We've had good experience with Mailroute.net - actually replaced hardware Barracuda 300s with this, never looked back.
Mailroute doesn't archive messages, just filters and forwards, so it won't help you if a you / a user deleted a message and you'd like to get a copy back from the 'backup'. But for basic filtering - really good, quite inexpensive.
And for us the cost was really more about the $$ necessary to keep a Barracuda alive in a data center plus the yearly spam update subscriptions.
It worked out to something like $2K / year for one Barracuda 300, and Mailroute is a fraction of that.
YMMV / FWIW
The main part relevant to this problem: responding to many stalkers even with negative / threatening behavior is a form of positive encouragement, and they'll keep at it. The only solution is to filter YOUR experience (delete / don't listen to VM, don't read emails etc) rather than trying to get the unwanted inputs to stop.
That way there's no feedback to the jerks on the sending side, they get bored or angry at someone else, and go away.
One subtlety is: don't turn off your phone, or leave a outbound message saying 'I will not be checking this voicemail because of the jerks". That's encouragement. Change nothing. Get a 2nd phone as needed, use that.
Likewise, don't setup an autoresponder saying "I don't read this email because of the jerks" - same logic as above.
GoF is a very worthwhile read, for everyone.
Some posters seem to miss the (huge) advantage that electric vehicles have vs gas, hydrogen etc. powered vehicles- they are decoupled from a specific energy source. Solar, nuclear, coal, wind ALL work as electric car fuel. Hydrogen requires a vast infrastructure that doesn't exist yet, but you can charge an e-car Right Now with whatever electrical supply you happen to have. Charge from solar/wind at home, charge from evil coal at work, whatever. The electric car is an omnivore. Bio-diesel is interesting because you can make your own, but the electric car democratizes the energy input for transport to a much higher degree.
PLUS it breaks the tight linkage between car maker and fuel supplier that exists now, and would also likely exit for hydrogen-based cars.
We used to host our own databases and mail / web server in the Boston area.
Not in a huge office complex, just in a small suite of offices. It sucked.
Every couple of weeks, someone would dig up a cable in the street (causing an outage), or the power would go off for a long time (and our UPS would die, and that would cause an outage), or someone would trip over something (causing an outage).
Grrr. We eventually moved our stack of mac minis (cheap! and low hassle) to a specialist colocation place in Las Vegas that basically is a sub-tennant of the gigantic Switch datacenter.
Here was the surprise bonus - in addition to way better uptime, the quality of the connection we got was SO good it was crazy. Doing a 500Mb system update takes like, a minute to download. And because we didn't need the fancy Symmetric DSL connection back home, we could save money by downgrading to a regular ADSL connection. And, we got a 'naked' / all ports open connection to the net without hassles.
This was a seriously Good Move for us - think about moving your box somewhere offsite. It's cool.
If you happen to be using Macs, we used http://macminicolo.com/ (we're just a customer, but a pretty stoked one).
And FF threw a JS unresponsive error on load....the purpose of doing this was what? Out-trending who?
Was ANY usability testing done? Anyone think of skimming "Don't Make Me Think"? [
link ]
Yuck.
So, a band I'm in signed up for "Tweet For A Track" - basically, a service that gives away a free song to folks to Twitter about the record. Mildly-bribed social networking. There are pros/cons to this approach, but we thought we'd try it.
Of course, our twitter feed is linked to FB (tweets become FB Wall posts automatically).
One day it dawns on us that Tweet for A Track had been sending the same, repeated, now-getting-quite-spammy promotional tweets every couple of weeks - and thus creating a host of boring, spammy FB Wall posts. Yikes! We had to go kill the TFaT / Twitter connection and then hand-delete all the FB posts. Not good.
So, the moral of the story is be very very careful about any 'services' you sign up for that have the power to post stuff, directly or indirectly, to your FB Wall. You can automate the process of alienating your friends very easily via these handy-dandy services.
- solar and wind electric are worthy goals, but can be expensive - and power transmission isn't easy or cheap.
