Music royalties and Pandora’s box

By James Ledbetter – You might think in the nearly two decades since music first began streaming over the Internet that some kind of consensus about paying artists would have emerged. But about the only thing most Internet radio stakeholders can agree on is that the current system makes no sense.

The business stakes of this battle flared up again this week, when the New York-based indie musician Blake Morgan picked a public fight with Internet radio giant Pandora. more> http://tinyurl.com/ca7h9go

Google, please be a benevolent internet overlord

By Dan Gillmor – Google is at the top of its game. It presides over, if not ruling outright, enormous swaths of modern life.

The company’s engineering culture assumes it will solve problems; that data is king; and that anyone with common sense will use the company’s solutions. It’s true enough, as Google notes, that its search dominance is always one click away from melting. Competition does exist. But the company’s culture has has been a factor in some bad ideas and worse moves, and I suspect it could be real trouble down the road. more> http://tinyurl.com/b32vu7b

Related>

• Google I/O 2013: Our complete coverage, Digital Trends

Updates from WordPress

Five Minutes with Philip Arthur Moore
By Lauren Orsini – My favorite ongoing project is _s, or Underscores. It’s a starter theme on which every single Automattic premium theme is built and it was created to both help us do our jobs better and educate the WordPress community on theming best practices. I actively contribute to the project primarily because I strongly believe in developer education and Open Source. It also doesn’t hurt that I get to play with git and GitHub, which is one of my favorite companies in existence.

It’s hard to understand the power of _s unless you see what’s built with it. Further, Ryu, A Simpler Time, and Untitled were all created using _s. more> http://tinyurl.com/d6swnm3

The Evolving Interconnect

By Ann Steffora Mutschler – Chip interconnect protocol requirements are evolving as designs move to 20nm and below process geometries, and not always in predictable ways.

The basic concept behind cache is that data is stored closer to processor for faster access. Cache coherence allows copies of that data to be stored in multiple places. But to be coherent, it also has to be updated regularly at all places where it is stored, and that means the interconnects have to keep up with this whole process.

“So suddenly, instead of just talking to memory you’re talking to local memories, and those local memories are talking to other people’s local memories to try and make sure whenever you need something you’ve got the right version,” Drew Wingard, CTO at Sonics said. “That has a big impact on what happens at the interconnect fabric level on these chips.” more> http://tinyurl.com/cf5xgsj

10 Tricks to Make Yourself a Google+ Master

By David Nield – Unless you happen to work for the search giant that created it, Google+ is probably not your social network of choice. Nevertheless, there’s a ton of functionality hidden behind its walls, covering everything from photos to local searches as the influence of Google+ stretches across the company’s multitude of other products. Here’s how to get the most out of it.

• Fill up your stream
• Save and filter searches
• Find your community
• Bookmark your favorite posts
• Add circles to Gmail
• Check your profile privacy
• Link to your content
• Back up your photos
• Hashtags, mentions and text formatting
• Set the mood

more> http://tinyurl.com/cwe2xt6

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