Having developers on a merry-go-round between projects is probably a good reason why their products never make it past the Beta stage (which is terrible).
Compare Vista Beta to Gmail Beta. Not all Beta is created equal.
Google's Beta products seem much more stable and mature than just about any "release" software I've used. The biggest problem is that they still call them Beta, thus losing the mindshare of morons like you.
Is it a bad thing that they aren't officially finished?
I think the biggest problem with Google's "betas" is that they call them that.
After all, their standard of release-quality software is www.google.com. If anything reaches that level of stability, usability, and reliability, it's likely to do for its domain what google.com does for searching. If Spreadsheets was out of Beta, Excel would be dead.
Anyone claiming that piracy hurts their business is assuming that if piracy were impossible, a significant number of would-be pirates would buy the product instead.
So, Mr. Costikyan's assertion that Gametap hurts developers is assuming that you could actually sell the original Doom and Tomb Raider for $20.
Sorry, but for my $20, I'd much rather have a more recent game, like, say, Final Fantasy X. Or maybe an indie game -- Lugaru sells for $20. Or an episode of a state-of-the-art episodic game. What's more, people are willing to pay these prices for these games, and thus, Gametap won't be able to buy the rights to Lugaru or Half-Life 2 just yet.
Game developers and publishers are not stupid. If a game isn't selling because it's too old, it's far better to put it on Gametap -- or better, release the source. Id has realized that all of their games up to and including Quake 3 Arena are far too old to sell either the game or the engine. It is better for the industry as a whole to release source which benefits everyone than to hold tight to the few dollars you might still make, benefiting no one. It's certainly better for the consumer -- getting Doom to run on a modern computer in its original DOS form is not easy. Since we have the source, Doom will last as long as it has a cult following to keep updating the source.
I don't believe copyright should last anywhere near as long as it does. I don't believe you should be able to make a living off of royalties from a game or a song you wrote 20 years ago. Here's a hint: By the time a game ends up on GameTap, the developers should be working on a brand new game. Otherwise, they should be subjected to the same rule that applies to any other job -- no work means no pay.
you can't trust machine counts - they're too easily hacked and manipulated
This may be true with all methods of machine counts that you're aware of, but that's the ludicrous statement of a luddite to claim that no machine count can ever be trusted. Humans are much more easily bribed and manipulated than machines. Humans from both parties.
hand counting doesn't take that long, anyway.
It costs more money, though, and it does take some amount of time more. That said, I was pretty annoyed that Kerry conceded before the votes were actually counted.
we do it that way every election here in australia
Quick Google search shows population of Australia to be 20,090,437. Population of US is 295,734,134. That's a significant difference. Now, if I could find out how many actual votes were cast...
with the counting done by thousands of volunteers
Which is also thousands of opportunities to make mistakes, intentional or not.
a short delay (at worst) to eliminate a potential avenue of massive electoral fraud is worth it.
Oh, I agree, but it would be nice if we could have neither the delay nor the fraud.
in other words, electronic vote counting is a solution for a problem that doesn't exist.
Aside from the sheer cost, time, number of volunteers, and potential innaccuracy... No, I don't think electronic voting is wholly uncalled for. I do think that I don't know strong enough words for the level of negligence with which the US has treated voting in general -- from the chads and the butterfly ballot to the Diebold machines.
It's been said over and over again -- we treat our electronic slot machines and poker machines with much more scrutiny than we treat our voting machines. Frankly, I'd feel better trying to win the jackpot from a slot machine than simply trying to have my vote counted by a Diebold machine.
Yes, the law can be annoying that way. You're using the software, making it known that you use it shouldn't be such a problem. If you're afraid to advocate it, why are you using it? Certainly, advocating standards can't be a bad thing.
But I can understand -- it's government. It's not only completely out of your hands, it's likely completely out of any one person's hands at this point.
I wonder if your area would've had such problems with metadata, however.
I did not miss the point, but you seem to have entirely missed the irony. The "remake" point would be just as valid if he picked "Wild Wild West", but the statement wouldn't also immediately remind us of when Hollywood gets it right.
A shame that this has actually gone this far. Let's drop it, it was offtopic in the first place.
