No, not really. This is a political article, plain and simple. It's about the legal and social aspects of a corporation's actions. Alluding that this article even deals with the ethics of science is a little misleading.
Monsanto had some people who appear to have either made a tragic mistake, or purposefully ignored harm they were causing to others for their own purposes. A classic moral dillema, just on a larger scale than normal.
It's fine by me to see slashdot thinking about more socially relevant topics than Beowulf clusters (obviously, excepting all the YRO stuff) but we shouldn't kid ourselves into calling another "big corporations are evil" article "science."
No, patching a game doesn't necessarily violate copyright, but the sort of patch this guy is writing does.
By translating the original Civ 3 text he is creating a derivative work which he cannot distribute without permission from the original work's owner.
The people who have been given distribution rights to that work in Germany stand to lose real money if his patch is distributed, so it's no surprise that they are suing him.
His motivations were very nice and all, but still, he's messing with another person's copyrighted works.
If he really wants to volunteer on a project I'm sure the Freeciv folks would be a bit more gracious about the help.
I use Idea, personally.
on
Java IDEs?
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· Score: 5, Informative
I've tried several. Here's a rundown of what I've experienced. All of these have syntax highlighting, code completion, popup parameter help, can jump to the place a class or variable was defined. The all have a debugger.
Codeguide This was my first java IDE. I used it for a while. For a java IDE it's not so slow. Real-time compilation shows any code mistakes (it underlines them red), even stuff that others miss. Free evaluation version. Not terribly expensive. Relatively poor debugger. Nice autoindenting and code formatting. Virtually nonexistant CVS integration. Closed source.
JBuilder : Slow. Does a lot. Has excellent plugin support, so it can be extended a lot. Nice project management. The Enterprise version has excellent CVS integration. Has a visual editor if you do a lot of Swing programming. Fairly poor real-time error detecting. The best "enterprise" tools of these I mention. If you're doing j2ee stuff maybe you can use that stuff. Nice debugger. Library support for editing classpath is great. Autoindenting and code formatting a little weaker. Frustrating memory leak under linux has been plaguing it for years. There is a free version, closed source.
NetBeans SLOW. Reall, really slow. Has a ton of plugins. Ant integration is cool. Project management is a little hard to get used to. Etrememly flexible.I gave this one a real chance but the speed and bugs finally drove me away. Weak CVS integration. This is whas Sun's Forte is based on. (Think Mozilla/Netscape.) Open source.
Idea Excellent IDE. The refactoring support is 2nd to none in any IDE for any language I've ever seen. Code formatting is excellent, I've never seen so many options for how to format code. Code templates are cool. Library support is a little weaker than jbuilder and codeguide - that's one of its few weaknesses. Decent CVS integration. (Not as good as JBuilder, nothing I've seen is.) I code faster with this IDE than any I've used. UI to override methods, implement interfaces, move methods (and fix all the dependencies in your project), rename methods/classes. Lots more. Try it. Closed source.
Is Exult, at http://exult.sourceforge.net. It's an intepreter for the Ultima 7 series of games. It's nearly perfect, and in many ways improved over the original. (Characters open doors, improved combat, higher res, antialiasing, etc)
The copy protection is worth mentioning in those games. It wasn't built into the.exe so much as it was built into the game's scripting system, so to accurately port the game they had to port the copy protection. I actually had to go cosult the original docs to get past the copy protection. Which seemed crazy since the game was written for a different OS 12 or so years ago.
You'll need the original data files to play it, of course, which I'm sure is the same with scummvm.
They are still distributing Cinelerra (see their sourceforge page, linked from their main site), and it seems to be very much along the same lines as Broadcast. If they were so worried, why keep distributing Cinelerra?
Here:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id =9 4322&forum_id=42723
they mention makine Cinelerra a commercial program, but the message itself looks like it was either a joke or written by someone high at the time. Cinelerra is GPLed, by the way.
From their docs (manual.ps in the Cinerella distro):
"In mid 2000 designs for a Broadcast 2000 replacement were drafted. The Broadcast name was officially retired from the series and the software would now be called Cinelerra."
