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Living Room / Re: Ars Technica on the problem with adblocking

« on: March 16, 2010, 05:17 PM »

I don't buy it. Their argument is that Ars is lying (basically) and that advertisers won't pay for impressions. TV has done this for ages, and I can see where a firm would pay for impressions rather than clicks, as some sites generate loads of traffic and could bargain based upon that.

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Living Room / Re: Anyone playing Mass Effect 2 game yet?

« on: March 16, 2010, 05:14 PM »

Actually, I liked dungeon siege... 2 and the expansions, not so much, but the original was pretty fun.

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Living Room / Re: Yay, Upgrade time! - Inspire me with hardware I can buy =-D

« on: March 16, 2010, 04:36 PM »

It really depends on what you're *doing* with your computer whether spending more will get you the gains that justify the money, IMO.

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Living Room / Re: Pirate vs. Paying Customer illustrated

« on: March 16, 2010, 10:08 AM »

There is no excuse or justification to pirating someone's work.
-y0himba (March 16, 2010, 07:23 AM)

QFE. And your thoughts pretty much mirror my own. I thought it very telling when someone in another thread on DC was very skeptical that all of the music on my computer was purchased in one form or another. It's not that hard not to pirate- just decide not to do it and don't. For any reason or no reason. Two wrongs has *never* made anything right.

But everyone has to realize that for themselves- or not. No matter how much you tell someone, no matter how much protection that you put in, no matter how many PSAs you annoy your paying customers with, pirates will pirate, because it's a state of mind that *none* of that will change.

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Living Room / Re: Stephen's Weekly Tech News - Edition 5

« on: March 14, 2010, 10:31 PM »

(where he basically said "while we're aware of what we've advocated, please understand we're not willing to go to jail for standing by it")
-40hz (March 14, 2010, 09:16 PM)

Did you really expect him to go to jail for this?

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Living Room / Re: Pirate vs. Paying Customer illustrated

« on: March 13, 2010, 11:57 AM »

Well, the article was articulating something I said earlier- about the rock and a hard place this sort of DRM puts gamers in. You either deny yourself the enjoyment of what is most likely a very good game- invariably doing nothing other than hurting yourself or contributing to the lower sales of the game which they will blame on the PC market dying rather than their DRM system. Or you buy it, and support their decision to use DRM.

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Living Room / Re: Pirate vs. Paying Customer illustrated

« on: March 13, 2010, 10:53 AM »

I think there are:
1. I know what URLs I've posted and have a record of them. This helps me not to post the same thing over again, and be able to go back to the reference for something that I've posted earlier more easily.
2. There are several developer tools that I've been experimenting with for posting from bit.ly automatically to other places (and they've been experimenting with them too- they already have an interface to gmail, facebook, and pop in addition to twitter). I have various groups of people that I interact with over different mediums (including print), and to be able to post all at once rather than from each individually is a great timesaver.
3. I'm already using it for twitter, so not to have a different URL to use for different mediums helps also.

I've thought about creating my own url shortening service to address issues 1 & 3 ... maybe I should take that approach (though using bit.ly is so easy...)

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Living Room / Re: Pirate vs. Paying Customer illustrated

« on: March 13, 2010, 10:13 AM »

Interesting OpEd article on the UbiSoft debacle - http://bit.ly/clZtRB
-wraith808 (March 12, 2010, 12:41 PM)
Why do you use bit.ly instead of direct links? please stop it.
-f0dder (March 13, 2010, 07:53 AM)

Why stop it? What's the big deal? As scancode said, I got it because I post to here and twitter and my blog... it makes it easier. So what's your argument against, and I'll consider it.

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Living Room / Re: Pirate vs. Paying Customer illustrated

« on: March 12, 2010, 12:41 PM »

Interesting OpEd article on the UbiSoft debacle - http://bit.ly/clZtRB

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Living Room / Re: When you make your 100'th Post

« on: March 12, 2010, 12:36 PM »

No wonder he's the devil's advocate in so many discussions...

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Living Room / Re: When you make your 100'th Post

« on: March 12, 2010, 10:07 AM »

For F0dder

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Living Room / Re: Ars Technica on the problem with adblocking

« on: March 12, 2010, 10:04 AM »

I was under the impression that you also get revenue just for displaying the ads? Might get more from a click-throug, though.
-f0dder (March 12, 2010, 04:24 AM)

Larger sites get revenue for views. And post #6666? LOL

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Living Room / Re: Ars Technica on the problem with adblocking

« on: March 12, 2010, 12:17 AM »

But wait, if the ad never loads and is blocked from starting, how am I consuming their bandwidth? Effectively all I'm loading is text and a header file. No matter the site or its subject, content is king. Always will be. Like modern DVDs (pirate vs. paying customer), if you're going to frustrate my consumption of your content with ads, then -- for me -- your content is not worth reading.
-zridling (March 11, 2010, 10:39 PM)

I think they mean the bandwidth from the content of the site- not the ads, i.e. the text and header file. And though that may be small individually, collectively that can be a large amount. Not arguing one side or the other- just pointing that out. And I don't think they'd have a problem with the people who choose not to read the content because of the ads, just those that block the ads and still consume the content.

