torkell | (no subject)

(no subject)

Banner ads I can handle.

Pop-ups are evil (and anyway the Google toolbar nukes those).

Flash ads I can handle (there's the occassional fun one).

Flash ads that use 100% of the CPU, and which don't let you stop or pause them... thanks, folks, obviously it's more important to use up my CPU cycles than it is for me to have a cooler computer BY NOT WASTING UNNEEDED CYCLES! Gah!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I was using a site like that the other day...the whole thing was in flash and it was just eating my CPU like it wasn’t there. I was far from impressed. I can only begin to imagine what that would be like to use on a 1.1Gh Celeron or something...

1.3GHz Athlon here. Since I'm running Windows 2000 the rest of the system was responsive and behaving itself, but this sort of behaviour still isn't on. Do they assume that everyone now has a 3GHz Pentium 4 with hyperthreading and 2 gigs of ram?

In a word, yes. Now that the capacity exists in /some/ of the machines displaying their content, a lot of advertisers seem to be of the school of "OMG, we can do this cool thing, and this cool thing, and this cool thing, so we must. Oooh, SHINY!!!". Sucks for the user.

Personally, I use Firefox with Flash-click-to-play installed, which more or less solves the problem. Failing that, .hosts the bitches: get their adserver's IP and direct it to localhost.

If they're willing to piss you off to this extent to get views, chances are you're not gonna buy from them anyway. So why subject yourself to it?

Hope this helps ;)

I did try using .hosts, but stopped when svchost.exe started eating obscene amounts of CPU and RAM every time the network appeared (i.e. every time I brought the machine out of hibernation). My best guess is that it cached the entire file in memory, and recached it (without deleting the old cache) every time a new network connection appeared. I would use Norton's ad-blocking, but it tends to be rather hit-and-miss and it blocks some things which are not ads. Plus I'm quite happy with people supporting their site through the use of banner ads.

Hmm, that's not clever. Of course, it's a constant running battle, and some tool will do better than others.

I've no problem with banner ads either, but only in their place. JPEG, text, GIF within reason, but if it pops up, plays obnoxious music, flashes or annoys me in some other way, it gets deep-sixed without a backward glance. If they play nice, I'll play nice.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only