You know who didn't get the message? Despite all the thousands of notices you just mentioned?
The maintainer who put it in Fedora. The one person who MOST needed to read and understand it.
So, basically, STFU. Regardless of what you think, that right there is PROOF POSITIVE that the message was no good, and communicated poorly. It's already happened, you can't deny it.
End-users care for *usability*, which is often confused for "eye-candy" by geeky types.
Putting drop shadows around window borders isn't "eye-candy", it's a visual reinforcement of how the windows overlap each other and make the system easier to use in a subtle way. Minimizing animations aren't "eye-candy", they visually show the user where to click to restore the minimized item-- without them, the window just seems to disappear, which is more confusing. "Ghost" icons, while dragging-and-dropping, are helpful as a remind to what exact files/items you were dragging. The highlight that appears around drop targets tells you you can drop the content there, and saves you wasting time when you release the mouse and nothing happens.
All of these things are valuable usability features, not eye-candy. They all existed in Windows 2000, which looked like ass. Frankly. And Classic Mac OS, ditto.
Now that said, there is such a thing as eye-candy. For example, the glassy-translucent window titles in Vista don't really serve any purpose other than to look cool... but users react to usability, not eye-candy. (Well, take Vista as an example; that glassy-translucent window didn't help them sell any more copies, did it? All the graphical usability features mentioned in the first paragraph are already in XP.)
Anyway, long story short, next time I see a person equating "making software usable" with "adding eye-candy", I'm going to smack them.
I don't want to support sites that have horrible usability and haven't improved in 15 years. I hate web developers getting support for having a shitty product doing NOTHING to improve, which is exactly what SourceForge has been doing in all that time. (Compare the typical SF project page with a typical Trax project page, and you'll realize just how shitty it is.)
It's like Umatic. It may have been the first video recorder for the home (1969), but since it totally failed to sell to homeowners, it made NO impact. Yes it was first to market, but Not revolutionary to lifestyles.
The revolution didn't arrive until almost ten years later with Betamax and VHS.
I hope you got that deleting-finger all warmed-up, because you got a lot of deleting to do!
Don't confuse the word "first of its type" with "revolutionary". The first to market often does NOT have a revolutionary impact.
Maybe not, but here's two problems: 1) As demonstrated above, by your VERY OWN crappy examples, you're holding MUDs to a standard that apparently doesn't apply to any other type of video game and/or home electronics device. 2) The Wikipedian "judging" my entry, more likely than not, knows absolutely dick about MUDs. And yet he has no problem judging that the article is delete-fodder. Instead of "assume good faith," Wikipedia has turned into "delete everything! Delete delete delete!" (It's admins have become Cybermen from Dr. Who, to make a geeky reference.)
I'm the developer, or at least the last maintainer who knew how the code/hosting worked, which I guess amounts to the same thing. What would I get out of putting the code on SourceForge? It would just be another abandoned project, and frankly I'd rather not support using SourceForge in the first place (their bug tracker is atrociously terrible.)
In any case, the code isn't important, since it would be useless to anybody not trying to replicate ES exactly, and 70-80% of it is just SMAUG anyway. What's important is the design of the features; for example these features are something Blizzard could add to WOW if they wanted to.
(After reading these comments, though, I think I will write out an article about the features we added, and how well they worked. There seems to be some interest.)
How is that any less arbitrary than me just writing it directly into Wikipedia? It's not like there's a "reliable multiple sourced yadda" listing the creator for every MUD that ever existed.
Of course maybe you're right that they wouldn't delete it in that case, but that only raises more questions about their guidelines: they're in place to prevent people from entering arbitrary information, but if you put that same arbitrary information into a blog first, possibly using an assumed name to boot, then it's ok? WTF.
BTW, Wikipedia is already a "mythology journal." There was a nugget about a Russian livestock shortage in 1986, or some shit, that was in several cross-linked articles (Russian, Economy of Russia, some charity entry) for a full year. It was only fixed when my friend who added it as a prank decided to come clean; the Russia article had been edited over a hundred times, and nobody ever removed the bullshit event. When he added it I was kind of pissed, because I still kind of believe a tiny bit in Wikipedia's mission, but now? Screw Wikipedia.
