Slashdot pages will be very difficult to WAP-enable without a major rearchitecture, as they'll go over the deck size limits of 1400 bytes of compiled WMLC very easily...
And if you've got a 7110 you're limited to 1387 bytes of deck due to a nasty bug in the Human Technology micro-browser - one that's taken over 20 versions of firmware to fix!
If you are looking a year or so out, then possibly as we transition to MExE from WAP for 3G devices, but there'll always be a place for WAP no matter what the wireless layer - purely because it is designed to work with the familiar handset.
EPOC devices will be part of the transition through GPRS and EDGE - but the SDKs for Quartz are not even in closed beta yet...
It's my job to think about mobile device strategy, and there's a lot happening that you don't know about. However the first GPRS networks will only run at 30Kbps and there's not really any scope for more complex devices until we hit EDGE roll out towards the end of 2001 - and that's unlikely to occur now with the up front costs of 3G licences...
The current generation of WAP 1.1 gateways don't deliver cookies to the micro-browser, as there isn't the memory space on the handset.
Whilst some gateways, most notably Phone.com's, will manage cookies for you, you're best off using the good old URL extension model for handling session information.
Dynamic URL generation is a given here for any HREFs, though alternatively you could hack around with postfields and the like. You will need to be careful with your dynamic pages not to exceed 1387 bytes per deck of WMLC at the gateway, if you wish to deliver to Nokia 7110s...
This means that you can use any servlet engine and web server combination. I'd recommend reading Steve Mann's "Programming Applications with the Wireless Application Protocol" [Wiley 2000] as a good starter. It's a bit too focused on Phone.com, but still worth a look at how to develop WAP servlet applications.
In the future WAP 1.2 devices and their associated gateways will support cookies and other session mechanisms through the use of the WIM, an enhanced SIM with PKI features. However, don't expect them for 8 months or so - and then be prepared to comletely rewrite your applications!
Actually the UK was running a national X.25 network for many years before switching to IP. The coloured books that formed the basis of JANET and its commercial equivalents were technically far superior to the IP stacks of the time...
It wasn't an announcement. I was at the press conference, and this was a response to a lot of very hard questioning on the direction of MS's audio tools.
The important (IMHO) thing was not the discussion of a Unix ASF player, but the fact that Microsoft were willing to discuss the licensing of the WMA codecs.
I'd suggest (like many others) that your best approach to a multiplatform environment would be to go straight to Java 2.0 EE - and specifically Enterprise Java Beans. This will give you access to a range of different distributed computing frameworks based on everything from RPC, to CORBA, to XML. With the backing of Sun and IBM, it's a well supported way of working.
One of the more off the wall reasons for going to J2EE is also Sun's recent purchase of Forte. Forte have been around a long time now, and have a mature distributed computing platform in their TOOL environment. Its partitioning and high availability features are second to none, and Forte are extending these to Java with their application server/distributed computing development environment SynerJ.
Of course, if you want to target C code at a range of different platforms, TOOL will do the job for you... and will integrate with the Fusion XML-based messaging architecture.
IBM's WebSphere is more immature, but promises standards-based integration with TXseries and MQseries environments if you have to target legacy systems. Don't overlook legacy system integration - as any large distributed application development is likely to need to link to existing infrastructure and datasources...
This is not a new problem, and the tools do exist to help you solve your issues. However, they are likely to be proprietary or part of proprietary environments...
Err... That was an opinion column. You're allowed to say what you feel in opinion columns. You don't have to be right, you just have to believe in what you're saying...
I'd suggest you first consider the difference between opinion and journalism, and then have a think about how someone might write an opinion about journalistic practices. Whatever you may think, Cringely is a well respected journalist.
He just happens to commit opinion as well. That's not a sin... Hell, I even stick opinions in my writing when I'm not reporting on something specific.
However, Slashdot is not a peer review body. I've had scientific papers reviewed, and this is nothing like it...
Where's Dan Farmer? Where's Wietse Venema? Or any other academically published security expert with serious real world expertise. What we have here is a gathering of enthusiasts which may (and I mean, may) just contain a handful of experts. That's not enough...
