Well, I've been playing computer games for around 30 years and without wishing to sound too much like a boring old man, about the time they started describing games as "immersive" was about the time they got both decidedly formulaic and linear.
Incidentally, my British English Dictionary extension in Firefox underlines "immersive" as an incorrect spelling or invalid word - so hopefully it won't be a part of the formal English language any time soon.
To be perfectly honest, as soon as I saw the idiot using the word "paradigm" in his article, I just switched off.
Yet another marketing-type consisting of nothing more than an empty Armani suit blithering on in fashionable words to try to stop us dropping into comatose states before he's finished spouting off his pathetic, substanceless monologue.
...You may have such an empty shell of a life that the only time you feel important is when you're connected to the Internet and therefore feel the need to impose those ideals on everyone else on the basis that you're also so self-conscious that you dare not stand out from the rest of the sheeple.
As for me? In my mid-40s now, I was born into the age of home computing, ZX Spectrums and Manic Miner, man walking on the moon, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, the birth of the Internet, Web and Linux. I love the Internet, I spend more time computing than watching TV these days, these are great times.
But I am NOT and NEVER WILL BE some soulless idiot who needs to spend his entire life peering into some huge or tiny computer screen never looking up to see what's happening in the real world. There are too many interesting REAL people to meet, too many good foods and wines to savour (preferably with some of those interesting real people), too much good music to listen to, to many books to read while laying on a sandy beach, etc. etc.
If you want to turn YOUR life into an extension of the Internet (or whatever it is you're wittering on about) then go do it. But then I hope in your case there is no afterlife that gives you the opportunity to look back upon that empty shell of a life you had to give you the chance to regret wasting it away.
Computers, phones, MP3 players, etc. etc. are FANTASTIC TOOLS for work, socialising and entertainment, no question about it. But they are there to ENHANCE our modern lives, not OWN them!
I've been into computers for 25-odd years, I'm Linux and Windows certified, I program in shell, Perl & C & I work as a security consultant...
...and 3 months ago even I fell for a Paypal phishing scam where I handed over my username, password and account details.
Fortunately, I realised what had happened within a few minutes, immediately changed my Paypal password and cancel my bank card. I also reported the site to Paypal where it was taken down within an hour. As a result, I've not had any problems between then and now.
Yes, it's all about attention, I agree - but it just takes a lapse in concentration to fall for one of these scams.
Oh, and before it happened to me, I, like you, was mouthing off on Slashdot about how it could never happen to me also...
I'm primarily a Linux user but I'm in the process of educating friends and family members who expect me to be their local PC support bloke. No, I don't wipe Windows in favour of Linux (though a few of them are, by choice, trying out Ubuntu as dual-boot) but I do steer them away from software piracy and cracks - not because I particularly give a damn about Microsoft or Adobe losing money, but because the risks of downloading infected software from Torrents are so high.
I'm usually willing to repair the PCs of friends and relatives but recently I've been refusing to give them support if I find they're using cracked tools on those machines. As a result, a couple of them went out and bought student licenses for MS Office (instead of running a copied version), and the others have started to look at OpenOffice (as the functionality they need from an office package is given to them in OO).
My teenage nephew has been doing stuff in a cracked copy of Photoshop which put a trojan on his PC - once I cleared that off, I installed The GIMP for him, and when he complained about its interface, I bought him a GIMP book for his birthday.
Another popular cracked tool is Nero. ImgBurn and Infrarecorder go a small way to being free replacements for Nero, otherwise a few of them have just bought a new DVD ROM drive with an OEM copy of it included.
As for Symantec and Mcafee, they're just not worth the money and hassle of usage - I point them at AVG AntiVirus free and Spybot Search & Destroy.
Above that, I install them Firefox and Thunderbird so they can ween themselves off of IE and Outlook (Express) and set them up a Gmail account (as opposed to Hotmail) which I set up for POP or IMAP access with Thunderbird.
