According to the NYT a few days ago, a car in Gaza, containing a bunch of Hamas guys, mysteriously blew up. Strangely, the car also contained a remote-controlled toy plane.
Hamas blamed it on Israel, issuing a statement saying that the men had been working on a small remote-controlled plane, which they evidently planned to use in an attack, but that Israel had booby-trapped the planes before they got to Gaza.
The more you know... These folks had a story last month about the ordering of the toys "for Palestinian children in hospitals" but finding that the planes never reached the children.
I'll start by saying that I am a player, I had high hopes for it, and I now think the game is in crisis. But not for the reasons other people say...
Players are often seen complaining about a lack of game objects, and rules problems that make it hard to have a correct economy.
Sure. But there IS a small subset of users that have turned the current objects into something more interesting. A few houses have figured out that if you hold "events" like trivia and game shows and such, you keep your visitors around, at their keyboards, entertained. I myself visited such a place one night and it was a blast.
One house I saw went to far as to create a board game with her house. You have a die roll object, you have cones, you have different colored tiles. Voila, a few little things that anyone could have used to create a board game.
One house I saw used the garden objects to create a unique, beautifully-designed house as a tribute to their sim "marriage".
These places say that there are enough objects for players to create their OWN fun by dreaming up scenarios that Maxis never could. And I think that's the whole idea; get enough brains in on it, and they create their own meta-games within the game. The game objects are meaningless, except to provide a kind of infrastructure that the players can use to... entertain themselves, 18 people at a time.
The problem is that it looks like the game is going to run into a catch-22 before it gets to that point. Players "play" the game expecting the fun to come from the game objects; households provide the game objects in with the expectation that this is all they need to do to be successful; and for a long time, all anyone plays with are game objects, and the whole thing gets boring VERY fast. As a lot of subscribers LEAVE without ever realizing that relatively minor point, you get fewer and fewer people trying to develop the game "properly", and a smaller and smaller potential audience.
Nobody is realizing that the overall concept is that house owners should be social engineers, not interior decorators.
As the game progresses, more and more people are figuring out the "secret" but are finding it impossible to get the critical mass of players needed to make their house a success because of the huge dropoff.
There are two things Maxis should do immediately in order to save the game. One: they should give all the players three gratis months. That would keep some of that critical mass of people around while the players develop their own fun. They should think of this time as an investment since the players are going to be doing the R&D for them.
Two: they need to give the players more provisions for communication. The board-game owner (Hula Babe @ Jolly Pines) told me that she'd put a message in the "news" section but that Maxis had not posted it! Players are nudged by the game to visit the "popular" locations but this is not enough information for potential visitors. In-game advertising is useless.
It might be helpful, too, if Maxis was a little more proactive about explaining what's great about these types of properties. It's as if they were hell-bent on making everyone figure it out on their own. When I posted a message telling the rest of the userbase what they had to do, and why they should create meta-games to attract people, one Maxis rep said on my thread "That's exactly the game we've set out to build!" Well damn, why not tell everyone who's bored out of their skull and thinking about dropping the game, only because they haven't figured that out?
Re:I can see ho wthis may appeal to women .... but
on
Metaverse Launched?
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· Score: 2
I recognize this. This is the same angle that told us, 40 years ago, that television would rot the brains of the masses.
This is the same angle that told us, 20 years ago and yesterday, that video games are harmful to society.
It's not tru y'know. Except for the schizophrenics, people can tell the difference between reality and computer games and have no trouble at all adapting their behavior for each. If you want to know what's really, truly ugly, it's the doomsday predictions of navel gazers such as yourself.
So you say they got original story, acting, and direction right, but borrowed the universe in which they were operating to apply all that?
That's exactly the opposite of standard television, where the universe is almost always original but the stories are recycled, the acting is hack, and the direction is preditable and bland.
