You're not doing anything wrong.:) I'm a long time slashdotter, left wing, privacy type guy. Nobody has to listen to me, but I do use FireFox, turn off ActiveX, regularly clean my cookie jar, etc.
I just dont see the hubbub about cookies. I wasn't saying you shouldn't delete them, I was simply pointing out that there wasn't much of a point in doing so.
If you dont want advertising, block the requests/hosts! Deleting cookies simply isn't an effective way of keeping advertisers at bay. We don't expect users to have cookies (most ad servers will do an intial cookie check to see if you do) - its just that, IF were going to serve you, and IF you're going to accept the request, cookies really make life easier for the end user.
I dont expect people to believe me, but thats my 2 cents as a vet in this industry and an open source, left wing, privacy minded developer. Don't want advertising? Use ad block!:)
Lower tier advertisers who are concentrating on reach (how many users see their ads) and branding (how often you see their ads) usually do not place frequency capping on their ads. However, higher paying campaigns (such as many of the ones running on the leader board at the top of/. for example) DO use frequency capping. One impression per hour or per 24 hours is a common cap.
Obviously, those mortgages people go for the 'throw as much shit as possible at the user and see what sticks.' But you can bet your behind that the MSNs, ThinkGeeks, Ebays of the world frequency cap their campaigns in order to limit the amount of 'wasted' impressions they pay for.
I dont blame you for not trusting advertisers. The bottom of the barrel in advertising do try anything they possibly can you get you; who cares if they annoy you in the process. However, top tier advertisers are actually quite meticulous about optimizing their campaigns through frequency capping, unique click counting, geographic targeting, and channel targeting.
Thanks for the insults! I think they really helped in making your point.
One small problem tho. You're dead wrong if you're running an ad network. There are some very good business reasons for using cookies to tie the click to the impression, but I'd rather not enlighten you since you're not terribly interested in anything other than:
a) insulting me b) noting that you block all ad requests, making your input to this discussion even LESS relevant (since the original discussion was about deleting cookies, not blocking ad requests.)
Man, I have no problem with anyone blocking ad requests. I'm sure you'd all love it if I got mad or thought that blocking ad requests was wrong, but hey, if you can do it, more power to you. I dont think your indebted to view advertising, although you clearly wish I did. My only point was that IF you view internet advertising, its in the end users' interest to use cookies.. blocking them simply makes the user experience even WORSE.
However, if you wanna take a stab at it, try and figure out why using cookies is better than parsing URLs. I'll give you some credibility if you can; otherwise, I'll assume you're a techy end user who is a little out of his industry element.
> all WEB internet traffic is filtered through privoxy.. therefore you can try to show any of us here the same ad over and over all you want. they do not get through and they do not get displayed.
Where, in my parent post, did I say anything about blocking the actual ad requests? I have no problem with this, and if you do it, more power to you. I was talking STRICLY about cleaning cookies as a means of fighting advertisers.
> BTW, you cant track any of us in this company by IP. because it looks like there is one IP address that is surfing a whole crapload of places.
Again, my p[arent post goes to great lengths to point out that I know that, and when we cant use cookies, we use IP addresses, which are inherently less accurate for the very reason you repeat for me.
Its funny, the combative tone some of these replies take. I have no problem with anyone blocking ad servers via proxies.. go for it. I only meant to point out that relying on the deletion of cookies to thrawt advertisers is not a terribly effective tactic. Proxying out requests to ad servers and networks works wonderfully; but if we dont serve an ad to you, why the hell would we want to track you? To us, you wouldn't exist, which is fine by us and you.
Maybe you didn't read the above post. They arn't wasting their money; they're spending according to what they're getting. Less accurate/informative tracking = less money. So you're not making them waste their money by blocking cookies; most of the fallout of not tracking by cookies is borne by the user.
I just realized that point #2 (we can't tie cookie data to private data) implies that we want to. What I meant to say is that while some fear that we can do this if you leave cookies on, those fears are unfounded.
Never really understood why users dont like tracking cookies.
A few things happen if you dont have cookies, the most important being that we can still do pretty much everything we can do with a cookie, only with less accuracy (since the fallback is to track ads seen/clicked via your IP address):
- we can't implement frequency capping very well. this means you have a much higher chance of seeing the same damn ad, again and again and again. you like?
