I used to use an Apple G4 cube and a PowerBook (G3 Pismo) on my desk at work and I loved how quiet they were. I traded them for a G5 last year and the increase in noise is marked. It has a noticeable impact on my ability to concentrate. Some people, like me, are just sensitive to noise. We are the market that this product is aimed at.
That's an incongruity that goes back a long way in western culture.
A particularly american example would be the puritans. They were legendary in their repression of sexuality. They also committed some of the most heinously violent acts to have occurred in this country. Take the Mystic Massacre during the Pequot War, for example. That this weird dichotomy became part of our societal mindset is probably at least partially due to the extensive puritan influence in America's childhood.
On the same subject there was an interesting statistic in this article today: The researchers found that "when it comes to popular movies and popular shows, tastes don't differ at all" between religious and nonreligious, said Joseph Helfgot, president of MarketCast. "What you find is that people with conservative religious doctrine are the most likely to see movies rated R for violence. If you compared it to liberals, it's a third more."
I think it wasn't until Napster shut down that it finally clicked for a lot of people out there. They finally realized that it was illegal
That's true. Just about everyone I know was downloading stuff from napster, bearshare, etc. for a while. Even my inlaws, who are religious, law-abiding people were doing it. It wasn't until the lawsuits that it even occurred to them that it was illegal and that's when they stopped doing it.
I've seen people that prefer to do very complicated things on windows rather than running a couple of unix commands
You're absolutely right, but people aren't born knowing "a couple of unix commands". The desktop paradigm isn't perfect but it's something that just about anyone can comprehend and remember.
It may take me a few minutes of looking through some text files to find the one I want whereas I could have found it in moments by doing
grep -r "mona's address"/home/me/myfiles/
BUT if I don't know that command it would take even longer to track down the correct one and leard the syntax and I'd probably have to look it up several more times before it really stuck in my head. Average users won't do that. Some can't do it. My 65-year old dad still can't comprehend what's going on when he drags a file to a floppy disk. Imagine trying to get him to understand regular expressions.
It's not just a matter of what you're used to. The learning curve for Linux is much steeper than an OS that doesn't require any knowledge of command lines.
I think you've got it backwards. Ad-blockers are not the cause of aggressive ads but rather the result of them. If ads would have stayed the way they were when the web was young, I doubt that ad-blockers would be as (relatively) widely used as they are today. Banner ads never bothered me personally until they started demanding attention. The problem is that advertisers are GREEDY and they kept pushing the limits trying to get more and more attention drawn to their ads. Tolerating annoying ads just tells marketers that we will put up with their crap and they will proceed to the next level of intrusive behavior.
Advertisers don't have a god-given right to make me look at their ads. The more they try to trick or force people into looking at their ads, the more people will hate ads in general and try to avoid them. Advertisers should be trying to woo and seduce me. Instead it feels like most of them are trying to trick me into walking into a dark alley where they can gang-rape me.
If the situation does arrive at a state where free content starts disappearing from the web because of lost advertising, it won't be caused by browser configurations but because the nature of the ads on the net has turned people against advertisers.
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I used to use an Apple G4 cube and a PowerBook (G3 Pismo) on my desk at work and I loved how quiet they were. I traded them for a G5 last year and the increase in noise is marked. It has a noticeable impact on my ability to concentrate. Some people, like me, are just sensitive to noise. We are the market that this product is aimed at.
It's not wrong to love an abusive spouse but that doesn't mean you shouldn't leave them for beating you up.
That's an incongruity that goes back a long way in western culture.
A particularly american example would be the puritans. They were legendary in their repression of sexuality. They also committed some of the most heinously violent acts to have occurred in this country. Take the Mystic Massacre during the Pequot War, for example. That this weird dichotomy became part of our societal mindset is probably at least partially due to the extensive puritan influence in America's childhood.
On the same subject there was an interesting statistic in this article today:
The researchers found that "when it comes to popular movies and popular shows, tastes don't differ at all" between religious and nonreligious, said Joseph Helfgot, president of MarketCast. "What you find is that people with conservative religious doctrine are the most likely to see movies rated R for violence. If you compared it to liberals, it's a third more."
That's true. Just about everyone I know was downloading stuff from napster, bearshare, etc. for a while. Even my inlaws, who are religious, law-abiding people were doing it. It wasn't until the lawsuits that it even occurred to them that it was illegal and that's when they stopped doing it.
You're absolutely right, but people aren't born knowing "a couple of unix commands". The desktop paradigm isn't perfect but it's something that just about anyone can comprehend and remember.
It may take me a few minutes of looking through some text files to find the one I want whereas I could have found it in moments by doing BUT if I don't know that command it would take even longer to track down the correct one and leard the syntax and I'd probably have to look it up several more times before it really stuck in my head. Average users won't do that. Some can't do it. My 65-year old dad still can't comprehend what's going on when he drags a file to a floppy disk. Imagine trying to get him to understand regular expressions.
It's not just a matter of what you're used to. The learning curve for Linux is much steeper than an OS that doesn't require any knowledge of command lines.
I think you've got it backwards. Ad-blockers are not the cause of aggressive ads but rather the result of them. If ads would have stayed the way they were when the web was young, I doubt that ad-blockers would be as (relatively) widely used as they are today. Banner ads never bothered me personally until they started demanding attention. The problem is that advertisers are GREEDY and they kept pushing the limits trying to get more and more attention drawn to their ads. Tolerating annoying ads just tells marketers that we will put up with their crap and they will proceed to the next level of intrusive behavior.
Advertisers don't have a god-given right to make me look at their ads. The more they try to trick or force people into looking at their ads, the more people will hate ads in general and try to avoid them. Advertisers should be trying to woo and seduce me. Instead it feels like most of them are trying to trick me into walking into a dark alley where they can gang-rape me.
If the situation does arrive at a state where free content starts disappearing from the web because of lost advertising, it won't be caused by browser configurations but because the nature of the ads on the net has turned people against advertisers.