14 Sep
2012
14 Sep
'12
8:40 p.m.
thats so funny. I hope Ill eventually remembes who I was conversing with, or even when it
was, but was told that phone companies should have been way ahead. After all a computer is
just a bunch of switches (one of the best definitions of a computer imho, albeit informal,
for those with a smattering of electronics knowledge).
------------------------------
On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 7:34 PM PDT Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 14 Sep 2012 at 21:08, William Donzelli wrote:
It seems that every good sized computer company
explores the telephone
market, and many actually bring some sort of product to market, mostly
leading to disaster. USR, IBM, and Data General all come to mind.
IBM did pretty well with their acquisition of Rolm. I still have a
Rolm frisbee for playing with the dogs.
OTOH, telephone companies didn't do all that well in the computer
business.
--Chuck
15 Sep
15 Sep
12:01 p.m.
thats so funny. I hope Ill eventually remembes who I was conversing
with, or even when it was, but was told that phone companies should have
been way ahead. After all a computer is just a bunch of switches (one of
the best definitions of a computer imho, albeit informal, for those with
a smattering of electronics knowledge).
As an aside, much of the electronicv work for codebreaking in the UK in
WW2, including Colossus, was done, IIRC, by people from the GPO research
labs. GPO = General Post Office, who at the time ran the telephone system
in the UK, and who therefore had great expereience of switching systems.
And how many computer debvelopments came from the Bell Telephone labs?
-tony
12:40 p.m.
________________________________
From: Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
And how many computer developments came from the Bell Telephone labs.
C: They were were experimenting w/biological computers at one point. I think they may have
gotten close to a NAND gate utilizing 2 slugs (the slimy kind).
?I met a guy last winter, who was very down on his luck, but had quite a resume (We stood
out in the cold for 3+ hours talking w/him. My feet were frozen). He claimed that Northern
Telecom in Canada was way ahead of anything Bell Labs/AT & T was doing. Perhaps not
w/slugs though.
1:05 p.m.
New subject: Slugs (Was: Microsoft cordless phone
On Sat, 15 Sep 2012, Chris Tofu wrote:
anything Bell Labs/AT & T was doing. Perhaps not
w/slugs though.
When my cousin (David Ungar) went to teach at Stanford (~20 years ago), he
told me that there was a group there reverse engineering banana slugs.
so that they can build artificial ones?
. . . and then use those artificial ones (which presumablyu need lots of
resources) as builfing blocks for making gates?
1:20 p.m.
New subject: Slugs (Was: Microsoft cordless phone
On 9/15/2012 2:05 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
On Sat, 15 Sep 2012, Chris Tofu wrote:
and you complain DOS is sluggish.
anything Bell Labs/AT & T was doing. Perhaps
not w/slugs though.
When my cousin (David Ungar) went to teach at Stanford (~20 years ago), he
told me that there was a group there reverse engineering banana slugs.
so that they can build artificial ones? . . . and then use those artificial ones (which
presumablyu need lots of
resources) as builfing blocks for making gates?
Well I guess they have to compete with the SNAILS in the Post Office.
Ducks any large equipment thrown this way.
Ben.
BTW in my local area in the 80's, used videotex equipment was surplus.
1:28 p.m.
New subject: Slugs (Was: Microsoft cordless phone
________________________________
From: ben <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca>
Well I guess they have to compete with the SNAILS in the Post Office.
Ducks any large equipment thrown this way.
C: What about ducks? Can a pair of them produce a XOR gate or something maybe? QUAX. LOL
sounds like an OS! If I were to write one that's what I'll call it -QU/AX
16 Sep
16 Sep
10:08 a.m.
New subject: Slugs (Was: Microsoft cordless phone
On 15 September 2012 21:05, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
On Sat, 15 Sep 2012, Chris Tofu wrote:
That seems very unlikely to me. Artificial-life research is nowhere
near the level of building individual bacterial cells yet, let alone
eukaryote cells - i.e., ones with a nucleus and mitochondria.
You're asking for a chainsaw from someone who hasn't yet moved from a
fragment of flint to a shaped arrowhead.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884
anything Bell Labs/AT & T was doing. Perhaps
not w/slugs though.
When my cousin (David Ungar) went to teach at Stanford (~20 years ago), he
told me that there was a group there reverse engineering banana slugs.
so that they can build artificial ones?
10:20 a.m.
New subject: Slugs (Was: Microsoft cordless phone
> When my cousin (David Ungar) went to teach at
Stanford (~20 years ago), he
> told me that there was a group there reverse engineering banana slugs.
> so that they can build artificial ones?
On Sun, 16 Sep 2012, Liam Proven
wrote:
That seems very unlikely to me. Artificial-life
research is nowhere
near the level of building individual bacterial cells yet, let alone
eukaryote cells - i.e., ones with a nucleus and mitochondria.
