I have toured both AT&T and MCI locally.
At AT&T they use a system with a monitor and camera, and each person has a device on the table. They swipe their employee ID card (also for access to the building and time "cards"). They answer questions from the instructor and request assistance (where they can ask a question and everyone can hear them), through the device, which has a microphone and keypad. When they complete and pass the class, their employee records are automatically updated to reflect that. Now, from what I understood, it used an OC3 of bandwidth (155Mbps), but since it was on the same floor as their switch (and I mean *THE* switch, nearly the entire floor), it was nothing.
MCI used almost the same setup, but I was told it was mostly for corporate broadcasts, such as the merger with Worldcom a couple of years ago.
I wrote down the brands/models of the systems, but unfortunately I cannot seem to find it anywhere (that's what I get for using trees!). My suggestion is to call them (usually a salesrep) and arrange a tour. Maybe you can get a gander at the system, just to see what features they have and all that. I had very good experiences touring both places, we ended up getting the tour from the head technician in both cases. They were spouting off lingo, giving us stats on the hardware, etc, confusing the hell out of the salesrep. Some damn fine systems they have! The way that I got the tours was that we were shopping around for our service, and they both wanted our $30K/month contract. I'm not sure if they give a tour to just anyone, but perhaps you could arrange it for a Cub/Boy Scout troup or something similar. I took my son's Cub Scout Den on a tour of the local phone company's main building (Cincinnati Bell) and they went home impressed as hell, though not as much as the adults who came along:).
I believe you meant to reply to the message I am replying to. _I_ am using Dialogic and Voicebridge hardware, and the direct C APIs for those cards.
Why don't you log in? Why must you be rude?
In writing apps for call control, the hardware used uses a bus for the voice data. All the software does is transfer sound files to the hardware when needed and provide call control, i.e. connect this line to this trunk.
The fact that it is Java-based has absolutely nothing to do with the scalability of the server application. I have written a highly scalable call processing application using C++. It can handle as many ports as are addressable by the hardware (assuming the processor/memory is sufficient). This app is handing 16 lines, about 2500 calls per day, using a PPro 200 with 64MB RAM (NT 4.0). In testing, I put 64 lines on the same box, and had no difficulty with it. If I wanted this to be scalable (so that calls could be connected from one to the other), I would have to write SOFTWARE that would run on both boxes and pass calls and data between each other, probably over TCP/IP. This is NOT a Java function. This is a application function. If I were to "plug in another box" for the job, install the same hardware, and run Linux on it, it would not work, because the hardware does not have Linux drivers (yet).
Furthermore, debugging being 5x harder than Java is bunk. I've debugged Java software. And what does it take to write software that is scalable? Give me a break! Software checks for hardware, creates a thread for each hardware port, threads take over their own port. Messaging is done between threads through a queue in the main thread. All done. That's why I am able to extend my app to provide other services, such as DISA-type outcalling and call forwarding to a list of numbers dialed simultaneously.
Oh, and while I'm bragging, I wrote this app in my spare time at home, to fill a need the company didn't yet know even existed. Now they are asking for all kinds of new features and buying me the dream hardware (Voicebridge cards, Dialogic cards, new backplanes, etc).
Nah, a voicemail system is not what is needed, unless they still want to be able to get quality tracks like 13.:)
I have a project at work that I worked on in my spare time and is now in production. It's an automated attendant that uses Dialogic hardware. Unfortunately, it runs on NT because the Linux API was only recently released. But the app runs for months at a time, no stability problems. It is monitored by a Linux box that sends an page to my cellphone if the system goes down (it monitors a heartbeat, retrieved from the NT system via HTTP, with Apache running on the NT system).
My point is that I'm fairly qualified to design and program a system that plays music.
However, the problem with the slightly older Dialogic hardware is that the sound files it can play are all Dialogic ADPCM (6Khz or 8Khz sampling). Use CoolEdit to turn a decent soundfile into a Dialogic vox file. The quality is pretty bad.
