If there's a sale and I receive 50% off on the purchase of a $200 trenchcoat that I was going to buy anyway, then that's a net financial gain of $100
If I see a designer outfit on a catwalk that costs $5000, and I make a perfect copy of it from an old pair of curtains, what's the loss to the designer? $5000, because I should have bought the original? Or nothing, because I was never going to buy the original anyway?
I haven't bought music in any form for about fifteen years. Up until about two years ago, I didn't even bother downloading it. Now I have about two dozen tracks on my hard drive, from a dozen artists, most of them old or hard to get (try buying an album by a dead Canadian folk singer in the UK).
What's the loss to the music industry? Two albums worth? A dozen albums worth (as I should only have been able to get these tracks by buying the albums that contained them)?
Bollocks. It's zero. There's no way that I'd have paid for that music. I could wipe it all today and not be bothered. That's not an empty claim, I have done that repeatedly in the past: pull down a few tracks, dump them, pull a few more.
Occasionally I'll pull down a track and then not listen to it for days, weeks, months. Sometimes I even pull one down and then never bother listening to it. Is that still theft? What if I pull down an Ogg Vorbis track, and don't have a player for it? Is that theft? Or a partial download? Is that half a theft? Is it better or worse than someone who pulls down a track and then listens to it ten times a day? If you're going to draw a distinction, where do you draw it?
That's the problem with using trite analogies. They don't actually match the diversity of the actual activity in the real world.
there is no legislative or judicial pronouncement which says that fair use may not scale
There's no legislative pronouncement, and never has been, that says that fair use encompasses making a tape for your friend.
There's judicial precedent, but that's unreliable when applied to new technology.
I'm really puzzled by where the idea came from that "fair use" covers anything other than non-commerical copying for educational or review purposes. It's an urban legend.
RIAA is just trying to atract free publicity to the copyright issue, because technically speaking, it's a lost war for them, and I think they know this
There is a body of opinion that thinks that the long term goal of the RIAA/MPAA is to lose, lose and lose again, each time strengthening their argument (supported by limos full of roofied cheerleaders and small unmarked non-sequential bills) to the legislature that the only way to stop this happening is to control the content until it hits your brain, and to jail anyone who so much as dissents, let alone tries to crack the system.
Paranoid? Cynical? Get back to me in ten years, and we'll compare notes.
Wow, uncanny, especially the bit about tech supporting other coders. Quick bit of advice; I was playing Age of Empires last night, and loving it. The original, that is. Rendering engines aren't everything. In fact, your rendering engine should be abstracted away from your game engine. Write the game, then add the pretty.;-)
i don't want to hear about anyones grandmother eating Friskies because she took a brokers advice
Now wait just a damn minute. This has been going on for years, and in the public eye. Any broker or individual who is still invested in Microsoft is taking a gamble, at their own risk. The value of shares may fall as well as rise, yadda yadda.
As the intention of an illegal monopoly remedy is (indirectly) to allow competitors to gain market share, that will hammer Microsoft anyway, just over a longer timescale. How many last chances to bail out do we want to gift to Microsoft investors? Isn't the message that if you invest in a company that's clearly been running an abusive monopoly, you're culpable? Ever hear of ethical investment?
Gaining from shares is a gamble, not a right. When share prices fall, someone loses their gamble and takes a beating. Let's not over emotionalise it by assuming it'll be Jane Grandmother.
All this is moot anyway; if I held Microsoft stock right now, I'd be laughing my arse off, because it's only going up from here.
Will whomever modded the parent post "Insightful" please cue me into the insight?
Feel free to debunk it. Explain why it's better for developers (and the user experience) to have to work out how to optimise to a new pipeline every couple of years, rather than to squeeze every last drop of speed out of one design before moving onto the next on (e.g.) a five year cycle.
Ever looked at the specification of a Playstation and wondered how on earth developers got it to do what they had it doing by the end of its lifecycle? Ever wondered why early Playstation 2 games bit the weenie?
I'm not claiming that the original poster was right, or you are wrong (if that's indeed your position), I'm saying that it's debatable. How about debating rather than sneering?
You forgot prohibiting them from taking a share in competitors, and divesting their current interests. Remind me, how much of Apple do Microsoft currently own?
I don't think anyone (with the capacity for thought) thinks Microsoft should be desolved
Then you think wrong, assuming that you mean dissolved. I am firmly of the belief that it was the only thing that - in combination with strict no-preferential-treatement remedies that applied to each split up segment in its dealings with the others - would have actually achieved the desired goals.
