Random ads from Linkshare are being removed from this site.
They are annoying and thus not effective for anyone.
Instead, ads relevent to the topic at hand.
This came about when I ran across this
RealPlayer video of a presentation to a technology management class at the University of North Carolina
The guy is from a company that measures "end-to-end" web performance, a service similar to what Keynote and Mercury offers.
But these guys can charge a lot less than the outrageous $4,000 per month than the big boys charge. Here's why.
Instead of using dedicated servers sprinkled around the world to measure network latency, they collect performance stats from regular user clients ("peers") running their agent in the background.
At first, I was leery of putting "spyware" on my machine since I've spent so many years fighting them.
But because they're not a marketing company, they don't care who people are and what sites people visit because they're into performance, not ads. They don't ask for demographics such as "are you a 40 year old male pedophile?" so they can't spam you with targeted porn.
Unlike AOL and others, who force you to see ads, their agent runs (via Winsock) to ping sites they specify, INVISIBLE to us users sitting at the client computer.
They want agents to get a variety of ISP linkage types at a variety of geographical locations, so they do give out a little cash to offset the hassle and risk of yet another process possibly slowing down and mucking up our machine.
I think that, to be safe, people should sign up for this only if they are willing and able to do backups and possibly rebuild machines.
I never give out to anyone email addresses of anyone I know, so you'll need to check on this scheme yourself.
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