Tuesday, October 19, 2010

private jets

Private Jets is a power pop quartet from Sweden, founded in 2001 by twin brothers Erik Westin and Per Westin.

The band started out as a song writing project, the brothers curious to see if they could mix their influences of pop, rock and jazz into their own brand of power pop with ambiguous lyrics and smart arrangements. When pushed by pop enthusiasts to record some of the songs, they realized that they had to put a band together. Janne Hellman was recruited as lead vocalist together with Mikael Olsson on bass, Olsson who had previous worked with the brothers in the hi-speed pop outfit Revolver Bop Agents.

First release Private Jets released the debut EP “A Four Leaf Clover in E-Major” on May 27, 2002 on Sparkplug Records. It contained four songs and a short snippet and was well received by the power pop community. The songs were written, arranged, produced and to a large extent performed by the brothers. Lead vocals was provided by Janne Hellman on all tracks and Olsson played bass on the song Millionseller.

In a radio interview on Swedish Radio, Erik Westin explained that the band were basically writing what they wanted to hear but couldn’t really seem to find anywhere. He also said that the ambition with the band is to write the ultimate pop song over and over again.

Second release After the release of “A Four Leaf Clover in E-Major” the brothers started to work on a new album. The band bio states that they wrote 43 new songs to be able to make an album filled with singles only. It says that they would strive for nothing less than power pop perfection. Of the songs written, the band chose to record twelve, and the result can be heard on the album “Jet Sounds”, released on May 26, 2008.

Live gigs In May 2008 Private Jets made their live debut at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, playing the International Pop Overthrow. An extra show was added.

On Saturday November 7, 2008, the band played at the International Pop Overthrow in New York City, performing at Kenny’s Castaways in Greenwich Village.

Work-at-home

A Work-at-Home scheme is a get-rich-quick scheme in which a victim is lured by an offer to be employed at home, very often doing some simple task in a minimal amount of time with a large amount of income that far exceeds the market rate for the type of work. The true purpose of such an offer is for the perpetrator to extort money from the victim.

Work-at-home schemes have been around for decades. Originally found as ads in newspapers or magazines, they have expanded to more high-tech media, such as television and radio ads, and on the Internet.

Legitimate work-at-home opportunities do exist, and many people do their jobs in the comfort of their own homes. But anyone seeking such an employment opportunity must be wary of accepting a home employment offer, as only about one in 42 such ads have been determined to be legitimate [1]. Most legitimate jobs at home require some form of post-high-school education, such as a college degree or certificate, or trade school, and some experience in the field in an office or other supervised setting. Additionally, many legitimate at-home jobs are not like those in schemes are portrayed to be, as they are often performed at least some of the time in the company's office, require more self discipline than a traditional job, and have a higher risk of firing.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. Examples include rewards sites, where users are rewarded with cash or gifts, for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'), the network, the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate') and the customer. The market has grown in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third parties vendors.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Broadband Internet access

Broadband Internet access, often shortened to just broadband, is a high data rate Internet access—typically contrasted with dial-up access using a 56k modem.

Dial-up modems are limited to a bitrate of less than 56 kbit/s (kilobits per second) and require the full use of a telephone line—whereas broadband technologies supply more than double this rate and generally without disrupting telephone use.

Although various minimum bandwidths have been used in definitions of broadband, ranging up from 64 kbit/s up to 2.0 Mbit/s, the 2006 OECD report is typical by defining broadband as having download data transfer rates equal to or faster than 256 kbit/s, while the United States (US) Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as of 2009, defines "Basic Broadband" as data transmission speeds exceeding 768 kilobits per second (Kbps), or 768,000 bits per second, in at least one direction: downstream (from the Internet to the user’s computer) or upstream (from the user’s computer to the Internet). The trend is to raise the threshold of the broadband definition as the marketplace rolls out faster services.

Data rates are defined in terms of maximum download because several common consumer broadband technologies such as ADSL are "asymmetric"—supporting much slower maximum upload data rate than download.

Windows Media Services

Windows Media Services (WMS) is a streaming media server from Microsoft that allows an administrator to generate streaming media (audio/video). Only Windows Media, JPEG, and MP3 formats are supported. WMS is the successor of NetShow Services.
In addition to streaming, WMS also has the ability to cache and record streams, enforce authentication, impose various connection limits, restrict access, use multiple protocols, generate usage statistics, and apply forward error correction (FEC). It can also handle a high number of concurrent connections making it ideal[weasel words] for content providers. Streams can also be distributed between servers as part of a distribution network where each server ultimately feeds a different network/audience. Both unicast and multicast streams are supported (multicast streams also utilize a proprietary and partially encrypted Windows Media Station (*.nsc) file for use by a player.) Typically, Windows Media Player is used to decode and watch/listen to the streams, but other players are also capable of playing unencrypted Windows Media content (Microsoft Silverlight, VLC, MPlayer, etc.)

64-bit versions of Windows Media Services are also available for increased scalability. The Scalable Networking Pack for Windows Server 2003 adds support for network acceleration and hardware-based offloading, which boosts Windows Media server performance. The newest version, Windows Media Services 2008, for Windows Server 2008, includes a built-in WMS Cache/Proxy plug-in which can be used to configure a Windows Media server either as a cache/proxy server or as a reverse proxy server so that it can provide caching and proxy support to other Windows Media servers. Microsoft claims that these offloading technologies nearly double the scalability, making Windows Media Services the industry's most powerful streaming media server.

Windows Media Services 2008 is no longer included with the setup files for the Windows Server 2008 operating system, but is available as a free download.