About a year and a half ago, DoubleClick announced that they had acquired NetCreations, a mailing list company run by an old friend of mine Rosalind Resnick, for a rediculously large number of millions of dollars. NetCreations had been in the business of running opt-in mailing lists. This didn't seem to attract a lot of interest at the time.
The deal fell apart after DoubleClick's stock price tanked, and NetCreations sold themselves instead to Seat Pagine Gaille.
So, they've tried this before, and it failed to gel. Let's hope that it fails again. The threat of targeted spam is far greater, I believe, than mass-mailed spam, because it's much more difficult to filter out.
I think that/. has a great opportunity to exert peer pressure. Everybody who is a subscriber should get an icon next to their name when posting commments, sort of like the shockingly cool friend/foe icon.
Slashdot might be compared to public radio; which unfortunately gets only about 5-7% of their listeners to contribute. By having a coveted icon next to their name, perhaps more people will subscribe to this forum.
Actually, no, one of my coworkers did that shot of Penelope in the nude. We had been wearing a little bit of clothing on the set which we had to get rid of.
The big ray-tracing scene was short, as you might expect -- it was tossing the rose from the balcony down to Toninio. We tried rendering the CG rose in RenderMan, and just couldn't get the shadows, bump maps, and translucency to look right. With BMRT it was a piece of cake.
We did all the effects in the movie for a song, just to be able to work on it. Often in the fall, after we've made our numbers for the year, Hammerhead will do an art-house movie like this. Woman on Top was a better movie than people (including Penelope! She never mentions it!) give it credit for. Cruz is simply radiant in the film. Sometimes, movies need just be fun and beautiful.
I've been a fan of the Alpha chip since its debut in the February, 1993 Communications of the ACM back in 1990. Alpha was the great hope, a new chip designed from the ground up as a scientific and technical powerhouse. I had read Darryll Strauss's great article about harnessing 166 433 MHz Alphas toward the production of Titanic, and that only whet my appetite further. When I read that Samsung was going to be pushing Alpha workstations, I exercised my most persuasive writing skills and requested a machine for development, with the idea that it might be used to further the use of Alphas in visual effects work.
Shockingly, about three months later, a battered old SmartAlpha Station A10 showed up on my doorstep. I suppose you can tell a workstation from a desktop machine by the gauge of sheet metal, this thing weighs about 50 lbs. At the time I was still under the influence of NT, so I ported all of our code over to NT on the Alpha. It wasn't that hard, but it wasn't that rewarding either. The rest of our shop is SGI machines, and, well, NT isn't Unix.
Then I decided to run Linux on the box. I ordered Red Hat 5.2 from CheapBytes. 5.2 was the latest Red Hat release for Alpha at the time, although they were shipping 6.0 for X86 machines.
We ported all of our SGI software to the Alpha, and used it for a couple of movies, most noteably Woman on Top. We did some ray tracing using Larry Gritz's BMRT for some of the scenes in the movie, where the power of the Alpha was well used.
After that, I took the machine home, and used it as my home computer until I got a laptop -- and it's been off since then. As promised by the title, here are the lessons learned.
Pro:
Alphas are significantly more finicky about floating point exceptions than the other machines we were using at the time. We found a lot of bugs in our code due to the fact that applications would crash on the Alpha rather than just silently generating bad results.
There are many benefits to using multiple architectures when developing code. It keeps you much more honest. It forces you to keep your build trees in good shape.
Alpha is a 64-bit machine, and it was my first exposure to the fact that long != int. We'll all find this out eventually, sooner is better than later.
Cons:
Alphas are outcasts. That was true three years ago when we got the machine, and it has become dramatically more true now. Finding a decent web browser, for instance, was a challenge. In general, the avalanche of tools that makes Linux so pleasant and productive dries up to a trickle when you look for Alpha tools.
It's very common that programs that you download source for don't quite compile under Alpha. It's not really the fault of those programmers, of course -- they don't have Alpha machines, typically, to test the installation on.
Alphas are just expensive boxes. They will never compete on a MIPS/$ basis. This was true even when they were many times as fast as the Intel chips, and it's becoming more and more true.
Finally, persuing oddball architectures is just typically not a cost-productive way to spend one's time. Of course, I say that -- and I'd sooner die than ever use a Microsoft product:)
HP was gracious enough to loan me one of these machines for a couple of weeks; so that I could write a review of it. I've only had it for a day, but it appears to be everything that one could ask for in a Linux graphics workstation. It's incredibly fast, has unbelieveable graphics, and has a customized RedHat configuration that just works.
HP has seen the light, too, and is running XFree86 instead of the custom Xserver inherited from their HPUX platforms. Their first Linux boxes, released about a year ago, weren't running XFree, IIRC.
More to follow, of course. One line summary -- The machines are real, and they rock.
If, due to global warming, ocean levels rise five feet, then (assuming a constant density, spherical earth) the rotation rate would slow down by about 1 part in 2 million, about 18 seconds a year.
Given that water is less dense than most of the rest of the earth, it would probably be only two or three seconds a year, but still a substantial amount.
