The problem is that most people/customers/users want products. They want stuff shrink-wrapped, polished, completed. They don't want some vague notion of a never-ending work in progress or an ever-evolving platform. They want discrete, well-defined units and releases. It's true of everything from Twinkies to CDs to operating systems, and it's why this common attitude among Linux zealots is counter-productive to their hopes for widespread adoption.
Where have you been for the past ten years. Big Corps. screwing the little guy, along with the government. Whoda'thunkit. Something needs to be changed here, and "being amazed" won't cut it.
Protests, boycotts, and contacting your rep.!
Dear Constituent,
Thank you for writing Senator Buymeov regarding your concerns about corporate greed. Unfortunately, due to the large volume of mail received by the Senator each day, combined with his complete lack of caring about you, your mail was fed directly through this automated reply system, and then incinerated. No real person will ever read your message, and the Senator's staffers actually spend each Friday night eating Chinese takeout and laughing at the poor fuckers who write in thinking anyone cares.
The Senator cares deeply about lining his own pockets and understands the benefits of corporate greed first-hand. Last year, the Senator voted to elinimate consumer rights and managed to rake in a cool $4.5million in various "gifts" and campaign donations from corporate sponsors. Senator Buymeov will continue to work hard to ensure you have no voice in government.
Thank you again for contacting us -- your participation in our government is what makes life worth living! (HAHAhahahahah!)
How bad is it going to have to get before you get angry enough to do something?
That's the point -- you can't do anything, no matter how pissed off you get or how badly you are wronged. You think your vote counts for anything? Fool! Unless you're a multi-billion-dollar corporation, you have no real voice in this country.
Wha? You must have one hell of an unorganized filesystem if making a playlist is hard. (in Winamp or xmms) Click the button that says "File" in the lower left corner, pick whether you want a directory, url, or individual files. Pick the target(s) and then click "Ok". Files are now on your playlist- and they can be deleted or re-ordered with single commands. How freakin' hard is that?
The WinAMP playlist isn't part of the main program window -- it's a seprate window you have to manage or attach and drag around. The UI widgets are not standard windows controls, and at 1280x1024 or larger they are too small to comfortably read. On top of that, the little abbreviations and symbols used on the various controls aren't intuitive, so you have to try things out to figure our what they do and how it works.
The Windows Media Player Media Library is even more obnoxious, because it requires you to enter, maintain, and store metadata in the Media Library database that isn't correspondingly present on the filesystem, and you can't pick up that metadata inside other programs.
The main complaint I had wasn't with the usability as much as it is with the bloatiness of the programs. WinAMP has degraded through the major releases into a giant bloated "let's skin everything, fuck performance" mess. It eats up memory and causes song playback to suffer when you've got numerous other programs running (which I almost always do when listening to music files on my PC).
After checking it out for a while, I would also add "ugly" and "redundant" to that list. Even if you only look at open-source players, there's still XMMS, which is actually pleasing to the eye rather than looking like just another vanilla-style Windows app.
I don't care about or want "pretty". I want efficient, simple, and functional. I want the bare minimum necessary to get the job done. VUPlayer meets those desires perfectly.
Not to mention that both Winamp and XMMS will do (almost, I don't think Winamp will have CD ripping for another update or two) everything VUPlayer can.
Yes, they can -- and a bit more -- but I dont' want or need their extra bells and whistles. I just want something that works reliably and efficiently and offers the functionality I care about.
Wrong. It doesn't matter if they have one already. It matters if their player can use them. Almost all players can (Winamp, and... well, who really uses anything else?:D )
Actually, I much prefer the non-bloated VUPlayer for playing all my media files. Fuck WinAMP and Windows Media Player with their giant, over-engineered bloated interfaces and difficult-to-understand-and-use playlist and media library concepts. VUPlayer is simple, fast, and supports basically everything. And when I found a bug in it and reported it to the author, he e-mailed me a private patch the next day and a few days later the official release on his website was rev'ed to include the fix. You can't beat that without going open-source.
Someone else already mentioned that CDs are too expensive, so be sure to offer your MP3s at a reasonable price point (50 cents/song seems reasonable).
