The miniseries finished airing about a half hour ago in the West Coast, and it just plain sucks.
Effects are barely worthy of a B-series movie (I can create better mountains and dunes in KPT Bryce!), acting is average, sets are soap-opera quality, and sound is horrendous with a background noise that's impossible to remove.
And did I mention the bad picture quality and jitters?
As far as the story is concerned it's a pathetic adaptation that insults the book.
I'm not going to bother watching part 2 tomorrow.
I expected that, I was just hoping to be wrong.
Ah well.
As I understand it from the CEO a few months ago, the serial number does not even allow ZK to trace it back to you. They supposedly don't keep track of any of the serial numbers, it's all done on the client side.
Also regarding how it works, it's a kind of "onion" system. Let's say A wants to send a bunch of packets to B. The first thing that A has done upon setting up ZK is to choose up to 3 gateway servers for ZK, call them G1, G2, G3, in that order.
For each packet sent out by A, it will do the following:
- Put header with destination address to B
- Encrypt packet with G3's public key
- Add header with destination address to G3
- Encrypt the whole thing with G2's public key
- Add header with destination address to G2
- Encrypt the whole thing with G1's public key
- Add header with destination address to G1
Then it will send it using the first destination address. At each gateway, one layer will be peeled off using the private key, the destination address read, and the packet will be sent forward.
The cool thing about this is that at any point in the path, if someone intercepts and somehow knows the private key of a gateway, it can only figure out the previous and next hops, not the whole path.
Of course, if B has PGP or anything like that, nothing stops you from also encrypting the packet with B's public key.
The ZK system is an addition to this, providing anonymous transfer, not encryption of data.
It does take a performance hit to do all that, but it's not that bad. I just wish they made it free.
Here's what's really going on:
GameFan states to its network that it will pay $2.5 CPM, which means that for every 1000 impressions it will pay them $2.5.
I can guarantee you that if GameFan were to pay that much it would go out of business. The problem is simply that the market does not pay that much! A savvy company wishing to advertise with GameFan will NOT, EVER pay that much today! Average clickthrough on banners in substantially below 0.5%, so if someone were to pay $2.5 CPM, it would cost them $5 a click at least. That's not acceptable.
So... What happens? Well, people don't advertise, and GameFan Network doesn't make any money. But wait! People do advertise? So what's going on? Well, they're paying much less than $2.5 CPM (which is very much negotiable). So does GameFan lose money? No! Because GameFan/Express.com HAS A CONFLICT OF INTEREST!
GameFan/Express.com is itself a website, with means of revenue dependent on people visiting the site. With this clause in their contract, this is what happens:
GameFan states that it will pay $2.5 CPM for any ad NOT for GameFan.
GameFan sells on its own site let's say an average of $1 CPM and fills its real estate.
GameFan also takes any idiot advertiser who wants to pay $2.5 CPM and shoves him in the network itself.
Anything else that's left unpaid, GameFan uses to drive traffic to its site, where it gets $0.5 CPM.
End result? GameFan makes $0.5 CPM out of every click on an ad IT SERVES, FOR ITSELF, on the network!
I just came upon that problem today, as I was debugging an issue with 2 of our co-branded services on our website. Everytime I'd enter the secure area I'd get the default certificate, and therefore the dreaded "certificate error" box popping up.
I traced it to the fact that we are using name-based virtual hosting: In our Intel 7110 SSL accelerators (nice hardware, but one nasty lingering bug) one cannot assign 2 SSL certificates to one IP address in the mapping table. I expect the same to happen when using software SSL under Apache/mod_ssl or anything else.
So now I'll have to somehow pull those 2 cobranded sites out of name-based hosting and into IP-based, add to the DNS tables, modify the Cisco LocalDirector tables, and fix the Intel 7110 mappings. That's going to be ugly.
IMHO for large ISPs that use a lot of SSL, name-based hosting is not an option. Also consider the fact that Verisign has finally simplified somewhat the process by which one can request massive numbers of SSL certificates, and with the new SSL hardware accelerators that came onto the market it becomes rather easy to aggregate all those certificates and manage them from one central point.
They should reconsider their expectations that everyone move to name-based hosting. For some it's not an option.