Open source is a good example. Most open source software doesn't attempt copy protection, because it would be very tricky to do. Most open source software is free. Thus, I am speaking of "no copy protection", not as in "a simple registration code, but you can still burn a CD", not as in "Checks for the CD, but doesn't check online", not as in "Can only be installed from one CD, but doesn't need the CD or Internet aftewards", but as in, absolutely none. I know of no incarnation of Firefox that has copy protection.
So, I'm sorry I offended your sensibilities, but I didn't think it needed further explanation.
I'm not, I'm just reflecting on how funny it is that you bring up a good movie to say how much hollywood sucks. You would seem to be contradicting yourself.
Before you flame back, please notice: You would seem to be contradicting yourself. I know very well what you mean.
Granted, but it's funny how you use LOTR to take a dig at Hollywood. There's so many movies to pick on (Dude, Where's my Car), but you picked movies this good to fight against?
I know people have attempted such a scheme with music. Has this been attempted (recently) with software? I'm not talking about weak protection -- Quake 4 can run without a CD/DVD by running on Linux, and without a (unique) valid key by adding one entry to the host file. I'm talking about none at all, like open source software, but for profit.
Not that I'm ungrateful, but we're honoring him for not causing total anihillation? Usually, we honor heroes for preventing someone else from destroying the world, not just from refraining from doing it ourselves.
I guess it's somewhat related to Jesus "saving" us -- from Hell, I assume? Yeah, thank you Jesus for not letting your Father burn us in the fires of Hell forever. Oh, wait, you are your father? Never mind...
is what they usually had to work with. So 96k was quite a bit more.
But, like everyone else, when they remove the restriction, they get lazy. I think there's one demo that's 5-10 megs, which they mostly fill with things like actual voice recordings for the audio. You can tell they're getting lazy, because they then redo something that looks much the same, only better, and in (again) 64k.
And there is actually someone doing a project -- don't remember what it was called, but the plan is to only design the street layout of major cities, and focus in on focal plot points, but otherwise procedurally generate a galaxy of planets, where each planet has as much detail as our own. The idea is to treat it as randomly generated, but start with the same seed each time, so it's more like a fractal. Such a game might even fit on a CD, would easily fit on a DVD, and would have much more sheer content than any PS3 game.
I'm not opposed to Blu-Ray, but I am opposed to spending more for it, especially when they'll likely be filling it with FMV until they are creating enough real content to fill it.
Don't hold your breath, though. Ian Carmack is going in completely the opposite direction. His concept is to create absolutely gigantic textures, even derive features of a level (shrubbery, trees, etc) from that texture, basically allowing the artists to be lazier, but the game will be much bigger.
Futurology is never accurate, because we never know which parts of technology will move faster. I've been watching a lot of Star Trek: TOS recently. Their computer sounds like a tin man -- ours can do much better voice synthesis -- but you can ask it to theorize based on the past 5 minutes of conversation. But it still works entirely with tapes. They can warp across space at incredible speed, and they can teleport, but they control it all through toggle switches and sliders -- no keyboards. They can beam down to the surface of a planet, but they have to use an elevator to get around the ship. And that's ignoring scientific problems -- how can a phaser completely vaporize a person, but not touch the floor they're standing on? They have something that looks oddly like a tablet PC, but it's twice as thick and looks plastic and bulky.
The reason futurology isn't accurate is that anyone can look at today's world and extrapolate where we'd expect technology to go, but no one can predict which technology will go there first. We can predict that computers will advance, but Star Trek didn't predict that we'd have incredibly powerful handheld computers by now, but still absolutely shitty AI. At least TNG's Data isn't actually created by our civilization.
Sometimes we get lucky, or we have especially insightful people, like George Orwell. I think that's more a combination of statistics and hindsight, though. We'll remember and laugh at the thousands of futurologists who got it wrong (Star Trek), but we'll also remember the ones who got it right and assume it was because they were brilliant, and not just because out of thousands of attempts, at least one has to be close to right.
Anyhow, back on topic. I think I can do better than this guy, because I'm actually somewhat up on this tech. Let's find out:
Actually, Sony is stupid, but more relevantly, having vaguely humanoid "companions" to do housework is likely. What's not likely is that you can count them as a percentage of population -- we still won't have good AI by then. You don't need good AI to have a good companion, though -- remember Virtual Pets?
