This is indeed their reasoning, which I consider to be utter horse shit. When I ran a cafe/art gallery in Silicon Valley I got hit up for the same fees. They wanted something on the order of between $1000 and $2000 per year, I wish I had saved the memo. Most of the artists we were playing were small and needed the publicity, and many of them were local and on non-ASCAP/BMI labels, so I ignored them.
Basically, they have a bunch of employees who canvas popular nightclub districts and downtown areas all over America (and the world, it looks like) looking for small businesses to hit up.
The problems I have with their asking for this fee follows:
1. When playing a radio station, it is essentially double taxation, the radio has paid it's fees and I am paying for that in the way of listening to commercials.
2. What does the artist get from this double taxation? Probably next to nothing. The artist most directly benefits when one of my customers would come up and ask "Hey, what's that great song you're playing?" A few thousand a year is a LOT for a small retail business, and I'm not going to pay that for the priviledge of promoting bands. I draw the line at places that charge admission vs. places that don't. We were not a nightclub, there was no admission. And I absolutely do not equate music to other tools that I would use to make a more pleasant atmosphere for my customers. Music is a special case, where a lot of people are going to hear this stuff and go out and buy it. They're not going to go out and buy the tables and chairs that I have.
In the mean time, large businesses cut sweetheart deals with the record companies to pump the most horrible fertilizer you've ever heard in to your head while you're waiting for your movie to start at a large theater chain. Those guys are probably getting the music for free, since the announcements inbetween the songs are blatant commercials for the songs. This type of behavior promotes a disgusting hemogeny and is why the average top-40 teenager has about as much musical diversity as a toad.
I should also note that if your primary server is a RAID, you can still use one drive for backup. If I had two 80GB drives in a RAID0 array on the primary, I'd use one 160GB drive as the backup, since the backup drive doesn't need to be fast. That way you can still do the drive swappy thingy without handling multiple drives.
When you get to RAID sizes that exceed the size of the largest single drive currently available, this system no longer works.
Ok here's what I do for my small (about 12 persons) company:
You need two server machines, one to be the primary server, and one to hold a backup drive. (having the primary and backup drives on seperate machines prevents total loss through several faliure modes right off the bat, like a power supply malfunction on one machine)
These machines can be affordable and inexpensive Pentium II or III machines.
For this example, I'll tell you exactly what I used.
I went to newegg.com and bought three identical hard drives, 80 GB maxtors. I also purchased a lian-li removable IDE hard drive bay plus an extra cartridge for it.
I put one of the maxtors in the primary server machine, and made it the primary drive.
I put the other two maxtors in lian-li removable carts, and labeled them Backup drive A and Backup Drive B.
I put backup drive A in the lian li bay on the backup computer.
On the primary server, I made two tasks with windows task scheduler:
The first task does a full backup every monday night to the backup drive over the network.
The second task does a nightly incremental backup, on every night of the week except monday night.
When I come in on Monday morning, I remove the current backup drive, take it down to our safe deposit box at our bank, and swap it for the other drive, which has been sitting there for a week. in the evening, task scheduler runs a full backup on the drive.
So at all times, there is at least a week of incremental backups in case a deleted file needs to be retrieved, and there is an offsite backup that is never more than a week old, and there are nightly incremental backups on-site. All you have to do is swap the drives once a week and take them to your favorite off-site location for storage.
I've been doing this for a few months now and it's been good. I also put the server and backup machine on UPS, and the primary server has control of it through USB, and shuts itself down before the power dies.
--Mike
One solution for spam in your inbox
on
As the Spam Turns
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Ok, here's one way to eliminate spam in your inbox. No, this doesn't eliminate the cause, only the symptom, but it will stop the bandwidth at your server if you so have the power.
This works best if you own your own domain name and can create multiple pop boxes. It's still doable using regular email accounts, however.
Step 1: Change your email address to a previously unused address at your domain. Test it for a day, verify no spam is coming in to that address.
Step 2: Email all your trusted friends, relatives and business contacts your new email address.
Step 3: Remove your old email address links from your website and replace them with a feedback form that emails an unrevealed throwaway secondary address using your favorite web -> email gateway scripts.
