It's hard to compare Teletext/Ceefax and Minitel. Minitel was a sort of BBS with a dedicated terminal and real keyboard and the service ran (well, it is still running) through telephone. Teletext is sent via TV signal in a non-interactive way and it's free.
The only common point is that it's ugly by 2004 standards.
Minitel has turned 20 recently and is still generating revenue (around 500 M euros in 2002) though decreasing smoothly.
There's also a French frigate with comparable characteristics, its design is not as stealth and it's not made of carbon but other composite material and it's twice as big.
The French Navy has five ships of this type.
Sorry, I don't think there is an equivalent sound in english for "Ingres". Try somethinq between "On-Gre" and "Inn-Gre", but with no "S" (the final "S" is never pronounced in French).
Sorry to reply to myself...
I just wanted to give the Slashdot crowd an example of "energetic" hypocrisy : the German government banned nuclear power a few years ago, now they buy French nuclear energy. The funniest part is that they used to send back their nuclear waste to France for reprocessing, now they only use "clean" energy like oil or coal... how cynical.
Here in France around 80% of the electricity is nuclear (15% hydroelectric...), it's not cheap but it's possible. EDF , the french monopoly, is actually the world leader (45 € billions, 22 % of the electricity of the European Union), so it can even become profitable (despite the huge investments). There's however a problem with nuclear waste, which is vehemently debated here. All nuclear plants are using the same technology (pressured water) and the MOX fuel, so on a large scale, they reduce costs and increase security.
What exactly are you talking about ? What part of computer science and information science are you interested in ? Computer science (although I don't like these limitative words, CS is not only about "machines") is like medicine, possible positions range from the nurse (no offense) to the highly trained specialist. It is mainly composed of anonymous, indistinguishable and outsourceable programmers, because the quality of the average occidental programmer is the same as in India. And you have small niches where the quality of your academic path is important. I'm in the "software security and reliability" field (planes, trains, cars, nuclear plants...) : you can't just be a script kiddie in this business. You need a solid academic education on semantics, high level languages, abstract models, formal systems... I'm definitely not in the same business (and the same level of requirements) as Joe "Average" Programmer.
Here, France Telecom (historical state-owned phone/ISP/mobile company) does exactly the same despite deregulation (enforced by EU commission).
Fortunately "courageous" private ISPs are continueing to fight against artificial technical limitations and commercial abuses (when every challenger has to register his customers to you, it's soooo easy to call them and suggest low-price services, arguing you're the number one and that, well you're an ISP and you do it well...)
Of course FT is so big thanks to happy taxpayers...
Actually O'Caml is a functionnal AND imperative AND OO language. It's also very optimized (during byte-code interpretation and native code execution). See The Great Computer Language Shootout. I hope that those guys at Microsoft are working hard to reach this level of performance...
Slashdot Mirror
Axalto has developed a Java-based version of this card, too.
It's hard to compare Teletext/Ceefax and Minitel. Minitel was a sort of BBS with a dedicated terminal and real keyboard and the service ran (well, it is still running) through telephone. Teletext is sent via TV signal in a non-interactive way and it's free.
The only common point is that it's ugly by 2004 standards.
Minitel has turned 20 recently and is still generating revenue (around 500 M euros in 2002) though decreasing smoothly.
In order to ease the transition from Imperial to Metric units in the US, maybe we could replace metre by Freedom meter ?
France is (was ???) the biggest apple market in Europe IIRC
There's also a French frigate with comparable characteristics, its design is not as stealth and it's not made of carbon but other composite material and it's twice as big. The French Navy has five ships of this type.
Sorry, I don't think there is an equivalent sound in english for "Ingres". Try somethinq between "On-Gre" and "Inn-Gre", but with no "S" (the final "S" is never pronounced in French).
Sorry to reply to myself ...
I just wanted to give the Slashdot crowd an example of "energetic" hypocrisy : the German government banned nuclear power a few years ago, now they buy French nuclear energy. The funniest part is that they used to send back their nuclear waste to France for reprocessing, now they only use "clean" energy like oil or coal ... how cynical.
Here in France around 80% of the electricity is nuclear (15% hydroelectric ...), it's not cheap but it's possible. EDF , the french monopoly, is actually the world leader (45 € billions, 22 % of the electricity of the European Union), so it can even become profitable (despite the huge investments). There's however a problem with nuclear waste, which is vehemently debated here. All nuclear plants are using the same technology (pressured water) and the MOX fuel, so on a large scale, they reduce costs and increase security.
I don't think so ... ;-)
there's a nice article on OSnews which looks back on the whole XFree86 affair of past year ...
What exactly are you talking about ? What part of computer science and information science are you interested in ? Computer science (although I don't like these limitative words, CS is not only about "machines") is like medicine, possible positions range from the nurse (no offense) to the highly trained specialist. It is mainly composed of anonymous, indistinguishable and outsourceable programmers, because the quality of the average occidental programmer is the same as in India. And you have small niches where the quality of your academic path is important. I'm in the "software security and reliability" field (planes, trains, cars, nuclear plants ...) : you can't just be a script kiddie in this business. You need a solid academic education on semantics, high level languages, abstract models, formal systems ... I'm definitely not in the same business (and the same level of requirements) as Joe "Average" Programmer.
His mental health suffered too much proximity with Windows PC ...
anyone remembers PC98 japanese standard ? i hope they will succeed this time ...
Here, France Telecom (historical state-owned phone/ISP/mobile company) does exactly the same despite deregulation (enforced by EU commission). Fortunately "courageous" private ISPs are continueing to fight against artificial technical limitations and commercial abuses (when every challenger has to register his customers to you, it's soooo easy to call them and suggest low-price services, arguing you're the number one and that, well you're an ISP and you do it well ...)
Of course FT is so big thanks to happy taxpayers ...
Actually O'Caml is a functionnal AND imperative AND OO language. It's also very optimized (during byte-code interpretation and native code execution). See The Great Computer Language Shootout. I hope that those guys at Microsoft are working hard to reach this level of performance ...
it will come from research labs ...
:
n g. html
...
Interesting readings
The join-calculus (how to express parallelism/distributed computation in a language)
http://pauillac.inria.fr/join/
Reactive programming
http://www-sop.inria.fr/meije/esterel/esterel-e
and of course logic programming with Prolog