The other issue is consumer rights. Once the consumer buys the MP3, they should be able to do whatever they want with it, unlimitedly, as long as it is for personal use. They should be able to make as many copies of it as they want, onto as many devices as they want, and convert it into any formats they want, as long as they are not giving copies away to people or reselling them.
Not saying I have any idea how to solve that issue, but that's clearly what consumers expect, and they won't readily settle for anything less.
What people want is simplicity and power. Contrary to popular belief, those are not mutually exclusive. They can and should coexist in a well-designed desktop appplication.
A program's capabilities should be categorized by usage level in the user interface. For example, commonly used features should all be listed together, rarely used features should all be listed together, and power-user features should all be listed together. Microsoft tried to address this problem (but used an entirely awful approach that creates even worse issues) when it introduced "personalized menus". I've seen few other attempts at addressing this issue, but good solutions are desperately needed by users overwhelmed by feature bloat in the user interface.
All simple applications can map to simple user interfaces. Unless you're designing a program to control a nuclear power facility, fly the space shuttle, or perform scientific simulations, you don't have much excuse for generating the type of interface complexity that comes out of Microsoft on a regular basis.
In my, limited, experience this is almost always the wrong approach, people do not know what they want
True, people sometimes don't know what they truly want, or don't know how to verbalize it. That is part of the challenge: to develop studies and tests that do a good job of identifying what people really want. But you should still try to find out what people want and give it to them.
they ignore there are options to the crap that Microsoft pushes on them.
Most people know that alternatives exist, but they don't see any of them as compelling enough to switch. Nearly anyone who knows about Windows PCs knows about Macintosh PCs, for instance. If an alternative OS comes along one day that actually offers things that are compelling enough to everyday people, then they will switch in droves.
There is one problem with straying from the Outlook user interface: Evolution's developers will need to instead conduct their own usability research and testing, which can be costly and may not be something they are good at.
Regardless of how you feel about Microsoft, the fact is that they perform thorough usability research and testing on all their software. A frustrated individual may question or complain about the interface of Outlook, but that interface was methodically refined and evolved to meet the needs of the widest majority of users, not that one user's preferences.
The single biggest failing in Microsoft's approach to usability is overkill. They make everything far more complex than it needs to be. For instance, in nearly every Microsoft program there are at least 4 different ways to accomplish the same task (window menu, shortcut key, toolbar icon, context menu). Ridiculous, and more than your average person can (or wants to) wrap their brain around.
Personally, I don't think much research or rocket science is necessary to create a usable program. Just follow the KISS philosophy ("keep it simple, stupid") and you'll be 90% on the right track. The critical part is to test the design against as many real, average users as you can, and seriously incorporate their feedback into your design (even if it seems contrary to your personal feelings about how the program should work).
Or, put even more simply: Give people what they want, not what you want to give them.
I think that pretty much sums it up. Too many people think computer = Windows and don't know how to use anything else. So if the Linux server (God forbid) breaks, who will be around to fix it?
That's just demonstrative of the entire problem with *NIX -- it's too difficult to learn and use. That's why Windows or even Mac OS X would be used by companies (as long as PCs or Macs will suit their needs) rather than Linux, because you don't have to have "l33t software gods" to simply set the systems up or run them.
In other words, the barrier to adoption may be support, but if your stuff is simpler to use then the need for support is reduced. The *NIX crowds (Linux, BSD, etc) need to take note of how relatively simple it is to set up and run a Windows or Mac OS X system, and start realizing that ease-of-use and consistent graphic interfaces are something real people care about.
Lookup the IP registrations, find the owners' locale, and then contact that local police department. Tell them a federal crime (felony) is being perpetrated on a grand scale, and that you need to speak with someone with extensive computer/internet/technical knowledge to report all the details.
Many of you keep saying Hilary was just a mouthpiece of the RIAA and had no hand in setting policy. You actually think that she might turn out to be some kind of ethical human being after leaving the RIAA.
Let me give you a bit of a wake-up call: if she were an ethical human being then she wouldn't have allowed herself to serve as the RIAA's mouthpiece for any amount of money. Any ethical human being with any concern for the public welfare would have rejected any carrots the RIAA dangled in front of them and given them the big "Fuck you". There are plenty of other jobs out there that deal with media and technology that wouldn't require a daily sacrifice of ethical principles.
