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Hummer H1 and H2 on BBC's 'Top Gear'

Hummer has been fairly newsworthy lately as General Motors has announced its plans to discontinue the SUV line and sell it off to a Chinese machinery manufacturer, and lately I've been dedicating a few blogs to the Hummer as GM plans to pull the plug on the Hummer brand. And as you may know I've become quite the fan of the popular BBC TV program "Top Gear." So I thought we'd have a little more fun with the blog with today's video featuring sharp-tongued host Jeremy Clarkson taking a spin in not one but … Read more

The 404 Podcast 498: Where Jeff battles the Triad

We love getting (scheduled) visits from fans of The 404, especially when they come with treats for us! Henry Chu, aka Charlie Chu, aka Tapchus in the chat room, stopped by this morning to pick up some stickers and ended up joining us in the studio for the first segment of the show. If you're watching the video, that's Henry taking some flicks of the CNET podcast studio. Be sure to send us those pictures, Henry, and thanks for the delicious pastries!

Plenty of stories to talk about today, including a kooky wedding stunt courtesy of Gizmodo. Instead of a traditional flower girl, an S.F. bride commissioned her robot-crazed sister to build a flower-bearing bot instead! We're all nerds here, but unfortunately Jeff tells us that there will be no robots in attendance at his wedding in October 2010.

Next up, we have some very exciting news, albeit three years too late, about the "Arrested Development" movie starting to unfold. The movie starts production this year, and despite rumors about Michael Cera, the entire cast will reprise their roles in the movie. Can't wait!

If you were ever a fan of the Mega Man series, get ready for Mega Man 10! We take a special look at Mega Man's eight new enemies (with eight painfully uncreative names, like Sheep Man) in the downloadable title, available for all three platforms this March.

EPISODE 498 Subscribe in iTunes audio | Suscribe to iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

2010 Ferrari California: The Practical Ferrari?

I know I've been giving a lot of lip service to Ferrari lately on this blog, but it's hard to argue that it's not been informative and fun. I promise to move on to other subjects this week, but I have one more Prancing Horse I'd like to take a closer look at.

Some critics and consumers have suggested that the introduction of the new Ferrari sports supercar, the 458 Italia, came about partly because certain Ferrari snobs were put off by the 2009 Ferrari California's more streamlined and practical features and design. It does … Read more

Ferrari F430 Scuderia on BBC's 'Top Gear'

Most people who know me consider me to be quite sarcastic. It turns out, that's a trait I share with my favorite "snarky British dude" Jeremy Clarkson, who hosts the popular British TV program "Top Gear." The BBC show is dedicated to automobiles and racing but with a biting sense of humor to make things interesting. Well, between all the great European cars and the sometimes nasty commentary, it's no surprise that I've become quite a fan of the show.

This isn't the first time I've featured a "Top Gear&… Read more

Philips' Activa MP3 player insults the lazy

LAS VEGAS--Wishing that your MP3 player would act more like a personal trainer? Me neither, but Philips is banking on finding an audience of motivation-starved fitness types for its newly announced Activa MP3 player ($129), available worldwide in April.

To put a new spin on working out with your MP3 player, the Activa gives gym rats real-time voice feedback on their performance. Only time will tell if the voice is more in step with the Wii Fit style of chipper encouragement, or with the Tony Little brand of aggressive shouting.

Assuming that the voice can be switched off for those … Read more

Cloud-scaling on Amazon with Memcached

One of the headlines that caught my eye today is this blog post from the Amazon Web Services team about a new Memcached as a service offering from Gear6.

For years, Memcached has been used quietly to provide in-memory caching for many popular Web sites, from LiveJournal (for which it was first developed six years ago) to Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook. In the last couple of months, Facebook has opened up about how it scales, and one the key technologies enabling this is Memcached, which services 120 million queries every second. To achieve this, Facebook admits it has had to … Read more

Offline Gmail access now a full-fledged feature

After more than five years as a publicly available test version, Gmail shed its beta label in July. Now one feature key to the Net giant's cloud-computing aspirations, offline access to Gmail, also has grown up less than a year after its debut.

"Offline Gmail is graduating from Labs and becoming a regular part of Gmail," Google programmer Aaron Whyte announced the change Monday in a blog post.

Offline Gmail support, which relies on a Google browser plug-in called Gears, lets people read, search, organize, and compose e-mail even when there's no Net connection; sent messages … Read more

2010 Lamborghini Murcielago LP670-4 SuperVeloce

Last week I got to attend the 52nd Annual International Auto Show in San Francisco. I actually got to sit behind the wheel of many fine automobiles, but one of the several cars that were off limits was the 2010 Lamborghini Murcielago. Unfortunately I've never had the pleasure of sitting (let alone driving) in a Lambo, so I've got to live vicariously through Web videos like this to get a taste of what it's like to drive the 2010 Lamborghini Murcielago LP670-4 SuperVeloce. And just as you might expect, this car appears to kick ass even on … Read more