34 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981Copyright © 2015 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.The Telecom Digest for Nov 3, 2015
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| 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 |
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| Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2015 19:36:51 -0700 (PDT) From: HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: PBX Attendant Tips Message-ID: <3746c2b9-b959-4310-aff2-8f01f6c3008e@googlegroups.com> > ***** Moderator's Note ***** > > Cellphone users tend to raise their voices because very few cellular > phones have a "sidetone" feature, i.e., they don't feed the microphone > back into the earpiece so that users experience a more "normal" > environment, as if they were speaking to someone else without the > phone blocking their ear. Given all the fancy features crammed into even basic cell phones, I don't understand why sidetone isn't included. Loud talking by cellphone users is a big social problem. > This is why "POTS" phones almost all have a hybrid network in them to > feed the user's voice into both the phone line and the earpiece: > when the earpiece is blocking their ear, they need to have the phone > provide the feedback they would normally hear while speaking without > it. This feature was so important that the telephone companies researched the optimum level of sidetone to provide in the telephone set. No sidetone would have people shouting, and too much sidetone would cause people to talk too softly. In addition, sidetone reassures the user that the phone is connected--no sidetone indicates a dead phone. I believe the models WE 302 and AE 40, both from the late 1930s, had good networks for optimum conversation quality. Indeed, today, one of those 65 year old units on a landline will offer better sound quality than a cell phone. So it goes. |
| Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2015 14:09:30 -0000 (UTC) From: Matt Simpson <usenet@news.jmatt.net> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: robocaller intelligence (was FCC hopes to ...) Message-ID: <621B0D28-80D2-466B-8691-493F158D8EAB%usenet@news.jmatt.net> Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu> wrote: > Lots of them also seem to be able to recognize the cadence of answering > machine messages. I get LOTS of calls (which I never answer) to my cellphone from some scummy payday loan outfit. Different caller-id each time, so blocking the number is pointless. They always leave a message on voice mail. Usually the message restarts after about a second, and leaves a complete message instructing me to go to some website, as if it knows it's leaving a message and not talking to a live person. Occasionally, the beginning of the message is truncated (as if it started playing as soon as my VM greeting started), and instructs me to press 1 or 2, as if it thinks it's talking to a live person. It seems likely that the robocaller usually figures out after a couple of seconds that it doesn't have a live person (maybe it catches the Voice mail "beep" interrupting its spiel), and switches to the message format that it uses for answering machines or voice mail. But sometimes it doesn't figure it out, and my VM picks up in the middle of its "live person" format. |
| Date: Sun, 01 Nov 2015 15:06:49 -0500 From: Ron <ron@see.below> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: How Emojis Find Their Way to Phones Message-ID: <jrrc3bp4v0d7mou35cj313kvofb5vd41nr@4ax.com> >***** Moderator's Note ***** > >I'd like some more opinions on this: please respond either online or >offline, and let me know if you are in favor of the Telecom Digest >switching from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. I wouldn't like to see the switch. I still read the group via a newsreader. Emojis and other UTF-8 cruft would look like garbage and damage the readability of the posts. --- Ron (user telnom.for.plume in domain antichef.com) ***** Moderator's Note ***** That's the problem in a nutshell: I want to keep the Digest compatible with newsreaders, but I don't want to obstruct the use of (appropriate) accented characters in posts. Maybe I'm looking at this in an unproductive way, so I'll add these questions to my reuest for opinions: 1. Is there Open-source software available to convert ISO-8859-1 to/from UTF-8? 2. Are there versions of pine, et al, which are able to understand utf-8? 3. What do users of "ascii only" newsreaders gain or lose from switching to utf-8? TIA. Bill Bill Horne Moderator |
| Date: 01 Nov 2015 02:19:32 -0300 From: Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: How Emojis Find Their Way to Phones Message-ID: <87ziyynvob.fsf@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net> writes: > On Wed, 21 Oct 2015 03:15:17 -0400, in a Moderator's comment to a post by > Monty Solomon, Bill Horne wrote: > >> ... I'm considering switching to "UTF-8" ... > > I most wholeheartedly and enthusiastically encourage you to do so, and as > soon as practical :-) ! ISO 8859-1 (and -2, and -15, et al.) won't ever be > good for more than isolated, local, insular, stop-gap use. UTF-8, OtOH, is > a universal solution that even Apple and Microsoft are coming around to > accepting after decades of promulgating their own, proprietary methods. As I can't read Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Arabic, Greek, Innuit, Hebrew or anything in Cyrillic and don't want to see emoji, I'm happy with ISO-8859-1 or even ASCII. I find news, mail and web sites that use (what I take to be) UTF-8 punctuation really annoying. I can read German and puzzle out bits in French, Spanish and Italian but they use the Roman characters. > ***** Moderator's Note ***** > > I'd like some more opinions on this: please respond either online or > offline, and let me know if you are in favor of the Telecom Digest > switching from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. There you go. Thanks for asking. --- Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada ***** Moderator's Note ***** I understand not wanting to see emojis or "dingbat" fonts, since they are still not standardized and some email programs over-decorate them. However, and no offense, but if the UTF-8 punctuation is accurate, why do you find it annoying? Bill Bill Horne Moderator |
| Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2015 09:09:36 -0800 From: "Harold Hallikainen" <harold@hallikainen.org> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: UTF-8 Message-ID: <91100e3594a3f7c3e0b56092cfc19f29.squirrel@www.hallikainen.org> I also encourage the use of UTF-8, [since] it allows the encoding of the Unicode character set. 7 bit ASCII characters are encoded as 8 bit characters with the most significant bit zero. I use UTF-8 in several products and then decode to 16 bit Unicode. The 16 bit Unicode then indexes into a bitmap table of Unifont characters for display. The characters I'm currently using are shown at http://ftp.uslinc.com/ftp/Products/CCR-100/Documents/Technical/CharacterSet130614.txt . Harold --- FCC Rules Updated Daily at http://www.hallikainen.com Not sent from an iPhone. ***** Moderator's Note ***** Harold, Please, have mercy on the old Model 33 repairmen in the audience, and explain why the Unicode character set is better than what ISO-8859-1 can provide. TIA. Bill Horne Moderator |
| Date: Mon, 02 Nov 2015 21:00:00 -0000 (UTC) From: Anonymous <anonymous@telecom-digest.org> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: AT&T withdrawing operator services Message-ID: <20151102152110@telecom-digest.org> AT&T says that it plans to withdraw certain operator services - including Bill to a Third Number, Busy Line Verify, Busy Line Interrupt, Collect Calling, and Person to Person - in its 21-state ILEC franchise service area. AT&T will discontinue these services for its retail and resale CLEC customers on or after March 18, 2016. Access, cellular, interconnection, and ILEC customers have until June 4, 2016, to eliminate these services for their end-users. Also going is International Directory Assistance Service. |
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