That seems quite right. I cannot see any way to prove that with electronic vote from one's own home somebody is not "voting" in front of somebody else asking him or her ""gently" to vote in a given way and not another. So there are two distinct problems to solve : first, how to ensure the electronic equivalent of the isolation booth (and is it only possible ?), and second, allow anybody to check that his/her OWN vote has been taken into account as it should (which implies that his vote stays nominative, though in a crypted form, in some huge public database - AND than nobody else than him/her can unscramble it. While not necessarily impossible, that seems to be a very tough thing. And even if the source code is publicly available, how can the compiler be trusted ? With a MD5 check ? How can the MD5 checker be itself trusted ?
OS/2 as an OS was a geat success, certainly the best in its time as far as PCs were concerned
Yes and no.
Yes as far as core operating system was concerned. OS/2 beautifully shared a sound card (a stupid idea, but a great OS test!) between two programs when Windows 3.0 did not do it very well
But unfortunately false as user interface was concerned. OS/2 fonts were ugly, and did not even incorporate the font design "know-how" that was present to design the 4250 electrocomposer fonts. Because the labs who designed them were not the same and had incentive to cooperate:o(
Now, what is the most important in a PERSONAL computer for the people who buy it ? A beautiful motor under the hood, or a beautiful look ? Well, the customer is always right, by definition.
However, a machiavelic move by Microsoft was to add these three useless and even harmful Windows keys to the PC keyboard! The two message to prospects were clear : "The PC is a thing intended to run Windows, period!"; and "What ? You mean that OS/2 is unable to use those keys ? Well, Windows is certainly a more mature product, then!"
Anti-Unix zealots... because *everything* can run on one of their mainframes or their POS mini computers.
I am not that sure about that. After all CMS or CICS were *much* more suited to terminal architectures available at that time (mostly 3278/9 and 3174 control units. On these, you just cannot run anything like vi;o), but you ease the CPU work to the point where you can have have 17,500 CICS terminals or 2000 CMS terminals connected to a 3033 having... less memory than our present PCs !:-o
Not that bad:o)
Also, I guess that IBMers were just as clumsy on UNIX than UNIX users were on CMS; and/or any vi-only users on the (excellent!) XEDIT:oD
IBM was probably right at the time; however, true, they were too slow to "move with the market" in time.
Probably it was not accustomed to at the time either;o) Remember however that IBM mainframes already had these wonderful typeballs 2741 fully-buffered terminals when plenty of their competitors were happy to give Teletype ASR33 and KSR33s !:-o
And I guess that today the price of software is the biggest inhibitor to the growth of hardware sales. The most software becomes free-because-standard, the more money the would-be-customers can spend on hardware... including development machines ! This really looks like a kind of "virtuos cycle":o)
Besides the Linux distribution used within IBM and customized for IBM needs, some people wondered at a time whether IBM would launch its own distribution of Linux. After all, before IBM switched to the OCO ("Object-Code Only"), IBM distributed the source code of anything, operating systems included, free of charge to whichever customer asked them.
The "source code" policy had to be stopped because customer-modified code generated a lot of calls for maintenance, and therefore costs for IBM at that time where the maintenance was still unbilled, I believe.
As far as I remember Vatican II, the question of extraterrestrial life had been brought as one of its themes, and (according to christian terminology), two cases had been considered:
- either the aliens had committed the "original sin", whatever might be meant by that, in which case either they had already got a Redemptor or not
- or... they HAD NOT committed that "original sin", in which case they would have no use for any religion of ours, of course:o)
I had seen that consideration in some french catholic magazines ("Fêtes et saisons", "La vie", "Le pélerin") at the time and am pretty sure it has been covered at the time by many catholic magazines all over the world.
As far as I remember Vatican II, the question of extraterrestrial life had been brought as one of the themes, and (according to christian terminology), two cases had been considered : either the aliens had committed the "original sin", whatever might be meant by that, in which case either they had already got a Redemptor or not or... they HAD NOT committed that "original sin", in which case they would have no use for any religion of ours:o)
I had seen that consideration in some french catholic magazines ("Fêtes et saisons", "La vie", "Le pélerin") and am pretty sure it has been covered at the time by many catholic magazines all over the world.
Just my two cents.
Have fun ! Tk is a quite good graphical interface, and Perl/Tk used with SciTE is much more pleasant to write small graphic programs than BASICA, GWBASIC or QBASIC ever were.
The following is not related exactly to people patenting what they do not intend to build, but about corporations buying patents they do not intend to use productively.
