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[With a 5-minute delay on payment cards,] Paying a toll booth or a bus ticket or any number of on-the-spot purchases becomes impractical.

Not if the cardholder asked the issuing bank to authorize a particular (merchant, maximum amount) pair more than 5 minutes in advance.

Artificial delays will kill things like media streaming

Unless it's a live stream of a sporting event or whatever, I don't see how a 5-minute delay to buffer up the start of a stream would hurt.

gaming

Video games can be downloaded to a suitable computer in advance of play. Multiplayer video games can run on a split* screen or over a local area network (LAN).

and VOIP

Even if a low-latency channel can provide only 2400 bps each way, Codec 2 squeezes usable voice into such a channel.

* Or otherwise shared, as seen in Konami's Bomberman and Nintendo's Super Smash Bros.

The revolt against GIF that culminated in PNG over 20 years ago showed that royalty free and patent unencumbered works. I recently learned of Free Lossless Image Format (FLIF), currently in development and intended to replace PNG, and it looks great. Handily beats WEBP, and also addresses animations, the reason GIF didn't completely die. FLIF alone shows that PNG was not a one time freak. But there's also Xiph, which has been working on audio and video codecs for decades, giving us Ogg Vorbis and fairly recently, Opus. And soon we will have AV1.

Opus supposedly bridges the gap in audio between music and voice, better at both than even the best codecs tuned specifically for one or the other. Opus is good at voice, but from my own experiences, no, it's not the very best. Shouldn't VoIP software use Opus, if it was the best? I'd love to abandon Skype. This is the first I've heard of Codec2, thanks for mentioning it.

The area most in need of an update is lossy stills, where JPEG is still supreme. (Why didn't JPEG 2000 catch on?) I saw a comparison on stills between AV1 and JPEG, and in my opinion, JPEG is clearly superior. I hope AV1 improves there, but I wonder if we could have a "double" JPEG, bump the 8x8 blocks up to 16x16, just as a stopgap?

Yet despite all this evidence, IP rights holders still refuse to concede that unencumbered works. What is accomplished by moaning the clearly wrong idea that codecs will not be developed? They really think they can persuade some deep pocketed organizations to swallow that propaganda and join with them? I don't follow that notion of "fractional options", and I don't see why anyone else should either, especially with AV1 in the wings. Meantime, for video I'm sticking with VP9 and Opus (and webVTT) inside WEBM.

HRD is widely used among Hams. One of its claims to fame is integration with amateur transceivers and other equipment; it can control and monitor a wide variety of complex modern rigs, amps, tuners, etc. through serial ports, USB, Ethernet, etc.

Honestly I'm disappointed with amateur radio in this regard; reliance on proprietary IP for too many things; proprietary stuff like HRD (there are open logging alternatives, but HRD dominates), closed source firmware from all the major manufacturers, IP protected digital audio protocols... seems like not enough hams value open platforms; they pay through the nose for proprietary stuff without a second thought.

There are brilliant exceptions, but they aren't getting the attention they deserve. You'd think there would be a dozen kickstarter projects for open HT/mobile/base hardware with firmware published on GitHub, displacing the traditional proprietary manufacturers.... the hardware engineering is trivial given the levels of expertise found among these people.

The entirety of https://perens.com/ has become a link to Codec2 page on Rowetel.com.

And here is a recent demo of real world performance. Compared to SSB the encoded voice is more artificial sounding, but there is no background noise (hiss and clicks) and it uses less than half the bandwidth to transmit. There is more info and a large playlist of demo/tutorial videos on David Rowe's blog (the creator of codec2).

Askozia used to be. If you can find some old 2.1 images still around, you can use the, Also, pfSense with the freeswitch plugin is fairly lightweight. And for the full deal, you don't get leaner than this. http://www.rowetel.com/blog/?page_id=440

It actually is not that demanding of the hardware.

Well, I don't know who thought it was a good idea to duplicate info like IP and port, but I've been using SIP for my own phone service for years, and G.711 works fine, so there's actually no need to use G.729. I'm sure there are some people on 56k or something where it actually makes a difference, but for your average broadband user, G.711 is fine. There's also Codec 2, Opus, which had outstanding performance on what looks like a pretty rigorous listening test, and of course, Speex, but uptake is an issue for those, of course, since both ends have to support the codec.

I found this and have been following for awhile, it is neat project and could benefit us all even more so than a high bandwidth CODEC such as skype uses going open source! per the site: http://www.rowetel.com/blog/?page_id=452 "Codec2 is an open source low bit rate speech codec designed for communications quality speech at around 2400 bit/s. Applications include low bandwidth HF/VHF digital radio and VOIP trunking. Codec 2 operating at 2000 bit/s can send 32 phone calls using the bandwidth required for one 64 kbit/s uncompressed phone call. It fills a gap in open source, free-as-in-speech voice codecs beneath 5000 bit/s and is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)." It has a bit of support now, and you can even donate a few bucks to get the ball moving faster!

