So tell me, how does the firmware know which country it is in if the OS doesn't tell it? Or does the hardware have some secret way of knowing? How is it going to get the frequencies correct, otherwise?
I don't know if there are any other wireless vendors that make things open source. If there are, or come to be, they will be the ones to get more business. And aside from that, if any OS is able to change the frequency of the device, then it will be reverse engineered, eventually. So unless the hardware has that capability locked up rock solid from any OS, it will happen despite what the manufacturers want. But it may happen more buggy, and do things like be on totally unintended frequencies.
If the hardware doesn't even allow Windows to change the frequency, then at least OpenBSD is not any worse off by not being able to. But it certainly should be able to change the channel number with the hardware deciding which channels have which frequency, and disable when the channel selected is not allowed in the country the hardware happens to be in.
Having never seen James Ketrenos, not even in pictures, I have no idea if he is fat or not. Maybe he's skinny and Theo is just trying to insult him. But if he says something that is false, and he knows it is false, then at least the liar part is true. Of course we may never know what he really knows. He could just be mistaken and skinny.
If the wiring goes through the walls, then it is the building wiring, and is subject to the code. And the six disconnect rule will apply. This article specifically says the UPSes are in a separate server room, so how do you get the power from there to the offices? The picture shows more than six, and these are the cheap office models that can't be paralleled, so they would have to be separately switched.
Unlike an office UPS sitting there in the room, there is the expectation that the wall outlets will provide the minimum power levels (e.g. 15 amps for the most common type). Just because they are orange indicating emergency backup power does not relieve this.
After the fire department has disconnected power in this building, they are going to be in for quite a shock to find that outlets in the walls of many rooms still have power if they have shut the building down according to code disconnects.
Apparently they don't (know their jobs) given the way they hooked it up. In most places where conduit is required, armored cable is acceptable. Maybe New York City otherwise prohibits armored cable. But I do know places like New York City tend to change things towards the safer direction, so I very highly doubt they have deleted the NEC requirements on available current and number of disconnects.
Having electrical outlets in the wall subjects them to the National Electrical Code. This code would place a number of requirements on the methods of attaching the UPSes back to the wall wiring, requirements for overcurrent protection separate from the UPS on each such circuit, minimum available current (e.g. at least 15 amps), and type of wiring used (armored cable, most certainly not anything of extension cord grade). And the most serious violation is the one that requires all power to be shut down with no more than six disconnecting operations grouped together in one location.
That office design violates the most important guideline of Feng shui, which is that when sitting at the desk, you must have the doorway in clear sight. This is also a good idea because it relieves people of the nervousness of wondering who might be standing in the doorway looking in. And besides, it gives you enough time to switch back to the desktop your real work is on.
Animated PNGs would have been very easy. The fact that the PNG format developers chose not to is perhaps at least partly to blame for the slow uptake of PNG. I never did understand why they felt it needed a whole new format. This is NOT about making something to replace MPEG. This is about making something to replace a feature of GIF (which was never any threat to MPEG).
It would have been simple to do. There could be additional chunks with repeated frames. Other optional chunks would set the time delay between the current frame and the next frame and be the default for subsequent frames unless another of these chunks appeared. Another chunk would specify repeating, possibly with a count, and posisbly with how many frames at the front to skip for the repeat point (something GIF didn't even have, but would be simple to do).
I know there were detractors that said "animations suck, we need to ban them" or "animations are just a form of abuse" or "if you want movies, use MPEG", etc. But one stated purpose of PNG was to eliminate the need for GIF (not to eliminate the need for JPEG or MPEG). It didn't meet that goal. GIF is still THE format for basic animations, whether they are abusive banner ads, or usable tools like a clock. Small images with a few frames are fully practical in GIF.
