Ron Lindeboom
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COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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You are indeed welcome, Gary. You know that we strive for fairness and balance. We let people have their say and they are welcome to express their opinion — but it ends there and is not going to become The Tirade That Would Not Die.
And as you have said, Jan most certainly does not deserve that: we have been honored over the years to have her input and presence here, she has helped many a user and she deserves more respect than what I saw happening in this exchange.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry -
Michael,
I hate to say this but as in most things that are made by humans, stuff happens.
I used to run a company that made parts for the Space Shuttle and even in that program, there was never a 100% failsafe part. (No, we didn’t manufacture O-rings but we did manufacture the parts that cut the heat shield tiles into the correct size and shape.) I will never forget the horror when we all watched the Challenger explode and kill so many people. As someone who worked on the project, I can still see Nancy Reagan working with the wives and spouses with whom she met and stayed for quite a few days down at Johnson Space Center.
NASA runs on quite a stringent standard of quality and even there, things happen.
In normal manufacturing circles, the average is 6% failure rate which is considered quite a good average. But it still means that six people out of 100 will have issues of some kind.
But 94 won’t.
If this seems too high, consider Palm Treo and the Blackberry which have far higher failure rates. See this story at: https://news.techwhack.com/9368-blackberry-treo-iphone
Unfortunately, these kinds of statistics don’t comfort the average-of-six people who will experience these issues but that is life in the world of humanity.
Tim Wilson (our associate publisher of our magazine) just spent the last couple of days getting his Adobe suite to reauthorize — again. It just quit on him and wouldn’t reauthorize.
Stuff happens.
Nearly all of us on the COW’s management team have been fighting these authorization issues for the last couple of years. Oh, and we buy our software, we do not get complimentary copies.
No one is immune to the fact that no matter what it is, no matter what you do, there will be failure along the way. As I have often said over the years: these things are not made by God and are not delivered to earth by dove and angel escort.
You have had your say and the COW has never been about whipping the audience into a feeding frenzy. That is why I have NOT approved the last 10 or so posts that you made because they were EXPRESSLY designed to do just that.
You want to scream censorship? We didn’t censor you, you said what you wanted to say and have made your point.
What HAS been censored and always will be in the COW is the ongoing, repetitious drum beating (ad nauseum) that some people want to do in the name of Free Speech. You may think it is interesting, we think that at a certain point, the point has been made and the solution offered. Live with it or don’t but high-jacking a forum and trying to turn it into a place to tar-and-feather a company isn’t going to happen. (We didn’t do it to Adobe, even though we sure wanted to. We aren’t asking you to do anything that we aren’t willing to live by ourselves.)
These are our policies and if they are too egregious for your personal tastes, then you have our apologies but we will not be changing them as fire fights get really boring after a while.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry -
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[Jeff Kitchiguine] “…but for them, why do they have to sign them?”
…for YOU.
:o)
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[bob malone] “I’m making a short video for the university I work for and I was wondering if it would be ok to take a song, such as one by coldplay, and strip the words so I can just use the music for a background music bed. I wasnt sure if that would be considered illegal or if it would be ok.”
I think the legal name for this is a “Bozo No-No.”
The fact is, you are legally barred from syncing music that you have not BOUGHT the license for, to video.
The rights to a song by Coldplay would cost you so much that it would make your student loan seem a week’s allowance by comparison.
As Mike Smith points out: use something that “sounds like” that fits the bill but is royalty-free. There are many things that follow this formula. Google royalty-free music and sounds like Coldplay. I bet you find something.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry -
As I am the guy who helped establish the COW from the beginning and set its rates, I guess that I am the right guy to answer the question.
Getting advertisers to advertise with you is VERY difficult. Especially in 2009. You have to have a reason for them to spend their hard-earned money with you and that reason is usually found in traffic numbers that can be proven. (We use direct-measuring services from Google (Google Analytics) and Quantcast.com as they aren’t guessing — usually poorly, in the case of things like Alexa.com and others whose numbers are meaningless today. We chuckle that both Google and Quantcast shows us as having tripled in size in 2008, while Alexa.com shows us as collapsing and losing traffic at astronomical rates. Yeah, right. Go figure. Because of this, we hardly ever bother checking Alexa.com anymore.)
A working formula is one that is usually a blend of raw numbers (how many visitors, visits and pageviews a site gets during a month) and the demographic data (who these people are and what they represent) to back up these numbers.
Most sites use Google Ad Sense to get something (which is better than nothing) for all their effort. As I said, it is tough to get the kind of banner ads we get on your site. We have been at this for almost 14 years now and have learned what it takes to do it in our market.
Aside from Google Ad Sense, you may look into some of the banner ad services that are out there that work and pay on a per-click scheme. We do not use them, so I do not remember any of the names off-hand, but you can do a Google search and it will likely return a number of them for you.
It is only after years of effort and proving yourself that you are going to be able to get direct advertising for your site. In the beginning, you will be lucky to find one or two companies that believe in you. Like most things in life, it is not easy and takes a long time. Most people tire along the way and so — as in most all things in life — very few succeed at it.
All I can give you for advice is keep your day job. Do something that you love and do it for the love of it. Don’t set out to do it for money because — as in our case — we lost money for about 8 years before the site ever got into the black.
Oh, and a last bit of advice, hobbies are way cheaper than businesses.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry -
You know, I hate to say this and have stayed out of this hoping for a positive resolution but…
Years ago I knew a business that came into a situation that sounds amazingly like what you are describing, except that it was a tax refund check that came back to a company. One of the partners in the business took the check and cashed it and didn’t tell the other partner what was up.
Fast forward…
A year went by with the unwitting partner fighting with the IRS until they produced the canceled check, which showed what had *really* happened. (Read: no lost check, imagine that.)
Needless to say, their partnership soon dissolved after that.
Are you sure that the check wasn’t deposited by someone else in your company? It wouldn’t be the first time that something like this happened.
I hope I am wrong in this matter, but it’s just a thought — hopefully one that doesn’t play out this way.
Ron Lindeboom
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We have a forum for InDesign, which is the software we use to lay-out the COW Magazine.
If the questions are not pertinent to InDesign, please feel free to ask them here in COWmunications.
Best regards,
Ron LIndeboom
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Bob, Craig, et al,
We are quite aware of the problem.
There appears to be no easy solution but we are looking into numerous hopefully workable possibilities and one of the most logical appears to be breaking out the forum by tasks. This way, FCP: Codecs and Formats can cover those issues and FCP: Set-Up and Configuration, for example, can cover those issues.
With a spry menu update to the site interface, along with breaking out the forums as outlined, we hope to get rid of some of the noise.
But unfortunately, I don’t think we will ever overcome human nature and some people’s near-absolute laziness.
Ron Lindeboom