I'm hiring for a position on our Linux Kernel Validation team which performs CI/CD on upstream Linux kernel branches, with a particular focus on long term stable branches.
I primarily wanted to note that I used 2^X notation in the math, in case it was confusing for folks. I used KB/MB/GB to be consistent with the language AWS uses on their S3 pricing page (https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/).
If you write a AWS-native service that uses S3 as a back end (a very reasonable thing to do), it may create many small files in S3. It would be unreasonable to incur the costs to retrieve them and tar them up, and it also does not make cents to "click the box" to have them archived to glacier.
How will you avoid being sued by artist's representation (i.e. record labels, RIAA, etc)? I would also be highly concerned about validating the recipient of the money, especially since they're unlikely to reach out directly.
The best you could do is purchase music from the musician though the least-fee-laden service available, so they get the most money legally possible.
Thought of a similar concept a few months back. When it comes to not getting sued, as long as they're not providing content, then the tip is simply a donation. If the users use the tip as moral justification to then steal the music ("hey, the artist got more than he would have if I bought it, and screw the labels!"), then the onus is on the user.
As for getting the money to them, that's the question I want answered. I had conceived it as pledges rather than donations. I think people are more likely to pledge than they are to donate, which would get the service started a lot faster (and not problematic as long as you provide cc/banking/bitcoin details so that pledges are automatically deducted). Artists could then be contacted and told to claim their pledged donations.
This is what we're aiming for - since there is no content being bought, it's really just a donation.
In terms of getting the money to the artists, this is definitely an important and difficult part - but we're going to start slowly, do things that don't scale and work it out from there. Out of interest, how do you see pledges and donations as different from a user's perspective?
I typed out an email and thought I'd just leave it here as it answers your question:
Hi, I was thinking about something like this after reading Jaron Lanier's Who Owns the Future (which I recommend simply for his view on how a capitalist economy could subsist on micropayments, if you haven't read it).
The world needs something like this, if only because the concept of post-payment, if successful, would align expenditure and value to a degree that is impossible if you've paid for a good before you can consume it. If this got big, it would change the quality of music that is produced as musicians would strive to make music that lasts. It requires a very moral user base, but I think you can find one.
I saw in another comment that you might use analytics as a future premium feature. If you think of the donor's psychology, tipping an artist comes from a desire to benefit the person who has provided them with an enjoyable experience, but also as an indication that of all the artist's material, that song/album/video is the direction that the band should continue to go in. If a donor thinks he can influence a band's decisions, then I am convinced that he would be likely to give more (remember, we're dealing with a fairly well-educated morally inclined user base. Not all people think this way, but they do). If analytics is locked behind a paywall, then donors might not feel the same incentive to give. This is obviously problematic, since you seem to be leaning freemium rather than charging fees as a source of revenue, and need to think of good premium features that the free user base won't miss.
If you truly view this as tipping, as a means to correct the fact that musicians receive far too little of their music's sales, then the payment model makes sens. If users start to use your website as a moral justification to steal music (as I certainly would) then you're effectively cutting into the labels' revenue. Though I applaud that initially, if this starts to gain scale, I would consider allowing users to give the labels a small percentage of their donation, as the labels do play an important role in producing, marketing… though not as big a role as their current compensation would suggest. I doubt that labels would ever accept these donations, as it would be an admission to the inadequacy of today's music distribution model, but you would gain a reputation of being a fair player rather than a pirate.
Though it sounds like this is already the case, I would highlight to your users that what they are giving is a pledge: it's not guaranteed that artists will agree to accept these donations. The pledging mentality, like with kickstarter and co, makes people give more as expected expenditure = pledge x probability of acceptance. An economically inclined user might give $15 instead of $10 if he only thinks that there's a 2/3 chance of that
Finally, you should allow for users to supply and request content associated with artists, tracks, albums… Hey, I'm looking for guitar tabs for this song and am willing to pay x for it. First person pays the fee, other downloaders can tip the guy who made the tabs if they choose. Or, I'll make tabs for this song for $20, people can leave little tips, and once it hits $20, it gets sent over to them and is available to the rest of the community. If there's too much content being generated, use a reputation system to only show the best and keep the UI clean.
