The Phoneboy Blog: HD VoIP? Oh, Brother…

Phoneboy talks about HD VoIP, or VoIP that sounds like it's coming from a CD Player, not a phone. That's entirely plausible, but, as he points out, it's a major increased bandwidth cost with minimal benefit.

Let's use Skype as an example. When you make a Skype-to-Skype call, the call quality is wonderful. Why? They use something called ISAC (warning: PDF link), which is a proprietary codec by Global IP Sound. It is a "wideband" codec that sounds pretty damn good. When you make a SkypeOut (PSTN) call, however, the codec used is G729, which is a narrowband codec that doesn't sound quite as good.

Presumably, if you are using a service that supports "HD" VoIP, then the "HD" codec, whatever it is, will only come into play on-net, meaning within the relevant VoIP provider's network. Once it goes off-net (e.g. to the PSTN), a different codec will be used (G711 or G729). This is all done on the fly and completely transparently to the end user, except for the obvious sound quality difference.

You blog as a Phoneboy. But someday, you will blog as a Phoneman.

ComputerWorld: Macs on the network: Time to panic?

We interrupt this blog post to provide a healthy list of times and places where it is appropriate to panic:

1. Your post-war recovering urban metropolis is currently under attack by Godzilla.
2. Your airplane is in dire straits and your only hope is Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, and Lloyd Bridges.
3. There is a Macintosh computer on the network.

We now resume our normal blog programming.

They're coming. Gleaming all-in-ones, metallic slimline notebooks and hand-size "mini" machines.

God help us!

Green did mention a few bugaboos, however, among his generally positive comments about the Mac. He said his group has seen more support issues related to the Cisco VPN for Mac than the version for Windows XP, although they have fewer support calls for the native VPN client for OS X.

"There have been problems with OS patches affecting wireless connectivity for a small portion of Mac laptops in the past -- specifically related to 802.1X," he said. "Those appear to have been corrected. We have found the Mac OS X client much easier for users to configure for wireless and 802.1X. It has been a benefit not having to deal with all the third-party drivers that come from the PC/XP world since this has caused a lot of problems for XP users during our 802.1X wireless rollout."

We've blogged about iPhones on the corporate environment before, but a full-on panic is silly. Prepare, know, and react accordingly. The only time you need to panic is if you don't prepare. Certainly, we've laid out our concerns with the iPhone and corporate environments, but they're just that - concerns. Not a dire warning of things to come.

ExtremeTech: AMD Confirms Addition of Three-Core Phenom Chips

Problem: A certain number of your quad-core processors have a single core of the four which doesn't hold up to specifications.

Solution: Disable that processor and sell it as a three-core chip.

SAN FRANCISCO-Advanced Micro Devices is adding a triple-core Phenom processor to its roadmap, AMD executives said Monday, selling processors that it would otherwise throw onto the scrap heap.

The chips will actually be a four-core Phenom with one core disabled, according to AMD representatives. It will be released during the first quarter of 2008, following the Phenom's launch this December, at an undetermined price.

(I can just imagine Mel Brooks as Moses, coming down from the mountain. "Your lord AMD brings you this four-- *crash* ... Oy. ... Three! Three-core chip!")

This is a godsend for budget-conscious power-users. Quad-core computing is price prohibitive, and there's no denying that three cores are better than two.

There are impacts for network servers as well, but not because of the chip directly. Since more of the quad-core chip-batch can be sold, AMD can increase production of quad-core chips across the board. and take advantage of greater economies of scale. That means lower prices, theoretically. And quad-core computers are great for systems running many virtual machines.