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I use and love that flexible filtering language, sieve. Designed for Cyrus/IMAP servers, but also works clientside.
(info about sieve can be found here)

Professor Andrew Appel of Princeton University thought so. OF course, I wouldn't expect you to accept an appeal to authority without some background arguement.

To people who code for the shear joy of it, it's plainy obvious that source code = free speech. We're just not always gifted at conveying that idea. (It has something to do with "inalienable rights" ie: the kind you can never take away so shouldn't try...)

Touretzsky took part in a debate this afternoon about the DMCA in which one of his slides was the DCSS code and the caption was "It is illegal to show this slide." :)

Somewhat related debate at CMU today between Touretzky and Shamos, who testified on opposite sides of the MPAA vs Reimerdes court cases. A CS department page on the debate is up, and it is in progress right now to a packed auditorium. Both of these men are Carnegie Mellon professors, and the debate has been punctuated by slides such as "this slide is illegal" and "you are one click away from destroying the motion picture industry...
Click here to continue"

Somewhat related debate at CMU today between Touretzky and Shamos, who testified on opposite sides of the MPAA vs Reimerdes court cases. A CS department page on the debate is up, and it is in progress right now to a packed auditorium. Both of these men are Carnegie Mellon professors, and the debate has been punctuated by slides such as "this slide is illegal" and "you are one click away from destroying the motion picture industry...
Click here to continue"

Its noticable that Dr. Touretzky has been threatened by the MPA, but the threat has neither been withdrawn nor acted upon (AFAIK). It seems to me that the EFF might have used that in the Felten case as evidence that the threat against Felten was not an isolated case, and the withdrawal of the threat against Felten was an attempt to avoid clarification of the law.

Paul.

Prof. Dave Touretzky at Carnegie Mellon (you may remember him for the gallery of CSS descramblers he keeps on his page) has an interesting practical reply to being threatened with bogus Lanham Act claims (scroll about halfway down for the relevant comments). I'm not sure if the reasoning applies here, but it's worth a read.

Prof. Dave Touretzky at Carnegie Mellon (you may remember him for the gallery of CSS descramblers he keeps on his page) has an interesting practical reply to being threatened with bogus Lanham Act claims (scroll about halfway down for the relevant comments). I'm not sure if the reasoning applies here, but it's worth a read.

At Carnegie Mellon University on Friday there is going to be a moderated debate between David Touretzky of DCSS webpage fame, and Michael Shamos who defended the DMCA in court against Touretzky.

Here's the link: http://calendar.cs.cmu.edu/scsEvents/demo/554.html

It isn't just The Sims. Transgaming and the Wine developers have done an incredible job. If you haven't looked at the game compatibility list recently, do so. Anything with a 5 (officially supported by Transgaming) or 4 (runs nicely) should be fine. It's up to an incredible number of good games now.

Nonrandom Link

That's pretty cool . There are lots of sort of soccer championships for robots, one of them with aibo, the famous robot dog. It's especialy interresting in the field of the computer vision interaction.

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
   
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
   
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
   

Computer science is already like this. You are not taken seriously unless you can produce code. For instance, in his autobiography, "Models of My Life", Herb Simon of Carnegie-Mellon recounts the first AI conference. He and Al Newell won the right to edit the proceedings of the conference because they were the only ones with actually working code. Dave Touretzky, also of Carnegie-Mellon, is even more adamant on this point, and his web-site has been cited frequently in this forum as regards the DECSS. Dave is very respected in CS, see his views at:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst

Doom and Marathon were both ground-breaking FPS games.

The big difference was in the actual gameplay. ID makes game engines (darn good ones, but still game engines). ID can make totally kickass game engines. Carmack amazes me every time he pulls out a new effect and makes it run at the speed he does. I can't *imagine* what tricks he's pulling.

That being said, ID does not make good games. ID games aren't detailed, have no story whatsoever, and don't try for player immersion in this lifetime.

Doom had one of the worst stories ever. Marathon had the best story of any game I've seen yet. There are still people analyzing it, years later. Despite the fact that years and tens of games have gone by since then, I have yet to see as detailed a game story.

Doom was really, really simple. Walk into room, shoot thirty enemies, get ammo, repeat. Over and over and over.

