I’m not clicking on links to the Onion any more. In fact, I’m not even linking to the Onion. Much as I love their fair and balanced news analysis, their man-on-the-street queries, the headlines, photos, stories, everything about the publication — as long as they deploy obnoxious navigational interruptions “predirecting” to advertisements, and redirect deep links and even searches from their own search page to the current issue, it’s just not worth the bother. De-link the Onion, and maybe they’ll get the message.
[Later: David Weinberger advises me that he had no trouble while using a pop-up blocker. I have Safari, my main browser, set to block pop-ups, but The Onion still interposes an unwelcome Monty Python ad between me and the main site. I’m experimenting with other browsers to see where the problem lies (Mozilla not-Firebird dodges the pre-direct, but still redirects archive searches to the main page. Internet Explorer receives a pop-up window, since MS doesn’t want to permit its users to avoid pop-ups. OK — now I’m finding that searches that point to older articles work fine in all my browsers (my problem seems to be that the California Recall picture, for which I’d been searching, redirects to the current front page for reasons I don’ quite fathom).
Lest I be thought to have been making this all up, Margaret points out to me that a CNN story involves the observation “During the dotcom boom, ads flowed into the Onion without much coaxing from sales reps. But the flow had stopped, so Mills sent reps out to build relationships with ad agencies. That change and a new willingness to accept rich-media ads have helped the Onion replace fallen dotcom advertisers with such blue chips as DreamWorks, HBO, Nike, and Volkswagen.” My emphasis on the phrase “rich-media ads.”]
Posted by AKMA at August 29, 2003 11:50 AM | TrackBackThese days I'd say the finest news source was actually the Ironic Times, which consistently hits the mark and yet is suitable for those of us with ADD.
Posted by: Simon Phipps at August 30, 2003 04:17 PMThe long-dissed AOL does have a pretty good pop-up blocker on its 9.0 version -- that, coupled with a program I installed several weeks ago, called Pest Patrol, does a fine job of keeping my computer free of garden-variety annoyance. (Pest Patrol blocks spy-ware, amongst other things.)
As for sites which send out these nasties -- I don't know if their webmasters have means of determining successful blocks -- but if they do, they'd have to know pop-ups' days are numbered, just as are telemarketers.
Posted by: Juli at August 31, 2003 02:01 PMNote first that favoriteNumbers type changed. Instead of our familiar int, we're now using int*. The asterisk here is an operator, which is often called the "star operator". You will remember that we also use an asterisk as a sign for multiplication. The positioning of the asterisk changes its meaning. This operator effectively means "this is a pointer". Here it says that favoriteNumber will be not an int but a pointer to an int. And instead of simply going on to say what we're putting in that int, we have to take an extra step and create the space, which is what does. This function takes an argument that specifies how much space you need and then returns a pointer to that space. We've passed it the result of another function, , which we pass int, a type. In reality, is a macro, but for now we don't have to care: all we need to know is that it tells us the size of whatever we gave it, in this case an int. So when is done, it gives us an address in the heap where we can put an integer. It is important to remember that the data is stored in the heap, while the address of that data is stored in a pointer on the stack.
Posted by: Everard at January 13, 2004 01:04 AMFor this program, it was a bit of overkill. It's a lot of overkill, actually. There's usually no need to store integers in the Heap, unless you're making a whole lot of them. But even in this simpler form, it gives us a little bit more flexibility than we had before, in that we can create and destroy variables as we need, without having to worry about the Stack. It also demonstrates a new variable type, the pointer, which you will use extensively throughout your programming. And it is a pattern that is ubiquitous in Cocoa, so it is a pattern you will need to understand, even though Cocoa makes it much more transparent than it is here.
Posted by: Jenkin at January 13, 2004 01:05 AMA variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.
Posted by: Machutus at January 13, 2004 01:05 AMWhen the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.
Posted by: Georgette at January 13, 2004 01:03 PMWhen the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.
Posted by: Sander at January 13, 2004 01:03 PMBeing able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.
Posted by: Joseph at January 13, 2004 01:03 PM