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You may remember a few weeks ago when we posed the question What is the greatest hacks. Well Derek Glidden has compiled the most popular selections from that discussion, and he presents below the winners. I was pretty surprised by some of the choices, but I think its a great list, with hacks spanning all sorts of areas of human creativity. Enjoy.

The following was written by Slashdot ReaderDerek Glidden

Slashdot's Top 10 Hacks

It's been a few weeks since my first Slashdot Article on Slashdot's Top 10 Hacks was posted - enough time for the comments to settle down and get moderated and the story archived, giving me time to go through them and try to figure out some reasonable way of counting and scoring them to come up with the Top 10 list.

My initial desire was to make this a completely "Open Source" selection by simply picking the 10 Hacks most popularly discussed in the above article, but the sheer number of comments precluded an approach like that. Instead, I had to use a little personal judgement to pick what Hacks made it on the list and in what order. Hacks that were mentioned a lot or moderated high or generated a lot of discussion moved higher on my list of all nominees before choosing the top 10. So the list may not exactly reflect the order or moderation from the original article, but I think the overall "feeling" of people's comments is as close as I could get.

Here's what I believe Slashdot users picked as their "Top 10 Hacks of All Time", see if you agree:

Honorable Mentions

These are subjects that came up frequently in the comments but for whatever reason, either lack of a specific enough focus or just not quite popular enough, didn't make it into the Top 10.

• Emulators - From the Vic-20 to the Nintendo 64, emulators do in software what the original system did in hardware. Some are relatively straightforward, reproducing in code a well-documented hardware interface, while others are inspired hacks, trying to reproduce the functionality of undocumented, proprietary hardware.
• The demoscene - Some of the best hackers that have ever put fingers to keyboard have shown what they can do by writing incredibly tight, incredibly fast, incredibly optimized code to make machines do things nobody ever imagined they could. Future Crew are the indisputable kings of the PC demoscene.
• The Trojan Horse - This Hack is so well known that its name became synonymous with any program that's disguised as one thing but secretly performs some malicious act.
• The Great Pyramids in Egypt - Huge rocks moved with ancient technology. Experts today still can't agree on how these structures were built.
• Duct Tape - Not a "Hack" in and of itself, but almost certainly responsible for more hacks than any other substance on the planet.