The other issue is the number of phone lines needed for a system like this. For more than 20 lines, it may be far better to get T1 or ISDN PRI voice service. This means other Dialogic hardware that can accept T1 or PRI directly. I'm also a PBX and telecomm expert, I work with phone companies and design stuff and all that.
BTW, the automated attendant pulls data from Lotus Notes and provides a directory, validates extensions, and uses PBX digital integration (Voicebridge cards) to do all kinds of cool stuff to the PBX. If anyone wants some code, reply to this. I check.
A flat tax would require your personal information, allow the IRS to pursue you for their money, and would still be evaded by the one out of siz people in the country.
A sales tax would be payed based on the goods you purchase. Not food, but cars, tobacco, electronics, etc. Things that are not essential to life. No personal information would be gathered, the retailers who already have to collect local taxes would simply collect a little more. Even a 20% tax would be less than we pay in income tax now, companies at every level have to pay for accounting teams to handle the taxes.
Sorry that I wasn't more specific, I was at work...
I agree that the government shouldn't be involved in this, however, the fact that they created a monopoly in the first place created a situation where it is impossible for a comptitor to break into the market.
Your analogy to a protocol is inaccurate. If AOL was the only online service for 80 years, and there is no internet. You want to compete with them, who is going to sign up with you if they can't send email to their friends with AOL? AOL would have no interest in letting you connect to their system to send e-mail?
Although I don't agree with him on the Microsoft situation, I will still be voting for him. Why? Cause I agree with damn near everything else and I think M$ is now in a position where they actually do have competition. I'm all for punishing them because of what they have already done, but I think that the rest of what Browne has to offer is far more valuable to the country.
Oh, bull. Anyone can get a job and get better at it and make more money. You think I have a decent job cause I was born into the right family? I scraped to get my first computer, worked hard as hell to learn everything about it, worked shit jobs making automobile shocks second shift, doing phone surveys, until I got a decent job because my current employer saw that I was worth it? Why? Cause I worked my BUTT off.
My family had nothing to do with it, except encouraging me, getting me to school (which was public), and supporting me when I decided that a public high school had nothing to offer me at all and dropped out to teach myself.
Anyone who doesn't want to live life in the gutter can pull themselves up by their bootstraps by getting a job, moving to a place where there are jobs, whatever. It CAN be done. It IS BEING done right now, all around us.
Any other phone company could have gone into a town and run phone wire into everyone's homes and provide them with a competetive service. (The government still doesn't allow that.)
However, if you had Bell's service and your friend has NewBell's service, how can you call each other? Bell and NewBell have to connect to each other. If Bell owns all of the country's long distance and local service, how can NewBell provide long distance service? The cost of installing a national phone network is huge.
Now the government is mandating that a competitor can use Bell to provide service to the consumer. NewBell connects to Bell at one location (a central office) and Bell connects that office to the end user. NewBell has to pay Bell for the line to connect, so they have to take a serious cut in profit. So far, this is only happening on local service, and is really only cost effective for digital voice service (T1 or PRI).
But without government mandating that Bell has to do this, you think they would let competitors near their networks? HA!
Well, he is talking about Federal funding. Don't forget that the state and local governments would be free to invest as they want. Also, for every invention that was government funded, I could name ten that were not. Maybe more.
Ha! with my HP 7200 Series (2x2xSomething) I play Quake3 while burning audio and data cds. Hell, I burn MP3s to AudioCD and play Q3 in the meantime. It makes Q3 a little jumpy, but I haven't made a single coaster in 2.5 years. My setup:
NT 4.0 SP6b
Dual PII-400
256 MB PC-100 RAM
9G SCSI 7200 RPM Quantum HD,
32G UATA-66 7200 RPM IBM DeskStar HD (where my files are),
CD Burner on IDE (as slave, master is Plextor CDROM).
But I would like to point out that enough people have already abstained from voting in the last election, and Ralph Nader _is_ using it as ammunition. What we need to do is rise up and vote for who we want. Who knows, we may end up electing someone else!