- we can't tie cookie data to private user data. I'm sure some people try to (although everyone involved, including the user, would have to jump through some pretty annoying hoopes, which is why advertisers dont even bother trying. Beyond the fact that such an act is against virtually every privacy policy in existance, the chances of this happening is slim to none. I don't buy the tin foil hat fears here.
- we can't send you to the right clickthru! I know we dont click on banners very often, but when you do, wouldn't you rather go to the correct clickthru rather than an the clickthru beloning to somebody else's impression who is behind the same firewall as you?
I hate advertising and spyware as much as the next guy, but ad network tracking cookies are harmless. Honestly, why are people scared of them? The more accurately we can report ROI to advertisers, the less annoying advertising becomes since advertisers are able to optmize their campaigns to ensure that they're not wasting impressions on folks who are less likely to care about them.
Is this simply a 'if they cant track me, maybe internet advertising will do away' thing? Because we can still track you, by IP.. only the user ends up paying for our less accurate user tracking. I've been working in this industry for a long time, and I *hate* advertising. I honestly believe that cookie tracking does the user an immense favour by allowing us to keep the signal to noise ratio between user and ad traffic higher.
One thing for sure is that internet advertising isn't going away, and sites that you like (this one included) stand a much better chance of staying subscription-free if the advertiser pays/. more for every impression or click. More optimized delivery = more money for publisher = less ads for you.
1600 we decide that arists actually own their own creations but that it MUST be in the public domain within a short amount of time.
now - copyright extends to 90 years beyond the death of the author, but is indefinate if produced as a 'work for hire' for a commerial purpose.
Its black and white. What we perceive as 'normal' protection for copyright holders is rediculous. I don't think ANYBODY wants the abolition of creators' rights, but the parent poster knows that while production costs have gone down, our cost hasn't. Why? Crazier copyright laws, and crazier copyright enforcement. Its basically collusion of a free market by using lobbyists.
"But somehow, despite pleading for our collective jobs and lives, we're still a huge, powerful industry capable of paying for big time lawyers to write THE BOMB cease and desist letters... Yo mamma! Plus, we employ a lot of people! Think about the children!"
Like it or not, the big fish MS forgot to do this and had their domain handed back to them in a nice manner by some dude who was clearly too harmonious with nature.
Hey, I think people should know when their domains are expiring; maybe somebody could make a cute 'whois' plugin for firefox that tells you when the tab's->URL's->domain expires. I can imagine some marketers monitor expiration dates, and register them the moment they expire... for no other reason than some random name script generates the domainname names that they monitor.
Its the Hedge Wars all over again. Only now it can happen in real time.
So I ultimate say screw this. 5 days is not nearly enough time.
Any game thats heavily loaded with menus will be dreamy to interface with using a touch screen.
Context sensitive menus and controls.
I could go on and on. I personally think Touch Screen capability is one of those things EVERY system would have if the game developer had control over your display hardware.
Plus, think of all the games with 'design your own logo/grafik' for customized characters, models, etc. With touch screen, that kind of feature actually becomes useful!
I think you'll find out soon enough how developers will make use of the touch screen; not all will, of course, but I can think of a myriad of applications, not the least of which is context sensitive interfaces for RPGs, racers, action games.. etc. The maximum number of GUI elements a game presents to the player is wholy independent of what physical interface the player is using. Basic controller... well, up to 10 fingers. Touch screen? The possibilities...
There is one in the eaton centre. Why is this news? Its always more expensive there, and its not like real AV guys work there (the trendy haircuts are a dead give-away.)
Mind you, I like to go window shopping there to see what Sony is trotting out, and then go somewhere else to actually buy.
well, I do, but I was wrong on both counts, so touche
a) you're right (tho the 8cm discs arn't as readily available as blank DVDs, you're right, its not tough to get ahold of black media of this variety)
b) you're right, but media is read from the outside in. xbox does this too, apparently, both companies choosing to do so in order to discourage piracy?
I love the big N to death, but remember, this is the company that made sure its last media format was
a) nonstandard in size b) spinning the opposite way of virtually every other optical drive out there
just to discourage armchair hacking that much more.
