Yes, exactly: local solar time is the way humans always dealt with time, even after the invention of the clock. It was only the railroads that necessitated timezones, because scheduling them in the face of every town having its own local time produced a complexity beyond the timekeeping technology of the day. Now that everyone has a GPS-enabled supercomputer in their pocket, the complexity issue can be easily solved, meaning we can all go back to local solar time.

Time zones are an anachronism from the days of railroads and pocket watches. They should be abolished. Instead of time zones, we should all use local solar time.

From the dawn of man everyone always used local solar time. We kept right on using it even after clocks became common. Time zones were created because it was too computationally complex to maintain train schedules when each town the train passed through was on local solar time. (In the days of stage coaches the inherent schedule variability produced by using horses to travel over unimproved roads was so large as to make the variations in local solar time insignificant.)

Computational complexity is no longer an issue. Nowadays everyone walks around with a supercomputer in his or her pocket. Those very same supercomputers also already have the one other thing needed to make local solar time practical: GPS positioning. (Because knowing the local solar time requires knowing where you are.)

More here: https://www.philipbrewer.net/2015/12/12/lets-abolish-time-zones-and-dst/

A previous poster argued that you have to choose between unix-ey freeware and pricey, pointy-clicky commercial software, but radmind actually bridges that gap nicely. It is a free set of unix command-line utilites with several GUI applications that can bind it together on the client and server sides -- if you like that sort of thing. In my implementation, we use perl scripts to actually do most of the heavy lifting. Moreover, it's relatively to give end users more-or-less control over the rest of the system: you want a lab computer? Radmind can do that. You want a user's workstation? Radmind can do that too.

Radmind is effectively a tripwire: it builds transcripts about what has changed on the system and can either capture those changes as a package or apply changes to restore (or setup) a system to a known state.

The only downside of radmind is that to use it effectively, you really need in-depth knowledge about the MacOS. In order to build transcripts, you need to know which of the changed things are meaningful and which are noise. You need to understand how packages have the potential to create dependencies and conflict with one another -- and to make sure the packages get applied in the right order.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Apple Movie Trailer site (part of the Quicktime site at Apple) and, when I went to look at a trailer, it redirected my connection to iTunes and showed the trailer from within iTunes. So, I think it's pretty clear that iTunes is being prepped as a movie distribution tool.

You're right to an extent--there are lots of other activities that book publishers and record companies do to contribute to the eventual success of the book or record. But you've missed the most important one.

All the ones you've listed can be, and increasingly are, outsourced. Talent scouts or agents bring in authors or acts. Publicists and more specialised people handle promotion. Engineering, editing, printing, etc. are done by third parties.

The main thing that can't be outsourced is the advance: Publishers are specialized venture capital firms.

That's the value-add that will keep publishing firms (books or music) in business, even as blogs and other ultra-low-cost marketing efforts become more and more important. Somebody who can front money to get the book written and printed (or the CD recorded and produced) will always have an advantage. They will soon learn that it's the one big advantage they have left.