- there are aggressive state subsidies for both solar electric and wind electric
- yet, solar domestic hot water is cheap to install (i.e. $4K for many houses) and has near 100% conversion efficiency at the panel (most of the indicent sunlight heats the water, as opposed to solar's conversion efficiency of 20-30%)
- AND 20-50% of a typical home's energy usage is hot water.
So, if the goal is to save money and reduce your greenhouse gas emissions, don't start with solar electricity or wind electricity - put in a simple solar hot water system, tied into your current tanked gas-or-electric heater. WAY better bang for the buck, and an order of magnitude cheaper than grid-tied PV systems.
CA and other states 'over-value' solar electric (for example by offering $10K+ credits on PV system) and under-promote solar hot water (with tiny $300 credits). That makes me a sad panda - if you're going to subsidize environmentally friendly choices, they should at least include the most efficient ones...
Guess it's time to go write a policy paper on this.
Errrr... I personally have no connection w/ NovaRoam (just used a few of their boxes for prototyping something). Price per unit was @ $2K, I believe. You'd need two.
http://novaroam.com/ - used by police, fire, etc. Good penetration through trees and foliage, unlike WiFi. Mesh networking capable if you need it (although your setup sounds like point-to-point).
I run IT at a small, mostly mac-based outfit. We tried client-side filtering (SpamAssassin), and the Mail.app plugin was OK, but - required constant training by the users to get good results - until spammers attack methods changed... then we waited for the plugin to be updated, etc. This was not a good solution - we have a 'few, very productive employees' setup rather than an OfficeSpace / lots of drones setup, so any lost time is bad news.
I then tried using Spamphibian (setup as a dedicated filter on a spare box). Total failure - LOTS of stuff got through, bad support from the parent company, slow filter updates. Terrible.
Then I tried Barracuda. WHAT a difference. Easy to setup, very very effective filtering, user-level training if desired, user level quarrantine-of-might-be-spam - so I the Admin don't have to review EVERYBODY'S junk folder for false positives. Sure, the product could be improved, and I totally agree with the back-scatter critique. But - if your time is valuable and you want your spam problem 99% solved, just install this thing. I love it. No, this isn't astroturf - I just like this tool very much.
I like and use the Amazon store, but I'd think the Slashdot crowd would be more impressed with 'unmediated' channels like CDBaby.org or even Nimbit.
Amazon is convenient if you already have an account with them (the 'one-click' convenience is pretty compelling if you want to buy just a single MP3), but there are still submission hassles for the indie artist, and they remain a gatekeeper of sorts between artist and audience / customer.
CDBaby.com is a pure service provider - pay them a flat fee, and they handle both physical CD sales and now whole-album MP3 sales. Lots of junk on there, but lots of great stuff also.
I'm also interested in Nimbit's model - they're a 'collect a piece of the action' model where you can put songs up for sale at any price you want as soon as they are done - it's pretty cool to be able to put something up for sale the second you get it back from Mastering. iTunes/Amazon/others have pretty long delays before your stuff appears for sale.
On the other hand, I'm just giving an older record of mine away for free (over here if you're interested - it's 'interesting rock') - I'd rather get the promotional milage out of it and focus on selling the new one I'm working on.
Yes, it's bad if the 'consumer base' ends up expecting all music to be free, no matter what. But in the past, tons of music was given away 'free' as part of promotional efforts, it was just that because each physical copy (CD, LP, whatever) had to be manufactured and paid for only funded acts could afford to do give aways on a large scale.
Now indie artists have the option of doing the same giveaways of content IF THEY WANT. This can work well - I heard that Tim Curran was giving away his record (over here, if you're interested) so I grabbed a copy. I went to see his show two weeks later ($12) and was happy to be there - I probably wouldn't have gone if I didn't get the album, and I'm much more likely to pay for his future releases now that I have some of his music.
I decided to put one (but not all) of my records up for free download in the same way (over here, if you're interested), and I've definitely expanded my listener base, had more cool interactions with folks who've downloaded the record, etc. The hope is that the new record I'm working on will land on more fertile ground, thanks to the donation of the previous work. We'll see.
The whole free thing might just be a binary version of variable pricing - new released record costs $10, 1 year old record costs $5, 3 year old record is... ? Free? $.50?
