On http://truc.hypermart.net/, a "random" link exchange site, I see an iframe, not just image. Iframe ads are annoying for several reasons, although I doubt advertisers use them just to be annoying.
- IE4 (but not later versions) will replace an entire page with a placeholder page if you go to a site with a missing iframe.
- If you try to block the hoster of an iframe using a "hosts" file and you use Mozilla as your browser, you get an alert each time you visit a site with a missing iframe. Hopefully this will be fixed in bug 28586 by implementing placeholder pages for all missing pages.
- Iframes will probably allow cookies for a short amount of time after browsers fix a similar problem for images, simply because it takes more coding to fix the problem for iframes. (Have any major browsers fixed the cookies-on-images bug?)
- Iframes allow Java ads, such as the infamous punch-the-monkey ad. (Jason Kersey removed all ads from mozillazine.org, and I think he did that because people complained about that ad so much.) LE doesn't seem to use Java ads at this point, although I have seen several "fake dialog" ads there.
I also heard someone tell me that some linkexchange ads were <script src="something.linkexchange.com"> at some point in order to allow linkexchange to update the entire banner code whenever they needed to. I think this might have just been a rumor -- can you imaging what a cracking target that would turn linkexchange into? Can anyone confirm or deny this rumor?
Btw, why is it that when I click a linkexchange banner, the site linked to almost never has a linkexchange banner itself?
Let's make non-animated gif or png ads a little cheaper than animated gif or mng ads. An an-rating system (or even a comment forum about each ad) should take care of the problem of some animated ads being excessively annoying.
Even better than letting users specify preferences (which I wouldn't expect more than 10% of users to do) would be to set up a collaborative-filtering system. Record if the user says he/she likes or dislikes the ad (or clicks on it), record how other logged-in users respond to various ads, and use that to guess which ads this user is most likely to respond positively to. Allow users to opt out of this system, of course.
I think the open-source world needs a good collaboritive filtering tool anyway, and this would be a great reason for someone to create one. It's too bad that firefly sold its technology when it wasn't doing well (?) rather than releasing it under an oss license.
I like the idea that I might be able to try out advertising for parts of my site without putting any money up front. That would allow me to get some idea of what parts of my sites people like and which parts they think are pointless. I don't make money off of my website, but if I got a lot of positive feedback (through e-mail or through a slashdot forum devoted to my ad), I might pay a reasonably low rate to keep running these ads, just because slashdot has turned me into a positive-feedback whore:) Or maybe I'd put ads on my own site or do something original like buying a.com or.org domain name for myself, who knows.
I can just see future conspiracy theories: the karma cap is part of a master plan to deprive karma whores of the positive feedback they love so much, and make them post ads for their own site (which previously got one hit a week), first for free, and later for money.
Some people might even put up humorous ads that don't link anywhere, just to burn off ad karma. This could be a good thing: it might get people to look at the ads instead of just scrolling past them, and it would be entertaining. But it might also mean that the exchange rate of points for ad views would have to be low. (As long as nobody tries to advertise the goatse site with what looks like a thinkgeek banner ad, I'll be happy.)
What do you think of letting slashdot users who don't have anything of their own to advertise give their ad points to someone who's advertising a "completely free" site (no ads, not selling anything)?
(Btw, does anyone know the minimum amount of money you have to put into a Google adwords account to try out an ad?)
P.S. I'm over the karma cap, so please accuse me of not-very-subtly plugging for my site rather than karma whoring.
But paranoia that the small company you're buying a computer from might disappear within a few months will lead to only trusting large companies. There *are* cases where it's important for fraud to be illegal.
I remember hearing that Exxon was trying to come up with a new name for itself (before it was called Exxon) and one employee employee decided to trademark each of the names they came up with. The company ended up paying the guy over a million dollars for the name "Exxon" because they were out of good names.
If that story is true, then I find it unlikely that it's necessary to actually use or plan to use a trademark in order to own it.