I think in the world of hacks, Nintendo isn't a particularly attractive target for many enthousiasts due to the streamlined and single-purposed nature of their hardware, and as a gamer, I really don't mind. The Gamecube is a game machine and isn't really suited to be much more. The XBox is a freakin PC sold at a loss, and deserved to be hacked.. lets face it, hacking these days tends often tends to involve just tricking the hardware into doing what it was capable of doing in the first place. Hacking as a form of finding new creative uses for existing technology doesn't seem to make the news as often as hacking for the purpose of circumventing manufacturer-imposed limits on usage of hardware.
It really does bother me when companies cripple their own products in order to preserve the market share of their other offerings. Just make the best thing at the cheapest price, please. I think those are the two distinct intentions behind hacking (creativity and unlocking crippled functionality) and there isn't much reason on either count to do it on Nintendo platforms.
Mind you, I guess that might be changing, what with Warp Pipe and all.
I don't know if it existsin current corperate usage policy software systems, but surely it can't be difficult for software create rules to block both:
x.com and x.com.what_ever_new_p2p_producturl.com:0000 and x.com.foo.com:4352 and x.com.bar.com:4352 etc...... while only having to provide the original x.com AND a list of known p2p caching URLs in such a product's interface.
I think its simply pathetic that Adobe or MS honestly cares so much about its ability to profit from Zimbabwe that its willing to plunge these nations into the technological dark ages instead of just letting the country get familiar and locked into its products through piracy. It's the usual mistake that authority figures often make; becoming detachted with what gave them the monopoly to begin with.
Photoshop, Windows are both decent products in their own right, but so many of these apps wouldn't have hit the tipping point of adoption had they not been piratable.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not doing anything wrong. :) I'm a long time slashdotter, left wing, privacy type guy. Nobody has to listen to me, but I do use FireFox, turn off ActiveX, regularly clean my cookie jar, etc.
:)
I just dont see the hubbub about cookies. I wasn't saying you shouldn't delete them, I was simply pointing out that there wasn't much of a point in doing so.
If you dont want advertising, block the requests/hosts! Deleting cookies simply isn't an effective way of keeping advertisers at bay. We don't expect users to have cookies (most ad servers will do an intial cookie check to see if you do) - its just that, IF were going to serve you, and IF you're going to accept the request, cookies really make life easier for the end user.
I dont expect people to believe me, but thats my 2 cents as a vet in this industry and an open source, left wing, privacy minded developer. Don't want advertising? Use ad block!
Lower tier advertisers who are concentrating on reach (how many users see their ads) and branding (how often you see their ads) usually do not place frequency capping on their ads. However, higher paying campaigns (such as many of the ones running on the leader board at the top of /. for example) DO use frequency capping. One impression per hour or per 24 hours is a common cap.
Obviously, those mortgages people go for the 'throw as much shit as possible at the user and see what sticks.' But you can bet your behind that the MSNs, ThinkGeeks, Ebays of the world frequency cap their campaigns in order to limit the amount of 'wasted' impressions they pay for.
I dont blame you for not trusting advertisers. The bottom of the barrel in advertising do try anything they possibly can you get you; who cares if they annoy you in the process. However, top tier advertisers are actually quite meticulous about optimizing their campaigns through frequency capping, unique click counting, geographic targeting, and channel targeting.
Thanks for the insults! I think they really helped in making your point.
.. blocking them simply makes the user experience even WORSE.
One small problem tho. You're dead wrong if you're running an ad network. There are some very good business reasons for using cookies to tie the click to the impression, but I'd rather not enlighten you since you're not terribly interested in anything other than:
a) insulting me
b) noting that you block all ad requests, making your input to this discussion even LESS relevant (since the original discussion was about deleting cookies, not blocking ad requests.)
Man, I have no problem with anyone blocking ad requests. I'm sure you'd all love it if I got mad or thought that blocking ad requests was wrong, but hey, if you can do it, more power to you. I dont think your indebted to view advertising, although you clearly wish I did. My only point was that IF you view internet advertising, its in the end users' interest to use cookies
However, if you wanna take a stab at it, try and figure out why using cookies is better than parsing URLs. I'll give you some credibility if you can; otherwise, I'll assume you're a techy end user who is a little out of his industry element.
Oh my. Where to begin.
