This happens to be why my quarter rack space has only 2 1U computers in it. It was supposed to be a quarter rack (10U), but I was told I had only 7U of space. Okay, not a problem, I can put in 7 1U systems, 14 if I purchase the half sized systems. Then I was told I have only 2A, oh, and here's a switch that'll turn it off if you go over. Which means my quarter rack has two 1U servers in it.
Worse, even the full rack is allowed only 15A before you have to buy a secondary power conduit to the rack at this particular colo.
I suspect it's more a way for the facility to make money than it is to reduce energy usage. When I visited the facility last to move boxes, 4 racks were being emptied and a good 60% of them were completely empty anyway, so the facility may not be long in this economy.
I'm on my seventh different (Ameritrade-only) email address with Ameritrade. Rather than doing nothing, however, I both forwarded the spams I received to my Ameritrade-only email account to Ameritrade's contact-us-with-security-issues email address, and filed a report/complaint with the SEC.
After the first complaint of Ameritrade's privacy breach to the SEC, Ameritrade starting responding with more than just the boiler-plate "It's not our problem, it's yours" responses. I received feedback from the SEC and someone at Ameritrade with more than just a "customer service rep" title.
A little satisfaction. Not a lot.
Unfortunately, I still receive the spam. The address change to spam delay has increased to about 4 months, up from about 2 months a year ago.
Build a project, then get the volunteers.
on
Paying for Volunteers?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Okay, you don't seem to be getting the information you're really looking for. So, here are my observations (with the caveat it's from the outside looking in).
A friend of mine (who may post here, if he finds the time) is a lead developer on a successful open source project. The project has a donation button both on its website and in the installation. It's a subtle message (end users don't see the donation message, but administrators do). The project has a great product, so the donation model works.
My friend gets these donations, and shares them with the people that help make the product, and there are a lot of them: programmers, graphic designers, technical support (answering questions on the project's forums). The donations don't provide a lot for any one person, but they make a pleasant thank you (when you volunteer expecting nothing, and get something, it's nice).
Now, how did he build up this successful project where he can pay various volunteers? Slowly. He created a product that he himself would use, then released it to the world. At first, just friends used it, but then it grew. The WOW factor helped.
After a while, when the load became too big (programming, tech support, website development), he sent a message to users mailing list asking for help. People volunteered. Not all stuck around, but there has been enough volunteers to sustain the development and help it grow.
So, here's my suggestion: create something with wow factor that people can use/demo/play with. It can be small, that's fine, but give them something to play with, get excited about. Create a user mailing list. Make it really easy to join the list (and don't spam it). Pay attention to what the users say (address concerns if you can). When you need help - ask the list, see what happens. People who are interested will help. If you get revenue (donations, sales, grants), share a bit. Doesn't have to be a lot.
The trick is to get people excited about the project. Actually, that sentence sums up marketing pretty well.
I agree with the wiki suggestion. They're very easy to use, encourage everyone to participate, and (usually) have revision control in case someone messes up.
That said, they can also be very chaotic. If you aren't careful with how you organize your pages, they can become unwieldy. Of course, so can using the Brain. Fortunately, reorganizing a wiki structure is easy (if time consuming).
That said, if IIS & ASP don't work for you, look into other flavors of wikis. For example:
I think it's fantastic. I have about 6 sites I regularly view throughout the day (including slashdot and a few science sites). I had, of late, been trying to find other sites that served my surfing style. In particular, sites with headlines that weren't just rehashed news of the other sites I view. Google News is exactly what I was looking for.
Now I start at google and wander to other sites as needed. The list of news feeds to Google doesn't include some of the science sites I enjoy (Nature and New Scientist). It might soon as everyone jumps on the Google wagon.
Books on Tape saved me during my long Los Angeles commute. It's a rental service: you rent tapes, listen to them, drop them in the mail when you're done (postage is already paid). You get a month to listen to them before they're late.
