I could rant (once again) about how WAP sucks, but I think this page says it quite well.
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~rohit/IEEE-L7-WAP.html
If only the telecom industry had focused on giving us GPRS instead of inventing yet another crappy 'standard'. HTML is platform agnostic anyway, but then they are catering "web designers" so...
You have completely misunderstood the WWW. The goal has _always_ been about managing information. Just reading the title of Tim Berners-Lee initial WWW proposal ( http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html ) "Information Management: A Proposal" says it.
I suggest you read about WebDAV ( http://www.webdav.org ).
Maybe. Maybe you are right. Or it could be that I am just disgusted by the ignorance shown by "web designers".
Just because because you can park in the handicap space doesn't mean you should. Just because you can screw those that had the most to gain from WWW over doesn't mean you should. Even if it means you have a shorter walk to the mall or a way to copy the paper media - verbatim.
If my web page doesn't please your eyes you can always use your own client side style sheet. One can't make up for abuse of HTML by "web designers" though.
Funny thing is the uproar that occurs here each time Linux users are shut out from something and then in the next moment they are perfectly content with screwing blind users (or whoever) over. I, as a Debian Linux user, can at any time go to the store and get Win* instead. A blind person can't buy a new pair of eyes.
I am probably wasting my time on yet another ignorant "web designer", but here goes..
HTML is designed to be universally accessible. That means the information can be accessed on your fancy PC, a PDA, or by a blind person using a braille terminal. What you are asking for is to piss on those that don't have the necessary hardware to render your "design" or even worse they _can't_ because of their disability.
I know, "I am not targetting blind people. They are not interested in what I am doing." yada yada. I am sure if you, or your children, lose your eye sight then you will lose all interest in your previous life too (or if you are blind you don't deserve a life at all or at the least you should be sent somewhere where you can't bother us real people). Umm, yeah, that seems likely.
The "funny" thing is that the people that had the most to gain from WWW (all those who couldn't read the newspaper because it wasn't available in Braille or on tape) are constantly being screwed over by the likes of YOU. Yes, lets use PDF all of us so that we can really shut them out.
What stops them from using all that bandwidth from a computer lab? Especially when the lab is located in the same building.
I don't claim that the buying your own AC analogy is suitable independant of what I said. I believe this has nothing to do with increased consumtion of bandwidth. The university just wants to have control and these students did something on their own which diminish that control. Which was why I wondered if they would be allowed to get their own AC.
We have 5578 student rooms/apartments connected currently (aside from all other apartments that are hooked up) and then we are talking 10Mbit ethernet and not cable modems or xDSL or similar half assed solutions. I have never heard anyone in administration talking about bandwidth problems just about how to get all students online. Different mindset I guess.
No, that would be violating the terms of use. That applies to everyone even the ones paying the extra $24.
The same with the meal hall.
The meal hall analogy would suitable if you said this: You have paid to eat in the meal hall. If you pay an extra $24 you can eat at any time. Now, you go to the meal hall within hours you are allowed to eat there and instead of eating there you bring the food home and eat it at 4:30AM. Shouldn't you be allowed to do that?
They had access to the computer lab. They had access to the network. They could pay to get a room where there was a ethernet connection installed. They didn't and instead got a cable of their own and plugged it in down in the computer lab, which they had access to, and voila! they had fixed access in their dorm room.
If you normally have access to the university president's office or are allowed to login directly on that alpha server - why not?
A more accurate analogy would be if I had access to the alpha server in the president's office and can't access it sitting in my homemade ergonomic chair instead of the plain wood ones available for everyone. A chair which looks almost like the official ergonomic chairs one can rent for $24.
That 24 dollars would be paying for the cost of getting the actual connection into your room (and related services [ip #, dns,..]). They didn't require any of that. They just used what they had paid for, which was access to the network and access to the computer lab downstairs. As long as no other student in the dorm is complaining about not being able to use the downstairs computerlab I don't see the problem.
People doing things by themselves - the horror. What's next? Someone writing their own operating system instead of paying someone to ship one with the computer hardware.. oh wait.. nevermind.
..and they didn't steal an ethernet connection from anyone. They just made use of an available one, which they supposedly have the right to use.
The descrambler analogy is therefore not suitable. They are btw not illegal in Sweden. Only selling them is.
It is like paying the "masturbation fee" and opting out from paying for the "masturbation room" and then getting caught masturbating somewhere else.
