Most works I've read on grammar seem to agree that this rule is no longer valid, and to end whatever sentances you want with prepositions.
Don't say "no longer valid": it gives the incorrect impression that there was a time when this so-called "rule" actually was valid. Which it never has been, any more than other made-up "rules" like the censure of split infinitives, or all that "that/which" BS, or the illogical hatred prescriptivists have for sentences starting with "and" or "but".
Just do R&D in a country that practically ignores patent law. China is your friend.
China certainly doesn't "practically ignore" patent law. Last time someone brought this up here, I googled around, and in less than five minutes I'd found numerous cases of Chinese courts ruling against Chinese companies that were violating patents held by US companies. I can't be bothered to do it again, but if you look, you will find.
There becomes a confusion when I write: "Hopefully, he left on Tuesday"
That sentence is not ambiguous.
Do I mean that I hope he left on Tuesday, or that he had hope when he left on Tuesday?
The former. It would not be natural English to use it in the latter sense.
It should mean the latter but in common use it's starting to instead mean the former.
"It's starting" is a rather funny way of describing a usage that has been standard for about a century, and "in common use" is a bit strange given that the form has been predominant even in formal, literary, and technical English for at least 40 years.
And I'm surprised to see you say that a word "should" mean something, when you go on to acknowledge, quite correctly, that language is a fluid thing. It's safe to assume you don't believe treacle "should" mean an antidote to snake venom, so why do you believe hopefully "should" mean "the subject acts with hope" rather than "I speak with hope"?
(I like the subtle split infinitive, incidentally. Nice way to emphasise the fact that most "rules" are arbitrary stylistic decisions, rather than being founded in usage or convenience.)
Naturally. Just like Apple gets all the credit for "inventing" the portable MP3 player, and Edison gets all the credit for "inventing" the lightbulb, and Columbus gets all the credit for "discovering" America...
It's not about who did something first - or even about who did it best. It's all about who got people interested in something first. Firefox was the first tabbed browser to penetrate into the public consciousness, so Firefox is the browser people associate with tabs. That's just the way it works.
Technically speaking all graphics packages are based on "8 bit" technology. An image on a computer is made up of (usually) 4 channels.. red, green, blue and alpha. Each channel contains a greyscale image.. with 256 levels of greyness. 256 levels = 8 bit.
The format you describe is the standard, but there is also a higher-quality standard where each channel is 16 bits. This is supported to some extent by many graphics packages; certainly Photoshop has had fairly decent 16-bit channel support since Photoshop CS.
So the GP's question makes perfect sense: does GIMP now support 16-bit channels?
Anti: it should be MDI, that's easier to use because it keeps all the windows together.
Pro: no, MDI sucks because Microsoft invented it and Apple don't use it. Virtual desktops are better.
Anti: Windows doesn't have virtual desktops, and I don't want them anyway. Photoshop uses MDI, so GIMP should too.
Pro: one of (a) you can get virtual desktops with the Windows XP Powertoys, (b) switch to Linux and/or Apple then, or (c) Photoshop doesn't use MDI on OS X, so there.
Repeat ad nauseum. Anti-GIMPers should be sure to complain that the name GIMP is unprofessional and insulting to the community of persons with disabilities, while pro-GIMPers are encouraged to mention that as GIMP is free software, the authors don't owe you anything and you should quit whining and write your own interface. (Do this as patronisingly as possible.)
Bonus points will be awarded to those successfully diverting the flamewar onto the subject of GPL-vs-BSD, C-vs-C++, or emacs-vs-vi. The winner will be the first person to convincingly compare the name "GNU/Linux" with the Holocaust.
Region codes may seem ridiculous and bothersome to the consumer, but it prevents us from ordering movies and games from less well off places where they're sold for maybe $2 instead of paying $10-$20 here.
In Britain we pay typically £20-£30* for a new release (US $35-$50). We also just want to be able to buy movies and games from places where they're really cheap. But when we say that, we mean the USA.
Region coding is about making a huge profit, like you say. I'm just not so sure that you're the ones they're gouging...
