and a good evening to everybody this is off the hook emmanuel goldstein here with you
and fiber optic over there on the other side of the room here i am yeah there's something going on
today in new york isn't there something weird it's horrible it's the traffic today is just it's a
nightmare you can't get anywhere and nobody knows why they're closing roads and mobs of people and
it's like the holiday shopping season except it's not the holiday yet you know i don't know
you have the crowds the bustling crowds without the the spirit of the bustling you know and it's
only going to get worse uh yeah yeah i imagine so that's new york if you're if you're not here
stay away because uh we don't need you we we have enough people here right now uh this is off the
hook we're broadcasting around the world uh once again at least i hope so uh we'll be uh updating
folks on that um hopefully on the internet and uh over 99.5 fm in new york city uh we have uh some
special uh features that we're going to be uh demonstrating and uh i guess the first thing
that we should do is ask ourselves a very simple question very simple question and i'll ask this
of you fiber okay when does black equal white ah you don't know do you so we don't rehearse this
with john travolta no no no we don't rehearse this this is not playing you you look very baffled and
that bafflement is is transmitting itself out over the airwaves because you have no idea what i'm
talking about so let us journey together out into the wondrous world of telecommunications
to find out when indeed black equals white
so
so
please enter your password
you have four messages four are saved to listen to your messages press one to send a
message press two to change your greeting press three to change your personal options press four
to make a call press nine yeah i really like that last one to make a call you know that's uh that's
what we're listening to listening to omni point voicemail and there's a really cool feature within
this a hidden feature well it's not really hidden if you know it's there but it's not on the menu
and that's if you hit two nines
this is what you get good evening voice dial what would you like to do and you can say all kinds of
of course now it's listening to me and it's not making any sense out of this um i'm sorry i didn't
hear you could you please repeat that well you heard me you just didn't understand me oh i'm gonna
have to start over again
let's go come on could you please repeat that
add
please say a personal directory name program dial customer care or help help
customer care or voicemail if you would like more help say program dial customer care or voicemail
to exit help say cancel program to program or modify your personal directory say program in the
main menu main menu what would you like to do program program menu
what would you like to do program i'm sorry i didn't hear you now you need to say add
oh add right what name would you like to add w b a i please repeat the name w b a i
please speak or key in the number for w b a i 2 1 2 2 7 9 0 7 0 7
the number is 2 1 2 2 2 7 9 0 7 0 7 is this correct yes yes and i'm very impressed
w b a i has been added would you like to add another name yes what name would you like to add
black
black
please repeat the name
please repeat the name
white
please speak or key in the number for
white
2 1 2 2 7 9 0 7 0 7
the number is 2 1 2 2 8 7 9 0 0 7 0 7 is this correct no n o no please speak or key in the number for
white
white
white
2 1 2 2 2 7 9 3 4 0 0
i changed it
the number is 2 1 2 2 2 7 9 3 4 0 0 is this correct
yeah
white
has been added would you like to add another name
no
i'm returning you to the main menu main menu what would you like to do
add
could you please repeat that
there's no add
oh program
program menu what would you like to do
add
what name would you like to add
black
that word is too similar to your personal directory entry
white
white
try using both the first and last name name not added
isn't that cool
program menu what would you like to do
dial
i'm sorry i didn't hear you
what is it dial call
you gotta go back to the main menu
oh main menu
main menu
what would you like to do
dial
i'm sorry i didn't hear you could you please repeat that
dial
please speak a telephone number or say cancel to return to the main menu
can i say a name
yeah
well it didn't say that it said enter a number or
i want to speak a you know i want to speak a name
maybe you gotta say program dial
program
i recognized
seven digit
please say a longer telephone number
please speak a telephone number or say cancel to return to the main menu
cancel
i have canceled this call
thank you
main menu
what would you like to do
program
program menu
what would you like to do
dial
i'm sorry i didn't hear you
can't do that
dial
i don't think i can dial from here
you are at the voice dialing program menu
at the program menu
at the program menu
you can say add
change
delete
review
or cancel
if you'd like more help
say add
change
delete
or review
to exit help
say cancel
program menu
what would you like to do
one more cancel
cancel
main menu
what would you like to do
dial
please speak a telephone number or say cancel to return to the main menu
WBAI
i recognized three digit
please say a longer telephone number
please speak a telephone number or say cancel to return to the main menu
cancel
this is the fundamental part of voice dialing
I have canceled this call
main menu
what would you like to do
help
could you please repeat that
yes
help
please help
you're at the voice dialing main menu
at the main menu
you can say a personal directory name
program
dial
help
customer care
or voicemail
if you would like more help
say program
dial
customer care
or voicemail
to exit help
say cancel
WBAI
if you would like more help
say program
dial
customer care
or voicemail
to exit help
say cancel
main menu
what would you like to do
WBAI
i will now call
WBAI
to cancel the call
say cancel
zip zip
it just speeds right through
doesn't it
here we go
you have reached 99.5 FM commercial free WBAI
if you know the three digit extension you want enter it now public affairs
okay it works so that's that's how you play with Omnipoint voice dialing which I just started playing with recently but the coolest part if I said if I said black it would say dialing white yeah you know what it does it takes it asks you to say the name twice
to say the name twice most people say the name twice and they say the same name however if you say a different name each time it saves both of those names as the name that you're calling so each name can have like a hidden name they don't talk about this at all I don't know if they even know it exists but but you can have two names for one number and one name will be hidden so I think that's kind of neat
