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I've seen clones of the GBA being sold on video shops as well as game dealers that sell bootlegged warez releases. Most of them come in an SP clamshell form factor, and either come with embedded games or a microSD slot for ROM dumps.
Makes me wonder as to how'd they duplicate the functionality of the original hardware, but given that it runs on an ARM7TDMI, it wouldn't be that hard to mimic.
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Yeah, and from what it seems NES clones have been more or less becoming rare these days in favour of GBA clones or Allwinner/Rockchip-powered tablets.
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<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://consumerist.com/2013/08/05/dear-facebook-please-do-not-start-running-video-ads/">http://consumerist.com/2013/08/05/dear- ... video-ads/</a><!-- m -->
I never really complain about changes to any major website I use, be it YouTube or Facebook. But this may take the cake....
I can handle unskippable 15-second ads on YouTube fine, because, well, it's a streaming video site. But forcing Facebook users to sit through 15-second ads in their newsfeeds?
I already hate it when sites like Wikia think it's great to start playing a video advertisement with sound at full blast. Now, those wonderful ads may be making their way to your Facebook news feed.... three times a day.
I'm about this close to installing AdBlock in my browsers because I seem to be more subjected to intrusive forms of advertising than I have been in the past. I tend to hate banner ads that automatically expand open when you don't want them to, or vertical banners that slide in from the side as you read your news article. Even more annoying are those little DHTML boxes that beg you to take a survey, appearing right over the news article that you are trying to read.
Another kind of banner ad that I am increasingly loathing are ads made by some company called "Criteo". They make banner ads for HSN, which IMO is a great little home shopping channel. But their banner ads are designed to annoy you. After you visit HSN for awhile, these ads begin appearing on various sites you visit through the wonderful magic of cookie tracking. These ads showcase various products and their brief descriptions and prices, which is fine in it's own right. Where it get's annoying is these ads constantly flash the descriptions back and forth, or keep scrolling through a small gallery of products. And the animations don't stop. Never. This is highly distracting if you are trying to watch a video on a site with one of these ads sitting right next to your video. Going into full screen helps, but if the video is low quality, then full screen doesn't help either.
I also recently discovered a more hideous form of intrusive advertising... video ads that appear right in the middle of your news article you are trying to read. ExtremeTech is the worst offender of these kind of ads. You scroll down on any news article a little ways, and a video ad slides in out of nowhere pushing the rest of your article down the page!
And Pop-ups.... yeah. But I found a nifty pop-up blocker for Chrome that takes care of those. Too bad Safari's pop-up blocker isn't as good.
Why should people resort to using ad-blocking software just to get around these ads? Can intrusive advertising be regulated by law without going into full censorship?
Asking for federal regulation of any kind is horrible, I know, because we all know about SOPA. Any kind of federal regulation can lead to unnecessary or mistaken censorship. But these ads are becoming so annoying and intrusive... I just have to share my idea for regulating these ads.
*For starters, all auto-expanding banner ads should be outlawed from auto-expanding. Such ads can still appear on websites, but they should only expand if the user clicks on them.
*Secondly, video advertisements can still be allowed, but with the sound muted. There are already some video ads on the internet that play muted, but once in awhile, you come across one that starts playing bad techno music and you frantically start clicking on browser tabs to find where that bad techno music is coming from. YouTube should remain exempt from these rules, as well as other streaming video sites because at least we expect commercials there.
*Third, any animated Flash advertisements should only start running their animations if the user rolls their mouse over the ads. This will prevent the ads from being distracting to the user as he/she focuses on the content that she wants.
*And finally, outlaw intrusive ads that slide in the middle of news articles. I know that websites need advertising revenue to remain free, but are they becoming this desperate?
I hope these ideas don't sound too heavy handed, but advertisers need to know that pushing these types of ads in our faces won't give them new customers. They will drive most of them away....and they will probably install AdBlock. Then again... if such regulations are ever introduced in the halls of Congress, the advertising industry would probably freak out and file a federal lawsuit to stop them, or launch a massive campaign against it.
I sometimes long for the days of simple banner ads that were animated GIFs and didn't play any intrusive animation or music.
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