From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Aug 2 23:43:45 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.3) id i733hi401418; Mon, 2 Aug 2004 23:43:45 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 23:43:45 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200408030343.i733hi401418@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 #360 TELECOM Digest Mon, 2 Aug 2004 23:44:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 360 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson VoIP Provider Vonage Suffers Outage (VOIP News) Sprint Expands VoIP Reach (VOIP News) TiVo Slumps as Rival DVR Maker Has DirecTV Deal (Monty Solomon) Vonage Service Interruption (Peter Pearson) Re: POTS' Dirty Little Secret: Big-Time Downtime (Jack Decker) Re: POTS' Dirty Little Secret: Big-Time Downtime (Ron Chapman) Re: POTS' Dirty Little Secret: Big-Time Downtime (Carl Navarro) Re: POTS' Dirty Little Secret: Big-Time Downtime (Lisa Hancock) Re: POTS' Dirty Little Secret: Big-Time Downtime (Tim Shoppa) Re: POTS' Dirty Little Secret: Big-Time Downtime (Charles B. Wilber) Re: The Convention in 1904, One Hundred Years Ago (Lisa Hancock) MCHSI Fibre/Fire Outage? (Clarence Dold) Re: S.Korea's Daum to Buy Lycos for $95 Mln (Scott Dorsey) Re: History of TV (was Bare-Bones DNC Coverage) (Scott Dorsey) Re: The Convention in 1904, One Hundred Years Ago (Lisa Hancock) Re: Cheapest Incoming-Only Phone Service? (T. Sean Weintz) Re: Last Laugh! Interesting Origins (T. Sean Weintz) Re: Last Laugh! Interesting Origins (Paul Vader) Re: Last Laugh! Interesting Origins - Ship High In Transit (Bart) 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: VOIP News Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2004 15:02:10 -0400 Subject: VoIP Provider Vonage Suffers Outage Reply-To: VoIPnews@yahoogroups.com http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5293439.html By Ben Charny and Robert Lemos CNET News.com Net phone service provider Vonage confirmed that it suffered its first outage in 18 months on Monday, due to problems at partner Global Crossing. Customers could still receive calls, but a small percentage of Vonage's 200,000 total subscribers couldn't make outbound calls from around 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. PDT, at which time the problem was fixed. The outage didn't sit well with at least one Vonage customer. Jay Ackerman was thinking of doing exactly what the company wants: dropping his traditional landline for Vonage's voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)-based service. Now, he said in an e-mail to CNET News.com, he's not so sure. Full story at: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5293439.html How to Distribute VoIP Throughout a Home: http://michigantelephone.mi.org/distribute.html If you live in Michigan, subscribe to the MI-Telecom group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MI-Telecom/ ------------------------------ From: VOIP News Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2004 15:05:59 -0400 Subject: Sprint Expands VoIP Reach Reply-To: VoIPnews@yahoogroups.com http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103_2-5293231.html By Matt Hines CNET News.com Telecommunications giant Sprint has signed a deal with regional cable and Internet service provider USA Companies to provide voice services in three states. Under the five-year agreement, announced Monday, USA Companies will offer voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone services to some 62,000 customers in California, Montana and Nebraska. Executives at Kearney, Neb.-based USA Companies lauded the deal as giving it the ability to introduce VoIP without being forced to construct its own infrastructure. Financial terms of the agreement were not immediately disclosed. Full story at: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103_2-5293231.html ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 18:41:47 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: TiVo Slumps as Rival DVR Maker Has DirecTV Deal NEW YORK, Aug 2 (Reuters) - TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ:TIVO) shares slipped 6 percent on Monday after a rival said it would next year supply television recording device technology to satellite television company DirecTV Group Inc. (NYSE:DTV), TiVo's biggest source of new customers. British digital TV technology firm NDS Group Plc (NASDAQ:NNDS), which like DirecTV is controlled by media conglomerate News Corp. Ltd., told Reuters on Monday that it plans to ship digital video recorder technology to DirecTV in the first quarter of 2005. The increasing NDS-DirecTV partnership follows several events that have shaken investors' confidence in Tivo's relationship with DirecTV, including DirecTV's sale of its stake in TiVo in June, and the resignation of DirecTV's chairman from TiVo's board. TiVo, which has a contract to supply digital video recorders (DVRs) to satellite firm DirecTV (NYSE:DTV) through 2007, has previously said that given a choice, DirecTV subscribers would pick TiVo's DVR service, which has unique features, programming and home networking options. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=42854843 ------------------------------ From: Peter Pearson Subject: Vonage Service Interruption Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2004 16:10:20 -0700 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Reply-To: ppearson@are.see.enn.com According to a Vonage bulletin, at 10:45 EDT today Global Crossing "experienced a data routing issue," which resulted in a variety of malfunctions. In my case, a couple of voice messages appear to have vanished. A bulletin visible to Vonage users who log into the Vonage server says, ... individual customers' success of [sic] making and receiving calls remained sporadic depending on where a particular customer was located on the Internet. The systems which were effected [sic] during the outage were: voicemail, voicemail email notification, vonage web login and network availability number. Overall, I'm quite happy with Vonage service. There are occasional audio quality problems (dropout, echo), but cell phones have forced us to adapt to such problems and worse. It is indescribably delightful to be able to report a problem to one's phone company and, within minutes, be speaking with a technically knowledgeable person who really cares about fixing the problem. - Peter To email me, replace the three words with the letters R, C, and N. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2004 05:07:39 -0400 From: Jack Decker Subject: Re: POTS' Dirty Little Secret: Big-Time Downtime Pat, please conceal my e-mail address as usual. On Sun, 01 Aug 2004 13:48:07 GMT, joel@exc.com (Dr. Joel M. Hoffman) wrote: >> As you probably know, one of the claims often made by the shills for >> the big phone companies is that VoIP is less reliable that POTS >> ("Plain Old Telephone Service"). Well, it turns out that's not >> necessarily true -- it depends a lot on where you live and which > Once again, I feel compelled to comment on "VOIP News," which > continues to look like propaganda for VoIP. This time, the "news" > story being reporting is merely one person's post in a chat room. > I think c.d.t is a wonderful place for dialog, and the VoIP vs. POTS > debate is clearly the defining telco debate of our time, but it helps > no one to hide opinion behind the title "news." I quess I should point out that VoIP News is the title of the Yahoo Group in which these posts originate. I picked that title because it was originally my thought that most of the posts would be pointers to news items that mention VoIP from various online sources. Now, in many towns near where I live, there is a publishing company that puts out a product called a "newspaper." Some of these products even have the word "news" in the title, such as the Detroit News, the Ann Arbor News, or the Saginaw News. Every one of these carries news from various sources, but also a variety of other things that are arguably not news - including, usually, at least one or two pages of opinions. And that's not even counting things like movie reviews, which are also opinion. But is Mr. Hoffman picking at them because they have the word "news" in the title? As for Mr. Hoffman's assertion that some of my posts "look like propaganda for VoIP", well you see, it's a group about VoIP (from which Pat selects articles to repost in the Telecom Digest) and I don't think very many people would want to read it if I was constantly knocking VoIP, now would they? But "propaganda" is an interesting word. I went to look it up on Google, using their "define:" feature, and it presented a wide range of definitions, which anyone interested can view at: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=define%3Apropaganda But the definition I liked the best, for probably obvious reasons, was this one: n. All utterances by the opposition, particularly if true. In describing my own posts, I would simply say that I am an advocate of the VoIP option, but only for so long as I actually believe it's a good option for consumers. I realize it's not for everyone, and particularly it's not for those who have no need or desire for broadband Internet service. But, the shills for the big phone companies are trying to spread a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) about VoIP right now, and it seems to me that if they had their way, they'd simply remove the VoIP option from the consumer (at least until they can come out with their own VoIP offerings). The only point I was really trying to make is that you cannot generalize about reliability -- that is, you cannot say that for any given customer, or that in every situation a POTS line will be more reliable than VoIP. Some customers seem to have gold-plated POTS service and lousy cable broadband service, so for them POTS might indeed be far more reliable. But others, particularly those living in rural areas or in big cities where the wiring is so old that Mr. Watson might have helped inspect it, may find that VoIP is more reliable, particularly if (as is not infrequently the case) the cable company has recently strung all new fiber optic cable throughout the area so they could offer broadband and digital cable. > In this case, suppose all of the posters "VOIP News" refers to *never* > had any service. Suppose even that there are 75 such people with 100% > downtime rates. I don't know how many POTS lines are in use in the > U.S., but let's supose that there are only 10 million. Then we'd have > a collective downtime from these 75 hypothetical people of 0.00075% > (yes, percent, also known as a downtime of 0.0000075). In other > words, even 75 reports