short, everything you could ever want in a place to relax. [Link]
If you had a treehouse when you were a kid, you probably considered it as your own private sanctuary. Imagine what it would be like to have a treehouse that is 11 stories tall, with dozens of rooms for you to run away and hide in. [Link]
Spending a few nights in a hotel is a great way to escape from our miserable lives, but the Winvian in Connecticut is more exciting than most. It features themed rooms that would be so much fun you would have little reason to go out during the day. There are golf rooms with putting greens, a treehouse cottage, a music room with playable architecture and even a helicopter room with an actual Coast Guard chopper inside. [Winvian]
As much as I can't stand the Cowboys, I have to admit that their ridiculously over-the-top stadium is probably the best place to watch a game on the face of the Earth. Super field-level luxury boxes, a mind blowing assortment of concessions and a HDTV that measures 159 feet across. If you were Joey Fatone's brother, you would have even had the privilege of playing Gears of War 2 on that gigantic screen. Of course, that would mean you would actually have to endure the shame of being related to Joey Fatone.
There should be a crime against spending $2 billion dollars on a private home, but I'm sure you could have a lot of fun hanging out in Mukesh Ambani's pad. Needless to say, this 22-story monstrosity has every kind of entertainment and relaxation facility you could imagine...and then some. [Link]
Prison may not be the most desirable place to be, unless you happen to be staying at the Leoben Justice Centre in Austria. Seriously, take a look at the pics in the following link. It looks more like a resort than a correctional facility. [Damn Cool Pics and Link]
Electronic House's Home of the Year for 2009 is short on taste, but high on gadgets. If you were hanging out here, you would be treated to beautiful views, the latest in home automation, racing simulators and an absurd amount of home theater equipment. [Electronic House via Link]
This list contains some extreme homes, but Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich's yacht takes excess to the high seas with a price tag rumored to have cost in the billions. While on board, you would be treated to every kind of luxury imaginable—and you wouldn't have to worry about intrusion because the yacht is fitted with a missile defense system and anti-paparazzi laser shield.
What if one of the best places to kick back and relax was your office at work? Google has taken that approach with the design of their Swiss headquarters. It features cozy seating, pool tables, foosball and a top notch lounge. [Link]

The K9 Storm Intruder, arriving in 2010, is a dog-fitted flak jacket, protecting a pooch's vital organs (other than the brain) while offering a means for handlers to track their animals. The vests are fitted with a wireless camera and speaker system, allowing you to see what the dog sees and maybe even command him appropriately, remotely.

And yes, $20,000 is a lot of money, but a military dog is a $50,000 investment. And dogs are worth it because they are far, far cuter than people. [K9 Storm via CNN Money via Popsci via New Launches]

Talks are very advanced, said the sources Friday. One of the sources said that the sides have already agreed on terms and have only to sign a final agreement.

Steve Dowling, Apple's spokesman, said the company doesn't comment on rumors and speculation. A representative from Lala was not immediately available.

An acquisition of Lala, a streaming-music site that has gone through multiple iterations including one as a CD-swapping service, would be the third acquisition deal of a digital-music site in recent months.

MySpace acquired iLike in August and Imeem last month.

Exactly what Apple intends to do with Lala remains unclear, but it would appear that Apple intends to offer some kind of streaming service to iTunes users. Right now, Apple is the largest music store online or offline and Apple has made more money than any other music service by selling music downloads.

But the public has shown an appetite for free music and many people have clamored for a better way to store music. Right now, most music libraries can be found on an owner's computer hard drive, which can malfunction. Lala enables users to store songs on the company's servers and access them from Web-enabled devices.

This story originally appeared on CNET

From hilarious TV scams to amateur space photography, to personally overdosing on caffeine in the name of pseudo-science, the early morning shift has let me cover stuff you just don't see anywhere else but Giz. But it's time to spread the freelance wings.