There is one thing I learned some time ago about the french law on patents, and that times it is good news : according to these laws, if some organization buys a patent and has not begun to commercialize something in a given lapse of time after that (two years, if I remember well), the patent author gets his rights back:-)
That forbids a corporation to buy a patent just to bury it; the legislator here estimated that such a thing did not go in the way of public interest.
I do not know how it is in other countries, european or not.
Not having patents on software or algorithms is a good thing for mankind as a whole, I am pretty sure of that, but probably not for the inventors themselves. Don't you think abnormal that the inventors of the Fast Fourier Transform never got a cent for their invention (which was a bright one) from the people who use it daily, and even sell devices using their algorithms ? Did not Boyer and Moore deserve something from the community for their clever string-search algorithm? And what about Quicksort?
I guess that if software and algorithm patents are forbidden, something should be put into place so the human community recognizes contributions of great value, and rewards them accordingly. As there are perhaps not more than one or two VERY bright ideas (like Boyer-Moore's) each year, or at most a score of them, this should be a manageable thing.
You can have a free Minitel in France, you just have to ask for it
Yes.
At the beginning it was always free
Not exactly. At the very beginning, it was even rented 70F per month (about 11 euros), to become free in 1986. This was the moment, and the reason, why I took one. From that moment too, my phone bills stopped to be about 100 euros every two months to reach about 350 euros. Discovering the 3614 and the RTC dropped that somehow to 200 euros, largely paying for the Minitel from 1986 to 1995, date where I switched to the Internet for chatting.
An additional benefit for France Telecom was that I had to install a second phone line in my home. Otherwise, while I was making new friends on the Minitel, I lost contact with the old ones who could never reach me!:o)
I think the Minitel 1B (switchable to VT-1xx emulation mode) arrived in 1987. Some people then tried to put their ordinary Minitel 1 to get a 1B instead. Their preferred way to to that was to patiently drop lemonade on the keyboard every day. That behaviour stayed marginal, though.
Yes, the modem, especially with the sequence that allowed to reverse it for 1200bps UPload, was one of the reasons PC users were happy to have a Minitel. Having a free ASCII terminal just for debugging purpose was interesting too. I guess than today the 1B, once connected, can directly be used with Linux by just issuing a penable tty0. But they will be limited to 4800, 9600 ou 19200 bps according to their age.
A small side effect of the Minitel (R) :
on
Minitel Hits Twenty
·
· Score: 1
Even before the first Minitels were in operation, somebody had understoot that it would allow deaf people to make phone calls (the caller just reversing his/her modem to send the tone to the other party. A special Minitel the "D" (dialogue) minitel was designed to help things by using automatically different shades of gray for the interlocutors.
Under the determination of somebody called Annie Sidier, some Minitel service providers even agreed to open 1 or 2 "free" lines for deaf people, as a given sequence allowed to identify the "D" minitels.
Re:BBSes were ages from Minitel network!
on
Minitel Hits Twenty
·
· Score: 1
The French, by the way, were ahead in many things.
Which gave rise to the French joke : "My wife is like a French invention : I was the discoverer, but other people are getting all the profit".
They had their fast train TGV (train a grande vitesse) a decade before the Germans did as well
The strange habit of trying railroad speed records was already there in 1955 as far as I remember : 331km/h (US people, please use your handheld computer conversion program), a record that stayed unchallenged for more than 20 years, if my memory is good. However the Japanese envetually got ahead with the Tokaïdo some time before the TGV was launched.
Remember that it is a well established tradition in France to separate as much as possible science from technology. Charles Cros was happy when he "recorded" voices visually in charcoal black, not trying to replay them (something that could be attempted now by the IRCAM, by the way). While the Science Museum in London and the Deutsches Museum in München happily mix science and technology, Paris prefers to have "Palais de la Découverte" for Science and the less-admired "Arts et Métiers" for technology. Ecole Normale Superieure has more prestige than Polytechnique, itself having more than the Arts et Métiers (again!).
A common and sad characteristic of all of us frenchmen is the idea that from the moment we have a lead to the right concept to solve a problem, we consider that problem as solved. Dassault's CATIA, recently adopted by Boeing in replacement for their inhouse CADAM (both having been used worldwide in the preceding 15 years) is more an exception than a rule.
Re:Want to try a Minitel service right now ?
on
Minitel Hits Twenty
·
· Score: 1
This service is extremely ugly
Yes.
>> and badly designed
Not exactly. It is designed for one purpose: meeting people and dating them fast (the necessary point of passage is of course to agree about a phone call first; voices can be just as informative as written conversation styles;o) ). It fits this purpose pretty well. No fancy graphics are needed for that
Videotex is way more powerful that what you can see here.