of intermittent failure in the U.S. doesn't > bring the reliability rating below what the OP called "the 5 nines." > Seventy-five reports of 100% downtime doesn't even bring the > reliability rating below those 5 nines. (And, as it happens, the > posts in the chatroom are roughly divided between which is more > reliable, POTS or VOIP.) So let me get this straight, Mr. Hoffman is willing to allow us to count those who posted to that thread (which was on BroadbandReports.com, not in VoIP News) as having had 100% downtime, but only if we let him count everyone else who did not post in that thread (including everyone who has never even heard of that particular forum) as having had 100% uptime? Give us a break -- we didn't all just fall off the turnip truck yesterday, you know! > In short, a handful reports in a random forum is statistically > irrelevant for downtime rates. This is not news. And VOIP went one > step further by taking the story out of context and misinterpreting it > for us. Who was talking statistics? I was simply reporting that this thread existed, and that at least some of those who posted were apparently not getting the fabled 99.999% uptime. Mr. Hoffman is setting up a straw man here. Perhaps I should have run a disclaimer saying that the statements expressed in that thread were those of the people who posted them, but I guess I thought that any reasonably intelligent person could figure that out. > To be clear, I have no problem with a poster doing this to advoate > VOIP. Why do I have a hard time swallowing that statement? > But hiding behind "news" is disingenuous. Everyone else uses > their real name here. Why can't "VOIP news"? Pat has already explained this and he pretty much said what I would have said, so I'll let his answer stand. I will ask, however, why Mr. Hoffman is so interested in someone's name? I've always figured that a post should stand or fall on its own merits. If he had known who I was, would he have perhaps responded with an ad hominem attack, instead of being forced to respond to the content of the post itself? Anyway, I have always said, no one is forced to read my "propaganda" if that's what they think it is. That's what kill filters are for; people should feel free to use them if they don't like what I write, or don't find the information useful. But just as Pat sometimes adds comments to articles that are sent directly to him, or sometimes writes his own commentary, I likewise sometimes add comments to items that appear in VoIP News, and sometimes even write a message that is primarily my own commentary. If that doesn't sit well with anyone, they should feel perfectly free to ignore anything and everything that has "VoIP News" or my name in the message headers. Jack ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 08:06:11 -0400 From: Ron Chapman Subject: Re: POTS' Dirty Little Secret: Big-Time Downtime In article , joel@exc.com (Dr. Joel M. Hoffman) wrote: > Once again, I feel compelled to comment on "VOIP News," which > continues to look like propaganda for VoIP. This time, the "news" > story being reporting is merely one person's post in a chat room. > I think c.d.t is a wonderful place for dialog, and the VoIP vs. POTS > debate is clearly the defining telco debate of our time, but it helps > no one to hide opinion behind the title "news." I read this through the Usenet, and I killfiled "VoIP News" a long time ago. The Digest became a much more pleasant read. In fact, I forgot all about that guy -- until I read the above. ------------------------------ From: Carl Navarro Subject: Re: POTS' Dirty Little Secret: Big-Time Downtime Reply-To: cnavarro@wcnet.org Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2004 15:33:54 GMT Organization: Road Runner High Speed Online http://www.rr.com On Sun, 01 Aug 2004 13:48:07 GMT, joel@exc.com (Dr. Joel M. Hoffman) wrote: >> As you probably know, one of the claims often made by the shills for >> the big phone companies is that VoIP is less reliable that POTS >> ("Plain Old Telephone Service"). Well, it turns out that's not >> necessarily true -- it depends a lot on where you live and which > Once again, I feel compelled to comment on "VOIP News," which > continues to look like propaganda for VoIP. This time, the "news" > story being reporting is merely one person's post in a chat room. > I think c.d.t is a wonderful place for dialog, and the VoIP vs. POTS > debate is clearly the defining telco debate of our time, but it helps > no one to hide opinion behind the title "news." <> > To be clear, I have no problem with a poster doing this to advoate > VOIP. But hiding behind "news" is disingenuous. Everyone else uses > their real name here. Why can't "VOIP news"? The noise to signal ratio in c.d.t. has pretty much doubled with VOIP news being added to it. Never mind that this group is getting those postings over one of the other 48,000 plus newsgroups. I have already suggested to the moderator that VOIP News would fit better in the voice-over-IP group. It fell on deaf ears so I have a very fast delete key. In fact, lately, I can read the 3 or so messages that interest me and bulk delete the rest. FWIW if I had poor telephone service, I'd call the one place where someone cares, not post it to 5000 or 10,000 people on the internet who could care less about the weather or quality of phone service in an apartment