First off I just want to say that I love Mozilla. This makes me love Mozilla even more. It means Mozilla will load pages 5-10% faster! Gotta love the lizard!
So a friend of mine who shares my interest of UI and UI issues sent me this link to Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox from a while back. I very much agree with this breakdown of the attitude toward online advertising. Online ads are almost completely different than TV or print material adverts and trying to annoy your users into looking at an ad is definitely not going to improve user satisfaction or the click through rates. I thought it was an interesting read all in all. Now with that in mind....
...have a look at this web page. So these guys seem to have a system that can block people who block popups from viewing content. I am sure that Mozilla and Opera will respond with a new addition that makes scripts and servers think the popup loaded when in fact it went straight to /dev/null. Whats even more interesting about these AntiAdBlocker people is that they are hosted on a network run by CAIS.net. Hmm, why does this matter? Well have a look at SpamCop's recent post here. The people forging SpamCop's from address are also using CAIS.net as the attack host. Methinks these CAIS.net people are bed fellows of the email and advert spamming dummies. Don't worry though, Mozilla stops almost all popups and will continue to do so no doubt and my 60+ email filters keep my main inbox very happy. One day though, these spammers will pay, its just a matter of time. In the mean time check out SPAMHAUS to make sure you know who is behind the spam in your inbox. Oh how I wish I could deliver flaming dog poop as an email attachment.
I must by virtue of my Keyurness completely and totally disagree with the findings of this website. Pumpernickel?! Maybe a good rye, but pumpernickel?!?!
Okay now onto the world of radio which has just gotten soo boring since I left high school a long long 4 years ago. Ever wonder why? Well you might want to read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the excellent series over at Wired which covers whats been happening in the world of radio. Yea buddy, gotta love the big anonymous conglemerates that will eventually control the world.
I am getting antsy waiting for this. I hope it's so expensive that I can't afford it otherwise I'm sooo going to want one of those phones and that service. Oh it hurts!!!
How many of you have heard of Janis Ian? Yea I didn't know she existed until three days ago. Apparently Janis Ian has been in the music industry long long before I was born and she makes some darn good music. She also knows the music industry inside and out. Why should I care? Well read this article and then its followup that she wrote about the music industry and its "give 'em hell" again P2P networks and music downloading services such as Napster. These articles are written with an unabashed clairvoyance that I have never seen in any articles or opinion pieces on the RIAA, the recording companies and their collective attitude towards the consumer and the new internet based distribution options. Anyone who enjoys music in America should not miss these two articles. I know its lame to just agree but I can't help it. She makes clear succinct points and then backs them up with the facts, you can't go wrong with that. These pieces are a must read.
Lastly Sony has begun hyping the processor for the PlayStation3. So this is going to be another massively parallel effort that adds the facet of distributed computing. For any of your who have read the PS2 developer forums know that the PS2 is one of the hardest consoles to design for. Not only does the PS3 further the parallelism but it adds distributed computing to the mix. The programmability is going to be very very hard. I don't see this as an advantage at all. I also hate the PS2 controller because I'm sure it was designed specifically for Verne Troyer.
Okay now back to work.
P.S. The Dr. Pepper flavour doesn't mix well at all with the mango flavour. *EECH*
Posted by Mr. Keyur at August 7, 2002 04:16 PM