To me that's the biggest problem with being a sysadmin professionally. Old-style, less competent managers don't believe that you're worthwhile because you appear idle while nothing ever seems to actually happen.
Once, a combination of a bad spot on tape and a very unusual ice storm combined to result in three days' worth of data. (This was before the advent of cheap and readily-available RAID.) I was called in to a vice-president's office and read a list of backup strategies that the guy had torn out of a Novell magazine, about half of which applied to the SVR3 we were running.
"Slowing the edit/compile/debug cycle reduces programmer productivity and code quality."
I guess, if you're compiling to figure out where your missing semi-colons are. Try working on a project where you can't tell whether your code works until there's a full build, and a full build takes 24 hours. You write quality code at that point, because you have to work top-down. No more write-compile-debug-write loops.
I'm sure that following shortly on the heels of WWE and Coca-cola will be the highly judgemental and anti-populist attitudes about such things. Your reaction to these things is also a part of the culture. Meanwhile, we should be kinda happy about the export of these other cultural notes:
- trial by jury - women's rights - end of torture - highly productive economy - separation of church and state - education of the masses - modern medicine - multicultural tolerance...and much, much more.
Well actually I don't recommend it, because it can cause your brain to implode.
At New York's Museum of Nat'l History there is an exhibit centered around a two-story-tall sphere. Around the sphere is a walkway with exhibits where they compare various sizes to the sphere.
At first, it's like the Total Perspective Vortex. They'll say things like (paraphrased) "If the sphere is the size of the known universe, then this teeny tiny speck is the galaxy you live in."
If you survive that, they get closer and closer to 1:1 size, then they move inwards and say things like "If the sphere is the size of a hydrogen atom, this speck is the size of the nucleus."
It was at that point that I realized that matter truly does equal energy, and that even matter is mostly empty space, but nanoseconds later my brain imploded. I now drive a bus for a living and talk quietly to myself. Perhaps you've seen me or many of my other museum visitors. This helps to explain why there are so many weirdos in NYC. It's not that they're mentally ill or homeless. It's just that they've been through the exhibit.
Okay, so there isn't a moral "free speech" issue. IMO there is still a free beer issue. Free ISOs can be a real boon when you're trying to get things done... especially on a budget and in a hurry.
To any ISP, throughput is not the big issue... bottlenecking is. When I was adminning for an ISP, there are several peak times for usage. We would see a big jump in connections around noon, and also between 8-10 at night; but the biggest peak would happen around 4pm. (All times EST.)
One marketing idea for ISPs, then, is to watch when the peaks happen. If peaking during the day, market to home users more. If peaking during the night, market to businesses.
Take that a step further... if the problem is P2P-using downloading freaks, stop marketing the speed issue and start marketing other benefits. I notice that right now Comcast is marketing the "always-on" nature of their service. Hey, good idea.
For playing against friends and co-workers it would be fine, possibly even excellent. Having tried a few times at zone.com, though, it blows. It appears that the definition of "relative newbie" is where they have about 1000 hours of online gameplay behind them. And in four games in a row, a single player scuttled the game.
"Business processes today reach beyond the four walls of a company and into the extended enterprise. This is new territory for many organizations, but at divine it's what we do.
"divine helps companies maximize profits through better collaboration, interaction, and knowledge sharing across their entire value chain."
OK, let me guess...
The top management are all book-trained MBAs. They built the business on venture capital with handshake deals where who you know is much more important than what you can do.
They are regularly written up in glowing articles in all the local business PR rags.
They are in technology, but they have a VP of communications and/or marketing who previously did not work in technology, and who mocks it openly.
Middle management is encouraged to think about their political standing within the company, and routinely value that over actually getting actual productive work done.
The sales force dresses in Armani or similar, and drives late-model cars more expensive than $40K because it is supposed to give them an advantage.
People who don't show up for happy hour are considered ineligible for promotion, despite the fact that behind their backs everyone hates everyone else and doesn't want to drink with them.