Cringely is an experienced journalist who knows the value of good, consistent sources. Slashdot, for all its good points, is not consistent. And it most definitely isn't journalism...
S.
Re:Metered telephone calls suck so much
on
ISP War in the UK
·
· Score: 1
It's actually worse than Piers says...
Currently it takes around one (count it, 1) whole month for a piece of transatlantic fibre to go into profit. Someone is making a fsck of a lot of money out of us.
However, back to the various issues involved in UK unmetered calls. Currently UK ISPs build to a roughly 30:1 modem user ratio. At current UK prices for bandwidth and access routers, it's only just economical for an ISP to operate at those sorts of ratios. In fact most make a loss, or are owned by telcos...
(I won't go into the erlang number that UK switches are built to, but lets just say the telecoms infrastructure in the UK is getting very close to the limit of the number of concurrent calls it can take...)
And the BT line pricing issue is one that *may* be going away. Prices in London are now below £3K pa for 64K, though 10:1 contended in the BT cloud. And OFTEL are due to report back by the end of the year on the current state of Internet access services in the UK.
It's just a pity that my contacts tell me consumer ADSL large scale trials aren't now due until the end of January/start of February.
S.
(Good grief, you, me and Charlie in the same thread. It's a gathering of the UK ISP old ones)
Most of the UK uses buried powerlines. As the DPL trials were in urban areas, and used substations as local hubs, the street-light flicker would have been induced at a distribution level. There were many security concerns as a result of this distribution model - and contention levels were higher than for alternate broadband techniques.
Interestingly, a friend in Bath builds HiFi components, and has discovered that one of the biggest sources of noise in his system is the daily DPL data dump from the local substation to the SWEB control centre in Bristol.
There are in fact two sets of servers here. There are the MS Instant Messaging servers which are at Hotmail, and there are AOL's IM servers...
MSIM is designed to work with both, using the MSIM servers to communicate with MSIM users and TOC and the Oscar servers for communication with AIM users.
I'm intrigued by your statement that AOL doesn't use their services for advertising. You're obviously using very old versions of the AIM client - as this has been streaming adverts for the last year or so... My partner runs a content channel at AOL UK, and I use AIM to keep in touch with her, and it's a pig having to ignore the advertising...
You also don't seemto have been tracking MS's IM strategy very well. MSIM has been rumoured for a long time as part of either the Platinum or Tahoe releases of Exchange, where it's being suggested as a basis for internal communications in a business setting. By pre-seeding a client before general use of the server, MS are building their market (look at how it integrates with Outlook and NetMeeting).
Unless you mean stealing time on a university computer to develop a BASIC? Hmmm. Seems to remind me of how a lot of Open Source products get started...
Well, it was a well written article. Unfortunately it was written by someone who hasn't looked at Windows 2000 or talked to anyone on the IIS 5.0 team...
There will be no webserver apart from PWS for W2K Professional. IIS 5.0 will be part of W2K Server (all three versions), and is an integrated part of the COM+ application server environment. It will also come with the O2K Server Extensions - a modified version of DAV.
The IIS 5.0 team have looked very closely at Apache, and have been learning lessons from it. IIS 5.0 will now auto-reboot, run ASPs and COM in protected memory, and will pre-launch server threads.
However, from what I've been able to gather, it's just seen as a technical issue. The marketing thrust is in building knowledge management solutions around IIS 5.0, structured storage, O2K and Exchange Platinum.
It's here that Open Source developers should be concentrating. There is a need for an effective messaging system integrated with Apache, along with a search tool and catalogue with XML support.
MS PR machine is geared up to providing information on demand. It is not proactive or reactive - in fact getting a response to a question can be hard enough at times...
The Linux Taliban do a good enough job on their own of discrediting Open Source and Linux to IT managers and senior journalists.
Cutting someone else's nose off to spite your face doesn't really work...
I'm a consultant and tech writer, writing the internet development column in a major UK/European title, as well as producing copy for both weeklies and monthlies here in the UK. If only I had a spin doctor or PR just for me...
Getting information from PR companies - and I'm including Microsoft's UK and US PRs here - is at times akin to getting blood out of a stone. I certainly don't get fed stories, and the tech news journalists I am friends with have just as many problems getting information as I do.
