Slashdot Mirror

The simple way you "can tell what the truth is", is that every single other person associated with censorware.org has wanted Michael Sims to stop playing dog-in-the-manger with the censorware.org domain name. And not only has he refused, he's now turned it into a smear-site. Note this does not depend on whether or not you believe I am sane.

It's instructive to look at, e.g. Jonathan Wallace's account, and a public comment by Jamie McCarthy. This isn't objective proof, though, because we all could be ganging-up on Michael Sims (pile-ons have happened, Michael Sims is trying to create one on me).

I categorically deny the accusations of spamming Slashdot and similar. And the way to know the truth of that is simple logic. If he had anything, anything, serious on me, he'd be making maximum use of it. When you break it down, the only thing he has, is much calling me names, and that other people have called me names. In contrast, he still has the censorware.org registration

If you want, we can take this to e-mail.

The original website http://www.trippingtherift.com/ seems to currently be down (I'd guess it's getting a sci-fi channel revamp, or something, since a via-google slashdotting seems unlikely) but it can still be reached thanks to the wayback machine

or you can visit Google's cached version of the downloads page to download the episode 1 movie

Thanks to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, the hop-on.com.au website is still acessible. Just click here to see a copy of the website from May, 10, 2000.

Yes, it's the SAME logo, and the same style of inflated claims on the web page (the portal of the future, massive content, loads of freebies). To me, this makes it clear that the disposable phones are fake. Too bad, it could be a good idea.

Thanks to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, the hop-on.com.au website is still acessible. Just click here to see a copy of the website from May, 10, 2000.

Yes, it's the SAME logo, and the same style of inflated claims on the web page (the portal of the future, massive content, loads of freebies). To me, this makes it clear that the disposable phones are fake. Too bad, it could be a good idea.

Makes you wonder how many of these anthems were as a result of some Dilbertism in the workplace... Hmmm.....

Two lazy bastards. http://cryptome.org/dirty-hope.htm
http://cryptome.org/dirt-feedback.htm
http://cryptome.org/dirt-author.htm
http://cryptome.org/dirt-safrica.htm

I personally heard the CTO of this company promise that this firewall would essentially solve all network security problems and almost anything else you want (excluding world hunger) almost one year ago. He said it would be done last summer. The product page hasn't change a word in that time either. Don't believe me, check the way back machine.

Yeah, there's not much there in the google cache. I checked over at the Internet Wayback Machine and there is an older listing for the site, but heck... every little bit helps I guess.

Yeah, there's not much there in the google cache. I checked over at the Internet Wayback Machine and there is an older listing for the site, but heck... every little bit helps I guess.

The site maybee slashdoted, but you can still look at it with the help of archive.org http://web.archive.org/web/20010721190400/http://t hespamletters.com

You can browse within the cache at archive.org... Try this.

Even the Internet Wayback Machine with its 10 billion web pages can claim only 100 TB (.1 PB). We could fit thirteen archives on it.

A use for this type of power and storage is simulating nuclear detonation. It's possible we noo longer have to actually detonate nukes on a test basis.

I think you're off base. I just used the Wayback Machine to look at PC Magazine from March 1997. Typical is the Dell Dimension XPS P200s which, at $3179, sported a 200MHz PPro and 32MB of SDRAM. Cut those numbers in half to find what a true five-year-old POS would be like, and then consider that a lot of people are still stuck with even older machines than that. Obviously we don't expect such a machine to keep up even with your machine that has 4x the MHz and 12x the MB (not to mention better I/O and who knows what other improvements) let alone a modern machine, but there's no reason a god-damned window manager or file browser shouldn't run just fine on it...and apparently they don't.

UPDATE: This seems to be a concerted effort to remove xenu.net from ALL search engines. The site is no longer in the Yahoo! Directory or archive.org. "Per request of the site owner" my ass.

-Lx?

• Blocked Site Error.

