All those windows, all that hitech (was POSIX bashing)

[Chris Calabrese]

In article <1991Apr21.171607.1891 at panix.uucp> eravin at panix.uucp (Ed Ravin) writes:
>As much as I like the windowed environments available to me at work,
>(Sunview, Xwindows), I almost never use them.  Why?  I don't like the idea
>of sitting two feet in front of a 25" monitor.  After the machine is set
>up and if I'm not using the floppies/tape drives, I retreat back to my office
>and access the beast from my friendly PC via the serial port.  I'm not sure
>which bothers me more from the large monitors -- the high-frequency sound
>(which I can hear and directly feel) or the electromagnetic fields (which I
>can't, but are getting more and more famous as each new "Currents of Death"
>book comes out).
>-- 
>Ed Ravin            | This random number tells the computer that you are 
>cmcl2!panix!eravin  | a member in good standing.  It is not related to your
>philabs!trintex!elr | membership number.   --- Sierra Club

Odd - I've been using Suns (and other workstations and xterminals, but
the poster mentioned sunview) for quite some time and have never had
problems with high pitch sounds.

Yes, I can hear the squeal in noisy monitors/TV's,
but none I've used at work have had this problem.

In any event, why should a PC's monitor be any better.  Besides, PC's
tend to have noisy fans and disk drives.

As for electromagnetic fields, the megawat transformer on top of our
roof creates much larger ones than the monitors (we've had sheilding
problems with certain monitors because of the magnetic field).
Check that you don't have this problem.  It's much worse than what
comes from your monitor.

I won't get into a flame war about whether these fields are actually
harmful.

Name:			Christopher J. Calabrese
Brain loaned to:	AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ
att!ulysses!cjc		cjc at ulysses.att.com
Obligatory Quote:	``pher - gr. vb. to schlep.  phospher - to schlep light.philosopher - to schlep thoughts.''