Carly axed HP's calculator division. The division now making their calculators is a completely different one. I sort of recall hearing it was one of their consumer laptop divisions, but I could be wrong. It's been a while.
No graphing calculator I have used that has come out since the 48G/GX has even come close to the 48 series. As a result, I still use a calculator that was probably on the market for 5+ years before I started using it a decade ago.
The numbers these companies provide will cause calls to be sent via VoIP to a computer or analog telephone adapter anywhere in the world. In this case, the number could be in California but you might in the end be connecting to a machine running Asterisk in Russia.
There are now plenty of companies (such as StanaPhone) that provide a free DID, all you need to do is register with them. Their business model is that they make money on outgoing calls, but most of them don't require payment until you actually decide to make such a call.
It's a lot easier to establish prior art by pointing to a patent than in a self-maintained database. A self-maintained database of prior art that will actually hold up in court (proof of claimed dates, etc) is extremely difficult and it's actually easier to just patent something. Then you can just point to the date on your patent and no one can dispute that prior art (at least when trying to sink a patent with a later date), because those dates are maintained by a trusted and (technically) unbiased source - the USPTO.
Otherwise, you must go to extensive measures to prove that prior art document X was published on date Y.
From what I've read of the actual patent so far, it appears that it is a very specific implementation of a specific type of firewall.
See claim 3 for example - What they are describing implies a machine with two dedicated processors with shared memory, one for each network. Note that for what they are describing, a typical SMP or dual core system does NOT count - It seems that they are effectively describing two seperate machines in one box that can communicate via shared memory.
Also other claims imply that the patented system will be talking to each network at the application level, so it's more of a special form of proxy server rather than a firewall.
I don't have time right now to read further details, but keep in mind that even specific patents can appear much broader than they are in the abstract. For example, one can't patent the wheel or a tire, but when patenting a tire with a specific tread pattern, it might appear in the abstract that the applicant is trying to patent the tire in general even when they're not.
EVE had a great concept. A complex, diverse, player driven economy. A player could focus on a wide variety of professions - Mining, research and development, manufacturing, combat, NPC hunting, or more.
Unfortunately, the implementation was horrible. Within 1-2 months the economy was in the crapper. There was virtually no profit in manufacturing, research never proved to be useful as there was almost no benefit whatsoever to putting a blueprint in for more than 3-4 cycles of research. Mining was insanely profitable only if you could get into one of the corporations that dominated insecure space. Combat was boring as hell - 2-3 hours of flying, 2-3 hours of gate camping, only to finally reach 30 seconds of intense combat.
I made it as far as having a Thorax blueprint of my own, along with owning my first battleship. Then I got BORED. Even as a member of one of the largest corps in the game, there was nothing that actually interested me.
Then Tech 2 came along. It was supposed to be the savior of the economy, finally guaranteeing manufacturers unique items that might actually make a profit. Nope, one corporation who had managed to stay in the lead with mining and one of only 3-4 that managed to get in on the manufacturing boom before it crapped out bought out all the Tech 2 blueprints and made the market even more FUBAR. While I happened to be in that corporation, it was sad seeing how lopsided the game was becoming.
Throughout this, let's not forget the bugs. Frequently major functions would get broken with a patch and not get fixed for 2-3 more patches. CCP NEVER revamped their precaching system to properly avoid gatecamping load lag exploits.
Last but not least, I can't point to any one single aspect of the game mechanics to cause it, but in general they were very conducive and if anything encouraged internal corporate strife. I was horrified what was happening to my corp, which consisted almost entirely of comrades of mine from a previous game, Planetarion. As the months went on, there was more and more internal arguing and strife, in many cases by people who used to be great friends.
I got tired of seeing what was happening and quit the game. A month and a half later, Xanadu practically split in two. I wasn't surprised at all, as it had been brewing for ages, but it was horrible to see former friends so angry at each other. EVE basically destroyed one of the best groups of gaming comrades I had ever been in.
