A Beginner's Guide to the Internet/INTERNET.ISO/text/telediag/tc13-169.txt

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TELECOM Digest     Thu, 11 Mar 93 11:35:00 CST    Volume 13 : Issue 169

Index To This Issue:                      Moderator: Patrick A. Townson

    "457 Channels and Nothin' on..." (Paul Robinson)
    Coventry Teletext Transfer Open Format (W. J. G. Overington)
    CLID vs ANI in California (Laurence Chiu)
    Modem Doesn't Answer But Line is Ringing (Craig Moynihan)
    Internet Access From Home (Chris Norley)
    DigitalLink DL551VX <-> Canoga 2240 (Mark Scannapieco)
    Need Card For Speech-Out and DTMF-In, Preferably For PC (Laird Broadfield)
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1993 10:36:01 -0500 (EST)
From: Paul Robinson <[e-mail]>
Reply-To: Paul Robinson <[e-mail]>
Subject: "457 Channels and Nothin' on..."


Back during November on the cartoon show "Tiny Toons" they did a
parody of television in general, and Cable TV in particular, with an
episode about a cable system which had 400 channels.  When I was
watching it, I was laughing about such a silly thing because it was so
obviously ridiculous.

They may have the last laugh after all.  There is a new system for
Cable-TV coming out which will offer over 500 channels.  It looks like
Bruce Springsteen underestimated capacity in the song whose name is
misquoted above.

More details later as soon as I can find out some information about
it.  But someone had better tell the local stations and the TV
networks to get their act together and make better programs or they
are going to be destroyed by this type of development.  Correction:
they will not 'be destroyed'; they will have committed mass suicide.
Broadcast television is dying from its lack of quality in writing,
script development and idea content.  And its anathema to taking risks
and making hard choices over carrying material some fringe group might
not like or be opposed to.

A lot of material appearing on Cable Television is boring or
uninteresting; it has been that way because of the large capacity of
most systems that can carry 40 channels or more, that you can't get a
large part of the audience when they can choose from 39 competitors.
Cable networks know they have to work with a fractional audience;
that's why a large number are using older material from shows which
were cancelled or have been off for a while; these shows often had
some good writing and ideas, and because they've already had a
broadcast run, are available much cheaper than equivalent material (if
it was even available.)

A subset of 'Gresham's Law' (Bad money drives good money out of
circulation) has come into effect in the broadcast industry: Bad (and
cheap) television drives good (and expensive) television off the air.
One need only look at the kind of garbage that makes the top 10
broadcast shows to know that there is a famine of ideas in network
television.  "Hill Street Blues", at the height of its effort, was
costing a million dollars an episode to make.  For that kind of money,
no cable network could come close to afford to make a show like that.
And the level of audience needed to support that kind of cost can only
be done by a Broadcast network.

Broadcast television has the money and the audience to put on shows
that require a larger audience to be profitable to do so.  But what
has been happening has been the constant 'eating the seed corn' in
which shows are being pushed out into broadcast where they have to be
instant, massive hits or are cancelled within *weeks*.  Some of the
best television programs on took two or more *years* to build an
audience: Hill Street Blues, 60 Minutes, Family Ties, Cosby, Cheers,
and others.  You can't build up a clientele who wants to come in for
good material when you keep changing the menu.  Also, I hear
complaints about good shows being 'poisoned' because the good content
of some shows were damaged by 'too many cooks spoling the broth.'
(The usual comment around my house I hear is 'They destroyed that
show, I want my "old Torkelsons" back').

A clear and obvious example of where quality will destroy lack of
quality, can be compared in the recent syndication of the new "Star
Trek: Deep Space Nine" and the cancelled CBS show "Space Rangers".  I
only watched two episodes of each, and while I thought that both shows
were valid expressions of science fiction, comparing the two shows
production values and quality of content was like looking at the
difference between AT&T Long distance and the Brazillian Telephone
Company, which is probably the only system worthy of the moniker,
"Worse than GTE."

So what has happened: since there's no guarantee a TV show will be
allowed enough time to build an audience, there is no risk taking
because the stakes are too high and the chance of failure is virtually
certain.  So what do we end up with: documentaries, talk shows and
amateur video -- all of which cost next to nothing to make, take almost
no brains to write scripts for, and provide no significant content.
(Those who think "U.S.  Best Snuff Video" represents a good use of
television should think twice.)