  Per the request of the site owner, http://xenu.net/index.html is no longer available in the Wayback Machine. Try another request...

Taken from NaN's March 1999 web page:

Commitment

Thanks to the enthusiastic support of Unix/Linux/FreeBSD users worldwide,
Blender has become the popular tool it is now. The current userbase is
very important for NaN. That's why I make this promise:

If NaN stops or fails, the sources will be GPL-ed immediately.
Blender won't be sold to another company without guarantees it continues
developement within the current open and free strategies. When NaN
becomes a big succes, you can count on me being insane enough to continue
what I did last year: choosing what is best for Blender, looking for
exciting different ways to proceed and just having a lot of fun!

Ton Roosendaal NaN march 1999

Not only does google sort it--- the wayback machine does backups. That's what I call best of breed solutions.

It is well understood that the more times you see an image, the more likely you are to purchase its related product when you are wandering down the store aisles, wondering what to purchase. You've had the moment when you're standing in front of seven different brands of raisin brans, and you opt for one or another, little calculating that the one you purchased was simply imprinted upon your brain more times in recent advertising.

Google strides like a valiant and noble knight, a Don Quixote on a mission from heaven, to clear the mindscape of all those lurching, fragmented thoughts: "buy me!" "buy me!" "buy me!"

Like a gift from another universe, where things are cleaner, and evaluated by merit rather than popularity, Google presents an elaborate algorithm for sorting websites into fields of clarity. So insightful is their methodology, other larger search engines have bowed to this upstart. Even the mighty Yahoo, the first big engine on the 'net, has Google under the hood. So do a dozen other search engines, and thousands of sites who have turned their proprietary search functions over to the agile Google churner. AltaVista, Lycos, metacrawlers, and a few other great ones keep the American principle of competition solid, yet here we behold the miracle of Google.

We programmers watched Google come from behind, for we needed a relevance-based engine long before anyone else did: we had to have it so we could put it in the hands of others who needed our services; we were developers: we knew the information was out there, and were willing to spend hours tracking it down. Somewhere along the way, we'd stumble across this small search engine called Google, and discover that it turned up amazingly relevant searches, time and time again. No advertising. Quick.

So we bookmarked it, then we earmarked it, and finally we began to deliver the most precious kind of advertising which can be earned: we told our friends about it. And we delighted in the lack of advertising. Truly a geek's machine; sleek and relevant.

We watched the Internet bubble come crashing down around its own self- exuberance; we all know at least one programmer humbled by the rapid withdrawal of venture capital.

And so we watch Google carefully now, knowing that it is still bearing fruit for its venture capital investors, yet also knowing that our economy is continuing to draw inward, and as carefully as we form our sentences regarding the future of our welfare... we hold our breath when we visit Google each day for its wealth of free, friendly, and advertising-free three billion interrelated facets of information.

We watched Google handle the September 11 tragedy, worried that it might spark them into becoming a news portal, since their cache ability made them compete with sites like CNN which were swamped with 50,000 hits per second... and we saw Google come out cleanly, building on the crisis in a noble, not-capitalizing-on-the-crisis, manner. Now you can visit Google and find current information; it's a portal, yet ever so quietly, since there are no advertisements. Portals have become synonymous with a barrage of advertising, so what do we call this gallant creature who will not stoop to capitalism?

It's just a humble search engine: A search engine which points the way into a future with a clean mindscape. We may not all make it there; spammers prove that they'll come into such a future kicking and screaming for attention, and since we know that we all have to arrive together or else we none of us can arrive, we tolerate them.

Yes, we hold our breath each time we visit Google, lest they make that sad plunge into our noisy world instead of rising above it. And we are continually surprised by the improvements which they are making. These are not trivial improvements, simple cosmetic additions; one by one they have expanded our notion of how powerful a search engine can be, how it can nimbly reach into the deepest crevices of the Internet and produce a slew of relevant information on obscure topics. Search within groups. Search for images. Search only for images which are wallpaper sized from sites in Europe and are black and white.