The fact that neither my game nor your game was ever published in a 80s-era computing magazine, probably means these games were NOT as revolutionary as we claim.
Wrong, it just means that not a ton of people like good RP-based text-only MUDs.
Look at the amount of attention Marathon gets compared to Doom, even though Marathon is a *much* more revolutionary and influential game... why is that? Marathon came out on Macintosh, which isn't a popular gaming platform, and Doom came out on DOS, which was. Does the Macintosh origin diminish the fact that Marathon was the first game with integrated voice communication over the network? No. Yet if not for Halo, Marathon would probably be completely forgotten now.
In any case, how could it POSSIBLY be published in an 80s-era computing magazine when the game (with its revolutionary features) didn't exist until 1996? Man, that's an asshole reply.
Anyway..... You still have the right of free speech. Exercise it. Go publish your own private encyclopedia or website. Then you can say whatever you want to say, and people can come read it, instead of wasting your time bitching.
I bitch because Wikipedia wasted a lot of my time and effort DELETING things that I'd written. I would expect anybody to bitch when their content was deleted without comment or discussion.
Damnit, I managed to copy and paste and stomp over my whole post. No wait, Slashdot did it with it's fucking retarded bug where it can't tell if 'less than' is being used to indicate 'less than' or open a quote. Gee, it's only been a dozen years, Slashdot, think you could manage a SINGLE bug fix inbetween making the site look like ass? Anyway.
Correct post:
Call me sceptical, but I'm pretty sure you aren't looking hard enough.
There might be more articles. As of about 3-4 years ago, there weren't any more books than that. (And I think I heard vaguely about a film documentary being made about MUDding, but I haven't personally seen it.) In any case, none of them cover the specific MUD I'd like to write an article about.
Bah, you're just jealous that your MUD hasn't been covered in real publications you read, like the MUD I used to play at, which has been the subject of several mainstream media articles over the years. =)
Ok, A) You're a condescending jerk, and B) I already mentioned the MUD closed down, so you're a condescending jerk who can't read.
Look, Eternal Struggle had a bevy of RP-based features, most of which have never been replicated (well, except in MUDs that splintered from ES in the first place):
* A "recog" system that would show you the text description of a person/NPC until you specifically used the "RECOG" command to recognize them. We introduced the need to introduce yourself, in short. But the beauty of the system is that it also allowed shapeshifting (with the ability to change your text description at demand, and others the ability to recognize your shifted form), giving false names, referring to people by keyword instead of name, people automatically no longer recognizing you if your description changes, and more minor things I no longer remember. This also turned admin-puppetted NPCs into basically full characters, since NPCs could be recognized like any other character-- no more hacking the MUD code to get NPCs to show a proper name.
* A "rpaward" system, so that a player could go from level 2 to 50 without ever killing a MOB if they didn't want to. Instead, fellow players could "reward" them based on the quality of their RP and earn points. At below level 50, the points contributed towards leveling, and at the level cap they could be redeemed for RP-related prizes (custom equipment, learning additional languages, etc.) My most famous character on that MUD actually played as a lawyer for the majority of his career, and hardly ever engaged in violence of any sort.
* The best EMOTE command you've ever seen, complete with language scrambler for dialog in emotes, referring to people/objects/location by keyword (to make the aforementioned RECOG code work; you'd see: "Bob talks to BlakeyRat", someone who didn't recognize BlakeyRat would see: "Bob talks to a generic man", someone who didn't recognize Bob would see, "Another man talks to BlakeyRat". It was brilliant.)
* Clear separation of IC/OOC chat. Of course, this is something any RP MUD can do, most just... don't. (You end up with the "every character is psychic" mechanism of everybody being able to use tells.) There were also alternate chat channels based on items, possessing certain colors of crystal would let you telepathically chat with other people with similar crystals.
