mendel

So watching all the froofroo in the posting-limits news thread finally convinced me to pay for my LJ account. To those of you wavering on this, I tell you: It is worth the money just to get access to the fast servers.

(Also, stimps points out that that post-limiting thread is a great way to find clueful, astute and witty perfect strangers to add to your friends list.)

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Dagbrown in #unix pointed out today that the banner ad in an unregistered Opera web browser has just contained the Opera name and logo for a long time. I don't use Opera much myself, but I realized that whenever I did, it didn't download any ads then either. We're talking months here.

So I was thinking about this, and it brought back warm fuzzies from the dot-com era. Here's the deal, folks: you give Opera Software ASA money, and they'll display your banner ads to a tiny audience of geeks who are not only resentful of having banner ads displayed to them, but who are also too stingy to spend the money to get rid of the ads in the registered copy of Opera! It's a market waiting to be exploited, I tell you.

(So now, Opera's plan for getting people to buy the registered version essentially boils down to "We will occupy an unreasonable amount of screen real estate until they give us money." Riiight.)