Finally, I tell them to either go buy games rather than downloading them, and have shown them a few Open Source games instead.
As a result, I've pretty much got my free time back now and I don't do that many repairs. Windows XP is fully of potential security holes but provided you don't use hooky software, you don't get too many problems with malware - provided you also stay clear of dodgy web sites.
Presumably if the XBox was covered in that many signatures, then it had been carried about a lot by the guy when taken to whatever events to get signed. Surely this would not be considered "reasonable" usage of an Xbox which would normally be placed under the TV and basically left there - so they should have invalidated his warranty.
Sometimes I really wish a lot of the human race would just "grow up". This idea of worshipping "celebrities" is pathetic and serves to show what empty lives some people lead.
By all means admire a musician for a great piece of music, an actor in a great film or even someone who programs a good game - but don't forget that in each case, you are PAYING them to entertain you, no different to paying a plumber for replacing a faulty washer in a tap.
Surely the best way to stop spammers and spam bots is for Google, MSN and other free email providers to start charging a nominal fee (say 1 dollar/pound/euro) to set up one of these accounts. Charging a fee means using Paypal or a credit card to pay it, thus destroying any anonymity the person setting up the account has. It might even be that once you've been verified against that transaction, you get the fee refunded.
You wouldn't even need to make a regular usage charge - a spammer that has to make any form of payment to create an email account is just not going to go any further.
With all respect, Slashdot is essentially a discussion area.
And if people of differing opinions weren't here expressing their opinions, there wouldn't be much by way of discussion here, now would there?
And the whole point of my original posting was that there are a lot of people like me (I believe) who have not risen through the ranks of their company or have no particular aspirations of huge salaries or promotions, yet consider themselves successful and live most definitely happy lives.
It's very easy for business leaders or social psychologists to pigeon-hole people into little boxes purely by the way they look or dress - but in reality, they should have utmost admiration for those people with enough self-confidence to not give a damn about what anyone else thinks and just get on and do what they feel like. (And before you ask, I'm clean shaven with short hair and dress standard business casual when I'm in my office, so I'm not one of those people.)
I know this is supposed to be a humourous article but I get really annoyed at these "business types" who consider anyone who isn't aiming for a 6/7 figure salary or who isn't treading on all of their work colleagues in order to reach the top, to be somehow abnormal - or even worse, demotivated or lazy.
I'm in my mid-40s here in the UK, I've been a techie in telecoms and security for 25+ years now, I'm now a consultant earning a good salary as does my wife. Admittedly we've no kids but we've got our own home as well as two holiday homes overseas (not time-shares, fully ours) and I couldn't want for a better life. I work a 37.5 hour week and at 5:30pm I can pretty much forget about work until the following morning, but whilst I'm at work, I do work hard.
So quite frankly, you can stuff your boardroom job, flashy cars, Armani suits, the endless travelling and hotel rooms, and the sixteen hour days because I'm not interested. I earn enough to live very comfortably provided that I'm careful but my life of "three thirds" is going great - one third work, one third sleep and one third pleasure...
I will happily accept that the security architecture of Vista may make it harder for viruses to run - but please don't get all smug about it not needing antivirus because the fact is that the whole architecture of Windows is deeply flawed when it comes to what permissions a service or program runs at.
Whilst it might be the case that less stuff on Windows now runs with highest level permissions, the fact is that if a virus runs at a user permission level then it can still affect that user's files and propogate across a network.
And I don't believe virus writers have yet fully discovered what holes they can exploit in Vista. In proportion to the whole computer-using world, hardly anyone is running Vista yet so they've not really given it much attention.
Fantastic! Another fool who buys his music downloadable and track-by-track at a more expensive price than buying the CD, who then goes to the expense of buying a blank CD to burn his music to!
And his newly burnt CD is of lower quality than just buying the original CD!
