I guess its just been within the last day or two, but now the "ad" is on all the forum pages. Dave said if they can't get enough impressions they are going to put it in all the Thread pages too. (Could you imagin trying to read a thread with that thing popping up?) He also said its going to run into November, maybe longer.

Its almost impossible to use the forums over there now. I know, I know, If I had Mozilla I could use its disable pop up feature. But I don't have Mozilla and I'm not going to move to Linux for a while yet.

In my opinion gamedev has been going downhill for a while (No new updates, no new content...) and this is just another nail in the coffin.

Bless you Matthew!

uh?

EDIT: Curse you 56k dial-up! Faster I say! )Its only 11.2 MB I thought it would be alot bigger.)

There's always www.panicware.com

The rage on GameDev is pretty high. I'm going to post a few links to threads ....

Bye, GameDev.
ATI pop-up ads suck
ATI slime ads
The Official Radeon Ad Thread
Radeon Advertisment

EDIT: I just saw a screenshot of the ad. That IS annoying

Get Phoenix, it's better than Mozilla

Its a mozilla like browser that uses most of the mozilla code... Its just smaller and a bit faster.

Phoenix is actually a little better than mozilla in various aspects. Right-click to open a tab doesn't direct you off the page, closing a tab sends you to the tab to the right, not the left. That's just two quick examples where Phoenix controls are more intuitive. Phoenix also makes use of Windows XP skins and colors, whereas Mozilla just uses ugly block buttons. I also like the default Phoenix skin, if I re-arrange the toolbar a bit. With Phoenix (and Mozilla most likely), you can right click the ad and "Block Image". You can also block pop-ups.

Which brings me to gamedev.net. Since it has no real revenue stream, if enough people do that, they'll just shut the site down.

I remember them having to raise $20,000 for bandwidth for a year? (I may be thinking of another site, I dunno.) With my current server rates, that would last me over 16 years. Even if I had to switch to a server with "unlimited bandwidth" (ie, 100Mbit), that amount would last me 4 years.

They use ASP, so I assume they run Windows servers. Those are a lot more expensive to operate and manage than *nix. I honestly don't know why anyone would choose to use Windows for a server, because ultimately you pay more for less.

Linux servers are more reliable than Windows ones
Linux requires less expensive hardware than Windows (ie, Linux OS is smaller - no GUI, etc)
PHP+MySQL performs WAY better than ASP+SQL Server
Linux is free, and Windows+SQL Server is expensive

Unless I had corporate sponsership, I wouldn't even be able to afford a Windows server. I'm not sure how Gamedev even gets by.

If they are spending a lot of $ on hardware/bandwidth, they would be well advised to convert the site to PHP and Linux.

I saw the screenshot, and yes it looks pretty annoying but I still think Gamedev site is not too bad. Sure, some of the content is a bit outdated and some it really sucks. But I think there is some good material in there, plus the one thing I like about it is the Game Dev news.

Just my 2cents worth....8-)

yeah gamedev has been going downhill for a long time now.....i stopped using their forums and all i use from them are their articles, some of them are actually pretty good.....good thing im on opera! no ads!;D

Well, for me, $20,000 in one year would supply me with 4 dedicated unmanaged servers with no bandwidth restrictions, other than what the 10Mbit card would allow.

In other words, each machine should be able to push over 100GB daily. This would be, of course, if you could get them to use 100% of the 10Mbit.

Keep in mind that the pricing above means that there is no onsite sysadmin, and I would have to be doing all the server updates and backups myself via remote.

As soon as you start renting a Windows machine with onsite sysadmins, you start paying about 4X the price for literally a tenth of the bandwidth.

[Edit: I accidently figured 100MBit the first time.]

(somewhat related to this) Is it just me or has Allegro.cc been very slow today?

[EDIT]
Seems to be some problem with the link to USA - domestic sites are still fast but everyone I know has had connection problems with American servers today...

Yeah, I just got the newest Mozilla, and it is VERY SLOW to start up, like MS word slow on my win ME.

Yeah, well I had a bad experience with that thing one time, It used to crash my system every time I tried to launch explorer so I don't use it.