The IEE is getting a lecture out of Tim Berners-Lee of the Dub
Consortium, and is giving him an honorary fellowship and a Lloyd prize
for it. (As an incentive for members to attend, turning up and
getting someone to take register and note your name is worth a
whole 0.75 of a Continuing Professional Development point.)
Goodness. Perhaps the IEE is not really the moribund stick-in-the-mud
dyed-in-the-wool bunch of conservative suit-and-tie-wearing
port-and-cigar mummified traditionalists that years of experience of
them has always suggested.
On the other hand, the IEE did wait until _after_ Tim got given an
OBE, so Establishment Approval is already there. However, they're not
taking the safe decision of waiting until after his death (aka the
Blumlein Decision) to avoid any possible future embarrassment - but
then, that does mean not having to find someone else to give the
lecture in his place.
Having started jumping through hoops to get tickets, I can provide a
report on the highlights in due course if anyone's at all interested.
The given title ('Whither The World Wide Web?') suggests a
talk with content similar to that of
http://www.w3.org/1998/02/Potential.html
but that (hopefully) might not be the case, so I'm thinking of running
a book on how many times XML (and PEP?) gets mentioned during the
lecture, how many times questions at the end bring up Prestel,
Teletext, Compuserve, comparisons with the national power grid, and
all that undesireable internet porn, and whether 'cogno-intellectual'
(today's Nobel Laureate's straightfaced quantum gravity mickeytake
term of choice) slips out at any point. Get your bets in now.
L.
and it had better be more interesting than
http://www.iee.org.uk/Lectures/prsad98.htm
<L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk>PGP<http://www.sat-net.com/L.Wood/>+44-1483-300800x3641