From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Sep 6 04:39:42 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i868dfC27146; Mon, 6 Sep 2004 04:39:42 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 04:39:42 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200409060839.i868dfC27146@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 #417 TELECOM Digest Mon, 6 Sep 2004 04:40:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 417 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson The Death of Diversity in Cable TV Programming (Monty Solomon) Bush to Big Cable: We Love You Time Warner, Comcast, Cox (Monty Solomon) Show Me the Convention (Monty Solomon) In Internet Calling, Skype Is Living Up to the Hype (Monty Solomon) Re: Party Lines No More? (John McHarry) Re: Party Lines No More? (John Levine) Re: Telephone Vocabulary -- "Straight Line" (John McHarry) Re: How to Call Blocked Canadian 800 Numbers From U.S. (John P. Dearing) Play DTMF Tones Over a Modem (Prospecting Sucks) Re: My New DVR From Cable One (Barry Margolin) Book Review: The Sinking of the Eastland (TELECOM Digest Editor) 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: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 22:46:14 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: The Death of Diversity in Cable TV Programming C. DELORES TUCKER WOULD THE civil rights movement of the 1960s have succeeded without the help of television? Johnathan Rodgers, CEO of TV One, a new African-American network, recently posed the question -- with skepticism. The indelible images of Bull Connor's dogs, and the spiritual nonviolent resistance to them, made a human struggle palpable for Americans otherwise absorbed in more mundane affairs. Television today, particularly cable, is in some ways both a manifest of the civil rights struggle and the very tool of its continuing execution. A generation after the march over the Pettus Bridge, African-Americans, Latinos, and women own, produce, and star in a rich menu of cable programming which illuminates their culture, mobility, and challenges -- both internal and external. Much of this success is owed to the very model of the cable television platform, where developing channels are placed alongside established ones -- a platform that some media critics now want to replace with a government mandated pay-per-channel (or "a la carte") regime where consumers would have to pay a set price for individual channels. And if these would-be regulators succeed, the diversity in cable programming -- a fruit of the civil rights movement -- will die with it. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/09/05/the_death_of_diversity_in_cable_tv_programming/ ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 22:59:01 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Bush to Big Cable: We Love You Time Warner, Comcast, Cox! Washington Watch A Pre-GOP Convention Gift to Media Monopoly for Broadband August 30, 2004 The Department of Justice last Friday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse a lower court decision that affirmed the broadband Internet's obligation to serve as a nondiscriminatory medium. The DOJ thus joined both the FCC and the cable industry, which also want to see a reversal of what is called the "Brand X" case (for the Santa Monica-based Internet service provider of that name). A federal Court of Appeals (Ninth Circuit) found last year that the Michael Powell FCC erred when it declared that the cable industry could, in essence, operate closed broadband networks. Fighting that decision in court were ISPs Brand X and Earthlink, along with Consumer Federation of American, Consumers Union, Media Access Project (as our counsel), and CDD. The Brand X case is vitally important to the future of the Internet as a democratic medium. As the Bush DOJ told the Supreme Court: "This case is likely to determine the regulatory classification under the Communications Act that will apply to broadband ( i.e., "high-speed") Internet access services in the United States." In essence, the federal government has come to the aid of its embattled great deregulator, FCC chairman Michael Powell. In May 2002, Powell, as part of his agency's "leave no media monopoly behind" policy, approved rules that permitted cable companies to extend their monopoly in multichannel television to the broadband market. Broadband provided by cable would not have to retain the characteristics of the dial-up Internet under his new policy, which meant that cable companies could deny access to their network by all other ISPs (forcing cable broadband subscribers to use the cable operator's monopoly ISP provider). In addition, by eliminating nondiscrimination safeguards for broadband service, Powell made it much easier for cable companies to manipulate their Internet platforms to further benefit commercial media content. http://www.democraticmedia.org/news/washingtonwatch/BrandXBush.html ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 23:07:56 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Show Me the Convention OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR By MICHAEL J. COPPS Washington - As a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, I may not agree with many positions taken by speakers this week at the Republican National Convention. Even so, I believe our broadcast media owe us more coverage of an event that remains an important component of the presidential campaign. Yet tonight, if people around the country tune in to the commercial broadcast TV networks, most will not see any live convention coverage. That's not right. Let's remember that American citizens own the public airwaves, not TV executives. We give broadcasters the right to use these airwaves for free in exchange for their agreement to broadcast in the public interest. They earn huge profits using this public resource. During this campaign season broadcasters will receive nearly $1.5 billion from political advertising. What do we get in return for granting TV stations free use of our airwaves? Unfortunately, when it comes to coverage of issues important to our nation, the answer is less and less. Coverage of the 2000 presidential election on the network evening news dropped by a third compared to reporting on the 1996 election. During the last election cycle we heard directly from presidential candidates for an average of 9 seconds a night on the news. Local races? Forget it. In 2002 -- the most recent midterm elections -- more than half of local newscasts contained no campaign coverage at all. Local coverage has diminished to the point that campaign ads outnumber campaign stories by four to one. What coverage there is focuses inordinately on polls and handicapping the horse race. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/30/opinion/30copps.html ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 23:18:39 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: In Internet Calling, Skype Is Living Up to the Hype TECHNO FILES By JAMES FALLOWS HOW big a deal will Skype turn out to be? I have no idea whether the company itself, which was founded one year ago, will someday come to epitomize and dominate a particular booming business, the way Google ,eBay and Amazon now do. But I feel confident that the service it provides will be attractive to most people who give it a serious look. Skype, a made-up term that rhymes with "tripe," is the most popular and sexiest application of VoIP, which doesn't rhyme with anything. VoIP -- sometimes pronounced letter by letter, like C.I.A., and at other times as a word -- stands for voice over Internet protocol. Essentially, it is a way of allowing a computer with a broadband connection to serve as a telephone. This new form of conveying voice messages has so many advantages over traditional systems that the whole telecommunications industry is scrambling to see how fast it can shift traffic onto the Internet. AT&T, for example, is no longer recruiting new home customers, but it is offering many new VoIP services. Dozens of other companies - new ones like Vonage and established ones like Verizon - are selling VoIP services, too. Skype's distinction is that, for now at least, it is the easiest, fastest and cheapest way for individual customers to begin using VoIP. It works this way: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/business/yourmoney/05tech.html ------------------------------ From: John McHarry Subject: Re: Party Lines No More? Date: Sun, 05 Sep 2004 23:17:39 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net DevilsPGD wrote: > In message John P. Dearing > wrote: >> By the 1980's and 1990's so few people still had party lines that many >> of them were effectively single party lines. That is, they had no >> "mate" on the party line. Bell then started doing "party line >> reassociations" which is putting party lines back together. You'd look >> for a Ring party with no mate and find a Tip party with no mate. Put >> them together and you now have a party line again. > Any idea how much it cost them to put together parties onto party lines > again? In later years, they just bridged them in the CO. This made it easy to use "killer little old ladies" to drive away other party line subscribers. ------------------------------ Date: 6 Sep 2004 06:19:41 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: Party Lines No More? Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > Any idea how much it cost them to put together parties onto party > lines again? Not much. It was usually just moving jumpers at the CO to bridge the lines together. Everyone had a private line from the CO out to their houses. My cousins who run a rural telco in VT told me that the "attack biddie" gambit to get people to switch to private lines was a well known one. ------------------------------ From: John McHarry Subject: Re: Telephone Vocabulary -- "Straight Line" Date: Sun, 05 Sep 2004 23:34:43 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net Carl Navarro wrote: > We used the term "straight line" in reference to the ringer. A > straight line ringer would ring on frequencies of 16 2/3 to about 33 > Hz, as opposed to a party line ringer that would only ring on the > frequency it was tuned to. That would be an independent phone company. I don't think the Bells ever used tuned ringers, except as an interim in companies they acquired. > For Central Offices, private line ring generator was either was either > 20 or 30 Hz. Other frequencies were different, depending on whether > the ring scheme was Harmonic or Decimonic. No, I don't remember what > party was what, except that party 2 was 50Hz in Harmonic. I suppose I > could look it up if it's important. There was also Synchromonic ringing. Seems to me there may have been another, but it may have been a variation of one of the other schemes. My favorite was GURF ringing. You could have full selective ringing on eight or ten party lines by putting half the ringers tip to ground and the other half ring to ground. Four party ANI was also possible using diodes. Tip to ring, ring to tip, tip to ground, and ring to ground. There may have been six party, but I don't recall. Maybe there is a problem with that. If you want to go beyond that, or don't use frequency selective ringing, there is coded ringing, or divided coded ringing, using tip and ring groupings. Old magneto phones were mostly coded ringing, and you could ring other parties on your line without going through "Central". There was an alarm code that could be use to summon the neighbors if you had a fire or something. ------------------------------ From: John P. Dearing Subject: Re: How to Call Blocked Canadian 800 Numbers From U.S. Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 00:27:58 GMT Our esteemed moderator wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think most 800 numbers simply > get translated into a 'regular' number; if you dial via that > 'regular' number you call will go through. For example, a friend > of mine in Canada (Ontario) who calls me occassionally to counsel > me with my computer stuff has my 800 number; but he cannot get > through on it -- I have never had it specifically authorized for > Canadian or other country use. So he dials in on the area codee 620 > version of same number instead. My question is (1) have you tried > dialing the untranslated or 'regular' number of the places you want > to call and (2) are they refusing to deal with your call on those > untranslated numbers? I would think there are various calling plans > in your (USA) area code which would make your call cheap enough > without the need for all the gymnastics you are otherwise going > through to get them on the phone. PAT] Pat, Even though many toll free numbers translate to POTS lines there are just as many that do not. This is especially true with large call volume toll free numbers like the original poster was talking about. Many times these lines come in on a T-1 directly from the IEC and therefore don't have a POTS line associated with them in any way. Cheers! John P. Dearing A+, Network+ To reply: Just drop "YOURPANTS" in my address! 