.. go for it. I only meant to point out that relying on the deletion of cookies to thrawt advertisers is not a terribly effective tactic. Proxying out requests to ad servers and networks works wonderfully; but if we dont serve an ad to you, why the hell would we want to track you? To us, you wouldn't exist, which is fine by us and you.
> all WEB internet traffic is filtered through privoxy.. therefore you can try to show any of us here the same ad over and over all you want. they do not get through and they do not get displayed.
Where, in my parent post, did I say anything about blocking the actual ad requests? I have no problem with this, and if you do it, more power to you. I was talking STRICLY about cleaning cookies as a means of fighting advertisers.
> BTW, you cant track any of us in this company by IP. because it looks like there is one IP address that is surfing a whole crapload of places.
Again, my p[arent post goes to great lengths to point out that I know that, and when we cant use cookies, we use IP addresses, which are inherently less accurate for the very reason you repeat for me.
Its funny, the combative tone some of these replies take. I have no problem with anyone blocking ad servers via proxies
Maybe you didn't read the above post. They arn't wasting their money; they're spending according to what they're getting. Less accurate/informative tracking = less money. So you're not making them waste their money by blocking cookies; most of the fallout of not tracking by cookies is borne by the user.
Which is a much saner way of fighting the machine. Go for it! If you don't want advertising, more power to ya!
I just realized that point #2 (we can't tie cookie data to private data) implies that we want to. What I meant to say is that while some fear that we can do this if you leave cookies on, those fears are unfounded.
Never really understood why users dont like tracking cookies.
.. only the user ends up paying for our less accurate user tracking. I've been working in this industry for a long time, and I *hate* advertising. I honestly believe that cookie tracking does the user an immense favour by allowing us to keep the signal to noise ratio between user and ad traffic higher.
/. more for every impression or click. More optimized delivery = more money for publisher = less ads for you.
A few things happen if you dont have cookies, the most important being that we can still do pretty much everything we can do with a cookie, only with less accuracy (since the fallback is to track ads seen/clicked via your IP address):
- we can't implement frequency capping very well. this means you have a much higher chance of seeing the same damn ad, again and again and again. you like?
- we can't tie cookie data to private user data. I'm sure some people try to (although everyone involved, including the user, would have to jump through some pretty annoying hoopes, which is why advertisers dont even bother trying. Beyond the fact that such an act is against virtually every privacy policy in existance, the chances of this happening is slim to none. I don't buy the tin foil hat fears here.
- we can't send you to the right clickthru! I know we dont click on banners very often, but when you do, wouldn't you rather go to the correct clickthru rather than an the clickthru beloning to somebody else's impression who is behind the same firewall as you?
I hate advertising and spyware as much as the next guy, but ad network tracking cookies are harmless. Honestly, why are people scared of them? The more accurately we can report ROI to advertisers, the less annoying advertising becomes since advertisers are able to optmize their campaigns to ensure that they're not wasting impressions on folks who are less likely to care about them.
Is this simply a 'if they cant track me, maybe internet advertising will do away' thing? Because we can still track you, by IP
One thing for sure is that internet advertising isn't going away, and sites that you like (this one included) stand a much better chance of staying subscription-free if the advertiser pays
dates are appox
1600 we decide that arists actually own their own creations but that it MUST be in the public domain within a short amount of time.
now - copyright extends to 90 years beyond the death of the author, but is indefinate if produced as a 'work for hire' for a commerial purpose.
Its black and white. What we perceive as 'normal' protection for copyright holders is rediculous. I don't think ANYBODY wants the abolition of creators' rights, but the parent poster knows that while production costs have gone down, our cost hasn't. Why? Crazier copyright laws, and crazier copyright enforcement. Its basically collusion of a free market by using lobbyists.
"But somehow, despite pleading for our collective jobs and lives, we're still a huge, powerful industry capable of paying for big time lawyers to write THE BOMB cease and desist letters ... Yo mamma! Plus, we employ a lot of people! Think about the children!"
> women came later
If they were anything like my exgirlfriend, they came much, much later!
Now only do Lego nerds not get laid very often, but now their creations get laid more than they do!
(Dislciamer: I am a lego nerd, yes I do get laid, but as theonion.com helpfully points out, stereotypes are a real time saver.)
Hey, in the states it costs millions if taxpayer dollars just to get a tube re-inserted!