These students have the paid for using the networks and they have (supposedly) several officially condoned ways to access the network. Instead of paying for an ethernet connection in their dorm room they used one of those ways combined with some know-how and ended up with one for them acceptable solution. The university haven't been forced to fund this 'extension' and therefore I don't see what they are complaining about. Except that they want a monopoly.
All this sounds an awful lot like Microsoft forcing people to pay for Win* even though they won't be using it or the RIAA wanting to stop non-approved DVD drivers for Linux.
Nope. When I pay for cable access I pay for the right to view the content. If I also need them to install a cable then that is a one time cost (except for any insurance that they will fix anything if it stops working). At home we did the digging ourselves to draw the cable. We only paid for the right to view the content.
So these students had a problem which they solved, but I guess the university wants to have a monopoly on solving things.
Umm, but what service are the other dorms paying for? Is it the installed ethernet connections in each room or is it access to the network?
It seems it is the former and therefore what they have done is to make use of the network to the fullest. So instead of moving around their computers they did the sensible thing and got a longer cable.
Would they be charged if they installed air conditioning in their rooms too?
IMO they didn't steal/misused anything. They used what they had available (and paid for) to it fullest.
Sounds more like the students in this particular dorm aren't be allowed to better their situation because that would devalue the other dorms that have paid the university for it. Overpaid, too, if it works like the Netware 5 network described.
I am sure here the university would be happy if as many students as possible could get access without it having to provide it. After all it is a way to attract students.
I think Miguel intended to use a OLE 'clone' all along and saw OpenParts as too complex (which was proved correct when KDE also dropped it).
As for CORBA I haven't seen any benchmarks pitting MICO and ORBit against each other. From the tests posted to gnome-component-list last week it seems to beat OmniORB handily (although I don't know much about CORBA or its pitfalls to judge for the general case).
Miguel (and Federico?) got the idea of a desktop project from that MSIE demo. He intended to join KDE, but then RMS and others pointed out it was based on a proprieraty toolkit (Qt), so he created GNOME instead.
``If one wants to learn good OO techniques, then it's best to avoid C++ altogether.'' - Dave Cook, on c.o.l.a
``I invented the term 'object oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.'' - Alan Kay
``This, by the way, is a document telling you all of the features of C++ that you must not use if you want your code to run on all platforms commonly deployed today. When you print it out, it's a quarter inch thick. If that doesn't say to someone, "don't use C++", there's probably no hope of ever reasoning with them.'' - Jamie Zawinski
Personally I dislike Python and the Pascal family of languages far more than C++ - purely on based syntactical grounds. I am weird like that. I like elegant languages - like Scheme and Haskell. I use practical languages - like Perl, C and C++.
Umm, and mathematics is defined and understood within the human intellect (the part of mathematics we humans know anyway). So therefore we are back with the problem of expressing the system within the system.
My human intuition tells me it holds for any system. At least any system a human can be said to understand. IMO that is human understanding. If we know how a system works the only way we can do that, and show it, is to formalize it.
In Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" he describes what he we calls the "imitation game" which he basicly equates to a test of intelligence.
We have a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C). A and B are in a separate room communicating with a teleprinter or through a messenger. C only knows A and B by the 'labels' X and Y. The objective of the game is for C to find out who is who i.e. who is the woman and who is the man. When C asks X (which can be either of the two obviosly) he/she must answer. A's objective is to cause C to make the wrong indentification and can therefore lie. B's objective is to help C.
Now what happens if we replace A with a machine?
Will the C make the wrong decision as often as when no machine participated?
Turing claimed that question replaced his initial one - "Can machines think?".
It is of course a very naive or simplistic view of what intelligence is. Doesn't intelligence entail understanding? But then we might just be highly complex Turing machines where our idea of understanding is just mechanical reactions to input hidden by our complexity.
I don't think we can understand ourselves anyway since a system can't be described within itself so real artificial intelligence, as defined by a human intelligence, is impossible for us to recreate.
XML sells bigger hard drives? It sells more bandwidth?
You have posted lots of post more or less claiming that XML sucks. Now how about actually proving your claims?
What I see is just whining about syntax. XML is human readable (just look at the success of HTML which shares the same basic syntax). XML will be used all over the place and then to invent other formats for config files or what not is Stupid(tm).
No I have no real idea why it was made outside of generating money for the telecom industry and related consults.
