i emailed verizon about this crap last time there was a big thread. here is my email and the response:
I recently read about Verizon's attempt to stop Vonage from allowing VOIP calls to connect to old telephone systems on basis of "patent infringement". If I recall, other companies used the technology mentioned before Verizon had acquired those patents. I have to say that I'm angry and baffled.
What is the ultimate goal for this type of action? Do you think that all of the Vonage customers who could potentially be without service soon would flock to gobble up everything Verizon has to offer? Don't you think that those people that have Vonage land lines, but have Verizon cellular service might reconsider their wireless provider when it's time to renew the contract? I don't have a wireless phone, but I had considered getting service from Verizon. You guys just shot that to hell. Well done. - Show quoted text -
Thank you for contacting the Verizon eCenter. I have received your email dated March 23, 2007 regarding our recent lawsuit with Vonage. Thank you for taking the time to provide us with your comments. My name is Wendy, and I will be happy to assist you.
We appreciate you sharing your concerns with us. We value the opinions of our customers and those that visit our website. On March 8, 2007, a jury found that Vonage Holdings Corp. had infringed three United States patents awarded to Verizon covering methods of offering commercial-quality VoIP services, including wireless access to VoIP.
As stated by John Thorne, a Verizon senior vice president and deputy general counsel, "Patents encourage and protect innovations that benefit consumers, create jobs, and keep the economy growing. Verizon's innovations are central to its strategy of building the best communications networks in the world. We are proud of our inventors and pleased the jury stood up for the legal protections they deserve."
I hope I have resolved your reason for contacting us. If you have additional questions, or if we may be of assistance to you in the future, please let us know. We look forward to serving you.
Thank you for using Verizon. We appreciate your business.
Sincerely, Wendy Verizon eCenter
to customersupport
Mar 23 My main question is what constitues infringment by Vonage and not others who offer identical service? Will you be suing all companies that are able to bill by the minute (every wireless carrier on the planet)? All VOIP providers that connect to POTS (Virtually ALL cable providers)? - Show quoted text -
Mar 26 Thank you for contacting the Verizon eCenter.
I apologize for the delay in my response, and I regret any inconvenience to you.
My name is Jamie and I have been forwarded your email with further questions regarding the Vonage lawsuit. You wanted to know if Verizon plans to pursue other companies who have produced the same services as Vonage. You also wanted clarification as to what constitutes infringement by Vonage, and not other VOIP carriers.
Vonage is the only company to our knowledge that used our specific patents to produce their products. Other VOIP companies that offer this service were able to provide this service using a different method other than our patents.
At this time, we do not have any intention to pursue other companies regarding this issue. We are not aware of other companies that have used our patents to produce this service.
If any further companies attempt to use a Verizon patent, a press release will be issued advising of any plan of action against other companies.
I hope this has clarified your concerns.
Thank you for using Verizon. We appreciate your business.
still using feisty beta that i installed monday last week. beryl works great and i haven't needed to boot windows for ANYHTING since the install. didn't even bother to download the release iso - seems to be working fine with the beta+updates. using an nvidia gpu on a latitude d620.
installed the same disc on my desktop at home and it was a little funny. had to get the alt iso because it didn't like my ATI all in wonder x800. after some tweaking i got it working pretty well.
some things i've noticed - on my laptop i had to set the renderer to aiglx instead of auto - was getting black empty windows after a while. have not had that problem since changing that setting. at home i get some flickering when rotating the cube.
other than that i couldn't be happier. fawn/beryl are working great for me and i have everything i need to do my job.
interesting you mention that. i stuck ubuntu fawn on my work laptop - dell d620 earlier this week. haven't booted back to windows yet. i'll keep windows on there for when i need an EQ2 fix. =) incidentally i have a macbook pro on the way so this thread is very valid. we got 7 new laptops in for others in my dept and they all had vista and i'm not having a fun time with them. incompatibilities, arbitrary rearrangement of menus/functions with no real improvement in said menus/functions...i already had to rebuild one because it was acting really strange out of the box, they don't want to join our AD domain sometimes (or at least grab all of the policies - takes kicking it out and rejoining a few times to get it right), and i have one that throws up an exception error on explorer.exe on shutdown. we're not doing any off the wall, ground-breaking stuff and we're all IT people so it's not like we have any Joe Schmoe's that don't know what the fuck to do with a computer.
after dealing with that i asked my boss if i could just have a mac. i'll boot linux/windows or run them in parallels when i need to. at first i disliked the apple commercials because they weren't entirely true and were just sort of using propaganda to make them look better than a "PC", but the one i saw with "Agent Vista" was spot on.
why was this worthy of being posted to/.? there's no way in hell we would ever be taxed for looting 50 silver off of a dead zombie or whatever...unless i can claim my characters as dependents i think people would give the gov't a big fat middle finger. hell i'd buy multiple accounts and fill the character slots just to get the deductions.
