h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I can certainly sympathise with you; I spent 10 rather intense months in a course that required me to learn to account for the way a USER might want to use a web-page/CD-ROM interface instead of the way I wanted to present it.
The sad fact is that for every 1 person who understands both the CONTENT and the DELIVERY SYSTEM of this technology and uses them both effectively, there are several hundred people who either haven't touched it before or who are utterly stymied by it.
Unfortunately, there is also a %age of people who've learnt enough about how to use it to be annoying to the rest of us (a decent computer virus may take care of them). I keep thinking of the number of Star Trek/Babylon 5/etc. sites there are when this question comes up. Of course, these may also be the same people that don't realise that stories on television are just that and not reality....of course, they may also think that their obsessive deovtion to an imaginary world may qualify them for first crack at crossing some imaginary/reality threshold and populating the Universe the story takes place in.

Fruitbat

Yes, yes, yes... all true all true. Who watches Babylon 5 anymore anyway?? Doesn't it come on at like 3:00 am? People who watch it now deserve to be transported to a different universe.

I don't know...I wasn't following the show with any fervour anyway; and acquaintance of mine, who was a devotee, had taped most of shows and I watched from his tapes.
While I liked the idea of the show, I found most of it far too average for my liking. And for all their talk about space constrictions, the Officer's Quarters remained the same huge size throughout the series. Also, they somehow found room for an equally-enormous Command-centre for the coming war, and the majority of spacecraft were enormous too.

Anyway, I've made a habit now of taking a mental step back to gain a little perspective on the IT scene. For those of us that "have" to keep up with the evolution of technology, the knowledge that consumers of it are being "forced" to keep up by being unable to use the older technologies (either software or hard) is also tempered by the fact that many users are quite happy with older technology and reluctantly upgrade only when the older stuff ceases to be useful.

Somehow, we call this "normal".

Fruitbat