Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Patents

Geoworks Demands Royalties For All WAP Apps 194

Posted by Roblimo from the enforcing-patents-after-the-technology-is-in-use dept.
Ian Davis writes "This Geoworks Press Release announces that they have U.S. and Japanese patents dating from 1994 covering some the essentials of the WAP and WML specs. They're demanding a license fee of $20,000 per year from all WAP phone manufacturers as well as WAP site owners. The WAP Forum have acknowledged the patent and their policy is to allow it provided the owners provide fair access to the technology covered. What do people think? Is this a fatal blow to U.S.-based WAP startups? Will it give the Europeans an even bigger lead in the WAP market?" The $20,000/year fee for WAP Web site operators is only for companies with $1 million or more in annual revenue. This _may_ not be as bad as it sounds.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Geoworks Demands Royalties For All WAP Apps More

Geoworks Demands Royalties For All WAP Apps

Comments Filter:

  • Re:crap "tech" (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    duh. It is obvious you don't know shit about WAP. WAE, Wireless Application Environment, where all development of services is done, is based on HTTP. WML is an implementation of XML. Any HTTP-server can act as a WAP-server, you just have to return the correct MIME-type and a valid WML document, which in turn can be generated using whatever you wish, for example Perl, JSP, ASP, CGI, SSI, whatever. Anyone with his own HTTP-server can provide a WAP-service. The only thing you need to know is WML and HTTP and which restrictions apply to develop a WAP service. Should you wish to develop a browser, you need more, especially if you want to place it inside a mobile handset.

  • HEY! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I LIKE Mork & Mindy!

    Pam Dawber is HOT! I'd live in her attic anytime!
    (I even tried to once -- damn restraining orders....)




    No! Wait, Mr. Moderator! I didn't mean to be offtopic! I'm sorry! It'll never happen again! Ahhhhhhhhhhhh....

  • Not patent{ed,able} in the Free World (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This kind of thing can't happen in the Free World - only in places like the USA.

    I hope we don't get software patents here.

  • Re:crap "tech" (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Excuse me? Exactly how is a RISC CPU going to increase the size of the screen on my cellular phone? Screen real estate will always be an issue on devices that are designed to fit in a pocket.

  • Patent law, complaints thereof (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Despite all the whining, i`ve yet to hear about more than a couple of cases where patents have been abused (xor-ing cursors, for example). You could just as well attempt to argue that the law on , say, murder is wrong because of a few abuses of justice. Sorry to sound like a troll, but this comes up every time someone protects their patent, and its beginnging to get *very* boring. These companies arent going to stop protecting themselves - are you lot just going to complain forever?
  • http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?pn=US05327529__

    States:

    A method for invoking a user interface for use with an application operating in a
    computer system which involves providing in the computer system a generic object
    class that corresponds to a class of function that is to be performed using the user
    interface; specifying in the application instance data in the form of a generic object
    specification that corresponds to the generic object class, the instance data including
    attribute criteria and hint criteria; providing in the computer system at least one specific
    user interface toolbox and controller that operates in the computer system to provide a
    selection of possible specific user interface implementations for use in performing the
    class of function; and providing in the computer system at least one interpreter that
    corresponds to the at least one specific user interface toolbox and controller.
    A method for invoking a user interface for use with an application operating in a
    computer system which involves providing in the computer system a generic object
    class that corresponds to a class of function that is to be performed using the user
    interface; specifying in the application instance data in the form of a generic object
    specification that corresponds to the generic object class, the instance data including
    attribute criteria and hint criteria; providing in the computer system at least one specific
    user interface toolbox and controller that operates in the computer system to provide a
    selection of possible specific user interface implementations for use in performing the
    class of function; and providing in the computer system at least one interpreter that
    corresponds to the at least one specific user interface toolbox and controller.

    Can anyone understand this? This is IMHO pure,
    100% lawspeak-trash. Nuke 'em.

    Kirth
  • This only shows that current patent system is very far from helping innovation. How happened that they invented some cool technology and holded it for 5 years until *other* inmplemented it and started to revenue from it - without any help from the parent holders, notice it - and then they jump out and cry "Gimme all your money!". How exactly this is going to help innovation? All innovative startups just close and/or go wait until the patent expires, or just leave it alone, and only corporations with deep pockets can continue now.

    And imagine this technology won't interesting enough? Then all the manufacturers would hold it back for some 15-20 years to get rid of the patents, and then start working on it - pretty innovation-advancing scenario, right?
  • 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

  • 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
  • ..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..

    /mill
  • 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.

    /mill
  • Wouldn't it be great if the people that have moderated something would get their 'names' assoicated with it too? The cluelessness shown in the above post and moderation would then be exposed as it should be.

    /mill

  • I believe you have to have implemented the idea yourself in order to receive a patent on it.

  • This pisses me off to no end. IE does it right, Netscape does it WRONG.

    Are you referring to sites that don't include the tags but do include the tags? Browsing malco's [malco.com] movie listings on their web site always looks screwed up in aol/ie and looks ok in netscape because of this. I've just gotten used to always using both sets of tags.

  • grrr...slashdot stripped some formatting...what I meant was sites that don't use the tr tags but do use the /tr tags.

    Offtopic: why do the & lt/gt characters get processed and displayed for preview mode, but not after the post has been submitted?

  • If I am not mistaken, at one time there was a web browser developed for the Palm platform that surfed through a proxy. You would send a request to your unix box, the unix box could go grab the page and render it appropriately for your platform (no color, limited fonts, limited screen) and send it out to you. I should go look up the reference. I use AvantGo for cached sites and it seems to do something similar.

    Also, why not use lynx and extend it to let you see images when you need to (maps, photos, etc.). Maybe webmasters would make their sites lynx friendly.

    ed




  • Mobile phone coverage in the UK is 98% of the
    population, which is more (obviously). You could
    mean percentage of the population who *has* a
    mobile phone of course - that's about 60% here, I
    think.

    I like my Nokia 7110e - WAP is damn useful.
  • I am not a lawyer but as I understand it, there's no "failure to defend" clause for patents. Surely, any such clause would have been used against UNISYS.
    --
  • punishable by 3 weeks of non-stop Mork & Mindy Re-runs.

