From editor@telecom-digest.org Sun Sep 12 01:34:37 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i8C5Yb426599; Sun, 12 Sep 2004 01:34:37 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2004 01:34:37 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200409120534.i8C5Yb426599@massis.lcs.mit.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: massis.lcs.mit.edu: ptownson set sender to editor@telecom-digest.org using -f To: ptownson Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V23 #425 TELECOM Digest Sun, 12 Sep 2004 01:33:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 425 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Weapons of Mass Delusion: America's Real National Emergency (M Solomon) Is That a Hard Drive in Your Pocket? (Monty Solomon) New Cellphone Headset Cuts Background Noise, Improves Voice (M Solomon) New BlackBerry Combo Takes on Treo (Monty Solomon) "Broadcast Flag", was Re: My New DVR From Cable One (Danny Burstein) Re: More Thoughts About RCA (Scott Dorsey) Re: More Thoughts About RCA (Lisa Hancock) Re: Microsoft Technology Powers Leading Broadcast Tools (Mark Atwood) Last Laugh! Start the Day Right! (Lisa Minter) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 17:45:53 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: "Weapons of Mass Delusion: America's Real National Emergency" UPDATE: 11 SEP 04: An Adobe PDF version of the book is now available for free and released under the Creative Commons License. Accordingly, any proceeds from sales of the hard-copy editions will be donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation Popular technology commentator and author Richard Forno's witty but realistic examination of American culture, particularly since September 11. He acknowledges -- and challenges where necessary - many of the critical issues Americans are afraid (or incapable) of confronting themselves. He concludes that the national emergency facing America today isn't terrorism or rogue nations, but the daily illusions and mass delusions that make up what passes for reality in American society -- in other words, the real danger facing America is what we're allowing ourselves to become. http://www.infowarrior.org/wmd/ ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 17:55:06 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Is That a Hard Drive in Your Pocket? The next big thing in cell phones has arrived. Now you'll just have to figure out what to do with a 1.5-gigabyte handheld. By Eric Hellweg Where were you on Tuesday, September 7? Struggling to get back to work mode after a three-day weekend? If so, then it's understandable if you missed the small announcement issued by Samsung on that date. The two-paragraph press release seemed innocuous enough, but its ramifications will likely be felt around the world. The company proclaimed that it was releasing the world's first cell phone with a hard drive. The SPH-V5400 model phone, which will debut in Korea next week, comes equipped with a postage-stamp-sized hard drive storing 1.5 gigabytes. That's a massive increase in capacity over the flash memory that most cell phones ship with today. The new phone also features a one-megapixel digital camera, a high-resolution, 5.6-centimeter liquid crystal display, a software-based MP3 player, e-book software, and Korean-English dictionary software. The device will sell for the equivalent of $800. So what's the big deal? The technology industry works under the maxim, build it and they will come. Build faster processors, and the applications taking advantage of the speed will arrive. Build more storage and the industry will find ways to fill it. Up until now, cell phones have made do with storage capacities that are tiny by today's standards. Most cell phones max out around 100 megabytes, while home computers ship with 40, 60, 80, or 100 gigabyte drives. A cell phone sporting 1.5 gigabytes suddenly opens itself up to more data possibilities, and begins encroaching even more into the domain of portable music player and PDAs. http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/09/wo_hellweg091004.asp ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 18:11:00 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: New Cellphone Headset Cuts Background Noise, Improves Voice By WALTER S. MOSSBERG One of the benefits of cellphones is that they allow you to make calls from anywhere you can get a signal. One of the downsides of that freedom is that you often find yourself calling from noisy environments -- sidewalks bathed in traffic sounds, airports bombarded with crowd noises and public announcements -- that can make the call nearly inaudible. Now, a small Silicon Valley start-up company called Aliph has come up with a solution: a new cellphone headset that suppresses background noise dramatically so that your voice comes through loud and clear even in the most clamorous settings. This new "adaptive" headset, called Jawbone, goes on sale for $150 starting today at the company's Web site, www.jawbone.com. In its first incarnation, it works with many, but not all, phones from Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Versions for other phones are in the works. Aliph's Jawbone technology, which grew out of research the company did for the Pentagon, relies on two kinds of microphones. Standard microphones transmit your speech and detect background noise. A special contact microphone, which rests against your cheek, uses vibrations in your bones to determine exactly when you are speaking. This latter mike, which Aliph calls a "voice activity sensor," allows the Jawbone headset to distinguish your voice from background noises much more accurately than a normal cellphone headset can. http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20040909.html ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 18:52:45 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: New BlackBerry Combo Takes on Treo By WALTER S. MOSSBERG In a quest to invent the perfect combination of a cellphone, pocket e-mail device and organizer, most companies have failed. Either their products were so big and bulky they didn't look or work like phones, or they were so small and phone-like they had no room for the keyboards needed to create lots of e-mail messages. Or, the hardware was creative, but they had lousy e-mail or phone software. Only the palmOne Treo 600 has succeeded so far. It looks and feels like a phone, and yet it has a full keyboard and excellent e-mail and phone software. By contrast, Research In Motion, makers of the BlackBerry e-mail device popular in corporate