Official ResPower Reaction to Locked Thread Controversy...

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
41

Crapweasel sounds right. You were deceiptful, misleading and and you are still ok with that. And several of the posters here aparently feel the same way. It makes me so incredibly angry that you think it’s ok to further your aims with those tactics I can’t even think straight.

And to anyone who feels they need to speak on my behalf apologize for yourself, not for me. They are predatory. Predators need to be treated as dangerous. No excuse. The only way they will change there approach is through behavior modification. Locking the thread brought an apology. If the thread hadn’t been locked there would have been no remorse.

Go ahead. Dump on me all you want. But that is my opinion and that is how my opinion will stay.

Now. Here’s the approach the true marketeer will take. “That was intense. How can we use that to make a sale.” fo

42

Wow. :o

Seems like there are alot of people around here who’ve never made a mistake! 8)

43

A crowd is preparing to stone to death a woman for adultry, and Jesus says “let he who is without sin throw the first stone” - so all the politicians start throwing stones. :slight_smile:

LetterRip

44

In the version of that one I heard a rock fell from the sky and hit Jesus on the head. He rolled his eyes, looked skyward and said “Sometimes Dad, you really get on my nerves”

45

can we please as already suggested stop talking about the sales trick ok?
shall we? everything is said already!

so lets be productive again.

46

I think a thread being locked is better than being banned. I don’t think it was personal, as much as it was “moderation” of the elysiun forums. I think tha appology was cool and I think ResPower is cool also.

Timmothy was doing the right thing, had he not “nipped it in the bud”, would ResPower still multi-poting from a single IP address to “spam” “customers”?

47

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.

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.

Ok, how about asking project orange to help you fix the fluid simulator problem in exchange for some free rendering time ? Or perhaps someone in the community will help in exchange for some free render time ?

That way you both win.

Also, there’s other blender forums out there, so now you can ask without making the same fatal mistake :wink:

48

Nils might be able to help you, he is the fluids creator, maintainer…

msg me and I can give you his email address…

LetterRip

49

I remember when I first had my cgtalk account, and some Blender users pointed to works they had done there. I zipped on over and gave them nice praise, without mentioning that I was a Blender user, that I knew they had used Blender to make the image, and that they had pointed both myself and others to the thread.

That’s deceptive in much the same way.

How many of you have done the same thing?

The service looks phenomenal, and I will absolutely use it to render finals for the Audition and any other animations of considerable length I complete.

50

How nice you got rid of that creepy monkey.

51

The problem with the pseudonym tactic is that it is misleading and deceitful marketing. It makes people think that actual, unbiased customers are saying those things, which is not the case. I can’t and won’t support such marketing practices.

Also, if you’re found out (as you were in this case), it makes you come across as extremely unprofessional and seedy, so for your own business’s sake I’m glad you’ve decided to stop. Truth be told, I still see you as unprofessional and seedy because of this stunt. And it will take time and professionalism to build my trust. First impressions are extremely important, and you blew it this time.

That being said, I’m glad and grateful that you are supporting Blender like this, and I do appreciate that you have openly acknowledged what you did and that it was wrong. The latter in particular earns you back some of your lost trust points.

52

How many points he has now and how many is required :stuck_out_tongue:

53

Apparently not everyone has seen the news regarding Orange and B.S.U. The project has been donated render time from the university on their BSU Xseed render farm.

The BSU Xseed, the 2.1 Tflop Supercomputing

Cluster at Bowie State University, will donate cycles for rendering.

Prof. Mark Alan Matties, Department of Computer Science at Bowie State University and Director of the BSU Xseed (xseed.bowiestate.edu), has offered the BSU Xseed as rendering farm for the entire period of the Orange Open Movie project. The BSU Xseed harnesses 224 Apple Xserve G5 - each with dual 2.0 GHz CPUs and 2GB RAM. The cluster has been built recently, and of the of areas of interest is targeting movie production.

Since our minimum target was 10 systems for about 3 months, using only 10% of the capacity of this cluster would already mean we can afford

rendering times of over 8 hours per frame! You can imagine everyone in the Orange team is wildly enthusiast about this exciting opportunity, which will solve a major bottleneck in the creation process.

http://www.bowiestate.edu/
The department’s web server seems to be locked down at the moment, but there was at one point some good information on the Universities site regarding their hardware.

54

Ahh yes, the ResPower spam thread.

And the spamming of our open source forums with multiple character from the same IP, (you really should learn more about the internet, and how to change your IP, before being so damn foolish)

I was thinking of making a link in my signature saying “ResPower are phony’s” and linking it to your delightful spam thread.

Then you come back, and act all innocnet, like “geez, I didn’t know multiple registrations were forbidden, (like they are at any forum)”

bottom line… you have a lot of learning left about the internet and the internet community. We are a lot smarter than you think, (I found your thread dubious, wiht the low post count member testimonies), and do not appreciate people attempting to use trickery to sell us something. I would never, ever, ever dream of ever giving you one cent, and if I ever, ever found out you were behind any other company, same thing.

