Duh! What good is pr0n in black-and-white? WE NEED full-color nekkid people. Couple this ad with one seen recently in the Register (www.theregister.co.uk) about pr0n marketers selling to the wireless crowd.
Just what makes you think that only parents in the United States abuse genetic research for perfect children? Is the U.S. the only country in the world whose parents have ambitions for your children?
Ever hear of Nazi Germany and the "Perfect Race?"
What makes you say such things?
I KNOW! I KNOW! PICK ME!!!!
It is, JonKatz, as I have said, and others have said before, that you TROLL for comments. You are a yellow journalist of the worst calibur. You make the New York Times look like responsible reporting. You make the Washington Post look like conservative reporting.
I saw your report a while back in a magazine (US News and World Report, or was it Time, I can't remember exactly.) You supposed that you could "speak" for "geeks" everywhere. For Heaven's sake, Jon, you're not a "geek." You're a troll. I was so pissed when I saw your words on the pages, telling people how "WE" feel. You don't know a fucking thing about us. You only know how to piss us off. I wouldn't even have seen your article today(I have the JonKatz filter checked) but I wasn't logged in at the time.
Even the opening blurb about your drivel was designed to inflame. And it worked.
You know, I mailed you once before, when you threw in the obligatory story about how angry white men are ruining the internet. Why are we angry JonKatz?
BECAUSE TROLLS LIKE YOU WON'T LEAVE US ALONE.
I wrote you back an angry retort, asking you how much money you got from Andover et. al. for your trolling. I suppose this wasn't fair to Andover, and I felt badly about this, and apologized to Hemos about the whole thing. I think I even apologized to you about the whole thing, saying merely that you had gotten me all worked up.
Jon, I am not going to tell you to "Please die." I am going to tell you to "Please go somewhere else." Please pretend to speak for someone else, not us.
Jon, you're not special. You're like Jenny Jones. You're like Geraldo Riviera. You're like Oprah Winfrey. You're like Jerry Springer.
Good comment! I, too, disagree with this unconstitutional war on drugs.
The one problem with your "peaceful" drug user idea is:
"Peaceful" drug users will sometimes do almost anything to gain access to drugs. That includes prostitution, robbery, murder, and other sordid affairs. You're correct in that drug use in itself harms only the user...but the support of drug use harms far more.
Speaking of auditory trademarks, Harley-Davidson has successfully trademarked the distinctive sound of a Harley engine, because the Japanese were engineering their motorcycles to sound exactly the same.
Oh yeah? I wanna see YOU do a thermodynamics test without one. Then I wanna see you do finite element analysis without a calculator. On a test. In less than an hour.:)
Your point is well taken though. Schools ARE letting students use calculators before students have a real grasp on analytical thinking. I didn't get to use a calculator until I started doing trigonometry. By that time, you should know how basic addition/subtraction/mult/div/decimal notation/etc. Who here is sadist enough to want to compute odd sine angles manually?
I have WinNT 4 on one of my workstations at work (usually not too bad) but M16 isn't too stable on it.
The ever-so-helpful Dr. Watson gleefully informs me that "An application has generated an error log" and takes my Mozilla away very very often. It does run really fast on NT, but goes away with the same speed.
As someone who has also "been there," I agree that there is more to this story than what we are told.
I was prodded with many, many needles before I was shipped off to the Gulf. I fortunately only spent about 2.5 weeks there, in Saudi Arabia. 3 days after I got there, Saddam threw in the towel.
About a month after I got back, I got mono. Then I got strep throat. Then the mono returned. Then I felt like crap with no energy for about 3 months. Then the mono came back.
I had a sore throat every day for 7 months. Does that sound normal to you? Previous to the vaccinations and so-called "flu shots" that the military requires you to "volunteer" for, I never got sick. I hadn't had a cold in almost 3 years. I lived in Southern California, so it sure wasn't the weather.
Now, several years later, I no longer get "flu shots." I no longer get anti-CBR (chemical-biological-radioactive) vaccines.
Oddly enough, I don't get sick much anymore.
Gulf War syndrome is a crime perpetrated by our own against our own.
I'm running the IDcide plugin for IE, and I cannot retrieve any of the cookies on my browser, including/., amazon.com, doubleclick, or any of the other sites that I regularly visit that I get cookies from. Just thought you'd like to know.
