I've been giving WAP training to Nokia personell and I've been involved in coding demos used by Nokia to display what WAP is
Whoopee. So have I. Lectures, demos and services. Recent too, as in "Not TTML". All my experience of Nokia Mobile Phones, Nokia Networks and Nokia Multimedia tells me that Nokia as a group know that WAP has nothing to do with the WWW. Perhaps back (1yr/2yrs ago?) when you were there they didn't know that. They do now.
And btw, WAP 2.0 will be XHTML
Yes? And? XHTML as it will be used in WAP is closer to XML (the basis of WML) than it is to
the HTML used in web sites. Was that supposed to imply that WML was wrong? Or that HTML is a good thing?
Also, in addition to Nokia, I've worked closely with Siemens and their WAP stuff and they too sure seem to think that WAP is the web on your cell phone, though they have a much more "it's applications"-view of it.
Good. As I said WAP is a mechansim for adding services to your mobile phone after the phone has been sold, without re-flashing the firmware.
Calling me a "dimbulb" when it comes to WAP is not exactly accurate.
Well then I apologise. How about "Out of touch" ?
Well, whoopee. I rest my case. You can name ONE site. And even so, you didn't even name it.
Kizoom's local rail information system for London.
I was involved very early in making WAP stuff - even before the term WAP was announced. At first, I was very excited at the thought of being able to use "the web" over a cellular phone but after realizing what it was all about (reinventing the whe.. uh, web)
*sigh*Another dimbulb web luser. Listen up son, WAP != WWW. WAP may use HTTP for part of its process, but that is as close as it gets. You've been mis-sold WAP as being related to the Internet, it is not.
WAP is a mechansim for adding services to your mobile phone after the phone has been sold, without re-flashing the firmware.
It is contaminated in peoples minds now becase it got sold by clueless marketeers as "internet on phone".
Today, WAP is a complete flop. Nobody cares to do any content for it because the technology screams "proprietary". Nobody cares about using WAP because there's no content and the little content that there is will most likely not work properly with your handset.
That is an excessively negative outlook. I can name one WAP site which get in excess of 1M hits a day and several others which get 1M hits a week. Thats hardly a flop.
The stupid thing about WAP is that people time and time again assume they are getting "internet on phone" and when they don't get it they blame the protocol. Get over it, FFS. Its here, it's evolving and it really is a one-horse race.
Things like steel and refridgerators are stable and dependable. Things like cell phone service are not.
Odd. I see comments like that from ppl (probably from the USA) where cellphone service appears to be appalingly bad and I really find it strange.
I've had a GSM cellphone here in the UK for several years and (with the exception of a prefix change) my telephone number is still the same as it was when I got it (although I've had many many handsets). Having a GSM phone in a good cellphone service environment like Europe has had a profound effect on society and me personally. I no longer need to arrange to meet people at place X at time Y, we simply call as the time approaches and meet wherever the rest of the ppl are.
I've got a freind who is a bodyguard who by the nature of her job is out the country for months at a time, and yet even though we've both moved houses and jobs several times, we can stay in touch effortlessly simply becase I have her GSM phone number.
My sister is in New Zeland yet I can send SMS messages without thinking about it. I'm standing in an airport in France with a UK handset speaking to a German who is in Italy with an Australian handset, and it all "just works".
Perhaps, as other posters have suggested, the low quality of service of 'traditional' landline telephony avalable in the 80's (it really was bad) made it easier for GSM to penetrate the market here in the UK. Fair enough.
One day, perhaps the USA will have a good cellphone service (You're screwed on 3G BTW, perhaps 4G, assuming you can get motorola + qualcomm to domainate it;-) and you'll see what I mean.)
Some say GSM phone are bad, dangerous, annoying, harmful to health etc. and they're probably right, but so are cars, PCs, aircraft etc. Acceptable levels of risk IMO.
Can anyone comment on my opinion of why the rest of the world seems to be ahead of the USA in the area of mobile phones? Here's my reason: The USA has years of infrastructure behind the conventional telephone system.
Basically, the phones are so damn good, that we didn't need to 'take to the airwaves' so soon.