You don't need "a fucking CD BURNER". You need the time to go explore proper music where listening to the whole album is a pleasure from start to finish, then you need to go buy that CD online somewhere (or support a local used CD shop) at the cheapest price possible and, when you've finished, give yourself a pat on the back for **TOTALLY AVOIDED** DRM, having a nice shiny CD in a pretty case and having spent peanuts on what is a product that will give you pleasure for years to come.
So let me get this right, just so I understand it...
You buy a piece of downloadable music that is in a lossy format at almost the same price (or more expensive than) it would cost to buy that track as a proportion of a whole CD.
You then buy a blank CD to burn those tracks to,
In other words, you're creating your own CD that has lower quality and costs more than buying the original CD. Fantastic!
Oh, and please don't give me this sob story about "I like it this way because I can choose my tracks and not buy a CD that only has two good songs on it." If that's the case then you want to step away from paying for the plasticized popular crap the record companies churn out and go search out decent music - there are **THOUSANDS** of albums out there that contain superb music all of the way through and are **WELL WORTH** buying on CD and ripping yourself.
And you own the original CD, you can rip at whatever rate you want to and there's no DRM to boot.
I hate to say this but I'm not aware that it actually ever took many skills to pirate Windows NT or MS Office in the first place. Certainly just a case of copying the CDs if I remember right - only recently has Microsoft made it more difficult by introducing registration keys. But around the time of Windows NT, there was no such thing, even on MS Office.
As for the rest of your monologue, how about just being a nice, sensible consumer and just DON'T BUY SHIT IF IT AIN'T WORTH THE MONEY! That way, the RIAA doesn't get the justification DORKS like you give it to treat me, an HONEST user, like a pirate...
Firstly, being "in the entertainment industry" could mean anything from being a member of a band to standing behind a till in the local record store - and since you've obviously obfuscated what you actually do behind a generic description, the chances are that your job is probably more at the "boring end" of the industry rather than at the end likely to impress anyone on here. I just thought I'd make that small point first.
Secondly, sonny, I'm 46 years of age and I was more than likely buying music long before you were even a "twinkle in your dad's eye". If my wife is the first love of my life, then music is my second one - you'll therefore appreciate why I take considerable offence at your statements above.
The problem with most people who buy music these days is they are NOT music fans. Just like an antiques fan is someone who can really appreciate the craftsmanship that went into a piece of old furniture, a music fan is somebody who can just sit down and listen to a CD on a reasonable sounding (no, I didn't say expensive) piece of hifi whilst doing absolutely nothing else so that the music gets his/her full attention. Sure, like everyone else, I have music on in the background also when I'm doing other things but that isn't listening to music, it's just giving the mind a rhythm to focus on.
Consequently, those people who are not true music fans are more likely to be swayed by advertising & marketing to buy only the plasticised crap that's cheap for the record companies to churn out in high volume. And because the record companies treat that trash music as a high-profit low-cost commodity, they are the prime cause of why people pirate music - because ultimately, the majority of what they churn out is not worth the money being asked for it.
I, on the other hand, do not listen to that mainstream rubbish. Every CD I buy, I research before I buy it - yes, if there's a copy of it on BitTorrent or Usenet, I'll download it first because the chances are that it won't be played on any radio station. If it's good, I buy it because there's nothing like having a nice shiny disk and sleeve notes to read - if it's crap, there's no point even keeping the MP3s so they're deleted.
Additionally, I passionately search for the best prices for my CDs and, as a result, I can honestly say that for the pleasure I get out of each CD I buy, each one is worth far more than I paid for it - yes, I consider music to be very fairly priced.
So please do not tar us all with the same brush. No, I'm not some intellectual classical music type (I do like a little classical music but not much), I listen mainly to rock and blues music with a particular love of British psychedelia and rock during the late 60s and early 70s (which at the moment, is great music to be exploring because a lot of really obscure stuff from that time is being rereleased on CD currently). I care deeply about the music I listen to and I use BitTorrent and Usenet enough to make sure I'm not ripped off for any CD I'm likely to buy - that in turn means that every CD I do buy is good value for money and that therefore I'm pleased with what the record companies produce for me, albeit 90% of what they produce is crap.