The ripple effect on the economy and industry would be horrific
So, you're saying that Microsoft has such a dominant market share that it's unthinkable to make a major change to that position? What do you think antitrust laws are for? Breaking up small monopolies?
When we talk of monopolies we do not mean that the consumer has no other choice, which is absurd
You mean whatever you like, chum, that's exactly what I mean. I mean that when the average consumer goes into the average computer store to buy an average machine, be it Dell, Compaq or anything other than Apple, it comes with Windows, only Windows and always Windows. You and I know better, but Jane Public doesn't, and she shouldn't have to spend weeks (minimum) gaining the basic know-how that is required to source bare components, build a box, and install another OS. Sure, buy a Mac if you like (running only MacOS, which is just as abusive as Wintel, but it's not a monopoly), but remember that Microsoft own 35% of Apple anyway.
I agree with your other points, but there's no need to position yourself as a moderate by saying "Microsoft ain't that bad..." before explaining why they are so bad.;-)
Which is how I got into hacking on Netrek (Roger, is that you??).
Yes, 'tis me! I went to using Rogerborg because Roger was already taken on some servers, plus if you're borging, it's only fair to be open about it.;-)
I haven't Netrek'd in years unfortunately, as my cable modem doesn't play well with the RSA check. Although, thinking about it, if it's a getpeername/gethostname mismatch, I had to hack that to get around the RSA check in the first place. Hmmm... nostalgia ahoy!
Hang on, let the guy make his own mistakes. I agree with everything you say, but I still think games programming, as a first job, before you have a mortgage and kids, is an astonishing accelerated learning experience. It's not all good, but that's rather my point.;-)
Sure, I agree completely (even about the temptation to go back in, despite the fact that it sucks). I'd only suggest it as a first job for the young and fired up, because it puts everything else you'll do in perspective, both for better and worse.
I want to move: I thought Canada, but they're backing their ass up for the US too much for my liking, so now I'm thinking New Zealand. But it might be too late for me; I think the national apathy has soaked through to the bone.:-(
One thing that I think makes the UK a great place is the very high level of integrity of its people
Of the people, yes, but we're (in general) as badly informed and easily manipulated as the rest of the world. I actually think that the US people are the best and greatest in the world. You still have recent memories of your reach exceeding your grasp ("We choose to go to the moon [..] not because it is easy, but because it is hard."). Unfortunately, we have both relapsed into having governments composed of a professional political class (an hereditary one at the executive level in both cases) who are alike in tolerating among their ranks liars, cheats, frauds, and manipulative and hypocrital mass murdering bastards of the highest calibre. I look at what we (Britain) are contributing to in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and I think "My god, viewed from their point of view, with their professional liars spinning it the other way, how can they not hate us?", and I want to get out, and soon.
On the bright side, as I said, at least the British government are largely too apathetic to abuse their powers, unless there's a media circus to play to. Hey ho, small blessings.
(Moderators: this is like 4 levels down. I know it's off topic, but there are better areas to vent your ire.)
Try it. Games programming will challenge you like you wouldn't believe. You'll sink or you'll swim, but if you last six months then you'll never fear another computer problem, ever.
As an aside, I went to one lecture in the second half of my senior CompSci year; it turned out to be a pre-exam revision lecture for a course I hadn't done. It was OK though, because I fell asleep, having been up all night hacking Netrek.
So, I got a sucky degree (British 2.2) but I learned to work with a real world project, made up of various standards of contributions, I learned a little graphics, a little input, a little maths, and a lot of network. I learned that an RSA authentication scheme is practically unbreakable, but easily duped. It got me a handle that I'm still using ten years later. It got me my first job, as a games programmer, where again I had to learn a little of everything. That got me the experience that I needed to make up for my degree.
So, sure, give it a try. If nothing else, it'll fast track your decision about whether computers are for you.
Perhaps someone will be able to write a utility to lock a desktop HD when users go on vacation or something.
Or if they're storing politically sensitive material, perhaps in a suppressive regime. Or really hard core porn.;-)
(not sure how the BIOS would handle a locked drive though
It doesn't see the drive. The controller won't respond to any ATAPI commands except the password ones.
Actually, if you really want the data, an informed poster on another forum reckons that if you whip the controller off a non-locked drive (without powering it off, so it never gets an ATAPI power down or sleep from the BIOS), you can drop it onto a locked drive and read the data (once, until you power it down). I'm dubious about that, as I can't see any non-volatile storage on the controller to hold that state, but hey, it might be worth a try.
