Slashdot Mirror

The ACLU is way ahead of you:

Cleek here

These are the same people that objected to (can't remember the site's name).com putting a server on the web where you could download companies' COMMERCIALS.

Hw? Why?

http://www.adcritic.com/interactive/view.php?id=59 27

http://www.adcritic.com/interactive/view.php?id=59 27

Just keep track in The MATRIX.

http://www.adcritic.com/interactive/view.php?id=59 27

There used to be a web site that had an archive of TV commercials; I can't remember the name of it. Sadly the site was taken down a few years ago due to huge bandwidth costs, but it was quite popular at the time, and showed that there are definitely entertaining commercials out there,

You're probably thinking of http://www.adcritic.com/. They didn't disappear, they turned into a paysite(!). Something is definitely wrong with your business model when people are willing to watch ads voluntarily and you still have to charge them for it to make ends meet. I recently visited the side and it kinda looks like they're back to being free as in beer, sponsored by Yahoo, but the site froze my firefox so I didn't examine it too closely.

http://www.adcritic.com/interactive/view.php?id=59 27

...we also had Adcritic as a free and enterprising service to see all our Ads for free. Now see what it has becomes :-(

It used to be ok to share funny commercial clips but sadly some of them might not be legal anymore.

Actually, no... Hosting movies for download is very costily. Remember AdCritic ? Well, they used to be free! I loved it, but of course during the dot-com boom they went under. Now subscription is 70$ a year. Sorry, that's too much for me.
Anybody know where I can download the Chanel N5 advertisement with the red-riding-hood and the wolves? I loved that one (and it even isn't funny)

To watch Superbowl commercials, just go to AdCritic. Not only do they usually have the commercials available, but they also let you rate them.

I just saw the commercial during Saturday Night Live. I'm surprised the commercial aired the same day as the story appeared on slashdot.

I wonder if it will be posted on the newly rivived Ad Critic, and itself distributed via the web and burned to CD-ROM?

Although I've never really been a fan of Gateway (home of Laptop Support Hell), but I'm glad they're doing this.

http://www.adcritic.com/default.html

Like I said above... this ain't your old AdCritic...

Jason

Dear Pud:
We're fucked. Damn.
Peter Beckman
[ex]Founder of AdCritic.com

Dear Peter:
Fuck you! Your site rocked. Why didn't you just make it subscription-only after you had the audience? Your "slow-bandwith-unless-you-pay" shit was dumb. Subscription-only might not have worked, but why didn't you try? Woulda cut your bandwith-bill down, and coulda made a couple of bucks.
Pud

When: 12/18/2001
Company: AdCritic.com
Severity: 100 - new hall of fame inductee!
Points: 200

Of course they could go the Salon route, and introduce "AdCritic PREMIUM!" with larger vid feeds for a few bux.

They did this. Adcritic had a pay version which would let you view the ads in a much larger size. I never did it, but i saw it advertised on their site.

Adcritic, IMDB, and the Quicktime Movie Trailers sites were three of the sites I would use all the time to see what cool ads and movies were out and to get more information on them. I'm sad that Adcritic couldn't make it, I'm fairly certain the Quicktime page is safe, but I hope IMDB can stay up.

They still are soliciting investments?

From their explanation: Our business, although strong, has been unable to weather the current economic realities beseiging the United States today.

I really wish failing dot COMs would quit blaming the "current economic realities", rather than simply saying "the commerce model for the internet hasn't panned out as we hoped, and those sucker VCs got a little wiser". Seriously it wouldn't matter if it was the biggest boom ever right now: There was a D-day seen coming for all sorts of these sites, but now they have the convenience of going "it's the economy, stupid". No it isn't, and the downturn didn't change their existing total lack of profitability.

Also, their Investment Page is still up, so you can get some idea of the shear amount of traffic they receive -- 32,500,000 videos streamed last January alone (that's a lot of bandwidth)!

In case anyone misses the irony, this is a site where people go looking for ads -- you'd think it's the perfect market for any advertisements. If banner ads can't succeed even here, then the future of free websites isn't looking too bright.