The books are unabridged, so they tend to be 10 - 20+ hours long. They have a frequent renter program (rent 10, get one rental free), and an online discount - rent 3 at once and you get a 5% discount. What else - you can space when they arrive - one big shipment, one every other week, once a month, whatever. And, once you're hooked, you can refer a friend, and get another free rental!
I often order 10 books at a time, delivered every other week for 5 months. Very handy.
You can rent CDs, too. They have two types of CD recordings: high quality & mp3 (resulting in 5+ discs, or one).
They're located at http://www.booksontape.com/ They have samples online so that you can hear the readers voices. I have my favorite readers - resulting in listening to authors that I would never have read normally, but I liked the reader so much I thought I'd give them a try.
I recommend the service very highly! If you decide not to use them, but listen to other tapes or CDs, be sure to get unabridged tapes. The abridged ones are short and miss a lot.
In the US, if you put humour in your manuals, you risk getting your pants sued off. Humourous documentation is considered "unprofessional", and therefore open to lawsuits.
Imagine if a manual said something in jest ("If you're having real problems, just flip the breaker in the computer room. No one will notice.") and a nitwit read it. He'd think it was serious, do it, cause all sorts of havoc, and then say, "But the manual said I should!"
Nah, the cynic in me thinks humour won't make it to manuals anytime soon. Too many nitwits.
My system was recently blacklisted on half a dozen lists because another system within my IP block was spamming. The blacklist used xxx.xxx.xxx.* instead of the specific IP address - a range that included my system. The end result for me was that I was unable to communicate with a large number of my customers, and had to move my server to a new IP range.
Requests to remove my old IP addres were, of course, ignored. My system didn't spam, had never spammed, wasn't an open relay, and was still blacklisted.
Personally, I think the spam blacklistings are a good idea in theory. As implemented, I find them annoying and worthless.
Slashdot Mirror
This happens to be why my quarter rack space has only 2 1U computers in it. It was supposed to be a quarter rack (10U), but I was told I had only 7U of space. Okay, not a problem, I can put in 7 1U systems, 14 if I purchase the half sized systems. Then I was told I have only 2A, oh, and here's a switch that'll turn it off if you go over. Which means my quarter rack has two 1U servers in it.
Worse, even the full rack is allowed only 15A before you have to buy a secondary power conduit to the rack at this particular colo.
I suspect it's more a way for the facility to make money than it is to reduce energy usage. When I visited the facility last to move boxes, 4 racks were being emptied and a good 60% of them were completely empty anyway, so the facility may not be long in this economy.
I'm on my seventh different (Ameritrade-only) email address with Ameritrade. Rather than doing nothing, however, I both forwarded the spams I received to my Ameritrade-only email account to Ameritrade's contact-us-with-security-issues email address, and filed a report/complaint with the SEC.
After the first complaint of Ameritrade's privacy breach to the SEC, Ameritrade starting responding with more than just the boiler-plate "It's not our problem, it's yours" responses. I received feedback from the SEC and someone at Ameritrade with more than just a "customer service rep" title.
A little satisfaction. Not a lot.
Unfortunately, I still receive the spam. The address change to spam delay has increased to about 4 months, up from about 2 months a year ago.
Whoo hoo! Slashdot as a help forum! Sweet!
You'd think with all the sites clamouring to be in the search engine results, they'd honor requests to be out.
Skip the *nuke open source content management systems (i.e. postnuke, phpnuke, etc.) and try Drupal. More secure, less buggy, easier to develop on.
Or, better yet, use the great research already done at http://www.opensourcecms.com/
Okay, you don't seem to be getting the information you're really looking for. So, here are my observations (with the caveat it's from the outside looking in).
A friend of mine (who may post here, if he finds the time) is a lead developer on a successful open source project. The project has a donation button both on its website and in the installation. It's a subtle message (end users don't see the donation message, but administrators do). The project has a great product, so the donation model works.