I happen to know:o) I learned Videotex graphics on a fully graphic dialog server called Privilege (later renamed Elliott). As it offered some properties to store videotex sequences, you could do a lot of things : rainbow-flashing greetings, semigraphic animations (moving spiders/\oo/\, black sky with blinking and shooting stars, thunderbolts and the like). A good side effect was that the (very relative, in fact) "complexity" of graphics kept the sex-obsessed people away:o)))
Every character, including graphical ones can be redefined (8x12 dots)
I was already fully happy with the 2x3 semigraphic "mosaic" mode. The important thing is to know where to stop sophisticating things. Remember the NAPLPS flop.
and latest minitels can also display jpeg images with full colors
A very, very bad idea on 56Kbps phone lines. By the way, JPEG is really obsolete. JPEG2000 gives an outstanding quality compressing images by a factor of 24 (yes, 4% of their original size, which means ONE bit per pixel for 24-bits RGB).
There are also plenty of tricks to speed up things (like using a lot CAN), and to make things look better (like overlapping double-sized characters that produces nice chrome effects)
So they consider it a feature now? In my times, everybody considered that as a bug:oD
An official communiqué was issued by France Telecom when the number of Minitel users became bigger than the number of Compuserve users. It was never taken too seriuously in France, however, because Compuserve was a centralized network offering itlself a wide range of services, while France Telecom only provided the Minitel + infrastructure, and the thousands of existing services were not originated nor controlled by them. FT did not even know in the detail which one they were, neither had to.
François Lagarde's Medical Server (SM, in French) is worth mentioning.
In the beginning, it was intended as a services provider for professionals (doctors), with just one entry in the menu for general chat. Young doctors would come and read - and exchange information - while waiting for their patients.
Quite soon, however, young secretaries learned that there was a Minitel chat room where they could get in touch with young doctors, and they took the habit to go there regularly, well, just in case;o)
A little later, a lot of other professionals learned that young secretaries came on "SM", and that they could have a chance to date them by pretending to be doctors:o)))
After one year or so, there were 9 "general users" entries in the "SM" menu, and just one for professionals - which soon disappeared, by the way.
It would be somehow helpful to consider facts, here:
The Minitel was intended to be a totally balanced operation in 8 years, as the cost of making, printing and distributing 6 million phone books was already over the cost of building the hardware (yes, you get quite good prices when you ask for a bid concerning 6 million machines putting 3 manufacturers in competition) plus very small infrastructure (TRANSPAC was already there. The only thing that had to be cone was to installed the PAVI - Points d'Accès Videotexte - ensuring conversions between asynchronous character mode and TRANSPAC X25 block mode.
The fast development of private services because of the microfacturation mode - something France Telecom had not expected - was uncanny. As soon as 1988, the Minitel services generated about 305 million euros per year (2 billion francs), or an average 51 euros per year and per owner, to be compared with the estimated 198 euros of the Minitel terminal itself, intended to last at least 10 years (no moving parts, no wear, just like an fully electronic watch or handheld calculette).
According to IBM in 1978, 1 $ of investment was needed by them to generate 1 $ of revenue. The 19.8/51 ratio of the Minitel does not seem to have been that bad compared to their data. Which is probably why IBM's Lou Gertner signed a co-development agreement with France Telecom' Michel Bon in the 90s (I do not know what came out of it, by the way).
Well, the Minitel had no special difficulties in being hacker-proof, as it did not have any programmable memory (just 2 small zones of 8 ASCCII characters non-volatile memories, that the "Informatique et Liberté" group ordered the Frace Telecom and the three Minitel manufacturers to remove). The only (semi-)harmful thing youcould make to it was to send it and ESC 9g (deconnection) sequence, something that was soon filtered by all sites.
On the other hand, the Minitel was a handy tool to break in a poorly conceived UNIX server : you just had to send a "BREAK" character from it (doing it from its PC interface, as only the second generation Minitel 1B had VT1xx compatibility mode), and if the application developer had been careless, you had a shell at your disposal.
A lot of hackers developed then what was called as "brasseurs" : computers that you could call from a 3613 line (called party paying the cost!) and that would dial a TRANSPAC 3614 or even modem 3615 line from the hacked computer. There were even systems allowing to switch from one minitel server to the othet via a hot key sequence. As a result, computer security concerns were quite high here in 1987 : the CNET of Lannion had the surprise to receive a 3 billion francs (457000 euros!) phone line bill from their mother company, France Telecom:o)))
Pretty nice other things were done. For instance in 1987 a 40-users chat server on a 386/20 running MS-DOS (using 2 Addiciel 68000-based intelligent X25 cards) when the competition still used 40 times more expensive UNIX machines.
