To watch this transparent cube build a ceramic bowl must be like watching magic. The nozzle shoots clay out, designing sculptures layer by layer, until the finished object is ready to be fired in a kiln.

Below you can see some of the creations made from the powder clay mixing with water in the printer's tubes. If ever the movie Ghost is remade and updated with 21st century technology, Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore's replacements should be straddling one of these 3D ceramic printers instead. Now there's a film I'd pay money to watch. [Unfold via Designboom]

The New York Times is saying that Walmart will acquire Vudu, the online movie service. The report's consistent with earlier rumors, and may just be a match made in heaven.

Walmart sells more DVDs than just about anybody on the planet, but have so far been shut out of the increasingly popular movie streaming business that's buoyed Netflix recently. Vudu gives them a convenient way into that market without having to build from the ground up.

For Vudu, selling out couldn't come at a better time: they've never been profitable, although they've been gaining some traction by having their players embedded in increasing numbers of TVs. Being owned by the world's largest retailer will help them build on that momentum. It also gives consumer electronics makers even more incentive to preload their sets with Vudu, since Walmart will be more inclined to sell products that incorporate a property that it owns.

But what about for consumers? Actually, it could end up being a win there, too. Nobody's more effective at driving down prices than the big box retailer, and giving Vudu more visibility and market share should lead to some healthy price competition.

Time will tell, but the could be one business transaction that ends up making sense for just about everyone. [NY Times]

A 43-year-old mother of three is currently wanted by the police in Oklahoma City for seducing a 14-year-old kid on PlayStation Home. Her avatar must've been really something.

Apparently, Annamay Alexander of Deltona, FL met this kid via Home and started sending him messages and a picture of her in her underwear. She then traveled to Oklahoma to see him and met with his mom, claiming to be there to talk about the kid wanting to marry her daughter. OK then!

Even after being told off by the kids mom, she continued to send downright-unsettling texts like "My body is yours to do whatever you want with," and "I love you and we are going to get married."

So yeah, be careful out there in those virtual worlds, kids. It's probably best to stick with Xbox Live, where the 14-year-old boys are so fucking obnoxious no one would ever in their right mind try to seduce them. [KOCO via Kotaku]

What happens when Marcus Tremonto, the lighting artist behind this thing updates Kidrobot's famed MUNNY dolls? Pew pew crosses with puke...and I mean that in the best possible way.

Starting this Friday, Kidrobot NY will have Tremonto's "Lightbot" MUNNY remixes on display (and apparently available for purchase, too). Each is signed, numbered and sold in its own custom box. I'm a bit curious as to the power source, but I'm assuming a plug is hiding there somewhere. [KRonikle]

Ultra-trendy fashion designer Henry Holland held his London Fashion Week show on Saturday, where the BlackBerry-using front row sitters could buy the clothes straight from the catwalk using the House of Holland app.

It's the first time a fashion designer's allowed their clothes to be purchased from an app during a show—in the UK that is, but in Japan they've been doing this kind of thing for a while on their cellphones—with the slogan t-shirts painted with internet acronyms like FFS, CTFO and HML. Don't ask me to explain what they mean, otherwise I'll tell you to KMT.

Here's me attempting to blend some knowledge of fashion with slightly more knowledge of tech: maybe "next season" Henry Holland will be offering an augmented reality app where the camera will recognize each "piece" and let you purchase them on the spot with your credit card, using the inevitable Square BlackBerry peripheral?

The app is a free download, and available now, where you can still buy the (overpriced) t-shirts for £55 / $85. [House of Holland BlackBerry App]

Google Earth is available on Android! (Isn't is weird that this didn't happen earlier? It's been on the iPhone for a year! Anyway.) The catch? For now, it only works on the Nexus One, which basically nobody owns. Don't worry, Droiders: Soon.

For now, Google Earth will only work on handsets with Android 2.1, which effectively limits it to the Nexus One. The good news is that the Droid, and some older HTC handsets, are due for a 2.1 upgrade relatively soon. The bad news is that even Google can't even escape Android's increasingly worrying fragmentation problem with its own apps, on its own operating system. This doesn't bode well.

