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Submission + - Ditch Sprint? or hope 4g will be here soon and solve my speed issues?

Submitted by
jamiedolan
jamiedolan writes: "I need your help deciding if I should keep my Sprint phone service, I have 6 days left in my return period. I upgraded my old phone to the Samsung Galaxy SIII. With my old phone
I assumed many connectivity issues were problems due to the phone. When I still had problems after getting the SIII I quickly found out based on some simple speed tests that it was in fact
Sprints network that was slow. I've also had no signal in many areas that clearly showed there was coverage. Sprint continues to promise 4g coverage; but not
yet in my area. Sprint employees have told me 4g will solve all my access woes (slow speeds and lack of coverage) and encourage me to wait it out, however of course I am skeptical.
Should I keep the 2 year contract and hope Sprint pulls through with 4g service or find a new provider? (Important to note; Sprint is significantly cheaper than other providers in my area, but that does me little good if it isn't fast enough to use)"
Advertising

Submission + - What do you get for $7 when you promote a post on facebook? (jamiedolan.com)

Submitted by
jamiedolan
jamiedolan writes: "Facebook has rolled out a feature that allows you to promote a posts to your friends (not fans, this is for your personal account) for the fee of $7. Initial feedback based on a survey by stern agee shows the majority of users (83.6%) are unwilling to pay anything to make sure people see an important post. I wanted to see what you get if you do decide to pay; when I promoted a post; my promoted post gathered 2.9 times as many views but only about the same number of likes as my typical post of this nature."
Social Networks

Submission + - Ask Slashdot - Keeping Customer data organized in a Social World

Submitted by
jamiedolan
jamiedolan writes: "I have a small business; most of my clients are on Facebook and many are connected as friends, though some just through the fan page. Data on existing clients tends to get spread across multiple platforms, gmail, Gdocs, and BigCommerce. Unfortunately Facebook doesn't have even the most basic address book / contact manager features, so something as simple as taking a note about a clients interest in a product has to go elsewhere.
When I need to look up something about a client or potential client I might have to search in 3 or 4 places trying to find the info. It quite honestly is very overwhelming and time consuming.
I'm familiar with the old style desktop contact managers like Act, I used it for years. However if I set myself up with something like that, I fear that I would have no end of copy-paste work to keep all of my info in Act current; which would likely be no less overwhelming than my current setup.

The only automated solution I have found are products like the advanced social package from salesforce. They have solutions that tie all of this stuff together from gmail to facebook and keep everything in sync. The problem is that at more than $100 a month, their solutions are out of reach for many small businesses, including mine.

What can a small business owner do for a reasonable cost to keep all of their customer data organized and accessible without excessive manual data transfer from one platform to another? I'm not opposed to paying a reasonable fee for a service (up to about $20 /mo), I could also purchase and run software locally or on my server if that was an option."
Data Storage

Submission + - How do I De-Dup a system with 4.2 million files? 2

Submitted by jamiedolan
jamiedolan writes: I've managed to consolidate most of my old data from the last decade onto drives attached to my main Windows 7 PC. Lots of files of all types from digital photos & scans to HD video files (also web site backup's mixed in which are the cause of such a high number of files). In more recent times I've organized files in a reasonable folder system and have an active / automated backup system. The problem is that I know that I have many old files that have been duplicated multiple times across my drives (many from doing quick backups of important data to an external drive that later got consolidate onto a single larger drive), chewing up space. I tried running a free de-dup program, but it ran for a week straight and was still "processing" when I finally gave up on it. I have a fast system, i7 2.8Ghz with 16GB of ram, but currently have 4.9TB of data with a total of 4.2 million files. Manual sorting is out of the question due to the number of files and my old sloppy filing (folder) system. I do need to keep the data, nuking it is not a viable option. Thanks. Jamie Dolan
Cloud

Submission + - Looking for Cloud Based Webinar Video Solution

Submitted by
jamiedolan
jamiedolan writes: "I am holding an online class and need to play quality video during the class. Most webinar systems allow me to share my desktop, but this is too slow for quality video. To eliminate the constraints of my Internet connection, I tried ruining a Webinar off of a VPS node at Amazon and the video still didn't look very good (choppy, pauses).
Right now I need to support up to about 25 people, but being able to support more in the future would be ideal. The system needs to be friendly for the end user, as my audience is not very technical. Support for both VOIP and call in via phone would be preferable, but we could get by with a VOIP only solution. I also need the ability to record the Webinars.
Though I would prefer not to have the videos public, I could put them on YouTube if there was a tool that would allow me to control the playback of the videos on users screens during the presentation. (i.e. YouTube would have the resources to play the video on many peoples computers at the same time, but I need to control the start and stop of the videos) Thanks in advance for any suggestions."

Comment Re:Not Worth it unless you have a very good reason (Score 1) 554

by jamiedolan (#37014778) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Self-Hosted Gmail Alternatives?

On this point I have to disagree. gmaill is highly capable and all, but I actually prefer roundcube's interface over gmail's.

I also disagree that maintaining a mail server competently is that hard for a single domain with maybe a half-dozen users. If you stick to packages provided by a linux distribution, distribution updates will handle most security updates. Many ISPs have blessed relays for your use that alleviates the blacklist problem significantly.

That said, I have co confess current state of gmail makes it hard to find reason to do it yourself. The only reason I could think of is fear for what google could do in the future given the fact they really can hold your email address hostage. If you pay for your own domain (using any subdomain like offered by dyndns or co.cc is begging for them to hold your domain hostage down the road (as dyndns already has done to its users), landing you in the same place. Since so many free offerings from other companies have either evaporated or 'altered' in unacceptable ways, it's not unreasonable to be wary of Google's take on the perceived business value of free email with ads. If data suggests the cost is higher than the revenue sometime later, say goodbye to your email.

I got fairly disgusted with roundcube for a ongoing bug that would cause it to loop and use %100 of the processor power on a box. That was earlier this year, so it may have been fixed but it had been an ongoing bug report for quite a while. I suppose a lot of it depends on the level your running a box at and how much Interaction there is with other networks and why. Running forums that can send out many thousands of notices a day can be a big deal to manage, as you can get filtered fairy easily ever for doing seemingly nothing wrong (e.g. you didn't throttle down your send rate low enough for one network). Your point about gmail taking away an address is very valid and a concern I have pondered. Using your own domain via gmail and backing up your mail solves much of this. As I mentioned though, there are things like forums, mailing lists, and discussion groups, who's volume of mail is not permissible to run through google and you have little choice but to either pay a 3rd party server for their out bound mail service which often has it's own limitations or to run your own server.

Comment Re:It's useless anyway (Score 1) 968

by jamiedolan (#34501770) Attached to: Google Wants To Take Away Your Capslock Key

I've been using this Windows hack to turn my Caps Lock key into a regular old Shift key for about a year now. I hardly noticed, except I don't have sentences tHAT LOOK LIKE THIS ANYMORE.

Don't you look at what your typing on the screen, while your typing it? I don't understand how people can write whole pages in all caps and not notice it. Hunt and Peck typing? Jamie

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