I may be thinking a little too niche because I play guitar, but this could extend into all sorts of other spaces like merchandise, though competing with ebay/amazon on that front probably isn't where you want to go with this. If you did get into selling physical goods, you could keep it pretty indie by only allowing user created content (a poster a user drew). Because you would be creating a market that doesn't really exist, you would be more justified in charging small fees for user to user interactions than for user to artist tips.
The problem is usually not the service. Services don't charge that much of a fee. Spotify, CDs, iTunes... They're pretty good. What really makes a difference is how big of a slice the record labels take off the rest of revenue. For Spotify and co. it's basically everything. "It's a new technology. Let's use it to screw over our signed artists!"
The argument is that if you wear gloves you miss out on the early signs of alarm from the bees, and therefore they are more likely to swarm and get aggressive towards bystandards. Without gloves you get a better sense of the alarm state and can avoid problems. It's generally easier to manage alarm state without gloves.
I got my first hive a few years ago, and I am noticing that there are fewer recommendations of working without gloves in urban environments today. I don't know why this is the case. Also I am used to a large yard/small town environment (lots of pedestrians, folks doing yard work, etc), and there are plenty of other environments where I would expect this to be less of an issue (for example a rooftop hive on the third storey is going to provide a lot less exposure in this regard). So demographics and hive placement may have something to do with it.
There really isn't anything janky going on here, it's a poor lack of communication on the part of the spotify program and lack of understanding on the part of the user.
As for Spotify, as a long time user I love it. Very much worth a try.
You can signup with an email address , but the option is hidden quite low in the signup page.
Best way to avoid this sort of stuff is just to sign up to spotify with throwaway email.
I have found that it's worth buying a domain name and just tying it to a VPS with SMTP installed (or using a third part service that offers unlimited addresses). That way you can just generate throwaway email addresses as you need them.
You can also use Mailinator[0] and their many other domains for throwaway email addresses. In fact, you can point your MX records to mail.mailinator.com for a custom domain without running a VPS.[1]
Not necessarily. They also give you a “gibberish” address to the account. So if I use “foobar” as my mailbox on mailinator, they will list an address like M8R-wk43th@mailinator too, that does not let people log in.
I've been working on a Git migration inside a fortune 50 primarily windows shop for about 6 months.
This line caught my eye:
"Some of its benefits fit well with the trends we see in software development: loosely coupled systems, distributed teams, lots of component reuse, incorporation of OSS, etc."
It's not a new trend. Nevertheless, I'm smitten that MS has acknowledged and embraced the model.
For us, the biggest issues with git on windows are:
1) SSH inconsistencies (cygwin/putty/msysgit/securecrt/etc) - I support users that use any combination of these.
2) Git implementations (cygwin/msysgit/git extensions/etc) and UIs all handle git and SSH differently. Users will typically have multiple copies of git installed and used, depending on context.
3) Support for HTTPS mode is inconsistent and in some cases non-existent. None of them can cache credentials.
To summarize; multiple git environments + multiple SSH environments + limited https support = pain.
For the first time I've recently been seriously considering going paperless at home.
However, every great solution involves uploading my scans to online services.
This is something I'm not comfortable doing with my sensitive data (i.e. tax records).
Has anyone found or developed tools that can be run locally to organize my files? Something like evernote? I'd like to just scan and shred, and not have to fuss too much with naming files, manually organizing files, etc. A good pdf search interface is a must.
Kind of makes me wish that we had a sort of local server appliance that was zero administration but provided a safe place for all of our documents at "home".
Devonthink Pro Office works for me. Local storage, one-touch scanning and OCR, and it learns where to file documents really well so usually it's a one click to get a PDF into the right folder.