Anyway, the app looks almost exactly like it does on the iPhone, meaning that you get to play God with a barren, lifeless Earth, in full 3D, with your fingers. Oh, and there's voice navigation! So there's that. [AndroidGuys]

U.S. authorities have tracked down the man who wrote the code used in the hacker attack on Google. He's a "freelance security consultant" in China, and his participation makes it even harder for the Chinese government to deny involvement.

The man's role was an oblique one: while he wrote the code that took advantage of a security hole in Internet Explorer, he himself didn't do any actual hacking. But according to the Financial Times, the Chinese government has "special access" to his work:

"If he wants to do the research he's good at, he has to toe the line now and again," the US analyst said. "He would rather not have uniformed guys looking over his shoulder, but there is no way anyone of his skill level can get away from that kind of thing. The state has privileged access to these researchers' work."

The "research he's good at," apparently, being breaking into computers and inserting spyware on them.

Hopefully by identifying the writer of the code, analysts are closer to tracking down the actual persons responsible. But until then, it's increasingly clear that the Chinese government had a prominent role in the implementation. [FT]

That's the moral of this NYT story about the bubbling war in mobile chips. They're expensive to make. And, no one's better at making them than Intel, whose manufacturing tech is years ahead of anybody else.

Until recently, foundries which manufactured chips on contract stuck to simpler chip designs because that's what their tech was suited for. But now smartphones, and the chips inside of them, are a BFD, so competition's ramping up, with $3 billion plants. GlobalFoundries, which was spun out of AMD, is one of the hot-and-heavy new guys, and about to open a massively advanced (and expensive) new plant in Germany. The first chips they're making? For mobile devices.

Also expensive? Designing chips. The NYT pegs the cost of simply designing a chip at a billion dollars. (Exactly just how much "from scratch" they mean is debatable, since Apple's A4 chip and Nvidia's Tegra use off-the-shelf designs from ARM and others.)

Where things will get interesting is when these mobile chips, mostly ARM-flavored, finally start crossing the same line as Intel's, since ARM chips are scaling up as Intel scales down, and the intersection's not too far away. And that's where Intel's got a chance to really show what it's made of, since they're the last game in town that still designs and makes its own chips. [NYT]

Undo relationship wrongs with this ctrl+z apology card, finely printed with hand-mixed ink on 100% cotton extra soft paper. $3.75. (Note: If things don't work out, the purchase of the card cannot be ctrl+z'd.) [Etsy via 9gag via thenextweb]

In 2009, Samsung's shipments of flat panel TVs (plasmas and LCDs) rose 22.6%, making them the number one US supplier, moving 6.6 million televisions in all. But you know who grew way, way, way more? Vizio.

Between 2008 and 2009, Vizio nearly doubled their US sales, which grew 92.1% as the company sold 5.9 million TVs—that's nearly one out of every five LCDs sold, or enough for them to claim the title as #1 in LCDs. It's hard to imagine anything but Vizio's complete market domination in the near future (even if they aren't an undisputed leader in quality).

Interestingly enough, Toshiba had nearly as much growth as Vizio in the LCD industry (confirming my suspicions that I'd suddenly seen their name everywhere), but they own a modest 7.6% of the market share.

All of these figures are courtesy of iSuppli's market analysis. So...do you have any TV brand loyalty? Or is it all about price?

Vizio Takes Lead in U.S. LCD-TV Market in 2009; Samsung Holds Flat-Panel Top Spot

El Segundo, Calif., February 22, 2010-Vizio Inc. became the leading LCD-TV brand in the United States in 2009, while Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. took the top spot in overall flat-panel television market for the year, according to iSuppli Corp.
U.S.-based Vizio's LCD-TV shipments nearly doubled in 2009, rising to 5.9 million units, up 92.1 percent from 3.1 million in 2008. This vastly exceeded the 29 percent growth of the overall U.S. LCD-TV market for the year and represented the strongest growth among the Top-6 brands. Company market share rose to 18.7 percent for the year, up from 12.6 percent in 2008.
This gave U.S.-based Vizio the No.-1 rank in 2009, up from third place in 2008.
"Vizio continues to benefit from its strong brand recognition among U.S. consumers," said Riddhi Patel, director, television systems and retail services for iSuppli. "The company already has established itself as the price leader in LCD-TVs. The company played to this strength in 2009 by offering attractive promotions to consumers. Furthermore, Vizio moved to make its LCD-TV products more competitive with premium brands, adding higher-end features such as LED backlights and Internet connectivity."
Vizio led the U.S. LCD-TV market during every quarter of 2009, except for the third, when Samsung took the top spot due to the popularity of its LED-backlit sets.