* High-street price - they're cheaper online, obviously. But I'm assuming the $20 you cite is the high-street price in the US?
Entire new genres may be created (First Person Adventure, anyone?)
Er... you mean like Myst, Normality Inc, and Return to Zork - or, indeed, the whole Famicom Detective Club series, which were on Nintendo consoles 15 years ago?
Not precisely what I'd describe as "entirely new", but maybe you had something different in mind.
You can buy Apple computers without an OS on them? I thought all Apple computers came with the proprietary OS X preinstalled. So, no different from a Windows XP box, if you want to run Linux - you're still paying* for an OS you don't need.
* Yeah, I know what this article's about. Nevertheless.
It's also because things might be considered copyrighted (e.g. Peter Pan in Britain), hateful (e.g. Nazism in Germany or France), or otherwise prohibited in one country but not in another.
But Britain, Germany, and Japan, three countries with wildly different rules and regulations about content and three different ratings/censorship systems, are all in the same DVD "region"! And even in games consoles, Britain is always in the same region as Germany, even though British law allows a large number of things that are illegal in Germany, and German versions of games are (I hear) often censored while British versions rarely are.
So, uh, exactly how is region coding supposed to have anything to do with helping governments enforce their local content regulations, given that there is absolutely no correlation whatsoever between the region codes and those content regulations?
However you still have to prevent it being redistributed, otherwise you *will* end up with "internet TV" sites putting these out without paying a penny, or simply ripped onto eDonkey or some other system. And most of those "internet TV" sites will inevitably be in Russia or somewhere else where rule of copyright law doesn't apply. So we're back to DRM again.
But any broadcast programme that people want to watch is already being ripped and distributed over just about any P2P system you care to name.
This cannot be emphasised too much: Downloadable content does not carry any new risks!
I can see that DRM is beneficial to copyright holders. I am open to the argument that it is beneficial to society, provided safeguards are put in place to ensure that the content will enter the public domain properly when its copyright expires. But the copyright holders do themselves no favours when they lie to us and pretend that DRM is a way for them to maintain the status quo, when it is really a way for them to increase the level of control they have over their work.
What if you just wanted to use a single function in your program that does something completely different? Is that still a derivative work? I'm sure that legally the answer would be yes, but it's an interesting mental exercise.
It's also basically only a mental exercise. I'm really, really struggling to think of a realistic situation in which it would be useful to take a single function, by itself, out of one program, and use it in a completely different program.
All I can think of are trivial utility functions, which (a) might well not be copyrightable due to being extremely short and essentially impossible to express in any other way, and (b) you're just going to pull from some bit of code you wrote yourself, not trawl through someone else's GPL'd software looking for.
Can you give an example of a realistic scenario where you could usefully copy someone else's code into your program, but still make a reasonable case that you weren't producing a derivative work?
There are safe ways to use GPL software, but using modified BSD licensed software can be done with no questions asked.
As long as you don't forget to reproduce the copyright notice, list of conditions, and disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with your software, you mean.
Are you saying that if I discovered the secret of eternal youth, then that wouldn't change the world, simply because it's not a new idea, people have been looking for it since the dawn of time?
To date, nobody has produced a major application that is used remotely over a public network. Therefore, if that is what Google and Sun have teamed up to produce, then that will be something new. Just because it's already been thought of doesn't mean that an implementation won't potentially be interesting.
This is to language learning what spellcheck is to essay writing, and long overdue.
Big horse spell chequers of god know floors at awl, an there eye deal four may king shore their's know miss takes inn Ann assay.
Spellcheckers can't turn hopeless spelling into beautiful prose: they are no substitute for a human proofreader. (And even a perfect spellchecker would be incapable of detecting real problems with an essay such as inappropriately colloquial language use, or an argument that made no sense.)
Likewise, it seems rather unlikely that robots will be a good substitute for a human teacher. Sorry, but so far, computers and human languages just don't go together well...
