From editor@telecom-digest.org Sat May 1 01:22:17 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p2/8.11.3) id i415MHM25157; Sat, 1 May 2004 01:22:17 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sat, 1 May 2004 01:22:17 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200405010522.i415MHM25157@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 #219 TELECOM Digest Sat, 1 May 2004 01:20:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 219 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: Used Norstar M7310 Sets Worth Anything? (Tom Betz) Re: Good News! Four Oakland Men Cited in First US Spam Case (Wesrock) Re: Receiving Faxes via the Internet? (Clarence Dold) Re: Find Update: Bellcore SR-320 Exchange Message Interface (McIntosh) Re: Feds: No Analog TV by '09 (Stanley Cline) Re: Telephony Software Recommendation (Mail Ias) Re: "If I am Elected" (Charles Cryderman) What Remains of Western Union (Michael D. Sullivan) Chicago City Government Centrex History (Lisa Hancock) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Tom Betz Subject: Re: Used Norstar M7310 Sets Worth Anything? Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 21:25:16 UTC Organization: XOme Quoth Dave Phelps in news:telecom23.217.13@telecom-digest.org: > Remarkably? That DR5 will probably run for another 10 years. I say it's remarkable because every surface (I mean EVERY nook and cranny, inside and out) is coated with a fairly thick layer of air-borne cocoa dust; this thing was mounted in a vented closet just outside the production floor, and was never cleaned in its entire life. I can't imagine how it has kept from melting down, the cooling from those cocoa-coated surfaces must be horrible. Thanks for the eBay suggestion; the Bakery's CEO is a big eBay fan. I can dump this in his hands, as I'm not one. "I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it; who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection." - W.S. ------------------------------ From: Wesrock@aol.com Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 19:33:28 EDT Subject: Re: Good News! Four Oakland Men Cited in First US Spam Case In a message dated 4/30/04 1:58:24 PM Central Daylight Time, editor@telecom-digest.org writes: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: While Wes is correct, he should recall > that television, radio and newspapers deal with thirty second 'sound > bites' for the general public, not oil company historians or economists > dealing with stocks and corporate mergers, etc. I am sure the use of > 'Amoco' in the source document was intended to be a convenient landmark > for the public readership rather than any official statement. I am > sure the official indictments, etc list the exact legal name of the > 'victims' of the theft of service the spammers used. "British Petroleum" > tends to make many folks think it is 'some sort of company over there > somewhere' while 'Amoco' on the other hand is around them everywhere > in this country. PAT] A check on the CBS Market Watch web site shows that the name is no longer "British Petroleum;" it is "BP plc" and is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol BP. Just as the American Association of Retired Persons has changed its name to simply "AARP," presumably because it wants to be seen as a representative of the middle aged, too, to enhance the perception of its lobbying efforts. Wes Leatherock wesrock@aol.com wleathus@yahoo.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: About a year ago, two no-good guys held up our local McDonalds, and got away with several hundred dollars. The Independence Reporter the next day noted in the police activities column that police never did catch the two guys, and quoted the manager as saying 'they had been watching for a couple days, and apparently knew my routine for going to the bank each day'. Trouble is of course there is no such entity as 'McDonalds'. There is a corporation called McDonalds Management Corporation of Tulsa, OK and there is locally the 'Tenth and Laurel Street Corporation' which is the name the local owners have for their business, d/b/a 'McDonalds'. McDonalds is a smart bunch; they don't actually *own* anything except a few (very few) corporate stores which they have not yet sold. I guess that makes it harder to find out exactly who does own one of their stores for lawsuit purposes. But when the story in the Daily Reporter said 'Armed Gummen Hit McDonalds' everyone in town knew who they were talking about. Ditto I think when the name 'Amoco' gets tossed around the same way. PAT] ------------------------------ From: dold@ReceivingX.usenet.us.com Subject: Re: Receiving Faxes via the Internet? Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 23:52:07 UTC Organization: a2i network Dr. Joel M. Hoffman wrote: > the others -- you can send your fax in .pdf format (which means you > can use any program to create it), and you can send it via e-mail. Along that vein, I stumbled onto a "pdf printer". It appears as a Windows printer, so you can print to it from any Windows program, and it renders a pdf file as the output, which you can then send via email. Go2PDF - Freeware - Create PDF http://www.go2pdf.com/product.html If you could convince the sender to install it, they might be able to email a pdf to you instead of sending a fax. I have an eFax number, receive only, and receive generic TIFF (I signed up as a non-Windows user). I haven't used it in two years, but I think it still works. Clarence A Dold - Hidden Valley (Lake County) CA USA 38.8-122.5 ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 01 May 2004 01:48:33 +0000 (GMT) From: mcintosh@nospam.com (Allen McIntosh) Subject: Re: Find Update: Bellcore SR-320 Exchange Message Interface ( Organization: mouse-potato.com In article , Madra Beag wrote: > I hope someone might be able to help. I own an old copy of the > Bellcore Special Report SR-320, Exchange Message Interface (EMI) Issue > 12 October 1995 > Is this record format still used today (by local and LD carriers)? > Is this record format still called EMI? > Is this some how related to CABS? > I did some reading on Telcordia, but with no luck. > Where might I get an updated version of this or similar record format? According to Verizon (found via google): Exchange Message Record/Exchange Message Interface (EMR/EMI) The standard format used for exchange of telecommunications message information among Local Exchange Carriers for billable, non-billable, sample, settlement and study data. EMR format is contained in Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bellcore) Publication BR-010-200-010 CRIS Exchange Messaging. Searching our website for BR-010-200-010 didn't turn up anything. The Telcordia Information SuperStore didn't seem to have it, which means it's either old or out of print. Maybe you can find a real person in publications somewhere: 1.800.521.2673 (USA & Canada) +1.732.699.5800 (Worldwide) My real email address is mcintosh ##at## research ##dot## telcordia ##dot## com ------------------------------ From: Stanley Cline Subject: Re: Feds: No Analog TV by '09 Organization: Myself, in Dunwoody/Sandy Springs/Atlanta, GA, USA :) Reply-To: sc1-news@roamer1.org Date: Sat, 01 May 2004 02:14:12 GMT On Fri, 30 Apr 2004 09:26:28 -0700, Mark Crispin wrote: > Grey bars are less likely to cause phosphor damage on the monitor, > especially if you leave your TV at the default settings which generally > have the white balance ("picture" or "contrast" control) much too high. True. Even with gray bars there's still *some* risk of burn-in damage, but IMO, proper settings (either just turning brightness and contrast down, or even better, properly calibrating the set with something like the Video Essentials or Avia DVDs) make the risk of burn-in fairly minimal for the average TV user. I just bought a new Toshiba 16:9 rear projection TV for my new house; I chose 16:9 as "futureproofing", and most current HD programming that I'd watch is 16:9 *now*. This particular TV has that "normal" 4:3 mode (4:3 picture with gray bars on the sides) and four stretch/zoom modes, some of which use unequal stretching to provide a better result than the usual "basic" fix of stretching or zooming in. Now back to cell phones ... Most analog cellular traffic nowadays comes from OnStar and other legacy/embedded equipment and from roaming traffic when customers with CDMA phones are roaming on TDMA/GSM systems and vice versa; very few carriers will activate analog-only phones (usually only on low-end "safety" plans if that) nowadays. Nearly all carriers either have digital or are adding digital (urban carriers to address capacity/demand, and rural carriers to maximize roaming revenue); the only carriers of *any* size that are still analog-only are some carriers in Alaska bush country (e.g., Unicom in Bethel) -- and Sussex Cellular (aka SciTel Wireless) in rural New Jersey, who is selling "unlimited" plans on an AMPS-only network, (per FCC filings) wants to go CDMA but doesn't have the money to do so, (again per FCC filings) is trying to get someone to provide an E911 solution for AMPS, and has no roaming revenue issues to worry about since practically no one roams on them. (Why Sussex won't sell out to AT&T or Dobson is a total mystery to me. Most rural carriers *live* off roaming revenue ...) Even small rural carriers that serve only one or a few counties, such as Wilkes Cellular in Georgia, Farmers Wireless in Alabama, and Pace Cellular in Louisiana, and Commnet Wireless, a fairly unique carrier which provides roaming-only coverage in scattered areas all over the US, are going digital! Stanley Cline -- sc1 at roamer1 dot org -- http://www.roamer1.org/ "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. There might be a law against it by that time." -/usr/games/fortune ------------------------------ From: mailias@yahoo.com (Mail Ias) Subject: Re: Telephony Software Recommendation Organization: Insight Broadband Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 18:45:19 GMT In article , Larry Snider wrote: > I was wondering what kind of software would be best for the following > hardware configuration: > Alliance Server Rack > Dual PIII 550Mhz CPU Card > 54 Gb (3 x 18 Gb drives) > 1 Dialogic VFX/40ESC > 2 Dialogic D/41E > 1 Dialogic D/480SC-2T1 > 2 Dialogic MSI/240SC Global cards each w/ 2 SI/80SC Global daughterboards > 1 Dialogic DCB/SC Global > Larry > www.eSnider.net You may want to look into Asterisk - The Open Source Linux PBX. http://www.asterisk.org I believe it supports some Dialogic hardware, but maybe not every piece you listed. ------------------------------ From: Charles Cryderman Subject: Re: "If I am Elected" Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 16:40:05 -0400 All, It just amazes me the way you people keep going on about this. First the media did a recount of their own and found that there was no difference in who won the Florida vote. Second, if these people in Florida are so stupid that they can't figure