You're asking for a chainsaw from someone who hasn't yet moved from a
fragment of flint to a shaped arrowhead.
He expected me to understand that they were trying to simulate the thought
processes, not build more of them.
10:25 a.m.
New subject: Slugs (Was: Microsoft cordless phone
On 16 September 2012 18:20, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
Ohhhhh right! Now I am with you.
Yes, actually, that seems quite doable. Not trivial 20y ago and not
that easy even now, mind you.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884
> When my
cousin (David Ungar) went to teach at Stanford (~20 years ago), he
> told me that there was a group there reverse engineering banana slugs.
> so that they can build artificial ones?
On Sun, 16 Sep 2012, Liam Proven
wrote:
That seems very unlikely to me. Artificial-life
research is nowhere
near the level of building individual bacterial cells yet, let alone
eukaryote cells - i.e., ones with a nucleus and mitochondria.
You're asking for a chainsaw from someone who hasn't yet moved from a
fragment of flint to a shaped arrowhead.
He expected me to understand that they were trying to simulate the thought
processes, not build more of them. 
15 Sep
15 Sep
12:54 p.m.
On 15 Sep 2012 at 20:01, Tony Duell wrote:
As an aside, much of the electronicv work for
codebreaking in the UK
in WW2, including Colossus, was done, IIRC, by people from the GPO
research labs. GPO = General Post Office, who at the time ran the
telephone system in the UK, and who therefore had great expereience of
switching systems.
Maybe, but in the 70s when I visited, telephones in Britain were a
nightmare compared to their US counterparts--particularly pay
telephones. And doesn't England still have coin-op residential
electrical service? When I heard this referred to on an old
"Steptoe and Son" broadcast, it seemed very backward to me (you
apparently needed a lot of 1s coins to keep out of the dark).
And how many computer debvelopments came from the Bell
Telephone labs?
A lot, granted. But that came from a time when Ma Bell was
prohibited from getting into the computer business. After the
consent decree and breakup, she went downhill fast.
--Chuck
1:22 p.m.
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org
[mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Guzis
Sent: 15 September 2012 20:55
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: Microsoft cordless phone
On 15 Sep 2012 at 20:01, Tony Duell wrote:
We were very slow in upgrading exchanges to handle touch tone phones, and
System-x
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_X_(telephony)
was only deployed from 1980 onwards nearly 20 years after the USA. The Post
Office and then British Telecom were directly owned and managed by the
Government. (Actually some say they were managed by the Unions). This made
us very slow to deploy new technology as convincing a government to invest
in new technology ...
As an aside, much of the electronicv work for
codebreaking
in the UK
in WW2, including Colossus, was done, IIRC, by
people from the GPO
research labs. GPO = General Post Office, who at the time ran the
telephone system in the UK, and who therefore had great
expereience of
switching systems.
Maybe, but in the 70s when I visited, telephones in Britain were a
nightmare compared to their US counterparts--particularly pay
telephones. And doesn't England still have coin-op residential
electrical service? When I heard this referred to on an old
"Steptoe and Son" broadcast, it seemed very backward to me (you
apparently needed a lot of 1s coins to keep out of the dark).
I don't think we still have coin fed utility meters, but they were common
place for many years. I well remember my Gran counting the coins out of one
of the meters, and getting some back. We do however have pre-payment meters.
Not sure if this link is visible out side the UK...
http://www.uswitch.com/gas-electricity/guides/prepayment-meters
but it explains the hows and whys...
And how many
computer debvelopments came from the Bell
Telephone labs?
A lot, granted. But that came from a time when Ma Bell was
prohibited from getting into the computer business. After the
consent decree and breakup, she went downhill fast.
--Chuck
16 Sep
16 Sep
10 a.m.
On 15 Sep 2012 at 20:01, Tony Duell wrote:
In the 1979s. the UK telephoens were still essentially a government
monopoly. Everything had to be rentyed from the GPO, you couldn't do any
mdoifications yourself [1]. Pkug-in telephones were very rare, most werre
hardwired. If you are interested in finding out more about the wiring of
subscriber equipment in the UK -- telephone schemantic,s how extensions
were wired [2], etc, then do a goodle search for N diagram. And enjoy...
[1] That's not to say it didn't occur :-)
[2] Multiple phones opn a line were a bit odd. The speech circuitry was
wired in paralel, the ringers (bells) in series. Evey extension scheme
had a 'Plan' number -- Plan 4 is the one for plug-in telephones. Note
that there are different versiosn of Plan 4 depending on whethr you
rented one telephoen or morte than one. I guess if you decided ot rent a
second telephoen on Paln 4, an engineer had ot come out and rewire all
the sockets and the existing telephone. You were saying... :-)
On the other hand, the Planphones (telephoens with swithcing to
extensions, facilities to call exten sions, etc) are rather fun.