that's kind of neat
well there's a couple other voicemail features I don't know if you're aware of if you have a message and it reads off the person's number at the beginning of the message you can type type 88 on the touchtone keypad and automatically call that number
call that number oh really yeah which is handy that's cool and I believe you you dial star one to go back to the message and another cool feature that a lot of voicemail systems don't have is undelete undelete which you can do as long as you're still connected uh-huh if you're in voicemail and you just deleted a message or any time during that session deleted a message that you realized you shouldn't have just dial star three but that only works while you're connected you're hanging up you're
you hang up it's all you hang up it's gone okay yeah yeah there there have been systems that that did that I mean yeah there are there are some yeah I mean every computer system you know yeah doesn't delete the thing until you say okay that's it you know it's all over but 9x voicemail you delete it it's gone it's gone okay we have some exciting updates on uh the various things that we're involved in tonight stay tuned
we'll see you next time
okay we've got pork chop on the line with us you there hello hey how you doing pretty good uh now we're doing a live netcast again tonight that is right and we're being bandied about all throughout the planet uh any ideas to capacity tonight last last week i think we had 160 180 what was it was 180 and unfortunately we're at the same limit this time
uh-huh okay and there's a reason for that right there's a reason it has to do with a problem on our end
yes it is um we need more coders more people to actually encode the um the audio stream that's being sent uh from the radio to uh the servers around the world
now do you need a college degree to be able to code these things or not exactly how does it work
well you can uh drop by www.real.com and uh just download the server it's free of charge i mean download
the um decoder rather um then you can contact me porkchop at 2600.com uh give me your computer
type and modem speed and uh i'll tell you which uh which server you can code to
um okay that's it okay so basically you just have to be within the listening area you have to have
a yeah a radio that can plug into your computer and a modem speed of of how much um 33.6 or 28 even
will work uh isdn is best if you have that that's great okay so email porkchop at 2600.com just to give
us an example if we had enough coders how many people could be listening right now as opposed to 180
uh theoretically infinite infinite infinite oh that's that's a nice number yeah i like that
number okay well uh are the 180 spots taken already uh they are except there is uh one server called
mutang um he is uh i think he's down at uh 21 instead of 60 uh-huh last i checked which was
34 now okay well hopefully some of those uh people from overseas and other places will call us so we look
forward to hearing from them a little later on in the program for for future reference the phone
number is country code one and area code uh two one two two seven nine three four hundred uh porkchop
thanks very much for uh for all your your efforts here one more thing um we are on irc right now if
you want to join efnet uh channel off the hook o-f-f-t-h-e-h-o-o-k no spaces okay and we can have an
ongoing discussion about the show as it progresses on the air all right well uh we'll see you
on the other side yep take care you too that's uh pork chops uh giving us an update from
control central i guess as we get spread all over the internet it's kind of cool did you ever really
think it would happen like this uh actually no yeah it's uh it's amazing it's like virtually
unlimited number of people can can tune in now and i think it's just the beginning of what we're
going to see in years ahead a lot cheaper than a satellite feed oh yeah that's true that's true
most definitely okay now we have some trouble we're going to cause um i'll tell you i've got i've
got mixed feelings about doing this i mean we always seem to be causing things to break and uh
telling people things that are are bad to know you know information can be very dangerous
and by giving out information are we not as responsible as those people that do the worst
possible thing with that information should we not feel as guilty are we not criminals this is a trick
question no actually it's just a rhetorical question oh but um we've got two lines of code here
it's not just two lines of code it's well actually uh yeah the two lines of code that packs a punch
you want you want to mention the little incident before today or should we just pretend no one else
ever finds out about that no well i mean we should give a little background first though um this this
happened last week right it was it was uncovered last week yeah this actually broke um at some time
last week it was it was kind of sketchy at the time but basically it was discovered that um there's a
really big nasty bug in uh intel pentium processors that um really makes their floating point
rounding problem in 1994 pale by comparison since that uh other than you know the occasional math
being wrong it was generally harmless unless you were computing missile trajectories or something
but um in the absence of that this is a lot more sinister because it's basically an impossible opcode
as uh as it likes to be known as impossible opcode impossible opcode and it's been nicknamed foof
foof okay that's a good good name as any yeah and the reason why it's been nicknamed foof is because
the impossible opcode in hexadecimal is f zero zero f c7 c8 and the f zero zero f at the beginning
looks like the word foof which isn't really a word but it looks funny nonetheless basically um this
impossible opcode confuses the hell out of your poor pentium cpu and just causes it to
completely hang not quite knowing what to do with that opcode really and unfortunately um that that
instruction will hang any unix machine that uh that is running on uh on a pentium well i mean in all
fairness how many unix machines are running on pentiums a lot i know more than anything else yeah
it's it's it's this is really a big problem here because uh with the information that we are going
to give out tonight you could conceivably crash any system on the net any that is running a pentium