I had seen some speculation that the magnetic field of the earth is due to a different rotation rate between the core and the rest of the earth. Changing these relative rates may be significant.
rlsnyder asks Has SPAM really decreased universally thanks to these lists? Well, it is hard to say. Spam has increased monotonically since its inception, and it continues to grow. It is possible that blacklists have helped lower the rate of growth.
What blacklists really do is get the attention of sysadmins, and get them to take the problem seriously. I, like rlsnyder, was victimized in the same way -- our mail server was an open relay, we forwarded some spam, and got blacklisted. It took me a week or so to get it straightened out, and in the process I learned quite a bit about the UCE problem. rlsnyder similarly has been enriched by the experience, whether he agrees to that at this point or not.
One always has the option of sending mail from one of the many free mail systems. If your mail is blocked while your case is being reviewed, then send it from hotmail or someplace like that. That's what we did. In took about a week for the last of the spam reporting services to delist our site, and while it was inconvenient, it wasn't devastating. It won't be for rlsnyder, either, I trust.
The big problem is that there is nothing to stop the spammers. People who relay mail through unsuspecting companies are already criminals, they will not be dissuaded by laws. The only thing that the anti-spam community can do is to try to put a finger in all 2^32 holes in the dike, and the only way to do that is to educate people. The blacklists are that education program
My company is committed to not growing, and it's amazing that I found so few other companies with the same princples, given the obvious success of the idea. ArsDigita is just one of any number of companies that went through the same trajectory.
My partners in Hammerhead Productions all worked at the same company, Pacific Data Images, before they closed their LA facility. I started with PDI when it was quite small, and was terribly fortunate that the management of PDI was committed to open books -- that is, they allowed the employees [at least the early employees, more on that, later] to see exactly what the revenues and expenses were. PDI was committed to growth, as most companies are.
The thing is that the company as the company went from 8 people to 100 people, the profits went down. They went down on a per-capita basis, but they even went down on an overall basis -- more people are much more expensive, as you add layers of overhead and spend much of your time on internal communication. Personally, I found the company less and less interesting -- as people you hired for their creative talents ended up supervising others instead, so you lost the spark that made the work interesting. I would point out over and over again, at meetings, that growth was killing us. I'd try to correct the historic graphs for inflation, to show that the numbers were even worse than they appeared at first glance. This made me quite unpopular at these meetings.
When we started our new company, we decided that we'd never grow. We've stabilized at about 10 people over the last five years, and it's worked out marvelously. The people we have are talented, creative, and are allowed to exercise their talents and creativity. The company is reasonably profitable, and shows every indication of staying that way. We are small enough that our overhead is low, so we can pick projects that interest us, instead of being forced to 'feed the machine', as larger facilities have to do.
The author of this article, Eve Andersson, says 'to make a substantial impact on the world, you gotta grow.' This is a well accepted fact, that just happens to be untrue. Even in the world of film visual effects, dominated in many ways by ILM (1500 people) and other big companies, Hammerhead holds its own. For the last two years, we've been in the Academy's Visual Effects Bake-off, showing that we can compete with those big companies.
When contracting with a company to do work, often it is more important to the person paying for the work to get a few key people working on it, rather than a slaveship of hundreds of drones.
I've gone on long enough. Just think, when you have to decide whether to grow or not, that there are substantial good reasons for staying small. Don't ignore the numbers, if the numbers are telling you that growth is killing you.
Thad Beier
Hammerhead Productions
ps. Ok, ok, PDI went on to make 'Shrek', which needed 300 people. I still stand by my thesis.
haggar says The movie netted a total of 104 million dollars,. Well, the movie cost $145M and had a box office of $104M, so it netted -$41M even if every dollar of box office went back to the studio. Probably the studio received on the order of $60M, so the net is even more negative. DVD sales will get them closer to breaking even, but I doubt they'll make up the $85 million deficit accrued so far.
I'm in the movie business, specifically visual effects, and I strongly feel that we are on the precipice of a cliff in film budgets. CmdrTaco opines that he'd 'see a lot more movies if they were only a buck', and that would no doubt be true, but there is no way that anyone will ever be able to finance film extravaganzas like Pearl Harbor or, more to the point for this group, The Lord of The Rings for a dollar a ticket. Of course, in this Taiwanese case, the studios are probably getting $0.00 for each ticket, so it's even harder to break even.
The only way to finance a movie in this new world is to sell the eyeballs that are watching the movie for other purposes. Already theaters make about half of their money on concessions, for example. The two other obvious ways of making money on the film is ancillary merchandise (toys, etc.) and product placement (advertising) within the film.
Future films will have smaller budgets, as these ancillary sources of revenues probably cannot replace the big ticket prices being charged today. One can make exciting movies for less money, of course. We worked on The Fast and The Furious last year, which was a low-budget (by today's standards) movie that was designed to get the most bangs for the very limited visual effects bucks that were available. We've been fortunate enough to be named to the "Bake-Off" for visual effects this Wednesday night, where they will choose the Oscar nominees -- which demonstrates that you can do competitive visual effects-laden movies on very limited budgets.
