OT-Killing Pop-ups as a webmaster

"Newps" wrote in message
news:UBtub.176854$mZ5.1249265@attbi_s54

Also no telemarketing at all.

That'll change soon. Recent rulings will allow cell phone numbers to be
published.

The only beef I have will cellular is that *I* pay for all calls - inbound
or outbound. That means (with my provider) that I am charged one minute
just to answer a "wrong number" call. I had one problem with an old number
where somebody apparently confused my number with a fax number. Sure, I
eventually recognized the number and stopped answering, but I was constantly
getting calls until I switched the number (for a hefty service fee from the
non-empathizing phone company). I wouln't have been nearly as ****ed had
the caller been charged for the air time.

--
John T
http://tknowlogy.com/tknoFlyer
__________

Jay Honeck wrote:

and we have cell phone tarrifs of about 1 cent per minute to other cell
phones
(on the same provider) or 1 cent from cellphone to fixed (land based)
phones.

What does this get you in terms of better service?

And if the answer is "nothing", why did you bring their existence up at
this juncture?

We're not discussing just service, but acceptance of service. With a lower
- and more predictable - price, acceptance will be quicker. Just imagine
what lower insurance rates would do for aviation.

I've also been told that European cell providers didn't go down the "charge
for received calls" route, but I don't know that this is accurate.

- Andrew

Newps wrote:


there are coming up mobile phones with about up to 1 mbit/s IP-access,
allowing video phone, data transmission, etc. (calles UMTS). there are
GRPS mobiles with built in browsers (the browser technology is from
Symbian), so you can go online and surf the web. you might search the web
for WAP, GRPS, UMTS, G3

This is also a cultural thing. Without a standard keyboard and a decent
screen size web service on your cell phone will never takeoff here.

Maybe. On the other hand, I'm seeing more and more people with what I'll
call "connected palmtops" around here (NJ/NY area). Whether these are PDAs
with modems or cell phones with Internetability makes little difference in
the scheme of things; they're coming.

Right now the camera phones are a joke. The picture quality is
horrible. I realize better camera phones are coming but this too is a
fad. I had web service for a while but you are so limited in what you
can see that it renders it worthless for the masses.

That's just a bootstrap problem. A number of our clients (I work at an
Internet software shop) are looking to have their content products (for
example, a "continuing education training system") made available on at
least some subset of these connected palmtops. So we should expect more
content to be available over time, which will bring more users, etc.

A couple of years ago, a client of ours that sells a type of financial
management product was giving away "connected palmtops" to their better
clients. This was to promote the immediate availability of the
information/management they were selling.

It worked, in the sense that a lot of their other users started using those
things too.

In the 4-plane club of which I'm a member, we've a website on which
scheduling is performed. Is it a coincidence that the person that consumes
the most hours has a web-capable palmtop of some sort? Nobody thinks so;
he can get immediate notification of cancellations, and leap.

There are other technologies happening which will likely also have an
impact. A client of ours with an unreasonable fear of wrist injury just
started sounding drunk in her email. It turns out she's started using some
voice "typing" package.

It's awful. Horrible. But *much* better than the recognition systems on
which my wife worked just a few years ago. Next year?

- Andrew

On Tue, 18 Nov 2003 16:47:57 GMT, "Jay Honeck"
wrote:

In other words, since the vastly superior US phone system was engineered (by
law) to the "Five Nines" standard (I.E.: 99.999% reliability), there wasn't
as urgent a need for a viable alternative.

I just want to point out that I know from experience that the Swiss,
Austrian, and German landline telephone systems are all at least as
good as the U.S. system.

Rob

--
[You] don't make your kids P.C.-proof by keeping them
ignorant, you do it by helping them learn how to
educate themselves.

-- Orson Scott Card

On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:

"Jay Honeck" writes:

In my world the only question that matters is this: Can it be done with
tools at hand?

Of course it can. Use Wordpad.

Seriously. HTML editors are a snare and a delusion, they produce
lousy code, and they interfere with your ever learning what you're
doing.

I really, really like Arachnophilia (http://www.arachnoid.com/) and it's
FREE! It's basically a set up from Wordpad/Editpad, in that it
"spellchecks" your HTML, and colour codes various parts to make it all
more viewable at source. (Content text is black, tags are blue, open tags
are purple, if you make a gross error you'll get lots of red text...)
Lovely program.

Arachnophilia 4 is Windows only, and is great.

Arach. 5 is Java-based, so it's platform independant but fiddlier to use.

The program ha got a bunch of wizards & helpers, but you can ignore then
and handcode to your hearts content if you like.

I was also not too disappointed with Netscape 7 Composer when I tried it
at a friend's a few weeks ago. It'll let you handcode, and the generated
code isn't total trash, but it still tries to control too much of the
coding process for you...

Brian.

On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Jay Honeck wrote:

Also note that mobile phone based web-browsers are going to become
increasingly prevalent. For a business in the hotel industry, mobile
devices will be VERY important to you, as people will probably use their
GPRS or 3G phone to look up a hotel when they show up to Iowa City
airport on a cold and rainy night. Most of these phones don't run MSIE -
they run the Symbian browser. Write Microsoft-only web pages at your
peril!

At last, a real REASON to write something that is "standardized".

Um... Jay, that's been the reason for HTML standards for a lot longer than
web-capable phones have been around! Windows has never been the only
platform, and Internet Exploiter has (thankfully) never been the only
browser going. Writing code that only works properly on Windows IE has
never been a good idea.

