pFiled under: a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/detroit-auto-show/" rel="tag"Detroit Auto Show/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/convertibles/" rel="tag"Convertibles/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/bmw/" rel="tag"BMW/a/pimg vspace="4" hspace="4" border="1" alt="" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/12/09-z4-rump.jpg" /br /br /We're waiting with bated breath for the December 15 unveiling of the all-new BMW Z4, but as we inch closer to Z-day we're getting a clearer picture of how the redesigned roadster will look. On Wednesday we a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/03/2010-bmw-z4-leaks-out-onto-web/"caught a glimpse/a of the Z4 that revealed much smoother, very un-Bangle-looking side panels. Above is the newest Z4 teaser, and as you can see, its a booty shot. The first thing we noticed was the bulging rear wheel arch, which gives the Z4 a more sporting personality than its predecessor. BMW designers also added a strong character line that starts from the inside of the headlamp and continues back to the very BMW-looking tail lamps, complete with white LED accent lights. Two healthy-sized exhaust tips reside out back to keep the Z4's naturally aspirated or turbocharged 3.0L in-line six breathing freely.br /br /img vspace="4" hspace="4" border="1" align="right" alt="" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/12/z4-side-spy1.jpg" /If you see the hard top and assume that you're looking at the Z4 coupe, you're likely wrong. The new Z4 will come as a hard-top convertible for 2009, with a soft-top variant rumored to be arriving one year later. Future Zs could also include an a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/11/25/rumormill-2009-bmw-z4-rumored-to-debut-next-month-z2-on-the-wa/"M-inspired variant with the M3's 4.0L V8/a and a smaller Z2 roadster. The new Z4 looks very promising, but we'll hold off on final judgment until we can check out the high-res photos on the 15th.br /br /[Source: a href="http://www.bmwblog.com/2008/12/04/and-here-is-the2009-bmw-z4/"BMW Blog/a]p style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/04/2010-bmw-z4-moons-the-camera/"2010 BMW Z4 moons the camera/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.autoblog.com"Autoblog/a on Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:58:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href=http://www.bmwblog.com/2008/12/04/and-here-is-the2009-bmw-z4/Read/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/04/2010-bmw-z4-moons-the-camera/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/forward/1391805/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/04/2010-bmw-z4-moons-the-camera/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/IIFhp-b6TX994-oNRY0HmI1fTIo/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/IIFhp-b6TX994-oNRY0HmI1fTIo/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=XvW6QxRW"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=XvW6QxRW" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=QQl4GC3D"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=QQl4GC3D" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/autoblog/~4/mpd0meqPh08" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/12/zoetropead.jpg" width="800" height="533" style="display:block;float:none;" /A new Sony Bravia ad from the creators of the Balls, Paint and Play-Doh ads is currently in production in Northern Italy, and we have some shots of the shoot. It looks just as crazy and awesome as its predecessors./p pscript type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" galleryPost('zoetropead', 6, 'Bravia Zoetrope Ad'); /script/p pI'm not sure what the ad is going to end up being, but I do know that it stars Brazilian soccer player Kaka and the huge-ass zoetrope you see being constructed in these photos. The zoetrope, when spun around at a high speed, will create a moving image out of a bunch of static images. It was a very early "movie" device invented in the 19th century. Tonight, it's being certified as the largest zoetrope in the world by the Guiness Book of World Records, and I can't wait to see it in action./p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=6a314ee4f333fc517fcc9ba7f63bc38ep=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=6a314ee4f333fc517fcc9ba7f63bc38ep=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=6a314ee4f333fc517fcc9ba7f63bc38e" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=uRoeuRv1"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=7q44imML"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=gz9D3OK0"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=gz9D3OK0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=NtEW9co3"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=NtEW9co3" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/LCwZ4FYVBwA" height="1" width="1"/

via AppleInsider:

Apple isn't lying in television ads that tout the iPhone 3G as twice as fast as its predecessor, but customers would have to be fools to take those claims at face value, the company argues.


