Nah, it won't install: The return of the ad-blocker-blocker If I give you some money, would you take your clothes off? Now that's what I call premium service. This is just my personal fantasy, of course. I wouldn't really stop passers-by and ask them to remove their apparel. Not since the restraining order, anyway. As I wander along my local high street, advertisements glare at me …
Simple solution: don't buy it; buy something else without the logo.
The last time I went shopping for new clothes, I spent some time carefully searching the racks of T-shirts for something with an interesting design but where the company's logo wasn't prominently displayed. It's harder than you might think to actually find such a thing. At one shop which shall remain nameless because it's nobody's business but mine that I shop there(0), I eventually bought one that still had the logo, but the logo is *below* my belt-line, and therefore not visible(1).
(0) Why do you think I'm spending so much effort to not have a visible logo?
(1) I'm not one of these scruffy youfs who think It's OK to go around with their T-shirt hanging out of their trousers. Now get off my lawn!
This is exactly what I do. They are all black "fruits of the loom" T-shits from ebay. I even went as far as to cut out the inside label on one, but then kept putting it on the wrong way round, so decided the tolerate the internal labels.
BTW - I also buy 25 identical pairs of socks at a time. So much easier to pair them up after washing day, and I never have more than one odd sock hanging around.
It's the sock grinding mechanism in the dryer that takes them. I contend that accurate machine vision systems have secretly existed since at least the 80's. How else does the dryer know to eat one of each pairs of socks?
I though I would outsmart the dryer by doing what 'Persona' above mentioned and buy all the same socks. But alas the dryer still has an apatite for socks.
Where do you think all of that lint in the filter comes from? There's no way all of that is just coming off of your cloths, right?
Gildan tees for me. Nice fit and they are often used for tour t-shirts so they can't be too bad. I do have to park my conscience down the road whilst ordering them, given where they're probably made. When it comes to socks and pants then I push the boat out for 'performance wear., but the labels are hidden from view
They want the brand name displayed to show they have arrived and/or are a member of a group....Not buying a shirt, buying status. "Conspicuous Consumption" is the name of the behavior.
I think that's two separate behaviours. Buying for group identity (eg a music group, campaign, political et al) has a degree of logic, even if you and I don't do that. That's not conspicuous consumption.
Buying to show a commercial brand identity, now that's conspicuous consumption for those who want the brand name and are paying top price. I've got a few tee shirts with the maker's name on them - but as others mention, it can be difficult to buy a good quality plain tee shirt - and TBH, plain colours accentuate whatever's underneath, so unless you REALLY don't care, or you have the body of a god, there's some advantage in a pattern, any pattern.
Simple solution: don't buy it; buy something else without the logo.
Took me AGES to find a baseball cap without a logo. I don't want to *pay* to advertise someone's product, and I don't give a crap about sports of ANY variety, so that's right out too. You want to GIVE me a cap with your logo tastefully and discretely placed on it? It still depends on the product, but if you'll give it to me FREE, then I'll take it (could use one I don't mind getting scuffed up and soiled).
Did someone mention Tommy Hilfifif(n)gerer?
Have some William Gibson:
She's gone to Harvey Nichols and gotten sick.
Should have known better.
How she responds to labels.
Down into menswear, unrealistically hoping that if anyone might have a Buzz Rickson's it would be Harvey Nichols, their ornate Victorian pile rising like a coral reef opposite Knightsbridge station. Somewhere on the ground floor, in cosmetics, they even have Helena Stonestreet's cucumber mask, Bernard having explained to her how he'd demonstrated his considerable powers of suasion on the HN buyers.
But down here, next to a display of Tommy Hilfiger, it's all started to go sideways on her, the trademark thing.
Less warning aura than usual. Some people ingest a single peanut and their head swells like a basketball.
When it happens to Cayce, it's her psyche.
Tommy Hilfiger does it every time, though she'd thought she was safe now. They'd said he'd peaked, in New York. Like Benetton, the name would be around, but the real poison, for her, would have been drawn. It's something to do with context, here, with not expecting it in London. When it starts, it's pure reaction, like biting down hard on a piece of foil.
A glance to the right and the avalanche lets go. A mountainside of Tommy coming down in her head.
My God, don't they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph
Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready−to−wear with liberal lashings of polo knit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hil−figer event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul. Or so she hopes, and doesn't know, but suspects in her heart that this in fact is what accounts for his long ubiquity.
She needs out of this logo−maze, desperately. But the escalator to the street exit will dump her back into Knightsbridge, seeming somehow now more of the same, and she remembers that the street runs down, and always her energy with it, to Sloane Square, another nexus of whatever she suffers these reactions to. Laura Ashley, down there, and that can get ugly.
Remembering the fifth floor, here: a sort of Californian market, Dean & Deluca lite, with a restaurant, a
separate and weirdly modular robotic sushi operation humming oddly in its midst, and a bar where they served excellent coffee.
"Simple solution: don't buy it; buy something else without the logo."
I remember, back in the dim and distant past, when dinosaurs ruled the earth and I finally became old enough to get my first part time job and could afford to go choose and buy my own clothes and suddenly realised why mum would never accede to my demands for Wrangler or Levi jeans. What a rip-off!!! And they expected me to display their advertising too!!! Bastards! I never did get a pair of Lees although ISTR I did once own a pair of Wranglers when I was still 26" waist. That put me of "brands" for life. I may be more likely to look at brand names when buying if in my mind I feel I can expect better quality or service, but I'll still balance that against the price when comparing with similar products.
With the weather reminiscent of my misbegotten youth, I have taken to wearing sunglasses as I wander about town (only during daylight hours - I am definitely not "cool" enough for the sunglasses at night look). One unexpected advantage is that the polarized lenses cause the electronic advertising boards at the many bus stops to fade into darkness. No risk of an autosomal compelling helio-ophthalmic outburst induced by an overly flashy perfume ad from me....
I do surreptitiously check for Rowdy Roddy Piper lookalikes, just in case.
polarized lenses cause the electronic advertising boards at the many bus stops to fade into darkness
Which is an issue for me - I wear glasses and recently got some that self-darken in sunlight and come with a spiffy set of polarisied magnetically-clip-on sunglasses for use when behind glass (such as in the car).