As an aside, much of the electronicv work for
codebreaking in the UK
in WW2, including Colossus, was done, IIRC, by people from the GPO
research labs. GPO = General Post Office, who at the time ran the
telephone system in the UK, and who therefore had great expereience of
switching systems.
Maybe, but in the 70s when I visited, telephones in Britain were a
nightmare compared to their US counterparts--particularly pay telephones. And doesn't England still have
coin-op residential
electrical service? When I heard this referred to on an old
Yes and no. It is not common, virtually everyone has a normal watt-hour
meter that is read 4 times a year (or should be) and gets a bill shortly
after.
However, if the electricity company thinks you're a 'bad risk' and are
likely to not pay the bill, they can install a prepaymetn meter. In the
old days, that was something you put coilns in (often shillings, not
pennies), nowadays it more likely you put money on a smartcard or similar
at a local shop and use that to add credit ot the meter. That way the
meter iteslf never contains coins, and they don't have to send soembody
round to empty it (such people were attecked for the money they carried,
and often scuh meters were used in less 'desirable' areas...)
I can see why a scrap dealer would be likely to be judged a 'bad risk'...
-tony
2:34 p.m.
Yes and no. It is not common, virtually everyone has a
normal watt-hour
meter that is read 4 times a year (or should be) and gets a bill shortly
after.
4 times a year?! :oO
In Brazil watt-hour meters are read every month :oo and we have one bill
per service, per month (one for telephone, one for cellular, one for water,
one for energy, etc)
11:31 p.m.
As an aside, much of the electronicv work for codebreaking in the UK
> in WW2, including Colossus, was done, IIRC, by
people from the GPO
> research labs. GPO = General Post Office, who at the time ran the
> telephone system in the UK, and who therefore had great expereience of
> switching systems.
The Enigma key recovery was done using the multi enigma simulators (bombes)
designed by Alan Turing and built by the British Tabulating Machine Company.
The GPO had a research station at Dollis Hill in north London.
One of their engineers was a certain Tommy Flowers who had done research
into valves as switches as opposed to your bog standard 3000 series PO
relay.
He found that provided you left the valves switched on they were nearly as
reliable as relays and of course much faster.
Flowers knew the Bletchley Park people as the Bombes were all relay and
motor driven and Flowers was the PO research man on fast switching.
Colossus was designed to attack something other than Enigma. To be exact the
Fish series of teleprinter cipher attachments. Whilst they could read the
tapes optically at high speed they could not react fast enough to matches.
They consulted Flowers informally and at least at first, he helped
(unfunded) to design and build the logic side out of valves.
Regards
?
Rod Smallwood
-----Original Message-----
From: cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org]
On Behalf Of Tony Duell
Sent: 16 September 2012 18:00
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: Microsoft cordless phone
>
> On 15 Sep 2012 at 20:01, Tony Duell wrote:
>
> > As an aside, much of the electronicv work for codebreaking in the UK
> in WW2, including Colossus, was done, IIRC, by
people from the GPO
> research labs. GPO = General Post Office, who at the time ran the
> telephone system in the UK, and who therefore had great expereience of
> switching systems.
>
> Maybe, but in the 70s when I visited, telephones in Britain were a
> nightmare compared to their US counterparts--particularly pay
In the 1979s. the UK telephoens were still essentially a government
monopoly. Everything had to be rentyed from the GPO, you couldn't do any
mdoifications yourself [1]. Pkug-in telephones were very rare, most werre
hardwired. If you are interested in finding out more about the wiring of
subscriber equipment in the UK -- telephone schemantic,s how extensions
were wired [2], etc, then do a goodle search for N diagram. And enjoy...
[1] That's not to say it didn't occur :-)
[2] Multiple phones opn a line were a bit odd. The speech circuitry was
wired in paralel, the ringers (bells) in series. Evey extension scheme
had a 'Plan' number -- Plan 4 is the one for plug-in telephones. Note
that there are different versiosn of Plan 4 depending on whethr you
rented one telephoen or morte than one. I guess if you decided ot rent a
second telephoen on Paln 4, an engineer had ot come out and rewire all
the sockets and the existing telephone. You were saying... :-)
On the other hand, the Planphones (telephoens with swithcing to
extensions, facilities to call exten sions, etc) are rather fun.
telephones. And doesn't England still have
coin-op residential
electrical service? When I heard this referred to on an old
Yes and no. It is not common, virtually everyone has a normal watt-hour
meter that is read 4 times a year (or should be) and gets a bill shortly
after.
However, if the electricity company thinks you're a 'bad risk' and are
likely to not pay the bill, they can install a prepaymetn meter. In the
old days, that was something you put coilns in (often shillings, not
pennies), nowadays it more likely you put money on a smartcard or similar
at a local shop and use that to add credit ot the meter. That way the
meter iteslf never contains coins, and they don't have to send soembody
round to empty it (such people were attecked for the money they carried,
and often scuh meters were used in less 'desirable' areas...)