I have to wonder how functional languages such as Scheme or Tcl work at all with memory protection enabled. Not only do they tend to lack explicitly separate data and code, but they more-or-less depend on the ability to construct functions dynamically, as data, and then invoke them as code.
Simple - those are interpreted languages. The functions they construct dynamically and invoke as "code" are not actually machine code. The only actual machine code in the system is in the interpreter and language runtime, and those don't have to change. From the hardware's perspective, the "code" constructed and modified at runtime is quite literally just data.
For dynamically compiling runtimes that do need to construct and execute actual machine code at runtime, I belive many memory protection schemata include ways to bypass the protection. But that's not actually necessary just to use the language - it's an optimisation detail.
I hope they get what they deserve. Six weeks in hell.
Man, this sucks. When I was a lad, if you earned something it was yours. Buy a phonograph record? It's yours, you keep it, you play it as often as you like, wherever you like, till it wears out. Fall foul of a capricious deity? You're damned to hell for all eternity, where your soul shall be tormented in lakes of burning sulphur, yea, and your worm didn't die, nor was your fire quenched. Now it's all "DRM this" and "license that" and "purgatory the other". Your music expires after a month, the TV shows you record delete themselves the next day, and you can't even get into hell for more than six months at a time before you have to go out and sin some more!
As much as I care about fostering growth throughout the world, I'm sorry but I'm much more concerned over my nations well-being.
I was going to respond to this, but I can't find any way of expressing my opinion that wouldn't get me modded into oblivion. All I'll say is: read this back to yourself. Imagine you're a third-world peasant, dying of a preventable disease and watching your kids starve, and a rich American tourist passes through your village, and this is what he says to you. Does nationalism still sound like a noble ideal? Thought not.
Yeah, this is pretty off-topic, isn't it? Sorry, I kind of got sidetracked while I was still trying to figure out what the hell controlling an international public resource had to do with the well-being of the world's richest nation.
You can have all the views of the US you want, but to think lowly of us for protecting a national asset is a bit ridiculous in my opinion.
The issue here, see, is that we're talking about something called the Internet. That stands for "international", not "internal". The first servers were American, but different parts of the system have been developed by people all over the world. As several people have noted already, the WWW was invented by a Briton in Switzerland! There are people who use the Internet daily who have never even visited a site based in the USA. How on earth can this be a "national asset"? It's like claiming that because the Pacific borders on the US, and even surrounds one state completely, the world's surface water is an American national asset and your national security depends on America having exclusive control of all the world's oceans! It just doesn't add up, see?
At least with specifically enumerated individual rights, the courts can stop that asshole from infringing on your rights. This is only true in the US.
Really? How is this different from the European Convention on Human Rights, which enumerates specific individual rights and gives the courts the power to make it damn tough for governments to breach them?
I'm not going to deny that the US has a fine constitutional history, and I'm not going to deny that it protects the rights of law-abiding citizens as well as any other nation on Earth, and better than the vast majority (though its record for non-citizens is somewhat worse, and its treatment of criminals is not at all impressive). But you Americans need to get the idea that you're somehow "unique" out of your heads. You're not unique. There are many other nations where the rights of the individual are enumerated and protected. You're good, sure. You're even the best, if you select your criteria carefully enough. But you're not something so amazingly special that no other nation has ever come close to matching you. Sorry, but you're not.
For example, I remember reading that the PS2 didn't officially release in china for several years after it's introduction in Japan, but pirated ps2 hardware and games were widely available.
Um. The games I can understand, but how do you pirate hardware? I can see only three scenarios:
1. Real piracy. Gangs of Chinese sailors with eyepatches board cargo ships carrying PS2s that were intended to bring a little bit of joy into the lives of American orphans, callously slaughter the crew, and haul the booty away to sell on the cheap in village markets.
2. Software-type piracy. Using top-secret 3D scanning technology, a stolen PS2 is cloned at zero cost and distributed to eager peasants over magic nanotech P2P networks.