Marathon was *scary*. Nasty. It wasn't a speed game, and it wasn't a mow-down-the-enemies game. It didn't have little floating heart powerups or unrealistic gimmicks. It's lighting was...intimidating. Half-Life comes close to Marathon's lighting (remember the assimilated scientist sitting at the madly flickering laptop in the darkened room near the very beginning?), which the map makers used brilliantly. I still remember a few scenes:

Arrival!: Walking down a brightly lit, curving hallway. You know something's gone wrong -- one of the ship's AIs nearly killed you on docking. You've shot a bug-eyed alien moments before. Now you step into a darkened observation deck. Huge windows on the side of the room cast three patches of light onto the floor. Then, you just make out dark shapes moving toward you, past the light patches...

Arrival!: You're walking down tiny maintenance corridors, turn a corner and come face to face with a big floating creature, intent on fiddling with the computer terminal in front of it.

Bigger Guns Nearby: You're walking through a darkened room. A light, either damaged or controlled by one of the crazed AIs, is casting a harsh, erratic strobe through the doorway twenty feet ahead of you onto the walls, ceiling, and floor. As you approach the doorway, an alien pops around the corner.

Eat the Sheep (a later Marathon): Insane. Nearly invisible creatures floating around, strange shapes, lights all around, spinning energy discs coming from the air at you.

(I forget the name, but the map in Marathon 1 with all the lurkers): A dingy brown (like a dark Quake) level infested with small floating bugs that act like evil, floating, homing land mines.

Bungie was one of the best game companies ever. I greatly regret the fact that they chose to become part of the Borg (for the money and power they got, I suppose I can't blame them). It'll probably mean that I'll never play another one of their games.

Rest in peace, Marathon. We loved you.

no-so-random-link

Oh, don't be silly. They'll SHAsum anything trying to look like FBI stuff, and require that the FBI hand 'em SHAsums of anything that they don't want to trigger the software. The lads at antivirus companies aren't dumb.

On another note, this opens whole new markets for (a) their competitors and (b) new companies making "privacy assurance" utilities that look for stuff like keystroke loggers, BO, etc.

I'm guessing Symantec isn't ignoring this...

Also, I'd be more concerned with Joe Hacker getting a copy of the blessed binary that the FBI's using and having a snooping program that all detect software has "agreed to ignore". I mean, the exact people that the FBI is gonna sic their software on (hackers/industrial espionage types that actually know enough to be encrypting everything) are the people that you *don't* want getting ahold of this software. So you have all this incredibly nasty software sitting happily on some (criminal enough to get the FBI's attention) hacker's computer, conveniently within his reach.

not-so-random-link

It has been said that one can "judge a tree by its fruit". The Pentagon says the one can judge the probability of whether a software program will function error-free by the Program's developers, their company, and their accreditation by the Carnegie-Mellon Software Engineering Institute. Ut's a CYA thing, mostly.
It is my perception that the CS community has never forgiven Mr. Berners-Lee for letting the non-initiated in the door. As a Project Manager for a large military/civilian software system in the mid-90's, I remember one contractor berating another because the winning contractor had done their work in VB. The loser had done his work in Fortran. Probably still is.

"On the surface this looks like a fairly boring document/process, but this is a major step forward - turning software engineering from an art into a science."

On the surface viewing Software Engineering as all science and no art makes for boring documents and processes. When people are bored, they naturally don't do nearly as good a job. Indeed, the best Software Engineers have the science part down cold, but also have a natural instinct that is the direct manifestation of their artistic inclination. Art and Science are the Yin and Yang of Software Engineering, and to remove or diminish the role of either is to diminish the effectiveness of the software developer(s), regardless of which one you mistakenly choose to emphasize.

If one wants to improve the overall quality of their software they must develop both their left and right brain. To shun one in favour of the other is folly. It is no different than strengthening one leg and cutting of the other in an attempt to be more mobile. Hopping around on that one remaining leg will certainly make it big and strong, but mobility will suffer almost detrimentally. I guess that makes it a major unbalanced hop toward the different, and less effective, not a major step toward anything.

Perhaps these people have never heard of the Software Engineering Institute and the Capability Maturity Model? Then again, what do I know? I'm too artistic to be any good at Software Engineering ;^)

A clear indication is that most universities around the country are sticking with computer science as the "programmers major". I've only heard of software engineering at the graduate level.

One decent program that sticks out in my mind is the one at CMU.

At the university I attend there is already a Software Engineering curriculum, and if you take a look at places like the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute, you'll see that this concept has been around for a little while now.

