Like solar panels, wind becomes more of an economically viable alternative when you are trying to power a remote site and the cost to bring power lines in is prohibitive.
Co-incidentally, a remote site also means that there are fewer neighbors to complain about the installation.
I dunno, as more tools to verify code become available, businesses will hire cheaper and sloppier programmers and just force all the code through the verifiers and hope for the best.
These aren't tools to make the best code better, they are tools to make the worst code okay.
My befuddlement isn't the specifics of how to do this, merely that advertisers haven't done much of anything in this area yet.
But your deadlock scenario is easy to deal with. After 5 seconds just let them have the rest of the html page.
Also it doesn't have to be enforced page by page...if they wander about the web site and never load any ads you can give them an interstitial or some text ads instead, or go ahead or start denying content after N ad-blocked pages. Maybe check that it's not a spider first!
Hate to put ideas in their heads but if companies really cared about making sure their ads are seen, I'm sure there is a way on the backend to check that a browser at least requests the ad from the server before delivering the content part of the page. I don't mean interstitials, I mean as the page is loading, the server checks that you've requested banner.gif before it gives you all the paragraphs in the article.
With css or javascript/DOM you can even position the text/ads however you like regardsless of the order they are downloaded.
Obviously, one could write a browser plug-in that faked a banner ad request, but you've at least taken away the download-speedup incentive part of the motivation for ad-blocking.
Hate to put any ideas in their heads, but odds are that a lot of hacks/cracks are compiled with visual studio, and on machines with WGA or other identifiable data.
In away I'm simply amazed that.exe and.dll files don't already have embedded in them a little tag that gives MSFT a clue who compiled it, what time zone, what IP address, what domain, what ISP/routes it uses, maybe even wifi connection history (if it's on the move).
Screw joining the clique. Start reading some management books and drive right over them. Any moderately talented, somewhat ambitious woman can make management in a year. If someone is blocking your progress, call them out and/or get another job. You don't have to sit still and you don't have to pander to a bunch of IT geeks.
Since this is a real cost to your business, I would give your customers the option of what to do with the original after you get the data off of the cd or dvd:
option 1: throw it away option 2: return it to customer immediately option 3: throw it away, but burn a new cd at job completion and return that option 4: save it until job completion, then return original
then assign modest fee (postage) for option 2, a somewhat punitive add-on cost to option 3, and a really nasty charge for option 4
i imagine that currently a lot of your customers get the cd back a few months later and just throw it out themselves anyway so the effort is wasted a lot of the time. If they really wanted a copy for themselves they can just burn an extra disc in the first place and save the postage.
I'm thinking it's not so much the company going to the spammer, but the spammer going to the company, perhaps claiming to be a more legit ad-placement agency than he actually is. If he can fake a few logs or can figure out where the spot checking is done he can charge for hits unrelated to actual click-through rates. He's a spammer remember so he's probably capable of lying and deception.
Ad campaigns usually try for lots of avenues in parallel--TV, radio, banner, word of mouth, whatever. While I agree a lot of companies track each click and referrer tag, a lot of ad managers won't get questioned on the details so long as the sales overall are "meeting the numbers" or better.
>> At least a tiny percent of the people who get this are acting on >> them. It must be paying off for someone.
It may just be "advertising dollars".
Spending on ads is seldom tracked for effectiveness or ROI. As long as the main product is selling, a percentage goes back into the ad budget and if a spammer can get his finger in that pie and justify it with some eyeballs/hits he can keep whatever he can skim off the top.
It's possible that *nobody* responds to spam anymore, but it's just accidentally profitable for spammers because the cost is lost in the noise on $100M+ ad budgets for some major products.