The Winners

• Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast - In 1938 George Orson Welles broadcast a special Halloween episode of "The Mercury Theatre on the Air" in which he recounted H.G.Wells' "War of the Worlds" in the context of a radio news announcement. People who missed the fact that this was an entertainment show believed that Martians had actually landed in Grover's Mill, New Jersey. (CT: An anonymous reader linked us to an mp3 version of the classic broadcast.
• Mars Pathfinder - Build a telerobot for cheap, ship it to Mars and then land it by pretending to be a big beach ball to cushion the impact by bouncing around the Martian landscape before finally settling down and getting to work. The amazing thing is, it worked. The more amazing thing is, it worked better and for far longer than NASA expected.
• Ken Thompson's "cc hack" - Presented in the journal, Communication of the ACM, Vol. 27, No. 8, August 1984, in a paper entitled "Reflections on Trusting Trust", Ken Thompson, co-author of UNIX, recounted a story of how he created a version of the C compiler that, when presented with the source code for the "login" program, would automatically compile in a backdoor to allow him entry to the system. This is only half the story, though. In order to hide this trojan horse, Ken also added to this version of "cc" the ability to recognize if it was recompiling itself to make sure that the newly compiled C compiler contained both the "login" backdoor, and the code to insert both trojans into a newly compiled C compiler. In this way, the source code for the C compiler would never show that these trojans existed.
• The AK-47 - A controversial winner? Probably, but Mikhail Kalashnikov created this weapon over 50 years ago and it is still one of the most commonly used automatic rifles in the world. Simplicity and elegance are the factors that went into the design of this weapon. "ktakki" summed up this gun well with the comments: "Five moving parts. Stamped parts instead of milled/machined components. Stranded steel wire instead of springs. Simple to operate and maintain. Fault-tolerant. A village blacksmith can gin up a new bolt carrier/gas piston assembly if need be. [...] Kalashnikov picked some of the best features of three contemporary designs (Mp-44, M1 Garand, SKS) and hacked together a design that's still in production 52 years later."
• Bombes/Colossus/Bletchley Park - During World War II, the Germans used a device called the "Enigma" to encrypt most of their morse code radio communications. The UK set up a team of mathematicians at Bletchley Park to break the codes the Enigma device created. Alan Turing is generally credited with creating the "bombes" - mechanical computing devices that could be used to brute-force determine which key had been used to encode a particular message orders of magnitude faster than humans could. "Colossus" - a similar mechanical device, could be "programmed" using paper tape and may have been the first truly programmable computer, albeit with limited capabilities. Bletchley Park mathematicians frequently came up with simple, yet brilliant, strategies to cut decoding time for messages encoded with the Enigma to fractions of what they would have been using brute-force methods. Even with the technological advances, this "first distributed cracking effort" was done mostly with paper, pencil and brainpower.
• Perl - A post-modern programming language or a scripting tool gone horribly, horribly wrong? When asking, you're likely to get both opinions on Perl, often from the same person. Because, or perhaps despite, of its "There's More Than One Way To Do It" attitude, Perl is probably responsible for more one-off hacks than any other tool in the programmer's arsenal. Perl is also probably responsible, more than any other technology, for more dynamic websites over simply serving up static pages. There's even this little website called Slashdot that's written in Perl...
• Second Reality by Future Crew - Awesome, Mindblowing, Unbelievable, Impossible. Some of the words used to describe what this piece of code from demoscene gods Future Crew did on 1993-era PC hardware. Even by today's standards, what this program can do without relying on any kind of 3D graphics acceleration is impressive. As if the graphics weren't impressive enough, it can even playback in Dolby Surround Sound.
• The Apple II - Woz created a masterpiece when he created the Apple II. In his words (from woz.org) "The Apple ][ was the third such [computer to ever come with a keyboard and look like a typewriter] and was the first of this breed to be completely assembled, the first in a plastic case, the first with a cool switching power supply that permitted plastic, the first with a large DRAM capability, the first with color graphics, the first with hi-res, the first with sound, the first with paddles, the first with game commands in the BASIC, the first with BASIC in ROM, the second to use your free home TV (Apple I was first), and a few more important things that shaped personal computers forever." Woz designed, built and programmed it almost entirely by himself.
• SR-71 "Blackbird" - This plane from "Kelly" Johnson's "Skunk Works" at Lockheed is made mostly of Titanium and expands an additional 11 inches at operating speeds from friction with the atmosphere. It has a cruising altitude of 85,000 feet, but has been reported to reach over 100,000 feet, higer than any interceptor missile could hope to reach and high enough that SR-71 pilots need to wear spacesuits. It is the fastest plane that has ever flown (that any government wil admit to, anyway) with a maximum speed of Mach 3.5 - around 2200 miles per hour. (Los Angeles to Washington D.C. in about an hour.) This plane, designed, built and deployed in the late 1950's/early 1960's with drafting boards and slide rules and in an amazingly short period of time, still outperforms and outclasses planes designed and built 30 years later using "state-of-the-art" technology.
• The Apollo 13 Mission Rescue - What do you do if you're in a spaceship on the way to the moon tens of thousands of miles away from the nearest repair facility when an O2 tank blows out and leaves your ship crippled? If you're on Apollo 13, you call home and report you "have a problem." The Apollo 13 support team, working against seemingly insurmountable odds (not enough power, not enough air, not enough time) using nothing more than what equipment the crew would have had available on their ship, and knowing that any mistake could easily kill the three astronauts, nonetheless managed to keep James Lovell, John Swigert, Fred Haise and their ship alive long enough to bring them home safely.

You may remember a few weeks ago when we posed the question What is the greatest hacks. Well Derek Glidden has compiled the most popular selections from that discussion, and he presents below the winners. I was pretty surprised by some of the choices, but I think its a great list, with hacks spanning all sorts of areas of human creativity. Enjoy.

The following was written by Slashdot ReaderDerek Glidden

Slashdot's Top 10 Hacks

It's been a few weeks since my first Slashdot Article on Slashdot's Top 10 Hacks was posted - enough time for the comments to settle down and get moderated and the story archived, giving me time to go through them and try to figure out some reasonable way of counting and scoring them to come up with the Top 10 list.

