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Video Adverts On the Printed Page
An anonymous reader writes "Prepare yourself. A staple of near-future sci-fi—magazine video ads—are now a thing of the present. And which high-tech magazine is leading the charge? Wired? Popular Mechanics? Nope. Successful Farming. The advertisement itself is for a pesticide that protects crops against nematodes. You can see a video of the video here."
Aren't there a lot of "bad things* in computers and monitors? Isn't it bad enough the ones on our desktops turn over every few years? Can you imagine if hundreds of thousands of these ended up in the landfill every month? Forgive me if I sound like a kneejerk hippy, but this just doesn't seem at all green.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Yo dawg! I heard you like overkill, so we put up a video of a video of an advertisement in an advertisement so you can watch while you read about watching while you read!
This is the kind of thing that will make me want to carry around a hammer or an EMP device. Ads already pollute enough of my life.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
some more links with additional information.
this post includes info on pricing, the cost is $50/insert for a volume of 1,000
http://blogs.physicstoday.org/newspicks/2009/08/welcome-entertainment-weekly-r.html
about halfway through there is footage of the raw board. looks like a standard small LCD, Li-Ion pack and logic board. and surprisingly a mini-usb for recharging
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3pI8F7ShSQ
I've been saying it for some time now, but farmers have pretty much always been on the cutting edge of technology. The common view of farmers as slack-jawed yokels couldn't be any further from the truth. For thousands of years, most technology advances were the domain of farming. How do you think we can continue to feed the world's growing population and still have food surpluses that can be used for stuff like ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, plastics, etc.?
Growing up as the son of a farmer, we were always playing around with new technology long before anyone else. Think your GPS is pretty sweet? Yeah, we had that in the early 90s for charting harvest yields (X bushels harvested at Y location with a relatively fine scale on the location == pretty yield maps). Wireless real-time stock quotes? We had that in the 80s for the futures markets. Self-driving vehicles? You've been able to buy tractors that would drive themselves in the fields for the past 15+ years, including collision avoidance (fields are not empty -- there are creeks, rocks, power lines, hills, etc that all need to be avoided or otherwise handled). The only thing surprising about this story is that this didn't happen 5 years ago.
Looking at this I was just thinking on how fast our technology moves.
15 years ago CRT screens were still the norm, 10 years ago they were still going strong against the flat screen competition. Now we have screens that are so flat and cheap that they can be added to a magazine page.
15 years ago playing video on your PC started to work, mostly. Not too high resolution and you're fine. Now we play video smoothly on our mobile phones. Video processors are now small enough to fit in a magazine page. The same for storage, even low res video requires a relatively large amount of memory.
15 years ago my simple mobile phone needed recharging of its bulky battery at least every two days, when not using it much. Now batteries have the capacity to run a video player, a small screen, for a significant period of time, all while being small enough to fit in a magazine page.
15 years ago I had a 120 MB hard disk in my computer, a quite reasonable size at the time. It served me well. Software came typically on small stacks of 1.44 MB floppy disks. Nowadays a magazine page can fit larger amounts of storage, at a mere fraction of the price.
It is simply absurd how fast this tech is moving these days. A video in a magazine page was pure science fiction at the time. The idea that you would go to a web page (that did exist already) and click on a link to watch a video without the need for a lengthy download.
We definitely live in exciting times for techies!