If you know what this is, and where it’s located, you could win a prize in the CNET Road Trip Picture of the Week challenge.

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The Marin County Civic Center was Wright’s last major design, and a rare government building for the master architect. The complex feels like it should be in a sci-fi movie, which of course, it has been.

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A cutting-edge saw and electric cars are among the 10 innovations the magazine’s editors award for solving existing problems in all-new ways.

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Part of a promotion for “Iron Man 2″ on DVD and Blu-ray, Raytheon Sarcos shows off the XOS 2, a real-life exoskeleton that could give combat soldiers superhuman strength in as little as five years.

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When Apple released the Iphone originally, they were careful to roll it out slowly into each market. As a result, there was plenty of grey market imported phones all over the world, as people who really wanted the phone and were not willing to wait would go out of market to get the phone.

One of the last markets they rolled out in was China, and by the time they go there not only had the grey market phones become an issue, but also the black market of knock off and near copy phones from Chinese companies had flooded the market. As a result, Iphone sales in China were not as strong as expected, and Apple just didn’t seem to crack the market.

Now with the Iphone4, Apple is moving much more quickly to get into the market, and will release the phone this week, only days after releasing the Ipad into this market. The phone will be available thorugh China Unicom stores, as well as Apple’s own stores in China. Read the full story here

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Broadband Wireless Access

Some are refering to it as “Wi-Fi on steroids”, others are calling it a significant breakthrough in computer communications. The FCC this week announced that they have approved “white space” wireless, which uses the spaces between TV channels to provide wireless network. The advantages are all over, including that the frequencies have reasonably good building penetration potential (not as easily blocked by buildings) and the range is up to several miles, rather than hundreds of feet.

This is a signifcant development in many ways, including the potential that this sort of system could be much more easily used for Municipal Wi-Fi or other public access wireless systems. The transmission distances would shrink significantly the number of nodes required to provide service to an area, which has been a major drawback in other projects. It certainly would appear to be giving a better alternative between 3G / 4G wireless and wi-fi.

This approval also makes the cities that attempted Muni-wifi before look a little to eager to get going. They weren’t so much early adopters as much as over eager and wasteful.

Check out stories on PC world here, and a good business viewpoint from Businessweek.com here

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Broadband Wireless Access

Founded in 1970, the former Xerox PARC was spun off as a wholly owned division of the printing giant in 2002. On Thursday, the R&D powerhouse that invented laser printing, Ethernet networking, and the GUI celebrated its four decades of innovation.

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Scientists at IBM Research say they have pioneered a way to measure environmental effects on individual atoms much more quickly than was previously possible.

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If you know what this is, and where it’s located, you could win a prize in the CNET Road Trip Picture of the Week challenge.

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Road Trip at Home: Leo Villareal has become one of the most prominent LED artists in the world, but he’d say his work is about applying logic and math to light.

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Worried that you’ll stumble across what happened on the last episode of “Mad Men” while going through your Facebook news feed? There may be hope.

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At an event showcasing its latest set of safety technology, Lexus gave CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman a chance to test his driving skills, and the limits of gravity.

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If you know what this is, and where it’s located, you could win a prize in the CNET Road Trip Picture of the Week challenge.

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Set to air in November, “Industrial Light & Magic: Creating the Impossible” highlights the visual effects house that has earned 15 Oscars for its work on nearly 300 movies.

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Almost every generation of music has had the professional fame whore. Pretty much since media became a visual medium (the TV era), there has always been at least one attention whore running around, doing whatever is required, dressing in whatever they can, just to get attention. The rock and roll world has had more than it’s share, from the outlandish costumes and glasses of (the still in the closet at the time) Elton John, to the makeup of Kiss, the 70s and 80s had their share of pure attention whores. Madonna took the whole deal to another level, being willing to get naked for a book if that is what it took to keep people’s attention.

The latest phenom to run down this road is Lady Gaga, aka Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, and she is proving not only is she willing to go the extra mile, but that she is horribly transparent at it. What is more disgusting, I think, is that the public is buying into it bigtime and rewarding her with huge amounts of fame and money. I was surprised up front that people didn’t catch on to the idea of outrageous outfits (many of which reveal more flesh than the average stripper), or the mind numbingly stupid afflictions (the tea cup), or the whole “on 24 hours a day” attitude. Gaga travels in full “costume”, and is rarely if ever seen in public in anything but outrageous. This morning, she was travelling in basically bra, panties, and fishnet stockings. This isn’t for an event or anything else, it’s just to get on a plane and fly to the next performance.

Her real trick is the outrageous for the intention only of getting the media to cover her. A minidress made entirely out of meat, example, which got enough press that she repeated it (as one of her many different outfits) at the MTV awards. She changed outfits a rediculous number of times. Again, I cannot grasp why people cannot see they are being set up. Her “connection” with certain people or groups is entirely to outrage as well, including her close personal relationship with failing (or is that flailing) gossip dude Mario Armando Lavandeira, aka Perez Hilton. Her support of causes (this week is the “don’t ask, don’t tell” gay military issue) is also quite transparent, often timed to perfectly match media desire for coverage and not really showing any true depth.

Wake up people… you are falling for an attention whore. The 15 minutes is long overdue. Time to tune out and move on before the maggots come and eat the meat off her back.

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With 78 percent of active users turning to Twitter’s Web site, the company is giving users a new way to see content like photos, videos, and user profiles, without having to navigate away from their main view.

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After nine years and millions of sales, it’s hard to imagine Halo: Reach taking anyone by surprise. But the sixth iteration of the hit franchise could shatter sales records.