My initial desire was to make this a completely "Open Source" selection by simply picking the 10 Hacks most popularly discussed in the above article, but the sheer number of comments precluded an approach like that. Instead, I had to use a little personal judgement to pick what Hacks made it on the list and in what order. Hacks that were mentioned a lot or moderated high or generated a lot of discussion moved higher on my list of all nominees before choosing the top 10. So the list may not exactly reflect the order or moderation from the original article, but I think the overall "feeling" of people's comments is as close as I could get.

Here's what I believe Slashdot users picked as their "Top 10 Hacks of All Time", see if you agree:

Honorable Mentions

These are subjects that came up frequently in the comments but for whatever reason, either lack of a specific enough focus or just not quite popular enough, didn't make it into the Top 10.

• Emulators - From the Vic-20 to the Nintendo 64, emulators do in software what the original system did in hardware. Some are relatively straightforward, reproducing in code a well-documented hardware interface, while others are inspired hacks, trying to reproduce the functionality of undocumented, proprietary hardware.
• The demoscene - Some of the best hackers that have ever put fingers to keyboard have shown what they can do by writing incredibly tight, incredibly fast, incredibly optimized code to make machines do things nobody ever imagined they could. Future Crew are the indisputable kings of the PC demoscene.
• The Trojan Horse - This Hack is so well known that its name became synonymous with any program that's disguised as one thing but secretly performs some malicious act.
• The Great Pyramids in Egypt - Huge rocks moved with ancient technology. Experts today still can't agree on how these structures were built.
• Duct Tape - Not a "Hack" in and of itself, but almost certainly responsible for more hacks than any other substance on the planet.

The Winners

• Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast - In 1938 George Orson Welles broadcast a special Halloween episode of "The Mercury Theatre on the Air" in which he recounted H.G.Wells' "War of the Worlds" in the context of a radio news announcement. People who missed the fact that this was an entertainment show believed that Martians had actually landed in Grover's Mill, New Jersey. (CT: An anonymous reader linked us to an mp3 version of the classic broadcast.
• Mars Pathfinder - Build a telerobot for cheap, ship it to Mars and then land it by pretending to be a big beach ball to cushion the impact by bouncing around the Martian landscape before finally settling down and getting to work. The amazing thing is, it worked. The more amazing thing is, it worked better and for far longer than NASA expected.
• Ken Thompson's "cc hack" - Presented in the journal, Communication of the ACM, Vol. 27, No. 8, August 1984, in a paper entitled "Reflections on Trusting Trust", Ken Thompson, co-author of UNIX, recounted a story of how he created a version of the C compiler that, when presented with the source code for the "login" program, would automatically compile in a backdoor to allow him entry to the system. This is only half the story, though. In order to hide this trojan horse, Ken also added to this version of "cc" the ability to recognize if it was recompiling itself to make sure that the newly compiled C compiler contained both the "login" backdoor, and the code to insert both trojans into a newly compiled C compiler. In this way, the source code for the C compiler would never show that these trojans existed.
• The AK-47 - A controversial winner? Probably, but Mikhail Kalashnikov created this weapon over 50 years ago and it is still one of the most commonly used automatic rifles in the world. Simplicity and elegance are the factors that went into the design of this weapon. "ktakki" summed up this gun well with the comments: "Five moving parts. Stamped parts instead of milled/machined components. Stranded steel wire instead of springs. Simple to operate and maintain. Fault-tolerant. A village blacksmith can gin up a new bolt carrier/gas piston assembly if need be. [...] Kalashnikov picked some of the best features of three contemporary designs (Mp-44, M1 Garand, SKS) and hacked together a design that's still in production 52 years later."
• Bombes/Colossus/Bletchley Park - During World War II, the Germans used a device called the "Enigma" to encrypt most of their morse code radio communications. The UK set up a team of mathematicians at Bletchley Park to break the codes the Enigma device created. Alan Turing is generally credited with creating the "bombes" - mechanical computing devices that could be used to brute-force determine which key had been used to encode a particular message orders of magnitude faster than humans could. "Colossus" - a similar mechanical device, could be "programmed" using paper tape and may have been the first truly programmable computer, albeit with limited capabilities. Bletchley Park mathematicians frequently came up with simple, yet brilliant, strategies to cut decoding time for messages encoded with the Enigma to fractions of what they would have been using brute-force methods. Even with the technological advances, this "first distributed cracking effort" was done mostly with paper, pencil and brainpower.
• Perl - A post-modern programming language or a scripting tool gone horribly, horribly wrong? When asking, you're likely to get both opinions on Perl, often from the same person. Because, or perhaps despite, of its "There's More Than One Way To Do It" attitude, Perl is probably responsible for more one-off hacks than any other tool in the programmer's arsenal. Perl is also probably responsible, more than any other technology, for more dynamic websites over simply serving up static pages. There's even this little website called Slashdot that's written in Perl...
• Second Reality by Future Crew - Awesome, Mindblowing, Unbelievable, Impossible. Some of the words used to describe what this piece of code from demoscene gods Future Crew did on 1993-era PC hardware. Even by today's standards, what this program can do without relying on any kind of 3D graphics acceleration is impressive. As if the graphics weren't impressive enough, it can even playback in Dolby Surround Sound.
• The Apple II - Woz created a masterpiece when he created the Apple II. In his words (from woz.org) "The Apple ][ was the third such [computer to ever come with a keyboard and look like a typewriter] and was the first of this breed to be completely assembled, the first in a plastic case, the first with a cool switching power supply that permitted plastic, the first with a large DRAM capability, the first with color graphics, the first with hi-res, the first with sound, the first with paddles, the first with game commands in the BASIC, the first with BASIC in ROM, the second to use your free home TV (Apple I was first), and a few more important things that shaped personal computers forever." Woz designed, built and programmed it almost entirely by himself.
• SR-71 "Blackbird" - This plane from "Kelly" Johnson's "Skunk Works" at Lockheed is made mostly of Titanium and expands an additional 11 inches at operating speeds from friction with the atmosphere. It has a cruising altitude of 85,000 feet, but has been reported to reach over 100,000 feet, higer than any interceptor missile could hope to reach and high enough that SR-71 pilots need to wear spacesuits. It is the fastest plane that has ever flown (that any government wil admit to, anyway) with a maximum speed of Mach 3.5 - around 2200 miles per hour. (Los Angeles to Washington D.C. in about an hour.) This plane, designed, built and deployed in the late 1950's/early 1960's with drafting boards and slide rules and in an amazingly short period of time, still outperforms and outclasses planes designed and built 30 years later using "state-of-the-art" technology.
• The Apollo 13 Mission Rescue - What do you do if you're in a spaceship on the way to the moon tens of thousands of miles away from the nearest repair facility when an O2 tank blows out and leaves your ship crippled? If you're on Apollo 13, you call home and report you "have a problem." The Apollo 13 support team, working against seemingly insurmountable odds (not enough power, not enough air, not enough time) using nothing more than what equipment the crew would have had available on their ship, and knowing that any mistake could easily kill the three astronauts, nonetheless managed to keep James Lovell, John Swigert, Fred Haise and their ship alive long enough to bring them home safely.

