Indeed. This is the first console in quite a long time that makes me want to buy it (btw the GameCube appealed to me because it can be played by 4 players, I hope Wii keeps that up).
I have one question on your examples, it is whether it's better to put the "Save" button on the left (like Windows often does) or right (like this Mac example).
I also wonder if there are real serious studies on usability done for Windows interfaces, and where can I read about them.
I read some articles by Jakob Nielsen http://www.useit.com/ but I find that his webpage doesn't actually make me confident in his knowledge (I find it repulsive and not that good in highlighting useful information) and also visited this funny website http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/ but I still feel I haven't learned much about usability.
In general, if people want something, they will seek it out for themselves.
That's not always true. There are several times when publicity is useful, at least in my experience:
when I did not know a product for that problem existed (though sometimes the publicity even "creates" that problem, that's the marketing depts. work),
and branding - between choosing brand x and a brand I saw an ad, though Google helps now to not automatically discard brand x if whatever it is I'm purchasing warrants a 5-minute comparison search.
Would you mind explaining how do you reach those figures? Especially the one:
"Assumming these problems away, the construction of an average car also consumes 120,000 gallons of fresh water. Unfortunately, the world is in the midst of a severe water crisis that is only going to get worse in the years to come. Scientists are already warning us to get ready for massive "water wars."
"
I've heard that said several times - and some tinfoil conspiracists mentioned that my country could get attacked by the US because it has a large water reserve, to that I pointed out the Great Lakes (biggest freshwater reservoir in the world) are in the US so it would be pointless.
Is this 120000 figure some reasonable number or just pulled from someone's *** ?
BTW I have difficulty considering your "life after the oil crash" a valid source since it states "uranium will soon be in short supply" when I have it on good faith (from a nuclear scientist at IAEA) that current nuclear fuel can be recycled in such a way to last thousands of years (it's generally not done because of a political issue mostly, as well as cost, etc.) (and I can provide studies of that).
Just to be a little on topic, as is always mentioned, the value of making electric cars is that they can use whatever efficient/ecology conscious method of generation of electricity there is (hydroelectric in my country, geothermal in Iceland, nuclear elsewhere). Though I would be more impressed if they made a breakthrough in energy storing tech (better batteries, fuel cells, whatever).
Cuba is widely regarded as having a very developed medicine (at least here in South America), it is very common for my fellow countrymen to go there for delicate surgery.
I'm not certain on why it is so, but it is one of the very few improvements I see in Cuba over other places - our healthcare, which is a public/private mismash, is in a chronical state of crisis, with the same "hot potato" syndrome someone described for the insurance companies in the US.
A study I read about on Wired stated that when there was less work among doctors, they "created" it, by making more cesarean births for instance in places with lower birthrates for instance.
If nothing else, you need a document collaboration tool, to avoid this nightmare of multiple files, and email is not it.
But it can be. I work for a company that develops a collaboration tool (amongs other stuff), and it uses a feature of Outlook that is sending an attachment by saving it into a SharePoint workspace (SharePoint is Microsoft's collaboration tool, they expect it to be a strong selling point of Office 2003 and beyond), that way every time someone opens it it's opened from the central workspace and edits are seen by everyone.
The collaboration tool we sell adds e-mail search and catalogation too.
So e-mail can potentially be adapted into a collaboration tool - I guess there must be an open source version of what I described hopefully.
Just make sure it is the BRAND's global warranty, and not some in-store warranty.
It is my experience that most laptops don't make it past 3 years anyway, so that's the time I'd purchase for the warranty.
Only people with no motivation or no skill make $25k a year for any extended period of time
Yes, I know I'm taking this out of context, but I'm so sick of reading this.
Here in the Third World (tm) I'd kill someone to make 25k a year. I've been studying for 7 years so far, and working the last 3. You bet I'm probably better than your average 25k coder, and I'm hoping this "free market" I keep reading about starts working and salaries start to even out. Does that mean US programmers will be in trouble? Hell, yes.
Supposedly the "new economy" is going to create more wealth though, so don't worry... right?
