i think this thread is going fast into the wrong direction and some extrem opinions are playing victory about any rational thought.
well still the trick with same ip might be common, while not smart, cause you should know that IPs can be traced back,
BUT
everybody is free to choose a product or not. and as long nobody get hurt or is a victim of fraud i think those names should not be used because in my opinion this also goes into a direction which can cause a legal problem.
just ride on principles doesnt do anybody any good here. the problem is uncovered and solved.
i think we should get over this subject matter now.
if anybodys trust is so damaged well dont use this service thats anybodys freedom. but we dont want to put this on a level where people will sue for their won stupidity.
unfortunately, we consider such actions almost as bad as the astroturfing to begin with, so we will have none of that.
right, children?
We will have a clean, thoughtful, logical debate, with open minds, or we will have nothing. that means, if you really have nothing new to add to the debate, don’t add anything at all.
That is all.
Oh, and this:
is just creepy.
Why don’t we leave the issue alone for now? Notice: no lock for now.
We know you ain’t defending your action and yes it is great that you offering this service for a low price, But just because this is all good doesn’t mean we are likely to forgive what was done. You could of gotten a lot more customers if you were honest from the beginning, now I feel you end up with alot less because of your action.
It’s like politics, just because one or two things they do is good doesn’t mean it makes it alright.
I for one welcome the services that ResPower offers to the community. They made a mistake, they’ve apologized (several times) for it. Most companies would not admit they had done anything wrong.
Please stop this. I am becoming annoyed with you Al. You really need to stop these kinds of posts.
Did you ever have a legitimate need to use the services of the company in question? if you did not, then you have no place to comment on the actions of those who may chose to use or not use the services. I am not sure who the “we” it is you speak of, but it does not include me, or many others.
Unless you have a good reason to post, don’t. I have had enough school experiences to hate is when people punish all for the actions of one, so I refuse to lock.
It looks like a good service, i am glad Blender has been added to it.
however i will certainly wait untill i have heard some real reviews of your service before signing up.
i may be needing the service in the future and will think of it when the time comes. but my decision to come to you will anly be based on the response of people i do trust.
not trying to be negative or insulting, as i do appreciate blender having access to this kind of resource.
perhaps a free trial (long enough for a project) to some “respected” blender users would be appropriate in building up a reputation. (just a thought)
somthing like a free account for plumiferous or somthing. for sponsorship is also another well known form of advertising.
has already been suggested and here was their response
[quote=“RCAS”]
Perhaps it could be a good thing to give a one month account to a member appointed by the Blender Foundation to make an independent review on the Renderfarm and then post it at the main website news area, that could be an option, but Ton has the call regarding this.
It would be good to have a review with some more renderfarms also.
[quote=“earyle”]
We would be happy to give a free month to whomever the Blender Foundation nominates. I’m not sure who to contact about this as Ton has made it pretty clear his plate is full, and the Blender site doesn’t seem to have anybody else’s address posted. Unless I’m blind and looking right past it.
a test drive function would be good, well for those who are new to render farms. i would say that the majority of blender users do not earn money with it so for them they are not realy embedded in renderfarms.
i could imagine that this would be beneficial, while still pro users might like that type of test drive as well. in case i am on a deadline i would shoot myself when i hit on problems i could have seen in a test drive before.
perhaps instead of the Blender Foundation nominating someone the community could do so. Not sure how many users we have who do animations enough to need a render farm though, and probably not many at all who have an animation ready to render now. Although I suppose for a test run it could be a render of a past work or such.
Early has given me a 1 month trial for the purpose of testing and reviewing his service. I’ll need some to time to do some tests and write up my results, but I wanted to give you guys some first impressions:
Its fast. Very fast. I need to study the logs a bit better to give an accurate rating of the speed, but to give a basic perspective: 180 frames on the ResPower renderfarm rendered in less than 10 minutes. On my 3 GHz P4 with 512 MB of ram, the same animation rendered at 5 minutes per frame.
Its easy to use. I haven’t located a user guide for using the renderfarm with blender (I don’t think its been written yet). But It is pretty easy to figure it out. In addition, customer support has been very good. My emails to Early have been replied to in less than an hour (this was during business hours).
The only complaint I have so far is that not all the frames rendered. However, it keeps track of failed frames and you can easily tell it to rerender those frames. All in all I’m pleased so far.
Thats all I have to say so far. I’ll write more when I have more data.
sketchy: Could you do a test with the fluid simulator? I’m curious if it will be able to render correctly because of the separate files needed for the simulation.
The reason I didn’t reply to your private message is simple: I didn’t have time this week since I’ve had a very tight deadline to make today. And thank goodness I’ve made it with only 15 minutes to spare!
The reason the thread was locked still stands: this website is a community forum, where community members can communicate with each other. This forum is not a place for advertisements and definitely not for misleading advertising.
But you’ve already explained you’re sorry for that. Nevertheless I think you were naive to think such tactics would be condoned or that your potential customers would appreciate them. The moderators and administrators of this forum constantly have to keep an eye out for potential trouble, so we always act on such threads.
We are generally very supportive of anyone willing to provide something for the Blender Community and the ResPower render farm seems a very nice initiative. I wish you good luck with that and hope many Blender users will benefit from it.
earyle, I really do like the idea of somebody making lots of horsepower for rendering available to clients, you just need to work on your marketing.
Here’s an idea, maybe Project Orange is in need of some more horsepower to get the movie finished? If so, perhaps you could come to some kid of sponsorship deal, like you give them free time on the render farm in exchange for a mention in the credits or something similar. That way you get your name out there without having to resort to tactics that many (myself included) find questionable. Plus, if the guys who worked on Project Orange have a good experience with your renderfarm you can maybe generate some real grass-roots support in the process
I’ll save you the trouble - they don’t work - it’s an issue listed in the “Known Issues” section of the user’s guide/tutorial. We’ve been scratching our heads about where the problem lies, but we’ll definitely post something when we’ve figured it out. Right now it looks like Blender isn’t building the file name to look for the fluid cache correctly, but we really don’t have enough information or tracing through the code to know for certain yet.
Well, hopefully we won’t make any more mistakes like the one that lead to this thread. As a programmer-turned-entrepeneur, I can tell you that the marketing side of things is probably the most difficult. I won’t wax philisophic on that - I’m pretty sure the mods think it’s a dead horse at this point…
On the Project Orange front, they’ve already got all the horsepower they need. Several months back when we first thought about supporting Blender, we were going to price it the way we price LightWave. I sent them an email offering $10,000 in free render time (by LW standards). They gracefully declined 8^o. Clearly they aren’t hurting for cycles. However, if they decide their farming source is insufficient, I would be more than happy to sponsor their project.