If only dealing with Rambus were this easy.

And for those that haven't: Flying Cars

ok, just to make sure you understand, my reply was to the anonymous-coward, so you have to be browsing at the correct level to get the humour here, but i decided to include a link to the original commercial....

it's available here.

Lets slashdot this fucker

People have been skipping ads, not only via VCRs, Tivos, and other timeshifting devices, but by flipping channels and leaving, for years. I thought it was an accepted fact that advertisers are gambling that you will see an ad, and that the ad will have an effect on your buying patterns.

Well, Office XP didn't help me with this. If I spend a bazillion $ on Windows XP, do I finally get the password?? And do I have to keep registering for it??

Yup, Adcritc has had a number of IBM's excellent Linux commercials for month.

"Where are the flying cars? I thought we are suppost to have flying cars..."

Check this out if you think the ad on Salon.com is annoying.

Saw it this morning, but I was just unable to reproduce it. Went to AdCritic and all of a sudden, everything on the page faded to a transparent state (javascript), and then an ad came up selling something (don't remember the product). To get back to AdCritic, I had to click on the "Close Ad" button. Pretty cool, but it'd get real annoying after the first couple. Has anyone else seen this type of ad?

- [grunby]

I work to live, not live to work. My family and my personal interests are much more important to me than my career.

Now, having said that I have to make the point that I do not feel that a job where you do not enjoy yourself is worth wasting your time with. HOWEVER, I also learned early on that with every job, no matter what it is or how much you love to do it, there will always be times where you are not having "fun". If you weather those times, very often you will be given projects to do that are more challenging and fun. That of course depends on your management.

How do you find such a job? That can be as easy as looking. Despite the "downturn" that the pundits and "experts" seem to feel that we are in there are so many jobs available for qualified technical individuals that every year the recruiters are begging universities to graduate more CS/CE/EE majors.

Notice that I said that there are positions for qualified individuals. I really think what is happening in America right now is that companies are getting rid of the flack. Suddenly managers seemed to figure out that a self-taught individual is generally not able to do large-scale programming tasks due to lack of training. Notice, I said generally! There are always exceptions.

Having said all that here are the answers to your questions:

1. Can you have a fun tech job, without the worry of being suddenly unemployed?

Absolutely, especially if you have some experience and possibly a degree. There are many companies that are doing very interesting and cool stuff. Most are not dot com companies. Look for a medical company that needs a sys admin, a small company that needs sales tools written in something other than Fortran, etc. It has been stated in other comments that whatever you want to do you can find a job doing it. If you can't find a company that you want to work for, start a company/product on your own that you could market. Remember, Open Source does not mean that you cannot sell support. You may fall on your face, but you will have learned something and very possilby had fun on the way.

2. If you are you forced (as I am) to get your fun on the side what are some good projects to get involved in?

There are so many as to be impossible to give you a specific example. The trick is just to find something that you love. Go to Freshmeat, SourceForge, or any of the other repositories and see if the killer app you want to work on is there. If it is not, start one yourself.

3. What do you to unwind and have a bit of 'fun' in the workplace?"

I code. I interact with my co-workers. The building I work in has a pool table. I listen to music. I read slashdot (blatant plug). I play Mahjongg (that game is evil!). adcritic is your friend. If you think that coding is not relaxing enough then perhaps you are in the wrong field. Debugging is what is stressful. Sometimes I have to code to get over the stress of debugging. :)

fuck! fuck! shit! shit! pee on your grave!

I've had a Tivo for about a year now. I fast forward through the commercials just as much as the next PVR owner, but occasionally, my roommates and I find ourselves going back to watch a commercial that caught our eye while we where skipping over it. I don't think commercials are threatened. Eye catching ads like the ones seen on AdCritic will still live on and continue to make you crave BigMacs.

Soapbox mode on
That speech in 1963 was a seminal moment in American History, and has become an iconic symbol for the entire Civil Rights movement in this country. Personally I felt that was offensive to have something so powerful cheapened by using it to sell wireless or whatever the hell it was.