The answer is simple: use a Tax Refund instead of a Tax Cut. Then one knows the size of the surpluses, and avoids the likelyhood of spending money that we haven't earned yet. Moreover, a Refund could boost the economy in the current short term better than a Cut...
If you cut taxes, people and corps are more likely to feel like they have more money in the long run, but if you give a one-year refund, they will just feel like they have some extra cash on hand. I don't think a tax refund can have the same effect on the economy as a tax cut.
(That said, I think that taking care of the national debt should have a high priority.)
It sounds like the site owner could have put a "this is a joke" disclaimer at the bottom of the page, but didn't because he wanted to read enraged responses and laugh at the senders. That's not very ethical by my standards -- especially when the content of the site might lead someone to hurt cats, or even if a it would lead a cat-lover to *think* that someone might hurt cats after seeing the site. Plenty of web surfers wouldn't be tipped off by "rectilinear" or "klein bottle" and immediately figure out that the site is a joke.
I haven't actually seen the website -- I'm just going by the linked articles, so I could be wrong about the facts. (Also, for now, I'll stay out of the debate over whether it was right for the FBI to shut down the site.)
HTTP/1.1 [RFC2616] allows transfer encoding. An example of encoding is data compression, which speeds up Web browsing over a slow connection.
The user agent should allow the user to set the transfer encoding in the HTTP requests sent out.
I don't understand why this pref is necessary. Browser makers generally have a much better idea of what the best transfer-encoding types are than users, and most users wouldn't have any reason to change this setting.
If saved locally, the filename on most computers should be html40.ps.gz for the applications to recognize the file type.
Wrong: Saving this compressed PostScript document as html40.ps is likely to confuse other applications.
Surely the correct thing to do is to save the _uncompressed_ file as html40.ps? Aren't most html files sent over the web sent with gzip content-encoding?
still slower than ns 4.x. Yes, netscape sucks, but it still appears quicker for me (1s) than mozilla (~2s) when clicked from the gnome panel. That's with an already running program btw, not from scratch.
Agreed. I'm on Windows and new window performance is the main thing preventing me from using Mozilla as my main browser (even though it's much more stable than IE).
What if the spam is sent in a way that hides the originating IP address, and then the owner of the website claims "I didn't send that spam; my competitors sent it to try to get my site shut down"? What do you do in that case?
OK. They're not collecting personal information here folks. Frankly, if it helps refine the search(es) that I perform, I'm all for it.
ISTM that using toolbar data to "improve searches" would increase the amount of porn you find on google. Most people don't link to their favorite porn sites from their personal home pages, you know.
However, if you tax it, then you are punishing someone for a crime (pollution) without due process.
I don't think of pollution as a crime; I think of it as part of the cost of making a product that is paid by society instead of by the company making the product. Taxing pollution just moves the cost back where it belongs. It also gives the government money, some of which will be used to clean up pollution, and some of which will be used to do other things that the government feels are more worthwhile to society that cleaning up all of the pollution.
If a company comes up with a great product that requires some pollution to manufacture, I would much rather that they have to pay a tax than that the company be blocked from making the product.
OBTW-- For those who think the Christmas lights are the big villain - think again. The alert was called at 5:15PM, before the lights went on.
Alerts are usually called before 5:15 pm. They try to predict whether they will have to interrupt power as early as possible, and they even have a page lists the forecasted peak throughout the day. (Another student at my school uses gnuplot to turn the on that page into a nice-looking graph.) So just because the alert was called before people started turning on Christmas lights doesn't mean the lights didn't affect the electricity use at the peak time (which is usually around 6 pm).
Also, some of the shortages are due to annual pollution credits for individual plants running out, so it's possible that using electricity even late at night could contribute to additional plants running out by the end of the year.
