The World Cup Blog is quite amusing. I've been watching England vs Sweden as a background task - a 1-1 score draw. No doubt there'll be lots of soul (no pun intended) searching about England's performance - pretty dire and lacking in imagination and flair. I don't intend to say much about the World Cup on DJ as there's plenty of media coverage. Even Tennent's, the Scottish beer brewer, is getting in on the act with their http://www.notattheworldcup.com website. I do like the current set of Tennent's TV 'pintlings' ads though ;-)

From Friday's Guardian Unlimited | Netnews | Europe votes to end data privacy

European law enforcement agencies were given sweeping powers yesterday to monitor telephone, internet and email traffic in a move denounced by critics as the biggest threat to data privacy in a generation.

Music Industry Unveils Piracy-Proof Format

"We can state with absolute certainty that no computer in the world can access the data on this disc," said spokesman Brett Campbell. "We are also confident that no-one is going to be able to produce pirate copies in this format without going to a heck of a lot of trouble. This is without doubt the best anti-piracy invention the music industry has ever seen."

I've also heard it said that some audiophiles prefer the sound output from this format of disc ;-)

via vfth - Web Page Design for Designers - Editorial June 2002 - Feature - Style Sheets without Tears - 3

Andrew 'bunnie' Huang has released a PDF version of his web page exposé of the Xbox innards - Keeping Secrets in Hardware: the Microsoft XBox Case Study.

There's even more on RSS auto-discovery on Mark's site. Looks like it'll reach critical mass soon ;-)

Ha! the Linux Journal On-Line | Obsolete Microkernel Dooms Mac OS X to Lag Linux in Performance article is rightly being derided as troll fodder. Although interesting from the point of view of an exposition of monolithic vs microkernel the article seems fundamentally flawed - not least because Mac OS X is not an example of a traditional microkernel OS!! The comments on the article are interesting too ;-)

Dave's been busy! - Aggregator Auto-Discovery

This page details the changes in the implementation of RSS Auto-Discovery in Radio and Frontier, and includes a heads-up for developers who have built on the aggregator, your code may have to change to support redirected subscriptions.

QUEEN NIGHT ON CHANNEL 4 has been playing in the background on the TV. I'm reliving some of my student days through the music of Queen and, earlier tonight, the Kenny Everett comedy sketches.

Quite rightly Paul Snively backlashes against the backlashed Ted Nelson:

The thing that always strikes me about the backlash against Nelson is that no one is willing to address his points about the disparity between the Web and Xanadu. No one has the intellectual honesty to examine the materials that Nelson has made available whether it's in the form of writing, such as Computer Lib/Dream Machines, or in the form of the Xanadu Green or Gold code or the ZigZag codand explain why Nelson's specific architectural vision is wrong. All of the attacks are ad hominem in nature.

Ted Nelson used to be visiting professor in the Department of Information Science at Strathclyde. I remember his inaugural lecture at the university. A very interesting guy. I seem to recall thinking during his lecture that the concepts in Project Xanadu were well ahead of their time but I couldn't imagine they'd ever make it into a real implementation.

It's a long story. Suffice to say that I've just had to re-install Radio Userland following the advice/steps in Radio UserLand : Re: Help....please.

via ranchero.com - Mac OS X: Version Control with CVS

Mark Pilgrim morphed Matt Griffith's question "Do any RSS aggregators use the HTML LINK Element?" into an implementation of RSS auto-discovery with a Radio auto-subscribe bookmarklet.

It's such a good idea I'm just about to add a <link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="XML" href="http://duncan.smeed.org/rss/jotter.rss"> to my site template.

Jim [hbwt] is home at last!. Have Browser Will Travel may be a bit of a misnomer for a while ;-)

EE Times - Iconoclast designers choose MIPS

A group of engineers in Calabasas Hills, Calif. wants to turn the microprocessor world on its head by doing the unthinkable: tossing out the clock and letting the signals move about unencumbered. For those designers, inspired by research conducted at nearby Caltech, clocks are for wimps.

The Fulcrum Microsystems Inc. design team isn't the first to propose an asynchronous processor, but president and chief executive officer Robert Nunn wants to be the first to take a clockless, fire-breathing processor mainstream. "We really deal with an asynchronous world," he said. "We only make it synchronous for our own convenience."

In fact the article concentrates more on MIPS and its willingness to license the MIPS ISA than it does on asynchronous processor design. If you want to learn more about unclocked processors than a Google Search: asynchronous processor is a good starting point ;-)

With this emphasis on the MIPS architecture and its design wins, perhaps my students will be well equipped to participate in the embeeded systems industry as they (should) really know all about the MIPS architecture ;-) They even had an exam question or two about it! B-}