No, it's not OS. But you can do virtually any data-crunching thing with it, and developing on it is insanely easy. For example, you can make changes to the way your system looks and functions without kicking users out. It's multi-platform. You can publish databases to the web (or just create simple 'guest-book' web forms that populate your primary databases) with just a couple of clicks. Imports / exports to spreadsheets, has fancy data-scraping tools (i.e. track packages via UPS, integrate GEO data from mapping sites, etc). The templates that come free with FMP are also very useful for many business functions (contact manager,invoicing system, inventory manager, etc.) , and you can learn how-to develop on FMP by modifying these solutions. I can't recommend it enough - we've used it for 9 years.
Just to head-off one assinine 'solution' to the problem of 'music wanting to be free':
If you're a rock pop jazz etc. act of a certain profile, playing live can generate some revenue. More often, tours are break-even or money losing enterprises, designed to sell CDs, shirts etc.
Other genres don't fit the play-live-to-make-money model well at all. Think some electronic music styles.
But here's the bigger issue: There are many CDs / AAC files etc in my collection from bands I've never seen live, and honestly, probably wouldn't enjoy seeing live given the hassles of many shows (parking, bad seats, annoying other fans, etc).
Further, with the consolidation of live music venues under the Clear Channel umbrella, the proliferation of dance music / cover bands vs original act venues, etc., the available 'space' for a live band to generate revenue in is severely constrained (vs, say 15 years ago).
So - don't rationalize stealing music that might take me 3 years to make in a studio by saying you might come see me live, IF I happen to drive all the way to your town and play your local club.
AND - as a musician, I want to be able to (potentially) sell to a global market - not just my local, logistically reachable live music patrons.
Complain about the big bad music companies all you want. But why shouldn't _I_ - the creator - be able to sell my material at any price I set, without having it 'liberated' by some fool who thinks they are doing me a favor with 'free publicity'?
P-Com Speedlan units are great. @$900 each, rock solid, automatic mesh networking (each units is a router and a repeater). Adding units is brainlessly easy.
To talk about hydrogen-powered cars having a 'bomb under the hood' is a bit simplistic.
If you have enough energy stored in a car to move that car, with passengers and cargo, from point A to point B 500 miles away, you have a 'bomb'. Big battery, flywheel, 12 gallons of gas, bunch of agitated gerbils, doesn't matter - there is enough energy in the vehicle to blow your ass up 'real good' if it gets released quickly!
If you're incinerated, you probably don't care if the crispyness comes from petrol or H2. So relax, we all drive potential bombs around every day.
Sorry, in most cases Apple is encoding from 44.1. Example: all the submissions from CD-Baby (big independent music distributor) are encoded from CD-masters, which are 44.1. Even if Apple re-processes the audio to an intermediate 48KHz state before AAC encoding, there is no potential audio improvement - in fact there might be a very small loss of quality if the sample rate conversion is done wrong.
In practical terms, audio pros work at 44.1 KHz or 96Khz, but rarely 48KHz - it's a pain in the ass to move to the 44.1 'standard' and the theoretical quality improvement is rarely worth it in real life.
AND - there are plenty of examples of well recorded music done at 16 bit / 44.1KHz with GOOD A/D converters sounding much better than higher bit-rate stuff done with shitty converters.
So don't get too hung up about 44.1 vs 48. It's a bit of canard.
The "freeze" functions and Offline bounce offered in 6 were a HUGE improvement to my workflow. Allows me to run very complicated mixes with lots of AU instruments, effects, automation, etc. on a relatively wimpy dual-500 G4. I'd say it was a massive jump-up from 5 to 6.
Logic Pro? Can't wait!
Here's my take on it:
A bunch of Indie lables and CD Baby (umbrella for lots of tinier labels and individual artists) are going to have their content on iTMS soon.
This is good for Apple - I suspect they're able to keep a higher percentage of the $.99 on those sales. Less RIAA strong-arming, less "fuck you - we're the Rolling fucking Stones" negotiating pressure.
Perhaps the mainstream content is a loss leader to sell iPods (good plan), and the vast ocean of indie content will actually be profitable in its own right.