8-) [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What you say is true, but even if the 800 lines terminated on a T-1 and were not themselves directly dialable (as a 'regular' 7-D number), all the places he mentioned such as Revenue Department, Immigration Department, etc would have directory listed 7-D 'administrative numbers' he could use and ask to be transferred as needed to the proper department. PAT] ------------------------------ From: action@xmission.com (Prospecting Sucks) Subject: Play DTMF Tones Over a Modem Date: 5 Sep 2004 18:10:12 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com I use a voiceblast system which allows me to keep up to date with customers and clients. The problem I have is that I have to call into a toll-free number and then using my telephone keypad I need to key in the telephone numbers (with area-code) of the people I want to receive my voiceblast. After I input each telephone number I have to input the number "1" to confirm the telephone number. The problem I have is that I have hundreds of customers and it is very time consuming to have to key these numbers in each time. Does anyone know of a program where I can point it to a TEXT file and have it play the telephone numbers over the modem? Basically just read the numbers using DTMF tones over the modem line? Thanks J.R. http://www.freebusinesscards.com ------------------------------ From: Barry Margolin Subject: Re: My New DVR From Cable One Organization: Symantec Date: Sun, 05 Sep 2004 23:22:26 -0400 In article , DevilsPGD wrote: > In message Danny Burstein > wrote: >> At a typical charge of $0.20 (20 cents) per kw-hr, that's a bit over >> $4/month in electricity. Add another buck or two if you're using air >> conditining and have to dump out that heat. Usually worth it, but >> worth a thought or two. > OTOH, since the majority of the energy used gets converted into heat, > it comes straight off your heating bill if you're in an area which > gets cold. But during the summer it increases your electric bill for air conditioning, so over the long run they probably cancel out. >> (And the "off" switch, if it has one, is only for show). > Weird. My Bell ExpressVu PVR does shut off the hard drive when not in > use (Although not immediately, it will update the guide and whatever > other housekeeping needs to be done first) ReplayTV used to do this, although there was an undocumented way to disable it. Starting with the 4000 series, they keep the disk spinning all the time. The problem was that when you turned the device on, it took 5-10 seconds for the disk to spin up. Also, it has to spin up every hour to check the guide to see if something needs to be recorded; in quiet rooms (like bedrooms), this periodic startup noise was annoying. Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu Arlington, MA *** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me *** [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Whoever it was said earlier in this thread on Friday that this new DVR device would change my television viewing habits was sort of correct. Most of Sunday afternoon I spent in my living room fiddling with the remote learning how to set up and remove 'favorite' channels, and watching a couple of interesting movies in the meantime. I think I am going to like it. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 04:28:15 EDT From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Book Review: The Sinking of the Eastland I want to tell you about an interesting new book just being published, and suggest you take a look at it. "The Sinking of the Eastland: America's Forgotten Tragedy" Written by Jay Bonansinga, a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, the 270-page book with many black/white photos uses newspaper accounts and interviews with the few remaining survivors of the July 24, 1915 accident which claimed the lives of more than 800 workers at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works plant in Cicero, Illinois. The book reconstructs the tragic event of that Saturday morning in great detail. I have touched on this incident a few times here in the Digest over the years, but never with the detail Bonansinga puts into his rendition of the horrors of that day. Everytime I mention it here in the Digest I always get at least one or two followup letters from people **in out own industry** who say they had never before even heard of the incident, let alone studied it in any detail. This is a book which all people with interest in telephone history will want to read. It was the greatest loss of lives in a single day in Chicago, exceeding even the Great Fire in 1871 (300 lives lost); the Iriquois Theatre Fire on New Years Eve in 1903 (several hundred lives lost); but 800 lost due to the Sinking of the Eastland.) Nearly everyone knows about the disaster with the Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean; almost no one it seems knows about the Eastland. Bonansinga suggests the reason for the notoriety regards the Titanic was that the boat was full of rich and wealthy people like the Astors, the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers, on the other hand the Eastland incident was just a couple thousand lower class people (telephone company workers) gathered for a weekend social outing. There were entire families wiped out in a few instances, and a couple departments at Western Electric who lost every single employee. Bonansinga has written seven novels which won awards, including "The Killers Game" and "The Black Mariah". This book is a work of narrative non-fiction. Since the individuals are no longer alive (the last direct survivor died in the 1980's) he has created this book based on the reconstruction of the public records from that day. I read the entire book in one day, over several hours in a couple reading sessions. Title: The Sinking of the Eastland: America's Forgotten Tragedy Author: Jay Bonansinga Format: Hardcover ISBN: 0-8065-2628-9 Recommended Price: $21.95 (USA) $29.95 (Canadian) Publication Date: October 5, 2004 Consult your book seller to obtain a copy. ------------------------------ 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'. 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Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #417 ******************************