What limitations do you have as to speed and accuracy and your range of motion? Do you have the ability to click? If so how many buttons can you similate? 1, 2, or 3 button mouse? What is comfortable for you? Do you have use of the keyboard at all?
I didn't see anything. I'd imagine I already have the offending sites AdBlock'd. I went ahead and blocked the rest of the ads that were showing on their website while I was at it.
Companies should learn that annoying ads get blocked. Interesting and unobtrusive ads get followed. The reason Google AdWords work so well is that most users don't even realize they are ads.
Text links, possibly with short descriptions, are fine if they aren't in the middle of content where they can interupt the reading of that content. If you must use a graphical ad then make it a button. That means something of about 60x15 pixels and certainly no more than 120x30 pixels.
What we need is a subscription-list for AdBlock so that users blocks are submitted and can be voted on by other users (either by also submitting the same thing or manually voting). Then you could subscribe to their list and choose what trust level you wanted to block. Obviously you'd be free to whitelist any of these sites you did want to see. All of this should be tied directly into AdBlock so we can easily control it while browsing.
I'd be happy if I could at least create my own list that was automaticlly shared between all of my computers.
Can you tell us which sites are doing this? I've yet to see any ads that Firefox's popup blocker and AdBlock extension haven't been taking care of. I'd like to see what this new annoyance is so that I can block it before it becomes an issue for me.:)
Owwie you pain me. I can't stand using Photoshop. It's so hard to get things done that I keep switching back to GIMP. It's really a case of which you're used to. I have issues with GIMP's usability but I have just as many with Photoshop's usability. In fact I have issues with most software's usability.:)
I suppose you're probably right that daisy chaining is the most economical way to go and that most technologies used for such wide areas already use that method. Does that fiber method you mentioned before offer gigabit speeds? I'd love to see gigabit networking connecting my neighborhood or city.
The city needs good jobs. I can't help but think that a city-wide affordable high-speed network would help bring that kind of worker and business to town. There'd be quite a market for delivering various multimedia applications to local residents over that network. Gamers would love it. It'd be great for VoIP and video-on-demand. There could be medical applications. All sorts of possibilities would exist if everyone was tapped into a gigabit network.
Wireless, DSL, and Cable are all offered here.
I've considered trying the wireless because it offers the least restrictions and a good price but in the past, in this area (Las Vegas), I've had problems with wireless Internet service. It would often slow down a lot and the ISP in question was clueless. They kept blaming the poor quality on us having a virus (which we didn't have). Funny.. they finally put up a bigger antenea and the virus just cleared up I guess.. any way the quality improved a lot. Also I found out they were logging all my network traffic and just showing it to random people. A good thing I know enough to use encryption when needed. Still annoying though.
Cable is fast but they were charging a lot for going over my allowed bandwidth, blocking me from hosting my own email and website, and their service was unreliable in that it couldn't maintain long running connections. Things like Everquest would disconnect about every five minutes which was really annoying.
DSL isn't nearly as fast, is still restrictive, but at least is more reliable. My roommate doesn't cry and scream over her Everquest connection going link dead every five minutes at least.
Guns don't kill anymore than video games or tv does. People kill people. Blaming a gun or the media is just a farce. If you kill someone then it was your decision to do so. Step up and take your punishment.
Americans need to stop trying to keep up with their twisted vision of the American Dream(tm) and stay home and raise their kids. Give up having the second car and the summer vacations in Malibu and actually spend some time with your mate and the offspring that you've brought into the world.
Besides, if you've played GTA then you'll know that it's much more fun to kill people by running them over with a car (an ambulance is pretty good) or with a chainsaw.;)
I will say that GTA tickles the already existing spot in my brain that thinks it's fun to kill cops and whores and make things explode. I could see how it might encourage someone that is already mentally disturbed or doped out of their head to go off the deep end. I don't think this is the type of thing you can really protect against though. Watching someone trip and skin their knee could trigger a blood lust just as easily. We can't sanitize life to make it entirely safe. Doing so would render life pretty much pointless.
