Here's something you don't expect to see: Comcast taking part in a test of new P4P file sharing protocol that offers up greatly increased speeds. And they actually want to make its use widespread. What's the catch here?

Essentially, the system localizes peer-to-peer file sharing. Right now, when you hop on a torrent, you download and upload data from and to people all over the world. It's quite inefficient. P4P prioritizes peers who are on your local ISP network, making downloads both much faster and much more efficient.

The system relies on iTrackers being installed on ISPs networks. The more networks that run iTrackers, the better the P4P system will run and the faster the speeds will be. Comcast is pushing to make the iTrackers an Internet Engineering Task Force standard, which would help the spread and use of the software greatly.

They want this because this is an actual win/win situation in the file-sharing front. P2P users get better speeds and Comcast gets less load on their backbone. Group hug, y'all! [Ars Technica]

For this week's Photoshop Contest, I asked you guys to imagine some Windows 7 features that we're not likely to see come its release next year. And while we have the predictable barrage of Blue Screen of Death jokes, we also have a bunch of other clever and awesome takes on Microsoft's next big OS. So come on, check out our top three winners and then peruse the rest of the best in our Gallery of Champions. Warning: one of the winners is mildly NSFW, so if you work in a monastery you might not want to click.

First Place — Jester Meister
Second Place — Wes Cohen
Third Place — Gary Chia

Today's crazy building comes to us via the architects at design firms MVRDV and ADEPT. And no, "Sky Village" is not headed for Dubai. Instead, the 380-foot "pixelated" structure will rise above the city of Roskildevej—just east of Copenhagen, Denmark. The building will include apartments, a hotel, retail shops and offices as well as sky gardens for residents. The most interesting aspect of the design however involves the adaptability of the pixel living spaces.

These pixels are arranged around a central core and can be moved about—so the layout would constantly evolve. On the downside, the ground floor was designed to be as thin as possible in order to make room for the surrounding plaza, so the whole structure looks bloated an precarious. Hopefully, they won't sacrifice strength and stability for eco-friendliness when it comes to the foundation. [Contemporist via Ecofriend]

Described as the "Kindle of email" the Peek handheld has been getting some good press lately. Time Magazine readers even voted it as "the gadget of the year"—although those results are dubious at best given the fact that the T-Mobile G1 came in a distant second. Nonetheless, Peek is currently offering their email-only handheld for $80—or $20 off the standard price. Keep in mind that unlimited use on T-Mobile will set you back an additional $20 per month. [Peek and Time]

Those who've been tuning in to Conan O'Brien may have noticed a certain endorsement made by the al-Qaeda. Oh, we're not talking about politics; we mean MP3 players. Because there's nothing terrorists like more than hanging out in caves, cranking up the Zune and watching Bill Bellamy break it down in his vintage MTV clips. [Thanks Brian!]

There's just no excuse for this leather-clad Eee PC 901 mod. No excuse at all. No—not even the fine workmanship which means it's got an arguably professional-grade finish. A cow died needlessly for this, remember. Daisy, I think she was called. And it's just a tiny, crappy netbook. If you're going to mod anything into a leather-clad version we want to see a 150-inch plasma TV in shocking-pink nubuck. That would be a worthwhile use of skin. [EEEPCNews.de]

While you might think that Apple products emerge from Steve Jobs' head, fully formed and perfect like any other offspring of gods, the inventor of the iPod was actually Tony Fadell (along with former Apple hardware chief of engineering Jon Rubinstein). Fadell, who took over the iPod division from Rubinstein in 2006, is leaving his position to take a "reduced role" as an advisor to Steve Jobs.

Jobs is a part of every device's DNA—they made the iPod louder than most MP3 players at the time because he's partly deaf. But Fadell was the guy who supposedly came up with the business model and actually put it together. Interestingly, the WSJ says he's being replaced by former IBM exec Mark Papermaster, who's taking over the Devices Hardware Engineering division and is more chip guru than gadget hound.

It makes some sense, given Apple's acquisition of P.A. Semi to make chips for iPods and maybe the iPhone. But it also says to me that they're definitely not thinking of iPods as dumb little music players anymore. [WSJ, Apple]

If you enjoy crazy lighting concepts like Anemix and Vortexx, you will love the list OObject has put together. Those first two are just a taste—there are 15 other designs to choose from. [OObject]

Mitch Altman, inventor of TV-B-Gone has done something kinda alien to many inventors of successful gizmos: he's made it open source. Interesting, since when he first came up with the idea, Altman patented it, on the advice of his patent attorney brother.