Step 4: Create a bounce message at your old address, with a link to the feedback form, for all the people you forgot to email about your new address, and for people who want to contact you through your old address as they have found it on google searches or other archived postings, or your old business cards, etc.
Step 5: Receive both the new email address and the feedback form submissions on to your local mail reader. Filter them in to seperate directories. Give out your real, private address to feedback form users once they've verified themselves as being legit. If not, have a throwaway identity you can talk to them through. (the email account that the feedback form mails to) If you start getting spam at that address, simply change it.
Step 6: When you make public postings, post the feedback form URL instead of your email address. When you have to give your address away to commercial websites to sign up or download things, give them the throwaway address, or create a third address for legitimate online companies and filter that into a third folder for "commercial website email" If that get compromised by an unscrupulous business, change it. Still doesn't affect your primary private address.
You can receive the two or three addresses all at once with any modern mail reader, and filter them into folders. I personally use Eudora.
This is a really easy thing to do if you can stand changing your email address. I've had the same address since 1995, so I get about 150 spams per day. I have a filter that gets rid of most of those, but that's local and I still take the bandwidth hit, and about 20% of them get to my inbox still. Rather than try to over-filter and get a false positive, I think the above solution is a worry free and clean way to make a break from spam.
Actually I haven't read that particular book, but there's a whole genre of robot stories out there that deal with the same issues, which is why I mentioned it. There's a very fertile field of thought and imagination when it comes to androids...
and it's interesting how people can react to the same AI when it takes a human form vs. when it takes some other physical form. Perhaps it's safe to say that on average we treat things with human characteristics with more respect? I.E. everyone wants to save the cute fuzzy creatures but nobody cares about bugs and reptiles, on a layman's level that is. I think the emotion that dominates there is compassion. Compassion combined with knowledge and intelligence (in a scientist, for example) can enable you to have as much sympathy for an alien looking insect or sea creature.
All of the things mentioned in the article can be accomplished by static sensors for much cheaper. Monitoring multiple rooms with cheap X10 cameras, speaking through speakers. Detecting for intruders. Emailing you or calling your celphone.All of this can be done with home control products such as Homeseer and X10 networks. The rest - reminders and scheduling, can be done with a PDA or scheduling software with your computer.
What this does represent is the very earliest twinkle in the imagination of robotic developers who are waiting for the technology to catch up to our science fiction dreams - the day when personal robots will truely be useful as 'pals' that will help you in your daily life and provide an anthropomorphic touch, kind of like Data and his 'positronic brain'.
At some point, the argument will begin as to whether they are 'alive' or not, and robot rights groups will spring up everywhere! Whee!
Can someone provide a breakdown of that 99 cents, and what goes where? I'd rather use a service that interfaces directly with the artists, so that the artists get to keep 80 of those 99 cents. If a few major musicians band together and create something like that, many more will follow. Janis Ian are you listening? The catch is that the artists who have already signed their rights away to the labels in perpetuity will never have this option. The most often heard piece of advice for new artists negotiating contracts is "get a lawyer!"
The jet engine acts as a turbine to drive a generator for the electric motors, just like diesel engine. It does not actually propel the train down the track directly. And this is not the first time just turbine engines have been tried.
UP had a few turbine locos in the 1960's but they didn't do well. In the past, the problem with turbines in locomotives has been low efficiency (especially at part throttle) and low reliability. They are getting better, but I doubt that you'll see them in freight locos in the near future. Their lighter weight is not a big advantage in freight pullers. Sounds good for lightweight passenger travel, though.
JP Aerospace is a great little company, partially run by volunteers. Their main specialty is extremely high altitude balloon platforms (edge of space) from which they can conduct experiments and launch rockets. John does a lot of work with kids and education, including taking up "Pong-Sats", which are ping pong balls cut open and stuffed with what ever the kids want to put in them, sans live animals. One person put some digital camera memory in it with all the bits set to zero, and then when it came back got a very accurate radiation measurement by counting all the bits that had flipped.