Oh, and before you ask - I have 1200+ original CDs over 20 years of collecting them, 400 or so I originally owned on vinyl before CDs came out.
The problem with Runequest was that as a fatasy RPG system, it never had an "epic" feel to it, it was far more "nitty gritty" than D&D ever was and I personally found the subject matter of Runequest very plain and ordinary.
However, with that said, I most of the games that were based on the same system because the mechanics of the system were far superior to D&D - Stormbringer and Hawkmoon captured the Michael Moorcock universe very well, the source material for Pendragon was absolutely top rate and Call Of Cthulhu IS simply the best RPG ever made.
However, I think it's going to be a long road for BluRay to get to a point where it will move past DVD, and it will take far longer than DVD took to move past VHS.
I don't think it will ever move past DVD, at least before someone else comes up with another format.
You could definitely see some logic to why DVD beat VHS:
1. Better quality.
2. More resilient format.
3. The inclusion of extra content.
4. Easy use of indexing and chaptering.
Blu-Ray only brings 1. as an improvement to DVD, and even then you're only going to notice a difference with the best quality TV and equipment. This puts Blu-Ray in league with proper hi-fi - it will be a minority for the real enthusiasts only.
My my, at Pirate Bay, Metallica did surrender Oh yeah, and Prince has met his destiny in quite a similar way His CDs are all on the shelf He's always repeating himself
Pirate Bay - Prince was defeated, you won the war Pirate Bay - promise to seed there for ever more Pirate Bay - couldn't pay Prince if I wanted to Pirate Bay - nor Benny or Bjorn or those other two Pirate Bay - YMCA on my hard drive too
RIAA tried to hold you back but you were stronger Oh yeah, and now it seems their only chance is giving up the fight Of renting the music to us Why do they make this awful fuss?
Pirate Bay - RIAA screamed, you just showed the bird Pirate Bay - Prince had a fit what a childish turd Pirate Bay - Lars Ulrich beat off upon his drums Pirate Bay - while 5 gay men wiggled their bums Pirate Bay - is YMCA on their hard drive too?
And how could Prince ever complain His CDs are in bargain bins
Pirate Bay - Hetfield is smashing up his guitar Pirate Bay - Prince might just wish he could play a chord Pirate Bay - corporate puppets are running round Pirate Bay - they want to drive you into the ground Pirate Bay - with YMCA on your hard drive too?
Slashdot Mirror
Incidentally, my British English Dictionary extension in Firefox underlines "immersive" as an incorrect spelling or invalid word - so hopefully it won't be a part of the formal English language any time soon.
And if you are typical of what everyone's life is to become, then I look forward to dying out before it.
Yet another marketing-type consisting of nothing more than an empty Armani suit blithering on in fashionable words to try to stop us dropping into comatose states before he's finished spouting off his pathetic, substanceless monologue.
As for me? In my mid-40s now, I was born into the age of home computing, ZX Spectrums and Manic Miner, man walking on the moon, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, the birth of the Internet, Web and Linux. I love the Internet, I spend more time computing than watching TV these days, these are great times.
But I am NOT and NEVER WILL BE some soulless idiot who needs to spend his entire life peering into some huge or tiny computer screen never looking up to see what's happening in the real world. There are too many interesting REAL people to meet, too many good foods and wines to savour (preferably with some of those interesting real people), too much good music to listen to, to many books to read while laying on a sandy beach, etc. etc.
If you want to turn YOUR life into an extension of the Internet (or whatever it is you're wittering on about) then go do it. But then I hope in your case there is no afterlife that gives you the opportunity to look back upon that empty shell of a life you had to give you the chance to regret wasting it away.
Computers, phones, MP3 players, etc. etc. are FANTASTIC TOOLS for work, socialising and entertainment, no question about it. But they are there to ENHANCE our modern lives, not OWN them!