    I think Mork and Mindy reruns would be pleasurable, not painful.
  • are one of the worst excuses for the reimplementation of a protocol stack ever seen [greenspun.com], and, to paraphrase a certain character in a favorite move, "I hope they die soon".

    Meant to get this comment in earlier, but I'd lost the link, and Dan Lyke, at Flutterby, whose weblog I'd gotten the link from, hadn't run his index engine recently; I had to mail him for it. [greenspun.com]

    If you have any interest in WAP et. al, at all, I'd suggest reading this paper.
    Cheers,
    -- jra
    -----

  • Um, "oops".

    :-)

    And I forgot to make my primary point too. Drat.

    Whenever a new protocol comes out that purports to solve all your problems, _and there's already protocol out there to do what you need_, examine the motives of the proponents _very_ carefully.

    Cf: DivX.

    Cheers,
    -- jra
    -----
  • > I am thinking this will alow me to telnet to my box at my house from school with a cell phone... at least at some point.

    Nope.

    That's precisely what they'd like for you to think. Read the paper in my above message to see why that's _not_ what will actually happen.

    Cheers,
    -- jra
    -----
  • My understanding of patent law is that it allows the owner of the patent an artificial monopoly over the process or thing descibed in the patent for a limited amount of time.

    I believe that time in this case is 7 years. If the patents they are using to require a license on this technology dates to 1994, that would only give them one year to get as many licenses fees as possible. After the patent expires the process described in the patent becomes public domain and can be used by anyone. Correct????

    Based on this assumption, I'm not surprised we are hearing from them now, nor at that apparent willingness of the WAP Forum to cooperate.

  • Opps. My mistake...

  • From my initial reading to the documents on Geoworks site (IANAL), it seems there will be no possibility of developing OSS tools to develop WAP applications... at least in any country that has the Geoworks patents.

    According to Geoworks, anything touching WAP/WML is theirs, and you have to license it from them. This includes sites that serve WAP applications, phones, development tools, etc.

    For us USA citizens, it's going to be the same situation as it is for working on OSS crypto. Blech!

  • I remember reading in 1991 or so in Byte that GeoWorks was fully object-oriented with extreme code reuse. That's one of the reasons it offered so much functionality in so little space. Alas, they promised a development system for the longest time, but never delivered. People were lining up to get into GeoWorks development. Heck, it looked SO much sharper than Windows 3.1, with a lot of the Motif look cloned, and tear-off menus and all kinds of other stuff. It looked up to date even by todays standards. They seriously shot themselves in the foot by not delivering development tools. At their brief peak of popularity Windows wasn't that entrenched yet, and they could have had a serious shot at never letting Microsoft happen. But, in the word(s) of Jerry Pournelle, alas...
  • GWRX, which had been surging from ~4 to ~18 over the past three months, went absolutely nuts yesterday -- something like +30! +300% in one day!! Apparently the pin stripes think there is some value in WAP, and that this action won't hurt WAP. Besides, why would GWRX be so foolish as to harm WAP with excessive licensing?

    WAP has been simmering for some time now and it is poised to take off now that tere are enough WAP devised in service and on the market to merit significant WAP/WML site development. Even if hand held wireless devices get more and more capable, WAP deals with both bandwidth and latency problems that are characteristic of wireless. It will prove valuable.

  • Here here. HTML is a markup language and is used to mark the structure of text. Table tags like TD are used to mark the limits of a span of text that is part of a table cell. As tags that mark a span of content, they damn well should have starting tags and ending tags. Just like the P tag. It marks a paragraph. There should be a tag that shows where the paragraph begins, and where it ends.

    Now, IMG tags and such are replaced entities and therefore need no closing tag. They mark the location in a document where another entity is placed. The BR tag is the same. But don't use a P tag when you mean two BR's. And don't use a TD tag as if it were a replaced entity.

    HTML is not a layout language, and it's the goddamn treating of it as such and "fixing" broken tags that has made this www the mess that it is. If people would just use the language as intended, as a markup language, oh the wonders we could work. Imagine, if our content marked up by structure we could acutally build decent search engines that could parse the structure of documents they crawl in order to better distill their content. Hey, we could actually get some work done on the Internet rather than using it to just replace the Sears catalog and the movie channel.

    oops, i'm ranting. time to get back to work.

  • I have been using geoworks' products for a longtime, both a hand-held device and their desktop operating system (now sold via NewDeal Inc.) as well as the old 6-64 GEOS (Graphical Environment Operting System.) While Geoworks could certainly use the revenue generated from charging royalties for WAP, it will be a big mistake. What this is going to do is force people to move to other protocols. That is going to make Geoworks devices incompatible with the rest of the world, cutting deaply into their marketshare.

    Sometimes, like in the case, enforcing a patent to protect your intellectual property is more likely to hurt your bottom line than simply allowing free use (and thus universal compatibility with your devices.)
  • Hmmmm. I stand corrected. You're right. It was Berkeley Softworks. I guess that's what I get for being to quick to troll for Karma.
  • A $20K annual licensing fee seems a little stiff for a developing industry, but if Geoworks holds the patents and the manufacturers are infringing on them, then that puts Geoworks firmly in the driver's seat.

    I don't think that it's a fatal blow...if the industry is going to be successful, that fee will not stop it. But I think that it might have been more politic to license the the technology at no charge for a certain period, then consider charging a fee, if only to foster rapid deployment of WAP.

    Since this is the era of intellectual property companies, I guess this will become the standard way of doing business...create an idea, patent it, then license it. I suppose the only real difference between IP now and IP ten years ago is that ten years ago a company would have been more vertically integrated. Now the idea seems to be to patent the idea, then license it instead of developing it.

    Complain all you want about patenting ideas, models and concepts...but the heart of the matter is that the patent system, as it exists in the United States, allows for that very thing. And as long as the system allows it, companies will take advantage of it...and who can blame them? For the most part, the US PTO isn't a bunch of blithering idiots. They are following the letter of the law, so if you don't like it, then you should work to change it.

  • WAP (if succesful) will bring billions of dollars of revenue to cell phone operators, they wont even notice the loss of $20k.