Thanks for taking the ride with me…and spotting my typos ;)
See you guys soon,
Danny

Caffeine Snack Test: Who Needs Coffee When You've Got Cookies and Gum?
I'm lightheaded and twitchy. This was never going to end well. The mission: Test if caffeine-infused munchies like cookies, mints, chewing-gum, and lollipops pack the same punch as energy drinks and coffee. (Hint: Most do). More »

Waking Up On Mars: Australia's Bizarre Dust Storm
I woke up Wednesday (Tuesday U.S. time), to a scene from Total Recall. Sydney had been blanketed by an apocalyptic glowing red dust storm. Red from iron-oxide: rust. And if I couldn't breathe, my tech gear wouldn't like this either. More »

Netbooks: What You Need to Know About the Next 6 Months
A bunch of great netbook upgrades are on the way in 2010—next-gen Intel CPUs in January; smooth HD video—but to spare you the brain hemorrhage of keeping track, we've laid it all out. Here's what you need to know. More »

MIT Students Explain How to Photograph Space for $150
On September 2nd 2009, Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh successfully took these images of Earth's curvature and the blackness of space using only a weather balloon and off-the-shelf components-without complicated hacks. Total cost: $148. Here's how they did it. More »

Student Kills Intruder with Samurai Sword After PlayStation, Laptops Stolen
Holy crap. Detectives are still interviewing a Johns Hopkins University student who fatally lacerated the upper body of a man breaking into his off-campus residence overnight. The suspect also suffered a nearly-severed hand, and was pronounced dead at the scene. More »

How Will Technology Affect the Future of Sex? Clones, Virtuality and Polyamorism
Are the rapid advancements in technology and science, in artificial-intelligence and genetics, leading us to a moment in time-a technological singularity-where ultra-intelligent machines improve on their own designs, while we humans are free to edit our own evolution? More »

Cops Bust Guy Selling Oven Door Disguised as HDTV
Wow, good try. San Leandro, California police stopped a man after reports he tried to sell an HDTV at a Wal-Mart parking lot. However! It turned out to be a plastic-wrapped glass oven door with Sony and Best Buy stickers. More »

With the debate on net neutrality in full swing in the US, we've been hearing about Bandwidth Hogs again. 'Bandwidth Hog' is a sound bite that conveys a strong emotion: you can virtually see the fat pig chomping on the bandwidth, pushing back all the other animals in the barnyard with his fat pig shoulders all the while scrutinizing with his shiny piggy eyes to see if the farmer isn't around...

The image is so powerful that everyone thinks they understand what the term means , no one questions if the analogy is correct. In discussing this issue, Herman and I realised we had serious doubts about the existence of that potentially mythical beast. In fact, we are not sure even the telcos know what a bandwidth hog is and does.

But it makes great headlines: "Net Neutrality will force the telco's to give The Internet away to Bandwidth Hogs". They claim that bandwidth hogs steal all the bandwidth and cause network congestion, and therefore their behaviour harms all the other regular and peaceful law-abiding users. And to add insult to injury they pay the same price as the others! No, policing and rationing must be applied by the benevolent telco to protect the innocent.

Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, the way that telcos identify the Bandwidth Hogs is not by monitoring if they cause unfair traffic congestion for other users. No, they just measure the total data downloaded per user, list the top 5% and call them hogs.

For those service providers with data caps, these are usually set around 50 Gbyte and go up to 150 Gbyte a month. This is therefore a good indication of the level of bandwidth at which you start being considered a "hog". But wait: 50 Gbyte a month is… 150 kbps average (0,15 Mbps), 150 Gbyte a month is 450 kbps on average. If you have a 10 Mbps link, that's only 1,5 % or 4,5 % of its maximum advertised speed!

And that would be "hogging"?

The fact is that what most telcos call hogs are simply people who overall and on average download more than others. Blaming them for network congestion is actually an admission that telcos are uncomfortable with the 'all you can eat' broadband schemes that they themselves introduced on the market to get people to subscribe. In other words, the marketing push to get people to subscribe to broadband worked, but now the telcos see a missed opportunity at price discrimination...