I'm back in DAoC, and while I'm in general annoyed with Mythic, at least the game mechanics don't encourage guilds tearing themselves apart.
Random streaming and/or chosen by a DJ or on-demand streaming by you?
It sounds like you would also be potentially very happy with XM or Sirius. I love my XM subscription.:)
Oh, while XMRO's online streams are WMA and officially controlled by an ActiveX control, plenty of people have figured out how to start the streams with shell scripts and have mplayer or xine play them under Linux.
Rutgers had a deal with CDigix when I was a grad student there. I didn't use the service for two reasons:
1) It was totally nonfunctional under Linux. I spend 95% or more of my time in Linux, and the 5% I used booted into Windows was spent playing games. 2) None of the music was playable on my Treo
Either one of those alone were dealbreakers. BTW, both of these reasons were covered in the article, although in slightly different form (Mac for 1 and iPod for 2).
I actually have 10-20 tracks legally bought from iTMS back when pyMusique worked. I'd probably have 10-20 tracks per month MORE if Apple hadn't gone and broken pyMusique.
I haven't collected much music on P2P either though - not worth the effort when I can get exposure to new songs I've never heard before (rather than only collecting stuff I've heard already) for $13/month from XM Radio.:)
"This fine is more like a contempt of court charge, and doesn't let MS off the hook."
I would hope that people would see this, as everyone is harping on the "lump sum" retroactive fine, but not the fact that the fine is an ongoing daily one that just happens to include retroactive fines back to 2004.
In short, until MS is compliant, the fines will just keep on coming.
It's not something that can be done at home, due to the fact that even if you do provide the extra hardware needed, there's the issue of cheating, as one could easily make their machine register higher RPMs per pedal than someone else's.
Unfortunately arcades are in a bit of a dilemma: To make games that can compete with home console gaming they need expensive hardware, not necessarily for the purpose of better graphics, but for unique control scenarios. (Think Prop Cycle hardware - an entire bike per system complete with sensing electronics and possibly force feedback.) Expensive hardware means having to charge more to make back your investment - but people are far less reluctant to play games with a higher price!
Oh, another thing I would love to see is a next-generation laser tag system - forget the lasers, use angle/location sensors and create an augmented reality environment. Imaging a real-life Quake deathmatch that was (relatively) safe!
Yup. Nearly all people I know fall into one of three categories:
1) No membership on MySpace or Facebook - Most people who graduated college around the same time I did (or earlier) and didn't go to graduate school 2) Membership on Facebook but not Myspace - A handful of college classmates, LOTS of friends that were approx. 2 years behind me or more in school 3) Facebook and Myspace - Not many people in this category.
I almost never go to Myspace because nearly every person's page there is so damn ugly. Facebook, on the other hand, has a nice clean design that the user isn't allowed to break. In terms of "features" they lag behind Myspace, but their features (such as user photo albums) are always MUCH better implemented when they are released.
I'm already scared. I don't think EA is dumb enough to kill a well established MMORPG in favor of one that has been dying for years. (Yes, I know, DAoC is dying too, but it's still FAR more healthy than UO.)
EA's track record of killing new MMOs before launch, and destroying any well established one that they do acquire (see UO) DOES scare me though. EA's track record with MMOGs is awful.
If only EVE's implementation hadn't ruined a great concept... (EVE Online had a wonderful concept and had so much potential, but CCP's lack of experience in game development and running an MMOG led to lots of awful problems such as "sledgehammer balancing" and horrible bugs with every patch.)
There's nothing preventing them from putting 16 PCIe lanes on a properly designed external connector, just like classic docking stations had a full blown PCI bus.
The new HyperTransport 3.0 spec also allows for external HT links, not useful for Dell at the moment since they don't have AMD-based systems, but it might be interesting for someone making Turion based laptops. So far every Turion-based laptop I've seen has been rather low end.:(
"With storms getting worse and worse (Maryland, DC and Northern Virginia have weathered torrential downfalls this week), might underground lines prove more resistant to storm-related power outages?"