* A culture that abhorred abuse from admins, and rewarded true creativity in play. This actually led to the MUD's downfall, since good RPers are oftentimes not really good at anything else but RP (including myself, but I digress.) But, the real point here, is that most MUDs instantly become politicized with abusive admins who love doing nothing more than randomly slaughtering players and calling it an "RP event." ES was great at getting rid of those a-holes, better than any other MUD I've played since.
Anyway, I'm not saying that ES is perfect, but I *do* think that a lot of the things listed there are definitely noteworthy, if only so future generations (or me!) can point to them from time-t
Call me sceptical, but I'm pretty sure you aren't looking hard enough.
There might be more articles. As of about 3-4 years ago, there weren't any more books than that. (And I think I heard vaguely about a film documentary being made about MUDding, but I haven't personally seen it.) In any case, none of them cover the specific MUD I'd like to write an article about.
Bah, you're just jealous that your MUD hasn't been covered in real publications you read, like the MUD I used to play at, which has been the subject of several mainstream media articles over the years. =)
Ok, A) You're a condescending jerk, and B) I already mentioned the MUD closed down, so you're a condescending jerk who can't read.
Look, Eternal Struggle had a bevy of RP-based features, most of which have never been replicated (well, except in MUDs that splintered from ES in the first place):
* A "recog" system that would show you the text description of a person/NPC until you specifically used the "RECOG" command to recognize them. We introduced the need to introduce yourself, in short. But the beauty of the system is that it also allowed shapeshifting (with the ability to change your text description at demand, and others the ability to recognize your shifted form), giving false names, referring to people by keyword instead of name, people automatically no longer recognizing you if your description changes, and more minor things I no longer remember. This also turned admin-puppetted NPCs into basically full characters, since NPCs could be recognized like any other character-- no more hacking the MUD code to get NPCs to show a proper name.
* A "rpaward" system, so that a player could go from level 2 to 50 without ever killing a MOB if they didn't want to. Instead, fellow players could "reward" them based on the quality of their RP and earn points. At but how about impressing a local game magazine instead, as they generally tend to pay attention to more marginal topics than the big media?
Two problems with this: 1) What is a "local game magazine?" in Western Washington? We barely even have any NATIONAL game magazines left, EGM just closed-up shop and became web-only. 2) What the hell would I tell them? "Hey there's this great game for the small subset of people who care about RP, but it's no longer around, please write an article so I can get it into Wikipedia?" That's retarded.
Surely there are sufficiently geeky game magazines out there who would love to cover the peculiarities your quaint game?
Name one. I dare ya.
The real point is that newspapers and magazines are dying; sooner or later, Wikipedia will *have* to allow online citations. Why don't they beat the rush and do it now before I completely forget all the stuff I'd like to post as articles?
Or I could just not edit Wikipedia at all, since every time I try to improve it (in good faith, which I believe is one of their confusingly-acronymed rules!) my changes get reverted with no explanation and no discussion.
Your workaround is basically to spend ten times the time/money (yes, hosting costs money) writing an ENTIRE WIKI so that I can get information added to Wikipedia-- but oh wait, it's still not in Wikipedia, it's in a link on Wikipedia. Which would probably get reverted anyway (see the other reply to your post.)
If the liberal-leaning news media don't care, and the conservative-leaning news media don't care, what makes you think the median reader would care?
Uh, the particular article I'm talking about has absolutely zilch to do with politics. Did you even *read* my post?
Instead of trying to get into Wikipedia before making the news,
The MUD ran for almost a dozen years without making the news. Thousands of players, possibly tens of thousands. If it didn't make the news in that amount of time, what makes you think it *ever* would? That doesn't mean the MUD didn't exist, or isn't important in any way, it just means the journalism industry is about 15 years behind the technology curve.
perhaps you could try posting about your community on a dedicated wiki on the subject, such as one hosted by Wikia.
Be happy, they've just started to install it in Washington State. They were too busy wiring up redneck-ville before getting around to the second biggest tech company state in the country.
Not only do we not have FIOS, where I live there still isn't any dry-loop DSL. Say hello to my little landline. (I refuse to give Comcast money, and Clearwire while THANK GOD they exist at all, has terrible latency at my home.)
Which deleted articles about comics that have been the subject of non-trivial coverage in multiple "third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy" are you complaining about?