Some happy effects of taking time to think
on
Minitel Hits Twenty
·
· Score: 1
France has always been a little slow, including for instance in accepting to include Thalidomides into its accepted drugs list. By the time the inquiry about the potential side effets was over, early adopters, like Belgium (what about the US?), had already taken their decision to remove thalidomides from their official drug list, as they had discovered that hundreds of children were born with severe birth malformations (lack of arms or legs!) following the use of this fantastic new drug.
Something similar happened with the telephone. France really jumped in the bandwagon of mass telephone wiring around 1974. Among other things, it allowed France to have a fully temporal (rather that spatial) and digital fiber-optic (rather than analog copper) wiring. Technology decisions are similar so decisions in SimCity : you have to choose between being right for today or right for tomorrow. Everybody has to.
As a consequence the Asynchronous Transfer Mode originated in France. As well as the wavelet technology leading to the JPEG2000 standard. These should make some rather positive contributions to the world.
Considering car technology in the '60s as well as civil aircraft technology in the '90s, it would be interesting to think again about who was somehow late on who in making the best technology decisions. Concerning Airbus, the maket has chosen (showing among other things that having German and French people collaborating is a poor idea in war-time, but a great one in peaceful periods.
Trying to make things too fast may also lead to harmful side effects, as myopic space telescopes, exploding space shuttles, and a number of unused planes stored uselessly in the Mojaves desert as a consequence of hazardous deregulation:o(
No fallacies please. Thanks.
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
Thats not true. I'm 29, and against the euro. So much for your theory.
As far as 50% of people + 1 agree with using the euro, the proposal of your interlocutor still holds. We see no sign of the contrary up to know, otherwise so-called "sovereignists" would be in power everywhere in Europe and the Maastricht vote would have been rejected by every country.
every conflict in europe for the last 1000 years have been about nationalism
Can you name just three of them ? I can hardly see any that did not have its origin in ECONOMIC reasons, including the two last world wars (so could be the case for the Secession war, incidentally : it was probably easier for the North to sell its machines to replace people in the South if there was no unpaid human workpower power to compete with them)
In such a case, the wars were the wrong answer to real problems. A central bank might be the right answer to the same real problems. Back to 1895, the Economist Charles Gide, looking at the regression line of interest rates thoughout the XIXth century, came to the conclusion : "If interest rates still go down like this, they will be zero by 1915, which is impossible. Therefore something has to happen in the meantime and we do not know what it will be.". We know by now.
(The "1000 years" are just stuff for kids. None of us is ever concerned with what occured more than 4 generations ago. I shall believe otherwise when I see somebody able to name me the list of all his/her great-grandparents. I still have to meet one (except those interested in genalogy, a quite different matter because you often find one or more migrants in one"s family in that case).).
Euro minds are not dollar minds
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
>> One nation under God. So lets start acting like it.
We saw with the Taliban what "one nation under God" could mean, so I would say NO, THANKS !:o(
In most countries of Europe, believing or not in an hypothetical God (whether an individual, a kind of extratemporal being or force, or a pure language metaphor) is an individual choice, note a state-relevant one. So do not expect to ever see "In God WE trust" on an euro coin. In God SOME OF US trust. Some do not. Obviously some have to be wrong but we shall not pretend any of them know best.
That being said, if there is no God to take care of people when they are down and out, a strong social security system has to, and this is why it was started as early as the end of XIXth century by Bismarck and others. The system has got slightly better ever since. Leveling the social security levels on te world seems up to now more important that just matching the currencies, though both of them should occur within this century unless surprising new conditions rise in the meantime.
Chosing pictures for the Euro bills
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
That is the problem : because there are (still) many chauvinists everywhere, nobody dared to suggest to put, for instance, Beethoven's face on a 500 euros bill (what is the need of a 500 euros bill, by the way, besides escaping the taxman?) and Leonardo da Vinci on "simply" a 100 euros bill.
An obvious solution would have been to represent only great people from outside the European Union (a very nice symbol of openness too). Seems that nobody was ready for that either. As (in France at least, I cannot say for the rest of Europe) best and brightest people just study math and physics, and politics seem to be left, at the other end of the rainbow, to people lacking both logical abilities and creativity, we can hardly be much surprised here.
Anyway, the Euro Notes will probably be redesigned, like most other bills, every 10 years or so, We could have something acceptable around 2080 if we do not revert to something harder to counterfeit (a given standard mix of expensive metals?) by that time. However, electronic money or even something more subtle could have taken over, and perhaps on the whole planet.
Euro and intra-european wars : wishful thinking ?
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
By the way, there is a strange wishful thinking here in Europe : many people insist on saying (and perhaps even believing) that countries having the same currency cannot have a war between them.