The essence of the Internet, the information revolution, has somehow been bestowed upon the novel minds working for Google. We look at their job offerings, and yearn for the day when we can deserve such benevolence as to work for Google. Certainly only the best of the best work for Google (or id). They play hockey in their parking lots, and eat catered food every day. Ah, there we begin holding our breath. We like to have fun at work, but too much fun is a sign of venture capital.

How do they do it, how do they keep going, and going, and going without losing integrity by selling ads or trying to do too much? Google quietly inspires us to consider a world without advertising. Oh, they take advertising alright, yet look at it: it's extremely targeted, intended to be relevant to the searcher. With a thick black line separating advertising and content. No advertiser images. None of this irrelevant barrage. Looking for a new ISP? Here's twenty links, and over here in the corner, ten folks who've paid us money to be listed when you search for ISPs. Google drew a distinct line between the advertiser content and their own content. And they steadfastly looked toward our needs when they tolerated no images. Text- based. Get the information into the hand of the gentleman while he needs it, and trust that he will come back later with a thank-you note in hand.

Well, here is one thank you note. I hold my breath each time I visit Google, and I use it extensively, and have for years. I was Googling when Google wasn't yet cool, and I'm delighted to see it surviving. I hope they remain solid in their condition of accepting no image-based advertisements, and pray they will continue to inspire us with clarity on the concept of what it means to serve.

The cache concept, now firmly entrenched in the way we conceive of the Internet, is perhaps the greatest aspect of the information revolution: You once published a site, but now it is defunct. Or your site is presently being slashdotted or DOS'd. No problem, visit the Google cache for the site, and there's your info, as clear and sometimes quicker than the original version. The folks at archive.org have taken this idea and run with it, yet I must admit the first time I realized how profoundly differently we were going to be processing information in the future came when I understood what Google was doing with their cache. I prayed then, and the prayer was answered, that the cache would not be shut down because of re-publishing rights issues. Now Google has enough momentum that it would take an act of Congress to shut off their caching.

Take a look at Google. Unlike most companies with bold pretty mission statements hiding inner corruption, Google somehow matches their ten operating principles with immediate proof. They do it right; they work hard for their money.

How much ass does Google kick? All of it.

Remember when searching the Internet was hard? The dark days when we relied on dumb-as-sand machine intelligences, like those on the back-ends of AltaVista and Lycos, to rank the documents that matched our keywords? The grim era before Google, when searching was a spew of boolean mumbo-jumbo, NEAR this, NOT that, AND the other?

God, that sucked.

Lucky for the Internet, Google figured out the One True Way to make sense of the Internet, to defeat gamers of the system and send info-free brochureware plummeting to number n - 1 out of n results.

They did it with our help. Google's near-magical ordering of the Internet is built around the notion that computers are good at doing repetitive, uncreative things -- fetishistically counting things, for example -- and rotten at understanding why they're being asked to do these boring tasks. By contrast, human beings are great at understanding why they're doing something, but they're woefully deficient in the do-the-same-thing-perfectly-and-forever department.

AltaVista tried to get computers to do both the repetitive parts (capturing billions of documents) and the creative parts (figuring out what the documents are about). This yielded the largest collection of randomly organized documents in the world, a Web-accessible version of a library where all the books have been re-shelved by axe-grinding illiterates who wanted to make sure that no matter what you were looking for, you'd find porn.

Yahoo tried just the opposite, getting human beings to manually identify and describe all the documents comprising what was meant to be an exhaustive index of all the worthwhile pages on the Web. There were "scaling issues" involved in this laudable effort (for "scaling issues" here, substitute "catastrophic failures"), and over time, Yahoo's directory dwindled to an increasingly marginal sliver of the Internet's vastness. At the rate that Yahoo's army of indexers work, and at the rate that the Internet's unwashed horde of writers is adding to the noosphere, it's only a matter of a few years before every human being alive will have to pass his or her every working hour contributing to Yahoo's index, just to keep its sliver from dwindling into utter pointlessness.