Next is the issue of cost.  In the past, a company would make a TV
show pilot for a small amount of money; if the pilot was successful,
the network would pay some, but not all, of the cost of the production
of the series, and the company making the show would gamble on it
staying on long enough for them to be able to put it in syndication
and make money off of it from that.  But no more; the constant demand
for 'instant success' means that no one is going to seriously be
willing to absorb the cost of production on a wghow that they know
will have almost no chance of succeeding; the networks will end up
having to fully fund, plus profit, the cost of these shows from the
beginning.  Otherwise the shows they will be able to obtain will be
reduced even further, as only large companies with huge, deep pockets
will be able to afford to make new programs.  This may even cause a
scandal if it comes out that some Japanese companies end up financing
some of these show ventures, as almost started over the issue of a
group of Japanese investors who wanted to purchase the remainder of
the Seattle baseball team.

Another problem is the continual attempts to do something or put on a
show that you have been unable to do.  Nobody can be all things to all
people.  The National Broadcasting Company has tried at least 23 times
to make a news analysis program like "20/20" or "60 Minutes" that
would be successful, and has failed miserably in every case.  It may
just not be possible in that culture to do this.  Jack Welch should
try and save General Electric some money: order NBC to not attempt any
more news analysis programs.  Which brings up another issue, that
because of their despiration to do something that they've been unable
to accomplish, has lead them to commit very serious breaches of
ethics, let alone honesty and integrity.  (This would be on the order
of Pat Townson, the Moderator, telling how people used to have problems
with AT&T's billing until they switched to the Orange Card, then we
discover the commentary was all faked.  [Note that this is an example;
I believe Mr. Townson has a higher level of ethical conduct than some of
the people working for NBC]).

The people who run these systems should be thinking long term.  Sure,
you can make money running cheap videos, talk shows or any of the
other things that local and network stations are doing.  But so can
their competitors in Cable, and since a cable channel carried
nationally or regionally on multiple systems could potentially have a
wider audience than any single broadcast station, local stations that
fall into this are risking their market share to someone else who can
provide the same thing, and perhaps do better.  (If there are 12
restaurants on one block all offering the identical thing, and one
which is offering something different, the one which is different has
the potential to steal customers who are bored of everyone else.  But
if they run a filthy counter and slovenly help, people will go back to
the other places.)  UPS washes its trucks every day, in order to show
a professional appearance.  They do deliver packages on time, which is
the main issue: but the 'spotless trucks' and 'spotless drivers'
inform people -- who may not yet be customers -- of how efficient their
operation is.

Broadcast television has the capacity to make more money than cable
networks because of its larger available audience, and its ability to
reach people who cannot afford or will not purchase Cable TV, which
means it can sometimes target people which are unreachable by other
means.  Note that more people get their knowledge of the world's
situation from the evening news than from anything else, including
magazines, newspapers, cable or radio.  This makes broadcast, and
network television, one of the last major mass communications methods
which is able to reach a significant segment of the public.

The telephone industry shows us the whole thing in a nutshell: since
the competitors to AT&T cannot compete on quality, the *only* thing
they can compete on is price.  With broadcast television dropping
quality, they have nothing to make people watch them in place of
virtually identical material on cable or on other broadcast stations.
(Someone want to tell me if there's a dime's bit of difference between
Oprah, Donohue, S.J.Raffael, Jenny Jones, Whoopi, and the next group
down from there?)  My mother complained because a cable network is
cancelling "the good movies" they used to run in the afternoon in
favor of a talk show.  Broadcast networks can compete on quality and
the money they have to spend to keep it, or they can fight for market
share against cable networks that can make the same cheap shows as
they run.  When they work on making shows based on cost alone,
broadcast will lose over cable because anything they can make cheap,
cable can do the same.

If you look at the wretched state of broadcast television, I think you
will discover that it was the 'flight to quick profit' and away from
quality, that has damaged their market share and in the long run will
damage their profitability.  Until they return to quality and
providing a much more expensive and well-done product than Cable
companies can afford to make, they will keep losing market share.


Paul Robinson -- [e-mail]

------------------------------

From: [e-mail] (W. J. G. Overington)
Subject: Coventry Teletext Transfer Open Format
Organization: Coventry University
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1993 11:31:54 GMT



Coventry Teletext Transfer Open Format for expressing the information
content of teletext pages with conventional computing equipment.

Issue 1.0

4th March 1993

W. J. G. Overington  Management Division,  School of Engineering,
Coventry University, Coventry, CV1 5FB   United Kingdom.
Telephone: [phone]   (within UK Telephone: [phone])
Fax:       [phone]   (within UK Fax:       [phone])
e-mail:    [e-mail]


Teletext pages are broadcast in the vertical blanking interval of some
television channels.  Teletext pages appear on a television screen in
a selection of colours, with various graphic mosaics and so on.  In
the engineering management of a teletext system, both of a working
service and within research and development, the need arises to be
able to express the information content of a teletext page using
conventional computing equipment.

