Ummmm....no...it is not filmed entirely in LA. It is primarily, but not exclusively. He has traveled to Michigan, Arizona and several other states to universities and (on rare occasions) other public areas.
I'm not sure about where Street Smarts is filmed, but most people who live here aren't native. So the show would be grabbing a variety of both native and non-native participants.
The joke is the entire population, not just one demographic.
This couldn't have even come close to being a surprise. If you've EVER watched Jay Leno more than a few times, you've seen JayWalking or Battle of the Jaywalkers. Or heck, even Street Smarts.
So before you start lambasting Kawhlefornia (Terminator speak for California), remember these shows prove it happens everywhere.
Actually, I read the article to state that Solaris and _some_ subsequent releases (BSD, Linux) are superior.
This article articulates very well the opinion I've come to hold, since being network and sys admin for about 300 Solaris and 2 or 300 NT machines for about 4 years.
My point of contention is that Microsoft built its legacy on home users, and "amatuer" (for lack of a better adjective) operating systems. Sun, HP and the other enterprise OS companies built it for business. I pitty anyone who relies on M$ servers for their bread and butter. I was talking to a DB manager for a M$ shop, that manages 7 terabytes of data. I complained how we had to bounce Oracle about once a month, and it was always the middleware failing. He laughed, and said, "We have to reboot the M$ DB _daily_ and reboot the whole machine". We only had to restart the middleware processes (e.g. ps -ef | grep middlware....kill...and the processes would automatically kick back off) and were back up and running in seconds, without affecting other DB processes on the box running.
This speaks volumes.
Those who don't know any better will keep their opinions for their own camp (either M$ or *nix) and those who've been on both sides are probably too busy to weigh in here anyway. (I'm out of it now, so I have more time:-)
I was thinking the same thing. On top of that, a spammer COUNTS on getting shut down. A real spammer will move on and not pay. So this looks like a policy that really only screws legit customers, however given it only hits a few percentage they haven't changed it. I'd certainly never do biz with them.
At the risk of suggestion something you've thought of already, have you looked into wireless providers that might be offering WiFi? Sprint PCS started offering WiFi on a limited basis to areas their phones cover. If you have PCS coverage, you might have WiFi. Just an idea
John
I was thinking the exact same thing. I just hope I am able to teach a little more common sense into my son (when he's older, he's only 16 mo right now) than I had. I was about 13 and decided to see what an apple would do when you shot it with a CO2 BB-gun. Of course, my friends were game and we had the apples set up in no time at the end of my driveway.
*pull trigger*
See apple move a little
*distant -TINK- sound*
We had fun taking a dozen or so shots (reloading CO2 bottle midway), before it was time to re-assemble the pieces since we had run out of apples to shoot.
We made a second mistake at this point. The first was not paying more attention to the -TINK- sound. The second was moving the apple a little farther down the driveway. The TINK was the BB hitting the house across the street. The movement of the apple changed the trajectory to conincide with the front-door storm door (glass) common in Oklahoma. So now the event became:
*pull trigger*
See apple move a little
*distant -TINK- sound*
*pull trigger*
See apple move a little
*distant -TINK- sound*
*Large panel of glass shattering across the street*
We scrambled to assemble all pieces of the apple and hid in the house. About 2 hours later, the neighbor's daughter came over and asked if we had seen any kids playing with BB guns in the area.:( "Ohhhh nooooo, we couldn't believe kids would do that! Why? What happened?"
So that's my, "Don't play with that, you'll shoot your eye out," story.
We need more general science, not just a space program
You could almost say that's a rhetorical statement. It's a space program that has lead to huge increses in general science. The experiements the astronaughts perform on the Shuttle affect many different facets of life, from cancer research, farming, biology, and on and on.
Even though I'm a space fan, I too questioned the need to spend a $1B (or whatever) on getting to the moon, when kids are homeless. However, I heard an astronaught (sp?) say, "You'd think people envision us going to Mars and burying huge bags of cash. That money doesn't go to mars, it employs people, develops science..." I may have slaughtered his exact words, but that was the general idea. And I somewhat agree. I don't mean to sound callous, but I have yet to see a society, whether capitalistic, socialist, communist, or totalitarian, that cures all social ills. So using that logic, we'd never spend money on anything except social programs. If history has taught us anything, it is that the government is often not a complete solution to ANY problem.
But I digress...