Here we are complaining about sponsorship? What kind of article is this? Haven't we in the Linux community been fighting for commercial interests to support Open Source? Don't you think it's right that they get credit?
Take a look at most of the 3com ethernet drivers when they load. The guy (sorry, I can't remember his name, he works at Nasa) has his name show up when the driver loads. After all the work he did, he deserves it.
So now we have some commercial interests give us something for free, and we whine about the terms? Over a few lines of text that say "Hey, look, we did this!"
I believe that under the GPL you must credit your sources. What better credit than this? Props to everyone involved in this project, a few lines of text to credit them are the very least that they deserve.
Slashdot needs a method by which people can rate articles.
This borders on redundant and OT, but I agree. Slashdot does need more articles like this. Great article!
I have built my own home and car mp3 players from older computer parts scrapped by the company I work for. I've built them out of a pentium 75 and 120. Got 'em in a metal box about the size of a car amp, and have in fact attached the car mp3 player to the amp in my car. IRman plus a bit of cabling gives me remote control. Now all I have to do is figure out how to get input to my player from an IDE cdrom drive which out of necessity will be about 4.5 feet away. (a Pioneer slot-load cdrom.) For now I just stick an IDE hard drive in the thing.
When you go to moderate a post as "Redundant" notice that all of us who posted a similar link did so in the first 10-12 posts. This means (let me spell this out for you) that we all submitted this at the same time. Sure it's redundant. But not intentionally so. Don't waste your moderator points on this.
Redundancy is for posts like "Me too!" Have you actually READ the moderator guidelines?
Don't you think parents have the right to say what their kids read, see, and hear? My parents monitored me closely. When I left home to join the Navy, I ran smack into everything they had ever tried to protect/hide from me. Much of it was very attractive to me, just away from home at first.
The more I saw of it, the more I realized my parents decisions were good ones. My parent's decisions helped to keep me from rushing headlong into really stupid decisions (mostly) and as I get older, my respect for my parents grows. It's really weird.
Now, I'm much more liberal than my parents. They don't drink (I do on occasion, but rarely do I keep alcohol) they don't go to bars (heh) and they attend church regularly. (I manage the major Catholic holy days)
Despite this, I tend to see things through a filter of my own now. (I got no cpHack for my brain:) ) This is where maturity begins. Good lord help me, what am I saying:)
My parents, of course would never listen to Insane Clown Posse. I never heard of them until I left the Navy. I think the lyrics are pretty ironic, and twisted to the point of the ridiculous, but you need to have a mature perspective to really see it. It's like SouthPark. And you can't really get that perspective until you've seen both sides of the coin, the conservative, and the liberal.
So AOL offers a filtering/censorship service. Don't you think people have the right to choose it if they wish? And don't you think that the public who requests the service has the right to demand the content of a service?
Now don't get me wrong. This sort of thing has no business being placed where the public doesn't request it. Do you hear me, public libraries? Library of Congress? Washington Post? (oh wait, they filter for liberal content there.:) But while you live under your parent's roof, they have the right to demand how you live there. Don't like it? Turn 18, get out of the house, join the military, and I guarantee you'll see more than you ever bargained, or even wished for.
Uncle Sam won't hold your hand.
The linux games site notes that DRI is not used, so I'm a bit confused. NVidia stated (prior to today's release) that they were developing DRI drivers. Your guess is as good as mine.
Contents of email below:
to: info@nvidia.com
I wasn't sure where else to send this, so I'm sending it to this address.
Thank you for your support of Linux and 3D. nVidia makes great 3D accellerators. I own a TNT2, and have been very impressed by the value it provided me. I have been looking forward to a high-performance driver solution for my card under Linux, and it's great to see your support of DRI. Thank you!
