For me, free snacks are a minus. I am trying to keep a handle on my weight. And I will admit it, I have very little control over eating food with lots of calories. I.e. most snacks. I manage it personally by not having any junk food at home.
Snacks at work make it too easy to say "Oh, I will only have one..."
So when the sales person calls me from their cell phone and I make a contact from his call, what number do I store? His cellphone number or the internal number I am supposed to call?
Not much of an issue for devops folks but a big issue in sales and marketing. I wonder if companies allow a sales phone number be switch to a competitor when the sales person switches jobs. This is what happens when Jane changes jobs.
Customer of company A calls Jane who has just gone to company B: Jane: "Hi Sam, I am glad you called. I now work for B and let me tell you how their product is much better for you..."
There are other jobs like customer support that have similar problems. In this case you want your customers when they call the cell phone to reach someone who works for the company.
I have used free software starting with inews on the extra tape archive on the SunOS (not Solaris) 1.X and 2.X 1/4" QIC cartridge boot tapes.
The FSF with its devotion to making everything it touches be free of copyright restrictions and to require you to publish any code that touches the FSF code has relegated itself to irrelevance. A $54 USB WIFI adaptor. Whoopdedo.
I have moved on. Most of the open source software i use has a far less restrictive Berkeley or Apache style license.
I have a Roku box attached to my TV. It is always on and always connected. Since I got the box, I have thought this dangerous. (but I leave it on . ..)
The article quotes TechAmerica's director of California government affairs Robert Callahan stated that a 2005 California privacy law already enables consumers to ask what personal information companies are using.
Does anyone know what this law is and how to use it?
If you look at the actual article, it is about existing technologies that could allow data centers to save power. It talks about how smart standby and dynamic frequency scaling can be used to reduce the power consumption of servers.
For web sites with large server pools it would be interesting to scale the size of the load balancer pool and put excess servers into a low power standby mode.
I.e. Our server pool is 10X of what our average daily maximum network load is. This is because we get occasional traffic spikes due to [events|news stories|slashdot postings|etc] and we need to be able to scale quickly to handle the load. If we could shrink the server pool our load balancer uses to 2X and put the other 8X servers into a fast startup standby mode we would significantly reduce our daily power consumption. When the spike hit, we would put the 8X servers into full power mode and add them back to the load balancer pool. We would also put the servers into full power mode when we did software updates. This would keep all the servers current.
Approaches like this could potentially save significant power for a web site.
If you are really rural, DSL is a non-starter. 10,000 feet? Try 10 miles. Very low population densities, 1 household per 5-10 acres. And the telco wire running to these households is likely to be old. I think they did not replaced our 500 pair trunk until 50-100 pairs went bad.
I used to live in the country, 7 miles to the local CO. We used a successful rural WiFi provider, Zetta Broadband. My kids still use them, $55 a month. They started out small and have expanded successfully. They do not use public right of ways. The poles are in the wrong places and there is all the legal mumbo jumbo. Instead they look at the local topography and approach the landowners of the high points. I believe they offer a free local Internet connection in return for siting a tower on their property. As I recall they will have a land line connection to a base station for an area and then hub and spoke repeaters as the demand succeeds.
The other thing they did was to get subscribers to put Zetta Broadband signs at the end of their driveways. You might offer a months free service for the lessor roads. On the main roads you might offer a significant discount. The signs were small 1' x 2' on wire H frame stakes. I know I decided to use Zetta because I saw their signs several times a week as I drove by. I eventually stopped and took down their information.
Caution: getting started is expensive, you probably need at least one commercial base station. You might be able to modify home WiFi units to act as repeaters but you will need some sort of tower or mast, antennas, weather proof enclosures, and possibly trenching from the house to the tower for power at least. Home WiFi units are a short term solution at best.
Customers also need an out-door directional POE WiFi unit. As I recall, Zetta charges $130- $150 to install it including the unit and they require a Zetta install. The one trick I saw was using a telescoping pole with a WiFi unit on it so they could measure the power and direction to choose the antenna location on the house.