Samsung tops in flat panel TV
Looking at the overall U.S. flat-panel television market, consisting of both LCD-TVs and plasma sets, South Korea's Samsung retained leadership in 2009.
Samsung's U.S. flat-panel television shipments rose to 6.6 million units in 2009, up 22.6 percent from 5.4 million units in 2008. The company ended 2009 with a market share of 18.4 percent, virtually unchanged from 18.5 percent in 2008.
"Samsung maintained its overall leadership in the U.S. flat panel television market due to the continued success of the LED-backlit LCD TVs and its strong price competitiveness in both value and premium TV segments," Patel said.

Toshiba and Sony star in 2009
The second strongest performance among the Top-6 LCD-TV brands in the United States in 2009 was posted by Japan's Toshiba Corp., which achieved a stunning 81.7 percent increase in unit shipments for the year. The company ended 2009 with a 7.6 percent share of unit shipments, up from 4.2 percent in 2008, giving it a fourth-place ranking for the year.
"Toshiba's rise was due to its increased shipments of LCD TVs at aggressive price points, which are much closer to the value brands," Patel said.
Sony Corp. of Japan was the best performer in the U.S. LCD TV market in the fourth quarter, with its share rising to 13.2 percent, up from 7.7 percent in the third quarter.
"Sony's strong fourth-quarter performance mainly was driven by its aggressive pricing and promotions for the Christmas season," Patel said. "Consumers were attracted by Sony's bundled deals combining LCD TVs with PlayStation 3 video game consoles and Blu-ray players."
Sony ranked third in the U.S. LCD-TV market both in the fourth quarter and for the entire year of 2009.
The attached tables present iSuppli's Top-6 rankings for LCD-TV and flat-panel television in the United States for the fourth quarter and for all of 2009.

If Nexus One reviewers could agree on one thing, it was that the phone has a stunning screen. But for those inky blacks and vivid colors, you're apparently paying a hefty price: I mean, look at that.

DisplayMate ran a battery of comparative tests on the Nexus One's AMOLED screen, and came away with a damning list of issues:

• The Nexus One only uses 16 bit color, which means that "Red and Blue only have 32 possible intensity levels and Green only has 64 possible intensity levels," as compared to the iPhone and others, which have at least 256 intensity levels for each color. Result: That horrible banding you see above.

• Android's sub-pixel rendering is great for icons and text, but terrible for images. Photos are "rendered poorly and inaccurately, with over-saturated colors, bad color and gray-scale accuracy, large color and gray-scale tracking errors, calibration errors, lots of image noise from excessive edge and sharpness processing, and many artifacts." Result: Blown-out areas in photographs, image noise, and general gaudiness in colorful images.

• The display's peak white brightness is oddly low. Result: It's hard to see the screen when used outdoors. (This, for what it's worth, we already knew.)

There's a lot more to chew on in DisplayMate's post, and the effect is actually worse than portrayed in their images, or ours above, since by the time you see them, they've been photographed, resaved and redisplayed on another display. And the results aren't trivial: in the right kind of photograph, there is significant color banding on the Nexus One, where there wouldn't be on virtually any other smartphone.

But when we came across this story, it took most of us by surprise, because those of us that'd used a Nexus One were utterly convinced of its display's awesomeness. From our review:

The AMOLED screen is gorgeous, and all the colors pop to the point that it makes both the iPhone 3GS and the Droid look washed out. It's really, really good.

Here's the thing: This is still true. HTC and Google likely made a conscious decision to sacrifice color fidelity, outdoor viewability, and maybe even touch accuracy for a screen that, experientially speaking, blows everything else out of the water. And depending on how anal you are, this is probably fine.

The question now facing Nexus One owners is a psychological one: Now that you know about the display's (or software's) flaws, will your brain still be able to look past them?

