Hodejo1 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Apple Points Guns at the TV Set (readwriteweb.com)

Submitted by Hodejo1 on Monday October 24, 2011 @09:59PM

Hodejo1 writes: "I finally cracked it," Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson just months before his death. He was referring to the design and functionality of television, something Jobs had long wanted his company to reimagine.

In the official biography of the late Apple founder that came out today, one of the last topics discussed before Isaacson touches on Jobs' summer 2011 resignation is how he had hoped to revolutionize the television set.

"I'd like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use," Jobs said. "It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine."

Apple is believed to already be building prototypes of such a television set, according to an analyst at Piper Jaffray. The TV is expected to hit the market sometimes next year, although probably a bit later than previous estimates. The idea that an Apple-branded HDTV set is in the product pipeline has been the subject of rumors for a few years. Apple patents and sources at some of the company's suppliers have fueled speculation since at least 2008. In August, one Wall Street Analyst predicted that three Apple HDTVs would be on the market as soon as March 2012. Does this also mean the emergence of the Apple Broadcast Network as posed here last year?

Submission + - FrostWire 5.0 Dumps Gnutella (torrentfreak.com) 1

Submitted by Hodejo1 on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @10:27PM

Hodejo1 writes: With the demise of LimeWire it's splinter app, FrostWire, became the keeper of the Gnutella flame as it took over as the leading app for that network. Those days are numbered. The FrostWire team just announced that with its upcoming 5.0 update it will drop Gnutella support and become a Bittorrent-only client.The team cited spam as the reason for leaving the Gnutella network. “We decided to go all out with BitTorrent and spend our time making FrostWire the best BitTorrent client out there, and not fighting the endless spam battle. The Gnutella Protocol is an amazing piece of technology, but one which the team is no longer interested in or capable of developing further.” Three years ago research on P2P applications pegged Gnutella as the most popular file sharing network followed by BitTorrent. With today's news it looks like Gnutella may soon join the likes of of FastTrack, AudioGalaxy, iMesh, eDonkey, ad infinitum, ad Gloriam.

Submission + - Zune Died Because.... (mp3newswire.net) 1

Submitted by Hodejo1 on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @12:31PM

Hodejo1 writes: "Zune died because, as a device, Microsoft designed the unit to please record industry execs over the consumer", says Richard Menta of MP3 Newswire. "With Zune and it's mated music store we watched a lost opportunity by Microsoft descend into a lost cause." This opinion was echoed by Jon C. OGG at 24/7 Wall St. who said "Yours truly was one of the first adopters of the Zune, but became frustrated with updates that changed music rights for many play-list songs". This strategic miscue manifested itself all too clearly in what should have been the unit's groundbreaking feature, Zune-to-Zune wireless. Zune-to-Zune wireless allowed Zune users to share tracks player-to-player via Wi-Fi, a compelling consumer feature with the added tint of social media just as social media was taking off. Unfortunately, free player-to-player sharing played like a nightmare scenario to the record labels who viewed it as a building block to the construction of an open-air bazaar of piracy. Catering to those fears Microsoft crippled Zune-to-Zune by limiting files shared in this manner to only three plays before the unit disabled them permanently. Potential Zune customers bought iPods instead. Four years later Microsoft Zune is left with the epitaph "could have been a contender".

Submission + - SkreemR Comes Back From the Dead (mp3newswire.net)

Submitted by Hodejo1 on Thursday March 03, 2011 @02:29PM

Hodejo1 writes: Back in October the principals behind the music search engine SkreemR decided it was time to pull the plug. Unlike SeeqPod, which was besieged by major label lawsuits, the decision to kill SkreemR was based on simple economics. "We had a good run of 3 and a half years", James Gagan wrote in his email, "but everyone involved has other interests and ultimately it was not a hugely profitable enterprise". Normally, that would be that, but it looks like the folks behind SkreemR have had a change of heart. The search engine has been quietly revived and even added improvements such as voice activated search for Chrome users.

Submission + - EMI is Dead. Will Apple Swoop Publishing Rights?