On a side note, I was a Ballistic Missile Early Warning (BMEWS) tracking control operator for a year up in Alaska (around 1995). The scorecard is correct, but might be misleading. BMEWS is intended to track ALL launches from Russia, and then immediately assess if they have a projectory that leads to North America (which is why we also had Canadian military there). It's also the mission at Clear AFS (the BMEWS site in Alaska) to track all objects within so close (I'm not sure if the distance is still classified) for cataloging purposes and to help Shuttle mission planners. You don't want manned spacecraft to fly through a bunch of debris. The BMEWS system formerly was a really old mechanical radar. The feedhorn would oscilate back and forth, while bouncing the signal off a large fence about the size of a football field. There were three of these. Since then, that has been yanked out for a Phased Array Radar system which is much higher in accuracy, sensitivity and is electronically alterable (where as the mechanical was fixed, you couldn't change where it looked).
Just some useless trivia to add for any space-buffs interested.
I have to agree in concept with the author of the piece. I have installed Solaris 8 on quite a few systems and just ran with what it included, and maybe added a few packages (SSH, PHP, etc) for different things. Life was simple and everything worked, everytime.
Then I changed jobs where there's not a single Unix machine to be found. Needing to set up a server (and knowing apache did what I needed), I took a PC and tried installing RedHat 8 from a disk I burned from a friend a long time ago. This is where my life got frustrating. I spent three weeks banging on this thing until someone mentioned Apache and Mod_Perl having different versions....oh yeah, and 1.99 is actually 2...WTF?? I came so close many times to just going on E-bay, buying an old Sun Ultra10, and donating it to work.
Yes, I eventually got it to work (it's what I'm using now to write this, on a Mozilla browser), but it just seems like things were more complicated than they needed to be. Apache 1 worked....mod_perl 1 worked....
So, since I agree with the author does that make me flamebait too? I guess the upside is now I have more books, as I went out and bought some Linux books to sit on the shelf next to my Sun Solaris System Admin 1 and 2 boxes.
The reason I knew right away that I'd sympathize with this article is that all my co-workers (at my former job) were upgrading to Sol9. They'd ask, why aren't you upgrading? I'd always ask, why should I? Silence... Occasionally someone would mention OpenSSH, but then I'd remind them that took me less than 2 minutes to download, untar and pkgadd. A lot less time than a full OS load.
Do you know if the calling party info provided with incoming calls on an ISDN PRI is always accurate or right?
Not always. Sometimes you'll need to talk with the maintenance group of your local telephone company. The information the telco switch has is correct, but sometimes it may not be passing along the information in a way that your PBX can interpret.
snip...incoming call on our RAS setup...I wonder if "Caller ID block" is something that applies to PRIs, or if its only applies to analog caller ID.
Just to make sure we're using the same terminology - RAS is usually a means of remotely dialing in. It usually stands for Remote Access Server, and is used by corporations to dial into the LAN ( your modem dials in, and then you use a VPN client to connect to an internal, secure server). PRI is Primary Rate Interface and is one of two types of T1 interfaces. The other is BRI (Basic Rate Interface). The phone company will bring in a T1 to your company (two-wire) at a U-interface. S or T interfaces then allow you to convert to a 4 wire system using ISDN equipment to provide phone, LAN, PBX and video conferencing.
So you can see where there are many places between the telco, the PBX and your RAS, where the CallerID information can get dropped/misread.
I'll be honest with you. I have a great deal of experience with the phone switching equipment, but next to none with PBXs. I know that at Nextel, we had a PBX that was the "cats ass!" If your office phone couldn't reach you, it would dump off to your cell phone (which, as employees, were free) and the voice mail would go there. The PBX caller ID was correct every time.
Later I worked for Sprint PCS and the PBX was very unstable. Some calls would ID correctly incoming and it was a crap shoot whether outgoing calls would show up correctly at the far end. I know the group that maintained the PBX stated it was the TELCO's fault. However, given my years of experience in telco, I learned if an engineer couldn't tell me WHY it was someone else's fault, it usually meant they were:
A: Guessing
B: Ducking the issue until someone could prove it was their equipment C: Lying.
Both jobs were in Irvine with the same telco (Pacific Bell) providing local service. The variable was the PBX maintainers (as both used the Meridian PBX....which seems to be a large chunk of whats out there). So given one PBX was great and the other terrible, both with the same LEC (local exchange carrier), this leads me to believe it is likely to be a PBX issue. Again, caller ID info is tied to the originating switch's SS7. This information has to be correct, as it includes a CIC code to establish the final circuit. One other variable is the switches between the originator and the destination of the call. Some treat Private flags differently. Hmmm...it seems like I'm probably leaving you with more questions than answers.