The issue is that, with said clipon sunglasses in place, I now can't read the in-car displays. Sure - the speedometer is old-fashioned analogue but pretty much everything else is displayed on one screen or another - all of which seem to get mostly blocked by the polarised sunglasses attachment.
So, ot's a choice of "drive with my eyes mostly screwed up"[1] or "drive without all the fancy stuff". Being a techie I, of course, selected the first option.
[1] Acute myopia seems to have made my eyes much, much more sensitive to bright light. It does have the plus side of enabling me to see well in the dark though.
Polarized lenses work by blocking horizontally polarized sunlight, which preferentially reflects from low flat surfaces like water and asphalt. ALL polarized glasses do this. If car displays are being blocked it must be because they emit primarily horizontally polarized light.
If that's true, why are the manufacturers doing this? Could they not have chosen to make screens polarize the opposite way, or is there some technical reason that isn't done?
If car displays are being blocked it must be because they emit primarily horizontally polarized light. If that's true, why are the manufacturers doing this?
Inherent in the LCD and LED technologies that underlies the displays. I suspect that it would have been better to used the sort of e-ink displays like on a Kindle for car use, but those don't allow the sort of glitzy colours, high contrast and brightness, and high res, fast changing graphics that attract marketing people like a milk bottle top attracts a magpie.
Car makers should have been kept away from all forms of user digital interface by law, on pain of death. I can't think of a single thing they've improved through these things, and many things are now harder to control, more poorly implemented, and demand more attention for the same result. Car controls used to be (mostly) a masterpiece of carefully thought through control logic and ease of use. They've now thrown half of that away just to offer garish displays and levels of interaction that simply aren't needed in a moving vehicle.
> Even if LCD does inherently produce polarised light, it doesn't stop the manufacturer turning the display 90 degrees.
That's true, but I agree with the vehicle manufacturers that a sideways mounted LCD screen is going to look a bit out of place when all the other switch gear is mounted in the upright orientation.
/Ah, my lab coat
@ridley: "turning the display 90 degrees."
From memory (and I can't check this right now, as I'm work, and it's pouring with rain, so I didn't bring sunglasses with me) the LCD panels in most kit are offset at 45º, but that blocks enough light to vertically oriented polarising lenses to make them look pretty dark. Still doesn't answer why it's 45º and not vertical though. Perhaps viewing angle,.....
LCD: yes. LED: no...LCD works on the principle of polarisation by the liquid crystals and require light passing through. LEDs just emit (non-polarised) light themselves.
For basic LED displays, yes, but the increasingly common OLED and AMOLED displays usually incorporate polarising layers, as do some high contrast LED displays.
LCD screens that don't black out when you're wearing polarised sunglasses do exist. They use circular polarising filters, like the ones in passive stereoscopic "3D" glasses that work regardless of their angle relative to the screen. And yet, there are cars being manufactured with linear polarising filters on their LCDs even today.
The probability of having problems with polarised sunglasses appears to be inversely proportional to the price of the car, but shame on car manufacturers for still designing cars that don't work properly when the technology is available to avoid it.
Just wait a few years until middle age then you need a bright light with everything.
Or reading glasses/bifocals.
Bright light causes the pupils to contract, which increases the depth of field. More depth of field effectively reduces the minimum focal length of your presbyotic eyes.
I'm severely myopic and middle aged, but I am also fairly photophobic. Bright lights and me do not mix well, and I have written a bunch of times about how the white backgrounds that are endemic in the computing world hurt my eyes. And if that is not enough, my night vision is terrible too. I got all of the downsides but none of the benefits!
So this is really off topic, but I had some of those clever self-darkening lenses at great cost. Less than a year later the prescription in just one of my eyes radically changed. Guess what? You can't replace just one of these lenses you have to replace both at twice the cost! Why's that? Because the manufacturer refuses to do a single lens ("we can't guarantee the same colour or speed of lightening/darkening").
Do not buy (regardless of the brand which may, like the T shirts, be on display for all to see)!
@sorry:
For some of us this is a biannual thing. Taking care of what eyesight we retain is for some of us worth the expense. My SO has a degenerative eye condition that is accelerated by overly bright lights. It may be a few years yet before we get grands, and she really does want to see them.
"Do not buy"
Or at least wait until your eyes stop changing. Years ago my employer decided to fit us out with safety glasses, prescription if needed. Being short-sighted and astigmatic I got the prescription glasses. I always thought it was suspicious that on every re-test I needed a slightly different prescription - and possibly it was. But now my prescription hardly, if ever, changes but if I hunt up one of those old pairs of safety glasses that were worn for just walking around* are now ideal for close-up work.
* When I wanted to examine something closely I took them off. Now that doesn't work either, I can't focus as close-up as I used to.
"The issue is that, with said clipon sunglasses in place, I now can't read the in-car displays."
I just spent two days trying to find a pair of non-polarised sunglasses that were cheap and cheerful, sort-of aviator style (I snapped the arm off mine). I ended up with a pair for a fiver from a local shop after trying all the more obvious places only to find that if I was a woman of a child I would have an enourmous range to pick from, but as a mature male, in the middle of summer, their's almost no choice at all if they even have any in stock.
I, like you, discovered that polarised glasses and LCD type display don't mix well when I bought my first SatNav years ago.
I once purchased some polarized sunglass clip-ons at one of those mall stores specializing in sunglasses. I couldn't understand why they seemed to bother me and even give me headaches until I looked at an LCD display while outdoors and wearing the clip-ons. One lens blocked the display while the other passed it. The two lenses were polarized in different orientations - one vertical, one horizontal!
This isn't exactly new. Nobody buys a Rolex because they need a watch, they're paying Rolex to create a fantasy for them in which they imagine they participate. High street retailers have just spread the idea downmarket. And Facebook will now do it for your for free (for some definition of "free", some assembly required).
Really? I thought that people buy Rolex as either an advert for "Hey mug me please?" or as a method of moving wealth around the globe in a hurry, The recently arrested Malaysian PM Najib Razak was found to have over 400 Rolex watches in his house in case he had to run .. obviously not quick enough this time.
Not yet, he is on RM1M bail at the moment and cannot leave the country.
When his house was raided they ended up with about USD 100M worth of handbags, jewelery and mixed currencies. He and his wife claimed it was all "gifts" from various people.