3. No piracy at all, but you used the word anyway because it sounds more serious that way. Maybe some kind of "grey market" import, or employees secretly flogging defective stock that Sony thought had been dumped in a landfill. Or whatever.
Or is there another option I haven't thought of? Cheap knockoff PS2 clones, perhaps, though the complete absence of any such thing in the Western black market (or of any references to them on Google) rather suggests that no such thing has ever been made.
I would never have thought that Haskell and Dylan would have even placed. I've been in a Java bubble for far too long. Time to burst that bubble and look into things like Ruby, Python, etc.
Given the context in which you're deciding to look outside your box, don't you think Haskell or Dylan might be more appropriate languages to look into?:P
I'd hope that a game that takes 6 days from design to completion would cost substantially less than $30. Maybe I'm just cheap.
Personally I'd prefer the price of a game to reflect its quality rather than the amount of work that went into it. If you offered me this for $30, or something like Daikatana for $3, I know which I'd choose - and my choice wouldn't be influenced by how long the games had taken to write!
That means that any application that you distribute that can access a MySQL database must be linked against the MySQL library, which is GPL, forcing your application to be GPL.
No it doesn't. The FLOSS License Exemption means that your application is not forced to be GPL if it uses any of 20 of the most popular free software licenses. The exempt licenses include the LGPL, the MIT and BSD licenses, the Mozilla license, the licenses for Perl, PHP, and Python... and the list goes on. In other words, the vast majority of free or open source software is able to link to the MySQL client library without being forced to change its license to the GPL.
This is a significant relaxation of the regular GPL terms. It even makes explicit allowances for users of the BSD license, the group that traditionally dislikes GPL software the most.
The only people who can complain about the MySQL licensing policy are freeloaders who want to benefit from free software without giving anything back to the developers or the community. You will, I trust, forgive me if I don't weep for such people.
Slashdot Mirror
Most works I've read on grammar seem to agree that this rule is no longer valid, and to end whatever sentances you want with prepositions.
Don't say "no longer valid": it gives the incorrect impression that there was a time when this so-called "rule" actually was valid. Which it never has been, any more than other made-up "rules" like the censure of split infinitives, or all that "that/which" BS, or the illogical hatred prescriptivists have for sentences starting with "and" or "but".
Just do R&D in a country that practically ignores patent law. China is your friend.
China certainly doesn't "practically ignore" patent law. Last time someone brought this up here, I googled around, and in less than five minutes I'd found numerous cases of Chinese courts ruling against Chinese companies that were violating patents held by US companies. I can't be bothered to do it again, but if you look, you will find.
There becomes a confusion when I write:
"Hopefully, he left on Tuesday"
That sentence is not ambiguous.
Do I mean that I hope he left on Tuesday, or that he had hope when he left on Tuesday?
The former. It would not be natural English to use it in the latter sense.
It should mean the latter but in common use it's starting to instead mean the former.
"It's starting" is a rather funny way of describing a usage that has been standard for about a century, and "in common use" is a bit strange given that the form has been predominant even in formal, literary, and technical English for at least 40 years.
And I'm surprised to see you say that a word "should" mean something, when you go on to acknowledge, quite correctly, that language is a fluid thing. It's safe to assume you don't believe treacle "should" mean an antidote to snake venom, so why do you believe hopefully "should" mean "the subject acts with hope" rather than "I speak with hope"?
(I like the subtle split infinitive, incidentally. Nice way to emphasise the fact that most "rules" are arbitrary stylistic decisions, rather than being founded in usage or convenience.)
But Firefox gets all the credit
Naturally. Just like Apple gets all the credit for "inventing" the portable MP3 player, and Edison gets all the credit for "inventing" the lightbulb, and Columbus gets all the credit for "discovering" America...
It's not about who did something first - or even about who did it best. It's all about who got people interested in something first. Firefox was the first tabbed browser to penetrate into the public consciousness, so Firefox is the browser people associate with tabs. That's just the way it works.
There's nothing in Grand Theft Auto that doesn't happen every day in Southern California.
Good God, I realised there was a massive crime problem down there, but surely people don't have sex too?!
