How hard was it to get acceptance for telling a long epic story instead of the usual "single story, push reset" that was the basic fare in the 80's?

Before B5 what we had was a bunch of loose episodes in a season. The only "story arc" was an occasional two-parter, usually the end-of-season cliffhanger episode resolved in next seasons first episode. We would probably not have had series like Battlestar Galactica or Game of Thrones today without B5 showing the way (to be fair there is a slight possibility that someone else could have done something similar later).

It must have been hard to convince the network to go for this?

I'd like to add a thank you for B5 (and Spider-man, Supreme Power, The Twelve etc.). It's without doubt the best tv experience I've had so far. I saw most of the series on NTSC tapes that I manged to borrow through a friend (who somehow managed to get this recorded and sent from US). This was before the it was possible to buy DVD's of series immediately after they where showed and it took years before anything reached norwegian tv (if they came at all). Actually it's one of the best DVD experiences I've had as well now that I think about it. All the little hints and portents I'd missed the first time made re-watching the series a great joy.

I find this whole issue very interesting though more in what I hope is the really long term. I personally have no interested in actually reselling any game I have on Steam, even those I have no intention of every playing (bought during Humble Bundle sales etc). I'm a hoarder/collector by nature.

However, what happens to my digital games, my digital music collection, my ebooks etc. when I die? All my physical possessions will likely pass on to my kids. I'd really like to pass my digital properties on as well. I've really only started buying pure digital stuff the last few years and this is only going to increase. Possibly more or less totally replace physical entertainment media in the pretty near future. The games are probably not that interesting since they may be more or less unplayable in a some decades. The books, music and films however are less likely to be obsolete.

Given the extremely long copyright terms publishers have at the moment this really is something that sort of worries me.

My mother bought me C64 when I was about 13 since I was spending all my time with a Dragoon 32 at a local bookstore.

I started out "playing" with Basic before moving on to assembly when our "group" moved from to game swapping to making demos. It wasn't actually assembly since coding was basically writing opcodes directly into memory using a tool called hexmon. Those where the days...

I'm not sure I can call this programming though. I didn't learn that before I started on the university. I still remember the first lecture when the professor asked if anyone had previous experience and then told us that we actually where at a disadvantage compared to the rest :-). He might have been right too. I don't think knowing Basic (C64, Amiga and PC) really was much of a benefit when starting on "Object Oriented Programming with Simula".

Phone designers have seem to have this insane need for removing all "real" buttons. I have a HTC HD mini which is mostly ok (leaving a side that it's a Windows mobile). But since they insist on putting in cameras on these things I really would like a physical button on the side of the phone to take picures. Having to push a field in the middle of the touch screen is not even remotely a good idea. I've always had this impression that it's preferable to keep the camera reasonably still when taking picures.

Well I'm leaving aside any discussion on which type of object orientation (static class vs prototype objects) is considered the "real" or "best" and are assuming that both Simula and Smalltalk qualify by todays perception as object oriented languages. Simula does preceded Smalltalk by a few years, and since I'm not aware of any earlier general programming language that has syntax supporting an object oriented programming paradigm directly wouldn't that make Simula the "first"?

Just to keep the record straight, Simula 67 is considered the first object oriented programming language.

If you are one person writing a 50 page document Word may very well be perfect. However, imagine you have 20 people who need to collaborate on keeping a 1000 page documentation set updated.

Now imaginge doing this in Word.

As fairly recently promoted from developer to a manager I have a comment to the above.

We all love "can do" guys, but only if they really can do. If your you are already fully booked please learn to say so. If you over commit you either

• need to work a lot of extra hours in order to complete your tasks or
• fail to deliver work on time

While the first is mainly a problem for you initially, it will most likely hurt everyone in the long run when the quality of your work starts to drop.

It worked for WildTangent... which turned out to be spyware. They interfaced to Direct3D as well. They were windows-only as well. A lot of people paid them for their technology and used it to make all kinds of crappy 3d games in a browser. When that turned out to be profitless people stopped and as far as I know it's been relegated to making crapware games packaged by Gateway and others with new PC installs... just one more piece of spyware in their crapflood. There's no particular reason to believe that this will turn out any different.