History does not say so, as for instance the Secession war suggests. Territories in war cannot go on sharing the same currency, but we see from this exemple that the inverse is not true.
Of course, many people say that "there cannot be war between democracies", but this only true as long as the winner of a war can decide what will be written in history books, in other words who was democratic and who wa not; an excellent privilege, indeed.
That being said, the Republic of Venice was terminated by a young general of the young French Republic - incidentally called Napoleon Bonaparte. This was, to be exact, not a "real" war, just an accepted ultimatum; besides, the two sides of this example are probably very atypical.
Re:Picture of bills with US bill
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
Euro notes are rather dull, though the pastel colors they use make our wallets look like (Seurat-like) rainbows, and also save time organizing them; just like with Monopoly banknotes; I wonder if royalties are being paid for that:o).
As far as I know, the first goal with Euro notes was to make their forgery more difficult as no other currency has has so many users in Europe since the Roman Empire. I hope that Europe's agony will be less painful, though.
The Euro will not change much about the economic war going on except its unit of measure. The State economic debt of France grew by almost one (ex-)World Trade Center tower each month and this has been going on, as far as I know, for more than ten years. No human casulaties, of course, except that we are now among the biggest antidepressor consumers in Europe, which makes us wonder whether we really live longer that other european residents or if is just an impression we have.
Now, the US also have a big national debt, I have been told (numbers are welcome if you have them) while Japan, which does not, is in a so-callled crisis (5% of jobseekers, a crisis ? France has around 10%, Mauretania 80% and yet nobody is ever left out alone in the latter). I do not know exactly what can be deduced here, and am open to any ideas by e-mail, here or both).
Slashdot Mirror
That seems quite right. I cannot see any way to prove that with electronic vote from one's own home somebody is not "voting" in front of somebody else asking him or her ""gently" to vote in a given way and not another. So there are two distinct problems to solve : first, how to ensure the electronic equivalent of the isolation booth (and is it only possible ?), and second, allow anybody to check that his/her OWN vote has been taken into account as it should (which implies that his vote stays nominative, though in a crypted form, in some huge public database - AND than nobody else than him/her can unscramble it. While not necessarily impossible, that seems to be a very tough thing. And even if the source code is publicly available, how can the compiler be trusted ? With a MD5 check ? How can the MD5 checker be itself trusted ?
In fact, I wonder if there is a piece of remapping software for the keyboard that would allow the following to be mapped :
1. CAPS LOCK becomes unoperative (as it is not only useless nowadays, but truly harmul when you press it by mistake when touch-typing)
2. "WINDOWS" keys become mere duplicates of their respective Alt keys (Ctrl-Escape seems good enough for most cases)
3. "List actions" key becomes a duplicate of Ctrl.
Our keyboards would then become efficient again when we use them at high speed :)
FD
PS : By the way, I guess you mean the highest common denominator ? ;)
Yes and no.
Yes as far as core operating system was concerned. OS/2 beautifully shared a sound card (a stupid idea, but a great OS test!) between two programs when Windows 3.0 did not do it very well
But unfortunately false as user interface was concerned. OS/2 fonts were ugly, and did not even incorporate the font design "know-how" that was present to design the 4250 electrocomposer fonts. Because the labs who designed them were not the same and had incentive to cooperate :o(
Now, what is the most important in a PERSONAL computer for the people who buy it ? A beautiful motor under the hood, or a beautiful look ? Well, the customer is always right, by definition.
However, a machiavelic move by Microsoft was to add these three useless and even harmful Windows keys to the PC keyboard! The two message to prospects were clear : "The PC is a thing intended to run Windows, period!"; and "What ? You mean that OS/2 is unable to use those keys ? Well, Windows is certainly a more mature product, then!"
I am not that sure about that. After all CMS or CICS were *much* more suited to terminal architectures available at that time (mostly 3278/9 and 3174 control units. On these, you just cannot run anything like vi ;o), but you ease the CPU work to the point where you can have have 17,500 CICS terminals or 2000 CMS terminals connected to a 3033 having... less memory than our present PCs ! :-o
Not that bad :o)
Also, I guess that IBMers were just as clumsy on UNIX than UNIX users were on CMS; and/or any vi-only users on the (excellent!) XEDIT :oD
IBM was probably right at the time; however, true, they were too slow to "move with the market" in time.
