That story was about the AT&T U-verse product, AT&Ts version of TV and high speed Internet. The batteries are located in cabinets outdoors usually close to roads. This isn't a traditional switching office backup system. The would also fail if a vehicle accident took it out.
# Could you ever imagine an NRA gun nut voting Democrat anyway?
Sure. A lot of the NRA gun nuts, of which I am, voted for the current Ohio Democratic governor, he is actually pro-gun. The Republicans ran an anti-gun fool and threw away the gun nut vote. If the Democrats want to win the Ohio seats in the US Senate they need to run pro-gun candidates.
The Democrats know the one and only reason they control the US Senate now is they ran MODERATE candidates, many of which were progun, or at least not obnoxiously antigun.
Plurality voting serves an important purpose, it moderates candidates -- and voters for that matter -- and keeps them close to the political center. Political extremists don't like it since they are locked out but that's a feature not a bug. If you want political change then sell your ideas to the public and get them to buy it and get candidates to support those positions. It's long hard work but it can and has been done. Repeatedly.
As the difficulty of voting increases the participation of voters drops off but not uniformly. It tends to be Democrats that drop off more than Republicans. Everyone knows this but doesn't say it in public, except on slashdot where people say anything. The US State of Ohio -- has a Democrat for governor now and executive branch -- is kicking around the idea of making elections last over a few days and making it easier to vote, but that's going to be a hard sell to the Republicans in the legislative branch.
# Once you are old enough to see a few election cycles, you start to notice this stuff.
Exactly right. The older I get the more cynical I get about politics. Some political issues don't matter, this is one of them. Hillary is just pandering to the "protect me from the bad bad world" crowd. This is the same song applied to a different issue
The Supremes issued a 5-4 ruling back in 2005 that sentencing guidelines are not mandatory, they are advisory only. IANAL either, but here's a link from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers:
And just this month a 7-2 ruling in the Minbrough and Gall cases, related to crack cocaine sentencing guidelines, again they are advisory only, not mandatory. Here's a link from the LA Times:
I found some early Message Manager documentation in our archives.
The technical prospectus ( which would be very early in the product cycle ) is dated March 25, 1994. The Release 1.0 requirements are dated March 11, 1994.
A development plan is dated April 6th, 1994 ( after the patent filing date ), however the document version number is 0.6. The status date of the document was December 2nd, 1993, which I think is the same as creation date.
One undated document, but added to the database on Jan 12th 1994, says the "competition has announced GUI interface to voice mail products including Northern Telecom, VMX, Active Voice, AVT, Octel and others", and goes into some detail on each one.
It sounds to me like this patent was filed back then as a patent time bomb, that is, let products get built that infringe on the patent and then years later file big dollar lawsuits. Nice business strategy. Hopefully there is enough prior art here to kill this lawsuit.
Message Manager was released in 1995. We were working on it and running it internally before that. AT&T had it prior to 1995, it just wasn't available to the public. I'll see what I can dig up in the archives at work ( Alcatel-Lucent ). All the documenation / source for enterprise products was given to Avaya when Avaya was spun out of Lucent, so we may not have anything on it anymore. I know a couple people that worked on it and they are still around, I can ask them. And yes, even then it seemed obvious to me.
IANAL... These two patents refer to using DTMF for random access to voice mail message. The iPhone doesn't use DTMF to access voice mail messages. Neither does Message Manager. How do these patents have any bearing on the iPhone ?
IANAL, however, the AT&T Intuity Audix Message Manager is a desktop product that gives you random access to your voice mail messages. The Message Manager user guide dated January 1995 is on the Avaya site at:
Go to page 25 "Listening to your messages" shows how to select any voice mail message displayed on your screen. This wasn't rocket science. I wasn't involved with that products development, but I don't recall any patents being issued for it. Even at the time it seemed like an obvious thing to do and should be to any practitioner in voice mail.
Exactly. There hasn't been any information as to exactly what the nature of that update from Apple was. All we know is after the update unlocked iPhones were no longer usable after the update was applied. The tech-ignorant media has been suggesting the purpose of the update was to turn unlocked iPhones into iBricks, but there has been no proof of that.
Apple did not release an iPhone SDK or API that could be programmed to. Why should they be held responsible for what happens when iPhone updates break iPhones with arbitrary software on them.