an internet service provider yeah you know a huge one hundreds perhaps thousands of users you just have
to run this little thing and whammo you know it locks up we figure there's going to be a lot of
chaos and mayhem that's going to ensue anyway yeah we don't want people to do that no see the thing is
that as reported in the media they didn't really describe it properly and certainly didn't give the
details and right now all the details are being discussed on various security mailing lists
and um i think that the general public should probably know and should probably know by knowing
how to do it uh-huh since they could try it themselves i have a question yeah how do you fix
this unfortunately there is no way to fix it the only real way you can fix it is um is if uh intel
themselves actually allowed you to trade in your penny i'm just like they did with the floating point
problem well you know i'll bet if there's enough of a demand they'll do just that yeah you know i
mean let me let me just draw a couple of examples we've got bernie s joining us uh on uh on the line
from uh from the philadelphia uh office hey off the hook incorporated how you doing good it's chilly
here yes well it's cold up here too but uh we're coping um now the pentium thing reminds me i mean
the public outcry thing right it has to do with uh with people reacting to what they consider to be
an unfair situation much like what happened with bernie s a little over a year ago much like what
happened a couple of days ago with this nanny case in in in boston i mean that was that was pretty
interesting in fact i saw a few parallels between the two cases you know it was much much bigger on
her you know her behalf if you're gonna get involved with killing babies i guess you get a lot more
attention and support and things like that but in your case where you got thrown into prison for
possessing a red box uh people were outraged it just took a little longer for uh for the outrage to
reach the boiling point but once that happened once people got outraged and spoke out and said things
all of a sudden all of a sudden the rules were set aside you were released from prison the nanny was
released from prison the pentium chips will be replaced you see you see where i'm going with this
we have to make a statement not try to keep this hidden you know and yeah it's going to be a crisis
for a little while until somebody comes up with a fix but with every single pentium computer out there
uh prone to this kind of thing including ours it's it's going to be um it's going to be madness
now we should add that uh we have uh unconfirmed reports that this does not affect uh pentium 2 or
pentium mmx cpus oh you know we're going to test that right after oh we have an update it definitely
does not or does it definitely does does okay we have a confirmed report okay okay the news is just
pouring into the to the bai newsroom here that it does now affect okay so apparently affects more than
we thought do we have more in that iraqi connection to this no okay i'm telling all the major media that
call me that has something to do with iraq okay just so they can get really happy about this
actually you know i i say i'm gonna i'm not gonna name the network out of embarrassment's sake
but i saved a major network a huge amount of embarrassment this week they wanted to do a
big story on that aol4 thing oh that was so stupid obviously obviously a hoax obviously something
that's not happening it basically what it's prodigy all over it's aol4 the new release is supposedly
investigating your hard drive and copying files i mean yeah and and these all these mailings are
going out all over the net now saying oh you have to beware of this i mean it's great fun you know
to play with aol like that but it's not true yeah uh there was almost a story on nationwide news
saying how dangerous this was and i i was able to quell it did i do the right thing i i think you did
the right thing all right but the iraqi connection i think that's fine yeah or the cubans that's as they
said on uh when i was on nbc a couple weeks ago what about cubans they said the cubans were
had a concerted effort to write computer viruses you don't say that's better thing to do don't we
effectively keep every single piece of machinery from ever getting there in the first place getting
to cuba yeah i don't think they even get calculators i'm sure they can buy a computer
most from who we have the whole island surrounded you can't even drop things from the air yeah but most
of the parts of a lot of the parts of computers are made in central and south america anyway i know
that but uh there are people arrested we own all central and south america too you know we do well
yeah we do we sure do really yeah you need to listen to this station a little more oh i'm missing out
yes but uh yeah so but we we've been told that uh pentium twos and pentium pros are not affected
uh-huh but all other pentiums including the pentium mmx are uh-huh and uh basically if if you'd like
to try this well stay tuned stay tuned because we understand armed gorillas are like you know
surrounding the station i mean i want to see if we can live through the hour there's some gorillas now
before we tell people that's not very nice uh bernie you're trying to say something i believe
yeah did the uh are the syrux uh 686 chips affected by this too um okay we're being told
that there's another bug that affects them but it's different ah another bug totally different
this this this is specific to intel pentium vanilla pentium yeah we're only going to talk about that
one no pro no two but um so they're gonna they're gonna have to yeah we got the word on yeah we got
the word one of our reporters just came running in should i give a sample c fragment well it's only
two lines how much of a sample can you get well there's different ways you can do the same thing
you know well yeah um let's let's say past the half hour mark we'll do that all right past the half
hour for those listeners in iran i believe your half hour is equal to our hour so basically i don't
know how to say that but uh it's 8 25 p.m in new york now so sometime after 8 30 p.m in new york we will
be giving out the full listing of this program okay how's that okay sounds good in the meantime
big news uh from big phone companies it's happening worldcon is taking over mci yeah the deal has been
completed except it hasn't been approved yet by uh the fcc bernie what do you think of that
oh it's just conglomeration of phone companies i think uh if you look at the continuing trend we're