I can see why a scrap dealer would be likely to be judged a 'bad risk'...
-tony
10 a.m.
On 15 September 2012 20:54, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
On 15 Sep 2012 at 20:01, Tony Duell wrote:
Really? My fairly brief experience with American phones has been the
precise reverse. Yes, we pay for local calls, but this means we pay a
LOT less for long-distance. (Now with internet telephony & a thousand
discount schemes, companies, phonecards and so on, this is all going
away anyway.)
We had one national phone company (and one rebel town in the far north
with its own). No complex tariffs, no high charges for calls from one
telco to another, etc.
The whole rest of the world has one mobile phone system, GSM, whereas
the USA has its own weird one and competing telcos in every city and
state meant that phones could not be used from one place to the next
/in the same country./
You guys even pay to /receive/ text messages!
It looks like pathetic, chaotic madness from over here.
It's the only reason Blackberry took off with its wretched glorified
pagers; that the US phone system was so broken, random and unreliable
that mobile phones didn't take off. When the whole rest of the planet
was going over to cellphones, out of North America we got a souped-up
two-way pager that gradually added phone functionality on.
Complete insanity.
As an aside, much of the electronicv work for
codebreaking in the UK
in WW2, including Colossus, was done, IIRC, by people from the GPO
research labs. GPO = General Post Office, who at the time ran the
telephone system in the UK, and who therefore had great expereience of
switching systems.
Maybe, but in the 70s when I visited, telephones in Britain were a
nightmare compared to their US counterparts--particularly pay
telephones. And doesn't England still have coin-op
residential
electrical service?
Not for 30 odd years now, no. By the 1990s, maybe some elderly people
who didn't want their equipment changed - but that was 20y ago.
Low-price rental accommodation sometimes has "power keys", where you
top up an encrypted electronic key in a corner shop and it authorises
your meter. This is still way better than coins, though. No emptying.
When I heard this referred to on an old
"Steptoe and Son" broadcast, it seemed very backward to me (you
apparently needed a lot of 1s coins to keep out of the dark).
The shilling went out before I could talk. I do not remember pounds,
shillings and pence at all. I am 44.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884
10:23 a.m.
On 09/16/2012 01:00 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
The whole rest of the world has one mobile phone
system, GSM, whereas
the USA has its own weird one and competing telcos in every city and
state meant that phones could not be used from one place to the next
/in the same country./
You guys even pay to /receive/ text messages!
It looks like pathetic, chaotic madness from over here.
It's the only reason Blackberry took off with its wretched glorified
pagers; that the US phone system was so broken, random and unreliable
that mobile phones didn't take off. When the whole rest of the planet
was going over to cellphones, out of North America we got a souped-up
two-way pager that gradually added phone functionality on.
Complete insanity.
Yes. But remember, in the case of the Blackberry, it's more of a
status symbol than anything else; there have always been better
communication devices. (or at least it "was" a status symbol...now it's
more of an "oh, how quaint, one of the six remaining people with a
Blackberry" symbol)
As far as the insanity, and paying to receive text messages...American
companies artificially create an atmosphere in which the customers view
them as figures of authority, so they will be more obedient when it
comes to purchasing things. Very rarely will an American question
ANYTHING about a product or service, instead preferring to just pay
whatever is demanded, and accept whatever they get in return. Combine
that with the general attitude that "cheaper is better, even when it
isn't", and you begin to see why utter trash like Wal*Mart (the
McDonald's of retail) and McDonald's (the Wal*Mart of food) becomes so
pervasive here...and craziness like paying to receive text messages.
In the end, we truly deserve the poor products and services that we
get, because the vast VAST majority of us just aren't smart enough to
demand more. Its really quite pathetic, and embarrassing.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
10:42 a.m.
On 16 September 2012 18:23, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On 09/16/2012 01:00 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
I don't know about that. My perception, as a Londoner who uses public
transport heavily, I see a /lot/ of Blackberries even today.
Until about 4-5y ago, they were the SuitPhone. You pretty much only
found them clamped in the pallid pasty paws of workers in the
corporate machine, hooked into the enterprise email backbone,
monitored and timed and measured, so that the slaves were never free
of their overlords.
The new iPhone - pre-apps and pre-3G - did great and became the
non-techie's phone of choice.
RIM responded with a big expensive ad campaign about the multimedia
and games abilities of the Blackberry, and as a result sold millions
of the things to teens. This is fading now - iPhone is winning - but
for 3-4y the changes are that if the phone user had acne, bad hair and
bad clothes, the piece of electronics they'd be hunched over was a
Blackberry.
The hardcore high-volume texters still favour them. They're also
/very/ cheap now, I think.