building in Manhattan. Perhaps that poster should spend some time reading the phone book instead of the chat room mail :-) My last call to the Public Utilities Commission must have made Verizon (nee GTE) flag their account, but my parents get excellent service from Verizon to this day. As far as using an alias or not, I guess the more you post the more you get spammed. Mailwasher lets me bounce mail before it is filtered and it seems to know what is spam. Carl Navarro [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Carl did make that suggestion; I mentioned to Jack Decker, but the decision reached was to keep those messages (which originate with people posting to Yahoo Groups) here. I think it was based on the volume of readers here as opposed to Voice Over IP. Jack did want to have those messages appear in a moderated news group. But the Voice Over IP group is a good choice as well if there was a moderator there; a job which Jack could probably handle. PAT] ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: POTS' Dirty Little Secret: Big-Time Downtime Date: 2 Aug 2004 09:42:14 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com joel@exc.com (Dr. Joel M. Hoffman) wrote > Once again, I feel compelled to comment on "VOIP News," which > continues to look like propaganda for VoIP. This time, the "news" > story being reporting is merely one person's post in a chat room. I have to agree. Certainly the VOIP people are entitled to their opinion, but it does seem there's a constant flood of messages that are rather shrill in their support of VOIP and criticizing existing lines, and without much substantiation to them. If there are problems that would knock out POTS, it is likely the same problems will knock out VOIP. When the errant truck knocks down a utility pole, all the wires on it -- POTS, fibre, cable, etc., all come down and go out of service. My cable TV, served by fibre-optic lines, is definitely not that reliable. > In short, a handful reports in a random forum is statistically > irrelevant for downtime rates. This is not news. And VOIP went one > step further by taking the story out of context and misinterpreting it > for us. Also true. It seems too many posts refer to a single example of someone liking their VOIP, but that in itself is not meaningful. FWIW, my own experiences with VOIP have been most unsatisfactory-- terrible unreliable connections. ------------------------------ From: shoppa@trailing-edge.com (Tim Shoppa) Subject: Re: POTS' Dirty Little Secret: Big-Time Downtime Date: 2 Aug 2004 10:06:43 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com VOIP News wrote in message news:: > As you probably know, one of the claims often made by the shills for > the big phone companies is that VoIP is less reliable that POTS > ("Plain Old Telephone Service"). Well, it turns out that's not > necessarily true -- it depends a lot on where you live and which > incumbent telephone company provides service in your area. In this > thread on BroadbandReports.com, participants take turns commenting on > the reliability of traditional phone service, and for several it's not > exactly the "five nines" (99.999% uptime) that the phone companies > would like you to believe. > http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/remark,10914037~mode=flat Unfortunately the availability of the switch isn't the same as the availability of the service. But the many-nines numbers always refer to switch availability. Depending on the model/frame the availability for making a call is probably lower than the availability for keeping a connected call connected. When I had dial-up net access via a 24x7 dedicated analog-line modem several years ago, I had one call that was continuously connected for over six months. When it did disconnect it was because my ISP was upgrading its modem banks. The switch(es) I was going through probably went through several upgrades and reconfigurations in those six months. Tim. ------------------------------ Date: 02 Aug 2004 15:57:06 EDT From: Charles.B.Wilber@Dartmouth.EDU (Charles B. Wilber) Subject: Re: POTS' Dirty Little Secret Even more telling and sly was the title of the posting. Calling the opinion piece "POTS' Dirty Little Secret: Big-Time Downtime" is apparently an effort to predispose readers to a certain point of view. I have read many interesting posts in this forum but have learned to treat them as opinion, never as fact, unless I can verify them myself. That sort of "yellow journalism" is the reason why. Charlie Wilber Dartmouth College --- You wrote: In short, a handful reports in a random forum is statistically irrelevant for downtime rates. This is not news. And VOIP went one step further by taking the story out of context and misinterpreting it for us. --- end of quote --- ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: The Convention in 1904, One Hundred Years Ago Date: 2 Aug 2004 07:33:26 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com I wonder how many telephone lines, if any at all, were installed and used for the convention? The Bell System used to always announce the big installation jobs it had to do for each political convention -- hundreds of telephones and lines for the politicians and press. I wonder what is involved today. I presume they still need a number of conventional land line telephone circuits. But they likely also get high speed data lines. I wonder if any additional cellular capacity is added; I presume a good number of delegates and press are on the cellphones, either talking about the latest political gossip or ordering in pizza. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Isn't it really bizzarre that an event > like a political convention -- allegedly a democratic process -- and > a 'public' event is totally closed to the general public? Our political system is not a pure "democracy" (where everyone gets to participate) but rather a _representative_ republic. That is, we elect representatives who act on our behalf. Actually, with the widespread use of the primary election, the conventions are more public and open than ever, since everyone can express their view in the primaries. Years ago, the party itself would choose the nominees and the primaries could be ignored. What troubles me is the tolerance of disruptive behavior. In 2000, protesters made it quite clear their objective was to disrupt, even shut down if they could, the conventions. That was the end objective in itself. The pundits seemed to excuse this behavior as a healthy exercise of free speech even though no one had a clue as to what message the protesters were sending. To me, it sounded like mob rule. Of course, when such shutdown protests are aimed at the pundits themselves (as happened when a newspaper was picketed by a big crowd), then it's another story. ------------------------------ From: dold@MCHSIXfibr.usenet.us.com Subject: MCHSI Fibre/Fire Outage? Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 14:59:09 UTC Organization: a2i network My MCHSI cable internet has been out since Saturday. I called and the service number notes that there is an outage in my area. This morning I stayed on hold, and they tell me that there is an area-wide outage caused by a fire, and it is affecting the AT&T feed into the cable headend. Okay. That's not their fault. But, MCHSI has no status page, AT&T doesn't have a status page that I can find, and searching the local news pages doesn't mention a fire or large AT&T outage near Lakeport/Clear Lake, CA. Is there a status page that I can check? I used to have a PacBell status page, but that doesn't work anymore. Clarence A Dold - Hidden Valley (Lake County) CA USA 38.8-122.5 ------------------------------ From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) Subject: Re: S.Korea's Daum to Buy Lycos for $95 Mln Date: 2 Aug 2004 11:25:08 -0400 Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000) Monty Solomon wrote: > By Jean Yoon and Rhee So-eui > SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea's top Web site operator Daum > Communications Corp., said on Monday it would acquire Lycos Inc., > the U.S. business of Spain's Terra Lycos, owner of popular sites > such as Wired News and Tripod, for $95 million. Daum being one of the ten major spam sources (slightly behind Korea's Kornet and Hananet), does this mean Lycos is now going to turn into a spam factory as well? --scott "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) Subject: Re: History of TV (was Bare-Bones DNC Coverage) Date: 2 Aug 2004 11:27:34 -0400 Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000) Paul Coxwell wrote: > Thanks for the replies everyone. >> There were noncommercial educational stations long before there was a >> PBS. I believe PBS emerged in the late 1960s (or possibly early >> 1970s), after the major educational stations, such as WNET (NY), WGBH >> (Boston), WETA (Washington), etc. had begun exchanging high-quality >> program content, and there was interest in Washington to get some of >> that programming onto educational stations in cities that didn't >> produce programming. As I recall, it started out with some government >> funding, but that subsequently dried up. > In recent years I've also seen quite a few documentaries which > indicate they're a joint production between WGBH Boston and the BBC. And can anyone explain to me what ITV was? I remember seeing a lot of documentaries (clearly film-to-tape jobs) when I was a kid, which claimed to be from ITV and had the ITV logos. This is no relation to the British outfit of the same name, but was the "Instructional Television" operation, whose programming was broadcast by the PBS affiliate. --scott "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: The Convention in 1904, One Hundred Years Ago Date: 2 Aug 2004 09:35:01 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com TELECOM Digest Editor wrote > I've got a hunch -- just a hunch -- that the Republican convention > this time around will be as much of a 'riot' as the Democratic > one in 1968 was. I strongly doubt it. I don't think the interest is there. > just as Chicago police considered everyone an 'anti-war protestor' > in 1968 as they cracked heads open assembly line style as they > gassed them and dragged them off to Cook County Jail. Many thousands > of gentle people whose crime was they disagreed with those in power. Several good books ("The Century" by Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster and "Reds" by Ted Morgan) discussed the 1968 riots. Both books describe in detail how the protest (riot) organizers worked hard to train their followers to provoke a police response -- that was their goal. I'm not sure calling the protesters merely "gentle people" is accurate. It was not right for the cops to react so violently, but it was also not right for the protesters to go to such extremes to intentionally provoke the cops. In 2000, protesters again attempted to riot at the convention. Again, their purpose was not to express a political message, but rather disrupt the convention and the host city. The police were extremely well trained and refused to react even when directly assaulted -- TV news showed protesters shoving cops off their bikes and slaming the bikes down onto the cops. There was considerable damage to private property, much of it owned by poor people. Ironically, the protesters supposedly were concerned about the poor, but none of them offered to pay to replace the damages. When I express these views, people criticize me for being "a facist" or "suppressing all dissent". Not true at all. What bothers me is that there are plenty of legal ways to protest, but protesters avoid them because they're boring. Supporters of mob rule think it was how social reforms were made; but this isn't true. It was the assault on _totally peaceful strollers_ in Birmingham that outraged the nation; and it was mob rule in the 1870s that overturned Reconstruction in the South. > and the telephone operator. ... Then his attention went to the > nearby telephone operator with a switchboard [I missed this part in my other post.] ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz Subject: Re: Cheapest Incoming-Only Phone Service? (Westchester, NY) Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2004 17:26:46 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Dr. Joel M. Hoffman wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Telcos which provide (Enterphone) > service or private contractors which provide (Interphone) service > usually generally have it rigged up so that door-to-apartment calls > *cannot* be forwarded off premises. You probably would not want to > have someone be able to remotely open your door when you were not > there; it is a security matter, that is why no forwarding is > available on Enter (Inter) phone service. If telco is supplying the > service, it works sort of like a gerry-rigged centrex. The lobby > phone gets dial tone from the central office and the caller dials > usually a two or three digit number associated with your name in > the lobby directory. You must tell your visitor your apartment number; > it is not obvious from the dialed code number. When you agree to > admit the caller and dial a '4' or '6' or whatever, the central > office pulses the front door latch to allow it to open so the caller > can hang up the phone and walk into the building. If you do not have > external phone service, then telco's contract with the building > management (which pays for the service) calls for telco to provide > you with a phone to operate the door only. > Now if your building has the service from a private contractor it > is called Interphone since the telco (at least years ago) had a patent > on 'Enterphone'. The private contractor usually has a 'computer like > box' in the basement or wherever telco enters the premises and the > 'box' functions like a little switchboard sort of like telco and > all the house pairs terminate in this box with the outside trunk > lines coming in. It is quite transparent in that the 'box' just sits > there silently when you make an outgoing call; but when an incoming > call **from the front door** comes in the box does two things: it > tests your line for busy; if you are not talking it gives you a > distinctive ring (same as telco; to aid you in identifying the source > of the call) and if your line *is* busy it sends you a distinctive > call waiting tone (again, same as telco, even if you do not already > have call-waiting) so you can flash, the box puts your outside call > on hold and gives you the door call. > Like telco's (non-subscriber) service where any old phone can be > plugged into the place on the wall where the phone plugs in, **no > actual phone number is needed** since telco (or the private > contractor) provides battery as needed to operate the phone when it > gets called from the door. So if your building has one of those two > types of service (Enter/Interphone) don't bother with calling telco to > get phone service; just plug some cheap phone into the jack; it will > ring as needed and allow talking as needed for the front door intercom > function. When there is not someone at the door talking to you, the > phone will otherwise be dead. In any event (Enter or Inter) **call > forwarding will not work**. Contractor's box won't do it and telco > won't provide it, mainly for security reasons. > But there is a *third* type of front door service, always private > contractor. Sort of cheesy, IMO. In that system, front door person > dials your code (never actual apartment number) and the premises > 'box' does a quick look up of your real seven-digit number then places > a phone call to that seven-digit number and bridges them together when > you answer (if you are home and do answer). Its sort of like a fancy > speed dial type thing. On that kind, you *can* do what you want and > have it call forwarded or run to an answering machine or wherever, > although IMO it is ill advised for security reasons. Do you want the > visitor to know you are not home because the door (speed