(Actually, I've been waiting most of the day to get crucial information for a piece I need to turn in today from several companies - even though they have my email address and mobile and land-line phone numbers.)
Yes, we do get briefings, but we'll use them to roast marketeers who skimp on facts or slide over details. What's the point of being a journalist if you can't get at the facts that the companies are trying to hide from the end users?
Of course AOL have used the name AOLsearch as the name for their internal web search engine for quite some time - at least two years. With that as prior usage, one does wonder who was doing some cybersquatting....
It's interesting to note that amongst most of the UK's technology journalists such discordant voices are referred to as "the Taliban", and are said to "give Team OS/2 a good name". Whilst we can ignore these things as one of a few bad things about a normally enjoyable task, the publicity that such attacks engenders in the US seems to have carried across the Atlantic.
One of the most important things about good advocacy is that it's gentle persuasion, not hitting people over the head with insults and flames.
How am I, as a writer and a consultant, able to get the good things about Linux and Open Source across to my readers and clients, if the public face that they see linked to those products and tools is a screaming abusive child?
Most of us in this industry are adults who are able to make reasoned judgements about the tools and technologies that are right for a job. Quite often that may mean using or working with Microsoft or Sun. Unreasonable Open Source tantrums won't change that.
Probably because Sun can't get their act together and come up with a consistent spec that the EJB developers can agree on...
Another journalist fails to understand COM+
on
Microsoft's COOL
·
· Score: 1
Looks like MS are shooting themselves in the foot over the naming of COM+. If Infoworld don't understand it, what will the message be when it gets launched with Windows 2K?
It's *not* the next generation of COM, it's the renaming of MTS and MSMQ...
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot pages will be very difficult to WAP-enable without a major rearchitecture, as they'll go over the deck size limits of 1400 bytes of compiled WMLC very easily...
And if you've got a 7110 you're limited to 1387 bytes of deck due to a nasty bug in the Human Technology micro-browser - one that's taken over 20 versions of firmware to fix!
S.
Yes and no.
If you are looking a year or so out, then possibly as we transition to MExE from WAP for 3G devices, but there'll always be a place for WAP no matter what the wireless layer - purely because it is designed to work with the familiar handset.
EPOC devices will be part of the transition through GPRS and EDGE - but the SDKs for Quartz are not even in closed beta yet...
It's my job to think about mobile device strategy, and there's a lot happening that you don't know about. However the first GPRS networks will only run at 30Kbps and there's not really any scope for more complex devices until we hit EDGE roll out towards the end of 2001 - and that's unlikely to occur now with the up front costs of 3G licences...
S.
The current generation of WAP 1.1 gateways don't deliver cookies to the micro-browser, as there isn't the memory space on the handset.
Whilst some gateways, most notably Phone.com's, will manage cookies for you, you're best off using the good old URL extension model for handling session information.
Dynamic URL generation is a given here for any HREFs, though alternatively you could hack around with postfields and the like. You will need to be careful with your dynamic pages not to exceed 1387 bytes per deck of WMLC at the gateway, if you wish to deliver to Nokia 7110s...
This means that you can use any servlet engine and web server combination. I'd recommend reading Steve Mann's "Programming Applications with the Wireless Application Protocol" [Wiley 2000] as a good starter. It's a bit too focused on Phone.com, but still worth a look at how to develop WAP servlet applications.
In the future WAP 1.2 devices and their associated gateways will support cookies and other session mechanisms through the use of the WIM, an enhanced SIM with PKI features. However, don't expect them for 8 months or so - and then be prepared to comletely rewrite your applications!
S.
A weaker case? Hmmm. Two email packages, one developed in the 1980s and still going strong, and one that obviously failed to check existing names.
I'm afraid I have to disagree there. There's absolutely no difference between IDG and Pegasus here.
S.
Actually the UK was running a national X.25 network for many years before switching to IP. The coloured books that formed the basis of JANET and its commercial equivalents were technically far superior to the IP stacks of the time...
S.
Actually it's down to the fact that the .us domain is allocated at a state level rather than a more logical usage basis.
.ca.us
So a site in California would be
Oh, and seeing as the British invented packet switched networks I guess you're wrong on the other point as well...