Like it or not, the big fish MS forgot to do this and had their domain handed back to them in a nice manner by some dude who was clearly too harmonious with nature.
... for no other reason than some random name script generates the domainname names that they monitor.
Hey, I think people should know when their domains are expiring; maybe somebody could make a cute 'whois' plugin for firefox that tells you when the tab's->URL's->domain expires. I can imagine some marketers monitor expiration dates, and register them the moment they expire
Its the Hedge Wars all over again. Only now it can happen in real time.
So I ultimate say screw this. 5 days is not nearly enough time.
Actually, they arn't releasing GTA, Halo or Grand Turismo for the DS.
Is originality really that integral to the success of a product?
One word: RPGs
.. etc. The maximum number of GUI elements a game presents to the player is wholy independent of what physical interface the player is using. Basic controller ... well, up to 10 fingers. Touch screen? The possibilities ...
Any game thats heavily loaded with menus will be dreamy to interface with using a touch screen.
Context sensitive menus and controls.
I could go on and on. I personally think Touch Screen capability is one of those things EVERY system would have if the game developer had control over your display hardware.
Plus, think of all the games with 'design your own logo/grafik' for customized characters, models, etc. With touch screen, that kind of feature actually becomes useful!
I think you'll find out soon enough how developers will make use of the touch screen; not all will, of course, but I can think of a myriad of applications, not the least of which is context sensitive interfaces for RPGs, racers, action games
There is one in the eaton centre. Why is this news? Its always more expensive there, and its not like real AV guys work there (the trendy haircuts are a dead give-away.)
Mind you, I like to go window shopping there to see what Sony is trotting out, and then go somewhere else to actually buy.
well, I do, but I was wrong on both counts, so touche
a) you're right (tho the 8cm discs arn't as readily available as blank DVDs, you're right, its not tough to get ahold of black media of this variety)
b) you're right, but media is read from the outside in. xbox does this too, apparently, both companies choosing to do so in order to discourage piracy?
doh
I love the big N to death, but remember, this is the company that made sure its last media format was
.. lets face it, hacking these days tends often tends to involve just tricking the hardware into doing what it was capable of doing in the first place. Hacking as a form of finding new creative uses for existing technology doesn't seem to make the news as often as hacking for the purpose of circumventing manufacturer-imposed limits on usage of hardware.
a) nonstandard in size
b) spinning the opposite way of virtually every other optical drive out there
just to discourage armchair hacking that much more.
I think in the world of hacks, Nintendo isn't a particularly attractive target for many enthousiasts due to the streamlined and single-purposed nature of their hardware, and as a gamer, I really don't mind. The Gamecube is a game machine and isn't really suited to be much more. The XBox is a freakin PC sold at a loss, and deserved to be hacked
It really does bother me when companies cripple their own products in order to preserve the market share of their other offerings. Just make the best thing at the cheapest price, please. I think those are the two distinct intentions behind hacking (creativity and unlocking crippled functionality) and there isn't much reason on either count to do it on Nintendo platforms.
Mind you, I guess that might be changing, what with Warp Pipe and all.
Idealism is calling, and it wants its invisible hand back, thanks.
Here here! Slashdot should aim for the kind of spin-free information contained in MS presskits and industry rags.
.. do you seriously think you're the only person on /. capable of reading articles or interpreting headlines?
Sarcasm aside, what exactly is unfair about holding a company accountable for the quality of the products they ship?
And why is everyone dumber than you are
I don't know if it existsin current corperate usage policy software systems, but surely it can't be difficult for software create rules to block both:
... ... while only having to provide the original x.com AND a list of known p2p caching URLs in such a product's interface.
x.com
and x.com.what_ever_new_p2p_producturl.com:0000
and x.com.foo.com:4352
and x.com.bar.com:4352
etc
That is a scary statistic. Even more so if you're a musician.
I think its simply pathetic that Adobe or MS honestly cares so much about its ability to profit from Zimbabwe that its willing to plunge these nations into the technological dark ages instead of just letting the country get familiar and locked into its products through piracy. It's the usual mistake that authority figures often make; becoming detachted with what gave them the monopoly to begin with.
Photoshop, Windows are both decent products in their own right, but so many of these apps wouldn't have hit the tipping point of adoption had they not been piratable.