The Coventry Teletext Transfer Open Format is designed to be usable in
a number of circumstances.  Files of information can be processed by
specially written software to give teletext format displays using, for
example, a vga display on a PC.  Only printable characters are used,
so that pages can also be viewed and edited using ordinary text
manipulating software which has not been designed for teletext format
usage.

The display will not, in such cases, be a teletext display, but a
knowledgeable person will be able to understand what is intended in a
straightforward manner.  It can be used easily in hand written notes,
may be expressed in documents typed on ordinary typewriters and can be
faxed.  In everyday speech, please refer to pages expressed using this
format as being in "Coventry format".  You may like to give computer
files containing information in Coventry format the suffix .ctt (from
the initial letters of the three words Coventry Teletext Transfer).
This is not obligatory but will often help file organization in a
system with many such pages, as the ready to broadcast file can have
the same name but with a different suffix.

The Coventry Teletext Transfer Open Format consists of the central
core, the simple method and the general method.

The Central Core:

Each line of text that appears upon a teletext page is expressed in
Coventry format by two lines of text, namely the text line and the
command line.  The text line is always above the command line and the
two lines are regarded as one line unit.

In analysing the meaning of the character to be placed at any one
character position of a teletext page one considers the two
corresponding characters in the Coventry format representation of the
page, namely one character from the command line and one character
from the text line.

If the command line character is any one of . ; : | then the page
character is taken to be simply the text line character as a level one
teletext character.

The four characters . ; : | are regarded as equivalent to comments.
The use of four such comment characters is so that | may be used every
five or ten character positions as desired or that ; and : may be used
every alternate fifth position.  Some typewriters do not have the |
symbol.

Here is an example.

  The snow is falling.
 ....;....:....;....:....;....:....;....:

The Simple Method:

Using the simple method one can express any level one teletext page.

Simply place the appropriate character in the appropriate place in the
command line and a space in the text line.

For example,

  Strawberries, lemons and aubergines.
 R...;....:....Y....:.G..;M...:....;....:

The commands listed below are defined.  Please note that, as
appropriate to a system intended for international usage, there is
both an English and a French influence in the choice of the command
characters.  For example, J reflects the French word jaune and U and D
the French words un and deux.

R  Red alphanumerics           r  Red mosaics
G  Green alphanumerics         g  Green mosaics
V  Green alphanumerics         v  Green mosaics
J  Yellow alphanumerics        j  Yellow mosaics
Y  Yellow alphanumerics        y  Yellow mosaics
B  Blue alphanumerics          b  Blue mosaics
M  Magenta alphanumerics       m  Magenta mosaics
P  Magenta alphanumerics       p  Magenta mosaics
C  Cyan alphanumerics          c  Cyan mosaics
T  Cyan alphanumerics          t  Cyan mosaics
A  White alphanumerics *       a  White mosaics
W  White alphanumerics *       w  White mosaics
F  Flash                       ?  Conceal display
S  Steady *                    O  Contiguous mosaics *
K  End Box                     E  Separated mosaics
I  Start Box                   Q  Escape
U  Normal height *             Z  Black background *
D  Double height               N  New background
                               H  Hold graphics
                               L  Release graphics *

                               X  Character 7/15

The commands marked * are the defaults at the start of the row of the
teletext page.

The General Method:

The general method, which can be stated as a method, but which is
still under development, and for which representations may be made, is
that the command character is a digit character and that the text
character is then also used in the procedure of deciding what
character is intended on the teletext page.  A figure 1 character in
the command line together with the same letter in the text line as
would appear in the command line for the simple method has the same
meaning as with the simple method.

For example,

 RStrawberries,YlemonsGandMaubergines.
 1...;....:....1....:.1..;1...:....;....:

has the same effect as

  Strawberries, lemons and aubergines.
 R...;....:....Y....:.G..;M...:....;....:

Clearly, for simple level one pages, the simple method is much clearer
to read when the Coventry format page is viewed by a person, whether
on a screen or a printed page.

However, the general method will allow the expression of more
complicated cases.  Where two character sets are used on the teletext
page, the Coventry format equivalent could also have figures as
commands beneath characters intended to be displayed as text
characters.  This will give an explicit indication of which character
set is to be used at the character position itself.

Consideration is also being given to using characters such as % & and
so on as command characters so that the contents of rows 25 to 31 of a
teletext page may be expressed in a .ctt file unambiguously.

------------------------------

From: [e-mail]
Subject: CLID vs ANI in California
Organization: HoloNet National Internet Access BBS: 510-704-1058/modem
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1993 03:47:25 GMT


I recently read an article in the {San Francisco Chronicle} which did
not appear to correct to me. I wonder if more Telecom literate readers
might comment.

The writer was reporting on the surprise of a caller who has an
unlisted number when he called a 800 number and the service provider,
addressed him by name, presumably based on his calling number and a
lookup database.