I had the pleasure of meeting John at the last Space Access Society meeting in Arizona and talking to him for several hours about high altitude photography from balloon and kite platforms.
there was a really terrific Defender clone for the Amiga...I think it was called Datastorm. It had really killer music, and some nice bosses. Anyone know where to get an image that will work with WinUAE?
Anyone remember Infinity Complex for MajorBBS? It was an insane game consisting of blowing each other up and creating the world yourself, by dynamiting new tunnels in a large cubic area of underground rock.
Also left out is the venerable Quest for Magic, which came with MajorBBS for free. A very small game but a lot of fun - as an alternative for chatting with people instead of using teleconference.
The real deal fantasy game that you had to buy seperately was Kyrandia, and Galatic Empires was the TradeWars clone of the day.
Ah so I wasn't on crack when I was riding that train! A co-worker independently came up with this idea and I told him that I was pretty sure I saw that in action when I was leaving Narita on the train for Tokyo.
I believe Microsoft is a paper free environment, having all employee related forms and guidebooks online on their corprorate intranet. Would any Microsoft employees care to comment? Anybody else here want to comment about other companies that have gone paper free or at least tried?
as for replacing BOOKS with electronic texts...that's still a problem because of readability due to resolution. It takes longer to read text on a CRT or LCD vs. a piece of paper. I've noticed it's easier to read text for longer periods of time on an LCD vs. a CRT, but the rate of absorbtion is not as fast as nice sharp text printed at 150 - 600 DPI. Technology will fix this eventually, but until then it's a partial solution at best.
Also, a quick followup. I didn't give my reasoning for using this method. I am also very experienced with high end inkjet printing, and to get archival inkjet prints with vibrant colors is very difficult and expensive, especially when you add up all the extra costs. The Epson 2000P is a good printer if you want to try this, it's a 6-color pigment based inkset rather than a dye based ink. However, the materials and the ink are quite expensive, as we all know that's how printer manufacturers make their money, by jacking up the recurring costs of the inks. Both the paper and the ink are extremely important for longevity, you can't use archival ink on any old inkjet paper, if the paper is not PH neutral it may slowly eat the inkset, or vice versa. There are also third party archival inksets and papers for other epson inkjet printers such as the 1270 and 1280, in particular, visit John Cone's website, Inkjet Mall.
John makes third party inksets for Epson printers for archival printing. One inkset replaces the color inks with 4 or 6 grey tones for printing of archival and true-toned B&W images. Other than that, your best bet for hassle-free off the shelf archival printing is the Epson 2000P with heavyweight archival matte paper.
I still use inkjet for when I need instant prints (I have an Epson 1270 wide format 6 color printer) but I never ever sell them, because even when framed and sealed away from moving air, the 1270 prints won't last as long as photoaccess' prints on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper.
To learn about all the gotchas and get started with high end inkjet printing, check out the Epson Inkjet Mailing List on lebenlists, which actually looks like it's been migrated to a Yahoo group.
If you want hard copies of your digital photos, I suggest making them exactly like your 35mm prints - use an online printing service such as ofoto.com,shutterfly.com or photoaccess.com.
These services burn your digital image on to ordinary film paper - the same stuff they use to make your prints from negatives in the lab. How do they do this? Instead of exposing the print paper to a darkroom enlarger with your negative in it, they scan the paper with a cathode ray tube (yea same technology as your monitor) and the results are actually better than a negative transfer because there isn't a second lens in the darkroom to distort and soften your image from the negative, the image goes from colored electrons to the paper directly.
as for reccomendations, I've had good service with all three, Ofoto and Shutterfly use Kodak professional and/or Kodak digital imaging paper (ofoto is owned by Kodak) and Photoaccess uses Fuji Crystal Archive paper, and also offers a beautiful matte finish paper that I use when I'm selling prints.
As for online photo display for the web, I would heartily reccomend Gallery, which is a set of PHP scripts. I have modified this software to allow print sales of my photographs. Photoaccess and all the other companies have online sharing of albums themselves, but their interfaces are mostly terrible and the preview images are way too small and lossy. (they have to go small to handle the traffic, I don't blame them) so I have my own web galleries, but I print through them.
