As with the d20 STL for Third Edition, this is a royalty-free license that will allow third parties to publish products using the rules developed by WotC
Does this free license apply only to pen-and-paper games or could you build a [non-commercial] computer RPG based on the WoTC rules?
Well, M$ is not an illegal monopoly, they are a confirmed monopoly which has been convicted of illegal behavior.
Spelling Microsoft with a dollar sign is adolescent.
The Bush era DoJ should have had the cajones to split them up as per the judges decree, but I suspect too many people in the Bush administration have too much cash tied up in M$ to do that.
The populist enthusiasm for trust-busting in has always been notoriously short-lived - and have had no lasting - beneficial - impact.
The break-up of Standard Oil strengthened Rockefeller's regional operating companies.
In the consumer market, "The Standard" had become a synonym for petroleum products that were cheap, reliable and safe. They voted for honest measurement and unadulterated gasoline at the pump.
The small independents faded out of the picture. The old man grew richer than ever.
Then why did the International Business Machines PC become the de-facto standard for personal computers, as opposed to more consumer-friendly machines, such as the Apple II or the Commodore64 or the more hacker-friendly slew of Z80 systems?
The PC of 2008 is the direct descendant of the IBM PC of 2008.
The external - full-sized - keyboard and monitor. The disk-based operating system. The modular construction that made upgrades convenient and affordable.
No single element of the IBM PC was new - but it was a very well-balanced and attractive design.
In 1982, magazines like Creative Computing were filling with adds for IBM PC software - and most of the major players of the DOS era are in place.
The Linux desktop is no different, get the home users and it will be dragged into business. The other way around isn't going to work.
I have said this before, but it will bear repeating:
The PC market splintered into distinct segments a long time ago.
The multimedia home pc is not the locked-down corporate desktop. It is a fundamentally different platform.
[Red Hat Global Desktop] encountered a variety of problems with developing the product including startup delays with resellers, hardware and market changes and "some multimedia codec licensing knotholes".
If anything, Red Hat aught to produce a home user version that is so easy to install a 5 year old could do it.
For thirty years, the PC has been sold as a plug and play home appliance. The DIY install is never going to catch on.
And leverage the Vista mess and hand me down computers. Sell it for $20 a download. Get it out there as a choice for new laptops.
Vista is closing in on 20% of the consumer market. It should have 50% by fall.
The $700 laptop at Walmart.com starts at dual core, 2 GB RAM and Vista Premium. $100 less than the Vista Premium holiday specials last fall.
Linux remains solidly anchored among the bottom feeders - Linux defines the bottom feeder at Walmart.
That is not an image that is easy to shed.
The "Green PC" shipped without a working modem - at a time when Walmart was still selling AOL Essentials - dialup at $10/mo - to its many low income, rural and small town customers.
This means that they don't plan on having a boxed desktop product that you can buy at the store like Mandriva. Fedora will continue on as is - something they work on with the community but don't sell.
which means that Fedora stays within the community - it has no reach beyond its base.
Except that your payoff time calcs are assuming that your windmill is generating 100% power every hour , every day of the year.
The numbers also assume that the mill will not need repair or replacement. That it will last the twenty or thirty years the manufacturer claims. Environments where wind power is feasible are not always the most predictable and benign.
Normal people don't install operating systems, they buy a machine in a box at the computer shop.
Normal people buy from their favorite big box retailer. Best Buy. Office Max. The aren't thinking "computer store," they are thinking "office supplies and home appliances."
That is why Dell is shifting focus to in-store sales through outlets like Walmart.
No, its getting OEM's to install it that's the trick. Once dell asks you to pay an extra $50 for Vista instead of Hardy, we will start to see Ubuntu pick up some momentum.
This is nonsense.
The OEM Windows OS is - for all practical purposes - a one-time purchase for the life of the system.
-- roughly equivalent to the price of two PC games, a pair of replacement ink jet cartridges, or a month of broadband cable service.
Here's a solution for the legislation-hungry out there: pass some legislation to limit the efforts and effectiveness of professional lobbyist groups.