This is the Internet! Wikipedia is on the Internet! There are entire, large, long-standing, communities here that have virtually no coverage in "multiple third-party published sources with a reputation yadda yadda."
For instance, I used to play MUDs, like tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people. MUDs have been around since the mid-80s, all modern MMOs (which have "multiple third-party yadda yadda") are based off MUDs to some extent, and yet there's maybe... 2-3 books and a dozen articles on the entire thing. So I can't write a Wikipedia article on my MUD, which had hundreds or thousands of users and lasted > 10 years and had revolutionary RP-based features which still hasn't been replicated in any other game, because we never got an article in the Wall Street Journal? Fuck that.
Wikipedia has put a bar where, for many communities, is simply impossible to reach. The most famous example being web comics, and of course my MUDs. And this problem will only get worse as the Internet gets bigger and more popular. (If it hasn't already maxed out.)
Microsoft sells tons of software for Macintosh. They might be the single biggest vendor of Macintosh software, in fact, although I'm not 100% sure on that.
This is like that idiotic story a few years ago where a Microsoft employee got in deep junk for taking pictures of a truck delivering new Mac computers to a MS building... and then posting them on his blog as if it was some kind of "caught in the act" or something.
And it never occurred to him that, hm, Microsoft makes Office for Mac? Maybe they need to buy Macs to do that? Why is it surprising, or interesting, that a Microsoft building has Macs in it? Or that this Microsoft program runs on a Macbook?
Have you thought about maybe being polite? And not a jackass?
The thing is, when you're a jackass while explaining something, even if you're right, you're usually not going to convince them. Instead, you just put them on the defensive and suddenly defending their (wrong) opinion becomes a huge issue. If you were polite, you'd make a lot more headway.
Of course, being a jackass, you're not going to read and/or digest that last paragraph anyway, so I don't even know why I'm bothering. I'll just call you a jackass again. Jackass.
Obviously their system doesn't work, otherwise Fedora (for example) wouldn't have adopted 4.0 as the default.
Look, I understand, believe me I do, that the developers put some message somewhere that explained that 4.0 was a piece of shit and nobody should use it. The problem is that obviously the right people didn't read that message, and it ended up being put in several distros by default, causing massive quantities of user pain.
And how could they have solved this problem? By adding a fucking "b" to the end of the "4.0"! Seriously, this is a *GUI environment* made by people with absolutely no understanding of human psychology or clear communication? Doesn't that worry anybody?
I don't really care about this thread, but having followed it down several layers and spending quite a bit of time reading it, I feel compelled to comment.
I'd like to see an explanation from the KDE developers of what, exactly, that reason happened to actually be. It's not very encouraging to find that a software project whose number one focus should be usability has very little understanding of human psychology or clear communication.
Then why doesn't it have any letters behind it? Like, say, "A" for "Alpha" or "B" for "Beta"? Everybody knows what those means, not everybody reads every single blog post and communication from the developers. In fact, I wager very few people do...
The irony is that you can't be hired as a programmer at Microsoft without a degree now, so basically Bill Gates wouldn't be able to get hired at his own company if he applied this year.
No, you're not. There's a lot more anti-H1B propaganda out there. For example, by law they can't be paid less than the prevailing wage for their job title-- if his past employer was paying H1B holders less, they were in violation of the law. I can guarantee that Microsoft (the company we're all discussing here) puts H1B holders on the same payscale and benefits program as US employees.
Slashdot Mirror
You know who didn't get the message? Despite all the thousands of notices you just mentioned?
The maintainer who put it in Fedora. The one person who MOST needed to read and understand it.
So, basically, STFU. Regardless of what you think, that right there is PROOF POSITIVE that the message was no good, and communicated poorly. It's already happened, you can't deny it.
End-users care for *usability*, which is often confused for "eye-candy" by geeky types.