Hard to say w/o access to insurance company data, but there are several possibilities, take your pick:
* older people tend to be retired and not commute on highways--so more of their driving is low-speed around town stuff, on top of which they naturally drive slower than other traffic. that doesn't mean they get in fewer accidents but it does mean that the accidents they get into will involve less severe injuries and be cheaper for insurance companies to cover
* some subset of old people go to bed earlier and so would not be driving at night, which is somewhat more dangerous in general
* in my observation, old people tend not to go to bars and drive drunk on friday and saturday nights. in my observation they are as comfortable drinking at home and don't need to drive afterward
* old people as a group have been subject to darwinian selection...foolhardy risk-takers have been removed from the pool earlier in life. what remains may be a more sedentary, less aggressive population less prone to tailgating or agressive driving.
* they actually have a lot of experience and can avoid or mitigate a lot of situations that might cause panic in a teen or young adult.
* they may buy larger, safer, more comfortable cars
* they may simply have more time to seek out favorable insurance companies.
There aren't any good reviews or tests for scaler accuracy so it's nice to have one each in your TV, receiver and DVD player so you can pick the one you like best.
If you've assembled your system slowly over the years there is some chance that newer scaler chips are better than what you have now.
Personally, I'd rather have a good scaler in my monitor or receiver so I can benefit from it on all sources, not just DVD.
sorry to hear that. a couple viruses down the road and the machines may well be toast, especially in a contagious environment like a school computer lab.
on the bright side... * as the installed base of w98 declines, many of the donated computers that schools get in the future should be w2k capable * java-based educational software is starting to trickle out which at least trades microsoft's vendor lock-in for sun's vendor lock-in
You should view this as an opportunity to get free training in java from your employer, which you can list on your resume in about 6 months, which is about when your job will be offshored after the IT dept implodes.
I'll rarely buy the initial single disk offer because I know that there might be a double disk offer coming down the road.
Indeed, but not just that. The whole way films are gradually released to different markets, re-released, director's cuts, extras, and whatnot is just a way to for them to ask people to pay for the same basic thing three or four times. And people like you are saying "no thanks".
As others have pointed out in this topic, a lot of people want a version the studios don't even release! A no-extras, no-menus full-resolution letterbox DVD. You have to roll your own to get that.
When they make a movie, they have dozens of marketing experts analyze the movie's plotline, product placements, advertising broken down by demographic and geographic market.
would it be too much effort to break into categories this piracy market instead of just lumping it all together as "bad"?
i'm not very good at marketing, but even I can see that pirates fall into some categories...
* the duplicator factories that get the artwork and labelling to match exactly so they can inject it into the distribution chain
* the guy that crouches in the theater hiding a mini-DV camcorder to get a copy before it goes to DVD
* weird bored guy who has a netflix account and a bunch of really big hard drives. rips the DVD's and then never really watches them again.
* tivo/dvr dude who records movies from HBO/cinemax and moves them to his PC for later viewing
* people who download movies from mysterious torrent sites
Anyway, what I'm saying is that some of the copying that goes on in these demographics is sort of paid for (HBO, netflix) and is after the dvd release anyway, so the MPAA should chill. Other copying (projectionist or guy with the camcorder) is pre-dvd release and HAPPENS IN THE DAMN THEATER so they should be able to get control of that situation if they didn't hire the minimum number of minimum wage ushers possible. Some of the people doing the copying are just being video pack-rats and just feel warm and fuzzy having access to 3000 movies...in my experience these people often buy plenty of DVDs on top of the downloads.
So no great news here, the MPAA and movie studios are stupid and don't understand their non-paying customers any better than they understand their paying customers.
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Like solar panels, wind becomes more of an economically viable alternative when you are trying to power a remote site and the cost to bring power lines in is prohibitive.
Co-incidentally, a remote site also means that there are fewer neighbors to complain about the installation.
I dunno, as more tools to verify code become available, businesses will hire cheaper and sloppier programmers and just force all the code through the verifiers and hope for the best.
These aren't tools to make the best code better, they are tools to make the worst code okay.
My befuddlement isn't the specifics of how to do this, merely that advertisers haven't done much of anything in this area yet.