S.
So you lied about the admin?
Oh dear. You must be very sad.
S.
It wasn't an announcement. I was at the press conference, and this was a response to a lot of very hard questioning on the direction of MS's audio tools.
The important (IMHO) thing was not the discussion of a Unix ASF player, but the fact that Microsoft were willing to discuss the licensing of the WMA codecs.
S.
I'd suggest (like many others) that your best approach to a multiplatform environment would be to go straight to Java 2.0 EE - and specifically Enterprise Java Beans. This will give you access to a range of different distributed computing frameworks based on everything from RPC, to CORBA, to XML. With the backing of Sun and IBM, it's a well supported way of working.
One of the more off the wall reasons for going to J2EE is also Sun's recent purchase of Forte. Forte have been around a long time now, and have a mature distributed computing platform in their TOOL environment. Its partitioning and high availability features are second to none, and Forte are extending these to Java with their application server/distributed computing development environment SynerJ.
Of course, if you want to target C code at a range of different platforms, TOOL will do the job for you... and will integrate with the Fusion XML-based messaging architecture.
IBM's WebSphere is more immature, but promises standards-based integration with TXseries and MQseries environments if you have to target legacy systems. Don't overlook legacy system integration - as any large distributed application development is likely to need to link to existing infrastructure and datasources...
This is not a new problem, and the tools do exist to help you solve your issues. However, they are likely to be proprietary or part of proprietary environments...
S.
Err... That was an opinion column. You're allowed to say what you feel in opinion columns. You don't have to be right, you just have to believe in what you're saying...
I'd suggest you first consider the difference between opinion and journalism, and then have a think about how someone might write an opinion about journalistic practices. Whatever you may think, Cringely is a well respected journalist.
He just happens to commit opinion as well. That's not a sin... Hell, I even stick opinions in my writing when I'm not reporting on something specific.
S.
However, Slashdot is not a peer review body. I've had scientific papers reviewed, and this is nothing like it...
Where's Dan Farmer? Where's Wietse Venema? Or any other academically published security expert with serious real world expertise. What we have here is a gathering of enthusiasts which may (and I mean, may) just contain a handful of experts. That's not enough...
Cringely is an experienced journalist who knows the value of good, consistent sources. Slashdot, for all its good points, is not consistent. And it most definitely isn't journalism...
S.
It's actually worse than Piers says...
Currently it takes around one (count it, 1) whole month for a piece of transatlantic fibre to go into profit. Someone is making a fsck of a lot of money out of us.
However, back to the various issues involved in UK unmetered calls. Currently UK ISPs build to a roughly 30:1 modem user ratio. At current UK prices for bandwidth and access routers, it's only just economical for an ISP to operate at those sorts of ratios. In fact most make a loss, or are owned by telcos...
(I won't go into the erlang number that UK switches are built to, but lets just say the telecoms infrastructure in the UK is getting very close to the limit of the number of concurrent calls it can take...)
And the BT line pricing issue is one that *may* be going away. Prices in London are now below £3K pa for 64K, though 10:1 contended in the BT cloud. And OFTEL are due to report back by the end of the year on the current state of Internet access services in the UK.
It's just a pity that my contacts tell me consumer ADSL large scale trials aren't now due until the end of January/start of February.
S.
(Good grief, you, me and Charlie in the same thread. It's a gathering of the UK ISP old ones)
Most of the UK uses buried powerlines. As the DPL trials were in urban areas, and used substations as local hubs, the street-light flicker would have been induced at a distribution level. There were many security concerns as a result of this distribution model - and contention levels were higher than for alternate broadband techniques.
Interestingly, a friend in Bath builds HiFi components, and has discovered that one of the biggest sources of noise in his system is the daily DPL data dump from the local substation to the SWEB control centre in Bristol.
S.
It's an Arthur C. Clarke story. You should find it in the collection of his Harry Purves science humour stories "Tales From The White Hart".
S.
There are in fact two sets of servers here. There are the MS Instant Messaging servers which are at Hotmail, and there are AOL's IM servers...
MSIM is designed to work with both, using the MSIM servers to communicate with MSIM users and TOC and the Oscar servers for communication with AIM users.