Next we'll have the guy in front of the tank at Tienanmen Square waiting for a Pepsi, or Kim Phuc going naked for PETA.

It just ain't right.

Ehm, I'm at work right now, so I prefer not to check out too much sites...but try AdCritic . They have a search-facility but unfortunately it is quite American-Based (I don't know what CN is, so I guess it is American), so most of my fav ads are not there.
All movies in Quicktime.

"Sweet! IBM is sounding cooler and cooler all the time. I distinctly recall the Apple TV advertisement that ran once during the '84 Olympics, announcing Macintosh, and portraying IBM as the Big Brother (1984, get it?). I guess IBM has been undergoing some revamping of their corporate culture."

Not to pick nits, but that commercial actually aired during the '84 Super Bowl.

It was an excellent commercial, though. There used to be a copy of it hosted at www.adcritic.com in the archives under Apple. They removed it when Apple threatened to sue, but there's another copy here, which also includes text translating the rather scratchy voice-over.

I can't say how IBM is as a place to work nowadays, but I hear back in the early 80s it was a bitch. A fellow I know worked at their South Florida office around that time, where they enforced a strict white shirt, coat and tie dress code...even in the summer. I can't imagine what the smell must have been like on 98-degree 98% humidity days, which is pretty much every day from May to September in Florida.

Also, Australians don't drink Fosters. We just export the crap to unsuspecting Americans (possibly as revenge for Tom dumping Nicole, opening up the possibility she might actually come back here).

*laugh* It figures. The same company owns `Molson Canadian' and it's not very popular here either. Did you guys get `The Rant' comercial as well? I caught on so well here they thought they'd try it with Fosters.

With my viewing habits... Lord knows I need to see more of those damn nike Freestyle dribbling commercials

(The above link requires Quicktime 5, available only for some MS and Mac OSes. It is a reference to a humorous Yahoo! commercial about a spacecraft crashing in an almost-uninhabited part of Australia.)

He owns his own business in Toronto [from his biography] so it stands to reason that he lives in the city too.
But alas, as I dig deeper, it turns out that his abode is in California.

"I AM CANADIAN!"

-William Shatner
[quote is from the same site as previous link]

See this

On my worst days at work, I'm happy that I'm not scraping gum off the floor of my old convenience store. And on the best days, I'm thankful that I ended up at a dot-com where a) I have to wear a tie to work b) there is no foozball and c) we're not going out of business. "C" makes up for the other two. Seriously, though...I'm ready for interstitials. No, not popup windows. I hate them and close them immediately. I'm ready to go to The Onion, click on a story, see a full-window ad for a product, which disappears in 5 seconds, or when I click. Why? Because while I love the wonderful and boundless and free exchange of information made possible by this Network of Networks, I am realistic. The Web is no longer academic. You can argue for the free exchange of useful (i.e. "educational" in the traditional sense) information, and I will agree 100%. But academic media is subsidized by universities and research organizations that make money, perhaps indirectly, through that research. Meanwhile, all traditional media (i.e. non-useful, entertaining, fun, like Daily Radar and its ilk), like it or not, makes money from advertising. Whether banner ads work or not is moot; the advertisers have said that they don't work, and because they're the ones with the checkbooks, they can write reality any way they see fit. But if you're guaranteeing that every time you click on a story, that advertiser is getting a guaranteed full-screen impression, maybe...just maybe...the same people that put ads for laptops in PC Computing will pay the same CPM for ads on PC Computing online. Which means that good people like the folks at Daily Radar and countless other dot-coms might keep their jobs and be able to feed their families. Frankly, I like good ads. I don't want to shock the monkey. I don't care if "there's a message waiting for me." And that flashing "WINNER" ad--you know what I'm talking about--makes me refresh every time. I'm talking about stuff the caliber of the John West Bear Fight ad on Adcritic. Interstitials might just give ad designers the space they need to produce more ads that aren't just annoying wastes of time. No, I don't work for an ad firm, and yes, I do believe in subsidized Federal health care and a bunch of other hippie causes. But I do recognize that as long as most of the free world operates on a capitalist economy, somebody has to pay the bills. Advertisers have done that for a good long time now. Nobody is forcing you to drink Soft Drink Product A (tm). I ignore as many ads as you do. But that bottom line is, any business--no matter how noble and free-expression oriented the cause--needs to make money just to pay the bills. Daily Radar is just the latest casualty. Hopefully Slashdot won't be next. I'll suffer for 5 seconds to keep the sites I love online.