Several reasons, I'd say. Firstly make no mistake, the USA is in the prehistoric era when it comes to cellphones. I really do shudder at just how awful the handsets and quality of service you get over there.
Firstly there is the lack of "calling party pays". What fuelled the growth of cellphones in the Europe (and, I assume, AsiaPac) was the tremendous volume of people saying "I'll just get one for emergencies, have it on all the time but not make any calls" which is difficult to pull off if you feel you as the cellphone owner are going to get charged if someone calls you.
Secondly there is the "not invented here" which does seem to pervade thinking in the USA. (I'm thinking particularly about GSM) Perhaps not a biggie, but worth mentioning.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly is the point you allude to in that the US was very progressive
about RF spectrum allocation last century but because of the (relatively) primitive nature of equipment at that time huge blocks of RF had to be allocated to applications rather than the very narrow bands that modern equipment can stick within.
Cell phones are already on some very crowded wireless bands. Anyone who has been in an ICU ecently has probably seen the "No Cell Phones, Please" sign. The phones interfere with one of the wireless monitoring schemes out there.
I had assumed it was because stuff like insulin pumps, mechanical drip systems etc are not EM sheilded, and (regardless of frequency) the presenece of large EM pulses can cause them to crash (which is not a good plan if you're on the end of the equipment)
Of course, police never aim for the eyes with non-lethal weaponry. Didn't just happen this week in Austin, possibly partially blinding a bystander with his arms raised in the air. nope. right?
Ha! You're in a riot zone and you've been repeatedly told by the authorities to leave the area. You do not. You stand and watch while your side throws rocks, bottles etc at the police. You stay. You're 18 years old. It's exciting. Then you get smacked in the face by a baton round. Well duh! If you don't want the possibility of being hit by police anti-riot weapons then don't hang around in riot situations. Leave! Go home! Yeah, it's not as exciting, but it sure is safe.
In the second article (Canvas Dreams), I take exception with saying that WAP has "100% industry acceptance".
Hi,
I'm the author of that bit, and I still stand by what I said. "WAP has 100% industry acceptance", I did not say that that meant that no-one was going to try expand/extend/compete etc with it, just that the people who matter (The handset manufacturers, network operators etc) are 100% behind WAP, and with the amount of money already spend on getting the WAP infastructure coupled with the ENORMOUS expenditure on 3G spectrum licences means there is little left for a dual technology play.
A side point;
Most people think that i-Mode is faster than WAP - suffucit to say that this is not true. WAP has no concept of speed, in the same way as HTTP has no concept of speed. WAP was deliberately designed to be air-interface bearer-indepandant. It'll work over GSM CSD, GSM HSCSD, GSM Cell Broadcast, CDMA, TDMA, GPRS, GPRS+EDGE, 3G etc etc. NTT DoCoMo launched i-Mode on a packet-based network which is faster than the GSM CSD available in European countries who deployed WAP. WAP is faster than i-Mode on comparable networks becase of the compression used on the WAP Gateway and the lack of "Slow start".
My boss cares about two things:
- price
- support
He loves linux for the price, but is always nervous about the support issue
So why not get a contract from Linuxcare then? I hear the "...but what about support?" argument a lot, and when ppl realise they can get "normal" tech support for Linux it makes that particular objection go away quite easily.
I used to work in Cellular billing systems, and I know the greif and sheer volume of changes that billing systems must go through in order to fit in with the rest of the enterprise.
Basically, the way I saw it, people had two choices
Develop and use their own in-house systems, and take the pain that comes from having to have a full-time developement staff available
Buy in a solution that fits 90% of your needs, and make do with the other 10% or change the way the company works to fit in with the software.
The basic problem being that "Billing" is better termed "Customer care and billing" software. It's got to not only handle the grunt work of creating invoices, tracking address changes, printing statements/invoices, but also do the "smart" stuff, e.g. create a picking note for the shipping guys when new customer signs up for special-offer-of-the-week. It's got to be easy to use for your staff, have extensive reporting for the higher ups etc etc.