You might start small with a collective. Find 5 - 10 neighbors who would be willing to buy the directional WiFi unit and pay you a monthly fee. Make sure these people's property makes sense in terms of line of site. The telescoping pole might be a good demo to convince people to chip in. Put the pole up and watch a NetFlix video on your laptop.
To get a fiber drop to your house check with the regulatory agencies if they have starter or seed programs. I know there is money collected for rural Internet. Figure out how to tap into it on a small scale.
Go full bore on this. There is a real need for rural Internet. Satellite and dial-up suck and if you are in the country DSL is not even a distant thought. If you are successful getting started word of mouth will spread.
I also recommend Velcro ties, but they can be expensive. Especially computer room grade. What I have discovered is "Velcro Plant Ties" It comes in a 75 foot X 1/2 inch roll for about 4 bucks. It can be found at Home Depot or Lowe's, but maybe not year round. It can also be found at nurseries.
I love the stuff. It is so cheap that I use enough to go around the cable bundle twice or more. Good for adding additional cables later. It is thinner so it is easier to cut and work with. It is cheap enough that I throw it away without a second thought. Well maybe a thought that I should recycle it and not add it to our landfill.
Two other suggestions. Short Cables. No cable should be over 6 feet long. I find 4 foot works well for me. For multiple computers and a KVM switch bundle the cables for each host together, keyboard/mouse, audio, VGA and Ethernet.
I think the LA Times article misconstrued the collecting of sales taxes on combined shipping and handling as to helping Amazon's bottom line. If they collect the tax, they have to pay it all to the state. They can not breakout shipping from handling and only pay the sales tax on the handling.
Now any handling fees above the actual shipping costs do help the bottom line.
BTW, I am glad that Internet sales are finally being charged sales tax. It helps to level the playing field between the Internet and brick and mortar stores. It also guarantees that the sales tax that we should be declaring on our state income forms actually gets collected. Sales taxes are badly needed by our local governments and schools to pay for the valuable local services they provide.
I am getting older and finding harder to read small fonts. 2560x1600 pixel displays will only make this worse. Yes, I know I can adjust my fonts but there is no single setting in Linux that adjusts *all* the fonts. In many cases I have to go to the individual app and change a setting. Many times this does not cover all the fonts. Icons, dialog boxes, menus still use the default font. A lot of web pages over ride the font settings to use a small font.
I have thought about using a 40 inch 1080p TV as a display. It would give me big fat pixels for my tired eyes. Has anyone tried this?
This is a really bad idea. If it gets adopted widely it will support the argument that DNT needs to be regulated and enforced by law. It is the old email optin/optout argument. You rarely see a site that does not have an explicit option to optin or optout check box when you register. A better patch would be to pop up a DNT dialog box allowing the customer to confirm tracking the first time they visit a site. And don't tell me this is hard to do. You are already tracking people. This is just another data point to track.
Security theater is always better if it is not just up on stage but if the TSA actors actually come down into the audience and randomly do interactive skits with people in the audience. It shows they take their art seriously.
From what I understand support for IPv6 happens in the DSL modem not the customer's router. It talks IPv6 on the DSL side or probably on the DSL concentrator at the POP. Over the Ethernet port it talks IPv4 private IP address space.
I am working on an IPv6 migration project for our group. Our solution will include:
IPv6 to IPv4 proxy servers to a Private internal IPv4 address space
Some native IPv6 support where it is easy
White listing of some IPv4 services where the above two solutions do not work
I suspect our solution is fairly typical for most Internet portals considering IPv6.
Two big issues with Carrier Grade NAT (CGN) or Large Scale NAT (LSN) that will have to be resolved are geolocation and denial of service protection.
Geo-location is the mapping of a browser's IP address to a physical location. Most of the large portals are fairly accurate about this. Although I move around from Hayward to Pleasanton and sometimes they get it right with Palo Alto. The problem with CGN is that many browsers for many different users will be NATed behind a single IP address. So if you are on the left coast you might be mapped to the Silicon Valley, if you are on the right coast it might be DC or New York, and people in the middle might be Omaha, Nebraska. As long as the ISPs hide big regions behind a single set of IP addresses, geolocation is going to have problems.