Check out this link to a great explanation of CID and then email me if there's any clarification you might need. I am not sure if I could answer it, but I have connections to guys who know SS7 inside and out. ( hee hee, this would fall under "B" in the list above:-)
I decided to poke around their studies, and this one made me almost fall out of my chair laughing: Case Study
I was reading along and saw, "I wanted to use Visual Basic to administer my Unix machines." HUH!? WTF?! He has a Sun Solaris box running Apache and he wants to use Visual Basic to administer his users/customers. Uh, I guess shell scripting, NAWK/AWK scripting, Python, TCL, Perl, Expect and a half dozen other Unix languages couldn't get the job done!? Please. I administered several hundred NT and Unix (Sun Solaris 8 on Netra servers) boxes and never found myself wanting VB. With crap like that, it baffles me who they thing they're kidding.
John
Re:Importance of GPS, & questions on its Relia
on
Equine Speedometers
·
· Score: 1
The concept you are explaining is usually referred to as Differential GPS (DGPS) and is used very frequently by small airports.
I flew GPS satellites for the AF for about 8 years, and taught it as a AETC instructor for about 3 of those 8. So you can consider me a Subject Matter Expert:-)
Anyway, DGPS and GLONASS (the Soviet Union's equiv to GPS) lead to the DoD turning off Selective Availability (SA), which degraded GPS to about a hundred meters. There are two signals sent down (L1 and L2) with Precision code and C/A (Coarse Acquisition) code. High quality, military units can lock right onto P-code, but most units lock onto C/A code and then they get P code. This is why older sources will quote 100 meter accuracy, but modern GPS sets will claim around 10 meters.
I mostly wrote this to add to some other questions, such as why don't we use other forms? Because accuracy of your positioning is very dependant upon timing. As a GPS satellite operator, I spent 80% of my time maintaining the atomic clocks on the 24 satellites. Newer generation GPS satellites will self-adjust each other, but I digress. An atomic clock on a GPS satellite is accurate to a nanosecond, and is monitored 24/7. The resources to recreate this locally would be very cost prohibitive. Yes, GPS can have drift due to atmospheric variances, but DGPS, and WAAS can compensate for this. Your signal is delayed due to the Earth's atmosphere, but you are still getting a timing signal that is close to a nanosecond of accuracy. I can't see how a 802.11b system can provide triangularization with even remotely close accuracy.
As a function of speed, the accuracy of a GPS set can degrade as a horse runs faster. However, technology can make it still very accurate. I'm not familiar with the units the horses will be using, but I would expect it to be within a foot or two. I'm not sure I would use it to establish a race winner, however, without some sort of supporting technology (photo, radar, GPS-augmentation such as WAAS, DGPS, etc). Regardless, it would still be incredibly accurate for training purposes.
On a side note, one of my friends' father owned/raised race-horses back in the 80s. Horse racing has been VERY scientific for quite some time now. Biology, geneology, toxicology, etc, are all brought in to maximize their performance
Just to add a little more useless trivia. Yes,the phone company can almost always see who the originating caller is when performing a call trace. Occasionally the SS7 drops it from the incoming Long Distance trunk, but 99% of the time a call trace will show the source phone number.
The Lucent 5ESS switch, which is very prevelant, has an Executive Call Processor (ECP). If a law enforcement agency provides adaquate subpoena paperwork (or electronic equiv.), the phone company can go into the ECP for the 5ESS and run a "call trace". It will show all SS7 and local call data about the phone call. With cell phones, I (or the wireless company) can tell you which switch you were using (location based) and which cell towers you hopped to/from. Nortel switches are very simliar (DMS 100, 250, etc), however there is not a seperate ECP.
With CALEA, the law enforcement agencies got even more wiretapping power and now actually have devices in the local switches to speed up the process of wiretapping. They still are *supposed* to follow procedures for submitting subpoenas, but I've seen certain installations of their equipment where, if they were technologically savy, they could circumvent the process. I won't go into more detail there.
I was a telecom engineer for about 6 years, so I can shed some light on the CallerID statement you made.