Imelda Marcos was nothing compared to his wife Rosma. Imelda may have had a lot of shoes but Rosma had 284 boxes of handbags from Birkin et al. Some of the bags are supposed to be worth something like USD 200,000 each. It took 5 trucks to transport everything. Many of the handbags were stuffed with cash and jewelery.
If you want to follow the story then search for "Rosma and Handbags"!
Andy
"They're very handy for identifying people to avoid doing business with.
In 1973 I bought an Omega wristwatch - because I wanted something that was self-winding, water-resistant, kept good time, and showed the date and day of week. Working hours were long and irregular at that time.
In fact it was never a good time-keeper. Remembering to change the date at the start of a short month was also a chore. Omega recommended an annual service by their workshops - which took six weeks and cost several hundred pounds in today's money. Eventually they apparently outsourced the repairs for older watches to other people - who didn't have the equipment to renovate the waterproof seals.
After the last £200 pound repair to replace rusted gears - the new owners of the local jewellers also upped the price of a generic leather strap from £7 to £25. The watch was then consigned to be just a special occasion "dress" piece - together with my Wedgwood cuff-links. My women friends complain because I wear it face inwards - so people have to be sharp-eyed to spot the brand logo on the fastener. According to them it is supposed to be flaunted.
I now wear a quartz analogue sweep that keeps very good time - and it was £3.99 in Aldi. I change the battery myself.
Crikey! They saw you coming didn't they. 200 squids and they didn't even change an O-ring and pressure test it (that's all that seal is, seriously). I get this done (clean, lubricate and pressure test) on Seikos about once a decade and it costs under 100 Ozzie Pesos.
Crikey! They saw you coming didn't they. 200 squids and they didn't even change an O-ring and pressure test it (that's all that seal is, seriously).
That isn't the issue here, the issue with resealing is that it needs to be done in a vacuum chamber: it is the pressure difference inside and out that restores the waterproofing. Personally I wouldn't trust a "service" from someone not willing to vouch for the seal afterwards - it isn't difficult but needs the equipment, and if they cut corners there what else have they done.
Not that a watch service should cost anywhere near £200, or need doing anything like annually.
In 1973 I bought an Omega wristwatch - because I wanted something that was self-winding, water-resistant, kept good time, and showed the date and day of week. Working hours were long and irregular at that time.
The Seiko 5 I was given forty years ago has all those features, still works fine when I wear it (not often; I've started disagreeing with the metal strap) and cost less than each of those Omega service jobs.
Nobody buys a Rolex because they need a watch, they're paying Rolex to create a fantasy for them in which they imagine they participate.
At least Rolex watches are suitably gaudy, old-school Auric Goldfinger stuff (well, until a London ratboy on a moped snatches it from the wrist).
Pity instead the pathetic twerps paying a small fortune for any of the gauche "aviator" or "deep sea diver" twatches, and imagining that having an ugly watch the size of a saucer, with a bazillion dials and a price tag above that of a competent car makes them Top Gun or Jacques Cousteau. I suppose these same people are keeping BMW's Rolls Royce brand alive, and likewise Volkswagen's Bentley sticker. Sad to see RR Motors and Bentley ending up as the modern equivalent of Ghia. How long till we see "Bentley" as a trim level on the VW Golf Mk23?
"Sad to see RR Motors and Bentley ending up as the modern equivalent of Ghia. How long till we see "Bentley" as a trim level on the VW Golf Mk23?"
Rolls Royce hit that point in the late 1970s selling what was, fundamentally, a rebadged Austin Maxi with some wood trim glued on. My uncle hid one in my dad's shed during while getting divorced.
I'd not miss RR or Bentley: the former has always been a marketing driven company and the latter's glory days were 90 years ago.
"or let me pay a subscription fee to turn them off. ............ The subscription? I dunno but promise not to circumvent your agreement to hide the ads by then stuffing your site with "exclusive subscriber offers" (i.e. ads)."
Fat chance. Totally untrustworthy so promises are valueless. . In the early days of Sky TV, some of the subscription channels were ad free. (Sky1 ?) They soon became subscription AND stuffed with ads. STNG on Beeb2 was 45 minutes. On Sky a full hour.
The world is full of Steff Murkeys ( http://www.userfriendly.org/) and they gravitate to Advertising. I hate it when it is called the "Advertising Industry". It doesn't make anything. In many ways it is an anti-industry in that it sucks the lifeblood from something that has value and diminishes it.
What we need is a 'subscription-paid-in-arrears' arrangement, where the user agrees to pay for a service but can cancel if the provider fails to comply with the conditions they initially stated.
Its basic contract law.
The providers will fight against this to the bitter end, for obvious reasons.
I haven't really been paying much attention to people displaying brand labels on their clothing, but now that you have mentioned I'm sure it will become infuriating - so thanks for that!
However, it will still pale into insignificance compared to being hassled by desperately cheerful chuggers leaping in front of me and trying to persuade me to sign up for X pounds per week.
being hassled by desperately cheerful chuggers leaping in front of me
Gloucester Westgate, one Saturday last month. Three of the fuckers in a row, maybe eighty yards apart. I was polite to the first one, brusque to the second, and snarled at the third "Only if you suck my cock." The look on his face was priceless.
I say "I used to support you, but not any more, since you started spending your money on chuggers"
It's a genuine shame that although I agree with most of what Amnesty do (with exception to their apparent attitude towards liberalising prostitution which is harmful to the millions of women worldwide forced into the sex trade, because "some of them might want to be doing it"), I won't give them a single penny because of their use of chuggers.
I could stop to explain this to them, but I find loudly proclaiming, "NO" before they have had a chance to open their gobs to be just as effective, and less of a theft of my time.
with exception to their apparent attitude towards liberalising prostitution which is harmful to the millions of women worldwide forced into the sex trade, because "some of them might want to be doing it"
If you let it come out of the shadows, it becomes harder to force people into it. Sunlight, as they say, is a great disinfectant, but as long as it's illegal, it will remain in the dark, along with all of the creatures that live in the dark, like the traffickers.
How about when they knock on your front door every six weeks or so at half-past seven in the evening when you're trying to eat your tea? That gets a bit tedious.
I asked one of them, "Does your charity have a website with a clearly indicated 'Donate' link on it?"
"Yes." He replied.
"Then why are you here?" I asked him. He had no answer.