It would be like changing the linux kernel for some special project you are workin on and then complaining that your unapproved changes no longer worked when the next kernel release came along. That's why there are API and SDKs and manual pages. Go beyond them at your peril.
My November 1979 edition of the CB/UNIX 2.3 manual pages has a chroot(1) and chroot(2) man page. It probably was not a CB add on and instead came from AT&T.
Here's the entire desccription of chroot(2)
NAME
chroot - change root directory
SYNOPSIS
chroot (rootname)
DESCRIPTION
Rootname is the address of the pathname of a directoyr, terminated by a null byte. Chroot
causes this directory to become the process root directory. This smeans that any references to
filename beginning with slash are not relative to the real root of the UNIX file system, but
relative to the new root directory specified in this system call. The current working directory
remains unchanged. Notice, however, that a chdir to slash ("/") following the chroot system
call wiill change the working directory to the new root directory. Arguments to chroot are always
absolute: no special meaning is given to initial slashes even if a chroot is currently in effect.
This system call is restricted to the super-user.
SEE ALSO
chroot(1)
DIAGNOSTICS
The error bit (c-bit) is set if the given name is not that of a directory or that is not searchable
(executable) or the current user is not the super user. From C, a -1 returned value indicates an
error, 0 indicates success
ASSEMBLER
(chroot = 61)
sys chroot; dirname
====
One of the things we used to chroot for was in support of buildiing many releases of our products, chroot pointed the compiler to the right set of files.
True, it's a tradition and doesn't have to be that way. In fact it's up to state law to decide how electoral votes are allocated, not federal law. The US Constitution does not specify a winner takes all electoral vote per state.
Some states, Maine is one and there are a couple others, split up electoral votes according to the percentage per candidate. I would like to see more states do that.
Okay, okay, I stirred up a hornets nest with my over generalization. That'll teach me. I've lived in the state of Ohio in the USA all my life, so what do you expect:) I'm a mathematics major, or maths major if you must.
We say moths, myths, sixths, truths, fifths, sixths, so why don't we say maths ? Beats me.
By the way, my cbunix23 handle refers to CB/UNIX 2.3 which I used when I first started working at AT&T in Columbus, Ohio. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CB_UNIX
Even though the source code has been released to the defense he still has to be very careful with copyright. If he gets some experts to look at it without getting appropriate nondisclosure agreements signed/first/ he'll get screwed for copyright violation.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is the most overturned district court in the US. The SCOTUS will probably overturn this 5 to 4. Your vote is supposed to be a private matter. We have a consitutional republic not a democracy. A vote swap is a sale of sorts, you're selling your vote for A in exchange for someone elses vote for B. Selling your vote is illegal, so vote swapping is illegal. But that'ss my opinion, the SCOTUS will have to decide, not nerds on/.
Police are already scanning in all license plates at airport parking lots looking for suspicous cars possibly involved in drug trafficing, and it was upheld as legal. Capturing the license plates of cars on public roads is not that much different, and in some ways, I could see the courts being more sympathetic to it than the parking lot situation.
The worse thing that happened to Usenet was the web browser and mouse. The entire web browser paradigm applied to Usenet just grates my nerves to no end. The only way you can navigate and control anything is with the mouse. I'd rather use trn anytime over any web browser. There are other issues with browsers as applied to Usenet, but this one really gets me irked. Why can't a web browser keyboard input for navigation, everything is on buttons and has to be mouse clicked.
The internally posted jobs of my employer, Alcatel-Lucent, are often rediculously specific. It's obvious to everyone that those job post are pro-forma and a specific individual is already locked in. I don't read job ads in the local newspaper so I don't know what's happening there. If that's not an abuse of the job posting process I don't know what is.
Slashdot Mirror
That story was about the AT&T U-verse product, AT&Ts version of TV and high speed Internet. The batteries are located in cabinets outdoors usually close to roads. This isn't a traditional switching office backup system. The would also fail if a vehicle accident took it out.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205801087
Spoken like a true believer. Just because the political center isn't where you want it doesn't mean it's not the center.