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Living Room / Re: Ars Technica on the problem with adblocking

« on: March 11, 2010, 02:10 PM »

Well, you're better than like 90% of users out there (including me)

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Living Room / Re: Ars Technica on the problem with adblocking

« on: March 11, 2010, 12:30 PM »

^ And it could also be the realization that you don't have the technical know-how to take on the task. Linux is a technological achievement, and I don't think that most people say that it isn't. However, something can be a technical achievement and a stepping stone, rather than a technical achievement and a final destination. And truthfully, I don't think that Linux is a viable final destination, and most people don't take that into account when looking at it as a feasible wide-spread consumer level OS. It's technically impressive, but it doesn't have to be a viable alternative...

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Living Room / Re: Stephen's Weekly Tech News - Edition 4

« on: March 11, 2010, 10:59 AM »

Apparently Tay Zonday (the chocolate rain guy) is an acquired taste for some people... he's even on iTunes! It still looks weird to me the way he ducks away from the mic, even with him explaining it!

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Living Room / Re: Ars Technica on the problem with adblocking

« on: March 11, 2010, 08:33 AM »

I will gladly put a no filtering entry in any ad removal program I use for sites that I truly enjoy and have TASTEFUL ads. Betanews is an example of a site with tasteless ads. After removing their ads, the pages become so much more readable, less lengthy, and overall easier to work with.
-Josh (March 11, 2010, 05:52 AM)

But most people are too lazy to do this- it's an all-in or all-out way of doing things (I have to admit, I'm one of the lazy). Things such as ad revenue become a big deal when you're doing something full-time, and not just as a hobby, just as content is a big deal when you're doing something full-time, and not just as a hobby. There are some hobbyists that approach (and in some cases surpass) the level of professional blogs- but if their RL was threatened by the time taken doing the hobby, which would take precedence?

I'll stop blocking ads when the following conditions are met:
-rssapphire (March 11, 2010, 07:33 AM)

Do you selectively unblock sites that meet these requirements? Or does *everyone* have to meet your requirements before you unblock anyone?

And to the micropayment idea, I quote this comment on the slashdot article:

The issue I have with the concept of many content providers going to a 'micropayment' subscription is that for the user, eventually, all the micropayments for the stuff they want to read ends up being one big MACROpayment.

I've got enough monthly payments to deal with between car payments, car insurance, rent, phone bill, internet, and so forth. I don't want to and am not going to add a bunch of $.99 micropayments on top of everything else.

$.05 an article? Micropayment? How many articles have you read on the internet today? How many this month? Let's see... in the past hour or so I read...

$.05 1-Article MMO-Champion.com
$.10 2-Articles WoW.com
$.10 2-Articles Slashdot.org
$.10 2-Articles ArsTechnica.com
$.10 2-Articles Cracked.com
$.05 1-Article NYTimes.com
$.05 1-Article NewsoftheWeird.com

Ok... that works out to $.55 in an hour. Let's say 3 hours on the internet per day or 21 hours per week... $11.55 a week multiplied by 4 to get per month... $46.20... multiplied by 12 for the yearly cost... $554.40. $554.40 a year on micropayments!!!

So... tell me again... are you willing to make micropayments for every article you read on the internet?

Also, if many websites go to a micropayment model users will get sick of having to enter their credit card or paypal account every time they want to read something. Someone like Rupert Murdoch will come along and offer a whole bunch of this content for one payment instead of a ton of little payments.

It'll be a reintroduction to an AOL type experience where everything the average user would look at would be through the filter of one giant corporation.

Yep... Micropayments is exactly where the big corporations would like us to go.

Pretty insightful on the monies paid...

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Living Room / Re: Pirate vs. Paying Customer illustrated

« on: March 10, 2010, 01:34 PM »

4. I don't like companies such as steam, who offer single-player, offline only games, yet FORCE you to be online while playing. They also (I don't know about the latest version of steam, I now refuse to ever own it again) punish you for losing internet connection. What I mean by this, is, if you unexpectedly lose your connection for any reason, while steam is in ONLINE mode, you CANNOT get to your games. You have to be ONLINE to turn the damn thing to OFFLINE.
-Stephen66515 (March 10, 2010, 11:35 AM)

This isn't true. As long as the game was not in the middle of updating when you lost your connection, you can always go offline. If it's in the middle of downloading, you don't have the information downloaded to allow offline use.

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