He may be right about AI, but I doubt it. There's nothing magical about the human brain, but it's insanely powerful, and we are NOT anywhere close in terms of raw processing power -- you just think that because humans don't really know how to harness the more mathematical parts of our brains. So, not that soon.
Natural selection of algorithms doesn't imply intelligence, and you need to set up the algorithm to begin with. If you just have a robot sit down at a computer and hammer out billions of programs, what's the chance you'll get one even close to what you want? We may get closer, but the bulk of the structure of a program will be written by humans.
Now, if AI actually does start programming, if a human can just explain to a computer what we want (and not be caught by flaws in our own logic), that implies the computer really is as intelligent as a person. Thus, they won't need humans to tell them what to program -- we'd likely have robots as managers, an entire software company of robots (and I don't mean Microsoft). But it seems much more likely that we'll first develop a way to describe a program in plain English, but it will be incredibly dangerous, because inherent ambiguity in the language, and the difficutly of thinking logically, will make such a thing unreliable. The people who can use it reliably will prefer programming languages.
"Hacking a nervous system" will be a more serious problem than he suggests. It depends how deep the immersion goes, but even if it's entirely sensory (contact lenses rather than directly touching the brain), owning someone would mean the ability to brainwash them, or at least incapacitate them.
I don't know much about GMO, but there have been quite a lot of unintended consequences. I think it'll be a lot longer than 10-15 years before we're willing to risk human life on this, especially whe
After all, a small, independant game has a better shot at online distribution anyway. The only reason most games are rated is to get them into stores (or not), but if it's available as a download, there's no reason for it.
So... wait, did Sony lose? Or did they decide the lawsuit wasn't worth waiting for?
Still, it's not like it's hard to reach for anti-Sony truths. Last-ditch effort to add motion sensor, to compete with the Wii. Constant arrogance: "We're assholes, but people will buy it anyway." Insistance on Blu-Ray, insane price of the system and the games. And that's just the PS3.
PSP locked down, UMD, MiniDisc, the rootkit, PS2 "Linux kit"... need I go on?
If Sony had behaved like a semi-decent company, like -- I don't know, even Microsoft is better now -- then we'd probably be a bit more tolerant of things like this. We'd probably be going after Immersion (or whatever they're called) instead of Sony. As it is, they've managed to actually make the PS3 less appealing than the PS2, in some respects.
I think it's unprofessional. Would you want a watermark of the GIMP... coyote? whatever... and URL on your wedding pictures?
If that's all that you think is unprofessional, would it suffice to have the watermark embedded, invisibly, somewhere in the file? Could be done with stenography, or depending on the file type, it could be embedded in some sort of "comments" section.
More likely, just stick to what I said -- provide source code on request. Maybe have some sort of license or BSD-like license fragment accompany works created with GPL'd software. That way, you wouldn't be able to simply hand the image to someone else who's not using the Gimp, and have them distribute it, but refuse to say what it was created with. But you could still have a professional-looking website, just link to these terms in the copyright notice at the bottom of the page.
Come to think of it, I remember wanting to use a piece of free web code of some sort at work a few years back, and we decided not to because one of the license stipulations was that the logo appear on the page.
How big a logo?
I don't think that's unreasonable. There are quite a few very tiny logos that would actually fit neatly around that copyright notice, and link back to the product's homepage. You'd be supporting the software (Apache/PHP/Lighttpd/Perl/MySQL/Drupal/whatever), even the standards (Valid CSS, Valid XHTML), and barely impact the look and feel of your site.
Supporting the software is good and bad. Possibly bad because it could clue in your competitors to software they weren't aware of. Good because with more people using it, even your competitors, the software is likely to improve.
But I really don't see how including little buttons on a webpage for the software you use is considered unprofessional. How, exactly, does it hurt your professional image? I can see where you'd want the freedom not to do so...
I think it's probably a good way to form word-of-mouth for some stuff. But for a large portion of software (targetted at business, government), it's just not kosher.
Businesses and government don't benefit from word-of-mouth?
and the problem with that is that it enables vote buying and/or vote coercion, it undermines the secrecy of the ballot.
