884 karma · joined March 1, 2011
If you want a week-ish long project, go for the full mid-2000s, boingboing and slashdot experience: buy the dead tree version of the O'Reilly Asterisk book, which has been kept up to date and is still an wonderful resource. Follow it until you have the Enterprise-grade phone system of your dreams.
I even hired Allison "The Voice of Asterisk" [0] to do our phone tree voice prompts. Her prices were very reasonable for a small batch of prompts, and it’s surreal hearing the same lady that does the IVR for your bank and cable company do your own voice prompts.
I use Twilio for my SIP trunking, and it has nice fallback features in case the Asterisk system needs to go down for maintenance or the like. Costs about $20/month for a dozen or so users and fairly frequent calls/SMS.
At first I was scared of how stupid simple it is. It feels like web servers are supposed to have giant config files with a hundred mysterious knobs to twiddle. Now I always default to Caddy, and have yet to find an instance where it didn't fit my needs. Congrats.
I followed the first 10 chapters or so of the O'Reilly Asterisk book making a few changes here and there to suit my preferences (different Linux flavor, different DB). I run a $10/month Digital Ocean droplet that hosts the Asterisk server. If you can deal with config files, you can have a rock-solid PBX with Enterprise-grade features for the cost of the server + Twilio's SIP trunking features. It ends up costing about $25 every 1.5 months or so. I barely ever think about it, except when I need to tweak a greeting for holiday hours or something.
I'm acutely aware of this having worked there. They're the same thing to you, but not to most authors. Seeing their [audio]book come up in an Amazon search is distinctly different, even if it all leads you to the same place.
> iTunes: Can't everyone get his/her audiobook on iTunes?
No. At least not when I worked there. Audible was the only way to get into the audiobooks section of iTunes. That may have changed.
The thread author's complaint about Audible relates specifically to ACX. Again, even if you are an avid AB listener, you are probably not aware of the existence of ACX because its function is extremely boring. It's Audible's "audiobook rights marketplace". It is designed especially for people that hold the rights to books that would otherwise not be produced in audio. Those people can use the ACX platform to connect with narrators and producers who will help them record an audiobook version of their text, which will eventually be distributed on Audible—and therefore Amazon and (the holy grail) iTunes.
If you're Stephen King, then Simon & Schuster is your publisher in hardcover, paperback, ebook, audio, whatever. There is no doubt in anyone's mind that Stephen King's next novel will be made into an audiobook, and it will release the same day in every format imaginable. The Stephen Kings of the [audio]book world will have never have anything to do with ACX. No need.
On the other hand, if you're a low-to-mid-tier author published by a smaller house that doesn't have audiobook production capabilities, things get dicier. Before Audible, many, many, many books were never made into audiobooks. Audiobook production is time-consuming and expensive, and audiobooks were a niche format. Audiobook rights, therefore were often sold to audiobook-only publishing houses that don't hold quite the same prestige as names like Random House or Penguin. You've probably never heard of these publishing houses, except maybe at the beginning of an audiobook: "Blackstone Audio presents…", "Brilliance Audio presents…", "Recorded Books Presents", etc. Those audiobook-only publishing houses could pick up the rights to reasonably well-known books and authors that their print publisher had no intention of producing in audio.
Now that audiobooks have become much, much more mainstream—in no small part thanks to Audible's efforts—there are fewer scraps from the major publishers to fight over. Today there is a much greater likelihood that a print book will be published in unabridged audio than there was twenty years ago. But there are still many "lost" books that didn't get picked up by the major audiobook publishing houses. Or the mid-tier ones, or even the bottom feeders. That's where ACX comes in.
If you must use ACX to publish your audiobook, it's been overlooked (perhaps unfairly) by just about everyone else who could stand to make a buck off of purchasing the audio rights and producing it. Perhaps there is a more charitable way to put it, but that's the gist.
Using ACX is definitely a gamble. It's a gamble for everyone except Audible. The gamble is this: you will spend thousands of dollars producing an audiobook. In exchange you will get distribution on the biggest audiobook marketplaces in the world: Audible, Amazon, iTunes. As I recall, there were ways to split this risk. If a narrator/producer believed that the audiobook would be a best-seller, they could negotiate a lower upfront fee in exchange for a cut of back-end sales, for example.
The specific terms of the ACX deal you sign on for are certainly in Audible's favor. The only way to get better terms is to have your audiobook rights picked up by a major publishing house that has a deal in place with Audible already. Then you are largely shielded from all of these details by your publisher/manager/lawyer. If you're on ACX, it's likely because you have no other choice. Audible's fee here is largely just a way to gatekeep access to their huge distribution platforms: the Audible service itself, Amazon, and iTunes.
I can't speak to the specifics of the author's complaints about how royalties are calculated. But knowing the people that worked, and still work at Audible, my gut feeling is that there is no malicious intent here. At worst, there is an imbalance of emotional investment between the authors and Audible. These authors have, after all, likely spent years of their life working on a book and shepherding it through the publishing world themselves without the aid of a publishing house. Audible, on the other hand, is largely devoted to the content they publish, the Audible platform itself, and their goal of converting people into subscribers.
In the early 2000s some of my high school friends started an invite only phpBB server. It functioned as a sort of proto-Facebook to keep in touch with one another as we became dispersed around the world because of college and jobs.
As our personal friend networks grew, the bulletin board grew till there were several hundred members. It remained invite only, and the content—while wonderful and funny—mostly reflected the interests and neuroses of sheltered twenty-something Utahns.
