The main article this is drawn from is based on some appalling errors. Angus needs to check his facts: I hope this isn't a paper for serious academic use as it wouldn't survive peer review.
A few samples
"Background - on Monday 26 th June, both BT Cellnet and Vodafone officially launched their GPRS pilot services for corporate users. Vodafone have made a commitment to extending the service to the wider market by Christmas. This is a direct competitor/replacement for the WAP service that the mobile phone companies have been advertising so heavily in recent months."
Utter nonsense. This is like saying that the Web is dead because more people are using DSL to access it. It hopelessly confuses physical carrier with the protocol: go back and re-read the 7 layer OSI model.
>(1 st generation was the basic digital phone, 2 nd generation is WAP, 3 rd generation is full internet GPRS)
Wrong. 1st generation is analog[ue], 2nd digital. WAP is sometimes semi-facetiously called 2.5G.
The sooner people actually read the specs before commenting the better.
I don't like WAP/WML, but it's here and LEAP isn't. The W3C should have come up with a Wireless mark-up language and the IETF with a robust IP replacement earlier, but they didn't. The W3C was so obsessed with internal bickering over CSS and P3P that it somehow forgot. Perhaps the fact that both organisations are based in the (as far as mobile telephony goes) technological backwater of the USA had something to do with it.
Re:Is Wap really connecting people to the "Interne
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WAP Under Fire
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· Score: 1
> calling this "the Internet", is, IMHO, a mistake.
Is ftp not the internet then because you can't check your mail?
This is an absurd point of view: WML devices don't provide a full range of IP services, but then neither does a mail client (well, maybe outlook does now...). It's a service that runs (partly) over P. That sounds like the (capital letter) Internet to me...
Re:E-Commerce Collapse?
on
Boo No More
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· Score: 3
Dr Spong is on the money: e-commerce is just mail order in fancy dress. This scored against Boo from the very beginning: they were attempting to sell a product that had never worked in mail order in Europe before. There are plenty of direct sales clothes retailers, but for specialised niches (extra-large, extra-small) or just cheap, but none selling heighth of fashion stuff.
Moreover, Boo attempted to launch as a fully fledged multinational, with 300 staff and offices all over the world. It over-engineered its front-end - whether this drove customers away is an issue i can't answer but it certainly took a chunk out of the $135m startup capital by launching over three months late.
It isn't the end of e-commerce: it's just yet another bad business idea, badly managed, by inexperienced managers, that spent too mcuh too quick. There's a surfeit of these on the Net now, - expect a spectacular crash every few months. But the idea of e-commerce is still sound, it's just the number of jokers getting VC for a used toilet paper B2B exchange that's the problem.
Try slipping 'a method for protecting intellectual property' past the USPTO and then sue them.
Alternately flood the system with junk patents until it grinds to a halt. Of course, lodging a patent application requires money, which is why a philanthropic billionaire who believes patents are basically defensive might want to fund such a piece of direct action. Mr Bezos?
It was only after reading to the bottom of this thread that I remembered that I had actually read the Chrysalids: Wyndham was a dull writer with only one story.
He is interesting historically as he was writing socially speculative sci-fi a decade before the great British sci-fi writers such as JG Ballard began taking the genre apart, but a footnote, nix more...
/"these enterprises [Baseball, Tv, movies] which, by the way, dominate the world..."/
Which is the real issue, isn't it? I've excerpted rather crudely in order to keep things short, but fundamentally his argument is this: American companies dominate media production, the Web cedes our finely grained control of the distribution of our productions to anyone ("a web site in Afghanistan" - interesting to see what the Taliban would think of that) with a broad enough connection.
Luckily for those of us in the 'dominated' world, the previous experience of intellectual property owners and the Net shows that, basically, you have to change. We've heard more or less the same arguments from image libraries, newspapers, software companies and so on: each has had to adapt to ESD.
I look forward to not having to wait six months for the Phantom Menace, just cos I live in airstrip one. Let the Net cause mayhem and misery to the MPAA until it finally 'gets it.'
(I don't think 78 year olds count as baby-boomers, btw)
Funny that he starts bashing microsoft just before negotiating on the (presumably vast) Intranet/Internet project. You don't think thew Navy pays retail, do you?
The interesting thing about Tesla, Edison, Bell, Marconi etc is how similar the world in which they worked was to today's software world: the technologies they worked with RF, inductance, etc, were reasonably open and understood, and easy and cheap(ish) to develop for. Consequently thousands of their peers were developing the same things muchly simultaneously.
However it was the patent-holders (and Edison was particularly assiduous at collecting these) that won through and got written into the history books. And especially US patent holders, given the way that world trade developed over the 20th century.
Perhaps in 100 years Slashdotters will be trying to get the guy who *really* invented one-click ordering into the Smithsonian.
That isn't the attitude I like to hear from a "hard" science fiction author
Which Gibson isn't. Gibson's books are about now, not the future, in the same way as Pynchon's historical novels are about now. The point of the tech aspects is to induce vertigo and to force the reader to re-view the world magnified and distorted but still recognisable. I'd argue that he isn't even Sci-Fi, or rather that if he is then we have to allow so many writers into the genre as to make it a pointless distinction.
