And I've done empirical testing - parent is right and if not, it's hardly the worst thing in the world to have kissed someone:)
I think this is another story of dubious merit. There are two ways you can deal with the risk of approaching someone else. One is to not really care about the other person and the other is to have some courage. Lacking people with the latter around, a girl may settle for the former (because everyone needs someone). But of the two options, you're way better off bringing yourself to take the chance through courage, rather than through trying to be callous.
It's all advertising. Hawking effectively calls more attention to his issues by rejecting the honour than by accepting.
It is not all advertising. He quietly refused the title ten years ago and this is the first we've heard of it as far as I'm aware. Everything points to this being a point of principle for him, not a means of gaining publicity. I guess you've shown that it sometimes is possible to be too cynical after all.
And good for him. I already had a lot of respect for him and now it's gone even higher. It's a wise man whose sense of self-worth isn't influenced by titles he's given.
On a slightly related topic, a friend tricked me into going to see "Superhero Movie" last week (I thought we were going to see "Hancock" when she said a spoof superhero movie). It had few enough laughs to begin with, but when they started taking the piss out of Stephen Hawking, they stopped entirely. He really is an incredible person, both for his ability and his fortitude. I'm glad he decided not to lend his stature to the British Honours system. They need him more than he needs them.
SuSE was my first Linux install, way, way back. Since there agreement with Microsoft I haven't touched it and have, in fact, been responsible for dropping its use in our department. I don't trust Novell.
I was making the point that not everything can be reduced to economic loss, which another poster is insisting is the only real criteria for harm. As regards protection against verbal or written attacks, more debatable, but there is certainly the capability for inflicting a great amount of suffering on someone either through the modern media machine or through malicious writings or comments on a more personal or social basis.
Let me get this straight, you think that a society which allows people to sue other people because the other person hurt their feelings would be better?
Let's suppose you or your partner was raped. Allowing that your attacker took precautions there would probably be no serious physical harm done, perhaps bruising from being restrained. Does that count as "hurt feelings" in your way of thinking? It's not an economic loss, but we judge it as harm and even make judgements on how serious it is. I repeat that any society that can only measure harm by equating it to money, is a sick society.
Yes every individual has that capacity, but there is no objective criteria with which to hammer out agreement between adversarial parties. They both "have the capacity" to guesstimate the harm, but what do you do when their answers differ by an order of magnitude?
So in essence, you are saying that it's not possible to "measured, proved or agree upon" any harm that isn't financial because it depends upon human assessment? You may dismiss any opinion that cannot be assigned a value in money, but most of society and the judicial system do not. And you pose an irrelevant question when you ask how adversarial parties will arrive at agreement. They need not. In the instances I gave, they attempt to prove their case to a judge or jury. Agreement between parties is unnecessary. And though it's irrelevant to what I'm saying, it's worth pointing out that your 'provable economic loss' is usually anything but objectively provable, merely to adversaries attempting to project favourable interpretations.
You're dreaming if you think you'd turn down a suitcase filled with 100-dollar bills in exchange for being locked in a cupboard for 24 hours. Or a duffel bag full for a week's worth of stalking and beatings. What's that, $100,000 an hour in exchange for serious distress?
I know it causes you dissonance to think that everything has a price.
It doesn't cause me dissonance at all. You don't know me and I can tell you that I would not accept any amount of money that you'd give me in return for the abuse you're asking for. Your certainty is misplaced. Not everyone values everything in money and without their doing so, your moral right to redress any wrong with cash does not exist. The world is full of people who would not sleep with someone other than their partner for any amount of money. There are guys who wouldn't submit to a beating by you for any price. If your child were killed or your partner raped, are you seriously saying there is any amount of money you would consider to make things okay to allow it to happen? Do you really have a price? If not, then don't be so quick to assume I do. And if you do, then I genuinely and honestly feel sorry for you.
Where do you get the idea that there is disagreement whether harm was done?
You're changing wording. Your statement was "It's [economic loss] the only sort of harm that can be measured, proven, agreed upon." All of the sorts of harm I listed can be proven to have happened, are agreed upon by society as being harm, and as for measurement... well assessing how much harm we consider to have been done by abuse, intimidation or whatever is done all the time, both by self-defined experts and by society in general. Opinions may vary from person to person, but we have the capacity to make judgement as to the degree of harm. Now you shifted your statement to it being "very difficult to quantify in an adversarial system" and that's something else. My original statement stands.