No, it doesn't, actually. It was quite an elegant solution, that I'd really like to see examined, as it does sound too good to be true. Basically, your receipt is printed in two parts, which are either on transparancies or close enough to them that you can see them through some sort of glass panel, and when the two are put together, they show the name of the candidate you voted for.
You then take half the receipt, and the other half is kept, or maybe destroyed. This means that neither half is enough to prove who you voted for -- only when they are together can you actually see the name. But, either half can be used to verify that your vote was counted, without actually revealing what that vote was. The verification is not very accurate, but it doesn't have to be, because if even a small portion (don't remember how much) attempt to verify, and if even a small portion of votes (again, don't remember how much) were falsified, at least some of the receipts will not verify.
electronic voting machines should print a paper ballot which the voter can examine to verify that their vote is correctly recorded - and then they deposit that paper ballot into the secure vote box where it becomes the *OFFICIAL* recorded vote which will later by counted by hand with scrutineers from multiple parties observing the count (the electronic tally in the machines being just an unofficial approximation)
This is nice, but it requires a hand count every time, defeating the purpose of the machine count. Also, it's not even close to the system I descibed, because if that system works, it would become possible for the voters themselves to verify, cryptographically, that the election was a fair one.
The problem is, I still can't actually find this system. Maybe it didn't hold up to scrutiny? It's a good idea nonetheless.
Let's see. I had my glasses on. I'm not sure how big the screen is in inches, but it measures roughly two cubits (elbow to fingertip), and my cubits are probably fairly average.
Standard TVs have a rather low resolution.
Fixed it for you. It was big, but CRT and not widescreen. It also was a good quality tape on a good quality VCR. I probably could tell the difference on my LCD monitor, but there are other considerations -- the TV's pixels aren't quite as focused or square, so it has sort of natural anti-aliasing. Also, the monitor is quite a bit smaller, and of much higher resolution -- at 1600x1200, I'm almost high def, and I can definitely tell the difference between scaled down 1080p and scaled up DVD.
It was also playing on a decent stereo, and I didn't notice a significant difference in sound quality. I imagine some was there, but if there was, not enough to matter.
In any case, I seriously doubt many people actually bought DVDs because of the difference in visual quality. I'm sure some did, but not a majority.
Unless you are Linus, I'm calling wrong on at least one count here. Linus doesn't care about the success of Linux, he cares about his ability to develop it. If he could develop Linux full time, with a team of maybe twenty or thirty people, he'd be happy. At least, that's roughly what he's said.
It would be nice to actually see some comments from Linus by now, though. It'll be a cold day in hell before he comes to Slashdot, but maybe we can at least find some quotes?
Actually, the spirit of the GPL has everything to do with hardware. It starts with RMS and a broken printer driver. He wanted to fix it, but it was proprietary -- he couldn't get his hands on the source code.
Certainly, the code isn't entirely useless, but the spirit of the GPL is: If I can run the software, I can modify the software. Modifying the software is pretty useless if you cannot run the modified code on the hardware for which it was intended. True, you could take the software and port it wholesale, but that's an entirely different world, more akin to Microsoft's "shared source" approach -- corporation to corporation, not one crazy innovating individual.
Actually, I agree with you. I was making the point that it makes sense to change the GPL to be effectively more restrictive than public domain for applications like this.
As for how much is PHP and how much is VM? I'm guessing they're about the same between PHP/Perl/Ruby and Java/.NET, and I know of almost no actual compiled web apps (as in c/c++).
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Compare Vista Beta to Gmail Beta. Not all Beta is created equal.
Google's Beta products seem much more stable and mature than just about any "release" software I've used. The biggest problem is that they still call them Beta, thus losing the mindshare of morons like you.
Is it a bad thing that they aren't officially finished?
I think the biggest problem with Google's "betas" is that they call them that.
After all, their standard of release-quality software is www.google.com. If anything reaches that level of stability, usability, and reliability, it's likely to do for its domain what google.com does for searching. If Spreadsheets was out of Beta, Excel would be dead.
Anyone claiming that piracy hurts their business is assuming that if piracy were impossible, a significant number of would-be pirates would buy the product instead.
So, Mr. Costikyan's assertion that Gametap hurts developers is assuming that you could actually sell the original Doom and Tomb Raider for $20.