I speak for many Linux users when I say: Can we expect open-source drivers? While the binary-only module that you provide is well-supported in XFree 4.0 on x86/Linux, it does not address the needs of PPC users, Alpha users, *BSD users, and others who can also use XFree 4.0. I would like to note that your competitors (3DFx, ATI, and Matrox) have not only released open-source drivers (un-obfuscated!) but hardware register-level specs as well. Note that even the ATI Rage Pro (a weak card) was consistently out-performing even your GeForce GPU in Linux. While that may have changed as of this driver release, still it was the Linux community who wrote, tested, and finalized the ATI driver (mostly through the efforts of John Carmack). The Matrox G200 handily beat the TNT2 in Linux, thanks to the community. We both know the TNT2 kicks the G200 hard under Win32. My old Voodoo 2 slams all of these cards handily, since open-source drivers have been available the longest for this card. Plus, 3DFx actively supports these drivers themselves.
While I am not a businessman, I don't see how you can lose business by releasing these drivers and specs. Admittedly, some of these users would be a pretty small market, I don't think it costs much to release what you've already developed for another platform.
Your upcoming GeForce 2 sounds like a winner in the specs department, and I'd love to have one. I don't mean to sound ungrateful for your Linux support, but I'm leaning toward the purchase of another kind of card, either a 3DFx V5, or Matrox G450. Neither of these cards has all the specs that your Geforce 2 has (the fillrate plus features; EMBM, Cubic Mapping, 3D Textures, etc) but these companies have open Linux drivers and specs now, and I know I can expect this from them in the future.
Thanks for your time, and your Linux support,
That we'll finally see the end of the: Perhaps you are seeking Jon Katz's series of articles related to recent events in Colorado. These articles include Voices from the Hellmouth, More Stories from the Hellmouth or The Price of Being Different. Yay! Now we can have instead: Perhaps you are seeking Anonymous Coward's series of postings related to off-topic postings on SlashDot. These postings include Trolls and their Hemos, More Trolls and Grits, or The Price of Pancakes.
Actually, electric engines have a pretty good power-to-weight ratio. The problem is that if we put an electric motor in a car that provides the torque (which is constant, unlike the gas engine!) and horsepower that we expect in a vehicle, the damn batteries weigh tons. THAT's our real problem.
I race R/C cars, and let me tell you, I have an electric dragster that will do better than 85 miles/hour. The electric motor weighs less than a comparable gas engine, but it eats the battery in a couple of runs.
Interestingly enough, I recall working on electronics repair training equipment in the Navy in the late 80's that used this kind of memory. This memory was part of a computer (based on the Z80 I think, it's been a long time ) If you looked at it under a powerful magnifier of some sort you could actually see little round ferrite cores wrapped in extraordinarily fine copper wire. I always wondered how anybody managed to wrap that in a production environment.
No, your lawyer could subpoena that standard. What is destroyed is not the scientific research, but rather the balloting and voting results of who voted how on the standard. All the people involved on the standard are engineers (whom are quite keenly aware of liability, I might add). The only things that are destroyed are the records of the processes by which descisions are made, not the decisions themselves, nor the research. As I'm not an engineer myself, I'm not totally qualified to give you all the gory details of the process. Perhaps some other/. readers do?
As for the information being public information, how do you propose funding of standards development, if not by sale? This is not sarcasm, but a genuine question.
I don't think copying of the page is what's at question here. What this is saying is: "We want to be the sole distibution point of this information." Is this legitimate?
I would argue that it is a point. Case in point: I work for a standards institution. We develop many of the standards that are used to develop products that you use every day. The development of a standard is not a trivial process, and is a committee affair which lasts some time. The actual proceedings of the committee leading up the release of the standard are destroyed, so as to limit liability.
Once this standard is released, our organization controls the delivery of these standards. We don't allow people to link to these, since you may only view a standard in its entirety. Why do we do this?
Again, more liability. A standard MUST be distributed with ALL relevant information. If we were to distribute part of a standard on high-strength aircraft bolts, but neglected to ensure that the reader of the standard read the section on post-heat-treatment, and the bolt design failed in use, then we, as the standards body are liable. Standards bodies are usually not-for-profit agencies, so we can't afford lawsuits.
Additionally, these standards are copyrighted. Our members purchase the right to view any or all of our standards. It costs LOTS of money to develop a standard. Do we, as an organization, have the right to tell our members, "Use of this information may not be distributed to any other person or organization. Only the purchasing member has rights to this information." I think so. It's like game piracy. Do I, just because I bought some game, have the right to make copies of the game to pass out to all my friends? No. Can I make copies for myself? Sure. But distribution is illegal, and I think that this point is the substance of the argument.