The whole rest of the world has one mobile phone
system, GSM, whereas
the USA has its own weird one and competing telcos in every city and
state meant that phones could not be used from one place to the next
/in the same country./
You guys even pay to /receive/ text messages!
It looks like pathetic, chaotic madness from over here.
It's the only reason Blackberry took off with its wretched glorified
pagers; that the US phone system was so broken, random and unreliable
that mobile phones didn't take off. When the whole rest of the planet
was going over to cellphones, out of North America we got a souped-up
two-way pager that gradually added phone functionality on.
Complete insanity.
Yes. But remember, in the case of the Blackberry, it's more of a
status symbol than anything else; there have always been better
communication devices. (or at least it "was" a status symbol...now it's
more of an "oh, how quaint, one of the six remaining people with a
Blackberry" symbol) As far as the insanity, and paying to receive text
messages...American
companies artificially create an atmosphere in which the customers view
them as figures of authority, so they will be more obedient when it
comes to purchasing things. Very rarely will an American question
ANYTHING about a product or service, instead preferring to just pay
whatever is demanded, and accept whatever they get in return. Combine
that with the general attitude that "cheaper is better, even when it
isn't", and you begin to see why utter trash like Wal*Mart (the
McDonald's of retail) and McDonald's (the Wal*Mart of food) becomes so
pervasive here...and craziness like paying to receive text messages.
In the end, we truly deserve the poor products and services that we
get, because the vast VAST majority of us just aren't smart enough to
demand more. Its really quite pathetic, and embarrassing.
I would not dare to disagree.
I did find a recent Reddit thread about this amusing.
An American poster was complaining about mobile costs.
A Brit posted "TIL Americans pay to receive texts". (Today I Learned.)
The Europeans were all amused, in a horrified but condescending sort of way.
The Americans were astounded. They had no idea that only they paid to
receive as well as send.
It was, overall, hilarious.
This is not the original article but a response to it, I think:
http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/hf0g3/til_that_most_of_the_w…
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884
10:50 a.m.
On 09/16/2012 01:42 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
No doubt. And...embarrassing. It's not my place to apologize to the
world for the stupid antics of my country, but sometimes I really feel
like I should. :-(
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
On 16 September 2012 18:23, Dave McGuire <mcguire
at neurotica.com> wrote:
Not so much here. I used to know a lot of Blackberry users; they've
all moved on to iPhones and Android devices, except for one
diehard...You know who you are. ;)
On 09/16/2012 01:00 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
I don't know about that. My perception, as a Londoner who uses public
transport heavily, I see a /lot/ of Blackberries even today. The whole rest of the world has one mobile phone
system, GSM, whereas
the USA has its own weird one and competing telcos in every city and
state meant that phones could not be used from one place to the next
/in the same country./
You guys even pay to /receive/ text messages!
It looks like pathetic, chaotic madness from over here.
It's the only reason Blackberry took off with its wretched glorified
pagers; that the US phone system was so broken, random and unreliable
that mobile phones didn't take off. When the whole rest of the planet
was going over to cellphones, out of North America we got a souped-up
two-way pager that gradually added phone functionality on.
Complete insanity.
Yes. But remember, in the case of the Blackberry, it's more of a
status symbol than anything else; there have always been better
communication devices. (or at least it "was" a status symbol...now it's
more of an "oh, how quaint, one of the six remaining people with a
Blackberry" symbol) Until about 4-5y ago, they were the SuitPhone. You
pretty much only
found them clamped in the pallid pasty paws of workers in the
corporate machine, hooked into the enterprise email backbone,
monitored and timed and measured, so that the slaves were never free
of their overlords.
The new iPhone - pre-apps and pre-3G - did great and became the
non-techie's phone of choice.
RIM responded with a big expensive ad campaign about the multimedia
and games abilities of the Blackberry, and as a result sold millions
of the things to teens. This is fading now - iPhone is winning - but
for 3-4y the changes are that if the phone user had acne, bad hair and
bad clothes, the piece of electronics they'd be hunched over was a
Blackberry.
It was a bit different here. They were the near-exclusive domain of
suits for a long time, and the primary desire was to be seen holding one
rather than actually using it.
The hardcore high-volume texters still favour them.
They're also
/very/ cheap now, I think.
They're cheap for a reason...RIM has been circling the drain for
awhile now. ;)
As far as
the insanity, and paying to receive text messages...American
companies artificially create an atmosphere in which the customers view
them as figures of authority, so they will be more obedient when it
comes to purchasing things. Very rarely will an American question
ANYTHING about a product or service, instead preferring to just pay
whatever is demanded, and accept whatever they get in return. Combine
that with the general attitude that "cheaper is better, even when it
isn't", and you begin to see why utter trash like Wal*Mart (the
McDonald's of retail) and McDonald's (the Wal*Mart of food) becomes so
pervasive here...and craziness like paying to receive text messages.