Where did you get the idea that the deficit is being payed? There _is_ _no_ surplus! They're stealing money from Social Security and calling it surplus. And instead of paying off the debt, they are looking for more things to spend it on. They might even put some of it back into Social Security, but not if they can help it.
Except that they already got royalty agreements with at least two major RAM manufacturers. They will continue to have an income until those contracts expire. If there were any justice, those contracts would be null and void.
But you can bet that not a single company will license one of their products in the future or give in to their legal crap.
But what about the PS2, which is based on Rambus? (isn't it?)
This will not be a takeover of the kind depicted in Terminator or The Matrix, but a slow merging of the two "species" and an eventual complete transformation of the very definition of "human" and "life."
I can see that. Our race could be the Borg. From the Borg's point of view, the species they assimilated were not being eradicated, but becoming part of the collective, which absorbs the entire race's experiences and knowledge.
It wouldn't be our death, we would be the perfect race, and we would go around the galaxy and eventually the universe assimilating every race we came across.
Zero-click shopping? Type the product code you want, type the quantity, then type your name, address, and credit card number. between fields, when done.
I'm a GENIUS!!
As an Ohio resident (in the Cincinnati Bell territory, I would never know about Ameritech. However, I work with them in our Cleveland and Indianapolis offices, and I can tell you that they are the worst phone company around.
Local service competition has been around in all of these cities, but certain areas get competition before others. Also note that local service competition means only that other carriers can get a T1 or other loop installed and can provide service to you through it, but must pay the local company for the loop they provide. That means that the local carrier can screw up the loop install all they want and the result is you can't switch to their competitor.
Our Indianapolis office was able to switch service to a competitor (Intermedia) and save more than half on a simple T1 local service.
However, no other local carriers were available yet at the Cleveland office, so we were made to suffer. It took me two days of calling them to get them to execute each step of the changeover (from centrex lines to T1 service, porting numbers to new DID service). On the second day, at 4:30pm, the technician told me that the numbers had already been ported that morning. Customers has been unable to call the office all day and we didn't know. You see, the new service wasn't installed before they ported the numbers. The numbers pointed at a T1 that was _down_. The two days involved me calling the local switch, and asking the guy there who to call next. I had to initiate each step, there was noone taking responsibility for the changeover, and I wasn't waiting around for them to do it. I wanted to go home to Cincinnati.
Porting Indanapolis was delayed by Ameritech, who kept finding stupid problems with the order. The order was "disconnect all lines except one (our modem line). Port all of the disconnected numbers to the new phone company." They said we couldn't leave only one Centrex line. We had to have a minimum of two. I said, "we need a standard phone line." She said, "that's a simple change, I will place the order, which will cost $$$, and in two weeks that will be complete." I said, "good, now, we scheduled a cutover for tomorrow." She said, "No, we must resubmit the cutover for scheduling." They wouldn't give the numbers to Intermedia until they were damned good and ready (and why do they care, as long as I'm paying them for their useless service). It took two months of rescheduling to finally get the job done.
In the end, the Ameritech technician was telling Intermedia that he couldn't port the numbers because the lines were in use. I called the PBx. I looked at the lines. They were not in use. I told Intermedia this. She placed a conference call to Ameritech with me. She said that I was on the line. Ameritech guy said, "you can't have the customer on the phone with me. Call back without him" and hung up.
Ameritech screwed up our billing in Cleveland (double billed us, half-refunded it, they billed us for 3 times the refunded amount again). Ameritech set up a new account with MCI without our permission when we took our service from them, and MCI billed us minimum usage on lines that didn't exist for three months before we noticed.
On the lighter side, Cincinnati Bell, consistently one of the top local phone companies in the US, has been approved for the whole state of Ohio. They are allowed to run copper lines wherever they want to to get around Ameritech, Sprint/United, or any other phone company. They are building out.
Slashdot Mirror
Convergys is a marketing survey, DirecTV call center, and billing(/collections?) company. They were spun off and needed a new name.