No, this is seriously bad news. Now not only is she evil, but she's evil being pumped straight into homes on a nightly basis. It wouldn't surprise me if this move was secretly orchestrated by the RIAA so as to get someone with their bias into the mainstream media in an unsuspecting, insidious way.
Give me a fucking break. The companies involved in the lawsuit aren't even selling modified DVDs. They are selling software that lets a user modify the playback of the DVD to avoid the undesirable portions.
The MPAA is basically arguing that my movie-watching sequence should be like the "therapy" in "A Clockwork Orange" -- I must see it exactly as the director intended, so I must have my eyelids forcibly held open so I can't possibly miss a single second.
And they think this will actually help their bottom line? The lunacy!
Companies will face an $11,000 fine for each telemarketing call that violates the FTC's new consumer-protection provisions.
They'll only face it if the recipients of the calls can identify them. Since nearly all telemarketers hide from Caller ID, and no violator will willingly give you identifying information so you can report them, the law is completely unhelpful.
Let me know when the courts pass a law requiring the phone companies to eliminate Caller ID hiding entirely from their networks. 100% accountability for actions. Then we'll be getting somewhere.
They've all done the sums and if it's more cost effective to manufacture (slightly) defective parts with a reduced warranty, well, they're right onto it.
Oh, come on. It's not even in the financial interest of the drive manufacturers to create less reliable products. The supposed "savings" of doing so would be easily outweighed by the decrease in reputation and sales figures, and the increase in costs to them for replacing drives that went bad during the warranty period (whatever the length).
The real reason they shorten the warranty period is so they aren't on the hook to provide technical support and replacements for drives they don't even make anymore. The costs they are trying to cut by shortening the warranty aren't manufacturing costs, but support costs.
This is the second story from a "Christian Science" author I've see in a week here on Slashdot.
I would love to know what relevance articles on religious philosophy have to a technology and geek news site. Some people may find this stuff interesting, but Slashdot shouldn't be posting "Christian science" articles on the frontpage while meanwhile rejecting far more relevant and substantive article submissions.
Yeah, that's it. Moderate my post as "Troll" just because you disagree with the content, regardless of the fact that it's not a troll and is merely an honest statement of my genuine opinion.
What ever happened to game developers understanding that making a game perform well was the highest priority?
Aspiring developers back in the demoscene truly understood the art of coding. It was all about finding are more optimized, elegant solution than the previous guy, and making the computer pull things off that made the user's jaw drop. Coders used integer math and lookup tables in interesting ways to avoid performance-expensive floating point or trigonometric computations. They hand-optimized code and knew that a high-level library or language to produce the most elegant solution. They knew how to identify performance bottlenecks and improve them.
Developers now think it's okay to trust in powerful hardware, high-level languages, and abstraction layers like COM or OpenGL. Anything to make the job less mentally taxing. As a result, games continue to gradually decline in quality.
The gaming market has become more commercialized and less artistic, resulting in an abundance of crappy games that are designed and implemented by businessmen instead of artists and coders. The entire industry is headed down the tubes, just like ATARI in the 1980's.
There's one exception: Nintendo. They are still consistently producing artistic, quality games in-house. They may not survive as a hardware company, but they will certainly be one of the few successful game development companies to weather the market when the bubble bursts.
Actually, Babylon 5 died because it didn't have ANY modularity to the episodes. As a complete stranger to the show, it was impossible for me to watch a single episode and make much (if any) sense of it.
Star Trek (in all its forms) has always succeeded commercially because it has some aspects of over-arching story and theme, but each individual episode is a nice encapsulated story. A newcomer can generally come to an episode and make some sense of what's happening and enjoy the story.
Note that DS9 was the furthest removed from this, especially when they got toward the last season with the ongoing Dominion war, etc. DS9 was ambitious, as was Babylon 5. They would be excellent material for release as a complete DVD collection, where someone can watch the entire series in sequence at their own convenience.
When you think about other shows that have gained popularity and commercial success over the years, you start to realize they have the same good balance between over-arching story and individual episode story. Look at the original Transformers cartoon series, or The Simpsons, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Heck, dare I say it, even Friends. They all had self-contained episodes which were also part of an over-arching story (however simplistic) that kept people coming back (with whatever level of frequency) to watch more episodes. But if individual episodes lack neat form, then it doesn't matter how cool the over-arching story is, because viewers who miss a few episodes will feel hopelessly lost. And if there's no over-arching story, a viewer won't feel as motivated to "check back in" on the show after missing a few episodes as they would feel if there were an over-arching story.