Slashdot Mirror
No, not really. This is a political article, plain and simple. It's about the legal and social aspects of a corporation's actions. Alluding that this article even deals with the ethics of science is a little misleading.
Monsanto had some people who appear to have either made a tragic mistake, or purposefully ignored harm they were causing to others for their own purposes. A classic moral dillema, just on a larger scale than normal.
It's fine by me to see slashdot thinking about more socially relevant topics than Beowulf clusters (obviously, excepting all the YRO stuff) but we shouldn't kid ourselves into calling another "big corporations are evil" article "science."
No, patching a game doesn't necessarily violate copyright, but the sort of patch this guy is writing does.
By translating the original Civ 3 text he is creating a derivative work which he cannot distribute without permission from the original work's owner.
The people who have been given distribution rights to that work in Germany stand to lose real money if his patch is distributed, so it's no surprise that they are suing him.
His motivations were very nice and all, but still, he's messing with another person's copyrighted works.
If he really wants to volunteer on a project I'm sure the Freeciv folks would be a bit more gracious about the help.
I've tried several. Here's a rundown of what I've experienced. All of these have syntax highlighting, code completion, popup parameter help, can jump to the place a class or variable was defined. The all have a debugger.
Codeguide This was my first java IDE. I used it for a while. For a java IDE it's not so slow. Real-time compilation shows any code mistakes (it underlines them red), even stuff that others miss. Free evaluation version. Not terribly expensive. Relatively poor debugger. Nice autoindenting and code formatting. Virtually nonexistant CVS integration. Closed source.
JBuilder : Slow. Does a lot. Has excellent plugin support, so it can be extended a lot. Nice project management. The Enterprise version has excellent CVS integration. Has a visual editor if you do a lot of Swing programming. Fairly poor real-time error detecting. The best "enterprise" tools of these I mention. If you're doing j2ee stuff maybe you can use that stuff. Nice debugger. Library support for editing classpath is great. Autoindenting and code formatting a little weaker. Frustrating memory leak under linux has been plaguing it for years. There is a free version, closed source.
NetBeans SLOW. Reall, really slow. Has a ton of plugins. Ant integration is cool. Project management is a little hard to get used to. Etrememly flexible.I gave this one a real chance but the speed and bugs finally drove me away. Weak CVS integration. This is whas Sun's Forte is based on. (Think Mozilla/Netscape.) Open source.
Idea Excellent IDE. The refactoring support is 2nd to none in any IDE for any language I've ever seen. Code formatting is excellent, I've never seen so many options for how to format code. Code templates are cool. Library support is a little weaker than jbuilder and codeguide - that's one of its few weaknesses. Decent CVS integration. (Not as good as JBuilder, nothing I've seen is.) I code faster with this IDE than any I've used. UI to override methods, implement interfaces, move methods (and fix all the dependencies in your project), rename methods/classes. Lots more. Try it. Closed source.
Is Exult, at http://exult.sourceforge.net. It's an intepreter for the Ultima 7 series of games. It's nearly perfect, and in many ways improved over the original. (Characters open doors, improved combat, higher res, antialiasing, etc)
.exe so much as it was built into the game's scripting system, so to accurately port the game they had to port the copy protection. I actually had to go cosult the original docs to get past the copy protection. Which seemed crazy since the game was written for a different OS 12 or so years ago.
The copy protection is worth mentioning in those games. It wasn't built into the
You'll need the original data files to play it, of course, which I'm sure is the same with scummvm.
They are still distributing Cinelerra (see their sourceforge page, linked from their main site), and it seems to be very much along the same lines as Broadcast. If they were so worried, why keep distributing Cinelerra?
d =9 4322&forum_id=42723
Here:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_i
they mention makine Cinelerra a commercial program, but the message itself looks like it was either a joke or written by someone high at the time. Cinelerra is GPLed, by the way.
From their docs (manual.ps in the Cinerella distro):
"In mid 2000 designs for a Broadcast 2000 replacement were drafted. The Broadcast name was officially retired from the series and the software would now be called Cinelerra."