unforum

[Adrian]

Re: trying to figure out the LG15 forums

[Adrian]

Oh yeah, and the guy who found the Cube was from UF, so I guess it turned out OK in the end But you know, I'll be honest - PXC's relationship with UF has not been perfect in the recent past. We made some mistakes. So that's one of the reasons why I tread carefully around here, to the extent of being excessively cautious when posting 'hints'.

[addlepated]

Re: trying to figure out the LG15 forums

[ariock]

Re: trying to figure out the LG15 forums

[konamouse]

Thank you so much for information from your side of the curtain!!!
BTW, I read that imagining your great UK accent in my head. Even though you speak so softly sometimes. Maybe next time Guy will chime in (his voice is very distinctive - I loved the YouTubes "ask Mind Candy" - hope there will be more of those).

Our phone system is only skrewed up when you are calling from overseas

One think I love about uF - open dialogue (that usually doesn't resort to name calling and bitch slapping).

[Rekidk]

I just wanted to be the first to say--very well handled, ARGNet. You covered the story in a way that does not unfairly defame Glenn or anyone else, yet that reveals the news that he will no longer be PMing OpAphid. Additionally, you focus on the continuation of the ARG in relation to the LG15 story. Very professionally handled.

[jamesi]

[negativeview]

Re: trying to figure out the LG15 forums

[thebruce]

I know this is OT, but what exactly is screwy about the phone system here? At least as it pertains to finding them and calling them...

[negativeview]

A lot of this boils down to how things used to work when phones were brand new. Once the infrastructure was in place, it couldn't easily be changed so things had be sortof hacked on.

A good example are SIT tones. Those are the "beep beep beep" sounds you hear before an operator says that the remote end has been disconnected, or you must dial a one plus area code, or whatever. Those were added after the initial bit, so if you hit the old-fashioned phone system at any point (which is almost a guarantee even if you're on VOIP and even if both you and the remote end is VOIP) then those tones are simply audio mixed into the audio stream. If you want software to detect that a phone line has been disconnected you have to try to detect those tones. And you have to do so reliably, without false-triggering on people playing music on their answering machines.

Oh, and every phone provider makes thier tones slightly different, despite them supposedly being the exact same tones with precise timing.

Oh, and if the line is noisy your problem just got a LOT worse.

The codes that we DO get are re-used when there is no code that makes sense. One provider we were dealing with recently only let us make a certain number of calls per area code. Being unaware of this, all we saw was that 90% of all of our calls were getting back congested (aka, busy). There is no code for "you've dialed too many numbers, fool!" We still haven't come up with a good, generic way to detect that that is happening, because other providers would let us go far past that limit and the only time we would get busy was when it was really busy.

Like I said though, if they've done one thing well it's hide all this nonsense from the end user. Once you get into dealing with error codes and SIT tones and answering machines and all that though -- it's a mess. I don't actually know much about the rest of the worlds' phone systems, but I am vaguely aware that their infrastructure was supposed to have been built after learning from the mistakes made in the US and it was made much easier to add features without requiring stupid hacks.

UK phone programmers are spoiled.

Like you said, finding them and making a call is not difficult at all. It's what you do when the call fails to go through that fails. And when/if you're trying to make hundreds/thousands/millions of calls, you can't rely on a human listening to the "the number you have dialed it out of service" message.