Gadget Helpline, a UK tech support service, found that well over half of their male customers didn't even bother to read the manual before calling tech support. C'mon guys, is that the best we can do?

Apparently, only 24% of females don't read the manual before picking up the phone. Good on you, ladies. Apparently you're far less lazy than us when it comes to reading.

We guys are worse at figuring out the easy stuff, too. 12% of male callers needed to do something stupid to fix the problem, like plugging the item in or turning it on, versus 7% of female callers.

We're also much less pleasant to talk to. Even through the average female customer spends 33% more time on the phone than the average male, 66% of the helpline staff said they preferred talking to female callers.

Of course, I know that all of you male readers fall into the category of never reading the manual and never having needed to. But still, we could be doing better. [BBC]

This gorgeous building in France is more than just a pretty complex. The Cité du Design does one of the best jobs I've ever seen at concealing the solar panels that help power the structure.

The building is made up of 14,000 equilateral triangles. Some are solar panels, some are windows, others just fill out the structure. The net result is a building that manages to mask the black behemoths you're used to seeing.

I love how the exterior influences the interior lighting, not to mention how great it all looks when lit up. [Inhabitat]

Enough with the back and forth already, Apple. If you're going to kill Atom support then just kill it. Don't toy with us, taking and giving like some sort of merciless god.

The video above shows what happens if you try to boot the latest 10.6.2 developer build on a Hackintosh. As you can see, not much. So if you're running OS X on Atom hardware, hold off on any updates until this whole mess gets sorted out. [OS X Daily]

We knew the the place and the price, just needed to know when the party starts. You can grab a pre-order for the $600 netbook ($300 with two-year contract) at Best Buy and pick it up November 15. [Engadget]

Hank Risan was ordered to pull The Beatles' catalog from the BlueBeat website this week, but those weren't the actual recordings. The tracks were "psycho-acoustic simulations" of the songs. Too bad that defense will never hold up in court.

Hank calls the technique equivalent to a virtual cover band playing The Beatles' songs. He bought all of their albums, had a computer analyze the waveforms to determine their pitch, timbre and other defining qualities, then destroyed the original copies of the music.

He then had a computer reconstruct the songs based on the data it collected from analyzing the waveforms. It wasn't a recording, but a complete mathematical rebuild of the song.

That's really cool, and incredibly impressive that he managed to recreate the tracks from scratch like that, but there's no way the defense stands a chance against EMI's lawyers. I think I remember this argument being tried before with MP3s. A defendant claimed that because a majority of the waveform data was thrown away during encoding, it was not identical to the original recording.

Nice try, said the judge. As long as it's audibly identifiable as a certain recording, it constitutes as copyright infringement. At least that's what I remember. If anyone knows the specific case or I'm completely wrong, please chime in. Have fun in court November 20, Mr. Risan. [FastCompany]

Objectified, Gary Hustwit's look at the world of industrial design, featured a lengthy section on Apple Chief Designer Jon Ive—and now that clip is online for impatient Apple fans to see. [Brainstorm Tech]

The clip is pretty interesting, even if you're not normally enamored with Apple. Ive is the most prominent tech designer of the last two decades, and I like his philosophy on "getting design out of the way." Hopefully the clip motivates you guys to go see the full movie, which is great, even if it doesn't reach the heights of Hustwit's previous effort Helvetica.

The ‘Haptic Cow' recently won Sarah Baillie the Most Innovative Teacher of the Year Award. Hear that, Adam Frucci? It's for learning. Don't get any ideas.

Miss Baillie's invention solves one of the biggest problems in veterinary medicine. That is, once your hand is up an cow's butt you can't really see anything you're doing. Now, with robotic organs and a monitor, she can teach students exactly what they should (and definitely should not) be grabbing.

On a related note, Miss Baillie claims she is also working on a 'Haptic Horse.' Kent Smith may well have some ideas for her, as evidenced by this September Photoshop Contest entry:
If you'd like to be put in touch, Miss Baille, please let me know. [Wired]

Apparently Microsoft's COFEE software that helps law enforcement grab data from password protected or encrypted sources is leaking all over the internet. So not only can you steal the software, but break the law by using it too.

Yep, it's all out there on the internet, but if you use it to grab private data from someone else's computer chances are you're in for a world of legal hurt. It's one of the few pieces of software I can think of where the subsequent use is more illegal than the act of downloading it.

But I know it's not the only one. What else can you guys come up with? [CrunchGear, Pirate Merch]

A while ago I was considering putting low-powered 5400 RPM drives into a NAS. I was worried about performance, but Tom's Hardware shows us that drive speed isn't the bottleneck, and how slower drives can even beat faster ones.

The main bottleneck in any NAS is the RAID engine. Since many NAS units don't include a dedicated controller, oftentimes the speed of the drive just doesn't matter. If you're using a blazing-fast hardware RAID card in your own custom built setup, then drive speed might make a difference. But for most consumer units, the controller is the bottleneck.

With that in mind, you can go with slower 5400 RPM drives that reduce power consumption, generate less heat, and will likely cost less up front too. Even if you have a dedicated RAID card that could let a 7200 RPM drive do it's thing at full speed, I'd consider the benefits of low-power drives to outweigh the marginal speed increase you might see.

This chart shows the difference between Samsung 7200 and 5400 RPM drives in various RAID configurations:

Not much, right? So think twice before you drop more than necessary on 7200 RPM drives for your backup unit. Check out the link for the full test rundown. [Tom's Hardware]