Reminds me of another Slashdot post that pointed out that it is really difficult to find the real productive people just by looking at that kind of indicators. A quiet person who works mostly office hours, takes a break to read the newspaper, surf the Web or play some game might seem less valuable than a glib articulate worker that stays overtime very often
However, I've seen that several of the first kind of workers actually do get their work done, are often way smarter/better qualified but have more difficulty expressing themselves and thus don't seem as good when viewed by upper management that sees a glib talker that might be clueless, and takes so much longer than the other to finish work that has to work extra hours (see joelonsoftware for some info he has on productivity related to programming in particular, which IMO can be applied to information workers in general). Also, the image which got me thinking about that recently, from a blog: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_us ers/2006/04/when_only_the_g.html
1- What's the usually accepted frequency of changing the admin password where you work? I work in a Microsoft shop, and there are way too many systems that have the password hard-coded (yes, I know that should not be), and everytime we change it everything breaks down, bringing down the wrath of upper management (the very same upper management that pushes for more frequent changes and more stringent password policy).
2- Another company I know of forced so many frequent changes that users started generating short passwords with an incremental number (d00D$001, d00D$002, d00D$003), making them easy to guess once you learn one (but complying with the password policy otherwise). Is that acceptable? (no I did not read TFA)
3- There was a nice article on Microsoft on passphrases and how they are so much better than passwords. Has anyone had a good (or bad) experience with that?
One question to all you who cycle to work: what do you do about sweat? Take a bath in the office?
I am expected to be in formal attire, so I don't see how I could fit in cycling into my routine
On the other hand, for those who can do it, it sounds great, I wouldn't mind some extra exercise, I used to cycle to high school and was moderately fit, now I'm overweight
Btw I solved my conmutting problem by moving 7 blocks from my employer, in a tiny one-room apartment.
Not ideal and probably unfeasible in other countries where housing and businesses are usually separated.
And I do miss the green and other perks of the suburbs, hopefully I'll be able to afford a car and a nice house not too far someday (see South America, avg wage, etc..).
And it uses less energy per capita than Luxembourg, Iceland, and Candada. Why don't you pick on them for a little while?
While that may be true, you might want to look a little deeper. The statistics you link to are expressed in Kilograms of oil equivalent (kgoe) per person per year.
Canada's energy profile is more environmentaly friendly than the US's (grossly one-fifth of their energy is environmentaly friendly compared to one-tenth of the US's).
Just to be a little on-topic, in my country (Uruguay) computer material is deemed too valuable and seldom just "thrown away". Lots of people are involved in recycling, just not for environmental reasons but sadly for economical ones (and they might just as well throw that lead or mercury battery into a river if it's not useful to them).
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.:-)
It is my understanding that trademarks are divided by classes (broad categories of similar goods/services), 45 different ones internationally, so it could be said that they can be divided by "types of service".
I thought there was no limitation on scope geographically, but I just learned otherwise (at least in the US) http://www.bitlaw.com/trademark/common.html. However, trademarks can be register federally as well as by state (as opposed to only nationwide in other countries), and if one company registers its trademark and others don't contest, once 5 years pass then it becomes "incontestable".
the United Parcel Service has a trademark on the color brown,but only in the context of being a worldwide delivery service
(emphasis mine)
That is certainly not the case.
UPS probably has a "composite trademark" on the logo on a brown background for their particular class. Any other company using a brown background and a non-sufficiently-distinguishable logo will probably infringe UPS's trademark. I would have to look up if plumbing services fall under the same class as delivery. If so, your hypothetical plumbing service would not be able to use the colour brown
More interesting info in the US Patent & Trademark Office FAQ http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/tac/tmfaq.htm
However, there is a lot to be said for the existence of a Christian church regardless of other factors. Examining the differences in states which are Christian and those that are militantly secular shows a much greater respect for the individual in the Christian states. While most atheists are also humanists, it is only the Christian humanists that seem to really believe in what they are saying.
The "militant" part threw me off, but my country (Uruguay) has been secular since 1919, and there has been no noticeable difference from neighbouring Catholic Argentina
It could even be argued that respect for the individual was higher in Uruguay during the dictatorship period in the seventies.
Another counter-argument could be made seeing the history of devout catholic european countries during the Middle Ages (not much respect for the individual there).
Current christian churches can be, as you mention, a positive influence since they try to teach commonly accepted moral values. But I dislike the way that some abuse their position by trying to force said values on the population - and most have some degree of variation among what constitutes appropiate values, behaviour, etc.
