This is not some ultra-secret network, it is a set of features that is only implemented on military phone switches. It's not widely known, but the frequencies are published, and you can buy surplus phones with the extra keys for cheap.
Except that as big as the (US) military is, it does not possess its own network of landlines to match AT&T's. Nor enough switches to handle all the traffic to Fort Podunk. (With BRAC and fewer bases, it might be closer to possible today, but not in, say, 1985). So some of that traffic, and some of that switching, has to be traversing the standard PSTN.
And in fact quite a few of the older AT&T CO's have signs on the door that say something along the lines of "intentional damage to this facility will be prosecuted as if the damage were done to a Department of Defense (or US Army) installation".
So there must be a bit more to it than what is on the surface.
The precident of sorts has been set, the article mentions that the phone system having to be reprogrammed to support this emergency feature, plus the issuance of "special calling cards".
Um, this capability was designed into the North American telephone system when it was retooled for touch tone in the 1950's. Ever wonder why telephone engineers, who are among the most symmetrical-thinking people in the world, would design an asymmetric touch tone keypad? Answer: they didn't. There are 16 valid touch tones, not 12. You just never get to see the rest of the system.
I am curious how they maintained this after the AT&T breakup, but I imagine that law that prevents majority foreign ownership of a US LEC has something to do with it.
Not quite true. The EBS is mainly intended for "All people downstream of the Lake Pueblo dam, move to higher ground immediately. The dam is breached" or "A tornado has been sighted in the southeastern corner of Arapahoe County, moving northeast at about twenty-five miles an hour. All persons in the area of Blah Blah Blah take cover." EBS isn't just a news substitute. Thats what Denver's (lack of) all-news AM stations are for.
NOAA weather radios with SAME encoding and automatic alert are down to about $20 now, and cover about 75% of the continental US. They can also transmit enough text with the alert to provide the instructions you describe.
In reading through the manual for my trusty Radio Shack model 2 years ago I found that SAME alert codes are already defined for biological attack, chemical attack, terrorist attack, etc. I thought it was amusing at the time...
If 15 years of customer loyalty can be destroyed by not finding a web page you were looking for, perhaps you weren't as loyal as a customer as you thought you were.
It isn't that I couldn't find a single web page. It was that the solid, well-structured, informative web pages for all the products that I normally specify as "HP only" have been replaced by marketroid-designed, glossy fluffballs with direct links to an overpriced e-commerce site which just happens to be run by H-P.
Example: direct technical comparisons across the H-P printer lines have been replaced with a "let us help you select the right e-imaging managment solution" wizard. Which wizard just happens to lead you to select a "solution" (doesn't anyone sell "stuff" anymore?) that is overkill and overpriced for your actual needs.
For the moment, lots of dedicated, knowledgable searching will still dredge up the technical data you need to make an informed decision. That information was presented first only 6 months ago. How long until it disappears entirely?
It could work out well for HP, if and only if, they use the Alpha technology to their advantage
I believe that Compaq already transferred all the patents, design information, and engineers (those who didn't jump to AMD) for the Alpha chip to Intel, where they no doubt joined HP's former PA-RISC team sitting in nice new cubicles, cashing paychecks and staring out at the parking lot while rereading their no-compete agreements.
With the current state of the (US) economy, it's a very smart move for hp & compaq to merge
Care to comment on the results of Compaq's takeovers of Tandem and Digital? HP's takeover of Apollo? AT&T + NCR? The track record just isn't there for technology mergers, particularly when the cultural issues are as bad as they will be between Houston and Palo Alto.
Prepare to see the quality of HP products plummet. Prepare to see a slow death of niche imaging products.
Through thick and thin, the one thing I have always been able to count on from HP was solid, honest engineering information about their products. Went to the HP web site last week for the first time in a few months to get comparitive technical data on a few printers. I was directed to a site full of eye candy which also provided one-click ordering from the "HP Store" - at prices 25% higher than CDW. No technical information in sight (or on site).