More importantly, the amount of data required to describe a frame in these kinds of movies is immense. We're talking gigabytes for a single image. So you're talking about gigabytes of communication and then a few hours of processing. It just doesn't make sense.
Right. What we have here is a truly heterogeneous network, with latencies you cannot calculate, as well as complete unreliability as to the availability and processing power of a node.
The best use of such processing network is when you have something like SETI@home: Massive local computations on very little transfer of data across the network, and the ability to slice the processing needs into minuscule chunks so you can easily duplicate processing of those chunks in case a node goes down.
Distributed internet processing is excellent when you want to solve problems with lots of computations for simple answers, much harder when you want to produce large output.
Enough with playing devil's advocate here. I never implied directly or indirectly that a Big Wed design Company == Good sites. Look at the client list that Razorfish boasted - you can see for yourself they must have had many satisfied customers.
Oh I agree with the above. I didn't mean to say that you implied anything. It was my own statement based on prior experience with a similar company.
Now let's not go assuming that Razorfish didn't use their A-Team, because we don't know that. Given the quality of the work, we might be able to arrive at that conclusion. Given the complicated design of the site, it looks at though it was improperly managed at a level higher than a web designer or programmer.
Actually this is generally what happens in such projects. The team that's assigned to you will be led by "more experienced" user experience and layout people, and since designers and programmers are junior to them, they will do all to please the boss. Never say that the flow and layout suck! Do what you're told to do: You're given a layout (Photoshop) that you should cut up into images and HTML, and you enlist the help of a programmer for the fancy Javascript. But never ever question the premise (which in the case of IAM was a badly flawed layout and design).
Why would any sane company (or person for that matter) continue on a course they are unsure is the correct one?? How can you expect a web design company to proceed past a milestone if they cannot receive feedback in a timely manner??
Once again, here I don't question the premise of getting feedback. I question the way it's done. It's a catch-22 here, and the only way out is if the team gets it right in the first revision or 2. Which brings me back to the point of getting the A-Team, otherwise you're done.
This is why contracts are written. If you stipulate a firm dollar amount in your contract, you don't have to worry about slipped deadlines as it only effects the bottom line of the web design firm. On the other hand, if you chose to pay hourly, then you are just shooting yourself in the foot. The design company has no incentive to deliver on time, since more time == more $$.
ABSOLUTELY! You hit it on the nose. NEVER work on T&M (Time and Materials) in a large project. Always work on fixed fee contract, with milestones to hit. Scope changes will always be T&M, but you can reduce those to a minimum.
If their team is crap, you pay for the first milestone and get your ass out of that contract. Then you find someone else to do the work.
Yeah, but many times (and I think this is what happened in this case) you wait too long to pull the plug, either because you're still hoping that things will get fixed tomorrow (one more iteration) or they make you feel guilty for being anal, which then makes you want to give them one more chance. And then, when the deadline for the end project has approached and gone, and you've sunk a lot of money into it, you just put up the crap that was done, salvage what can be salvage, and get rid of the web design company as quickly as you can.
Anyway, to recap our conversation, the important points to remember are:
1- Always use fixed fees / project, tied to milestones. But have detailed requirements documents! 2- Do background and reference checks on the team that's assigned to you, not the company in general 3- Pull the plug early if you feel that deadlines are slipping! 4- Don't compromise on the quality, find a better group of people to work with.
Maybe it's because Razorfish does big sites, but I wouldn't trust a web design company to make a site from scratch without checking in periodically.
They certainly did check in periodically. In fact, Rasorfish itself sets deliverables on a continuous basis throughout the project, and expects feedback from the client. The problem is that if the client does not have the technical knowhow and Razorfish isn't providing them with the A-Team, then IAM probably got completely blindsided by nice promises and delivery dates slipping "because of late feedback by the client."
That's a pretty standard stalling tactic by Web design companies: They tell you that they want feedback and acceptance every step of the way, and by asking for your feedback and NOT DOING ANYTHING while waiting for it, they lay the blame on you for a missed deadline. But you as a client are doing your job, analyzing the deliverables and finding them unacceptable. You get back to them, they start another iteration, etc... Then all the deadlines slip and you're screwed. Just because their team is crap.
