> About the only attempt at offering an opposing view was the brief mention that the WHO states that there is no known risk of wifi at this time, this brief mentioning was followed by a couple of minutes of slagging off the credibility of the WHO.
That's not strictly accurate, they had quite a long interview with the Italian chappy... Professor Rumbaldi or whatever he was called who said that there was no risk. However I do share your misgivings and think the problem is fitting Panorama into a 30 minute slot doesn't leave much time to explore themes. I came away with the impression that there was no big problem with WiFi but that perhaps further studies were needed.
Personally I can't believe that the power involved in WiFi transmissions can be dangerous but then I would sooner not see my tax $$$ spent on laptops for schools so kidz can copy their homework off Dickipedia.
> The trick: The Megaupload toolbar [megaupload.com] integrates the Alexa toolbar, which is the source of the traffic data used for the Alexa rankings.
they also host p0rn which more mainstream sites won't touch.
> MSN was, at first inception, meant to be *the* portal to the internet.
erm I think you've got that wrong. MSN was meant to replace the Internet, at least that is what the Microsoft Sales Idiots tried to convince me around 1994. The exact term they used was "MSN will bury the Internet in 6 months". The idea at Microsoft was that centralized and controlled networks were the future, think France's Minitel mating with AOL. You've got to remember that this was around the time Bill Gates tried the vision thing with his "Road Ahead" book and ended up looking like some lamer who just didn't get it.
Why didn't anyone pick up his PC was spewing viri etc when he was still using it? I don't understand why they didn't just ghost his machine like most companies do? After all there can't have been much worth saving if the m/c hadn't been turned on in weeks. I also think this "surfing dodgy sites" == "malware" is a bit overplayed. First of all a good proxy could block a lot of this stuff, such as executing certain types of Javascript and secondly unless someone is installing stuff by clicking on pop-ups or whatever the sites would have to rely on browser exploits which is less straightforward.
> ANd if that was not enough, back in 94, I even saw the code for NT (I worked at HP and a neighboring group were asked to port it to the pa-risc. )
that's true
and back in 92ish the OSF seriously considered the NT core for the microkernel part of OSF uK rather than Mach. I think I must have a copy of the NT source on tape somewhere.
> So, what do you have to do in order to be considered a journalist in France?
It is quite onerous. You have to either be an accredited foreign journalist - registered with the French authorities if you are resident in France - or you have to be a member of the French journalist's union and earn a significant part of your revenue from journalism. Because of this many "journalists" working for the press and media don't have professional journalist status - they are called pigiste because they work "à la pige" - that is on an article by article basis, sometimes independently.
I would have thought that the the guy who filmed the Rodney King video would have been considered as a pigiste by the French courts and, after checking with a French judge this morning, pigiste would be likely to be considered as a professional journalist for the purpose of the law. Obviously this would have to be tested in court.
You forgot DOS which was a decompiled version of Digital Research CP/M for x86 that some guys sold to Bill Gates for 50 grand. The whole Microsoft edifice is built on stolen IP.
> Why in the hell do you have your secret and SCI sides on the internet? That's DOD/DOE no-no number one!
Of course things are never as black and white as all that. I worked for XXXXXXXs research group. We were told the stuff we were working on was so sensitive that there was no Internet connection, instead whenever I needed to access information on the web I had to go to a special terminal with its own ISP access. It was all very inconvenient as I frequently had to look up information to do my job.
Guess what? When Slammer hit we were off-line for 2 days because somehow the worm had hopped from network to network, past firewall to firewall eventually taking down our MS machines running SQL server.... or maybe it had just arrived on a laptop or floppy?
Of course the repair needn't have taken two days but our dosy sysadmins took all the servers (including those running solaris) off-line as well as halting our internal network.
> If there were a pandemic, I doubt that people would necessarily be surfing YouTube.
course you would, it would be the only way to get non-censored information, you know, cell phone footage of food riots or nuclear plants melting down due to lack of workers, people dying in their beds, zombies at the shopping mall, that kind of thing, the next pandemic will be live on YouTube.
I noticed that dumbass Maggie Philbin claimed that Vista had cost 200 Billion dollars to develop, at that rate everone on the planet will need to buy a copy for M$ to make back the dev costs.
