New Heights of Lame Promotion

Not sure just who and what story you're thinking of, but I'm constantly reminded how prescient Pohl and Kornbluth were in "The Space Merchants" and "Gladiator at Law", not to mention the (nearly 20 years later) John Brunner novel "The Sheep Look Up".

Works fine on my Netscape 7.2 browser. Same here, use IE for updates and saving a gif image as a bitmap for later translation to a JPG

Wolf Kirchmeir wrote:

It's too bad that the intro is so annoying. The site actually has some good news for modelers. ____ Mark

What is much worse than the lack of "skip intro" or "text only" buttons are the websites fully designed using Flash! Do I need to say any more? :-)

Peteski

Macromedia claims that over 95% of Web users have Flash Player installed.

Mark

Hah , hah, hah! You burned him with that one.

Sounds like a story by J.G. Ballard I once read, also I think Philip K. Dick wrote something along the same lines.

Those are related stories, and even better examples than the one I was thinking of, whose title I've forgoteen. Its plot was that the lower down the socio-economic scale you were, the more you had to consume. The hero was hoping for a promotion, so he could buy less. The authorities actually punished you by making you buy _more_ if you missed out on buying the latest hyped crapola. So you ended up in deep debt. Only the pwoerful did not have to buy anything; and they were debt free, of course. The story actually satirises some common (and inconsistent) notions of wealth, which might be worth pondering, too. :-)

The "...could not be found" Must've been a momentary glitch at the ISP. I did find it, and saw a nice big white box with "get plug-in here" in the middle of it. Stoopid, that.

Oh, I have it installed, I just moved the plug-in from Mozilla's plug-in directory, so Mozilla doesn't automatically start it up. There may be a way to control that behaviour, but I haven't found it. Advice, anybody?

If Flash were configured so that I could turn it on and off at my discretion, I wouldn't mind it at all.

There are far too many websites that do _not_ have the skip intro option. If you and Chris are willing to put up with that kind of preposterous arrogance from a website, well, be my guests.

In fact, if you don't click that box, the intro stops and the page just sits there showing the last frame of the animation. There are no links, no menu, nothing but a box that says to click here for a list of Trainman dealers. At least the thing should go on and transition into the next sequence.

Froggy,

"I owe my soul to the company store" - Sixteen Tons by Merle Travis*

"There's a brand new shopping center seven storys high There's bound to be a sale or two -- something we can buy There's four floors of pak\rking and we're sure to find a space We'll spend all the money that the government doesn't take

Down in the mall I'll be your man We'll go shopping, babe It's something we can stand Down in the mall We will abide Up on the escalator Darling, we will ride" - Down in the Mall by Warren Zevon

• which got him considered a communist by the FBI; but then what can you expect from a cross-dressing old queen on the make?

[snip some other cool stuff]

Did they also investigate Elvis when he sang that song?

I think by then McCarthy's star had waned and Elvis was too popular - they got on Travis' case in '47 or '48, when certain forces were seeking to have anything smacking of concern for workers' rights labeled communist. Some of the same folk go on and on about boiling hot coffeeoid beverage suits.

Worked fine for me in Mozilla. I confess. I didn't read it, but it looks like a rather long company "ra-ra" page.

It's been changed to skip the animation!!!!!

I don't think that was the point of the original posts in this thread.

I might have a Flash player and still have a slow dialup connection where I wish not to view some Flash animation.

This relly getting OT even for this OT thread. :-)

Peteski

... then you click on the huge white box that says "skip intro"!!!

(The point of the original post is that the animation was lame.)