    20,000 might be problem to small WAP content providers, but it is starting to look that there probably won't many of them anyway. Cell phone operators are demanding that WAP be made more closed so that they can be the only content providers. If the operators get their way, WAP, even without the $20k fee, will never be like the web where you can surf to where ever you want, but instead are restricted to a fairly limited amount services your operator has decided to provide. This would obviously be Bad Thing(TM) for the consumers, lack of choice combined with high prices resulting from the "content monopoly" is never very appealing.

    Still, saying that WAP is dead does sound a bit hasty to me.

  • are Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), and the Wireless Markup Language (WML).

    Of course that's a direct cut and paste out of the press release.

    bnf

  • If they are just now enforcing a 6 year old patent, then it could be thrown out - after all, letting everyone adopt a technology without saying anything and then suing is something between entrapment and extortion..

    But, IANAL, etc etc...
  • It's worth noting that WAP - especially its low-level protocols intended to replace IP and TCP - has been widely discredited within the Internet engineering and research communities. See, for example, the critique "W* Effect Considered Harmful [4k-associates.com]". There is also ongoing work within the IETF on compression techniques, etc., to make TCP/IP work better on low-bandwidth wireless links, making much of WAP unnecessary.

    These patent claims may simply be speeding up WAP's demise.

  • The solution to this is obvious I think.

    Modify the standard and exclude the GeoDorks stuff (and any other propietary crap).

    I wonder if GeoSucks realizes the bad press they have generated over this? Reminds me of UniPiss and the GIF patents fiasco...(thank-you PNG)!
  • What's happening is that when the text from the Comment field is pasted into the TEXTAREA tag to create the Preview page, the The workaround is to click Preview, and if it's okay, click Back and then click Submit. The fix, for Rob, would be to replace < and > signs and suchlike with their HTML entity equivalents when generating the TEXTAREA tag.

  • it's frightening to think that people who don't know the difference between a sarcastic remark and a flame are moderating slashdot. this pretty well pisses me off.

  • wasn't that for the commodore 64/128? Or am i thinking of something else?
  • Wait....what's "WAP"?
    ---
    This comment powered by Mozilla!

  • However, no matter how much I dislike them and dislike spending time on creating them, you need those kinds of patents for trading or your company goes under.

    Instead of merely trading patents with a few other parties, which doesn't do anything to help solve the larger problem, I would suggest a method of cross-licensing them with everyone who uses them defensively and gaining the advantages that would imply.

    At www.openpatents.org [openpatents.org], I'm trying to promote the notion of an Open Patent cross-licensing agreement. Companies who agree to its various Options have access to different sets of its Open Patent Pools. One consequence of this is that if you agree to the terms and conditions of certain Options of the license, in addition to being able to negotiate licensing agreements based on your own patent portfolio, you would also effectively be able to negotiate based on the much larger portfolios of one or more of the Open Patent Pools.

    Since you have written software patents, (presumably for the company you're currently working for, and presumably for reasons that both you and the company consider defensive), would you be interested in submitting patents under such a license?

  • We should create an open patent license; something similar to the GPL, but for patents instead of copyrights.

    Such as the Open Patent License [openpatents.org] described at www.openpatents.org [openpatents.org] perhaps?

  • Well first, if you're getting *very* bored after only "a couple of cases", you haven't got much of an attention span.

    Second, "abuse of justice" isn't quite the term you're looking for. More like "abuse of law". The problem here is that justice is precisely what's NOT happening because there's a problem with the system of laws, and that's what's being abused. I don't see a problem with people complainig if they think there's something wrong with the system that's supposed to be protecting their rights and delivering justice. Those things are kinda important.
  • Are there provisions that GeoWorks is allowing for non-profit WAP sites?

  • Thanks for the constructive answer to my question. Perhaps you might be so kind as to point out the exact place where I may find the infomation which I seek, and then when I learn to read, I may enlighten myself.

  • <sarcasm>

    Yeah!

    We should trademark the word open so that nobody else can use it without a license.

    </sarcasm>

  • They are not required to defend it. It is not going away.

    Actually I belive you do have to enforce patents. Why this wasnt used in the Unisys/GIF case is odd (though did anyone challenge them?).

    IANAL
  • I think people have been overlooking the potential importance of the story poster's comment about giving an advantage to Europe. Europe's GSM networks are highly developped and high-quality, and I wouldn't be surprised that part of the battle for the control will happen there rather than in the good ol' US of A.

    I was at the Telecom 1999 gathering in Geneva and I heard from both Bill Gates and Larry Ellison that they are betting Europe could be leading the way to mobile applications.

    Oh and weather it's WAP or not I don't really care, as long as it's XML based :)
  • I wonder how this will shift the balance of power between the WAP Forum and the W3C over markup languages? They both have specs in this area: the WAP Forum with WML (Wireless Markup Language) and the W3C with XHTML Basic. (XHTML Basic is part of the modularisation effort of XHTML).

    One thing people should be careful of is deciding that the W3C is morally superior - both the W3C and the WAP Forum are just associations of big companies.

  • You may be thinking of "Top Gun Wingman", developed at UCB and presented at Middleware 98 [lancs.ac.uk] as an example of an adaptive middleware proxy. It is wonderful what happens when students want to look up the Internet Movie DataBase from a wireless PDA while watching a film.

  • How about royalty fees on obscure acronyms? That's where the big bucks are.
  • The problem with the US Patent office is not the underlying principle, I.E. Encourage the development and dissemination of new technology by providing a mechanism for the developer to profit from it. The problem is implementation. The existing requirements for patents are just fine, if only the patent office would enforce them. I.E.

    1. Your invention must be novel/original:

    - That is to say that the patent must ADD to the body of knowledge.
    - You can not patent parts of nature or other things that already exist.
    - The idea must not be obvious to a skilled practitionar in the field.

    2. Reduction to practice:

    - A practical demonstration of the patent must be at least described.

    I think that if the patent office simply enforced these two principles we would be in reasonably good shape. Unfortunately, in the absence of the necessary expertise required to be able to appraise proposed high-tech patents, the USPTO seems to have taken a "grant them all and let the courts figure it out" attitude.