There goes 15 years of my loyalty as an HP customer down the drain in one shot.
Well, with a $3M bonus for Carly riding on this merger, you certainly don't have to question her motives...
Um, Ms. Fiorina refused to confirm or deny that she would receive a bonus in the neighborhood of $110 million for successfully completing the merger. I doubt any U.S. executive would bother denying a $3M bonus, so the actual amount probably is somewhere near the upper end of the outrageous amounts being thrown about.
It's easy to pick up many books published within the last ten years and learn about ESF B8ZS, etc. What we REALLY need is a book on how to get what you want from the telco, how their resellers work, the horror stories that have happened, etc.
Absolutely. Took me about 2 years of dealing with AT&T on a weekly basis to learn the hidden handshakes and secret words/phrases that were needed to make things work. Example: new T1 from AT&T. Tech reports "installed and tests clean". Don't even bother testing your CPE - just place a trouble call and ask the CSR to put the circuit in loopback mode and take it out. Now your equipment will work. Why do they always leave it in the wrong mode after install? Why doesn't it show an alarm at that point? Who knows? But the practical side of making it talk is what you need.
Of course, after I got that all figured out I started with international circuits...
sPh
Re:How to Google Whack...
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Assumming about 3,000,000 words in the English Language (http://www.wordorigins.org/number.htm), then we get about 8,999,997,000,000 possible two word combinations (correct that number if needed.)
Except that most of those combinations will return zero hits.
sPh
Re:How to Google Whack... + what comes next
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 2
Ah, but the thing to do then would be to add the Googlewhack phrase to your home page, thus taking it out of play. The universe of possible hits would then decrease over time, increasing the challenge...
Dude, if that's your most recent experience with Microsoft's networking..... wow, man, wow....
First, I should clarify that I do try to be vendor agnostic when selecting vendors and technologies. Let the problem dictate the solution and all that. If I sound bitter about M$, it is simply due to the number of bad experiences I have had with that particular vendor.
As to Lanman 1.1: I have been working with NT 4.0 and now Windows 2000 since 1996. I find NT usable if not the best technology in the world. However, I have seen very little in Microsoft Networking that has changed since 3Com 3+Open / Lanman 1.0/1.1. In fact, my Netware-centric coworkers were amazed when I just jumped in and started configuring NT 4 literally without having seen it before my first logon. "How did I know all that stuff?" they wondered.
Active Directory is a bit of a different story, but not entirely if you have worked with NT domains, which are based on MS Networking, which is based on Lanman, which is based on PCLP...
Yes, I do remember when my Commodore 64 worked to specification, I also distincly remember it not doing too much of anything compared to the computer systems of today.
Um, I was thinking more like a DECSystem-10 (3 years uptime with a typical load of 50 simultaneous users), HP 3000 (50 users, at age 10 we dropped the maintenance contract and it ran for 5 more years with no outages or unscheduled downtime), VAX 780, IBM System/1 => AS/400 (2 years uptime on that one after our sysadmin resigned), that sort of thing.
Have you ever had Novell run stable for any length of time?
1250 user 3.11 network, 3 years with no significant unscheduled outages and no excessive maintenance time; 12500 user 4.x network, 4 years with no unscheduled outages. Some others as well.
Have you ever had Netware lock up for no reason whatsoever?
Yes, of course. I have had my car quit on me unexpectedly too. Once every 5 years or so. Not every 48 hours as with MS-LANMan 1.1.
How long have you been involved in IT, long enough to become sour and bitter against anything new?
In my humble opinion, the only reason all the security holes are being found in Microsoft's software, is by virtue of the fact that it is, like it or not, running the majority of the world's computers, something like 95%. I am sure that if any other OS was as widely used, more breaches would be found
How long have you been involved with information technology? Do you remember the days when computer systems actually worked according to specification? And when their suppliers could understand and fix things that were broken? To pick a very recent example, were you around when Microsoft marketing and monopoly clout started pushing Netware out of the NOS arena, despite the fact that Microsoft's offering had 20% of the features and 5% of the stability of Netware? Have you ever compared MS Active Directory to Novell eDirectory on a point-by-point basis, including features, managability, and stability?