HTML 5 has a separate geolocation protocol built in, but that is going to have to wait for browser upgrades. A logical solution might be to have the ISPs map their old POPs to a single fixed IPv6 address so all traffic from Palo Alto has one IPv6 address and all the traffic from Redwood City has another IPv6 address. But this is entirely to logical and would require effort on the part of the ISPs
The other big problem is Denial Of Service protection. My company has tools to block traffic from IP addresses that are determined to be abusers of the site: to many account creation requests, to many emails sent, to many login failures, etc. With CGN this becomes a real problem. First how do you determine how many is to many. With thousands of hosts NATed behind a single address a thousand emails an hour is entirely reasonable and ten thousand an hour is not outrageous. The other problem is that when you block the IP address you block all of the customers, not just the one causing the problem. A logical solution for this would be to give each customer their own IPv6 address that they are NATed behind. This could also work well with geolocation. But again it entirely to logical and it requires work on the part of the ISPs. Without the unique per browser IP addresses DOS protection becomes a really hard problem.
Duhh... He does show a keen grasp of the obvious. And for people who use command lines he is preaching to the choir.
On the other hand for the GUI based people, they will miss it entirely. They will talk about add on GUI replay tools that allow one set of mouse clicks to be replayed to many different servers, or configuration management tools that do the work for you. I believe they truly do not understand that someone could get 20 mouse clicks on 40 different servers wrong. "Why would someone ever click the wrong check box?" They also believe that screen shots are valid ways to store configuration information off line.
Not as good as the one on Wikiped which was extracted from a goverment PDF report. It is not hard to grab the seal from various government web sites and documents.
If you are thinking about this for your home, think about the cost of power. I bet that G5 sucks a lot of AC juice. And most likely this is at the highest tier of your power pricing. In the winter its not so bad because it heats the house, but in the summer if you live in an area where air conditioning is not just nice but an essential then you have to suck that heat out.
Buy one of these atom mother boards like the one of the fanless mini-ATX mother boards, one of the PicoPSU DC-DC ATX power supplies that plugs into the ATX power socket, http://www.mini-box.com/picoPSU-80, and you have a system that would make a nice file server. Add one or two 2 Tb 3.5" drives if you need space or one or two 500 Mb 2.5" drives to save power. This would give you a nice file server that sips the juice. Would probably pay for it self in a year in power savings and it is good for the environment.
I switched my X86_64 desktop for a dual core atom a year ago and love how much cooler it runs. My office is in the attic and does not have air conditioning or a window so heat is a big issue for me. I run Linux on the desktop and do browsing, email, text editing and the performance is acceptable. Sort of like the first dual core 32 bit systems. It is not a gaming system, but I am not a gamer.
Go green, use low power computers and save the environment.
Moses Avalon is a record company insider who has written some very funny books about the industry:
Million Dollar Mistakes
Confessions of a Record Producer
Secrets of Negotiating a Record Contract (maybe not funny, have not read it)
On his web site he as a royalty calculator that allows you to plug in numbers for a recording contact and see how much the band will make: http://www.mosesavalon.com/calculate.shtml It includes standard things in record contracts such as 10% record (CD) breakage and 23% production costs. He gives hints how to maximize the return to the band. At standard record industry contract terms with no advance to the band you have to sell over 3/4 of a million records in order to break even. This assumes the band has already recorded the album. Need an advance to do that, then you have to sell more albums in order to break even. It is fun to play with and the hints are funny and eye-opening. His basic point is that the only money the band is likely to see is the advance. So get as large an advance as possible and spend as little of it as you can.
At one time he had an article about the economics of a record contract and touring to support it and the end result is that for the hours the band worked, they would make the same money flipping burgers at MacDonald's. And this is for a band with a million selling record.
Now I do not know how this translates to itunes sales but I would not be surprised if itunes sales still have a 10% breakage allowance.
I should have read a bit more. After threatening to sue and getting a huge public outcry, they backed off. Said is was simply a mistake with a mailing list.