    Historically speaking the patent office has always had problems. If the bio-tech patents of today bother you then imagine what it was like for South American farmers when they discovered in the late 1800's that the wheat they grew had been patented in the US and that they would have to pay license fee's to import it.

  • Re:Fatal? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If $20,000/year for a patent license represents a "fatal blow", then those startups must have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel...

    A $20K is a large amount when you're not expecting it. Imagine having $100K of funding, then suddenly to have 20% of it dissappear. I call that a problem. They're asking for the $20K from sites with more than $1M/year in revenue. From economics class, the average company make a profit of 6% of their revenue. That means of the average company with $1M revenue, $60K will be profit. 20K is a third of the profit. Ouch!

    I know my 200K/year revenue company couldn't come-up with 5K off of the top (5K:200K == 20K:1M). You're not going to find many bankers who like to loan money to a small business for a recurring cost. The last few banks I talked to wanted loans on recuring charges to be paid back in half of the recuring period (so that you don't pile-up debt when you borrow again the next year). Calling a start-up weak because they can't come-up with 20K? That's lame.

  • The reason standards bodies don't avoid patented technology is that they have to concentrate on producing a good, rather than absolutely free, standard. Often there is no alternative to do anything but go with a patented soultion because no other solutions are avaliable. For instance, I challenge you to find a non-patented technique for audio compression that even approaches systems like MP3 and AAC...

    But what prevents standard bodies from demanding everyone who wants to have their technology included in the standard, to abandon patents, or provide free blanket license? Then companies will have choices -- keep technology proprietary, or have it "endorsed" as a standard (and benefitting from already having that technology _implemented_) at the price that they no longer can put any restrictions or licensing fees on it?

    RFCs about IP and related protocols don't contain patented algorithms, and TCP/IP seems to turn out just fine without them. OTOH, ITU "standardizes" all kinds of proprietary shit, and this is why telephony is such a mess when it comes to interoperability.

  • As someone else pointed out, in some cases people will give up charging royalties on their patent if there is a great deal of incentive in having a part in the standard. Of course, this isn't always enough motivation, but maybe that could be changed.

    How about bidding? Bidding is done in all sorts of situations, and where institutions are involved (like in a large corporation, a government, or a standards body) and there isn't bidding, it's often a sign of corruption, because of the conflict of interests when chosing an implementor. As many of the people defining standards are employed in their respective industries, the potential for conflict of interest should be taken very seriously (though I fear it is not).

    I can see bidding work well with something like sound compression. The standards body says: we'll pay a single fee to a company for their sound compression, and they will in turn give up all future rights to charge royalties on that patent. You could weight the quality of implementations against the bid, so a compressor that was 10% worse than another would have to underbid by at least 10%. (deciding on "10% worse" would have to be somewhat subjective, but it could be done)

    There is a great deal of incentive -- if the standard becomes widely implemented (all the more likely because patents don't restrict it) and a company's compression isn't part of the standard, it's potential profits are negligable.

    This could bring competition back into the highly anti-competitive realm of patents. It could also keep patent-holders from robbing us all blind. However, it requires some capital on the part of the standards bodies (not impossible) and some will on the part of the standard-makers (again, not impossible). But altogether, there's just too much money being made (stolen) to imagine it could change easily.

  • Having read their claims, it seems to me that, given the technology represented by the "Open Interface" technology of what used to be Neuron Data (now Blaze Software, http://www.blazesoft.com/ [blazesoft.com]), they do not actually have a claim for anything not obvious to a competent practioner in interface architecture. The patent is not novel and should be invalidated because of this fact.

  • I'm not sure exactly what the laws state, but I'm not sure they *CAN* declare IP on something when they have allowed it to be developed without defending it.

    Do IP laws function anything like trademark laws? I find it hard to believe that anyone can develope a set of ideas, wait untill something simular comes along, and declare IP licencing fees. There has to be some sort of law that puts a limit on it..

    If there isn't, as the saying goes..

    "There auta be a law for somethin like that"
  • So essentially, start coming up with ideas for devices that could be used to do just about anything, and you can squeeze the people who actually develop it? That just seems WAY overboard to me. Essentially, a company like UPS could develop an 'idea' of delivery trucks using hybrid power sources, and if *ANYONE* else actually develops such a beast, they could charge IP fees?
  • ...they had some fairly revolutionary stuff going for a while in the late '80s.

    Anybody else remember GEOS, the GUI for the Commedore 64? (A GUI that fits in 64k of RAM? Who woulda thunkit?) Or GeoWorks Ensemble, the short-lived GUI on the x86 platform that (at least on my 386/25 with 1mb of RAM) seriously outperformed Windows 3.1? That also worked on an 8086 and maybe even an 8088?

  • As a programmer, I am always disturbed by "closing" tags without an "opening" tag (or vice versa). A C compiler would complain if you tried to use only }'s and never any {'s, just as an example. So I always "balance" my HTML (not that I write much html anyway, webpage creation is something I think other people can do) by using both p and /p, tr and /tr, td and /td, etc. The BR tag still disturbs me, since it doesn't have any matching closing tag. Not that it would make much sense, but anyway.

  • See the WAP Forum What is WAP [wapforum.org] page.
  • How can the forum declare that this is an open specification, then allow someone to charge a royalty for it's use[?]

    By 'Open' they mean that it is open for anybody to see how it works, so anybody can do an implementation. However, they probably *will* have to have some money ;)

    It's similar to the situation with MPEG. All the MPEG standards have sections in them that are covered by patents. However, normally for a technology to go into a standard, the patent owener has to agree to license it at a reasonable fee.

    The reason standards bodies don't avoid patented technology is that they have to concentrate on producing a good, rather than absolutely free, standard. Often there is no alternative to do anything but go with a patented soultion because no other solutions are avaliable. For instance, I challenge you to find a non-patented technique for audio compression that even approaches systems like MP3 and AAC...

    cheers,

    Tim

  • I'd imagine that in the field of mobile information appliances, there are a great many patents held by the by the large mobile phone companies (ericsson, nokia, etc.) which will cover the technology needed to create their products. Most of them will have deals with each other to cover them. If the patent has merit, they'll pay up - I doubt $20,000 is a great deal to a large company like that. Otherwise they'll just team up, get some very expensive lawyers and see if Geoworks has the balls to go up against them. I don't suppose it's a big deal, and I don't think that people who create WAP content will be hit by it, but I could be wrong.