going to end up with uh with uh one big phone company eventually one big fat monopoly that's that's
right uh now even with this the biggest corporate merger i think in history mci is still not going
to be uh i mean they're going to be number two and not very close to number one i think they would have
uh 25 of all long distance revenues all right at&t has 48 sprint only has 10 so you can see it's
getting there you know it's almost competition but the most important thing and i think fiber you'd be
interested in this this company mci and worldcom mixed together will control 60 of the internet
backbone that's kind of that's kind of frightening yeah i can see that so worldcom has been buying up
a heck of a lot of companies that's how they got big just by buying things up nobody knew who they
were you know until a couple of weeks ago no one ever heard of them you know they just they were
that that company that started out in what kansas and a waitress named them yeah you know
with a long distance uh what discount club they bought telesphere that was their big claim to fame
about 10 years ago well when they buy microsoft i'll take an interest okay all right um what
speaking of long distance yes speaking of long distance i've been playing with a new toy
i got a few weeks ago um i'm going to talk about it briefly if you have a minute go ahead a company
called called media com has put out this little uh little gadget it's actually a hardware product
that uh works in conjunction with software and a service that a database service that they provide
it's called the phone miser i don't know if anybody's had a chance to play with it have you seen
this thing fiber hello uh he's not paying any sorry okay the phone the phone miser what this
what this little i've heard of the phone miser what what what this little thing does
little parallel port device that plug in the back of your pc you have to run windows 95 so it doesn't
report any other operating system um what it does is uh for you pay media com five bucks a month
and what they do is they maintain a database for all the long distance carriers in your particular market
um that and the advantages that would allow you to basically what the thing does is it it dials
when you dial a phone number it does what all the big companies do and it routes it over the
the cheapest one least least cost rating it dials all the equal access codes for you and picks the
carrier for each call depending on the time of day where you're calling from special offers whatever
i see and basically they can guarantee you about 8.9 cents a minute day or night for long distance
calls they don't take a piece of the long distance um revenues is that is that really the price that
they get or is that the average of the price they get that that's about the average um but it's not
it's generally daytime you can get you can get 8.9 cents a minute um well now if this phone miser
thing can dial something for 8.9 cents a minute why can't we dial it what what magic number is it
dialing you can but you would have to know the specifics of the tariffs for all the carriers
the times you'd have to have you know subscribe to like a long distance for less or one of those
uh expensive uh periodicals to look up all the tariffs and rate tables basically what you're
saying is 12 o'clock noon i'm sitting in my house there is a number i can call where i can make a
long distance phone call for 8.9 cents a minute i just don't know what it is they have the company
medicom has a has a a website with a with a uh a java app running on it it's uh phone miser.com
and you can enter your location and where you're calling from and it will tell in the time of day you
want to make a call and it will tell you how much that call will cost before you even make it
but as far as this device goes uh... the only the only downside is you have to wire your
your phones in your in your house so that they all run through this thing
once that's done every phone in your house will will work through this thing what it basically
does is it listens to your touch tones or dial pulses and then uh... grabs that call before it
goes out inserts the the uh... equal access codes and then dials the call and on your pc you can keep
track of all the calls you've made that month uh... as you go you can it'll show you uh... where
you've called it'll show the location the city how long the call was it actually acts as a pen
register as well every call you make um... it shows you know when you made it and how long it is
okay very quickly how do we get a hold of this thing uh... phone miser.com it's fifty bucks is how
much it was a hundred bucks they dropped the price down to fifty bucks uh... about a
week ago and uh... i'm working on a software application to make other use of
this device for use as a uh... as a pen register that would do other neat things
so phone miser.com yeah it's a cool thing check out their uh... their interactive rate
finder and uh... it doesn't do anything that you couldn't do for yourself but it
saves you an awful lot of time as far as looking up all the tariffs right specific
to your thing they charge five bucks a month for the database service don't you get
like fifty thousand phone bills at the end of the month though?
no the way they do that the other downside is you have to have a credit card
what they do is they've signed agreements with literally scores of long
distance carriers a lot of the small ones uh... and the big ones as well
and uh... media comm does not... media comm doesn't bill you for the long
distance calls all of your long distance calls get billed to your credit card
and are are broken down by carrier in other words you might have five or six
charges on your credit card at the end of the month from the different carriers
and they're broken they're lumped together but then media comm sends you an
itemized bill every month showing every call you've made it's on your pc as well
i see
but uh... so that's how they handle the billing thing media comm doesn't take a
piece of the long distance traffic they're not making any money on that
they're making money on selling you the device
and the five bucks a month for the database service now if your if your
long distance calls don't total more than like twenty thirty dollars a month or
more then this probably isn't going to save you any money but if you make it if
you make a fair number of long distance calls this least cost routing thing is
pretty much going to give you the lowest possible cost per call i played with
this thing it's it's pretty accurate okay well that's uh... that's uh...
