I think the web ads do sell products and services, otherwise no one would bother. However, by using an extension like adblock, I am simply removing annoying advertisements that I will never click on to purchase an item. As a general principle I do not click on these ads and would never consider making a purchase based on a banner ad or popup that I saw. If a company wants my business they better find more creative ways of marketing. And some companies get it. Offer competitive prices, great customer service and a quality product and then make your site easily reachable through google searches, word of mouth, price searches, etc. Get some good reviews by reputable sources. When I want to make an online purchase I do research, google searches, and talk to friends about what their experiences have been. Then I make an educated decision.
To summarize: no company is losing any revenue by my using adblocking software.
BugMeNot.com was created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of web sites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information (such as the New York Times).
The main reason I'm excited about Yahoo's recent surge of activity and announcements is that it will up the ante for Google and increase competition between the two companies. C'mon, Google, look at Yahoo! Redouble your efforts!
No good player would say he is "pot committed" when he knows for certain he is going to lose. I know what pot odds are. I was referring to situations where good players say they are pot committed, meaning that they are getting the correct pot odds to call and have invested a huge amount in the hand already. For example:
Our table broke, and I my new and last table of the day had Barry Greenstein to my left, with Men Nguyen and David Plastik to my right. Another Pokerstars guy named Olof Thorsen opened for 10,000 and I sensed weakness. I raised it 20,000 with AQ and he immediately moved in for 30,000 more. I was pot committed getting over 3-1 to call. He turned over 77, and when the board came no help, I found myself back down 140,000.
i said the analogy isn't perfect. But spent money is not the same as the pot you lost last hand. That money is gone and you have nothing to show for it. With spent money you have something to show for it and potentially a return on your investment.
Being a poker player, and realizing that poker mirrors life, I have to disagree. In poker there is a concept called being "pot committed." If you have invested a large amount in a hand and then face the decision to call one more small bet in order to get a showdown, even if at this point you are pretty darn sure you have the worst hand, it is worth it because at this point you're getting a small price to potentially gain a lot. Now the analogy isn't perfect. It's not like if NASA pumps another 4 million into the program for a few more years they'll get it all back if they win. But the point is that they've already put the bulk of the money "in the pot" and have a huge amount to gain potentially by keeping the program going for a few more years.
In other words, that "spent money" isn't all gone. It's out there in space. I say put a few a few more bucks in the pot.
I'm sorry, but they are common. Just because you haven't noticed dead pixels on your machines, doesn't mean they aren't a common problem. In our small office, about a third of our laptops we purchased from Gateway have at least one dead pixel. I haven't bothered to replace my display because it just wasn't worth the hassle and it's only one pixel in the lower right part of the display that doesn't really bother me too much. I talk to a lot of guys with LCD displays and I would say that 25 to 33% of them have experienced dead pixels on their displays. I would classify that as a "common problem."
Guys, this stuff really isn't that hard. There is no such thing as a "bad memory." Just an untrained one. Seriously, anyone with half a brain can learn to memorize long-digit numbers or the order of a deck of cards. I consider myself a person of average intelligence and yet I can take a randomly shuffled deck of cards and view each card in order once for less than a second and then list the cards in order or name a specific card by it's index. It just takes training.
People often attribute these sorts of feats to raw ability, but the truth is you can vastly improve your ability to remember through practice.
Beagle rocks. It was pretty easy to get set up on Ubuntu (Hoary). If anyone has yet to see Beagle in action, check out Nat's flash demos. The "live queries" demo is my favourite.
OS X is wonderful, to be sure. But it is proprietary and only runs on Mac hardware. Xorg is open source and runs on many operating systems and architectures. Big difference. You will continue to see Linux improve in the coming years and there will be more and more Linux desktop deployments. That is the advantage of open source. The battle is far from won. You didn't hear it here first, but you did hear it here.
I can't run OS X on my machine. "Go buy a mac" is not a solution. I have nothing against Macs, but it isn't beating a dead horse to implement this functionality for Linux/FreeBSD on intel. Also OS X isn't open source.
Um, shouldn't this be a poll, rather than an "Ask Slashdot"? It would be like having a story asking for comments on what everyone's favourite pizza topping is.
Can someone explain why it costs $425 to upgrade to 1Gb RAM from apple? That seem insanely high to me. How difficult is it to open up the Mac Mini and upgrade yourself?
-jamin
You can't sign up unfortunately. It was a trial they offered to test the new service. They offered it to some customers based on location and a few other factors. Eventually they will offer it to all their customers.
Think again, Monkelectric. I just finished SBC's ADSL2 trial and it was amazing. We're talking 10-12Mb/s downstrea, over 1.2Mb/s upstream, brilliant HDTV over IP and no, it is not PPPoE anymore. Stay tuned....
To put it in another perspective, it's close to the odds of being dealt pocket Aces ("pocket rockets", "American Airlines", "bullets") in Texas Holdem.