Another way to get more efficiency is to operate the Switched-mode power supply at the higher voltage it supports, usually 220 to 250 volts. In most of the world this is already done. In North America computers are typically run on 120 volts (in Japan this is 100 volts). In general, these power supplies are more efficient by about 3% or so, on the higher voltage. Of course, be sure to flip the voltage switch if it has one, or otherwise verify that it does support the higher voltage.
For a single computer, it would not be worth adding the extra circuit to get 240 volts. But if you run several, it could be worth doing so, especially if you have so many that it exceeds the capacity of one 120 volt 15 or 20 amp circuit (you could have twice as many on the same amperage if operating at 240 volts). If you already have a circuit dedicated to the computers, that circuit could be converted from 120 volts to 240 volts by changing out the circuit breaker from a one pole to a two pole type, marking the white neutral wire with red or black tape to comply with electrical code identification requirements, attaching these wires to that new breaker (not to the neutral bus), and installing a 240 volt style outlet (NEMA 6-15R or 6-20R). These are the steps that would be used to install an outlet for a big window air conditioner (which you might need anyway with so many computers). Then you can use this power cord.
There are different kinds of UPSes that do this in different ways. The two major types used for PCs are called "line interactive offline" and "dual conversion online". The first just passes the AC power straight through to the output. If the AC power coming in goes out of range, then it flips a switch internally (relay, contactor, thyristor, etc) to supply the power from an inverter driven by the battery. The second converts the AC coming in to DC all the time, and converts that DC back to AC for output. It then does the switching in DC, or parallels the DC with the battery directly. These variations are classified as "topology" by many manufacturers.
Both of these kinds can have inverters that produce square waves, pseudo-sine waves, or very nice clean sine waves. The dual conversion type can also isolate a poor power factor (the deviation of the current wavefrom from being a sine wave in sync with the voltage) of the PC power supply from the power source. A poor power factor means the product of the average current times the average voltage (apparent power) exceeds the actual real power (average of all the products of the voltage and current and each point in time) being used, which results in reduced efficiency and other problems.
Your understanding of technology is obviously zilch, zippo, nada, nothing. And that leaves me with the feeling that your understanding of law is also generally diminished. And I presume you've never changed any software on the PC you own?
Carbon going into the air from tobacco smoke is actually carbon taken from the air in the first place (for the most part). That pales in comparison to carbon taken from deep underground isolation and releasing it into the atmosphere. The latter substantially increases the carbon load (generally in the form of carbon dioxide), while the former does not.
Similarly, burning wood to heat your home in the winter is just circulating the carbon load, whereas burning coal, gas, or petroleum products is releasing new carbon load into the air. This does differ from the above in that the tree you kill and burn might have been around for decades, holding that carbon from the atmosphere. But as soon as a replacement tree can grow to the original size, the carbon is then back out of the atmosphere. So in the long term it is just a cycle.
Real programmers can change their clothes. They just keep on typing while they are doing it.
Seriously, when I was in high school, a friend of mine successfully changed out of his band uniform (he had been at dress practice before our little road trip) and into his street clothes, while driving his car on the highway. And yes, he did become a programmer.
They had all their eggs in one basket? Where's the live replica machine? Where are the redundant copies? Oh wait, this is a for-profit business. Never mind.
Next time you see an ad for something you are interested in, instead of clicking on the ad to visit the site, just open a new window/tab and type the URL in. Now no one gets paid. Is that fraud, too? If intentional, it sure is.
This is also abusable by advertisers themselves. If they are trying to drive up web site visits, they make sure the site URL is in the ad so people will remember it and visit later (knowing that most people won't drop everything they are doing to visit right now). If they sell products away from the web (e.g. Pepsi and Coca-Cola selling drinks in stores and other places), all they need to do is build traditional impression based advertising. Almost no one will click (unless trying to do the fraud thing) and these advertisers get a free right, and the intermediary (Google, etc) and publisher (that might be you) get screwed putting up "click through" ads that are never going to be clicked on.