an interesting device that uh... i'm sure a lot of us will be winding up
playing with now we uh... we've got a lot of things to cover in a very short
amount of time so fiber what do you have there you've got uh... some new
bell atlantic features some very disturbing bell atlantic features yeah
they are kind of kind of annoying depending on what you find disturbing
one of them is rather innocuous which you know many people are aware of
already is they're extolling the virtues of caller id with name okay that's
that's old yeah that's that's pretty much old news the the other one newer
that's uh... coming around this month whether you want it or not yeah yeah one of
those things that you automatically get it's already on your phone line yeah
you might already have it it's basically it's it allows somebody to leave a
message for you if you don't answer the phone and this thing will ring you at
regular intervals to deliver this message what they don't say is how often it's
going to try and how you can make it stop and also here's the other thing when
you call somebody and their line is is either ringing or busy right it cuts in
now for instance let's say you're using a modem right and you're trying to call
something that's always busy or even a phone trying to call something that's
always busy it's not going to know the phone is not going to know that it's
busy it's going to think it picked up because going to hear a voice saying
would you like to leave a message and it's not going to try again now the only way
you can try again would be if you use the uh the star six six feature that bell
atlantic happens to offer for another cost you know it's they're defeating
hardware solutions i can't believe i use the word solutions on the air but it's it's
true they did well the thing is if you have voicemail normally your voicemail is
going to kick in after four rings uh-huh this says after 30 seconds or about five
rings so what if you do want this does that mean if you have voicemail you can't
nobody can use it that's uh that's interesting or the thing that i don't
understand is what if you don't have voicemail and this thing kicks in then
why would anybody want to pay for voicemail well a lot of questions accomplishes a
very similar thing so what's this thing called it's called name and number
delivery service all right well that's that's coming soon to a phone near you
and probably the phone inside your house and you won't be able to do anything
about it there is a way to turn it off but you have to contact them yeah which is a
real pain sometimes all right want to uh say hi to our three german listeners are
two uk listeners and a bunch of people in canada um that's what we're told from
from operations that uh we we have those people listening yeah we can tell who's
listening not you know by name but by what's connecting to our site we can see
where they're coming from in the world so let's give out the phone number uh country
code one if you're out of the country area code two on two if you're out of the
area two seven nine three four hundred and we'll uh try to get to as many calls
as possible interesting thing in yesterday's times
um new device to help emergency workers find people who use a mobile phone to
call for help the whole thing with nine one one here is
that when you call it and you don't say anything
they see your name they see your address they know where you're calling from
doesn't happen with the cell phone because they just don't have that
technology but you know under the um the telecommunications bill that
passed last year uh there is a mandate that wireless
phones must be able to identify their location on nine one one calls by the year
2001 now already it's scary enough that when
you're walking around the omnipoint phone or your sprint pcs phone
they can tell exactly where you are because your phone is receiving a signal
all the time right they can tell where you are walking as long as that phone is
on now they can do that they can also use gps technology
you know with satellites this is not including that that's a whole other way of
finding out exactly where people are but the technology is being developed by
law and just by by you know progressing into it uh where we can always tell where
everybody is for our own protection yes absolutely nine one one you're having a
heart attack you know but you have to be able to to you know tell people where you
are isn't isn't aren't the the ems people going to be walking around a city
block like looking for where the injured person is they can walk pretty fast
i guess you wouldn't have to you wouldn't have to dial nine one one they could they could easily
pull your phone um there's both cellular and gsm and and i assume a cdma to see if you're okay if
your pulse rate's going up or something no they want to uh they have the system has to keep track of
where your phone is so it doesn't just waste its resources and in in keeping all the cell
sites uh active for your account all over the place i mean i mean that's oversimplifying it but
basically the system likes to know where your phone is even when you're not making calls if the
phone is off it can't do that they can basically using triangulation figure out what you know within
a few block radius of where you are all the time if the phone is on now here's an interesting story
and then we're going to go to the telephone uh this comes out of today's news day although she was a
figment of federal investigators imaginations undercover special agent tracy was convincing enough to help
catch cyber steve a real life child pornographer who used that pseudonym on the internet according
to u.s customs agents with tracy's help federal agents arrested cyber steve yesterday on charges
of trafficking and child pornography after he sent the fictitious internet user 40 graphic image files
which contain photographic depictions of minors engaging in sexually explicit activities
uh cyber tracy has captured cyber steve said andre flores at the custom services investigations unit
i don't know if they realize how silly they sound but this is um the the agent and her daughter
they have a picture there's a picture of them right here see these people that i'm showing you do not
exist there's a composite photo of many different people and they just kind of kind of made them up
out of out of images uh they do not exist they they sought out people uh to send them illegal things
got them to send them illegal things and then went out and arrested them it's kind of kind of weird you
have to wonder where this is going i mean it's it's one thing to to post something is it is it
something else to receive something you know they call this person a child pornographer but basically
what they're accusing him of is sending a file to a non-existent person and a couple of years ago
that wouldn't seem like a crime but uh the way things are going today i don't know that's um