No management has ever showed up at a goodbye luncheon, or if they did, they spent five minutes there and didn't speak to the outgoing employee.
HR is the second-most powerful unit in the company (behind marketing) and establishes policies with the help of corporate lawyers.
During the last century, more people were killed by their own governments than were killed in wars. And while some of those killings were known about and the requisite attention paid, many more were purged in massive numbers while the rest of the world wasn't watching.
Stalin and Mao killed literally millions per year while US college students studied their form of government and wondered whether it wouldn't be more fair than their own. After the end of the USSR, historians went in to try to figure out how many had been purged, and literally couldn't determine whether it was 20 million or 30 million -- that's how closed their society was.
But if a government can't run tanks over students in Tiananmen Square without a camera catching the footage, something's changed.
The situation in the middle east is that some cultures are still very closed. When UBL announces on several video tapes that he WAS in fact responsible and a majority of a culture still doesn't believe that fact, something else is going on there. But this is a short-term situation. The fact that al Jazzera exists and provides even a little competition in the war for people's minds, and the net is widely available, means the culture will slowly drift towards openness. I hope...
I have a T1 for my business. I have to pay 100% of the bill for it. Sometimes my clients and I get email from AOL users. AOL doesn't pay for one cent of my T1, yet they expect to send me messages without worrying about the cost! This is annoying. Please, can someone tell me how I can get others to pay for my T1? Thanks.
I'm with you man -- my BBS went telnet and then web-ized and finally vBulletin-ized. Never an ad, always 100% free as in beer AND as speech, some of the folks there have been there for over a decade.
Along the way, by 1992 (through 1996) I offered a co-op for text-based Usenet and net mail, only $5/month. But nobody wanted that; at its peak there were only 50 people in Philly who were interested. I don't blame them, but they were all waiting for the full-fledged $20/month access, with the headaches of SLIP, and Win 3.1 with Trumpet Winsock (remember the days?), requiring 24x7 tech support to retrieve images at 14.4kb (remember the days?).
IGnatius, I guess we just have to admit it: most people just aren't like you and me. That's cool, I let them have their ways, curious as they might be.
Deregulation doesn't work when it is closer to re-regulation for the benefit of a few, or when the remaining regulations put into place some kind of stupid market situation.
The S&L deregulation mess was a mess because they left in place federal load guarantees. "Now you can loan to anyone you like! And if they don't pay you back, the government will!" It didn't fly.
But interstate commerce deregulation was a true boon.
So was airline deregulation, according to those who look at all the facts and not some tiny subset. The number of crashes did increase moderately, but the number of miles traveled also increased. The big change was the price of tickets being cut in half, opening the skies to the masses. This change led to increases in productivity for everyone.
Deregulation will not work, I think, during times when the big co's have a lot of sway with the gov't. They will angle for the rules they want to maintain a competitive advantage. The ideal deregulation is *complete* deregulation; either you have a lot of rules in place to provide precise paths for commerce, or you open the doors and let everyone play however they like. The key there is to have low barriers to entry so that small businesses and individuals can compete with large businesses. Large businesses would rather compete with other large businesses, maintaining an oligopoly.
I'm just moved from IE to Opera. For the sole reason that I hate having 15 IE windows open.
OBOY do I know what you mean, and that's exactly how I used to browse. I'm about to make your life a WHOLE lot easier.
Go download Mozilla and install it. Go to Edit->Preferences. Double-click on Navigator. Click on Tabbed Browsing. Select "Load links in the background" and "Middle-click or control-click of links in a Web page". Also select any of the other boxes that you think you might be interesting. Click OK.
Now go to any site you browse frequently. Use control-click or middle click to open new tabs in the background whilst your main site window does not change.
After two minutes with this feature, you will not be able to live without it. Guaranteed.
The point at which Netscape's business model was collapsed was the point at which the tide turned. Market share reflects the events of the past year or two, not the current time.