I'm intrigued by your statement that AOL doesn't use their services for advertising. You're obviously using very old versions of the AIM client - as this has been streaming adverts for the last year or so... My partner runs a content channel at AOL UK, and I use AIM to keep in touch with her, and it's a pig having to ignore the advertising...
You also don't seemto have been tracking MS's IM strategy very well. MSIM has been rumoured for a long time as part of either the Platinum or Tahoe releases of Exchange, where it's being suggested as a basis for internal communications in a business setting. By pre-seeding a client before general use of the server, MS are building their market (look at how it integrates with Outlook and NetMeeting).
S.
Where did MS start by being software pirates?
Unless you mean stealing time on a university computer to develop a BASIC? Hmmm. Seems to remind me of how a lot of Open Source products get started...
S.
Well, it was a well written article. Unfortunately it was written by someone who hasn't looked at Windows 2000 or talked to anyone on the IIS 5.0 team...
There will be no webserver apart from PWS for W2K Professional. IIS 5.0 will be part of W2K Server (all three versions), and is an integrated part of the COM+ application server environment. It will also come with the O2K Server Extensions - a modified version of DAV.
The IIS 5.0 team have looked very closely at Apache, and have been learning lessons from it. IIS 5.0 will now auto-reboot, run ASPs and COM in protected memory, and will pre-launch server threads.
However, from what I've been able to gather, it's just seen as a technical issue. The marketing thrust is in building knowledge management solutions around IIS 5.0, structured storage, O2K and Exchange Platinum.
It's here that Open Source developers should be concentrating. There is a need for an effective messaging system integrated with Apache, along with a search tool and catalogue with XML support.
This is what MS is building out of O2K and W2K.
S.
Not as far as I've seen.
MS PR machine is geared up to providing information on demand. It is not proactive or reactive - in fact getting a response to a question can be hard enough at times...
The Linux Taliban do a good enough job on their own of discrediting Open Source and Linux to IT managers and senior journalists.
Cutting someone else's nose off to spite your face doesn't really work...
S.
I think you have a very unusual view of tech PR!
I'm a consultant and tech writer, writing the internet development column in a major UK/European title, as well as producing copy for both weeklies and monthlies here in the UK. If only I had a spin doctor or PR just for me...
Getting information from PR companies - and I'm including Microsoft's UK and US PRs here - is at times akin to getting blood out of a stone. I certainly don't get fed stories, and the tech news journalists I am friends with have just as many problems getting information as I do.
(Actually, I've been waiting most of the day to get crucial information for a piece I need to turn in today from several companies - even though they have my email address and mobile and land-line phone numbers.)
Yes, we do get briefings, but we'll use them to roast marketeers who skimp on facts or slide over details. What's the point of being a journalist if you can't get at the facts that the companies are trying to hide from the end users?
S.
They'll still pay the registration and other fees. It's not a way of getting a domain for free...
S.
Of course AOL have used the name AOLsearch as the name for their internal web search engine for quite some time - at least two years. With that as prior usage, one does wonder who was doing some cybersquatting....
S.
It's interesting to note that amongst most of the UK's technology journalists such discordant voices are referred to as "the Taliban", and are said to "give Team OS/2 a good name". Whilst we can ignore these things as one of a few bad things about a normally enjoyable task, the publicity that such attacks engenders in the US seems to have carried across the Atlantic.
One of the most important things about good advocacy is that it's gentle persuasion, not hitting people over the head with insults and flames.
How am I, as a writer and a consultant, able to get the good things about Linux and Open Source across to my readers and clients, if the public face that they see linked to those products and tools is a screaming abusive child?
Most of us in this industry are adults who are able to make reasoned judgements about the tools and technologies that are right for a job. Quite often that may mean using or working with Microsoft or Sun. Unreasonable Open Source tantrums won't change that.
S.
Probably because Sun can't get their act together and come up with a consistent spec that the EJB developers can agree on...
Looks like MS are shooting themselves in the foot over the naming of COM+. If Infoworld don't understand it, what will the message be when it gets launched with Windows 2K?
It's *not* the next generation of COM, it's the renaming of MTS and MSMQ...
Oh well...