Disk Full...

[fluffflinger]

Steve

Your excellent work I'm sure is very personal to you but equally you need to show a return on your DVD's. That is a difficult situation to resolve, as if you went the digital delivery route and found your material pirated it may be a bitter pill to swallow even if you were making a better return on your investment???

As far as I see it and understand the market Steel City Man is spot on as are other that have commented that digital is the way forward, I'd even say the only way forward for specialist interest material.

Might I suggest that you offer your next piece in a digital form by way of a trial, leave it there for a period and see if it is pirated and if so what effect does it have on your sales? That way you are not putting all your eggs in the one basket.

I don't currently own any of your DVD's and I may or may not buy in the future but I'm pretty sure if you offered your material in a downloadable form I would already be a customer.

Regardless of what you do I'm sure all of us on the forum hope you prosper and continue to produce further material in the future.

Regards

Richard

 

[Steve Maskery]

Richard
Thank you for your good wishes. But the sound you can hear in the background is that of hollow laughter. What you very charitably describe as "investment" is actually "spending"! I started doing this in 2006 and it is only this year that I have earned back the money I spent then. So I'm now paying myself for 5 years work.
October has been the best month ever and, indeed, if every month was like that I would have a living. But it was only so good because I released two new titles, and if I remove that bump it's back to a steady trickle. At this rate I'll be up to minimum wage by the time I retire.
I don't disagree with anything said above, I'm just loathe to "invest" any more money in what is essentially a vanity project appreciated by a small number of people with very good taste!
But if I were to be persuaded that going DD would transform sales - and, TBH, I'm not, yet, - then it might be a different matter.
I think I need to do some more research on what is involved.
S

 

[wobblycogs]

I bought two of these http://www.readynas.com/?cat=97 NAS boxes for my business a few months ago. I went for the Ultra 4 and I'm completely over the moon with them. There's ample space (I currently have 2*2TB disks in it and I'll be adding another 2 soon), regular updates, flawless operation. I really can't say a bad word about them. They aren't the cheapest but I think this is one area where you get what you pay for to some extent.

As for not offering digital downloads because of piracy I think you are probably kidding yourself. It's completely trivial to rip a DVD and it only takes one, a quick Google search will turn up page after page of user friendly software that will do it for you. Yes, there are protection mechanisms but they have all been circumvented and they cost money for you to use so you are losing out from the start.

If I were you I would just not worry about it too much, the vast majority of the people that will pirate your stuff weren't going to buy it anyway. If I were you I'd spend my time trying to think of ways of encouraging people to buy rather than pirate. Personally, I would be more inclined to buy if there was a download version. If I bought a DVD the first thing I'd do is rip it, there's no way I'd take a DVD into the workshop but that's where I'd want to watch it while I, for example, tweaked the bandsaw.

 

[Eric The Viking]

This is all helpful stuff, chaps, thanks.
Am I right in thinking that the NAS servers require me to add my hard drives myself?
S

Usually yes. That's for two reasons: the vendor doesn't know the capacity nor the configuration you want, and the margins are so low it's not worth setting up a range of different-sized systems as products.

Regarding MS orientation, they almost invariably run Linux or a BSD variant. They usually support Sun NFS and/or Samba (Windows NT server emulation, built into Mac OS for several generations - Samba Macs used to ID as "NT v4.5"!), and often support Unix-style and LDAP authentication if you want better security, but in this context it's moot really.

Bear in mind these are appliances: the boot code/vestigial OS is usually held in ROM (moved to RAM on boot, per PC BIOSes), and they're designed to be as inexpensive as possible. You administer them through an HTTP server - there's no graphics, just a network port. Pretty much anything that can be TCP/IP networked will connect to them.

I don't agree about RAID 5 though: it won't in practice give you much performance improvement (the network will be the bottleneck, not the disk channels), and although theoretically it's more robust, (a) you need lots of disks (min 3, 5 better), and (b) rebuilding if one disk fails takes a lifetime. If two fail (e.g. if a power supply goes ape), it presents a much bigger recovery challenge than mirrored disks. To get the theoretical advantages you'd need to spend a fair bit more on just the raid controller than the entire NAS box.

I'd just mirror the disks, if necessary to two different brands of similar size. That should improve read performance (if the firmware does properly managed pre-fetches), and won't hit the write performance. In the event of catastrophic failure, each is a straightforward disk structure to recover, and won't have to be rebuilt from huge disk images. If you want huge, you can probably span the logical volume over two mirrored pairs (not sure, but it should be possible).