Slashdot Mirror
On http://truc.hypermart.net/, a "random" link exchange site, I see an iframe, not just image. Iframe ads are annoying for several reasons, although I doubt advertisers use them just to be annoying.
- IE4 (but not later versions) will replace an entire page with a placeholder page if you go to a site with a missing iframe.
- If you try to block the hoster of an iframe using a "hosts" file and you use Mozilla as your browser, you get an alert each time you visit a site with a missing iframe. Hopefully this will be fixed in bug 28586 by implementing placeholder pages for all missing pages.
- Iframes will probably allow cookies for a short amount of time after browsers fix a similar problem for images, simply because it takes more coding to fix the problem for iframes. (Have any major browsers fixed the cookies-on-images bug?)
- Iframes allow Java ads, such as the infamous punch-the-monkey ad. (Jason Kersey removed all ads from mozillazine.org, and I think he did that because people complained about that ad so much.) LE doesn't seem to use Java ads at this point, although I have seen several "fake dialog" ads there.
I also heard someone tell me that some linkexchange ads were <script src="something.linkexchange.com"> at some point in order to allow linkexchange to update the entire banner code whenever they needed to. I think this might have just been a rumor -- can you imaging what a cracking target that would turn linkexchange into? Can anyone confirm or deny this rumor?
Btw, why is it that when I click a linkexchange banner, the site linked to almost never has a linkexchange banner itself?
Let's make non-animated gif or png ads a little cheaper than animated gif or mng ads. An an-rating system (or even a comment forum about each ad) should take care of the problem of some animated ads being excessively annoying.
Even better than letting users specify preferences (which I wouldn't expect more than 10% of users to do) would be to set up a collaborative-filtering system. Record if the user says he/she likes or dislikes the ad (or clicks on it), record how other logged-in users respond to various ads, and use that to guess which ads this user is most likely to respond positively to. Allow users to opt out of this system, of course.
I think the open-source world needs a good collaboritive filtering tool anyway, and this would be a great reason for someone to create one. It's too bad that firefly sold its technology when it wasn't doing well (?) rather than releasing it under an oss license.
I like the idea that I might be able to try out advertising for parts of my site without putting any money up front. That would allow me to get some idea of what parts of my sites people like and which parts they think are pointless. I don't make money off of my website, but if I got a lot of positive feedback (through e-mail or through a slashdot forum devoted to my ad), I might pay a reasonably low rate to keep running these ads, just because slashdot has turned me into a positive-feedback whore :) Or maybe I'd put ads on my own site or do something original like buying a .com or .org domain name for myself, who knows.
I can just see future conspiracy theories: the karma cap is part of a master plan to deprive karma whores of the positive feedback they love so much, and make them post ads for their own site (which previously got one hit a week), first for free, and later for money.
Some people might even put up humorous ads that don't link anywhere, just to burn off ad karma. This could be a good thing: it might get people to look at the ads instead of just scrolling past them, and it would be entertaining. But it might also mean that the exchange rate of points for ad views would have to be low. (As long as nobody tries to advertise the goatse site with what looks like a thinkgeek banner ad, I'll be happy.)
What do you think of letting slashdot users who don't have anything of their own to advertise give their ad points to someone who's advertising a "completely free" site (no ads, not selling anything)?
(Btw, does anyone know the minimum amount of money you have to put into a Google adwords account to try out an ad?)
P.S. I'm over the karma cap, so please accuse me of not-very-subtly plugging for my site rather than karma whoring.
Which post was a troll? And btw, isn't it "YHL"?
But paranoia that the small company you're buying a computer from might disappear within a few months will lead to only trusting large companies. There *are* cases where it's important for fraud to be illegal.
I remember hearing that Exxon was trying to come up with a new name for itself (before it was called Exxon) and one employee employee decided to trademark each of the names they came up with. The company ended up paying the guy over a million dollars for the name "Exxon" because they were out of good names.
If that story is true, then I find it unlikely that it's necessary to actually use or plan to use a trademark in order to own it.