My advice: get Freeside (or any other fine slashdot suggestions) and then work from there, but for gods sake, use a better database than MySQL. A few thousand invested in a good quality database backend machine and software solution with Veritas or similar backup solution will save tens of thousands of $LOCAL_CURRENCY_UNIT in hassle, downtime, etc etc.
PS: WRT to the "3rd party Perl Modules (21 to be exact)" that is exactly what the Bundle:: mechanism is for.
You can start by noting that Russia has a nonstandard track gauge... something about the czars being afraid of the railroad being used by invading enemy armies...
Actually, this is normal in virtually all countries for exaclty that reason. Remember, at the time railways were born, it was quite normal for your neighbour to want to move large numbers of hostile troops in to and around your country. No sense in giving them too much of a hand, so everyone made the rain guages slightly different.
I suspect the reasons behind this is that Palm
has it's eye on the GSM cellphone market, a lot
of which use ARM chips inside.
Perhaps Palm are hoping to compete with Symbian's embedded RTOS?
Re:I have a question...
on
New Crypto-OS
·
· Score: 1
How does one frame the argument that privacy is worth more than child abuse (to be provocative, for a moment) in a concincing manner to the
supporters of RIP, who blather on about 'the children' at every opportunity?
This is a fairly good example of Argumentum ad hominem and is just one of a range of fallacies that you'll see brought up whenever there is an emotive issue being discussed.
Counters to this sort of thing should be structured with agreememt points aloing the way. I'd hearlty recomment reading the entirity of
the Infidels.org web site if you want to know more about logic, fallacies and structured debating.
With regard to that specific point (Privacy vs "The Children") my best bet would be relying on proven fact only. Ask the arguer to produce evidence that privacy through encryption has compromised the successful capture of something that threatend "The Children". While there is a load of anecdotal evidence and people will say "It's _Obvious_!", but may falter when asked to produce real evidence.
The ISP's AUP said "No MP3s, and no download sites" If the guy was putting MP3s up their so they could be downloaded then he was in breach of their AUP. He is at fault, not the ISP.
AS far as your hysterical rant (troll?) about sueing them, jesus, grow up.
Mmm, I remember very clearly standing in a newsagent with ten or so others, stock still as we concentrated on listening to the first radio reports from Dunblane come in over radio behind the counter. Walking back to the office and telling people that some nutcase had taken his firearm collection to the local school. Sad day. Very sad.
The Bush/Gore thing makes me sad too. I see reports on TV and in magazines like The Economist about their antics and shudder in horror at the things they come out with. Having said that, with a cooler head it must be said that this is a two horse race, and that a certain amount of politicking is inevitable when the voting audience is so apathetic (just as it is here, btw) and so huge.
Unfortunately, the realities of the modern political democratic process require a certain amount of what can be described at best as pragmatic game playing, and at worst as outright lying in order to get the player/liar in to power. They may not do all they say, although in fairness it's virtually impossible to say.
> What most folks don't seem to realize is that no > new legislation or technology is required for a > cell phone provider to get a fix on your > location: *they already have this ability*. All > they need to do is triangulate based on the > relative signal strength received from two or > more nearby towers.
Uhhm, *cough* not true *cough*.
The legislation is under a modification to the FCC E911 regulations, requiring cellular network operators to provide the location of a caller to the emergency services in case of an emergency call. The reason for this is that the percentage of E911 calls coming in via cell phones is on the up-and-up and since the landline telco provides location info during E911 calls, the logic follows that the cellular operators should too.
There are several competing technologies for locating cellular users, and while your statement about signal strenght is true-ish, that sort of system is not very accurate, and is too complex to be used in the mass market, i.e. the cell ops are not tracking you right now, but are actively looking at technological solutions to be able to do so.
No doubt the network ops will look for commercial opportunites for the data they will be able to collect, I certainly would not spend upwards of UKP100M on a UK-sized network w/o having some possibility of getting a return on it, and there will probably be a can-o-worms about who gets access to the data, and under what circumstances, but I'm still in favour of it since it will bring a shed load of useful location-based services.
