Since 2003, the SourceForge.net Terms and Conditions of Use have prohibited certain persons from receiving services pursuant to U.S. laws, including, without limitations, the Denied Persons List and the Entity List, and other lists issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security. The specific list of sanctions that affect our users concern the transfer and export of certain technology to foreign persons and governments on the sanctions list. This means users residing in countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, may not post content to, or access content available through, SourceForge.net. Last week, SourceForge.net began automatic blocking of certain IP addresses to enforce those conditions of use.

I can appreciate that these nations have been placed under sanction, but theres a few things that the US gov should probably keep in mind:

1. Its very easy to get around this denial of access: just use an open proxy from an IP thats not banned
2. How does the US gov measure whether or not a site is major enough to warrant putting specific restrictions on its export?  Surely the correct measure would be to determine how useful the code is, as opposed to the volume? With this in mind, surely every Linux distribution should also ban those IPs?
3. Will the US gov now prosecute any bloggers/ “small scale” producers of code who don’t conform to this law?

The first thing to say is that netbeans does take a little while to load, which is a shame really because it looks like they missed the opportunity to show off javas threading abilities. The other downer is that it eats alot of ram you’ll want at least a gig to run netbeans and happily get on with your other desktop tasks (music, word processing etc)

After the load, the fun stuff!

The best thing to say is that the web container integration works really well. It comes with glassfish as a standard, but you can add many different different verions of tomcat ontop if you prefer that. It makes deploying your servlets or jsps as easy as hiting F6 (which runs you main project, remember to select your project as main first!) . You can change where netbeans deploys the servlet by right clicking on the project and going to properties. Once in properties you can go down to run and select your server Of course, you will need to have the server running first!

IMO the best update for the editor is the code highlighting, particularly the instant rename. You can basically out the caret in the middle of a word and hit <ctrl> + R The editor then selects every other instance of that word in the file and changes it as you change the currently selected one accordingly.