What we need is impression based advertising. And that's already exactly what they do on TV, radio, and bilboard advertising. Newspaper and magazine advertising is mostly like that, but cut-out coupons do some level of feedback. But such feedback doesn't pay the agency or publisher anything.
The price per impression would obviously be way less than the price per click. Impression is very much subject to the "no look fraud". And unlike TV, which assumes a viewership based on ratings that affect the advertising prices, at least the web can provide a means to measure how many impressions actually take place. What the proportion should be, I can't reliably say. But I've seen ads at various companies go for from 0.5 cent to 25 cents per click, and what little impression ads are available typically going for 1/20 to 1/50 of that, in the range of 1 cent down to 0.01 cent.
One big problem is it's all abusable on the web, whereas on places like TV it's just not always accurate (maybe no one watched all of a given episode of a show). Impression ads can be abused, too. Who reports how many impressions were made (by hosting the images)? The publisher who could inflate the logs? An intermediary that might get blocked easily? The advertiser who could deflate the logs?
This is highly abusable by the advertiser. At one end of this abuse we have advertisers that might not properly track or report the conversions. At the other end are products that such tracking really cannot be done for in the first place.
A lot of products are really the kind of thing that impression advertising is the only way to do it. Examples include grocery products you buy in a store.
What if Pepsi or Coca-Cola were to purchase advertising through Adsense and put up ads that just kept the name recognition in front of people, with no effort at doing any kind of click through or action conversion? They would, in effect, get a free ride, and the publisher sites would get nil.
I am often seeing ads on web page that do interest me, but not so much as to divert my attention. I just remember what it is and go visit the site later. In effect my action as a viewer is quite the opposite of click-fraud. Intsead of overpayment, my action results in underpayment. But that's just the way it is because by the time I have finished the current quest and decide to pursue what I saw in the ad, it's gone.
Wikipedia is too open. I think it would discourage the vandalism a bit more if it first required logging in as a registered username to make changes. And maybe in addition to that some kind of moderation system could apply to changes made to controversial articles. And a new idea to add would be "rebuttal articles", different than a talk/discussion article, parallels each controversial article where differing points of view can be placed with less limitations.
This model will fail for impression ads. And impression ads are important for a large number of products and services. For many things, from mundane things like consumer goods, to advanced business services, the products and services are not purchased or acted upon immediately. Impression ads just keep the name, logo image, or musical jingle, in the minds of the readers. In TV they call them viewers. In radio they call them listeners.
Obviously, in media like TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines, impression ads are about the only thing they can do. But they do work, else such media would be failing.
The web, of course, gives a new opportunity because it is, or can be, interactive. And advertisers like that because it can give them direct feedback, at least in some cases. Unfortunately, too many of them think that all their potential customers will drop everything they are doing and "buy now". The reality is, almost no one ever does "buy now". So despite the fact that the web does have the means to support interactive advertising, the model really isn't viable.
There's another reason web advertising needs to be impression based rather than interactive based. Unlike much other media, on the web, people tend to be focused on a goal, such as to access some particular information, or send some important family email. With these goals up front, they don't just drop everything to buy the latest cool product simply because one advertisement for it shows up. The few people who would, tend to be all out of money, anyway.
Google's model of Adsense where advertising is (supposedly) selected based predictions of what the readers tend to be interested in is a good one. If I tend to be interested in remote control model cars, for example, I will be often visited sites related to it, or maybe talking about it through Gmail or Google Groups. Showing ads for makers and sellers of model cars and related products and services certainly would have a higher likelihood of advertising success. It is ad dollars better spent than in showing things like feminine hygiene products to men.
But that doesn't mean I'm going to buy the product or obtain the service right then. That may come later. But when the time comes, enough impressions of a particular product, or keeping the name of a great online hobby store in front of me regularly, will go a long way towards influencing where I might visit first when I am ready to buy.
