Gateways exist for Linux other than the one
made by phone.com, too. Peramon Technology
(just to mention one company which I happen to
work for:) makes one, and I believe I saw a
reference to an open source one earlier.
Are you serious about phones in the US not
supporting changes of settings? All the phones
I've seen here in the UK allow you to change which
gateway you go to. If this isn't so in the US,
then that's a problem with the phones, not a
problem with the idea of WAP gateways on Linux.
I couldn't find out from the website how small the sums could be, so thanks for the info:)
A while ago I was part of a team working on a micropayment system which could handle payments of about 100th of a cent, IIRC. (Below that the amount of processing power needed for the encryption etc starts to cost more than the transaction is worth, after the various other slices have been taken out.) Ideal for things like dictionaries, online papers etc - I'd be happy to pay 100th of a cent every time I used www.dictionary.com, but a whole cent would start to put me off, I suspect.
Perhaps "minipayment" would be a more appropriate term for PayPal.
Yup. I wrote Colossal Cave for WAP several months ago. There are still some problems with it that I need to get back to, but it's usable (I think!) (And no, it doesn't have voicemail.)
Last year I was taking Data Structures, taught in Java. I wrote a Markov chain program. It ran quite well on my dinky little machine (only 64M of memory at the time), with the latest JDK (1.1.8 IIRC). Then I got a score of 10/20 when memory allocation failed on a Sun server with 4 gigs of RAM, using JDK 1.1.6.
Um, did you tell Java to *use* that much memory? Java has a default maximum heap size to avoid it eating up all the system memory before garbage collecting. There are options to increase this, however.
I'm another person who's been part of a development team working on a medium-sized WAP application. In our case, it's a mail connector (at the moment).
Does WAP "suck"? Depends what you want from it. There are certainly hurdles - Nokia and UP phones have quite different navigation styles, and a good application will want to play to the strengths of each phone. There are problems with deck lengths, encodings, different gateways choking bizarrely.
On the other hand, as a consumer - I rather like being able to read email practically wherever I am, and reply in a primitive fashion if need be. I rather like having Colossal Cave available at any time - or Hangman, or a crossword solver.
No, it's not Quake or anything like that, but that doesn't stop it from being useful.
WAP may well not be the future - but it's a viable present. I'd say that any company betting that WAP will be used much in 10 years is shortsighted - but while it's here, let's make the most of it.
I haven't looked at the Nokia toolkits yet, but I *hope* they're able to produce "cross-platform" WML. Yes, WML is meant to be standard, but we all know how "standard" HTML is, for example. The same bit of WML can look radically different on different browsers. I *hope* the Nokia toolkits have a way of dealing with this, rather than just targetting the 7110. We'll see.
There are a number of companies offering WAP email, and I'm happy to say that I work for one of them - Peramon, at http://www.peramon.com.
<plug> From our website you can download a restricted (by number of users, I believe) demo of the server, which will connect to any (reasonable) POP3 or IMAP4 server and SMTP server, with LDAP optional to make things simpler. Our WAP gateway also has a demo version. </plug>
In the interests of balance, I should point out that a number of other companies are doing it including Infinite, which provides a service at http://www.mailandnews.com. As has been pointed out elsewhere, Nokia's gateway (the smaller version too, not just the Artus platform) also provides a similar service. Of course, I believe Peramon's offering is the best one:)
Various ISPs are now providing the service at source, such as Freeserve and Gateway.net in the UK.
WAP works *today* - I use my WAP phone for reading mail (and occasionally playing Colossal Cave Adventure or Hangman, or solving crossword clues) most days, and certainly will be using it on holiday. Yes, there's limited content at the moment but it's growing at a rate of knots.
Get a clue. No one is forcing anyone to use the GPL or GPL'd. If you don't like it, don't use the software.
I'm not so sure about that. That smacks of the kind of argument Microsoft uses saying it's not forcing anyone to use their products. The GPL is good in many ways, but I wouldn't say it's perfect, either. I view its viral nature as a shame in some respects, although obviously useful in others.
Does anyone know whether it will be possible for developers to release games which will work on both PS1 and PS2, from the same CD, using the enhancements of the PS2?
