🚀 go-pugleaf

Mark Anderson <mea@nospambradnylion.com> wrote:
> In article presence@MUNGEpanix.com says...
>> The same type of idiots that made LDAP came up with ISDN as a solution to 
>> a problem that never existed. Like anything from a committee with no real 
>> technical skills or real life experience, it was far too complex and 
>> offered nothing anybody really wanted.
> 
> ISDN certainly wasn't complex by today's standards.  Running a digital 
> protocol on a digital switch is far simpler than detecting DTMF, doing 
> a/d, and providing ring and tone cadences.  What made ISDN not feasible 
> in the US is no one could agree on a standard.  My memory might be off 
> but there was National ISDN standard 1 and then NI2 and then maybe more 
> and even with those standards the switch manufacturers implemented the 
> protocols differently.  So if you had some new whiz bang phone you had 
> to set an option for the type of switch you're connected to.  The phone 
> makers had to design to all implementations.  This makes mass producing 
> CPE rather difficult.  In Europe they had ETSI which defined the ISDN 
> interface for the entire continent and whatever other country wanted to 
> comply.  This allowed CPE makers to design and support a single 
> interface able to sell in all ETSI markets which allowed their costs to 
> decrease.  I think at one point in Germany all new phone deployments 
> were ISDN, thus, they could upgrade all their line units from analog to 
> digital which is the natural progression for all telecom.  The phone 
> companies in this country didn't really want it and why should they 
> upgrade their equipment when it's already paid for and still works.  
> It's not like they have any competitors breathing down their necks.

I forgot about that switch type stuff.

Europe has some shitty phone systems. What ever they do, is usually just 
wrong.

> Also, why the hate on LDAP?  Just curious.  What do you prefer instead 
> of LDAP?

LDAP is pure bullshit no matter how you look at it. It's the electronic 
version of flipping though the yellow pages while repeating the alphabet 
over and over again. Message to anybody involved in creating LDAP- you're 
a complete fucking idiot, and you deserve to die in a slow burning fire 
tha makes no toxic smoke to kill you right away.

AD, while based on LDAP actually works the first time where you don't have 
to see all the broken garbage under the hood. IF x.500 wasn't such a bad 
idea to start with, you would not need LDAP which is a giant bloated in 
practice piece of shit which is just hack upon hack upon hack, and quite 
possibly the worst "standard" of any sort.

Directory service stuff is still obnoxious. It's a rediculous way to store 
information in these days.

>> Sadly, the committee or whoever that came up with ISDN seemed to think 
>> these were the people that would want it. So obviously since nobody aside 
>> from 14 businesses used it, it was hard to get for anybody else.
> 
> ISDN does have value and at the time provided much better speeds than 
> modems.
> 
>> I lived at one place that I wanted ISDN at. AT&T said my CO had no 
> capable 
>> switch, but they could run the line over from another CO for only 
>> $285/month or something weird like that.
> 
> That's what happens when you let a monopoly run things.  They simply 
> don't care.

pretty much.