Remember, you're not hiring a company. You're hiring a team of individuals with skills and personalities. Don't be excited by the nice presentation. Ask for a review of the team that will be working for you before you sign that contract!
Let me tell you a story that happened to me and I'll let you judge again IAM's decision to sue:
It was around July of last year. My company was embarking upon an ambitious project to revamp and dramatically extend our website. Being a pure Internet company, our website is our lifeblood. At the time I was away on other business, and did not take part in the RFPs and other negotiations, but suffice it to say that when I got back, we had hired a very large Web development company that is a direct competitor of Razorfish's, and about the same size. They assured us that they could deliver on time (by October) and within budget on the detailed requirements that we had provided them. I was skeptical, because in my view they weren't anywhere near technical enough. Anyway, I let it ride because I wasn't in charge of the project at the time. What did we get from them? NOTHING. Oh yes, we did get some stuff, mostly garbage and absolutely NO ACCEPTABLE DELIVERABLE whatsoever. By the time we fired them, we had ourselves created a site map, flow and UI designs. In fact, for the site map they took ours and reposted it as a deliverable without even removing the initials of our person who wrote it! They showed us a design for the home page one day. I asked how they'd actually code it. "What do you mean?" "Well, it's a cute Photoshop picture, now I want to see it in HTML." "No problem." "Trust me, your design is crap, there's no way you can turn that into usable HTML." "Our coders are good." "No way, the layout is impossible to turn into HTML, too many curves." etc..etc.. They spent 2 weeks trying to make that one design work. I then spent 1 week debugging it and cleaning all the crap out to try to make it work, and it still would break under MacOS IE&NS, Linux NS,etc... Then we scrapped the whole thing, fired them, and got down to business. We had 2 weeks to go before the big launch (we were spending $10MM on marketing for it). We hired a few freelance people (ended up hiring one full time) and did the whole thing ourselves, and managed to release on time, with a few all-nighters in between. Had we not fired them at that time, we would have lost all of our marketing budget and certainly gone bankrupt by now. If a company that you entrust to create your consumer experience makes a mistake, you are dead. I wonder how much marketing money IAM lost on this fiasco. Remember, you pay TV and Radio Spots well in advance....
Slashdot Mirror
The miniseries finished airing about a half hour ago in the West Coast, and it just plain sucks.
Effects are barely worthy of a B-series movie (I can create better mountains and dunes in KPT Bryce!), acting is average, sets are soap-opera quality, and sound is horrendous with a background noise that's impossible to remove.
And did I mention the bad picture quality and jitters?
As far as the story is concerned it's a pathetic adaptation that insults the book.
I'm not going to bother watching part 2 tomorrow.
I expected that, I was just hoping to be wrong.
Ah well.
As I understand it from the CEO a few months ago, the serial number does not even allow ZK to trace it back to you. They supposedly don't keep track of any of the serial numbers, it's all done on the client side.
Also regarding how it works, it's a kind of "onion" system. Let's say A wants to send a bunch of packets to B. The first thing that A has done upon setting up ZK is to choose up to 3 gateway servers for ZK, call them G1, G2, G3, in that order.
For each packet sent out by A, it will do the following:
- Put header with destination address to B
- Encrypt packet with G3's public key
- Add header with destination address to G3
- Encrypt the whole thing with G2's public key
- Add header with destination address to G2
- Encrypt the whole thing with G1's public key
- Add header with destination address to G1
Then it will send it using the first destination address. At each gateway, one layer will be peeled off using the private key, the destination address read, and the packet will be sent forward.
The cool thing about this is that at any point in the path, if someone intercepts and somehow knows the private key of a gateway, it can only figure out the previous and next hops, not the whole path.
Of course, if B has PGP or anything like that, nothing stops you from also encrypting the packet with B's public key.
The ZK system is an addition to this, providing anonymous transfer, not encryption of data.
It does take a performance hit to do all that, but it's not that bad. I just wish they made it free.
Here's what's really going on:
GameFan states to its network that it will pay $2.5 CPM, which means that for every 1000 impressions it will pay them $2.5.