This may not sit well with the ILM's of the world -- but it is also inevitable. While with music there were huge profit margins that gave the record companies some slack with the advent of song sharing over the 'net, the movie studios don't have that kind of margin anymore. Once movie sharing becomes ubiquitous, they just will not be able to make $100M blockbusters.
In animation, the story is more important than everything else put together. If you don't have a compelling story, $150M of computing horsepower can't save you, they just make for a bigger crater at the end.
Look at the astonishing Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius It was made for a tiny fraction of what was spent on Final Fantasy, and it looks terrible in comparison -- but the story is fun and engaging. It's made over $76M so far at the box office. DNA, the company that made Neutron did it all with off-the-shelf commodity hardware and software, so they could do it quickly and inexpensively. Rugrats in Paris and Beavis and Butthead were similarly successful with really pretty awful animation.
I really think that the demise of Square USA's studio should be applauded rather than mourned, because it shows with unmistakable clarity that it doesn't take a hundred million dollars to make a movie; and that spending that kind of money doesn't guarantee success. Corporations can't buy success -- it has to come from individual storytellers. I can't think of a more empowering, encouraging message.
The nice thing about this article is that the people building it at SDSC really took extreme care in getting quality components that would work together to build a reliable, solid system, and still didn't spend more than $5K for a terabyte file server. In particular, the tradeoff of disk speed vs. power consumption was extremely insightful.
I built one of these to their spec for my company, and I couldn't be happier. It's worked flawlessly since then. It's not clear if the Escalade boards are still available -- 3ware had said that they were discontinuing them, but they still appear to be for sale.
In Tracy Kidder's classic book The Soul of the new Machine he discusses the creation of a new computer at Data General, to succeed their 16-bit Eclipses to a new 32-bit architecture. It was shockingly reminiscent of this case, Intel's transition from 32 to 64 bit machines.
In the book, Data General starts to design a fabulous new machine, breaking new ground in a lot of areas, when going to 32 bits. This new effort was called 'The Fountainhead Project', and had all of the best and brightest engineers working on it. At the same time, the hero of the book, Tom West, instituted a new project to do a simple extension of the Eclipse architecture, in parallel.
There was massive infighting between the two camps, and West had to fight tooth and nail for every scrap of resources to build the 32-bit Eclipses; to the point that the machine was almost entirely designed and built by kids fresh out of college because that's all he could afford.
Needless to say, the FHP failed, and Data General released West's machine to reasonable success.
The similarities here are almost eerie, except that, of course, Itanium actually made it out the door.
If you haven't read Kidder's book, it's definitely a great one. Beautifully written, and while the technology has changed dramatically over the last
fifteen years, the social and business rules are still the same.
Consumer-electronics executives say they don't want consumers who've invested in HDTVs--about 2 million so far--to lose any of the value of their investment. But Preston Padden, an executive vice president of Walt Disney Co., said the impact would be extremely limited. "If the biggest problem to getting this solved is the 13 people who've already purchased HDTVs, I will personally drive the converter boxes to their homes and install them myself."
If it really is 2 million people, Preston Padden has some serious work ahead of him.
Basically, the article says that the studios and networks are desparately trying to get a standard in place for watermarking video before they are mandated to begin transmitting digital signals in just a few months. The article unfortunately doesn't explicitly point out the implications of this technological solution -- that all current computers would have to be made illegal for this to work.
thad
Re:If you don't like this -- speak up![Fahrenheit]
on
MS Buys (Some) SGI Patents
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Interestingly, while several people speculated that Fahrenheit was intended to kill OpenGL, from what I can see it actually saved it. Fahrenheit encouraged Microsoft to not knife this particular baby long enough to allow a reasonably strong set of OpenGL boards to be produced.
Fairly quickly in the course of the Fahrenheit project, SGI realized that it would not be a good idea for Fahrenheit to actaully be released; because that really would mean the end of OpenGL. So, they dithered and delayed, rewrote and reimplemented, argued and agreed to disagree for a truly critical couple of years. That was long enough.
Eventually the charade could not be maintained any longer, and Fahrenheit disappeared. Up until the last day, though, SGI made every appearance of being totally committed to Fahrenheit -- it was on the front page of www.sgi.com until the day it was killed.
The application that Sandia has given, at least in the past, for their micromachine efforts is better locks for nuclear warheads. So, the analogy that the article makes to sewing machine factories only makes sense if they were nuclear sewing machines.
As I understand it,.doc is considerably more than a file format, it contains hooks into the Windows operating system and other Office applications; in such a way that it is impossible to convert it completely to another file format.
It is even conceivable that this impossiblity was not the intent; conceivable by people with better imaginations than me.
As an example, all movie studios in LA now require the driver's licenses of each person coming onto the lot. There were 'plausible' threats that the studios would come under attack (supposedly).
Most (all?) airports also now require a driver's license to get past security.
I was wondering as I read the headline and summary on slashdot "how can these sleazeballs possibly promote this scam, because it would be easy to show counterexamples?" This shows, once again, that I lack the imagination and chutzpah of a real con artist.