Truly, America is doomed!
Technically speaking all graphics packages are based on "8 bit" technology. An image on a computer is made up of (usually) 4 channels .. red, green, blue and alpha. Each channel contains a greyscale image .. with 256 levels of greyness. 256 levels = 8 bit.
The format you describe is the standard, but there is also a higher-quality standard where each channel is 16 bits. This is supported to some extent by many graphics packages; certainly Photoshop has had fairly decent 16-bit channel support since Photoshop CS.
So the GP's question makes perfect sense: does GIMP now support 16-bit channels?
Let's get the rest out of the way too:
Pro: GIMP's interface is much more intuitive.
Anti: it should be MDI, that's easier to use because it keeps all the windows together.
Pro: no, MDI sucks because Microsoft invented it and Apple don't use it. Virtual desktops are better.
Anti: Windows doesn't have virtual desktops, and I don't want them anyway. Photoshop uses MDI, so GIMP should too.
Pro: one of (a) you can get virtual desktops with the Windows XP Powertoys, (b) switch to Linux and/or Apple then, or (c) Photoshop doesn't use MDI on OS X, so there.
Repeat ad nauseum. Anti-GIMPers should be sure to complain that the name GIMP is unprofessional and insulting to the community of persons with disabilities, while pro-GIMPers are encouraged to mention that as GIMP is free software, the authors don't owe you anything and you should quit whining and write your own interface. (Do this as patronisingly as possible.)
Bonus points will be awarded to those successfully diverting the flamewar onto the subject of GPL-vs-BSD, C-vs-C++, or emacs-vs-vi. The winner will be the first person to convincingly compare the name "GNU/Linux" with the Holocaust.
Region codes may seem ridiculous and bothersome to the consumer, but it prevents us from ordering movies and games from less well off places where they're sold for maybe $2 instead of paying $10-$20 here.
In Britain we pay typically £20-£30* for a new release (US $35-$50). We also just want to be able to buy movies and games from places where they're really cheap. But when we say that, we mean the USA.
Region coding is about making a huge profit, like you say. I'm just not so sure that you're the ones they're gouging...
* High-street price - they're cheaper online, obviously. But I'm assuming the $20 you cite is the high-street price in the US?
Entire new genres may be created (First Person Adventure, anyone?)
Er... you mean like Myst, Normality Inc, and Return to Zork - or, indeed, the whole Famicom Detective Club series, which were on Nintendo consoles 15 years ago?
Not precisely what I'd describe as "entirely new", but maybe you had something different in mind.
The CD drive in the original playstation was a terrible idea. Those things were slow. Loading times were terrible.
You weren't around in the days when games came on cassette tapes, were you?
You can buy Apple computers without an OS on them? I thought all Apple computers came with the proprietary OS X preinstalled. So, no different from a Windows XP box, if you want to run Linux - you're still paying* for an OS you don't need.
* Yeah, I know what this article's about. Nevertheless.
It's also because things might be considered copyrighted (e.g. Peter Pan in Britain), hateful (e.g. Nazism in Germany or France), or otherwise prohibited in one country but not in another.
But Britain, Germany, and Japan, three countries with wildly different rules and regulations about content and three different ratings/censorship systems, are all in the same DVD "region"! And even in games consoles, Britain is always in the same region as Germany, even though British law allows a large number of things that are illegal in Germany, and German versions of games are (I hear) often censored while British versions rarely are.
So, uh, exactly how is region coding supposed to have anything to do with helping governments enforce their local content regulations, given that there is absolutely no correlation whatsoever between the region codes and those content regulations?
However you still have to prevent it being redistributed, otherwise you *will* end up with "internet TV" sites putting these out without paying a penny, or simply ripped onto eDonkey or some other system. And most of those "internet TV" sites will inevitably be in Russia or somewhere else where rule of copyright law doesn't apply. So we're back to DRM again.
But any broadcast programme that people want to watch is already being ripped and distributed over just about any P2P system you care to name.