Putting drop shadows around window borders isn't "eye-candy", it's a visual reinforcement of how the windows overlap each other and make the system easier to use in a subtle way. Minimizing animations aren't "eye-candy", they visually show the user where to click to restore the minimized item-- without them, the window just seems to disappear, which is more confusing. "Ghost" icons, while dragging-and-dropping, are helpful as a remind to what exact files/items you were dragging. The highlight that appears around drop targets tells you you can drop the content there, and saves you wasting time when you release the mouse and nothing happens.
All of these things are valuable usability features, not eye-candy. They all existed in Windows 2000, which looked like ass. Frankly. And Classic Mac OS, ditto.
Now that said, there is such a thing as eye-candy. For example, the glassy-translucent window titles in Vista don't really serve any purpose other than to look cool... but users react to usability, not eye-candy. (Well, take Vista as an example; that glassy-translucent window didn't help them sell any more copies, did it? All the graphical usability features mentioned in the first paragraph are already in XP.)
Anyway, long story short, next time I see a person equating "making software usable" with "adding eye-candy", I'm going to smack them.
I don't want to support sites that have horrible usability and haven't improved in 15 years. I hate web developers getting support for having a shitty product doing NOTHING to improve, which is exactly what SourceForge has been doing in all that time. (Compare the typical SF project page with a typical Trax project page, and you'll realize just how shitty it is.)
Of course, I'm a hypocrite, because I post to Slashdot. But at least Slashdot is *trying* to improve in a completely half-assed and wrong way. Half the time I go to SF, all I see is this:
http://schend.net/images/screenshots/slashdot/sourceforge_blank_window.png
http://schend.net/images/screenshots/slashdot/sourceforge_wish_it_was_a_blank_window.png
The fucking site doesn't even WORK.
It's like Umatic. It may have been the first video recorder for the home (1969), but since it totally failed to sell to homeowners, it made NO impact. Yes it was first to market, but Not revolutionary to lifestyles.
The revolution didn't arrive until almost ten years later with Betamax and VHS.
Quick, you better delete it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-matic
Same applies to the gaming. Marathon may have been first, but the revolution arrived later with a different game.
True, but... OH WAIT, here's Marathon, too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(computer_game)
(And similarly Haunted House was the first survival-horror game, but the revolution did not arrive until Resident Evil wowed the massed.)
And yet here it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haunted_House_(video_game)
I hope you got that deleting-finger all warmed-up, because you got a lot of deleting to do!
Don't confuse the word "first of its type" with "revolutionary". The first to market often does NOT have a revolutionary impact.
Maybe not, but here's two problems:
1) As demonstrated above, by your VERY OWN crappy examples, you're holding MUDs to a standard that apparently doesn't apply to any other type of video game and/or home electronics device.
2) The Wikipedian "judging" my entry, more likely than not, knows absolutely dick about MUDs. And yet he has no problem judging that the article is delete-fodder. Instead of "assume good faith," Wikipedia has turned into "delete everything! Delete delete delete!" (It's admins have become Cybermen from Dr. Who, to make a geeky reference.)
I'm the developer, or at least the last maintainer who knew how the code/hosting worked, which I guess amounts to the same thing. What would I get out of putting the code on SourceForge? It would just be another abandoned project, and frankly I'd rather not support using SourceForge in the first place (their bug tracker is atrociously terrible.)
In any case, the code isn't important, since it would be useless to anybody not trying to replicate ES exactly, and 70-80% of it is just SMAUG anyway. What's important is the design of the features; for example these features are something Blizzard could add to WOW if they wanted to.
(After reading these comments, though, I think I will write out an article about the features we added, and how well they worked. There seems to be some interest.)
Yah, I've done this thing called "talked to them." You know, I meet them at a party, and we chat for awhile.
How is that any less arbitrary than me just writing it directly into Wikipedia? It's not like there's a "reliable multiple sourced yadda" listing the creator for every MUD that ever existed.
Of course maybe you're right that they wouldn't delete it in that case, but that only raises more questions about their guidelines: they're in place to prevent people from entering arbitrary information, but if you put that same arbitrary information into a blog first, possibly using an assumed name to boot, then it's ok? WTF.
