fan

With the NFL season under way many football fans are just getting started with another great season of Fantasy Football. If you're a Fantasy sports fan, you've probably already mapped out who your favorites are at each position and right now you're hoping your picks will reap big rewards as the numbers start rolling in. If you're looking to join a late-starting league, you know that every pick counts and any help with organizing your team is what could push you to the top of your league.

Here at CNET Downloads we know that being successful … Read more

SpeedFan isn't overly complicated, but if you don't understand the information it offers, I strongly recommend you research it before proceeding. If you do know the difference between your Vcore and Vsb, it presents some useful system details. SpeedFan's tabbed interface isn't hard to navigate, but let's face it: most users won't be able to make head or tail of the data this utility provides. The program's system-tray icon tells you the temperature of your PC's hard drive, and you can receive information on voltage and fan speeds.

The utility can display … Read more

Location-based social network Whrrl has forged a rather odd partnership with content provider HBO to place various fictional characters from the show Entourage as real users on its network.

Events from the television show will end up as annotated items on Whrrl's user-generated map. You can subscribe to whichever of the characters you want, and each of their items go into your central friends feed along with regular users who are providing "real" ratings and locational bookmarks. As the series progresses, locations seen on the show will continue to be placed on the map.

This is a … Read more

Another entrant in the race to produce a ducted-fan-propelled, vertical-take-off-and-landing UAV, the planned "humvee of the air" will morph to different missions and reach targets three times faster than helicopters, according to the manufacturer.

The official name of the vehicle is VTOL-Swift Tactical Aerial Resource, or V-STAR. With a cruising speed of 288 knots, a 650-mile range and a 400-pound payload, the V-STAR promises to be a "breakthrough solution for frontline military logistics," according to Broomfield, Colo.-based Frontline Aerospace. The aircraft would use a Rolls-Royce gas turbine with counter-rotating blades and "diamond-box-wing" design … Read more

Rory Reid from CNET.co.uk joins us to talk all things tech. iPhones won't help you get laid in the U.S. or the U.K., Speed Racer looks like an abomination and Randall's stuffy nose ruins the show.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

It seems that the founder of Napster--no, not Seth Green--may have finally cashed in big time on one of his creations.

According to TechCrunch, Napster founder Shawn Fanning has sold his gaming social-media start-up, Rupture, to Electronic Arts for $30 million.

TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld reported Thursday afternoon that as part of the deal--which EA has not yet announced, "but is expected to do so soon," Fanning and Rupture co-founder Jon Baudanza will become EA employees.

For Fanning, this represents the big-time payday he's clearly been seeking for years. He never made much off of … Read more

Paramount Pictures and application developer FanRocket announced a service for Facebook users that will allow them to send movie clips to each other. The clips, which are sent as messages and last from a few seconds to several minutes, are intended to help recipients "relive the moment" in a familiar film, a studio executive told the Associated Press.

The service, called VooZoo, certainly takes message ornamentation a step or two beyond the emoticon, letting the "stars do the talking," as the FanRocket site says. I'm not sure, though, that some Facebook users will be familiar … Read more

New or relatively obscure artists might have to turn to an organization like ArtistShare or Sellaband to get listeners to fund a professional-level recording project, but established artists have an easier way: they can ask their fans. (Or have their mothers do it.)

That's what Jill Sobule has done. She's best known for her minor 1995 hit "I Kissed a Girl," but has released several albums since then. Unfortunately, she's had a lot of trouble with her labels--two have gone bankrupt, and another two have dropped her. So to fund her next recording, she's … Read more

I've written about "fan clubs" before--by and large, I think they're a scam by which very popular artists and concert promoters can charge even more money than the already ridiculous list prices. Usually, "fan clubs" make you pay a one-time fee of something like $100 for the right to buy tickets slightly earlier than the unwashed masses, then they throw in a couple of nearly worthless perks. In the case of The Police, I got the "right" to buy tickets near the top of the arena, access to online chat rooms, … Read more