This cannot be emphasised too much: Downloadable content does not carry any new risks!
I can see that DRM is beneficial to copyright holders. I am open to the argument that it is beneficial to society, provided safeguards are put in place to ensure that the content will enter the public domain properly when its copyright expires. But the copyright holders do themselves no favours when they lie to us and pretend that DRM is a way for them to maintain the status quo, when it is really a way for them to increase the level of control they have over their work.
What if you just wanted to use a single function in your program that does something completely different? Is that still a derivative work? I'm sure that legally the answer would be yes, but it's an interesting mental exercise.
It's also basically only a mental exercise. I'm really, really struggling to think of a realistic situation in which it would be useful to take a single function, by itself, out of one program, and use it in a completely different program.
All I can think of are trivial utility functions, which (a) might well not be copyrightable due to being extremely short and essentially impossible to express in any other way, and (b) you're just going to pull from some bit of code you wrote yourself, not trawl through someone else's GPL'd software looking for.
Can you give an example of a realistic scenario where you could usefully copy someone else's code into your program, but still make a reasonable case that you weren't producing a derivative work?
There are safe ways to use GPL software, but using modified BSD licensed software can be done with no questions asked.
As long as you don't forget to reproduce the copyright notice, list of conditions, and disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with your software, you mean.
Are you saying that if I discovered the secret of eternal youth, then that wouldn't change the world, simply because it's not a new idea, people have been looking for it since the dawn of time?
To date, nobody has produced a major application that is used remotely over a public network. Therefore, if that is what Google and Sun have teamed up to produce, then that will be something new. Just because it's already been thought of doesn't mean that an implementation won't potentially be interesting.
This is to language learning what spellcheck is to essay writing, and long overdue.
Big horse spell chequers of god know floors at awl, an there eye deal four may king shore their's know miss takes inn Ann assay.
Spellcheckers can't turn hopeless spelling into beautiful prose: they are no substitute for a human proofreader. (And even a perfect spellchecker would be incapable of detecting real problems with an essay such as inappropriately colloquial language use, or an argument that made no sense.)
Likewise, it seems rather unlikely that robots will be a good substitute for a human teacher. Sorry, but so far, computers and human languages just don't go together well...
I have to wonder how functional languages such as Scheme or Tcl work at all with memory protection enabled. Not only do they tend to lack explicitly separate data and code, but they more-or-less depend on the ability to construct functions dynamically, as data, and then invoke them as code.
Simple - those are interpreted languages. The functions they construct dynamically and invoke as "code" are not actually machine code. The only actual machine code in the system is in the interpreter and language runtime, and those don't have to change. From the hardware's perspective, the "code" constructed and modified at runtime is quite literally just data.
For dynamically compiling runtimes that do need to construct and execute actual machine code at runtime, I belive many memory protection schemata include ways to bypass the protection. But that's not actually necessary just to use the language - it's an optimisation detail.
I hope they get what they deserve. Six weeks in hell.
Man, this sucks. When I was a lad, if you earned something it was yours. Buy a phonograph record? It's yours, you keep it, you play it as often as you like, wherever you like, till it wears out. Fall foul of a capricious deity? You're damned to hell for all eternity, where your soul shall be tormented in lakes of burning sulphur, yea, and your worm didn't die, nor was your fire quenched. Now it's all "DRM this" and "license that" and "purgatory the other". Your music expires after a month, the TV shows you record delete themselves the next day, and you can't even get into hell for more than six months at a time before you have to go out and sin some more!
As much as I care about fostering growth throughout the world, I'm sorry but I'm much more concerned over my nations well-being.
I was going to respond to this, but I can't find any way of expressing my opinion that wouldn't get me modded into oblivion. All I'll say is: read this back to yourself. Imagine you're a third-world peasant, dying of a preventable disease and watching your kids starve, and a rich American tourist passes through your village, and this is what he says to you. Does nationalism still sound like a noble ideal? Thought not.