If someone wants me to watch a commercial, they better make it entertaining and/or interesting.

People really do like entertaining ads. Not these sickening Taco Bell "zesty" ads. *cringe*

People will actually put off their bathroom break if an ad is entertaining. They will even spend their time and bandwidth watching ads if they're entertaining enough...as is shown by AdCritic.com. I think more advertisers need to look at the "Top 10" ads on AdCritic and realize that people don't mind ads much...if the ads are as entertaining as the show they're interrupting.

Again, the market comes into play on this.

People want to watch TV shows but do not wish to watch ads.
Consequently they skip the adds.
If the ads are made more amusing and more interesting people will want to watch the ads as well.

The clear example of this is the Super Bowl. My fiancee, who thinks football is a barbaric, mindless, tiresome practice that somehow vents our twisted societies need to experiance violence, religiously watches the Super Bowl every year explicitly for the comercials.

The success of sites like AdCritic indicates that people will, if the content is good enough, actualy go out of their way to watch comercials. Hell, the 7up commercials had me laughing so hard I fell out of my chair once. Lo and behold I find myself drinking more 7up.

If advertisers are pissed because people won't watch their shit the clear solution is to make better commercials.

If you build it they will come

This has been another useless post from....

despite the fact that the Celeron is more than double the price of the equivalent Duron, Intel has a virtual monopoly on the sub-$1000 market, which makes me very seriously question AMD's marketing abilities.

Consumers probably think that "Duron" is a paint not a processor. Plus, AMD doesn't have the Blue Man Group doing cheesy commercials (QuickTime).

But to my real point. As i said, i have had this cable isp for over year now (closing on to 2) and while most of the time i get decent speed while downloading stuff, all pings are horrible. I have never and i do mean never seen steady ping under 100ms except to the next hop in my traceroute to the world. No matter if the site im pinging is in Finland, or Sweden or States, pings can vary from 80-2000ms. Thou most usually its around 130-300ms. And the frigin packet loss. 10-35%. Man, try writing code thu ssh with packet loss of 30% and ping around 500 and you see how things are with cable connections (atleast in Finland & with HTV) (And yes, there is nothing wrong in cabling, all have been tested with good equipment)

As a comparisement, all finnish isp that support DSL service have much better reputation (infact, im going to work in one) and people have made websites out of their own experience with they have turned down their cable and ordered dsl lines. Here's some "downtime" statistics pages of people who use HTV cable line. First, Second and third one

For a bit of amusement, i must say that people are starting to act like those "cable subscribers" in that Pasific Bell DSL commercial (check out adcritic for laughs, and sorry, no linux there, its in *quicktime*). Well, when i first saw it, it made me laugh too but now, its so so real.
--

Do you mean this one?

link
---
a=b;a^2=ab;a^2-b^2=ab-b^2;(a-b)(a+b)=b(a-b);a+b=b; 2b=b;2=1

You mean
http://www.adcritic.com/content/sony-playstation 2- the-beginning.html


---
a=b;a^2=ab;a^2-b^2=ab-b^2;(a-b)(a+b)=b(a-b);a+b=b; 2b=b;2=1

the comercials that ibm did about linux with Cirroc Lofton (ok I may have totally spelled that WRONG) of startrek DS9 fame? I saw it air once and then never again. If you missed it AdCritic has it here.

Do you really think that, among the other lies and half-truths in your post, that the W3C has specifications for graphics primitives like drawing a line?

I assume you've never heard of SVG, the W3C's "language for describing two-dimensional graphics in XML."