burley@geech.ai.mit.edu (Craig Burley) (02/28/91)
The problem with Prodigy ads for me wasn't their presence on part of the screen (less than 1/3rd, perhaps 1/5th or even 1/6th), since occasionally they were interesting enough to look into. No, the problem for me was the extra time it took to draw them. Prodigy is slow enough as it is. Worse, some ads are "animated", so you not only have to wait for the ad to draw, you then have to wait for the silly thing to dance around, change the colors of its lettering in sequence, etc -- especially fascinating on a monochrome display (heavy sarcasm here). And, of course, during this tedious activity, you can't type ahead at all. If they had a decent protocol, they could have the entire ad space get updated last, and have the program on your computer allow you to type ahead and see the corresponding updates, even while the ad did its thing. So just turning off the display for the ad wouldn't make me any happier if I still had Prodigy. On the other hand, if there was a way to tell the host "no thanks, don't bother sending any info on the ad..." in a reliable way, that'd be great, because it'd be a timesaver. Note that not all Prodigy screens have ads. However, I think the following two things are true: 1) all ads appear in the same place on the screen (except for email ads -- yes, they send bulk junk email, sigh); 2) all ads have a "LOOK" button, which might help a filter determine whether an ad is present. -- James Craig Burley, Software Craftsperson burley@ai.mit.edu