Slashdot Mirror
Business Adventures https://www.amazon.com/Busines... The New New Thing https://www.amazon.com/New-Thi... and probably Microserfs: https://www.amazon.com/Microse...
We've had good experience with Mailroute.net - actually replaced hardware Barracuda 300s with this, never looked back. Mailroute doesn't archive messages, just filters and forwards, so it won't help you if a you / a user deleted a message and you'd like to get a copy back from the 'backup'. But for basic filtering - really good, quite inexpensive. And for us the cost was really more about the $$ necessary to keep a Barracuda alive in a data center plus the yearly spam update subscriptions. It worked out to something like $2K / year for one Barracuda 300, and Mailroute is a fraction of that. YMMV / FWIW
The main part relevant to this problem: responding to many stalkers even with negative / threatening behavior is a form of positive encouragement, and they'll keep at it. The only solution is to filter YOUR experience (delete / don't listen to VM, don't read emails etc) rather than trying to get the unwanted inputs to stop.
That way there's no feedback to the jerks on the sending side, they get bored or angry at someone else, and go away.
One subtlety is: don't turn off your phone, or leave a outbound message saying 'I will not be checking this voicemail because of the jerks". That's encouragement. Change nothing. Get a 2nd phone as needed, use that.
Likewise, don't setup an autoresponder saying "I don't read this email because of the jerks" - same logic as above. GoF is a very worthwhile read, for everyone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... Classic problem with companies and industries being able to influence their regulators.
/reporting from shadow-Earth.
Some posters seem to miss the (huge) advantage that electric vehicles have vs gas, hydrogen etc. powered vehicles- they are decoupled from a specific energy source. Solar, nuclear, coal, wind ALL work as electric car fuel. Hydrogen requires a vast infrastructure that doesn't exist yet, but you can charge an e-car Right Now with whatever electrical supply you happen to have. Charge from solar/wind at home, charge from evil coal at work, whatever. The electric car is an omnivore. Bio-diesel is interesting because you can make your own, but the electric car democratizes the energy input for transport to a much higher degree. PLUS it breaks the tight linkage between car maker and fuel supplier that exists now, and would also likely exit for hydrogen-based cars.
Every couple of weeks, someone would dig up a cable in the street (causing an outage), or the power would go off for a long time (and our UPS would die, and that would cause an outage), or someone would trip over something (causing an outage).
Grrr. We eventually moved our stack of mac minis (cheap! and low hassle) to a specialist colocation place in Las Vegas that basically is a sub-tennant of the gigantic Switch datacenter.
Here was the surprise bonus - in addition to way better uptime, the quality of the connection we got was SO good it was crazy. Doing a 500Mb system update takes like, a minute to download. And because we didn't need the fancy Symmetric DSL connection back home, we could save money by downgrading to a regular ADSL connection. And, we got a 'naked' / all ports open connection to the net without hassles.
This was a seriously Good Move for us - think about moving your box somewhere offsite. It's cool.
If you happen to be using Macs, we used http://macminicolo.com/ (we're just a customer, but a pretty stoked one).
And FF threw a JS unresponsive error on load. ...the purpose of doing this was what? Out-trending who?
Was ANY usability testing done? Anyone think of skimming "Don't Make Me Think"? [
link ]
Yuck.
So, a band I'm in signed up for "Tweet For A Track" - basically, a service that gives away a free song to folks to Twitter about the record. Mildly-bribed social networking. There are pros/cons to this approach, but we thought we'd try it. Of course, our twitter feed is linked to FB (tweets become FB Wall posts automatically). One day it dawns on us that Tweet for A Track had been sending the same, repeated, now-getting-quite-spammy promotional tweets every couple of weeks - and thus creating a host of boring, spammy FB Wall posts. Yikes! We had to go kill the TFaT / Twitter connection and then hand-delete all the FB posts. Not good. So, the moral of the story is be very very careful about any 'services' you sign up for that have the power to post stuff, directly or indirectly, to your FB Wall. You can automate the process of alienating your friends very easily via these handy-dandy services.