I have some friends in the Baltimore area. There has been severe flooding in the area.
Well, not being able to scale back below 6 Mbps isn't a bad thing. That means inherently more capacity (more users) IF the system is implemented right. Of course, for a small number of users per base station, a lower speed would be more appropriate to allow more independent base stations.
The problem is that WiFi's channel access scheme is designed for packet switched data that often comes in large bursts. Its CSMA/CA scheme is great for that, but is vastly inferior in terms of overhead to TDMA or CDMA schemes for multiple users who each only need a small fraction of capacity. To support VoIP well, WiFi really needs some sort of timeslot reservation scheme.
"I've got a real problem with this. WTF is up with this 'understandably paranoid' statement? The FAA doesn't know what will happen, and refuses to test and qualify *anything* to do with wireless or computers. They refuse to come up with acceptable RF leakage standards, they refuse to come up with a test method so that equipment can be qualified, and they continue to say on each flight "please turn everything off"."
No, the FAA is perfectly happy to certify electronics that involve computers or wireless communications.
The rigorous procedures required for such certification are such that very few vendors pay for such qualification. FAA regs are MUCH more stringent than FCC Part 15 requirements (which are, to be honest, a joke).
There are two basic components needed for a useful Wi-Fi connection:
1) A WiFi access point. This is reasonably easy, even if you have to make it play nice on the plane. Flight safety certification/qualification is difficult. The FAA is (understandably) paranoid about such things and I'm glad they are.
2) A connection to the outside world. On an airplane, this is much more difficult. Unless you want the system to be restricted to certain service areas (like CONUS only), this part means "satellite". Satellite means EXPENSIVE. Hell, even to provide full coverage of the CONUS airspace from the ground would be extremely expensive. $1 billion for such infrastructure seems cheap to me.
PC-based? H.323 is basically dying in favor of SIP, and fast. Many of the former open-source H.323 projects have added SIP support, and in most of those cases SIP has become the primary protocol. (See Ekiga - They went from H.323 only to H.323 plus SIP, but their associated service is SIP-based.) and SCCP (aka Skinny) is used by Cisco and no one else.
Landline replacement? Despite being rather consumer-unfriendly, Vonage dominates this market (partly due to their consumer-unfriendly practices, it's damn near impossible to buy an ATA in a store that isn't Vonage locked) and uses SIP. NO ONE in this market uses H.323. Everyone uses SIP except for a handful that use MGCP like AT&T CallVantage. Skinny is only used for internal business networks that are running Cisco equipment.
In short, H.323 has been around for a long time, and did dominate the voice over IP market, but during that entire time, H.323 VoIP was almost exclusively considered a toy. No one used it to replace their landlines, and no businesses used it to replace their phone system. Now the VoIP market is growing rapidly with people replacing landlines and business phone systems with VoIP, and *all* of that growth is in SIP, IAX, and (to some degree due to Cisco's dominance in business networking) SCCP. H.323 may still be growing in usage, but its growth rate isn't even close to that of the rest of the VoIP market and hence its market share is dropping like a rock.
In regards to the original poster - When talking to the CSRs, don't start making uneducated guesses as to what is happening. Cloning is INCREDIBLY rare these days, and for various reasons pretty much doesn't work for theft of service (see earlier posts...). As a result, bringing it up will probably cause the CSR to begin thinking you're an idiot/get frustrated with you.