BTW, Wikipedia is already a "mythology journal." There was a nugget about a Russian livestock shortage in 1986, or some shit, that was in several cross-linked articles (Russian, Economy of Russia, some charity entry) for a full year. It was only fixed when my friend who added it as a prank decided to come clean; the Russia article had been edited over a hundred times, and nobody ever removed the bullshit event. When he added it I was kind of pissed, because I still kind of believe a tiny bit in Wikipedia's mission, but now? Screw Wikipedia.
The fact that neither my game nor your game was ever published in a 80s-era computing magazine, probably means these games were NOT as revolutionary as we claim.
Wrong, it just means that not a ton of people like good RP-based text-only MUDs.
Look at the amount of attention Marathon gets compared to Doom, even though Marathon is a *much* more revolutionary and influential game... why is that? Marathon came out on Macintosh, which isn't a popular gaming platform, and Doom came out on DOS, which was. Does the Macintosh origin diminish the fact that Marathon was the first game with integrated voice communication over the network? No. Yet if not for Halo, Marathon would probably be completely forgotten now.
In any case, how could it POSSIBLY be published in an 80s-era computing magazine when the game (with its revolutionary features) didn't exist until 1996? Man, that's an asshole reply.
Anyway..... You still have the right of free speech. Exercise it. Go publish your own private encyclopedia or website. Then you can say whatever you want to say, and people can come read it, instead of wasting your time bitching.
I bitch because Wikipedia wasted a lot of my time and effort DELETING things that I'd written. I would expect anybody to bitch when their content was deleted without comment or discussion.
Hah! Maybe I should try again now that the MUD is shut down. They can hardly get me for "advertising" a product that you can't possibly play.
Damnit, I managed to copy and paste and stomp over my whole post. No wait, Slashdot did it with it's fucking retarded bug where it can't tell if 'less than' is being used to indicate 'less than' or open a quote. Gee, it's only been a dozen years, Slashdot, think you could manage a SINGLE bug fix inbetween making the site look like ass? Anyway.
Correct post:
Call me sceptical, but I'm pretty sure you aren't looking hard enough.
There might be more articles. As of about 3-4 years ago, there weren't any more books than that. (And I think I heard vaguely about a film documentary being made about MUDding, but I haven't personally seen it.) In any case, none of them cover the specific MUD I'd like to write an article about.
Bah, you're just jealous that your MUD hasn't been covered in real publications you read, like the MUD I used to play at, which has been the subject of several mainstream media articles over the years. =)
Ok, A) You're a condescending jerk, and B) I already mentioned the MUD closed down, so you're a condescending jerk who can't read.
Look, Eternal Struggle had a bevy of RP-based features, most of which have never been replicated (well, except in MUDs that splintered from ES in the first place):
* A "recog" system that would show you the text description of a person/NPC until you specifically used the "RECOG" command to recognize them. We introduced the need to introduce yourself, in short. But the beauty of the system is that it also allowed shapeshifting (with the ability to change your text description at demand, and others the ability to recognize your shifted form), giving false names, referring to people by keyword instead of name, people automatically no longer recognizing you if your description changes, and more minor things I no longer remember. This also turned admin-puppetted NPCs into basically full characters, since NPCs could be recognized like any other character-- no more hacking the MUD code to get NPCs to show a proper name.
* A "rpaward" system, so that a player could go from level 2 to 50 without ever killing a MOB if they didn't want to. Instead, fellow players could "reward" them based on the quality of their RP and earn points. At below level 50, the points contributed towards leveling, and at the level cap they could be redeemed for RP-related prizes (custom equipment, learning additional languages, etc.) My most famous character on that MUD actually played as a lawyer for the majority of his career, and hardly ever engaged in violence of any sort.
* The best EMOTE command you've ever seen, complete with language scrambler for dialog in emotes, referring to people/objects/location by keyword (to make the aforementioned RECOG code work; you'd see: "Bob talks to BlakeyRat", someone who didn't recognize BlakeyRat would see: "Bob talks to a generic man", someone who didn't recognize Bob would see, "Another man talks to BlakeyRat". It was brilliant.)