C|Net recently made waves with its "Top 10 Hacks" story which seemed to say that Hack==Website Defacement. Derek Glidden found that wrong. And I'm glad he did because he's proposed that we do our own top 10 hacks. He's written a fabulous article, and challanges us to come up with a real list of hacks: The good stuff. Not the script kiddie stuff that the media likes to use to generate extreme headlines. Read this story. Its a good one.

A lot of people pointed out in Slashdot's recent coverage of an article run on C|Net called "The Top 10 Subversive Hacks of All Time" that 8 out of the 10 so-called "Hacks" listed were merely website defacements and not deserving of the "Hack" label at all. Here's your chance, as the Slashdot community, to set the record straight!

C|Net, perhaps in some kind of bizarre response to millenia fever, has lately been printing a few "Top 10 Lists" of sensational-sounding topics but rather lame content:

The Top 10 Technology Terrors - Billed as "10 products that will scare you to death" complete with a cute little Grim Fandango-esque skeleton as a mascot. Of course Back Orifice is on the list. Are you terrified yet?

Top Ten Terrors That Scare Web Builders - I'm not even sure where this article is supposed to be going. I know when I'm building a website I'm always "scared" of the Y2K problem as it relates to interfacing with my mainframe...

Ten Tricks for Digital Pranksters - Which I'd hoped might be at least slightly amusing, but turns out to be amusing in the same way that going to a K-Mart, finding the Commodore 64's on display, disabling BREAK and writing that BASIC program '10 PRINT "K-MART SUCKS "; 20 GOTO 10' was amusing when I was 12. (But then, it's not a "Top Ten" list, so I shouldn't complain.)