Of course, they'd be limiting themselves in terms of space on the CD, but I can imagine it would be cheap to have games which used PS2 features in just a few places to make it look much better if possible (rather than just the interpolation) but was reasonable on a PS1.
I'm sure I can't be the only person to think of this, but I haven't seen anything about it yet.
Suppose My coffee maker wants to know the time, and its sitting on a network in my Home Of The Future® It can query the local e-speak server server (e-speak core???) for a service with the appropriate properties (must have TimeZone=>GMT, must have Precision=>microsecond, must have Name=>Time, etc), and then follow it up with a call to the *right* server's services. shazam.
Is this very different to Jini? I've never actually used Jini, just read the hype, but they sound quite similar. Is this just because the hype is vague, or are they really doing similar things?
Jon
Re:A few trivial comments
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 1
I don't have a problem with the "penalty zone". Perhaps it comes from growing up with pc keyboards instead of unix keyboards. I use the numeric keypad without missing a beat too.
My thoughts exactly. I don't often use the numeric pad, but I *do* use the arrow keys all the time with barely a pause.
Also, your point about what you grow up with is very important. Recently I've had a to use some Sun boxes and I'm *constantly* failing to find Ctrl, 'cos it's in "the wrong place" as far as I'm concerned. (For that matter, pretty much every keyboard I've used has a Ctrl key on the right hand side as well as the left, so I'm not sure where that complaint comes from. Maybe US keyboards don't - I'm in the UK.)
With a PC keyboard, Ctrl is in a pretty convenient place for me - just where my little finger can get at it easily. I do notice that it gets a little sore if I use that (or shift) for very long at a time, but my little finger is far more versatile than my 4th (piano counting:) finger.
I agree with the general point of the article, that you should choose the right input mechanism for the job and hone the app for that, but just not the keyboard specifics:)
(Btw, has anyone put a small trackball in a keyboard between return and the arrow keys? You could use it with your little finger... not sure about buttons though.)
Perhaps the most harmful trend is when people make copies of these proprietary programs to share with their friends. Suddenly the industry will turn to them and call them pirates.In our community, we try to teach people that sharing software with your friends is the right thing to do.
Sure, but I hope we also acknowledge that if we're not allowed (by licence agreements we've agreed to) to share things, then we shouldn't. IBM have every right not to make their software free etc, and have every right to call us pirates if we break licences we agree to.
I hope the open source community's attitude is, "Look how great it is to let people share!" rather than "We're going to steal your software if you don't agree with our principles."
If you disagree with the licence that software comes with, don't use it - it's (usually) as simple as that, as far as I'm concerned. Things like DVD encryption cracking may be exceptions - I'm afraid I don't know enough about that to comment.
Yes, I know HotJava's not that wonderful a browser, just thought it'd be a good test to see how well IBM's JDK and JRE work.
Maybe. Or maybe it's a good test to see whether or not Sun are relying on any implementation-specific bits of their JVM... Of course, without seeing the problems and analysing them properly, it's impossible to say one way or the other.
I would agree with the previous poster - Java support for Linux may well be more IBM-based than Sun-based in the future. In fact, I can see that spreading beyond just Linux... IME, IBM are the most Java-savvy company around. (Oh, and jikes is fantastic:)
but certainly there is little room for debate that any number greater-than one could be considered to be "many"
LOL! In other words, when you think most people will disagree with you, you just say it's subjective and leave it at that. I don't think most people would consider 2 to be many. If someone said they had worked with many computers and it turned out to be 2, I think you'd be rather disappointed, don't you?
As you've said you'll be ignoring me from now on (which together with your tag line says all I feel I need to know about your opinion of yourself with respect to others), I'll leave it at that...
No, C does not do the porting for you. C doesn't do a lot of things for you. Languages are written with certain concerns in mind. None of them are a silver bullet. If there was a silver bullet language, we wouldn't have so many. C focuses on performance, power, flexibility, portability, etc. If C did the porting for you, you'd likely take a performance hit. It's a constant trade-off. Saying C isn't portable is an incorrect statement. Saying you'd rather have a language that made your software portable for you is an opinion, and one anyone is welcome to, like all opinions. Just don't confuse the issue.
