Recent Comments

1. over 2 years ago on Dilbert Classics

   Interesting fact. Urban Decay Cosmetics (heroin chic front runner) was founded by Sandy Lerner, a co-founder of Cisco Systems.

2. over 2 years ago on Dilbert Classics

   When I was a young software engineer me and my friends from work would make up all sorts of fake jobs. Helicopter pilot, surgeon, psychiatrist. One friend convinced a couple of girls that he had recently returned from Rwanda where he’d been a sheep farmer until the Hutu’s killed all his sheep thinking they belonged to some Tutsi tribe.

3. over 2 years ago on Dilbert Classics

   Ah the good ol’ days. When you felt like a King with a Pentium PC running Windows 95 and 128Kb/s internet connectivity.

4. over 2 years ago on Dilbert Classics

   Another problem was that many telco’s were making very very good money selling 64K fixed data lines to businesses who needed network connectivity between sites. No such thing as VPN’s or ATM packet data etc back then. So ISDN posed a threat to their lucrative business which made many price it uncompetitively or just make getting it installed as hard as possible. BT in the UK was particularly bad for this. ISDN also didn’t really do much for telephone calls that plain old analogue telephones could already do. Some tried to market video phones but even today users are happy just to voice call so that never caught on. The real winner in the end for ISDN was the internet dial up, but only briefly until ADSL wiped it out. Not dial up from home ISDN, I’m talking about landing the dialup calls at the ISPs over primary rate ISDN. That was when and where ISDN had is all too brief golden age. Lasted about 5 years.

5. over 2 years ago on Dilbert Classics

   My perspective, working on ISDN in Europe an elsewhere, was that immediately after the ISDN standard “red book” was published every country scrabbled to alter it just enough to make their’s incompatible and requiring country approvals certification on vendors equipment. Market protectionism at its absolute worst. I could on at length about the politics and dirty shenanigans that ensued there. The only shining light was the EU who put a stop to it in Europe with a single Euro ISDN standard. Get approval in one EU state and that was enough for the whole continent. In the US it was different as the switch providers did the “flavouring” on their own.

6. over 2 years ago on Dilbert Classics

   ISDN = “Integrated Services Digital Network” or unofficially “Innovation Subscribers Didn’t Need”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Services_Digital_Network

7. over 2 years ago on Dilbert Classics

   I was a young 20 something european engineer who specialised in ISDN and networking. Got H1B-ed into the SF Bay in the mid 90’s so an American company could catch up on ISDN. We got ISDN lines at home for working from home. I lived in Mountain View and for some reason we could not establish data calls between our San Jose HQ offices and MV. So I did some debugging only to find that the calls were landing in SJ as 56K even though they’d been initiated as 64K in MV. A switch problem. I called PacBell. Oh help me Lord I must have muttered many times going through hours of tech support asking me “if you plug a regular telephone into the socket can you hear a dial tone?”. Trying to explain to them that ISDN was digital telephony, and no, that wouldn’t work. Finally they put me through to someone in San Francisco who, when I explain who I was, who I worked for, what I’d found by debugging, went and looked. Yep, the PacBell switches had been mis-configured. In my time working there I got regular invites up to PacBell’s HQ where Scott Adams was working at the time. Didn’t meet him but I did get to know “Alice” who is based on a real person. Yes she actually looked a bit like that too! Never annoyed her enough to see the “fist of death”.

8. over 3 years ago on Dilbert Classics

   Reminds me of one or two of my graduate interviews. I had a job in my back pocket so I had reference point to help me to decide if I wanted to work there or not. Most jobs you can tell before the interviews have even begun if you want to work there or not (Amazon R&D! NOT!). I had great fun poking fun at their questions instead of answering them. The bizarre thing was that they still offered me the job and they’d been interviewing dozens at the same time as me.