Parents came to visit last weekend. brought Casino Royale to watch. wouldn't play in my mac that i use as a media center. had to use fab decrypter (after getting newest version) to rip it and reburn it. way to go. blocked legitimate usage and forced me to "violate the dmca" to be able to use it.
i helped a friend "upgrade" his box. went from an athlon xp 2400+ and a geforce 4 to an athlon 64 4000+. didn't have money for a new video card so we got him a motherboard with the 6150 gpu. it was no faster, in fact it was slower than his old setup. the 61xx gpu blows for gaming. he put a 7800gt in there and nothing slows it down. so even though you may be getting the *features* of the 6000 series gpus, you're not getting the power to use it properly - 2 rendering pipes won't do squat. also, the 5700LE is more or less an overclocked 5200 which is actually very close in performance to a geforce4. i would suggest getting a real video card and maybe swapping out that sempron for a 4000+ (2.4ghz, 1mb L2) a64. they just dropped to $70 on new egg if you're using a 939 socket. i hear they overclock pretty well too.
i sent them an email on the subject. below are my email and their response.
"I recently read about Verizon's attempt to stop Vonage from allowing VOIP calls to connect to old telephone systems on basis of "patent infringement". If I recall, other companies used the technology mentioned before Verizon had acquired those patents. I have to say that I'm angry and baffled.
What is the ultimate goal for this type of action? Do you think that all of the Vonage customers who could potentially be without service soon would flock to gobble up everything Verizon has to offer? Don't you think that those people that have Vonage land lines, but have Verizon cellular service might reconsider their wireless provider when it's time to renew the contract? I don't have a wireless phone, but I had considered getting service from Verizon. You guys just shot that to hell. Well done."
"Thank you for contacting the Verizon eCenter. I have received your email dated March 23, 2007 regarding our recent lawsuit with Vonage. Thank you for taking the time to provide us with your comments. My name is XXXX, and I will be happy to assist you.
We appreciate you sharing your concerns with us. We value the opinions of our customers and those that visit our website. On March 8, 2007, a jury found that Vonage Holdings Corp. had infringed three United States patents awarded to Verizon covering methods of offering commercial-quality VoIP services, including wireless access to VoIP.
As stated by John Thorne, a Verizon senior vice president and deputy general counsel, "Patents encourage and protect innovations that benefit consumers, create jobs, and keep the economy growing. Verizon's innovations are central to its strategy of building the best communications networks in the world. We are proud of our inventors and pleased the jury stood up for the legal protections they deserve."
I hope I have resolved your reason for contacting us. If you have additional questions, or if we may be of assistance to you in the future, please let us know. We look forward to serving you.
Thank you for using Verizon. We appreciate your business.
Sincerely, XXXX Verizon eCenter"
Nice canned response that seems to have been "tailored" just for me. Glad they care.
I was thinking the same thing. Except I want them to service the rest of my 1 year period that i just prepaid for. FREE. I'm sure they would be able to afford it with all their filthy Vonage money.
i prepaid for a full year a few months back because i actually get decent service from vonage. what i'm not sure of is what the hell they intended to accomplish by being the ones that squish vonage...being the asshole doesn't really attract a large customer base.
The original appeal of firefox was that it was small and fast because there was no extra crap in it. why would we go back to the original mozilla suite that was bloated and horribly slow?
i bought the original GBA. i was pissed at the dark display and bought an afterburner. it's irritating that they keep releasing "new and improved" versions. they need to fucking do it right the first time and let it go.
has anyone seen the keynote from Steve Jobs at WWDC this year? I recently got my hands on a mac and was able to play with it in depth for the first time in my life. i now realize how archaic a product windows really is. i now realize what a good OS should be like and i must say windows has nothing on panther - let alone tiger.
the version of windows i have right now is the same version i used 4 years ago except they made it look "pretty" with luna. how long were we running windows 95 technology? and wasn't that just more focused on the GUI than win 3.x? sure it had 32 bit software support but it still ran on top of DOS. where's the innovation there?
apple started fresh with their mach kernel and slapped finder on top of it. they basically VM'ed OS9 so people could run their old stuff. why doesn't MS just do that?
instead of reusing the same OS over and over with new "features" just so you can support all of the old software, give me something new. if i want to run old shit let me VM it. just becuase each new release of windows takes more and more power to run doesn't mean it's getting more powerful. it means it's getting less efficient.