Okay, let's get some idea of what you mean by "portable" then. To a lot of people (I suspect), portable means "write once, compile and run anywhere" - and that's the goal of using ANSI C wherever possible, I would imagine. That's what Java does particularly well (in terms of language - the implementation of applet viewers is another matter, of course). That's using "portable" in the sense of "mobile" (a portable object being one that can be moved around at will).
What do you mean by portable? Do you mean you can change the code to make it run on another box (ie it's "able" to be "ported")?
As I've said before, C is good for portability when you want to do mostly processing, but when you start doing a lot of IO (particularly network and/or user IO) it loses out.
Yep. This number is the CD-KEY that you're required to enter at startup. What else could it be?
Well it could be a randomly generated number with some guarantee (?) of uniqueness. There's nothing to stop people from using the same CD key for different machines - that's what site licences are for. However, that's not the same as ghosting a machine.
I don't know whether this is what's going on or not, but it seems perfectly feasible.
Obviously portable C code is going to include #ifdef's.. They're what helps make C so portable.
To me, they're what signifies that C isn't truly portable. Or rather, it's port-able but not automatically port-ed, if you take my meaning. If you have to write code which conditions on which operating system it's on, then it's not portable IMO. If a piece of source code is portable, I should be able to compile it on a brand new operating system which supports that language, and have it work with *no* code changes. If you're conditioning code on operating system, that's not going to happen.
ANSI helps to an extent, but it's not a silver bullet - otherwise the book in front of me, "The Annotated ANSI C standard" wouldn't have sections for undefined or unspecified behaviour. Also, I believe there are other things that ANSI doesn't provide, in terms of library functions. Is select() ANSI, for instance? (It may be, but it's not in the index of the book, so I'm guessing not:)
Sure, when you're coding something that can be done in ANSI C, it makes sense to do it, being careful not to use any of the undefined/unspecified behaviour. It just isn't always that easy, unfortunately.
Jon
PS: I realise all this is rather perpendicular to the original topic which is to do with frameworks than languages - but I'd be interested to know just how far ANSI C can take you.
Apache has been ported to a very wide array of Unix boxes - in fact, we're not aware of any Unix boxes which Apache can't run on. This has been possible by making conservative architecture decisions, by modularizing the code as much as possible, and sticking to POSIX and ANSI wherever possible (and functional).
However, due to the code's legacy, and use of metaphors and systems which are Unix-specific (such as, having multiple processes all accept()ing connections to the same port), the road to porting to Windows NT has not been a pretty one.
Things are better now, but if C were completely portable (and useful in its entirely portable form) then this would never have happened, would it? Even now, I'd be highly surprised if the apache source code didn't have a few #IFDEFs in...
Having been involved in porting a commercial product from Tru64 Unix to Solaris and Linux (which shouldn't be nearly as hard as going to NT), I can say that it's not as easy as you might think - especially when intricate optimisation (not to mention multithreading) is involed.
Slashdot Mirror
Gateways exist for Linux other than the one :) makes one, and I believe I saw a
made by phone.com, too. Peramon Technology
(just to mention one company which I happen to
work for
reference to an open source one earlier.
Are you serious about phones in the US not
supporting changes of settings? All the phones
I've seen here in the UK allow you to change which
gateway you go to. If this isn't so in the US,
then that's a problem with the phones, not a
problem with the idea of WAP gateways on Linux.
Jon
This was a point I was going to make, actually.
:)
I couldn't find out from the website how small the sums could be, so thanks for the info
A while ago I was part of a team working on a micropayment system which could handle payments of about 100th of a cent, IIRC. (Below that the amount of processing power needed for the encryption etc starts to cost more than the transaction is worth, after the various other slices have been taken out.) Ideal for things like dictionaries, online papers etc - I'd be happy to pay 100th of a cent every time I used www.dictionary.com, but a whole cent would start to put me off, I suspect.
Perhaps "minipayment" would be a more appropriate term for PayPal.
Jon
Try http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/servlets/wapcave/
Funny... no-one seemed interested at the time. Now a company's doing it it's news...
Jon
Um, did you tell Java to *use* that much memory? Java has a default maximum heap size to avoid it eating up all the system memory before garbage collecting. There are options to increase this, however.
