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A Curmudgeonly Look At Google Wave
rsmiller510 writes "For those of you who think Google Wave is all that and a bag of chips, I put on the brakes and give you a few questions to ponder."
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Take a break from your open sores circle jerk and fix your fucking code.
I checked my submissions. I have a pending submission that turned a year old last month and crap like this makes it through. Good QC, /.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
(warning, offtopic coming, mod appropriately)
Spam may not be a problem to me, but it is a general problem. Likewise, those ads are. Allow me to elaborate.
I don't get to see spam. My spamfilter is set well, it works great, it catches 99% of the trash. All peachy. But the problem of spam isn't just that I might get to see and have to delete it. The problem is that spam is one vector of infection for malware. People with less restrictive spamfilters (who usually are also less computer savvy) get to see it, might click it and become part of a botnet herd. Ready to spam or execute DDoS attacks. And then it may well be your problem again when your server goes down due to overload.
Likewise, those ads. I don't like adblocking software. Adblockers increase instead of solve the ad problem. First of all, people making pages for me to view have bills to pay. And they either pay them themselves, have advertisers pay them or have me pay them. The first is usually short lived because invariably they run out of money or simply lose interest in sinking money into something that they may not enjoy anymore one day. The last is out of the question, I won't pay for something I get free elsewhere. So ads have to generate the revenue. They can only do that, though, if I get to see them. I don't mind banner ads or other forms of advertising between the content.
Worse, though, those ad blockers scrub away those obnoxious full screen in-your-face ads. Without blockers, people would eventually simply ignore those pages and go elsewhere, because they don't want to put up with the junk. Which leads to fewer impressions and thus might have some "educational value" for webmasters who could maybe gain the insight that less obtrusive ads is the way. Since adblockers take this nuisance away, visitor numbers are steady and thus full page ads are here to stay.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's no different than saying "spam isn't a problem, my spam filters get almost all of it".
Actually, it's very different. When a jerk sends spam, they suck up resources within the network, where it must be transmitted, and on the servers and clients, where it must be stored and filtered.
Annoying popups and rollovers, on the other hand, may never be downloaded at all (thanks to NoScript), meaning no waste, other than the extra bit of javascript that's downloaded but never executed. And even if the content is downloaded but just not shown (as is sometimes the case with AdBlock and similar tools), it's a fairly small amount of extra crap, so it's not a lot of extra expense... and the lions share of that expense is actually paid by the provider of the content (who must serve all those page views), rather than the user viewing said content.
Dude Bush isn't president anymore, update your spam please