Now that things like Tivo are gaining popularity, and simulating many aspects of an "on-demand" model where viewers don't have to worry so much about missing out on episodes, it's possible that shows with a balance swung more heavily toward long-term story may succeed where they couldn't have before. But that will be a slow and gradual transition if it happens at all.
This is just another problem that can and should be solved by accountability. As long as people can be anonymous online, then they will behave badly because they will know they cannot be held accountable for their actions.
If you want to fix Usenet, then simply change one important aspect of the design: no anonymity. Then watch as the piracy, trolling, and other shit disappears.
And don't flame with the usual crap about anonymity being necessary to protect freedom of speech or freedom of opinion. Any decent country already guarantees those freedoms through existing laws, so you don't need to hide behind anonymity to exercise them. And any country that lacks such protections needs to be concerning itself with more important things than the signal-to-noise ratios in newsgroups...
How can a responsible thinker so easily shrug off the need to protect oneself from the unknown abuses of the future just because one may think things are relatively agreeable at present?
Complacency. Historical lessons are an interesting thing... people only tend to learn a lesson if they were personally affected by the lesson in their own lifetime. I would venture to say that at least half the civilized global population has lived in a stable enough societal setting (whether repressive or not) that they just figure the status quo is the way at's the way it always has been and always will be. It's the same reason a dissenting majority of people in a country often can't/won't get up the balls to overthrow their repressive leaders.
Anonymity is not needed as long as other rights are explicitly protected. Free speech is explicitly protected by the US Constitution.
It's already illegal to infringe upon someone's free speech, kidnap them, murder them, or harass them. Therefore there is no need for them to have to hide behind anonymity to enjoy those rights.
Slashdot Mirror
If this attitude is a problem, that means Linux should not succeed---because it means users don't want Linux.
Exactly what I'm saying.
The problem is that most people/customers/users want products. They want stuff shrink-wrapped, polished, completed. They don't want some vague notion of a never-ending work in progress or an ever-evolving platform. They want discrete, well-defined units and releases. It's true of everything from Twinkies to CDs to operating systems, and it's why this common attitude among Linux zealots is counter-productive to their hopes for widespread adoption.
Where have you been for the past ten years. Big Corps. screwing the little guy, along with the government. Whoda'thunkit. Something needs to be changed here, and "being amazed" won't cut it. Protests, boycotts, and contacting your rep.!
Dear Constituent,
Thank you for writing Senator Buymeov regarding your concerns about corporate greed. Unfortunately, due to the large volume of mail received by the Senator each day, combined with his complete lack of caring about you, your mail was fed directly through this automated reply system, and then incinerated. No real person will ever read your message, and the Senator's staffers actually spend each Friday night eating Chinese takeout and laughing at the poor fuckers who write in thinking anyone cares.
The Senator cares deeply about lining his own pockets and understands the benefits of corporate greed first-hand. Last year, the Senator voted to elinimate consumer rights and managed to rake in a cool $4.5million in various "gifts" and campaign donations from corporate sponsors. Senator Buymeov will continue to work hard to ensure you have no voice in government.
Thank you again for contacting us -- your participation in our government is what makes life worth living! (HAHAhahahahah!)
Sincerely,
Fake signature of Senator Buymeov
How bad is it going to have to get before you get angry enough to do something?
That's the point -- you can't do anything, no matter how pissed off you get or how badly you are wronged. You think your vote counts for anything? Fool! Unless you're a multi-billion-dollar corporation, you have no real voice in this country.
Wha? You must have one hell of an unorganized filesystem if making a playlist is hard. (in Winamp or xmms) Click the button that says "File" in the lower left corner, pick whether you want a directory, url, or individual files. Pick the target(s) and then click "Ok". Files are now on your playlist- and they can be deleted or re-ordered with single commands. How freakin' hard is that?
The WinAMP playlist isn't part of the main program window -- it's a seprate window you have to manage or attach and drag around. The UI widgets are not standard windows controls, and at 1280x1024 or larger they are too small to comfortably read. On top of that, the little abbreviations and symbols used on the various controls aren't intuitive, so you have to try things out to figure our what they do and how it works.
