Ads are ads are ads. They generate revenue, they are the lifeblood of many websites. On most days, I can tolerate them.
But when a website I’ve been using for a decade, a site that is truly the core of much of the Linux community, for all its faults, supports an ad so blatantly sensationalistic, with no bylines, no disclaimers, and in fact nothing to say this IS in fact an ad, I find my bile rising.
This ad appeared on this mornings reload of Slashdot.org. It ran big bold headlines “LONDON STOCK EXCHANGE CHOOSES WINDOWS OVER LINUX FOR RELIABILITY!” and stopped at the frame shown here. The implication is “Windows is more reliable than Linux in server environments. You should run Windows Server 2003 if you want to succeed.”
This really isn’t the place to go into whether Windows or Linux is more appropriate in the data center – that’s been hashed, rehashed, and argued ad nauseum. What bothers me is seeing this sort of IN YOUR FACE advertising on a site that really is against all that this ad represents – the blind marching toward the All Savior of Microsoft, only they can run our data center! Only they can run stable servers!
Ads are ads, as I said. But Slashdot, shouldn’t this bother you, even a smidgen?
There are ads on slashdot?
I {heart} AdBlock Plus. I’m totally not seeing them.
I’m not sure what the big deal is. The ads are undoubtedly syndicated from Google and/or Doubleclick. I would personally like to see a little more neutrality on Slashdot since it purports to be a news site. I don’t like many things that MS does, but then again I feel the same way about Apple, Red Hat, and even mySQL these days. If they’ve got to have ads on there, MS is as good as anyone. Gods know Slashdotters spend enough time talking about them.
You mean like the ads for windows 2003 that appear on this page? 🙂
Mmmm, AdBlock. (Ads? What ads?)
You mean like the ads for windows 2003 that appear on this page? 🙂
Well, there’s a couple of differences. First of all, I’m not a news site founded on opensource ideals. I’m a geek, pure and simple.
Second, my ads specifically say “And now a word from our sponsors” – it’s pretty obvious that the ads you’re seeing on my site are google adsense ads, they are marginalized and do not threaten to take over the site. I do not show animations or the like.
I feel the ad on slashdot is about as far from OSDN’s ideals as you can get, and it’s quite obvious Microsoft paid OSDN a tremendous amount of money to place that ad on the home page of slashdot (as opposed to my Adsense ads which are pulled contextually from a large pool based on whatever I happen to have on the page at the time).
Anyway. _I_ found it poor taste. So there.
Ha ha I awas thinking the same thing as Mort!
But. Windows 2003 IS stable. It’s the services that aren’t.