I do quite a bit of number crunching. Here are
some of the resources I use:

Netlib (www.netlib.org) -- Yes, it's mostly Fortran, but that's a good thing! Just use f2c (easy to find) and translate to C if that's what you want. Don't underestimate the power of decades-old programs -- old == widely used and well-tested.

StatLib (lib.stat.cmu.edu) -- Collection of statistical software, in various languages, including C, Fortran, and S.

SAL, Scientific Applications on Linux (sal.kachinatech.com) -- a very large collection of links.

Freshmeat (www.freshmeat.net) -- Not scientifically oriented, but there is much scientific stuff there, along with all kinds of miscellany.

Octave (www.octave.org) -- A package for matrix manipulations, similar to Matlab, but free. Useful for all kinds of problems.

R (www.r-project.org) -- An implementation of the S language for statistics, but also useful for general problems, similar to Octave. S+ is a commercial implementation of S.

Well, that ought to be enough to get started. To echo something other posters have mentioned -- don't even bother with Windows software. If your budget is tight, save your money for hardware, don't waste it on the MS tax.

Scientifically proven. Sorry, I don't have the original source for this, but it was one of the few things that I actually believed from my social psych class.

More importantly, can we get Microsoft to subsidize our relatively cheap X terminals?

:-)

Whoever manages to get the kernel running on these really has given MS a kidney puch. MS is supposed to lose something like 1 to 2 billion dollars selling the systems...and by God, I want some of that going towards my new Linux box.

Unfortunately, getting information on the video chipset is undoubtedly going to be rough.

Random link o' the year.

It isn't just this -- Bush recently revoked the current and future rights of journalists to view old presidential memos and such. Normally, after a period of time (IIRC, something like 30 years), they're opened. That is no longer the case.

One wonders what exactly he's doing that he's unwilling to let the public know about.

random link

It's nice to see that a new buzzword has emerged to allow people to gloss-over topics they don't get

Perhaps it only seems that way to you because its a topic you don't understand. The term "genetic algorithm" is FAR from new, genetic algorithm research has been going on for decades (with some machine-learning-related texts dealing with "evolutionary programming" dating back to the 1960s), and the term describes a very specific (and actually somewhat mundane) AI technique. Its not a "general term" being used to describe something that they aren't willing to describe in the article, in fact, its pretty much a certainty that they chose that word precisely because it refers to the *exact technique* being used, and there is no ambiguity in using it if you know what genetic algorithms are. Hardly a buzzword.

(I assume you have a roommate or something in which other, non-computer-literate person(s) are around your computer while you are not.)
Do this, install Festival on your machine. Later, ssh in, and have it start saying stuff from 2001. This works even better if you have a microphone and recording an IceCast stream so you can have a conversation.

Yes, mod the parent of this post up. What would be the basis for art as a legal tactic? I want to know.

I consider myself an artist, with programming as my medium. When I consult for a company to integrate foo into their web service, that is commercial programming, like commercial painting. But when I am constructing a massively multiplayer interactive experience, that is artistic programming. I am trying to break through the existing constructs to something new, something that is my own. That is art.

And I have difficulty articulating the rage I feel at those banal greedy fuckwads who want to take away my artistic tools. The only reason we can do anything as programmers is because of the decades of patent-free ideas and expressions contributed to computer science. If software patents had been the name of the game from the get go there would be no Internet, no home computing, and none of the opportunities available to us now.

What if brush-stroke technique was patentable? So only Monet could paint impressionistically, only Seurat could use little dots, only Pollack could throw paint at a canvas. There would be no growth in art, the art world would wither and die.

Don't talk to me about patent expirations. Art grows and develops only when there is an active body of work and active painters, riffing off each other and each others' techniques. Patents put a lock, a brain-death on the exploration that is critical to art.

Touretzky is really on to something with his library of DeCSS scramblers. Not so much for the DeCSS case, but for the larger point that programming and computer science are not like other "patentable" domains. The library of scramblers shows the easy transition from art to code, that art is code, and this for a DeCSS scrambler.

Thank god for people like Lessig, who have the skills and talents to navigate the world of the fuckwads. As a computer artist (in the larger sense), I am busy trying to do art. By the way, there was a hopeful piece in the NYT today: I say "hopeful" only because it is another indicator that the mass-media zeitgeist is slowly waking up to the tragedy of the fuckwads.