Do I believe linking is bad? Hell no. The web would not exist without it. Do I believe web sites have the right to demand that you go through them to get the information which THEY cataloged, which THEY invested in, which THEY made available as a service to those who subscribe to their services? Wholeheartedly.
As an example, should it be legal for me, as a subscriber to some pr0n service, to start my own pr0n site which merely links to the site I belong to? No. How about this: I'm a student at a university. I have a T1 line into my room as a perk of living on-campus. Can I resell that service to others? Not likely. Should I be allowed? You decide.
I can't speak for the JVM distribution, but a link to the Java plugin seems to be the way to go.
Compilers, however, I can speak of.
We just went through an exhaustive process trying to determine which IDE we would use at my company. Opinion was strong in favor of Visual Cafe', but myself and three other holdouts work on Sun Ultra 10's. They'll get my Ultra from my cold dead fingers before I move to an NT box. A factor in our argument was that deployment was to Solaris servers.
We ended up with Borland Enterprise 5.5. It's got hooks into revision control (user specified), it's a Swing app, so it'll run anywhere (anywhere you have 128megs of ram and a JVM that is:) ), it's much faster than Forte' CE, less buggy than Forte', and you can actually get a copy of the Enterprise edition to TRY right now (unlike Forte'). Are you listening, Sun? Additionally, Sun reps wanted to send a developer at the cost of $8k for a week to teach us how to use Forte before they would sell us the IDE.
So, I can recommend JBuilder as a multi-platform IDE. I'm using it right now. I'm not used to the way the wizards create servlets, but they seem to work well.
Here's a great example of illegal reverse engineering, under the DMCA.
I went out and bought Heavy Gear 2. It's a great game. Unfortunately, the copy protection on this game doesn't agree with my DVD/CD reader (a Pioneer DVD-113). The reader makes a lot of awful grinding and clicking noises, and I soon get a BSOD because of an "Error reading drive X:\."
So, I went out and about on the net, looking for a crack. After finding and installing a no-cd crack, the game runs just fine. It's a great game, and I encourage everyone who likes Mech-style games to try it out. I intend to buy the Linux version as well to help support Linux gaming.
Oh hell, I just broke the law! I defeated an access control to a work to view a work! Cuff me and stuff me now. No matter that I actually bought the game...Obviously I need to rush out and buy all new computer equipment to play this $40 game.
I think this is cool, if it works out the way that it looks now. Microsoft gets to sell more copies of their operating system, I (potentially) get to play my MS-based games whilst running Linux.
Unfortunately, it apprears that VMware isn't a good choice for gamers yet. They don't support much DirectX/Direct3D/DirectDraw yet, and their interface to the X server is the DGA interface, not the new DRI interface. Plus, their DGA interface is proprietary, although their FAQ comments that they'd like to see some of their code added to the XFree tree.
Sound under VMware is apparently limited to SB16 emu, and no midi/joystick/wavetable function.
I'm looking forward to a VMware that will let me toss that Windows partition so I can play games! After all, computers were invented for games and pr0n. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise:)
Slashdot Mirror
Duh! What good is pr0n in black-and-white? WE NEED full-color nekkid people. Couple this ad with one seen recently in the Register (www.theregister.co.uk) about pr0n marketers selling to the wireless crowd.
Ever hear of Nazi Germany and the "Perfect Race?"
What makes you say such things?
I KNOW! I KNOW! PICK ME!!!!
It is, JonKatz, as I have said, and others have said before, that you TROLL for comments. You are a yellow journalist of the worst calibur. You make the New York Times look like responsible reporting. You make the Washington Post look like conservative reporting.
I saw your report a while back in a magazine (US News and World Report, or was it Time, I can't remember exactly.) You supposed that you could "speak" for "geeks" everywhere. For Heaven's sake, Jon, you're not a "geek." You're a troll. I was so pissed when I saw your words on the pages, telling people how "WE" feel. You don't know a fucking thing about us. You only know how to piss us off. I wouldn't even have seen your article today(I have the JonKatz filter checked) but I wasn't logged in at the time.
Even the opening blurb about your drivel was designed to inflame. And it worked.