that's really kind of kind of interesting anyway he's being held in fifty thousand dollars bail
and he could uh could receive up to fifteen years in prison well people in other countries tell us
is that uh the way things are done over there and uh maybe parts of this country too what do you think
okay let's take some phone calls uh and of course we will be releasing the um the uh dangerous code
dangerous code to crash pendium computers worldwide
because uh we have no choice all right 212-279-3400 good evening you're on the air
hi um i hope you reconsider about releasing that code well why should we why should we tell us give
us an argument here oh no that's okay um uh i have two questions one could you give me the the pros and
cons because we're thinking of making a purchase the pros and cons of a 56k uh modem versus a 33 modem
a 56k modem versus a 33 6 modem i believe well there there's there's the question of math
one is faster than the other yeah that's the i'm really serious because i heard that 56 had
problems so this is really a serious question yeah that has gone around that the 56 is not
really what it seems to be well it only is what it seems to be if your internet service provider has
the same now a 56k modem right we're not talking isdn here right all right
now would he be better off doing 56k over isdn or uh getting a 56k modem well if he's going to
get isdn he could do a lot faster than that anyway that's true but what i'm asking is is the 56k
that you get if you use isdn the same as the 56k you get over a regular phone line or is the 56k
not really 56k no more more or less it's about the same because the uh the internet service provider
needs to have uh a trunk side t1 that's broken out into into 24 phone lines how about a a bargain
rate lease line 56k you know at uh you can get for about 400 bucks a month they still offer that
and i can't figure out why well the reason why they offer that is for businesses that are stupid to
know any better too stupid to know any better but the fact is that if uh they're not going to get isdn
because they have to pay a penny a minute no matter what anyway so that's the only reason these 56k
lease line still exists because that penny a minute ridiculousness yeah because businesses
got to pay a timed rate and it's a lot more to pay by the minute for 56k isdn than it is to get a
flat rate 56k line sir do we answer your question at all all right thank you oh i guess we did okay
thanks for calling let's go to another phone call good evening you're on the air hey guys how you
doing we're getting all local callers i haven't i haven't called for four months how's it going pretty
good when you got through you beat all the foreigners oh yeah well i'm in the foreign country if you
consider the bronx a foreign country but i have three questions okay um with the omnipoint phone
you're so fond of it's almost like an appendage i hate to say or the pcs phone what signal or message
do you get if you punch in your own number that's question one a couple of things happen it'll either
connect to voicemail or i think you might get a busy signal give you a happy busy signal yeah okay
question two what do you guys think of this thing they keep plugging with as a sponsor of public radio
known as wildfire i do not know what wildfire is sort of like um a computerized secretary and they
have oh yeah i did hear about that yeah do you guys know if it's as good as they say
it's it's uh apparently it's expensive but um it's the ceos i guess but uh well maybe we you can
like fool around with their 800 number sometime the last thing is i was watching the discovery channel
a few months ago and guess who shows up on their show but mr fiber optic yeah i was actually startled
by that because i was taking a uh a very relaxed afternoon nap and i watch discovery channel if you
want to do that well i was i was just channel flipping watch mtv because they never startle you
yeah but there's too much flashing okay but the question about it is i had i'm sure everyone says
like the people on radio you look nothing at all like you said you look quite nice and i want to know
what what bread mousse were you using your hair was like you had the goatee and like the armani glasses
and were you moussed up or what actually actually i don't i don't look that way anymore that was
he shaved all the hair off all right and bernie as you're still there inducted into a well never
mind bernie as you're still there yeah i don't look that way anymore either bernie as you remember
me of course of course um i'm like about about a year ago i look a lot different than i do now too
i'm glad the jaw is healed you're sounding like you never had an elocution problem i'm glad you three
guys are fine and i hope you never sell ads and do lotus commercials like dennis leary okay take care
well it's awfully tempting i'll say that but uh what do you think of that dennis leary commercial
i i feel like going home and working the web that's obnoxious as hell you know this this this poor
little kid you know yeah we've talked about this we've talked about no but that commercial is funny
that one where he's making fun of all the people oh yeah no it's funny but uh you know come on the web
is kind of uh being ruined by commercial interests yeah and spam everywhere all right 212-279-3400 good
evening you're on the air um hi manuel let's see this week okay um let's see us west has news out
recently um they might be lowering their cable motor rates thirty dollars a month are you calling from
us west um yeah where are you nebraska nebraska okay what is this with nebraska what's wrong with
nebraska they called last week wait the same person yeah this is how the same people are getting
through yeah you see there's nothing to do out here so we mentioned last week that bernie s came
from nebraska yeah you know i heard that just want to mention that again yeah hi bernie um hi there
okay and by doing research tonight one isp in the entire omaha area carries adsl currently
they offer four bandwidths of it one 28 256 35 12 and 7 something i forgot um but it's only for
business currently in fact they're charging 550 a month for 256k bandwidth adsl how much 550 a month
for only 256k on adsl when i called another one um they started laughing because someone passed out
in our studio is he okay i can see that that's that's something yeah they're the only ones though
um another one that i called said they would like to but they're having trouble getting us west to come
and do the wiring for them and in fact it would take close to a year to do that and i can see that
because when my isp up to x2 it took us about six months which i can't blame the us west because
they have their own internet providing wow um well that's that's that's something i hope uh
hope the atlantic does a better job well that's well i don't know us west is also offering a deal