It ain't gonna happen.
You can't turn your back the tourism industry when your district is in central Florida.
You can't wish away the AARP when you represent retirement communities in Arizona.
The congressman serves for two years.
The lobbyist represents an organization that has been a going concern for twenty years, fifty years, one hundred years.
The congressman - if he is to be at all effective - has to draw on the lobbyist's experience and resources. He shouldn't be listening to only one voice. But he does have to listen.
IF HE HAD THOUGHT A LITTLE MORE ABOUT IT, HE WOULD HAVE ADVISED THE WATERTIGHT COMPARTMENTS BE OPENED, BECAUSE THE THE SHIP WOULD HAVE SETTLED LEVEL
The price of opening the compartments is that you flood the engine room.
You lose power to the screws. Power to the rudder. There's no steam to work machinery of any kind. To sound a whistle. No electricity. No lights. No radio.
You become a black motionless hulk in the North Atlantic at 1 o'clock in the morning.
That is a very tough call to make.
The Marconi rig on Titanic depended on raw power. It was more a heavy weight motor driven electro-mechanical device than anything you would recognize as a radio.
It took a hard-driven Carpathia four hours to reach Titanic.
Carpathia was launched in 1903. The odds that a ship of her size and competence could be found within 100 miles of Titanic seem mighty slim. The strict 24-hour radio watch wasn't the norm even for Cunard - and that should tell you something.
They say that better rivets would have probably kept the Titanic afloat long enough for rescuers to have arrived, saving hundreds of lives
The Olympic, five hundred miles off, make perhaps twenty-four knots in a pinch.
There were very few vessels that could match her speed. Carpathia, sixty miles off, could be pushed to fifteen - a nightmare four hour run through the arctic ice fields.
The North Atlantic is a mighty big ocean. Titanic had other problems.
The 24 hour radio watch was not standard. Titanic had a 500 KHz 5 KW Marconi spark-gap transmitter with a nominal range of 250 nm. She had far greater reach at night - but much would depend on the relative orientation of antennas and so on.
The best you could hope for in a receiver would be a very early vacuum tube design.
But operation burnt through your stock of tubes very quickly.
Mot even taking into consideration that browser type and OS enumeration can be easily blocked and/or forged.
That objection is rediculous when you looking at the global share of mass market OS.
There is no intelligible reason to believe that a significant fraction of the billion or so Windows users on the desktop know or care about the user agent - and even less reason to believe that would edit - forge - an agent without having the faintest notion of what the consequences might be.
The desktop market as a whole has been growing at something like 8% per year since 2005. So, at best the Windows brand as a whole can only grow about 8%/yr. However, the growth of OSX is almost entirely at the expense of Windows
If this is true why does Boot Camp play so big a part in the marketing of OSX? Boot Camp. Run Windows on Your Mac. What is the purpose of a product like the headless Mac mini?
The truth is that Apple and Microsoft carved out distinct markets that have been quite stable from the beginning, looked at closely, their relationship is more symbiotic than predatory.
The thought comes to mind that you are not looking at the global market.
Is the Mac a significant challenge to Microsoft outside the US?
It seems a fair question to ask, given the extraordinary numbers Microsoft has been posting for fiscal 2008. 20% growth in European revenues. 30% in the emerging markets of Asia, Africa, etc. Each quarter.
Vista won't run well on the increasingly popular lightweight and low end laptops like the eepc, olpc xo, and what are sure to be many imitators. People have demonstrated they're willing to use linux on these machines, and Microsoft has demonstrated they Don't Get It.
The cheapest Vista Basic laptop at Walmart.com is $500.
The problem is that the next step up is all Vista Premium.
17" screen. 2 GB RAM. The dual core CPU and and so. For about $100 less than last fall's holiday special.
The problem is that - long term - even Walmart with its enormous purchasing power hasn't been able to sell OEM Linux at a meaningful discount.
The problem is that the Linux PC at Walmart is always the bottom feeder.
There is never a link to so basic an accessory as a printer.