You know, I mailed you once before, when you threw in the obligatory story about how angry white men are ruining the internet. Why are we angry JonKatz?
BECAUSE TROLLS LIKE YOU WON'T LEAVE US ALONE.
I wrote you back an angry retort, asking you how much money you got from Andover et. al. for your trolling. I suppose this wasn't fair to Andover, and I felt badly about this, and apologized to Hemos about the whole thing. I think I even apologized to you about the whole thing, saying merely that you had gotten me all worked up.
Jon, I am not going to tell you to "Please die." I am going to tell you to "Please go somewhere else." Please pretend to speak for someone else, not us.
Jon, you're not special. You're like Jenny Jones. You're like Geraldo Riviera. You're like Oprah Winfrey. You're like Jerry Springer.
You will never have the respect of us "geeks."
And I will never apologize to you again.
The one problem with your "peaceful" drug user idea is:
"Peaceful" drug users will sometimes do almost anything to gain access to drugs. That includes prostitution, robbery, murder, and other sordid affairs. You're correct in that drug use in itself harms only the user...but the support of drug use harms far more.
Except for maybe the pot hook-ups... ;)
Speaking of auditory trademarks, Harley-Davidson has successfully trademarked the distinctive sound of a Harley engine, because the Japanese were engineering their motorcycles to sound exactly the same.
Your point is well taken though. Schools ARE letting students use calculators before students have a real grasp on analytical thinking. I didn't get to use a calculator until I started doing trigonometry. By that time, you should know how basic addition/subtraction/mult/div/decimal notation/etc. Who here is sadist enough to want to compute odd sine angles manually?
The ever-so-helpful Dr. Watson gleefully informs me that "An application has generated an error log" and takes my Mozilla away very very often. It does run really fast on NT, but goes away with the same speed.
Mozilla runs great on my Ultra 5 tho...
I was prodded with many, many needles before I was shipped off to the Gulf. I fortunately only spent about 2.5 weeks there, in Saudi Arabia. 3 days after I got there, Saddam threw in the towel.
About a month after I got back, I got mono. Then I got strep throat. Then the mono returned. Then I felt like crap with no energy for about 3 months. Then the mono came back.
I had a sore throat every day for 7 months. Does that sound normal to you? Previous to the vaccinations and so-called "flu shots" that the military requires you to "volunteer" for, I never got sick. I hadn't had a cold in almost 3 years. I lived in Southern California, so it sure wasn't the weather.
Now, several years later, I no longer get "flu shots." I no longer get anti-CBR (chemical-biological-radioactive) vaccines.
Oddly enough, I don't get sick much anymore.
Gulf War syndrome is a crime perpetrated by our own against our own.
I'm running the IDcide plugin for IE, and I cannot retrieve any of the cookies on my browser, including /., amazon.com, doubleclick, or any of the other sites that I regularly visit that I get cookies from. Just thought you'd like to know.
No need. Look at theregister.co.uk for news about that. Some weird button combo.
Take a look at most of the 3com ethernet drivers when they load. The guy (sorry, I can't remember his name, he works at Nasa) has his name show up when the driver loads. After all the work he did, he deserves it.
So now we have some commercial interests give us something for free, and we whine about the terms? Over a few lines of text that say "Hey, look, we did this!"
I believe that under the GPL you must credit your sources. What better credit than this? Props to everyone involved in this project, a few lines of text to credit them are the very least that they deserve.
Slashdot needs a method by which people can rate articles.
Thanks!
I have built my own home and car mp3 players from older computer parts scrapped by the company I work for. I've built them out of a pentium 75 and 120. Got 'em in a metal box about the size of a car amp, and have in fact attached the car mp3 player to the amp in my car. IRman plus a bit of cabling gives me remote control. Now all I have to do is figure out how to get input to my player from an IDE cdrom drive which out of necessity will be about 4.5 feet away. (a Pioneer slot-load cdrom.) For now I just stick an IDE hard drive in the thing.
Anybody got any ideas here?
Redundancy is for posts like "Me too!" Have you actually READ the moderator guidelines?
The more I saw of it, the more I realized my parents decisions were good ones. My parent's decisions helped to keep me from rushing headlong into really stupid decisions (mostly) and as I get older, my respect for my parents grows. It's really weird.