The Windows Media Player Media Library is even more obnoxious, because it requires you to enter, maintain, and store metadata in the Media Library database that isn't correspondingly present on the filesystem, and you can't pick up that metadata inside other programs.
The main complaint I had wasn't with the usability as much as it is with the bloatiness of the programs. WinAMP has degraded through the major releases into a giant bloated "let's skin everything, fuck performance" mess. It eats up memory and causes song playback to suffer when you've got numerous other programs running (which I almost always do when listening to music files on my PC).
After checking it out for a while, I would also add "ugly" and "redundant" to that list. Even if you only look at open-source players, there's still XMMS, which is actually pleasing to the eye rather than looking like just another vanilla-style Windows app.
I don't care about or want "pretty". I want efficient, simple, and functional. I want the bare minimum necessary to get the job done. VUPlayer meets those desires perfectly.
Not to mention that both Winamp and XMMS will do (almost, I don't think Winamp will have CD ripping for another update or two) everything VUPlayer can.
Yes, they can -- and a bit more -- but I dont' want or need their extra bells and whistles. I just want something that works reliably and efficiently and offers the functionality I care about.
Wrong. It doesn't matter if they have one already. It matters if their player can use them. Almost all players can (Winamp, and ... well, who really uses anything else? :D )
Actually, I much prefer the non-bloated VUPlayer for playing all my media files. Fuck WinAMP and Windows Media Player with their giant, over-engineered bloated interfaces and difficult-to-understand-and-use playlist and media library concepts. VUPlayer is simple, fast, and supports basically everything. And when I found a bug in it and reported it to the author, he e-mailed me a private patch the next day and a few days later the official release on his website was rev'ed to include the fix. You can't beat that without going open-source.
Someone else already mentioned that CDs are too expensive, so be sure to offer your MP3s at a reasonable price point (50 cents/song seems reasonable).
The other issue is consumer rights. Once the consumer buys the MP3, they should be able to do whatever they want with it, unlimitedly, as long as it is for personal use. They should be able to make as many copies of it as they want, onto as many devices as they want, and convert it into any formats they want, as long as they are not giving copies away to people or reselling them.
Not saying I have any idea how to solve that issue, but that's clearly what consumers expect, and they won't readily settle for anything less.
What people want is simplicity and power. Contrary to popular belief, those are not mutually exclusive. They can and should coexist in a well-designed desktop appplication.
A program's capabilities should be categorized by usage level in the user interface. For example, commonly used features should all be listed together, rarely used features should all be listed together, and power-user features should all be listed together. Microsoft tried to address this problem (but used an entirely awful approach that creates even worse issues) when it introduced "personalized menus". I've seen few other attempts at addressing this issue, but good solutions are desperately needed by users overwhelmed by feature bloat in the user interface.
All simple applications can map to simple user interfaces. Unless you're designing a program to control a nuclear power facility, fly the space shuttle, or perform scientific simulations, you don't have much excuse for generating the type of interface complexity that comes out of Microsoft on a regular basis.
In my, limited, experience this is almost always the wrong approach, people do not know what they want
True, people sometimes don't know what they truly want, or don't know how to verbalize it. That is part of the challenge: to develop studies and tests that do a good job of identifying what people really want. But you should still try to find out what people want and give it to them.
they ignore there are options to the crap that Microsoft pushes on them.
Most people know that alternatives exist, but they don't see any of them as compelling enough to switch. Nearly anyone who knows about Windows PCs knows about Macintosh PCs, for instance. If an alternative OS comes along one day that actually offers things that are compelling enough to everyday people, then they will switch in droves.
There is one problem with straying from the Outlook user interface: Evolution's developers will need to instead conduct their own usability research and testing, which can be costly and may not be something they are good at.
Regardless of how you feel about Microsoft, the fact is that they perform thorough usability research and testing on all their software. A frustrated individual may question or complain about the interface of Outlook, but that interface was methodically refined and evolved to meet the needs of the widest majority of users, not that one user's preferences.