It's also not including the fact that the known global reserves keeps growing, not declining, despite our huge rate of consumption. In 1920, the world estimate was 60 billion barrels of reserves. In 1950, 600 billion barrels. From 1970 to 1990, estimates increased from 1,500 to 2,000 billion barrels. In 1994, the USGS estimated world reserves at 2,400 billion barrels. In 2000, the same estimate was raised to 3,000 barrels. Note that these estimates are not limited to "proved reserves" and only cover conventional crude. In short, we've been finding conventional crude faster than we've been taking it out of the ground, and faster than we've been expecting to find it -- at least in the long term.

There's a lot of distortion about oil reserves from the doomer crowd. For example, doomers love to point to graphs like this:

Link

Dear god! Run out and panic, right? Well, no. This graph is about as distorting as a graph can get. It's all based on backloading data. For each field, its current proven size is marked at the point in time when the field was discovered. What that should tell you is that regardless of however the actual rate of oil discoveries, you'd expect that shape on the graph! Oil fields aren't suddenly proven at their maximum capacity they're discovered. An oil field isn't proven until you start to produce from it, and there are even supergiants out there that we haven't started producing from yet. And the proven size continues to grow as you expand and explore the field. So for example, Ghawar, when it was first discovered in 1948, it was estimated to have "billions" of barrels. This grew to "60 billion barrels" in the 1970s. It's now produced 65 billion, and is estimated at 100 billion. Graphs like this backload that whole 100 billion to the 1940s.

It's trivially easy to disprove graphs like this. Let's just list some of the more noteworthy discoveries of the past decade or so. Jack 2 (3-15B), Noxal (~10B), Azadegan (~42B), Ferdows/Mound/Zagheh (~38B), Sugar Loaf (~25-40B), Tupi(5-8B), Jupiter(5-8B), West Kamchatka (10.3B), Tahe (29B), Jidong Nanpu (7.5B; potentially 146 in all of Bohai Bay), Kashagan (9-13B), and on and on. See those on the graph? But I guarantee you that a graph like that made a few decades from now will have them all conveniently showing up for this point in time.

There's this notion that "the biggest fields are found first, then everything else goes on the decline". Really? The US drilled its first well in 1859. It took us another 109 years to find Prudhoe Bay. And today we've got the absurdly massive Bakken field looming which back in the 1970s was assumed to be small and impossible to extract (Elm Coulee has proven otherwise). The same can be pointed to all over the world. Just simply pointing to Ghawar is not a counterexample. Look at coal; a single subsea coal deposit found off Norway in 2005 more than triples the world's known coal reserves. Or natural gas -- Israel has spent pretty much its whole existence in a vain search for sizeable deposits of oil or natural gas, only to hit the motherlode last year. How is this sort of thing possible? Simple. New exploration tech beats the pants off old exploration tech; new production tech makes far more things that used to be unviable, viable; there's always more "down" (especially with advancing technology); and most of the world haven't even been surveyed at all or has been only poorly surveyed -- sometimes even in known oil-rich areas (a good example of this is Iraq, which due to decades of war and sanctions is poorly explored and has just been living off its earlier finds).

Hubbert Peaks are the epitamy of fitting a particular curve to whatever arbitrary dataset you want (sometimes by hand) and the insisting that it matches. The US is a popular one, but the best-fit curve for the US is closer to a poisson than a normal (the US oil production

you'll be happy to know that it's a fellow Australian ham developing this Codec2 - David Rowe, VK5DGR Here's a link to David's development page

Codec2 is a digital voice codec for ham radio and potentially all low-bandwidth voice communication. Currently it fits in 2550 bits per second, and we expect it to get narrower. See the Alpha Release Code.

Bruce Perens, K6BP, proposed replacing the proprietary AMBE codec with a new open codec. David Rowe, VK5DGR, has strted a project to replace the codec, but needs support in order to continue.

Anyone willing to help out or donate?

-molo

I think we can indeed woo open hardware vendors, but I am much less confident that they can be the existing vendors. They just have too many conflicts of interest for it to work.

The first real piece of Open Hardware I've purchased is the ip08 PBX from David Rowe's store. No proprietary code at all in the box. It came with the screws that hold the box together and the rubber feet in a little zip-lock bag. In other words, the default mode of the unit when shipped is one in which you can "open the hood". No tricky process to crack the box open as with so many consumer products. And this even though the daughter cards came already installed. It's manufactured for David by Atcom, but the design is David's and is itself Open Sourced. Anyone can manufacture it.

It's using the Asterisk GUI 2.0, which is a little too fresh for the less technical, but it'll mature.

I think we can indeed woo open hardware vendors, but I am much less confident that they can be the existing vendors. They just have too many conflicts of interest for it to work.

The first real piece of Open Hardware I've purchased is the ip08 PBX from David Rowe's store. No proprietary code at all in the box. It came with the screws that hold the box together and the rubber feet in a little zip-lock bag. In other words, the default mode of the unit when shipped is one in which you can "open the hood". No tricky process to crack the box open as with so many consumer products. And this even though the daughter cards came already installed. It's manufactured for David by Atcom, but the design is David's and is itself Open Sourced. Anyone can manufacture it.