By having the State separated from the church, it can more appropiately reflect what the population wants rather than current church's views (not to mention churches tend to have difficulty adapting and thus often hold antiquated views).
That doesn't mean that they can't/shouldnt influence the state and express their views, just that they don't have any special privileges (and why should they?).
Sorry but I think you got it wrong (were you trying to be wrong? sarcasm doesn't carry well over the net sometimes).
Overture Services, Inc. is the former name of Yahoo! Search Marketing (obligatory wikipedia link here)
Yahoo! makes ads available to partners to display in exchange for a cut of the fees. One particular partner (Ditto.com) passed it to its own partner (NBCSearch, no affiliation to NBC)
NBCSearch in turn displayed the ad using 180solutions' spyware, which in some cases simulated a click-through.
Yahoo! claims that it loses the ability to track its ads when they are passed on in this manner.
I think Hanlon's Razor might apply here: "Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice."
IMO your friend's post was not worded that well, not enough that I'd mod it down, but I wouldn't mod it up either unless I knew that the statement accusing Daniel Lyons was true (and I don't know whether it is).
Plus, there are many Slashdot readers that either work with very closely with Microsoft or directly are Microsoft employees (for example http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/30/132125 1&from=rss has several posts by either Microsoft employees or ex-employees), which might have felt that the post was a troll (it is a strong acusation).
I would be surprised if at least some of them didn't have mod points (just reading regularly and being reasonable when posting seems to give you some).
That only leaves the timing to explain, but I guess they would naturally be attracted to a Microsoft story.
Of course, your explanation might be true as well, I definitely hope it isn't so (the implications would certainly be disturbing).
BTW which of these explanations fails Occam's Razor?
what did they do before email in the workplace was common?
Use the company phone. No, I don't know what they did before then, but I'm almost certain they did something (write personal letters in the company typewriters? use office stationery for personal use?).
And what about MMORPGs, and online games, and better computer games and whatnot? Aren't they competition?
20 years ago I would have been a hardcore D&D or whatever flavor, no doubt, but times have changed... now I'm a M:TG player and people consider ME hardcore for putting all that time into a game - while (I believe) D&D and such take a lot more time.
The people that have that much time are probably those playing MMORPGs now. I really like computer games handling all the D&D rules, I liked Icewind Dale & Neverwinter Nights, but I fumbled through a basic pseudo-D&D campaign due to all those stats - and me being a worse storyteller than the computer script
It depends on the area it seems. Here in Uruguay, cyber-cafés (kiosks or whatever you want to call them) are everywhere (including 100 person villages in the middle of nowhere), and so it is in Argentina (one fifth of their population uses them according to the Buenos Aires government), Chile and coastal Brazil at least.
All three countries (Uruguay, Argentina and Chile) already have a similar plan, also sponsored by Intel - see http://www.mipcuruguay.com.uy/plan_antecedentes.ht m , but I'd say that it's behind the times - there are several sellers of "clone" computers that beat that price, often with cheap AMD chips, and sellers of used European and US Pentum IIs that are more than enough for Internet access.
According to the C-Net article, this is basically more of the same program, but aimed at developing countries with harsher conditions (India, Africa I guess, tropical Brazil and Mexico).
our society's attitude toward sexuality is morbid and ridiculous
As someone not living in the USA, I can say that it does look that way from here (although we have our own religious extremists here too, our state is secular). I did read some interesting articles on how the perception of forbidden varies from culture to culture - see Arab states where seeing a woman's anke might be too much, compare to some African countries where Janet Jackson at the superbowl would not stand out
In many countries wine and beer are a normal part of life and young people are exposed to it accordingly. You don't typically see alcoholism problems or alcohol abuse in general in these countries.
Hmm... in my country young people can drink from age 18 (younger usually as sellers are very permissive) and we DO have the same alcohol problems as the USA, probably neither more nor less.
Well, one local credit card (with an 80% market share) decided they were going to do online shopping their way.
Each customer needs to request a special digital signature and register it on only one computer.
Guess what, there are like 2 online shops for that credit card (even though there were like 30 who initially pledged) and very few users. Users DO NOT want to go through that much hassle.
I really liked how it could engage you in so many fronts (unlike many other games of the era) you could advance your crew (RPG-like), your spaceship, the plot, manage money, find artifacts (although you could spend hours in barren systems).