The beauty of this scam is that zeospace claims that they can't even do it themselves, yet. They've only managed to compress very short strings. So, they can't be called to compress large random files because, well gosh, they just haven't gotten the big file compressor work yet. So, you can't prove that they are full of shit.
Beautiful flash animation, though. I particularly like the fact that clicking the 'skip intro' button does absolutely nothing -- you get the flash garbage anyway.
Pixtech is one of the companies hoping to make field emission CRT displays. They've been around for a while, and always seem to be on the verge of something great. Perhaps the problem with maintaining the sharpness of the emitting points mentioned in this articles is the sticking point.
This page is a good primer on the different competing display technologies.
Magic Mountain, in Valencia, California. I believe it is the Superman ride. It launches a pretty massive set of roller coaster cars from 0 to 100mph at about 2 Gs. I'm not sure why the designers chose this method, but it is a great proof of concept.
To me, the best use of this kind of launcher would be to get an orbiter up to ramjet speeds, say 500 mph, then let it fly on ramjet power up to a tanker. I'd have the ship fully fueled with LOX, but with almost empty fuel tanks, so that it could be lighter and easier to get off the ground. Once fully fueled, use the ramjet to get to 100,000 ft and Mach 3 or so. From that altitude and speed, single-stage-to-orbit is remarkably easier than it is from the ground. You can use full-expansion engine bells to get good specific impulse, and going from Mach 3 to Mach 25 is significantly delta-V than 0 to Mach 25.
What the article fails to mention is that PDI and Pixar both have been working toward these CG animated films for 20 years; the article makes it sound like Dreamworks was able to make their first animated film very quickly and easily -- it could only do so because they bought Pacific Data Images who had been laying the foundations for these films beginning in 1980 (disclaimer -- I was at PDI from 1983 'til 1995).
Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar, has been trying to make animated films since the mid-70's, starting at the University of Utah, then going to the New York Institute of Technology's Computer Graphics Lab, then to Lucasfilm; whose computer division was spun off to become Pixar.
The film that did seem to happen amazingly fast was Jimmy Neutron; Boy Genius. While Pixar and PDI have used proprietary, in-house systems to do their animation; DNA used pretty much off-the-shelf software (although today's commercial software is very customizable, so the line is blurrier than you might think at first glance). DNA was able to make the jump from hand-drawn 2D animation to a 3D feature very quickly indeed. And while the characters are goofy and the rendering is not (even attempting to be) photoreal -- it is still amazing to me that a small group of people actually can pull off an animated film in a reasonable amount of time.
Jimmy Neutron will not be the box-office smash that Shrek or Monsters are; but it is the more revolutionary film.
Comments like this show that Microsoft has already won, at least for the large majority of lusers. It is vitally important that there be diversity, in all things.
This is truly similar to saying "6 billion people? How many of them do we really need?" If McDonalds and McRosoft had their way, they'd all be identical consumer-units, anyway.
I do not know of any complaints, but it is somewhat hard to tell. During the last 24 hours, when we were getting bombarded under an avalanche of spam relay attacks, I had to remove to postmaster mailbox; as it had filled up the disk with automated complaints about non-existent mailboxes. It's conceivable that there were complaints in that mailbox; likely even.
Certainly people complained, and rightly, to the various spam-listing services -- or perhaps the services own automatic spam-traps listed me.
thad
My experience as an open mail relay
on
Crazy Stats on Spam
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I reconfigured our mail server a month or so ago, and, well, misconfigured it, so that it was an open mail relay on our DSL line. It took the bad guys about 2 weeks to notice; at which point we all of a sudden started getting hit with tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of relays through our server per day.
I'm only a part-time sysadmin, so I didn't realize what was wrong for a couple of days, just noticed that the mail server was slow...during that time perhaps half-a-million messages were forwarded by my machine. Unforgivable, I know. I didn't realize the threat; and most of it happened over a weekend.
On Monday, I spent a few hours finding out what was going on, and madly tried to cancel the messages by hand from the mail queue, before I did the right thing and installed the latest version of sendmail -- which by default doesn't relay.
For the next several weeks, I've been petitioning the various spam reporting lists to take us off of their blacklists. I have to say that everybody was reasonable in this respect. It took some time to hunt them all down, but I think I have them all. If you are doing this yourself, http://relays.osirusoft.com has a great resource for checking what lists your server is blacklisted with.
The only good thing to come out of this is that during the cleanup phase, spammers continued to try to relay spam through my site, and I was able to get several of those accounts cancelled by calling up the various email abuse departments at their ISPs. (My favorite was worldcom, I called them and they answered "Abuse!" I told them that I really wanted an argument...) The biggest disappointment was @home, who required a 1-week waiting period before shutting down a really high-volume spamming operation.
I was surprised how quickly my open relay was discovered, and then how quickly that information was distributed among quite a few (at least 40) spammers. Perhaps they watch incoming spam to see where it is relayed from; and harvest those to run their own spam.
Anyway -- my apologies to the community. It won't happen again.