> A simple packet sniffer (i'd laugh if they call > it a hacker's radio) could easily intercept data > transmissions from anyone in the area.
Well, GSM is encrypted in the air with the A5 algorithm, and while A5 is not a particularly hard nut to crack, it is almost certainly out the reach of the hobbyist interceptor.
If you're government or intelligence services then cracking an intercepted transmission would almost certainly be quite feasable in realtime, but why bother when you can just tell the network operator to tape record all the traffic for you in the clear.
There are a few different ADSL schemes out there, the one BT have been trialling in the UK gives 1.5 Mb/s, however it should be noted that they supply 1.5Mb/s to your street, not each person's house.
I'll be interested to see how they're gonna interface the ADSL network to the Internet.
If anyone is harbouring any sympathy for JP in this affair, I would advise them to check out http://www.attrition.org/nega tion/special/report.html first. Pretty good evidence and a pretty conclusive argument that JP is funding the very people he proports to help defend against.
Mmm, I made the stupid mistake of buying a Quick Cam VC thinking it was a noraml Quickcam. I wrote to logitech at the time (a couple of months ago) asking for drivers/support/interface specs and they wrote back saying "we don't support linux"
Slashdot Mirror
All my experience of Nokia Mobile Phones, Nokia Networks and Nokia Multimedia tells me that Nokia as a group know that WAP has nothing to do with the WWW. Perhaps back (1yr/2yrs ago?) when you were there they didn't know that. They do now. Yes? And? XHTML as it will be used in WAP is closer to XML (the basis of WML) than it is to the HTML used in web sites. Was that supposed to imply that WML was wrong? Or that HTML is a good thing? Good. As I said WAP is a mechansim for adding services to your mobile phone after the phone has been sold, without re-flashing the firmware. Well then I apologise. How about "Out of touch" ? Kizoom's local rail information system for London.
*sigh*Another dimbulb web luser. Listen up son, WAP != WWW. WAP may use HTTP for part of its process, but that is as close as it gets. You've been mis-sold WAP as being related to the Internet, it is not.
WAP is a mechansim for adding services to your mobile phone after the phone has been sold, without re-flashing the firmware.
It is contaminated in peoples minds now becase it got sold by clueless marketeers as "internet on phone".
That is an excessively negative outlook. I can name one WAP site which get in excess of 1M hits a day and several others which get 1M hits a week. Thats hardly a flop.
The stupid thing about WAP is that people time and time again assume they are getting "internet on phone" and when they don't get it they blame the protocol. Get over it, FFS. Its here, it's evolving and it really is a one-horse race.
Odd. I see comments like that from ppl (probably from the USA) where cellphone service appears to be appalingly bad and I really find it strange.
I've had a GSM cellphone here in the UK for several years and (with the exception of a prefix change) my telephone number is still the same as it was when I got it (although I've had many many handsets). Having a GSM phone in a good cellphone service environment like Europe has had a profound effect on society and me personally. I no longer need to arrange to meet people at place X at time Y, we simply call as the time approaches and meet wherever the rest of the ppl are.
I've got a freind who is a bodyguard who by the nature of her job is out the country for months at a time, and yet even though we've both moved houses and jobs several times, we can stay in touch effortlessly simply becase I have her GSM phone number.
My sister is in New Zeland yet I can send SMS messages without thinking about it. I'm standing in an airport in France with a UK handset speaking to a German who is in Italy with an Australian handset, and it all "just works".
Perhaps, as other posters have suggested, the low quality of service of 'traditional' landline telephony avalable in the 80's (it really was bad) made it easier for GSM to penetrate the market here in the UK. Fair enough.
One day, perhaps the USA will have a good cellphone service (You're screwed on 3G BTW, perhaps 4G, assuming you can get motorola + qualcomm to domainate it
Some say GSM phone are bad, dangerous, annoying, harmful to health etc. and they're probably right, but so are cars, PCs, aircraft etc. Acceptable levels of risk IMO.
Several reasons, I'd say. Firstly make no mistake, the USA is in the prehistoric era when it comes to cellphones. I really do shudder at just how awful the handsets and quality of service you get over there.