* Clear separation of IC/OOC chat. Of course, this is something any RP MUD can do, most just... don't. (You end up with the "every character is psychic" mechanism of everybody being able to use tells.) There were also alternate chat channels based on items, possessing certain colors of crystal would let you telepathically chat with other people with similar crystals.
* A culture that abhorred abuse from admins, and rewarded true creativity in play. This actually led to the MUD's downfall, since good RPers are oftentimes not really good at anything else but RP (including myself, but I digress.) But, the real point here, is that most MUDs instantly become politicized with abusive admins who love doing nothing more than randomly slaughtering players and calling it an "RP event." ES was great at getting rid of those a-holes, better than any other MUD I've played since.
Anyway, I'm not saying that ES is perfect, but I *do* think that a lot of the things listed there are definitely noteworthy, if only so future generations (or me!) can point to them from time-t
Call me sceptical, but I'm pretty sure you aren't looking hard enough.
There might be more articles. As of about 3-4 years ago, there weren't any more books than that. (And I think I heard vaguely about a film documentary being made about MUDding, but I haven't personally seen it.) In any case, none of them cover the specific MUD I'd like to write an article about.
Bah, you're just jealous that your MUD hasn't been covered in real publications you read, like the MUD I used to play at, which has been the subject of several mainstream media articles over the years. =)
Ok, A) You're a condescending jerk, and B) I already mentioned the MUD closed down, so you're a condescending jerk who can't read.
Look, Eternal Struggle had a bevy of RP-based features, most of which have never been replicated (well, except in MUDs that splintered from ES in the first place):
* A "recog" system that would show you the text description of a person/NPC until you specifically used the "RECOG" command to recognize them. We introduced the need to introduce yourself, in short. But the beauty of the system is that it also allowed shapeshifting (with the ability to change your text description at demand, and others the ability to recognize your shifted form), giving false names, referring to people by keyword instead of name, people automatically no longer recognizing you if your description changes, and more minor things I no longer remember. This also turned admin-puppetted NPCs into basically full characters, since NPCs could be recognized like any other character-- no more hacking the MUD code to get NPCs to show a proper name.
* A "rpaward" system, so that a player could go from level 2 to 50 without ever killing a MOB if they didn't want to. Instead, fellow players could "reward" them based on the quality of their RP and earn points. At but how about impressing a local game magazine instead, as they generally tend to pay attention to more marginal topics than the big media?
Two problems with this:
1) What is a "local game magazine?" in Western Washington? We barely even have any NATIONAL game magazines left, EGM just closed-up shop and became web-only.
2) What the hell would I tell them? "Hey there's this great game for the small subset of people who care about RP, but it's no longer around, please write an article so I can get it into Wikipedia?" That's retarded.
Surely there are sufficiently geeky game magazines out there who would love to cover the peculiarities your quaint game?
Name one. I dare ya.
The real point is that newspapers and magazines are dying; sooner or later, Wikipedia will *have* to allow online citations. Why don't they beat the rush and do it now before I completely forget all the stuff I'd like to post as articles?
Or I could just not edit Wikipedia at all, since every time I try to improve it (in good faith, which I believe is one of their confusingly-acronymed rules!) my changes get reverted with no explanation and no discussion.
Your workaround is basically to spend ten times the time/money (yes, hosting costs money) writing an ENTIRE WIKI so that I can get information added to Wikipedia-- but oh wait, it's still not in Wikipedia, it's in a link on Wikipedia. Which would probably get reverted anyway (see the other reply to your post.)
Fuck that.
If the liberal-leaning news media don't care, and the conservative-leaning news media don't care, what makes you think the median reader would care?
Uh, the particular article I'm talking about has absolutely zilch to do with politics. Did you even *read* my post?
Instead of trying to get into Wikipedia before making the news,
The MUD ran for almost a dozen years without making the news. Thousands of players, possibly tens of thousands. If it didn't make the news in that amount of time, what makes you think it *ever* would? That doesn't mean the MUD didn't exist, or isn't important in any way, it just means the journalism industry is about 15 years behind the technology curve.
perhaps you could try posting about your community on a dedicated wiki on the subject, such as one hosted by Wikia.
The MUD's shut down now, so there'd be no point.
