The Software Awards Scam

jamie sends us to a blog post about the worthlessness of some download sites' "5-star" awards. Andy Brice, a UK-based software developer, packaged up a little text file full of the words "This software does nothing" as an EXE and named it "awardmestars." So far his self-proclaiming useless program has garnered sixteen 5-star awards from download sites he submitted it to. Brice concludes that many of the download sites are "just electronic dung heaps, using fake awards, dubious SEO and content misappropriated from PAD files in a pathetic attempt to make a few dollars from Google Adwords."

Comments

Like university degrees

[Colin Smith]

Some aren't worth the paper they are printed on.

MOMMY! MAKE THEM STOP!

[ColdWetDog]

Insightful?

Oh, now I get it. I had wondered what it took to get mod points. It appears that one of the major criteria is a non-functioning sarcasm meter.

I guess when you spend that much time in the basement, you lose out on a lot of useful social interaction and subsequently miss those subtle clues that people give out from time to time.

Which also explains why nobody can seem to get dates.

Re:Is this any surprise?

[Iron Condor]

I've not encountered this with Linux, FreeBSD or OpenBSD.

OK up to here

I've not encountered it with OS X either, [...]

As this appears to be news to you: OSX is "Linux, FreeBSD or OpenBSD". There is no distinction between the pieces of software you have already named and the one you are trying to make out as somehow different from them.

There is no such thing as a "mac" anymore. There's PCs running Windows, PCs running Linux, and PCs running some form of BSD. That's it. Mac lost the OS wars. Renaming some entirely different piece of software that is running on an entirely different piece of hardware "MacOS" is the thinnest of pretenses of any kind of continued existence.