Unfortunately, it's hard to avoid despair when the fuckwads control the government. The other day I was walking, thinking of this and other problems, and I thought, there must be some way we could all retaliate against the fuckwads.

Anyway, someone who is a lawyer, please comment on the art as legal defense possibility. I have to get back to making art.

a language for describing partial recursive functions.

The important point here is that the definition has nothing to do with physical devices. Of course, most computer languages can be understood by particular physical devices (electronic computers), but that is not required--and it only came about later. Even after the advent of electronic computers, some computer languages were still being invented for the purpose of communicating with people. Two good examples illustrating this are APL and MIX.

APL (A Programming Language) was invented by Ken Iverson, a Harvard mathematician. His sole purpose was to have a good way to describe algorithms to people. Physical computers were not even a consideration. Later, other people thought that it would be a good idea to implement the language, and interpreters for computers were crafted, but that was strictly secondary.

MIX was invented by Don Knuth, a Stanford mathematician. His primary purpose was to have a "formal, precise way" to "present the various techniques" detailed in his book Art of Computer Programming (I'm quoting from the preface). Although algorithms described in MIX could be executed on a (idealized) computer, Knuth's primary purpose was communicate to people.

Both these languages are intended to be used to describe algorithmic calculations, but not all computer languages need do this. Prolog is an example, where you just describe the input and output of the program (e.g. input "a list" and output "an ordered list", where "ordered" means "i LE j implies list[i] LE list[j]"), without necessarily describing how to calculate the output. And Prolog was invented primarily to be executed on a computer.

If an algorithm is described in English, then plainly, there are free-speech protections. What if Esperanto were used? Again, free-speech protections should apply, but note that Esperanto is an artificial language. So, I think that the same provisions should apply if the language is APL or MIX. From there, we surely get protection for Prolog, Java, C, etc.: all human-readable languages.

Has this line of reasoning been used in the courts? If not, why?

If your home computer is online 24/7 (which is presumably is if you're on broadband) t's cooler to use SAMBA, AFS (or here), Coda, InterMezzo, NFS, or the unfinished Lustre. If you're not big on effort, set up an http or ftp (or gopher!) server. That way, you have an automatically up-to-date menu of your mp3s, where you can access all your music any time you can connect to the 'Net.
This box is just itching to be a Coda server.

If your home computer is online 24/7 (which is presumably is if you're on broadband) t's cooler to use SAMBA, AFS (or here), Coda, InterMezzo, NFS, or the unfinished Lustre. If you're not big on effort, set up an http or ftp (or gopher!) server. That way, you have an automatically up-to-date menu of your mp3s, where you can access all your music any time you can connect to the 'Net.
This box is just itching to be a Coda server.

If you're archiving your own music and have the luxury of choosing a format to store music in, don't use MP3! FLAC is a lossless, open, LGPL-in-implementation format that's wonderful for archiving. A few years down the road, when you have more storage space, a higher-tech, cleaner audio system, and are wishing that you hadn't used MP3 because you can now hear the artifacts, FLAC will still be in original CD quality.

Disadvantages: Most people aim for about 10 to 1 compression with MP3...FLAC only gives you 2 to 1. You'll have to decide whether the cost in space is worth have a lossless duplicate of the CD.

A person I know has been archiving all their data in FLAC on their Linux box, and has been raving about the results.

Touretzky, D.S. Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation, Benjamin/Cummins, 1990. ISBN 0-8053-0492-4. (For Lisp novices.)

Let's make it simple -- id is not, and may never be a good game development company.

Hold those flames, though. id is an *incredible* game *engine* development company. id work has gone into all sorts of amazing games. Their engines still blow me away. But really, the "game" that comes out with each new engine (quake, doom) is nothing much more than a glorified tech demo without much gameplay. Other companies take these incredible engines and make polished games with them.

I really am serious. quake had no story, not a lot of variety, mediocre multiplayer (yes, deathmatch was novel when it was invented, but it's hardly been as long-lived as, say, Team Fortress). The reason quake was so popular and so long-lived was because of the great mods that came out and quake-engine games that came out. *Those* are actual, complete games. Quake is just an engine with a demo on top.

Every time a new id comes out with a new "game", though, it advances the state-of-the-art in 3d gaming, so I like seeing the Quake logo in stores...