Submitted by Hodejo1 on Wednesday February 02, 2011 @01:04PM

Hodejo1 writes: Yesterday, Citigroup foreclosed on EMI Group, ending the 80 year run of the smallest of the major labels. With no desire to run a record company Citigroup will presumably sell off the assets piecemeal with the labels vast array of publishing rights being the most valuable prize. As ex-Creation Records head Alan McGee told NME "Their publishing catalogue is still worth a lot of money, but unfortunately these days no f**ker wants to buy a record company". With the other major labels facing financial issues themselves some see this as a ripe opportunity for Apple to snare the publishing rights for iTunes at distressed prices and keep the checks it now sends to EMI. Google Music might have similar thoughts.

Comment Apple Broadcast Network back last June (Score 1) 244

by Hodejo1 on Tuesday December 28, 2010 @02:54PM (#34689602) Attached to: Apple's $1 Billion Data Center Mystery

Slashdot ran the idea of an Apple broadcast network back in June: http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/06/05/219214/The-Apple-Broadcast-Network?from=rss

Comment Hydrodynamic Girder and Panel Set (Score 1) 458

by Hodejo1 on Saturday November 20, 2010 @09:36PM (#34294900) Attached to: Thought-Provoking Gifts For Young Kids?

A company called Tekton bought the molds for the old Kenner Girder and panel sets and manufacture them in Boston. The best of the sets that would fit your needs for the higher end of your age range is the Girder and Panel Hydrodynamic Deluxe Set (Amazon has it here http://www.amazon.com/Girder-Panel-Hydrodynamic-Deluxe-Set/dp/B000PVVQMU/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=toys-and-games&qid=1290302783&sr=1-3 ). The company also makes the bridge set, which I have in it's original 1960's Kenner version. I have played with this set as an adult and it too makes an excellent choice.

Submission + - The iTunes Beatles Folly

Submitted by Hodejo1 on Tuesday November 16, 2010 @11:24AM

Hodejo1 writes: 20 minutes before Apple's big music announcement Engadget discovered that iTunes had already uploaded the entire Beatles catalog. Despite the scoop they were less than impressed and for obvious reasons. As Richard Menta at MP3 Newswire pointed out more than two years ago "If you do a Google search for Beatles music what you will find is a massive collection of Beatles MP3s posted on web servers worldwide. It's all there, every track from every album they ever made including the Christmas EPs, alternate takes and any other audio ephemera the global fans of the Fab Four could find and post. You don't need LimeWire. You don't need BitTorrent. And you don't need iTunes". At Digital Music News Paul Resnikoff wrote "Jefferson Graham of USA Today gave just gave me a call, asking if adding the Beatles to the iTunes Store would make a difference. So who cares exactly? Actually, plenty will not only care, but buy serious digital chunks of the Beatles catalog. Yes, despite a ten-plus year window to rip their entire CD collections, despite the endless opportunities to steal the entire Beatles remastered discography in about 20 minutes. There will be people buying, most of them older and carrying the greatest emotional attachment to the group".

Submission + - Why Nielsen is Worthless to Music Industry

Submitted by Hodejo1 on Saturday October 23, 2010 @08:38AM

Hodejo1 writes: Nielsen is considered to be the most reliable information. It's what people turn to when they want to find out what's happening as far as data goes. The truth is Nielsen doesn't have half the story. If you add up all their available new release figures from 1992 to 2009, you're going to come up with a total in the neighborhood of 735,000 new releases.

Now, go take a look at CDBaby's "About" page. According to CDBaby, they are "the largest online distributor of independent music." And they'll give you their numbers. 278,510 albums being sold on CD Baby, 5,339,025 CDs sold online to customers, $107,769,092 paid directly to the artists. The stat there that I'm keying on is 278,510 albums being sold. That's a full third of what Nielsen reports to have been released since 1992. In 2005, Tunecore arrived. They're a little less public with their numbers, but I know that last year, they claimed 90,000 new releases, just about the same as Nielsen reported for the entire industry. Unless CDBaby went on a hiatus for the year, obviously there's a huge pile missing. Let's add Catapult to that. They released more than 10,000 new titles in 2009. There's also Ditto Music, IODA, The Orchard, MusicBizAcademy, RouteNote, FUGA, and that's just the first page of Google results for "digital music distribution." Who's missing from this picture? How about ReverbNation? If you use FaceBook at all, you know who they are.