Given the trend, one wonders when their "Top 10 Pr0n Websites That Will Make Your Child Grow Up Into A Pervert If He or She So Much As Thinks About The URL", "Top 10 Most Violent Video Games Guaranteed To Make The Flesh Of Your Flesh And Blood Of Your Blood Turn Into A Deviant Sociopath Who Will Probably Shoot Up A McDonalds By The Time They're 25" or "Top 10 Really Annoying Top 10 Lists That We've Broken Up Into One Page Per Entry To Maximize Our Banner Ad Display" lists will show up.

Regardless of whether or not C|Net gets it in general, (I think I've made my opinion on that clear by now. :) they surely dropped the ball on their "Hacks" article. Rob and the gang at Slashdot liked my suggestion that the question be put to the Slashdot community and find out what you consider a "Great Hack."

So what is a "Hack"?

A lot of people reading that article were disappointed that C|Net decided to more or less define "Hack" as being equivalent to "website defacement", completely ignoring the traditional, more creative and useful meaning of the word. (Notice here how I deftly sidestep the whole 'hacker' vs. 'cracker' debate...) How should we determine what's a "Great Hack", much less the Top 10 of All Time, then?

Eric Raymond's Jargon File defines "Hack" in the first two meanings as:

"1. n. Originally, a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well. 2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed."

(Which are entirely contradictory, but hackers never let mundane things like paradoxes slow them down.) He further refines the meaning in Append ix A, "The Meaning of Hack" as:

"Hacking might be characterized as `an appropriate application of ingenuity'. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it."

If you'll notice, nothing in these definitions say anything about a "Hack" being computer-related. There have been many great Hacks that are not computer-related; it's just that people tend to associate the word "hack" with computers.

Adding to the ideas defined above, an "All-Time Great Hack" will probably also have:

• longevity - people should still be talking about it 20 or 30 years later, or even beyond.
• social and/or technological impact - it should change some aspect of life, either by directly changing every-day life or indirectly by changing how people view the world
• "eleganc e" - note however, that this does not necessarily equate simplicty. (Some people may consider the Saturn V booster a truly moby hack, as it got its job done precisely well with no doubt as to its purpose, but was anything but simple.)
• that not-easily definable quality of "I shoulda thought of that!" A Great Hack doesn't have to be "not immediately obvious" - it may just be something nobody else has done yet. For example: the WWW - there's nothing "unobvious" about defining a set of page layout macros that include text and graphics and a way to transmit and view them, but it didn't become commonplace until Tim Berners-Lee made it a big deal.

Some examples of things I would consider "Great Hacks" by these guidelines:

• Putting Apollo 11 on the moon - the NASA engineers at the time of the Apollo project are, to my mind, some of the greatest hackers in history. When you consider the state of technology at the time, what they accomplished is amazing.
• Ken Thompson's "cc hack" - No explanation necessary. A truly elegant hack that is already part of computer folklore.
• Both the "development" of AT&T UNIX into BSD UNIX and the way BSD was distributed, essentially creating the first widespread market demand for "open source software."
• Of course, no Slashdot feature article would be complete without mentioning: the development of the Linux Kernel, both for what it is and how it was/is developed.

But wait, there's more!!

In his Appendinx on "The Meaning Of Hack", ESR also says:

"An important secondary meaning of hack is `a creative practical joke'."

and MIT's Gallery of Hacks defines "hack" as:

"The word hack at MIT usually refers to a clever, benign, and "ethical" prank or practical joke, which is both challenging for the perpetrators and amusing to the MIT community (and sometimes even the rest of the world!)."

A sure point of dissent in this definition is going to be the "ethical" clause. I'll take the easy road out and leave this point to be decided by the audience - if enough people think a particular hack is a "Great Hack" regardless of ethics - then into the pot it goes.

On the other hand, the closest thing I can think of to a "Great Hack" that skirts ethical boundaries is the Robert Morris Worm. It's an event that will live in infamy in the lore of the Internet for all times for the problems it caused, but that it could accomplish what it did shows an incredible understanding of the way the systems worked and how they were interconnected at the time it happened.