The starmap and especially the manual included with the game gave it a lot of inmersion, the back story was good too. In fact, those are two features I find lacking in modern games (truth be told, I haven't bought many recently, so I could be wrong).
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. This is the first console in quite a long time that makes me want to buy it (btw the GameCube appealed to me because it can be played by 4 players, I hope Wii keeps that up).
Very good examples, and good point.
I have one question on your examples, it is whether it's better to put the "Save" button on the left (like Windows often does) or right (like this Mac example).
I also wonder if there are real serious studies on usability done for Windows interfaces, and where can I read about them.
I read some articles by Jakob Nielsen http://www.useit.com/ but I find that his webpage doesn't actually make me confident in his knowledge (I find it repulsive and not that good in highlighting useful information) and also visited this funny website http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/ but I still feel I haven't learned much about usability.
That's not always true. There are several times when publicity is useful, at least in my experience:
when I did not know a product for that problem existed (though sometimes the publicity even "creates" that problem, that's the marketing depts. work),
and branding - between choosing brand x and a brand I saw an ad, though Google helps now to not automatically discard brand x if whatever it is I'm purchasing warrants a 5-minute comparison search.
"
I've heard that said several times - and some tinfoil conspiracists mentioned that my country could get attacked by the US because it has a large water reserve, to that I pointed out the Great Lakes (biggest freshwater reservoir in the world) are in the US so it would be pointless.
Is this 120000 figure some reasonable number or just pulled from someone's *** ?
BTW I have difficulty considering your "life after the oil crash" a valid source since it states "uranium will soon be in short supply" when I have it on good faith (from a nuclear scientist at IAEA) that current nuclear fuel can be recycled in such a way to last thousands of years (it's generally not done because of a political issue mostly, as well as cost, etc.) (and I can provide studies of that).
Just to be a little on topic, as is always mentioned, the value of making electric cars is that they can use whatever efficient/ecology conscious method of generation of electricity there is (hydroelectric in my country, geothermal in Iceland, nuclear elsewhere). Though I would be more impressed if they made a breakthrough in energy storing tech (better batteries, fuel cells, whatever).
Cuba is widely regarded as having a very developed medicine (at least here in South America), it is very common for my fellow countrymen to go there for delicate surgery.
I'm not certain on why it is so, but it is one of the very few improvements I see in Cuba over other places - our healthcare, which is a public/private mismash, is in a chronical state of crisis, with the same "hot potato" syndrome someone described for the insurance companies in the US.
A study I read about on Wired stated that when there was less work among doctors, they "created" it, by making more cesarean births for instance in places with lower birthrates for instance.
I'm not certain if it was conscious though.
But it can be. I work for a company that develops a collaboration tool (amongs other stuff), and it uses a feature of Outlook that is sending an attachment by saving it into a SharePoint workspace (SharePoint is Microsoft's collaboration tool, they expect it to be a strong selling point of Office 2003 and beyond), that way every time someone opens it it's opened from the central workspace and edits are seen by everyone.
The collaboration tool we sell adds e-mail search and catalogation too.
So e-mail can potentially be adapted into a collaboration tool - I guess there must be an open source version of what I described hopefully.
And the "blue screen generator" screensaver, right?
h tml
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/BlueScreen.
Just make sure it is the BRAND's global warranty, and not some in-store warranty. It is my experience that most laptops don't make it past 3 years anyway, so that's the time I'd purchase for the warranty.
Here in the Third World (tm) I'd kill someone to make 25k a year. I've been studying for 7 years so far, and working the last 3. You bet I'm probably better than your average 25k coder, and I'm hoping this "free market" I keep reading about starts working and salaries start to even out. Does that mean US programmers will be in trouble? Hell, yes.
Supposedly the "new economy" is going to create more wealth though, so don't worry... right?
You're correct, I must admit.
:-)
However, it would help if Slashdot submitted the cache link so the webpage was not slashdotted.
I'll have to look up that Firefox extension.