If someone is unexpectedly knocking on my door, I know right away that it isn't a friend or family member -- they would have texted ahead. Therefore, if I'm busy (regardless of whether it's eating, working, or I just settled down into a comfy chair), the door doesn't get answered. Problem solved.
Problem not solved if you work night shifts and the knock at the door wakes you up.
Putting a notice om your door asking people not to disturb you doesn't work.
They always think their cause is more important than your sleep.
I no longer give to any charities unless I'm at a funeral where the family have requested a donation to a particular charity that means something to them. I think that's an appropriate exclusion to my rule,
the door doesn't get answered
I've gone one better. I live in an upstairs flat with a long staircase and a soundproof inner door. I've disconnected the front door bell.
I don't even notice if someone is at the door pressing the button or knocking.
You want in? I'll give you a key or my mobile number if I want that. Otherwise bog off.
"when you're trying to eat your tea
My impression is that most people tend to soak their tea leaves in boiling water for the appropriate time, then drink the infusion.
But whatever floats your boat."
Ha!
http://greatbritishmag.co.uk/lifestyle/why-do-some-people-call-their-evening-meal-tea
"How about when they knock on your front door every six weeks or so at half-past seven in the evening when you're trying to eat your tea?"
They usually have some laminated ID badge they wave in your face. It puzzles them then I point out it means nothing because I could knock one up with a camera and colour printer and buy the laminating stuff off eBay so it means they could have done so as well.
What is is with ID badges? They mean nothing out of a particular context - the premises of the organisation that issued them.
However, it will still pale into insignificance compared to being hassled by desperately cheerful chuggers leaping in front of me and trying to persuade me to sign up for X pounds per week.
Now don't be hasty. How many pounds per week are we talking? I could be persuaded to sign up to receive pounds every week!
> McDonalds seems to have been very successful in conditioning people to whistle their irritating little signature tune at random times of the day.
I can't remember the last time I watched TV with ads and have no idea what McD's jingle is...
All I know about McDonalds is the endless amount of litter from them (and KFC, etc) on our local streets. I harbour fantasies of disrupting their sales by getting our neighbours to take back McD litter and dump it on their serving counters with the words "I think one of your customers dropped this in my street" and force them to stop and disinfect everything... Maybe even buy and "accidentally" drop opened thick shakes on the counter so the sticky liquid runs under the cash registers and all over the floors.... It would serve them right!
"I think one of your customers dropped this in my street"
Which means you should really be shooting their customers, or knifing them seeing as you're in the UK, or simply bludgeoning them if you're in London and can't own a kitchen knife anymore. Because it isn't McDonald's fault that their customers are stupid fucks who litter because its easier than thinking.
Which means you should really be shooting their customers, or knifing them seeing as you're in the UK, or simply bludgeoning them if you're in London and can't own a kitchen knife anymore.
London isn't quite to compulsory soft plastic spork levels yet. But we're getting to the point where we could easily create 'ad free' shopping zones. Israel, South Korea and others have developed automatic and computer controlable sentry gun mounts. Logos, being prominent and clearly defined are much easier for pattern recognition systems than individual faces. So bye bye to superdry, convert Gap to goop, and other t-shirt wearers can fcuk right off. Could even make it self-funding and allow brand owners to raise or lower (but not remove) their logos from the target priority lists.
"Because it isn't McDonald's fault that their customers are stupid fucks who litter because its easier than thinking."
Quite, and people who blame companies and councils for the litter all over the place are as far as I'm concerned just as bad as the people who drop it.
And where do you think they get their own litter to drop? If not McDonald's, then whatever takeout place is handy. It's less a problem with the venue than with the customer. Customers demand eating on the go and whoever accommodates will get their money. What else can you do?
"I can't remember the last time I watched TV with ads and have no idea what McD's jingle is"
I was about to say the same. Although I can remember the last time I watched TV, because the advertising was absolutely horrific and reminded me of why I stopped watching TV.
"All I know about McDonalds is the endless amount of litter from them (and KFC, etc) on our local streets."
Where I live, businesses have a legal requirement to remove any of their litter from the streets. All that's required is for a citizen to complain to the city, then the city tells the business to clean up the litter in the next day or pay a steep fine. You see remarkably little of that kind of litter on our streets.
"I was about to say the same. Although I can remember the last time I watched TV, because the advertising was absolutely horrific and reminded me of why I stopped watching TV."
I find there's actually quite a lot of stuff on TV that enjoy watching. But I do take the precaution of recording everything so I can skip over the ads. It's a rare occasion when there is something on worth watching at time of broadcast.
All I know about McDonalds is the endless amount of litter from them (and KFC, etc) on our local streets.
Could not agree more about that.
Just over half a mile away there is a McD's and a KFC right next door to each other.
KFC wasn't so bad but since McD's opened a year ago, the amount of their branded litter that is strewn on the road between my house and their emporium of shite in a cardboard box has grown astronomically.
They don't care a toss about it. We are left to clear it up and put it in a bin.
I ate a Mc'D's thing once. (Albany, NY, 1977) and it was shite. Sorry, tasteless shite. I've vowed to never set foot in one again even if nothing else is open.
If McD's closed down tomorrow, I'd run naked through our town (not a pretty sight) but they won't so everyone is safe.
As for adverts while you are shopping. Anything advertised to me is NOT bought.
I'm an Anti-Ad person.
This is due to working for an Ad Agency for a while in 2009/10. I saw how they operated and it changed my behaviour for good.
Not only on. Our streets but also in the country side.
What is it with McD customers who happily buy the stinking sh*t, drive 5 miles with it in their cars, park up somewhere nice, eat some of the cr*p and then presumably think you know what this stuff is stinking up my car let's, chuck it in that pretty field.
I mean if they wanted it out of the car just store the rubbish in your exhaust pipes till you get to a bin, they're fecking big enough.
I hate to have to stick up for McDonald’s, but as a PFY (not so P, actually) one of the part time jobs I had when at school was working in the local McD’s, and if your shift had you rostered for cleaning duty, one of the cleaning tasks was to go out every couple of hours with a bin bag and collect any dropped McD’s litter within 50 m of the restaurant, so at least they had a small element of social responsibility.
'McDonalds seems to have been very successful in conditioning people to whistle their irritating little signature tune at random times of the day. I'm sure they don't even realise they are doing it.'