"Thou shalt not speak ill of thy fellow Aerospace Entrepreneur." Being corteous goes a long way to not burning bridges you don't even know you're going to need yet.:)
Consider the FBI's page count as a measure of perceived threat to the current regime. It will then come as no surpise to find out that the best and brightest of all people are targeted for monitoring.
Make sense? Martin Luther King was an incredibly charismatic public speaker. He had the ability to sway the hearts and minds of millions of people, whether they were black, white green or purple. Grass roots movements always pose the greatest threat to a body in power, thus they are always first to be targeted, destabilized and squashed. Look at any movement, right or left, and you will begin to see a subtle trend. It takes an incredible amount of human inertia to change or supplant an existing power base, but it is possible.
Coronation, n.:
The ceremony of investing a sovereign with the outward and visible signs of his divine right to be blown skyhigh with a dynamite bomb.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Carmack is extremely intelligent and knows what he's doing. He's following a good process of build a little, test a little. He's been absorbing a huge amount of information from people who have built and flown things in the past, and does have a clue. I'd suggest listening to him speak at next year's Space Access conference before passing judgement on him. Coming from an unrelated industry does not disqualify him and his team from building flight hardware. It's like anything else, if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.
> However, I have heard a rumour that someone has bought up the company and plans on reviving the technology.
XCOR Aerospace has aquired the intellectual property of Rotary Rocket, but has no plans to revive the Roton program. The buildings, test site and Roton landing demonstrator vehicle (Roton ATV) were not part of the aquisition.
We've lots and lots of reusable liquid fuel rocket videos on our website www.xcor.com as well as a new photo gallery and redesigned engine projects page. Have a look if you haven't been there in a while or been there at all.:) We make reliable rocket hardware and rocket powered aircraft. There's some good video of the EZ-Rocket flying in the Space Access presentation video (the conference that the the space.com article was about) as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, they have a bunch of employees who canvas popular nightclub districts and downtown areas all over America (and the world, it looks like) looking for small businesses to hit up.
The problems I have with their asking for this fee follows:
1. When playing a radio station, it is essentially double taxation, the radio has paid it's fees and I am paying for that in the way of listening to commercials.
2. What does the artist get from this double taxation? Probably next to nothing. The artist most directly benefits when one of my customers would come up and ask "Hey, what's that great song you're playing?" A few thousand a year is a LOT for a small retail business, and I'm not going to pay that for the priviledge of promoting bands. I draw the line at places that charge admission vs. places that don't. We were not a nightclub, there was no admission. And I absolutely do not equate music to other tools that I would use to make a more pleasant atmosphere for my customers. Music is a special case, where a lot of people are going to hear this stuff and go out and buy it. They're not going to go out and buy the tables and chairs that I have.
In the mean time, large businesses cut sweetheart deals with the record companies to pump the most horrible fertilizer you've ever heard in to your head while you're waiting for your movie to start at a large theater chain. Those guys are probably getting the music for free, since the announcements inbetween the songs are blatant commercials for the songs. This type of behavior promotes a disgusting hemogeny and is why the average top-40 teenager has about as much musical diversity as a toad.
---M
I should also note that if your primary server is a RAID, you can still use one drive for backup. If I had two 80GB drives in a RAID0 array on the primary, I'd use one 160GB drive as the backup, since the backup drive doesn't need to be fast. That way you can still do the drive swappy thingy without handling multiple drives.
When you get to RAID sizes that exceed the size of the largest single drive currently available, this system no longer works.
Ok here's what I do for my small (about 12 persons) company:
You need two server machines, one to be the primary server, and one to hold a backup drive. (having the primary and backup drives on seperate machines prevents total loss through several faliure modes right off the bat, like a power supply malfunction on one machine)
These machines can be affordable and inexpensive Pentium II or III machines.
For this example, I'll tell you exactly what I used.
I went to newegg.com and bought three identical hard drives, 80 GB maxtors. I also purchased a lian-li removable IDE hard drive bay plus an extra cartridge for it.
I put one of the maxtors in the primary server machine, and made it the primary drive.
I put the other two maxtors in lian-li removable carts, and labeled them Backup drive A and Backup Drive B.
I put backup drive A in the lian li bay on the backup computer.