Now he's sold a bundle of them, he's had a change of heart. Seeing patent laws as responsible for stifling "the creativity that patents were supposed to encourage," he's making the source code, board layout and TV power codes all available online. Can we expect a host of DIY hacks? Ohboyyes. Read on at the Makezine link: the full skinny on his reasoning is pretty interesting. [Makezine]

It’s time for a heart-to-heart.

While I’ve spent my entire mission talking to followers via Twitter, some things just can’t be said in 140 characters or less. So I was thrilled when the editors of Gizmodo asked if I would contribute as a guest blogger, and even more thrilled when they said I could write more than two sentences at a time.

One of the most common questions I’m asked, and one of the most difficult to explain, is whether I knew going in that this mission would cost me my life. The answer to that is yes, of course, and there’s not a single robotic explorer in our solar system that doesn’t know it faces the same fate. Unlike all of you, most of us can’t go home again.

Perhaps what troubles people most is that my mission will come to an end so soon. They want to know what it is the long-lasting Mars rovers have that I don’t? Just like the rovers, I set out on a mission expected to last a mere 90 days. I’ve outlived my warranty and lasted five months, but those plucky rovers have lasted nearly five years (with no end in sight).

What the rovers have that I don’t is sunlight and plenty of it. They’re on opposite sides of the planet from each other and located close enough to the Martian equator to ensure they get a good dose of sunshine every day (um, sol) of the year.

And sun equals life when you’re a solar powered robot.

I’m located in the far north, above the Martian arctic circle. When I landed at the start of summer, this was the land of the midnight sun. But summer is giving way to autumn and now the sun dips below the horizon for longer periods of time each day. Right now, the sun dips below the horizon for seven hours a day, and it’s only a matter of time before I’m in total darkness. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the temperatures here will drop to -180F, low enough to destroy circuit boards and crack my solar arrays.

“But your name is Phoenix!” some say. “That means you’ll come back to life, right?”

Many people don’t know that the name “Phoenix” was bestowed on me the first time I came back to life. That was in 2003, when NASA decided to pull me out of storage and prepare me for my current mission. I was sitting in storage because my original mission—a flight to Mars in 2001—was cancelled after a 1999 mission was lost during landing.

At the time, I was half-built and under the guidance of Ed Sedivy, a spacecraft manager at Lockheed Martin. Ed, as you can imagine, wasn’t thrilled to learn his spacecraft had been cancelled, but he understood NASA hesitance in going forward with a mission that had similarities to the ’99 mission. Ed moved on to manage other spacecraft for Lockheed Martin, but he didn’t forget I was there.

In 2002, something wonderful happened. An instrument on the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, an orbiter, detected a lot of “H.” That’s H as in hydrogen—the H of H2O—sitting there under the Martian surface. “I was blown away by the data,” said Bill Boynton, the lead scientist, at a press conference to announce the finding. "This is really amazing. This is the best direct evidence we have of subsurface water ice on Mars.”

That discovery got a lot of scientists thinking. One of them, Peter Smith, wanted to reach out and touch that ice. And Peter knew about a half-built spacecraft sitting in storage in Denver that just happened to have the right stuff, including a 7.7-foot robotic arm. Peter, of the University of Arizona in Tucson, proposed that I be taken out of storage and sent to touch that ice. He even came up with an appropriate name for a spacecraft that was getting a second chance. He called me Phoenix.

Pulling me out of storage didn’t immediately bring me to life. No, there was plenty of work to do first. A team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was given the ulcer-inducing responsibility to make sure that whatever doomed the ‘99 mission wouldn’t happen again. Barry Goldstein, fresh from his work on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, was appointed to lead the JPL team.

Barry and his team at JPL, along with Ed and his team at Lockheed Martin, began to take apart, test, and examine every system. They were on a quest to locate anything that could fail because when it comes to landing, just one mistake can end a mission. They started out with one suspected culprit—the retro rockets used during landing—but in the end they found and fixed over one dozen issues that could have led to some pretty dire consequences I’d rather not think about.

So in that sense I arose from the ashes back in 2003 when I began my current trek to Mars. When people ask if I knew going in that I’d eventually become a frozen fixture on the Red Planet, the answer is yes, and it’s a heck of a better place to be than locked in storage.