Okay, here's a question for you: Can I make "standardized" web pages using
FrontPage?

I'm sure you can, but it might involve either manual editing after
FrontPage has finished, or tweaking FP's options & defaults.

In my world the only question that matters is this: Can it be done with
tools at hand?

Editpad is a highly underrated little utility.

Brian.

In article kkqub.38033$Dw6.176065@attbi_s02, Jay Honeck wrote:
Okay, here's a question for you: Can I make "standardized" web pages using
FrontPage?

No idea, never used it.
The only GUI HTML editor I've used was GNNpress back in about 1996.

My real objection to Front Page is the extensions - they are a nasty
security risk server-side. I did have one user on my server who really
wanted to use them, so I put them on a virtual machine on their own!
(One of the nice things about having a non-Microsoft server is that you
can create complete, separate virtual machines without having to pay
through the nose for licensing and having to pay through the nose
CPU-time wise)

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"

In article 13sub.38831$Dw6.179091@attbi_s02, Jay Honeck wrote:
Yeah, I've heard that. The reasons for this remains mysterious to me,
although the explanation always given here is that it's because European
(and Asian) land-line phone systems were so awful that the new (and better)
cellular technology just exploded as a result.

The explanation is wrong. Britain, at least, has had a digital-based
telephone system for years - System X and System Y (modular digital
telephone exchanges developed by Plessey (IIRC) and Ericssen
respectively were around when I was a teenager. The last
electromechanical Strowger exchanges disappeared even from the lowest
priority rural areas years ago.

In other words, since the vastly superior US phone system was engineered (by
law) to the "Five Nines" standard (I.E.: 99.999% reliability), there wasn't
as urgent a need for a viable alternative.

The British phone system was engineered to a similar standard. (On a
completely unrelated note, it's interesting how calls from the Isle of
Man to the United States are 7p a minute (roughly US $0.10/min) but
calls from the IOM to France are about 30p a minute...). However, when
cellphones started really picking up in popularity in Britain, all
providers Europe-wide had standardized on GSM (so wherever you went,
your phone would work) wheras coverage in the US at the same time was
poor and fragmented, even at a state level. In Europe, you could go
to any country and the phone would just work. In the USA, even in 2002,
you'd often end up paying through the nose on 'analog roaming' where
most of the features of your phone would stop working! Understandably,
the take-up would be lower in that environment. Not to mention you have
to pay for incoming calls, which you generally don't in Europe (so
a GBP20 top-up on my prepaid cellphone can last three months).

The standardization on GSM helped competition, too. The cellular market
in Britain at least is extremely competitive which helps drives prices
down. Because of this competition, the cell phone can free you from
your local phone monopoly. From the outset of GSM to today, this has
been really limited to voice, but with 3G emerging, mobile technologies
will also make the Internet service market more competitive and drive
down prices there, too.

It has little to do with the quality of US landlines, and a lot more
to do with the fragmented offerings of the cell companies, who are
trying desperately to behave like the fixed-line monopolies most of
them have come from. The cell companies in the US seem to be thinking
in landline terms, and trying to do the utmost to lock the customer
in rather than offering good value. That's why I never bought a cell
phone when I was living in the States - it just wasn't worthwhile.
You are stuck in long contracts, and more often than not your cell
phone is locked to a particular provider. With my phone, I just put
a different SIM card in to switch providers. Providers know this,
and know they have to provide a good service for me to not take the
thirty seconds or so it takes to pop the back off the phone and put
a different SIM card in.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"

In article , Frank wrote:
No offense taken. And FTR I can see your site just fine, I just can't view
the videos because they are in proprietary formats. (There is no viewer for
Linux for .wmv's as of now.)

Xine will show .wmv videos just fine. I watched the video using Xine.
The wmv format is just a slightly repackaged MPEG4 file that has been
"embraced and extended" by the Beast of Redmond.

Even if I used MS as an OS, I still would use Mozilla just because I like
the features it provides. If it came to pass that Mozilla was found to not
work correctly because of non-compliance I would look for a new browser
too. (Assuming it wasn't just a bug that would be fixed after being
reported).

Mozilla has become much better than MSIE in recent years. So has
Konqueror. Windows users can run Mozilla too - if you run Windows, try
it and see how you like it compared to MSIE. I don't know what I'd do
without tabbed browsing now. I use Konqueror on Linux and *BSD, and
Mozilla on Windows.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"

On Wed, 19 Nov 2003 13:42:15 -0000, Dylan Smith
wrote:

The standardization on GSM helped competition, too. The cellular market
in Britain at least is extremely competitive which helps drives prices
down. Because of this competition, the cell phone can free you from
your local phone monopoly.

Cell phone competition in the U.S. is reasonably healthy, except in
low population-density areas. Even there, as for example in my
father-in-law's area in rural southern Utah, he's got two choices for
providers.

So the situation, while not terribly *standardized* on one kind of
technology, is also not as dire as people make it out to be. I'm on a
plan which permits the use of "daytime minutes" in an area reaching
from the southern border of the United States all the way to the
northern border, and 1000 miles inland or so from the west coast of
the country.

That particular plan is discontinued, but others like it exist which
cover the entire country in all the areas I can think of going. Many
of my neighbors simply don't bother with landline phones anymore.

Rob

--
[You] don't make your kids P.C.-proof by keeping them
ignorant, you do it by helping them learn how to
educate themselves.

-- Orson Scott Card