One of the popular mobile phone manufacturers has a ringtone (or possibly SMS notification) that sounds a lot like the McDonalds jingle.
McDonalds seems to have been very successful in conditioning people to whistle their irritating little signature tune at random times of the day.
My mother tells me that I wasn't talking yet at 2 years, just making sounds, until I started uttering the McDonald's "You deserve a break today" jingle (and appropriately, meaning when I was in the little seat and the car passed by a McDonald's)." My first words might have been advertising for a company we have nothing to do with, other than as infrequent customers!
Where do you draw the line with advertising of the brands you have bought though? Clothing is one thing, but taking it to extremes you'd need to use a cover or tape over the logos on your phones and tablets, cover up the logo on the lid of your laptop and de-badge your car, the latter of which is only done (at least where I live) by people who have more power in decibels in the boot than they do in horses under the bonnet.
Sent from my iPad
I have no idea if it is possible for them to tickle a setting to not put this in.
It's easily edited or removed.
My .sig used to be "Sent from my Vertu". I've never even seen one.
Now it's "Sent from my iPhone 9". My phone wifi SSID is "iPhone 9+".
I have to update the settings every year just to keep annoying people, hence the troll icon. :-D
It is possible to remove this, but the setting is hidden so that most people don't try to find it. Also, it has an irritating habit of switching itself back about once a year. If you send relatively few messages from your phone compared to your computer, you're liable to send out a few before you notice that the thing is back.
"You might elicit screams of outrage from overprotective Catholic mothers.
A few years ago a "think of the children" woman took me to task in the street because of my T-shirt's very abstract motif. I pointed out that if the children she was protecting could understand the sexual allusion then they were not "innocent".
A neighbour looked at it one day and was puzzled by its meaning. "Oh mum!" said her 14 year old daughter - who then explained it to her.
A Catholic neighbour shocked me the other day by saying she regularly checks the contents of her 15 year old son's smart phone and emails etc. He is expected to hand it over on demand. He is not an irresponsible type - I await the day he rebels about being dragged out of bed for 9am Mass on Sunday's while his father gets a lie-in.
This post has been deleted by its author
I was that harsh (and furious) when I got an e-mail from my wife, when she got an iphone at work (a pretty out of date model, etc.). Well, she didn't realize. Because you don't see it when you're sending the message. Just like you don't see the advertising shit that gets attached to the e-mail you send. Until you realize, sooner or later, you've become a "carrier" :/
> Sent from my iPad
My friends and I have a tendancy to subvert footer messages like that (usually when we're planning a pub crawl)
Here's a selection from the recent collection of emails relating our annual pilgrimage to the pubs of Cambridge (that ocurred last weekend)
*****
Sent from my Amiga
Sent from my Vic 20.
Sent from my Tandy TRS-80
Sent from my Phillips Videopac G7000
Sent using intergalactic morse code
Sent from my Atari 8000XL
Sent from my HAL9000
What are you doing, Dave?
Sent from my Orac
Sent from the bottom of a beer glass
Sent from my Holly.
Everyone's dead, Dave.
Sent from the footplate of a Class A4 4-6-2 Pacific steam locomotive
Sent from my iBacus
"Just try to visit UK daily newspaper The Independent without an ad-blocker (remembering to disable media autoplay as you go) and you'll find yourself mired in a swirling nightmare of digital ad manure that keeps jumping around but never completes loading. "
On the rare occasion I mistakenly hyperlink into https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/ I just spend my time fighting the thing to stop throwing awfulness at me before I manage to close the tab in disgust. The things in unreadable and blocks your adblocker.
For a while when physical junk mail advertising was a real nuisance, I took to opening it up and helpfully forwarding on all the crap to any company kind enough to include a pre-paid return envelope. Got it out of my house and ensured they were charged for the return postage at the same time.
If only we could do the same with spam email......
On mobile, I find ublock origin does most of the job, followed by whatever that firefox page-simplifying thingy is called. This last step is necessary else (usually) an unwanted video appears to take up half the screen and you have to peer through a small slot to read the text. I like the Independent, but there seems to be no sane way to read it without stopping the ads first (not that that's so different to other papers, mind).
The Independent web site has an annoying habit of regularly asking for confirmation of your privacy options. You either can say "accept" with unknown consequences - or click through to see the discrete options which fortunately retain your previous setting.
Many other sites are doing something similar since GDPR came into force - usually I just close the tab. The Independent hasn't quite exhausted my patience - yet.
Our local rag's website shows the first paragraph of an article then asks you to answer a survey question to see the rest of it.
Of course you don't have to actually read the question or any of the multiple choice answers, jabbing one at random works fine.
No idea who is paying them for the survey results but it can't be very useful data.
Dabbsy, this party must be in its fourth decade by now, I first started noticing designer names plastered on clothing after all the RELAX sweatshirts knocking around in the '80s.
I have nevver been much of a fashion watcher so I could easily be wrong.
It's amazing that subsequent generations still buy into this crap, goes to show how shallow we are.
A dozen Virtual Pints for the Blockheads vid though, Ian Dury was a London humoured poet/philosopher/ rock'n'roller of the highest calibre.
"I don't really remember a lot of logo fashion from the '70s [...]"
Tennis player Fred Perry's shorts carried the small laurel wreath logo on the left hem probably since 1952. More recent branding has shirts that have the logo writ large plus the name at the same scale - across the chest.
Tennis player René Lacoste apparently put his crocodile/alligator logo on shirts in 1933.
The Jantzen Diving Girl logo appeared on their swimsuits in 1923.
The last bit of branded clothing with really obvious adverts I bought was a 'Hendrix Lives' T-Shirt around September 1970.
I hate all Adverts with a vengance.
I am not interested in anything that is advertised to me in the Media and on TV especially "Over 50's Life Insurance", "Funeral Plans", leaving my money to Cancer Research UK even though I'm in remission from Leukaemia, 0% Car finance deals and the rest.
As for sites that detect that you are using an AdBlocker. Well, Tough. There is always another place on the internet that I can go to.
Yours,
Grumpy.
{Bah Humbug}
Is there anything advertising can't make worse? Venturing onto the web without an ad blocker is, these days, like voluntarily walking behind a farmer's muck spreader at full flow while trying to admire the scenery, and that's before you even consider it as a delivery vector for malware.