I intentionally excluded mention of linux to defeat any chance of being termed a "zealot". linux does have room to grow, but i agree with an earlier post about getting feedback to fix what's wrong/missing. let us have it MS. any deficiency you think we have is just a few cases of Bawls away.
I had an old Dell machine that I was trying to get back up and running. it wouldn't boot so i was going to reseat the ram and the cpu. well i apparently didn't hold down the power button long enough for the system to go down. i unplugged the cpu and stuck it back in. then i realized the fan in the power supply was still running and about shit my pants. turned it off and back on and it powered right up. i though for sure i would have shorted something. especially in a component that is typically not very tolerant to adverse conditions.
i think it's great that the direct marketing association is assisting in these efforts. i believe not all spam is bad or malicious. but there are a lot of groups/people who give spam a bad wrap. much like the hacker culture. most of us don't commit crimes but are hackers in its truest meaning.
That house in Henderson, Nevada is a great mockup of the one in the show! Awesome that they're giving it away this fall. Henderson, Nevada. Nevada. This fall. Henderson Henderson.
Why did they feel the need to reiterate the location and date of the giveaway below EVERY FUCKING PICTURE?
Just a thought, but I wonder if SCO got a list of the top 100/1,000 (whatever) companies in america and started going down through the list alphabetically. Next up for suit: Best Buy! then Corel!
Slashdot Mirror
Came to bitch about formatting and ads. Sent them some feedback in "Contact Us" to let them know they failed.
try changing the channel. i had this happen last week - couldn't hit my AP from 10 feet away. changed the channel and voila.
i emailed verizon about this crap last time there was a big thread. here is my email and the response:
I recently read about Verizon's attempt to stop Vonage from allowing VOIP calls to connect to old telephone systems on basis of "patent infringement". If I recall, other companies used the technology mentioned before Verizon had acquired those patents. I have to say that I'm angry and baffled.
What is the ultimate goal for this type of action? Do you think that all of the Vonage customers who could potentially be without service soon would flock to gobble up everything Verizon has to offer? Don't you think that those people that have Vonage land lines, but have Verizon cellular service might reconsider their wireless provider when it's time to renew the contract? I don't have a wireless phone, but I had considered getting service from Verizon. You guys just shot that to hell. Well done.
- Show quoted text -
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: customersupport@verizon.com
Date: Mar 23, 2007 3:38 PM
Subject: RE:Verizon.com Consumer email response [#16185185]
Thank you for contacting the Verizon eCenter. I have received your email dated March 23, 2007 regarding our recent lawsuit with Vonage. Thank you for taking the time to provide us with your comments. My name is Wendy, and I will be happy to assist you.
We appreciate you sharing your concerns with us. We value the opinions of our customers and those that visit our website. On March 8, 2007, a jury found that Vonage Holdings Corp. had infringed three United States patents awarded to Verizon covering methods of offering commercial-quality VoIP services, including wireless access to VoIP.
As stated by John Thorne, a Verizon senior vice president and deputy general counsel, "Patents encourage and protect innovations that benefit consumers, create jobs, and keep the economy growing. Verizon's innovations are central to its strategy of building the best communications networks in the world. We are proud of our inventors and pleased the jury stood up for the legal protections they deserve."
I hope I have resolved your reason for contacting us. If you have additional questions, or if we may be of assistance to you in the future, please let us know. We look forward to serving you.
Thank you for using Verizon. We appreciate your business.
Sincerely,
Wendy
Verizon eCenter
to customersupport
Mar 23
My main question is what constitues infringment by Vonage and not others who offer identical service? Will you be suing all companies that are able to bill by the minute (every wireless carrier on the planet)? All VOIP providers that connect to POTS (Virtually ALL cable providers)?
- Show quoted text -
Mar 26
Thank you for contacting the Verizon eCenter.
I apologize for the delay in my response, and I regret any inconvenience to you.
My name is Jamie and I have been forwarded your email with further questions regarding the Vonage lawsuit. You wanted to know if Verizon plans to pursue other companies who have produced the same services as Vonage. You also wanted clarification as to what constitutes infringement by Vonage, and not other VOIP carriers.