With DWDM what happens if one of the homes goes to their backyard and cuts the fiber? Is the whole neighborhood dead?
I'd never force someone to participate. It's in their best interests anyway and costs them very little so you shouldn't have to force them. In the majority of cases you can at least get a right-of-way just by doing a little talking. It's hardly like you're going to be putting a freeway through their yard. A bit of cable is unlikely to bother them at all.
In the rare case that you couldn't right away then you'd just route around that person. If they aren't interested then probably one of their neighbors will be.
As for other expenses they'd be covered by the members. Everyone would pay for the wiring of their own house and the time/materials needed to connect their house into the network. There'd probably be a monthly due to cover support and the link for Internet connectivity. The founding members would probably have to pay more out of pocket to get things going but they'd get back some of their money as people joined and paid their hookup fees.
Fiber is really the way to go but wireless could get things started. Setup a neighborhood wireless network and once you've got enough members on board for that then work out a plan to lay fiber.
Exactly. IPv6 provides enough addresses for everyone to have a static IP. Well written applications shouldn't need to have much about them rewritten. The libraries they tie to should be able to be rewritten with the changes reflected immediately in the applications. IPv6 has existed for a while now so many applications and libraries should support it already.
Sounds like a shitty deal. Has there been anyone grouping to fight against it? I'd think that any law that makes competition illegal should send up red flags right away. It's hard to believe any politican could vote this in and still get reeelected.
I don't know if I'd say that government regulation is a good idea but I think the government should allow anyone to compete freely. The phone companies, cable companies, etc often have government sponsored monopolies or use anti-competitive practices to keep smaller companies or community-groups from becoming competition. We need to get rid of such protection for the rich so that we can all benefit from increased competition.
Also we need to change the public's laziness. People in the US don't especially like doing things for themselves and they don't like small businesses. To save $.20 on green beans people will go to a massive chain store like Walmart rather than to their neighborhood store. They save money but they kill off the chain stores competition. Without competition there is nothing to keep those chain stores from raising prices and abusing their power. So we suffer at the hands of the powers that we've created. It's the same with the telcos.
That is why you'd pool funds and hire someone, hopefully that lives in your neighborhood and who knows what they are doing, to do the tech stuff. None of these are problems the phone company doesn't have to deal with. You'd just be making a similar non-profit that only deals with your neighborhood.
I wouldn't filter any traffic. Let the end-users deal with that. Filtering doesn't really help much and it annoys the piss out of a lot of users. The only filtering that'd be done would be against active DoS attacks.
Obviously line care would fall on whomever was hired to care for the network. The organization would pay for the work and possibly fine little Johnny's parents for letting him dig in a restricted area. Probably the lines would be laid inside a protective pipe too so it'd not be that easy to damage them.
I'm not proposing some half-assed free attempt at a community network. You'd still have to pay and you'd still have to hire people who knew what they were doing. The users would be the owners though and they wouldn't exist to make money. Rates might or might not be cheaper but they would probably get better service.
I have my own hosted servers so I can handle dynamic name assignments to my dynamic IP but I don't think I should need to. There are plenty of IP addresses to go around if we'd just upgrade and make them available. Each home or business should be able to get at least one static IP. We shouldn't have to beg and pay extra for what is essentially a free and practically limitless resource.
Not that expensive. Do it neighborhood by neighborhood. I run a million cables through my home. It wouldn't be that much more expensive to run it between homes if you could get the right-of-way donated. You'd have to get everyone to donate right-of-way and pay to have their own home connected. It'd probably work best in neighborhoods with younger net-addicted families. Make it work for one neighborhood and gradually add to it.