Fuck that.
Nope, because the goal is to tie the content to the ad so that if you attempt to trash the ad, you trash the content as well. It's happening more and more often along with adblock-detectors that whitewash the session and ad-walls where no scripting means no article.
Frankly, I think the journalism industry is soon going to to en masse to paywalls to stay in existence since newspapers and magazines don't seem to be cutting it anymore.
I've been suggesting that for a while. The ad-blocker-blockers can only detect whether your browser requested certain pages or executed certain scripts... it has no idea whether any of the ads were actually displayed or not. There could be a pseudo-whitelist that would appear to the server that the full ad-laden page was being shown, but on the client end, it would look like the adblocked version. For people who want to support certain sites by turning off the adblocker, it would allow a painless way of doing it, and their advertisers would be none the wiser that it wasn't actually ever seen.
Of course, that would still leave one subject to the tracking, the slow page load times, and the threat of the ad network being used to deliver malware. It would only be used for sites that have some degree of trust, though even that is not the best practice, since they're not hosting the ads themselves (so they could be anything).
"Of course, that would still leave one subject to the tracking, the slow page load times, and the threat of the ad network being used to deliver malware. "
It would stop some of that. The cookies and malware just go to /dev/null. Page load times? Maybe there would be possibilities of capping the volume or speeds of the advertising sites providing the main site keeps loading, otherwise just go to a different site instead.
I've advocated this for some time. The publisher gets paid so they're happy. The ad networks get pais so they're happy. The malware flingers don't get paid so everybody else is happy. The advertisers' crap doesn't alienate the viewers they're trying to pester so they should also be happy but probably wouldn't be if they knew it was going on. The trouble is that the advertising networks get paid, ultimately, by the advertiser's customers who should be unhappy.
I really don't understand the business model of websites that rely on adverts for revenue.
Nobody looks at them, nobody clicks on them, apart from by mistake when another ad loads and pushes the link you were trying to click on, to some other part of the screen.
It just seems like pyramid selling to me, a vicious circle. Lets just cut the chain and have done with it. If the content was actually worth anything then we wouldn't mind paying for it!
If I see a page that denies access because I refuse to load ads or accept a million cookies, then tough, i'll just go some place else
He / She says, whilst posting on The Register - a website funded by Ads.
There is a certain irony, isn't there?
If funding by advertising works for The Register that's fine for The Register (and I'm happy to get it for nothing) ... but, like the earlier poster, I don't understand how that works. Why does advertising pay? Are we really such a bunch of feckless shallow fools that we spend our money on things just because we're seen them advertised?
I'd really like to believe that we weren't, but the evidence seems to be to the contrary.
"Nobody looks at them, nobody clicks on them, apart from by mistake"
That's actually just not true. I do click on ads that show me something I'm interested in. It's how I found Digital Ocean on the Register when they advertised on here some years ago. I'm still a customer and it saved me money over who I was with. So ads do work and the way the Register presents them is exactly how it should be done.
I really don't understand the business model of websites that rely on adverts for revenue.
They don't rely on adverts for revenue, they rely on advertisers for revenue. As long as advertisers think they're getting something, they'll pay, that's what finances the websites. When the advertisers go bust due to adblockers no-one cares, another one will be along in a minute. PT Barnum had it right.
"Otherwise, the ad spamming would have been long dead."
You forgot one thing. The advertising industry is very, very good at selling. They sell advertising. Nothing else; advertising. They sell it to advertisers who are going to be pre-disposed to buy it because it strokes their egos by having their companies' "messages" "out there". The PT Barnum effect works.
"We could all simply wear sheets on the streets and no longer brand anything. Then you wouldn't need ads on websites making you buy the latest whatever. What a dismal state of affairs. Just like North Korea."
I can't quite decide whether that's a better example of a false dichotomy or a straw man.
Either way it's total bollox. Presumably from someone wasting their life working in marketing, or a victim - in which case it's not too late, you can get help, keep reading comments on here from the grizzled oldsters who have been there, seen it, done it and got the (unbranded) T-Shirt.
Or an indication of the contents.
A couple of years back a client asked me to drop them off at the gay beach near Las Salinas in Ibiza, while parked in the car park chatting before he went off with his mate for a swim, I was unaware that I was staring at a large lady in a shocking pink tee shirt bearing the legend 'fat' on the front and 'dyke' on the back. She grinned at me and said ' What! You gonna call me a liar?'
That would happen only in Ibiza.
I swear to god, trying to get the sales guy from evan halshaw et al to remove the ugly sticker with their name on from the rear window of a car I'm paying good money to buy outright is an ordeal, but it's the line in the sand for me, the walking away point. I know how much advertising is worth; If you want that sticker there you can pay me a fee for the life expectancy of the car.
The only advertising I'll wear or have in my home is something where it's part of what I'm buying, like an old F1 t-shirt or scale model car; I even insist on the correct tobacco advertising rather than have it sanitised away
If you want that sticker there you can pay me a fee for the life expectancy of the car
Having just bought a new car[1], I can confirm that proper dealerships confine their advertising to the small print on the bottom of the license plate.
[1] Toyota C-HR. Driving a proper hybrid is very odd )but growing on me!). It also has lotsa toys :-)
When I last bought a new car I was very direct during the early paperwork signings.
1. If the car has any own brand stickers or badges on it the deal is off, you can put your name on the number plates, that's it.
2. If I find the number plate holes have been drilled pissed then the deal is off. There is very little as annoying as a new car with a number plate that is just slightly pissed, you can never not see it.
I browse with javascript disabled so what I presume are adverts on the Register show up like broken links to pictures. I checked the HTML and the adverts have a <noscript> section containing a simple <img>. wget can get it. identify tells me it is a 1x1 gif with a transparency layer. The gimp shows that the pixel is transparent.
That advert is a bit to cryptic for me. What are they selling?
Yes, but I did not see the point the the same site tracking me repeatedly on one page, with the pixel in places I remember seeing adverts on ages ago. There are also width and height markers in the URL that match the column width.
It seriously looks like half an attempt was made to show adverts on browsers with javascript disabled: the page code is working but the ad server is just returning 1x1pixclear.gif
(Hint to advertisers: I will not make an effort to block a static image that does not cover the text but if it moves you get blocked for years.)