# Could you ever imagine an NRA gun nut voting Democrat anyway? Sure. A lot of the NRA gun nuts, of which I am, voted for the current Ohio Democratic governor, he is actually pro-gun. The Republicans ran an anti-gun fool and threw away the gun nut vote. If the Democrats want to win the Ohio seats in the US Senate they need to run pro-gun candidates. The Democrats know the one and only reason they control the US Senate now is they ran MODERATE candidates, many of which were progun, or at least not obnoxiously antigun.
Plurality voting serves an important purpose, it moderates candidates -- and voters for that matter -- and keeps them close to the political center. Political extremists don't like it since they are locked out but that's a feature not a bug. If you want political change then sell your ideas to the public and get them to buy it and get candidates to support those positions. It's long hard work but it can and has been done. Repeatedly.
As the difficulty of voting increases the participation of voters drops off but not uniformly. It tends to be Democrats that drop off more than Republicans. Everyone knows this but doesn't say it in public, except on slashdot where people say anything. The US State of Ohio -- has a Democrat for governor now and executive branch -- is kicking around the idea of making elections last over a few days and making it easier to vote, but that's going to be a hard sell to the Republicans in the legislative branch.
# Once you are old enough to see a few election cycles, you start to notice this stuff.
Exactly right. The older I get the more cynical I get about politics. Some political issues don't matter, this is one of them. Hillary is just pandering to the "protect me from the bad bad world" crowd. This is the same song applied to a different issue
The Supremes issued a 5-4 ruling back in 2005 that sentencing guidelines are not mandatory, they are advisory only. IANAL either, but here's a link from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers:
http://www.nacdl.org/public.nsf/mediasources/20050113b
And just this month a 7-2 ruling in the Minbrough and Gall cases, related to crack cocaine sentencing guidelines, again they are advisory only, not mandatory. Here's a link from the LA Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-sentencing16dec16,0,1084405.story?coll=la-opinion-center
I found some early Message Manager documentation in our archives.
The technical prospectus ( which would be very early in the product cycle ) is dated March 25, 1994. The Release 1.0 requirements are dated March 11, 1994.
A development plan is dated April 6th, 1994 ( after the patent filing date ), however the document version number is 0.6. The status date of the document was December 2nd, 1993, which I think is the same as creation date.
One undated document, but added to the database on Jan 12th 1994, says the "competition has announced GUI interface to voice mail products including Northern Telecom, VMX, Active Voice, AVT, Octel and others", and goes into some detail on each one.
It sounds to me like this patent was filed back then as a patent time bomb, that is, let products get built that infringe on the patent and then years later file big dollar lawsuits. Nice business strategy. Hopefully there is enough prior art here to kill this lawsuit.
Message Manager was released in 1995. We were working on it and running it internally before that. AT&T had it prior to 1995, it just wasn't available to the public. I'll see what I can dig up in the archives at work ( Alcatel-Lucent ). All the documenation / source for enterprise products was given to Avaya when Avaya was spun out of Lucent, so we may not have anything on it anymore. I know a couple people that worked on it and they are still around, I can ask them. And yes, even then it seemed obvious to me.
IANAL ... These two patents refer to using DTMF for random access to voice mail message. The iPhone doesn't use DTMF to access voice mail messages. Neither does Message Manager. How do these patents have any bearing on the iPhone ?
IANAL, however, the AT&T Intuity Audix Message Manager is a desktop product that gives you random access to your voice mail messages. The Message Manager user guide dated January 1995 is on the Avaya site at:
http://support.avaya.com/edoc/docs/intaudix/iammusr1.pdf
Go to page 25 "Listening to your messages" shows how to select any voice mail message displayed on your screen. This wasn't rocket science. I wasn't involved with that products development, but I don't recall any patents being issued for it. Even at the time it seemed like an obvious thing to do and should be to any practitioner in voice mail.
Sony owes Steve Popovich $5,000,000 and won't pay. Sony has lost the lawsuit and two appeals. Yeah, copyright law is working all right.
http://oneamericanagainstsonymusic2.blogspot.com/
Sony shouldn't be able to collect any money for copyright violations until they pay for their own copyright violationss.
GWB sticks up only for his friends in corporate America. That's how he got to be president, he's not going to change anytime soon.
Exactly. There hasn't been any information as to exactly what the nature of that update from Apple was. All we know is after the update unlocked iPhones were no longer usable after the update was applied. The tech-ignorant media has been suggesting the purpose of the update was to turn unlocked iPhones into iBricks, but there has been no proof of that.