The thing that you have to understand about the UK is that there really is a history of these things been put in place and then not used, through apathy, budget constraints, or good old fashioned incompetence.
The omnipresent cameras are useless for identifying individuals; all they are used for is to grab grainy, wobbly pictures of suspects that identify height, clothing (maybe) and gender (if you're lucky) which are then splashed all over tabloids and the TV as part of appeals for actual eye witnesses to come forward.
A few more examples. The UK has had a DMCA since 1988, but few people know about it, because it's never been used. The RIP act, that mandates prison sentences if you fail to hand over encryption keys, is again a paper tiger because the Home Office doesn't have the budget to train anyone in its use. In fact, the police already suffer from having a surfeit of powers.
There was a case last year of a young student who went missing, sparking a nationwide hunt for her. She (or someone purporting to be her) sent an email from an internet cafe claiming that she was all right. The police eventually found her not by tracking back the message through the headers to find the cafe (a 30 second process), or through cameras, or through any technological procedure. Instead, they guessed where she was by looking at her past history, then blanketed the area with police handing out leaflets to cybercafes, until they got a response from an owner, then they staked it out until she turned up again.
So, sure, the UK has Draconian laws (but I'm sure the US will catch up), and sure, open networks and all that, but on the other hand, blurgh, it's a typical wet and windy British night tonight, and the Evil Things will be tucked up all warm and cosy in bed, not prowling the land looking for innocents to molest.;-)
Banning non-vendor bags and laptops in no way increases security
Not really true. Cynical as I am, I think that this is a genuine (if token) attempt at security, not a restriction on unwelcome items. The policy is a blanket ban on anything that can be used to contain or conceal Something Nasty. It will stop stupid, lazy, people who don't want to die from walking in the front door carrying a bomb in their hand.
It's just a shame that people like the September 11th hijackers, are neither stupid, nor lazy, nor do they care about their own lives. They'll use the back door, or just strap 20kg of plastique on themselves, throw a jacket over it, and walk through the front door with their perfectly valid passport.:-(
I can understand a no bags policy, but barring people from entering COMDEX with laptops is just stupid
It's not really inconsistent. The policy is clearly intented to cover anything that can conceal or contain something nasty. Expect to see anyone wearing a Matrix trenchcoat stopped and searched as well. If you ban bags, you have to ban everything else as well.
Of course, being consistent doesn't mean that the entire policy isn't risible. If you're of the calibre of the September 11th hijackers, or a typical Hammas suicide bomber, you'll just strap explosives all over you, throw on a jacket, bring your perfectly valid passport, waddle right through the door, then turn the floor into an abbatoir.
To those joking that only strip searches will solve the problem: it's not a joke. And by strip searches, I mean a goon squad who will grab you from behind, throw you down and tazer you if you so much as blink. It's untenable, but anything short of that is window dressing for the benefit of those attendees who don't really want to think about the scale of the problem, they just want to feel protected.
If bags are banned, how can chick geeks (of which I'm sure there are a few going to Comdex) possibly bring their purse or handbag in? Will they have to wear a stylish yet goofy-looking fanny pack, or would that count too
Gee, maybe if you weren't such a lazy fuck, you could have read the actual security policy and found out. You lazy fuck.
"Anyone carrying a purse or fanny-pack will be asked to go through a security check"
Too bad guns are disallowed in WAY TOO MANY places now days
Untrue. Weapons are not banned; you have 2nd Amendment protection on that, and if we don't need an armed militia now, then when will we need one?
What is happening is that people carrying weapons (not just firearms) are banned. The statement couldn't be clearer: if you have a weapon, and aren't wearing a uniform, we will assume that you have criminal intent.
Don't ever let anyone tell you that they're banning your weapon, or that your weapon poses a security risk. They're making a "guilty until proven innocent" judgement about you, they're just too weaselly to admit it.
Drivel. A polygon has as many points as you like. A triangle has 3 points. Just because 3D programmers and artists get lazy and refer to triangles as "poly's" doesn't make it true.
If you're going to be a smart arse, at least have the common courtesy to be a correct one.
The best thing to do with a used HD is throw it in the garbage
Tsk tsk. If the Magic Smoke hasn't got out, it's usable or at least a fun project. Not everyone is ready to embrace the culture of disposability so readily.