People should look into starting neighborhood-wide networks or even city-wide networks that are ran as non-profit community groups. It'd be awesome to run gigabit fiber to every home in your neighborhood and share the cost of upstream access. I'd go as far as supplying public wireless coverage and local servers for proxy, email, public notices, chat, etc. That'd be something useful the local home owners association could do rather than making rules on how your grass should look.
This is one of the things that pisses me off the most. They block my own access to my own computers. At the same time they allow some cluelees n00b next door to download craploads of kiddie porno vids. I'd hardly use any network resources even if I could accept inbound web, mail, etc traffic but no they have to go and fuck with me and leave him to download gigs of porn.
The whole dynamic IP things irks me too. I want a real IP address and the right to use the Internet however I see fit without having to buy a business package. I'm not running a business in my home so why should I need a business package? For that matter why should a business need a business package if it's the same type of connection.
We should just create community-funded networks and leave the commercial guys in the cold if they won't give the consumer a good enough deal to compete. Why don't we have city-wide gigabit networks plugged into every home and business?
Getting the word out and organizing a community around your project isn't always an easy thing. PR is as much a part of opensource as it is of any commercial product. I've had a couple fairly successful small projects and have yet to get more than a few minor bug fixes returned to me. It's really okay though because I never expected that much help. Unless you write a large project or agressively seek out help then you aren't likely to get it.
Even if you're not a programmer try joining the mailing list for somethings like Pygame. If you have ideas for games you can mention them and some bored developers might help you out with making some of these games.
It sounds as if the biggest change you're looking for from the usual edutainment titles is that it needs to have a theme more appropiate for older children or adults. In most cases these kinds of changes can be made just be theming an existing program. You can change fluffy bunny alphabet into zombie bunnies from space alphabet just by tweaking the graphics and sound.
Personally I think this could be pretty fun for something like the classic edutainment games word muchers and number munchers.
You left out group 4. Those of us who own hundreds or thousands of legal movies and who get very pissed off when somebody tries to tell us what we can or can't do with what we have purchased.
I'm tempted to burn off a few thousand copies and start walking up and down the street passing them out for free as part of my 'fuck the RIAA/MPAA' protest.
Anybody interested in joining in? We should organize a day. December 16 (Boston Tea Party) might be a good day. To bad it's so far away. Could do it twice a year. June 16th and December 16th. Each local group should copy 1,773 DVDs and CDs and pass them out for free on those dates.
It'd be more interesting if he'd done the study across a wider selection of hardware. You can get very different results from this sort of thing depending on your cpu, ram, hdd, etc.
Also it looks like he loaded the pages off the local disk. This doesn't really test how fast the browsers can download and render the pages. It's more of a comparison of the rendering engines only.
Then there are issues, which he mentioned, such that some browsers take longer because they optimize page loads to be useful faster rather than for raw speed. Redrawing a page over and over as new content loads is bound to be slower than waiting until it's all loaded and then drawing it once.
How often do users do cold starts? I know I almost always have a browser window left open. Most people whom I've fixed their computers for seem to leave a browser window open at all times. My experience is that the browser is more important than the desktop to most users and they treat it that way. Therefore users almost never do cold starts.
Finally.. what does it matter if a browser is faster if it isn't correctly rendering the page? I can make the worlds fastest browser by just having it always display a blank page.;)
I have done something very similar plenty of times except with the goal of raising website's search rank. Appropiate topic-related keywords and links is a good way to raise the search rank. Usually I try to do at least part of the site by hand though to insure it's got real, original, content on it. Using feeds to supplement user supplied content. Hrm - sounds familiar.
I know I've used MUDs that did this for over a decade. You could play one MUD and use an IM-like network to see who was on other MUDs and chat with them or even play games with them. Seems the concept would be similar enough to invalidate such lame patents.
I remember doing similar things with BBS systems too.
And following my own advice from the previous message.. here is a link to a new page I put up today to an ISO image I created that has FreeDOS, Memtest86, and a lot of useful free Windows programs on it. Burn yourself a copy of my Free Windows Tools CD if you want a handy toolkit CD to carry with you when servicing Windows machines.