I can guarantee you that if GameFan were to pay that much it would go out of business. The problem is simply that the market does not pay that much! A savvy company wishing to advertise with GameFan will NOT, EVER pay that much today! Average clickthrough on banners in substantially below 0.5%, so if someone were to pay $2.5 CPM, it would cost them $5 a click at least. That's not acceptable.
So... What happens? Well, people don't advertise, and GameFan Network doesn't make any money. But wait! People do advertise? So what's going on? Well, they're paying much less than $2.5 CPM (which is very much negotiable). So does GameFan lose money? No! Because GameFan/Express.com HAS A CONFLICT OF INTEREST!
GameFan/Express.com is itself a website, with means of revenue dependent on people visiting the site. With this clause in their contract, this is what happens:
GameFan states that it will pay $2.5 CPM for any ad NOT for GameFan.
GameFan sells on its own site let's say an average of $1 CPM and fills its real estate.
GameFan also takes any idiot advertiser who wants to pay $2.5 CPM and shoves him in the network itself.
Anything else that's left unpaid, GameFan uses to drive traffic to its site, where it gets $0.5 CPM.
End result? GameFan makes $0.5 CPM out of every click on an ad IT SERVES, FOR ITSELF, on the network!
I'd call that a scam, but hey...
I just came upon that problem today, as I was debugging an issue with 2 of our co-branded services on our website. Everytime I'd enter the secure area I'd get the default certificate, and therefore the dreaded "certificate error" box popping up.
I traced it to the fact that we are using name-based virtual hosting: In our Intel 7110 SSL accelerators (nice hardware, but one nasty lingering bug) one cannot assign 2 SSL certificates to one IP address in the mapping table. I expect the same to happen when using software SSL under Apache/mod_ssl or anything else.
So now I'll have to somehow pull those 2 cobranded sites out of name-based hosting and into IP-based, add to the DNS tables, modify the Cisco LocalDirector tables, and fix the Intel 7110 mappings. That's going to be ugly.
IMHO for large ISPs that use a lot of SSL, name-based hosting is not an option. Also consider the fact that Verisign has finally simplified somewhat the process by which one can request massive numbers of SSL certificates, and with the new SSL hardware accelerators that came onto the market it becomes rather easy to aggregate all those certificates and manage them from one central point.
They should reconsider their expectations that everyone move to name-based hosting. For some it's not an option.
Right. What we have here is a truly heterogeneous network, with latencies you cannot calculate, as well as complete unreliability as to the availability and processing power of a node. The best use of such processing network is when you have something like SETI@home: Massive local computations on very little transfer of data across the network, and the ability to slice the processing needs into minuscule chunks so you can easily duplicate processing of those chunks in case a node goes down. Distributed internet processing is excellent when you want to solve problems with lots of computations for simple answers, much harder when you want to produce large output.
Enough with playing devil's advocate here. I never implied directly or indirectly that a Big Wed design Company == Good sites. Look at the client list that Razorfish boasted - you can see for yourself they must have had many satisfied customers.
Oh I agree with the above. I didn't mean to say that you implied anything. It was my own statement based on prior experience with a similar company.
Now let's not go assuming that Razorfish didn't use their A-Team, because we don't know that. Given the quality of the work, we might be able to arrive at that conclusion. Given the complicated design of the site, it looks at though it was improperly managed at a level higher than a web designer or programmer.
Actually this is generally what happens in such projects. The team that's assigned to you will be led by "more experienced" user experience and layout people, and since designers and programmers are junior to them, they will do all to please the boss. Never say that the flow and layout suck! Do what you're told to do: You're given a layout (Photoshop) that you should cut up into images and HTML, and you enlist the help of a programmer for the fancy Javascript. But never ever question the premise (which in the case of IAM was a badly flawed layout and design).
Why would any sane company (or person for that matter) continue on a course they are unsure is the correct one?? How can you expect a web design company to proceed past a milestone if they cannot receive feedback in a timely manner??
Once again, here I don't question the premise of getting feedback. I question the way it's done. It's a catch-22 here, and the only way out is if the team gets it right in the first revision or 2. Which brings me back to the point of getting the A-Team, otherwise you're done.
