"Though I make predictions that they will begin adding ear-drum-peircing tones to the beginning and end of each commercial to take advantage of the new pain marketting techniques..."
We nearly have this already. They're called car ads. Look at the number of commercials for local car dealerships that have flooded network TV which involve obnoxious sound effects, horrible color schemes, and repetitive, shouting voices- "$24,990! $24,990! $24,990!". Especially aggravating are the ones that feature sound effects that one would normally be on alert for anyway: sirens, screams, telephones, doorbells, etc. I don't know how many times I've been listening to the radio while driving, and was startled by a car horn that I thought originated from an unseen, oncoming driver but turned out to be part of an ad. I wonder, what if I were to get into a wreck because my attention has been distracted by the nonexistent car that is supposedly about to hit me?
Seriously though, marketers today have the idea that, if people ignore them, they should just scream louder. This is why ads seem to be in constant competition with one another to do the best job of grabbing the viewer's attention in whatever way possible. Our society today is nearly saturated with advertising to the point that we get in the habit of filtering it out in order to keep our sanity, but there seems to be this idea that the more invasive and hard to ignore an ad is, the better it is. When popups became commonplace, we got in the habit of reaching for the close box, or eventually got fed up and started blocking them altogether. Marketing responds by making them harder to get rid of, sticking them in front of content, making them run around the screen, or drawing fake close boxes and making the "close" link as small and as out of the way as possible. As these floaters become more common, people will get used to them, or figure out ways to block them, and advertisers will come up with an even more obnoxious method of getting us to notice their product.
Whoops... nevermind. It seems that if you connect through a proxy server that intercepts the error and sends you a "no such domain" type error page, Firefox is tricked to believing the address is valid and will not perform a Google search.
A four-gigabyte MicroDrive comes in the box and holds one hour of best-quality video. Another four-gigabyte card will set you back about $200. Of course, you can also buy smaller, less expensive MicroDrives.
As far as cost per byte, micro drives are one of the most expensive hard drives availible. One hour of video is fine for a soccer game or birthday party, but what about that that week-long vacation? Even after deleting unwanted scenes, it's easy to amass more than an hour's worth of footage. I don't use tapes for long-term storage anyway; we have several tapes that, after recording, are backed up onto hard drive and burned to DVD. $200 per hour of video when you are without easy access to a computer for several days can get prohibitive quickly. Now, stick a 60 or 80MB 2.5" drive in there, and we'll talk...
if there's competition in the market, service qualities will go up and prices will go down. A government monopoly funded by tax dollars will give government style service with no incentive to keep costs down. (emphasis mine)
Of course, the key here is competition in the market. Where I live, I would pay more than double for cable service than someone who lives across town, because two different providers have mini- monopolies in each area. Of course, we wanted to go with the cheaper provider (for basically the same level of service), but were told that we had no choice because of our location. Hmm... they have no competition in our neighborhood, so it seems that there is no incentive to keep costs down...
...You'll still be forced to buy overpriced, half-filled ink tanks...
Ha, I'd feel lucky if I bought a Lexmark cartridge that was even half full. Once, I was curious and dissected a used black Lexmark cartridge. The reservior is stuffed with a large sponge that is used to hold the ink and I guess to keep it from splashing when the cartridge is moved. Looking at the stained part of the sponge, I could tell that the cartridge had never been filled more than 1/4 of the way. I estimated that the cartridge couldn't have contained more than 4-5ml of ink, and that is without considering the volume taken up by the sponge itself. No wonder cartridges these days don't seem to last...
Slashdot Mirror
"Though I make predictions that they will begin adding ear-drum-peircing tones to the beginning and end of each commercial to take advantage of the new pain marketting techniques..."
We nearly have this already. They're called car ads. Look at the number of commercials for local car dealerships that have flooded network TV which involve obnoxious sound effects, horrible color schemes, and repetitive, shouting voices- "$24,990! $24,990! $24,990!". Especially aggravating are the ones that feature sound effects that one would normally be on alert for anyway: sirens, screams, telephones, doorbells, etc. I don't know how many times I've been listening to the radio while driving, and was startled by a car horn that I thought originated from an unseen, oncoming driver but turned out to be part of an ad. I wonder, what if I were to get into a wreck because my attention has been distracted by the nonexistent car that is supposedly about to hit me?
Seriously though, marketers today have the idea that, if people ignore them, they should just scream louder. This is why ads seem to be in constant competition with one another to do the best job of grabbing the viewer's attention in whatever way possible. Our society today is nearly saturated with advertising to the point that we get in the habit of filtering it out in order to keep our sanity, but there seems to be this idea that the more invasive and hard to ignore an ad is, the better it is. When popups became commonplace, we got in the habit of reaching for the close box, or eventually got fed up and started blocking them altogether. Marketing responds by making them harder to get rid of, sticking them in front of content, making them run around the screen, or drawing fake close boxes and making the "close" link as small and as out of the way as possible. As these floaters become more common, people will get used to them, or figure out ways to block them, and advertisers will come up with an even more obnoxious method of getting us to notice their product.
Whoops... nevermind. It seems that if you connect through a proxy server that intercepts the error and sends you a "no such domain" type error page, Firefox is tricked to believing the address is valid and will not perform a Google search.
It doesn't seem to work for me in Firefox 1.0 for OSX- entering either "http://" or "Quicktime", for example, just results in an error 404.
From TFA:
A four-gigabyte MicroDrive comes in the box and holds one hour of best-quality video. Another four-gigabyte card will set you back about $200. Of course, you can also buy smaller, less expensive MicroDrives.
As far as cost per byte, micro drives are one of the most expensive hard drives availible. One hour of video is fine for a soccer game or birthday party, but what about that that week-long vacation? Even after deleting unwanted scenes, it's easy to amass more than an hour's worth of footage. I don't use tapes for long-term storage anyway; we have several tapes that, after recording, are backed up onto hard drive and burned to DVD. $200 per hour of video when you are without easy access to a computer for several days can get prohibitive quickly. Now, stick a 60 or 80MB 2.5" drive in there, and we'll talk...
if there's competition in the market, service qualities will go up and prices will go down. A government monopoly funded by tax dollars will give government style service with no incentive to keep costs down. (emphasis mine) Of course, the key here is competition in the market. Where I live, I would pay more than double for cable service than someone who lives across town, because two different providers have mini- monopolies in each area. Of course, we wanted to go with the cheaper provider (for basically the same level of service), but were told that we had no choice because of our location. Hmm... they have no competition in our neighborhood, so it seems that there is no incentive to keep costs down...
...You'll still be forced to buy overpriced, half-filled ink tanks...
Ha, I'd feel lucky if I bought a Lexmark cartridge that was even half full. Once, I was curious and dissected a used black Lexmark cartridge. The reservior is stuffed with a large sponge that is used to hold the ink and I guess to keep it from splashing when the cartridge is moved. Looking at the stained part of the sponge, I could tell that the cartridge had never been filled more than 1/4 of the way. I estimated that the cartridge couldn't have contained more than 4-5ml of ink, and that is without considering the volume taken up by the sponge itself. No wonder cartridges these days don't seem to last...