- solar and wind electric are worthy goals, but can be expensive - and power transmission isn't easy or cheap.
- there are aggressive state subsidies for both solar electric and wind electric
- yet, solar domestic hot water is cheap to install (i.e. $4K for many houses) and has near 100% conversion efficiency at the panel (most of the indicent sunlight heats the water, as opposed to solar's conversion efficiency of 20-30%)
- AND 20-50% of a typical home's energy usage is hot water.
So, if the goal is to save money and reduce your greenhouse gas emissions, don't start with solar electricity or wind electricity - put in a simple solar hot water system, tied into your current tanked gas-or-electric heater. WAY better bang for the buck, and an order of magnitude cheaper than grid-tied PV systems.
CA and other states 'over-value' solar electric (for example by offering $10K+ credits on PV system) and under-promote solar hot water (with tiny $300 credits). That makes me a sad panda - if you're going to subsidize environmentally friendly choices, they should at least include the most efficient ones...
Guess it's time to go write a policy paper on this.
- KvK
The rock, I has it: http://www.instarmusic.com/
Errrr... I personally have no connection w/ NovaRoam (just used a few of their boxes for prototyping something). Price per unit was @ $2K, I believe. You'd need two.
-Karl
A rock record: http://www.instarmusic.com/
I run IT at a small, mostly mac-based outfit. We tried client-side filtering (SpamAssassin), and the Mail.app plugin was OK, but - required constant training by the users to get good results - until spammers attack methods changed... then we waited for the plugin to be updated, etc. This was not a good solution - we have a 'few, very productive employees' setup rather than an OfficeSpace / lots of drones setup, so any lost time is bad news. I then tried using Spamphibian (setup as a dedicated filter on a spare box). Total failure - LOTS of stuff got through, bad support from the parent company, slow filter updates. Terrible. Then I tried Barracuda. WHAT a difference. Easy to setup, very very effective filtering, user-level training if desired, user level quarrantine-of-might-be-spam - so I the Admin don't have to review EVERYBODY'S junk folder for false positives. Sure, the product could be improved, and I totally agree with the back-scatter critique. But - if your time is valuable and you want your spam problem 99% solved, just install this thing. I love it. No, this isn't astroturf - I just like this tool very much.
Amazon is convenient if you already have an account with them (the 'one-click' convenience is pretty compelling if you want to buy just a single MP3), but there are still submission hassles for the indie artist, and they remain a gatekeeper of sorts between artist and audience / customer.
CDBaby.com is a pure service provider - pay them a flat fee, and they handle both physical CD sales and now whole-album MP3 sales. Lots of junk on there, but lots of great stuff also.
I'm also interested in Nimbit's model - they're a 'collect a piece of the action' model where you can put songs up for sale at any price you want as soon as they are done - it's pretty cool to be able to put something up for sale the second you get it back from Mastering. iTunes/Amazon/others have pretty long delays before your stuff appears for sale.
On the other hand, I'm just giving an older record of mine away for free (over here if you're interested - it's 'interesting rock') - I'd rather get the promotional milage out of it and focus on selling the new one I'm working on.
Yes, it's bad if the 'consumer base' ends up expecting all music to be free, no matter what. But in the past, tons of music was given away 'free' as part of promotional efforts, it was just that because each physical copy (CD, LP, whatever) had to be manufactured and paid for only funded acts could afford to do give aways on a large scale. Now indie artists have the option of doing the same giveaways of content IF THEY WANT. This can work well - I heard that Tim Curran was giving away his record (over here, if you're interested) so I grabbed a copy. I went to see his show two weeks later ($12) and was happy to be there - I probably wouldn't have gone if I didn't get the album, and I'm much more likely to pay for his future releases now that I have some of his music. I decided to put one (but not all) of my records up for free download in the same way (over here, if you're interested), and I've definitely expanded my listener base, had more cool interactions with folks who've downloaded the record, etc. The hope is that the new record I'm working on will land on more fertile ground, thanks to the donation of the previous work. We'll see. The whole free thing might just be a binary version of variable pricing - new released record costs $10, 1 year old record costs $5, 3 year old record is... ? Free? $.50?
