Does the recently confirmed existence of UfO's pose a threat to Christianity?

[The Liturgist]

Beats me; I just designed stuff for civilian PSTN phone systems, what do I know?

Oh cool. Are you familiar with central office switches like the Western Electric/Lucent 4ESS and 5ESS and the Nortel DMS? One thing I really regret not being able to have in my lab is a 5ESS. If I recall the command processor on them ran a UNIX flavor (which would make sense since UNIX was developed at Bell Labs).

 

[Jipsah]

Oh cool. Are you familiar with central office switches like the Western Electric/Lucent 4ESS and 5ESS and the Nortel DMS? One thing I really regret not being able to have in my lab is a 5ESS. If I recall the command processor on them ran a UNIX flavor (which would make sense since UNIX was developed at Bell Labs).

Never did any WE stuff, but ran quite nicely on ATT Definity switches, as well as Nortel CO stuff that I didn't necessarily know about. We did a lot of Mitel switches as well. For most of the big iron (as opposed to typical large, or small (like the Panasonic 12 line 32 station PBXs) our resident metal scratcher had worked with an outfit in Buffalo called Voice Technologies Group that did set emulation integration with whole bunch of different enterprise or CO level switches.

The net effect of that for me was that all the VTG integrated swiches "looked" the same to me, since the VTG interface and Mikey's abstration layer served to make them all look the same from a call control/call progress standpoint. Mikey took whatever data the switch sent him, translated it into AVT pidgin, I acted on it, and then handed him an aknowledgement that he translated into Wombat or whatever and handed back to the switch.

i know that we never did any Western Electric stuff, because I generally had to go to the manufacturer's site to help Mikey sus out what he had to do to translate their protocols to look like AVT standard protocols. (I was one of the principals with AVT back when there were 5 of us and we could recognize a telephone 3 out of 4 times when shown one) up until we got bought out by crooks who didn't care what we did or whether we were any good at it or not, (which is a long story in itself).

Good old days for engineers. We never knew how good we really were, we just worked like dogs to keep up with what we thought the competition had, when a lot of the time we were miles ahead of them and didn't know it. A young man's game, and we were good at it. "Hey, Jipsah, we need you in Toronto tomorrow, you good?" Of course the answer was always yes.

Now the daughters (3 of them) are successful in their own right. The professional violinist (this is Nashville, after all), the doctor, and the aeronautical engineer. I'm a barista at a local coffee shop, and wifey babysits the youngest grandbaby and watches Korean videos. Sic transit gloria mundi. <Laugh>

 

[The Liturgist]

Never did any WE stuff, but ran quite nicely on ATT Definity switches, as well as Nortel CO stuff that I didn't necessarily know about. We did a lot of Mitel switches as well. For most of the big iron (as opposed to typical large, or small (like the Panasonic 12 line 32 station PBXs) our resident metal scratcher had worked with an outfit in Buffalo called Voice Technologies Group that did set emulation integration with whole bunch of different enterprise or CO level switches.

The net effect of that for me was that all the VTG integrated swiches "looked" the same to me, since the VTG interface and Mikey's abstration layer served to make them all look the same from a call control/call progress standpoint. Mikey took whatever data the switch sent him, translated it into AVT pidgin, I acted on it, and then handed him an aknowledgement that he translated into Wombat or whatever and handed back to the switch.

i know that we never did any Western Electric stuff, because I generally had to go to the manufacturer's site to help Mikey sus out what he had to do to translate their protocols to look like AVT standard protocols. (I was one of the principals with AVT back when there were 5 of us and we could recognize a telephone 3 out of 4 times when shown one) up until we got bought out by crooks who didn't care what we did or whether we were any good at it or not, (which is a long story in itself).

Good old days for engineers. We never knew how good we really were, we just worked like dogs to keep up with what we thought the competition had, when a lot of the time we were miles ahead of them and didn't know it. A young man's game, and we were good at it. "Hey, Jipsah, we need you in Toronto tomorrow, you good?" Of course the answer was always yes.

Now the daughters (3 of them) are successful in their own right. The professional violinist (this is Nashville, after all), the doctor, and the aeronautical engineer. I'm a barista at a local coffee shop, and wifey babysits the youngest grandbaby and watches Korean videos. Sic transit gloria mundi. <Laugh>

Ah I find myself wishing you had learned TCP/IP and had gone into network engineering, which I have done, although I’m mainly an operating systems programmer, but I will say I love configuring Cisco and Juniper layer 3 switches, in terms of setting up the routing protocols, configuring virtual LANs and so on, I think you would find it refreshingly easy compared to your work on the legacy PSTN.

By the way, the Definity product line if I recall was spun off by Lucent into Avaya. Most of Lucent’s money in the late 1990s came from selling the giant 5ESS switch, as an artificial demand for them was created by the ILECs and the temporary increase in demand for PSTN second lines caused by dial-up Internet, but obviously that didn’t last, since using the PSTN for Internet access is seriously disadvantageous.

 

[FredVB]

But those circles have been debunked.

Even without that debunking I would not be fooled with thinking aliens explain crop circles. If aliens actually came to this world from another world, unlikely as that really is, as humanity will not become capable of reaching that far and it would not be so subtle, as if another inhabited world would be found where any of us could go however far that would actually be managed, I am sure the aliens would be much more obvious.