On the primary server, I made two tasks with windows task scheduler:
The first task does a full backup every monday night to the backup drive over the network.
The second task does a nightly incremental backup, on every night of the week except monday night.
When I come in on Monday morning, I remove the current backup drive, take it down to our safe deposit box at our bank, and swap it for the other drive, which has been sitting there for a week. in the evening, task scheduler runs a full backup on the drive.
So at all times, there is at least a week of incremental backups in case a deleted file needs to be retrieved, and there is an offsite backup that is never more than a week old, and there are nightly incremental backups on-site. All you have to do is swap the drives once a week and take them to your favorite off-site location for storage.
I've been doing this for a few months now and it's been good. I also put the server and backup machine on UPS, and the primary server has control of it through USB, and shuts itself down before the power dies.
--Mike
This works best if you own your own domain name and can create multiple pop boxes. It's still doable using regular email accounts, however.
Step 1: Change your email address to a previously unused address at your domain. Test it for a day, verify no spam is coming in to that address.
Step 2: Email all your trusted friends, relatives and business contacts your new email address.
Step 3: Remove your old email address links from your website and replace them with a feedback form that emails an unrevealed throwaway secondary address using your favorite web -> email gateway scripts.
Step 4: Create a bounce message at your old address, with a link to the feedback form, for all the people you forgot to email about your new address, and for people who want to contact you through your old address as they have found it on google searches or other archived postings, or your old business cards, etc.
Step 5: Receive both the new email address and the feedback form submissions on to your local mail reader. Filter them in to seperate directories. Give out your real, private address to feedback form users once they've verified themselves as being legit. If not, have a throwaway identity you can talk to them through. (the email account that the feedback form mails to) If you start getting spam at that address, simply change it.
Step 6: When you make public postings, post the feedback form URL instead of your email address. When you have to give your address away to commercial websites to sign up or download things, give them the throwaway address, or create a third address for legitimate online companies and filter that into a third folder for "commercial website email" If that get compromised by an unscrupulous business, change it. Still doesn't affect your primary private address.
You can receive the two or three addresses all at once with any modern mail reader, and filter them into folders. I personally use Eudora.
This is a really easy thing to do if you can stand changing your email address. I've had the same address since 1995, so I get about 150 spams per day. I have a filter that gets rid of most of those, but that's local and I still take the bandwidth hit, and about 20% of them get to my inbox still. Rather than try to over-filter and get a false positive, I think the above solution is a worry free and clean way to make a break from spam.
---Mike
and it's interesting how people can react to the same AI when it takes a human form vs. when it takes some other physical form. Perhaps it's safe to say that on average we treat things with human characteristics with more respect? I.E. everyone wants to save the cute fuzzy creatures but nobody cares about bugs and reptiles, on a layman's level that is. I think the emotion that dominates there is compassion. Compassion combined with knowledge and intelligence (in a scientist, for example) can enable you to have as much sympathy for an alien looking insect or sea creature.
What this does represent is the very earliest twinkle in the imagination of robotic developers who are waiting for the technology to catch up to our science fiction dreams - the day when personal robots will truely be useful as 'pals' that will help you in your daily life and provide an anthropomorphic touch, kind of like Data and his 'positronic brain'.
At some point, the argument will begin as to whether they are 'alive' or not, and robot rights groups will spring up everywhere! Whee!
--Mike
Can someone provide a breakdown of that 99 cents, and what goes where? I'd rather use a service that interfaces directly with the artists, so that the artists get to keep 80 of those 99 cents. If a few major musicians band together and create something like that, many more will follow. Janis Ian are you listening? The catch is that the artists who have already signed their rights away to the labels in perpetuity will never have this option. The most often heard piece of advice for new artists negotiating contracts is "get a lawyer!"
--Mike
UP had a few turbine locos in the 1960's but they didn't do well. In the past, the problem with turbines in locomotives has been low efficiency (especially at part throttle) and low reliability. They are getting better, but I doubt that you'll see them in freight locos in the near future. Their lighter weight is not a big advantage in freight pullers. Sounds good for lightweight passenger travel, though.
Here is Bombardier's own page on it and a photo of the locomotive.