out how to vote then maybe they are to stupid to even be permitted to vote. I have used the old lever machines, optical scan machines as well as absentee and punch cards. Found them all easy to use and understand. Besides, if they are that stupid there are people at the polling places to teach them how to vote. President Bush won the election; get over it and move on. This November you can vote for the person that you believe will do the best job, who knows, you may get lucky. Also, Pat, in a recent issue you implied (I may be wrong on this) that come November if Senator Kerry wins that he'll get us out of Iraq, don't bet on it. We are going to be there for many years no mater who is in the White House. Now for my disclaimer, I am not a President Bush fan and do not plan to vote for him again (Yes, I did in 2000) but I also would never vote for Senator Kerry either. For me, I am writing in Senator John McCain and Secretary Colin Powel. Chip Cryderman [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So either President Bush won the election in which case 'he was elected' and has not been very good about keeping his election promises or he did not win the election and was appointed by Supreme Court fiat. Either way, President or resident or resident President now in power, as I sometimes say, the situation is very grim, IMO. I think what I implied was the the earliest opportunity to get out of Iraq (not that it would happen that day) would be on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, assuming people get totally fed up with the fundamentalist Christian now in office. No guarentees of course. Remember in Viet Nam, President Kennedy got us into that mess and it was twelve or thirteen years later under President Nixon that we got out of it, so no, there is no guarentee that Kerry will end it either, but sure as hell, Bush isn't going to end it. By the way, if you have a Greek dictionary, check out the two parts of our common word these days, 'fundamentalist': 'fundle' and 'mental' and don't forget that the first /a/ in the middle serves to negate the rest of the word which follows. You can write in whomever you wish, and I am inclined to do the same for whichever Libertarian candidates are running for election, but as the Democrats angrily point out if you do that you have given your vote to Bush. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Michael D. Sullivan Subject: What Remain of Western Union Re: Review: 19th Century Telegraphers Date: Sat, 01 May 2004 03:35:33 GMT In article , Charles.Cryderman@globalcrossing.com says: > Just a FYI > Western Union was taken over by MCI in the early nineties. At one > time WU had run fiber across many of their right-of-ways and were > selling long haul facilities to carriers as well as being a CAP > (completive access provider). MCI bought a fair amount of physical plant from WU (including Telex/TWX?), but it didn't take over the company. WU the company, including what was left of its telegram and Mailgram service, its funds- transfer business, and an enhanced service called Desk Mail (electronic access to telegram and Mailgram) became New Valley Corp., which continued to offer these services through a subsidiary, Western Union Data Services Co., for a while. It had shed the telegram and mailgram (and presumably Desk Mail) by the early 1990s and was no longer a common carrier. It's still around today as a funds-transfer company. Michael D. Sullivan Bethesda, MD, USA Delete nospam from my address and it won't work. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Chicago City Govt Centrex History? Date: 30 Apr 2004 20:44:59 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com In the Amoco post, the Centrex used by the city of Chicago was mentioned. I was curious about its history, particularly in the early days. By way of comparison, for many years the City of Phila had a quasi centrex -- MUnicipal 6-9700. While many city agencies were served by direct dial lines, a great many had 5 digit extension numbers that outside callers had to go through the switchboard. (Today there is 685 as well as 686 and the main number is 686-1776, renumbered for the bicentennial.) Anyway, in 1970, City Hall had a 24 position (divided into two sections of 12) type 608 switchboard to handle incoming calls, despite so many lines being directly dialable. The 608 was the Bell System's last cord board, developed in the late 1950s. The operators had jack fields for extension groups. That is, if you wanted ext 3-1234, she'd plug into the 3- group and dial (on a key pad) 1234. While the City upgraded the centrex, many station sets, such as in the libraries, remained old WE 500 sets with the old number plates. The City didn't get around to converting to touch tone until very late. The city had a private PABX system that apparently was phased out in the late 1970s. You could see the distinctive AE 40 sets in certain places. An odd quirk was modern signs at the airport directing people to report a fire to use "any city automatic telephone", which referred to the city's PABX which no longer existed. The city's transit system also had its own private PABX, also discontinued, and replaced by a Bell Centrex. For emergency calls, most people dialed 0 and asked for the police or fire dept. Around the late 1960s, the city introduced an easy number for police -- 231-3131. Later, they had 911, but kept the 231 number for minor calls and asked the public to use 911 only for life/crime emergencies. They