Mine has; name, birthdate, address, height, weight, sex, eye color, date issued, organ donor status (yes), class, picture of me, and my signature.
My state legislator lives down the street from me and his children go to school with mine. My senator has a house in a gated, guarded community in a very rich area of the the state, and is usually behind locked doors in Washington DC anyway. The people who work for John Ashcroft have no accountability to me whatsoever.
Creating a government necessarily means making a mutual agreement to give up some freedom for the greater benefit of all, but the smaller the unit of government, and the closer it is to the governed, the easier it is to monitor abuses and correct errors of course. That's why, although a drivers license issued by a state government carries some risk to freedom, it is not intolerable. Link that drivers license into a nationwide biometric database though and you have another kettle of fish.
This statement clearly demonstrates the ignorance of meggito, the poster. I have dealt with telephone since the days of hand cranked ringer codes and the upgrade to operator placed calls. Technology took off like a skyrocket with the end of the ATT monopoly, and attempts by Ma Bell to stall progress suffered ignominious defeat in all three branches of the federal government. Plain Old Telephone Service might have suffered (I don"t think so), but technology has zoomed
Well, perhaps. From the viewpoint of Joe and Jane user, or Small Business Inc., how exactly have things "improved"? In 1970 you received somewhat overpriced telephone service from an arrogant and unresponsive bureaucracy - but that service was 100% reliable, of very high quality, and was managed by an organization that did actually spend some of its excess loot thinking about things like long-term planning, stability, disaster preperation, the future, etc.
Today, we can choose from a bewildering array of "services", most of which we don't need, that appear to have a lower unit price but which after fees, surcharges, fees on fees, fees on surcharges, and opportunity costs of fighting through your bill (we have a full-time person doing that now) generally turn out to be more expensive than they were in 1970. And we receive these services from organizations which are not only just as arrogant as the Bell companies of 1970, but which often don't even bother to answer their phones and which can't find a person to fix your problem even when they do bother to answer. And which also tend to disappear overnight, taking your wonderful "services" with them.
And, of course, the old Bell companies are still there (dealt with Verizon lately?), as arrogant and as profitable as ever.
Um, why, exactly? Do you never have thunderstorms where you live? Never any downed tree limbs taking out wires? Does the ATM nearest your house never break or run out of cash?
In fact, about 4 years ago Quebec experienced the worst ice storm ever recorded in North America. Electricity and phone service were cut off in some urban areas for up to six weeks. No panic or mass disorder that I am aware of; just a lot of people working very hard to get things cleaned up and running again.
The only people who would "panic" over a 1 minute phone outage are those already in line for a Darwin Award.
Did you all know that all power transactions on public power systems travel over the internet?
Baloney. Electric power providers have had extensive backup, communication, and disaster recover plans in place since the 1880's. The plant where I used to work had contingency plans for everrything from a Bell System outage (we would revert to our own internal, hardwired phone network and our interally-owned microwave system) to complete loss of communication with the outside world (we would work with the local dispatcher to isolate our area and restart the unit in "island mode" - same way they did it in the 1920's).
While some power sale transactions no doubt go over the Internet, I doubt very very much that any mission-critical dispatch information is being transmitted that way. For obvious reasons.
The giveaway of pre-judged closed-mind thinking is someone who calls something he didn't try to understand nonsense and just plain stupid, is told he doesn't get it
Sure. But as Martin Gardner used to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. 99.999% of all who claim to be revolutionaries turn out in the end to have been crackpots. If you explain your great new idea to me, and after careful consideration I say, "sorry, I don't agree", is it then automatically true that I "don't get it"? Or is it possible that you have nothing to give?