I guess that makes the BitTorrent version of Britney Spears latest CD a Weapon Of Mass Destruction then? Cool, take the bitch out once and for all!
Fortunately, I realised what had happened within a few minutes, immediately changed my Paypal password and cancel my bank card. I also reported the site to Paypal where it was taken down within an hour. As a result, I've not had any problems between then and now.
Yes, it's all about attention, I agree - but it just takes a lapse in concentration to fall for one of these scams.
Oh, and before it happened to me, I, like you, was mouthing off on Slashdot about how it could never happen to me also...
No, you're not.
I'm primarily a Linux user but I'm in the process of educating friends and family members who expect me to be their local PC support bloke. No, I don't wipe Windows in favour of Linux (though a few of them are, by choice, trying out Ubuntu as dual-boot) but I do steer them away from software piracy and cracks - not because I particularly give a damn about Microsoft or Adobe losing money, but because the risks of downloading infected software from Torrents are so high.
I'm usually willing to repair the PCs of friends and relatives but recently I've been refusing to give them support if I find they're using cracked tools on those machines. As a result, a couple of them went out and bought student licenses for MS Office (instead of running a copied version), and the others have started to look at OpenOffice (as the functionality they need from an office package is given to them in OO).
My teenage nephew has been doing stuff in a cracked copy of Photoshop which put a trojan on his PC - once I cleared that off, I installed The GIMP for him, and when he complained about its interface, I bought him a GIMP book for his birthday.
Another popular cracked tool is Nero. ImgBurn and Infrarecorder go a small way to being free replacements for Nero, otherwise a few of them have just bought a new DVD ROM drive with an OEM copy of it included.
As for Symantec and Mcafee, they're just not worth the money and hassle of usage - I point them at AVG AntiVirus free and Spybot Search & Destroy.
Above that, I install them Firefox and Thunderbird so they can ween themselves off of IE and Outlook (Express) and set them up a Gmail account (as opposed to Hotmail) which I set up for POP or IMAP access with Thunderbird.
Finally, I tell them to either go buy games rather than downloading them, and have shown them a few Open Source games instead.
As a result, I've pretty much got my free time back now and I don't do that many repairs. Windows XP is fully of potential security holes but provided you don't use hooky software, you don't get too many problems with malware - provided you also stay clear of dodgy web sites.
Sometimes I really wish a lot of the human race would just "grow up". This idea of worshipping "celebrities" is pathetic and serves to show what empty lives some people lead.
By all means admire a musician for a great piece of music, an actor in a great film or even someone who programs a good game - but don't forget that in each case, you are PAYING them to entertain you, no different to paying a plumber for replacing a faulty washer in a tap.
And for that we can be truly thankful!
Apple haven't integrated Safari into the desktop.
Safari can be removed.
So can a veruca - I just wouldn't want one in the first place.
Apple aren't trying to kill off Netscape :)
Nobody killed off Netscape, it died because it wasn't innovating and fell behind.
Undocumented does not necessarily mean secret, commercial companies have timescales.
No, commercial companies have IP and profit interests - documentation might be deemed counterproductive to those two interests.
Safari is based on open source software.
Therefore, by assumption, since Safari itself isn't Open Source, then it's probably violated a license somewhere.
You wouldn't even need to make a regular usage charge - a spammer that has to make any form of payment to create an email account is just not going to go any further.
And if people of differing opinions weren't here expressing their opinions, there wouldn't be much by way of discussion here, now would there?
And the whole point of my original posting was that there are a lot of people like me (I believe) who have not risen through the ranks of their company or have no particular aspirations of huge salaries or promotions, yet consider themselves successful and live most definitely happy lives.
It's very easy for business leaders or social psychologists to pigeon-hole people into little boxes purely by the way they look or dress - but in reality, they should have utmost admiration for those people with enough self-confidence to not give a damn about what anyone else thinks and just get on and do what they feel like. (And before you ask, I'm clean shaven with short hair and dress standard business casual when I'm in my office, so I'm not one of those people.)