Simply call them up, and state the cold hard facts. You have unexplained incoming calls without caller ID which do not cause your phone to ring, and also which sometimes overlapped with actual calls you DID make. For technical reasons, I don't think it's cloning. For technical reasons, it COULD be something caused by a misconfiguration of their billing system's handling of data service. In the past, some providers would give "minutes only usage" for high speed data services such as CDMA2000 1xRTT service, and (possibly, I'm only familiar with Verizon in this regard) for GPRS service too. Also, most CDMA2000 phones (maybe GPRS/EDGE too?) support simultaneous voice and data. i.e. the phone can be connected to a data call and still receive incoming calls. Yes, even though 1xRTT/1xEV-DO are packet data, there's essentially a low level heartbeat on the connection that is considered a "call". Usually the minutes of these "calls" are free and do not even show up in your plan summary, only the actual data usage does. Again, on some older plans and data services tacked onto legacy plans, it WAS possible to be charged per-minute instead of per-kilobyte or even per-kilobyte AND per-minute (rare though). Data "calls" could often be initiated without the users' knowledge unless specific settings were disabled in the phone, ones which were normally enabled by default because purchasing an unlimited data plan was strongly encouraged with most such phones. I believe this is one of the main reasons Verizon discontinued MOU data pricing.
As such, those unknown calls COULD be related to some sort of data capability. Don't mention this to the customer service rep as a guess though. Just the known facts.
Simple. Because the network was designed such that for users on the ground, it is NOT possible for a phone on the ground to be visible to more than one tower on the same frequency with similar signal strength, as towers in adjacent cells operate on different frequencies within the carrier's assigned band. If weird propagation DOES cause more than one tower on the same frequency to be able to hear the phone, it is easy for the network to figure out which tower is appropriate based on the signal strength. (The signal will be very weak at any tower other than the nearest one to the phone.)
This changes when a user goes above the maximum altitude of a user the system was designed to handle. All of a sudden the user will have LOS *with high signal strength* to multiple towers on the same frequency. In older systems, this could cause calls to be billed multiple times. In newer systems, multiple billing is eliminated and the network can handle it, EXCEPT that even if the phone is only communicating with a single tower, it will still cause significant interference with other towers that it normally would not, and as a result a handful of airborne users can significantly decrease the capacity of the network. Essentially, instead of being a single user in one cell for the purposes of capacity handling, they become an additional user in every cell within LOS of the aircraft. (Remember, even if they aren't actively communicating with a particular tower, their signal is still present and causes interference.)
It's called the Session Initiation Protocol, and pretty much every VoIP service OTHER than Skype uses/supports it. (With a few small exceptions such as Google Talk which uses the Jingle VoIP extensions to the XMPP (aka Jabber) protocol). Note in that particular case that Google and many of the big proponents of SIP (especially Project Gizmo/SIPPhone) have been working on solutions for XMPP+Jingle interoperability with SIP.
There are a wide variety of SIP softphones available, just as there are a wide variety of SIP service providers. Many of these also support the IAX protocol, which is primarily used by Asterisk PBX systems.
Examples, most of these service providers provide their own SIP client, but in most cases SIP clients are interchangeable between SIP services: StanaPhone (http://www.stanaphone.com/) - Free incoming DIDs (dial-in phone numbers) in various New York area codes SIPPhone/Gizmo Project (http://www.gizmoproject.com/) - Free PC-to-PC, DIDs and outgoing PSTN cost money (not much though) Free World Dialup - Primarily PC-to-PC (or Asterisk-to-Asterisk or whatever), but with some PSTN in/out capability The list goes on and on, and I haven't even included the "landline replacement" VoIP providers. (Vonage in the U.S. is the most well known example, but most educated consumers hate them as they have some rather customer-unfriendly policies such as locking telephone adapters to their service and forbidding the use of your own telephone adapter without paying a significant extra fee). A few other providers do use other (although usually still known and standardized) protocols such as AT&T CallVantage (which uses the MGCP protocol).
See http://www.voip-info.org/ for LOTS of addition information on hardware, setup, and cheap providers.
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Merom is from the same microarchitecture as Conroe and Woodcrest.
You are correct about Yonah though.
Don't forget the capital investment involved in the manufacturing line itself.
The costs of any given chip are probably something like this:
1% raw materials, 15% operating costs (electrical, labor, etc), 20% R&D, 74% paying back your capital costs before your plant becomes obsolete.