It's using the Asterisk GUI 2.0, which is a little too fresh for the less technical, but it'll mature.

Open Hardware can make a difference in the developing world. http://manypossibilities.net/2008/08/open-hardware-for-development/ Stand by for the Mesh Potato http://www.rowetel.com/blog/?p=70

David Rowe has been quite busy working on cool, low-cost telcomm stuff. His site also has links and comments and so forth from others interested in the subject, including people doing actual, in the field, deployments in fairly poor and hostile(to the tech) environments.

cdrguru is correct in noting that a setup requiring significant amounts of admin per system just isn't going to happen. Even admins have limited time and patience.

That said, the continuum from appliance to fully customized system is, while not orthogonal to it, distinct from the continuum between fully closed and fully open systems.
Take the Free Telephony Project as an example. Their product is a little embedded Astrix PBX in a box. Plug it in, it works. Such a device can easily qualify as an appliance. It is, however, a fully open, fully hackable system. You don't have to poke at it; but if you want to, you can.
The OLPC is another decent example. Not quite as open as the Free Telephony Project's hardware(firmware blob in the wifi controller, and I'm not sure how the hardware schematics are licenced); but it is also appliance-like in operation, designed for easy use by young possibly illiterate children without computing experience, while being fully modifiable by somebody with appropriate interest and skill.

It is also possible for systems to be open, at least in limited contexts, without being Free. Customers with specific needs, and sufficient clout, can sometimes obtain access to vendor code or designs and at least test and monitor the product, even if they have no other rights. I suspect we'll see a lot of this in the future, from proprietary entities that don't want to loosen their grip; but do want to keep large security conscious customers(take the story about Cisco gear in federal facilities that ran a little while ago).

Oh, come on, now. It's been a good year. The iPhone brought multi-touch displays into the mainstream. Google started the Android project. Hybrids made huge gains with new battery technology. VoIP? How about Skype and the new Asterisk appliance, or even the Free Telephony Project? I see the same list, but somehow I see it in a more positive light, but heck, I'm an optimist. I saw the moon landing, too. I also witnessed the birth of the personal computer, cell phones, and the Internet. Computing power increased a mind boggling amount, memory went from $1M for 64K bytes to $50 for a gigabyte, and of course disk storage went nuts.

As for real revolutions, I don't believe in them. From airplanes to telephones, when I dig into the story of innovation, I find instead a series of incremental improvements. All we've really been missing lately is those OMG moments like a moon landing. I'm jaded too... when a 5-year-old boy gets to see the first moon landing, he expects amazing things for the rest of his life. At 44, I'm still waiting for a comparable moment. When I think about it, I feel let down. The trick is to step back and realize that the revolution has been happening every day, little by little, just without the OMG moments.

I am planning on starting a company of that sort next year in my country. I will let you know how it goes, if you want.

Here's another community project that /. could support, with the goal of bringing cheap telephones to the masses in under-developed countries: http://rowetel.com/ucasterisk/index.html. It's David Rowe's Free Telephony Project.

VoIP is going to be a VERY interesting space to watch over the next few years. With an old PC, I wired two small companies with PBX's, and connect them with multi-line capability through Sipphone.com for $0.01/minute, and no monthy fee or setup charge (sorry to sound like an add... here's another equivalent service: Vitelety.com). Further, in less than a year, you wont even need an old PC. Check out http://www.rowetel.com/ucasterisk/ip04. David Rowe is giving the world Asterisk capable hardware designs for free! My own feeling is that these things can be used as a bridge between the old analog days and the future (VoIP). A similar piece of hardware could act as an answering machine, and also determine if the number your calling even needs to route through for-fee services (using http://e164.org/). If the other end is listed in the free directory, your call will be FREE (in both senses - beer and speech). Look to AT&T to launch a major public smear campaign, push more insane laws, try to kill net neutrality (to kill VoIP), and file law-suits galore against VoIP providers. One downside... I'm not sure if I like the idea of Mom being able to call for free :-)

I am building a business based on Open Source Hardware: http://www.rowetel.com/blog/?p=14. Open hardware also has potential to help the developing world: http://www.nextbillion.net/blogs/2006/09/05/is-ope n-source-hardware-an-answer

One very interesting example of open-source hardware is the Free Telephony Project.
David Rowe, the author has almost single-handedly designed an embedded computer using a blackfin processor combined with FXO/FXS (PSTN lines) chips to produce an extremely low-cost PBX running uclinux and asterisk. Recent posts indicate he's also close to producing a T1 interface as well. The amazing thing about this project is how open it all is. The cirucuit design, and layout for all of the boards are open. Also, he's committed to using only open-source software to do the design (and contributed a number of enhancements back to these projects, such as pcb). Not to mention also developing the uclinux based distribution, astfin, as well as a number of custom modifications to asterisk itself to use some of the Blackfin's special DSP capabilities.