It's still not entirely easy to think of "All-Time Great Hacks" that fit this definition, including the "ethical" clause:

• The canonical example is usually the MIT hack of the Harvard-Yale football game in which MIT students caused a six-foot weather baloon covered with the letters "MIT" to inflate at the 40 yard line during a pause in gameplay
• In the Slashdot article, "Uruk" pointed out that Orson Welles' broadcast of "The War Of The Worlds" in 1938 is arguably the best example of this definition of "Hack" that the world has ever known

So we have two definitions to deal with: The "Classic" Hacks, and the "MIT-Style" Hacks. It may or may not be worthwhile to separate these out into two distinct categories - I think we'll have to wait to see if there are enough unique entries in each category to require two lists.

What now?

In this feature, I would like you to list what you think are the "Greatest Hacks of All Time" and after a time to let enough people enter their suggestions and comments, I'll come back and gather up the most popular/frequent responses. Those suggestions will go up as a Slashdot poll, and the top ten from that poll will be officially listed in a subsequent feature article: "Slashdot's Top 10 Hacks of All Time" along with a bit of background on each one; rather like C|Net, except we'll put them all on one page for you.

There is only one restriction I would like to impose on suggestions: they have to be able to be documented somehow. I used to know a guy who could make his TRS-80 machines play music with software that somehow buzzed the floppy disk motor at different rates, which is a neat hack, but as I have no idea where he lives, if he still has a copy of his software, or even where to find a TRS-80 to play with anymore it's not a good candidate for this.

I've defined what it takes for a hack to be a "Great Hack", I've given some examples to help "seed the idea pool", and now it's your turn: what do you think should go on Slashdot's list of the Top 10 Hacks of All Time?

Ledge Kindred asks: "I am looking for a distributed filesystem to run on my Linux boxes at home. I have several and most of the "extra" space on each one is "going to waste" - I'd like to be able to combine it all into a single network-able filesystem. How?" Click below for more.

"So far the two (three?) solutions that had the most promise are: AFS or Arla, and Coda.

The reasons against: AFS is commercial and I don't want to pay $15,000 in licenses just for a convenience to me. Arla still appears to be extremely alpha quality, even for a Linux hacker used to seeing major parts of his kernel labeled "alpha" or "beta". I had Coda up and running for a couple of days before I ran into a fairly severe flaw in the fundamental design that showed it to be inappropriate for what I want it to do. (But Coda is still the coolest thing since individually-wrapped cheese slices, and if you don't need to worry about that little problem, it's cooler than sex.)

I've found lots of references to the "GFS" project which is not at all what I want, and here and there mentions of other projects such as "DFS", "xFS" and a distributed filesystem for Beowulf clusters but no further details, URLs or most importantly - code - could I dig up.

I don't need RAID, redundancy, failover, or anything like that. I only need to take these extra machines on my home network and make all their extra disk space look like a single volume on the network. Support for Linux as a client is, obviously, essential, but I also have Windows, BeOS, *BSD and Solaris machines on my network, so clients for those would be appreciated but not necessary. Since this is just for me at home, (yes, I've got all that crap on my network at home - so I'm a little crazy) I'd rather stick with free software. Is there anything that can do this? "

If not, then it sounds like it would be an interesting project to work on. The ability to be able to harness the spare disk space across a private network can only be a good thing.

Derek Glidden writes "Not Quite C is a C-like programming language for programing the Lego RCX brick that runs on Linux! This sort of programming is a lot easier than the funky visual interface Lego supplies. (Plus, did I mention it runs on Linux?)" amazing what ya stumble on over at FreshMeat, isn't it?

dglidden writes "BladeEnc is another MP3 encoder that's been ported to Linux. The author says that since he lives in Sweden, the laws governing patents allow him to continue to develop and distribute his software despite Fraunhofer's recent attacks on MP3 developers " Ed: AFAIK: In the UK, and I thought in the rest of the EU, algorithms are recognized as mathematics, and therefore unpatentable. Indeed, according to jusrisdiction.com , European Software Patent Law excludes mathematical methods. Any lawyers care to clarify? (The 8Hz guys were students in the Netherlands (EU)) Ed: As the first comment points out: no source :-( However I would like to get some answers on the Patent question.

dglidden writes "3dlinux.org will be "officially" going online this evening. I've designed it as a slashdot/freshmeat type service primarily for the advocacy of 2-D/3-D graphics on Linux, but any visitors interested in 2-D/3-D graphics are welcome. " There really isn't much actual content yet, but I'm sure that will change.