If they can't save the information contained in an HTML document how would they be able to save the same information in an WML document? It is no different! If they have found a way to store the information with WAP that uses less memory the same can be done with HTML or whatever. But then you already know that since you wrote "WML is just the way you WRITE the pages". Since WML is an application of XML why not "compile" XHTML or something similar? Solves the bandwidth problem (the better way would be to spend all this money on providing real bandwidth).
Tiny displays? HTML doesn't have any requirements on the size of displays or the existence of a display at all for that matter. Of course moronic "web designers" impose requirements on all sorts of things but that is separate from HTML itself and need to be solved with WML anyway.
We could use XHTML instead if we wanted, but since the telecom companies can't control such standards we won't. They do control the cell phones and there is little we can do about it.
..and in five years cell phones will, hopefully, use the real standards instead of what WAP Forum provides. Maybe it can be accomplished in even less time if the telecom industry really wanted to provide us with real bandwidth.
Hrrmm, who am I kidding. We will be stuck with the telecom industries whitepapers and crappy solutions. WAP generates money for both the telecom companies and the consults so why should they change. It is only the customers that get screwed so..
I can't find anything in that announcement that specifies what these "special problems" are or how they aren't addressed by the W3C. It is just the usual marketing-speak with little to no content.
Well, I thought I knew these things, but obviosly not so why don't you enlighten me why HTML is not a feasible standard for mobile user agents?
Screen estate? Well, HTML doesn't make any requirements of it. Heck, you don't even need a screen to use it.
Memory size? Use compression if that solves anything. Information is information whatever format it is encoded in.
Processing limitations? HTML doesn't require much processing if you don't want to render fancy visual things like animations or rerendering during fetching - neither would be applicable on a handheld.
In short WAP/WML is crap. It makes the same mistakes HTML made in the beginning and adds a bunch of new ones. The only reason it is promoted is because the telecom companies want to control the standards. They should focus on delivering real bandwidth instead of locking users into proprieraty content solutions.
/mill - who realized whomever wrote the WML spec doesn't know (s)he is talking about
Slashdot Mirror
I could rant (once again) about how WAP sucks, but I think this page says it quite well.
/mill
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~rohit/IEEE-L7-WAP.html
If only the telecom industry had focused on giving us GPRS instead of inventing yet another crappy 'standard'. HTML is platform agnostic anyway, but then they are catering "web designers" so...
You have completely misunderstood the WWW. The goal has _always_ been about managing information. Just reading the title of Tim Berners-Lee initial WWW proposal ( http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html ) "Information Management: A Proposal" says it.
/mill - tired of all this
I suggest you read about WebDAV ( http://www.webdav.org ).
Maybe. Maybe you are right. Or it could be that I am just disgusted by the ignorance shown by "web designers".
/mill
Just because because you can park in the handicap space doesn't mean you should. Just because you can screw those that had the most to gain from WWW over doesn't mean you should. Even if it means you have a shorter walk to the mall or a way to copy the paper media - verbatim.
If my web page doesn't please your eyes you can always use your own client side style sheet. One can't make up for abuse of HTML by "web designers" though.
Funny thing is the uproar that occurs here each time Linux users are shut out from something and then in the next moment they are perfectly content with screwing blind users (or whoever) over. I, as a Debian Linux user, can at any time go to the store and get Win* instead. A blind person can't buy a new pair of eyes.
I am probably wasting my time on yet another ignorant "web designer", but here goes..
/mill
HTML is designed to be universally accessible. That means the information can be accessed on your fancy PC, a PDA, or by a blind person using a braille terminal. What you are asking for is to piss on those that don't have the necessary hardware to render your "design" or even worse they _can't_ because of their disability.
I know, "I am not targetting blind people. They are not interested in what I am doing." yada yada. I am sure if you, or your children, lose your eye sight then you will lose all interest in your previous life too (or if you are blind you don't deserve a life at all or at the least you should be sent somewhere where you can't bother us real people). Umm, yeah, that seems likely.
The "funny" thing is that the people that had the most to gain from WWW (all those who couldn't read the newspaper because it wasn't available in Braille or on tape) are constantly being screwed over by the likes of YOU. Yes, lets use PDF all of us so that we can really shut them out.
Once again. You people make me sick.
What stops them from using all that bandwidth from a computer lab? Especially when the lab is located in the same building.
/mill
I don't claim that the buying your own AC analogy is suitable independant of what I said. I believe this has nothing to do with increased consumtion of bandwidth. The university just wants to have control and these students did something on their own which diminish that control. Which was why I wondered if they would be allowed to get their own AC.