My friend gets these donations, and shares them with the people that help make the product, and there are a lot of them: programmers, graphic designers, technical support (answering questions on the project's forums). The donations don't provide a lot for any one person, but they make a pleasant thank you (when you volunteer expecting nothing, and get something, it's nice).
Now, how did he build up this successful project where he can pay various volunteers? Slowly. He created a product that he himself would use, then released it to the world. At first, just friends used it, but then it grew. The WOW factor helped.
After a while, when the load became too big (programming, tech support, website development), he sent a message to users mailing list asking for help. People volunteered. Not all stuck around, but there has been enough volunteers to sustain the development and help it grow.
So, here's my suggestion: create something with wow factor that people can use/demo/play with. It can be small, that's fine, but give them something to play with, get excited about. Create a user mailing list. Make it really easy to join the list (and don't spam it). Pay attention to what the users say (address concerns if you can). When you need help - ask the list, see what happens. People who are interested will help. If you get revenue (donations, sales, grants), share a bit. Doesn't have to be a lot.
The trick is to get people excited about the project. Actually, that sentence sums up marketing pretty well.
That said, they can also be very chaotic. If you aren't careful with how you organize your pages, they can become unwieldy. Of course, so can using the Brain. Fortunately, reorganizing a wiki structure is easy (if time consuming).
That said, if IIS & ASP don't work for you, look into other flavors of wikis. For example:
Lots of choices!
I think it's fantastic. I have about 6 sites I regularly view throughout the day (including slashdot and a few science sites). I had, of late, been trying to find other sites that served my surfing style. In particular, sites with headlines that weren't just rehashed news of the other sites I view. Google News is exactly what I was looking for.
Now I start at google and wander to other sites as needed. The list of news feeds to Google doesn't include some of the science sites I enjoy (Nature and New Scientist). It might soon as everyone jumps on the Google wagon.
Books on Tape saved me during my long Los Angeles commute. It's a rental service: you rent tapes, listen to them, drop them in the mail when you're done (postage is already paid). You get a month to listen to them before they're late.
The books are unabridged, so they tend to be 10 - 20+ hours long. They have a frequent renter program (rent 10, get one rental free), and an online discount - rent 3 at once and you get a 5% discount. What else - you can space when they arrive - one big shipment, one every other week, once a month, whatever. And, once you're hooked, you can refer a friend, and get another free rental!
I often order 10 books at a time, delivered every other week for 5 months. Very handy.
You can rent CDs, too. They have two types of CD recordings: high quality & mp3 (resulting in 5+ discs, or one).
They're located at http://www.booksontape.com/ They have samples online so that you can hear the readers voices. I have my favorite readers - resulting in listening to authors that I would never have read normally, but I liked the reader so much I thought I'd give them a try.
I recommend the service very highly! If you decide not to use them, but listen to other tapes or CDs, be sure to get unabridged tapes. The abridged ones are short and miss a lot.
Ayn Rand. Haven't read her books in a long time. Time to dig them out. Thanks for the nudge.
In the US, if you put humour in your manuals, you risk getting your pants sued off. Humourous documentation is considered "unprofessional", and therefore open to lawsuits.
Imagine if a manual said something in jest ("If you're having real problems, just flip the breaker in the computer room. No one will notice.") and a nitwit read it. He'd think it was serious, do it, cause all sorts of havoc, and then say, "But the manual said I should!"
Nah, the cynic in me thinks humour won't make it to manuals anytime soon. Too many nitwits.
My system was recently blacklisted on half a dozen lists because another system within my IP block was spamming. The blacklist used xxx.xxx.xxx.* instead of the specific IP address - a range that included my system. The end result for me was that I was unable to communicate with a large number of my customers, and had to move my server to a new IP range.
Requests to remove my old IP addres were, of course, ignored. My system didn't spam, had never spammed, wasn't an open relay, and was still blacklisted.
Personally, I think the spam blacklistings are a good idea in theory. As implemented, I find them annoying and worthless.