Recycling is better than disposal. Re-use is better than recycling. Recovery of an otherwise defunct drive is best of all. C'mere, and give me a hug. C'mon, it won't hurt.
Got that, thanks. Only thing is, there are no J11 and J15 on the controller. Perhaps he means pins 11 and 15, but as these are well defined I/O (HD03 and HD01) and not reserved, I'm highly dubious about following this advice.
Slashdot Mirror
My company's gifted IS department blocked xxx.soton.ac.uk. I phoned them up to get it unblocked, and the techie on the end of the phone asked me repeatedly if this was a sex site. God damn. I mean God damn. How dumb do you have to be to not just type it into a browser and see, and how dumb would I have to be to phone IS, give my name, and as for a "sex site" to be unblocked.
Er, sorry, this turned into more of an anti-IS rant. I had a point when I started, but it escapes me. ;-)
If I see a designer outfit on a catwalk that costs $5000, and I make a perfect copy of it from an old pair of curtains, what's the loss to the designer? $5000, because I should have bought the original? Or nothing, because I was never going to buy the original anyway?
I haven't bought music in any form for about fifteen years. Up until about two years ago, I didn't even bother downloading it. Now I have about two dozen tracks on my hard drive, from a dozen artists, most of them old or hard to get (try buying an album by a dead Canadian folk singer in the UK).
What's the loss to the music industry? Two albums worth? A dozen albums worth (as I should only have been able to get these tracks by buying the albums that contained them)?
Bollocks. It's zero. There's no way that I'd have paid for that music. I could wipe it all today and not be bothered. That's not an empty claim, I have done that repeatedly in the past: pull down a few tracks, dump them, pull a few more.
Occasionally I'll pull down a track and then not listen to it for days, weeks, months. Sometimes I even pull one down and then never bother listening to it. Is that still theft? What if I pull down an Ogg Vorbis track, and don't have a player for it? Is that theft? Or a partial download? Is that half a theft? Is it better or worse than someone who pulls down a track and then listens to it ten times a day? If you're going to draw a distinction, where do you draw it?
That's the problem with using trite analogies. They don't actually match the diversity of the actual activity in the real world.
There's no legislative pronouncement, and never has been, that says that fair use encompasses making a tape for your friend.
There's judicial precedent, but that's unreliable when applied to new technology.
I'm really puzzled by where the idea came from that "fair use" covers anything other than non-commerical copying for educational or review purposes. It's an urban legend.
There is a body of opinion that thinks that the long term goal of the RIAA/MPAA is to lose, lose and lose again, each time strengthening their argument (supported by limos full of roofied cheerleaders and small unmarked non-sequential bills) to the legislature that the only way to stop this happening is to control the content until it hits your brain, and to jail anyone who so much as dissents, let alone tries to crack the system.
Paranoid? Cynical? Get back to me in ten years, and we'll compare notes.
Wow, uncanny, especially the bit about tech supporting other coders. Quick bit of advice; I was playing Age of Empires last night, and loving it. The original, that is. Rendering engines aren't everything. In fact, your rendering engine should be abstracted away from your game engine. Write the game, then add the pretty. ;-)
How long has Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 been out for? How many new pipelines have come out in that period. Thanks for making my point for me. ;-)
Now wait just a damn minute. This has been going on for years, and in the public eye. Any broker or individual who is still invested in Microsoft is taking a gamble, at their own risk. The value of shares may fall as well as rise, yadda yadda.
As the intention of an illegal monopoly remedy is (indirectly) to allow competitors to gain market share, that will hammer Microsoft anyway, just over a longer timescale. How many last chances to bail out do we want to gift to Microsoft investors? Isn't the message that if you invest in a company that's clearly been running an abusive monopoly, you're culpable? Ever hear of ethical investment?
Gaining from shares is a gamble, not a right. When share prices fall, someone loses their gamble and takes a beating. Let's not over emotionalise it by assuming it'll be Jane Grandmother.
All this is moot anyway; if I held Microsoft stock right now, I'd be laughing my arse off, because it's only going up from here.
Feel free to debunk it. Explain why it's better for developers (and the user experience) to have to work out how to optimise to a new pipeline every couple of years, rather than to squeeze every last drop of speed out of one design before moving onto the next on (e.g.) a five year cycle.
Ever looked at the specification of a Playstation and wondered how on earth developers got it to do what they had it doing by the end of its lifecycle? Ever wondered why early Playstation 2 games bit the weenie?