The writer went on to say after some investigation, that although
California has no CLID yet, 800 service providers can get the calling
number because 1) they are paying for the call and need it for
demographic purposes 2) although CLID is not available in CA, there is
nothing to stop the number from being sent out of state. From there
the name of the caller. This was an invasion of privacy and a direct
contradiction to the idea of have an unlisted number.

This seems wrong to me.  Recent postings here have indicated that even
if the appropriate SS7 signalling is in place from CA to another
state, and the callee has CLID enabled, they do not see a number but
some message to the effect that the number is not available. I am
guessing that in the above scenario, the 800 service provider received
the number via ANI and the caller was a repeat customer who had to
give his phone number on a previous occasion to make a credit card
order or such. Thus there was a record in the database of the 800
service provider.


Comments?


Laurence Chiu   [e-mail]


[Moderator's Note: As you note, ANI is *not* Caller-ID although the
end results are the same. The California requirements do not pertain
to ANI -- only to Caller-ID. Out of state calls would not be part of
this requirement in any event.  PAT]

------------------------------

From: [e-mail] (Craig Moynihan)
Subject: Modem Doesn't Answer But Line is Ringing
Organization: Balr Corporation
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1993 05:11:33 GMT


Can anyone explain to me why the following scenario can occur:

A phone can use an analog phone line to orignate and receive phone
calls. A modem is hooked up to this same phone line. This modem is set
answer on the third ring (S0=3). Another modem calls this modem.  The
AA light flashes on and off, but the modem does not answer.

Occasionally, the modem will answer after a hundred rings or so.

Does this behavior indicate that the modem is sensative to ring
voltage and this ring voltage is too low? Should the polarity of the
two wire phone connection have any impact on the modem answering?

Can anyone provide some general answers on why a phone would work on
this line, but a modem typically won't.


Thanks in advance.

Craig A. Moynihan   Naperville,IL
nalco@balr     ..!balr.com!nalco

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 11 Mar 93 07:50:39 EST
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Internet Access From Home


I am interested in getting internet access capabilities from my home
computer.  How do I do that? I have a Mac IIvx. What hardware/software
will I need and who do I call to allow access and get the internet
access phone number?

Thanks in advance for any information.


Chris Norley    Internet: [e-mail]


[Moderator's Note: There is no single point of contact for access or
single 'internet access phone number'. For example, if the administrator
of pwfl.com okayed it, you could call into that system from home with
a terminal program for your Mac and a modem. There are numerous public
access services which connect with the internet. Some which come to
mind are the Freenet sites, Portal Communications in San Jose, CA, and
Chinet in Chicago run by Randy Suess. All you need at home is a modem
and a terminal (program). Lots of places sell or give away (depending
on circumstances) access. Check out the 'nixpub' file if it is still
being published.  PAT]

------------------------------

From: [e-mail] (Scannapieco)
Subject: DigitalLink DL551VX <-> Canoga 2240
Reply-To: [e-mail] (Scannapieco)
Organization: Cornell National Computer Facility
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1993 21:37:44 GMT


Folks,

    I'm attempting to connect a DL with a T1 feed to a Canoga
fiber modem via a V.35. I realize a standard v.35 cable won't cut it
but my "null modem" isn't either. Here are the pin assignments I'm
using:

pins    CSU    LINE DRIVER

P-R    TDa    RDa
T-S    TDb    RDb

R-P    RDa    TDa
S-T    RDb    TDb


V-U    RCa    XTCa
X-W    RCb    XTCb

U-V    XTCa    RCa
W-X    XTCb    RCb

C-D    RTS    CTS

D-C    CTS    RTS

E-H    DSR    DTR

H-E    DTR    DSR


    Has anyone had any experience or success in doing this ?

    Any and all insight would be appreciated. Please respond to me
directly. Suggestions for a more appropriate group would also be
welcomed.


Thanks,

Mark Scannapieco   [e-mail]

------------------------------

From: [e-mail]
Subject: Need Card For Speech-Out and DTMF-In, Preferably For PC
Date: 11 Mar 93 20:14:03 GMT


I need to find a card that will receive calls, accept DTMF digits, and
play speech back, with a decent API.  My preferred target is PCs, but
I'll look at anything right now.

The ability to support multiple lines, whether through several cards
or through several ports per card, is a big plus.

The name Dialogic comes to mind, but that's all I know, so contact
info would be appreciated, as would other vendors, feedback, etc.  I'm
just starting this project, so I'm looking for anything at this point.


Thanks!

Laird P. Broadfield     [e-mail]    ...{ucsd, nosc}!crash!lairdb

------------------------------

End of TELECOM Digest V13 #169
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