Vonage is the only company to our knowledge that used our specific patents to produce their products. Other VOIP companies that offer this service were able to provide this service using a different method other than our patents.
At this time, we do not have any intention to pursue other companies regarding this issue. We are not aware of other companies that have used our patents to produce this service.
If any further companies attempt to use a Verizon patent, a press release will be issued advising of any plan of action against other companies.
I hope this has clarified your concerns.
Thank you for using Verizon. We appreciate your business.
Sincerely,
Jamie
Supervisor
Verizon eCenter
still using feisty beta that i installed monday last week. beryl works great and i haven't needed to boot windows for ANYHTING since the install. didn't even bother to download the release iso - seems to be working fine with the beta+updates. using an nvidia gpu on a latitude d620.
installed the same disc on my desktop at home and it was a little funny. had to get the alt iso because it didn't like my ATI all in wonder x800. after some tweaking i got it working pretty well.
some things i've noticed - on my laptop i had to set the renderer to aiglx instead of auto - was getting black empty windows after a while. have not had that problem since changing that setting. at home i get some flickering when rotating the cube.
other than that i couldn't be happier. fawn/beryl are working great for me and i have everything i need to do my job.
interesting you mention that. i stuck ubuntu fawn on my work laptop - dell d620 earlier this week. haven't booted back to windows yet. i'll keep windows on there for when i need an EQ2 fix. =) incidentally i have a macbook pro on the way so this thread is very valid. we got 7 new laptops in for others in my dept and they all had vista and i'm not having a fun time with them. incompatibilities, arbitrary rearrangement of menus/functions with no real improvement in said menus/functions...i already had to rebuild one because it was acting really strange out of the box, they don't want to join our AD domain sometimes (or at least grab all of the policies - takes kicking it out and rejoining a few times to get it right), and i have one that throws up an exception error on explorer.exe on shutdown. we're not doing any off the wall, ground-breaking stuff and we're all IT people so it's not like we have any Joe Schmoe's that don't know what the fuck to do with a computer.
after dealing with that i asked my boss if i could just have a mac. i'll boot linux/windows or run them in parallels when i need to. at first i disliked the apple commercials because they weren't entirely true and were just sort of using propaganda to make them look better than a "PC", but the one i saw with "Agent Vista" was spot on.
why was this worthy of being posted to /.? there's no way in hell we would ever be taxed for looting 50 silver off of a dead zombie or whatever...unless i can claim my characters as dependents i think people would give the gov't a big fat middle finger. hell i'd buy multiple accounts and fill the character slots just to get the deductions.
Parents came to visit last weekend. brought Casino Royale to watch. wouldn't play in my mac that i use as a media center. had to use fab decrypter (after getting newest version) to rip it and reburn it. way to go. blocked legitimate usage and forced me to "violate the dmca" to be able to use it.
i helped a friend "upgrade" his box. went from an athlon xp 2400+ and a geforce 4 to an athlon 64 4000+. didn't have money for a new video card so we got him a motherboard with the 6150 gpu. it was no faster, in fact it was slower than his old setup. the 61xx gpu blows for gaming. he put a 7800gt in there and nothing slows it down. so even though you may be getting the *features* of the 6000 series gpus, you're not getting the power to use it properly - 2 rendering pipes won't do squat. also, the 5700LE is more or less an overclocked 5200 which is actually very close in performance to a geforce4. i would suggest getting a real video card and maybe swapping out that sempron for a 4000+ (2.4ghz, 1mb L2) a64. they just dropped to $70 on new egg if you're using a 939 socket. i hear they overclock pretty well too.
old news:
http://www.marykateandashley.com/
nobody thought it was odd that "fraternal" twins looked nearly identical?
i sent them an email on the subject. below are my email and their response.
"I recently read about Verizon's attempt to stop Vonage from allowing VOIP calls to connect to old telephone systems on basis of "patent infringement". If I recall, other companies used the technology mentioned before Verizon had acquired those patents. I have to say that I'm angry and baffled.
What is the ultimate goal for this type of action? Do you think that all of the Vonage customers who could potentially be without service soon would flock to gobble up everything Verizon has to offer? Don't you think that those people that have Vonage land lines, but have Verizon cellular service might reconsider their wireless provider when it's time to renew the contract? I don't have a wireless phone, but I had considered getting service from Verizon. You guys just shot that to hell. Well done."