Let humans do what they do; let computers do the same.

Google bridges the divide between human-generated indexes and machine-generated analysis.

Y'see, the Web is full of people like you and me, making links between documents; human beings, making decisions about documents, voting with their links. When I link to some arbitrary document, it's an indication that I think that it's in some way authoritative. When you link to a document I wrote, you're indicating that I'm in some way authoritative. The Internet is already structured in a meaningful way, but that structure is obscured. Google teases out the relationship between the URLs, examining the webs of authority: this person is linked to by 50,000 others, and he links to this other person over here, which indicates that person one is a pretty sharp individual, one who's inspired 50,000 human beings to take time out of their busy schedules to link to him; and person one thinks that person two is on the ball, which suggests that person two knows what she's on about.

It's a best-of-both-worlds solution. The computers at Google are asked to tirelessly count and re-count the number and destination of links on every page that Scooter, the Googlebot, can lay its user-agent on. Those links are made by human beings, doing what they do best, link by link, drip by drip, layering a film of order over the Internet.

The approach works well. Eerily well. Enter a couple of search terms, and biff-bam, the most authoritative documents containing those keywords are served up in an instant. Nearly every document on the Web has a human decision associated with it for Google to glom onto; that's because nearly every document on the Web has a human author. Human authors don't just put documents onto the Web; they put them into the Web, into the meshed hairball of incoming and outgoing links, indicating not only what keywords the document contains, but also who the document's author believes is authoritative, and vice versa.

It's quite elegant.

An imperfect forgettery

Meatspace ASCII, the revered printed word, has many things going for it:

• It's high-resolution: Whether scrawled with a toddler's crayon or hammered out by a quaint, humming Selectric's print-ball, a traditionally printed word is an order of magnitude sharper and better-defined than the phosphors marching across your screen.
• It requires no specialized reader: A printed word can be read by any literate human being during daylight hours without any particular technological assist, specialized readers, or even electricity.
• It is hard to make obsolete: Printed works don't staledate the way that electronic words do. It's difficult to apply "digital rights management" schemes to the printed word that will stymie generations to come with bizarre cryptosystems that seek to circumvent posterity.

As someone in possession of tens of thousands of books, I understand why people get misty and sentimental about dead-tree libraries. As someone who has moved twice in the past 18 months, I feel compelled to point out that the printed word has a couple of major downsides:

• It is fragile: We print books on the same substrate we employ for cleaning our nether regions after excreting. Think about that for a second: Paper is considered degradable enough to flush billions of sheets of it down the crapper every day, and yet we entrust our precious words to a material that auto-incinerates if you put it into contact with oxygen.

  Well, so what? We've got mass production techniques that will let us preserve our most important documents by making millions of copies of them. Which brings us to the next problem:

• It is bulky. Moving-box companies sell specialized shipping boxes for books, boxes that are smaller than all the other species of boxen. That's because books are freakin' heavy. They're made from trees!

Every year, storage media increases in density, decreases in size, and gets cheaper. I can fit all the hard drives of all the computers I've owned, plus all the floppies for all the computers that I owned before hard drives were common, onto the hard drive of my latest laptop, with storage to spare. Hell, most of that stuff will fit on my iPod! The data that previously occupied a roomful of storage devices now fits comfortably in my pocket.

In a world of degradable storage, replicating copies is the surest way to guarantee longevity. Whether your data is in atoms or bits, the more copies you make of it and the more widely you disperse it, the greater the likelihood that your data will persist forever. (That's why Jaron Lanier jokingly proposed encoding printed matter into the DNA of the notoriously prolific cockroach, as a means of ensuring archives through a nuclear war and beyond.)

With bulky printed words, only the commercially successful (and hence prolific) and very lucky works are likely to survive the voyage through history. All the words we write try to crowd into the lifeboat, but only a lucky few survive.