While the specs on the Windows machine look significantly better even at entry level. It has a recognizable brand name - and what looks like "crapware" to the Geek - is familiar and reassuring to everyone else.
My personal experience has been that more and more mainstream folks (especially under the age of 25) are using Linux because it's where the social apps are changing fastest.
The nature of social apps is that they are, well, social.
Meaning that the biggest draw will always be the sites and services that are most inclusive and with the farthest reach.
If you're going to prattle about how rockstar doesn't have street cred because they don't have a lot of blacks on staff, then your opinion is worth nothing.
It isn't a question of "street cred" in so crude a sense. It is question of situational awareness. Missed opportunities. If the adolescent white male is a declining percentage of your potential market then you need to know how to reach - and not alienate - a larger audience.
Compare Vista sales through Dell versus how many retail licenses were purchased at Worst Buy.
For thirty years, give or take, the PC has been marketed as a plug and play home appliance or office machine.
When you upgrade to a new PC you upgrade to the latest iteration of the Windows OS. Hardware and software at the OEM price. Installed and tested. Sales of the retail box are simply a bonus.
The desktop problems are much more difficult to solve and the payoff in dollars is worth maybe a nice dinner.
The client division has paid off handsomely for Microsoft in fiscal 2008. $4.34 billion in the second quarter. Up 68% from fiscal 2007. Microsoft Q2 2008 by the Numbers
I've played pool tables with a more visible slope than this particular measure of the trend line for Linux - and since these are web based stats, I am going to assume that the numbers for Vista for real.
- - a fair representation of Vista's strength in the consumer market.
20% by the end of in April. 50% probably no later than late summer or early fall. The Back-To-School sale.
In the W3Schools OS Platform Statistics it took OSX and Linux five years to edge up from 4% to 8% of the market - and these stats track the pro, the web developer.
No matter what I want to believe about merit and talent, there is an underlying "how did you get in, here?!" sentiment floating around the development industry when it comes to blacks doing design and engineering work. It is a real shame that we as an industry can't just be above all of this a hire people based on there capability. Sad world......
My sister had much the same experience in entering the tight little world of landscape architecture.
The funny thing about the geeks of my generation, is that most of us don't really care about race. You're a noob if you don't know how to recompile your kernel, not because you happened to be born a specific hue.
Yes. But we are talking about video gaming - and a game is more than code. That is the fundamental reason why anything new out of iD looks and plays like a tech demo. Why the original Half-Life remains in print after ten years.
Slashdot Mirror
I think what I had in mind was not the mechanics of the die roll - but of striking the right balance between the different elements of a game.
Does this free license apply only to pen-and-paper games or could you build a [non-commercial] computer RPG based on the WoTC rules?
Spelling Microsoft with a dollar sign is adolescent.
The Bush era DoJ should have had the cajones to split them up as per the judges decree, but I suspect too many people in the Bush administration have too much cash tied up in M$ to do that.
The populist enthusiasm for trust-busting in has always been notoriously short-lived - and have had no lasting - beneficial - impact.
The break-up of Standard Oil strengthened Rockefeller's regional operating companies.
In the consumer market, "The Standard" had become a synonym for petroleum products that were cheap, reliable and safe. They voted for honest measurement and unadulterated gasoline at the pump.
The small independents faded out of the picture. The old man grew richer than ever.
The PC of 2008 is the direct descendant of the IBM PC of 2008.
The external - full-sized - keyboard and monitor. The disk-based operating system. The modular construction that made upgrades convenient and affordable.
No single element of the IBM PC was new - but it was a very well-balanced and attractive design.
In 1982, magazines like Creative Computing were filling with adds for IBM PC software - and most of the major players of the DOS era are in place.
I have said this before, but it will bear repeating:
The PC market splintered into distinct segments a long time ago.
The multimedia home pc is not the locked-down corporate desktop. It is a fundamentally different platform.
[Red Hat Global Desktop] encountered a variety of problems with developing the product including startup delays with resellers, hardware and market changes and "some multimedia codec licensing knotholes".
