32 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981 Previous Issue (Only one) Add this Digest to your personal   or   The Telecom Digest for May 20, 2014 Volume 33 : Issue 88 : "text" Format Messages in this Issue: Re: Telephony nostalgia -- dialing POP-CORN for free time of day (Thad Floryan) New gTLDs Are Now Available for Registration (Neal McLain) ====== 32 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======

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Date: Sun, 18 May 2014 18:47:47 -0700
From: Thad Floryan <thad@thadlabs.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Telephony nostalgia -- dialing POP-CORN for free time of  day 
Message-ID: <537962C3.6040704@thadlabs.com>

On 5/17/2014 9:19 PM, Thad Floryan wrote:
> We had a thread today (Saturday, 17 May 2014) in ba.internet that I felt
> readers of comp.dcom.telecom might find interesting noting "ba.*"  is
> Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area.
> [...]
> So there was a good reason (then) for dropping POPCORN.

To which one person responded quoted by "|" here and again below:

| No, not really

to which I replied:

And why not?  Cellphones are ubiquitous and every single one I've
seen displays the current date and time.  And some people still
wear wristwatches.  GPS units all display time.  And some of us
can tell the time reasonably accurately day or night looking at
the Sun or the stars as can be seen at the 2nd thumbnail here or
by using a Sundial daytimes:

http://thadlabs.com/Planispheres/

| Anybody, you or me or the other people watching this newsgroup,
| could write a simple program that could do exactly what the
| Audichron did.  I'd do it under Windows, since I'm way more
| familiar with its various API calls.  Heck, it wouldn't take more
| than an hour or two to write and debug it.  This assumes that the
| audio distribution to the phone circuits stays in place, but
| being solid state I don't see why it wouldn't.

Even simpler would be to use a Votrax Type 'N Talk (T'NT) and one doesn't
have to write any code -- simply type text to the Votrax using any terminal
program over RS-232 serial and it speaks.

A simple command-line or GUI program could be easily and quickly written to
send specific speech text strings to the T'NT unit for quick responses when
one needs to camouflage/conceal one's voice [but Caller ID would probably
throw the proverbial monkey wrench on that idea nowadays].

I bought one in the early 1970s and it's amazing: simply send ASCII chars to
it over RS-232 as either text strings to be spoken or as phoneme codes to be
pronounced and it does it all automatically; 3 pix taken about 4 years ago:

http://thadlabs.com/PIX/Votrax_1.jpg
126kB   box and Votrax T'NT

http://thadlabs.com/PIX/Votrax_2.jpg
98kB   Votrax front panel

http://thadlabs.com/PIX/Votrax_3.jpg
83kB   Votrax back panel

I still have a tube "somewhere" in my garage of the SC-01A speech synthesis
chips used in it if I wanted to make a new speaking accessory.  The Votrax
sounds much better than whatever-it-is Stephen Hawking is using (per his
speeches that I've heard to date):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking

My Votrax TYPE 'N TALK still works fine today and I control it using a
serial port on any one of my computers (*BSD, Linux, Solaris, Windows).

It's great fun to use it to carry-on a conversation with someone on the
phone and changing speech parameters to vary the accents, pitch, and
more.  By tweaking the parameters it can even mimic the speech of a help
desk person for whom English is not a primary language which is hilarious
when wanting to prank someone over the phone -- I did that once and it
was difficult stifling my laughter in the background -- noting I'm a very
fast typist so I could keep the T'NT going in realtime.  :-)

More info about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Votrax

    The Votrax Type N Talk - Kevtris.org

http://kevtris.org/Projects/votraxtnt/index.html

    Tasty Crepes: Votrax Type 'n Talk

http://tastycrepes.blogspot.com/2011/08/votrax-type-n-talk.html

    SC-01A Speech Synthesizer and Related ICs

http://www.redcedar.com/sc01.htm

And it seems I had the "last word" with the above comments in ba.internet

Thad



Date: Mon, 19 May 2014 04:14:34 -0700 (PDT)
From: Neal McLain <nmclain.remove-this@and-this-too.annsgarden.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: New gTLDs Are Now Available for Registration 
Message-ID: <c550b95c-dbe3-418e-8f89-10cf91ec4b4f@googlegroups.com>

By FHH Law, CommLawBlog, May 18, 2014

Put your thinking caps on, review the ICANN list, and get started 
-- NOW is the time.

We have previously alerted our readers to the impending arrival 
of new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) on the Internet and the 
opportunities that their arrival will be opening up. And now the 
time has come -- or, at least, it has come for some new domains, 
with others to be rolling out periodically for the foreseeable 
future.

Anyone contemplating expansion of their Internet presence into 
any of the new gTLDs should already be regularly reviewing the 
website of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and 
Numbers (ICANN). That's where ICANN lists the opening and closing 
dates for the various filing periods (e.g., Sunrise, Landrush, 
etc.) for each new gTLD as it becomes available.

We'll be keeping an eye on the ICANN list as well, looking for 
new gTLDs that, in our purely subjective view, might have some 
particular interest for our readers. When those pop onto our 
radar screen, we'll post about them here. This will be an ongoing 
process. There are still more than 1,500 gTLD applications 
working their way through the ICANN system, so attention must be 
paid to periodic developments for months, if not years, to come.

Continued:

http://www.commlawblog.com/2014/05/articles/internet/theyre-heeere-new-gtlds-are-now-available-for-registration/index.html

-or-

http://tinyurl.com/mdprkda

Neal McLain 





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