Er, not my take on it. It was a dollop of common-sense wrapped in trendy packaging.
On the one hand, I was being a bit harsh to make a point. I was once forced to sit through 3 days of "7 Habits" training at a megacorp, and out of sheer boredom I read the book backwards and forwards several times. What I found was that the guy actually contained had a few useful observations about how to deal with difficult situations and time management - wrapped up in hundreds of pages of pompous blather.
I did read Cluetrain and felt pretty much the same way: several very cogent observations, wrapped up in hundreds of pages of pomposity. Here's an example:
The Internet is inherently seditious. It undermines unthinking respect for centralized authority, whether that "authority" is the neatly homogenized voice of broadcast advertising or the smarmy rhetoric of the corporate annual report.
And Internet technology has also threaded its way deep into the heart of Corporate Empire, where once upon a time, lockstep loyalty to the chairman's latest attempt at insight was no further away than the mimeograph machine. One memo from Mr. Big and everyone believed (or so Mr. Big liked to think).
No more. The same kind of seditious deconstruction that's being practiced on the Web today, just for the hell of it, is also seeping onto the company intranet. How many satires are floating around there, one wonders: of the latest hyperinflated restructuring plan, of the over-sincere cultural-sensitivity training sessions Human Resources made mandatory last week, of all the gibberish that passes for "management" -- or has passed up until now.
Pretty funny in work that claims to be skewering conventional wisdom, eh?
Youch! Here's a quick quote from the Dvorak piece:
The giveaway that cult thinking is present in any environment is how responses are given from possible cult members to probable nonbelievers. If you disagree, then you "don't get it." Werner Erhard of EST (the über-cult of the 1970's) used to use this phrase over and over. Tell Erhard that something makes no sense. "You don't get it." Tell him that something is self-contradictory. "You don't get it." Tell him that something is just plain stupid. "You don't get it." This is the level of debate you can expect when cult thinking is present. But, of course, "I don't get it."
Cluetrain Manifesto... hmmm... wasn't that the book that described everyone who didn't immediately dump all their current business practices and processes in favor of a net-centric, dotcom model as a "clueless idiot"? Yep, that was good advice. I'll rush right out and buy that guy's next book.
As one who WORKED on the east power trading desk for enron, yes a "dummy" trading floor was set up but that was because the traders didn't want the investors distracting them and pitcking up insider info on their trades.
Enron has a lot of justifications for what it did. Whether or not those justifications will hold up in court is another question.
If I am selling my house, and I convert an empty storage room into a "bedroom" using cardboard and paint, I will undoubtedly be sued by the purchaser when he discovers the actual situation. That's called "fraud" when ordinary people do it. I guess things are different for $40 billion corporations though.
That wasn't a rigged demo. The trading operation was the one real asset they had, and UBS/Warburg bought it from them.
Um, no. Here's one link. Enron apparently set up bogus "trading floors" full of janitors and secretaries looking intently into monitors and talking on telephones to impress potential investors.
That's not to say that they didn't have actual trading going on too, because obviously they did. But as with everything they felt the need to "cook the books".
Since there are no unique medical uses for uranium, that shouldn't be a problem.
Uranium has been, and I believe sometimes still is, used as a coloring agent for tooth fillings. It adds the tinge of yellow needed to make white fillings look natural and also adds strength to the ceramic filling.
Now, the amount involved is a few micrograms so I doubt that it is of concern anyway. But it is a legitimate medical use.
Slashdot Mirror
And in fact quite a few of the older AT&T CO's have signs on the door that say something along the lines of "intentional damage to this facility will be prosecuted as if the damage were done to a Department of Defense (or US Army) installation".