The historical forgettery is something of a blessing, though. Many's the word that's been penned, in casual correspondence or published works, that is best forgotten. I know that I've written a few things I'd rather no one ever saw. Much of it is embarrassing; most of it is banal. History flenses away the great bulk of utterance and leaves behind a barely manageable archive that we can get our heads around.

Words-as-bytes need not be forgotten! Storage is cheap, storage is compact, and the lifeboat has got plenty of room for every jot and tittle keyed into the Internet. Brewster Kahle built an archive with several copies of the Web at different times, using off-the-shelf PCs and standard drives.

This is a good thing, but it's also a pain in the ass. Our embarrassing excesses, drunken rants, typos and brain farts and flames no longer vanish into our sub-consciences, but rather hang around like embarrassing relatives, undeniably ours, with us forever.

There's an upside, of course. The enduring presence of our publicly stated positions acts as an accountability system, making us own up to our errors and perhaps encouraging us to think carefully before putting our fingers on our keyboards. Old Usenet clients used to have a standard warning that would appear the first time you used Usenet to send a message, a dire warning to the effect that your words were about to pass from your computer and onto the computers of thousands of other people, and are you really sure that you've expressed yourself adequately?

Perfect surveillance

Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn features Lionel Essrog, a private detective with Tourette's Syndrome whose obsessive-compulsive illness makes him ideal for long, boring stake outs and wiretap parties. Once the compulsion to listen for a keyword in the soup of a rambling conversation or to continually re-check a staked-out doorway for a suspect has been planted in Lionel's Tourettic brain, he is unable to do anything except listen and watch until the compulsion has been satisfied.

Boring, repetitive, endless tasks don't actually require someone with a compulsive disorder to do them; computers can do them just fine. A computer can sieve through the torrent of packets passing over the Internet and look for keywords like "terrorism" and "anthrax" and "fissile" and "child-porn," then flag them for later consideration by law-enforcement officials at spooky three-letter agencies.

Law enforcement doesn't really need any specialized equipment to surveil the average netizen. Google does it better than anything else possibly could (dirty snitch), and it doesn't cost a cent.

But Google only acts on the public data that human beings are free to link to and that the Googlebot is free to discover. Private documents (email, instant messages, internal memos) are off-limits to Google. Even if you manually poured them down the Googlebot's throat, the absence of incoming or outgoing links to these documents means that they won't be placed in any meaningful context in the Googleverse.

Increasingly, law-enforcement agencies are pushing for (or owning up to) the creation of really creepy spyware projects like Eschelon, Magic Lantern, and Carnivore, systems that are placed on your computer, at your ISP or at a major Internet backbone, and used to indiscriminately capture all of the data they encounter, shunting it off to shadowy bunkers where the secret masters of the universe can use it to shine a light up the skirts of your privacy and, possibly, that of criminals, too.

People are, rightfully, very upset about all of this. Continuous wiretapping of the entire Internet is a revolting idea, something like the Panopticon, a prison where the warders can see your every move from perfect obscurity. It's enough to make you want to draw your blinds and curl up under the sofa.

AltaVista for them, Google for us

But what do they do with all of that data that they collect? Filter it for keywords? Fat chance. The volume of false positives (e.g., people talking about child pornography who aren't child pornographers) far exceeds the volume of actual criminal activity. Even creaky old Lycos gave up on plain-old keyword matching a long, long time ago.

Maybe they manually check it. After all, that approach worked for Yahoo, right? Oh, right, it didn't work. Scratch that.

Then they must use some hybrid approach: human editors and AI (Artificial Intelligence or Almost Implemented, take your pick) working in concert to tweeze out the most relevant material as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Right. AltaVista.

Poor bastards.

Now this is some old news.