I worked there as a temp when it was still Cincinnati Bell and owned stock in Cincinnati Bell when it was spun off (and now own stock in both).
I have toured both AT&T and MCI locally. :).
At AT&T they use a system with a monitor and camera, and each person has a device on the table. They swipe their employee ID card (also for access to the building and time "cards"). They answer questions from the instructor and request assistance (where they can ask a question and everyone can hear them), through the device, which has a microphone and keypad. When they complete and pass the class, their employee records are automatically updated to reflect that. Now, from what I understood, it used an OC3 of bandwidth (155Mbps), but since it was on the same floor as their switch (and I mean *THE* switch, nearly the entire floor), it was nothing.
MCI used almost the same setup, but I was told it was mostly for corporate broadcasts, such as the merger with Worldcom a couple of years ago.
I wrote down the brands/models of the systems, but unfortunately I cannot seem to find it anywhere (that's what I get for using trees!). My suggestion is to call them (usually a salesrep) and arrange a tour. Maybe you can get a gander at the system, just to see what features they have and all that. I had very good experiences touring both places, we ended up getting the tour from the head technician in both cases. They were spouting off lingo, giving us stats on the hardware, etc, confusing the hell out of the salesrep. Some damn fine systems they have! The way that I got the tours was that we were shopping around for our service, and they both wanted our $30K/month contract. I'm not sure if they give a tour to just anyone, but perhaps you could arrange it for a Cub/Boy Scout troup or something similar. I took my son's Cub Scout Den on a tour of the local phone company's main building (Cincinnati Bell) and they went home impressed as hell, though not as much as the adults who came along
I believe you meant to reply to the message I am replying to. _I_ am using Dialogic and Voicebridge hardware, and the direct C APIs for those cards.
Why don't you log in? Why must you be rude?
In writing apps for call control, the hardware used uses a bus for the voice data. All the software does is transfer sound files to the hardware when needed and provide call control, i.e. connect this line to this trunk.
The fact that it is Java-based has absolutely nothing to do with the scalability of the server application. I have written a highly scalable call processing application using C++. It can handle as many ports as are addressable by the hardware (assuming the processor/memory is sufficient). This app is handing 16 lines, about 2500 calls per day, using a PPro 200 with 64MB RAM (NT 4.0). In testing, I put 64 lines on the same box, and had no difficulty with it. If I wanted this to be scalable (so that calls could be connected from one to the other), I would have to write SOFTWARE that would run on both boxes and pass calls and data between each other, probably over TCP/IP. This is NOT a Java function. This is a application function. If I were to "plug in another box" for the job, install the same hardware, and run Linux on it, it would not work, because the hardware does not have Linux drivers (yet).
Furthermore, debugging being 5x harder than Java is bunk. I've debugged Java software. And what does it take to write software that is scalable? Give me a break! Software checks for hardware, creates a thread for each hardware port, threads take over their own port. Messaging is done between threads through a queue in the main thread. All done. That's why I am able to extend my app to provide other services, such as DISA-type outcalling and call forwarding to a list of numbers dialed simultaneously.
Oh, and while I'm bragging, I wrote this app in my spare time at home, to fill a need the company didn't yet know even existed. Now they are asking for all kinds of new features and buying me the dream hardware (Voicebridge cards, Dialogic cards, new backplanes, etc).
Nah, a voicemail system is not what is needed, unless they still want to be able to get quality tracks like 13. :)
I have a project at work that I worked on in my spare time and is now in production. It's an automated attendant that uses Dialogic hardware. Unfortunately, it runs on NT because the Linux API was only recently released. But the app runs for months at a time, no stability problems. It is monitored by a Linux box that sends an page to my cellphone if the system goes down (it monitors a heartbeat, retrieved from the NT system via HTTP, with Apache running on the NT system).
My point is that I'm fairly qualified to design and program a system that plays music.