The single biggest failing in Microsoft's approach to usability is overkill. They make everything far more complex than it needs to be. For instance, in nearly every Microsoft program there are at least 4 different ways to accomplish the same task (window menu, shortcut key, toolbar icon, context menu). Ridiculous, and more than your average person can (or wants to) wrap their brain around.
Personally, I don't think much research or rocket science is necessary to create a usable program. Just follow the KISS philosophy ("keep it simple, stupid") and you'll be 90% on the right track. The critical part is to test the design against as many real, average users as you can, and seriously incorporate their feedback into your design (even if it seems contrary to your personal feelings about how the program should work).
Or, put even more simply: Give people what they want, not what you want to give them.
I think that pretty much sums it up. Too many people think computer = Windows and don't know how to use anything else. So if the Linux server (God forbid) breaks, who will be around to fix it?
That's just demonstrative of the entire problem with *NIX -- it's too difficult to learn and use. That's why Windows or even Mac OS X would be used by companies (as long as PCs or Macs will suit their needs) rather than Linux, because you don't have to have "l33t software gods" to simply set the systems up or run them.
In other words, the barrier to adoption may be support, but if your stuff is simpler to use then the need for support is reduced. The *NIX crowds (Linux, BSD, etc) need to take note of how relatively simple it is to set up and run a Windows or Mac OS X system, and start realizing that ease-of-use and consistent graphic interfaces are something real people care about.
Lookup the IP registrations, find the owners' locale, and then contact that local police department. Tell them a federal crime (felony) is being perpetrated on a grand scale, and that you need to speak with someone with extensive computer/internet/technical knowledge to report all the details.
Many of you keep saying Hilary was just a mouthpiece of the RIAA and had no hand in setting policy. You actually think that she might turn out to be some kind of ethical human being after leaving the RIAA.
Let me give you a bit of a wake-up call: if she were an ethical human being then she wouldn't have allowed herself to serve as the RIAA's mouthpiece for any amount of money. Any ethical human being with any concern for the public welfare would have rejected any carrots the RIAA dangled in front of them and given them the big "Fuck you". There are plenty of other jobs out there that deal with media and technology that wouldn't require a daily sacrifice of ethical principles.
No, this is seriously bad news. Now not only is she evil, but she's evil being pumped straight into homes on a nightly basis. It wouldn't surprise me if this move was secretly orchestrated by the RIAA so as to get someone with their bias into the mainstream media in an unsuspecting, insidious way.
Give me a fucking break. The companies involved in the lawsuit aren't even selling modified DVDs. They are selling software that lets a user modify the playback of the DVD to avoid the undesirable portions.
The MPAA is basically arguing that my movie-watching sequence should be like the "therapy" in "A Clockwork Orange" -- I must see it exactly as the director intended, so I must have my eyelids forcibly held open so I can't possibly miss a single second.
And they think this will actually help their bottom line? The lunacy!
Unfortunately I downloaded the Metallica autobiography and ended up with Battlefield:Earth instead.
Oh, wait... you mean those aren't the same story?
Companies will face an $11,000 fine for each telemarketing call that violates the FTC's new consumer-protection provisions.
They'll only face it if the recipients of the calls can identify them. Since nearly all telemarketers hide from Caller ID, and no violator will willingly give you identifying information so you can report them, the law is completely unhelpful.
Let me know when the courts pass a law requiring the phone companies to eliminate Caller ID hiding entirely from their networks. 100% accountability for actions. Then we'll be getting somewhere.
Oh, come on. It's not even in the financial interest of the drive manufacturers to create less reliable products. The supposed "savings" of doing so would be easily outweighed by the decrease in reputation and sales figures, and the increase in costs to them for replacing drives that went bad during the warranty period (whatever the length).
The real reason they shorten the warranty period is so they aren't on the hook to provide technical support and replacements for drives they don't even make anymore. The costs they are trying to cut by shortening the warranty aren't manufacturing costs, but support costs.
Trend Micro goofs up big-time, and the Slashdot crowd laughs.
Microsoft goofs up even in a small way, and the Slashdot crowd boos, hisses, and forms a lynch mob.
Yeah, that's objective.
This is the second story from a "Christian Science" author I've see in a week here on Slashdot.
I would love to know what relevance articles on religious philosophy have to a technology and geek news site. Some people may find this stuff interesting, but Slashdot shouldn't be posting "Christian science" articles on the frontpage while meanwhile rejecting far more relevant and substantive article submissions.