"Thank you for contacting the Verizon eCenter. I have received your email dated March 23, 2007 regarding our recent lawsuit with Vonage. Thank you for taking the time to provide us with your comments. My name is XXXX, and I will be happy to assist you.
We appreciate you sharing your concerns with us. We value the opinions of our customers and those that visit our website. On March 8, 2007, a jury found that Vonage Holdings Corp. had infringed three United States patents awarded to Verizon covering methods of offering commercial-quality VoIP services, including wireless access to VoIP.
As stated by John Thorne, a Verizon senior vice president and deputy general counsel, "Patents encourage and protect innovations that benefit consumers, create jobs, and keep the economy growing. Verizon's innovations are central to its strategy of building the best communications networks in the world. We are proud of our inventors and pleased the jury stood up for the legal protections they deserve."
I hope I have resolved your reason for contacting us. If you have additional questions, or if we may be of assistance to you in the future, please let us know. We look forward to serving you.
Thank you for using Verizon. We appreciate your business.
Sincerely,
XXXX
Verizon eCenter"
Nice canned response that seems to have been "tailored" just for me. Glad they care.
I was thinking the same thing. Except I want them to service the rest of my 1 year period that i just prepaid for. FREE. I'm sure they would be able to afford it with all their filthy Vonage money.
i prepaid for a full year a few months back because i actually get decent service from vonage. what i'm not sure of is what the hell they intended to accomplish by being the ones that squish vonage...being the asshole doesn't really attract a large customer base.
The original appeal of firefox was that it was small and fast because there was no extra crap in it. why would we go back to the original mozilla suite that was bloated and horribly slow?
pretty sure i heard HD-DVD equipment/discs were released last week.
last i heard KDE was a window manager/desktop environment not a filesystem.
i bought the original GBA. i was pissed at the dark display and bought an afterburner. it's irritating that they keep releasing "new and improved" versions. they need to fucking do it right the first time and let it go.
has anyone seen the keynote from Steve Jobs at WWDC this year? I recently got my hands on a mac and was able to play with it in depth for the first time in my life. i now realize how archaic a product windows really is. i now realize what a good OS should be like and i must say windows has nothing on panther - let alone tiger.
the version of windows i have right now is the same version i used 4 years ago except they made it look "pretty" with luna. how long were we running windows 95 technology? and wasn't that just more focused on the GUI than win 3.x? sure it had 32 bit software support but it still ran on top of DOS. where's the innovation there?
apple started fresh with their mach kernel and slapped finder on top of it. they basically VM'ed OS9 so people could run their old stuff. why doesn't MS just do that?
instead of reusing the same OS over and over with new "features" just so you can support all of the old software, give me something new. if i want to run old shit let me VM it. just becuase each new release of windows takes more and more power to run doesn't mean it's getting more powerful. it means it's getting less efficient.
I intentionally excluded mention of linux to defeat any chance of being termed a "zealot". linux does have room to grow, but i agree with an earlier post about getting feedback to fix what's wrong/missing. let us have it MS. any deficiency you think we have is just a few cases of Bawls away.
I had an old Dell machine that I was trying to get back up and running. it wouldn't boot so i was going to reseat the ram and the cpu. well i apparently didn't hold down the power button long enough for the system to go down. i unplugged the cpu and stuck it back in. then i realized the fan in the power supply was still running and about shit my pants. turned it off and back on and it powered right up. i though for sure i would have shorted something. especially in a component that is typically not very tolerant to adverse conditions.
i think it's great that the direct marketing association is assisting in these efforts. i believe not all spam is bad or malicious. but there are a lot of groups/people who give spam a bad wrap. much like the hacker culture. most of us don't commit crimes but are hackers in its truest meaning.
That house in Henderson, Nevada is a great mockup of the one in the show! Awesome that they're giving it away this fall. Henderson, Nevada. Nevada. This fall. Henderson Henderson.
Why did they feel the need to reiterate the location and date of the giveaway below EVERY FUCKING PICTURE?
last i heard the base had been evacuated. about 4-5 years ago i think. art bell had a blurb about it being deserted.
i don't see how any of this will stop me from taking line out to line in and just recording/encoding shit myself.
last time i checked, MS made WINDOWS. how did ID whore themsleves out to MS?
this was funny when i saw it the first time 10 years ago. still cracks me up. good to know the research is continuing =)
Just a thought, but I wonder if SCO got a list of the top 100/1,000 (whatever) companies in america and started going down through the list alphabetically. Next up for suit: Best Buy! then Corel!