But your deadlock scenario is easy to deal with. After 5 seconds just let them have the rest of the html page.
Also it doesn't have to be enforced page by page...if they wander about the web site and never load any ads you can give them an interstitial or some text ads instead, or go ahead or start denying content after N ad-blocked pages. Maybe check that it's not a spider first!
Hate to put ideas in their heads but if companies really cared about making sure their ads are seen, I'm sure there is a way on the backend to check that a browser at least requests the ad from the server before delivering the content part of the page. I don't mean interstitials, I mean as the page is loading, the server checks that you've requested banner.gif before it gives you all the paragraphs in the article.
With css or javascript/DOM you can even position the text/ads however you like regardsless of the order they are downloaded.
Obviously, one could write a browser plug-in that faked a banner ad request, but you've at least taken away the download-speedup incentive part of the motivation for ad-blocking.
Hate to put any ideas in their heads, but odds are that a lot of hacks/cracks are compiled with visual studio, and on machines with WGA or other identifiable data.
.exe and .dll files don't already have embedded in them a little tag that gives MSFT a clue who compiled it, what time zone, what IP address, what domain, what ISP/routes it uses, maybe even wifi connection history (if it's on the move).
In away I'm simply amazed that
Screw joining the clique. Start reading some management books and drive right over them. Any moderately talented, somewhat ambitious woman can make management in a year. If someone is blocking your progress, call them out and/or get another job. You don't have to sit still and you don't have to pander to a bunch of IT geeks.
Since this is a real cost to your business, I would give your customers the option of what to do with the original after you get the data off of the cd or dvd:
option 1: throw it away
option 2: return it to customer immediately
option 3: throw it away, but burn a new cd at job completion and return that
option 4: save it until job completion, then return original
then assign modest fee (postage) for option 2, a somewhat punitive add-on cost to option 3, and a really nasty charge for option 4
i imagine that currently a lot of your customers get the cd back a few months later and just throw it out themselves anyway so the effort is wasted a lot of the time. If they really wanted a copy for themselves they can just burn an extra disc in the first place and save the postage.
I'm with you on the rest, but I have to take exception to this one:
> Star Trek would have its own cable channel. Or two.
check out the program listings for Spike TV and G4.
it's not 24/7 but there are multiple episodes per day in re-runs.
> No wonder that company [digital] went under.
m pany#Closing_DEC.27s_business
There's more to the story. It was actually a combination of several spin-offs and a buyout by Compaq, which was in turn bought out by Hewlett-Packard.
Check out wikipedia for a nice summary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Co
I'm thinking it's not so much the company going to the spammer, but the spammer going to the company, perhaps claiming to be a more legit ad-placement agency than he actually is. If he can fake a few logs or can figure out where the spot checking is done he can charge for hits unrelated to actual click-through rates. He's a spammer remember so he's probably capable of lying and deception.
Ad campaigns usually try for lots of avenues in parallel--TV, radio, banner, word of mouth, whatever. While I agree a lot of companies track each click and referrer tag, a lot of ad managers won't get questioned on the details so long as the sales overall are "meeting the numbers" or better.
>> At least a tiny percent of the people who get this are acting on
>> them. It must be paying off for someone.
It may just be "advertising dollars".
Spending on ads is seldom tracked for effectiveness or ROI. As long as the main product is selling, a percentage goes back into the ad budget and if a spammer can get his finger in that pie and justify it with some eyeballs/hits he can keep whatever he can skim off the top.
It's possible that *nobody* responds to spam anymore, but it's just accidentally profitable for spammers because the cost is lost in the noise on $100M+ ad budgets for some major products.
Just a theory.
Maybe move the work area into a nearby cubicle.
Lot of server rooms have no accomodations...it's for servers after all.
I'm going to guess Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science.
I do not find your examples of critical management expertise compelling.