Yeah, that's it. Moderate my post as "Troll" just because you disagree with the content, regardless of the fact that it's not a troll and is merely an honest statement of my genuine opinion.
Dickheads.
What ever happened to game developers understanding that making a game perform well was the highest priority?
Aspiring developers back in the demoscene truly understood the art of coding. It was all about finding are more optimized, elegant solution than the previous guy, and making the computer pull things off that made the user's jaw drop. Coders used integer math and lookup tables in interesting ways to avoid performance-expensive floating point or trigonometric computations. They hand-optimized code and knew that a high-level library or language to produce the most elegant solution. They knew how to identify performance bottlenecks and improve them.
Developers now think it's okay to trust in powerful hardware, high-level languages, and abstraction layers like COM or OpenGL. Anything to make the job less mentally taxing. As a result, games continue to gradually decline in quality.
The gaming market has become more commercialized and less artistic, resulting in an abundance of crappy games that are designed and implemented by businessmen instead of artists and coders. The entire industry is headed down the tubes, just like ATARI in the 1980's.
There's one exception: Nintendo. They are still consistently producing artistic, quality games in-house. They may not survive as a hardware company, but they will certainly be one of the few successful game development companies to weather the market when the bubble bursts.
Actually, Babylon 5 died because it didn't have ANY modularity to the episodes. As a complete stranger to the show, it was impossible for me to watch a single episode and make much (if any) sense of it.
Star Trek (in all its forms) has always succeeded commercially because it has some aspects of over-arching story and theme, but each individual episode is a nice encapsulated story. A newcomer can generally come to an episode and make some sense of what's happening and enjoy the story.
Note that DS9 was the furthest removed from this, especially when they got toward the last season with the ongoing Dominion war, etc. DS9 was ambitious, as was Babylon 5. They would be excellent material for release as a complete DVD collection, where someone can watch the entire series in sequence at their own convenience.
When you think about other shows that have gained popularity and commercial success over the years, you start to realize they have the same good balance between over-arching story and individual episode story. Look at the original Transformers cartoon series, or The Simpsons, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Heck, dare I say it, even Friends. They all had self-contained episodes which were also part of an over-arching story (however simplistic) that kept people coming back (with whatever level of frequency) to watch more episodes. But if individual episodes lack neat form, then it doesn't matter how cool the over-arching story is, because viewers who miss a few episodes will feel hopelessly lost. And if there's no over-arching story, a viewer won't feel as motivated to "check back in" on the show after missing a few episodes as they would feel if there were an over-arching story.
Now that things like Tivo are gaining popularity, and simulating many aspects of an "on-demand" model where viewers don't have to worry so much about missing out on episodes, it's possible that shows with a balance swung more heavily toward long-term story may succeed where they couldn't have before. But that will be a slow and gradual transition if it happens at all.
This is just another problem that can and should be solved by accountability. As long as people can be anonymous online, then they will behave badly because they will know they cannot be held accountable for their actions.
If you want to fix Usenet, then simply change one important aspect of the design: no anonymity. Then watch as the piracy, trolling, and other shit disappears.
And don't flame with the usual crap about anonymity being necessary to protect freedom of speech or freedom of opinion. Any decent country already guarantees those freedoms through existing laws, so you don't need to hide behind anonymity to exercise them. And any country that lacks such protections needs to be concerning itself with more important things than the signal-to-noise ratios in newsgroups...
How can a responsible thinker so easily shrug off the need to protect oneself from the unknown abuses of the future just because one may think things are relatively agreeable at present?
Complacency. Historical lessons are an interesting thing... people only tend to learn a lesson if they were personally affected by the lesson in their own lifetime. I would venture to say that at least half the civilized global population has lived in a stable enough societal setting (whether repressive or not) that they just figure the status quo is the way at's the way it always has been and always will be. It's the same reason a dissenting majority of people in a country often can't/won't get up the balls to overthrow their repressive leaders.
Anonymity is not needed as long as other rights are explicitly protected. Free speech is explicitly protected by the US Constitution.
It's already illegal to infringe upon someone's free speech, kidnap them, murder them, or harass them. Therefore there is no need for them to have to hide behind anonymity to enjoy those rights.