    To conclude: I don't think it'll be a very big deal.

    cheers,

    Tim
  • I am normally with the intellectual property traditionalists in that I believe that patents and copyrights serve a valid purpose in our society, in most cases. Therefore, I typically say that a company holding a valid patent has a right to set the terms at which it licenses its technology.

    The difference in this case is that levying a fee on the WAP-server side is impractical. A small fee per physical WAP-enabled device is easily embedded in the cost of the unit, takes place once, and is easy to account for. But any fee on the server side is inherently unfair because it is bound to be collected inconsistantly, and generally serves as a depressant to the size of the content base for these devices.

    Having said all of this, I feel that the entire argument will be moot soon. My guess is that WAP will be a transitional technology, because it is not based on the standards of the rest of the Web and it is a solution that presumes low bandwidth.

    I think once the display size and wireless bandwidth problems are addressed, everyone will have ultraportable devices that will use the existing standards for display and interaction -- in other words, not WAP. I would also mention power consumption, but Transmeta may have addressed that yesterday.

    --

    Dave Aiello

  • I agree that WAP and SMS (Short Message Service) will not actually go away. I mean, if magazine articles can be believed, SMS is more popular in Skandinavia than all of AOLs Instant Messaging protocols combined. AFAIK, that's enough to sustain developer support.

    But, the point I am trying to make is that a lot of the rationale for WAP goes away as wireless bandwidth increases.

    Two small points in rebuttal to the previous post: Twenty percent of the US population is still over 50 million units. And, a large part of that 20 percent of the US population has shown a willingness to treat mobile technology as disposable over several technology cycles.

    --

    Dave Aiello

  • The GEOS (Graphical Environment Operating System) was introduced by Br0derbund software during the mid 80's for the Commodore 64. Later versions were available for the C128, and I believe for the Atari and Apple II.

    Around the same time that Microsoft began shipping Windows 1.1, the first versions of GEOS were made available for the PC, running on top of DOS (just like Windows). GEOS was a technically superior product, but like Apple, they discovered that superior technology does not beat out Microsoft's superior marketing. Around this same time, Br0derbund became Geoworks.

    Geoworks experimented with and 8088 based PDA around '93-'94, called the Zoomer (marketed by Radio Shack, Casio, and a third manufacturer whom I cannot recall at the moment. The Zoomer was superior in many ways to it's contemporary PDA, the original Apple Newton, in fact the Zoomer was responsible for the creation of the Palm pilot as Palm created Graffitti to originally run on the Zoomer to replace it's less then perfect handwritting recognition engine. The Zoomer came with a version of the America Online client which allowed you to send and receive email as well as read news. America Online also produced a client for the desktop GEOS which was everybit as good as the Windows client.

    Geoworks soon got out of the desktop market, giving the desktop license to New Deal Inc., and began focusing on "Smart Phones" - PDA enabled mobile phones.

    So yes, GEOS was for the 64/128

  • are you lot just going to complain forever?

    No, we are just going to complain long enough and loud enough until some greedy politician hears us and decides to run on a platform that involves reforming IP abuses. Then we are going to vote this person into office and watch as he either:

    • Gets bribed and backstabs us
    • Fails due to being outnumbered by the guys who took the bribes
    • Succeeds

    Here are the words that I am waiting to hear:

    "Hi, I'm Fairbourne P. Swellguy, and if I'm elected, I will introduce legislation that will require that all patent applications be reviewed by qualified experts to insure that they truly new inventions, not discoveries or mundane and obvious variations on existing ideas. Furthermore, I will introduce legislation that will require that all taxpayer-funded computer systems and networks be based on open and unencumbered standards whenever practical."

    ---
  • "providing in the computer system an interpreter for the specific user interface toolbox and controller"

    Yeah, sure. This describes a browser to the T. Mosaic was first created in the early 1990's. Text examples of this "patent" technique date back to the mid or early 1980's.

    There is so much prior art that I predict this will be demolished by the first company to take it to court.

    Also, note that Geoworks claims a U.S. and a Japanese patent but no European patents. According to the Paris Convention governing patents, patent holders in the U.S. have one year from the patent issue date to seek a patent in Europe. Geoworks does not seem to have done this and, thus, cannot seek claims in Europe.


  • This is patent law. Not trademark, not copyright, patent.

    They don't *HAVE* to declare patent. They are not required to defend it. It is not going away.
    Just because they knew about it before hand does not invalidate their patent whatsoever.

    From what I've heard/read, the fact that they knew about the infringement but didn't say anythign sipmly limits the damages they can claim for past infringement.. they can still set any licensing terms they want. (in other words, they can't reall claim damages past the point they found out about the infringement but chose not to say anything, as damages after that point were their fault)
  • No. This is within their rights as the patent holder.
    They do not have to sue.. that implies damages. They sipmly state that they NOW rquire royalties, and will proceed to sue anyone who refuses to pay after this point. There are no past damages here.
  • I too remember GEOS and have been using it even recently on my Nokia 9000 Comunicator.

    However, as a developer of a non-profit wap site and a developers mailing list, I felt that I should write and let Geoworks know how many developers will feel about this action and how it could harm the both the development of WAP as a serious standard and their own reputation.

    A copy of the letter can be found at http://wapwarp.com/geoworks [wapwarp.com]

    I encourage others to write (an email address is on the letter), but also encourage people to write a civil letter of complaint - or don't bother. We should all by now know the damage that letters of abuse can do.
  • If you read their actual Wireless Internet White Paper [geoworks.com], they are intimating that any company that creates a WAP based site and has an income of over 1,000,000 USD will have to pay the licensing fee.

    They are also extremely unclear as to how companies with lower turnovers will be affected - there is certainly no guarantee in their papers that there will be no license fee for general use by non-profits or low-profits.