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Dual SIM phones have long been popular in places like China. These phones allow the user to have more than a single system available to them. In some cases, this is used to seperate out work and personal lines, or to have access to a better daytime or long distance plan on a different network. Now Motorola has announced the EX128 and X115 phones for the European market. While these sorts of dual sim phones are not popular with the cellular providers (as they are often not locked to a single system and encourage people to shop for better services or prices), the public tends to like them because it allows them to have both a business line (for work) and a personal line, avoiding issues of using the company phone for personal calls.

No indication at this point if these phones will actively support both sims at the same time or will require switching.

For more information on dual SIM phones, check out this article.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Broadband Wireless Access

I was looking through my sat-tv programming guide the other day, and I have been noticing more and more channels using weird timings on their shows, with networks often seeming to want to start and end their programs 1 minute offset from the top of the hour for some reason, perhaps to make it harder to record the next program on another channel. But cable channel SpikeTV had some pretty off numbers, and I was trying to figure out what was up.

Where I first noticed it was CSI repeats running an hour and ten minutes or an hour and twenty minutes each. Half hour shows were running closer to 40 minutes. I though perhaps they had “added scenes” or “never before seen footage” at the source of the extra time. But it turns out to be a much more self serving additional that has stretched out the programming:

They added a ton more commercials.

This evening, I was checking out a replay of one of the past Ultimate Fighter finales, flopping back and forth from the somewhat slack Washington / Dallas game. The fight in question was the Chris Lytle vs Kevin Burns fight. I hadn’t seen it originally, so it was interesting. Round 1 runs a bit long (time out for a major cup kick), maybe 5 and a half to six minutes total. Commercial break time, and the commercials run an astounding 7 minutes and 30 seconds. Second round, another maybe 6 minutes, and we are off for almost 8 more minutes of commercials. So now I have seen 12 minutes of the UFC, and 15 plus minutes of commercials. Holy crap.

During the week, they do similar with other programming, packing in huge numbers of commercials. There is a double benefit here. Not only are they packing in more paying commercials, they are also lowering their programming costs. If you add in 15 minutes extra commercials into an hour long show, you only need 4 episodes to fill a 5 hour block. 25% lower programmming costs, and increases in revenue from commercial sales.

Now for me, this shows one of two things: Either Spike is losing money hand over fist and desperately needs to increase their income and lower costs, or their ratings for most of this stuff is so low that whatever loss of viewership occurs with this commercial message pummeling is significant enough to cost them advertisers or income. Either way, it appears to be short term gains for long term pain, as people will tune out.

Anyone from Spike TV want to comment?

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Stuff Channel

Interesting story from ARS Technica here that suggests that usage of Android OS will sail past Blackberry and iOS by the end of the year. They are still behind Nokia, because of the wider distribution of the Nokia products worldwide. It is interesting to see how quickly Andoid is taking a big chink of the marketplace.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Broadband Wireless Access

No fancy graphics or amusing pictures for this one. Each year as we arrive at September 11th, those of us in the Western world look back at the terrorist acts on that day in 2001 that have forever changed the way we look at our lives. Just like the old “where were you when JFK died?”, pretty much every adult in can remember where they were when they found out what was happening in New York.

Myself, I had just arrived in Las Vegas, getting off a plane about 5 hours before the first hit in New York. I was staying with my then business partner, and he came to wake me up with a “you are probably going to want to see this” sort of deal. It took a while for the concept to register. That was truly one weird day. The days the followed in Vegas were even weirder, with absolutely no planes in the air, no nothing, it was like the city went to sleep. Most of the tourists in the city didn’t want to be there, didn’t have any way to leave, and many of them didn’t have any money to do anything but sit around and watch CNN and see the video of that horrible morning over and over again. It was a truly bizarre time.

The US in particularly has been through many of the stages of grieving. Denial was tried and failed, although there are some who still claim missiles hit the Pentagon, not a plane. Anger has been tried on as well, which lead to George W Bush’s war on terrorism, leading to the current messes that are Iraq and Afghanistan. It has spiraled through depression and frustration, and ended up with a bizarre sort of acceptance that few find truly acceptable.

That acceptance has changed the way that the Western world looks at war, at terrorism, at personal security. American military action has always been against another army, against countries, against, dictators. Iraq in the end may be the last of those wars, and even it has mutated into a battle against terrorist actions. That is a battle that the US is really ill equipped to fight, and many brave men and women, sons and daughters have lost their lives trying to fight the shadows that are the terrorists.

As a whole, the Western world is also less tolerate of people who are “not like them”. There has been plenty of misdirected anger against Muslims, a sort of a nasty undercurrent of hatred. Sometimes it feels like many in the US are sitting at home, sharpening their pitch forks and preparing the fire carrying poles, ready to do a good old fashioned lynching, not against the black man, but against the brown man. Many mosques have been damaged, vandalized. The very beliefs of the Muslim people have come into question, and anger often surfaces when people see that women appear to have fewer rights and are treated poorly, forced to cover up and hide from society.

The current “burn a Koran day” sentiment being fanned by certain groups is just another outcrop of this anger. It’s a stupid act, a needless taunting of a people who already are angry back at the US for years of failed policies and angry military actions in the Middle East. It is the sort of action that drives more sane Muslims to become more militant, more willing to fight against the US.

We spin closer and closer to the abyss, a sort of personal one on one war that is just not going to turn out well. Here is to hoping that on 9/11, saner and more stable minds will win out the day, remember that like nuclear attacks on Japan, we just do not want to ever go down this road again.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Stuff Channel

If you know who this is and where she’s located, you could win a prize in the CNET Road Trip Picture of the Week challenge.

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There’s a whole team behind the special Google logos that mark holidays, big events, and VIP birthdays. CNET’s Daniel Terdiman witnesses the Doodlers in process.

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If you know what this is and where it’s located, you could win a prize in the CNET Road Trip Picture of the Week challenge.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Geek Gestalt – CNET News