moon

Adding to all the cover versions of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" that are out there--the recent one by the Flaming Lips and guests, the dub version by The Easy Star All-Stars, the brilliant parody by The Squirrels--comes this.

Video game programmer Brad Smith has taken the Pink Floyd classic and reworked it as a bunch of sound files for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Nintendo's classic 8-bit video console. And he has posted the whole album as a YouTube playlist. (YouTube seems to be having some technical issues as I write this, … Read more

Moon Audio claims the Signature Titan was designed to outperform any speaker system in the world. It's a strictly limited edition of three pairs, and each pair is hand-signed by the designer. Each pair will also be named after its buyer and once the third pair is built, the Signature Titan is history.

Even by high-end audio standards the pricing structure is a little unusual: Signature Titan #003 can be yours for $500,000 per pair, but the cost for #002 doubles to $1,000,000! Sounds crazy, but #001 has already been sold for $2,000,000!

I spoke with Moon Audio's founder, Chris Moon, yesterday about the Signature Titan, and learned the speaker grew out of Moon's dissatisfaction with the world's best production speakers. He went out and built the Signature Titan just to see how far he could take speaker design. Moon isn't your average high-end guy, he told me that he discovered, recorded, and produced Prince, along with Morris Day, Alexander O'Neal, Dez Dickerson, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.

Moon wrote and produced music for companies such as Northwest Airlines, music scores for films and television.

Moon claims the designers of the 72-inch-tall speaker have been involved in the high-end audio industry for 25 years. Installation and setup in the customer's home anywhere in the world is included in the purchase price. They better have strong floors; the pair of speakers weighs 2,800 pounds!… Read more

Earth Vs Moon is a fast-paced, well-made, and often funny arcade game that bears a close resemblance to the Atari classic Missile Command, along with quite a few homages to other beloved old-school video games.

The setup is similar to Missile Command: three stationary bases along the bottom of your screen that fire missiles up at incoming targets with a limited ammo supply. Earth Vs Moon makes great use of the touch screen (you tap to target), offering an improvement over the original game's trackball controls and the Atari 2600's joystick. Many of the game's levels play … Read more

NASA scientists reported Monday night that the space agency has discovered as much as 1.3 trillion pounds of ice on the moon, a finding that indicates future lunar visitors could have a wealth of water waiting for them.

The new data was found using a NASA radar placed on board India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. The ice was located in more than 40 craters, which vary in size from one mile to nine miles wide. All are located near the moon's north pole. All told, it is thought that there may be 600 million cubic meters of ice in … Read more

Each week brings a bevvy of new iPhone games to our digital doorstep, but time doesn't permit us to cover each one individually. Therefore, here's a roundup of some new and interesting titles you might want to check out:

Alice in Wonderland: You can't judge a book by its cover, but you can judge a movie by its trailer--and Tim Burton's latest attempt to make Johnny Depp look weird (aka "Alice") offers little appeal to me or my kids. The eponymous tie-in game, on the other hand, is a surprisingly charming little platformer. Don'… Read more

Yes of course we rehash the Apple iPad. We find out how to pronounce it properly in Boston. And we determine that it is the fundamental problem with democracy. But there is other news, including a class-action suit against Microsoft over its points system on Xbox and Zune. And President Obama wants to kill the moon program for now.

Apple’s iPad: What you need to know http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20000020-37.html

Apple lifts VoIP over cellular restrictions in new iPhone … Read more

Welcome back to another Yuletide Mini-sode of CNET's The 404 Podcast. We'll be keeping you company all season with fresh episodes, year-end wrap-ups, CES 2010 previews, and much more!

We're all a little torn up about the top 50 highest grossing movies of 2009. Films like Watchmen, Bruno, and Star Trek blew us away and easily lived up to the hype; it's too bad that flops like Hotel For Dogs and Paranormal Activity had to ruin it for the rest!

In typical 404 fashion, we run down the list and pick out the movies that we love, and of course the movies that we love to hate.

Enjoy, and have a fun (and safe!) New Year!

I have no doubt musicians will continue to perform throughout the 2010s, but they'll make less and less money from recorded music. The passion to make and sell recorded music is already starting to wane.

Big record labels will be increasingly irrelevant so I wouldn't be surprised if Warner, Universal, Sony/BMG, and EMI eventually merge into one mega-label to sell and license back-catalog music. New music, that's another story. Already established bands, like Radiohead, have already proved the point: they don't need record companies anymore. They can sell their music directly to fans.

But that model won't work for smaller groups. Recorded music for them may survive purely as a promotional tool, as fewer and fewer bands have any expectation of seeing recording as a potential source of income. Buying music, in physical form or by legal download, doesn't seem to have much of a future. So why would a band make an effort to make music people would want to listen to decades from now? The art of making albums--a suite of songs if you will--may become a rare pursuit. … Read more

So, Apple bought Lala, and Ars Technica thinks it has a source who knows what Apple's going to do with it-- it's going to make a Web site that sells music and stores it in the cloud. Kind of like what Lala already is, but it's going to be all iTunes-ified. And that has Rafe worrying about cloud failure again. We also kvetch about Facebook, a Mozilla employee complains about Google, and the "New Moon" videotaper is set free.