So there must be a bit more to it than what is on the surface.
sPh
I am curious how they maintained this after the AT&T breakup, but I imagine that law that prevents majority foreign ownership of a US LEC has something to do with it.
sPh
In reading through the manual for my trusty Radio Shack model 2 years ago I found that SAME alert codes are already defined for biological attack, chemical attack, terrorist attack, etc. I thought it was amusing at the time...
sPh
Example: direct technical comparisons across the H-P printer lines have been replaced with a "let us help you select the right e-imaging managment solution" wizard. Which wizard just happens to lead you to select a "solution" (doesn't anyone sell "stuff" anymore?) that is overkill and overpriced for your actual needs.
For the moment, lots of dedicated, knowledgable searching will still dredge up the technical data you need to make an informed decision. That information was presented first only 6 months ago. How long until it disappears entirely?
sPh
sPh
sPh
There goes 15 years of my loyalty as an HP customer down the drain in one shot.
sPh
sPh
Of course, after I got that all figured out I started with international circuits...
sPh
sPh
Ah, but the thing to do then would be to add the Googlewhack phrase to your home page, thus taking it out of play. The universe of possible hits would then decrease over time, increasing the challenge...
sPh
As to Lanman 1.1: I have been working with NT 4.0 and now Windows 2000 since 1996. I find NT usable if not the best technology in the world. However, I have seen very little in Microsoft Networking that has changed since 3Com 3+Open / Lanman 1.0/1.1. In fact, my Netware-centric coworkers were amazed when I just jumped in and started configuring NT 4 literally without having seen it before my first logon. "How did I know all that stuff?" they wondered.
Active Directory is a bit of a different story, but not entirely if you have worked with NT domains, which are based on MS Networking, which is based on Lanman, which is based on PCLP...
sPh
sPh
sPh
Creating a government necessarily means making a mutual agreement to give up some freedom for the greater benefit of all, but the smaller the unit of government, and the closer it is to the governed, the easier it is to monitor abuses and correct errors of course. That's why, although a drivers license issued by a state government carries some risk to freedom, it is not intolerable. Link that drivers license into a nationwide biometric database though and you have another kettle of fish.
sPh
Today, we can choose from a bewildering array of "services", most of which we don't need, that appear to have a lower unit price but which after fees, surcharges, fees on fees, fees on surcharges, and opportunity costs of fighting through your bill (we have a full-time person doing that now) generally turn out to be more expensive than they were in 1970. And we receive these services from organizations which are not only just as arrogant as the Bell companies of 1970, but which often don't even bother to answer their phones and which can't find a person to fix your problem even when they do bother to answer. And which also tend to disappear overnight, taking your wonderful "services" with them.
And, of course, the old Bell companies are still there (dealt with Verizon lately?), as arrogant and as profitable as ever.
Now what was that "progress" you mentioned?
sPh
In fact, about 4 years ago Quebec experienced the worst ice storm ever recorded in North America. Electricity and phone service were cut off in some urban areas for up to six weeks. No panic or mass disorder that I am aware of; just a lot of people working very hard to get things cleaned up and running again.
The only people who would "panic" over a 1 minute phone outage are those already in line for a Darwin Award.
sPh
While some power sale transactions no doubt go over the Internet, I doubt very very much that any mission-critical dispatch information is being transmitted that way. For obvious reasons.
sPh
sPh
I did read Cluetrain and felt pretty much the same way: several very cogent observations, wrapped up in hundreds of pages of pomposity. Here's an example:
Pretty funny in work that claims to be skewering conventional wisdom, eh?sPh
sPh
sPh
If I am selling my house, and I convert an empty storage room into a "bedroom" using cardboard and paint, I will undoubtedly be sued by the purchaser when he discovers the actual situation. That's called "fraud" when ordinary people do it. I guess things are different for $40 billion corporations though.
sPh
That's not to say that they didn't have actual trading going on too, because obviously they did. But as with everything they felt the need to "cook the books".
sPh
Now, the amount involved is a few micrograms so I doubt that it is of concern anyway. But it is a legitimate medical use.
sPh