“Hack Days” are intended to celebrate creativity as developers race to create Web apps in less than 24 hours. And past events have had performances from Beck and Girl Talk. But hiring go-go dancers isn’t exactly going to attract more women to the male-dominated industry.

It’s not much worse than some of the booth babe demonstrations I’ve seen, though. And don’t tell anyone, but I’m a fan of those gals. [Yahoo Developer Blog via Simonwillison.net]

Sorry
I wanted to acknowledge the public reaction generated by the images of female dancers at our Taiwan Open Hack Day this past weekend. Our hack events are designed to give developers an opportunity to learn about our APIs and technologies. As many folks have rightly pointed out, the “Hack Girls” aspect of our Taiwan Hack Day is not reflective of that spirit or purpose. And it’s certainly not the message we want to send about our values here at Yahoo!. Hack Days are about making everyone feel welcome, including women coders and technologists.

This incident is regrettable and we apologise to anyone that we have offended. Rest assured, it won’t happen again.

If and when we will ever see the M20 in the states is open for debate. After all, we are still waiting on the Linux-powered G60. The problem is that many people probably stopped caring about a Garmin GPS phone months ago. [CENS via Engadget]

The Colossus 120 (128GB) and 250 (256GB) will cost $US300 and $US650, respectively. As a quick comparison, Intel’s recently announced—and delayed—X-25M drives have channel prices of about $US225 (80GB) and $US440 (160GB).

At the upper end of town, the Colussus 500 (512GB) and 1TB (1024GB) SSDs will cost your first born $US1200 and $US2200.

First unveiled in prototype form at Computex 2009, the 3.5-inch (but too-big for laptops) Colussus drives have claimed read speeds of up to 250MB/s (write), and 220MB/s (read) over a SATA2 interface. [Gizmag and Engadget]

The family now gets $US52,600 (up from $US44,000) as well as $US4,385 every year as long as one of the parents are alive. The Foxconn official that leaked this information to the press spoke anonymously since he wasn’t a qualified press-relations employee. [Yahoo]

It was January of 2008 when we first caught wind of Garmin’s widening ambitions, and grabbed our first joyful glimpse of the navigation-centric handset, followed by an (also joyful!) hands-on. But that was in February, nearly a year after the announcement. And also, again, that was February, about six months ago. The ASUS-built Nuvifone was uniformly impressive from the start—with a custom-built Linux OS, creative location-aware applications, clean styling—but it’ll have a much tougher go of it in the age of app stores, especially against the 3GS, Pre, and Hero, which have pretty impressive GPS integration in their own right.

Sadly all we’re learning today is that the G60—to be followed closely by the much less exciting Windows Mobile M20—is shipping somewhere—US release, decidedly not happening in Q3 of last year, is still unknown, as is the price. [Garmin]

The Taiwan National Stadium makes use of 60 distributed Apogee Sound AE-7SX weather-resistant loudspeakers for primary seating area coverage, 12 Apogee Sound ALA-5WSX weather resistant Acoustic Linear Array loudspeakers provides field coverage, and 2 Apogee Sound AFI-205 and two AFI-Point5 loudspeakers provide Control Room audio monitoring. The 76 loudspeakers are powered by 52 Peavey Electronics model PV2600 and 3 model PV1500 power amplifiers. Additional signal processing equipment includes Apogee Sound loudspeaker controllers, Symetrix SymNet Digital Signal Processing equipment, an Altair 48-channel mixing desk, Tascam CD, DVD and cassette players, Peavey Electronics, microphones, and CUE Touch Panel Controllers, all wired together with 9,500 meters (5.5 miles) of Klotz Cable.

Naturally, going 100% solar with an installation like this requires a buttload of green tech:

The ultra-modern $US5 billion Taiwan National Stadium, designed by renowned Japanese architect Toyo Ito, and constructed for the 2009 World Games, features a stunning 14,155 square meter roof incorporating 8,844 solar panels, which emulates the form of a flowing river, and generates 1.14 million KWh annually preventing the release of 660 tons-per-annum of atmospheric carbon dioxide. On days when the Taiwan National Stadium is not in use, the electricity generated from its roof is fed back the city’s electrical grid where it will meet almost 80% of the area’s energy requirements.

Indeed, if you look at the images of the roof, it seems to be completely covered in “a flowing river” of solar panels. [PrthatRocks]

The entire exterior is covered with curved fins that generate wind energy while also making it look like a huge cloud. At least it would be, if it was selected as the winning entry in the contest to design the performing arts centre. Which is wasn’t. But still, it’s a pretty stunning design. [Plus Mood via Inhabitat]

This kind of thing isn’t too uncommon, and normally a company like Dell would either honour the price (if relatively few orders were placed) or offer some kind of discount, so as not to, you know, go out of business. But the Taiwanese government is now saying Dell must honour all 140,000 orders or face prosecution for violation of fair trade laws (and no, we have no idea what fair trade has to do with this situation).

Dell has apologised and says it will compensate buyers for the mistake, but they probably mean some sort of discount instead of a loss of millions of dollars. [Channel Register via The Raw Feed]

Acer’s rise to the number two spot behind Hewlett-Packard was fuelled in part by netbooks and other low-cost PC models, as well as what people in the biz call “vision” as it pertains to introducing new PC features months before the competition even knew consumers wanted them. The souring economy has helped too, notes the New York Times, as consumers were naturally inclined to reward PC companies that could sell them cheaper hardware.

Perhaps the biggest piece of the explosive growth puzzle, however, is Acer’s relatively recent acquisition spree. The short list read, to me, like a laundry list of PCs that friends and I had owned in the early 1990s:

Over the last two years, it has acquired brands like eMachines, Gateway and Packard Bell. It pitches eMachines as its most affordable brand, while Acer-branded products cater to the mainstream. The Gateway moniker covers more expensive, flashier computers in the United States, while the Packard Bell brand serves the same purpose in Europe.

The four-front branding assault adds a thick layer of complexity to the company’s ultimate goal of establishing a consistent image around the globe. But Mr. Lanci says PC makers must follow the lead of automobile companies and the likes of Procter & Gamble with a brand for every occasion now that consumers make up such a large part of the computer business.

These factors have combined to give Acer a sure shot at dethroning the mighty Dell as the No. 2 PC maker. That fact sat strangely with us at Gizmodo today, if only because of the scant anecdotal evidence we’ve associated with the brand: Neither Blam or I could name one person we know who owns an Acer computer.

Obviously someone is buying all these computers (and that comment isn’t meant as a sleight against Acer at all), but who? You? [NYT]

Details are scarce, but it appears that Taiwan-based Aware Electronics is planning to release a netbook with a detachable screen (similar to the Touch Book) for only $US150.

As far as specs are concerned, the only information available at this time is that it will feature an 8MB SSD and 512MB of RAM—a significant jump from the $US400 Touch Book. It can also run Windows XP or Linux. That sounds great, but if the A-View ever becomes widely available, I would expect that a hefty price increase might come along with it. [Digitimes]