A couple months ago I saw an ad by Google for wickedlasers. I was busy at the time and went on about what I was doing. But I was done about half an hour later and remembered seeing the web site for wickedlasers. So I went and checked the place out and surveyed the lasers they had all the way up to the really nasty ones that can light cigarettes (but please, don't start smoking just because you can light up with a wickedlaser). I don't really need one of these right now. But I might in the fall. And I might buy one for a gift for a relative this coming holiday season.
That's how impression ads work. But will the original site I saw the ad on get credit for it and get paid? Since the ad was gone a half hour later, that's very doubtful. I just visited the site directly. When I'm ready to buy, I'll go directly there again.
One huge problem that could crop up with Google's cost-per-action model is that advertisers of products which work by impression only will have a free ride. They will get to make the impressions, but won't have to pay (very much) for the advertising because there won't be (much, if any) direct sales (even though they can certainly set up a web page to pretend it's possible). Think about it, if you see an ad (many times) for a new flavor of soft drink that happens to be a flavor you think you would like, would you click on the ad and make a purchase for a 6-pack of bottles to be shipped to you, or would you check the soft drink aisle the next time you make a food run?
Why does it take so long just to put honest prices on the products? Don't they have a list of what the prices are? I bet there are even new products coming in during this time.
My kids are clearly instructed that they do not give out their passwords to anyone under any circumstances. Not teachers. Not principals. Not even the police. They are told that to get those passwords they must come to me. Then I, or if necessary my lawyer, will determine if the process protection in the 5th amendment has been properly carried out.
But so far, all we get from BB is words and no actions. How long does it take to just put the honest and true "what you pay at the register" prices on all products, and tell supplies "provide us with in-store instant rebates and discounts. We are not setting shelf pricing based on main-in rebates you may offer."
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So tell me, how does the firmware know which country it is in if the OS doesn't tell it? Or does the hardware have some secret way of knowing? How is it going to get the frequencies correct, otherwise?
I don't know if there are any other wireless vendors that make things open source. If there are, or come to be, they will be the ones to get more business. And aside from that, if any OS is able to change the frequency of the device, then it will be reverse engineered, eventually. So unless the hardware has that capability locked up rock solid from any OS, it will happen despite what the manufacturers want. But it may happen more buggy, and do things like be on totally unintended frequencies.
If the hardware doesn't even allow Windows to change the frequency, then at least OpenBSD is not any worse off by not being able to. But it certainly should be able to change the channel number with the hardware deciding which channels have which frequency, and disable when the channel selected is not allowed in the country the hardware happens to be in.
Having never seen James Ketrenos, not even in pictures, I have no idea if he is fat or not. Maybe he's skinny and Theo is just trying to insult him. But if he says something that is false, and he knows it is false, then at least the liar part is true. Of course we may never know what he really knows. He could just be mistaken and skinny.
If the wiring goes through the walls, then it is the building wiring, and is subject to the code. And the six disconnect rule will apply. This article specifically says the UPSes are in a separate server room, so how do you get the power from there to the offices? The picture shows more than six, and these are the cheap office models that can't be paralleled, so they would have to be separately switched.
Unlike an office UPS sitting there in the room, there is the expectation that the wall outlets will provide the minimum power levels (e.g. 15 amps for the most common type). Just because they are orange indicating emergency backup power does not relieve this.
After the fire department has disconnected power in this building, they are going to be in for quite a shock to find that outlets in the walls of many rooms still have power if they have shut the building down according to code disconnects.
Apparently they don't (know their jobs) given the way they hooked it up. In most places where conduit is required, armored cable is acceptable. Maybe New York City otherwise prohibits armored cable. But I do know places like New York City tend to change things towards the safer direction, so I very highly doubt they have deleted the NEC requirements on available current and number of disconnects.
You can get much cheaper office space here. It's newer and looks better.