Sorry, but for my $20, I'd much rather have a more recent game, like, say, Final Fantasy X. Or maybe an indie game -- Lugaru sells for $20. Or an episode of a state-of-the-art episodic game. What's more, people are willing to pay these prices for these games, and thus, Gametap won't be able to buy the rights to Lugaru or Half-Life 2 just yet.
Game developers and publishers are not stupid. If a game isn't selling because it's too old, it's far better to put it on Gametap -- or better, release the source. Id has realized that all of their games up to and including Quake 3 Arena are far too old to sell either the game or the engine. It is better for the industry as a whole to release source which benefits everyone than to hold tight to the few dollars you might still make, benefiting no one. It's certainly better for the consumer -- getting Doom to run on a modern computer in its original DOS form is not easy. Since we have the source, Doom will last as long as it has a cult following to keep updating the source.
I don't believe copyright should last anywhere near as long as it does. I don't believe you should be able to make a living off of royalties from a game or a song you wrote 20 years ago. Here's a hint: By the time a game ends up on GameTap, the developers should be working on a brand new game. Otherwise, they should be subjected to the same rule that applies to any other job -- no work means no pay.
Yes, John Carmack. I think I somehow managed to confuse him with Ian of Freenet. It was 3 or 4 AM, so I'm not surprised.
This may be true with all methods of machine counts that you're aware of, but that's the ludicrous statement of a luddite to claim that no machine count can ever be trusted. Humans are much more easily bribed and manipulated than machines. Humans from both parties.
It costs more money, though, and it does take some amount of time more. That said, I was pretty annoyed that Kerry conceded before the votes were actually counted.
Quick Google search shows population of Australia to be 20,090,437. Population of US is 295,734,134. That's a significant difference. Now, if I could find out how many actual votes were cast...
Which is also thousands of opportunities to make mistakes, intentional or not.
Oh, I agree, but it would be nice if we could have neither the delay nor the fraud.
Aside from the sheer cost, time, number of volunteers, and potential innaccuracy... No, I don't think electronic voting is wholly uncalled for. I do think that I don't know strong enough words for the level of negligence with which the US has treated voting in general -- from the chads and the butterfly ballot to the Diebold machines.
It's been said over and over again -- we treat our electronic slot machines and poker machines with much more scrutiny than we treat our voting machines. Frankly, I'd feel better trying to win the jackpot from a slot machine than simply trying to have my vote counted by a Diebold machine.
Yes, the law can be annoying that way. You're using the software, making it known that you use it shouldn't be such a problem. If you're afraid to advocate it, why are you using it? Certainly, advocating standards can't be a bad thing.
But I can understand -- it's government. It's not only completely out of your hands, it's likely completely out of any one person's hands at this point.
I wonder if your area would've had such problems with metadata, however.
I did not miss the point, but you seem to have entirely missed the irony. The "remake" point would be just as valid if he picked "Wild Wild West", but the statement wouldn't also immediately remind us of when Hollywood gets it right.
A shame that this has actually gone this far. Let's drop it, it was offtopic in the first place.
Open source is a good example. Most open source software doesn't attempt copy protection, because it would be very tricky to do. Most open source software is free. Thus, I am speaking of "no copy protection", not as in "a simple registration code, but you can still burn a CD", not as in "Checks for the CD, but doesn't check online", not as in "Can only be installed from one CD, but doesn't need the CD or Internet aftewards", but as in, absolutely none. I know of no incarnation of Firefox that has copy protection.
So, I'm sorry I offended your sensibilities, but I didn't think it needed further explanation.
I'm not, I'm just reflecting on how funny it is that you bring up a good movie to say how much hollywood sucks. You would seem to be contradicting yourself.
Before you flame back, please notice: You would seem to be contradicting yourself. I know very well what you mean.
Most popular fiction has a plot summary on Wikipedia. Go look it up. No, I won't give you a link, you lazy bastard.
Granted, but it's funny how you use LOTR to take a dig at Hollywood. There's so many movies to pick on (Dude, Where's my Car), but you picked movies this good to fight against?
You need help!
I know people have attempted such a scheme with music. Has this been attempted (recently) with software? I'm not talking about weak protection -- Quake 4 can run without a CD/DVD by running on Linux, and without a (unique) valid key by adding one entry to the host file. I'm talking about none at all, like open source software, but for profit.