Jon
I'm another person who's been part of a
development team working on a medium-sized WAP
application. In our case, it's a mail connector
(at the moment).
Does WAP "suck"? Depends what you want from it.
There are certainly hurdles - Nokia and UP phones
have quite different navigation styles, and a good
application will want to play to the strengths of
each phone. There are problems with deck lengths,
encodings, different gateways choking bizarrely.
On the other hand, as a consumer - I rather like
being able to read email practically wherever I
am, and reply in a primitive fashion if need be.
I rather like having Colossal Cave available at
any time - or Hangman, or a crossword solver.
No, it's not Quake or anything like that, but
that doesn't stop it from being useful.
WAP may well not be the future - but it's a viable
present. I'd say that any company betting that
WAP will be used much in 10 years is shortsighted
- but while it's here, let's make the most of it.
I haven't looked at the Nokia toolkits yet, but I
*hope* they're able to produce "cross-platform"
WML. Yes, WML is meant to be standard, but we all
know how "standard" HTML is, for example. The same
bit of WML can look radically different on
different browsers. I *hope* the Nokia toolkits
have a way of dealing with this, rather than just
targetting the 7110. We'll see.
Jon
<plug>
From our website you can download a restricted (by number of users, I believe) demo of the server, which will connect to any (reasonable) POP3 or IMAP4 server and SMTP server, with LDAP optional to make things simpler. Our WAP gateway also has a demo version.
</plug>
In the interests of balance, I should point out that a number of other companies are doing it including Infinite, which provides a service at http://www.mailandnews.com. As has been pointed out elsewhere, Nokia's gateway (the smaller version too, not just the Artus platform) also provides a similar service. Of course, I believe Peramon's offering is the best one :)
Various ISPs are now providing the service at source, such as Freeserve and Gateway.net in the UK.
WAP works *today* - I use my WAP phone for reading mail (and occasionally playing Colossal Cave Adventure or Hangman, or solving crossword clues) most days, and certainly will be using it on holiday. Yes, there's limited content at the moment but it's growing at a rate of knots.
Jon
I'm not so sure about that. That smacks of the kind of argument Microsoft uses saying it's not forcing anyone to use their products. The GPL is good in many ways, but I wouldn't say it's perfect, either. I view its viral nature as a shame in some respects, although obviously useful in others.
Jon
Does anyone know whether it will be possible for developers to release games which will work on both PS1 and PS2, from the same CD, using the enhancements of the PS2?
Of course, they'd be limiting themselves in terms of space on the CD, but I can imagine it would be cheap to have games which used PS2 features in just a few places to make it look much better if possible (rather than just the interpolation) but was reasonable on a PS1.
I'm sure I can't be the only person to think of this, but I haven't seen anything about it yet.
Jon
The main function for which the AltaVista search engine was developed was news, I believe. How many people are likely to use it for news?
Jon
Is this very different to Jini? I've never actually used Jini, just read the hype, but they sound quite similar. Is this just because the hype is vague, or are they really doing similar things?
Jon
My thoughts exactly. I don't often use the numeric pad, but I *do* use the arrow keys all the time with barely a pause.
Also, your point about what you grow up with is very important. Recently I've had a to use some Sun boxes and I'm *constantly* failing to find Ctrl, 'cos it's in "the wrong place" as far as I'm concerned. (For that matter, pretty much every keyboard I've used has a Ctrl key on the right hand side as well as the left, so I'm not sure where that complaint comes from. Maybe US keyboards don't - I'm in the UK.)
With a PC keyboard, Ctrl is in a pretty convenient place for me - just where my little finger can get at it easily. I do notice that it gets a little sore if I use that (or shift) for very long at a time, but my little finger is far more versatile than my 4th (piano counting :) finger.
I agree with the general point of the article, that you should choose the right input mechanism for the job and hone the app for that, but just not the keyboard specifics :)
(Btw, has anyone put a small trackball in a keyboard between return and the arrow keys? You could use it with your little finger... not sure about buttons though.)
Jon
Sure, but I hope we also acknowledge that if we're not allowed (by licence agreements we've agreed to) to share things, then we shouldn't. IBM have every right not to make their software free etc, and have every right to call us pirates if we break licences we agree to.