Having electrical outlets in the wall subjects them to the National Electrical Code. This code would place a number of requirements on the methods of attaching the UPSes back to the wall wiring, requirements for overcurrent protection separate from the UPS on each such circuit, minimum available current (e.g. at least 15 amps), and type of wiring used (armored cable, most certainly not anything of extension cord grade). And the most serious violation is the one that requires all power to be shut down with no more than six disconnecting operations grouped together in one location.
That office design violates the most important guideline of Feng shui, which is that when sitting at the desk, you must have the doorway in clear sight. This is also a good idea because it relieves people of the nervousness of wondering who might be standing in the doorway looking in. And besides, it gives you enough time to switch back to the desktop your real work is on.
Animated PNGs would have been very easy. The fact that the PNG format developers chose not to is perhaps at least partly to blame for the slow uptake of PNG. I never did understand why they felt it needed a whole new format. This is NOT about making something to replace MPEG. This is about making something to replace a feature of GIF (which was never any threat to MPEG).
It would have been simple to do. There could be additional chunks with repeated frames. Other optional chunks would set the time delay between the current frame and the next frame and be the default for subsequent frames unless another of these chunks appeared. Another chunk would specify repeating, possibly with a count, and posisbly with how many frames at the front to skip for the repeat point (something GIF didn't even have, but would be simple to do).
I know there were detractors that said "animations suck, we need to ban them" or "animations are just a form of abuse" or "if you want movies, use MPEG", etc. But one stated purpose of PNG was to eliminate the need for GIF (not to eliminate the need for JPEG or MPEG). It didn't meet that goal. GIF is still THE format for basic animations, whether they are abusive banner ads, or usable tools like a clock. Small images with a few frames are fully practical in GIF.
I'd be glad to adopt the unused Sun boxes.
Another way to get more efficiency is to operate the Switched-mode power supply at the higher voltage it supports, usually 220 to 250 volts. In most of the world this is already done. In North America computers are typically run on 120 volts (in Japan this is 100 volts). In general, these power supplies are more efficient by about 3% or so, on the higher voltage. Of course, be sure to flip the voltage switch if it has one, or otherwise verify that it does support the higher voltage.
For a single computer, it would not be worth adding the extra circuit to get 240 volts. But if you run several, it could be worth doing so, especially if you have so many that it exceeds the capacity of one 120 volt 15 or 20 amp circuit (you could have twice as many on the same amperage if operating at 240 volts). If you already have a circuit dedicated to the computers, that circuit could be converted from 120 volts to 240 volts by changing out the circuit breaker from a one pole to a two pole type, marking the white neutral wire with red or black tape to comply with electrical code identification requirements, attaching these wires to that new breaker (not to the neutral bus), and installing a 240 volt style outlet (NEMA 6-15R or 6-20R). These are the steps that would be used to install an outlet for a big window air conditioner (which you might need anyway with so many computers). Then you can use this power cord.
There are different kinds of UPSes that do this in different ways. The two major types used for PCs are called "line interactive offline" and "dual conversion online". The first just passes the AC power straight through to the output. If the AC power coming in goes out of range, then it flips a switch internally (relay, contactor, thyristor, etc) to supply the power from an inverter driven by the battery. The second converts the AC coming in to DC all the time, and converts that DC back to AC for output. It then does the switching in DC, or parallels the DC with the battery directly. These variations are classified as "topology" by many manufacturers.
Both of these kinds can have inverters that produce square waves, pseudo-sine waves, or very nice clean sine waves. The dual conversion type can also isolate a poor power factor (the deviation of the current wavefrom from being a sine wave in sync with the voltage) of the PC power supply from the power source. A poor power factor means the product of the average current times the average voltage (apparent power) exceeds the actual real power (average of all the products of the voltage and current and each point in time) being used, which results in reduced efficiency and other problems.
Your understanding of technology is obviously zilch, zippo, nada, nothing. And that leaves me with the feeling that your understanding of law is also generally diminished. And I presume you've never changed any software on the PC you own?
