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John McCain wants to make it easier for consumers to buy only the TV shows they want to watch.

On Thursday, the Arizona senator introduced legislation that would force cable operators and other TV providers to split up their so-called programming bundles and instead offer TV shows in smaller, more affordable packages and as a la carte channels. His legislation, called the Television Consumer Freedom Act, also would require sports leagues that use publicly financed stadiums to broadcast home games within their local markets. Now many home games are blacked out in an effort to encourage fans to go to … Read more

Those who want to use their laptop as a media server or to play continuous music may want to keep operating it while the lid is closed. InsomniaX for Mac is a simple application that performs this single purpose well.

InsomniaX for Mac downloads quickly and comes with no restrictions. The program installs without any problems, too, although the user must accept a licensing agreement to complete the process. The user agreement contains several warnings and disclaimers about the potential problems the program may cause to the computer, which is troublesome. There were no user instructions or technical support available, … Read more

Intel needs to make waves in mobile computing. That's exactly what the first overhaul of the Atom chip design intends to do.

The new Silvermont Atom micro-architecture -- the first major architectural change since Atom debuted in 2008 -- delivers a "significant reduction in power [consumption] and a significant increase in performance," Dadi Perlmutter, an Intel executive vice president, said in a conference call Monday.

Perlmutter was quick to point out that the two -- performance and power efficiency -- are not incompatible. A slide (below) showed Silvermont Atom performing at twice the level of the previous … Read more

The final flight of the U.S. Air Force's X-51A Waverider program wasn't a long one, but it was long enough.

The Air Force cheerfully announced Friday that the scramjet-powered X-51A flew for more than six minutes earlier this week. Of that total flight time, partner Boeing said, three and a half minutes was done on scramjet power and the vehicle reached a top speed of Mach 5.1, which pushed it into the hypersonic range that researchers had been hoping for.

The accomplishment marked the longest flight for the $300 million X-51A technology demonstration program and, the … Read more

The Nintendo 3DS has already been through a lot. The first-ever glasses-less 3D portable console didn't have the most glamorous of launches when it hit the market more than two years ago. Tainted by an underwhelming batch of debut software, controversial 3D effect, and a disappointing battery life, the 3DS didn't have a whole lot going for it out of the gate.

If that wasn't enough of a burden, the 3DS was also forced to follow up the original DS, a predecessor that is approaching worldwide sales of 154 million units combined. It's the best-selling portable console of all time.

But in the 25 months since its release, the 3DS has made significant strides. A focus on the platform's online store and a hardware refresh with a much bigger screen and better battery have begun to right the ship. Most importantly, a bevy of compelling software has been made available -- though some have criticized the company's continual recycling of classic games. … Read more

If you're looking to attract attention, setting a Guinness World Record is probably a good way to start.

That was the goal -- attracting attention, that is -- for a group of IBM Research scientists who recently set out to make what turned out be the Guinness World Record-certified smallest stop-motion film ever.

Called "A Boy and His Atom," the animated film features a small boy having a good old time as he bounces around, playing catch, and dancing. The twist? The film was shot at the atomic level and features 130 atoms that were painstakingly placed, atom by atom, as the researchers shot 250 individual frames. The images were created at a temperature of negative 268 degrees Celsius and were magnified 100 million times. … Read more

Texas hold 'em may not enjoy the popularity that it did only a few years ago, but it is still the most popular card game in America, with hundreds of tournaments, Web sites, and apps devoted to it. There are quite a few apps that attempt to bring that experience to the app store. Texas Hold'em Poker 100K by ASH is one of the most popular and for good reason: it manages to bring the feeling of a high-stakes game of poker to the iPad in a way that few other games have managed to do.

If you've … Read more

The iPad has made it possible to create some very impressive pieces of music. It's hard to imagine something as complex and deeply intellectual as composition happening on a device used more often to play bird-tossing games, but there are some truly impressive compositions and even more impressive apps to create those works. One such app is Sketch-a-Song, providing a sleek, drag-and-drop interface to create songs with the tap of a button.

Sketch-a-Song starts by requiring you to register an account. You can choose to connect to Facebook, but Facebook integration is deep and the settings are not immediately … Read more

Huawei has announced (translate) a midrange Android smartphone for China and emerging markets in the form of the 5-inch A199.

Powered by Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, the Huawei A199 also features Huawei's custom Emotion 1.5 UI. On hardware, the handset falls in the mid-to-high end of the spectrum with its quad-core 1.5GHz processor, 2GB RAM, 8GB internal storage, and 8.0-megapixel rear camera.

Whereas most 5-inch smartphones tend to offer a 1080p HD display, the Huawei A199 comes with a still respectable 720p resolution screen. Additional hardware includes a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, a 2,150mAh … Read more