As the site grew we naturally developed a set of norms and rules of etiquette that governed the way things were discussed. New users who blasted in and violated those norms were gently redirected initially, ignored eventually, and banned at worst. But in all, things were pretty staid. Since you had to be invited by an existing user, the type of people that joined were of more or less self-selected tastes and temperaments.
Then a user called `phonequail` joined and began posting bizarre threads. Bizarre relative to the typical discussions of workplace drama, Mormon theology, 24, and indie rock, anyway. As an example, he started a thread in which he GM'd a Belle & Sebastian-based RPG. In another instance he satirized a thread called "Shooting the Breeze", which functioned as a pre-Twitter for short thoughts and observations not worthy of their own thread. He declared it had too many words and too much discussion. Conesequently, he started his own thread "Muting the Breeze", in which users were only allowed to converse using images—except images of baby ultrasounds, which were too violent for polite conversation.
His magnum opus was another series of threads in which he played out a sci-fi RPG he called "Spacelab". Participants traveled around the galaxy, and he gave paragraphs of vivid, hilarious descriptions of strange worlds and aliens. Each post ended with an arbitrary, seemingly meaningless choice, which would ultimately propel the player into another offbeat adventure. E.g., "Do you pick up the calendar on the desk, or relax on your bed with a magazine". Meanwhile other users participated as "fans" of Spacelab imagining it to be a long-running sci-fi universe in the mold of Star Trek, with ego-driven stars, fan conventions, and a children's show spinoff.
I realize that some of this might strike people as an insufferable bit of "Katy t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m"-style forced randomness. And perhaps it would be if it weren't carried out by someone with such a staggering imagination.
Several years later when I was deciding whether I wanted to learn to program, I kept reading about the poignant guide. I decided to check it out. I was struck by how similar the tone and style was to phonequail's. It was uncanny. Finally, when one of the examples of ruby variables was `phone_a_quail`, I had my Keyser Soze moment.
Eventually Facebook, Twitter and increasing responsibilities at our various jobs atomized the board and its participants. Phonequail himself was a divisive figure. Being a far more competent programmer than the guy who initially spun up the phpBB server, he took the board's technical helm. At one point he tried to replace the phpBB with a homegrown bulletin board app he'd written himself. Users voted against it after trying it for a few weeks, and we switched back to phpBB. Phonequail more or less stopped participating.
Anyway, either you played along, looked forward to his posts, and marveled at his imagination, or you proclaimed you didn't 'get' him. I was among the former, and, if nothing else I am still fascinated by how by sheer force of will he got a group of young not-quite-adults who were struggling to be taken seriously to _play_ in a way we hadn't done in years.
After I shopped a few other companies to see how our plans compared, I notified the marketplace operator via the only link on the website for customer service. Within about an hour, someone from their IT department rang me on the phone and started grilling me about how many other plans I browsed, and insisted that I clear my cache and browsing history, and notified me that they would be watching to make sure nobody at our IP address didn't access any other plans while the issue was being fixed.
I was pretty surprised at his response, and assumed they would be more grateful for exposing a pretty basic flaw, but I guess a natural human tendency in these situations is to try to externalize the blame. Perhaps it's more difficult to hold yourself accountable than it is to assume that others who've found your shoddy work are malicious actors.
One section I was hoping would get more treatment in your article (like the same treatment you gave classes, which was great) was imports/exports. Named vs. default exports are kind of baffling for a newcomer, and the usage of the named import with curly bracket syntax seems completely arbitrary.
I am sure there are many, many good explanations of named vs. default imports/exports out there on the Internet, but this is one that leaped out at me. I was a little disappointed that the section on imports/exports was so comparatively short. It mostly discussed the usage of imports/exports in CRA.
Still, awesome article. Thanks again.
I sell large equipment to the food & spirits industry. It often has to be shipped on pallets. Before a customer decides to order something from us they generally want to know the freight shipping cost. Rates vary daily, so our salesperson has to stop the sales process to get a freight quotation.
3PL companies already exist, and are supposed to exist to get a best-available rate from the sprawling mess of local, intrastate, and interstate freight carriers. Still, we've found that to REALLY get the best freight rates we have to send out a quote request to 3+ different 3PL companies, wait for all the quotes to come back in, figure out the cheapest quote from the most reliable carrier, then re-ask the same 3PL parties if they're willing to beat the best available rate. The sales process loses a ton of momentum, and it wastes our shipping manager's time.
I always thought that it would be a good idea to bring to the US if only you could figure out a way to work with insurers. Glad someone worked it out.
The Community Manager is the face and voice of the company externally and feeds back the learning needs and demographics of our customers internally. Practice Areas are main areas of editorial content and audience development at O'Reilly Media, currently organized as follows: data, web operations and performance, and programming (development and open source).
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If you were to ask me to choose between Steam Controller and a 360
controller, I would choose 360. Don’t take that as slight to the controller
though because it’s more about the comfort of familiarity over
functionality. I would choose a 360 controller because I have several
thousand hours experience using it, however if tomorrow all game controllers
were wiped off the earth and the only option was the Steam Controller, I
don’t think this would be a bad thing. In fact, I don’t think gaming would
miss a beat.As of iOS 7, you can actually remotely render the phone unusable. I've heard NYPD is now handing out flyers advising people to update their iOS devices to iOS 7[1] so they can take advantage of this feature.
While most crime in NYC has declined, smartphone robberies are -- as in Oakland -- majorly up y/y.
[1]https://twitter.com/Hoffm/status/381564392602480640/photo/1
[1]http://www.home-gym-bodybuilding.com/homemade-power-rack.htm...
[2]http://www.roguefitness.com/burgener-rippetoe-men-s-bar.php