Inspired by your comment, I went back and looked up
CmdrTaco's old homepage. What a kick in the pants! :)

One of the questions was about whether there was an archives of the first slashdot page.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://slashdot.org appears to go back as far as 21 Dec 1997, but when I try to view the older pages, I get a blank document. Maybe a temporary glitch? You can see pages from earch 1998, in any case.

On March 14, 2001, BountyQuest announced that while no one had uncovered the prior art that would invalidate Amazon's 1-click patent , a few were able to surface information that could make the patent more difficult to enforce A pyhrric victory? Perhaps, but one that has called attention to the exponential growth in overly-broad and often questionable patents.

What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Check out this mirror: http://web.archive.org/web/20020306130830/http://w ww.ipodorganizer.com/

Orange

I managed to find the story here.

Unfortunately, in this current climate, a new amendment - "one dollar, one vote" is much more likely... http://web.archive.org/*/http://www.army.mil/leade rs/Secarmy/bio.htm

Alternately, apt-get install bnetd still works, and I'm sharing the latest development version (bnetd-0.4.25pre3.tar.gz) on the OpenFT network, in case they take it off sourceforge. Someone should stick it into Freenet too.

I think that history is fun.

Apple rocks.

Ok, so I've known a number of people in my life, but this is the first time any of them have ever did anything which warranted their appearance on the infamous slashdot. So, with my knowledge of a grand total of TWO of the players, I want to ask you, what do you think this guy is up to?

Ok, sure, it's a cool hack... blah blah blah, but you're all missing the most important point of discussion, does or does not Marco Carbone look like Jon Favreau (of Swingers fame):

Picture of Marco Carbone: here.
Picture of Jon Favreau: here.

There's almost certainly some sort of conspiracy afoot.

PS. I attempted to find a picture of Marco Carbone as a dog, but alas the wayback machine failed me.

Q: What degree of diligence did BountyQuest exert in trying to understand the very high profile 1-Click submissions? Were people contacted who had actually used or were at least familiar with the prior art described in the submissions? (Submitted by Edie)

TOR: Again, I can't really answer for BountyQuest. However, I imagine that they used the same criteria a court would use, namely to read the documents and to do "pattern matching" on them.

Q: Of the four entries cited specifically by number as "Terrific Submissions" by BountyQuest, Tim O'Reilly chose to exclude only one - #25, which referred to anIBM mainframe system -- from receiving a portion of the $10,000 "unofficial" award, even though it's arguably the most similar to the Amazon patent and represents prior art that Jeff Bezos could have personally used or seen earlier in his mainframe days. Why? (Submitted by Ted)

TOR: Well, I actually thought the Doonesbury cartoon was the best example - it made it pretty clear to me that 1-click shopping was an "obvious" idea. But as programmers say on the net, IANAL (I am not a lawyer), and the lawyers at BountyQuest obviously didn't think that it would pass muster in a court of law as evidence of prior art.

But as to the specific entry you mention - # 25 - it isn't at all clear to me how it's relevant. I didn't read every page, but in scanning through it, I didn't see much evidence of relevance in it. Perhaps if whomever had submitted it had pointed specifically to the passages they thought were relevant, we might have been able to see it as well. But frankly, based on what I did see there, it's hard to see why it was submitted at all!

The three selected entries were patents. The other one (#25) was not. So while it might have been closer in a conceptual sense, it arguably wasn't as close in a patent-law sense.

Though the statement on the BountyQuest 1-Click prior art page gives me pause:

What's also interesting, though, is the number of submissions that talk about simplifying the buying process on the Web without actually inventing 1-Click shopping. Look at submission #25 to see how much work some IBM engineers did on the subject of digital shopping without actually inventing 1-Click.

Anyway, I've probably spent more time on this than I should have. Chalk it up to my extreme sympathy for those subject to journalist attack, because of What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Stallman himself describes the demise of the AI Lab as only one of many reasons for GNU's creation in this landmark Stocholm talk.

