[clue-tech] upstart

[Nate Duehr]

On Sep 10, 2008, at 6:39 PM, David L. Anselmi wrote:

> Adam Bultman wrote:
>> Yeah, we should have kept the old hand-crank style. It wasn't broken,
>> it worked just fine!  I think the whole key turning and button
>> pushing was done by ADD engineers who didn't want to work on other
>> problems cars had.  Everybody wants to engineer, and nobody wants to
>> shovel coal.
>
> Thanks man, I needed that.  Perhaps a little like Nate, I shovel  
> coal for a living.  But I'm always looking to work myself out of  
> business: "simple should be easy".


I also laughed out loud at that one.  I thought he was picking on me  
for my recent tirades about Linux, and probably was a little bit --  
but it was still downright funny.

Those keyless start things on cars kinda weird me out.  I know they're  
(well, hopefully) secure, and all that, but it's just weird to me.  I  
noticed on commercials that they show the fancy cars really "revving  
up" when you press the start button.

Knowing the modern combusion engine might only need to rev 500 RPM  
higher after start up (maybe?), I wonder if they REALLY do that.  I  
haven't driven one, but was it some requirement the engineers had to  
put in the startup code so folks really know the engine has started?

Seems like a waste of gas for a "user interface" issue to me, if they  
really do that... not significant to that one car, but over thousands  
of cars, kinda wasteful, no?

Today's lament to a co-worker (even though we both work for a telco  
manufacturer, of course) was that telco has been in a similar "race to  
the bottom" like Linux since deregulation.  Yes, prices were high and  
innovation low during the reign of Ma Bell, but the darn phone worked  
and sounded pretty good.  Now we have cell phones that will do our  
laundry for us, but the audio quality (due to very real physical  
limitations on RF bandwidth) and dropped call rate is insanely high,  
compared to what Ma Bell would have found "acceptable" back in the day.

I'm kinda getting tired of saying, "You're breaking up" into my 100+  
year old technology (phone), lately.  I'm on AT&T/Cingluar's cell  
network GSM which is certainly lower audio quality than CDMA, but  
cheaper almost across the board, and most often (not that I travel  
internationally) the only type of phone that'll work overseas, since  
it's a more widely used standard internationally... but man, the thing  
sounds bad.

Analog was analog.. and sounded pretty good, but had some white noise  
static if you were really out in the boonies.  TDMA was the best  
sounding "digital" system, but the carrier that used it (AT&T) dropped  
it in favor of GSM for economic reasons.  CDMA always sounded pretty  
good but came from carriers like Verizon who seems to always charge  
20% more than everyone else... and that's cellular...

On the home front... I dropped the Qwest analog line a long time ago  
and went to Vonage, and started the whole "Can you hear me now?"  
process anew a number of years ago.  It's usually "good" but there are  
times when I know I have nothing going on on the local LAN and the  
"Internets" are killing it... kinda sucks when you're talking about  
something important on a customer conference call, or whatever.

At the office, we've recently gone to VoIP phones with "HD Audio"  
CODECs in them.  The VoIP to PSTN gateway of course, can't do any  
better audio quality than the old PSTN system can do... 300-3000 Hz...  
but internal calls sound AMAZING.  It's a little weird to the pre-set  
"phone filters" in my brain though to hear much fuller range audio  
than I'm "used" to from a phone.  I like it though, and I'll get used  
to it.  BUT... and this is the big BUT... we're seeing some problems  
with packet loss from time to time on both internal and external  
calls... knowing how to fix it, and having any influence over the  
internal IT group that is actually responsible for the phone  
deployment, are two different things... so when the phone is doing  
stuff like that, it's ultra-annoying.  I want to log into the switches  
and see what's going on... but I can't, of course.  I answer calls and  
help CUSTOMERS through that kind of thing all the time, but the desk  
phone is the purvey of the IT group... sigh...

And thus, even the new desk phones are great when they're working --  
and have (well, supposedly they will... they're still "working on it")  
nifty features the old boring phone system never had... but... there's  
times I wish it would just place a dang call and not sound like ass...  
same with the cell, and same with the Vonage...

So we were talking about this at work... did deregulation help or  
hurt?  Ultimately the new tech and innovation that came out of  
deregulation of the phone system here in the U.S. brought about some  
really nifty technologies... but when those technologies pretty  
consistently deliver a crappy phone call that sounds bad... at least  
some measurable percentage of the time... is that "hurt" or "help"?

Heh... crazy.  I don't know.  It's kinda like the "Hey Linux changed  
something again... is that good or bad?" discussions.

I'm old enough to remember 3 hour phone calls in the 80's on the Bell  
Network where there was NEVER even a hint of audio problems, nor would  
one ever think there would be.  Even long-distance (but back then,  
whoo-boy, watch out for the bill at the end of the month if you called  
L/D!)... now I can't make it through a 15 minute conversation without  
some strange audio artifact of a digital CODEC, or a drop-out, or  
whatever... on any of the three "modern" phones at my disposal.

Remember the old Sprint commercials?  "You can hear a pin drop."   
Trying to get people away from AT&T and Ma Bell?

(By the way, there's interesting trivia behind that commercial.   
SPRINT was an acronym.  Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network &  
Telephone.  Now who knows where the phrase "you could hear a pin drop"  
came from?  It's an old railroad term about a quiet railroad switching  
yard without much going on.  A good railroad engineer hooking cars  
together if they slowed/stopped at just the right time, wouldn't get a  
big "bang" from clanking the cars together at their couplings, and  
could hear the "pin drop" -- the safety pin that drops into the  
coupling to hold it together as the cars latch together.  So SPRINT  
used the phrase either knowingly or unknowingly, but definitely  
ironically, since they were originally a railroad telephone system,  
turned "competitor" in telco after deregulation!  Cool, huh?)

--
Nate Duehr
nate at natetech.com