As to:
Bulls***. Tell us, how much would you charge to let me lock you in a cupboard for 24 hours? How much would you charge to let me stalk you for x days and beat you y times? You can very easily fix a price for those abuses.
I would not accept payment for you for these things. There are things that matter to me more than money. That is what I mean when I say that some of us do not believe that everything has a price. And you can't fit these people into your system where you can assign a price. There's no exchange rate to be found.
It's the only sort of harm that can be measured, proven, agreed upon.
Nonsense. If somenone is raped, is that not agreed upon that harm has been done? Or do you measure it merely as a cost of a few therapy sessions? If I lock someone up in a cupboard for 24 hours do you just assess it as loss of income from a days work and reimburse accordingly? If someone is stalked or beaten, is it not possible to prove harm or agree that there is harm? Trying to set everything in terms of money doesn't work for those of us who do not believe everything has a price.
Whilst your intentions are good in the above, and you are correct as far as it goes, the real problem of -isms is not whether one group is generally different to another or not, but when members of a group are presupposed to conform to the stereotype. We know that a bishop moves in a specific way in chess. But the real world that you are comparing to has "bishops" that may tend to move in a particular way but very far from always do. For a generalisation such as this article makes to be a useful guide to decision making such as what gender to employ, even if the article were correct in a general case which I'm very far from allowing, the tendency would have to be absolutely overwhelming before it became more efficient to pre-judge people based on their gender rather than assess people for who they actually are.
Quite simply, the average man is seldom average, and neither is the average woman.
Bah! I can think of three female programmers immediately who I've worked with closely enough to comment on their code. Two of them were C++ programmers and I don't remember their code being anything atypical in terms of comments, though one wrote very elegant code. The third works primarily in Java and somehow manages to turn out hideously unreadable code. Conversely, I've seen numerous men who program in a variety of ways, readable and otherwise.
It's now well established that the human brain builds negative stereotypes more easily than positive ones and that people see what they are expecting and apply a double standard. This person sees what she wants to see.
Usenet was great once and I liked it. But the quantity of spam there these days has made it almost impossible to use. Plus it's spam soliciting things I *really* don't want. It's spam that's really killing Usenet, imo.
"Our city" isn't useful. Tell us where abouts you are. I may change my ISP soon (as I'm with Pipex who recently got taken over by the Tiscali monster) and looking for a decent provider.
I'm the only person I know of my age group or younger (excluding pre-teen children) who doesn't download pirated music or movies. Leastways of anyone I know well enough to say, which is a lot of people. I think all of them download in preference to buying. At least I'm not aware of any of them going on to buy the film / album after having downloaded it - why bother? I think I'm regarded as slightly quaint in refusing to download.
Well yes, always YMMV. I will say that for those who try it and find it uncomfortable (obviously not if you have an actual physical problem), they should try it for a few days. You get used to it very quickly which for me is one of the supporting arguments that it is more natural.
Personally I think all of these are merely the best attempt at the wrong solution. The best thing for your back (and I know this because it's what I use), is a stand up desk. You get used to it quite quickly and you feel all the better for it. Many or most are adjustable so you can lower them to chair height when you want to. But you very quickly find it odd and sluggish to sit down.
The Independent tends to make pretty good guesses about how things will go and they think it'll almost certainly be thrown back by the House of Lords. I'll be praying that they do. If it comes back though, I think it will die in its current form. Brown did everything he could to get this passed including stake the Labour Party's image on it and rumours of backroom deals that are bribery in all but name. If that didn't get him more than a majority by twelve, then hopefully it will fail completely the second time around. Putting our hope in the House of Lords to protect the common people! What have we come to, eh?
I'll dispute both of your suppositions. You're making wild assumptions in an effort to back your opinion and make youself feel superior.
Motivations are irrelevant in an argument, only facts are. Let us be quite clear on the statements that you wish to dispute. A. That the percentage of Windows installations is lower when you consider only home machines than when you include business usage. B. Alternative OS's are going to be more common amongst better educated demographics. It's incredible that you actually think either of these statements is wrong. It's even more incredible when your counter-argument is "people you know." Both my statements seem pretty obviously correct seeing as the overwhelming majority of the business world uses Windows, I can't see how the first statement can be anything other than correct. Business machines are irrelevant to WotC's sales. Only figures for home users matter.As to education correlated with uptake of new technology, that is also beyond obvious. You're going to have to come up with something better than "people you know" to deal with this.