UPDATE: Some commenters are pointing to the fact that DisplayMate's testing appears to have been done in Android's gallery app, which may be compressing images and throwing the tests. This could be part of the problem, but our comparison shot, posted at the top of this article, was taken from within Android's browser, not the gallery app. If this is merely software issue, it runs across at least the gallery and browser apps, which are the apps you're most likely to view images in. Something's wrong here. [DisplayMate]

Dear Apple, we get that you're taking away our almost naughty iPhone apps, but why are you denying us the iTouch My Friends app? There's no violence, no sexual content, and nothing sexy other than silly avatars getting dressed up.

You can see a demo of what the iTouch My Friends app does with our very own John Herrman as the guinea pig right below. Note that the developers have actually removed any references to alcohol in an attempt to get the app approved:

In essence you're just making goofy animated videos using your friends' faces—not really different from another app which lets you push similar avatars down stairs. There doesn't seem to be any objectionable content in the app, but this is what the developers encountered while going through the approval process:

We never offered sexual content as part of the iTouch My Friends experience, so we set to work stripping all content from the app that was violent or referenced alcohol. We removed a number of props, effects and movies (including bottles of beer, samurai swords and the vomit effect) that seemed to be against the policy. We added replacement props and movies featuring dances and superhero themes, and resubmitted the application on February 2.

After resubmitting, another Apple representative informed us that there was a bug in their submission system, and held our application out of review. Finally, after contacting them many times in an attempt to resolve the issue, iTouch My Friends was put back into review on February 9. Again we anxiously began preparing for the launch of our application.

Last Thursday, February 18, exactly one month after our initial submission to Apple, iTouch My Friends was again rejected. This time, Apple has not contacted us or given a reason for the rejection, the app has simply appeared in the rejected state on Apple's submission tool. We have tried contacting Apple on all official channels for an explanation. So far we have not gotten anything out of them except for the red icon telling us our app is not going to see the store any time soon.

At this point we are unsure how we should proceed. As far as we know iTouch My Friends does not violate any of the rules of Apple's store. It is a large and complex app, so it's possible we overlooked or missed some detail that Apple does not like. Like we did with the objectionable content, we are willing and eager to bring the app to a conforming state, but without knowing what we are doing wrong it is impossible for us to know what we need to fix.

So what's wrong with this app and why wouldn't an even tamer version fly through the approval process? [Toga Pit]

We have been seeing concepts similar to this Peugeot bubble electric car for years now, but they never seem to materialize. Why? Aren't people interested in getting to deserted beaches to walk barefoot, alone, lost in a nostalgic mood?

Apparently not. [Coroflot via Likecool]

You've gotta love companies trying to figure out this whole "social networking" thing. Take Denny's, for example. Their menus invite you to follow @dennys on Twitter. They do not run @dennys.

Instead, a dude from Taiwan named Dennys Hsieh owns it. And these menus have been this way for months.

A Denny's rep says the menus are a result of a misprint, and that they run two Twitter accounts: @DennysAllNightr for late night customers and @DennysGrandSlam for morning people. Both of those are featured on the respective late night and breakfast menus. The normal menus, however, still point you to Mr. Hsieh.

It's all pretty troubling, at least to me. I mean, if I can't get Moon Over My Hammy updates via Twitter, what the hell is the point of Twitter? Come on, Denny's! [CNET]

Retired police officer Bill Angus hates speeding almost as much as he loves birds. So he did what any reasonable person would do: design a feeder that looks exactly like a speed camera, and mount it in his front yard.

And it seems to be working! At least, the slowing traffic part; there's no word on how birds have taken to it yet:

Mr Angus insists - without so much as a hint of a smile - that the effect on speeders is no more than a happy coincidence.

'Why does everyone think it's a fake speed camera?' he asked.

'It's a bird box and has been designed this way to stop people stealing it. It's a bright colour, too, to attract the blue tits and finches. Since I have put it up, the traffic is keeping to 30mph. If people want to think it is a camera, that is a matter for themselves.'

