Scheduling finals without the headache
Want to become rich and famous? Schedule UAH finals so no one has three in a day. A Tech Talk column on NP-complete problems such as graph coloring.
Blog
Thoughts and observations.
DVD copy protection and the paying customer
My new DVD player wouldn’t play through my VCR, thanks to copy protection. A Tech Talk column on King’s Quest, license servers, fair use, and Betamax.
Grammar checkers and sand in the carpet
Fun with mass nouns. Sands in the carpet and an awful traffic show why English is hard for programs and why word-processor grammar checkers miss so much.
Should people or machines count votes?
Florida’s recount asked whether people or machines should count votes. A Tech Talk column on early computers, Gödel’s incompleteness, and trusting machines.
Napster, open source, and why artists create
Napster went legit with Bertelsmann, and the doomsayers came out again. A Tech Talk column on why musicians, teachers, and hackers create without pay.