And as I explained quite clearly, you're addressing the RARE exception. If home penetration were as high as you would like to believe, all major gaming software would have crossplatform releases. This is more the exception than the rule....because the crossplatform sales do not justify the dev and support expenses.
I'll explain the point for a third time. This is different to selling games to individuals. WotC has to market to groups. If one in twenty potential customers has only a non-Windows machine, and each role-playing group consists of five people, then WotC is not losing 1 in 20 sales, they are losing 1 in 4. Got it? That is a very big difference.
Regarding Blizzard, I was simply pointing out that successful cross-platform games are viable and exist. All your statements about the resources Blizzard have to show that they are that much better equipped than WotC, are a little undermined by the fact that WotC are attempting something not remotely as ambitious as Blizzard's projects. The userbase will be far smaller (I expect), the software far simpler and the usage much lower. It's a package that displays a 3D map with static tokens on it combined with a chat function and a dice roller tool. A weekend project - certainly not. World of Warcraft - not that either. If they took an organised approach to developing their system with cross-platform compatibility in mind from the start, it would not add greatly to their overheads.
Yes, and I can throw out that just because we can do a thing does not mean that we should.
And that statement is also true. However, where it differs to what I said is that my comment contradicted something you had said whereas yours is just an aphorism that doesn't actually reply to anything I have said.
And just to match your anecdotal evidence with some of my own, my group of five contains two members (one player and the regular DM) without Windows at all. The group would certainly not start subscribing to a system that excluded anyone.
You're being obtuse.
Being a computer geek does not equate being a role player.
Being a role player does not equate running a non-Windows OS.
And when did I say either of those things? I said (a) that an overall market share that included businesses will not be the same as a market share defined as only personal computers and it's the latter proportion that is relevant. And (b), that alternative O/S's are going to be more common amongst better educated demographics and people that play role-playing games tend to be more educated. Now which of those are you disputing?
Why waste cross platform dev costs on the release of your product which is designed to test the waters of virtual tabletop gaming?
As explained quite clearly, I thought, if one person in a gaming group has a Mac or Linux box, that's a disincentive for the whole group to use the product. They'll more likely go with a system that is cross-platform (which do exist). Furthermore, Linux and Macs are both gaining ground in the home use market which is where the market share matters (not work computers), so it's wise of a company to think about the long term. Finally, the largest costs are in porting software across to multiple systems. Planning to support multiple O/S's from the start is much easier. For example, if WotC had chosen to use OpenGL instead of DirectX 10, they'd now find it not that difficult at all to support Macs and Linux boxes. The increase in cost would be fairly small in comparison to the return on investment.
Don't waste your fingertips on building up an argument in favor of cross platform web based game... If it were such a viable choice, you would see a helluva lot more companies taking that route.
Like that little company Blizzard, you mean? They did a cross-platform game. World of something or other, I think. But anyway, that sort of argument doesn't really work as technology changes. Writing something like this cross-platform five years ago would be significantly harder than it is today. Practice lags behind Possibility. Saying if something were worthwhile it would be being done by others would have left mankind in the caves without fire or the wheel.
Just because you can brilliantly find an offending semicolon in two million lines of code does not grant you some kind of omnipotent understanding of real world business and marketing.
And just because I can brilliantly scan those two-million lines of code doesn't mean I can't have an understanding of the business world. Did I say that you should listen to my opinions because of my programming brilliance? No, I gave solid reasons why I thought the way I did which you are welcome to engage with if you wish. But you haven't, you've skipped my arguments and just gone for strawmen and sarcasm. It suggests you can't see actual problems with what I've said if those are your responses.
That leaves out vast dozens of players! You're the one who exiled yourself to the smugzone. Get a real computer. You've got no one to blame but yourself for paying extra for a machine that does less.