Be happy, they've just started to install it in Washington State. They were too busy wiring up redneck-ville before getting around to the second biggest tech company state in the country.
Not only do we not have FIOS, where I live there still isn't any dry-loop DSL. Say hello to my little landline. (I refuse to give Comcast money, and Clearwire while THANK GOD they exist at all, has terrible latency at my home.)
Which deleted articles about comics that have been the subject of non-trivial coverage in multiple "third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy" are you complaining about?
This is the Internet! Wikipedia is on the Internet! There are entire, large, long-standing, communities here that have virtually no coverage in "multiple third-party published sources with a reputation yadda yadda."
For instance, I used to play MUDs, like tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people. MUDs have been around since the mid-80s, all modern MMOs (which have "multiple third-party yadda yadda") are based off MUDs to some extent, and yet there's maybe... 2-3 books and a dozen articles on the entire thing. So I can't write a Wikipedia article on my MUD, which had hundreds or thousands of users and lasted > 10 years and had revolutionary RP-based features which still hasn't been replicated in any other game, because we never got an article in the Wall Street Journal? Fuck that.
Wikipedia has put a bar where, for many communities, is simply impossible to reach. The most famous example being web comics, and of course my MUDs. And this problem will only get worse as the Internet gets bigger and more popular. (If it hasn't already maxed out.)
Why?
Microsoft sells tons of software for Macintosh. They might be the single biggest vendor of Macintosh software, in fact, although I'm not 100% sure on that.
This is like that idiotic story a few years ago where a Microsoft employee got in deep junk for taking pictures of a truck delivering new Mac computers to a MS building... and then posting them on his blog as if it was some kind of "caught in the act" or something.
And it never occurred to him that, hm, Microsoft makes Office for Mac? Maybe they need to buy Macs to do that? Why is it surprising, or interesting, that a Microsoft building has Macs in it? Or that this Microsoft program runs on a Macbook?
Christ, it's a toy! With a cheesy commercial.
In other news, Tonka trucks can't actually be used to construct skyscrapers! Slashdot scoop at 11:00.
Have you thought about maybe being polite? And not a jackass?
The thing is, when you're a jackass while explaining something, even if you're right, you're usually not going to convince them. Instead, you just put them on the defensive and suddenly defending their (wrong) opinion becomes a huge issue. If you were polite, you'd make a lot more headway.
Of course, being a jackass, you're not going to read and/or digest that last paragraph anyway, so I don't even know why I'm bothering. I'll just call you a jackass again. Jackass.
Obviously their system doesn't work, otherwise Fedora (for example) wouldn't have adopted 4.0 as the default.
Look, I understand, believe me I do, that the developers put some message somewhere that explained that 4.0 was a piece of shit and nobody should use it. The problem is that obviously the right people didn't read that message, and it ended up being put in several distros by default, causing massive quantities of user pain.
And how could they have solved this problem? By adding a fucking "b" to the end of the "4.0"! Seriously, this is a *GUI environment* made by people with absolutely no understanding of human psychology or clear communication? Doesn't that worry anybody?
I don't really care about this thread, but having followed it down several layers and spending quite a bit of time reading it, I feel compelled to comment.
CarpetShark? You're a fucking jackass.
There we go, now the time is well-spent.
I'd like to see an explanation from the KDE developers of what, exactly, that reason happened to actually be. It's not very encouraging to find that a software project whose number one focus should be usability has very little understanding of human psychology or clear communication.
Then why doesn't it have any letters behind it? Like, say, "A" for "Alpha" or "B" for "Beta"? Everybody knows what those means, not everybody reads every single blog post and communication from the developers. In fact, I wager very few people do...
The irony is that you can't be hired as a programmer at Microsoft without a degree now, so basically Bill Gates wouldn't be able to get hired at his own company if he applied this year.
No, you're not. There's a lot more anti-H1B propaganda out there. For example, by law they can't be paid less than the prevailing wage for their job title-- if his past employer was paying H1B holders less, they were in violation of the law. I can guarantee that Microsoft (the company we're all discussing here) puts H1B holders on the same payscale and benefits program as US employees.