Maybe you don't remember what happened?
MS made a deal with Spyglass whereby they would sell their browser as Internet Explorer. Spyglass would get a portion of those sales.
Deal in hand, MS then declared that IE would be free and bundled. This screwed Spyglass and Netscape at the same time; the former because the "portion" of sales would now be zero, and the latter because they could now no longer SELL their software.
Is it all coming back now? Netscape needed to sell the browser, because that was part of their business model. That was how they funded further development of it -- the standard model. Now screwed, they then tried to change their business model to become a portal, when portals were big and everyone thought being a portal was the way of the future. (As we now know, that's no way to make money...)
Also remember that at the time most of this happened we are talking about IE3 and NS3 competing, and while each had their quirks, you couldn't really say one was definitively better to the point where it was a clear winner. The only advantage MS had was that IE was bundled.
I've left a lot out but that's my recollection of the events.
There is a very serious disconnect between the/. editorship and the/. readership.
I suspect that the first 1000 "shots" in this disconnect were shot by the readership, because we are a serious pain in the ass. We carp. We moan. We complain. We whine. Nothing is good enough for us.
Such is the geek nature; our personalities cause us to question every system and complain without concern for the social niceties.
I would imagine that after a few years of dealing with such a readership, one might grow quite thick skin and have absolutely no concern for their whims and desires. In fact, one might even want to "punish" the group for whom nothing is quote good enough or free enough. ASK them what they want? No need; they speak up all the time and their concerns, so much that it's a constant, painful din.
Third -- the "usability" whiners. No, you can't use the back button, and that's a good thing when you're talking about instruction. Did you give a wrong answer? Well oops, I guess you just hit the back button and do it again -- that sounds like a really bad way to give tests to me.
Of course, there are plenty of ways to code around that particular problem. And so we are left with the following situation: A good standard site hand coder can code around the HTML quirks, while a good Flash coder can attempt to correct the egregious UI choices.
So far I've seen hundreds of examples of the former -- and almost no examples of the latter.
Slashdot Mirror
Hamas blamed it on Israel, issuing a statement saying that the men had been working on a small remote-controlled plane, which they evidently planned to use in an attack, but that Israel had booby-trapped the planes before they got to Gaza.
The more you know... These folks had a story last month about the ordering of the toys "for Palestinian children in hospitals" but finding that the planes never reached the children.
I'll start by saying that I am a player, I had high hopes for it, and I now think the game is in crisis. But not for the reasons other people say...
Players are often seen complaining about a lack of game objects, and rules problems that make it hard to have a correct economy.
Sure. But there IS a small subset of users that have turned the current objects into something more interesting. A few houses have figured out that if you hold "events" like trivia and game shows and such, you keep your visitors around, at their keyboards, entertained. I myself visited such a place one night and it was a blast.
One house I saw went to far as to create a board game with her house. You have a die roll object, you have cones, you have different colored tiles. Voila, a few little things that anyone could have used to create a board game.
One house I saw used the garden objects to create a unique, beautifully-designed house as a tribute to their sim "marriage".
These places say that there are enough objects for players to create their OWN fun by dreaming up scenarios that Maxis never could. And I think that's the whole idea; get enough brains in on it, and they create their own meta-games within the game. The game objects are meaningless, except to provide a kind of infrastructure that the players can use to... entertain themselves, 18 people at a time.
The problem is that it looks like the game is going to run into a catch-22 before it gets to that point. Players "play" the game expecting the fun to come from the game objects; households provide the game objects in with the expectation that this is all they need to do to be successful; and for a long time, all anyone plays with are game objects, and the whole thing gets boring VERY fast. As a lot of subscribers LEAVE without ever realizing that relatively minor point, you get fewer and fewer people trying to develop the game "properly", and a smaller and smaller potential audience.
Nobody is realizing that the overall concept is that house owners should be social engineers, not interior decorators.