on cable homes to people who have them for cable tv so yeah okay well keep people updated how's the
signal coming in out there so um no clue my any of the 14 fours which is what i have don't pick up
on real audio oh really i couldn't get on i tried around 7 10 7 15 ish and it kept saying it
couldn't find the file really okay well that's something to to tell the people working on things
like that you can only try at 14 4 i imagine yeah okay i have a more modem i'm sorry there
there's people scrambling around to uh figure out what's what's going on with that thanks for
letting us know though i'm sure no problem okay good luck okay thanks bye that's uh our caller
from nebraska who cannot hear us unfortunately should i mention the dvd thing um well before we mention
a dvd thing right i think we should give out the first line of the code okay all right just to keep
people uh on their toes here okay well actually yeah go ahead give out the do you have it in your
head oh yeah you want a piece of paper yeah no i don't need paper all right oh what you what you
want to do in this uh first line of code if uh if you're a c programmer you'll know what we're talking
about yeah you want you want to define uh and this is this is just one of you know a myriad of ways
that you could do the exact same thing um you want to uh you want to declare a static int a static
integer what about this part up here do they need that oh yeah main squiggle you know it goes with
the territory you know but we should tell people so they know well anybody who programs in c knows
you got to begin with a main and you got to begin with an open squiggle okay but people might be
learning c and this might be their first first exercise not be their first program because it might
turn out to be their last program but uh yeah you know main main open squiggles uh not with
standing okay and of course a close squiggle at the end of course the close squiggle okay we're
not going to give out the first of two lines right go ahead is uh you want to declare a static integer
to uh to equal the magic long word and the magic long word as i said before was f zero zero f c seven c
eight but of course you have to shuffle that around because intel machines are little endian and you need
to allow for the little endian bite ordering so what that really comes out to be in a manual
can correct me if i'm wrong is uh is c8 c7 zero ff zero uh no you're way off uh because you forgot
the zero x at the beginning oh yeah it just means it's hexadecimal oh yeah but you have to put it in
there yeah okay all right so it'll be zero x c8 c7 zero uh-oh ff zero right that's what i said okay
okay i'm just clarifying all right say the whole thing there so the line should read right static
int code equals zero x c8 c7 zero ff zero and then do you need the semicolon yes you need the
semicolon then you put the semicolon in you don't have to call the variable code though you can call
it whatever you like that's true yeah yeah we just called it code because well that's what it is it's
yeah decided to do it that way um okay 56 k's do not work on pbx's so i hear um okay i'm not quite
sure what they mean by that but four servers are working uh including korea and everyone loves the
code how can they love the code we just gave it out in fact this message came in before we got we
gave out the code i don't understand that it's the squiggles all right let's take another phone call
and we'll give out the second part of the code assuming that we last that long good evening you're
on the air speak up please oh hi emmanuel how you doing not bad and i can tell by the by the quality
of uh the the radio that i hear in the background that you are listening on real audio yes i am okay
where are you calling from uh upstate new york upstate new york yeah what part of upstate new york
uh potsdam new york i've been there oh yeah yeah you have a campus there yes clarkson university
beautiful college clarkson university is one of the first colleges to give computers to all their
all their students they gave z100s to every student well not not anymore yeah i know they well they're
kind of outdated now but i guess they don't even give computers no they stopped doing that because they
were outdated before you know we were sophomores so now we have a t3 up here oh wow yeah well maybe
you can help with uh with our real audio distribution do i have to be in the uh in the
local area for the local area for that well you have to be in the local area in order to send the
signal out to people like you with bandwidth right uh so that's what we really need are what is known
as coders who can receive the radio station and uh send it out but you need at least a 288 connection
well you guys are coming in loud and clear that's good that's good to know what kind of connection
do you have to uh to that well i'm on i'm connected with a man across the t3 so okay i mean you know
i'm getting perfect so it's not at all choppy i would imagine no no not really just a little bit
you know but that's just in that so uh what's uh what's up in telecommunications and uh computers
up there uh not much um there's nothing to do here yeah well that's what i hear yeah what i was
wondering actually though is because i'm from new york city so it's always great to hear you guys
um you know a little bit of home um what's going on with the uh with the area code crisis in uh the
two and two anything new in that i don't think anything has actually been decided um six four six
is of course the uh the split of two one two well actually i i know what was uh what was being
proposed and what seemed to get support i don't know if it's been officialized yet though and that
would uh there would be an overlay where everybody would have to dial 11 digits for every phone call
they make um because everyone getting a new phone number would be six four six area code and even
if it was in the same house it's a two one two right so even if i'm calling within the same house
i gotta dial one six one six and then six four six six yeah that's that's what you'd have to do
um you know it's it's a pain but it's better than having you know the east side be six four six and
the west side be two one two everything above 14th street be something else definitely it just
leads to all kinds of bitterness and scorn you know we don't need that yeah so i think that's
the latest but we'll update people on that cool all right hey thanks for calling all right thanks
good evening you're on the air hi there how you doing good where you calling from i'm calling from
105th street broadway oh wow listen to uh two two quick yeah right you don't have to be that specific
though it's okay you can triangulate me two uh two quick things most people are not aware of it but
any of the pentiums faster than p90s have all the microcode in flash which means that they can be