First, the person who stated the number in the header of a fax is software driven is mostly correct. There may be newer faxes that use CallerID, but each and every fax machine I have used or seen to date sends it's own number with the fax (which is then inserted in the header).
Ever since people figured out how to cheat pay phones by phreaking and sending tones (by whistling, or use black boxes held up to the phone mic), phone switches use out of band signaling (SS7) to route calls. This means that before your call is actually placed, all the phone switches in the path from the source to destination coordinate the call (based on call translation tables, options in the switches, etc). This way a circuit is not wasted if the call can not get through. So often, when you hear a "ringing" sound, it's a "comfort tone" sent while the circuit is being established (this way you aren't left wondering, due to the "dead air", or lack of any sound).
I digressed a little. Part of the SS7 messaging that is sent back and forth included. among other things, the source of the phone call. Your caller ID block is a software feature in your local telephone company (telco) swithing office. It's illegal, but if you work for a phone company you can override and see all CallerID info, regardless if the caller has it set to "blocked".
All bets are off if you receive your calls via a PBX. Most PBXs are configured incorrectly (at some level) and can display anything from the local trunk (from the telco) for the incoming call to the actual phone number (assuming it's not blocked). But again, the PBX receives the phone number from the local telco switch that provides local service (or incoming long distance). How the info is treated in a PBX is a function of its configuration.
And since they are a little older, there are more stats for the liars to figure with ("Figures don't lie, but liars figure").
It is moderately amusing that the bird-loving group uses the Oil-Companies' lower reported numbers, for quoting total birds killed. He still made the case credible for wind power advocates, when he quoted 240,000 killed in Valdez. If 20,000 were killed by the Altamont Pass propellers in 20 years, than we're still talking 100 years (as opposed to 400). I'm sure these wind farms will be figments of our imagination (and Google) in that much time.
Driving past them, they sure are cool to view from a distance. I'm normally not a tree-hugger, but we just put in a pool solar heating system two weeks ago for our pool being built. It sure beats $400-$800 natural gas bills....however, boy did my neighbors scream like Nancy-boys with their nipple rings caught in a blender when they saw 14 4'X12' panels.....I've come to the conclusion all forms of power generation are a love/hate relationship. The one that aligns with your pocketbook will be loved, all others will be hated and maligned with venomous words
It's sad that they've locked themselves into this closet of self-defeating behavior
It smacks upon the ineptness of SCO's management to realize that litigation as a primary means of justifying revenue is a dark room with no way out. Now even Walmart and others have figured out profitable methods of music distribution. It's sad that a retailer embraced it before an agency representing CREATIVE ARTISTS (sorry for yelling). Yes, the Record Labels have been working on their own version, but IMHO they've spent so much time trying to lock it down they got left behind.
I'm surprised there aren't anti-trust lawsuits against the record lables for supressing innovation and forcing flawed products upon us (at artifically inflated prices). Hmmmm...DVD 19$, CD soundtrack $16.....
John "Don't tell me this is the most distubing post you've seen on/."
Wow, the article at wtop.com is written much better than the original story this thread is under.
Given the nature of his spamming, it sounds like he is a prime candidate for what this law was intended for (not random victim, or a script kiddie learning to spam for fun).
I also like the closing statement that the, "law will be keeping (them) busy for the near future." GO GET 'EM ROSCOE....cuff n stuff em
I think it would have been more beneficial to have discussed the wasted resources from sole-source projects that were ram-rodded by well-intentioned program managers.
At my last job, the corp. security group wanted a solution that could manage users on a few thousand servers (NT and mostly *nix). What started off as a simple project turned into this huge system (running on Windows, ACK!)that every user would have to go through to get to any network element. So a technician using a terminal for a Sun box (Netra T1120) about two feet away, would have to go through a central-computer buried in a bunker thousands of miles away. Nevermind that something similar had been tried and died twice before.
Without getting bogged in details, my point is that I agree with Marvin that many times an inferior project with a lot of "yes" men (and women) behind it are actually much more of a threat than forking.
I love the analogies to forking = captialism (and evolution). I hadn't thought of it that way, but it's completely true. Just think if no one had come up with an alternative to RedHat's Linux, and now they've walked away from the consumers. My next *nix install will either be Solaris 8 for Intel (cuz I just cant let it go...its my fix) or FreeBSD.
I used to be an avid gamer, but it just got so old being forced to constantly upgrade to get even marginal play. My original computer (TRS 80 CoCo1 and 2) played for years with new games, without being forced to go from 4k to 16k to 32k to 64k, etc memory. (OK, yes the games were lame ascii characters, but you get my point).