Maybe you just want to start here.
Carbon going into the air from tobacco smoke is actually carbon taken from the air in the first place (for the most part). That pales in comparison to carbon taken from deep underground isolation and releasing it into the atmosphere. The latter substantially increases the carbon load (generally in the form of carbon dioxide), while the former does not.
Similarly, burning wood to heat your home in the winter is just circulating the carbon load, whereas burning coal, gas, or petroleum products is releasing new carbon load into the air. This does differ from the above in that the tree you kill and burn might have been around for decades, holding that carbon from the atmosphere. But as soon as a replacement tree can grow to the original size, the carbon is then back out of the atmosphere. So in the long term it is just a cycle.
See: Carbon Cycle
Real programmers can change their clothes. They just keep on typing while they are doing it.
Seriously, when I was in high school, a friend of mine successfully changed out of his band uniform (he had been at dress practice before our little road trip) and into his street clothes, while driving his car on the highway. And yes, he did become a programmer.
They had all their eggs in one basket? Where's the live replica machine? Where are the redundant copies? Oh wait, this is a for-profit business. Never mind.
No, it shouldn't take half an hour. You obviously need to get a faster computer, faster disk, and configure the DMA correctly :-)
Oh, and I hid some files in your root directory for you to practice on.
Next time you see an ad for something you are interested in, instead of clicking on the ad to visit the site, just open a new window/tab and type the URL in. Now no one gets paid. Is that fraud, too? If intentional, it sure is.
This is also abusable by advertisers themselves. If they are trying to drive up web site visits, they make sure the site URL is in the ad so people will remember it and visit later (knowing that most people won't drop everything they are doing to visit right now). If they sell products away from the web (e.g. Pepsi and Coca-Cola selling drinks in stores and other places), all they need to do is build traditional impression based advertising. Almost no one will click (unless trying to do the fraud thing) and these advertisers get a free right, and the intermediary (Google, etc) and publisher (that might be you) get screwed putting up "click through" ads that are never going to be clicked on.
What we need is impression based advertising. And that's already exactly what they do on TV, radio, and bilboard advertising. Newspaper and magazine advertising is mostly like that, but cut-out coupons do some level of feedback. But such feedback doesn't pay the agency or publisher anything.
The price per impression would obviously be way less than the price per click. Impression is very much subject to the "no look fraud". And unlike TV, which assumes a viewership based on ratings that affect the advertising prices, at least the web can provide a means to measure how many impressions actually take place. What the proportion should be, I can't reliably say. But I've seen ads at various companies go for from 0.5 cent to 25 cents per click, and what little impression ads are available typically going for 1/20 to 1/50 of that, in the range of 1 cent down to 0.01 cent.
One big problem is it's all abusable on the web, whereas on places like TV it's just not always accurate (maybe no one watched all of a given episode of a show). Impression ads can be abused, too. Who reports how many impressions were made (by hosting the images)? The publisher who could inflate the logs? An intermediary that might get blocked easily? The advertiser who could deflate the logs?
This is highly abusable by the advertiser. At one end of this abuse we have advertisers that might not properly track or report the conversions. At the other end are products that such tracking really cannot be done for in the first place.
A lot of products are really the kind of thing that impression advertising is the only way to do it. Examples include grocery products you buy in a store.
What if Pepsi or Coca-Cola were to purchase advertising through Adsense and put up ads that just kept the name recognition in front of people, with no effort at doing any kind of click through or action conversion? They would, in effect, get a free ride, and the publisher sites would get nil.
I am often seeing ads on web page that do interest me, but not so much as to divert my attention. I just remember what it is and go visit the site later. In effect my action as a viewer is quite the opposite of click-fraud. Intsead of overpayment, my action results in underpayment. But that's just the way it is because by the time I have finished the current quest and decide to pursue what I saw in the ad, it's gone.
