As some of you have noticed, I've been counting down years over the last 10 days. That countdown has reached an end.
As of 6:29pm EST on December the 26th, Team AnandTech is 10 years old.
I'm not one for flowery speeches (or at least not as much as I used to be), so I'll keep this rather short. As one of the first people to join Team AnandTech, 10 years ago none of us expected this to last. AnandTech itself was only 2 years old, and there was a reasonable expectation that it would eventually wind down so that Anand could start college in 2000. If not that, then certainly things would come to an end once RC5-64 defeated within a few years.
We are still here.
RC5-64 ended, and what was at once point a field that involved so few companies that you could literally count them on one hand has blossomed in to something where there's practically a different project for every branch of science imaginable. What started as a few geeks taking up an offer from a security company to prove the relative (in)security of their products has become a legitimate, global research program. People run science projects on their video game consoles for heaven's sake!
Team AnandTech has without a doubt been more successful than we could have ever imagined. When we started, we just wanted to place somewhere in the top 10, taking out Team Mac Evangelista any given point in time for 1st place was but a pipedream. But we did it, and for a time we were the #1 RC5-64 team until we were ultimately displaced by the Dutch Power Cows. Then we did the same thing over the years in DPAD, Seti@Home, Folding@Home, and the project list continues on. The community has come through again and again for the purposes of scientific research and the occasional stats race.
Of course this hasn't been without its bumps and bruises. The years have been marked with cheating in many of these races, threatening to compromise the scientific integrity of these projects. People like the Phantom Flusher have attempted to discredit members of Team AnandTech, sending out trojan clients loaded with their email addresses. Members of Team AnandTech have been litigated against by the government itself for things related to Distributed Computing. Member turned against member in the Alien Cow Wars when arguing about the direction the team would take and if we should all work on one project.
But we are still here.
10 years should not have happened, and yet it did, and here we are. Congratulations belong to one and all, old and new, for keeping Team AnandTech alive and well. The users of AnandTech have come together to accomplish some very important research, to launch their team to the top of the rankings, and to build a long-lasting community. There would not be a Team AnandTech without each and every last one of you. So take this day to sit back and look at what has been done, and what is yet to come. For tomorrow there is more research to be done and more races to win, but today is a time to reflect.
Congratulations on your 10th birthday Team AnandTech, and I hope that in another 10 years all is well and that someone's going to have to drag me out of storage again to do another one of these things.
As of 6:29pm EST on December the 26th, Team AnandTech is 10 years old.
I'm not one for flowery speeches (or at least not as much as I used to be), so I'll keep this rather short. As one of the first people to join Team AnandTech, 10 years ago none of us expected this to last. AnandTech itself was only 2 years old, and there was a reasonable expectation that it would eventually wind down so that Anand could start college in 2000. If not that, then certainly things would come to an end once RC5-64 defeated within a few years.
We are still here.
RC5-64 ended, and what was at once point a field that involved so few companies that you could literally count them on one hand has blossomed in to something where there's practically a different project for every branch of science imaginable. What started as a few geeks taking up an offer from a security company to prove the relative (in)security of their products has become a legitimate, global research program. People run science projects on their video game consoles for heaven's sake!
Team AnandTech has without a doubt been more successful than we could have ever imagined. When we started, we just wanted to place somewhere in the top 10, taking out Team Mac Evangelista any given point in time for 1st place was but a pipedream. But we did it, and for a time we were the #1 RC5-64 team until we were ultimately displaced by the Dutch Power Cows. Then we did the same thing over the years in DPAD, Seti@Home, Folding@Home, and the project list continues on. The community has come through again and again for the purposes of scientific research and the occasional stats race.
Of course this hasn't been without its bumps and bruises. The years have been marked with cheating in many of these races, threatening to compromise the scientific integrity of these projects. People like the Phantom Flusher have attempted to discredit members of Team AnandTech, sending out trojan clients loaded with their email addresses. Members of Team AnandTech have been litigated against by the government itself for things related to Distributed Computing. Member turned against member in the Alien Cow Wars when arguing about the direction the team would take and if we should all work on one project.
But we are still here.
10 years should not have happened, and yet it did, and here we are. Congratulations belong to one and all, old and new, for keeping Team AnandTech alive and well. The users of AnandTech have come together to accomplish some very important research, to launch their team to the top of the rankings, and to build a long-lasting community. There would not be a Team AnandTech without each and every last one of you. So take this day to sit back and look at what has been done, and what is yet to come. For tomorrow there is more research to be done and more races to win, but today is a time to reflect.
Congratulations on your 10th birthday Team AnandTech, and I hope that in another 10 years all is well and that someone's going to have to drag me out of storage again to do another one of these things.