I bought a laptop off ebay with a PII 300Mhz and 256 Mb of RAM. I was bored and tried to find anything at Microcenter that would run on it. I gave up after only finding 4 year old lame knockoffs ("Classic Arcade") that my system would meet. My Dell 1.3 GHz that's only about 2 years old is borderline in terms of playing any RPG nowadays. This may be a dumb analogy, but could you imagine if your 3 year old car couldn't find gas anymore that allowed it to run above 55mpg.
Consoles turned me off for similar reasons. I might have had unrealistic expectations, but I expected games to be similar to DVDs. Expensive at release and then decline to a reasonable ~$30 level (like PC games were). No, instead even games for obsolete boxes are still >$50 often times. Although I played my freinds' Segas, Ataris, Com64, etc, my first console I plumped down hard cash on was the Super NES. Not even a year or so later its EOL. Pissed is an understatement.
I know this post sounds like a rant, but these are the reasons I stay away from both. I would like to get back into an RPG, but I don't want to spend $100-300 for a box that will EOL within 2 years or be forced to constantly upgrade.
As a telecom Engineer working as a sys and network admin, this just sounds too out there to be viable. Nortel isn't one to trash a technological standard unless they've really tested it.
There's quite a few issues with power spikes, power filters, etc that would seem to make this an unlikely competitor. Plus, the market is already crowded with cable, DSL, satellite, and wireless carriers (Sprint) providing WiFi ISP coverage.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure about where Street Smarts is filmed, but most people who live here aren't native. So the show would be grabbing a variety of both native and non-native participants.
The joke is the entire population, not just one demographic.
So before you start lambasting Kawhlefornia (Terminator speak for California), remember these shows prove it happens everywhere.
Oh look a puppy!
This article articulates very well the opinion I've come to hold, since being network and sys admin for about 300 Solaris and 2 or 300 NT machines for about 4 years.
My point of contention is that Microsoft built its legacy on home users, and "amatuer" (for lack of a better adjective) operating systems. Sun, HP and the other enterprise OS companies built it for business. I pitty anyone who relies on M$ servers for their bread and butter. I was talking to a DB manager for a M$ shop, that manages 7 terabytes of data. I complained how we had to bounce Oracle about once a month, and it was always the middleware failing. He laughed, and said, "We have to reboot the M$ DB _daily_ and reboot the whole machine". We only had to restart the middleware processes (e.g. ps -ef | grep middlware....kill ...and the processes would automatically kick back off) and were back up and running in seconds, without affecting other DB processes on the box running.
This speaks volumes.
Those who don't know any better will keep their opinions for their own camp (either M$ or *nix) and those who've been on both sides are probably too busy to weigh in here anyway. (I'm out of it now, so I have more time :-)
John
He said the blackout can lead to violence, which is what happened in Haiti. No Sponge Bob will lead to mass rebellion, bloodshed and carnage...
John
John
At the risk of suggestion something you've thought of already, have you looked into wireless providers that might be offering WiFi? Sprint PCS started offering WiFi on a limited basis to areas their phones cover. If you have PCS coverage, you might have WiFi. Just an idea
John
*pull trigger*
See apple move a little
*distant -TINK- sound*
We had fun taking a dozen or so shots (reloading CO2 bottle midway), before it was time to re-assemble the pieces since we had run out of apples to shoot.
We made a second mistake at this point. The first was not paying more attention to the -TINK- sound. The second was moving the apple a little farther down the driveway. The TINK was the BB hitting the house across the street. The movement of the apple changed the trajectory to conincide with the front-door storm door (glass) common in Oklahoma. So now the event became: :( "Ohhhh nooooo, we couldn't believe kids would do that! Why? What happened?"
*pull trigger*
See apple move a little
*distant -TINK- sound*
*pull trigger*
See apple move a little
*distant -TINK- sound*
*Large panel of glass shattering across the street*
We scrambled to assemble all pieces of the apple and hid in the house. About 2 hours later, the neighbor's daughter came over and asked if we had seen any kids playing with BB guns in the area.
So that's my, "Don't play with that, you'll shoot your eye out," story.
John
You could almost say that's a rhetorical statement. It's a space program that has lead to huge increses in general science. The experiements the astronaughts perform on the Shuttle affect many different facets of life, from cancer research, farming, biology, and on and on.