    Think it's not important? Where would the web be now if 5 years ago all the companies who wanted to start putting up sites had to pony up 20 G's first?

    It may not hurt the MS's and RedHats of this world, but it's sure as hell going to hurt the development and uptake of WAP as a standard if the MSE's (Medium Sized Enterprises) can't get onto the playing field.


    Steve Cook
    WapWarp [wapawrp.com]

  • Your situation is not hypothetical.

    Microsoft was awarded a patent on the idea behind Cascading Style Sheets, one that is sufficiently general that it may also cover XML transcoding and XSL.

    The whole Web is essentially just waiting for the other shoe to drop and Microsoft to decide that people have become dependent enough on CSS and XML technologies to start collecting royalties. It's probably only the antitrust suit that's prevented it so far, but watch out for the "Internet busines division" of any Microsoft split up.

    With CSS and XML becoming ubiquitous across the industry (esp. with big companies), attempted enforcement of this one patent could finally force the govt. to come to terms with the whole mess they've been creating. It would be pretty entertaining to watch these big organizations that rely so heavily on patents themselves have to weigh the equally unattractive options of giving up all their own bogus IP or paying MS crippling royalties on their most popular products.

  • It didn't seem that obvious back when the idea was first developed. At GEOS developer training sessions, students seemed kind of confused by the whole idea of "hints". They liked the idea of putting a button at coordinates (24, 38). They didn't really like the idea of telling the button to look for a dialog-reply-bar and try to insert itself therein.

    Of course, back then, object-oriented programming was pretty cutting-edge. The idea of "classes" that defined behavior--and could inherit behavior from other classes--well, it might have been a lot for those students to take in at the time.
  • Unless the law requires you, as a developer, to research any prior art for what it is you are developing.
  • WAP is about content, pure and simple. It's for delivery of news, directions, anything where all you need is the information quickly and in a mobile environment. Also, you are certainly able to use other standards within WAP. You list XML and CGI as two examples, but I wrote a CGI script that parses slashdot.xml (an XML file that CmdrTaco provides which contains info on the main pafe stories) for headlines and returns them in HDML (part of WAP). You can use darn near anything to process your info, but if you want remote, easy access to it, WAP is currently the way to go. BTW, if anyone has a wireless web phone and wants to see the script in action, you can get to it at thinkery.org/chewie/phone.hdml (no link 'cause you can't see it on a regular browser)
    ---------------------------
  • HDML can use ( and in mobile devices does use ) WAP as a transport. You may be interested in looking at WML as it is intended to replace HDML. WML was writen by the WAP consortium, If memory serves me correctly HDML was written by Unwired Planet. WML is based on HDML. You would be forgiven if when presented code in each language you could not tell the difference.
    a point of interest: unlike HTML, WML and HDML are complied on the fly by the server. UP provide a proxy (?) that translates HTML into HDML for the WAP server.


    D.
  • This is a big bite to take for such a kludge, and after it's had time to become something of a standard.

    I wonder if they may have lost some of their legal footing by keeping their mouth shut for so long.

    The question is whether the bite is too big to survive; I doubt they can defend this in court if a big phone manufacturer decides to fight it.
  • I think it's a big mistake for an organisation or a consortium that create standards to include patented technology.

    If one member of the consortium has patented technology that it want inserted in the standard, they should give the consortium all rights to the patent. The consortium, it turn, should make the technology availlable at no cost to all the consortium members.

    It's becoming more and more common that a company offer technology to a standard body whitout telling anybody that they hold a patent on it. They a couple of years later, when the standard it being used by a lot of people, they requires licensing fees.

    This should stop... Standard bodies and consortium should have rules to prevent that.
  • This would cover just about any menu generation language including the MGL in O'Reily's "Lex and Yacc" which dates back to at least 1992.
  • Yes, it was, although us old Commodore hackers remember them as Berkley Softworks. They released a version of GEOS for the PC about the time Microsoft released Windows 3.1. GEOS/PC (called Geoworks Ensemble) worked very well on a 386SX, and had cool things like scalable fonts and WYSIWYG (it used Bitstream's Speedo, iirc), off line printing, on-the-fly resolution changing... it was very cool. Alas, it wasn't from Microsoft, so it didn't become popular. it would make a cool wm for X, though (you know, we need some more, there aren't that many ;)) GEOS/PC still exists as NewDeal; you can get details and trial versions at the NewDeal [newdealinc.com] website.

    it's neat to see these companies from the Old Days back in the news, although, in this case, the news may not be all that great. You may remember the old Commodore on-line service called Q-Link; the rest of the world knows it as AOL.

  • After reading thru the patent (very briefly) I noticed a trend that most everything talked about was client side.

    So, if my company makes more than $1mil/year, and I have an .asp script on my page that spews out some HDML to cell users can get a bite sized info chunk, I have to pay the royalty fee? Is this $1mil/year from services extracted from the wireless network or all services?

    I don't get it. It doesn't seem right that I should have to pay royalties to spewing out HDML pages. I didn't even need phone.com's SDK for that. They're easy enough to reverse engineer.

  • The WAP Forum Website says The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is an open, global specification that empowers mobile users with wireless devices to easily access and interact with information and services instantly.

    How can the forum declare that this is an open specification, then allow someone to charge a royalty for it's use. It will be interseting to see what happens in the Sprint PCS "Wireless Web" market now.


    Munky_v2
  • This pisses me off to no end. IE does it right, Netscape does it WRONG. /td and /tr tags are *not* part of the HTML spec, and are useless, as much as /p tags are. They need *not* be interpreted, as they can be assumed the very next time you see a td or tr respectively (assuming of course there isn't another nested table, but dealing with that is not mind bending either).

    *sigh* This'll get moderated out of existance and my karma'll go down I'm sure.

  • I think the fee is high... (Score:3)

    by Matts ( 1628 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @08:39AM (#1355101) Homepage
    Yes, even considering that it only applies to large companies.

    If this charge is for companies delivering WAP web content, then consider that the WAP side of their business is currently very small, and web delivery already isn't bringing in revenue. Try convincing your pointy haired boss to spend an extra $20k on handheld delivery and he's not going to like it.