Goodwin Sands, stretch of shoals and sandbars, c.10 mi (20 km) long, lying off the east coast of Kent, SE England. The shifting sands do not allow the construction of lighthouses, but there are several lightships and numerous buoys. The Sands were once a fertile isle called Lomea, the property of Godwin, earl of Wessex; Lomea was submerged by a great storm in the late 11th cent.
> I keep wondering why nobody stands up to these clowns.
At the last UK elections only around 20% of those allowed to vote voted for the New Labour Fascist Party. Even if you take votes cast around 65% of the country voted against them, and still they have a huge majority. If Britain was in the Middle East Tony Blair and Dubya would be invading to "liberate" the people from a nasty repressive regime.
It is a good point. By 1900 much of the basic physics behind current technologies was known so it was possible for a scientist or scientifically educated person to look at an idea and decide whether it made some sense. The other thing is many inventions over the past 50 to 100 years have been refinements or mass production of existing technologies. Think about what is important around the home... fridges, vacuum cleaners, cookers, cars, all existed in 1900. As the saying goes, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
At the same time things like DVDs would maybe have appeared as outlandish as say the colonisation of Mars. In 1900 we could accept that maybe it would be possible to store an entire library on a silver disk but the technology to do this such as the laser, was unknown. Same for coloniation, we know we can fly to other other planets but the technology that would enable pratical colonisation of those planets is unknown. My suspicion is that with the physics knowledge in 1900 the laser was probably less outlandish than some envisiging today a kind of motor that can transport a mass of several tonnes many hundreds of millions of km in say a month rather than 6-12 months.
They hired the whole Mach OS team apart from Tevenian who went to NeXT and David Black who was at the OSF. Anyone ever hear of those guys again? They certainly haven't done anything earth shifting since MachOS. I heard from one of the team who was on the Cairo project at the time that he was being paid to do very little and was there not to work for anyone else. Still they all got very rich.
Anyway I was right about the French connection Jean-Marie Hullot and Bertrand Serlet are the authors. Bertrand worked at Inria in the offices next to mine when I was an engineer at the OSF. It is interesting that Simon Patience is director of Engineering at Apple and also worked in the same office block in downtown Grenoble city. I believe their are others too.
> I know at least Visual Studio 6 had a GUI dialog editor.
It did. IB was a steeper learning curve but built nicer looking (at the time)and more robust interfaces. The Visual Studio GUI builder produced some really messy code as I recall - but I haven't used it since 1993.
> Apple has had this for years with Interface Builder
Presumably NeXT has had it for even longer, a couple of decades or there abouts. IB was written by a brilliant French coder as I recall... he was a friend of a colleague. Short of firing up my NeXTBox does anyone remember more of the history?
Look, managers don't need to be technical, they just need to contact their nearest Microsoft salesman to ask which Microsoft solution is appropriate to their current business problem.
I can't answer your question but I've worked on some French govt. OS projects. Antares - a Ministry of Education system for recruiting lecturers and professors used Weblo. (as it is called here - Weblogic AS) on RedHat.
The Interior Ministry, Finance and Economic Ministry, Customs and Ministry of Works all use Open Office having migrated from Office 97. The Gendarmeries eC@RE project is also migrating a lot of functionality to Open Office. We are talking around 150,000 to 200,000 seats in total for these ministries. In most cases these systems will run legacy Windows 98 or 2000. A lot of the equipment is very dated so can't run more recent OSes.
My wife works for the Conseil d'Etat (Supreme Court) and most judges and recorders are still on Windows and Office but there is no reason beyond administration I can see why this couldn't be migrated as they only use limited parts of these applications.
> Ultimately people won't pay you money for something that they get for free elsewhere.
oh I don't know, it has worked for hookers for thousands of years for much the same reasons people will pay for OS: service level agrements and a no quibble contract
Slashdot Mirror
> About the only attempt at offering an opposing view was the brief mention that the WHO states that there is no known risk of wifi at this time, this brief mentioning was followed by a couple of minutes of slagging off the credibility of the WHO.