Even though I'm a space fan, I too questioned the need to spend a $1B (or whatever) on getting to the moon, when kids are homeless. However, I heard an astronaught (sp?) say, "You'd think people envision us going to Mars and burying huge bags of cash. That money doesn't go to mars, it employs people, develops science..." I may have slaughtered his exact words, but that was the general idea. And I somewhat agree. I don't mean to sound callous, but I have yet to see a society, whether capitalistic, socialist, communist, or totalitarian, that cures all social ills. So using that logic, we'd never spend money on anything except social programs. If history has taught us anything, it is that the government is often not a complete solution to ANY problem.
But I digress...
On a side note, I was a Ballistic Missile Early Warning (BMEWS) tracking control operator for a year up in Alaska (around 1995). The scorecard is correct, but might be misleading. BMEWS is intended to track ALL launches from Russia, and then immediately assess if they have a projectory that leads to North America (which is why we also had Canadian military there). It's also the mission at Clear AFS (the BMEWS site in Alaska) to track all objects within so close (I'm not sure if the distance is still classified) for cataloging purposes and to help Shuttle mission planners. You don't want manned spacecraft to fly through a bunch of debris. The BMEWS system formerly was a really old mechanical radar. The feedhorn would oscilate back and forth, while bouncing the signal off a large fence about the size of a football field. There were three of these. Since then, that has been yanked out for a Phased Array Radar system which is much higher in accuracy, sensitivity and is electronically alterable (where as the mechanical was fixed, you couldn't change where it looked).
Just some useless trivia to add for any space-buffs interested.
John
Then I changed jobs where there's not a single Unix machine to be found. Needing to set up a server (and knowing apache did what I needed), I took a PC and tried installing RedHat 8 from a disk I burned from a friend a long time ago. This is where my life got frustrating. I spent three weeks banging on this thing until someone mentioned Apache and Mod_Perl having different versions....oh yeah, and 1.99 is actually 2...WTF?? I came so close many times to just going on E-bay, buying an old Sun Ultra10, and donating it to work.
Yes, I eventually got it to work (it's what I'm using now to write this, on a Mozilla browser), but it just seems like things were more complicated than they needed to be. Apache 1 worked....mod_perl 1 worked....
So, since I agree with the author does that make me flamebait too? I guess the upside is now I have more books, as I went out and bought some Linux books to sit on the shelf next to my Sun Solaris System Admin 1 and 2 boxes.
The reason I knew right away that I'd sympathize with this article is that all my co-workers (at my former job) were upgrading to Sol9. They'd ask, why aren't you upgrading? I'd always ask, why should I? Silence... Occasionally someone would mention OpenSSH, but then I'd remind them that took me less than 2 minutes to download, untar and pkgadd. A lot less time than a full OS load.
John
So you can see where there are many places between the telco, the PBX and your RAS, where the CallerID information can get dropped/misread.
I'll be honest with you. I have a great deal of experience with the phone switching equipment, but next to none with PBXs. I know that at Nextel, we had a PBX that was the "cats ass!" If your office phone couldn't reach you, it would dump off to your cell phone (which, as employees, were free) and the voice mail would go there. The PBX caller ID was correct every time.
Later I worked for Sprint PCS and the PBX was very unstable. Some calls would ID correctly incoming and it was a crap shoot whether outgoing calls would show up correctly at the far end. I know the group that maintained the PBX stated it was the TELCO's fault. However, given my years of experience in telco, I learned if an engineer couldn't tell me WHY it was someone else's fault, it usually meant they were:
- A: Guessing
Both jobs were in Irvine with the same telco (Pacific Bell) providing local service. The variable was the PBX maintainers (as both used the Meridian PBX....which seems to be a large chunk of whats out there). So given one PBX was great and the other terrible, both with the same LEC (local exchange carrier), this leads me to believe it is likely to be a PBX issue. Again, caller ID info is tied to the originating switch's SS7. This information has to be correct, as it includes a CIC code to establish the final circuit. One other variable is the switches between the originator and the destination of the call. Some treat Private flags differently. Hmmm...it seems like I'm probably leaving you with more questions than answers.B: Ducking the issue until someone could prove it was their equipment
C: Lying.