There's one final possibility that occurs to me, which is using an external SATA box. This will fulfil all the requirements of speed and possibly ruggedness (if it does RAID), and in the real world It'll probably be a bit faster than Gigabit+NAS, BUT you can't share it directly with more than one processor. You'd have to connect it to a Mac or a PC and use Samba or Windows' sharing in the normal way, and only the most recent motherboard have external SATA ports anyway.

My twopence,

E.

 

[Chems]

Richard
Thank you for your good wishes. But the sound you can hear in the background is that of hollow laughter. What you very charitably describe as "investment" is actually "spending"! I started doing this in 2006 and it is only this year that I have earned back the money I spent then. So I'm now paying myself for 5 years work.
October has been the best month ever and, indeed, if every month was like that I would have a living. But it was only so good because I released two new titles, and if I remove that bump it's back to a steady trickle. At this rate I'll be up to minimum wage by the time I retire.
I don't disagree with anything said above, I'm just loathe to "invest" any more money in what is essentially a vanity project appreciated by a small number of people with very good taste!
But if I were to be persuaded that going DD would transform sales - and, TBH, I'm not, yet, - then it might be a different matter.
I think I need to do some more research on what is involved.
S

There's next to nothing involved for setting up a digital download, if you spent more than £100 in the process of setting it up I'd say you'd been ripped off. Its a simple little bit of code to generate an email with a one-time download link on it once they've checked out.

If you could do more videos, not huge ones, small ones, little projects I'm sure you'd do well, look at the wood whisperer model, that guy hasn't got anything you haven't, he started with a similar idea and has scaled it up.

 

[fluffflinger]

Steve

I'm with Chems, although I lack the technical knowhow to make it happen for any price let alone £100, there is a ripe market "worldwide" for what you produce.

I'm totally confident if you posted a thread asking for subjects people would like to see covered you would get a ton of ideas. I appreciate you saying it is a vanity project and if so then the money shouldn't matter but if it is and I think you'd like it to be, a way to earn a living or at east break even on a regular basis then you have to take this thing to the next level.


I'll start the ball rolling with a couple of ideas that instantly spring to mind.

What about some short videos showing projects that can be built using some of your jigs or maybe a trip to a decent hardwood merchant and do a buying guide, you could probably get sponsorship from a merchant to cover some or all of your costs (surely buying hardwood is one of the most daunting tasks facing the newbie woodworker?). I'm going to stop here as I could go on for ages.

Come on guys pick it up from here.

Regards

Richard

 

[woodpig]

You're right about buying hardwood Richard!

 

[Steve Maskery]

Well thank you for the vote of confidence, it really is appreciated.
One tinsey-winsey snag - I no longer have a workshop and I don't know when I will have next. Not this year, for sure, and probably not next either. I'm now an armchair woodworker and I hate it.

But lots of food for thought.
S

 

[RogerS]

Well thank you for the vote of confidence, it really is appreciated.
One tinsey-winsey snag - I no longer have a workshop and I don't know when I will have next. Not this year, for sure, and probably not next either. I'm now an armchair woodworker and I hate it.

But lots of food for thought.
S

Oh don't be so defeatist :wink:

I'm sure there are plenty of smaller downloadable things you could do as Richard suggests that don't need a workshop. Going to a timber yard or buying at auction or how to select wood or how to buy wood, for starters.

 

[Lons]

Here's something you might relate to Steve

Paddy McCoy, an elderly Irish farmer, received a letter from the Department for Work & Pensions stating that they suspected he was not paying his employees the statutory minimum wage and they would send an inspector to interview them.

On the appointed day, the inspector turned up. "Tell me about your staff," he asked Paddy.

"Well," said Paddy, "there's the farm hand, I pay him £240 a week, and he has a free cottage. Then there's the housekeeper. She gets £190 a week, along with free board and lodging. There's also the half-wit. He works a 16 hour day, does 90% of the work, earns about £25 a week along with a bottle of whisky and, as a special treat, occasionally gets to sleep with my wife."

"That's disgraceful" said the inspector, "I need to interview the half-wit."


"That'll be me then," said Paddy

 

[Steve Maskery]

Well I can relate to the whisky.
S

 

[Lons]

Well I can relate to the whisky.
S

I was thinking more of the pay yourself peanuts bit