As Herman explains in his post, TCP/IP is by definition an egalitarian protocol. Implemented well, it should result in an equal distribution of available bandwidth in the operator's network between end-users; so the concept of a bandwidth hog is by definition an impossibility. An end-user can download all his access line will sustain when the network is comparatively empty, but as soon as it fills up from other users' traffic, his own download (or upload) rate will diminish until it's no bigger than what anyone else gets.

Now I'm pretty sure that many telcos will disagree with our assessment of this. So here's a challenge for them: in the next few days, I will specify on this blog a standard dataset that would enable me to do an in-depth data analysis into network usage by individual users. Any telco willing to actually understand what's happening there and to answer the question on the existence of hogs once and for all can extract that data and send it over to me, I will analyse it for free, on my spare time. All I ask is that they let me publish the results of said research (even though their names need not be mentioned if they don't wish it to be). Of course, if I find myself to be wrong and if indeed I manage to identify users that systematically degrade the experience for other users, I will say so publicly. If, as I suspect, there are no such users, I will also say so publicly. The data will back either of these assertions.

Please email me if you're interested. And please publicise this offer if you're not in a position to extract such a dataset but are still interested in the answer. This is a much more important question than knowing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin!

Reprinted with permission from Fiberevolution; written in collaboration with Dadamotive. Megahog source image from the AP via TheAge

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[Thanks TechDealDigger, Dealzon, Logic Buy, GamerHotline, Cheap College Gamers, CheapStingyBargains and TechBargains.]

You've gotta love the FCC these days, right? First they ask Google, AT&T and Apple just what they hell they're doing rejecting Google Voice from the App Store. Then they just don't fuck around when it comes to backing net neutrality. And now they're calling Verizon on its insane $350 ETF it's forcing people into with their "advanced" phones. It doesn't get much more pro-consumer than this.

[FCC via Engadget]

Send your best entries to me at contests@gizmodo.com with Xmas Decorations in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Send your work to me by next Tuesday morning, and I'll pick three top winners and show off the rest of the best in our Gallery of Champions. Get to it!

This is what happened, according to the experiment project manager Stefanie Countryman:

They basically learned really quickly not to fly. When they try to fly, because there's no gravity to stabilize them, they basically tumble.

This is what happened, according to the butterfly:

So I was like, you know, taking this nap, and then I woke up and I was like, Huh? What? What? Fuck. I'm not a worm anymore. Oh, and I had these things on my back, you know? Wings. So I said: hey, let's try to fly for a little b*WHOAWHOAWHOAWHOAWHOA!!! What the fuck was that? The hell... I was like, going like crazy, man. So I got back down, or up, or whatever the fuck, I don't know, this is space, you know. And I was like OK, let's try ag*WHOAOHFUCKOHFUCKOHFUCK!!! What fuckassery is this? I don't know man. Fuck that flying thing. I'm staying on the ground.

True story. [Bloombert]

The park was Corona Heights, the rockiest park with my favorite view of the city. Today's dog walk was unusual; there was a little gray dog that was actually faster than Malcolm—fast enough to run up from behind and jump over him. I'm not sure Malcolm had seen other dogs much faster or agile than him, other than the trio of Italian greyhounds who don't play much. They ran around each other in the lower field, and later atop a series of large stone points above the field, overlooking a vista from Market Street to the Bay. The owner, in a blue baseball cap, afforded his pup more freedom than usual, and looked on quietly as they played, recalling his dog with a whistle when necessary.

Before Malcolm could eat the phone, I picked it up. I pressed a key and it powered up. The last call was 20 minutes ago, so the owner could have easily left the park already. I had to take it with me. The last few numbers were 212, 415, 415 but I wasn't quite ready to dial all the numbers while walking through the park.

I saw several dog owners looking for something on the ground and asked all of them if they had lost phones. Turns out, they were just looking for dog crap.

Here's the creepy part. Walking home, I scanned the menu. Gmail! Sms! Call Logs! I was so curious about who this person was, it was honestly took all I could muster to not dive into and read all the messages. Would you have read the texts? Are you disgusted at my impulse? Well I didn't do anything snoopy, so you can stop judging me now, OKAY?