Firstly there is the lack of "calling party pays". What fuelled the growth of cellphones in the Europe (and, I assume, AsiaPac) was the tremendous volume of people saying "I'll just get one for emergencies, have it on all the time but not make any calls" which is difficult to pull off if you feel you as the cellphone owner are going to get charged if someone calls you.
Secondly there is the "not invented here" which does seem to pervade thinking in the USA. (I'm thinking particularly about GSM) Perhaps not a biggie, but worth mentioning.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly is the point you allude to in that the US was very progressive
about RF spectrum allocation last century but because of the (relatively) primitive nature of equipment at that time huge blocks of RF had to be allocated to applications rather than the very narrow bands that modern equipment can stick within.
I had assumed it was because stuff like insulin pumps, mechanical drip systems etc are not EM sheilded, and (regardless of frequency) the presenece of large EM pulses can cause them to crash (which is not a good plan if you're on the end of the equipment)
Ha! You're in a riot zone and you've been repeatedly told by the authorities to leave the area. You do not. You stand and watch while your side throws rocks, bottles etc at the police. You stay. You're 18 years old. It's exciting. Then you get smacked in the face by a baton round. Well duh! If you don't want the possibility of being hit by police anti-riot weapons then don't hang around in riot situations. Leave! Go home! Yeah, it's not as exciting, but it sure is safe.
Hi,
I'm the author of that bit, and I still stand by what I said. "WAP has 100% industry acceptance", I did not say that that meant that no-one was going to try expand/extend/compete etc with it, just that the people who matter (The handset manufacturers, network operators etc) are 100% behind WAP, and with the amount of money already spend on getting the WAP infastructure coupled with the ENORMOUS expenditure on 3G spectrum licences means there is little left for a dual technology play.
A side point;
Most people think that i-Mode is faster than WAP - suffucit to say that this is not true. WAP has no concept of speed, in the same way as HTTP has no concept of speed. WAP was deliberately designed to be air-interface bearer-indepandant. It'll work over GSM CSD, GSM HSCSD, GSM Cell Broadcast, CDMA, TDMA, GPRS, GPRS+EDGE, 3G etc etc. NTT DoCoMo launched i-Mode on a packet-based network which is faster than the GSM CSD available in European countries who deployed WAP. WAP is faster than i-Mode on comparable networks becase of the compression used on the WAP Gateway and the lack of "Slow start".
I used to work in Cellular billing systems, and I know the greif and sheer volume of changes that billing systems must go through in order to fit in with the rest of the enterprise.
Basically, the way I saw it, people had two choices
The basic problem being that "Billing" is better termed "Customer care and billing" software. It's got to not only handle the grunt work of creating invoices, tracking address changes, printing statements/invoices, but also do the "smart" stuff, e.g. create a picking note for the shipping guys when new customer signs up for special-offer-of-the-week. It's got to be easy to use for your staff, have extensive reporting for the higher ups etc etc.
My advice: get Freeside (or any other fine slashdot suggestions) and then work from there, but for gods sake, use a better database than MySQL. A few thousand invested in a good quality database backend machine and software solution with Veritas or similar backup solution will save tens of thousands of $LOCAL_CURRENCY_UNIT in hassle, downtime, etc etc.
PS: WRT to the "3rd party Perl Modules (21 to be exact)" that is exactly what the Bundle:: mechanism is for.
Actually, this is normal in virtually all countries for exaclty that reason. Remember, at the time railways were born, it was quite normal for your neighbour to want to move large numbers of hostile troops in to and around your country. No sense in giving them too much of a hand, so everyone made the rain guages slightly different.
Re: Palm -> ARM
I suspect the reasons behind this is that Palm
has it's eye on the GSM cellphone market, a lot
of which use ARM chips inside.
Perhaps Palm are hoping to compete with Symbian's embedded RTOS?
-
How does one frame the argument that privacy is worth more than child abuse (to be provocative, for a moment) in a concincing manner to the
supporters of RIP, who blather on about 'the children' at every opportunity?