uh reprogrammed there's a there's a small boot sector which is um used to reinitialize the microcode
and that's not unflashable that's permanent um but anything else can be fixed well actually the the
statement from intel which is what i wanted to get to after we gave this out was that um not
they claim that pentiums are not flashable that the microcode is not programmable except during the
power on self-test and that they are cooperating with bios manufacturers that the bios manufacturers
would receive the microcode updates from intel and basically the bioses of your various machines like
your dells and your your gateway 2000s would initialize the pen the flawed pentium after it
went through the power on self-test which is fiber yes it is yeah that's not true because i you know i
teach at columbia and we do it regularly we we've we've managed actually to change the microcode to do
all kinds of interesting things really i'd like to like to hear more about that okay the the other
thing is uh the fellow called up about uh 56 kb and my internet provider um just went to x2 about a month
ago and um of course you can't get 56 kb because of an fcc regulation you're only allowed to get uh
53.5 i assume you're familiar with that problem i never heard about that okay okay the problem is
you know what a gaussian curve looks like sure do okay there's a gaussian curve defined by the fcc
from the old going way back to the late 1920s early 30s when they used to use carrier h and carrier i
that defines the amount of rf power you're allowed to put on a jason twisted pair of 24 and 26 gauge
wire and um you cannot put enough um energy in at 56 kb and still be within their power curve so for
that reason you're not allowed uh to go faster than a 53.5 and they don't do that's a that i mean
that's just an fcc rig and you can you can ask usr or anybody else i mean they'll they'll confirm that
you're talking about you're talking about line speed not after compression this is this is raw
bitrate right and of course you're you're aware that any any modem 4800 board or faster is really
only a 4800 synchronous modem i assume you're aware of that a 9.6 or 14.4 or any or anything else
those are all um 4800 board modems and they simply use various combinations of amplitude and phase to
make a 16 or 32 or 64 way constellation right and so it really is only a 400 4800 board
but the bps is 56 kb um my internet provider will always connect with uh 53.5 and i measure that
but of course it's only in the in one direction the other way you only get v34
right so that's kind of screwy now bernie did you have something to say i was just saying what if
you exceeded that uh that artificial speed limit uh what are the what are the penalties for doing
that well the penalties for doing that actually are fairly uh serious because there's a galvo desk
in every central office and they measure radiation and a couple of guard payers that are in every
trunk table and they'll be on you um if you messed around with the little girl next door
some cops it's uh it's considered fairly serious and in fact periodically somebody will um get
ringing voltage or something from a burglar alarm circuit you know about burglar alarm circuits which
are about to be de-tariffed um and i'll get that into a chunk and uh the phone company will be there
within minutes because um i think they do run rf as part of carrier not carrier h anymore it's all
digital but the crosstalk problems are very severe and the reason the crosstalk problems are so severe
is that with digital you know you're you're basically supposed to be sending square waves
and square waves are all of the um even harmonics it's a fourier you know what a fourier transform is
and um those harmonics get way up there and they cause a tremendous amount of adjacent twisted pair
uh interference okay sir we're going to have to wrap this up okay the last thing i was going to say
is uh you ought to ask your listeners if they're interested in my speed is to look at direct pc
from hughes i don't know if any of if you've talked about that in the past we've glanced at it
we have it here in our co-op and it's fantastic we have the entire co-op on a router uh with one ip
address and then everybody is permanently on the internet so we uh go v34 out we have 400 kb coming
back in and i'll call some other time and describe it okay great by the way i used to take care of the
transmitter at bai back in the whitmore days oh really all right great well hopefully that was your
job uh all right that's that's interesting now uh we only have a couple of seconds left so let's uh
let's give out the uh the rest of the program microsoft will be issuing another statement aimed
directly at us after we do this uh which we probably can't uh mention uh do you want to give this up
sure basically since we uh first uh defined a uh variable that has the uh the instruction for the
uh the impossible opcode what we now need to do is uh make it uh make it execute right and the
easiest way to do that is to typecast the variable to be a pointer to a function um which then has the
added bonus of running it just give the code oh good you give it okay two open parentheses right
followed by int right and i guess you need the space if you want it to be neat yeah and then
another open parentheses with a star in the middle of it right and a closed parentheses then an open
parentheses and a closed parentheses and a closed parentheses right then an and sign and the word
code or whatever your variable happens to be uh then a closed parentheses and then another open
and closed parentheses and then a semicolon there you go that's kind of ridiculous all those
parentheses i mean i don't know how to say that any is there a quick way to say all that no you
said it right okay so double open parentheses int open parentheses star close parentheses open
parentheses close parentheses close parentheses and sign variable which we said code in this
case basically in plain english you're typecasting right and i finished close parentheses open
parentheses close parentheses semicolon and then of course your closed squiggle at the end of the
program okay all right that's it there we just given out the worst information i think we've ever
given out and we'll see what the uh what the aftermath of that is next week uh until then
four fiber optic bernie s this is emmanuel galtstein for off the hook have a good night
have a good night
the telephone keeps ringing
so i ripped it off the wall
i cut myself while shaving
now i can't make a call
it couldn't get much worse
the campaign to free the puerto rican nationalists being held in u.s prisons is picking up momentum
and now labor is playing its part as well come to a night of labor solidarity with the puerto
rican political prisoners on friday november 14th at 6 p.m it'll be held at local 1199 310 west 43rd street