Instead, I found the entry for "home" and called it. The guy picked up at the same time as his answering machine and after the beep, he confessed to not have been going nuts looking for it like you or I might have after 4 minutes, but hadn't even noticed it was gone. I gave him my address and he said he'd come right over. When the doorbell rang, it was the nice man in the blue hat, and his super-speed dog.

"Oh, it's you!" he said.

Having some association with the man beforehand made me glad I didn't dive into his personal data. I would have felt icky.

What would you have done?

Whenever a Google has a hiccup, even if it's not search, our tiplines are flooded. Twitter becomes an unreadable stream of complaining. The world, online, stops. Bing? Despite capturing about 10% of the search market, not so much. We got a couple pings in our tips page, and exactly zero emails. Which is odd! So let's theorize:

1. Bing users don't report outages to tech blogs, because they don't read tech blogs. They're using Bing because that's what Internet Explorer tells them to use
2. Bing users don't bother complaining; they just use Google for a half an hour. They're natural switchers anyway—they switched to Bing, right?—so it's not a big deal to shake things up for a bit. Google users, they're stubborn.
3. People don't feel so bonded with Bing, because it doesn't seem as central to their lives online as Google. Google apps—Mail, Maps Docs, Calendar, whatever—all live under the same umbrella, in the same rough interface, and under the same branding. Bing feels like its own thing to a certain extent
4. Shut up you jerk, I was utterly beside myself between the minutes of 9:24 and 10:07 PM EST last night, because of the lack of Bing.

Now you go! What will it take before Bing starts to feel, as depressingly as Google, like some kind of digital phantom limb? Will it ever?

Held in Austria, it's basically a bunch of boozehounds that show off their cocktail-mixing robots. The best of the creations appear in the two in the videos below, which force you to play Mario or Tetris, with the sort of cocktail the robot mixes you dependent on how you play the games. Slow and steady wins the race, in my books, but what would that earn me? [Roboexotica via Kotaku]

Image Credit: MattDork

Quite simply, castration anxiety is a theory proposed by Freud in which a boy sees a girl's genitalia (or lack of penis) as a symbol of punishment, as if she's been castrated.

In this particular instance, I'd argue that the console becomes the phallus in a symbolic castration. Man plays video games. Woman does not. And when the video-game-less female destroys the male's video games, that's akin to a woman removing a man's manhood. It just so happens that, in this metaphor, man has both a literal phallus and a gaming phallus. Really, an analog like a guy tossing his girlfriend's makeup collection out the window could work just as well.

But why the fixation? Why can't we look away? Like a thought scab that our brains can't help but pick, male philosophers and writers have been obsessed with castration probably since the the beginning of time itself. A notable example would be Ernest Hemingway, as outlined by the famous literary criticism Freud, Fetishism and Hemingway's Phallic Women. For instance, in A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway writes (through character), "Sometimes I am afraid I will break off a finger as one breaks a stick of chalk."

It just so happens, the ladies of YouTube aren't generally as eloquent, but they do tend to show more cleave. [Ripten via Kotaku]

A floating speaker that would play theme music when you entered a room, WWE-style. Movie protagonist style.

Imagine, you walk into the office, Every Rose Has Its Thorn deafens a whole room of cubicles. Pumped (and possibly greased), you march through the office in slow motion (or just very slowly, no one can quite tell). And it's all thanks to your little Melody Balloon, a concept that is now 1% less plausible but 10000000% more incredible. I mean, as long as we're making stuff up, it might as well include at least one 80s meme. [Yanko via UberGizmo]

And she has good reason to be scared that an entire generation doesn't find a television to be an essential household item. People are flocking to the web to watch streaming shows, but the networks still aren't making any money off these views. Hulu, the largest streaming site, is getting over 40 million visitors a month who are viewing 5 billion minutes of shows and clips. And that number is only going up, while TV viewership is going down.