As the game progresses, more and more people are figuring out the "secret" but are finding it impossible to get the critical mass of players needed to make their house a success because of the huge dropoff.
There are two things Maxis should do immediately in order to save the game. One: they should give all the players three gratis months. That would keep some of that critical mass of people around while the players develop their own fun. They should think of this time as an investment since the players are going to be doing the R&D for them.
Two: they need to give the players more provisions for communication. The board-game owner (Hula Babe @ Jolly Pines) told me that she'd put a message in the "news" section but that Maxis had not posted it! Players are nudged by the game to visit the "popular" locations but this is not enough information for potential visitors. In-game advertising is useless.
It might be helpful, too, if Maxis was a little more proactive about explaining what's great about these types of properties. It's as if they were hell-bent on making everyone figure it out on their own. When I posted a message telling the rest of the userbase what they had to do, and why they should create meta-games to attract people, one Maxis rep said on my thread "That's exactly the game we've set out to build!" Well damn, why not tell everyone who's bored out of their skull and thinking about dropping the game, only because they haven't figured that out?
I recognize this. This is the same angle that told us, 40 years ago, that television would rot the brains of the masses.
This is the same angle that told us, 20 years ago and yesterday, that video games are harmful to society.
It's not tru y'know. Except for the schizophrenics, people can tell the difference between reality and computer games and have no trouble at all adapting their behavior for each. If you want to know what's really, truly ugly, it's the doomsday predictions of navel gazers such as yourself.
So you say they got original story, acting, and direction right, but borrowed the universe in which they were operating to apply all that?
That's exactly the opposite of standard television, where the universe is almost always original but the stories are recycled, the acting is hack, and the direction is preditable and bland.
Nobody notices if you're doing it well.
To me that's the biggest problem with being a sysadmin professionally. Old-style, less competent managers don't believe that you're worthwhile because you appear idle while nothing ever seems to actually happen.
Once, a combination of a bad spot on tape and a very unusual ice storm combined to result in three days' worth of data. (This was before the advent of cheap and readily-available RAID.) I was called in to a vice-president's office and read a list of backup strategies that the guy had torn out of a Novell magazine, about half of which applied to the SVR3 we were running.
Thankless job, exactly.
"Slowing the edit/compile/debug cycle reduces programmer productivity and code quality."
I guess, if you're compiling to figure out where your missing semi-colons are. Try working on a project where you can't tell whether your code works until there's a full build, and a full build takes 24 hours. You write quality code at that point, because you have to work top-down. No more write-compile-debug-write loops.
I'm sure that following shortly on the heels of WWE and Coca-cola will be the highly judgemental and anti-populist attitudes about such things. Your reaction to these things is also a part of the culture. Meanwhile, we should be kinda happy about the export of these other cultural notes:
...and much, much more.
- trial by jury
- women's rights
- end of torture
- highly productive economy
- separation of church and state
- education of the masses
- modern medicine
- multicultural tolerance
No you don't see it, but as a Paypal tip jar owner, believe me they took it out.
Since Paypal takes $.30 per transaction, plus a percentage from each donation, you should probably consider sending $1.35 instead.
Well actually I don't recommend it, because it can cause your brain to implode.
At New York's Museum of Nat'l History there is an exhibit centered around a two-story-tall sphere. Around the sphere is a walkway with exhibits where they compare various sizes to the sphere.
At first, it's like the Total Perspective Vortex. They'll say things like (paraphrased) "If the sphere is the size of the known universe, then this teeny tiny speck is the galaxy you live in."
If you survive that, they get closer and closer to 1:1 size, then they move inwards and say things like "If the sphere is the size of a hydrogen atom, this speck is the size of the nucleus."
It was at that point that I realized that matter truly does equal energy, and that even matter is mostly empty space, but nanoseconds later my brain imploded. I now drive a bus for a living and talk quietly to myself. Perhaps you've seen me or many of my other museum visitors. This helps to explain why there are so many weirdos in NYC. It's not that they're mentally ill or homeless. It's just that they've been through the exhibit.