I have a Linux box - I paid less for it than I would have for an equivalent Windows machine and I get more performance out of it. You should join us.:)
I don't have concrete figures to support my impression, but I can say with great confidence that the proportion of Windows to non-Windoes installations amongst home users is *not* the same proportion as the total computers out there including all those work desktops. And this is important because the work machines are irrelevant to WotC's marketing. The only thing that matters is what the role-players have at home and that's going to be substantially higher. So lets round up the 8% overall figure to what is probably a conservative 10% to cover all the Macs and Linux boxes amongst this demographic. Does excluding these people mean reducing sales by 10%? No - as I've already explained, they have to market to groups. A group of five players, including DM is 50/50 going to have a non-Windows user in there. That's an instant disincentive to use WotC gaming tools (and they're not a monopoly - there are other virtual tables). If you're marketing to individuals, you can perhaps forego inter-operability. Market to groups, and it becomes hugely important.
t's currently just over 4.5 out of 5. When you use the actual proportion of users it doesn't look quite as clear cut as you'd like it to be.
I've addressed the fact that one member of a group who can't use your product scuppers the product for the whole group, so the only thing to comment on here is the "as you'd like it to be" line. Why you think I have a bias, I don't know. It *is* possible to simply state how things are, you know?
A cursory analysis would show that the costs of porting to Mac, or starting with a cross-platform solution, would have to be no more than 7% higher in order to be viable, which I don't find very likely.
That makes absolutely no sense at all. Are you seriously saying that if Mac users comprise 7%, that it would only justify a 7% increase in development costs? As a simple illustration of why your logic is wrong consider: If you make $100 for every unit sold and the total development costs were $100,000 (note there are no significant production costs per unit with software), and you sell perhaps 1,000,000 units, then you've made $100,000,000 gross. If your market share increases by 7% so that you sell 1,070,000 units then you've gained an extra $70,000,000. Do you see how that is worth far more than spending an extra 7% ($7,000) on your development costs? It's all about return on investment.
It's a bad move for a number of reasons. The first is the demographic they are targeting. Whilst Windows has a very high share of the market, that's taking into account business use as well as the trends of the overall population. I would say that the young and generally better than averagely educated demographic that make up D&D players is going to have a much greater proportion of Linux and Mac users. Secondly, it is a group activity, so whilst 4 out of 5 potential customers might be Windows users, it is still a big problem if one or two members of a group are not. When you need everyone in a group to be a Windows user, then suddenly that four out of five statistic looks like a serious issue. Thirdly is long term planning. Windows isn't going away in this year, but uptake of rival OS's is rising and this is especially the case in the home market where people can do what they like. Windows will hold on very well in the business world for quite some time, but that's again not the market WotC are after. They really have to think about the future here. Fourthly is the assumption that you make about the cost of porting their product to other OS's. If they had planned for this from the start they could have (a) taken a cross-platform approach (does DirectX 10 really offer that irresistable advantage to an application that moves static 3d figures around a board?) and (b) looked at a more web-based approach to their offering which would be better in any case. If they had set out to create a cross-platform solution they would have found the additional cost was not so great and certainly worth their while in terms of return.
I suspect WotC management were victims of listening to one individual with one way of doing things. It's all too easy to hire someone, even a very senior person, and have them tell you it should be done in way X and not know any better. It's a shame they didn't consult me, eh?
Actually, in 4e there is a mechanical thing that prevents you have flaws. The skill system takes account of your level and you also don't invest points in skills, you just are trained or not. If you're a Level 10 Wizard, you're a better blacksmith than any level 1 villiage blacksmith. There's no way you can't swim, or rope-climb or dance. 4e characters can do just about anything. And the difference between trained and untrained is a on / off thing. Two Level 10 characters who are both trained in "Athletics" are equally perfect in simming, climbing and running. There's no differentiation.
Slashdot Mirror
And I've done empirical testing - parent is right and if not, it's hardly the worst thing in the world to have kissed someone
I think this is another story of dubious merit. There are two ways you can deal with the risk of approaching someone else. One is to not really care about the other person and the other is to have some courage. Lacking people with the latter around, a girl may settle for the former (because everyone needs someone). But of the two options, you're way better off bringing yourself to take the chance through courage, rather than through trying to be callous.
It is not all advertising. He quietly refused the title ten years ago and this is the first we've heard of it as far as I'm aware. Everything points to this being a point of principle for him, not a means of gaining publicity. I guess you've shown that it sometimes is possible to be too cynical after all.
And good for him. I already had a lot of respect for him and now it's gone even higher. It's a wise man whose sense of self-worth isn't influenced by titles he's given.