For example, the idoru was based on a real attempt to build a popular virtual singing star in Japan: the Sci-Fi theme of the book is there to make you question what celebrity is when the image is more simulacrum than real. If he just wrote a book called "neat things that have happened in Japan" his arguments would be less forceful.
We're working on a GPLed business plan generator that scans NASDAQ for the fastest risers, inserts the appropriate words into a pre-formatted 400 page document and then automails it to all the VCs in the valley. Linux just happened to be keyword for fall and winter 99/00. Sorry. We expect it will be "bluetooth" by summer, but you never can tell.
WAP is optimised for *mobile* devices, as well as low-bandwidth connections. It provides a lot of information back to the server such as the cell you're in, as well as providing reasonable state information, so that the server knows who you are without a cookie hack. It also handles latency better than TCP/IP, so when you disappear into a tunnel while driving you don't lose your connection to the server.
And HTML & WAP, no; XML to WML, HTML or whatever you please, yes.
The only solution is for slashdot to patent the US Patent Office, and watch them try and get that dismissed as prior art.
This is a storm in a tea-cup compared to the patenting of sequences of DNA, which the USPO is happy to do.
The situation is more like the land claims of the old West than a true intellectual property law. From outside the US it just looks as though the USPO is happy to grant a patent to more or less anybody, on whatever weakened claims, just so long as they're from the US.
And the issue is not that this is a minor CGI bug. The circumstances that lead to it are rather obscure - eg, you have to be running Apache benchmark simultaneously.
What is a major problem is that it drives the OS into System Panic, rather than Apache simply dumping core. Unix systems that crash aren't really very useful. Apple need to fix this quick if they want any credibility in the server market.
similar reports have been filtering through to us about MIS depts banning Macs for homeworkers. i used to work in a web dev house where only two people out of 100 were permitted to use Linux on a workstation, on the grounds that the tech support department (who all were competent with Linux, as many internal dev servers were linux) wanted to limit their workload to Mac OS and Win9x/NT. it takes a long time to get Microsoft certified...
n lines of gcc is greater than n lines of utils?
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Feature:Free Linux
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· Score: 1
jon, i suggest you re-read your MIT history. yep, rms formalised and evangelised the notion of free software, but hand-me-down open source projects were the lifeblood of MIT (and probably every other University with a decent computer lab in the 60s and 70s). open source is just the continuation of the culture surrounding academic minicomputers, particularly the DEC and PDP.
and if writing a C compiler is hard then why do they make CS graduates do it?
Slashdot Mirror
The main article this is drawn from is based on some appalling errors. Angus needs to check his facts: I hope this isn't a paper for serious academic use as it wouldn't survive peer review.
A few samples
"Background - on Monday 26 th June, both BT Cellnet and Vodafone officially launched their GPRS pilot services for corporate users. Vodafone have made a commitment to extending the service to the wider market by Christmas. This is a direct competitor/replacement for the WAP service that the mobile phone companies have been advertising so heavily in recent months."
Utter nonsense. This is like saying that the Web is dead because more people are using DSL to access it. It hopelessly confuses physical carrier with the protocol: go back and re-read the 7 layer OSI model.
>(1 st generation was the basic
digital phone, 2 nd generation is WAP, 3 rd generation is full internet GPRS)
Wrong. 1st generation is analog[ue], 2nd digital. WAP is sometimes semi-facetiously called 2.5G.
The sooner people actually read the specs before commenting the better.
I don't like WAP/WML, but it's here and LEAP isn't. The W3C should have come up with a Wireless mark-up language and the IETF with a robust IP replacement earlier, but they didn't. The W3C was so obsessed with internal bickering over CSS and P3P that it somehow forgot. Perhaps the fact that both organisations are based in the (as far as mobile telephony goes) technological backwater of the USA had something to do with it.
> calling this "the Internet", is, IMHO, a mistake.
Is ftp not the internet then because you can't check your mail?
This is an absurd point of view: WML devices don't provide a full range of IP services, but then neither does a mail client (well, maybe outlook does now...). It's a service that runs (partly) over P. That sounds like the (capital letter) Internet to me...
From the Evening Standard
Dr Spong is on the money: e-commerce is just mail order in fancy dress. This scored against Boo from the very beginning: they were attempting to sell a product that had never worked in mail order in Europe before. There are plenty of direct sales clothes retailers, but for specialised niches (extra-large, extra-small) or just cheap, but none selling heighth of fashion stuff.
Moreover, Boo attempted to launch as a fully fledged multinational, with 300 staff and offices all over the world. It over-engineered its front-end - whether this drove customers away is an issue i can't answer but it certainly took a chunk out of the $135m startup capital by launching over three months late.
It isn't the end of e-commerce: it's just yet another bad business idea, badly managed, by inexperienced managers, that spent too mcuh too quick. There's a surfeit of these on the Net now, - expect a spectacular crash every few months. But the idea of e-commerce is still sound, it's just the number of jokers getting VC for a used toilet paper B2B exchange that's the problem.
Try slipping 'a method for protecting intellectual property' past the USPTO and then sue them.