We could have had this, really.
It could have been the killer app for Google Glass - something that detects ads whether on billboards, backsides, or buses, and on-the-fly replaces them with more pleasing images - nice landscapes, beautiful women, specialist pornography, or a combination of all three.
For driving, it could just replace the ads with flat beige, to reduce distraction.
...but no, the word "Glasshole" was too tempting, and our urban views continue to be polluted by idiotic branding and the effluent of marketers' minds.
This post has been deleted by its author
Do you really think that the Big G would let you block adverts? On their hardware? And not substitute them for paid ones? Or add adverts EVERYWHERE, a la Minority Report?
May I please have a lil' bit of whatever you're smoking? I want me pink coloured glasses, too.
It could have been the killer app for Google Glass - something that detects ads whether on billboards, backsides, or buses, and on-the-fly replaces them with more pleasing images - nice landscapes, beautiful women, specialist pornography, or a combination of all three.
Mmmm.... replacing all the models on those ads with Megurine Luka....
"unless you're prepared to get out the sewing scissors at home and unpick the logo stitching."
Hey! I resemble that comment :)
I've unpicked or ironed off* many logos on clothes purchased for me by other people. Even my mum, who has spent forty odd years getting me clothes, keeps thinking that when I say "plain black hoody" I really want some bright pink logo and a picture on it. On the other hand my father in law manages to not only buy ones that fit me, but also monochromatic, no stupid logos and decent zips.
I gathered, from a fashionable friend, that this is apparently "normcore". So even not having a brand is, in fact, a brand....
I'll stoop to wearing logos on tshirts, mainly because the promo ones can often be of quite high quality. Although I'm getting to the age where polo shirts make me look less like a sack of shit. And those buggers seem to always come with a logo. Admittedly a truck flap or a little croc is within my tolerance, still draw the line at names.
* not directly onto the iron, since that'll bugger it, but onto brown paper.
I've unpicked or ironed off* many logos on clothes purchased for me by other people. Even my mum, who has spent forty odd years getting me clothes,
I've gone well out of my way to remove or obliterate IBM logos on whatever tat I got from them before being resourced. Feck them if they want me to advertise their shit.
"refusal to show complete content unless you disable the blocker first"
That's ok, if manually updating the adblocker's lists doesn't wipe the overlay away then I rip it off manually using ublock's picker, HackTheWeb or the dev tools of the browser - and if all that fails, I go away and never return. If any of it succeeds, I read what I came for and never return.
Sometimes Firefox's reader mode will get you the content you want (if the text was what you were after) when the adblocker blockers hit. I also use an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker user script, but the paywalls are getting worse (some of them are not removed by the script, whereas it used to work nearly all the time).
It's simple. Like Zaphod Beeblebrox, you wear sunglasses that block out anything you don't want to see. This is actually doable, if you don't mind carrying high-end AI around with you. A camera mounted on your sunglasses scans the field of view for logos and icons, and active optics conceal them from your vision.
Of course it could get a bit awkward moving around if advertising takes up most of your field of view, but then the AI can also project helpful visual cues so you can dodge bus shelters, dogs, and oncoming moped bandits.
"But mine is so obvious what it is."
Car models used to be distinctive shapes - and makers had house styles. So a Triumph was square-ish cornered and a Rover rounded. A Volvo was rectangular.
Nowadays I find it hard to distinguish them except for the logo on the front. Presumably the design is either outsourced - or the designers went to the same colleges and read the same influential reports.
Worst thing I can think of car wise are body kits that let your premium quality car from good manufacturer look like a premium car from a knob manufacturer.
Why would you want a top end Opel to look like an Audi?
(Only rebrands people liked were Cadillacs as Opel and Vauxhalls as Holden)
I may be mistaken, but I think part of the reason was that washing wasn't always a private affair, so skivvies that looked alike could get mixed up. It was certainly true in the military, particularly in the World War II period when underpants were a uniform drab olive to avoid drawing enemy fire when they were hung out to dry. So basically, if moms put names on the skivvies, it was for their sake, to avoid mixups in communal washes. This BTW became less of an issue after this time period because this was just about the point where underwear became a fashion statement.
" So basically, if moms put names on the skivvies, it was for their sake, to avoid mixups in communal washes.
There was a ritual in my school days of some clothing worn to school having name tags. There were preprinted custom labels - but most people bought a bottle of indelible ink and some white tape. Understandable as the school uniform was standardised in most respects - and could get mixed up in cloakrooms and sport changing rooms.
Perhaps The Reg should consider an optional paywall, add-free membership for a reasonable monthly fee
The subscription could be pay any amount over £1 per month for the add-free service. Many would pay the £1 but other would happily pay more. This would also allow you to evaluate how much your readers are willing to pay for such a service.
Just a suggestion.
This has been mentioned a few times however I don't think it's sustainable. How would you serve an ad-free version? Duplicate the site with a paywall? Which one shows on the search engines then how do you get new subscribers if it's the paywall one? That's something all those paywall news website are going to learn the hard way eventually.
Nicely put indeed. But one quibble: was it really the second half of the last century? My late mother (born mid-1930s) told a story against her (mid-century) schoolgirl self falling for some advertising, and her dad - already then an Old Cynic about such things - laughing as he explained how it worked. And - credit where it's due - my upbringing successfully made me a complete cynic before I reached the age of having or spending money.
"Why the hell you want to set yourself up as an unpaid walking advert for someone else's company is anyone's guess."
I don't understand this either. In my younger days, I took to removing the branding from everything I could, especially on the clothes. I confess that I didn't keep up that habit (it was a lot of work), however I still tend to avoid buying things that have very prominent branding.
Yep. Most of Google, FB, Twitter and all that other anti-social media sites are blocked on my firewall.
Pisses my Grandkids off a bit but they have learned that my home is a social media free zone and they are only here for a few hours every couple of weeks.
There's a scene towards the end of '94s documentary `Crumb' where Robert Crumb is sitting on a bench along a street shaking his head at the people proudly walking by with "BENNETON", "GAP", or some other corporate logo emblazoned across their chests. Apparently, shirts with the corporate mascot--an alligator, etc.--sewn on the pocket were just a test for the later unpaid advertising blitz that uses that "90,000" point font. How long before the logos are on the back of the shirts as well?