Now, I'm much more liberal than my parents. They don't drink (I do on occasion, but rarely do I keep alcohol) they don't go to bars (heh) and they attend church regularly. (I manage the major Catholic holy days)
Despite this, I tend to see things through a filter of my own now. (I got no cpHack for my brain :) ) This is where maturity begins. Good lord help me, what am I saying :)
My parents, of course would never listen to Insane Clown Posse. I never heard of them until I left the Navy. I think the lyrics are pretty ironic, and twisted to the point of the ridiculous, but you need to have a mature perspective to really see it. It's like SouthPark. And you can't really get that perspective until you've seen both sides of the coin, the conservative, and the liberal.
So AOL offers a filtering/censorship service. Don't you think people have the right to choose it if they wish? And don't you think that the public who requests the service has the right to demand the content of a service?
Now don't get me wrong. This sort of thing has no business being placed where the public doesn't request it. Do you hear me, public libraries? Library of Congress? Washington Post? (oh wait, they filter for liberal content there. :) But while you live under your parent's roof, they have the right to demand how you live there. Don't like it? Turn 18, get out of the house, join the military, and I guarantee you'll see more than you ever bargained, or even wished for.
Uncle Sam won't hold your hand.
The essence of my meaning was that John Carmack did most of the work on the ATI Rage Pro driver, not the Utah-glx project.
The linux games site notes that DRI is not used, so I'm a bit confused. NVidia stated (prior to today's release) that they were developing DRI drivers. Your guess is as good as mine.
Contents of email below:
to: info@nvidia.com
I wasn't sure where else to send this, so I'm sending it to this address.
Thank you for your support of Linux and 3D. nVidia makes great 3D accellerators. I own a TNT2, and have been very impressed by the value it provided me. I have been looking forward to a high-performance driver solution for my card under Linux, and it's great to see your support of DRI. Thank you!
I speak for many Linux users when I say: Can we expect open-source drivers? While the binary-only module that you provide is well-supported in XFree 4.0 on x86/Linux, it does not address the needs of PPC users, Alpha users, *BSD users, and others who can also use XFree 4.0. I would like to note that your competitors (3DFx, ATI, and Matrox) have not only released open-source drivers (un-obfuscated!) but hardware register-level specs as well. Note that even the ATI Rage Pro (a weak card) was consistently out-performing even your GeForce GPU in Linux. While that may have changed as of this driver release, still it was the Linux community who wrote, tested, and finalized the ATI driver (mostly through the efforts of John Carmack). The Matrox G200 handily beat the TNT2 in Linux, thanks to the community. We both know the TNT2 kicks the G200 hard under Win32. My old Voodoo 2 slams all of these cards handily, since open-source drivers have been available the longest for this card. Plus, 3DFx actively supports these drivers themselves.
While I am not a businessman, I don't see how you can lose business by releasing these drivers and specs. Admittedly, some of these users would be a pretty small market, I don't think it costs much to release what you've already developed for another platform.
Your upcoming GeForce 2 sounds like a winner in the specs department, and I'd love to have one. I don't mean to sound ungrateful for your Linux support, but I'm leaning toward the purchase of another kind of card, either a 3DFx V5, or Matrox G450. Neither of these cards has all the specs that your Geforce 2 has (the fillrate plus features; EMBM, Cubic Mapping, 3D Textures, etc) but these companies have open Linux drivers and specs now, and I know I can expect this from them in the future.
Thanks for your time, and your Linux support,
That we'll finally see the end of the: Perhaps you are seeking Jon Katz's series of articles related to recent events in Colorado. These articles include Voices from the Hellmouth, More Stories from the Hellmouth or The Price of Being Different. Yay! Now we can have instead: Perhaps you are seeking Anonymous Coward's series of postings related to off-topic postings on SlashDot. These postings include Trolls and their Hemos, More Trolls and Grits, or The Price of Pancakes.
I race R/C cars, and let me tell you, I have an electric dragster that will do better than 85 miles/hour. The electric motor weighs less than a comparable gas engine, but it eats the battery in a couple of runs.
Interestingly enough, I recall working on electronics repair training equipment in the Navy in the late 80's that used this kind of memory. This memory was part of a computer (based on the Z80 I think, it's been a long time ) If you looked at it under a powerful magnifier of some sort you could actually see little round ferrite cores wrapped in extraordinarily fine copper wire. I always wondered how anybody managed to wrap that in a production environment.