We have 5578 student rooms/apartments connected currently (aside from all other apartments that are hooked up) and then we are talking 10Mbit ethernet and not cable modems or xDSL or similar half assed solutions. I have never heard anyone in administration talking about bandwidth problems just about how to get all students online. Different mindset I guess.
Coming from a Coward I take that as a compliment :-).
/mill
No, that would be violating the terms of use. That applies to everyone even the ones paying the extra $24.
/mill
The same with the meal hall.
The meal hall analogy would suitable if you said this: You have paid to eat in the meal hall. If you pay an extra $24 you can eat at any time. Now, you go to the meal hall within hours you are allowed to eat there and instead of eating there you bring the food home and eat it at 4:30AM. Shouldn't you be allowed to do that?
They had access to the computer lab. They had access to the network. They could pay to get a room where there was a ethernet connection installed. They didn't and instead got a cable of their own and plugged it in down in the computer lab, which they had access to, and voila! they had fixed access in their dorm room.
If you normally have access to the university president's office or are allowed to login directly on that alpha server - why not?
/mill
A more accurate analogy would be if I had access to the alpha server in the president's office and can't access it sitting in my homemade ergonomic chair instead of the plain wood ones available for everyone. A chair which looks almost like the official ergonomic chairs one can rent for $24.
That 24 dollars would be paying for the cost of getting the actual connection into your room (and related services [ip #, dns, ..]). They didn't require any of that. They just used what they had paid for, which was access to the network and access to the computer lab downstairs. As long as no other student in the dorm is complaining about not being able to use the downstairs computerlab I don't see the problem.
/mill
People doing things by themselves - the horror. What's next? Someone writing their own operating system instead of paying someone to ship one with the computer hardware.. oh wait.. nevermind.
..and they didn't steal an ethernet connection from anyone. They just made use of an available one, which they supposedly have the right to use.
/mill
The descrambler analogy is therefore not suitable. They are btw not illegal in Sweden. Only selling them is.
It is like paying the "masturbation fee" and opting out from paying for the "masturbation room" and then getting caught masturbating somewhere else.
These students have the paid for using the networks and they have (supposedly) several officially condoned ways to access the network.
Instead of paying for an ethernet connection in their dorm room they used one of those ways combined with some know-how and ended up with one for them acceptable solution. The university haven't been forced to fund this 'extension' and therefore I don't see what they are complaining about. Except that they want a monopoly.
All this sounds an awful lot like Microsoft forcing people to pay for Win* even though they won't be using it or the RIAA wanting to stop non-approved DVD drivers for Linux.
Nope. When I pay for cable access I pay for the right to view the content. If I also need them to install a cable then that is a one time cost (except for any insurance that they will fix anything if it stops working). At home we did the digging ourselves to draw the cable. We only paid for the right to view the content.
/mill
So these students had a problem which they solved, but I guess the university wants to have a monopoly on solving things.
Umm, but what service are the other dorms paying for? Is it the installed ethernet connections in each room or is it access to the network?
/mill - who enjoys his firewall free 10Mbit
It seems it is the former and therefore what they have done is to make use of the network to the fullest. So instead of moving around their computers they did the sensible thing and got a longer cable.
Would they be charged if they installed air conditioning in their rooms too?
IMO they didn't steal/misused anything. They used what they had available (and paid for) to it fullest.
Sounds more like the students in this particular dorm aren't be allowed to better their situation because that would devalue the other dorms that have paid the university for it. Overpaid, too, if it works like the Netware 5 network described.
I am sure here the university would be happy if as many students as possible could get access without it having to provide it. After all it is a way to attract students.
I think Miguel intended to use a OLE 'clone' all along and saw OpenParts as too complex (which was proved correct when KDE also dropped it).
/mill
As for CORBA I haven't seen any benchmarks pitting MICO and ORBit against each other. From the tests posted to gnome-component-list last week it seems to beat OmniORB handily (although I don't know much about CORBA or its pitfalls to judge for the general case).
Miguel (and Federico?) got the idea of a desktop project from that MSIE demo. He intended to join KDE, but then RMS and others pointed out it was based on a proprieraty toolkit (Qt), so he created GNOME instead.