There are many campfire songs that the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts no longer sing because they were told they would be sued for royalties if they did not pay. It is bone headed things like this that give ASCAP and the music publishing industry a bad name. They could have given Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and other non-profits limited permission to perform the songs at official functions and maybe made some money off of related sales like records and sheet music. But no, they had to threaten to sue. So songs like "This Land Is Your Land", "Puff the Magic Dragon", "God Bless America" and "Happy Birthday" are no longer sung around the campfire.
From the first line of the Wikipedia entry for hazing:
"Hazing is a term used to describe various ritual and other activities
involving harassment, abuse or humiliation used as a way of initiating
a person into a group."
It is not "good natured". And yes, it is illegal. It was your choice of the word not mine.
As to "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus", yes there are differences between the way the men and women interact and that is OK. If you want an all male work environment, then keep up the all male attitude. But if we want a balanced male/female environment we need to make the environment more inviting to women.
If you go back to my original post, I said that female sys admins I have known that have left the field do so because they are *tired* of the macho environment. It is not that they can not take it. It is not that it is illegal. The message I get is that they are not having fun any more or enjoying it so they leave the field and do other things. And I feel that it is the men who loose out. We keep to our macho ways and look enviously at the other departments with a mix of men and women. Well, at least I do.
If we want to keep women in the industry, we need to tone down our attitudes and listen to how women would prefer to work. I am not saying that we need to drop all of our male attitudes and start having tea parties (sorry for the stereotype). But it would help if we spent some time asking women how they would like to interact and then adopting some of those behaviors. And maybe, just maybe, we could apologize once in awhile when we step over the line with our competitive behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
For me, free snacks are a minus. I am trying to keep a handle on my weight. And I will admit it, I have very little control over eating food with lots of calories. I.e. most snacks. I manage it personally by not having any junk food at home.
Snacks at work make it too easy to say "Oh, I will only have one..."
What a pleasant surprise to see Congress asking intelligent questions about a technical topic. I think we should encourage this type of thinking.
So when the sales person calls me from their cell phone and I make a contact from his call, what number do I store? His cellphone number or the internal number I am supposed to call?
Not much of an issue for devops folks but a big issue in sales and marketing.
I wonder if companies allow a sales phone number be switch to a competitor when the sales person switches jobs. This is what happens when Jane changes jobs.
Customer of company A calls Jane who has just gone to company B:
Jane: "Hi Sam, I am glad you called. I now work for B and let me tell you how their product is much better for you..."
There are other jobs like customer support that have similar problems. In this case you want your customers when they call the cell phone to reach someone who works for the company.
The above problems also apply to IM handles.
I have used free software starting with inews on the extra tape archive on the SunOS (not Solaris) 1.X and 2.X 1/4" QIC cartridge boot tapes.
The FSF with its devotion to making everything it touches be free of copyright restrictions and to require you to publish any code that touches the FSF code has relegated itself to irrelevance. A $54 USB WIFI adaptor. Whoopdedo.
I have moved on. Most of the open source software i use has a far less restrictive Berkeley or Apache style license.
I have a Roku box attached to my TV. It is always on and always connected. Since I got the box, I have thought this dangerous. (but I leave it on . . .)
The article quotes TechAmerica's director of California government affairs Robert Callahan stated that a 2005 California privacy law already enables consumers to ask what personal information companies are using.
Does anyone know what this law is and how to use it?
If you look at the actual article, it is about existing technologies that could allow data centers to save power. It talks about how smart standby and dynamic frequency scaling can be used to reduce the power consumption of servers.
For web sites with large server pools it would be interesting to scale the size of the load balancer pool and put excess servers into a low power standby mode.
I.e. Our server pool is 10X of what our average daily maximum network load is. This is because we get occasional traffic spikes due to [events|news stories|slashdot postings|etc] and we need to be able to scale quickly to handle the load. If we could shrink the server pool our load balancer uses to 2X and put the other 8X servers into a fast startup standby mode we would significantly reduce our daily power consumption. When the spike hit, we would put the 8X servers into full power mode and add them back to the load balancer pool. We would also put the servers into full power mode when we did software updates. This would keep all the servers current.