"Apparently, shirts with the corporate mascot--an alligator, etc.--sewn on the pocket were just a test for the later unpaid advertising blitz that uses that "90,000" point font."
In doing some research for a comment I found that the discrete laurel wreath logo of Freddy Perry probably appeared from the start in 1952. My 1970/80s shorts are like that.
Fast forward to the current day. On a sports shirt this JPG has the branding like a billboard plastered across the chest.
If you go to the Fred Perry brand site itself - they have a drop down for "Subculture". You can find the link yourself if you want.
Why the hell you want to set yourself up as an unpaid walking advert for someone else's company is anyone's guess.
Once I remember watching "Wogan" - though I can't remember if the person being interviewed was Ralph Lauren or Tommy Hilfiger (I think it was probably the former) - anyhow, what I do remember is Wogan mentioning that it is known that he does not wear clothes which advertise the name of the brand - to which the reply was that if his company wanted him to do that, then, the company should pay him for the service
Here is the deal, Mr Dabbs.
You promise not to track me, not to give my data to Google (or any other outsider), not to use sound, animation, or Javascript, and not to allow any third party code injections onto yor page.
And then I promise not to block your adds.
That the fairest deal you are going to get. You get open slather, provided only that you play by fair, decent rules.
But you don't like it? Hmmph. I thought as much.
"And then I promise not to block your adds."
I have El Reg white listed in uBlock Origin and NoScript. 3rd party stuff is not whitelisted though. No ads. If El Reg want to place ads that meet that criterion, I'll see them. I'm fine with that. I've seen far too many intrusive ads, ads which cause the page to bounce/re-format, ads which auto-play video/audio etc., not to mention the well documented cases in these very pages of even so-called reputable ad slingers being hijacked or scammed into placing malware into the feed.
It should be blindingly obvious to the El Reg staff that their readership are going to be high on the scale of security conciousness and find a way to do ad delivery in a way that we readers won't feel the need to block.
There are a lot of TV channels now showing adverts, and that is pushing the old model to its limits. Perhaps it's why we are never likely to see the quality of Ridley Scott's Hovis adverts ever again. But in those far-off halcyon days the only thing the advertiser knew about his targets was that they were watching a particular TV programme.
Nowadays, as GDPR has revealed, they can't place an advert without knowing your inside-leg measurement.
One has to wonder if the computer has made people smarter, or just biased success in life towards sociopathic semi-literate jackasses.
As for the clothing, Levi Strauss have their label on a pair of jeans, and I reckon that's OK. The logo-laden shirt of your favourite football club is tolerable. Nike have that swirl element in their footwear design, and if that's "in your face" you have other problems and are likely to wake up in hospital. Though the French Connection UK branding seems like a funny-once joke.
But I doubt I would buy these expensive brands anyway. So there's no point in saying I'll boycott them.
"The logo-laden shirt of your favourite football club is tolerable."
Only if you really believe that, if you turn up at a match wearing it and they're in need of a a last minute substitute, they're going to pick you because you came prepared.
...is the gigantic "We value your privacy"* popup that covers up the content until you tell it to feck off. That and the in your face button to "Enable all purposes" button followed by a ream of much smaller switch off this reason to rape your privacy buttons. I don't want to view the vendor list. No I don't want to see the list of companies. What I want is a giant feck off I don't accept or disable all purposes permanently. Sure I can click through all of the tiny buttons and view the page with impunity, however if I have the temerity to click on another page it loads up the same bullshit to click through a the list again. It's a tactic to wear you down so you eventually click sod it, enable all.
I even tried to use uBlock to remove these specific elements which appeared at first to work. Alas it also blocked the scroll bar, so I end up with a portion of the underlying page and no way to scroll.
The final solution is to simply not use sites that force-feed irritating content down your throat.
*Which is an even more gigantic lie. They're forced to pay lip-service by gdpr or something.
/rage
I only wear visible brands if I am paid to. Since I am not a celebrity or anything, I consider giving me the garment for free adequate payment.
...
Actually not entirely true. I do buy and wear T-shirts branded to my favorite web-comics, though I guess their entertaining me otherwise for free can be considered good payment too.
I applaud you, sir! I found it striking, way back when out of my teenhood, and exposed to the vile world of consumerism in the west, that the people are usually daft, preening with all over them. I have, pretty much, always bought good quality, because it makes sense (costs less, usually), but one of the main criteria before purchase was, whether I can remove or cover that piece of advertising they slap on (soo to be) MY property. I always told my workmates, who smirked at my obsession, that the brands should pay ME to advertise for them, and if they don't - FUCK THEM, here's a razor blade to remove that logo. Or a patch. Or, if worst comes to the worst, a non-removable (sadly washable) pen marker.
black mirror ahoy. Well, it was only for legal purposes, but I can't believe it starts and stops at that. Most likely, it will propagate from and within the "consumer" world. Once we get those eye implants... obligatory for any newborn, that is!
Until the ad-services stop tracking without consent (must be opt-in, no log in required and if you clear cookies, you are opted out and stop half page pop ups saying consent or else) using whatever flavour of the month is being used for the tracking is stopped, ad-blockers will continued to be used.
If the site uses static images (sick of auto-play and ads that expand convering half the page) and the total number of ads are only less than 10% of the page content and there is no tracking, then the ad-blocker will come off.
Also, sites need to consider the band-width useage of the client. Eat their data allowance and lose the visitor.
Sadly, I suspect there are few clothing manufacturers that treat their suppliers and their workers properly ethically, so, on the assumption that they are all probably as bad as each other, at least Primark sell t-shirts (and sometimes, shirts) in an enormous variety of plain colours, with no branding visible whatsoever.
(A similar peeve of mine is why on earth does the fashion industry think that as men we must like t-shirts with giant sports-like numbers on them, or meaningless ingrish slogans, or shirts with unflattering stripes or checks? Just plain single colours all the way for me, please.)
"A similar peeve of mine is why on earth does the fashion industry think that as men we must like t-shirts with giant sports-like numbers on them, or meaningless ingrish slogans, or shirts with unflattering stripes or checks?"
Probably because they sell and they have the numbers to back it up. If a superfan buys four or five of them at a time, they probably pull in more money than two or three normal customers. See where this is going? There's simply no cure for stupidity, especially when it's "Shut Up and Take My Money" stupidity.
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