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Well said! Doubleclick is telling us that the sky's falling, when it's only some acorns.

Sure, hugh cost-to-run/maintain sites like our beloved /. will have to find some way to stay afloat, but it's not the (spooky echo voice) END OF FREE CONTENT (end voice). You might recall that Ads are 'new' to the Internet -- they've been around for less than a third of its lifetime.

Also -- why do people use pop-up and ad blockers? Because of spyware, annoying ad systems, and bandwidth. If you're on dialup or some painfully slow connection, hopefully you'll be surfing with some serious ad-blocking or even images and js off; everyone but Google and their copycats looses that (tiny) crowd.

Half of the crappy banners try and trick you to click on them, using dubiously legally defensible lies to do so, and installing spyware on your system if you bite (I think. I run firefox with some heavy duty filters, so I haven't seen any ads since I started using PortableFirefox from my USB if I happened to be at a computer without a safe browser.)

Also, seriously guys, just try harder. It's a cat and mouse game with filters, and advertisers are being stupid and/or lazy. Of course doubleclick is 127.0.0.1 for me, but ads served by the actual web site I'm viewing are at least marginally harder to block (thanks for everyone clearly serving them from their /ads/ directory!)

Basically, advertisers should stop whining and adjust their business model -- don't piss your consumers off so much that you begin to present negative value to the products being advertised, pick your sites and target to the normal customer of said site (/. does well there, as does Google) and don't try and fool me with javascript post-page-load hyperlinking to ad sites, prevent me from getting to my content (interstitials) or anny the fuck out of me (flash overlays), and certainly don't install software on my system that slows it down at the same time as selling all my personal data, no matter how "anonymous"

not that I'm bitter or anything. Currently, ads, like the lottery, are a tax on the stupid. There's LOTS of stupid people out there, so it's not a by definition poor business model, until (as the case seems to be) the ads get so horrible and detrimental to the user experience that even IE is doing pop-up blocking by default.

Damnit. Thou shalt put http:// in front of all URLs. Mr. Taco said so.

That url again is: http://www.griffjon.com/travel

When I was in venezuela Cybercafes were all the rage, and it was very 1997Q4-esque (just as the Internet Economy was really beginning to ramp up) there were big banners offering HTML and computing workshops, the middle class tended to own computers and sometime dialup access--a major problem was that the phone company charged per-minute for even local calls, but there were a few wireless/cell companies competing. It makes me happy to see that the problems are being moved past.

I hope it doesn't ruin some of the really beautiful rustic scenery, tho.

I was working hard last year to find some of these style bots, as I was writing my thesis on communication over the Internet and also a hyperfiction in which all the characters are essentially bots.

Oh, and a hilariously funny link from that research is MGonz which not only fooled a human, but made the human confess some wonderful things.

I was working hard last year to find some of these style bots, as I was writing my thesis on communication over the Internet and also a hyperfiction in which all the characters are essentially bots.

Oh, and a hilariously funny link from that research is MGonz which not only fooled a human, but made the human confess some wonderful things.

I'm saddened by the slow evaporaiton of sites that give you shell access. I can't code a page worth crap if I'm not in the ditches using pico (emacs flames directed to /dev/nul), reloading, fixing, reloading, etc. FTP'ing a page back and forth is a royal pain in the ass, and replicating a directory structure locally is as well, especially if you're working across platforms...

When I ask a hoster if they give shell access, they tend to have one of two responses, either, 'huh?' (...but these folks support frontpage extensions!) or 'Why, you a hacker?' [sic].

I recently had to find a home for GriffJon.com and settled on a small outfit called TranSonicNet. Linux and BSD servers (they're pretty security-conscious) with not-that-great uptime, but clued tech support with reasonable email reply-times. The price was right ($10/month), and the feature set is good. They claim unlimited bandwidth allowance, but I can't say for sure what really happens when you start chugging gigs through their servers.

And don't get me wrong. I wrote a fragging thesis on the use of language online--you can transmit surprising amounts of information normally delegated to body-language. It's not the information, I posit, but the perception.

I've moved out of the OL arena to find dates, though I will occasionally drop a line to a particularly skilled (or interesting) webmistress to strike up a conversation. I've learned to dance and try to meet girls through off-line type ways. And, I live in Austin, so there are nerd/techie socializing events now and again

But as another /.er posted, online is a great way to keep in touch with a friend who's moved away.