have 911 only now, but I believe some cities are introducing a second number (311?) for low level calls. The fire dept dispatcher before 911 was interesting. Calls at street pull boxes (now discontinued) sounded a loud beep in response to the callbox #. The dispatcher looked up the number then used a simple cord switchboard to notify the appropriate fire house. Voice calls were handled the same way. Many callboxes were false alarms. The fire dispatcher's office was pretty quiet. The School District adm offices had a simple centrex, 448-3000. nI discovered that all extensions began with 3, and that numbered was absorbed. So, if an extension was 3453, you could just dial 453. My co-workers were impressed with that discovered. If the ext began with 3 (ie 3343), you still had to dial the leading 3. Individual schools had their own local number, though today many are part of a new city wide school centrex. The Adm Bldg had a small old style cord switchboard for the centrex. I was surprised since I presumed all Centrexes had modern consoles. The board had some features such as auto flashing and auto ringing. Note that Philadelphia had a separate Keystone Telephone company that served business lines only. It provided flat rate service to businesses while Bell provided only message rate. Keystone folded after WW II and Bell took it over. There are still some manholes downtown. Years ago the city police dept had callboxes for cops to use to check in, before the days of radios. I think they were part of that city PABX. Newer sections of the city did not have them. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: City of Chicago had the switchboard number RANdolph 8000 for about sixty years, and cord boards like you described. Police and Fire were respectively POLice 1313 and FIRe 1313 and each central office translated those into other numbers-1313 at the Police Administration Building and the City Hall Fire Alarm office. In the mid to late 1960's (the Vietnam era and a time of much civil unrest in Chicago [consider the 1968 Democratic National Convention for example] Illinois Bell got City of Chicago to ditch their cord boards and go with centrex. Remember in those days, there was no rush on prefixes or area codes like in more recent times; when City decided to take Bell's suggestion and go with centrex, 'someone' employed by Illinois Bell looked through a list of available prefixes and 'for some reason, quite coincidentally' chose 312-744 as the prefix to use; it had to be sent to AT&T to be entered in routing tables, etc. Then that person (most likely a phreak, IBT had lots of them on the payroll in the 1960's mostly by accident) kept his mouth shut until it was too late to make any changes, i.e. centrex was cut in, all routing tables updated to reflect it, etc, then 'someone' told the Chicago Seed, which was a very anti-war, anti-most government, anti-everything in Chicago newspaper that '744' could be remembered as 'PIG'. Pig was the very derogatory name by which police officers were often times known. So the Chicago Seed decided as a 'public service' to the community to print a new, revised telephone directory explaining the new phone system to residents. It went like this: 'To reach any pig or other government official in Chicago, just dial PIG and the last four digits of the pig's phone number; here are some common often used numbers in the new system:' Chief of Pig Police, PIG-xxxx, Mayor Daley, PIG-xxxx, and on through a few hundred of the internal extensions on the centrex. Everyone of them showing the phone number as PIG-xxxx. Mayor Daley the First (father of the present Mayor Daley the Second who has been in office for almost twenty years; his father was in office at the time and for thirty years) was, to say the least, furious when he saw it. The mousy little men who worked as clerks in the offices downtown, the women doing the same work, everyone liked to read the Chicago Seed because it was clever, witty and *very* anti-everything the 'establish- ment' wanted. In summary, the 'anti-war crowd' were their heros, and witty and funny at that. You'd see them grab a copy of the Seed from the 'take one free' rack in the subway station, then stash it under their arm until they found a seat on the train where they could read it and snicker at the latest antics in City Government while hoping no one saw them reading that 'trash'. 1968 was the year Mayor Daley the First made his now infamous comment about the large number of people who referred openly or in secret about police as pigs. He said, 'our police officers are not pigs! They are Human Beans like everyone else.' Then about a month later, at the riotous Democratic National Convention where police were clubbing and gassing everyone, the cameras caught Mayor Daley referring to one of the US senators at the convention as 'that Jew Bastard, Ribicoff, who started this riot our city is having right now; the Jews started all the trouble.' In the past few years, the City has increased their phone system to the point they now have four centrexes (312-744, 745, 746, 747) with all kinds of things tied on it such as police, the libraries, all the schools, Fire Department and others. PAT] ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, Yahoo Groups, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copyrighted. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occasional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. 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