I'm not claiming that the original poster was right, or you are wrong (if that's indeed your position), I'm saying that it's debatable. How about debating rather than sneering?
You forgot prohibiting them from taking a share in competitors, and divesting their current interests. Remind me, how much of Apple do Microsoft currently own?
Then you think wrong, assuming that you mean dissolved. I am firmly of the belief that it was the only thing that - in combination with strict no-preferential-treatement remedies that applied to each split up segment in its dealings with the others - would have actually achieved the desired goals.
So, you're saying that Microsoft has such a dominant market share that it's unthinkable to make a major change to that position? What do you think antitrust laws are for? Breaking up small monopolies?
You mean whatever you like, chum, that's exactly what I mean. I mean that when the average consumer goes into the average computer store to buy an average machine, be it Dell, Compaq or anything other than Apple, it comes with Windows, only Windows and always Windows. You and I know better, but Jane Public doesn't, and she shouldn't have to spend weeks (minimum) gaining the basic know-how that is required to source bare components, build a box, and install another OS. Sure, buy a Mac if you like (running only MacOS, which is just as abusive as Wintel, but it's not a monopoly), but remember that Microsoft own 35% of Apple anyway.
I agree with your other points, but there's no need to position yourself as a moderate by saying "Microsoft ain't that bad..." before explaining why they are so bad. ;-)
Yes, 'tis me! I went to using Rogerborg because Roger was already taken on some servers, plus if you're borging, it's only fair to be open about it. ;-)
I haven't Netrek'd in years unfortunately, as my cable modem doesn't play well with the RSA check. Although, thinking about it, if it's a getpeername/gethostname mismatch, I had to hack that to get around the RSA check in the first place. Hmmm... nostalgia ahoy!
Hang on, let the guy make his own mistakes. I agree with everything you say, but I still think games programming, as a first job, before you have a mortgage and kids, is an astonishing accelerated learning experience. It's not all good, but that's rather my point. ;-)
Sure, I agree completely (even about the temptation to go back in, despite the fact that it sucks). I'd only suggest it as a first job for the young and fired up, because it puts everything else you'll do in perspective, both for better and worse.
I want to move: I thought Canada, but they're backing their ass up for the US too much for my liking, so now I'm thinking New Zealand. But it might be too late for me; I think the national apathy has soaked through to the bone. :-(
Of the people, yes, but we're (in general) as badly informed and easily manipulated as the rest of the world. I actually think that the US people are the best and greatest in the world. You still have recent memories of your reach exceeding your grasp ("We choose to go to the moon [..] not because it is easy, but because it is hard."). Unfortunately, we have both relapsed into having governments composed of a professional political class (an hereditary one at the executive level in both cases) who are alike in tolerating among their ranks liars, cheats, frauds, and manipulative and hypocrital mass murdering bastards of the highest calibre. I look at what we (Britain) are contributing to in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and I think "My god, viewed from their point of view, with their professional liars spinning it the other way, how can they not hate us?", and I want to get out, and soon.
On the bright side, as I said, at least the British government are largely too apathetic to abuse their powers, unless there's a media circus to play to. Hey ho, small blessings.
(Moderators: this is like 4 levels down. I know it's off topic, but there are better areas to vent your ire.)
Try it. Games programming will challenge you like you wouldn't believe. You'll sink or you'll swim, but if you last six months then you'll never fear another computer problem, ever.
As an aside, I went to one lecture in the second half of my senior CompSci year; it turned out to be a pre-exam revision lecture for a course I hadn't done. It was OK though, because I fell asleep, having been up all night hacking Netrek.
So, I got a sucky degree (British 2.2) but I learned to work with a real world project, made up of various standards of contributions, I learned a little graphics, a little input, a little maths, and a lot of network. I learned that an RSA authentication scheme is practically unbreakable, but easily duped. It got me a handle that I'm still using ten years later. It got me my first job, as a games programmer, where again I had to learn a little of everything. That got me the experience that I needed to make up for my degree.
So, sure, give it a try. If nothing else, it'll fast track your decision about whether computers are for you.
Bzzt, thanks for playing. Identical drives function as slaves just fine. Try before you post, please.
Or if they're storing politically sensitive material, perhaps in a suppressive regime. Or really hard core porn. ;-)
It doesn't see the drive. The controller won't respond to any ATAPI commands except the password ones.
