Any embedded programmer with even a passing familiarity with the PC business might have reason to despair. Computers were once a rich, thriving, vital, and exciting industry ripe with alternatives and possibilities, advances and innovations. You bet they do. The benefits of e-business are obvious. We're bombarded with statistics on Internet growth and, more to the point, the rise in electronic commerce.
Success involves a good dose of understanding how the Web affects culture, public policy, and law.
Despite manufacturers' bickering over rewritable DVD formats and the lack of widespread acceptance of a DVD-audio spec, DVD technology remains on a sure course to serve in applications from living rooms to supercomputers. An Urban Legend for the Internet Good Times will re-write your hard drive. It will scramble any disks that are even close to your computer. It will recalibrate your refrigerator's coolness setting so all your ice cream goes melty. It will demagnetize the strips on all your credit cards, screw up the tracking on your television and use subspace-field harmonics to scratch any CDs you try to play .