Quote:
Originally Posted by MovieBird
It depends. Is the person a student that is attempting to do homework at home; instead of in the overcrowded lab on campus? Are they a student/poor person attempting to learn a skill (software package) for the purpose of landing a job?
Or are they a company that simply doesn't want to pay the licensing fees?
The first, I have zero issues with. It's only when it's used for monetary gain that I balk.
Have you even seen the student versions of CAD programs? Back when I was trying to learn this stuff, SolidWorks sold a Student Version for $150. A princely sum to a educational pauper. What did this $150 get you? A piece of software that was one year behind the stated release. So Student 2011, is just repackaged 2010. It was locked to two installs. If your hard drive borks itself like mine did, you're screwed.
If you create a project in Student, and then open it in Educational or Professional, or any other version, it updates the file and refuses to let it open in Student anymore. I learned that the hard way from the computer lab. Nor would it let you actually learn the interesting stuff like the Thermal/Stress Analysis modules.
MATLAB similarly charged north of $100 and restricted the number of matrices you could calculate in a script/program. Essentially making it useless for Finite Element Analysis. You also missed a ton of essential modules for higher level modeling.
Oh, and EAGLE CAD restricts you to two signal layers and a board area of 100x80 mm. Great if all you're doing is making a blinky LED. Or if you can hand solder SMTs. But if you want anything more advanced, like a simple DAC with through hole components, you're gonna need more.
So screw CAD software companies and their draconian limitations.
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Exactly.
On the literary side of things, that's also why textbook companies release a new edition every year and give professors kickbacks for requiring students to use the latest edition. What could be a $15 book of text with minimal illustrations is turned into a $100+ tome with too many illustrations and sidebars and a useless CD-ROM, whose colors all change every year. And then these companies have the gall to try and smear the used book market claiming its stealing their sales or something. And that's why self- destructing ebooks exist, too. Pay $100 now, and $100 each semester beyond the first that you want to use it.
Shame we can't wring a lot of the excess greed out of the system.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sabredog
Why?
Our referee prefers 3.5e. Apparently most D&D gamers do.
There should be no reason why older rules versions could not be sold as PDF's. They take up bugger all space on a modern server hard drive.
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I'm pretty sure someone's still publishing the open source version somewhere, but I've had difficulty finding it.