Hot Mp3 news - new releases CD's, music albums

Girly girls rejoice, as you can now play guitar hero with the best of them. Why should you have to put up with a mannish guitar when you can have this glorious pink heart shaped one instead? It is fully functional and oh

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It will come as a surprise to precisely no one that Britain is lagging behind much of the world in the broadband speed stakes and complaining about slow downloads and glitchy video streaming doesn't seem to be geeing things up any. Blighty has found a new hero in the form of Professor Christopher Bishop, who has been pretty vocal about the situation recently and claims that far more worthwhile areas, such as health care, education and the environment, are suffering from our lack of fibre optics. The chief scientist at Microsoft Research in Cambridge is lecturing this week on the state of the nation and will be calling for 'urgency' in getting a programme in place to sort these connections out sharpish. If you were wondering exactly how places like schools, hospitals and the environment are being affected, consider how useful it might be to be able to study x-rays and health records, download lesson plans and videos and increase the amount of video conferencing to cut down on pollution caused by commuting. Bishop goes so far as to claim that our lack of progression in this field is beginning to have 'serious consequences' and outlines more clear benefits for the nation if the situation is improved. "If we are looking for a government project that would stimulate the economy in the short term and help combat the impact of the credit crunch, while also bringing long-lasting improvements to the nation's infrastructure, then we could do no better than rewire the nation with fibre optics. We can now shift huge amounts of data speedily around the country but cannot move it for the last mile into people's houses because there is not enough bandwidth in our domestic telephone cables, the only effective route we have for taking broadband signals into homes and small businesses. This is beginning to have serious consequences." Here's hoping the good Professor has a captive audience during his lectures and manages to convince those in the biz to to kick Britain into touch ahead of schedule. - Paul Lester [Guardian] broadband fibre optics online

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Here's an interesting take on the modern massage chair. This Acoustic Resonance version has 60 piano strings strapped to the back and was inspired by medieval Scandinavian cradles that had a similar design underneath to help mothers rock their babies to sleep.The rest of the chair is specially designed to hold and carry the sound generated by the strings, offering a subtle vibrating effect for that much sought after medieval massage experience. Those ball things you can see on the arms carry vibrations to the wrist, palms and fingertips and you can even retune the strings for perfect pitch. Unfortunately there's no sort of ghostly automation going on here so you'll have to get a slave, sorry, one of the house staff, to knock out a few tunes while you sit there supping on mead. And the price for this luxurious piece? That'll be $7,000 to you, though we'd imagine this wouldn't make much of a dent in the bank account of the target audience for this sort of thing. - Paul Lester [Hammacher] chair music massage

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(LiveDaily.com) Madonna [ tickets ]'s "Sticky & Sweet" trek distinguished itself as the top-grossing tour in North America this year, with the Material Girl racking up a total of $105.3 million in ticket sales across the continent, according to concert-industry trade-magazine Pollstar.... continued

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(LiveDaily.com) British rock-'n'-soul veteran Joe Cocker [ tickets ] has assembled dates for a spring tour of North America.... continued

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