On a slightly related topic, a friend tricked me into going to see "Superhero Movie" last week (I thought we were going to see "Hancock" when she said a spoof superhero movie). It had few enough laughs to begin with, but when they started taking the piss out of Stephen Hawking, they stopped entirely. He really is an incredible person, both for his ability and his fortitude. I'm glad he decided not to lend his stature to the British Honours system. They need him more than he needs them.
SuSE was my first Linux install, way, way back. Since there agreement with Microsoft I haven't touched it and have, in fact, been responsible for dropping its use in our department. I don't trust Novell.
I was making the point that not everything can be reduced to economic loss, which another poster is insisting is the only real criteria for harm. As regards protection against verbal or written attacks, more debatable, but there is certainly the capability for inflicting a great amount of suffering on someone either through the modern media machine or through malicious writings or comments on a more personal or social basis.
Let's suppose you or your partner was raped. Allowing that your attacker took precautions there would probably be no serious physical harm done, perhaps bruising from being restrained. Does that count as "hurt feelings" in your way of thinking? It's not an economic loss, but we judge it as harm and even make judgements on how serious it is. I repeat that any society that can only measure harm by equating it to money, is a sick society.
So in essence, you are saying that it's not possible to "measured, proved or agree upon" any harm that isn't financial because it depends upon human assessment? You may dismiss any opinion that cannot be assigned a value in money, but most of society and the judicial system do not. And you pose an irrelevant question when you ask how adversarial parties will arrive at agreement. They need not. In the instances I gave, they attempt to prove their case to a judge or jury. Agreement between parties is unnecessary. And though it's irrelevant to what I'm saying, it's worth pointing out that your 'provable economic loss' is usually anything but objectively provable, merely to adversaries attempting to project favourable interpretations.
You're changing wording. Your statement was "It's [economic loss] the only sort of harm that can be measured, proven, agreed upon." All of the sorts of harm I listed can be proven to have happened, are agreed upon by society as being harm, and as for measurement... well assessing how much harm we consider to have been done by abuse, intimidation or whatever is done all the time, both by self-defined experts and by society in general. Opinions may vary from person to person, but we have the capacity to make judgement as to the degree of harm. Now you shifted your statement to it being "very difficult to quantify in an adversarial system" and that's something else. My original statement stands.
As to:
I would not accept payment for you for these things. There are things that matter to me more than money. That is what I mean when I say that some of us do not believe that everything has a price. And you can't fit these people into your system where you can assign a price. There's no exchange rate to be found.
Nonsense. If somenone is raped, is that not agreed upon that harm has been done? Or do you measure it merely as a cost of a few therapy sessions? If I lock someone up in a cupboard for 24 hours do you just assess it as loss of income from a days work and reimburse accordingly? If someone is stalked or beaten, is it not possible to prove harm or agree that there is harm? Trying to set everything in terms of money doesn't work for those of us who do not believe everything has a price.
Does harm have to be measured in "economic loss" ? That's a pretty grim inditement of US society in itself.
Whilst your intentions are good in the above, and you are correct as far as it goes, the real problem of -isms is not whether one group is generally different to another or not, but when members of a group are presupposed to conform to the stereotype. We know that a bishop moves in a specific way in chess. But the real world that you are comparing to has "bishops" that may tend to move in a particular way but very far from always do. For a generalisation such as this article makes to be a useful guide to decision making such as what gender to employ, even if the article were correct in a general case which I'm very far from allowing, the tendency would have to be absolutely overwhelming before it became more efficient to pre-judge people based on their gender rather than assess people for who they actually are.
Quite simply, the average man is seldom average, and neither is the average woman.
Actually dated one of them. Well one and a half of them, kind of...
Bah! I can think of three female programmers immediately who I've worked with closely enough to comment on their code. Two of them were C++ programmers and I don't remember their code being anything atypical in terms of comments, though one wrote very elegant code. The third works primarily in Java and somehow manages to turn out hideously unreadable code. Conversely, I've seen numerous men who program in a variety of ways, readable and otherwise.
It's now well established that the human brain builds negative stereotypes more easily than positive ones and that people see what they are expecting and apply a double standard. This person sees what she wants to see.
Usenet was great once and I liked it. But the quantity of spam there these days has made it almost impossible to use. Plus it's spam soliciting things I *really* don't want. It's spam that's really killing Usenet, imo.
