Posts filed under 'Interoperability'
The answer to this question is obvious: VoIP is an element of Communication, and firewalls and network address translators (NATs) are elements of Separation (NAT tends towards Obfuscation, but it amounts to the same thing). These are opposing forces: Separation constricts Communication and Communication pierces Separation. It’s like yin and yang, day and night, law and chaos. Can a leopard change his spots? Can a firewall be welcoming? Oh, you mean at the technical level? Right. None shall pass There’s
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By Ran Arad | August 6th, 2008 | Filed under Interoperability, Standardization
After the last post about text and binary protocols, Sagee sent me a link to Google’s protocol buffers, which is a protocol used to send structured data over the network, which also provides backwards compatibility between versions. From the announcement: “XML? No, that wouldn’t work. As nice as XML is, it isn’t going to be efficient enough for this scale. When all of your machines and network links are running at capacity, XML is an extremely expensive proposition. Not to
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By Ran Arad | July 23rd, 2008 | Filed under Development, Interoperability, Standardization
A while ago, Paul E. Jones, the prophet of AMS, mentioned that AMS would use XML encoding: “We just finished a meeting yesterday. During the meeting we reached agreement to use XML for this new system. Personally, I think that’s going to be very cool. There is a huge amount of tool support for XML. We also had a person from the W3C attend who shared information on the Efficient XML Interchange (http://www.w3.org/XML/EXI/). In theory, this allows one to create
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By Ran Arad | July 16th, 2008 | Filed under Interoperability, Standardization
In the standardized human behavior series, I discuss human behavior, compare it to a protocol and see what we can alter or learn from it. Previously I considered whether people want to be standardized at all and concluded that they do not. Nobody wants to think of himself as a puppet manipulated by external forces or to act just as is expected of him. It’s possible to take the “Soup Nazi” episode from the Seinfeld sitcom as an example. The
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By Ran Arad | May 14th, 2008 | Filed under Interoperability, Standardization
I have previously mentioned Joel Spolsky’s brilliant post about standards. If you’ve not read it yet, it is really worth your while. In that post he quotes Jon Postel‘s robustness principle and Marshall Rose’s critique: Counter-intuitively, Postel’s robustness principle (”be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept”) often leads to deployment problems. Why? When a new implementation is initially fielded, it is likely that it will encounter only a subset of existing implementations. If those implementations follow
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By Ran Arad | April 7th, 2008 | Filed under Interoperability, Standardization
There are two kinds of protocol wars: one is between competing protocols, and the other is between protocol implementations. I would like to offer a glimpse into the reasons and ways in which companies implementing the same protocol compete with each other. However, I will first need to make a small disclaimer: any example I give here is not meant to imply that any company involved has any intention of malice or foul play. In fact, I am sure that
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By Ran Arad | March 31st, 2008 | Filed under Interoperability
Joel Spolsky wrote a brilliant post 3 days ago about Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 development team declaring that IE8 will enforce standard HTML, and sites that do not confirm to the standards will not be displayed properly. Joel did not wish to take sides in the war between idealists and pragmatists, but eventually concluded that since there are so many HTML pages already written in bad HTML, the pragmatists are likely to win. That means that any web site not
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By Ran Arad | March 20th, 2008 | Filed under Interoperability, Standardization
Last week I was in Finland. And it snowed. And it was dark. And we had an interoperability conference for 3G-324M and for IMS Video Share. And in that location in time and space, these two things were very close physically, but a world apart conceptually.In one world, there was the 3G-324M. This protocol has become popular with vendors of 3G phones, and it is now reaching an envious level of maturity: the basic functions work well, and vendors are
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By Ran Arad | January 28th, 2008 | Filed under Interoperability
On January 21-25 2008, an IMTC 3G-324M and IMS Activity Groups Face2Face event will take place in Finland hosted by Nokia. This is going to be the second time that Nokia hosts such an event in their lovely town, Tampere, in this cold season of the year. Will it be cold as it sounds? I am not so sure about that…This is going to be the second event for the IMS AG, while 3G-324M AG did so many
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By Oren Libis | January 9th, 2008 | Filed under Interoperability