Probably it was not accustomed to at the time either ;o) Remember however that IBM mainframes already had these wonderful typeballs 2741 fully-buffered terminals when plenty of their competitors were happy to give Teletype ASR33 and KSR33s ! :-o
And I guess that today the price of software is the biggest inhibitor to the growth of hardware sales. The most software becomes free-because-standard, the more money the would-be-customers can spend on hardware... including development machines ! This really looks like a kind of "virtuos cycle" :o)
The "source code" policy had to be stopped because customer-modified code generated a lot of calls for maintenance, and therefore costs for IBM at that time where the maintenance was still unbilled, I believe.
Now, the question is : "How would they name it" ?
Do you think "OS/3" would be a good choice ? :D
- either the aliens had committed the "original sin", whatever might be meant by that, in which case either they had already got a Redemptor or not
- or... they HAD NOT committed that "original sin", in which case they would have no use for any religion of ours, of course :o)
I had seen that consideration in some french catholic magazines ("Fêtes et saisons", "La vie", "Le pélerin") at the time and am pretty sure it has been covered at the time by many catholic magazines all over the world.
Just my two cents.
As far as I remember Vatican II, the question of extraterrestrial life had been brought as one of the themes, and (according to christian terminology), two cases had been considered : either the aliens had committed the "original sin", whatever might be meant by that, in which case either they had already got a Redemptor or not or... they HAD NOT committed that "original sin", in which case they would have no use for any religion of ours :o)
I had seen that consideration in some french catholic magazines ("Fêtes et saisons", "La vie", "Le pélerin") and am pretty sure it has been covered at the time by many catholic magazines all over the world.
Just my two cents.
http://www.activestate.com/Products/Download/Get.p lex?id=ActivePerl
To download SciTE :
http://www.scintilla.org/SciTEDownload.html
(I would recommend the download with extensions)
Have fun ! Tk is a quite good graphical interface, and Perl/Tk used with SciTE is much more pleasant to write small graphic programs than BASICA, GWBASIC or QBASIC ever were.
There is one thing I learned some time ago about the french law on patents, and that times it is good news : according to these laws, if some organization buys a patent and has not begun to commercialize something in a given lapse of time after that (two years, if I remember well), the patent author gets his rights back :-)
That forbids a corporation to buy a patent just to bury it; the legislator here estimated that such a thing did not go in the way of public interest.
I do not know how it is in other countries, european or not.
Not having patents on software or algorithms is a good thing for mankind as a whole, I am pretty sure of that, but probably not for the inventors themselves. Don't you think abnormal that the inventors of the Fast Fourier Transform never got a cent for their invention (which was a bright one) from the people who use it daily, and even sell devices using their algorithms ? Did not Boyer and Moore deserve something from the community for their clever string-search algorithm? And what about Quicksort?
I guess that if software and algorithm patents are forbidden, something should be put into place so the human community recognizes contributions of great value, and rewards them accordingly. As there are perhaps not more than one or two VERY bright ideas (like Boyer-Moore's) each year, or at most a score of them, this should be a manageable thing.
Yes.
At the beginning it was always free
Not exactly. At the very beginning, it was even rented 70F per month (about 11 euros), to become free in 1986. This was the moment, and the reason, why I took one. From that moment too, my phone bills stopped to be about 100 euros every two months to reach about 350 euros. Discovering the 3614 and the RTC dropped that somehow to 200 euros, largely paying for the Minitel from 1986 to 1995, date where I switched to the Internet for chatting.
An additional benefit for France Telecom was that I had to install a second phone line in my home. Otherwise, while I was making new friends on the Minitel, I lost contact with the old ones who could never reach me! :o)
I think the Minitel 1B (switchable to VT-1xx emulation mode) arrived in 1987. Some people then tried to put their ordinary Minitel 1 to get a 1B instead. Their preferred way to to that was to patiently drop lemonade on the keyboard every day. That behaviour stayed marginal, though.
Yes, the modem, especially with the sequence that allowed to reverse it for 1200bps UPload, was one of the reasons PC users were happy to have a Minitel. Having a free ASCII terminal just for debugging purpose was interesting too. I guess than today the 1B, once connected, can directly be used with Linux by just issuing a penable tty0. But they will be limited to 4800, 9600 ou 19200 bps according to their age.
Under the determination of somebody called Annie Sidier, some Minitel service providers even agreed to open 1 or 2 "free" lines for deaf people, as a given sequence allowed to identify the "D" minitels.
Which gave rise to the French joke : "My wife is like a French invention : I was the discoverer, but other people are getting all the profit".
They had their fast train TGV (train a grande vitesse) a decade before the Germans did as well
The strange habit of trying railroad speed records was already there in 1955 as far as I remember : 331km/h (US people, please use your handheld computer conversion program), a record that stayed unchallenged for more than 20 years, if my memory is good. However the Japanese envetually got ahead with the Tokaïdo some time before the TGV was launched.