In the end, we truly deserve the poor products and services that we
get, because the vast VAST majority of us just aren't smart enough to
demand more. Its really quite pathetic, and embarrassing.
I would not dare to disagree.
I did find a recent Reddit thread about this amusing.
An American poster was complaining about mobile costs.
A Brit posted "TIL Americans pay to receive texts". (Today I Learned.)
The Europeans were all amused, in a horrified but condescending sort of way.
The Americans were astounded. They had no idea that only they paid to
receive as well as send.
It was, overall, hilarious.
This is not the original article but a response to it, I think:
http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/hf0g3/til_that_most_of_the_w…
11:03 a.m.
Yes. But remember, in the case of the Blackberry,
it's more of a
status symbol than anything else; there have always been better
communication devices. (or at least it "was" a status symbol...now it's
more of an "oh, how quaint, one of the six remaining people with a
Blackberry" symbol)
Interesting...In Brazil, the shittyberry is THE corporate telephone.
Almost everyone has a nextel line, and most of them uses blackberries.
I hate this shitty phone. It is WORSE than my iPhone 3GS - and I don't
have that much consideration for it either.
10:42 a.m.
The shilling went out before I could talk. I do not
remember pounds,
shillings and pence at all. I am 44.
The old shilling coins same size and vlaue as the 5p coins tht replaced
them were sitll in use until quite recently (ditto tneh florin and 10p).
I am very suprised you'd not leasrtn to talk by then :-).
More seirouly, I rememebr pounds/shiilings/pence and the decimalisation
-- just. I am only one year older than you. SOmewhere I have an
electically pwoered mechancial desk calcualtor that works i
pounds/shillings/pence (although that feature has been disabled by a
previous orner, I intend to sort it ot).
-tony
11:16 a.m.
On Sun, 16 Sep 2012, Liam Proven wrote:
The whole rest of the world has one mobile phone
system, GSM, whereas
the USA has its own weird one and competing telcos in every city and
state meant that phones could not be used from one place to the next
/in the same country./
Incorrect. First, GSM is one set of standards (mostly; telco standards are
a special kind of hell), but it operates on no less than 14 frequency
bands:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_frequency_bands
Good luck finding a phone that supports all of them! But wait, there's 3G
now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMTS_frequency_bands
And let's not forget LTE, which changes the radio interface _again_:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_(telecommunication)
But that's just the GSM family! Let's not forget that Japan and the nordic
countries did their own thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Handy-phone_System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Mobile_Telephone
And then of course, some 'American' network technologies had major
deployments outside the USA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Digital_Enhanced_Network
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IS-95
Alexey
11:59 a.m.
On 16 September 2012 19:16, Alexey Toptygin <alexeyt at freeshell.org> wrote:
On Sun, 16 Sep 2012, Liam Proven wrote:
I did in 1999 or so, actually. Well, it was tri-band and worked
everywhere I've ever even heard of. Motorola Timeport 7089, I think.
Oddly, only the German Wikipedia has a page on it, but you can see one here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-band_device
I sold one last month, as a matter of fact. Only fetched about ?3-?4,
but that's pretty good for a 13y old phone!
I later replaced it with a quad-band phone, I think.
The whole rest of the world has one mobile phone
system, GSM, whereas
the USA has its own weird one and competing telcos in every city and
state meant that phones could not be used from one place to the next
/in the same country./
Incorrect. First, GSM is one set of standards (mostly; telco standards are a
special kind of hell), but it operates on no less than 14 frequency bands:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_frequency_bands
Good luck finding a phone that supports all of them! But wait, there's 3G
now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMTS_frequency_bands
And let's not forget LTE, which changes the radio interface _again_:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_(telecommunication)
Yuh-huh. I do actually know a little bit about this stuff; Q.v.
http://www.reghardware.com/2011/05/24/wtf_is_4g/
But that's just the GSM family! Let's not
forget that Japan and the nordic
countries did their own thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Handy-phone_System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Mobile_Telephone
NMT was in some ways an ancestor of GSM, was it not? I forget the details now...
And then of course, some 'American' network
technologies had major
deployments outside the USA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Digital_Enhanced_Network
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IS-95
Yes, true, but fortunately, they did not do very well and have now
pretty much all died out.
Japan always has had a fondness for weird proprietary stuff. AIUI
they've come round now on phone standards, though, no?
Something I learned relatively recently about American mobiles - that
the old, pre-GSM phones didn't have SIM cards? You couldn't move your
phone from one network to another? Is that correct? That *amazed* me.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884
12:48 p.m.
On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 06:16:55PM +0000, Alexey Toptygin wrote:
On Sun, 16 Sep 2012, Liam Proven wrote:
Frequency band allocation is not identical the world over, surprise,
surprise. That being the case, the only way to deal with it is to allocate
multiple frequency bands depending on location.