If you find this useful then help others find it by linking to the above page. This kind of linking is how SEO should work. Usually though you'd want to post to more on topic chat. This post is just a general example of what I meant in the previous message.
Still not really true. The most effective steps an SEO company will tell you to take are the cheapest things to do. That's likely to remain the case because efforts to cheat are noticed by the search engines and they eventually counter that method of cheating. Sometimes they go as far as blacklisting sites that were cheating. It's really best to play fair.
The two best steps to take. 1) Clean up your website. Everything must be readable by the search engines. The desired keywords must be on your website. and 2) Build a community. There is nothing that beats a strong community of active users. They'll link to you in masses you could never afford to buy. Their links will carry more weight than linkfarm links. Definately the way to go.
Finding things to buy is as valid as anything else users search for. It just has to be done in an appropiate way so that if a user searches for 'Corvette' then they get not only the Corvette website but also places where they can buy Corvettes, Corvette parts, and other related websites. Obviously this includes informational websites on Corvettes but would you really not want to find any websites you could buy cars or parts from? Websites can make this easier by optimizing for the right keywords. If they're selling Corvette stuff then they need to include keywords like 'shop', 'buy', etc on their website so that users can search for 'buy a Corvette' and find relevant websites.
Most porn sites do well in search engine placement of unrelated topics only because websites that are related to those topics aren't making any effort to place well. You have no idea how many websites I've worked with that didn't even have the name of the company on their website before I optimized them. How stupid is that? Someone searches for 'Your Company' and they don't find anything because you never thought to put the name of your company on your website. Doh!
Properly optimized websites should appear before porn sites in the results because they should have more, and better, incoming links (from customers, business partners, fans, etc) and more keyword matches. You might still get pictures of topless girls posing on Corvettes, which would be a valid search result, but you shouldn't see many unrelated results in the top few pages.
When you have trouble finding the website you need the first people to bitch at should be the people providing that website. Why haven't they optimized it to make searching for it easier?
Slashdot Mirror
What limitations do you have as to speed and accuracy and your range of motion? Do you have the ability to click? If so how many buttons can you similate? 1, 2, or 3 button mouse? What is comfortable for you? Do you have use of the keyboard at all?
I didn't see anything. I'd imagine I already have the offending sites AdBlock'd. I went ahead and blocked the rest of the ads that were showing on their website while I was at it.
Companies should learn that annoying ads get blocked. Interesting and unobtrusive ads get followed. The reason Google AdWords work so well is that most users don't even realize they are ads.
Text links, possibly with short descriptions, are fine if they aren't in the middle of content where they can interupt the reading of that content. If you must use a graphical ad then make it a button. That means something of about 60x15 pixels and certainly no more than 120x30 pixels.
What we need is a subscription-list for AdBlock so that users blocks are submitted and can be voted on by other users (either by also submitting the same thing or manually voting). Then you could subscribe to their list and choose what trust level you wanted to block. Obviously you'd be free to whitelist any of these sites you did want to see. All of this should be tied directly into AdBlock so we can easily control it while browsing.
I'd be happy if I could at least create my own list that was automaticlly shared between all of my computers.
Can you tell us which sites are doing this? I've yet to see any ads that Firefox's popup blocker and AdBlock extension haven't been taking care of. I'd like to see what this new annoyance is so that I can block it before it becomes an issue for me. :)
Owwie you pain me. I can't stand using Photoshop. It's so hard to get things done that I keep switching back to GIMP. It's really a case of which you're used to. I have issues with GIMP's usability but I have just as many with Photoshop's usability. In fact I have issues with most software's usability. :)
I suppose you're probably right that daisy chaining is the most economical way to go and that most technologies used for such wide areas already use that method. Does that fiber method you mentioned before offer gigabit speeds? I'd love to see gigabit networking connecting my neighborhood or city.