You write:
The GPL arose from Stallman's desire to sabotage his colleagues prospects for success -- as well as those of all other commercial developers

- sure, he's trying to sabotage all commercial developers by writing free code. On the other hand, commercialization of formerly public domain (and publicly funded) university "intellectual property" is natural.

War is Peace.

Stallman himself describes the demise of the AI Lab as only one of many reasons for GNU's creation in this landmark Stocholm talk.

You write:
The GPL arose from Stallman's desire to sabotage his colleagues prospects for success -- as well as those of all other commercial developers

- sure, he's trying to sabotage all commercial developers by writing free code. On the other hand, commercialization of formerly public domain (and publicly funded) university "intellectual property" is natural.

War is Peace.

And I've learned some great things by being willing to listen to the target.

TheoDP briefly laid out his complaint in his own words in a Usenet Posting

At the very least, this makes me dubious about the claim by O'Reilly that TheoDP wouldn't explain the relevance of his material.

Hmm, let's compare, O'Reilly claims, regarding TheoDP:

He sent in hundreds of pages of material without any explanation of why he believed any particular part of it invalidated the patent, and all of those who looked at it couldn't see the remotest relevance. Requests for clarification about just what in this material represented prior art were met with avoidance and hostility. His continued harrassment of both me and BountyQuest has convinced me that he's some kind of a crank.

The story gets weirder still. Another contestant in the Amazon sweepstakes has stepped forward, complaining that his entry was one of four BountyQuest cited as a ``Terrific Submission'' but that, unlike the other three, he didn't get any money.

Ted Conway, a freelance programmer in Chicago, submitted details of a system used by IBM in the 1970s to order and ship printed reports. ``The parallels to Amazon's system are very similar,'' Conway tells me. (He notes that Bezos worked at IBM's San Jose research labs in college and likely would have used the IBM system.)

BountyQuest didn't agree and offered Conway a T-shirt as a consolation prize. Conway now accuses BountyQuest of pulling a whitewash to protect Amazon's legal case.

In a Q&A posted today on SiliconValley.com (www.siliconvalley.com/opinion/gmsv/), an online partner of the Mercury News, O'Reilly says Conway's submission isn't relevant to the Amazon patent. But he admits he's not clear how BountyQuest officials researched and judged the entries. Cella declined to answer any questions about the contest.

Matthew Powers, managing partner of the Silicon Valley office of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, says it's unlikely the site would try to cover for Amazon.

The Menlo Park patent attorney says the publicity ``would be so valuable for BountyQuest that there's no way in the world they would not have accepted a submission that killed the patent

Pending further evidence. I'm inclined to side with TheoDP. It looks like the power of journalism again. Throw the mud, make the smear, virtually no-one will ever check the evidence, and the target can't fight back. Yes, my experiences do color my view here.

wayback machine

I know what you mean.

Use the Wayback Machine to take a look at Dr. Pearson's predictions circa 1997. Not very accurate so far, and that's just trying to go 5 years in the future. On this basis I don't think he has much credibility for his future predictions.

Here is a copy of the site if anyone is interested:

http://web.archive.org/web/20011218062013/www.ra is ethefist.com/index1.html

Here's some shameless karma whoring for all of you who want to get a taste for what kind of content this guy had on his site: You can find a decent representation of what used to be there at Archive.org.

hopefully someone might turn up with a URL.

I don't know if this is what you were talking about, but try the Wayback Machine entry here.
Even some of the links are working...

Kathleen Fent

Kathleen Fent

Yeah I noticed, my squid acl rules that were blocking it were timing out in dns and making the proxy take ages to start. But never fear you can still get at goatse.cx with the Way Back Machine!

1. Which operating systems the open sourced version at Sourceforge supports as of now?

Stephane Denis: Actually, the sources are designed for Win32 but they will be compatible for Linux and MacOS soon.
The ENSEIRB (a french engineer school in Bordeaux) are currently porting it for Linux and will probably speed up a lot the developement of the interface.