Hard to say w/o access to insurance company data, but there are several possibilities, take your pick:
* older people tend to be retired and not commute on highways--so more of their driving is low-speed around town stuff, on top of which they naturally drive slower than other traffic. that doesn't mean they get in fewer accidents but it does mean that the accidents they get into will involve less severe injuries and be cheaper for insurance companies to cover
* some subset of old people go to bed earlier and so would not be driving at night, which is somewhat more dangerous in general
* in my observation, old people tend not to go to bars and drive drunk on friday and saturday nights. in my observation they are as comfortable drinking at home and don't need to drive afterward
* old people as a group have been subject to darwinian selection...foolhardy risk-takers have been removed from the pool earlier in life. what remains may be a more sedentary, less aggressive population less prone to tailgating or agressive driving.
* they actually have a lot of experience and can avoid or mitigate a lot of situations that might cause panic in a teen or young adult.
* they may buy larger, safer, more comfortable cars
* they may simply have more time to seek out favorable insurance companies.
Okay, so CCD's are retroreflective...do CMOS sensors have the same property?
There aren't any good reviews or tests for scaler accuracy so it's nice to have one each in your TV, receiver and DVD player so you can pick the one you like best.
If you've assembled your system slowly over the years there is some chance that newer scaler chips are better than what you have now.
Personally, I'd rather have a good scaler in my monitor or receiver so I can benefit from it on all sources, not just DVD.
if nothing else, the use of desalinated water for municipal supplies makes more "regular" water available for farming.
is an ellipsoid.
is that too much to ask?
sorry to hear that.
a couple viruses down the road and the machines may well be toast, especially in a contagious environment like a school computer lab.
on the bright side...
* as the installed base of w98 declines, many of the donated computers that schools get in the future should be w2k capable
* java-based educational software is starting to trickle out which at least trades microsoft's vendor lock-in for sun's vendor lock-in
anyway, good luck to you my friend
try a linux distro on those older machines before you throw them out.
the only reservation i have is regarding spam and viruses. should it make you less of a common carrier if you refused to transport malware?
You should view this as an opportunity to get free training in java from your employer, which you can list on your resume in about 6 months, which is about when your job will be offshored after the IT dept implodes.
I'll rarely buy the initial single disk offer because I know that there might be a double disk offer coming down the road.
Indeed, but not just that. The whole way films are gradually released to different markets, re-released, director's cuts, extras, and whatnot is just a way to for them to ask people to pay for the same basic thing three or four times. And people like you are saying "no thanks".
As others have pointed out in this topic, a lot of people want a version the studios don't even release! A no-extras, no-menus full-resolution letterbox DVD. You have to roll your own to get that.
When they make a movie, they have dozens of marketing experts analyze the movie's plotline, product placements, advertising broken down by demographic and geographic market.
would it be too much effort to break into categories this piracy market instead of just lumping it all together as "bad"?
i'm not very good at marketing, but even I can see that pirates fall into some categories...
* the duplicator factories that get the artwork and labelling to match exactly so they can inject it into the distribution chain
* the guy that crouches in the theater hiding a mini-DV camcorder to get a copy before it goes to DVD
* weird bored guy who has a netflix account and a bunch of really big hard drives. rips the DVD's and then never really watches them again.
* tivo/dvr dude who records movies from HBO/cinemax and moves them to his PC for later viewing
* people who download movies from mysterious torrent sites
Anyway, what I'm saying is that some of the copying that goes on in these demographics is sort of paid for (HBO, netflix) and is after the dvd release anyway, so the MPAA should chill. Other copying (projectionist or guy with the camcorder) is pre-dvd release and HAPPENS IN THE DAMN THEATER so they should be able to get control of that situation if they didn't hire the minimum number of minimum wage ushers possible. Some of the people doing the copying are just being video pack-rats and just feel warm and fuzzy having access to 3000 movies...in my experience these people often buy plenty of DVDs on top of the downloads.
So no great news here, the MPAA and movie studios are stupid and don't understand their non-paying customers any better than they understand their paying customers.