``If one wants to learn good OO techniques, then it's best to avoid C++ altogether.'' - Dave Cook, on c.o.l.a
/mill
``I invented the term 'object oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.'' - Alan Kay
``This, by the way, is a document telling you all of the features of C++ that you must not use if you want your code to run on all platforms commonly deployed today. When you print it out, it's a quarter inch thick. If that doesn't say to someone, "don't use C++", there's probably no hope of ever reasoning with them.'' - Jamie Zawinski
Personally I dislike Python and the Pascal family of languages far more than C++ - purely on based syntactical grounds. I am weird like that. I like elegant languages - like Scheme and Haskell. I use practical languages - like Perl, C and C++.
Umm, no. The obvious answer would be Keyser. "My name is SuSE, Keyser SuSE".
/mill
The irony. There is no "ALT-tag" - it is an attribute of the IMG element.
/mill
Umm, and mathematics is defined and understood within the human intellect (the part of mathematics we humans know anyway). So therefore we are back with the problem of expressing the system within the system.
/mill
My human intuition tells me it holds for any system. At least any system a human can be said to understand. IMO that is human understanding. If we know how a system works the only way we can do that, and show it, is to formalize it.
/mill
In Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" he describes what he we calls the "imitation game" which he basicly equates to a test of intelligence.
/mill
We have a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C). A and B are in a separate room communicating with a teleprinter or through a messenger. C only knows A and B by the 'labels' X and Y. The objective of the game is for C to find out who is who i.e. who is the woman and who is the man. When C asks X (which can be either of the two obviosly) he/she must answer. A's objective is to cause C to make the wrong indentification and can therefore lie. B's objective is to help C.
Now what happens if we replace A with a machine?
Will the C make the wrong decision as often as when no machine participated?
Turing claimed that question replaced his initial one - "Can machines think?".
It is of course a very naive or simplistic view of what intelligence is. Doesn't intelligence entail understanding? But then we might just be highly complex Turing machines where our idea of understanding is just mechanical reactions to input hidden by our complexity.
I don't think we can understand ourselves anyway since a system can't be described within itself so real artificial intelligence, as defined by a human intelligence, is impossible for us to recreate.
If end tags and quotes around attributes make any significant difference you have no content.
/mill
Remove the pretty pictures if bandwidth is a problem.
XML sells bigger hard drives? It sells more bandwidth?
/mill
You have posted lots of post more or less claiming that XML sucks. Now how about actually proving your claims?
What I see is just whining about syntax. XML is human readable (just look at the success of HTML which shares the same basic syntax). XML will be used all over the place and then to invent other formats for config files or what not is Stupid(tm).
No I have no real idea why it was made outside of generating money for the telecom industry and related consults.
/mill
If they can't save the information contained in an HTML document how would they be able to save the same information in an WML document? It is no different! If they have found a way to store the information with WAP that uses less memory the same can be done with HTML or whatever. But then you already know that since you wrote "WML is just the way you WRITE the pages". Since WML is an application of XML why not "compile" XHTML or something similar? Solves the bandwidth problem (the better way would be to spend all this money on providing real bandwidth).
Tiny displays? HTML doesn't have any requirements on the size of displays or the existence of a display at all for that matter. Of course moronic "web designers" impose requirements on all sorts of things but that is separate from HTML itself and need to be solved with WML anyway.
We could use XHTML instead if we wanted, but since the telecom companies can't control such standards we won't. They do control the cell phones and there is little we can do about it.
..and in five years cell phones will, hopefully, use the real standards instead of what WAP Forum provides. Maybe it can be accomplished in even less time if the telecom industry really wanted to provide us with real bandwidth.
/mill
Hrrmm, who am I kidding. We will be stuck with the telecom industries whitepapers and crappy solutions. WAP generates money for both the telecom companies and the consults so why should they change. It is only the customers that get screwed so..
I can't find anything in that announcement that specifies what these "special problems" are or how they aren't addressed by the W3C. It is just the usual marketing-speak with little to no content.
/mill
Well, I thought I knew these things, but obviosly not so why don't you enlighten me why HTML is not a feasible standard for mobile user agents?
/mill - who realized whomever wrote the WML spec doesn't know (s)he is talking about
Screen estate? Well, HTML doesn't make any requirements of it. Heck, you don't even need a screen to use it.
Memory size? Use compression if that solves anything. Information is information whatever format it is encoded in.
Processing limitations? HTML doesn't require much processing if you don't want to render fancy visual things like animations or rerendering during fetching - neither would be applicable on a handheld.
In short WAP/WML is crap. It makes the same mistakes HTML made in the beginning and adds a bunch of new ones. The only reason it is promoted is because the telecom companies want to control the standards. They should focus on delivering real bandwidth instead of locking users into proprieraty content solutions.