Check out this link to a great explanation of CID and then email me if there's any clarification you might need. I am not sure if I could answer it, but I have connections to guys who know SS7 inside and out. ( hee hee, this would fall under "B" in the list above :-)
hth,
John
Case Study
I was reading along and saw, "I wanted to use Visual Basic to administer my Unix machines." HUH!? WTF?! He has a Sun Solaris box running Apache and he wants to use Visual Basic to administer his users/customers. Uh, I guess shell scripting, NAWK/AWK scripting, Python, TCL, Perl, Expect and a half dozen other Unix languages couldn't get the job done!? Please. I administered several hundred NT and Unix (Sun Solaris 8 on Netra servers) boxes and never found myself wanting VB. With crap like that, it baffles me who they thing they're kidding.
John
I flew GPS satellites for the AF for about 8 years, and taught it as a AETC instructor for about 3 of those 8. So you can consider me a Subject Matter Expert :-)
Anyway, DGPS and GLONASS (the Soviet Union's equiv to GPS) lead to the DoD turning off Selective Availability (SA), which degraded GPS to about a hundred meters. There are two signals sent down (L1 and L2) with Precision code and C/A (Coarse Acquisition) code. High quality, military units can lock right onto P-code, but most units lock onto C/A code and then they get P code. This is why older sources will quote 100 meter accuracy, but modern GPS sets will claim around 10 meters.
I mostly wrote this to add to some other questions, such as why don't we use other forms? Because accuracy of your positioning is very dependant upon timing. As a GPS satellite operator, I spent 80% of my time maintaining the atomic clocks on the 24 satellites. Newer generation GPS satellites will self-adjust each other, but I digress. An atomic clock on a GPS satellite is accurate to a nanosecond, and is monitored 24/7. The resources to recreate this locally would be very cost prohibitive. Yes, GPS can have drift due to atmospheric variances, but DGPS, and WAAS can compensate for this. Your signal is delayed due to the Earth's atmosphere, but you are still getting a timing signal that is close to a nanosecond of accuracy. I can't see how a 802.11b system can provide triangularization with even remotely close accuracy.
As a function of speed, the accuracy of a GPS set can degrade as a horse runs faster. However, technology can make it still very accurate. I'm not familiar with the units the horses will be using, but I would expect it to be within a foot or two. I'm not sure I would use it to establish a race winner, however, without some sort of supporting technology (photo, radar, GPS-augmentation such as WAAS, DGPS, etc). Regardless, it would still be incredibly accurate for training purposes.
On a side note, one of my friends' father owned/raised race-horses back in the 80s. Horse racing has been VERY scientific for quite some time now. Biology, geneology, toxicology, etc, are all brought in to maximize their performance
HTH,
John
The Lucent 5ESS switch, which is very prevelant, has an Executive Call Processor (ECP). If a law enforcement agency provides adaquate subpoena paperwork (or electronic equiv.), the phone company can go into the ECP for the 5ESS and run a "call trace". It will show all SS7 and local call data about the phone call. With cell phones, I (or the wireless company) can tell you which switch you were using (location based) and which cell towers you hopped to/from. Nortel switches are very simliar (DMS 100, 250, etc), however there is not a seperate ECP.
With CALEA, the law enforcement agencies got even more wiretapping power and now actually have devices in the local switches to speed up the process of wiretapping. They still are *supposed* to follow procedures for submitting subpoenas, but I've seen certain installations of their equipment where, if they were technologically savy, they could circumvent the process. I won't go into more detail there.
HTH, John
First, the person who stated the number in the header of a fax is software driven is mostly correct. There may be newer faxes that use CallerID, but each and every fax machine I have used or seen to date sends it's own number with the fax (which is then inserted in the header).
Ever since people figured out how to cheat pay phones by phreaking and sending tones (by whistling, or use black boxes held up to the phone mic), phone switches use out of band signaling (SS7) to route calls. This means that before your call is actually placed, all the phone switches in the path from the source to destination coordinate the call (based on call translation tables, options in the switches, etc). This way a circuit is not wasted if the call can not get through. So often, when you hear a "ringing" sound, it's a "comfort tone" sent while the circuit is being established (this way you aren't left wondering, due to the "dead air", or lack of any sound).
I digressed a little. Part of the SS7 messaging that is sent back and forth included. among other things, the source of the phone call. Your caller ID block is a software feature in your local telephone company (telco) swithing office. It's illegal, but if you work for a phone company you can override and see all CallerID info, regardless if the caller has it set to "blocked".