As for the information being public information, how do you propose funding of standards development, if not by sale? This is not sarcasm, but a genuine question.
I would argue that it is a point. Case in point: I work for a standards institution. We develop many of the standards that are used to develop products that you use every day. The development of a standard is not a trivial process, and is a committee affair which lasts some time. The actual proceedings of the committee leading up the release of the standard are destroyed, so as to limit liability.
Once this standard is released, our organization controls the delivery of these standards. We don't allow people to link to these, since you may only view a standard in its entirety. Why do we do this?
Again, more liability. A standard MUST be distributed with ALL relevant information. If we were to distribute part of a standard on high-strength aircraft bolts, but neglected to ensure that the reader of the standard read the section on post-heat-treatment, and the bolt design failed in use, then we, as the standards body are liable. Standards bodies are usually not-for-profit agencies, so we can't afford lawsuits.
Additionally, these standards are copyrighted. Our members purchase the right to view any or all of our standards. It costs LOTS of money to develop a standard. Do we, as an organization, have the right to tell our members, "Use of this information may not be distributed to any other person or organization. Only the purchasing member has rights to this information." I think so. It's like game piracy. Do I, just because I bought some game, have the right to make copies of the game to pass out to all my friends? No. Can I make copies for myself? Sure. But distribution is illegal, and I think that this point is the substance of the argument.
Do I believe linking is bad? Hell no. The web would not exist without it. Do I believe web sites have the right to demand that you go through them to get the information which THEY cataloged, which THEY invested in, which THEY made available as a service to those who subscribe to their services? Wholeheartedly.
As an example, should it be legal for me, as a subscriber to some pr0n service, to start my own pr0n site which merely links to the site I belong to? No. How about this: I'm a student at a university. I have a T1 line into my room as a perk of living on-campus. Can I resell that service to others? Not likely. Should I be allowed? You decide.
Compilers, however, I can speak of.
We just went through an exhaustive process trying to determine which IDE we would use at my company. Opinion was strong in favor of Visual Cafe', but myself and three other holdouts work on Sun Ultra 10's. They'll get my Ultra from my cold dead fingers before I move to an NT box. A factor in our argument was that deployment was to Solaris servers.
We ended up with Borland Enterprise 5.5. It's got hooks into revision control (user specified), it's a Swing app, so it'll run anywhere (anywhere you have 128megs of ram and a JVM that is :) ), it's much faster than Forte' CE, less buggy than Forte', and you can actually get a copy of the Enterprise edition to TRY right now (unlike Forte'). Are you listening, Sun? Additionally, Sun reps wanted to send a developer at the cost of $8k for a week to teach us how to use Forte before they would sell us the IDE.
So, I can recommend JBuilder as a multi-platform IDE. I'm using it right now. I'm not used to the way the wizards create servlets, but they seem to work well.
I went out and bought Heavy Gear 2. It's a great game. Unfortunately, the copy protection on this game doesn't agree with my DVD/CD reader (a Pioneer DVD-113). The reader makes a lot of awful grinding and clicking noises, and I soon get a BSOD because of an "Error reading drive X:\."
So, I went out and about on the net, looking for a crack. After finding and installing a no-cd crack, the game runs just fine. It's a great game, and I encourage everyone who likes Mech-style games to try it out. I intend to buy the Linux version as well to help support Linux gaming.
Oh hell, I just broke the law! I defeated an access control to a work to view a work! Cuff me and stuff me now. No matter that I actually bought the game...Obviously I need to rush out and buy all new computer equipment to play this $40 game.
Unfortunately, it apprears that VMware isn't a good choice for gamers yet. They don't support much DirectX/Direct3D/DirectDraw yet, and their interface to the X server is the DGA interface, not the new DRI interface. Plus, their DGA interface is proprietary, although their FAQ comments that they'd like to see some of their code added to the XFree tree.
Sound under VMware is apparently limited to SB16 emu, and no midi/joystick/wavetable function.
I'm looking forward to a VMware that will let me toss that Windows partition so I can play games! After all, computers were invented for games and pr0n. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise :)