| Author |
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Johnnymossville
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 - 11:43 am: | 
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I just read the last couple posts literally laughing my ass off out loud here in my office. Door Closed.
I haven't been this entertained since I saw a group of 4 Ricers all fail to start at a MDA biker charity run I was at. I think they all filled up at the same gas station. Bikers around them had a field day, All in good fun ofcourse. |
45_degrees
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 - 11:50 am: |
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??? The humor eludes me. |
Buellinachinashop
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 - 01:17 pm: |
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I've decided to create a T-shirt for all of us who didn't make the cut. We'll show them!
(I know, its copy right infringement, but hell, they can do it, why can't I??)
 |
45_degrees
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 - 01:24 pm: |
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 The man who created the Serenity ship would need one too. |
Diablobrian
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 - 01:52 pm: |
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I know I'm not in the "sore loser" category since I didn't submit a design and I
still think that the Serenity(spaceship) design and the one with the Vargas-esque
girl should both be disqualified.
I do think both the highway design and the psuedo-chrome neighborhood scene bike designs
are really cool and highly detailed, but ultimately not something many would buy.
I've seen a few on here that are more original and (maybe) more importantly more marketable.
I wonder if that makes me a sore loser in some convoluted logic? |
45_degrees
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 - 02:08 pm: |
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I think people should be upset. Some people took quite a bit of time to make their's and they were probably anticipating some heavy competition. I was excited just to see the top 10, let alone if I could actually make it. |
Buellinachinashop
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 - 02:14 pm: |
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I had my submission emailed 30 minutes after it started. I literally spent 10 whole minutes making the pattern and applying it to the template.
I'm not salty in the least. I'm a designer for a living and get rejected every day on one thing or another. It happens. What looks good to you, doesn't to others, it's not that your idea is bad, it doesn't form to other people's idea of what's good.
When I submit anything to my boss, I usually submit 3-4 ideas, then he selects an idea and that one will get altered. Its a process. |
Blackxb9
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 - 02:25 pm: |
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I'm sure the lawyers for Buell are already called to action. The decision of "winner" will probably come down to least likely to cause BMC to get sued vs. most marketable and creative design. That is a sad thing for a contest that had only good intentions in marketing Buell and creating an industry buzz. I'd be surprised if the voting percentages are taken away on the site soon so people are in the dark on who is actually getting the votes. Before the conspiracy theories begin I say good luck to whoever "wins" and hopefully the "winner" actually is the original artist of his/her design with the most votes. |
Reepicheep
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 - 03:43 pm: |
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And thats just the tip of the iceburg. They will need another pass for "click fraud" filtering. It will be able to weed out the most agregious violators if the contest is not that close, otherwise they are going to be making "educated guesses" in that area as well. |
Gowindward
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 - 04:14 pm: |
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Bill, what's "click fraud filtering"? |
Naustin
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 - 04:28 pm: |
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They should just give the bike to the design that gets the most votes, and then let Fox and Universal sue the winner for copyright infringement if they really want to.
Where exactly is Buell's liability in all this? - As long as they don't put the design into production, BMC has done nothing wrong other than post the submission for the purposes of the contest. The wrong doing was perpetrated by the entrant, and BMC can not be expected to screen every entry against some kind of omnipotent database of every image ever created.
It lame that these are not all original artwork, but what can you really expect in this type of contest? Its a copy/paste world and a I'll bet a majority of people who submitted entries don't even have the software required to create original artwork. Most of the submission were probably cobbled together in MS Paint, not Photo-shop Pro.
JMHO... But who cares? If the original artist has a problem with it, they have recourse in court with the person who stole the image, its really not BMC's fault. The rules were clear. The rules were meant to protect buell from exactly what happened, and were not necessarily intended to actually be enforced because doing so is probably impossible. |
Reepicheep
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 - 05:34 pm: |
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"Click Fraud" is a term coined to describe people doing malicious things to interfere with attempts to measure peoples use of internet features and sites.
The traditional form of abuse would be with advertising. Say company A has a deal with some web site where they pay $.25 any time somebody clicks an advertisement to go to their site. If I work for competitor B, I may get a program (or even a group of people) to go click that link with no intention of buying anything. I am bleeding out my competitor $.25 at a time.
Or if I am the web site getting part of the profits, I can play various games to drive up the number of clicks to make it look like I am driving over a lot more customers then I really am. It would be like if I put a link here saying "click here for a spy photo of the 2008 Buell blast based XR-650 killer" but really had that link just go to an advertiser site. The advertiser in that case is getting traffic, but not the premium traffic they thought they were paying for (interested consumers). Rather they are getting angry disinterested consumers (which they would also probably pay for, but not nearly as much).
In the case of votes, if Buell (or more like Buell's contractor) did the normal due diligence on this feature, I could have a program racking up votes (thousands per minute) with about 10 minutes of investigation and maybe 10 minutes of programming. I wouldn't and I won't though, and will rat out anyone asking me. I am firmly in the "good guys" camp and have a lot of pent up anger at punks and immoral idiots that have wasted my time over the years cleaning up after their stupid selfish acts.
If the makers of the site went to some extreme measures to protect themselves, it would take me maybe a days worth of investigation and coding. But I could still do it.
In either case, they could detect the abuse... sort of, but it would be in many ways hard to distinguish from other legitimate usage. I don't want to describe more then that here, as it might give badweb attackers information I don't want to hand over.
If I was willing to break the law and build or buy a network of compromised end user machines (a zombie network), I could make those vote and make it virtually undetectable on a purely technical level. The only defense would be some sort of statistical approach based on human inferences and decisions... which again goes back to a human opinion and decision. Which ain't unreasonable. Pick a wise and impartial person to just make a judgement call. Like judges 
They helped themselves a lot with the structure of their approach. They chose the 8 best, so to be able to fix the contest you would have to be a decent designer, get picked, and then be able to launch the attack. And even then, the winner would be one of the 8 that was picked anyway.
And clearly there is no prohibition about voting every day, and trying to get out the vote for your design, so the rules are fairly "fuzzy" anyway. Hopefully the volume of legitimate votes will drown out any attempts at subtle click fraud (which would be virtually impossible to detect) and any gross attempts at click fraud would be detectable and eliminated from the voting. The bigger the fraud, the harder it gets to hide. |
Rocketsprink
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 - 06:05 pm: |
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And to think, most everyone here was giving me shit when they announced this contest and I said it was F***ing stupid. |
Firemanjim
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 - 07:49 pm: |
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I thought it was stupid then and still do,it excluded too many people. |
Buellinachinashop
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - 09:18 am: |
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I agree with you Jim. Odds are the person who wins it will end up selling it because they don't even ride. I don't really feel it's an effort to entice owners into becoming involved with design. |
Johnnymossville
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - 10:04 am: |
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looks pretty obvious to me that most of the designs are from riders and not designers. |
Naustin
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - 10:26 am: |
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^  |
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