It may not have the same vigilante cachet as, say, Batman, but bonus points for creativity. And although it's sneaky, I'd much prefer a birdhouse that looks like a speed trap than a speed trap disguised as a birdhouse. [Daily Mail UK via Neatorama]

If you enjoy 33-page camera reviews, today's your lucky day, friend, with DP Review's epic page-turner on Canon's 1D Mark IV. Solid low-light performance, the fastest full-res shooting on the planet, and they've fixed the AF. Video? Dicier: [DP Review]

I'd be more excited if this special limited edition color was a never-seen-before color, but alas Pentax thinks the camera world can still get excited about silver. Or maybe silver is rare in Japan, where this model is launching?

The K-7 has been around since last summer, but only 1,000 of these limited edition model exist. If the new silver color, a reinforced LCD screen and new firmware and image processing software is making your fingers itch at the thought of flying out to Japan to scoop one up, it's on sale March 13th for the equivalent of $1,420.

Apart from those minor changes, it's still the same old 14.6-megapixel, 720-p-shooting camera which can be picked up for as low as $1,000 on Amazon. [CrunchGear]

Over at Beyond Binary, Ina Fried's got a fascinating profile of Omega Timing, the company that's been managing event timing at the Olympics for over 70 years. Counting seconds now is somehow totally different than it was in 1936.

Take the methods for timing skiers:

Less than a century ago, the timing of downhill skiing required someone at the top and bottom of the run, each with a stopwatch synchronized to the time of day.

Every few skiers, the timer at the top would send down a piece of paper with the start times of the last few skiers and then some math would ensue, eventually resulting in the time of the run being calculated.

Or the above pictured replacement for the classic—and conceptually bizarre, because what the hell, a gun?—starter pistol:

Among the many Winter Olympics firsts at Vancouver is the use of a new all-electronic starter gun that emits a consistent sound and light. Plus, says Omega's Christophe Berthaud, it's a whole lot easier to get through airport security.

Or—and this is the most surprising bit—the raw manpower it takes to time the Olympics now, versus the good old days:

At its first Olympics, in Germany in 1936, Omega sent a single technician with 27 stopwatches to the Games. At the 2006 Turin, Italy, Winter Games, Omega sent 208 people—127 timekeepers and 81 data handlers—along with some 220 tons of equipment.

I'm partial to the classic classic method, by which competitors judged their own finishing times, got in fights about who finished first, and settled the dispute like real athletes: On the floor of the coliseum, with improvised weapons, while running from recently imported, still very disoriented exotic animals. Athletes these day! [CNET]

The 23.6-inch Acer GD235HZ ($399) and Alienware OptX AW2310 ($499) represent the latest gen 3DHD monitors. So which is the better buy for 3D gaming? Tom's Guide actually likes them both quite a bit.

In their epic review of these 120Hz displays, Tom's gives Acer points for excellent contrast while praising the Alienware for superior color. Both seem equal in terms of actual 3D (and much improved from the previous generation of 3D LCDs), which makes sense given that two monitors with equal refresh rates and resolution are being driven by identical graphics cards and looked at with identical NVIDIA shutter glasses.

For Tom's, it comes down to amenities, which they feel Alienware nails with extra ports, a nicer build and a swiveling display. I personally just dig that orange finish. Since the OptX AW2310 is on sale for $450 at the time of this post, it certainly sounds worth the $50 premium, should you want to enter that whole 3D glasses lifestyle. [Tom's Guide]

Windows Phone 7 could save Microsoft's mobile future, but what do developers think about it? IM app BeeJive's CEO Kai Yu: "I think it's just royally fucked. That place is so big: The tools, the people, it's all so fragmented."

The one developer Wired talked to who was actually kinda up on Windows Phone 7 was the COO of Pageonce, which makes the awesome app Personal Assistant for iPhone and BlackBerry—he's excited that Microsoft "has some incredible platforms they can tie all together with the new mobile platform."

But then there's Peter Hoddie, the CEO of Kinoma, which makes media software for Windows Mobile, who wasn't too thrilled about Silverlight supposedly being a huge component of the app development kit: "Silverlight, geez...Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water."

Given the way some developers feel Microsoft's mistreated them in the past—and the way Microsoft's basically killed the current Windows Mobile platform—it sounds like Microsoft's got a ton of sweet talking to do to rally the dev troops if they wanna be on the same playing field as other platforms when it comes to apps. More quotes from developers over at Gadget Lab: [Gadget Lab]

Update: Corrected a mix-up with the quotes from Pageonce and Kinoma's respective execs.