2. If the wrapper only supports Windows and BeOS, how easy/difficult a port to Linux or MacOS would be?

Stephane Denis: Personally, I continue the win32 emulation/wrapper to validate the wrapper compatibility and then I will do the MacOS version. For Linux, there is already a crew on it working. For the BeOS version, well I probably adapt it later.

A test D3D-2-GL program loading under WindowsXP. Click for larger version.

3. How far down the line the wrapper is? What has to be done yet?

Stephane Denis: Actually the Direct3d 8.0 part (only immediate mode) seems to works more or less, but not sufficiently enough to support really complex programs for the moment. But I expect that more people will look on other parts too, like DirectInput and DirectSound (since they are completly separated modules).

4. How fast/slow the implementation is when compared to a "native" GL app?

Stephane Denis: The speed or efficiency of the wrapper depends mainly of the OpenGL extensions supported. Since most of the time is consumed on rendering and not on API calls, this should be as fast as the original Direct3D code.

But you know, the goal is to get the DirectX API available on non-Win32 platform in order developers be able to create or port actual Direct3D 8 code. For Win32, some video cards like 3DLabs Wildcat or professional SGI video cards do not support Direct3d or Directdraw at all, but they have an excellent Opengl implementation. So the wrapper would be especially useful for theses adapters. A solution already exists, but we want to add Direct3D8 support.

I truly hope that more developers will join this interesting project now so we get things going in a faster pace.

A Direct3D application running in GL mode with the help of the wrapper.

You thought it was gone, you thought you sent it to /dev/null hell, but i found it and its back!

Wouldn't it be great for when they say "your code doesn't meet the specification of what the product needs to do" and you can use it to say "let's look to the wayback machine to see when you changed the spec but didn't bother telling me"

:-)

I remember reading about this a long time ago. The site that had it is down, but there's a copy on archive.org.

Get with the times, Slashdot! "News for Nerds" doesn't mean "News the rest of the world heard months ago"!

Some buyout from ZDNet or Vice Versa (or partnership or whatever. Gamespot was picked to close down because 90% of the pages were hard-coded HTML where as GameSpot used FrontPage or whatever WYSIWYG Editor. Factor in better marketing support for GameSpot at the time, and it wasn't too tough of a decision for ZDNet/C-Net to make. Shame too, 'cause Gamecenter was the premier site out there for Gaming News. (They had articles like this constantly and had a great hardware feature as well--something Gamespot is lacking).

If anyone doesn't believe me, check out some of their pages here. The newest ones (from Late Feb 2001/Early March 2001 will probably redirect you to GameSpot, so don't bother.)

If you want the very last page they made, then you want to check here here (Gotta love Archive.org)

Some buyout from ZDNet or Vice Versa (or partnership or whatever. Gamespot was picked to close down because 90% of the pages were hard-coded HTML where as GameSpot used FrontPage or whatever WYSIWYG Editor. Factor in better marketing support for GameSpot at the time, and it wasn't too tough of a decision for ZDNet/C-Net to make. Shame too, 'cause Gamecenter was the premier site out there for Gaming News. (They had articles like this constantly and had a great hardware feature as well--something Gamespot is lacking).

If anyone doesn't believe me, check out some of their pages here. The newest ones (from Late Feb 2001/Early March 2001 will probably redirect you to GameSpot, so don't bother.)

If you want the very last page they made, then you want to check here here (Gotta love Archive.org)

Philip Greenspun's story (not surprisingly) agrees with Eve's, but provides a very different point of view.

Eve's story was an interesting read, and it's quite similar to the history posted by Greenspun. To make a long story short, greedy VCs drove an otherwise good company straight into the ground. Greenspun's account of the action has been removed, but a cached copy is at archive.org.

If you want to know what really happened, I'd say that a combination of the two journals is likely a good start.

Courtesy of the wayback machine here is Phil's side of the story.

This is a quality read and highly recommended for any entrepreneur.

He removed it from his site when he entered into the settlement.