BTW, what's an analogy for Anonymous Coward
Reminds me of another Slashdot post that pointed out that it is really difficult to find the real productive people just by looking at that kind of indicators. A quiet person who works mostly office hours, takes a break to read the newspaper, surf the Web or play some game might seem less valuable than a glib articulate worker that stays overtime very often
s ers/2006/04/when_only_the_g.html
0 9-week/ h tml (very general but covers the topic briefly near the end. I can't find a more specific one ATM)
However, I've seen that several of the first kind of workers actually do get their work done, are often way smarter/better qualified but have more difficulty expressing themselves and thus don't seem as good when viewed by upper management that sees a glib talker that might be clueless, and takes so much longer than the other to finish work that has to work extra hours (see joelonsoftware for some info he has on productivity related to programming in particular, which IMO can be applied to information workers in general). Also, the image which got me thinking about that recently, from a blog: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_u
which I originally found here: http://www.businessinnovationinsider.com/2006/04/
Joelonsoftware's link: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.
Several comments actually:
1- What's the usually accepted frequency of changing the admin password where you work? I work in a Microsoft shop, and there are way too many systems that have the password hard-coded (yes, I know that should not be), and everytime we change it everything breaks down, bringing down the wrath of upper management (the very same upper management that pushes for more frequent changes and more stringent password policy).
2- Another company I know of forced so many frequent changes that users started generating short passwords with an incremental number (d00D$001, d00D$002, d00D$003), making them easy to guess once you learn one (but complying with the password policy otherwise). Is that acceptable? (no I did not read TFA)
3- There was a nice article on Microsoft on passphrases and how they are so much better than passwords. Has anyone had a good (or bad) experience with that?
One question to all you who cycle to work: what do you do about sweat? Take a bath in the office?
I am expected to be in formal attire, so I don't see how I could fit in cycling into my routine
On the other hand, for those who can do it, it sounds great, I wouldn't mind some extra exercise, I used to cycle to high school and was moderately fit, now I'm overweight
Btw I solved my conmutting problem by moving 7 blocks from my employer, in a tiny one-room apartment.
Not ideal and probably unfeasible in other countries where housing and businesses are usually separated.
And I do miss the green and other perks of the suburbs, hopefully I'll be able to afford a car and a nice house not too far someday (see South America, avg wage, etc..).
While that may be true, you might want to look a little deeper. The statistics you link to are expressed in Kilograms of oil equivalent (kgoe) per person per year.
However, Iceland produces about twice as much renewable energy (hello first geothermal energy producer in the world) as it consumes oil, so you can cut that figure to one-third http://earthtrends.wri.org/text/energy-resources/
Canada's energy profile is more environmentaly friendly than the US's (grossly one-fifth of their energy is environmentaly friendly compared to one-tenth of the US's).
See http://earthtrends.wri.org/pdf_library/country_pr
Just to be a little on-topic, in my country (Uruguay) computer material is deemed too valuable and seldom just "thrown away". Lots of people are involved in recycling, just not for environmental reasons but sadly for economical ones (and they might just as well throw that lead or mercury battery into a river if it's not useful to them).
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I thought there was no limitation on scope geographically, but I just learned otherwise (at least in the US) http://www.bitlaw.com/trademark/common.html. However, trademarks can be register federally as well as by state (as opposed to only nationwide in other countries), and if one company registers its trademark and others don't contest, once 5 years pass then it becomes "incontestable".
(emphasis mine)
That is certainly not the case.
UPS probably has a "composite trademark" on the logo on a brown background for their particular class. Any other company using a brown background and a non-sufficiently-distinguishable logo will probably infringe UPS's trademark. I would have to look up if plumbing services fall under the same class as delivery. If so, your hypothetical plumbing service would not be able to use the colour brown
More interesting info in the US Patent & Trademark Office FAQ http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/tac/tmfaq.htm
The "militant" part threw me off, but my country (Uruguay) has been secular since 1919, and there has been no noticeable difference from neighbouring Catholic Argentina
It could even be argued that respect for the individual was higher in Uruguay during the dictatorship period in the seventies.
Another counter-argument could be made seeing the history of devout catholic european countries during the Middle Ages (not much respect for the individual there).
Current christian churches can be, as you mention, a positive influence since they try to teach commonly accepted moral values. But I dislike the way that some abuse their position by trying to force said values on the population - and most have some degree of variation among what constitutes appropiate values, behaviour, etc.