If anything, Red Hat aught to produce a home user version that is so easy to install a 5 year old could do it.
For thirty years, the PC has been sold as a plug and play home appliance. The DIY install is never going to catch on.
And leverage the Vista mess and hand me down computers. Sell it for $20 a download. Get it out there as a choice for new laptops.
Vista is closing in on 20% of the consumer market. It should have 50% by fall.
Vista has not been a failure here. Top Operating System Share Trend [By Versions]
The $700 laptop at Walmart.com starts at dual core, 2 GB RAM and Vista Premium. $100 less than the Vista Premium holiday specials last fall.
Linux remains solidly anchored among the bottom feeders - Linux defines the bottom feeder at Walmart.
That is not an image that is easy to shed.
The "Green PC" shipped without a working modem - at a time when Walmart was still selling AOL Essentials - dialup at $10/mo - to its many low income, rural and small town customers.
which means that Fedora stays within the community - it has no reach beyond its base.
The numbers also assume that the mill will not need repair or replacement. That it will last the twenty or thirty years the manufacturer claims. Environments where wind power is feasible are not always the most predictable and benign.
The first question that comes to mind is "what is causing all those power failures?"
Locally, the answer would be "gale force winds."
The second question I would ask - having lived on a family farm - founded ca. 1820 - is whether that DIY windmill can carry the load. Tractor-Driven Generators: Producing Quality Power
This the attitude - which the geek radiates like a sun gone nova - that has earned Linux a 0.61% share of the desktop.
Normal people buy from their favorite big box retailer. Best Buy. Office Max. The aren't thinking "computer store," they are thinking "office supplies and home appliances."
That is why Dell is shifting focus to in-store sales through outlets like Walmart.
This is nonsense.
The OEM Windows OS is - for all practical purposes - a one-time purchase for the life of the system.
-- roughly equivalent to the price of two PC games, a pair of replacement ink jet cartridges, or a month of broadband cable service.
For which the buyer gets 100% compatibility with the hardware and software the home user wants to run. 'The Sims' franchise hits 100 million units sold
It ain't gonna happen.
You can't turn your back the tourism industry when your district is in central Florida.
You can't wish away the AARP when you represent retirement communities in Arizona.
The congressman serves for two years.
The lobbyist represents an organization that has been a going concern for twenty years, fifty years, one hundred years.
The congressman - if he is to be at all effective - has to draw on the lobbyist's experience and resources. He shouldn't be listening to only one voice. But he does have to listen.
The price of opening the compartments is that you flood the engine room.
You lose power to the screws. Power to the rudder. There's no steam to work machinery of any kind. To sound a whistle. No electricity. No lights. No radio.
You become a black motionless hulk in the North Atlantic at 1 o'clock in the morning.
That is a very tough call to make.
The Marconi rig on Titanic depended on raw power. It was more a heavy weight motor driven electro-mechanical device than anything you would recognize as a radio.
It took a hard-driven Carpathia four hours to reach Titanic.
Carpathia was launched in 1903. The odds that a ship of her size and competence could be found within 100 miles of Titanic seem mighty slim. The strict 24-hour radio watch wasn't the norm even for Cunard - and that should tell you something.
The Olympic, five hundred miles off, make perhaps twenty-four knots in a pinch.
There were very few vessels that could match her speed. Carpathia, sixty miles off, could be pushed to fifteen - a nightmare four hour run through the arctic ice fields.
The North Atlantic is a mighty big ocean. Titanic had other problems.
The 24 hour radio watch was not standard. Titanic had a 500 KHz 5 KW Marconi spark-gap transmitter with a nominal range of 250 nm. She had far greater reach at night - but much would depend on the relative orientation of antennas and so on.
The best you could hope for in a receiver would be a very early vacuum tube design.
But operation burnt through your stock of tubes very quickly.
The Marconi Wireless Installation in R.M.S. Titanic
Titanic's watertight compartments did not reach full height, as one flooded over, the next would begin to fill.