The whole rest of the world has one mobile phone
system, GSM, whereas
the USA has its own weird one and competing telcos in every city and
state meant that phones could not be used from one place to the next
/in the same country./
Incorrect. First, GSM is one set of standards (mostly; telco
standards are a special kind of hell), but it operates on no less
than 14 frequency bands:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_frequency_bands Good luck finding a phone that supports all of them!
Never had a problem. My GSM phones in the last 10+ years all have been
multiband phones and they worked just fine in Germany, Switzerland, Italy,
Portugal, Spain and in the US (although coverage in the US leaves a bit
to be desired). And multi-band has been standard for GSM phones for quite
a few years now - only rock bottom throw-away phones didn't have it and
by now you can get even those with multiband GSM.
But wait,there's 3G now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMTS_frequency_bands
3G phone aquired in .ch for use in .ch and .de, fed it a US SIM card
and got 3G service in the US just fine. Bit pricey, but hey, US telcos,
'nuf said.
Kind regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison
11:32 a.m.
On 16 Sep 2012 at 18:00, Liam Proven wrote:
Really? My fairly brief experience with American
phones has been the
precise reverse. Yes, we pay for local calls, but this means we pay a
LOT less for long-distance. (Now with internet telephony & a thousand
discount schemes, companies, phonecards and so on, this is all going
away anyway.)
There *is* the matter of scale. My state, for instance, is larger
than the entire UK in terms of land area and far more varied in terms
of geography and *much* lower in population density. It's far from
being the largest state in the union. There are many areas of this
country that are classifed as "frontier" (<6 people per square mile).
But I'll agree with you on the mobile phone mess. Wierd licensing,
odd terms of service and scams abound. This is the legacy of our
"free market" thinkers--put everything up for sale with minimum
regulation and let the devil take the hindmost. Margaret Thatcher
would be proud.
I sometimes get no signal indication, just on my daily walks out my
front door. I have to go outside of the house and walk down my
driveway to make a reliable call on mobile. On the other hand, the
wired service we inherited from the Bell conglomerate is utterly
reliable--and the telcos are trying to figure out a way to get rid of
them, as mobile is far more profitable.
The shilling went out before I could talk. I do not
remember pounds,
shillings and pence at all. I am 44.
I do--and still have a few. I also recall seeing monochrome 405-line
TV broadcasts in the UK and thought they were the most flickery awful
things I'd ever seen.
But your statement about coin-op residential electric meters in the
UK simply isn't true:
http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?285552-Old-
Coin-Electric-Meter
--Chuck
11:45 a.m.
On 09/16/2012 02:32 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
But I'll agree with you on the mobile phone mess.
Wierd licensing,
odd terms of service and scams abound. This is the legacy of our
"free market" thinkers--put everything up for sale with minimum
regulation and let the devil take the hindmost. Margaret Thatcher
would be proud.
If "take the hindmost" means "do you in the pooper", well, yes. ;)
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
12:27 p.m.
On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 06:00:10PM +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
The whole rest of the world has one mobile phone system, GSM, whereas
the USA has its own weird one and competing telcos in every city and
state meant that phones could not be used from one place to the next
/in the same country./
You guys even pay to /receive/ text messages!
And pay to receive calls. That came as a rude surprise to me a few years
ago when I travelled to the US on business. Got me a local pay-as-you-go
phone and told the wife to call me on that one - would be cheaper than
her calling me on my normal mobile where I would pay the roaming charges.
Little was I aware of the greed of the american telco ... turns out that
they weren't happy with the money they were getting from the caller, they
also charged me something like $2/min or so for the incoming international
call. Which I wasn't used to - in europe (well, .de and .ch definitely, but
I guess the rest is not too dissimiliar on that one ) you only pay for
incoming calls if you're doing international roaming.
At point which I went "fine, if you're _that_ greedy, you are not going to
see another cent" and installed Skype.
Kind regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison
3:35 p.m.
The shilling had a good run, it was the last vestige of the sestertius - a roman
denomination.
--------
Paul Anderson -- VE3HOP
On 2012-09-16, at 1:00 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
The shilling went out before I could talk. I do not remember pounds,
shillings and pence at all. I am 44.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884
5:08 p.m.
Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> writes:
I rented a flat on Worthing seafront for a few months in 2001, which was
equipped with a coin-op meter when I moved in. (Not for very long; the
electricity company were more than happy to replace it.) I'd be
surprised if there weren't still a few of them to be found in holiday
cottages and similar.
The modern equivalent is the prepayment meter -- which has an electronic
"key" that appropriately-equipped shops can put credit onto. I lived in
a rented house with that system for a couple of years. It's not an
improvement on the coin meter: it's unreliable (ours broke twice,
leaving us without electricity, and it's easy for a housemate to take
the key to recharge and then forget about it), and it's much harder to
find a shop with a key-recharging machine at 2AM than it is to find a ?1
coin.