Apple did not release an iPhone SDK or API that could be programmed to. Why should they be held responsible for what happens when iPhone updates break iPhones with arbitrary software on them.
It would be like changing the linux kernel for some special project you are workin on and then complaining that your unapproved changes no longer worked when the next kernel release came along. That's why there are API and SDKs and manual pages. Go beyond them at your peril.
Actually Bill Joy got it from AT&T.
My November 1979 edition of the CB/UNIX 2.3 manual pages has a chroot(1) and chroot(2) man page. It probably was not a CB add on and instead came from AT&T.
Here's the entire desccription of chroot(2)
NAME
chroot - change root directory
SYNOPSIS
chroot (rootname)
DESCRIPTION
Rootname is the address of the pathname of a directoyr, terminated by a null byte. Chroot
causes this directory to become the process root directory. This smeans that any references to
filename beginning with slash are not relative to the real root of the UNIX file system, but
relative to the new root directory specified in this system call. The current working directory
remains unchanged. Notice, however, that a chdir to slash ("/") following the chroot system
call wiill change the working directory to the new root directory. Arguments to chroot are always
absolute: no special meaning is given to initial slashes even if a chroot is currently in effect.
This system call is restricted to the super-user.
SEE ALSO
chroot(1)
DIAGNOSTICS
The error bit (c-bit) is set if the given name is not that of a directory or that is not searchable
(executable) or the current user is not the super user. From C, a -1 returned value indicates an
error, 0 indicates success
ASSEMBLER
(chroot = 61)
sys chroot; dirname
====
One of the things we used to chroot for was in support of buildiing many releases of our products, chroot pointed the compiler to the right set of files.
True, it's a tradition and doesn't have to be that way. In fact it's up to state law to decide how electoral votes are allocated, not federal law. The US Constitution does not specify a winner takes all electoral vote per state. Some states, Maine is one and there are a couple others, split up electoral votes according to the percentage per candidate. I would like to see more states do that.
Okay, okay, I stirred up a hornets nest with my over generalization. That'll teach me. I've lived in the state of Ohio in the USA all my life, so what do you expect :) I'm a mathematics major, or maths major if you must.
We say moths, myths, sixths, truths, fifths, sixths, so why don't we say maths ? Beats me.
By the way, my cbunix23 handle refers to CB/UNIX 2.3 which I used when I first started working at AT&T in Columbus, Ohio. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CB_UNIX
Only non-native English speakers says "maths". It's "math", or if you must "mathematics" Carry on.
ed - s/calling/called/ w q .
Where do you think voice mail is stored when the calling party iPhone is not reachable ?
Huh ? How is N^N polynomial time ? N^M is polynomial for /fixed/ M. N^N is much larger than polynomial time.
Even though the source code has been released to the defense he still has to be very careful with copyright. If he gets some experts to look at it without getting appropriate nondisclosure agreements signed /first/ he'll get screwed for copyright violation.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is the most overturned district court in the US. The SCOTUS will probably overturn this 5 to 4. Your vote is supposed to be a private matter. We have a consitutional republic not a democracy. A vote swap is a sale of sorts, you're selling your vote for A in exchange for someone elses vote for B. Selling your vote is illegal, so vote swapping is illegal. But that'ss my opinion, the SCOTUS will have to decide, not nerds on /.
Police are already scanning in all license plates at airport parking lots looking for suspicous cars possibly involved in drug trafficing, and it was upheld as legal. Capturing the license plates of cars on public roads is not that much different, and in some ways, I could see the courts being more sympathetic to it than the parking lot situation.
The worse thing that happened to Usenet was the web browser and mouse. The entire web browser paradigm applied to Usenet just grates my nerves to no end. The only way you can navigate and control anything is with the mouse. I'd rather use trn anytime over any web browser. There are other issues with browsers as applied to Usenet, but this one really gets me irked. Why can't a web browser keyboard input for navigation, everything is on buttons and has to be mouse clicked.
The internally posted jobs of my employer, Alcatel-Lucent, are often rediculously specific. It's obvious to everyone that those job post are pro-forma and a specific individual is already locked in. I don't read job ads in the local newspaper so I don't know what's happening there. If that's not an abuse of the job posting process I don't know what is.