You are not here to make the internet better, you are here because you think you can pull some shenanigans, prop your feet up, and retire a millionaire.

And lets not try to sugarcoat this, this has a lot of names, but the most accurate is, you lied. And if your mom never told you lying was wrong, then I have no intentions of supporting someone so morally vacuous.

Here is someone who posted an announcment honestly in our forums, I would suggest any render business be awarded to the honest:
http://renderplanet.com/

55

misleading and deceitful marketing
criminal act in EU. can be legally prosecuted and finned.

<cough> didn’t something like that happen to apple? in a bit more funny context, but nevertheless </cough>

56

Oh, and while I am showing honest alternatives:

http://www.drqueue.org/

57

I think some people here have a lesser grasp of the law than they think. What the ResPower employees did was not to mislead anyone about their product, or even into purchasing their product. What they did was to attempt to give a false impression of popularity in this forum in order to get people to simply look at the product. The product would then stand or fall on its own merits. They did not lie about the product itself.

New flash for some of you: the people you see in tv commercials enjoying various products (beer, mattresses, etc.) are quite often PAID ACTORS. They don’t use those products. And they tell you they do. Liars! That food in magazine ads? You can’t eat it, because it’s covered with varnish to make it look good for the length of the photo shoot. Liars!

Granted, from a business standpoint, you shouldn’t do this kind of thing in an online forum, because it’s so easily detectable and you’ll get nailed. And they’ve acknowledged that. But geez-o-crimeny, some of you are reacting as though ResPower came to your house and skinned your llama.

*drqueue is a great alternative if you have, say, a 400-node renderfarm in your garage. It’ll run your renderfarm, not buy one for you.

58

So. They lied about who they were. I don’t care about the law personally, I care about ethics.

Granted, from a business standpoint, you shouldn’t do this kind of thing in an online forum, because it’s so easily detectable and you’ll get nailed. And they’ve acknowledged that. But geez-o-crimeny, some of you are reacting as though ResPower came to your house and skinned your llama.

I don’t know of too many marketers that give fake testimonials… actually I know of a few, since I worked fighting spyware and scumware for a year and a half.

What ResPower did was think I was a fool. I find that insulting. Maybe you don’t mind having people trying to pull a fast one on you, but I hate it.

*drqueue is a great alternative if you have, say, a 400-node renderfarm in your garage. It’ll run your renderfarm, not buy one for you.

I am aware of this. renderplanet doesn’t talk to itself, and supports 2.4
I for one have learned trusting liars is a bad game to play.

59

Indeed we did. And yes, all of the flames we are receiving are greatly deserved.

What’s worse than that, though, is that I lied to myself - “hey, here’s a good idea, spice up the forum with some fake testimonials! It’s not lying, it’s marketing!” Coming to that realisation has been worse than coming to the realisation that what we did was wrong. It’s been worse than admitting publicly that it was wrong. It’s been worse than the veritable prose-beating we’ve received here.

Hopefully it leads to some personal growth.

If not, there’s always that katana…

60

I did some background checking, and found this is not your MO, allthough Blender’s forums were not the only one you tried this marketing campaign with, but they all seemed pretty recent, like you were dabbling with the idea.

I also saw many indications your company is not doing so well.

Let me tell you a story about an anti-virus software company I worked for called eAcceleration. aka eanthology.

They were started by a dot.com millionaire, and about 4 years ago, someone approved what was known as a drive-by download on one of the pages of the website, where if someone pressed a close button on a pop-up message, it would then download the software. The news spread like wildfire across the net, and every other AV program labeled them, (and many still do) as malware, or spyware.

So they stopped the drive-by downloads, and were not doing them when I worked there, but then they tried to hack google, and google pulled them when they found out. That hurt sales for another 6 months. After google allowed them back on, they started new billing practices, which according to their EULA was legal, but certainly overdrafted many of their customers accounts, and I found alarmingly unethical, in an obvious attempt to burn the customer, to accrue cash and survive.

Today, the customer support is top-notch, but expensive, and a good percentage is still used trying to patch up the unintended consequences of these actions. eAcceleration has accrued too much debt, and will never go public, (which is what the CEO really wanted), because they cannot learn from their mistakes.

Just because it is legal, does not make it ethical.

Believe you me, for the next decade, I will periodically run a google on your name, and respower, and see if I can find any complaints. I do it for many people and companies I have found unethical.

And some marketing advice… either pay the money for a trusted source, or do it yourself. Do not rely on affiliates, do not attempt to “hack google”, and certainly do not try bulk emailing. Look to see if maybe you can outsource for computational fluid dynamics companies, like Fluent. ( http://www.cfdreview.com/ on the right is a list of vendors of CFD programs) I know you have way too many chips and not nearly enough customers.

Best of luck to you and your brother, I know you are in a hard place, and are staring into the abyss, but please do not become a monster.

Renderplanet seems to have had some 1 post forum members talk about how great it is too, so perhaps they are not much better than your company. Either way, it would still be a year or two before I personally would need a renderfarm.