Ragnar

Oh, bullshit. AMD doesn't have "better policies" than Intel. AMD is trying to wipe out the existing king of the arena by underselling him. If Intel went away, AMD would be charging you just as much as Intel once did.

Second, AMD's product is not, IMHO, all that mindblowing. Yes, for consumer applications they can currently squeeze out a bit more performance. However the utter flakiness of the chipsets supporting them is a big issue. If your motherboard and your video card fight, a 2% performance difference is not an issue.
News flash: WinNT/2K isn't *perfectly* stable...but neither does it hard freeze frequently. I've seen hardware issues blamed on Windows a *lot* (I did it myself once when I had a bad video card that would hard freeze my NT system...and, as I later discovered, my Linux box). MS (bad as they are) gets a lot of the bad rap for motherboards that are way too twitchy on RAM timing...mostly AMD ones.

Second, as illustrated by Tom's Hardware (and recently, my dormmate burning through a processor accidentally), AMD procs have lousy thermal regulation.

Third, neither AMD nor Intel is the greatest chip manufacturer *anyway*. Both AMD and Intel's chips are spiralling way out of sight in terms of power consumption. It's just silly. The PowerPC 603e used so much less power than a "modern" x86 chip that it's ridiculous.

Fourth, the x86 architecture blows. Period. Sorry, but that's the way it is. I had a PowerPC system that I used to hack around in assembly on, and the x86 is crap. Whoever came up with variable-width instructions, less registers than I have fingers, and enough legacy junk to drown in should be shot.

Anyway, Intel is actually moving toward IA64, a non-lousy architecture (and way overdue, IMHO). Sure, you pay a premium for Intel's high end products...but at least some of that money is going to R&D for wildly new technologies...not just producing new fab plants, a la AMD. AMD is going to sit on x86 as long as they can, since the cost of going to a new architecture in terms of R&D is enormous.

Of course, not everyone agrees with me...

I've found that a 17" monitor with virtual desktops is far superior to twin 20" monitors. You can't *look* at all the stuff at the same time, and with zero-delay edge flipping and a fast window manager, moving your mouse (or hitting a keyboard key) is as automatic as moving your eyes.

It's cheaper, too. And you get a bigger desktop.

Philosophy and CS

Naw. Matrox wants to get the business market with this. Remember how they swore off gaming and aimed for the business market?

So the problem with videoconferencing, which was being pushed at businesses not too long ago, is bandwidth requirements. It's pricy if you have fifty execs, none of whom want chopping, skipping images, trying to videoconference over your oubound link.

Enter Matrox's "Headcasting". Textures are maybe updated now and then over the network, but just about the only thing that goes over the network is deformation vectors. The guy moves his mouth, a couple of deformations are sent across the network, the video card at the other end moves a few polygons.

"Headcasting" does entail a bit of neat technology. Matrox had to do scads of transformations in hardware in order to keep up a high-res model of the face. Basically, Headcasting is a bunch of software and a seriously bumped on-silicon transformation engine.

But don't try to figure out how Headcasting is going to be cool for gaming. It isn't, and Matrox doesn't intend it to be. It's a stab at a new business market.

Not running a Matrox video card

Intel was talking about how SSE lets you decode highly-compressed video more efficiently -- letting you download streaming video faster (this came out back when streaming video was all the industry rage).

Granted, Intel probably didn't mind helping the misunderstanding along a bit, but if you look at their original ads, they weren't flat-out lying or anything.

Ragnar Ho!

I completely agree with you -- my trusty 266 Mhz PII is running the latest version of all the Linux software I use, and is still peppy and sprightly.

Xemacs is fine. Dillo is fine. Sawfish is fine. GNOME is fine (Nautilus might be slow...I don't know. I like having a desktop unblemished by icons, so I ripped gmc and Nautilus out). rxvt is zippy. links/lynx is fast. vm (one of xemacs' excellent mail clients) is nice.

If you're less of a developer, you could use abiword, gnumeric, balsa, and still have a zippy system.

I'll probably be happy for at least another year with my current system.

"Upgrade fever" stems partly from hard core gaming, and partly from the fact that Windows/MS products are God-awful when it comes to efficiency and RAM/CPU usage. Linux will be the death of the hardware manufacturers. ;-)

If you use Linux, where's the reason to upgrade?

This little guy's a great little webserver, and he doesn't need more than a 486 -- and he's *never* saturated.

