Transparence to any degree beyond the company community relations and sales walls is always a good thing for consumers. Hats off those running things at SD for giving consumers and critics alike a look into their privately held company.

I expect it simply means that developers using reactor will have the option of using the same system as alreaady used on GalCiv2, WindowBlinds, etc.

The Impulse Reactor is planned to be a tool for other developers to get their stuff published on Impulse without much hassle, it's supposed to use a standard licensing agreement (between publisher and developer, not the EULA for us) and the hope is that it will make it fairly painless for developers to get their stuff published digitally. The caveat of course is that not all developers think alike, and so to attract the majority of them, the Impulse Reactor does need to offer protection options that the developers will be able to select for the protection scheme that they are comfortable with, but at the same time one that's not nearly as bad as SecuROM, for example.

And it is noted on a product's store page if it uses "extra" protection besides the basic Impulse verification on patching.

In essence, it's aspiring to be a good thing. It will help bring more developers to put up their stuff on Impulse while offering them essentially a Stardock designed protection scheme if they want one. And since Stardock isn't one for intrusive protection, it'll be much friendlier than the few options developers have currently, as Frogboy mentions.

I am really disappointed that there's no mention of DesktopX in the PDF. I think it's one of the best softwares Stardock makes. Second only to Windowblinds, IMHO.  Some say it's too hard to learn...it's child's play compared to making a windowblind.  Just an opinion....   

Towards the bottom of page 24

Control Center had the best virtual desktops around but there were free o;
the same held true for Object Edit and ObjectZIP.  By contrast, programs like WindowBlinds have no are .
What Stardock needs to continue to explore is how to develop software that adds functionality that 
DesktopX 4.0 is an area where we plan to explore this further.  Stay tuned.

For what it is worth I was one of those people. I must be lucky since I got the survey last year and the year before as well if memory serves.

As long as everything is transparent, it's okay for me. (Okay for me to use Impulse to buy games with acceptable protection schemes.)

I woke up with a plausible answer to my whiny "why no survey for me" question: I probably took every opportunity to set no marketing message options, and Stardock might have considered the survey to be a marketing project.

Still curious to know what the return sample size was in comparison to the total of customers logging in to the SDC or Impulse servers for the period.

GP just published an article on the revised GBR from the report info. Do you want to know more? If so, go here.

This is basically a version of one of my favorite questions from when I was a working "social scientist." But those shudder quotes mean that I was on the losing side of the current claims in the discipline that they are "scientific," and they're there because I have steadily increasing doubts about survey methodologies and think we might well be best of ditching them all and trying to limit our arguments to more "concrete" results like election returns, product sales, and *possibly* aggregate forum posts *if* you can present some sort of plausible schema for classifying and summarizing them mathematically. Without serious math, it ain't science, IMO.

Mind you, I strongly believe that lots of academic work done in the name of "political science" and "economics" is worthwhile--it's just been done under an arrogant rubric. I don't think they deserve to claim they're sciences until they consistently base their arguments on empirically testable hypothoses, and IMO, no survey will every yield empirical results because they depend on the inherently subjective nature of language. Medicine's closer to being a real science, and that's really only because they have a bunch of rigourous biologists to rely on.

It's not negotiable, right?

I agree on those ones

I answered the same because there's already a lot of other dev studios working on projects like FPSes, RTSes, RPGs ...

and also I prefer stardock to stay focused on where their development skills are, in a few years from now, when stardock will be 4x the size of now, maybe it'll be time to find new game types to develop, until then.. let's stay focused