That's not strictly accurate, they had quite a long interview with the Italian chappy... Professor Rumbaldi or whatever he was called who said that there was no risk. However I do share your misgivings and think the problem is fitting Panorama into a 30 minute slot doesn't leave much time to explore themes. I came away with the impression that there was no big problem with WiFi but that perhaps further studies were needed.
Personally I can't believe that the power involved in WiFi transmissions can be dangerous but then I would sooner not see my tax $$$ spent on laptops for schools so kidz can copy their homework off Dickipedia.
> and after a year or so, only the people who were clueless or didn't care would still be using it
AKA the Microsoft demographic.
> The trick: The Megaupload toolbar [megaupload.com] integrates the Alexa toolbar, which is the source of the traffic data used for the Alexa rankings.
they also host p0rn which more mainstream sites won't touch.
> MSN was, at first inception, meant to be *the* portal to the internet.
erm I think you've got that wrong. MSN was meant to replace the Internet, at least that is what the Microsoft Sales Idiots tried to convince me around 1994. The exact term they used was "MSN will bury the Internet in 6 months". The idea at Microsoft was that centralized and controlled networks were the future, think France's Minitel mating with AOL. You've got to remember that this was around the time Bill Gates tried the vision thing with his "Road Ahead" book and ended up looking like some lamer who just didn't get it.
Why didn't anyone pick up his PC was spewing viri etc when he was still using it? I don't understand why they didn't just ghost his machine like most companies do? After all there can't have been much worth saving if the m/c hadn't been turned on in weeks. I also think this "surfing dodgy sites" == "malware" is a bit overplayed. First of all a good proxy could block a lot of this stuff, such as executing certain types of Javascript and secondly unless someone is installing stuff by clicking on pop-ups or whatever the sites would have to rely on browser exploits which is less straightforward.
> ANd if that was not enough, back in 94, I even saw the code for NT (I worked at HP and a neighboring group were asked to port it to the pa-risc. )
that's true
and back in 92ish the OSF seriously considered the NT core for the microkernel part of OSF uK rather than Mach. I think I must have a copy of the NT source on tape somewhere.
It is quite onerous. You have to either be an accredited foreign journalist - registered with the French authorities if you are resident in France - or you have to be a member of the French journalist's union and earn a significant part of your revenue from journalism. Because of this many "journalists" working for the press and media don't have professional journalist status - they are called pigiste because they work "à la pige" - that is on an article by article basis, sometimes independently.
I would have thought that the the guy who filmed the Rodney King video would have been considered as a pigiste by the French courts and, after checking with a French judge this morning, pigiste would be likely to be considered as a professional journalist for the purpose of the law. Obviously this would have to be tested in court.
You forgot DOS which was a decompiled version of Digital Research CP/M for x86 that some guys sold to Bill Gates for 50 grand. The whole Microsoft edifice is built on stolen IP.
> Why in the hell do you have your secret and SCI sides on the internet? That's DOD/DOE no-no number one!
Of course things are never as black and white as all that. I worked for XXXXXXXs research group. We were told the stuff we were working on was so sensitive that there was no Internet connection, instead whenever I needed to access information on the web I had to go to a special terminal with its own ISP access. It was all very inconvenient as I frequently had to look up information to do my job.
Guess what? When Slammer hit we were off-line for 2 days because somehow the worm had hopped from network to network, past firewall to firewall eventually taking down our MS machines running SQL server.... or maybe it had just arrived on a laptop or floppy?
Of course the repair needn't have taken two days but our dosy sysadmins took all the servers (including those running solaris) off-line as well as halting our internal network.
C'mon we know you are talking about Bob Metcalfe
possibly down to too much groundzeroitude ?
> If there were a pandemic, I doubt that people would necessarily be surfing YouTube.
course you would, it would be the only way to get non-censored information, you know, cell phone footage of food riots or nuclear plants melting down due to lack of workers, people dying in their beds, zombies at the shopping mall, that kind of thing, the next pandemic will be live on YouTube.
I noticed that dumbass Maggie Philbin claimed that Vista had cost 200 Billion dollars to develop, at that rate everone on the planet will need to buy a copy for M$ to make back the dev costs.
