Technology News

Colbert Gets a Treadmill, Not a Space Station

Source: PC Magazine
April 17, 2009

NASA on Tuesday named its new living quarters on the International Space Station “Tranquillity," denying television comedian Stephen Colbert his attempt to get the new Node 3 named after himself. Astronaut Sunita L. Williams, appearing on “The Colbert Report" on cable TV network Comedy Central, said NASA will name the new module Tranquility, instead of Colbert as he and his fans demanded after winning an online poll conducted by NASA. But the U.S. space agency did make one concession. It ...

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Directv, Comcast Violate Their Own Do Not Call Lists

Source: Michael Ricci
April 17, 2009

Federal government to DirecTV and Comcast cable: What part of Do Not Call didn't you understand?

Satellite television provider DirecTV Inc. agreed to pay $2.31 million to settle charges that it made more than 1 million calls to its customers who had -- as was their right -- placed themselves on a Do Not Call list, the Federal Trade Commission said Thursday.

And why did the company make the calls? To ask the customers to remove themselves from the list, ...

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'We Are Haunted' Fantastic New Way to Find Hot Music

Source: All About Jazz
April 16, 2009

A new, playable music chart is like a Billboard chart for the P2P generation -- and you can play anything on it with a single click.

It would take an army of listeners to keep tabs on all the music being recorded and posted to MySpace, YouTube, BitTorrent and the like. How to filter it all?

We Are Hunted, a clean and simple music chart cuts to the chase. It tracks the most-favored music on P2P and social networks, Twitter, ...

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Internet Providers Want to Meter Usage

Source: All About Jazz
April 16, 2009

Customers who like to stream movies, TV shows may get hit with extra fees.

If Internet service providers' current experiments succeed, subscribers may end up paying for high-speed Internet based on how much material they download. Trials with such metered access, rather than the traditional monthly flat fee for unlimited connection time, offer enough bandwidth that they won't affect many consumers yet.

But as more people use the Internet to watch TV and stream movies, they could bump up against ...

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How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall? Youtube.

Source: All About Jazz
April 16, 2009

Hannah Pauline Tarley, a ponytailed 17-year-old violinist, smiles for the camera. Then she plays the opening notes of an excerpt from Brahms' Symphony No. 4 as she sways in a room decorated with stickers and posters of the Beatles and the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra.

Tarley filmed herself in her bedroom in Cupertino, Calif., using a computer placed atop several volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. She is one of approximately 3,000 professional and amateur classical musicians in countries from ...

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Obama Builds Tech Bridge to Cuba

Source: PC Magazine
April 15, 2009

What better way to ease relations with Cuba than iPhones, Twitter, and satellite TV? President Obama on Monday unveiled a plan that will allow U.S. residents to send cell phones, computers, satellite receivers, and more to friends and family in Cuba, and also allow U.S. telecom companies to do business in the country. Obama has “directed that steps be taken to enable the freer flow of information among the Cuban people and between those in Cuba and the rest of ...

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Mobile Music: Band Geeks Play iPhones, Not Instruments

Source: All About Jazz
April 15, 2009

Once upon a time, orchestras required instruments. Then computers reproduced the sounds of symphonies. Now, band geeks are playing iPhones.

Stanford University's newest ensemble is called MoPhO, short for Mobile Phone Orchestra. Its conductor, Ge Wang, is a veteran of Princeton's Laptop Orchestra (see issue 14.04) and is obsessed with making electronic music as mobile as possible. “The iPhone holds a lot of potential for what kind of music can be made and how it can be made," Wang says. ...

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Pandora: Putting the "Me" Back into Mass-Media

Source: HypeBot
April 14, 2009

Kyle Bylin, Associate EditorIntroduction - At the rate of twenty-two million regular listeners and a billion hours streamed last year, Pandora is leading individuals astray from the masses and giving them a new direction.  Since their debut on the iPhone, approximately three million people have activated the application and in addition to that, about twenty thousand new users sign up for the service each day.  For many, it's the dawn of an entirely new kind of radio where ...

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