Approaches like this could potentially save significant power for a web site.
If you are really rural, DSL is a non-starter. 10,000 feet? Try 10 miles. Very low population densities, 1 household per 5-10 acres. And the telco wire running to these households is likely to be old. I think they did not replaced our 500 pair trunk until 50-100 pairs went bad.
I used to live in the country, 7 miles to the local CO. We used a successful rural WiFi provider, Zetta Broadband. My kids still use them, $55 a month. They started out small and have expanded successfully. They do not use public right of ways. The poles are in the wrong places and there is all the legal mumbo jumbo. Instead they look at the local topography and approach the landowners of the high points. I believe they offer a free local Internet connection in return for siting a tower on their property. As I recall they will have a land line connection to a base station for an area and then hub and spoke repeaters as the demand succeeds.
The other thing they did was to get subscribers to put Zetta Broadband signs at the end of their driveways. You might offer a months free service for the lessor roads. On the main roads you might offer a significant discount. The signs were small 1' x 2' on wire H frame stakes. I know I decided to use Zetta because I saw their signs several times a week as I drove by. I eventually stopped and took down their information.
Caution: getting started is expensive, you probably need at least one commercial base station. You might be able to modify home WiFi units to act as repeaters but you will need some sort of tower or mast, antennas, weather proof enclosures, and possibly trenching from the house to the tower for power at least. Home WiFi units are a short term solution at best.
Customers also need an out-door directional POE WiFi unit. As I recall, Zetta charges $130- $150 to install it including the unit and they require a Zetta install. The one trick I saw was using a telescoping pole with a WiFi unit on it so they could measure the power and direction to choose the antenna location on the house.
You might start small with a collective. Find 5 - 10 neighbors who would be willing to buy the directional WiFi unit and pay you a monthly fee. Make sure these people's property makes sense in terms of line of site. The telescoping pole might be a good demo to convince people to chip in. Put the pole up and watch a NetFlix video on your laptop.
To get a fiber drop to your house check with the regulatory agencies if they have starter or seed programs. I know there is money collected for rural Internet. Figure out how to tap into it on a small scale.
Go full bore on this. There is a real need for rural Internet. Satellite and dial-up suck and if you are in the country DSL is not even a distant thought. If you are successful getting started word of mouth will spread.
I also recommend Velcro ties, but they can be expensive. Especially computer room grade. What I have discovered is "Velcro Plant Ties" It comes in a 75 foot X 1/2 inch roll for about 4 bucks. It can be found at Home Depot or Lowe's, but maybe not year round. It can also be found at nurseries.
I love the stuff. It is so cheap that I use enough to go around the cable bundle twice or more. Good for adding additional cables later. It is thinner so it is easier to cut and work with. It is cheap enough that I throw it away without a second thought. Well maybe a thought that I should recycle it and not add it to our landfill.
Two other suggestions. Short Cables. No cable should be over 6 feet long. I find 4 foot works well for me. For multiple computers and a KVM switch bundle the cables for each host together, keyboard/mouse, audio, VGA and Ethernet.
Never mind, my mistake
How do I delete a comment?
I think the LA Times article misconstrued the collecting of sales taxes on combined shipping and handling as to helping Amazon's bottom line. If they collect the tax, they have to pay it all to the state. They can not breakout shipping from handling and only pay the sales tax on the handling.
Now any handling fees above the actual shipping costs do help the bottom line.
BTW, I am glad that Internet sales are finally being charged sales tax. It helps to level the playing field between the Internet and brick and mortar stores. It also guarantees that the sales tax that we should be declaring on our state income forms actually gets collected. Sales taxes are badly needed by our local governments and schools to pay for the valuable local services they provide.
I am getting older and finding harder to read small fonts. 2560x1600 pixel displays will only make this worse. Yes, I know I can adjust my fonts but there is no single setting in Linux that adjusts *all* the fonts. In many cases I have to go to the individual app and change a setting. Many times this does not cover all the fonts. Icons, dialog boxes, menus still use the default font. A lot of web pages over ride the font settings to use a small font.