I hope the open source community's attitude is, "Look how great it is to let people share!" rather than "We're going to steal your software if you don't agree with our principles."
If you disagree with the licence that software comes with, don't use it - it's (usually) as simple as that, as far as I'm concerned. Things like DVD encryption cracking may be exceptions - I'm afraid I don't know enough about that to comment.
Jon
Maybe. Or maybe it's a good test to see whether or not Sun are relying on any implementation-specific bits of their JVM... Of course, without seeing the problems and analysing them properly, it's impossible to say one way or the other.
I would agree with the previous poster - Java support for Linux may well be more IBM-based than Sun-based in the future. In fact, I can see that spreading beyond just Linux... IME, IBM are the most Java-savvy company around. (Oh, and jikes is fantastic :)
Jon
LOL! In other words, when you think most people will disagree with you, you just say it's subjective and leave it at that. I don't think most people would consider 2 to be many. If someone said they had worked with many computers and it turned out to be 2, I think you'd be rather disappointed, don't you?
As you've said you'll be ignoring me from now on (which together with your tag line says all I feel I need to know about your opinion of yourself with respect to others), I'll leave it at that...
Jon
Okay, let's get some idea of what you mean by "portable" then. To a lot of people (I suspect), portable means "write once, compile and run anywhere" - and that's the goal of using ANSI C wherever possible, I would imagine. That's what Java does particularly well (in terms of language - the implementation of applet viewers is another matter, of course). That's using "portable" in the sense of "mobile" (a portable object being one that can be moved around at will).
What do you mean by portable? Do you mean you can change the code to make it run on another box (ie it's "able" to be "ported")?
As I've said before, C is good for portability when you want to do mostly processing, but when you start doing a lot of IO (particularly network and/or user IO) it loses out.
Jon
Well it could be a randomly generated number with some guarantee (?) of uniqueness. There's nothing to stop people from using the same CD key for different machines - that's what site licences are for. However, that's not the same as ghosting a machine.
I don't know whether this is what's going on or not, but it seems perfectly feasible.
Jon
To me, they're what signifies that C isn't truly portable. Or rather, it's port-able but not automatically port-ed, if you take my meaning. If you have to write code which conditions on which operating system it's on, then it's not portable IMO. If a piece of source code is portable, I should be able to compile it on a brand new operating system which supports that language, and have it work with *no* code changes. If you're conditioning code on operating system, that's not going to happen.
ANSI helps to an extent, but it's not a silver bullet - otherwise the book in front of me, "The Annotated ANSI C standard" wouldn't have sections for undefined or unspecified behaviour. Also, I believe there are other things that ANSI doesn't provide, in terms of library functions. Is select() ANSI, for instance? (It may be, but it's not in the index of the book, so I'm guessing not :)
Sure, when you're coding something that can be done in ANSI C, it makes sense to do it, being careful not to use any of the undefined/unspecified behaviour. It just isn't always that easy, unfortunately.
Jon
PS: I realise all this is rather perpendicular to the original topic which is to do with frameworks than languages - but I'd be interested to know just how far ANSI C can take you.
Really? If that is true, why hasn't apache always run on NT? From http://www.apache.org/info/apache_nt.html:
(December 22nd 1996)
Apache has been ported to a very wide array of Unix boxes - in fact, we're not aware of any Unix boxes which Apache can't run on. This has been possible by making conservative architecture decisions, by modularizing the code as much as possible, and sticking to POSIX and ANSI wherever possible (and functional).
However, due to the code's legacy, and use of metaphors and systems which are Unix-specific (such as, having multiple processes all accept()ing connections to the same port), the road to porting to Windows NT has not been a pretty one.
Things are better now, but if C were completely portable (and useful in its entirely portable form) then this would never have happened, would it? Even now, I'd be highly surprised if the apache source code didn't have a few #IFDEFs in...
Having been involved in porting a commercial product from Tru64 Unix to Solaris and Linux (which shouldn't be nearly as hard as going to NT), I can say that it's not as easy as you might think - especially when intricate optimisation (not to mention multithreading) is involed.
Jon