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Apple isn#39;t lying in television ads that tout the iPhone 3G as twice as fast as its predecessor, but customers would have to be fools to take those claims at face value, the company argues.

p style="text-align: center;"a href="http://img.qj.net/uploads/articles_module/126991/popbanner_qjpreviewth.png?899680" rel="lightbox[article126991]" title="Prince 20of 20Persia 20- 20Image 201 20 26nbsp 3B 20 20 26nbsp 3B 20 3Ca 20href 3D 22http 3A//img.qj.net/uploads/articles_module/126991/popbanner.png 3F899680 22 20target 3D 22_blank 22 3E 3Cimg 20src 3D 22/img/newwindow.png 22 20title 3D 22Open 20in 20new 20window 22 20border 3D 220 22 3E 3C/a 3E"img style="margin-bottom: 3px;" alt="Prince of Persia - Image 1" title="Prince of Persia - Image 1" src="http://img.qj.net/uploads/articles_module/126991/popbanner_qjpreviewth.png?899680" align="" border="0"/abr/pbrIt's as simple as this - you asked, he answered. By "he" I meant no less than span style="font-style: italic;"Prince of Persia /spanproducer Ben Mattes from a href="http://ps3.qj.net/tags/ubisoft/178" id="tag" title="makers of GT4"Ubisoft/a. Mattes checks in on some of the most frequently asked fan questions, gives them his answers, and posted them on the PlayStation Blog. Now how about that? Squeenix could take a leaf out of his book. brbrSome of the questions have already been answered on previous announcements and interviews, so let's look at what we don't already know.brbrFor one, it's going to be better-balanced than its predecessors - no draggy fight-less story parts, nor will there be fight-saturation to the point of battle boredom. In addition, the new fighting system will allow newbie gamers to fight well, but give advanced gamers access to wicked combos.brbrAs for lifespan, rushing through the game would take about 12-15 hours. But if you go out of your way collecting trophies and finding out more about the game's story, Mattes reckons you'll take about 18-20. Not bad.brbrIf you're wondering about the relevance to other span style="font-style: italic;"Prince of Persia/span titles, it won't have anything that'll affect the main story. But hardcore fans will get to appreciate a few tidbits that'll remind them of the past titles.brbrBen Mattes did take on a handful, and you can catch that and the rest of his answers for span style="font-style: italic;"Prince of Persia /spanon the PlayStation Blog. Follow the source link and you're good to go.brspan span span id="iTxt"span id="iTxt"span id="iTxt"/span/span/span/span/spanbrbrhr style="width: 100 ; height: 2px;"brspan style="font-weight: bold;"More on the latest on Prince of Persia:br/spanullia href="http://www.qj.net/Jade-from-Beyond-Good-and-Evil-has-unlockable-skin-in-Prince-of-Persia/pg/49/aid/126906"span title="Jade has unlockable skin" style="font-style: italic;"Jade from Beyond Good and Evil has unlockable skin in Prince of Persia/span/a/lilispan title="Jade has unlockable skin" style="font-style: italic;"a href="http://www.qj.net/Achievements-list-for-Prince-of-Persia-released/pg/49/aid/126703"span title="Prince of Persia achievements" style="font-style: italic;"Achievements list for Prince of Persia released/span/abr/span/li/ulbrbrspan span span id="iTxt"span id="iTxt"span id="iTxt"Buy: [Prince of Persia: (a title="Prince of Persia for the PlayStation 3" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001ASJIS6/quickjumpnetw-20"PS3/a, a title="Prince of Persia for the Xbox 360" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001ASJISG/quickjumpnetw-20"Xbox 360/a)]/span/span/span/span/spanbrbrimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/qj/ps3/~4/_P8-V6XGAoA" height="1" width="1"/

http://www.bobatkins.com/photograph...D_review_1.html

"Canon added much more to the Canon EOS 50D than just another 5MP. Improvements over the EOS 40D include: A 15.1 MP CMOS sensor with a "gapless microlens" design for higher efficiency, a 920,000 dot, 3" 640x480 pixel VGA resolution LCD with enhanced anti-reflection coating, a microfocus adjustment which can be applied on a fixed or lens by lens basis, an ISO range from 100-3200, plus expansion to 6400(H1) and 12800(H2)..."