dial type > phone) forwards to wherever? There is an exception to the **no for- > warding** rule: If you have a telco centrex type system (the first > one, above) fully connected and taking incoming/outgoing calls, etc > then TRUE incoming calls (not front door calls) can be call forwarded. > Turn call forwarding on as desired, but the front door will still > give its funny little ring-ring on the phone and not forward. I guess > that is because the programming decision whether or not to forward > is made at telco long before the decision as the origin of the call. > So find out from your new landlord **what kind** of front door > intercom service they have. If it is 'cheap' you want then you may > be able to get by just plugging a dead phone into a modular jack and > letting the front door do its own thing (types one and two above). If > you have to have an *actual phone number* (as in type three) then > bear in mind the front door will be as limited as the cheap phone > service is. If your line is busy (cheap phones do not get call > waiting) then the front door will get a busy signal also, and this > 'cheap phone you never use since everyone has your cell phone' may > turn out to be sort of expensive as you install call waiting (to pamper > the front door) and call waiting to forward everyone else (but > hopefully not a bad guy burglar, etc) to your cell phone when you are > away from home. If you are dealing with type three above and > absolutely must get a working phone number from telco, then I would > say never give the number out to anyone (the people who matter would > have your cell phone anyway). Just let the phone sit there idly 99 > percent of the time. > At this point you probably know more about Front Door Intercom Service > than most landlords and building managers. Oh, and regards repairs: > standard telco contracts on these devices call for a *thirty minute* > repair time turnaround if/when the front door intercom goes out of > order. Various reasons; all the pairs from central office to the > building and the jumpers, etc are *supposed to be dedicated and > plainly marked in the c.o.* and in the building basement, but it is > not uncommon to get a dorkus installer tech who rips off pairs in > older neighborhoods, nor is it uncommon for the cellanoids unlatching > the front door to go bad, and telco understands it is a rush/24 hour > per day repair job. Hopefully private contractors sense the urgency > also. If the landlord does not understand what kind of front door > intercom system he has, then try plugging in a dead phone to a jack > first and see if it works; if it does then all is cool. Some of them > say 'oh, you gotta have a phone to make the door work' and they don't > really know what they are saying. Then get back to us as needed. PAT] I am in the property management business, and in my experience the most common type of these building entry systems are made by a company called "doorking". The base models (they do make a "NO phone bill" system which I do not discuss here) simply have 1 outgoing phone line. These are "option 3" as you note above. There is a database of phone numbers mapped to entry codes (or apartmenet numbers). When you enter the code (or apt number) on the panel, all it does is call the number that matches it it's database. No special contracts with the telco, no special switching equipment on site. And the kicker is, if you know the number of ther phone line it dials out from, you can call into it and press whatever DTMF is assigned to open the door. (And also you can program the database by dialing in, if you know the security code assigned. 9999 is the default I think.) Lousy security, very low tech, and, unfortunately, VERY common. And bottom line is you MUST have telco service for it to work for your apartment. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I know that at the time of divestiture, telco was forbidden (under divestiture) to actively solicit new subscribers to the Enterphone Front Door Security System, but all existing customers were grandfathered, and there are still some of those older (20 years) systems. Interphone is also a classy type of system and not too many buildings can (or want to) afford them, so regretfully, the 'option 3' systems are in use a lot. The Enterphone set up from Illinois Bell used build in the wall style nice looking stainless steel plates and armored handsets. Cheap they weren't, but extremely good security. Mr. Weintz, are your tenants aware of just how insecure, how woefully lacking in security their downstairs front door is? And who comes around to maintain it as needed? PAT] ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Interesting Origins Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2004 17:15:41 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Bill Burns wrote: > Paul Vader wrote: >> Lisa Minter writes: >>> In the 16th and 17th centuries, most things were shipped by boat. >> The word in question, which I won't use to avoid content filters, >> has its origins in English at least 300 years earlier than that. >> Research people, research! > The first cite of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated > Y1K -- the year 1000! > Bill Burns, Long Island, NY, USA > mailto:billb@ftldesign.com > Undersea Cable History Website: > http://atlantic-cable.com Most "S" word