I don't really understand why people choose to go to Starbucks when in most cities there are excellent local coffeeshops with much better coffee and atmosphere. In St. Louis, one of my favourites is Kaldi's.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone know what the PS3 will run?
I think the web ads do sell products and services, otherwise no one would bother. However, by using an extension like adblock, I am simply removing annoying advertisements that I will never click on to purchase an item. As a general principle I do not click on these ads and would never consider making a purchase based on a banner ad or popup that I saw. If a company wants my business they better find more creative ways of marketing. And some companies get it. Offer competitive prices, great customer service and a quality product and then make your site easily reachable through google searches, word of mouth, price searches, etc. Get some good reviews by reputable sources. When I want to make an online purchase I do research, google searches, and talk to friends about what their experiences have been. Then I make an educated decision. To summarize: no company is losing any revenue by my using adblocking software.
How about Creative Commons?
It's one of my favourite Firefox extensions.
The main reason I'm excited about Yahoo's recent surge of activity and announcements is that it will up the ante for Google and increase competition between the two companies. C'mon, Google, look at Yahoo! Redouble your efforts!
i said the analogy isn't perfect. But spent money is not the same as the pot you lost last hand. That money is gone and you have nothing to show for it. With spent money you have something to show for it and potentially a return on your investment.
Being a poker player, and realizing that poker mirrors life, I have to disagree. In poker there is a concept called being "pot committed." If you have invested a large amount in a hand and then face the decision to call one more small bet in order to get a showdown, even if at this point you are pretty darn sure you have the worst hand, it is worth it because at this point you're getting a small price to potentially gain a lot. Now the analogy isn't perfect. It's not like if NASA pumps another 4 million into the program for a few more years they'll get it all back if they win. But the point is that they've already put the bulk of the money "in the pot" and have a huge amount to gain potentially by keeping the program going for a few more years. In other words, that "spent money" isn't all gone. It's out there in space. I say put a few a few more bucks in the pot.
If you got sucked into a dark energy star, would you be turned into spaghetti?
I'm sorry, but they are common. Just because you haven't noticed dead pixels on your machines, doesn't mean they aren't a common problem. In our small office, about a third of our laptops we purchased from Gateway have at least one dead pixel. I haven't bothered to replace my display because it just wasn't worth the hassle and it's only one pixel in the lower right part of the display that doesn't really bother me too much. I talk to a lot of guys with LCD displays and I would say that 25 to 33% of them have experienced dead pixels on their displays. I would classify that as a "common problem."
Guys, this stuff really isn't that hard. There is no such thing as a "bad memory." Just an untrained one. Seriously, anyone with half a brain can learn to memorize long-digit numbers or the order of a deck of cards. I consider myself a person of average intelligence and yet I can take a randomly shuffled deck of cards and view each card in order once for less than a second and then list the cards in order or name a specific card by it's index. It just takes training. People often attribute these sorts of feats to raw ability, but the truth is you can vastly improve your ability to remember through practice.
Beagle rocks. It was pretty easy to get set up on Ubuntu (Hoary). If anyone has yet to see Beagle in action, check out Nat's flash demos. The "live queries" demo is my favourite.
I also think all porn sites should be hosted on .cum domains.
OS X is wonderful, to be sure. But it is proprietary and only runs on Mac hardware. Xorg is open source and runs on many operating systems and architectures. Big difference. You will continue to see Linux improve in the coming years and there will be more and more Linux desktop deployments. That is the advantage of open source. The battle is far from won. You didn't hear it here first, but you did hear it here.
The two are not mutually exclusive. The developers are not going to spend their time negotiating. They are developer not negotiators.
I can't run OS X on my machine. "Go buy a mac" is not a solution. I have nothing against Macs, but it isn't beating a dead horse to implement this functionality for Linux/FreeBSD on intel. Also OS X isn't open source.
WTF? I'm hoping you don't mean that literally.
Um, shouldn't this be a poll, rather than an "Ask Slashdot"? It would be like having a story asking for comments on what everyone's favourite pizza topping is.
rhetorical question: I wonder, how hard would it be to write a bit of code to check if a story in the past 2 weeks or so has pointed to the same URL?
Can someone explain why it costs $425 to upgrade to 1Gb RAM from apple? That seem insanely high to me. How difficult is it to open up the Mac Mini and upgrade yourself? -jamin
dogtown area here, work in Westport at a small start-up company.
You can't sign up unfortunately. It was a trial they offered to test the new service. They offered it to some customers based on location and a few other factors. Eventually they will offer it to all their customers.
Think again, Monkelectric. I just finished SBC's ADSL2 trial and it was amazing. We're talking 10-12Mb/s downstrea, over 1.2Mb/s upstream, brilliant HDTV over IP and no, it is not PPPoE anymore. Stay tuned....
To put it in another perspective, it's close to the odds of being dealt pocket Aces ("pocket rockets", "American Airlines", "bullets") in Texas Holdem.
I don't really understand why people choose to go to Starbucks when in most cities there are excellent local coffeeshops with much better coffee and atmosphere. In St. Louis, one of my favourites is Kaldi's.