circles, has failed to meld the phone with e-mail very well. Its BlackBerry models with built-in phones have been bulky, with a clumsy interface for phone calls. But the Treo 600 finally has a worthy competitor, and, surprisingly, it's a BlackBerry -- a radically different BlackBerry that looks like a phone, not like the squat models that have so far borne the BlackBerry name. Not only that, but this BlackBerry is inexpensive for a smart phone and is aimed as much at consumers and small businesses as it is at corporations. The new gadget is called the BlackBerry 7100t, and it will be available starting early next month from T-Mobile USA. It looks and works like a phone, but includes standard BlackBerry e-mail and a very cleverly designed keyboard. It's smaller and lighter than the Treo 600, and costs just $199. Service plans start at $59.99 a month, including 1,000 anytime minutes of voice calling and unlimited e-mail, Web browsing, instant messages and text messages. The 7100t works on the GSM and GPRS standards and can be used in both the U.S. and Europe. http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/solution-20040908.html ------------------------------ From: Danny Burstein Subject: "Broadcast Flag", was Re: My New DVR From Cable One Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 10:05:36 UTC Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC In pv+usenet@pobox.com (Paul Vader) writes: >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I was told by CableOne (and perhaps I >> should have questioned them further, but it didn't really matter to me) >> that most or all 'conventional, over the cable recording systems such >> as TiVo' would not allow recording of many or most movies which had >> restrictions on them.' > I figured it was something like that. You were lied to. * Nope. He was just given given advance warning. New recording equipment is supposed to recognize a "do not record" flag that gets sent over-the-air along with the signal. Periodically a couple of the networks "accidentally" activate it nowadays and a hefty number of folk discover they can't time shift the program they wanted. It's going to get a lot worse Real Soon Now. Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded] ------------------------------ From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) Subject: Re: More Thoughts About RCA Date: 11 Sep 2004 09:48:26 -0400 Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000) Lisa Hancock wrote: > The Campbell-Kelly book "Computer" says that IBM's very popular 1401 > was popular because of its excellent printer -- a mechanical device -- > rather than the CPU electronics. > It took a heck of a long time for other manufacturers to come up with > a line printer that matched the IBM 1403 printer's quality. I'm not sure they ever did. As of around 1995, a local business was still running a whole line of 1403 printers and they were chugging along solidly. It's hard to beat a record like that. They have since replaced them, though, with some far less reliable laser printers. > In the Watson autobiography, he says Sarnoff came to IBM to get > patents (that the govornment ordered IBM to release). So, RCA used > IBM know-how. Also, RCA's Spectra was a copy of S/360. The Spectra/70 wasn't really an S/360 copy. They copied much of the instruction set with the intention of making it a compatible machine, but they didn't copy any of the actual architecture. (At the time, the whole notion of microcode making the architecture and instruction set independant was fabulously innovative, and this was one of the huge wins of the 360 concept: a whole line of different machines that could run the same code). Anyway, when they did this, they guessed wrong and implemented only the ASCII support, not any of the EBCDIC support for peripherals. IBM later discontinued all the ASCII stuff. So effectively compatibility was out the wall, although the similarities made it easier for assembler programmers to go between the two machines. Sperry turned the Spectra/70 into the Series/70, and it was actually a very solid machine. I think that Georgia State University was using one as late as 1988 or so. --scott "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: More Thoughts About RCA Date: 11 Sep 2004 09:51:56 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Julian Thomas wrote: > I tried to send this to Lisa (or is it Jeff??) at > hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com but it failed. Public responses that can be shared by all are respectfully requested. > And, for my $0.02 worth, Honeywell had tape drives on the H800 that > were far superior to the IBM 727/729 models. I admit some bias; I > worked on the D1000 and the H800 before joining IBM in 1962. They were better, Watson admits so. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, IBM was concentrating on other areas, and didn't do too much with its tape periperhals. This allowed other mfrs to get ahead of IBM. While the CPUs of IBM's System/360 were new, the tape drives were basically warmed over models from the prior generation. ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Microsoft Technology Powers Leading Broadcast Tools; IPTV From: Mark Atwood Organization: EasyNews, UseNet made Easy! Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 19:40:27 GMT Monty Solomon writes: > Microsoft Demonstrates First Set-Top Boxes for IPTV Platform "First" my ass. There are several IPTV STBs available already, just not from Microsoft. FerEx, the Amino IPTV STBs, at http://www.aminocom.com/ (I don't work for Amino. I just hate it when Microsoft spins their press releases to make it sound like when it's the first time *they* did something, it's the first time anyone did.) Mark Atwood | When you do things right, people won't be sure mra@pobox.com | you've done anything at all. http://www.pobox.com/~mra | http://www.livejournal.com/users/fallenpegasus ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Last Laugh! Start the Day Right! Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 23:44:37 -0500 With thanks to Kathy and Ken (the other one.) One can substitute many, many people/things/ideas for "John Kerry." How to start each day with a positive outlook ... 1. Open a new file in your PC. 2. Name it "John Kerry." 3. Send it to the trash. 4. Empty the trash. 5. Your PC will ask you, "Do you really want to get rid of John Kerry?" 6. Answer calmly, "yes," and press the mouse button firmly. 7. Feel better ... ?? Cheers. ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. 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