Tag: Tech

Rainbow Connection | Pop Song 360.

As noted in countless Woeful State of the Industry pieces over the past week, In Rainbows, the new Radiohead album, is now available for download directly from the band. (I figure I’ll give ’em ten bucks.) Also, it seems R.E.M. is premiering a new song on Anderson Cooper 360 tonight. The song, “Until the Day is Done,” will be featured in a CNN ecodocumentary, Planet in Peril, later this month. (If you’ve watched the Youtubes of the Dublin rehearsal shows a few months back, you’ve already heard it.) Update: 160kbpgate for Radiohead?

TheLeft.com

“What was once seen as a liability for Democrats and progressives in the past — they couldn’t get 20 people to agree to the same thing, they could never finish anything, they couldn’t stay on message — is now an asset,’ Leyden said. ‘All this talking and discussing and fighting energizes everyone, involves everyone, and gets people totally into it.‘” The WP’s Jose Antonio Vargas examines why the Dems are winning the Web War. “‘For Republicans, the Internet is where bad things happen. Take [former U.S. senator] George Allen and his ‘macaca’ moment…You can kind of understand why Republicans have this almost instinctive fear of the Internet, where the mob rules.”

Double Dip Disc Detente.

Hopefully (and cleverly) taking the sting out of the looming format wars, Warner Brothers announces the Total High Def disc at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “If broadly adopted by the industry, the Total Hi Def disc would eliminate consumer confusion by including both formats [HD-DVD and Blu-Ray] on a single disc. Tested with leading manufacturers and replicators, the Total Hi Def disc would also simplify point of sale issues for retailers by reducing the shelf space required to carry two versions of the same content.”

We’re All Doomed.

By way of my sister Tessa, a robotic gastronome determines human flesh tastes exactly like bacon (or possibly prosciutto.) Sigh…I was afraid of this. Once the machines acquire the taste, we’re all in deep, deep trouble. Or have they already figured it out, and cubicle culture is really just an attempt by the mechs to fatten us up for harvest? Hmmm…is it too late to install a vegetarian subroutine?

Phoning it in.

So, as of this morning, I’ve been moving up in the smartphone world. I awoke at 7am to find my long-suffering, increasingly indignant Treo 400 had decided overnight to up and die completely, so I bit the entropy bullet and picked up a brand-spankin’ new Treo 700 this afternoon (after, I might add, a rather miserable customer service experience that resulted in a good two hours of grappling with the Verizon Wireless bureaucracy. Apparently, despite all the hype about the national network in those aggravating ads, Verizon Kauai and Verizon NYC don’t play very nice together. Really, people, I’m trying to give you my money.) At any rate, I’m looking forward to playing around with the new apparatus, even if I did end up losing some txt conversations I wanted to keep, not to mention some truly righteous Dopewars scores.

Great Eye in the Karoo.

The WP takes a gander at the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), which “can see 13 billion years back in time, nearly to the big bang. With its 10-by-11-foot hexagonal mirror — the largest of its type in the world — SALT concentrates the faintest, most distant light in the universe. If a candle were to flicker on the moon, SALT could detect it.“

Digital Empire.

“It costs about $1,200 for a print and about $200 for a digital print. So what you do is charge the distributor the same $1,200 they would ordinarily be charged, and $1,000 of it goes into a pot that eventually pays for all the projectors and everything. In about five years you would basically reconvert the entire industry.” TIME‘s Richard Corliss discusses Indy 4, the Star Wars TV show, and the future of cinema with a “retired” George Lucas.

On Avatar and Mars.

More James Cameron news: Harry of AICN has a wide-ranging conversation with the director which, if you can get past the usual Knowlesisms, reveals that Project 880 is in fact Avatar, and that Cameron has been working with NASA on a “Live Video Stereo Motion Image” (3-D) camera for the next Mars Rover.