Carly axed HP's calculator division. The division now making their calculators is a completely different one. I sort of recall hearing it was one of their consumer laptop divisions, but I could be wrong. It's been a while.
What I can find is at http://www.hpcalc.org/hp49gplus.php, which implies that HP calculator development is now outsourced to a third party.
No graphing calculator I have used that has come out since the 48G/GX has even come close to the 48 series. As a result, I still use a calculator that was probably on the market for 5+ years before I started using it a decade ago.
The numbers these companies provide will cause calls to be sent via VoIP to a computer or analog telephone adapter anywhere in the world. In this case, the number could be in California but you might in the end be connecting to a machine running Asterisk in Russia.
There are now plenty of companies (such as StanaPhone) that provide a free DID, all you need to do is register with them. Their business model is that they make money on outgoing calls, but most of them don't require payment until you actually decide to make such a call.
It's a lot easier to establish prior art by pointing to a patent than in a self-maintained database. A self-maintained database of prior art that will actually hold up in court (proof of claimed dates, etc) is extremely difficult and it's actually easier to just patent something. Then you can just point to the date on your patent and no one can dispute that prior art (at least when trying to sink a patent with a later date), because those dates are maintained by a trusted and (technically) unbiased source - the USPTO.
Otherwise, you must go to extensive measures to prove that prior art document X was published on date Y.
From what I've read of the actual patent so far, it appears that it is a very specific implementation of a specific type of firewall.
See claim 3 for example - What they are describing implies a machine with two dedicated processors with shared memory, one for each network. Note that for what they are describing, a typical SMP or dual core system does NOT count - It seems that they are effectively describing two seperate machines in one box that can communicate via shared memory.
Also other claims imply that the patented system will be talking to each network at the application level, so it's more of a special form of proxy server rather than a firewall.
I don't have time right now to read further details, but keep in mind that even specific patents can appear much broader than they are in the abstract. For example, one can't patent the wheel or a tire, but when patenting a tire with a specific tread pattern, it might appear in the abstract that the applicant is trying to patent the tire in general even when they're not.
EVE had a great concept. A complex, diverse, player driven economy. A player could focus on a wide variety of professions - Mining, research and development, manufacturing, combat, NPC hunting, or more.
Unfortunately, the implementation was horrible. Within 1-2 months the economy was in the crapper. There was virtually no profit in manufacturing, research never proved to be useful as there was almost no benefit whatsoever to putting a blueprint in for more than 3-4 cycles of research. Mining was insanely profitable only if you could get into one of the corporations that dominated insecure space. Combat was boring as hell - 2-3 hours of flying, 2-3 hours of gate camping, only to finally reach 30 seconds of intense combat.
I made it as far as having a Thorax blueprint of my own, along with owning my first battleship. Then I got BORED. Even as a member of one of the largest corps in the game, there was nothing that actually interested me.
Then Tech 2 came along. It was supposed to be the savior of the economy, finally guaranteeing manufacturers unique items that might actually make a profit. Nope, one corporation who had managed to stay in the lead with mining and one of only 3-4 that managed to get in on the manufacturing boom before it crapped out bought out all the Tech 2 blueprints and made the market even more FUBAR. While I happened to be in that corporation, it was sad seeing how lopsided the game was becoming.
Throughout this, let's not forget the bugs. Frequently major functions would get broken with a patch and not get fixed for 2-3 more patches. CCP NEVER revamped their precaching system to properly avoid gatecamping load lag exploits.
Last but not least, I can't point to any one single aspect of the game mechanics to cause it, but in general they were very conducive and if anything encouraged internal corporate strife. I was horrified what was happening to my corp, which consisted almost entirely of comrades of mine from a previous game, Planetarion. As the months went on, there was more and more internal arguing and strife, in many cases by people who used to be great friends.
I got tired of seeing what was happening and quit the game. A month and a half later, Xanadu practically split in two. I wasn't surprised at all, as it had been brewing for ages, but it was horrible to see former friends so angry at each other. EVE basically destroyed one of the best groups of gaming comrades I had ever been in.