I have thought about using a 40 inch 1080p TV as a display. It would give me big fat pixels for my tired eyes. Has anyone tried this?
This is a really bad idea. If it gets adopted widely it will support the argument that DNT needs to be regulated and enforced by law.
It is the old email optin/optout argument. You rarely see a site that does not have an explicit option to optin or optout check box when you register.
A better patch would be to pop up a DNT dialog box allowing the customer to confirm tracking the first time they visit a site.
And don't tell me this is hard to do. You are already tracking people. This is just another data point to track.
Security theater is always better if it is not just up on stage but if the TSA actors actually come down into the audience and randomly do interactive skits with people in the audience. It shows they take their art seriously.
From what I understand support for IPv6 happens in the DSL modem not the customer's router. It talks IPv6 on the DSL side or probably on the DSL concentrator at the POP. Over the Ethernet port it talks IPv4 private IP address space.
Does anyone know if I am correct?
RLH
"IPv6, too much, too soon" -- Someone
I am working on an IPv6 migration project for our group. Our solution will include:
IPv6 to IPv4 proxy servers to a Private internal IPv4 address space
Some native IPv6 support where it is easy
White listing of some IPv4 services where the above two solutions do not work
I suspect our solution is fairly typical for most Internet portals considering IPv6.
Two big issues with Carrier Grade NAT (CGN) or Large Scale NAT (LSN) that will have to be resolved are geolocation and denial of service protection.
Geo-location is the mapping of a browser's IP address to a physical location. Most of the large portals are fairly accurate about this. Although I move around from Hayward to Pleasanton and sometimes they get it right with Palo Alto. The problem with CGN is that many browsers for many different users will be NATed behind a single IP address. So if you are on the left coast you might be mapped to the Silicon Valley, if you are on the right coast it might be DC or New York, and people in the middle might be Omaha, Nebraska. As long as the ISPs hide big regions behind a single set of IP addresses, geolocation is going to have problems.
HTML 5 has a separate geolocation protocol built in, but that is going to have to wait for browser upgrades. A logical solution might be to have the ISPs map their old POPs to a single fixed IPv6 address so all traffic from Palo Alto has one IPv6 address and all the traffic from Redwood City has another IPv6 address. But this is entirely to logical and would require effort on the part of the ISPs
The other big problem is Denial Of Service protection. My company has tools to block traffic from IP addresses that are determined to be abusers of the site: to many account creation requests, to many emails sent, to many login failures, etc. With CGN this becomes a real problem. First how do you determine how many is to many. With thousands of hosts NATed behind a single address a thousand emails an hour is entirely reasonable and ten thousand an hour is not outrageous. The other problem is that when you block the IP address you block all of the customers, not just the one causing the problem. A logical solution for this would be to give each customer their own IPv6 address that they are NATed behind. This could also work well with geolocation. But again it entirely to logical and it requires work on the part of the ISPs. Without the unique per browser IP addresses DOS protection becomes a really hard problem.
RLH
"IPv6, too much, too soon" -- Someone
Duhh... He does show a keen grasp of the obvious. And for people who use command lines he is preaching to the choir.
On the other hand for the GUI based people, they will miss it entirely. They will talk about add on GUI replay tools that allow one set of mouse clicks to be replayed to many different servers, or configuration management tools that do the work for you. I believe they truly do not understand that someone could get 20 mouse clicks on 40 different servers wrong. "Why would someone ever click the wrong check box?" They also believe that screen shots are valid ways to store configuration information off line.
Only half in jest.
RLH
Wikipedia is not the only place to get the seal. I went to the FBI's web site and found this:
http://www.fbi.gov/images/seal.gif
Not as good as the one on Wikiped which was extracted from a goverment PDF report. It is not hard to grab the seal from various government web sites and documents.
If you are thinking about this for your home, think about the cost of power. I bet that G5 sucks a lot of AC juice. And most likely this is at the highest tier of your power pricing. In the winter its not so bad because it heats the house, but in the summer if you live in an area where air conditioning is not just nice but an essential then you have to suck that heat out.