However, the problem with the slightly older Dialogic hardware is that the sound files it can play are all Dialogic ADPCM (6Khz or 8Khz sampling). Use CoolEdit to turn a decent soundfile into a Dialogic vox file. The quality is pretty bad.
The other issue is the number of phone lines needed for a system like this. For more than 20 lines, it may be far better to get T1 or ISDN PRI voice service. This means other Dialogic hardware that can accept T1 or PRI directly. I'm also a PBX and telecomm expert, I work with phone companies and design stuff and all that.
BTW, the automated attendant pulls data from Lotus Notes and provides a directory, validates extensions, and uses PBX digital integration (Voicebridge cards) to do all kinds of cool stuff to the PBX. If anyone wants some code, reply to this. I check.
Yep, the last few I have done created a boot floppy using DR-DOS, now owned by Novell. There was an advertisement on the screen while it was booting.
A flat tax would require your personal information, allow the IRS to pursue you for their money, and would still be evaded by the one out of siz people in the country.
A sales tax would be payed based on the goods you purchase. Not food, but cars, tobacco, electronics, etc. Things that are not essential to life. No personal information would be gathered, the retailers who already have to collect local taxes would simply collect a little more. Even a 20% tax would be less than we pay in income tax now, companies at every level have to pay for accounting teams to handle the taxes.
In other words a sales tax is NOT a flat tax.
Sorry that I wasn't more specific, I was at work...
I agree that the government shouldn't be involved in this, however, the fact that they created a monopoly in the first place created a situation where it is impossible for a comptitor to break into the market.
Your analogy to a protocol is inaccurate. If AOL was the only online service for 80 years, and there is no internet. You want to compete with them, who is going to sign up with you if they can't send email to their friends with AOL? AOL would have no interest in letting you connect to their system to send e-mail?
I hate to "mee too", but:
Although I don't agree with him on the Microsoft situation, I will still be voting for him. Why? Cause I agree with damn near everything else and I think M$ is now in a position where they actually do have competition. I'm all for punishing them because of what they have already done, but I think that the rest of what Browne has to offer is far more valuable to the country.
WHERE ARE THE MODERATORS!!?!?!?
...and some more text to foll the filter...
Oh, bull. Anyone can get a job and get better at it and make more money. You think I have a decent job cause I was born into the right family? I scraped to get my first computer, worked hard as hell to learn everything about it, worked shit jobs making automobile shocks second shift, doing phone surveys, until I got a decent job because my current employer saw that I was worth it? Why? Cause I worked my BUTT off.
My family had nothing to do with it, except encouraging me, getting me to school (which was public), and supporting me when I decided that a public high school had nothing to offer me at all and dropped out to teach myself.
Anyone who doesn't want to live life in the gutter can pull themselves up by their bootstraps by getting a job, moving to a place where there are jobs, whatever. It CAN be done. It IS BEING done right now, all around us.
Any other phone company could have gone into a town and run phone wire into everyone's homes and provide them with a competetive service. (The government still doesn't allow that.)
However, if you had Bell's service and your friend has NewBell's service, how can you call each other? Bell and NewBell have to connect to each other. If Bell owns all of the country's long distance and local service, how can NewBell provide long distance service? The cost of installing a national phone network is huge.
Now the government is mandating that a competitor can use Bell to provide service to the consumer. NewBell connects to Bell at one location (a central office) and Bell connects that office to the end user. NewBell has to pay Bell for the line to connect, so they have to take a serious cut in profit. So far, this is only happening on local service, and is really only cost effective for digital voice service (T1 or PRI).
But without government mandating that Bell has to do this, you think they would let competitors near their networks? HA!
Cable is a different story.
But now we have a "War" on Drugs.
I agree completely.
Well, he is talking about Federal funding. Don't forget that the state and local governments would be free to invest as they want. Also, for every invention that was government funded, I could name ten that were not. Maybe more.
Here, here. I wish my wife could do something like that. Hell, for one, she knew that DIMM meant memory!
It should be this easy for everyone...
But I would like to point out that enough people have already abstained from voting in the last election, and Ralph Nader _is_ using it as ammunition. What we need to do is rise up and vote for who we want. Who knows, we may end up electing someone else!
Where did you get the idea that the deficit is being payed? There _is_ _no_ surplus! They're stealing money from Social Security and calling it surplus. And instead of paying off the debt, they are looking for more things to spend it on. They might even put some of it back into Social Security, but not if they can help it.
Except that they already got royalty agreements with at least two major RAM manufacturers. They will continue to have an income until those contracts expire. If there were any justice, those contracts would be null and void.
But you can bet that not a single company will license one of their products in the future or give in to their legal crap.
But what about the PS2, which is based on Rambus? (isn't it?)
I can see that. Our race could be the Borg. From the Borg's point of view, the species they assimilated were not being eradicated, but becoming part of the collective, which absorbs the entire race's experiences and knowledge.
It wouldn't be our death, we would be the perfect race, and we would go around the galaxy and eventually the universe assimilating every race we came across.
Zero-click shopping? Type the product code you want, type the quantity, then type your name, address, and credit card number. between fields, when done.
I'm a GENIUS!!
Moderators WTF?!?!? Redundant?
Titanium is also used for laptop/notebook cases, and other techie items.
HAHA you're right!! what a fucking week...
As an Ohio resident (in the Cincinnati Bell territory, I would never know about Ameritech. However, I work with them in our Cleveland and Indianapolis offices, and I can tell you that they are the worst phone company around.
Local service competition has been around in all of these cities, but certain areas get competition before others. Also note that local service competition means only that other carriers can get a T1 or other loop installed and can provide service to you through it, but must pay the local company for the loop they provide. That means that the local carrier can screw up the loop install all they want and the result is you can't switch to their competitor.
Our Indianapolis office was able to switch service to a competitor (Intermedia) and save more than half on a simple T1 local service.
However, no other local carriers were available yet at the Cleveland office, so we were made to suffer. It took me two days of calling them to get them to execute each step of the changeover (from centrex lines to T1 service, porting numbers to new DID service). On the second day, at 4:30pm, the technician told me that the numbers had already been ported that morning. Customers has been unable to call the office all day and we didn't know. You see, the new service wasn't installed before they ported the numbers. The numbers pointed at a T1 that was _down_. The two days involved me calling the local switch, and asking the guy there who to call next. I had to initiate each step, there was noone taking responsibility for the changeover, and I wasn't waiting around for them to do it. I wanted to go home to Cincinnati.
Porting Indanapolis was delayed by Ameritech, who kept finding stupid problems with the order. The order was "disconnect all lines except one (our modem line). Port all of the disconnected numbers to the new phone company." They said we couldn't leave only one Centrex line. We had to have a minimum of two. I said, "we need a standard phone line." She said, "that's a simple change, I will place the order, which will cost $$$, and in two weeks that will be complete." I said, "good, now, we scheduled a cutover for tomorrow." She said, "No, we must resubmit the cutover for scheduling." They wouldn't give the numbers to Intermedia until they were damned good and ready (and why do they care, as long as I'm paying them for their useless service). It took two months of rescheduling to finally get the job done.
In the end, the Ameritech technician was telling Intermedia that he couldn't port the numbers because the lines were in use. I called the PBx. I looked at the lines. They were not in use. I told Intermedia this. She placed a conference call to Ameritech with me. She said that I was on the line. Ameritech guy said, "you can't have the customer on the phone with me. Call back without him" and hung up.
Ameritech screwed up our billing in Cleveland (double billed us, half-refunded it, they billed us for 3 times the refunded amount again). Ameritech set up a new account with MCI without our permission when we took our service from them, and MCI billed us minimum usage on lines that didn't exist for three months before we noticed.
On the lighter side, Cincinnati Bell, consistently one of the top local phone companies in the US, has been approved for the whole state of Ohio. They are allowed to run copper lines wherever they want to to get around Ameritech, Sprint/United, or any other phone company. They are building out.