I'm back in DAoC, and while I'm in general annoyed with Mythic, at least the game mechanics don't encourage guilds tearing themselves apart.
Um, Mythic has basically ALWAYS been on board - It was a Mythic project long before the EA acquisition.
EA, on the other hand, has a long track record of killing MMOGs and running previously excellent studios into the ground.
Random streaming and/or chosen by a DJ or on-demand streaming by you?
:)
It sounds like you would also be potentially very happy with XM or Sirius. I love my XM subscription.
Oh, while XMRO's online streams are WMA and officially controlled by an ActiveX control, plenty of people have figured out how to start the streams with shell scripts and have mplayer or xine play them under Linux.
Rutgers had a deal with CDigix when I was a grad student there. I didn't use the service for two reasons:
:)
1) It was totally nonfunctional under Linux. I spend 95% or more of my time in Linux, and the 5% I used booted into Windows was spent playing games.
2) None of the music was playable on my Treo
Either one of those alone were dealbreakers. BTW, both of these reasons were covered in the article, although in slightly different form (Mac for 1 and iPod for 2).
I actually have 10-20 tracks legally bought from iTMS back when pyMusique worked. I'd probably have 10-20 tracks per month MORE if Apple hadn't gone and broken pyMusique.
I haven't collected much music on P2P either though - not worth the effort when I can get exposure to new songs I've never heard before (rather than only collecting stuff I've heard already) for $13/month from XM Radio.
"This fine is more like a contempt of court charge, and doesn't let MS off the hook."
I would hope that people would see this, as everyone is harping on the "lump sum" retroactive fine, but not the fact that the fine is an ongoing daily one that just happens to include retroactive fines back to 2004.
In short, until MS is compliant, the fines will just keep on coming.
Prop Cycle Deathmatch
It's not something that can be done at home, due to the fact that even if you do provide the extra hardware needed, there's the issue of cheating, as one could easily make their machine register higher RPMs per pedal than someone else's.
Unfortunately arcades are in a bit of a dilemma: To make games that can compete with home console gaming they need expensive hardware, not necessarily for the purpose of better graphics, but for unique control scenarios. (Think Prop Cycle hardware - an entire bike per system complete with sensing electronics and possibly force feedback.) Expensive hardware means having to charge more to make back your investment - but people are far less reluctant to play games with a higher price!
Oh, another thing I would love to see is a next-generation laser tag system - forget the lasers, use angle/location sensors and create an augmented reality environment. Imaging a real-life Quake deathmatch that was (relatively) safe!
Yup. Nearly all people I know fall into one of three categories:
1) No membership on MySpace or Facebook - Most people who graduated college around the same time I did (or earlier) and didn't go to graduate school
2) Membership on Facebook but not Myspace - A handful of college classmates, LOTS of friends that were approx. 2 years behind me or more in school
3) Facebook and Myspace - Not many people in this category.
I almost never go to Myspace because nearly every person's page there is so damn ugly. Facebook, on the other hand, has a nice clean design that the user isn't allowed to break. In terms of "features" they lag behind Myspace, but their features (such as user photo albums) are always MUCH better implemented when they are released.
I'm already scared. I don't think EA is dumb enough to kill a well established MMORPG in favor of one that has been dying for years. (Yes, I know, DAoC is dying too, but it's still FAR more healthy than UO.)
EA's track record of killing new MMOs before launch, and destroying any well established one that they do acquire (see UO) DOES scare me though. EA's track record with MMOGs is awful.
If only EVE's implementation hadn't ruined a great concept... (EVE Online had a wonderful concept and had so much potential, but CCP's lack of experience in game development and running an MMOG led to lots of awful problems such as "sledgehammer balancing" and horrible bugs with every patch.)
There's nothing preventing them from putting 16 PCIe lanes on a properly designed external connector, just like classic docking stations had a full blown PCI bus.