The city needs good jobs. I can't help but think that a city-wide affordable high-speed network would help bring that kind of worker and business to town. There'd be quite a market for delivering various multimedia applications to local residents over that network. Gamers would love it. It'd be great for VoIP and video-on-demand. There could be medical applications. All sorts of possibilities would exist if everyone was tapped into a gigabit network.
Wireless, DSL, and Cable are all offered here.
I've considered trying the wireless because it offers the least restrictions and a good price but in the past, in this area (Las Vegas), I've had problems with wireless Internet service. It would often slow down a lot and the ISP in question was clueless. They kept blaming the poor quality on us having a virus (which we didn't have). Funny.. they finally put up a bigger antenea and the virus just cleared up I guess.. any way the quality improved a lot. Also I found out they were logging all my network traffic and just showing it to random people. A good thing I know enough to use encryption when needed. Still annoying though.
Cable is fast but they were charging a lot for going over my allowed bandwidth, blocking me from hosting my own email and website, and their service was unreliable in that it couldn't maintain long running connections. Things like Everquest would disconnect about every five minutes which was really annoying.
DSL isn't nearly as fast, is still restrictive, but at least is more reliable. My roommate doesn't cry and scream over her Everquest connection going link dead every five minutes at least.
Guns don't kill anymore than video games or tv does. People kill people. Blaming a gun or the media is just a farce. If you kill someone then it was your decision to do so. Step up and take your punishment.
;)
Americans need to stop trying to keep up with their twisted vision of the American Dream(tm) and stay home and raise their kids. Give up having the second car and the summer vacations in Malibu and actually spend some time with your mate and the offspring that you've brought into the world.
Besides, if you've played GTA then you'll know that it's much more fun to kill people by running them over with a car (an ambulance is pretty good) or with a chainsaw.
I will say that GTA tickles the already existing spot in my brain that thinks it's fun to kill cops and whores and make things explode. I could see how it might encourage someone that is already mentally disturbed or doped out of their head to go off the deep end. I don't think this is the type of thing you can really protect against though. Watching someone trip and skin their knee could trigger a blood lust just as easily. We can't sanitize life to make it entirely safe. Doing so would render life pretty much pointless.
With DWDM what happens if one of the homes goes to their backyard and cuts the fiber? Is the whole neighborhood dead?
I'd never force someone to participate. It's in their best interests anyway and costs them very little so you shouldn't have to force them. In the majority of cases you can at least get a right-of-way just by doing a little talking. It's hardly like you're going to be putting a freeway through their yard. A bit of cable is unlikely to bother them at all.
In the rare case that you couldn't right away then you'd just route around that person. If they aren't interested then probably one of their neighbors will be.
As for other expenses they'd be covered by the members. Everyone would pay for the wiring of their own house and the time/materials needed to connect their house into the network. There'd probably be a monthly due to cover support and the link for Internet connectivity. The founding members would probably have to pay more out of pocket to get things going but they'd get back some of their money as people joined and paid their hookup fees.
Fiber is really the way to go but wireless could get things started. Setup a neighborhood wireless network and once you've got enough members on board for that then work out a plan to lay fiber.
Exactly. IPv6 provides enough addresses for everyone to have a static IP. Well written applications shouldn't need to have much about them rewritten. The libraries they tie to should be able to be rewritten with the changes reflected immediately in the applications. IPv6 has existed for a while now so many applications and libraries should support it already.
Sounds like a shitty deal. Has there been anyone grouping to fight against it? I'd think that any law that makes competition illegal should send up red flags right away. It's hard to believe any politican could vote this in and still get reeelected.
Sounds good. I wish I had that kind of broadband.
I don't know if I'd say that government regulation is a good idea but I think the government should allow anyone to compete freely. The phone companies, cable companies, etc often have government sponsored monopolies or use anti-competitive practices to keep smaller companies or community-groups from becoming competition. We need to get rid of such protection for the rich so that we can all benefit from increased competition.