    On the other hand I don't see how they can charge against users of the technology (people hosting web sites), as well as integrators of the technology (people building the wap delivery software). I'm not sure what the precedent of that model is. Although I'm sure the cost will pass down the line.
  • They also patented BAPs, and will sue all hamburger chains earning more than $4.50 for all their Pokemon cards.

    Seriously, this is stupid. If a company has a patent on a genuine invention, fine. But DON'T wait half a decade to "notice" (where "notice" depends on how rich the rival company gets).

    This smacks of Patent Trawling, rather than serious protection of genuine investment of time and effort. May the day come when Patent Trawling is a criminal offence, punishable by 3 weeks of non-stop Mork & Mindy Re-runs.

  • Re:What you didn't know... (Score:3)

    by Chops-Frozen-Water ( 2085 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @07:02AM (#1355103) Homepage
    Trawling is a criminal offence, punishable by 3 weeks of non-stop Mork & Mindy Re-runs.

    Isn't that a little harsh?

    Seriously, though, such Patent Trawling becomes hard to prosecute without some hard "what did they know and when did they know it" evidence. It'd probably be better to enforce the 'non-obvious invention' requirement for a patent to be granted (at the least). Or maybe something like an early expiration if you don't do something with it within a certain amount of time.

    That's all I'm going to say, since just thinking about the patent system makes me ill.
    --

  • How to Kill an 'Open Standard' (Score:3)

    by chromatic ( 9471 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @09:14AM (#1355104) Homepage

    That brings to mind an interesting question. Hypothetical situation:
    • A company obtains a patent on, or relating to an Open Standard, in such a way that it is prohibitively expensive or difficult to use the standard without 'infringing' on the patent.
    • The company allows the Open Standard to prosper, in order to gain in popularity, commercial value, and dispersion.
    • The company decides, at some point, to seek financial remuneration from certain uses of its patented technology.
    Does this make it likely that the Open Standard will falter or fail? Pro: Alan Cox's comment above (and I think he's credible). Con: Unisys and GIF (where's my PNG support?), Microsoft and the .doc file format (okay, not really an Open Standard).

    My theory: it depends on how long the company can wait in the second step up above.

    --

  • Most people do not even what WAP is for, right? (Score:3)

    by TheOpus ( 21081 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @08:42AM (#1355105) Homepage
    I see loads of posts here saying stuff like: WAP sucks anyway, nuke it and use stuff like HTML, XML and TCP/IP instead. .... These people must not really have any idea what WAP is and why it was made, huh?

    WAP is a Protocol used for low-bandwidth devices, devices where things like HTML or XML are really way too big to use well. Most Mobile Phones have so little available memory that they can not even save the same page in HTML. Also, WML is just the way you WRITE the pages. It is NOT the way that most mobile phones read it!! Most mobile phones receive cWML, which is COMPILED WML, from the so-called WAP-Gateway, which is basically something like a Proxy operated by the Cell Phone Provider which receives data from the real Web/WAP Server and compiles it to make it WAY smaller. cWML uses byte-codes for all tags and stuff like that, so that they do not need to receive and store all those Text-based Tags.
    And this is just one single thing that makes WAP important for mobile phones, they just HAVE low bandwidth, so we will have to live with it, and on top of that they have low storage. Of course, later on it will make sense to have the possability to use full TCP/IP with mobile phones since speed and space in them will increase, but until this happends, it just makes no sense.
    Another reason which makes WAP important is the TINY displays most Cell Phones have. It just does not make sense to use full HTML in them!

    Also, for those people who didn't know. If you REALLY want to via normal web sites, there is no problem at all. Many WAP Gateways have HTML to WML converters built in which will make it possible to display those pages on WAP devices also!

    About the Patent, can somebody please explain to me in WHAT way WML and WAP is SOOO much different to HTML and the any other protocol out there?? It doesn't make any sense to me why GeoWorks should be able to use their patent talking about USER INTERFACES with the WAP system! Except for one thing, mobile phones display WAP pages (and most WAP pages are written in such a way) to make them look like extended MENUS of the phone itself. Is THAT the only reason why they think they can come and charge those silly amounts for using 'their' patent?

    Fabian Thylmann
    STATSnet sprl
  • Are there any /. readers who were at the last WAP forum meeting last week which led to the fallout of GeoDorks with the rest of the forum? If you were there, email me, I need some good hard info to help put some pressure on the WAP forum to free up the protocols once and for all.

    I've heard rumours that the meeting got really ugly, when the GeoFucks reps announced they were going back on their long standing promise to leave the protocol open and free. Last year the forum was told that GeoCracks had quietly sought patents on a lot of work done by all the members of the forum. There was a resolution passed requiring all members of the forum to disclose which parts of their work was going to be covered by IPR, patents, trade or service marks or anything else which would harm the status of a "free and open" protocol. I guess this is their announcement, I wonder if they wore eye patches and raised a pirate flag and threatened the others with cutlasses :-)

    I heard that some of the big industry reps announced they are all leaving the forum if GeoSucks starts asking for any money. So if anyone has any inside info, let me know.

    This could also mean that any attempt at creating OpenSource WML/WAP/WDP applications or drivers for L*nux or BSD could result in lawsuits like the DeCSS shit going on right now. Yes, this affects me directly, and those of us working on a free/illegal (choose one) version of the protocols.

    the AC
  • I investigated WAP a month ago in relation to an idea I had.

    It took me about ten minutes to dismiss them. If you attempt to download the technical specifications from www.wapforum.org, it presents you with a license agreement, just to look at the specifications. They call that open ? It irritates me when companies put these EULA which they know are unenforceable in court on packaging. But a supposedly open non-profit body ?

    It is also not clear what part the EULA restrained me beyond what the law does anyway. It says that you agree not to violate their copyright. The whole thing gave me the creeps -- should I pick through the fine print to find where they hid the real restriction in all the clauses saying that I couldn't do things I can't do anyway ?

    The whole thing had a juvenile feel to it, as if the people making the web site just did not have a cultural background in the industry. I don't know how to express this well, but an EULA for a technical publication is the type of thing a shiny-faced freshman or high school entrepreneur wannabee would come up with.

