Survival of FLGS moving into the digital doc age

[GamerDude]

Actually the setup is cheap and small

Cool, I may just have to bug you in PM sometime for more details. *(my one downfall is I never really had the chance to develop much in the way of Unix/Linux skills).

 

[IanBruntlett]

Actually the setup is cheap and small

Cool, I may just have to bug you in PM sometime for more details. *(my one downfall is I never really had the chance to develop much in the way of Unix/Linux skills).

.
I've got one or two Linux skills. I don't know where you live but if you search for Linux User Groups (abbreviated to LUG) in your local area, you should find people willing and able to help you. I can point you in the right direction if you're looking for good Linux books.

 

[GypsyComet]

With one single exception I have never
encountered a salesperson from a German roleplaying games shop who
really had an idea what he or she was selling and had the basics of the
social skills and the patience required to run a shop...

So Magabotato is a lie, then? Chatty, personable, and know their stuff? :wink:

 

[rust]

So Magabotato is a lie, then? Chatty, personable, and know their stuff? :wink:

I do not see the Magabotato people as salespersons of a role-
playing games shop, at least I have never met one of them
at any of the shops I visited - but I admit that I do not know
all of Germany's roleplaying games shops ... :lol:

 

[IanBruntlett]

For Linux this would be the better idea then asking me. I am a "SOLARIS or SOLARIS or why not use SOLARIS" guy after trying to install a few commercial software packages (i.e ORACLE) on LINUX and ending up with "requiers distribution x" (with different values of x for each program)

I am currently running the latest Ubuntu - the one with the controversial GUI changes. A friend of mine needed Linux on his PC (long story & he's not really computer literate). Then one day his PC popped up a dialogue box asking "New version available. Upgrade?" and he clicked "Yes". It did the update and it worked.

Traditionally Linux programs have been distributed in source form (sometimes binary). Those files are bundled up into a "tar ball" and compiled on the downloadee machine.

Then people came along and wrote special systems to make things easier. They decided that they would have software organised into packages. Those packages have a filename extension (e.g. .deb, .rpm) and the software on the PC was updated from the command line using special commands specific to that package manager.

Then people came along and used GUIs. My experience with that on Ubuntu Linux is as follows. To keep systems up to date, every so often a computer will pop up an "Update Manager" dialogue box and ask if you want to downloaded the latest package updates - you can force a check by clicking on "Software up to date". If you feel like downloading stuff, I simply click on the "Ubuntu Software Centre" icon and pick and choose what I like. Note that in ptactise most Linux software is free.

HTH

 

[IanBruntlett]

Thanks for that - very illuminating.

As for GNU software, I like gcc, g++, make, emacs etc. I might not always agree with Richard Stallman's views but he has made a significant contribution to the world.

 

[tneva82]

I will never ever approve electric dice in my games(unless impossible to avoid. Via irc kinda hard to use real dices). Why? I want TRUSTWORTHY rolls!

Nevermind simply using rigged program(easy enough) there's the tiny wee little problem that computers can't easily generate TRULY random numbers. Requires some "serious" effort to do that. I doubt very much any phone/tablet can do that.

Sometime ago I made quick test program that used computers standard RNG with seed created from time(and then combined with mouse's position at the time of creation). Several attempts with 100,000,000 dice rolls(I tell you that took a while to run...). Frequency of results ranged from 12% to 19%...That's pretty big bias I would say! Especially when that happened every single time I ran the program through...

Computer's built-in RNG sucks. As a result you get events like where after 6 terms highest roll character managed to roll in character creation was 3...Needless to say that character was constantly moving from mishap to mishap. Wasn't even fun time.

And then of course there's danger of simply cheater using rigged program. When I go to miniature tournaments I keep running into cheaters. No reason to think nobody in RPG's would not do that.

So difficultiness to ensure that program isn't rigged to begin with and that program uses some more advanced RNG than built-in RNG to generate being hard to verify(I'm not interested in browsing through source code even if it's available. Too much of an effort)...No edices here tyvm.