"Our city" isn't useful. Tell us where abouts you are. I may change my ISP soon (as I'm with Pipex who recently got taken over by the Tiscali monster) and looking for a decent provider.
I'm the only person I know of my age group or younger (excluding pre-teen children) who doesn't download pirated music or movies. Leastways of anyone I know well enough to say, which is a lot of people. I think all of them download in preference to buying. At least I'm not aware of any of them going on to buy the film / album after having downloaded it - why bother? I think I'm regarded as slightly quaint in refusing to download.
Well yes, always YMMV. I will say that for those who try it and find it uncomfortable (obviously not if you have an actual physical problem), they should try it for a few days. You get used to it very quickly which for me is one of the supporting arguments that it is more natural.
Personally I think all of these are merely the best attempt at the wrong solution. The best thing for your back (and I know this because it's what I use), is a stand up desk. You get used to it quite quickly and you feel all the better for it. Many or most are adjustable so you can lower them to chair height when you want to. But you very quickly find it odd and sluggish to sit down.
I'm serious - this is by far the best option imo.
The Independent tends to make pretty good guesses about how things will go and they think it'll almost certainly be thrown back by the House of Lords. I'll be praying that they do. If it comes back though, I think it will die in its current form. Brown did everything he could to get this passed including stake the Labour Party's image on it and rumours of backroom deals that are bribery in all but name. If that didn't get him more than a majority by twelve, then hopefully it will fail completely the second time around. Putting our hope in the House of Lords to protect the common people! What have we come to, eh?
Motivations are irrelevant in an argument, only facts are. Let us be quite clear on the statements that you wish to dispute. A. That the percentage of Windows installations is lower when you consider only home machines than when you include business usage. B. Alternative OS's are going to be more common amongst better educated demographics. It's incredible that you actually think either of these statements is wrong. It's even more incredible when your counter-argument is "people you know." Both my statements seem pretty obviously correct seeing as the overwhelming majority of the business world uses Windows, I can't see how the first statement can be anything other than correct. Business machines are irrelevant to WotC's sales. Only figures for home users matter.As to education correlated with uptake of new technology, that is also beyond obvious. You're going to have to come up with something better than "people you know" to deal with this.
I'll explain the point for a third time. This is different to selling games to individuals. WotC has to market to groups. If one in twenty potential customers has only a non-Windows machine, and each role-playing group consists of five people, then WotC is not losing 1 in 20 sales, they are losing 1 in 4. Got it? That is a very big difference.
Regarding Blizzard, I was simply pointing out that successful cross-platform games are viable and exist. All your statements about the resources Blizzard have to show that they are that much better equipped than WotC, are a little undermined by the fact that WotC are attempting something not remotely as ambitious as Blizzard's projects. The userbase will be far smaller (I expect), the software far simpler and the usage much lower. It's a package that displays a 3D map with static tokens on it combined with a chat function and a dice roller tool. A weekend project - certainly not. World of Warcraft - not that either. If they took an organised approach to developing their system with cross-platform compatibility in mind from the start, it would not add greatly to their overheads.
And that statement is also true. However, where it differs to what I said is that my comment contradicted something you had said whereas yours is just an aphorism that doesn't actually reply to anything I have said.
And just to match your anecdotal evidence with some of my own, my group of five contains two members (one player and the regular DM) without Windows at all. The group would certainly not start subscribing to a system that excluded anyone.
And when did I say either of those things? I said (a) that an overall market share that included businesses will not be the same as a market share defined as only personal computers and it's the latter proportion that is relevant. And (b), that alternative O/S's are going to be more common amongst better educated demographics and people that play role-playing games tend to be more educated. Now which of those are you disputing?
As explained quite clearly, I thought, if one person in a gaming group has a Mac or Linux box, that's a disincentive for the whole group to use the product. They'll more likely go with a system that is cross-platform (which do exist). Furthermore, Linux and Macs are both gaining ground in the home use market which is where the market share matters (not work computers), so it's wise of a company to think about the long term. Finally, the largest costs are in porting software across to multiple systems. Planning to support multiple O/S's from the start is much easier. For example, if WotC had chosen to use OpenGL instead of DirectX 10, they'd now find it not that difficult at all to support Macs and Linux boxes. The increase in cost would be fairly small in comparison to the return on investment.