Okay, so there isn't a moral "free speech" issue. IMO there is still a free beer issue. Free ISOs can be a real boon when you're trying to get things done... especially on a budget and in a hurry.
It took the guy an entire year to rehab a single nightclub, and he's still moaning about the long Mozilla release schedule?
To any ISP, throughput is not the big issue... bottlenecking is. When I was adminning for an ISP, there are several peak times for usage. We would see a big jump in connections around noon, and also between 8-10 at night; but the biggest peak would happen around 4pm. (All times EST.)
One marketing idea for ISPs, then, is to watch when the peaks happen. If peaking during the day, market to home users more. If peaking during the night, market to businesses.
Take that a step further... if the problem is P2P-using downloading freaks, stop marketing the speed issue and start marketing other benefits. I notice that right now Comcast is marketing the "always-on" nature of their service. Hey, good idea.
They are part of the italicized text, and so, part of the original submitter's comments.
For playing against friends and co-workers it would be fine, possibly even excellent. Having tried a few times at zone.com, though, it blows. It appears that the definition of "relative newbie" is where they have about 1000 hours of online gameplay behind them. And in four games in a row, a single player scuttled the game.
"divine helps companies maximize profits through better collaboration, interaction, and knowledge sharing across their entire value chain."
OK, let me guess...
- The top management are all book-trained MBAs. They built the business on venture capital with handshake deals where who you know is much more important than what you can do.
- They are regularly written up in glowing articles in all the local business PR rags.
- They are in technology, but they have a VP of communications and/or marketing who previously did not work in technology, and who mocks it openly.
- Middle management is encouraged to think about their political standing within the company, and routinely value that over actually getting actual productive work done.
- The sales force dresses in Armani or similar, and drives late-model cars more expensive than $40K because it is supposed to give them an advantage.
- People who don't show up for happy hour are considered ineligible for promotion, despite the fact that behind their backs everyone hates everyone else and doesn't want to drink with them.
- No management has ever showed up at a goodbye luncheon, or if they did, they spent five minutes there and didn't speak to the outgoing employee.
- HR is the second-most powerful unit in the company (behind marketing) and establishes policies with the help of corporate lawyers.
- Golf is considered essential to one's career.
divine employees or ex-employees, how'd I do?During the last century, more people were killed by their own governments than were killed in wars. And while some of those killings were known about and the requisite attention paid, many more were purged in massive numbers while the rest of the world wasn't watching.
Stalin and Mao killed literally millions per year while US college students studied their form of government and wondered whether it wouldn't be more fair than their own. After the end of the USSR, historians went in to try to figure out how many had been purged, and literally couldn't determine whether it was 20 million or 30 million -- that's how closed their society was.
But if a government can't run tanks over students in Tiananmen Square without a camera catching the footage, something's changed.
The situation in the middle east is that some cultures are still very closed. When UBL announces on several video tapes that he WAS in fact responsible and a majority of a culture still doesn't believe that fact, something else is going on there. But this is a short-term situation. The fact that al Jazzera exists and provides even a little competition in the war for people's minds, and the net is widely available, means the culture will slowly drift towards openness. I hope...
I have a T1 for my business. I have to pay 100% of the bill for it. Sometimes my clients and I get email from AOL users. AOL doesn't pay for one cent of my T1, yet they expect to send me messages without worrying about the cost! This is annoying. Please, can someone tell me how I can get others to pay for my T1? Thanks.
I'm with you man -- my BBS went telnet and then web-ized and finally vBulletin-ized. Never an ad, always 100% free as in beer AND as speech, some of the folks there have been there for over a decade.