Not that I'm ungrateful, but we're honoring him for not causing total anihillation? Usually, we honor heroes for preventing someone else from destroying the world, not just from refraining from doing it ourselves.
I guess it's somewhat related to Jesus "saving" us -- from Hell, I assume? Yeah, thank you Jesus for not letting your Father burn us in the fires of Hell forever. Oh, wait, you are your father? Never mind...
Oh, that's not the problem. The problem is I'm over-engineering it.
is what they usually had to work with. So 96k was quite a bit more.
But, like everyone else, when they remove the restriction, they get lazy. I think there's one demo that's 5-10 megs, which they mostly fill with things like actual voice recordings for the audio. You can tell they're getting lazy, because they then redo something that looks much the same, only better, and in (again) 64k.
And there is actually someone doing a project -- don't remember what it was called, but the plan is to only design the street layout of major cities, and focus in on focal plot points, but otherwise procedurally generate a galaxy of planets, where each planet has as much detail as our own. The idea is to treat it as randomly generated, but start with the same seed each time, so it's more like a fractal. Such a game might even fit on a CD, would easily fit on a DVD, and would have much more sheer content than any PS3 game.
I'm not opposed to Blu-Ray, but I am opposed to spending more for it, especially when they'll likely be filling it with FMV until they are creating enough real content to fill it.
Don't hold your breath, though. Ian Carmack is going in completely the opposite direction. His concept is to create absolutely gigantic textures, even derive features of a level (shrubbery, trees, etc) from that texture, basically allowing the artists to be lazier, but the game will be much bigger.
Futurology is never accurate, because we never know which parts of technology will move faster. I've been watching a lot of Star Trek: TOS recently. Their computer sounds like a tin man -- ours can do much better voice synthesis -- but you can ask it to theorize based on the past 5 minutes of conversation. But it still works entirely with tapes. They can warp across space at incredible speed, and they can teleport, but they control it all through toggle switches and sliders -- no keyboards. They can beam down to the surface of a planet, but they have to use an elevator to get around the ship. And that's ignoring scientific problems -- how can a phaser completely vaporize a person, but not touch the floor they're standing on? They have something that looks oddly like a tablet PC, but it's twice as thick and looks plastic and bulky.
The reason futurology isn't accurate is that anyone can look at today's world and extrapolate where we'd expect technology to go, but no one can predict which technology will go there first. We can predict that computers will advance, but Star Trek didn't predict that we'd have incredibly powerful handheld computers by now, but still absolutely shitty AI. At least TNG's Data isn't actually created by our civilization.
Sometimes we get lucky, or we have especially insightful people, like George Orwell. I think that's more a combination of statistics and hindsight, though. We'll remember and laugh at the thousands of futurologists who got it wrong (Star Trek), but we'll also remember the ones who got it right and assume it was because they were brilliant, and not just because out of thousands of attempts, at least one has to be close to right.
Anyhow, back on topic. I think I can do better than this guy, because I'm actually somewhat up on this tech. Let's find out:
After all, a small, independant game has a better shot at online distribution anyway. The only reason most games are rated is to get them into stores (or not), but if it's available as a download, there's no reason for it.
Now to actually make a game in the first place...
So... wait, did Sony lose? Or did they decide the lawsuit wasn't worth waiting for?
Still, it's not like it's hard to reach for anti-Sony truths. Last-ditch effort to add motion sensor, to compete with the Wii. Constant arrogance: "We're assholes, but people will buy it anyway." Insistance on Blu-Ray, insane price of the system and the games. And that's just the PS3.
PSP locked down, UMD, MiniDisc, the rootkit, PS2 "Linux kit"... need I go on?
If Sony had behaved like a semi-decent company, like -- I don't know, even Microsoft is better now -- then we'd probably be a bit more tolerant of things like this. We'd probably be going after Immersion (or whatever they're called) instead of Sony. As it is, they've managed to actually make the PS3 less appealing than the PS2, in some respects.
If that's all that you think is unprofessional, would it suffice to have the watermark embedded, invisibly, somewhere in the file? Could be done with stenography, or depending on the file type, it could be embedded in some sort of "comments" section.