Like that little company Blizzard, you mean? They did a cross-platform game. World of something or other, I think. But anyway, that sort of argument doesn't really work as technology changes. Writing something like this cross-platform five years ago would be significantly harder than it is today. Practice lags behind Possibility. Saying if something were worthwhile it would be being done by others would have left mankind in the caves without fire or the wheel.
And just because I can brilliantly scan those two-million lines of code doesn't mean I can't have an understanding of the business world. Did I say that you should listen to my opinions because of my programming brilliance? No, I gave solid reasons why I thought the way I did which you are welcome to engage with if you wish. But you haven't, you've skipped my arguments and just gone for strawmen and sarcasm. It suggests you can't see actual problems with what I've said if those are your responses.
I have a Linux box - I paid less for it than I would have for an equivalent Windows machine and I get more performance out of it. You should join us.
I don't have concrete figures to support my impression, but I can say with great confidence that the proportion of Windows to non-Windoes installations amongst home users is *not* the same proportion as the total computers out there including all those work desktops. And this is important because the work machines are irrelevant to WotC's marketing. The only thing that matters is what the role-players have at home and that's going to be substantially higher. So lets round up the 8% overall figure to what is probably a conservative 10% to cover all the Macs and Linux boxes amongst this demographic. Does excluding these people mean reducing sales by 10%? No - as I've already explained, they have to market to groups. A group of five players, including DM is 50/50 going to have a non-Windows user in there. That's an instant disincentive to use WotC gaming tools (and they're not a monopoly - there are other virtual tables). If you're marketing to individuals, you can perhaps forego inter-operability. Market to groups, and it becomes hugely important.
I've addressed the fact that one member of a group who can't use your product scuppers the product for the whole group, so the only thing to comment on here is the "as you'd like it to be" line. Why you think I have a bias, I don't know. It *is* possible to simply state how things are, you know?
That makes absolutely no sense at all. Are you seriously saying that if Mac users comprise 7%, that it would only justify a 7% increase in development costs? As a simple illustration of why your logic is wrong consider: If you make $100 for every unit sold and the total development costs were $100,000 (note there are no significant production costs per unit with software), and you sell perhaps 1,000,000 units, then you've made $100,000,000 gross. If your market share increases by 7% so that you sell 1,070,000 units then you've gained an extra $70,000,000. Do you see how that is worth far more than spending an extra 7% ($7,000) on your development costs? It's all about return on investment.
Give them time.
It's a bad move for a number of reasons. The first is the demographic they are targeting. Whilst Windows has a very high share of the market, that's taking into account business use as well as the trends of the overall population. I would say that the young and generally better than averagely educated demographic that make up D&D players is going to have a much greater proportion of Linux and Mac users. Secondly, it is a group activity, so whilst 4 out of 5 potential customers might be Windows users, it is still a big problem if one or two members of a group are not. When you need everyone in a group to be a Windows user, then suddenly that four out of five statistic looks like a serious issue. Thirdly is long term planning. Windows isn't going away in this year, but uptake of rival OS's is rising and this is especially the case in the home market where people can do what they like. Windows will hold on very well in the business world for quite some time, but that's again not the market WotC are after. They really have to think about the future here. Fourthly is the assumption that you make about the cost of porting their product to other OS's. If they had planned for this from the start they could have (a) taken a cross-platform approach (does DirectX 10 really offer that irresistable advantage to an application that moves static 3d figures around a board?) and (b) looked at a more web-based approach to their offering which would be better in any case. If they had set out to create a cross-platform solution they would have found the additional cost was not so great and certainly worth their while in terms of return.
I suspect WotC management were victims of listening to one individual with one way of doing things. It's all too easy to hire someone, even a very senior person, and have them tell you it should be done in way X and not know any better. It's a shame they didn't consult me, eh?
Actually, in 4e there is a mechanical thing that prevents you have flaws. The skill system takes account of your level and you also don't invest points in skills, you just are trained or not. If you're a Level 10 Wizard, you're a better blacksmith than any level 1 villiage blacksmith. There's no way you can't swim, or rope-climb or dance. 4e characters can do just about anything. And the difference between trained and untrained is a on / off thing. Two Level 10 characters who are both trained in "Athletics" are equally perfect in simming, climbing and running. There's no differentiation.