---Mike
I had the pleasure of meeting John at the last Space Access Society meeting in Arizona and talking to him for several hours about high altitude photography from balloon and kite platforms.
---Mike
there was a really terrific Defender clone for the Amiga...I think it was called Datastorm. It had really killer music, and some nice bosses. Anyone know where to get an image that will work with WinUAE?
--Mike
Also left out is the venerable Quest for Magic, which came with MajorBBS for free. A very small game but a lot of fun - as an alternative for chatting with people instead of using teleconference.
The real deal fantasy game that you had to buy seperately was Kyrandia, and Galatic Empires was the TradeWars clone of the day.
--Mike
P.S. Hello Infernoites!
Ah so I wasn't on crack when I was riding that train! A co-worker independently came up with this idea and I told him that I was pretty sure I saw that in action when I was leaving Narita on the train for Tokyo.
as for replacing BOOKS with electronic texts...that's still a problem because of readability due to resolution. It takes longer to read text on a CRT or LCD vs. a piece of paper. I've noticed it's easier to read text for longer periods of time on an LCD vs. a CRT, but the rate of absorbtion is not as fast as nice sharp text printed at 150 - 600 DPI. Technology will fix this eventually, but until then it's a partial solution at best.
---Mike
It was tres cool last year.
www.caextreme.org coming up on Sept. 7-8!
I still use inkjet for when I need instant prints (I have an Epson 1270 wide format 6 color printer) but I never ever sell them, because even when framed and sealed away from moving air, the 1270 prints won't last as long as photoaccess' prints on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper.
To learn about all the gotchas and get started with high end inkjet printing, check out the Epson Inkjet Mailing List on lebenlists, which actually looks like it's been migrated to a Yahoo group.
These services burn your digital image on to ordinary film paper - the same stuff they use to make your prints from negatives in the lab. How do they do this? Instead of exposing the print paper to a darkroom enlarger with your negative in it, they scan the paper with a cathode ray tube (yea same technology as your monitor) and the results are actually better than a negative transfer because there isn't a second lens in the darkroom to distort and soften your image from the negative, the image goes from colored electrons to the paper directly.
as for reccomendations, I've had good service with all three, Ofoto and Shutterfly use Kodak professional and/or Kodak digital imaging paper (ofoto is owned by Kodak) and Photoaccess uses Fuji Crystal Archive paper, and also offers a beautiful matte finish paper that I use when I'm selling prints.
As for online photo display for the web, I would heartily reccomend Gallery, which is a set of PHP scripts. I have modified this software to allow print sales of my photographs. Photoaccess and all the other companies have online sharing of albums themselves, but their interfaces are mostly terrible and the preview images are way too small and lossy. (they have to go small to handle the traffic, I don't blame them) so I have my own web galleries, but I print through them.
---Mike
"Thou shalt not speak ill of thy fellow Aerospace Entrepreneur." Being corteous goes a long way to not burning bridges you don't even know you're going to need yet. :)
---Mike
...watch pr0n while you make pr0n!
Now I know where to get 1.21 jigawatts if I'm stranded in 1993. I'll be saved from listening to REM's "everybody hurts" on the radio all over again!
Make sense? Martin Luther King was an incredibly charismatic public speaker. He had the ability to sway the hearts and minds of millions of people, whether they were black, white green or purple. Grass roots movements always pose the greatest threat to a body in power, thus they are always first to be targeted, destabilized and squashed. Look at any movement, right or left, and you will begin to see a subtle trend. It takes an incredible amount of human inertia to change or supplant an existing power base, but it is possible.
Coronation, n.:
The ceremony of investing a sovereign with the outward and visible signs of his divine right to be blown skyhigh with a dynamite bomb. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
--Mike
--Mike
We've lots and lots of reusable liquid fuel rocket videos on our website www.xcor.com as well as a new photo gallery and redesigned engine projects page. Have a look if you haven't been there in a while or been there at all. :) We make reliable rocket hardware and rocket powered aircraft. There's some good video of the EZ-Rocket flying in the Space Access presentation video (the conference that the the space.com article was about) as well.
This will get us by until the Hubble Heritage Site gets ahold of them or the main site becomes un-/.ed.