I'm in my mid-40s here in the UK, I've been a techie in telecoms and security for 25+ years now, I'm now a consultant earning a good salary as does my wife. Admittedly we've no kids but we've got our own home as well as two holiday homes overseas (not time-shares, fully ours) and I couldn't want for a better life. I work a 37.5 hour week and at 5:30pm I can pretty much forget about work until the following morning, but whilst I'm at work, I do work hard.
So quite frankly, you can stuff your boardroom job, flashy cars, Armani suits, the endless travelling and hotel rooms, and the sixteen hour days because I'm not interested. I earn enough to live very comfortably provided that I'm careful but my life of "three thirds" is going great - one third work, one third sleep and one third pleasure...
I'm serious! iTunes changed... who cares. Oh wait, /. is a Steve Jobs worshippers haven.
I'm serious! Vista SP1 changed... who cares. Oh wait, /. is a Microsoft worshippers haven.
etc.
etc.
Whilst it might be the case that less stuff on Windows now runs with highest level permissions, the fact is that if a virus runs at a user permission level then it can still affect that user's files and propogate across a network.
And I don't believe virus writers have yet fully discovered what holes they can exploit in Vista. In proportion to the whole computer-using world, hardly anyone is running Vista yet so they've not really given it much attention.
And his newly burnt CD is of lower quality than just buying the original CD!
You don't need "a fucking CD BURNER". You need the time to go explore proper music where listening to the whole album is a pleasure from start to finish, then you need to go buy that CD online somewhere (or support a local used CD shop) at the cheapest price possible and, when you've finished, give yourself a pat on the back for **TOTALLY AVOIDED** DRM, having a nice shiny CD in a pretty case and having spent peanuts on what is a product that will give you pleasure for years to come.
Erm, where???
Sure, and it really must hurt Steve badly having all that iTunes revenue flowing into his bank account!
I'm no Apple fanboy at all
Anybody who opens a post with that comment will gladly perform fellatio on Steve Jobs - please do not try to convince us otherwise.
You buy a piece of downloadable music that is in a lossy format at almost the same price (or more expensive than) it would cost to buy that track as a proportion of a whole CD.
You then buy a blank CD to burn those tracks to,
In other words, you're creating your own CD that has lower quality and costs more than buying the original CD. Fantastic!
Oh, and please don't give me this sob story about "I like it this way because I can choose my tracks and not buy a CD that only has two good songs on it." If that's the case then you want to step away from paying for the plasticized popular crap the record companies churn out and go search out decent music - there are **THOUSANDS** of albums out there that contain superb music all of the way through and are **WELL WORTH** buying on CD and ripping yourself.
And you own the original CD, you can rip at whatever rate you want to and there's no DRM to boot.
I hate to say this but I'm not aware that it actually ever took many skills to pirate Windows NT or MS Office in the first place. Certainly just a case of copying the CDs if I remember right - only recently has Microsoft made it more difficult by introducing registration keys. But around the time of Windows NT, there was no such thing, even on MS Office.
As for the rest of your monologue, how about just being a nice, sensible consumer and just DON'T BUY SHIT IF IT AIN'T WORTH THE MONEY! That way, the RIAA doesn't get the justification DORKS like you give it to treat me, an HONEST user, like a pirate...
Secondly, sonny, I'm 46 years of age and I was more than likely buying music long before you were even a "twinkle in your dad's eye". If my wife is the first love of my life, then music is my second one - you'll therefore appreciate why I take considerable offence at your statements above.
The problem with most people who buy music these days is they are NOT music fans. Just like an antiques fan is someone who can really appreciate the craftsmanship that went into a piece of old furniture, a music fan is somebody who can just sit down and listen to a CD on a reasonable sounding (no, I didn't say expensive) piece of hifi whilst doing absolutely nothing else so that the music gets his/her full attention. Sure, like everyone else, I have music on in the background also when I'm doing other things but that isn't listening to music, it's just giving the mind a rhythm to focus on.