These content creators need to figure out a way to monetize this phenomenon, and fast. Because the genie is out of the bottle, and there's no putting him back in. [NY Times]

Researchers inserted the prairie vole genomes with a glowing jellyfish's gene, which contains a fluorescent protein that makes it glow. Once the embryos grew into prairie voles, the jellyfish gene was evident in its glowing skin, and even their children had similar strengths of luminescence. These prairie voles will help scientists discover genetic secrets of pair bonding, social behaviors, understand psychiatric disorders better, and also intrigue and fascinate. Look! Glow in the dark voles! [Science Daily]

The suit bears a lot of the stamps of hollow patent trollery, from the outside-the-industry plaintiff company to the oddly late filing. (The iPhone has been out for a couple years now, and it's had a camera the whole time.) But these guys aren't bullshitting: they have a history of winning similar suits against major camera maufacturers, including Sony, which paid them $25m in 2001, and Canon, which paid them $34m in damages in 2003. They've entered into licensing agreements with "many" of the companies they've sued, which include the likes of Samsung, Nokia and Nikon. So, what's their secret? Patents like this:
Digital cameras, have you ever heard of them?

To have a patent as fundamental as this—among others, including a patent on digital shutter buttons, and one for storage and display methods for digital images—awarded in the early 90s and upheld by the courts is nothing to scoff at. When this thing finally kicks off—the scheduling conference isn't until January, so it'll probably be a few months before we see fireworks—it'll be one to watch, since companies who land in court with Apple have a tendency to—one sec—DIE HORRIBLY. There. [LoopinSight, specific patent list here]

Netbooks with Intel's next-gen Pineview Atom N450 CPUs arrive in January, and the faster N470 chip may hit in March. There are also more netbooks with Ion graphics coming down the pipe, including the first Ion-based Eee PC. AMD is still kicking around the netbook space, too.

Little netbook keyboards will still make you feel like a basketball player driving a Mini Cooper, but the damn things are just so cute and cheap we can't stay away. (It's a love / hate relationship). And though HD video is most definitely a reality for netbooks, not all the new models will give you that smooth HD Hulu loving you crave.

Next-Gen Intel Chips

As our break down of Intel's line-up explains, "Pineview" Atom processors (like the single-core N450 or the eventual dual-core 510) integrate the CPU, GPU, and memory controller on the same chip. The benefits: Better graphics, and according to MSI, at least 20 percent better power consumption.

MSI previously gave us the scoop that Pine Trail-M netbooks, using Pineview processors, are slated for a big CES debut. Their upcoming 10-inch convertible touchscreen U150 with Windows 7 will use one. Though Intel still hasn't set an official date (publicly at least), DigiTimes is reporting today that the launch date will be January 10. That means Asus, Acer, Lenovo and MSI, which had planned to launch Atom N450-based netbooks in December, are all now expected to make their new models available from January 11 onwards. As mentioned, we expect to preview them at CES the week before.

DigiTimes goes on to say that the follow-up N470 chip (likely 1.83GHz) is expected to land in March. That syncs with apparent leaks of the Pine Trail-M roadmap that have floated around. And even though netbook makers already ship machines with more than 1GB of RAM, word is that Intel will actually encourage 2GB of memory for the N470. An upgrade over previous Microsoft/Intel limitations imposed to prevent cannibalization of ultra-portable notebooks.

So will N450-based netbooks handle HD video? According to Engadget, not without an extra chip like the Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator, which should add about $30 to the overall price. Apparently, native HD video is still a little down Intel's roadmap path.

So What About Nvidia Ion Netbooks?

I'll be very interested to see just how close Pine Trail-M netbooks get to Ion performance, and for those with an HD video chip, how well they handle high-definition video, too. The integrated nature of Pine Trail-M could give it an advantage in price. But will the price/performance ratio be enough?

Nvidia also has a little ace in the hole called Flash video acceleration. They recently demonstrated an Ion-powered HP Mini 311 playing stutter-free YouTube HD video on an external monitor. Watch the demo below. The final version of Flash 10.1 will make this an everyday occurrence sometime mid-next year. And you can try the Beta now.

News also dropped today that Asus' 12.1-inch Eee PC 1201N, its first Eee PC with Ion graphics, is finally up for pre-order over at Amazon for $500. It'll be available in January, and join existing Ion-based netbooks like the HP Mini 311 (11.6-inch), Lenovo IdeaPad S12 (12.1-inch), and the Samsung N510 (11.6-inch). But here's the thing: they all use existing Diamondville-class Atom processors.