In the 50D, not only were enhancements made, Canon also added new features not seen before on their mid-level digital SLRs. The best enhancement to the 50D is the upgraded 640x480 920,000 pixel screen on the back of the camera. As a current owner of Canon's predecessor, the 40D, its 320x240 screen is the one flaw I found on the otherwise excellent camera it as it is hard to judge your photos. The best new features are the micro focus adjustment and the two higher ISO settings. The only drawback is that Canon once again pushed the number of megapixels to the maximum. In doing so, the 50D photos show noise that is equal to or slightly higher than the 40D. For this reason, I think the 50D is a minor upgrade for a 40D owner, but a significant upgrade for owners of earlier versions of Canon DSLRs.

On Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Jane Jacobs, 2001, Star Wars, and minimalism: Star Wars: A New Heap.

Kubrick's film presented a future of company men moving with assurance and clear intention toward a godlike minimalist object. Lucas, on the other hand, gave us a slapdash world of knuckleheads pursued by industrial-scale minimalists. Visually, Kubrick's film is as seamless and smooth as the modernist authority it mirrored. Like the mid-century modernists, 2001 associated abstraction with the progressive ideals of the United Nations as embodied by its New York headquarters. Lucas, on the other hand, was a nonbeliever. Even the initially smooth and unitary form of the Death Star was shown, as the rebel fighters skimmed its surface, to be deeply fissured with an ever-diminishing body of structural fragments. These crenulated details suggested a depth and complexity to modern life that modernism's pure geometries often obscured.

And this:

A flying saucer had never been a slum before. The immaculate silver sheen of the saucer was reinvented as a dingy Dumpster full of boiler parts, dirty dishes, and decomposing upholstery. Lucas's visual program not only captured the stark utopian logic that girded modern urban planning, it surpassed it. The Millennium Falcon resisted the modernist demand for purity and separation, pushing into the eclecticism of the minimalist expanded field. Its tangled bastard asymmetry made it a truer dream ship than any of its purebred predecessors. It is the first flying saucer imagined as architecture without architects.

(thx, matt)

(link)

div style="FLOAT: right"img title="Xbox 360 Arcade Bundles Get 256MB Internal Storage" alt="Xbox 360 Arcade Bundles Get 256MB Internal Storage" hspace="5" src="http://www.ubergizmo.com/photos/2008/12/arcade-256mb.jpg" vspace="5" border="0" //div pIt is official now - Microsoft's Xbox 360 Arcade units will be equipped with 256MB of internal storage, which is an infinite improvement over its previous iteration (mathematically speaking, of course), since its predecessor came with 256MB of external memory. This would mean you are able to save games and download content the moment you get the Xbox 360 Arcade up and running in your home, although if you plan on traveling with your precious console, you will still need to purchase a Memory Unit. Any other goodies for us this Christmas, Microsoft? Congratulations on your console outselling the Sony PS3 three-to-one during the recent Black Friday period./p pPermalink: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/12/xbox_360_arcade_bundles_get_256mb_internal_storage.html"Xbox 360 Arcade Bundles Get 256MB Internal Storage/a from Ubergizmo (a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com"US/a, a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/fr"FR/a) | a href="http://www.uberbargain.com/"Good deals/a | Hot: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/blackberry_storm_review.html"Storm Review/a/p pmap name="google_ad_map_081202185725" area shape="rect" href="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/imgclick/081202185725?pos=0" coords="1,2,367,28"/ area shape="rect" href="http://services.google.com/feedback/abg" coords="384,10,453,23"//map img usemap="#google_ad_map_081202185725" border="0" src="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/ads?format=468x30_aff_imgamp;client=ca-pub-7335032025195922amp;channel=9684588219amp;output=pngamp;cuid=081202185725amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubergizmo.com%2F15%2Farchives%2F2008%2F12%2Fxbox_360_arcade_bundles_get_256mb_internal_storage.html"//p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/aCM4Nwcwhz_b9CkIrtU9hQrI2bo/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/aCM4Nwcwhz_b9CkIrtU9hQrI2bo/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=8TEBY6tN"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=QaUuut2M"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=QaUuut2M" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=l1stAESG"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=G1FhKTjd"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=G1FhKTjd" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=TNZOLRck"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=TNZOLRck" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ubergizmo/~4/wDa4j2DZYq8" height="1" width="1"/