Consumer 3d printing is invaluable for small batch rapid prototyping. I can design and print multiple revisions of a prototype in as many hours. That type of efficiency was previously out of reach(expensive) for tiny, bootstrapped product design teams. It's a huge win.
It is definitely not ready for my Nana to print out a new frame for her eyeglasses after she accidentally sits on them. But it will be one day.
If you are subscribed to the labeling service, absolutely. If not, the fulfillment center may do it as a courtesy. The most important issue is what the FC expects from your shipment. Any unplanned or unexpected prep activity will cause your items to be sidelined in order to continue the inbound process for all of the other shipments. If a massive shipment comes in that isn't labeled/labeled correctly the FC may elect to ship it back due to things like space considerations or man power needs to handle the prep.
Sorry for the delay in replying. Feel free to pm if you have any other questions.
The barcode you mention links your specific merchant account to the physical product's UPC/ASIN in order to properly track your inventory. Amazon can also handle the labeling of the inbound inventory for an added fee.
Enjoy some good conversation and some cold beers @ The West Alabama Ice House. This is the first of hopefully many fun and interesting meet ups. We are hoping to get a nice mix of hacker types. Devs, artists, EEs and musicians are all welcome.
No cover and beer ranges from $2 - $4. The Ice House has tons of seating and is an outdoors location.
Working on a possible small but nice sponsorship/giveaway. Details to come.
As a musician and a developer, I can agree with most of this. I do however, see it as two opposite sides of a defined spectrum.
When I am playing an instrument, I typically lose any connection with thought or the rest of my body not directly involved in playing. My mouth sorta drops down and I begin to almost drool. Something my girlfriend loves to remind me of. I am literally lost in the music.
When coding, I am almost hyper aware of the thought process. I am surely focused on only what is happening relating to the code, but the disconnect from myself never happens.
I think the connection is the desire to create something and an inborn understanding of modularity and the flow of ideas/actions. People with these qualities are often drawn to both.
For most if not all ISPs, using a purchased email list is against the TOS. It doesn't matter how targeted it is. You have not stated that you have a purchased list, but I'm assuming it is from your wording.
You should contact your ISPs data security department(not tech support) and ask them to advise you on mail limits. Typically these are based on mails per hour. Im not suggesting you send the mails, because I think it's a bit tacky for a quality product, but they will best be able to answer your questions. Also be aware that the number of emails is not the only way you will be labeled a spammer by an ISP. The amount of email just triggers a port filter and equally or more important is the nature of your mail, the source of the addresses and the response of the people receiving it.
When I was doing data security and TOS work for an ISP, spam complaints meant us cutting your service off. People hate unsolicited email. Find another way.
It's not really about friends,it's about growing up. Self reliance and such. The older one gets, the less anyone has in common with anyone else. In a couple of seconds you'll be contemplating retirement and barely remember this question at all.
You are learning how to deal with the real world, the world you must navigate to find happiness. Sooner than later you'll fall in love and then even this goes out the window. You think you're confused now? Just wait.
Just be thankful you have a place like this, where people want to answer with contemplated gems and not something something...
This is the model I have been using in my app. The goal is to have your vendors/customers be a function and asset of your service, provided to the free user base.
It's really all about extremely targeted but transparent marketing as well as finding interesting ways to utilize user data. The data and its interpretation is what is really valuable, and that is what the customers are paying for. It cant just be simple advertising though, it has to resolve a shared necessity of both customer and user.
I find it much easier to keep my ideas in order using a notebook instead of my iphone or other PDA. To me theres a lot of beauty in the longevity and immediacy of a notebook. They obviously fill different roles, but I really find myself reaching for a pen much more than I expected.
I initially interpreted that comment to mean corkd.com at this point runs itself(code wise at least), so the developers are working on other projects. But you raise a good point, and I surely do not have any knowledge to say otherwise.
I absolutely agree and we did our best to automate as much of the process as possible. There were a few problems that required a pair of human eyes though. First, no copyright holder sent a complaint in the same format. Some sent a simple email with a file name and ip/time stamp while others sent a long poorly rendered xml file that was automatically sent from some contractor's hacked torrent client. There was no rhyme or reason to the manner in which we received the data. Another issue was file name problems. The copyright holder would send out complaints for a user sharing the movie "Dune" when in reality the file was only a copy of pictures taken dirt biking at the local dunes.
The automation mostly came in pulling known data like our IP block from the complaints, and having a good IP logging system. We broke the process down to 3 steps, each very quick. A complaint only took 3-5 seconds to process, so the issue was just the sheer volume in them.
When the end result is the possibility of a lawsuit, it is in everyone's best interest to maintain a human element in the chain.
Up until about a year ago I was data security coordinator for a very large cable ISP. A large portion of our team's time was spent dealing with DMCA copyright complaints.
At this point, by law, an ISP must accept copyright complaints and have a publicly registered copyright agent (At our ISP, our team's director was the registered agent). The DMCA gives ISPs some choice in how they handle the complaints, but they can not be ignored. I fear this ISP owner may not be fully aware of current obligations(I am not speaking about non-actionable RIAA threats or future plans).
We hated this work. Our main focus was catching criminals that were committing crimes either utilizing or against our network. With an online customer base in the millions we would get thousands of complaints a day. If a big movie came out on Friday, for the next week or two we could get upwards of ten thousand a day. We feared Star Wars openings like you wouldn't believe. You can imagine a team of 6 very techy hacker guys getting extremely depressed spending 2-3 hours a day matching IP logs to modem MACs and finally onto a customer.
Our only solace in this work was something that my manager made clear was a department goal and practice. That this menial task was meant to protect the customer base from the copyright holder's carpet bombing mentality. We kept accurate data and because of that, were able to simply discard a large portion of the complaints as inaccurate. When the evidence was clear, we forwarded the complaint to the subscriber by email and snail mail. We instructed our subscribers to not contact the copyright holder to discuss it as this would just enable the holder to get identifying info(name, address) without a subpoena.
We also warned our customers that after a single complaint the copyright holder may subpoena our records and take them to court. Out of the almost million complaints a year, I saw an insignificant amount of cases ever go this far. The DMCA complaints were largely a scare tactic and often nothing more.
I was not privy to any knowledge of the compensation we received for completing this process, but did gleam from over hearing from the higher ups that we did indeed receive some money for the process or were in process of creating contracts to do so. I wish I had more info on that aspect to share with news.y.
The guys doing this work hate it, but the law forces it onto them. Until the laws change, no security department is going to bend over backwards for these guys.
It was an amazing and exciting job despite this issue.
On a lighter note, for your random facts file, the movie "Mean Girls" was the number one infringed file for 4 years running. Lots of laughs were had seeing what kind of weird and random stuff the people were downloading. Fun times.
I think that is more of a cult of personality issue. The iPhone is a great product, but waiting in line for hours for it is more of a super-fan thing to do. I saw the papers and the articles so I know it happened, but I sure don't know anyone who waited in line. A lot of people also wait in lines for video games and movie tickets but they are not the masses, they are the hardcore fringe fans.
It is definitely not ready for my Nana to print out a new frame for her eyeglasses after she accidentally sits on them. But it will be one day.