By having the State separated from the church, it can more appropiately reflect what the population wants rather than current church's views (not to mention churches tend to have difficulty adapting and thus often hold antiquated views).
That doesn't mean that they can't/shouldnt influence the state and express their views, just that they don't have any special privileges (and why should they?).
Sorry but I think you got it wrong (were you trying to be wrong? sarcasm doesn't carry well over the net sometimes).
Overture Services, Inc. is the former name of Yahoo! Search Marketing (obligatory wikipedia link here)
Yahoo! makes ads available to partners to display in exchange for a cut of the fees. One particular partner (Ditto.com) passed it to its own partner (NBCSearch, no affiliation to NBC)
NBCSearch in turn displayed the ad using 180solutions' spyware, which in some cases simulated a click-through.
Yahoo! claims that it loses the ability to track its ads when they are passed on in this manner.
I think Hanlon's Razor might apply here: "Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice."
5 1&from=rss has several posts by either Microsoft employees or ex-employees), which might have felt that the post was a troll (it is a strong acusation).
IMO your friend's post was not worded that well, not enough that I'd mod it down, but I wouldn't mod it up either unless I knew that the statement accusing Daniel Lyons was true (and I don't know whether it is).
Plus, there are many Slashdot readers that either work with very closely with Microsoft or directly are Microsoft employees (for example http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/30/13212
I would be surprised if at least some of them didn't have mod points (just reading regularly and being reasonable when posting seems to give you some).
That only leaves the timing to explain, but I guess they would naturally be attracted to a Microsoft story.
Of course, your explanation might be true as well, I definitely hope it isn't so (the implications would certainly be disturbing).
BTW which of these explanations fails Occam's Razor?
Use the company phone.
No, I don't know what they did before then, but I'm almost certain they did something (write personal letters in the company typewriters? use office stationery for personal use?).
And what about MMORPGs, and online games, and better computer games and whatnot? Aren't they competition?
20 years ago I would have been a hardcore D&D or whatever flavor, no doubt, but times have changed... now I'm a M:TG player and people consider ME hardcore for putting all that time into a game - while (I believe) D&D and such take a lot more time.
The people that have that much time are probably those playing MMORPGs now.
I really like computer games handling all the D&D rules, I liked Icewind Dale & Neverwinter Nights, but I fumbled through a basic pseudo-D&D campaign due to all those stats - and me being a worse storyteller than the computer script
It depends on the area it seems. Here in Uruguay, cyber-cafés (kiosks or whatever you want to call them) are everywhere (including 100 person villages in the middle of nowhere), and so it is in Argentina (one fifth of their population uses them according to the Buenos Aires government), Chile and coastal Brazil at least.
t m , but I'd say that it's behind the times - there are several sellers of "clone" computers that beat that price, often with cheap AMD chips, and sellers of used European and US Pentum IIs that are more than enough for Internet access.
All three countries (Uruguay, Argentina and Chile) already have a similar plan, also sponsored by Intel - see http://www.mipcuruguay.com.uy/plan_antecedentes.h
According to the C-Net article, this is basically more of the same program, but aimed at developing countries with harsher conditions (India, Africa I guess, tropical Brazil and Mexico).
As someone not living in the USA, I can say that it does look that way from here (although we have our own religious extremists here too, our state is secular). I did read some interesting articles on how the perception of forbidden varies from culture to culture - see Arab states where seeing a woman's anke might be too much, compare to some African countries where Janet Jackson at the superbowl would not stand out
Hmm... in my country young people can drink from age 18 (younger usually as sellers are very permissive) and we DO have the same alcohol problems as the USA, probably neither more nor less.
Well, one local credit card (with an 80% market share) decided they were going to do online shopping their way. Each customer needs to request a special digital signature and register it on only one computer. Guess what, there are like 2 online shops for that credit card (even though there were like 30 who initially pledged) and very few users. Users DO NOT want to go through that much hassle.
Starflight was amazingly advanced for its time.
I really liked how it could engage you in so many fronts (unlike many other games of the era) you could advance your crew (RPG-like), your spaceship, the plot, manage money, find artifacts (although you could spend hours in barren systems).
The starmap and especially the manual included with the game gave it a lot of inmersion, the back story was good too.
In fact, those are two features I find lacking in modern games (truth be told, I haven't bought many recently, so I could be wrong).