More likely, just stick to what I said -- provide source code on request. Maybe have some sort of license or BSD-like license fragment accompany works created with GPL'd software. That way, you wouldn't be able to simply hand the image to someone else who's not using the Gimp, and have them distribute it, but refuse to say what it was created with. But you could still have a professional-looking website, just link to these terms in the copyright notice at the bottom of the page.
How big a logo?
I don't think that's unreasonable. There are quite a few very tiny logos that would actually fit neatly around that copyright notice, and link back to the product's homepage. You'd be supporting the software (Apache/PHP/Lighttpd/Perl/MySQL/Drupal/whatever), even the standards (Valid CSS, Valid XHTML), and barely impact the look and feel of your site.
Supporting the software is good and bad. Possibly bad because it could clue in your competitors to software they weren't aware of. Good because with more people using it, even your competitors, the software is likely to improve.
But I really don't see how including little buttons on a webpage for the software you use is considered unprofessional. How, exactly, does it hurt your professional image? I can see where you'd want the freedom not to do so...
Businesses and government don't benefit from word-of-mouth?
No, it doesn't, actually. It was quite an elegant solution, that I'd really like to see examined, as it does sound too good to be true. Basically, your receipt is printed in two parts, which are either on transparancies or close enough to them that you can see them through some sort of glass panel, and when the two are put together, they show the name of the candidate you voted for.
You then take half the receipt, and the other half is kept, or maybe destroyed. This means that neither half is enough to prove who you voted for -- only when they are together can you actually see the name. But, either half can be used to verify that your vote was counted, without actually revealing what that vote was. The verification is not very accurate, but it doesn't have to be, because if even a small portion (don't remember how much) attempt to verify, and if even a small portion of votes (again, don't remember how much) were falsified, at least some of the receipts will not verify.
This is nice, but it requires a hand count every time, defeating the purpose of the machine count. Also, it's not even close to the system I descibed, because if that system works, it would become possible for the voters themselves to verify, cryptographically, that the election was a fair one.
The problem is, I still can't actually find this system. Maybe it didn't hold up to scrutiny? It's a good idea nonetheless.
Let's see. I had my glasses on. I'm not sure how big the screen is in inches, but it measures roughly two cubits (elbow to fingertip), and my cubits are probably fairly average.
Fixed it for you. It was big, but CRT and not widescreen. It also was a good quality tape on a good quality VCR. I probably could tell the difference on my LCD monitor, but there are other considerations -- the TV's pixels aren't quite as focused or square, so it has sort of natural anti-aliasing. Also, the monitor is quite a bit smaller, and of much higher resolution -- at 1600x1200, I'm almost high def, and I can definitely tell the difference between scaled down 1080p and scaled up DVD.
It was also playing on a decent stereo, and I didn't notice a significant difference in sound quality. I imagine some was there, but if there was, not enough to matter.
In any case, I seriously doubt many people actually bought DVDs because of the difference in visual quality. I'm sure some did, but not a majority.
Unless you are Linus, I'm calling wrong on at least one count here. Linus doesn't care about the success of Linux, he cares about his ability to develop it. If he could develop Linux full time, with a team of maybe twenty or thirty people, he'd be happy. At least, that's roughly what he's said.
It would be nice to actually see some comments from Linus by now, though. It'll be a cold day in hell before he comes to Slashdot, but maybe we can at least find some quotes?
Actually, the spirit of the GPL has everything to do with hardware. It starts with RMS and a broken printer driver. He wanted to fix it, but it was proprietary -- he couldn't get his hands on the source code.
Certainly, the code isn't entirely useless, but the spirit of the GPL is: If I can run the software, I can modify the software. Modifying the software is pretty useless if you cannot run the modified code on the hardware for which it was intended. True, you could take the software and port it wholesale, but that's an entirely different world, more akin to Microsoft's "shared source" approach -- corporation to corporation, not one crazy innovating individual.
Actually, I agree with you. I was making the point that it makes sense to change the GPL to be effectively more restrictive than public domain for applications like this.
As for how much is PHP and how much is VM? I'm guessing they're about the same between PHP/Perl/Ruby and Java/.NET, and I know of almost no actual compiled web apps (as in c/c++).