    They may or may not have some good standards and technology, but I won't be associating any business efforts with them. I never read the technical documents. If they have something to publish, then why don't they just publish it, like the rest of the world ?

  • Two Things (Score:3)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @07:29AM (#1355108) Homepage Journal
    1) What exactly does their patent cover? It wouldn't surprise me if it was 100% prior art or dead obvious.

    2) I've been seeing this disturbing trend for companies to get in on standards talks, propose standards and then a few months later after much work has been done in that direction, we find much to our surprise that the company owns a patent on the technology they suggested (MS and XML Style Sheets is a great example of this.) There should be some basic requirements in order to participate in any internet standards groups. The company should be required to sign a contract giving up all rights to patents and IP rights for any technology they suggest to the group. The company should be summarily thrown out of the group and blacklisted from any internet standards group for one year if they try to pull this shit, and they should agree to pay for time lost by the group and by the industry if a standards group goes down a dead end due their pulling this sort of thing.

  • Fatal? (Score:3)

    by TopShelf ( 92521 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @07:02AM (#1355109) Homepage Journal
    If $20,000/year for a patent license represents a "fatal blow", then those startups must have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel...

  • Re:Offtopic, IE fixing 'missing' Table tags. (Score:4)

    by Matts ( 1628 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @08:22AM (#1355110) Homepage
    Well apparently your karma just went up because of your bogus post. ;-)

    Netscape does NOT do it WRONG.

    The /TABLE tag (which is what the user was talking about) is required. See the spec [w3.org].

    The /TR and /TD tags are part of the HTML spec. They are optional. See the spec [w3.org].

    Now you should get moderated out of existance :)

  • Re:BOYCOTT!!! (Score:4)

    by sammy baby ( 14909 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @07:04AM (#1355111) Journal
    WAP is an API for making systems which interface with mobile phones, specifically the kind marketed to the "I'm so cool I need to surf the Internet on my mobile phone" set. You can find more about WAP here [wapforum.org].

    WML is like HTML for mobile phones.

  • Only WAP, not (D)HTML (Score:4)

    by nazerim ( 32960 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @07:06AM (#1355112) Homepage
    My main query of this patent is, how it applies to only the Wireless Application Protocal and not Dynamically generated HTML (I'm talking about Zope and ASP mainly - as these have server side Objects, and to a certain extent ECMAScript).

    I don't object to them wanting to make money out of their patent, but it's painfully obvious that they did *not* invent the WAP/WML standard. I'm not sure if they helped develop it (this is unlikely, as the claim would have been made earlier if this was so).

    I go back to another of my comments on Patenting - is it such a good idea? (Has anyone read Bruce Sterling's Distraction? The bit where he talks about the Chinese broadbanding US Intellectual Property? Then you'll have an idea of what I'm trying to get at.)

    Okay, back to Geoworks Patent - one of the things they've highlighted is the top-down hierarchy of implementating a "label" or "hint" and displaying it according to context. To me, this looks like what any sensible expert/AI display system would do - don't get me wrong, Internet Browsers are min-expert systems in that they make decisions on how to present the HTML to the user (IE also goes as far to fix missing TABLE tags).

    Their white paper insists on calling the display application a "mini-browser" ... this has other implications, in that they have not made it clear prior art is of course things such as the HyperCard browser (i believe this came much before HTML/Mosaic, i'm frequently wrong though ...)

    .my 2p

  • Ridiculous. (Score:4)

    by anatoli ( 74215 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @07:23AM (#1355113) Homepage
    While all software patents are bad, this one is simply ridiculous. Did anybody bother to actually read the claims? (It's not that hard.) In Claim 1 they say, in essence:
    • we have objects that need be presented to the user
    • each object has mandatory requirements and advisory attributes
    • the UI engine selects a UI implementation that satisfies mandatory requirements; if it can also satisfy advisory attributes, great; if not, well, life is tough
    That is, I have a list of objects, and want to present it with a listbox (mandatory) with 2 columns (advisory), but my widget set has only 1-column listboxes, so I have no choice but use 1-column listbox. That's it.

    Will somebody stand up and challenge this nonsence in court?

    Moderate this down (-1, YANA(P)L)
    --

  • Re:What you didn't know... (Score:4)

    by Mark F. Komarinski ( 97174 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @07:10AM (#1355114) Homepage
    According to the Yahoo press release:

    In May of 1999, Geoworks, in accordance with WAP Forum guidelines, was the first WAP member to announce its patented technology is employed as essential technology in the WAP standard.

    It looks like WAP knew about this for 8 months.
    So the WAP forum knew they were using Geoworks technology. No doubt this annoncement is after a bunch of negotiation between WAP and GeoWorks.

    At least it's not like that nasty UNISYS/GIF thing.

  • Re:It's sad to see GeoWorks fall this far... (Score:5)

    by Roblimo ( 357 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @07:31AM (#1355115) Homepage Journal
    NewDeal is a separate company that bought the old GEOS GUI in, I believe, 1995 or 1996, and made marvelous changes to it. I wrote about it several times in my "Cheap Computing" column on andovernews.com and before that on Time Warner's Netly News, which is where I wrote (online) before Andover.

    I still have NewDeal running in DRDOS 6.something on an old monochrome 386 laptop with a 20MB HD. Works fine. Nice little "full featured" office program. Its only flaw IMO is the WWW browser, which simply doesn't cut it on "modern" websites with frames, tables, etc.

    DOS, NewDeal and a throwaway PC make a great training tool for small children. There are a lot of old DOS games around that are still new to a 4-year-old.

    - Robin "roblimo" Miller

  • WAP is history (Score:5)

    by Alan Cox ( 27532 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @07:04AM (#1355116) Homepage
    The wap forum can do nothing but put a brave face on their ending. The $20,000 for companies will put anyone off meaning WAP will never get the rich content the web did. Nothing appears to preclude the patent owners from charging everyone later if the so wish.

    There is a lesson here for the US goverment. Had their stupid algorithm patents got out of hand before the web they'd have no internet worth talking about, just a random bunch of computer wizards, universities and military sites

    Alan

Slashdot Top Deals

If all else fails, lower your standards.

Close