There was a program that I went through called Personal Software Process, that was taught by someone at Carnegie Mellon University, in the Software Engineering Institute division. He taught us that by keeping track of certian factors including the LOC (lines of code) you can write an hour, peer review times, and a host of others that schedules can be very accurate, but it is all part of a very well defined process.

Check it out about

With software, the first part of that expression tends towards zero since most things we know how to do we can reuse code, whereas with building it remains a large accurate estimate.

I thought that's where GoF patterns could help. When I've been asked to explain design patterns to PHBs, the analogy I've always used is structural engineering - eg. for a bridge, we could have: box girder, suspension, cantilever etc. Design patterns are just like that.

Of course, in the real world, this is only a partial solution. Over 90% of software project failures are down to requirements. If we could get that right, then software development could, indeed be a "proper" engineering discipline. The only place it is, though, is where people are prepared to pay what it takes to get it right - flight control systems etc. IIRC, one of the few people to have achieved the SEI CMM level 5 are the lot who develop the space shuttle software. At the last count, their code was costing them over $1m a line. How many people would put up with what that would do for the cost of their text editor?

I have worked in a couple organizations where schedule estimates are pretty accurate. The key, for these orgs at least, was to follow a structured development model where the requiremenst were well defined in advance. We used the Capability Maturity Model. This methology probably wouldn't work for very small or very large projects, but it works very well for medium sized project.

It's important to note that this methology is independent of programming language, operating system, etc. What is does require, however, is experience. In other words, the longer that you follow the CMM, the better your schedule estimates will be. Also not that everybody related to the progect (System Engineering, Managament, etc.) has to participate. Management in particular has to understand that it is better to have an accurate schedule that ends later than desired than it is to have a schedule that meets the desired end date but that is impossible to meet.

The amazing thing about the CMM is that the higher the rating of the organization, the less stress that the programmers feel when they are doing their work. For me, that makes it all worthwhile.

/Don

On the other hand, if we used our education system to encourage everyone to do everything, I think we'd have a lot of non-genius folks who would just suck at lots of things. We're probably better off just letting the geniuses figure out that they're destined for bigger & better things.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, you'd can get a good feel for the existing work in the field from:

• InteractiveStory.net - Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern's interactive drama/believable agent project, and obligatory huge page o'links.
• Oz - The Oz project at CMU
• Erasmatron@Robotwisdom - Jorn Barger's excellent thumbnail sketch of Crawford's writings. In most cases, Jorn's synopsis is hyperlinked to the related page on erazmatazz

Selmer Bringsjord and David Ferrucci, Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, A Storytelling Machine, August 30, 1999.

Nicolas Szilas, Interactive Drama on Computer: Beyond Linear Narrative, 1999.

Antonio Furtado, Angelo Ciarlini, Plots of Narratives Over Temporal Databases, 1997.

Barbara Hayes-Roth, Robert van Gent, Story-marking with improvisational puppets, 1997.

W. Scott Neal Reilly, A methodology for building believable social agents, 1997.

IMHO, interactive storytelling is one of the most interesting cross-discipline computational problems out there.

An even more interesting robot is the one at CMU that walks around talking to people & showing facial expressions... these roboguard robots don't seem all that advanced, especially after seeing robot museum guides, nurses, and lots of other cool robots.

... or you could come to CMU which has had wireless for a while now (since at least 2000) ...

500 EEs, who know about as much about software as I do about circuit design.

Most digital design nowadays is done in a programming language such as Verilog and compiled into netlists. Given that Verilog code can easily be interpreted on a computer, there isn't much difference between a computer program and a circuit description for describing a computation; EEs can easily adapt.

Still, it's fun to read about

So the venerable DEC rises from the ashes?

If they were calling this a DEC S ound S ystem, and they later announced a DVD upgrade, would they be sued?

So the venerable DEC rises from the ashes?

If they were calling this a DEC S ound S ystem, and they later announced a DVD upgrade, would they be sued?

This got me intrigued, so I hopped on to Google, and, lo and behold, this is what I found. Probably one of the more interesting works that I have read online in quite some time, although there were parts that I didn't understand since I haven't yet taken enough coursees in high math to properly comprehend them.

People who are advising changing your browser string, you are playing into MS's arms. You're making percieved IE browser market share rise...and other websites will respond, with lots of IE-only features and less effort to support other browsers.

Please don't do this, unless you are sending that version string *only* to the MSN site.

Thanks!