All bets are off if you receive your calls via a PBX. Most PBXs are configured incorrectly (at some level) and can display anything from the local trunk (from the telco) for the incoming call to the actual phone number (assuming it's not blocked). But again, the PBX receives the phone number from the local telco switch that provides local service (or incoming long distance). How the info is treated in a PBX is a function of its configuration.
HTH,
John
It is moderately amusing that the bird-loving group uses the Oil-Companies' lower reported numbers, for quoting total birds killed. He still made the case credible for wind power advocates, when he quoted 240,000 killed in Valdez. If 20,000 were killed by the Altamont Pass propellers in 20 years, than we're still talking 100 years (as opposed to 400). I'm sure these wind farms will be figments of our imagination (and Google) in that much time.
Driving past them, they sure are cool to view from a distance. I'm normally not a tree-hugger, but we just put in a pool solar heating system two weeks ago for our pool being built. It sure beats $400-$800 natural gas bills....however, boy did my neighbors scream like Nancy-boys with their nipple rings caught in a blender when they saw 14 4'X12' panels.....I've come to the conclusion all forms of power generation are a love/hate relationship. The one that aligns with your pocketbook will be loved, all others will be hated and maligned with venomous words
John
It smacks upon the ineptness of SCO's management to realize that litigation as a primary means of justifying revenue is a dark room with no way out. Now even Walmart and others have figured out profitable methods of music distribution. It's sad that a retailer embraced it before an agency representing CREATIVE ARTISTS (sorry for yelling). Yes, the Record Labels have been working on their own version, but IMHO they've spent so much time trying to lock it down they got left behind.
I'm surprised there aren't anti-trust lawsuits against the record lables for supressing innovation and forcing flawed products upon us (at artifically inflated prices). Hmmmm...DVD 19$, CD soundtrack $16.....
John
"Don't tell me this is the most distubing post you've seen on
Given the nature of his spamming, it sounds like he is a prime candidate for what this law was intended for (not random victim, or a script kiddie learning to spam for fun).
I also like the closing statement that the, "law will be keeping (them) busy for the near future." GO GET 'EM ROSCOE....cuff n stuff em
John
At my last job, the corp. security group wanted a solution that could manage users on a few thousand servers (NT and mostly *nix). What started off as a simple project turned into this huge system (running on Windows, ACK!)that every user would have to go through to get to any network element. So a technician using a terminal for a Sun box (Netra T1120) about two feet away, would have to go through a central-computer buried in a bunker thousands of miles away. Nevermind that something similar had been tried and died twice before.
Without getting bogged in details, my point is that I agree with Marvin that many times an inferior project with a lot of "yes" men (and women) behind it are actually much more of a threat than forking.
I love the analogies to forking = captialism (and evolution). I hadn't thought of it that way, but it's completely true. Just think if no one had come up with an alternative to RedHat's Linux, and now they've walked away from the consumers. My next *nix install will either be Solaris 8 for Intel (cuz I just cant let it go...its my fix) or FreeBSD.
John
I bought a laptop off ebay with a PII 300Mhz and 256 Mb of RAM. I was bored and tried to find anything at Microcenter that would run on it. I gave up after only finding 4 year old lame knockoffs ("Classic Arcade") that my system would meet. My Dell 1.3 GHz that's only about 2 years old is borderline in terms of playing any RPG nowadays. This may be a dumb analogy, but could you imagine if your 3 year old car couldn't find gas anymore that allowed it to run above 55mpg.
Consoles turned me off for similar reasons. I might have had unrealistic expectations, but I expected games to be similar to DVDs. Expensive at release and then decline to a reasonable ~$30 level (like PC games were). No, instead even games for obsolete boxes are still >$50 often times. Although I played my freinds' Segas, Ataris, Com64, etc, my first console I plumped down hard cash on was the Super NES. Not even a year or so later its EOL. Pissed is an understatement.
I know this post sounds like a rant, but these are the reasons I stay away from both. I would like to get back into an RPG, but I don't want to spend $100-300 for a box that will EOL within 2 years or be forced to constantly upgrade.
John
As a telecom Engineer working as a sys and network admin, this just sounds too out there to be viable. Nortel isn't one to trash a technological standard unless they've really tested it. There's quite a few issues with power spikes, power filters, etc that would seem to make this an unlikely competitor. Plus, the market is already crowded with cable, DSL, satellite, and wireless carriers (Sprint) providing WiFi ISP coverage.