:(
The new HyperTransport 3.0 spec also allows for external HT links, not useful for Dell at the moment since they don't have AMD-based systems, but it might be interesting for someone making Turion based laptops. So far every Turion-based laptop I've seen has been rather low end.
"With storms getting worse and worse (Maryland, DC and Northern Virginia have weathered torrential downfalls this week), might underground lines prove more resistant to storm-related power outages?"
I have some friends in the Baltimore area. There has been severe flooding in the area.
Well, not being able to scale back below 6 Mbps isn't a bad thing. That means inherently more capacity (more users) IF the system is implemented right. Of course, for a small number of users per base station, a lower speed would be more appropriate to allow more independent base stations.
The problem is that WiFi's channel access scheme is designed for packet switched data that often comes in large bursts. Its CSMA/CA scheme is great for that, but is vastly inferior in terms of overhead to TDMA or CDMA schemes for multiple users who each only need a small fraction of capacity. To support VoIP well, WiFi really needs some sort of timeslot reservation scheme.
"I've got a real problem with this. WTF is up with this 'understandably paranoid' statement? The FAA doesn't know what will happen, and refuses to test and qualify *anything* to do with wireless or computers. They refuse to come up with acceptable RF leakage standards, they refuse to come up with a test method so that equipment can be qualified, and they continue to say on each flight "please turn everything off"."
No, the FAA is perfectly happy to certify electronics that involve computers or wireless communications.
The rigorous procedures required for such certification are such that very few vendors pay for such qualification. FAA regs are MUCH more stringent than FCC Part 15 requirements (which are, to be honest, a joke).
There are two basic components needed for a useful Wi-Fi connection:
1) A WiFi access point. This is reasonably easy, even if you have to make it play nice on the plane. Flight safety certification/qualification is difficult. The FAA is (understandably) paranoid about such things and I'm glad they are.
2) A connection to the outside world. On an airplane, this is much more difficult. Unless you want the system to be restricted to certain service areas (like CONUS only), this part means "satellite". Satellite means EXPENSIVE. Hell, even to provide full coverage of the CONUS airspace from the ground would be extremely expensive. $1 billion for such infrastructure seems cheap to me.
PC-based? H.323 is basically dying in favor of SIP, and fast. Many of the former open-source H.323 projects have added SIP support, and in most of those cases SIP has become the primary protocol. (See Ekiga - They went from H.323 only to H.323 plus SIP, but their associated service is SIP-based.) and SCCP (aka Skinny) is used by Cisco and no one else.
Landline replacement? Despite being rather consumer-unfriendly, Vonage dominates this market (partly due to their consumer-unfriendly practices, it's damn near impossible to buy an ATA in a store that isn't Vonage locked) and uses SIP. NO ONE in this market uses H.323. Everyone uses SIP except for a handful that use MGCP like AT&T CallVantage. Skinny is only used for internal business networks that are running Cisco equipment.
In short, H.323 has been around for a long time, and did dominate the voice over IP market, but during that entire time, H.323 VoIP was almost exclusively considered a toy. No one used it to replace their landlines, and no businesses used it to replace their phone system. Now the VoIP market is growing rapidly with people replacing landlines and business phone systems with VoIP, and *all* of that growth is in SIP, IAX, and (to some degree due to Cisco's dominance in business networking) SCCP. H.323 may still be growing in usage, but its growth rate isn't even close to that of the rest of the VoIP market and hence its market share is dropping like a rock.
This has always worked for me.
In regards to the original poster - When talking to the CSRs, don't start making uneducated guesses as to what is happening. Cloning is INCREDIBLY rare these days, and for various reasons pretty much doesn't work for theft of service (see earlier posts...). As a result, bringing it up will probably cause the CSR to begin thinking you're an idiot/get frustrated with you.
