Category Archives: News

Music download prices to rise

The Register reports that major music labels are trying to get music retailers to increase prices. What a good idea! Let’s make it even more costly for individuals to acquire music, that’s sure to drive down the rates of copyright infringement!

Seriously, what are they thinking?

The problem appears to be related to Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Apparently 65% of all music downloads for money occur through the iTunes music store. Apple’s success in online marketing of music appears to be at the expense of the major labels (or so they apparently believe) and they apparently aren’t happy.

I do see why they are worried. The wholesale price for songs is 65 cents per track. Apple collects 99 cents per track, netting themselves 34 cents. The record companies do have expenses that Apple probably does not: they do after all pay to produce albums, and they have to manufacture them. One could expect that over time, online distribution of music will become the norm, and the overall market for the solid vinyl plastic form of music will become a thing of the past, and record companies will not be able to maintain their lofty lifestyles.

But it’s there fault for handing a huge market over to Apple for a pittance. You can’t put the djinni back in the bottle, and it will be damned tough for them to take the market back. Raising prices at this point results in a Pyrrhic victory for all businesses involved.

It’s time to evolve or perish.

Win for The Incredibles

Academy Award Win for Pixar's The IncrediblesWell, the Oscars have more or less just begun, but the news is good for us Pixarians: The Incredibles won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Congratulations to Brad Bird, John Walker, and all of my fellow monkeys who worked on the film. It’s always great to have played a part, no matter how small, in the creating an Academy Award winning film.

Update: Michael Silvers and Randy Thom also won Oscar Gold for their work in Sound Editing on The Incredibles. Well done lads!

Jef Raskin

It is with considerable surprise and sadness that I heard of the passing of Jef Raskin this weekend. I wasn’t a friend: merely an admirer of his work and his appearances at the Hackers conference. I found his delight with model airplanes to be infectious and genuine, and his innovative ideas to be thought provoking. To all those whose life he played a more direct and personal role, you have my condolences.

Millenium Post!

This post marks the 1000th entry in my weblog. Quite a milestone for me. I hope you all have found something useful or thought provoking in it. As an idea of what topics interest me the most, here is the list of the top 10 categories:

Category Name Count
Link of the Day 147
General 131
Audioblogs and Podcasting 115
Rants and Raves 87
My Projects 86
Toys and Gadgets 73
Science 56
Brainwagon Radio 52
New 52
Blogging 51
Intellectual Property 46

Okay, that’s really 11 topics, because most of the posts which ended up in General did so because I was too lazy to figure out a real category.

iPod returned!

iPod returned!My wife called and informed me that a Fedex Box had shown up from Apple with my newly repaired iPod tucked inside. Neat! Now I can catch up on all the podcasts I’ve been missing. Not bad, I mailed it in on the 13th, they got in on the 14th, and today is the 17th. Now that’s customer service.

Building Carma Karma

Well, as the holiday approaches, I’ve got all three cars in the shop virtually simultaneously:

  • My Expedition, for shocks, two tires and alignment
  • The Jeep, for body work, and
  • The Cavalier, for one highly fu-barred transmission.

To deflect some of my bad Karma, I decided to do something nice and selfless: I went out and gave blood at the Red Cross. I hope this restores some of the natural order to things, but even if it doesn’t, it’s a nice thing to do. Consider donating blood this holiday season.

Addendum: Upon returning to pick up my car, I’m greeted with the news that it still needs $350 more work. On the way back, my wife tries to deposit a check at an ATM, and it jams and requires me to come help her out with tweezers to retrieve her check.

I think I want my blood back.

Minor website improvements…

I downloaded the most recent release of ChaitGear Powerpack, a set of WordPress Plugins that you include support for the referer list and an Amazon Wishlist. I ended up having to recompile mod_php4 and install a couple of php modules, but now all seems to work.

I put up the wishlist mainly as a lark, but if in the last twelve months you have

  1. Come into vast sums of money…
  2. Have already bought presents for all your loved ones…
  3. Enjoyed either my weblog or podcasts…

then perhaps you might wish to select one of the items to send my way. It’s a sure fire way to get me to plug your website and link it in the next year! 🙂