Also we need to change the public's laziness. People in the US don't especially like doing things for themselves and they don't like small businesses. To save $.20 on green beans people will go to a massive chain store like Walmart rather than to their neighborhood store. They save money but they kill off the chain stores competition. Without competition there is nothing to keep those chain stores from raising prices and abusing their power. So we suffer at the hands of the powers that we've created. It's the same with the telcos.
That is why you'd pool funds and hire someone, hopefully that lives in your neighborhood and who knows what they are doing, to do the tech stuff. None of these are problems the phone company doesn't have to deal with. You'd just be making a similar non-profit that only deals with your neighborhood.
I wouldn't filter any traffic. Let the end-users deal with that. Filtering doesn't really help much and it annoys the piss out of a lot of users. The only filtering that'd be done would be against active DoS attacks.
Obviously line care would fall on whomever was hired to care for the network. The organization would pay for the work and possibly fine little Johnny's parents for letting him dig in a restricted area. Probably the lines would be laid inside a protective pipe too so it'd not be that easy to damage them.
I'm not proposing some half-assed free attempt at a community network. You'd still have to pay and you'd still have to hire people who knew what they were doing. The users would be the owners though and they wouldn't exist to make money. Rates might or might not be cheaper but they would probably get better service.
I have my own hosted servers so I can handle dynamic name assignments to my dynamic IP but I don't think I should need to. There are plenty of IP addresses to go around if we'd just upgrade and make them available. Each home or business should be able to get at least one static IP. We shouldn't have to beg and pay extra for what is essentially a free and practically limitless resource.
Not that expensive. Do it neighborhood by neighborhood. I run a million cables through my home. It wouldn't be that much more expensive to run it between homes if you could get the right-of-way donated. You'd have to get everyone to donate right-of-way and pay to have their own home connected. It'd probably work best in neighborhoods with younger net-addicted families. Make it work for one neighborhood and gradually add to it.
People should look into starting neighborhood-wide networks or even city-wide networks that are ran as non-profit community groups. It'd be awesome to run gigabit fiber to every home in your neighborhood and share the cost of upstream access. I'd go as far as supplying public wireless coverage and local servers for proxy, email, public notices, chat, etc. That'd be something useful the local home owners association could do rather than making rules on how your grass should look.
This is one of the things that pisses me off the most. They block my own access to my own computers. At the same time they allow some cluelees n00b next door to download craploads of kiddie porno vids. I'd hardly use any network resources even if I could accept inbound web, mail, etc traffic but no they have to go and fuck with me and leave him to download gigs of porn.
The whole dynamic IP things irks me too. I want a real IP address and the right to use the Internet however I see fit without having to buy a business package. I'm not running a business in my home so why should I need a business package? For that matter why should a business need a business package if it's the same type of connection.
We should just create community-funded networks and leave the commercial guys in the cold if they won't give the consumer a good enough deal to compete. Why don't we have city-wide gigabit networks plugged into every home and business?
Getting the word out and organizing a community around your project isn't always an easy thing. PR is as much a part of opensource as it is of any commercial product. I've had a couple fairly successful small projects and have yet to get more than a few minor bug fixes returned to me. It's really okay though because I never expected that much help. Unless you write a large project or agressively seek out help then you aren't likely to get it.
Even if you're not a programmer try joining the mailing list for somethings like Pygame. If you have ideas for games you can mention them and some bored developers might help you out with making some of these games.
It sounds as if the biggest change you're looking for from the usual edutainment titles is that it needs to have a theme more appropiate for older children or adults. In most cases these kinds of changes can be made just be theming an existing program. You can change fluffy bunny alphabet into zombie bunnies from space alphabet just by tweaking the graphics and sound.
Personally I think this could be pretty fun for something like the classic edutainment games word muchers and number munchers.