No, it's not OS. But you can do virtually any data-crunching thing with it, and developing on it is insanely easy. For example, you can make changes to the way your system looks and functions without kicking users out. It's multi-platform. You can publish databases to the web (or just create simple 'guest-book' web forms that populate your primary databases) with just a couple of clicks. Imports / exports to spreadsheets, has fancy data-scraping tools (i.e. track packages via UPS, integrate GEO data from mapping sites, etc). The templates that come free with FMP are also very useful for many business functions (contact manager,invoicing system, inventory manager, etc.) , and you can learn how-to develop on FMP by modifying these solutions. I can't recommend it enough - we've used it for 9 years.
If you're a rock pop jazz etc. act of a certain profile, playing live can generate some revenue. More often, tours are break-even or money losing enterprises, designed to sell CDs, shirts etc.
Other genres don't fit the play-live-to-make-money model well at all. Think some electronic music styles.
But here's the bigger issue: There are many CDs / AAC files etc in my collection from bands I've never seen live, and honestly, probably wouldn't enjoy seeing live given the hassles of many shows (parking, bad seats, annoying other fans, etc).
Further, with the consolidation of live music venues under the Clear Channel umbrella, the proliferation of dance music / cover bands vs original act venues, etc., the available 'space' for a live band to generate revenue in is severely constrained (vs, say 15 years ago).
So - don't rationalize stealing music that might take me 3 years to make in a studio by saying you might come see me live, IF I happen to drive all the way to your town and play your local club.
AND - as a musician, I want to be able to (potentially) sell to a global market - not just my local, logistically reachable live music patrons.
Complain about the big bad music companies all you want. But why shouldn't _I_ - the creator - be able to sell my material at any price I set, without having it 'liberated' by some fool who thinks they are doing me a favor with 'free publicity'?
True, but they are weatherproof and 'just work'. Might be cheaper over the long haul.
P-Com Speedlan units are great. @$900 each, rock solid, automatic mesh networking (each units is a router and a repeater). Adding units is brainlessly easy.
To talk about hydrogen-powered cars having a 'bomb under the hood' is a bit simplistic. If you have enough energy stored in a car to move that car, with passengers and cargo, from point A to point B 500 miles away, you have a 'bomb'. Big battery, flywheel, 12 gallons of gas, bunch of agitated gerbils, doesn't matter - there is enough energy in the vehicle to blow your ass up 'real good' if it gets released quickly! If you're incinerated, you probably don't care if the crispyness comes from petrol or H2. So relax, we all drive potential bombs around every day.
Sorry, in most cases Apple is encoding from 44.1. Example: all the submissions from CD-Baby (big independent music distributor) are encoded from CD-masters, which are 44.1. Even if Apple re-processes the audio to an intermediate 48KHz state before AAC encoding, there is no potential audio improvement - in fact there might be a very small loss of quality if the sample rate conversion is done wrong.
In practical terms, audio pros work at 44.1 KHz or 96Khz, but rarely 48KHz - it's a pain in the ass to move to the 44.1 'standard' and the theoretical quality improvement is rarely worth it in real life.
AND - there are plenty of examples of well recorded music done at 16 bit / 44.1KHz with GOOD A/D converters sounding much better than higher bit-rate stuff done with shitty converters.
So don't get too hung up about 44.1 vs 48. It's a bit of canard.
Is the BEFW11S4 even Linux? Bandwidth shaping on this widely used box would be a wonderful thing.
The "freeze" functions and Offline bounce offered in 6 were a HUGE improvement to my workflow. Allows me to run very complicated mixes with lots of AU instruments, effects, automation, etc. on a relatively wimpy dual-500 G4. I'd say it was a massive jump-up from 5 to 6. Logic Pro? Can't wait!
"One CD to bring them all"... How is this different / beter than Knoppix?
This is good for Apple - I suspect they're able to keep a higher percentage of the $.99 on those sales. Less RIAA strong-arming, less "fuck you - we're the Rolling fucking Stones" negotiating pressure.
Perhaps the mainstream content is a loss leader to sell iPods (good plan), and the vast ocean of indie content will actually be profitable in its own right.