likely derives from the germanic Scheisse. A lot of words that are considered vulgar today were ordinary regular words 1000 years ago. True for most vulgar words connected with anatomy and body functions. It was only later when the Latin speaking nobility began to excercise some control of the local (ie: english) language that we got the current latin derived words for these same body parts and body functions - and now they are considered the "proper" words to use for these, while the earlier germanic derived words are now considered vulgar. ------------------------------ From: pv+usenet@pobox.com (Paul Vader) Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Interesting Origins Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2004 22:09:08 -0000 Organization: Inline Software Creations Bill Burns writes: >> has its origins in English at least 300 years earlier than that. >> Research people, research! > The first cite of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated > Y1K -- the year 1000! I wish I had an OED handy (they have a ridiculously expensive subscription service -- I don't see paying it just to tell neophiles who wrong they are on word origins), but I did find references on the web to the 1300's, which was good enough to blow the stupid "ship high in transit" thing out of the water. Who makes up this crap anyway? So to speak. * * PV something like badgers--something like lizards--and something like corkscrews. ------------------------------ From: Bart Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Interesting Origins - Ship High In Transit Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2004 07:33:19 -0700 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Reply-To: spam@icpage.com On 29 Jul 2004 11:58:09 -0700, adamsjac@telcordia.com (Jack Adams) wrote: > Yet another interesting origin of a phrase, this time as reported in > Harry Newton's Telecommunication Dictionary: > Edited for brevity ... > In the 16th and 17th centuries, most things were shipped by boat. > Among the products so shipped was dried manure (tightly bailed) as > commercial manufactured fertilizers weren't yet invented. Shipping it > dry reduced its weight yet produced another problem. Once the bails > of manure got wet, the fermentation process started with the byproduct > of methane gas (highly flammable). Several accidents occurred as the > result of bails of manure being stowed low in the hold of the ship and > getting wet due to water in the low part of the ship. These accidents > usually occurred when a crewman decended into the hold with a lantern > ... ka BOOM! Investigations soon revealed that these manure bail > should be kept out of the water, or on the upper or higher decks. The > labeling used on the bails was Ship High In Transit, which became > S.H.I.T., which became .... > Lisa Minter wrote in message > news:: >> A few thousand years agom as incredible as it sounds, men and women >> took baths only twice a year (May and October)! Women kept their hair >> covered, while men shaved their heads (because of lice and bugs) and >> wore wigs. Wealthy men could afford good wigs made from wool. They >> couldn't wash the wigs, so to clean them they would carve out a loaf >> of bread, put the wig in the shell, and bake it for 30 minutes. The >> heat would make the wig big and fluffy, hence the term "big wig." >> Today we often use the term "here comes the Big Wig" because someone >> appears to be or is powerful and wealthy. >> In more recent years, common entertainment included playing >> cards. However, there was a tax levied when purchasing playing cards >> but only applicable to the "Ace of Spades." To avoid paying the tax, >> people would purchase 51 cards instead. Yet, since most games require >> 52 cards, these people were thought to be stupid or dumb because they >> weren't "playing with a full deck." >> In the heyday of sailing ships, all war ships and many freighters >> carried iron cannons. Those cannons fired round iron cannon balls. It >> was necessary to keep a good supply near the cannon. However, how to >> prevent them from rolling about the deck? The best storage method >> devised was a square-based pyramid with one ball on top, resting on >> four resting on nine, which rested on sixteen. Thus, a supply of 30 >> cannon balls could be stacked in a small area right next to the >> cannon. There was only one problem ... how to prevent the bottom layer >> from sliding or rolling from under the others. The solution was a >> metal plate called a "Monkey" with 16 round indentations. >> However, if this plate were made of iron, the iron balls would quickly >> rust to it. The solution to the rusting problem was to make "Brass >> Monkeys." Few landlubbers realize that brass contracts much more and >> much faster than iron when chilled. Consequently, when the temperature >> dropped too far, the brass indentations would shrink so much that the >> iron cannonballs would come right off the monkey. Thus, it was quite >> literally, "Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey." (All >> this time, you thought that was an improper expression, didn't you.) ------------------------------ 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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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #360 ******************************