You left out group 4. Those of us who own hundreds or thousands of legal movies and who get very pissed off when somebody tries to tell us what we can or can't do with what we have purchased.
I'm tempted to burn off a few thousand copies and start walking up and down the street passing them out for free as part of my 'fuck the RIAA/MPAA' protest.
Anybody interested in joining in? We should organize a day. December 16 (Boston Tea Party) might be a good day. To bad it's so far away. Could do it twice a year. June 16th and December 16th. Each local group should copy 1,773 DVDs and CDs and pass them out for free on those dates.
It'd be more interesting if he'd done the study across a wider selection of hardware. You can get very different results from this sort of thing depending on your cpu, ram, hdd, etc.
;)
Also it looks like he loaded the pages off the local disk. This doesn't really test how fast the browsers can download and render the pages. It's more of a comparison of the rendering engines only.
Then there are issues, which he mentioned, such that some browsers take longer because they optimize page loads to be useful faster rather than for raw speed. Redrawing a page over and over as new content loads is bound to be slower than waiting until it's all loaded and then drawing it once.
How often do users do cold starts? I know I almost always have a browser window left open. Most people whom I've fixed their computers for seem to leave a browser window open at all times. My experience is that the browser is more important than the desktop to most users and they treat it that way. Therefore users almost never do cold starts.
Finally.. what does it matter if a browser is faster if it isn't correctly rendering the page? I can make the worlds fastest browser by just having it always display a blank page.
I have done something very similar plenty of times except with the goal of raising website's search rank. Appropiate topic-related keywords and links is a good way to raise the search rank. Usually I try to do at least part of the site by hand though to insure it's got real, original, content on it. Using feeds to supplement user supplied content. Hrm - sounds familiar.
I know I've used MUDs that did this for over a decade. You could play one MUD and use an IM-like network to see who was on other MUDs and chat with them or even play games with them. Seems the concept would be similar enough to invalidate such lame patents.
I remember doing similar things with BBS systems too.
If you find this useful then help others find it by linking to the above page. This kind of linking is how SEO should work. Usually though you'd want to post to more on topic chat. This post is just a general example of what I meant in the previous message.
Still not really true. The most effective steps an SEO company will tell you to take are the cheapest things to do. That's likely to remain the case because efforts to cheat are noticed by the search engines and they eventually counter that method of cheating. Sometimes they go as far as blacklisting sites that were cheating. It's really best to play fair.
The two best steps to take. 1) Clean up your website. Everything must be readable by the search engines. The desired keywords must be on your website. and 2) Build a community. There is nothing that beats a strong community of active users. They'll link to you in masses you could never afford to buy. Their links will carry more weight than linkfarm links. Definately the way to go.
Finding things to buy is as valid as anything else users search for. It just has to be done in an appropiate way so that if a user searches for 'Corvette' then they get not only the Corvette website but also places where they can buy Corvettes, Corvette parts, and other related websites. Obviously this includes informational websites on Corvettes but would you really not want to find any websites you could buy cars or parts from? Websites can make this easier by optimizing for the right keywords. If they're selling Corvette stuff then they need to include keywords like 'shop', 'buy', etc on their website so that users can search for 'buy a Corvette' and find relevant websites.
Most porn sites do well in search engine placement of unrelated topics only because websites that are related to those topics aren't making any effort to place well. You have no idea how many websites I've worked with that didn't even have the name of the company on their website before I optimized them. How stupid is that? Someone searches for 'Your Company' and they don't find anything because you never thought to put the name of your company on your website. Doh!
Properly optimized websites should appear before porn sites in the results because they should have more, and better, incoming links (from customers, business partners, fans, etc) and more keyword matches. You might still get pictures of topless girls posing on Corvettes, which would be a valid search result, but you shouldn't see many unrelated results in the top few pages.
When you have trouble finding the website you need the first people to bitch at should be the people providing that website. Why haven't they optimized it to make searching for it easier?