Actually, if you really want the data, an informed poster on another forum reckons that if you whip the controller off a non-locked drive (without powering it off, so it never gets an ATAPI power down or sleep from the BIOS), you can drop it onto a locked drive and read the data (once, until you power it down). I'm dubious about that, as I can't see any non-volatile storage on the controller to hold that state, but hey, it might be worth a try.
The thing that you have to understand about the UK is that there really is a history of these things been put in place and then not used, through apathy, budget constraints, or good old fashioned incompetence.
The omnipresent cameras are useless for identifying individuals; all they are used for is to grab grainy, wobbly pictures of suspects that identify height, clothing (maybe) and gender (if you're lucky) which are then splashed all over tabloids and the TV as part of appeals for actual eye witnesses to come forward.
A few more examples. The UK has had a DMCA since 1988, but few people know about it, because it's never been used. The RIP act, that mandates prison sentences if you fail to hand over encryption keys, is again a paper tiger because the Home Office doesn't have the budget to train anyone in its use. In fact, the police already suffer from having a surfeit of powers.
There was a case last year of a young student who went missing, sparking a nationwide hunt for her. She (or someone purporting to be her) sent an email from an internet cafe claiming that she was all right. The police eventually found her not by tracking back the message through the headers to find the cafe (a 30 second process), or through cameras, or through any technological procedure. Instead, they guessed where she was by looking at her past history, then blanketed the area with police handing out leaflets to cybercafes, until they got a response from an owner, then they staked it out until she turned up again.
So, sure, the UK has Draconian laws (but I'm sure the US will catch up), and sure, open networks and all that, but on the other hand, blurgh, it's a typical wet and windy British night tonight, and the Evil Things will be tucked up all warm and cosy in bed, not prowling the land looking for innocents to molest. ;-)
Not really true. Cynical as I am, I think that this is a genuine (if token) attempt at security, not a restriction on unwelcome items. The policy is a blanket ban on anything that can be used to contain or conceal Something Nasty. It will stop stupid, lazy, people who don't want to die from walking in the front door carrying a bomb in their hand.
It's just a shame that people like the September 11th hijackers, are neither stupid, nor lazy, nor do they care about their own lives. They'll use the back door, or just strap 20kg of plastique on themselves, throw a jacket over it, and walk through the front door with their perfectly valid passport. :-(
It's not really inconsistent. The policy is clearly intented to cover anything that can conceal or contain something nasty. Expect to see anyone wearing a Matrix trenchcoat stopped and searched as well. If you ban bags, you have to ban everything else as well.
Of course, being consistent doesn't mean that the entire policy isn't risible. If you're of the calibre of the September 11th hijackers, or a typical Hammas suicide bomber, you'll just strap explosives all over you, throw on a jacket, bring your perfectly valid passport, waddle right through the door, then turn the floor into an abbatoir.
To those joking that only strip searches will solve the problem: it's not a joke. And by strip searches, I mean a goon squad who will grab you from behind, throw you down and tazer you if you so much as blink. It's untenable, but anything short of that is window dressing for the benefit of those attendees who don't really want to think about the scale of the problem, they just want to feel protected.
Gee, maybe if you weren't such a lazy fuck, you could have read the actual security policy and found out. You lazy fuck.
Untrue. Weapons are not banned; you have 2nd Amendment protection on that, and if we don't need an armed militia now, then when will we need one?
What is happening is that people carrying weapons (not just firearms) are banned. The statement couldn't be clearer: if you have a weapon, and aren't wearing a uniform, we will assume that you have criminal intent.
Don't ever let anyone tell you that they're banning your weapon, or that your weapon poses a security risk. They're making a "guilty until proven innocent" judgement about you, they're just too weaselly to admit it.
Drivel. A polygon has as many points as you like. A triangle has 3 points. Just because 3D programmers and artists get lazy and refer to triangles as "poly's" doesn't make it true.
If you're going to be a smart arse, at least have the common courtesy to be a correct one.
Tsk tsk. If the Magic Smoke hasn't got out, it's usable or at least a fun project. Not everyone is ready to embrace the culture of disposability so readily.
Recycling is better than disposal. Re-use is better than recycling. Recovery of an otherwise defunct drive is best of all. C'mere, and give me a hug. C'mon, it won't hurt.
Got that, thanks. Only thing is, there are no J11 and J15 on the controller. Perhaps he means pins 11 and 15, but as these are well defined I/O (HD03 and HD01) and not reserved, I'm highly dubious about following this advice.
Still, I don't really have much to lose...