Slashdot Mirror
About a year and a half ago, DoubleClick announced that they had acquired NetCreations, a mailing list company run by an old friend of mine Rosalind Resnick, for a rediculously large number of millions of dollars. NetCreations had been in the business of running opt-in mailing lists. This didn't seem to attract a lot of interest at the time.
The deal fell apart after DoubleClick's stock price tanked, and NetCreations sold themselves instead to Seat Pagine Gaille.
So, they've tried this before, and it failed to gel. Let's hope that it fails again. The threat of targeted spam is far greater, I believe, than mass-mailed spam, because it's much more difficult to filter out.
thad
I think that /. has a great opportunity to exert peer pressure. Everybody who is a subscriber should get an icon next to their name when posting commments, sort of like the shockingly cool friend/foe icon.
Slashdot might be compared to public radio; which unfortunately gets only about 5-7% of their listeners to contribute. By having a coveted icon next to their name, perhaps more people will subscribe to this forum.
Just a thought.
thad
Actually, no, one of my coworkers did that shot of Penelope in the nude. We had been wearing a little bit of clothing on the set which we had to get rid of.
The big ray-tracing scene was short, as you might expect -- it was tossing the rose from the balcony down to Toninio. We tried rendering the CG rose in RenderMan, and just couldn't get the shadows, bump maps, and translucency to look right. With BMRT it was a piece of cake.
We did all the effects in the movie for a song, just to be able to work on it. Often in the fall, after we've made our numbers for the year, Hammerhead will do an art-house movie like this. Woman on Top was a better movie than people (including Penelope! She never mentions it!) give it credit for. Cruz is simply radiant in the film. Sometimes, movies need just be fun and beautiful.
thad
I've been a fan of the Alpha chip since its debut in the February, 1993 Communications of the ACM back in 1990. Alpha was the great hope, a new chip designed from the ground up as a scientific and technical powerhouse. I had read Darryll Strauss's great article about harnessing 166 433 MHz Alphas toward the production of Titanic, and that only whet my appetite further. When I read that Samsung was going to be pushing Alpha workstations, I exercised my most persuasive writing skills and requested a machine for development, with the idea that it might be used to further the use of Alphas in visual effects work.
:)
Shockingly, about three months later, a battered old SmartAlpha Station A10 showed up on my doorstep. I suppose you can tell a workstation from a desktop machine by the gauge of sheet metal, this thing weighs about 50 lbs. At the time I was still under the influence of NT, so I ported all of our code over to NT on the Alpha. It wasn't that hard, but it wasn't that rewarding either. The rest of our shop is SGI machines, and, well, NT isn't Unix.
Then I decided to run Linux on the box. I ordered Red Hat 5.2 from CheapBytes. 5.2 was the latest Red Hat release for Alpha at the time, although they were shipping 6.0 for X86 machines.
We ported all of our SGI software to the Alpha, and used it for a couple of movies, most noteably Woman on Top . We did some ray tracing using Larry Gritz's BMRT for some of the scenes in the movie, where the power of the Alpha was well used.
After that, I took the machine home, and used it as my home computer until I got a laptop -- and it's been off since then. As promised by the title, here are the lessons learned.
Pro:
Alphas are significantly more finicky about floating point exceptions than the other machines we were using at the time. We found a lot of bugs in our code due to the fact that applications would crash on the Alpha rather than just silently generating bad results.
There are many benefits to using multiple architectures when developing code. It keeps you much more honest. It forces you to keep your build trees in good shape.
Alpha is a 64-bit machine, and it was my first exposure to the fact that long != int. We'll all find this out eventually, sooner is better than later.
Cons:
Alphas are outcasts. That was true three years ago when we got the machine, and it has become dramatically more true now. Finding a decent web browser, for instance, was a challenge. In general, the avalanche of tools that makes Linux so pleasant and productive dries up to a trickle when you look for Alpha tools.
It's very common that programs that you download source for don't quite compile under Alpha. It's not really the fault of those programmers, of course -- they don't have Alpha machines, typically, to test the installation on.
Alphas are just expensive boxes. They will never compete on a MIPS/$ basis. This was true even when they were many times as fast as the Intel chips, and it's becoming more and more true.
Finally, persuing oddball architectures is just typically not a cost-productive way to spend one's time. Of course, I say that -- and I'd sooner die than ever use a Microsoft product
thad
HP was gracious enough to loan me one of these machines for a couple of weeks; so that I could write a review of it. I've only had it for a day, but it appears to be everything that one could ask for in a Linux graphics workstation. It's incredibly fast, has unbelieveable graphics, and has a customized RedHat configuration that just works.
HP has seen the light, too, and is running XFree86 instead of the custom Xserver inherited from their HPUX platforms. Their first Linux boxes, released about a year ago, weren't running XFree, IIRC.
More to follow, of course. One line summary -- The machines are real, and they rock.
thad
If, due to global warming, ocean levels rise five feet, then (assuming a constant density, spherical earth) the rotation rate would slow down by about 1 part in 2 million, about 18 seconds a year.
Given that water is less dense than most of the rest of the earth, it would probably be only two or three seconds a year, but still a substantial amount.
I had seen some speculation that the magnetic field of the earth is due to a different rotation rate between the core and the rest of the earth. Changing these relative rates may be significant.
thad
rlsnyder asks Has SPAM really decreased universally thanks to these lists? Well, it is hard to say. Spam has increased monotonically since its inception, and it continues to grow. It is possible that blacklists have helped lower the rate of growth.
What blacklists really do is get the attention of sysadmins, and get them to take the problem seriously. I, like rlsnyder, was victimized in the same way -- our mail server was an open relay, we forwarded some spam, and got blacklisted. It took me a week or so to get it straightened out, and in the process I learned quite a bit about the UCE problem. rlsnyder similarly has been enriched by the experience, whether he agrees to that at this point or not.
One always has the option of sending mail from one of the many free mail systems. If your mail is blocked while your case is being reviewed, then send it from hotmail or someplace like that. That's what we did. In took about a week for the last of the spam reporting services to delist our site, and while it was inconvenient, it wasn't devastating. It won't be for rlsnyder, either, I trust.
The big problem is that there is nothing to stop the spammers. People who relay mail through unsuspecting companies are already criminals, they will not be dissuaded by laws. The only thing that the anti-spam community can do is to try to put a finger in all 2^32 holes in the dike, and the only way to do that is to educate people. The blacklists are that education program
thad
My company is committed to not growing, and it's amazing that I found so few other companies with the same princples, given the obvious success of the idea. ArsDigita is just one of any number of companies that went through the same trajectory.
My partners in Hammerhead Productions all worked at the same company, Pacific Data Images, before they closed their LA facility. I started with PDI when it was quite small, and was terribly fortunate that the management of PDI was committed to open books -- that is, they allowed the employees [at least the early employees, more on that, later] to see exactly what the revenues and expenses were. PDI was committed to growth, as most companies are.
The thing is that the company as the company went from 8 people to 100 people, the profits went down. They went down on a per-capita basis, but they even went down on an overall basis -- more people are much more expensive, as you add layers of overhead and spend much of your time on internal communication. Personally, I found the company less and less interesting -- as people you hired for their creative talents ended up supervising others instead, so you lost the spark that made the work interesting. I would point out over and over again, at meetings, that growth was killing us. I'd try to correct the historic graphs for inflation, to show that the numbers were even worse than they appeared at first glance. This made me quite unpopular at these meetings.
When we started our new company, we decided that we'd never grow. We've stabilized at about 10 people over the last five years, and it's worked out marvelously. The people we have are talented, creative, and are allowed to exercise their talents and creativity. The company is reasonably profitable, and shows every indication of staying that way. We are small enough that our overhead is low, so we can pick projects that interest us, instead of being forced to 'feed the machine', as larger facilities have to do.
The author of this article, Eve Andersson, says 'to make a substantial impact on the world, you gotta grow.' This is a well accepted fact, that just happens to be untrue. Even in the world of film visual effects, dominated in many ways by ILM (1500 people) and other big companies, Hammerhead holds its own. For the last two years, we've been in the Academy's Visual Effects Bake-off, showing that we can compete with those big companies.
When contracting with a company to do work, often it is more important to the person paying for the work to get a few key people working on it, rather than a slaveship of hundreds of drones.
I've gone on long enough. Just think, when you have to decide whether to grow or not, that there are substantial good reasons for staying small. Don't ignore the numbers, if the numbers are telling you that growth is killing you.
Thad Beier
Hammerhead Productions
ps. Ok, ok, PDI went on to make 'Shrek', which needed 300 people. I still stand by my thesis.
haggar says The movie netted a total of 104 million dollars,. Well, the movie cost $145M and had a box office of $104M, so it netted -$41M even if every dollar of box office went back to the studio. Probably the studio received on the order of $60M, so the net is even more negative. DVD sales will get them closer to breaking even, but I doubt they'll make up the $85 million deficit accrued so far.
thad
I'm in the movie business, specifically visual effects, and I strongly feel that we are on the precipice of a cliff in film budgets. CmdrTaco opines that he'd 'see a lot more movies if they were only a buck', and that would no doubt be true, but there is no way that anyone will ever be able to finance film extravaganzas like Pearl Harbor or, more to the point for this group, The Lord of The Rings for a dollar a ticket. Of course, in this Taiwanese case, the studios are probably getting $0.00 for each ticket, so it's even harder to break even.
The only way to finance a movie in this new world is to sell the eyeballs that are watching the movie for other purposes. Already theaters make about half of their money on concessions, for example. The two other obvious ways of making money on the film is ancillary merchandise (toys, etc.) and product placement (advertising) within the film.
Future films will have smaller budgets, as these ancillary sources of revenues probably cannot replace the big ticket prices being charged today. One can make exciting movies for less money, of course. We worked on The Fast and The Furious last year, which was a low-budget (by today's standards) movie that was designed to get the most bangs for the very limited visual effects bucks that were available. We've been fortunate enough to be named to the "Bake-Off" for visual effects this Wednesday night, where they will choose the Oscar nominees -- which demonstrates that you can do competitive visual effects-laden movies on very limited budgets.
This may not sit well with the ILM's of the world -- but it is also inevitable. While with music there were huge profit margins that gave the record companies some slack with the advent of song sharing over the 'net, the movie studios don't have that kind of margin anymore. Once movie sharing becomes ubiquitous, they just will not be able to make $100M blockbusters.
Enjoy them while you can.
thad
In animation, the story is more important than everything else put together. If you don't have a compelling story, $150M of computing horsepower can't save you, they just make for a bigger crater at the end.
Look at the astonishing Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius It was made for a tiny fraction of what was spent on Final Fantasy, and it looks terrible in comparison -- but the story is fun and engaging. It's made over $76M so far at the box office. DNA, the company that made Neutron did it all with off-the-shelf commodity hardware and software, so they could do it quickly and inexpensively. Rugrats in Paris and Beavis and Butthead were similarly successful with really pretty awful animation.
I really think that the demise of Square USA's studio should be applauded rather than mourned, because it shows with unmistakable clarity that it doesn't take a hundred million dollars to make a movie; and that spending that kind of money doesn't guarantee success. Corporations can't buy success -- it has to come from individual storytellers. I can't think of a more empowering, encouraging message.
thad
Check out this article referenced by slashdot on July 20 2001.
The nice thing about this article is that the people building it at SDSC really took extreme care in getting quality components that would work together to build a reliable, solid system, and still didn't spend more than $5K for a terabyte file server. In particular, the tradeoff of disk speed vs. power consumption was extremely insightful.
I built one of these to their spec for my company, and I couldn't be happier. It's worked flawlessly since then. It's not clear if the Escalade boards are still available -- 3ware had said that they were discontinuing them, but they still appear to be for sale.
thad
In Tracy Kidder's classic book The Soul of the new Machine he discusses the creation of a new computer at Data General, to succeed their 16-bit Eclipses to a new 32-bit architecture. It was shockingly reminiscent of this case, Intel's transition from 32 to 64 bit machines.
In the book, Data General starts to design a fabulous new machine, breaking new ground in a lot of areas, when going to 32 bits. This new effort was called 'The Fountainhead Project', and had all of the best and brightest engineers working on it. At the same time, the hero of the book, Tom West, instituted a new project to do a simple extension of the Eclipse architecture, in parallel.
There was massive infighting between the two camps, and West had to fight tooth and nail for every scrap of resources to build the 32-bit Eclipses; to the point that the machine was almost entirely designed and built by kids fresh out of college because that's all he could afford.
Needless to say, the FHP failed, and Data General released West's machine to reasonable success.
The similarities here are almost eerie, except that, of course, Itanium actually made it out the door.
If you haven't read Kidder's book, it's definitely a great one. Beautifully written, and while the technology has changed dramatically over the last
fifteen years, the social and business rules are still the same.
The LA Times has a great article on the coming copy protection for video. It has a truly halarious ending...
Consumer-electronics executives say they don't want consumers who've invested in HDTVs--about 2 million so far--to lose any of the value of their investment. But Preston Padden, an executive vice president of Walt Disney Co., said the impact would be extremely limited. "If the biggest problem to getting this solved is the 13 people who've already purchased HDTVs, I will personally drive the converter boxes to their homes and install them myself."
If it really is 2 million people, Preston Padden has some serious work ahead of him.
Basically, the article says that the studios and networks are desparately trying to get a standard in place for watermarking video before they are mandated to begin transmitting digital signals in just a few months. The article unfortunately doesn't explicitly point out the implications of this technological solution -- that all current computers would have to be made illegal for this to work.
thad
Interestingly, while several people speculated that Fahrenheit was intended to kill OpenGL, from what I can see it actually saved it. Fahrenheit encouraged Microsoft to not knife this particular baby long enough to allow a reasonably strong set of OpenGL boards to be produced.
Fairly quickly in the course of the Fahrenheit project, SGI realized that it would not be a good idea for Fahrenheit to actaully be released; because that really would mean the end of OpenGL. So, they dithered and delayed, rewrote and reimplemented, argued and agreed to disagree for a truly critical couple of years. That was long enough.
Eventually the charade could not be maintained any longer, and Fahrenheit disappeared. Up until the last day, though, SGI made every appearance of being totally committed to Fahrenheit -- it was on the front page of www.sgi.com until the day it was killed.
thad
The application that Sandia has given, at least in the past, for their micromachine efforts is better locks for nuclear warheads. So, the analogy that the article makes to sewing machine factories only makes sense if they were nuclear sewing machines.
thad
As I understand it, .doc is considerably more than a file format, it contains hooks into the Windows operating system and other Office applications; in such a way that it is impossible to convert it completely to another file format.
It is even conceivable that this impossiblity was not the intent; conceivable by people with better imaginations than me.
thad
As an example, all movie studios in LA now require the driver's licenses of each person coming onto the lot. There were 'plausible' threats that the studios would come under attack (supposedly).
Most (all?) airports also now require a driver's license to get past security.
thad
I was wondering as I read the headline and summary on slashdot "how can these sleazeballs possibly promote this scam, because it would be easy to show counterexamples?" This shows, once again, that I lack the imagination and chutzpah of a real con artist.
The beauty of this scam is that zeospace claims that they can't even do it themselves, yet. They've only managed to compress very short strings. So, they can't be called to compress large random files because, well gosh, they just haven't gotten the big file compressor work yet. So, you can't prove that they are full of shit.
Beautiful flash animation, though. I particularly like the fact that clicking the 'skip intro' button does absolutely nothing -- you get the flash garbage anyway.
thad
Pixtech is one of the companies hoping to make field emission CRT displays. They've been around for a while, and always seem to be on the verge of something great. Perhaps the problem with maintaining the sharpness of the emitting points mentioned in this articles is the sticking point.
This page is a good primer on the different competing display technologies.
thad
Magic Mountain, in Valencia, California. I believe it is the Superman ride. It launches a pretty massive set of roller coaster cars from 0 to 100mph at about 2 Gs. I'm not sure why the designers chose this method, but it is a great proof of concept.
To me, the best use of this kind of launcher would be to get an orbiter up to ramjet speeds, say 500 mph, then let it fly on ramjet power up to a tanker. I'd have the ship fully fueled with LOX, but with almost empty fuel tanks, so that it could be lighter and easier to get off the ground. Once fully fueled, use the ramjet to get to 100,000 ft and Mach 3 or so. From that altitude and speed, single-stage-to-orbit is remarkably easier than it is from the ground. You can use full-expansion engine bells to get good specific impulse, and going from Mach 3 to Mach 25 is significantly delta-V than 0 to Mach 25.
thad
What the article fails to mention is that PDI and Pixar both have been working toward these CG animated films for 20 years; the article makes it sound like Dreamworks was able to make their first animated film very quickly and easily -- it could only do so because they bought Pacific Data Images who had been laying the foundations for these films beginning in 1980 (disclaimer -- I was at PDI from 1983 'til 1995).
Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar, has been trying to make animated films since the mid-70's, starting at the University of Utah, then going to the New York Institute of Technology's Computer Graphics Lab, then to Lucasfilm; whose computer division was spun off to become Pixar.
The film that did seem to happen amazingly fast was Jimmy Neutron; Boy Genius. While Pixar and PDI have used proprietary, in-house systems to do their animation; DNA used pretty much off-the-shelf software (although today's commercial software is very customizable, so the line is blurrier than you might think at first glance). DNA was able to make the jump from hand-drawn 2D animation to a 3D feature very quickly indeed. And while the characters are goofy and the rendering is not (even attempting to be) photoreal -- it is still amazing to me that a small group of people actually can pull off an animated film in a reasonable amount of time.
Jimmy Neutron will not be the box-office smash that Shrek or Monsters are; but it is the more revolutionary film.
thad
This is truly similar to saying "6 billion people? How many of them do we really need?" If McDonalds and McRosoft had their way, they'd all be identical consumer-units, anyway.
thad
I do not know of any complaints, but it is somewhat hard to tell. During the last 24 hours, when we were getting bombarded under an avalanche of spam relay attacks, I had to remove to postmaster mailbox; as it had filled up the disk with automated complaints about non-existent mailboxes. It's conceivable that there were complaints in that mailbox; likely even.
Certainly people complained, and rightly, to the various spam-listing services -- or perhaps the services own automatic spam-traps listed me.
thad
I reconfigured our mail server a month or so ago, and, well, misconfigured it, so that it was an open mail relay on our DSL line. It took the bad guys about 2 weeks to notice; at which point we all of a sudden started getting hit with tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of relays through our server per day.
I'm only a part-time sysadmin, so I didn't realize what was wrong for a couple of days, just noticed that the mail server was slow...during that time perhaps half-a-million messages were forwarded by my machine. Unforgivable, I know. I didn't realize the threat; and most of it happened over a weekend.
On Monday, I spent a few hours finding out what was going on, and madly tried to cancel the messages by hand from the mail queue, before I did the right thing and installed the latest version of sendmail -- which by default doesn't relay.
For the next several weeks, I've been petitioning the various spam reporting lists to take us off of their blacklists. I have to say that everybody was reasonable in this respect. It took some time to hunt them all down, but I think I have them all. If you are doing this yourself, http://relays.osirusoft.com has a great resource for checking what lists your server is blacklisted with.
The only good thing to come out of this is that during the cleanup phase, spammers continued to try to relay spam through my site, and I was able to get several of those accounts cancelled by calling up the various email abuse departments at their ISPs. (My favorite was worldcom, I called them and they answered "Abuse!" I told them that I really wanted an argument...) The biggest disappointment was @home, who required a 1-week waiting period before shutting down a really high-volume spamming operation.
I was surprised how quickly my open relay was discovered, and then how quickly that information was distributed among quite a few (at least 40) spammers. Perhaps they watch incoming spam to see where it is relayed from; and harvest those to run their own spam.
Anyway -- my apologies to the community. It won't happen again.
thad