Consequently, those people who are not true music fans are more likely to be swayed by advertising & marketing to buy only the plasticised crap that's cheap for the record companies to churn out in high volume. And because the record companies treat that trash music as a high-profit low-cost commodity, they are the prime cause of why people pirate music - because ultimately, the majority of what they churn out is not worth the money being asked for it.
I, on the other hand, do not listen to that mainstream rubbish. Every CD I buy, I research before I buy it - yes, if there's a copy of it on BitTorrent or Usenet, I'll download it first because the chances are that it won't be played on any radio station. If it's good, I buy it because there's nothing like having a nice shiny disk and sleeve notes to read - if it's crap, there's no point even keeping the MP3s so they're deleted.
Additionally, I passionately search for the best prices for my CDs and, as a result, I can honestly say that for the pleasure I get out of each CD I buy, each one is worth far more than I paid for it - yes, I consider music to be very fairly priced.
So please do not tar us all with the same brush. No, I'm not some intellectual classical music type (I do like a little classical music but not much), I listen mainly to rock and blues music with a particular love of British psychedelia and rock during the late 60s and early 70s (which at the moment, is great music to be exploring because a lot of really obscure stuff from that time is being rereleased on CD currently). I care deeply about the music I listen to and I use BitTorrent and Usenet enough to make sure I'm not ripped off for any CD I'm likely to buy - that in turn means that every CD I do buy is good value for money and that therefore I'm pleased with what the record companies produce for me, albeit 90% of what they produce is crap.
Oh, and before you ask - I have 1200+ original CDs over 20 years of collecting them, 400 or so I originally owned on vinyl before CDs came out.
However, with that said, I most of the games that were based on the same system because the mechanics of the system were far superior to D&D - Stormbringer and Hawkmoon captured the Michael Moorcock universe very well, the source material for Pendragon was absolutely top rate and Call Of Cthulhu IS simply the best RPG ever made.
Well, if I was being pedantic I could say 4 (Easy Indexing) covered that issue - but I'll give you that one.
I don't think it will ever move past DVD, at least before someone else comes up with another format.
You could definitely see some logic to why DVD beat VHS:
1. Better quality.
2. More resilient format.
3. The inclusion of extra content.
4. Easy use of indexing and chaptering.
Blu-Ray only brings 1. as an improvement to DVD, and even then you're only going to notice a difference with the best quality TV and equipment. This puts Blu-Ray in league with proper hi-fi - it will be a minority for the real enthusiasts only.
(Sung to the tune of "Waterloo" by ABBA)
My my, at Pirate Bay, Metallica did surrender
Oh yeah, and Prince has met his destiny in quite a similar way
His CDs are all on the shelf
He's always repeating himself
Pirate Bay - Prince was defeated, you won the war
Pirate Bay - promise to seed there for ever more
Pirate Bay - couldn't pay Prince if I wanted to
Pirate Bay - nor Benny or Bjorn or those other two
Pirate Bay - YMCA on my hard drive too
RIAA tried to hold you back but you were stronger
Oh yeah, and now it seems their only chance is giving up the fight
Of renting the music to us
Why do they make this awful fuss?
Pirate Bay - RIAA screamed, you just showed the bird
Pirate Bay - Prince had a fit what a childish turd
Pirate Bay - Lars Ulrich beat off upon his drums
Pirate Bay - while 5 gay men wiggled their bums
Pirate Bay - is YMCA on their hard drive too?
And how could Prince ever complain
His CDs are in bargain bins
Pirate Bay - Hetfield is smashing up his guitar
Pirate Bay - Prince might just wish he could play a chord
Pirate Bay - corporate puppets are running round
Pirate Bay - they want to drive you into the ground
Pirate Bay - with YMCA on your hard drive too?
Presumably because nobody would be stupid enough to pay good money for it.