The good news is that Intel has actually pointed out that despite having integrated graphics, Pineview processors are compatible with Ion. We've not seen such a netbook with both yet, but CES is just around the corner. Nvidia has also reportedly said that its Ion 2 (yep, gen 2) chipset for Atom netbooks will arrive by the end of the year. I'm betting we'll see some Ion 2-based netbooks at CES in January, but my guess is we won't be able to buy one until March or April at the earliest.

A netbook with Ion graphics and an Intel Pineview processor like the N450 sounds pretty sweet, right? Hopefully that's what we have to look forward to.

Next Gen Flash Runs 720p Movie Smoothly on a Netbook, Demo -

Distractions, Distractions

Real quick: I'm not ignoring AMD. Having left it too late to join the netbook fray, their upcoming Congo platform will instead mostly complete with Intel's ultra-low voltage processors. We're talking about notebooks with 12 to 13-inch displays. I say mostly, because Asus is readying an AMD Congo-based version of that 12.1-inch Eee PC I mentioned above. The unit's ATI Radeon HD3200 graphics will handle 1080p video.

It's going to be one hell of an interesting Consumer Electronics Show. ARM and VIA are still trying to get inside netbook trousers: Asus has an Android-based "Smartbook" planned for early next year, and Nvidia is pushing its competing ARM-based Tegra chip. Asus also wants to be first with a Chrome OS netbook when Google completes it in the second half of 2010. Finally, there are a ton of interesting eReaders and touchscreen tablets on the horizon...and don't even start me on the Apple Tablet.

A number of these devices might replace what you thought would be your next netbook. Either way, whatever we see, you'll hear about them here in almost pornographic detail. Personally, the tech behind my next $500 netbook—still no small investment—will almost certainly be something we first see under the bright lights of Vegas. Hopefully they'll be better-looking by then, too.

Though I'll probably keep doing what I usually do, and just plug words into my browser's search bar when I wanna know what it means—why bother going to a separate dictionary site? [Google via LA Times]

It's been so long since Kodak's been relevant that it's easy to forget how much they've pioneered. Today, though, they've been reduced to a case study in what happens when companies built on increasingly obsolete technology are slow to evolve. Kodak's OLED business is good example of what's gone wrong: they've made some nice (though questionably necessary) advances with it, but don't have any TV or monitor presence with which to leverage it. So now they've handed it off to LG, who'll save fistloads of cash by having access to Kodak's "fundamental" OLED intellectual property portfolio, while Kodak will use whatever money they got out of the sale to buy down some debt and make some perfectly adequate printers.

To keep the metaphors coming: Kodak hasn't so much passed the torch as they have sold the farm. [BusinessWire via Endgadget]

You can also add four 2-terabyte hard drives from the factory, for $550 a pop ($350 to upgrade the default drive to 2TB). Unfortunately, this is not an architectural change, just a speed bump. [AppleStore—Thanks Michael Fisher]

It's currently most optimized for WebKit browsers—iPhone, Android, webOS and Symbian—but BlackBerrys work too. It's built entirely using Twitter's own APIs, hence the announcement post's title, "Takeout Dogfood." (Why not ice cream?) For now, you'll have to go to mobile.twitter.com to use it, but they'll eventually be transitioning m.twitter.com over to the new site as they work out all the kinks. And so far, it's pretty impressive, even if it does feel a tad slower than I'd like at the moment.

[Twitter, Twitter]

I got an email from Steve Jobs (the night the laptop was revealed) he said you can't build it for a hundred dollars, and my answer was oh yes I can. He was actually a very good critic, and each time we got to a point, I did talk to him.

Surprised? I'm too. It's just too bad that Steve was right in the first place. Like our own Mark Wilson puts it:

The OLPC is such a piece of shit—the one I have here is completely misshapen from lousy production/materials, i dont know how these are supposed to last in harsher environments

I agree both on the spirit and the lettering. [The Digital LIfestyle]