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If you cut taxes, people and corps are more likely to feel like they have more money in the long run, but if you give a one-year refund, they will just feel like they have some extra cash on hand. I don't think a tax refund can have the same effect on the economy as a tax cut.
(That said, I think that taking care of the national debt should have a high priority.)
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It sounds like the site owner could have put a "this is a joke" disclaimer at the bottom of the page, but didn't because he wanted to read enraged responses and laugh at the senders. That's not very ethical by my standards -- especially when the content of the site might lead someone to hurt cats, or even if a it would lead a cat-lover to *think* that someone might hurt cats after seeing the site. Plenty of web surfers wouldn't be tipped off by "rectilinear" or "klein bottle" and immediately figure out that the site is a joke.
I haven't actually seen the website -- I'm just going by the linked articles, so I could be wrong about the facts. (Also, for now, I'll stay out of the debate over whether it was right for the FBI to shut down the site.)
Ahh, thanks, I remember getting those mixed up a while ago too.
HTTP/1.1 [RFC2616] allows transfer encoding. An example of encoding is data compression, which speeds up Web browsing over a slow connection.
The user agent should allow the user to set the transfer encoding in the HTTP requests sent out.
I don't understand why this pref is necessary. Browser makers generally have a much better idea of what the best transfer-encoding types are than users, and most users wouldn't have any reason to change this setting.
Content-Type: application/postscript; qs=0.001
Content-Encoding: gzip
If saved locally, the filename on most computers should be html40.ps.gz for the applications to recognize the file type.
Wrong: Saving this compressed PostScript document as html40.ps is likely to confuse other applications.
Surely the correct thing to do is to save the _uncompressed_ file as html40.ps? Aren't most html files sent over the web sent with gzip content-encoding?
I don't get the joke...
Found this great article through adnews.com: The best commercials that never were (National Post).
If only superbowl.adcritic.com weren't superbowled... oh wait, posting this isn't going to help, is it?
Warning: Plot is discussed but nothing is given away.
I don't see why that requires a warning. How about: "As always, plot is discussed but nothing is given away."
still slower than ns 4.x. Yes, netscape sucks, but it still appears quicker for me (1s) than mozilla (~2s) when clicked from the gnome panel. That's with an already running program btw, not from scratch.
Agreed. I'm on Windows and new window performance is the main thing preventing me from using Mozilla as my main browser (even though it's much more stable than IE).
please make sure the bugs also occur in a recent nightly build. Mozilla 0.7 branched about two weeks ago so your bug might have been fixed since then.
By the way, today's nightlies are pretty good - several recent regressions were fixed. Two new bugs in today's builds that weren't in 0.7: links on some pages are ignored and home page isn't displayed on startup under Win32 when using -console option.
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ISTM that using toolbar data to "improve searches" would increase the amount of porn you find on google. Most people don't link to their favorite porn sites from their personal home pages, you know.
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I don't think of pollution as a crime; I think of it as part of the cost of making a product that is paid by society instead of by the company making the product. Taxing pollution just moves the cost back where it belongs. It also gives the government money, some of which will be used to clean up pollution, and some of which will be used to do other things that the government feels are more worthwhile to society that cleaning up all of the pollution.
If a company comes up with a great product that requires some pollution to manufacture, I would much rather that they have to pay a tax than that the company be blocked from making the product.
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Alerts are usually called before 5:15 pm. They try to predict whether they will have to interrupt power as early as possible, and they even have a page lists the forecasted peak throughout the day. (Another student at my school uses gnuplot to turn the on that page into a nice-looking graph.) So just because the alert was called before people started turning on Christmas lights doesn't mean the lights didn't affect the electricity use at the peak time (which is usually around 6 pm).
Also, some of the shortages are due to annual pollution credits for individual plants running out, so it's possible that using electricity even late at night could contribute to additional plants running out by the end of the year.
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