This is a fairly good example of Argumentum ad hominem and is just one of a range of fallacies that you'll see brought up whenever there is an emotive issue being discussed.Counters to this sort of thing should be structured with agreememt points aloing the way. I'd hearlty recomment reading the entirity of the Infidels.org web site if you want to know more about logic, fallacies and structured debating.
With regard to that specific point (Privacy vs "The Children") my best bet would be relying on proven fact only. Ask the arguer to produce evidence that privacy through encryption has compromised the successful capture of something that threatend "The Children". While there is a load of anecdotal evidence and people will say "It's _Obvious_!", but may falter when asked to produce real evidence.
Shouldn't that be "The actions of the many harm the few" ?
Hello, hello!
The ISP's AUP said "No MP3s, and no download sites" If the guy was putting MP3s up their so they could be downloaded then he was in breach of their AUP. He is at fault, not the ISP.
AS far as your hysterical rant (troll?) about sueing them, jesus, grow up.
The Bush/Gore thing makes me sad too. I see reports on TV and in magazines like The Economist about their antics and shudder in horror at the things they come out with. Having said that, with a cooler head it must be said that this is a two horse race, and that a certain amount of politicking is inevitable when the voting audience is so apathetic (just as it is here, btw) and so huge.
Unfortunately, the realities of the modern political democratic process require a certain amount of what can be described at best as pragmatic game playing, and at worst as outright lying in order to get the player/liar in to power. They may not do all they say, although in fairness it's virtually impossible to say.
Infidels.org&l t;/a> has a well written peice on this, quite worth a read.
You could look at datacash.net, they do Perl API
credit card processing w/ blowfish which might suit you.
> What most folks don't seem to realize is that no
> new legislation or technology is required for a
> cell phone provider to get a fix on your
> location: *they already have this ability*. All
> they need to do is triangulate based on the
> relative signal strength received from two or
> more nearby towers.
Uhhm, *cough* not true *cough*.
The legislation is under a modification to the FCC
E911 regulations, requiring cellular network operators
to provide the location of a caller to the
emergency services in case of an emergency call.
The reason for this is that the percentage of
E911 calls coming in via cell phones is on the
up-and-up and since the landline telco provides
location info during E911 calls, the logic follows
that the cellular operators should too.
There are several competing technologies for
locating cellular users, and while your statement
about signal strenght is true-ish, that sort of
system is not very accurate, and is too complex
to be used in the mass market, i.e. the cell ops
are not tracking you right now, but are actively
looking at technological solutions to be able to
do so.
No doubt the network ops will look for commercial
opportunites for the data they will be able to
collect, I certainly would not spend upwards of
UKP100M on a UK-sized network w/o having some
possibility of getting a return on it, and there
will probably be a can-o-worms about who gets
access to the data, and under what circumstances,
but I'm still in favour of it since it will bring
a shed load of useful location-based services.
> A simple packet sniffer (i'd laugh if they call
> it a hacker's radio) could easily intercept data
> transmissions from anyone in the area.
Well, GSM is encrypted in the air with the A5
algorithm, and while A5 is not a particularly hard
nut to crack, it is almost certainly out the reach
of the hobbyist interceptor.
If you're government or intelligence services then
cracking an intercepted transmission would almost
certainly be quite feasable in realtime, but why
bother when you can just tell the network operator
to tape record all the traffic for you in the clear.
There are a few different ADSL schemes out there, the one BT have been trialling in the UK gives 1.5 Mb/s, however it should be noted that they supply 1.5Mb/s to your street, not each person's house.
I'll be interested to see how they're gonna interface the ADSL network to the Internet.
If anyone is harbouring any sympathy for JP in this affair, I would advise them to check out http://www.attrition.org/nega tion/special/report.html first.
Pretty good evidence and a pretty conclusive argument that JP is funding the very people he proports to help defend against.
Mmm, I made the stupid mistake of buying a Quick Cam VC thinking it was a noraml Quickcam. I wrote to logitech at the time (a couple of months ago) asking for drivers/support/interface specs and they wrote back saying "we don't support linux"