Buy one of these atom mother boards like the one of the fanless mini-ATX mother boards, one of the PicoPSU DC-DC ATX power supplies that plugs into the ATX power socket, http://www.mini-box.com/picoPSU-80, and you have a system that would make a nice file server. Add one or two 2 Tb 3.5" drives if you need space or one or two 500 Mb 2.5" drives to save power. This would give you a nice file server that sips the juice. Would probably pay for it self in a year in power savings and it is good for the environment.
I switched my X86_64 desktop for a dual core atom a year ago and love how much cooler it runs. My office is in the attic and does not have air conditioning or a window so heat is a big issue for me. I run Linux on the desktop and do browsing, email, text editing and the performance is acceptable. Sort of like the first dual core 32 bit systems. It is not a gaming system, but I am not a gamer.
Go green, use low power computers and save the environment.
RLH
Moses Avalon is a record company insider who has written some very funny books about the industry:
Million Dollar Mistakes
Confessions of a Record Producer
Secrets of Negotiating a Record Contract (maybe not funny, have not read it)
On his web site he as a royalty calculator that allows you to plug in numbers for a recording contact and see how much the band will make:
http://www.mosesavalon.com/calculate.shtml
It includes standard things in record contracts such as 10% record (CD) breakage and 23% production costs. He gives hints how to maximize the return to the band. At standard record industry contract terms with no advance to the band you have to sell over 3/4 of a million records in order to break even. This assumes the band has already recorded the album. Need an advance to do that, then you have to sell more albums in order to break even. It is fun to play with and the hints are funny and eye-opening. His basic point is that the only money the band is likely to see is the advance. So get as large an advance as possible and spend as little of it as you can.
At one time he had an article about the economics of a record contract and touring to support it and the end result is that for the hours the band worked, they would make the same money flipping burgers at MacDonald's. And this is for a band with a million selling record.
Now I do not know how this translates to itunes sales but I would not be surprised if itunes sales still have a 10% breakage allowance.
Moses is a very funny author to read.
RLH
I should have read a bit more. After threatening to sue and getting a huge public outcry, they backed off. Said is was simply a mistake with a mailing list.
There are many campfire songs that the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts no longer sing because they were told they would be sued for royalties if they did not pay. It is bone headed things like this that give ASCAP and the music publishing industry a bad name. They could have given Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and other non-profits limited permission to perform the songs at official functions and maybe made some money off of related sales like records and sheet music. But no, they had to threaten to sue. So songs like "This Land Is Your Land", "Puff the Magic Dragon", "God Bless America" and "Happy Birthday" are no longer sung around the campfire.
A quick google search found:
The birds may sing, but campers can't unless they pay up:
http://archive.southcoasttoday.com/daily/08-96/08-23-96/b02li056.htm
And it is even mentioned in Wikipeda:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers,_Authors_and_Publishers#Criticism
Isn't America wonderful
From the first line of the Wikipedia entry for hazing:
"Hazing is a term used to describe various ritual and other activities
involving harassment, abuse or humiliation used as a way of initiating
a person into a group."
It is not "good natured". And yes, it is illegal. It was your choice of the word not mine.
As to "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus", yes there are differences between the way the men and women interact and that is OK. If you want an all male work environment, then keep up the all male attitude. But if we want a balanced male/female environment we need to make the environment more inviting to women.
If you go back to my original post, I said that female sys admins I have known that have left the field do so because they are *tired* of the macho environment. It is not that they can not take it. It is not that it is illegal. The message I get is that they are not having fun any more or enjoying it so they leave the field and do other things. And I feel that it is the men who loose out. We keep to our macho ways and look enviously at the other departments with a mix of men and women. Well, at least I do.
If we want to keep women in the industry, we need to tone down our attitudes and listen to how women would prefer to work. I am not saying that we need to drop all of our male attitudes and start having tea parties (sorry for the stereotype). But it would help if we spent some time asking women how they would like to interact and then adopting some of those behaviors. And maybe, just maybe, we could apologize once in awhile when we step over the line with our competitive behavior.