PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

kensuguro wrote:I think ultimately the problem is that the same people started running the internet ad industry. Came in with their funny math and silly talk. They're usually a strange bunch... people who are very weak with numbers, but extremely sensitive to performance stats. You know, the type that thinks everything travels in a linear trajectory because their mathematical imagination is limited.

That was pretty much what I was suggesting, that the same middlemen from other industries inserted themselves into the web world over the last decade. These same mathematically-limited imaginations also have a hard time dealing with workflows that go beyond simple web browsing & using MS Office products. "Why can't you just cut & paste it to the website in a few minutes? I can export webpages from my copy of Word." etc...

Just a little update on this one - after a few months of using Noscript (pentium M internet laptop at home) and Flashblock (athlon64 at work in dire need of OS reinstall), the result is that Flashblock wins!

Noscript did indeed turn out to be extremely annoying... plays havoc when trying to purchase something online for example, and makes a lot of harmless sites really ugly/messed up/non-functional... there's also no easy way of fully disabling/enabling it on the fly without restarting Firefox - if there is one I couldn't find it. 'Allow top level sites by default' or whatever just didn't do it. I found myself starting IE to access some sites!

Flashblock just seems really really simple and great. It's actually more effective against advertising - with Noscript the flash ads usually turn into animated GIFs, which obviously isn't CPU-intensive, but it's still bloody annoying and distracting.

I think Noscript is only really useful if you are extreeeemely paranoid about all websites until proven otherwise, or if you simply surf a lot of 'dubious' sites.

I'm not terribly paranoid, I keep noscript installed & activated as a plugin, but set to allow all sites normally. It's only when I wander out of my normal pathways that I re-enable it (it solves more than just scriping btw, it will trap cross-site scripting hacks as well for instance). I still find it useful when going places unknown via search engines and things like that. Free fonts, shareware repositories and even fortune 500 companies have had sql-injection compromises and other 'infections' so it isn't always just pr0n & juarez that you find problems with.

It's sort of like my anti-virus software. I can't actually recall ever having an actual infection on my machine, but my wife's pc has been infected and so have machines of friends (who bring USB drives over for instance) so having anti-virus I can reasonably trust still gives me that warm fuzzy feeling. Same with noscript.

I will agree, Flashblock is an effective way of dealing with what it addresses, so when it comes to doing just that I agree, it wins! (My wife's PC uses it because it's so damn old it freezes on sites like myspace under FF3).