[MUD-Dev] Re: META/ADMIN: Re: ADMIN: Advertising on MUD-Dev

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Mike Sellers wrote:
> I think maybe you're confusing two separate things here.  The first is spam
> -- email that you didn't request promoting something you probably don't
> want.  No one here is saying that's a good thing.

> The second is in-email adverts, what JC starting asking about banning here.

The approach is more or less the same, except that in the second case the
advertiser puts the perceived responsibility on a clueless newbie.  Poor
sod. It would actually be a lot more honourable if Yahoo posted their
advertisments directly to the list, I could easily filter them out, I
would never see them. And more importantly they would confirm their position
as proud jerks instead of using users without pride as hosts for their
parasite-like marketing scheme.

> trade, then it will cease being a viable business.  OTOH, Hotmail was sold
> to Microsoft for nearly $400M (maybe an order or two of magnitude more than
> has been made on all muds combined?), so I don't think this is going to go
> away.

Neither is spam.  Nor Microsoft... But both are being nurtured by clueless
users (without pride some might add).  That doesn't imply that I have to dig
into spam or microsoft (unless it happens to be convinient).

> And contrary to your last point, that in-email adverts aren't worth
> very much, I can tell you that they actually work quite well: we use them
> in some of our specialty email (recipe-a-day, that sort of thing), and they
> get a tremendously positive response with no apparent customer backlash.

Worth, for who?  I meant the receiver not the advertiser. Saturated
marketing works for the advertiser, there is no doubt about that!  However,
I do assume the average member of this mailinglist to be somewhat more picky
about what they buy into than the average "aol-user". 

> >All intrusion on my private sphere and it's immediate conceptual
> >surroundings is immoral.  Any machine which requests my attention is evil,
> >unless it does so on my command.

> Well, that's your opinion -- but you're part of a tiny minority that feels
> that way.  (BTW, can I assume then that you do not have an alarm clock or
> automatic coffee maker or telephone ringer or doorbell or a car with
> automatic transmission, since each of these would be immoral and evil by
> the above standard?)

I use an alarmclock when I have exams, but it is acting on my command.

I nuke cookies as well...

On-topic:
Anyone tried SciTech's MGL library? (guess I should search the archives)
Sounds neat, but their webpage (www.scitechsoft.com) doesn't mention a Linux
port, although it says a port would only take 1000 lines of sourcecode,
which suggests that it is fairly portable.  I believe MGL is a subset of
OpenGL?
--
Ola Fosheim Groestad,Norway      http://www.stud.ifi.uio.no/~olag/worlds/