Simply call them up, and state the cold hard facts. You have unexplained incoming calls without caller ID which do not cause your phone to ring, and also which sometimes overlapped with actual calls you DID make. For technical reasons, I don't think it's cloning. For technical reasons, it COULD be something caused by a misconfiguration of their billing system's handling of data service. In the past, some providers would give "minutes only usage" for high speed data services such as CDMA2000 1xRTT service, and (possibly, I'm only familiar with Verizon in this regard) for GPRS service too. Also, most CDMA2000 phones (maybe GPRS/EDGE too?) support simultaneous voice and data. i.e. the phone can be connected to a data call and still receive incoming calls. Yes, even though 1xRTT/1xEV-DO are packet data, there's essentially a low level heartbeat on the connection that is considered a "call". Usually the minutes of these "calls" are free and do not even show up in your plan summary, only the actual data usage does. Again, on some older plans and data services tacked onto legacy plans, it WAS possible to be charged per-minute instead of per-kilobyte or even per-kilobyte AND per-minute (rare though). Data "calls" could often be initiated without the users' knowledge unless specific settings were disabled in the phone, ones which were normally enabled by default because purchasing an unlimited data plan was strongly encouraged with most such phones. I believe this is one of the main reasons Verizon discontinued MOU data pricing.
As such, those unknown calls COULD be related to some sort of data capability. Don't mention this to the customer service rep as a guess though. Just the known facts.
Simple. Because the network was designed such that for users on the ground, it is NOT possible for a phone on the ground to be visible to more than one tower on the same frequency with similar signal strength, as towers in adjacent cells operate on different frequencies within the carrier's assigned band. If weird propagation DOES cause more than one tower on the same frequency to be able to hear the phone, it is easy for the network to figure out which tower is appropriate based on the signal strength. (The signal will be very weak at any tower other than the nearest one to the phone.)
This changes when a user goes above the maximum altitude of a user the system was designed to handle. All of a sudden the user will have LOS *with high signal strength* to multiple towers on the same frequency. In older systems, this could cause calls to be billed multiple times. In newer systems, multiple billing is eliminated and the network can handle it, EXCEPT that even if the phone is only communicating with a single tower, it will still cause significant interference with other towers that it normally would not, and as a result a handful of airborne users can significantly decrease the capacity of the network. Essentially, instead of being a single user in one cell for the purposes of capacity handling, they become an additional user in every cell within LOS of the aircraft. (Remember, even if they aren't actively communicating with a particular tower, their signal is still present and causes interference.)
It's called the Session Initiation Protocol, and pretty much every VoIP service OTHER than Skype uses/supports it. (With a few small exceptions such as Google Talk which uses the Jingle VoIP extensions to the XMPP (aka Jabber) protocol). Note in that particular case that Google and many of the big proponents of SIP (especially Project Gizmo/SIPPhone) have been working on solutions for XMPP+Jingle interoperability with SIP.
There are a wide variety of SIP softphones available, just as there are a wide variety of SIP service providers. Many of these also support the IAX protocol, which is primarily used by Asterisk PBX systems.
Examples, most of these service providers provide their own SIP client, but in most cases SIP clients are interchangeable between SIP services:
StanaPhone (http://www.stanaphone.com/) - Free incoming DIDs (dial-in phone numbers) in various New York area codes
SIPPhone/Gizmo Project (http://www.gizmoproject.com/) - Free PC-to-PC, DIDs and outgoing PSTN cost money (not much though)
Free World Dialup - Primarily PC-to-PC (or Asterisk-to-Asterisk or whatever), but with some PSTN in/out capability
The list goes on and on, and I haven't even included the "landline replacement" VoIP providers. (Vonage in the U.S. is the most well known example, but most educated consumers hate them as they have some rather customer-unfriendly policies such as locking telephone adapters to their service and forbidding the use of your own telephone adapter without paying a significant extra fee). A few other providers do use other (although usually still known and standardized) protocols such as AT&T CallVantage (which uses the MGCP protocol).
See http://www.voip-info.org/ for LOTS of addition information on hardware, setup, and cheap providers.