Yeah, this is pretty off-topic, isn't it? Sorry, I kind of got sidetracked while I was still trying to figure out what the hell controlling an international public resource had to do with the well-being of the world's richest nation.
You can have all the views of the US you want, but to think lowly of us for protecting a national asset is a bit ridiculous in my opinion.
The issue here, see, is that we're talking about something called the Internet. That stands for "international", not "internal". The first servers were American, but different parts of the system have been developed by people all over the world. As several people have noted already, the WWW was invented by a Briton in Switzerland! There are people who use the Internet daily who have never even visited a site based in the USA. How on earth can this be a "national asset"? It's like claiming that because the Pacific borders on the US, and even surrounds one state completely, the world's surface water is an American national asset and your national security depends on America having exclusive control of all the world's oceans! It just doesn't add up, see?
At least with specifically enumerated individual rights, the courts can stop that asshole from infringing on your rights. This is only true in the US.
Really? How is this different from the European Convention on Human Rights, which enumerates specific individual rights and gives the courts the power to make it damn tough for governments to breach them?
I'm not going to deny that the US has a fine constitutional history, and I'm not going to deny that it protects the rights of law-abiding citizens as well as any other nation on Earth, and better than the vast majority (though its record for non-citizens is somewhat worse, and its treatment of criminals is not at all impressive). But you Americans need to get the idea that you're somehow "unique" out of your heads. You're not unique. There are many other nations where the rights of the individual are enumerated and protected. You're good, sure. You're even the best, if you select your criteria carefully enough. But you're not something so amazingly special that no other nation has ever come close to matching you. Sorry, but you're not.
For example, I remember reading that the PS2 didn't officially release in china for several years after it's introduction in Japan, but pirated ps2 hardware and games were widely available.
Um. The games I can understand, but how do you pirate hardware? I can see only three scenarios:
1. Real piracy. Gangs of Chinese sailors with eyepatches board cargo ships carrying PS2s that were intended to bring a little bit of joy into the lives of American orphans, callously slaughter the crew, and haul the booty away to sell on the cheap in village markets.
2. Software-type piracy. Using top-secret 3D scanning technology, a stolen PS2 is cloned at zero cost and distributed to eager peasants over magic nanotech P2P networks.
3. No piracy at all, but you used the word anyway because it sounds more serious that way. Maybe some kind of "grey market" import, or employees secretly flogging defective stock that Sony thought had been dumped in a landfill. Or whatever.
Or is there another option I haven't thought of? Cheap knockoff PS2 clones, perhaps, though the complete absence of any such thing in the Western black market (or of any references to them on Google) rather suggests that no such thing has ever been made.
I would never have thought that Haskell and Dylan would have even placed.
:P
I've been in a Java bubble for far too long. Time to burst that bubble and look into things like Ruby, Python, etc.
Given the context in which you're deciding to look outside your box, don't you think Haskell or Dylan might be more appropriate languages to look into?
I'd hope that a game that takes 6 days from design to completion would cost substantially less than $30. Maybe I'm just cheap.
Personally I'd prefer the price of a game to reflect its quality rather than the amount of work that went into it. If you offered me this for $30, or something like Daikatana for $3, I know which I'd choose - and my choice wouldn't be influenced by how long the games had taken to write!
That means that any application that you distribute that can access a MySQL database must be linked against the MySQL library, which is GPL, forcing your application to be GPL.
No it doesn't. The FLOSS License Exemption means that your application is not forced to be GPL if it uses any of 20 of the most popular free software licenses. The exempt licenses include the LGPL, the MIT and BSD licenses, the Mozilla license, the licenses for Perl, PHP, and Python... and the list goes on. In other words, the vast majority of free or open source software is able to link to the MySQL client library without being forced to change its license to the GPL.
This is a significant relaxation of the regular GPL terms. It even makes explicit allowances for users of the BSD license, the group that traditionally dislikes GPL software the most.
The only people who can complain about the MySQL licensing policy are freeloaders who want to benefit from free software without giving anything back to the developers or the community. You will, I trust, forgive me if I don't weep for such people.