Along the way, by 1992 (through 1996) I offered a co-op for text-based Usenet and net mail, only $5/month. But nobody wanted that; at its peak there were only 50 people in Philly who were interested. I don't blame them, but they were all waiting for the full-fledged $20/month access, with the headaches of SLIP, and Win 3.1 with Trumpet Winsock (remember the days?), requiring 24x7 tech support to retrieve images at 14.4kb (remember the days?).
IGnatius, I guess we just have to admit it: most people just aren't like you and me. That's cool, I let them have their ways, curious as they might be.
The S&L deregulation mess was a mess because they left in place federal load guarantees. "Now you can loan to anyone you like! And if they don't pay you back, the government will!" It didn't fly.
But interstate commerce deregulation was a true boon.
So was airline deregulation, according to those who look at all the facts and not some tiny subset. The number of crashes did increase moderately, but the number of miles traveled also increased. The big change was the price of tickets being cut in half, opening the skies to the masses. This change led to increases in productivity for everyone.
Deregulation will not work, I think, during times when the big co's have a lot of sway with the gov't. They will angle for the rules they want to maintain a competitive advantage. The ideal deregulation is *complete* deregulation; either you have a lot of rules in place to provide precise paths for commerce, or you open the doors and let everyone play however they like. The key there is to have low barriers to entry so that small businesses and individuals can compete with large businesses. Large businesses would rather compete with other large businesses, maintaining an oligopoly.
Given a complete childhood of parenting with this person, I seroiusly doubt little Melissa would really be better off without the watch.
I'm just moved from IE to Opera. For the sole reason that I hate having 15 IE windows open.
OBOY do I know what you mean, and that's exactly how I used to browse. I'm about to make your life a WHOLE lot easier.
Go download Mozilla and install it. Go to Edit->Preferences. Double-click on Navigator. Click on Tabbed Browsing. Select "Load links in the background" and "Middle-click or control-click of links in a Web page". Also select any of the other boxes that you think you might be interesting. Click OK.
Now go to any site you browse frequently. Use control-click or middle click to open new tabs in the background whilst your main site window does not change.
After two minutes with this feature, you will not be able to live without it. Guaranteed.
The point at which Netscape's business model was collapsed was the point at which the tide turned. Market share reflects the events of the past year or two, not the current time.
Maybe you don't remember what happened?
MS made a deal with Spyglass whereby they would sell their browser as Internet Explorer. Spyglass would get a portion of those sales.
Deal in hand, MS then declared that IE would be free and bundled. This screwed Spyglass and Netscape at the same time; the former because the "portion" of sales would now be zero, and the latter because they could now no longer SELL their software.
Is it all coming back now? Netscape needed to sell the browser, because that was part of their business model. That was how they funded further development of it -- the standard model. Now screwed, they then tried to change their business model to become a portal, when portals were big and everyone thought being a portal was the way of the future. (As we now know, that's no way to make money...)
Also remember that at the time most of this happened we are talking about IE3 and NS3 competing, and while each had their quirks, you couldn't really say one was definitively better to the point where it was a clear winner. The only advantage MS had was that IE was bundled.
I've left a lot out but that's my recollection of the events.
There is a very serious disconnect between the /. editorship and the /. readership.
I suspect that the first 1000 "shots" in this disconnect were shot by the readership, because we are a serious pain in the ass. We carp. We moan. We complain. We whine. Nothing is good enough for us.
Such is the geek nature; our personalities cause us to question every system and complain without concern for the social niceties.
I would imagine that after a few years of dealing with such a readership, one might grow quite thick skin and have absolutely no concern for their whims and desires. In fact, one might even want to "punish" the group for whom nothing is quote good enough or free enough. ASK them what they want? No need; they speak up all the time and their concerns, so much that it's a constant, painful din.
Of course, there are plenty of ways to code around that particular problem. And so we are left with the following situation: A good standard site hand coder can code around the HTML quirks, while a good Flash coder can attempt to correct the egregious UI choices.
So far I've seen hundreds of examples of the former -- and almost no examples of the latter.