Posts by Christian Berger

Re: The problem lies deeper

"More likely, Mozilla would have fallen behind its commercially-driven competitors and faded away."

The question is, back when Mozilla had a large market share (it's still significant) would features they did not support be adapted by the web?

When Apple decided to abandon Flash, they had no bigger market share than Mozilla has now. So what did fade, Apple or Flash?

Re: The problem lies deeper

"Is a corporation with $30+ million in net assets large enough?"

The problem is that any browser will need such a large community to maintain it, that you will eventually end up with a large corporation mostly concerned with its own survival.

The primary interest of Mozilla is not to provide a good browser, the primary interest is to keep on existing and grow. Providing a browser is just a means to this end. It's the same as with any big corporation, tax exempt or tax dodging.

That's why Mozilla has no interest in a "better web". A "better web" would mean to say "no" to bad proposals like "WebAssembly", Bluetooth APIs or HTTP/2. However a "better web" would be simpler and lower the barrier of entry for new browsers. If writing a browser engine was as simple as writing a text editor, we'd have hundreds of engines, all competing to be the fastest and safest. Instead we have an oligopoly. We have a browser engine by Microsoft, one by Apple, one by Google and one by Mozilla. 4 browser engines, all with their own user group. Often they don't even care about fixing bugs, as the web will just develop around those bugs.

The problem lies deeper

"The money has to come from somewhere."

The problem is that browsers now are so incredibly complex that you need a large corporation to support them. If Mozilla wanted to do something for a free and open web, they'd have done everything they could to prevent the bloat of web functionalities. Instead of making Javascript ever faster, they'd have provided, for example some "remote GUI" standard which is less insane than web applications.

If Mozilla would just have said "no" to new web standards more often, those standards wouldn't have gotten off the ground and nobody would have had to implement them.

Re: The problem probably wasn't the software...

"Almost certainly not the software although the software migration could be non trivial if the code relied on long deprecated low level run time functions."

Yes, that's why experienced programmers see any kind of dependency as a potential problem. Perhaps it can be hoped for that NASA only employed experienced ones.

"The other factor to consider with the hardware is not just reading the stuff but being able to write it to something your more modern hardware can handle."

Well in that case, that's probably not a problem. VAXes have serial interfaces and even have power of 2 word sizes. Since it can't possibly be a lot of data (probes have very slow links) it should be trivial to just convert it to text, set your terminal program to log the incoming text and just pipe it over that way. It might take a couple of hours, but then again that data obviously was worth that.

"at least for non-international calls"

Well actually the standards for the same for international and non-international calls. The "problem" is that some phone providers are very sloppy when dealing with those numbers. It's not unlikely that a phone call from Germany to Germany will have a Swiss network provided number, because the carriers the call went through couldn't be arsed to do their job right.

BTW what good does it do if you know the number? It could still be a company acting as a front for someone. In a time when coorporations can create fake identities by building fake companies, a phone number is worth nothing.

"This could be avoided if we ditched the old phone system for one that could actually verify who was calling you."

a) There already is a field for the "Provider Asserted Identity", it's just that providers often are rather sloppy.

b) You're suggesting no less than a complete redesign of the phone network, a network that has grown over a century and consists of wildly divergent technologies, often as many of 3 generations being active at the same time.

Re: So what about the customers?

"If we're looking at VOIP and digital-only to the premises, who's going to pay to make my analogue interfaced cordless system a VOIP compatible one?"

First of all, my condolences for that piece of kit. You should sue the person who sold you that... but I digress...

In Germany the scenario for old, so called ANIS lines (essentially people who still rent their Dialphone for an Euro a month) is simple. You install a special line interface which is essentially an ATA so you can have all your analogue goodness like Impulse dialing, static, echoes and even semi-broken signaling so your answering machine will record some noise or beeps when the caller hangs up.

For people who want to have Internet along with ISDN, there's not much change. The most popular routers people buy in Germany already include a very decent VoIP stack you can plug your ISDN phones into (or even dialphones if you insist), and they even include a DECT base station. If you are one of those customers renting the CPE and you don't have the necessary equipment, you'll get CPE with at least one port for your dialphone. Some telcos in Germany, like Deutsche Telekom, are known for extremely shitty CPEs.

Re: Digital Fibre Future

"Yes,all exchanges were digital since the mid 1980's,"

Sorry but that probably should be "all _new_ exchanges were digital since the mid 1980's".

In Europe development on digital exchanges started in the early 1970s when phone companies were hyped about computer powered switches. The only country I know of that saw significant use of those were the USA. The idea was that once you have such a system running, you could just replace the analogue switching matrix with something digital, and you get a completely digital system once that was more economical.

What they didn't take into account were the advances in microelectronics. While back in the early 1970s it was perfectly normal to have a computer with ferrite core memory, it was ridiculously outdated by the early 1980s when development was done. The result was that large parts of those switches were re-developed, based on microcomputers. Those switches then were completely digital and gradually came to service in the 2nd half of the 1980s.

Here's a commercial for a 1970s style analogue computerized switching system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgB0KSjC2zg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbTGVN2VMnQ

Ohh and here's a BT film about their development of ISDN switches

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy_6DL4haJA

There's even a 1984 Japaneese childrens programme about I(S)DN. Here's the German dub of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sCuN6TE8y4

Re: Yeah right @Hoppy

"If I remember correctly, ISDN specified a 144Kb/s link, which could carry a 2 voice calls, each using 64Kb/s, and a 16Kb/s signaling channel."

That's correct, though those 2 64k channels could carry everything, even non-voice. It's signalled via the "bearer-capability".

"Also IIRC from my POTS training, analog phone lines used to have a filter at 8KHz, which was regarded as plenty high enough to carry voice communications."

Well there were early very long lines which used indutances on the lines which acted as a low pass filter, but extended the reach. I don't know exactly where that filter was.

However the actual limit was when carrier-wave systems were introduced shortly before WWII. Those stacked voice channels in frequency so a single coaxial cable could carry dozends of voice channels. So obviously you had steep filters to only give you a passband of 300-3400 Hz so they could stack more channels. (in fact there are reports about the stacking being changed during the day, so at night you actually got wider channels) Back in the days however you were likely to even get less if you had a worn out microphone capsule.

As for digital telephone networks they decided to use a sampling rate of 8000Hz as this allowed for affordable analog filters on both sides and was well withing the technical capabilities of the 1960s. The codec they used was G.711 which could be implemented fairly easily as it could be done by having some analogue circuity and an 8-Bit A/D converter.

ISDN actually had a special bearer capability for G.722 encoded audio which allows for frequencies of up to about 7.2 kHz to be transmitted over a single 64k channel. This caused quite some hype at radio stations, but ultimately fell into obscurity.

Re: Mobile as the emergency option?

"Not really - you don't get location information from mobile."

That really depends on many factors. The interface towards the emergency services in Germany has ways to transmit either an address or a set of geometrical figures indicating the location. In the US, for example, virtually all phones have a way to capture a short burst of GPS data which then will be sent to the base stations in order to get a location fix for the phone which will then be transmitted.

Re: Yeah right

"I know VOIP is better than it was some years ago, but it certainly seems that overall phone call quality has gone dramatically down over the years."

Well that depends on many factors. There are providers and PBXes insisting on the god awful G.729 for example, while any decent provider will use G.711 which is just as good as ISDN (but with a longer delay), good providers will support G.722 which does much better quality at the same bitrate. Another problem are really bad ATAs. Quality doesn't seem to correlate with price. The best ones (I've seen) for home uses are the "Fritz!Box" series from AVM, which you can get refurbished for about 70 Euros, but cost around 150-200 Euros for the top of the line model... which includes an internal ISDN port, a DECT base station, as well as a V/ADSL modem. Software support usually is several years for feature updates, and longer for security updates.

It depends

First of all you already have that problem with regular ISDN, there the solution is simply to have a local battery backup... which your PBX will need anyhow.

If you still get a network connection depends on the way it's handled. For example classical ADSL tends to come directly from the old "switching office" where you have battery backup, so it should work fine. VDSL, particularly when done at the "curb" would need decentralized battery backups which may work. It won't work for vectoring as those boxes need _insane_ amount of power. If you have a dedicated fibre to your "switching office" to your home, it's likely to work. DOCSIS has many amplifiers and media converters, some of which are powered by the "groundstation" some are somewhere hidden inside your home.

The good thing about VoIP from a reliability aspect is that you just need any kind of decent Internet access. At work we've had many companies using even things like LTE when their wire based connection broke down. For a competent administrator it's easy to patch together a perfectly acceptable emergency solutions. This is far harder with ISDN as if your provider's ISDN switch goes down, you're toast and there's nothing you can do about it. ISDN equipment used to be highly reliably, however now 30-40 years into the lifetime of the equipment you find more and more failures, but no more spare parts.

So in short it's hard to say if VoIP will be more or less reliable given a certain situation. The main problem on current networks is that operators are trying out every new feature they can find. The result is that things like DTMF won't work, because one operator wants to do them as telephony-events, while the other one wants to do them inband (the saner alternative), and they somehow mess up signalling so both sides have different opinions on what's been negotiated.

Re: Time to claw some back

"What's the point in trying to claw back IPv4 addresses? It would not fix the problem, just delay it for another couple of years."

There's actually an interesting thought there. There are multiple groups of people who are "anti Internet".

One is the Facebook Crowd, they only want Facebook, not the Internet. Those people typically either don't use E-Mail at all or use one of the few largest mail providers.

The other one is the people being fed up with their ISPs meddling with the Internet and certain agencies sniffing it all, so they create their own overlay network using the Internet only as a transport network for their VPNs.

So there's a chance that in a few years people don't want the Internet any more.

Re: IPv6 in the DMZ

Well actually many companies are already working on getting IPv6 in their internal networks, as those private blocks are already to small for them, but yes, if you are contempt with E-Mail and the Web, there is no need to have IPv6 on your internal network.

Well first of all...

it can coexist with IPv6 and for most applications you can easily mix them. Essentially everything that runs though NAT also works through 6to4.

Also it's kinda hard to extend IPv4 to longer addresses in a compatible manner. Feel free to give some actual ideas. Putting everybody behind NAT is _not_ a solution.

Re: DROP

Well either that, or it would be like with VBA or Active-X which everybody hoped they would drop it ASAP.

Re: Remember when..

Yes, though the stronger vendor locks exist with SoC Companies like Broadcom or Allwinner, at least in the mobile market.

In a way it's like with home computers. We have lots of different vendors there, all with their own lock-in hardware, but most of them ran some version of Microsoft BASIC.

"Financial pain is probably the only incentive. Or jail time."

That only works if you can still find that company or that company still exists then.