Remember that it is a well established tradition in France to separate as much as possible science from technology. Charles Cros was happy when he "recorded" voices visually in charcoal black, not trying to replay them (something that could be attempted now by the IRCAM, by the way). While the Science Museum in London and the Deutsches Museum in München happily mix science and technology, Paris prefers to have "Palais de la Découverte" for Science and the less-admired "Arts et Métiers" for technology. Ecole Normale Superieure has more prestige than Polytechnique, itself having more than the Arts et Métiers (again!).
A common and sad characteristic of all of us frenchmen is the idea that from the moment we have a lead to the right concept to solve a problem, we consider that problem as solved. Dassault's CATIA, recently adopted by Boeing in replacement for their inhouse CADAM (both having been used worldwide in the preceding 15 years) is more an exception than a rule.
This service is extremely ugly
Yes.
>> and badly designed
Not exactly. It is designed for one purpose: meeting people and dating them fast (the necessary point of passage is of course to agree about a phone call first; voices can be just as informative as written conversation styles ;o) ). It fits this purpose pretty well. No fancy graphics are needed for that
Videotex is way more powerful that what you can see here.
I happen to know :o) I learned Videotex graphics on a fully graphic dialog server called Privilege (later renamed Elliott). As it offered some properties to store videotex sequences, you could do a lot of things : rainbow-flashing greetings, semigraphic animations (moving spiders /\oo/\, black sky with blinking and shooting stars, thunderbolts and the like). A good side effect was that the (very relative, in fact) "complexity" of graphics kept the sex-obsessed people away :o)))
Every character, including graphical ones can be redefined (8x12 dots)
I was already fully happy with the 2x3 semigraphic "mosaic" mode. The important thing is to know where to stop sophisticating things. Remember the NAPLPS flop.
and latest minitels can also display jpeg images with full colors
A very, very bad idea on 56Kbps phone lines. By the way, JPEG is really obsolete. JPEG2000 gives an outstanding quality compressing images by a factor of 24 (yes, 4% of their original size, which means ONE bit per pixel for 24-bits RGB).
There are also plenty of tricks to speed up things (like using a lot CAN), and to make things look better (like overlapping double-sized characters that produces nice chrome effects)
So they consider it a feature now? In my times, everybody considered that as a bug :oD
François Lagarde's Medical Server (SM, in French) is worth mentioning.
According to IBM in 1978, 1 $ of investment was needed by them to generate 1 $ of revenue. The 19.8/51 ratio of the Minitel does not seem to have been that bad compared to their data. Which is probably why IBM's Lou Gertner signed a co-development agreement with France Telecom' Michel Bon in the 90s (I do not know what came out of it, by the way).
On the other hand, the Minitel was a handy tool to break in a poorly conceived UNIX server : you just had to send a "BREAK" character from it (doing it from its PC interface, as only the second generation Minitel 1B had VT1xx compatibility mode), and if the application developer had been careless, you had a shell at your disposal.
A lot of hackers developed then what was called as "brasseurs" : computers that you could call from a 3613 line (called party paying the cost!) and that would dial a TRANSPAC 3614 or even modem 3615 line from the hacked computer. There were even systems allowing to switch from one minitel server to the othet via a hot key sequence. As a result, computer security concerns were quite high here in 1987 : the CNET of Lannion had the surprise to receive a 3 billion francs (457000 euros!) phone line bill from their mother company, France Telecom :o)))
Pretty nice other things were done. For instance in 1987 a 40-users chat server on a 386/20 running MS-DOS (using 2 Addiciel 68000-based intelligent X25 cards) when the competition still used 40 times more expensive UNIX machines.
Something similar happened with the telephone. France really jumped in the bandwagon of mass telephone wiring around 1974. Among other things, it allowed France to have a fully temporal (rather that spatial) and digital fiber-optic (rather than analog copper) wiring. Technology decisions are similar so decisions in SimCity : you have to choose between being right for today or right for tomorrow. Everybody has to.
As a consequence the Asynchronous Transfer Mode originated in France. As well as the wavelet technology leading to the JPEG2000 standard. These should make some rather positive contributions to the world.
Considering car technology in the '60s as well as civil aircraft technology in the '90s, it would be interesting to think again about who was somehow late on who in making the best technology decisions. Concerning Airbus, the maket has chosen (showing among other things that having German and French people collaborating is a poor idea in war-time, but a great one in peaceful periods.
Trying to make things too fast may also lead to harmful side effects, as myopic space telescopes, exploding space shuttles, and a number of unused planes stored uselessly in the Mojaves desert as a consequence of hazardous deregulation :o(
Thats not true. I'm 29, and against the euro. So much for your theory.