This is why contracts are written. If you stipulate a firm dollar amount in your contract, you don't have to worry about slipped deadlines as it only effects the bottom line of the web design firm. On the other hand, if you chose to pay hourly, then you are just shooting yourself in the foot. The design company has no incentive to deliver on time, since more time == more $$.
ABSOLUTELY! You hit it on the nose. NEVER work on T&M (Time and Materials) in a large project. Always work on fixed fee contract, with milestones to hit. Scope changes will always be T&M, but you can reduce those to a minimum.
If their team is crap, you pay for the first milestone and get your ass out of that contract. Then you find someone else to do the work.
Yeah, but many times (and I think this is what happened in this case) you wait too long to pull the plug, either because you're still hoping that things will get fixed tomorrow (one more iteration) or they make you feel guilty for being anal, which then makes you want to give them one more chance. And then, when the deadline for the end project has approached and gone, and you've sunk a lot of money into it, you just put up the crap that was done, salvage what can be salvage, and get rid of the web design company as quickly as you can.
Anyway, to recap our conversation, the important points to remember are:
1- Always use fixed fees / project, tied to milestones. But have detailed requirements documents!
2- Do background and reference checks on the team that's assigned to you, not the company in general
3- Pull the plug early if you feel that deadlines are slipping!
4- Don't compromise on the quality, find a better group of people to work with.
They certainly did check in periodically. In fact, Rasorfish itself sets deliverables on a continuous basis throughout the project, and expects feedback from the client. The problem is that if the client does not have the technical knowhow and Razorfish isn't providing them with the A-Team, then IAM probably got completely blindsided by nice promises and delivery dates slipping "because of late feedback by the client."
That's a pretty standard stalling tactic by Web design companies: They tell you that they want feedback and acceptance every step of the way, and by asking for your feedback and NOT DOING ANYTHING while waiting for it, they lay the blame on you for a missed deadline. But you as a client are doing your job, analyzing the deliverables and finding them unacceptable. You get back to them, they start another iteration, etc... Then all the deadlines slip and you're screwed. Just because their team is crap.
Remember, you're not hiring a company. You're hiring a team of individuals with skills and personalities. Don't be excited by the nice presentation. Ask for a review of the team that will be working for you before you sign that contract!
Let me tell you a story that happened to me and I'll let you judge again IAM's decision to sue:
It was around July of last year. My company was embarking upon an ambitious project to revamp and dramatically extend our website. Being a pure Internet company, our website is our lifeblood. At the time I was away on other business, and did not take part in the RFPs and other negotiations, but suffice it to say that when I got back, we had hired a very large Web development company that is a direct competitor of Razorfish's, and about the same size.
They assured us that they could deliver on time (by October) and within budget on the detailed requirements that we had provided them. I was skeptical, because in my view they weren't anywhere near technical enough. Anyway, I let it ride because I wasn't in charge of the project at the time.
What did we get from them? NOTHING.
Oh yes, we did get some stuff, mostly garbage and absolutely NO ACCEPTABLE DELIVERABLE whatsoever. By the time we fired them, we had ourselves created a site map, flow and UI designs. In fact, for the site map they took ours and reposted it as a deliverable without even removing the initials of our person who wrote it!
They showed us a design for the home page one day. I asked how they'd actually code it. "What do you mean?" "Well, it's a cute Photoshop picture, now I want to see it in HTML." "No problem." "Trust me, your design is crap, there's no way you can turn that into usable HTML." "Our coders are good." "No way, the layout is impossible to turn into HTML, too many curves." etc..etc..
They spent 2 weeks trying to make that one design work. I then spent 1 week debugging it and cleaning all the crap out to try to make it work, and it still would break under MacOS IE&NS, Linux NS,etc... Then we scrapped the whole thing, fired them, and got down to business. We had 2 weeks to go before the big launch (we were spending $10MM on marketing for it). We hired a few freelance people (ended up hiring one full time) and did the whole thing ourselves, and managed to release on time, with a few all-nighters in between. Had we not fired them at that time, we would have lost all of our marketing budget and certainly gone bankrupt by now.
If a company that you entrust to create your consumer experience makes a mistake, you are dead.
I wonder how much marketing money IAM lost on this fiasco. Remember, you pay TV and Radio Spots well in advance....