Alternately flood the system with junk patents until it grinds to a halt. Of course, lodging a patent application requires money, which is why a philanthropic billionaire who believes patents are basically defensive might want to fund such a piece of direct action. Mr Bezos?
It was only after reading to the bottom of this thread that I remembered that I had actually read the Chrysalids: Wyndham was a dull writer with only one story.
He is interesting historically as he was writing socially speculative sci-fi a decade before the great British sci-fi writers such as JG Ballard began taking the genre apart, but a footnote, nix more...
/"these enterprises [Baseball, Tv, movies] which, by the way, dominate the world..."/
Which is the real issue, isn't it? I've excerpted rather crudely in order to keep things short, but fundamentally his argument is this: American companies dominate media production, the Web cedes our finely grained control of the distribution of our productions to anyone ("a web site in Afghanistan" - interesting to see what the Taliban would think of that) with a broad enough connection.
Luckily for those of us in the 'dominated' world, the previous experience of intellectual property owners and the Net shows that, basically, you have to change. We've heard more or less the same arguments from image libraries, newspapers, software companies and so on: each has had to adapt to ESD.
I look forward to not having to wait six months for the Phantom Menace, just cos I live in airstrip one. Let the Net cause mayhem and misery to the MPAA until it finally 'gets it.'
(I don't think 78 year olds count as baby-boomers, btw)
Metcalfe's argument is reminiscent of the bar-room bait - "Hey, you're a vegetarian, but plants feel pain too. You chould eat rocks!"
The Point award sent me scurrying to the bottom of the page: copyright 1997. Oh well.
Funny that he starts bashing microsoft just before negotiating on the (presumably vast) Intranet/Internet project. You don't think thew Navy pays retail, do you?
The interesting thing about Tesla, Edison, Bell, Marconi etc is how similar the world in which they worked was to today's software world: the technologies they worked with RF, inductance, etc, were reasonably open and understood, and easy and cheap(ish) to develop for. Consequently thousands of their peers were developing the same things muchly simultaneously.
However it was the patent-holders (and Edison was particularly assiduous at collecting these) that won through and got written into the history books. And especially US patent holders, given the way that world trade developed over the 20th century.
Perhaps in 100 years Slashdotters will be trying to get the guy who *really* invented one-click ordering into the Smithsonian.
That isn't the attitude I like to hear from a "hard" science fiction author
Which Gibson isn't. Gibson's books are about now, not the future, in the same way as Pynchon's historical novels are about now. The point of the tech aspects is to induce vertigo and to force the reader to re-view the world magnified and distorted but still recognisable. I'd argue that he isn't even Sci-Fi, or rather that if he is then we have to allow so many writers into the genre as to make it a pointless distinction.
For example, the idoru was based on a real attempt to build a popular virtual singing star in Japan: the Sci-Fi theme of the book is there to make you question what celebrity is when the image is more simulacrum than real. If he just wrote a book called "neat things that have happened in Japan" his arguments would be less forceful.
We're working on a GPLed business plan generator that scans NASDAQ for the fastest risers, inserts the appropriate words into a pre-formatted 400 page document and then automails it to all the VCs in the valley. Linux just happened to be keyword for fall and winter 99/00. Sorry. We expect it will be "bluetooth" by summer, but you never can tell.
We'll post it on freshmeat as soon as we vest.
WAP is optimised for *mobile* devices, as well as low-bandwidth connections. It provides a lot of information back to the server such as the cell you're in, as well as providing reasonable state information, so that the server knows who you are without a cookie hack. It also handles latency better than TCP/IP, so when you disappear into a tunnel while driving you don't lose your connection to the server.
And HTML & WAP, no; XML to WML, HTML or whatever you please, yes.
The only solution is for slashdot to patent the US Patent Office, and watch them try and get that dismissed as prior art.
This is a storm in a tea-cup compared to the patenting of sequences of DNA, which the USPO is happy to do.
The situation is more like the land claims of the old West than a true intellectual property law. From outside the US it just looks as though the USPO is happy to grant a patent to more or less anybody, on whatever weakened claims, just so long as they're from the US.
Well, Apple have, according to c't.
And the issue is not that this is a minor CGI bug. The circumstances that lead to it are rather obscure - eg, you have to be running Apache benchmark simultaneously.
What is a major problem is that it drives the OS into System Panic, rather than Apache simply dumping core. Unix systems that crash aren't really very useful. Apple need to fix this quick if they want any credibility in the server market.
similar reports have been filtering through to us about MIS depts banning Macs for homeworkers. i used to work in a web dev house where only two people out of 100 were permitted to use Linux on a workstation, on the grounds that the tech support department (who all were competent with Linux, as many internal dev servers were linux) wanted to limit their workload to Mac OS and Win9x/NT. it takes a long time to get Microsoft certified...
jon, i suggest you re-read your MIT history. yep, rms formalised and evangelised the notion of free software, but hand-me-down open source projects were the lifeblood of MIT (and probably every other University with a decent computer lab in the 60s and 70s). open source is just the continuation of the culture surrounding academic minicomputers, particularly the DEC and PDP.
and if writing a C compiler is hard then why do they make CS graduates do it?