By David Sims
[email protected]
Yes, that’s right campers, an Extra Special edition of First
CoffeeSM, because… well, didja hear the one about the guy who wasn’t
allowed to board an American Airlines flight from San Francisco to New York
WHICH WAS NOT FULL, so he had to… oh, you have?
The music is the greatest rock album of all time, The
Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street,
which sounds like a runaway freight train joyriding between Chicago and New
Orleans at night with Hank Williams, Keith Richards and Robert Johnson passing
a whiskey bottle around the locomotive as the ghosts of Mississippi Delta blues
guitarists and white Southern Baptist gospel shouters trade off at the
throttle.
“What? How can that clown say…” Okay okay, insert any caveat
or disclaimer you want here. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band is much more important and influential (sitars, anyone?). No album in
rock can touch Dylan’s Blood On the Tracks for songwriting. The Beach
Boys’ Pet Sounds is the only note-for-note perfect rock album. The Clash’s London
Calling set the new rules. Rod
Stewart’s Every Picture Tells A Story is the most honest rock record
ever made.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. When Charlie Watts kicks in his killer
snare about the fifth measure of “Rocks Off” all argument tumbles away like
drunken bums off a speeding freight train.
Exile On Main Street is British lovers of American
music sloshing around the back roads of America buying drinks for every backwoods shouter and picker they see. It’s a freeway crash
of rock, country, blues and gospel at the Wild Turkey distillery with a whiskey
bottle smashed over a guitar amp turned up to eleven.
It’s proof that Americans need outsiders to interpret our
own musical heritage, to help us stop treating it as museum pieces and Ken
Burns documentaries but more like guys you’d like to have a drink and jam with
at the after-hours club out Route 27. It’s being taken to see what Mississippi
Delta Sunday morning gospel musicians do in the juke joints on Saturday nights.
It’s the song of the sinner who’d want to be a saint if only the music were
better, the girls prettier and the communion wine stronger. It’s the old, weird
America, a tanker-truckload of the Rev. Billy Joe’s Kentucky Rock And Roll Gospel Whiskey.
But mostly, it’s kids in Kalamazoo and Connecticut,
California and Kokomo cutting the cellophane and realizing an hour later that
you don’t have to be the most talented, the most professional, the most technically
adept, the most showy or the most trendy to rip true joy out of this life, that
the secret is just to do what you love doing because that’s what you do, thrash
away and not worry as long as you’re sure you had fun doing it.
And that, my friends, is what rock’n’roll is all about.
…
By the way, anyone who wants a trenchant, well-informed and
well-written – ah ye stars, how infrequently do those two go together – opinion on the Siebel/Oracle merger and
the general state of Big Software need look no further than new SoundBite veep Chris
Selland’s excellent blog entry. First CoffeeSM hopes his
daughter Zelda is as cute as Chris’s, and if she ends up looking more like her
mother than her father she has a decent shot at Terminal Cutehood.
You know, actually, First CoffeeSM hopes Zelda
grows up looking like the back side of an Iowa barn after a mud storm, let
Chris deal with (wait until you see the picture) what will obviously be a gorgeous 16-year old daughter. Fathers of attractive teenage
girls understand.
…
Legerity, Inc. has
announced its new VeriVoice Test Suite
software for the VE880 VoicePort Series of devices.
In combination with
the VE880 VoicePort products, Legerity’s new VeriVoice Test Suite – a subscriber
line test software package for VoIP equipment – is a product for VoIP line test
and self test, which company officials claim “minimizes the cost of ownership
for service providers.”
Since, as company officials point out, “VoIP service
providers are expected to provide traditional carrier class voice quality and
reliability to consumer equipment in a wide geographical distribution,”
Legerity is marketing the automated, remote testing capability of the VeriVoice
Test Suite as eliminating “the need for costly truck rolls, which minimizes
maintenance costs, improves reliability of service, and decreases the mean time
to repairs.”
The VeriVoice Test Suite software currently consists of two
distinct test packages corresponding to two different levels of coverage. The
first test package consists of outward looking line tests, while the second
test package consists of both outward looking line tests and inward looking
self tests. The outward looking tests, or drop tests, are intended to check the
customer equipment and copper pair leading to it while the inward looking self
tests check the VoIP equipment itself.
…
Integrated circuit vendor Infineon Technologies AG has announced that its revenues in VoIP
Customer Premises Equipment products grew
at the rate of 300 percent from 2003 to 2004, which is, admittedly, much
higher than the 70.2 percent average for the total market of $102 million.
Okay, so that’s about what a .293 career hitter signs for,
still, it’s a growing market.
The worldwide number of residential VoIP users is expected
to be approximately 5 million in 2004 and to increase to 200 million
subscribers in 2010, Infineon claims in the most optimistic claim First CoffeeSM’s
seen. Experienced in Plain Old Telephone System applications, Infineon ranked
as the world’s fifth largest supplier of VoIP ICs in 2004, up from number 10
position in the previous year.
…
Industry observer Jennifer
Hagendorf Follett is reporting that today Microsoft said it is jumping into the hosted VoIP arena
through a new partnership with Qwest Communications International that “will
create a suite of services aimed at the SMB market.”
She says Avaya is teaming with Sprint to develop and deliver
hosted VoIP services to North American businesses, while “AOL said it is
launching VoIP services for consumers.”
Microsoft’s deal will combine their Solution for Enhanced
VoIP Services with Qwest’s OneFlex VoIP services “to create a bundle of VoIP,
e-mail, Internet access, collaboration, presence, IM and desktop services,” the
companies said.
Follett cites Michael O’Hara, general manager of service
provider business at Microsoft who says the two companies are now “working to
develop a channel strategy and training efforts around the service suite, which
is expected to debut in early 2006.”
In related news, AOL is readying the launch of its
consumer-focused TotalTalk VoIP services on October 4.
…
This is all over everywhere right now, First CoffeeSM
saw it from Peter
Sayer that Opera
Software is finally giving
away a genuinely free PC version of its Web browser, Opera, without any licensing fee or
even forcing users to watch banner ads.
It’s now as free as Mozilla
Firefox, First CoffeeSM’s preferred browser. Thank you,
Michelle, for turning First CoffeeSM on to that.
So no more paying $39 to not have to watch the ads, although
the premium support still does cost $35 a year. Maybe now Opera will increase
on that one percent of the PC market they command, huh?
Not to poke fun, since the Norwegian-made Opera is great as
a mobile browser. It’s used by Nokia and Motorola, as well as several Japanese
and Chinese phones. It might well be the most widely-used mobile browser in
existence.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