Wikipedia is too open. I think it would discourage the vandalism a bit more if it first required logging in as a registered username to make changes. And maybe in addition to that some kind of moderation system could apply to changes made to controversial articles. And a new idea to add would be "rebuttal articles", different than a talk/discussion article, parallels each controversial article where differing points of view can be placed with less limitations.
This model will fail for impression ads. And impression ads are important for a large number of products and services. For many things, from mundane things like consumer goods, to advanced business services, the products and services are not purchased or acted upon immediately. Impression ads just keep the name, logo image, or musical jingle, in the minds of the readers. In TV they call them viewers. In radio they call them listeners.
Obviously, in media like TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines, impression ads are about the only thing they can do. But they do work, else such media would be failing.
The web, of course, gives a new opportunity because it is, or can be, interactive. And advertisers like that because it can give them direct feedback, at least in some cases. Unfortunately, too many of them think that all their potential customers will drop everything they are doing and "buy now". The reality is, almost no one ever does "buy now". So despite the fact that the web does have the means to support interactive advertising, the model really isn't viable.
There's another reason web advertising needs to be impression based rather than interactive based. Unlike much other media, on the web, people tend to be focused on a goal, such as to access some particular information, or send some important family email. With these goals up front, they don't just drop everything to buy the latest cool product simply because one advertisement for it shows up. The few people who would, tend to be all out of money, anyway.
Google's model of Adsense where advertising is (supposedly) selected based predictions of what the readers tend to be interested in is a good one. If I tend to be interested in remote control model cars, for example, I will be often visited sites related to it, or maybe talking about it through Gmail or Google Groups. Showing ads for makers and sellers of model cars and related products and services certainly would have a higher likelihood of advertising success. It is ad dollars better spent than in showing things like feminine hygiene products to men.
But that doesn't mean I'm going to buy the product or obtain the service right then. That may come later. But when the time comes, enough impressions of a particular product, or keeping the name of a great online hobby store in front of me regularly, will go a long way towards influencing where I might visit first when I am ready to buy.
A couple months ago I saw an ad by Google for wickedlasers. I was busy at the time and went on about what I was doing. But I was done about half an hour later and remembered seeing the web site for wickedlasers. So I went and checked the place out and surveyed the lasers they had all the way up to the really nasty ones that can light cigarettes (but please, don't start smoking just because you can light up with a wickedlaser). I don't really need one of these right now. But I might in the fall. And I might buy one for a gift for a relative this coming holiday season.
That's how impression ads work. But will the original site I saw the ad on get credit for it and get paid? Since the ad was gone a half hour later, that's very doubtful. I just visited the site directly. When I'm ready to buy, I'll go directly there again.
One huge problem that could crop up with Google's cost-per-action model is that advertisers of products which work by impression only will have a free ride. They will get to make the impressions, but won't have to pay (very much) for the advertising because there won't be (much, if any) direct sales (even though they can certainly set up a web page to pretend it's possible). Think about it, if you see an ad (many times) for a new flavor of soft drink that happens to be a flavor you think you would like, would you click on the ad and make a purchase for a 6-pack of bottles to be shipped to you, or would you check the soft drink aisle the next time you make a food run?
Why does it take so long just to put honest prices on the products? Don't they have a list of what the prices are? I bet there are even new products coming in during this time.
My kids are clearly instructed that they do not give out their passwords to anyone under any circumstances. Not teachers. Not principals. Not even the police. They are told that to get those passwords they must come to me. Then I, or if necessary my lawyer, will determine if the process protection in the 5th amendment has been properly carried out.
It wasn't free. It cost you time and the hassle of tracking to be sure you didn't get ripped off.
Want a free ink-jet printer?
But so far, all we get from BB is words and no actions. How long does it take to just put the honest and true "what you pay at the register" prices on all products, and tell supplies "provide us with in-store instant rebates and discounts. We are not setting shelf pricing based on main-in rebates you may offer."