She was going down by the head, not on the level, which meant that evacuation was going to become progressively more difficult and dangerous.
It was a sloppy business from the start.
Titanic's crew poorly trained - if trained at all - in the use of her new and more efficient davits.
That objection is rediculous when you looking at the global share of mass market OS.
There is no intelligible reason to believe that a significant fraction of the billion or so Windows users on the desktop know or care about the user agent - and even less reason to believe that would edit - forge - an agent without having the faintest notion of what the consequences might be.
it would save no end of wasted time and argument if every geek had this pounded into his head.
If this is true why does Boot Camp play so big a part in the marketing of OSX? Boot Camp. Run Windows on Your Mac. What is the purpose of a product like the headless Mac mini?
The truth is that Apple and Microsoft carved out distinct markets that have been quite stable from the beginning, looked at closely, their relationship is more symbiotic than predatory.
The thought comes to mind that you are not looking at the global market.
Is the Mac a significant challenge to Microsoft outside the US?
It seems a fair question to ask, given the extraordinary numbers Microsoft has been posting for fiscal 2008. 20% growth in European revenues. 30% in the emerging markets of Asia, Africa, etc. Each quarter.
The cheapest Vista Basic laptop at Walmart.com is $500.
15" widescreen LCD. 1.86 Celeron M CPU, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, CD-R/DVD-ROM Drive.
The gOS laptop at $400:
1.6 GHz VIA CPU, 512 MB RAM and a 60 GB HDD.
The problem is that the next step up is all Vista Premium.
17" screen. 2 GB RAM. The dual core CPU and and so. For about $100 less than last fall's holiday special.
The problem is that - long term - even Walmart with its enormous purchasing power hasn't been able to sell OEM Linux at a meaningful discount.
The problem is that the Linux PC at Walmart is always the bottom feeder.
There is never a link to so basic an accessory as a printer.
While the specs on the Windows machine look significantly better even at entry level. It has a recognizable brand name - and what looks like "crapware" to the Geek - is familiar and reassuring to everyone else.
The nature of social apps is that they are, well, social.
Meaning that the biggest draw will always be the sites and services that are most inclusive and with the farthest reach.
The tech isn't going to be decisive, but Windows is by no means poorly positioned here,Microsoft Partners with Top Social Networks to Put Users at the Center of their Data [March 25, 2008]
It isn't a question of "street cred" in so crude a sense. It is question of situational awareness. Missed opportunities. If the adolescent white male is a declining percentage of your potential market then you need to know how to reach - and not alienate - a larger audience.
For thirty years, give or take, the PC has been marketed as a plug and play home appliance or office machine.
When you upgrade to a new PC you upgrade to the latest iteration of the Windows OS. Hardware and software at the OEM price. Installed and tested. Sales of the retail box are simply a bonus.
The desktop problems are much more difficult to solve and the payoff in dollars is worth maybe a nice dinner.
The client division has paid off handsomely for Microsoft in fiscal 2008. $4.34 billion in the second quarter. Up 68% from fiscal 2007. Microsoft Q2 2008 by the Numbers
someday, perhaps, the geek may realize that the PC market splintered into distinct segments a long time ago.
that placement on the enterprise desktop doesn't give you anything more than placement on the enterprise desktop.
but I am not holding my breath.
Growth curve?
What growth curve?
Top Operating System Share Trend [By Versions]
Top Operating System Share Trend
I've played pool tables with a more visible slope than this particular measure of the trend line for Linux - and since these are web based stats, I am going to assume that the numbers for Vista for real.
- - a fair representation of Vista's strength in the consumer market.
20% by the end of in April. 50% probably no later than late summer or early fall. The Back-To-School sale.
In the W3Schools OS Platform Statistics it took OSX and Linux five years to edge up from 4% to 8% of the market - and these stats track the pro, the web developer.
My sister had much the same experience in entering the tight little world of landscape architecture.
Yes. But we are talking about video gaming - and a game is more than code. That is the fundamental reason why anything new out of iD looks and plays like a tech demo. Why the original Half-Life remains in print after ten years.