Submission + - SkreemR Officially Dead

Submitted by Hodejo1 on Wednesday October 13, 2010 @09:37AM

Hodejo1 writes: It's confirmed. The MP3 search engine SkreemR, which had been down over a week, is no more. As spokesperson James Gagan told MP3 Newswire "Yes, our audio search engine at skreemr.org has been mothballed indefinitely. The site may return in some form, but probably not as an mp3 search engine".

Submission + - Where is SkreemR?

Submitted by Hodejo1 on Sunday October 10, 2010 @09:40AM

Hodejo1 writes: Those of you who utilize the music search engine SkreemR know that the site has been down for a week now. Not a word has been offered to explain the downtime, suggesting that it has joined Seeqpod in that overly bulging graveyard of consumer-friendly tools. So, was the site finally forced off by the copyright oligarchs or did it just quietly die for lack of a business model?

Submission + - Our Music Collection Mess

Submitted by Hodejo1 on Tuesday September 28, 2010 @10:37PM

Hodejo1 writes: What a mess I've become. This embarrassment of musical riches has gotten the better of me, and my so-called "collection" is now strewn across the physical, digital, and streaming worlds. I've got favorites bookmarked on Pandora from at least a dozen stations, a growing pile of Grooveshark 'hearted' songs, and songs lost in the fire at Imeem. I have a great collection of 70s funk and rap I created on Spotify while in London — maybe it's floating in the cloud somewhere, waiting for me to return. And what about that Rhapsody collection that I let lapse two years ago?

Submission + - Rat's Nest of Music Licensing Horror in one Chart 1

Submitted by Hodejo1 on Thursday August 19, 2010 @05:51PM

Hodejo1 writes: The flow of rights and and royalties in music is such a convoluted mess it's no wonder licensing the stuff has become such a minefield. Here's a US-centric chart, shared with Digital Music News by royalty administration specialist Music Reports that distills it all in a single frame. Needless to say it has devolved to a point where everyone just puts their hand out demanding payment, whether they actually hold legitimate rights or not. So why pay a fortune in royalties when there is no guarantee you actually licensed all the rights? The UK-centric chart is no better.

Submission + - File-sharing weakened copyright—and helped s

Submitted by Hodejo1 on Monday June 21, 2010 @01:24PM

Hodejo1 writes: "Consumer welfare increased substantially due to new technology," write Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard and Koleman Strumpf of the University of Kansas. "Weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society." By charting the production of new books, new music albums, and new feature films over the last decade, the authors tried to see whether creative output went up or down in correlation with file-sharing. "The publication of new books rose by 66 percent over the 2002-2007 period. Since 2000, the annual release of new music albums has more than doubled, and worldwide feature film production is up by more than 30 percent since 2003... In our reading of the evidence there is little to suggest that the new technology has discouraged artistic production. Weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society.” The authors don't claim (anymore) that file-sharing has no effect on industries like recorded music. Though both authors also collaborated on a now-famous paper from 2007 which argued that file-sharing had no appreciable impact on music sales, they are willing to concede now that it might be a small part of the industry's problems.

Submission + - The Apple Broadcast Network

Submitted by Hodejo1 on Saturday June 05, 2010 @02:46PM

Hodejo1 writes: In 1959 5,749,000 television sets were sold in the US, bringing the cumulative total of sets sold since 1950 to 63,542,128 units. This number supported, through advertising, three national television networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS (a fourth, Dumont, folded in 1956) and numerous local independent stations. Now here are another set of numbers. As of April this year Apple sold 75 million iPhone and iPod touch units, devices capable of delivering video via Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. Add to that figure 2 million iPads and counting. By the end of the year Apple should have about 90 million smart mobile devices in the wild. That makes a proprietary amalgam greater than what the TV networks had in 1959 and one that easily serves as a foundation for a pending broadcast network that will be delivered not through tall radio towers, but through small wireless hubs and the Internet. Call it the Apple Broadcast Network. iAd is how Apple plans to pay for it.

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