Both systems also ludicrously overcharge you for electricity compared to
having a proper meter, of course...
--
Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org> <http://offog.org/>
And
doesn't England still have coin-op residential electrical
service?
Not for 30 odd years now, no. By the 1990s, maybe some elderly people
who didn't want their equipment changed - but that was 20y ago.
6:20 p.m.
On 17 Sep 2012 at 1:08, Adam Sampson wrote:
Both systems also ludicrously overcharge you for
electricity compared
to having a proper meter, of course...
The November, 2010 post I linked to made reference to a single
household spending ?9 per day using their coin-op meter. They
suspected that the landlord was skimming the take from the meter.
--Chuck
15 Sep
15 Sep
2:05 p.m.
On 09/15/2012 03:01 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
I'm surprised you'd even take that swing.
For openers the most famous, the transistor.
The most notable was K&R were employed by Bell Labs.. so Unix and
all the useful utilities.
Bell Labs like your GPO was the local experts on switches and all things
switching and yes, they were indeed involved. What they learned went
into their automated billing and switching systems. They were
involved with relay computers and later electronic ones as well.
Allison
thats so funny. I hope Ill eventually remembes who I was conversing
with, or even when it was, but was told that phone companies should have
been way ahead. After all a computer is just a bunch of switches (one of
the best definitions of a computer imho, albeit informal, for those with
a smattering of electronics knowledge).
As an aside, much of the electronicv work for codebreaking in the UK in
WW2, including Colossus, was done, IIRC, by people from the GPO research
labs. GPO = General Post Office, who at the time ran the telephone system
in the UK, and who therefore had great expereience of switching systems.
And how many computer debvelopments came from the Bell Telephone labs?
2:33 p.m.
On 9/15/2012 3:05 PM, allison wrote:
For openers the most famous, the transistor.
The most notable was K&R were employed by Bell Labs.. so Unix and
all the useful utilities.
I thought most of the big labs, had too much politics to get things done.
Both Unix* and the Transistor was just luck!
Bell Labs like your GPO was the local experts on
switches and all things
switching and yes, they were indeed involved. What they learned went
into their automated billing and switching systems. They were
involved with relay computers and later electronic ones as well.
Allison
Ben.
*back on topic :) DEC equipment.
5:04 p.m.
On 15 Sep 2012, at 2:33 PM, ben wrote:
I thought most of the big labs, had too much politics
to get things done.
Both Unix* and the Transistor was just luck!
You haven't read much of the Bell System Journals then, have you?
--
Dr. Christian Kennedy
chris at mainecoon.com AF6AP | DB00000692 | PG00029419
http://www.mainecoon.com PGP KeyID 108DAB97
PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97
"Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration..."
6:12 p.m.
On 15 Sep 2012, at 5:14 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
I don't dispute that; I dispute that the politics prevented things from getting done.
--
Dr. Christian Kennedy
chris at mainecoon.com AF6AP | DB00000692 | PG00029419
http://www.mainecoon.com PGP KeyID 108DAB97
PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97
"Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration..."
You
haven't read much of the Bell System Journals then, have you?
Bell Labs was an insanely intense political snakepit, from What the
old timers I have known have said.
5:39 p.m.
On 15 Sep 2012 at 17:05, allison wrote:
I'm surprised you'd even take that swing.
For openers the most famous, the transistor.
Well, the bipolar point-contact transistor, at any rate. Julius
Lillenfeld had patented the FET in 1925. Apparently, Shockley wanted
to patent the FET but was informed by the Bell legal beagles that
that had already been done some 22 years earlier and might not be
patentable.
Which brings up a question. What constitutes the majority of
transistors in use today--bipolar junction or field-effect? My
money's on the FET simply because of the trillions present in
microelectronics.
And then there's the Lillenfeld invention of the electrolytic
capacitor, yet most high-school texts give BB+S the credit for
inventing the transistor and do not mention Lillenfeld.
Bell Labs should also receive some credit for the discovery of the
cosmic microwave background radiation (Penzias and Wilson worked for
BL at the time of the discovery).
Bell Labs has had a remarkable history of no fewer than 13 Nobel
laureates (7 prizes), the last one being in 2009 to Boyle and Smith
for CCDs. And I'm not counting Schanlow's work with MASERs while at
Bell.
Quite a remarkable organization in its heyday.
--Chuck
10:49 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
Bell Labs has had a remarkable history [...] Quite a
remarkable
organization in its heyday.
For anyone wanting to learn more about the history of Bell Labs, I
highly recommend _The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of
American Innovation_ by Jon Gertner.
16 Sep
16 Sep
10:05 a.m.
And how many
computer debvelopments came from the Bell Telephone labs?
I'm surprised you'd even take that swing.
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