As far as 50% of people + 1 agree with using the euro, the proposal of your interlocutor still holds. We see no sign of the contrary up to know, otherwise so-called "sovereignists" would be in power everywhere in Europe and the Maastricht vote would have been rejected by every country.
every conflict in europe for the last 1000 years have been about nationalism
Can you name just three of them ? I can hardly see any that did not have its origin in ECONOMIC reasons, including the two last world wars (so could be the case for the Secession war, incidentally : it was probably easier for the North to sell its machines to replace people in the South if there was no unpaid human workpower power to compete with them)
In such a case, the wars were the wrong answer to real problems. A central bank might be the right answer to the same real problems. Back to 1895, the Economist Charles Gide, looking at the regression line of interest rates thoughout the XIXth century, came to the conclusion : "If interest rates still go down like this, they will be zero by 1915, which is impossible. Therefore something has to happen in the meantime and we do not know what it will be.". We know by now.
(The "1000 years" are just stuff for kids. None of us is ever concerned with what occured more than 4 generations ago. I shall believe otherwise when I see somebody able to name me the list of all his/her great-grandparents. I still have to meet one (except those interested in genalogy, a quite different matter because you often find one or more migrants in one"s family in that case).).
>> One nation under God. So lets start acting like it. We saw with the Taliban what "one nation under God" could mean, so I would say NO, THANKS ! :o(
In most countries of Europe, believing or not in an hypothetical God (whether an individual, a kind of extratemporal being or force, or a pure language metaphor) is an individual choice, note a state-relevant one. So do not expect to ever see "In God WE trust" on an euro coin. In God SOME OF US trust. Some do not. Obviously some have to be wrong but we shall not pretend any of them know best.
That being said, if there is no God to take care of people when they are down and out, a strong social security system has to, and this is why it was started as early as the end of XIXth century by Bismarck and others. The system has got slightly better ever since. Leveling the social security levels on te world seems up to now more important that just matching the currencies, though both of them should occur within this century unless surprising new conditions rise in the meantime.
That is the problem : because there are (still) many chauvinists everywhere, nobody dared to suggest to put, for instance, Beethoven's face on a 500 euros bill (what is the need of a 500 euros bill, by the way, besides escaping the taxman?) and Leonardo da Vinci on "simply" a 100 euros bill.
An obvious solution would have been to represent only great people from outside the European Union (a very nice symbol of openness too). Seems that nobody was ready for that either. As (in France at least, I cannot say for the rest of Europe) best and brightest people just study math and physics, and politics seem to be left, at the other end of the rainbow, to people lacking both logical abilities and creativity, we can hardly be much surprised here.
Anyway, the Euro Notes will probably be redesigned, like most other bills, every 10 years or so, We could have something acceptable around 2080 if we do not revert to something harder to counterfeit (a given standard mix of expensive metals?) by that time. However, electronic money or even something more subtle could have taken over, and perhaps on the whole planet.
By the way, there is a strange wishful thinking here in Europe : many people insist on saying (and perhaps even believing) that countries having the same currency cannot have a war between them.
History does not say so, as for instance the Secession war suggests. Territories in war cannot go on sharing the same currency, but we see from this exemple that the inverse is not true.
Of course, many people say that "there cannot be war between democracies", but this only true as long as the winner of a war can decide what will be written in history books, in other words who was democratic and who wa not; an excellent privilege, indeed.
That being said, the Republic of Venice was terminated by a young general of the young French Republic - incidentally called Napoleon Bonaparte. This was, to be exact, not a "real" war, just an accepted ultimatum; besides, the two sides of this example are probably very atypical.
Euro notes are rather dull, though the pastel colors they use make our wallets look like (Seurat-like) rainbows, and also save time organizing them; just like with Monopoly banknotes; I wonder if royalties are being paid for that :o).
As far as I know, the first goal with Euro notes was to make their forgery more difficult as no other currency has has so many users in Europe since the Roman Empire. I hope that Europe's agony will be less painful, though.
The Euro will not change much about the economic war going on except its unit of measure. The State economic debt of France grew by almost one (ex-)World Trade Center tower each month and this has been going on, as far as I know, for more than ten years. No human casulaties, of course, except that we are now among the biggest antidepressor consumers in Europe, which makes us wonder whether we really live longer that other european residents or if is just an impression we have. Now, the US also have a big national debt, I have been told (numbers are welcome if you have them) while Japan, which does not, is in a so-callled crisis (5% of jobseekers, a crisis ? France has around 10%, Mauretania 80% and yet nobody is ever left out alone in the latter). I do not know exactly what can be deduced here, and am open to any ideas by e-mail, here or both).