Goodwin Sands, stretch of shoals and sandbars, c.10 mi (20 km) long, lying off the east coast of Kent, SE England. The shifting sands do not allow the construction of lighthouses, but there are several lightships and numerous buoys. The Sands were once a fertile isle called Lomea, the property of Godwin, earl of Wessex; Lomea was submerged by a great storm in the late 11th cent.
> I keep wondering why nobody stands up to these clowns.
At the last UK elections only around 20% of those allowed to vote voted for the New Labour Fascist Party. Even if you take votes cast around 65% of the country voted against them, and still they have a huge majority. If Britain was in the Middle East Tony Blair and Dubya would be invading to "liberate" the people from a nasty repressive regime.
It is a good point. By 1900 much of the basic physics behind current technologies was known so it was possible for a scientist or scientifically educated person to look at an idea and decide whether it made some sense. The other thing is many inventions over the past 50 to 100 years have been refinements or mass production of existing technologies. Think about what is important around the home... fridges, vacuum cleaners, cookers, cars, all existed in 1900. As the saying goes, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
At the same time things like DVDs would maybe have appeared as outlandish as say the colonisation of Mars. In 1900 we could accept that maybe it would be possible to store an entire library on a silver disk but the technology to do this such as the laser, was unknown. Same for coloniation, we know we can fly to other other planets but the technology that would enable pratical colonisation of those planets is unknown. My suspicion is that with the physics knowledge in 1900 the laser was probably less outlandish than some envisiging today a kind of motor that can transport a mass of several tonnes many hundreds of millions of km in say a month rather than 6-12 months.
They hired the whole Mach OS team apart from Tevenian who went to NeXT and David Black who was at the OSF. Anyone ever hear of those guys again? They certainly haven't done anything earth shifting since MachOS. I heard from one of the team who was on the Cairo project at the time that he was being paid to do very little and was there not to work for anyone else. Still they all got very rich.
Thanks for the extra info, I'm wondering now if it was Jean-Marie who worked in the neighbouring office block to mine...
Exciting times and Jobs seems very able to spot winners, a talent the Sculley sorely lacked.
Yes but they don't say who the author(s) is.
Anyway I was right about the French connection Jean-Marie Hullot and Bertrand Serlet are the authors. Bertrand worked at Inria in the offices next to mine when I was an engineer at the OSF. It is interesting that Simon Patience is director of Engineering at Apple and also worked in the same office block in downtown Grenoble city. I believe their are others too.
> I know at least Visual Studio 6 had a GUI dialog editor.
It did. IB was a steeper learning curve but built nicer looking (at the time)and more robust interfaces. The Visual Studio GUI builder produced some really messy code as I recall - but I haven't used it since 1993.
> Apple has had this for years with Interface Builder
Presumably NeXT has had it for even longer, a couple of decades or there abouts. IB was written by a brilliant French coder as I recall... he was a friend of a colleague. Short of firing up my NeXTBox does anyone remember more of the history?
Look, managers don't need to be technical, they just need to contact their nearest Microsoft salesman to ask which Microsoft solution is appropriate to their current business problem.
I can't answer your question but I've worked on some French govt. OS projects. Antares - a Ministry of Education system for recruiting lecturers and professors used Weblo. (as it is called here - Weblogic AS) on RedHat.
The Interior Ministry, Finance and Economic Ministry, Customs and Ministry of Works all use Open Office having migrated from Office 97. The Gendarmeries eC@RE project is also migrating a lot of functionality to Open Office. We are talking around 150,000 to 200,000 seats in total for these ministries. In most cases these systems will run legacy Windows 98 or 2000. A lot of the equipment is very dated so can't run more recent OSes.
My wife works for the Conseil d'Etat (Supreme Court) and most judges and recorders are still on Windows and Office but there is no reason beyond administration I can see why this couldn't be migrated as they only use limited parts of these applications.
> If you think sex without hookers is free you must not have much experience with women.
:-)
I suspect you've just had some bad experiences with women
> Ultimately people won't pay you money for something that they get for free elsewhere.
oh I don't know, it has worked for hookers for thousands of years for much the same reasons people will pay for OS: service level agrements and a no quibble contract