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Do you know that T-Mobile is a subsid of the German National Telekom? No? Well,have a look: http://www.telekom.de/

Martin

Even better, for those with a landline or VoIP phone, would be a system that automatically picks the cheapest route out for any given call.

Basically, you're looking for something like Least Cost Routers (anybody wanna translate this?). These things have been very popular in Germany ever since the telecom market was deregulated. In Germany you can use other (landline) telecom providers through a Call-By-Call system, dialing the provider's prefix before your actual phone number if you want to use a provider other than your default one (e.g., 01033 for German Telekom, 01013 for Tele2). There's whole websites dedicated to providing lists of the cheapest call-by-call providers. These LCRs can store such lists of providers and their rates for different types of calls (i.e., local, long-distance, other countries, cell phone networks, etc.) at different times of the day/week, and the automatically prefix the number you dial with the cheapest provider's. Of course, lists can be updated manually or automatically. Now, I'm not sure if anybody has built such a device with cell vs. landline vs. VoIP in mind, but if that exists, other Slashdotters who can be bothered to look it up instead of working ;-) will surely post links...

FWIW, there's also an isdn4linux-based LCR tool and corresponding phone rate databases (see English summary at bottom) available. For cell/landline/VoIP solutions, if there's nothing else available, there is probably a good starting point.

Darm, if I'm not mistaken, means 'intestine'. Stadt means city. So this element is Intestine-city-um.

Exactly. AFAIK the city is named after the wriggly litte rivulet Darmbach which is not quite visible any more in the city.

Darmstadt, by the way, is about the geekiest place in old Europe. Seemingly ordinary people may actually understand the print on your T-shirt there. Besides GSI, Darmstadt has a Technical University and a University of Applied Sciences. The European Space Operations Center is located there and the Fraunhofer institutes for Secure Telecooperation, Integrated Publication and Information Systems, Computer Graphics, and Structural Durability. Deutsche Telekom is running a research center there and the headquarters of T-Online are about to move to Darmstadt from the nearby town of Weiterstadt. There is a Linux User Group too. Darmstadt officially carries the title Wissenschaftsstadt (city of science). It is located about 30km south of Frankfurt/Main. The bus ride from Frankfurt airport takes 25 minutes.

Here in Germany, the color magenta is a registered trademark of this company

I suggest VoiceStream. I have had no trouble using several phones with them. It's just a matter of popping the sim card out and moving it to a different phone. I have so far resisted getting a triband phone (I prefer Nokia and their triband is $$$) and so pop my sim card out of one Nokia 69xx series and in to another. I have had no trouble using the service in the US, Canada, UK, Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, Greece, or Spain.

This is probably because VoiceStream is owned by Deutsch Telekom.

Oh there are other countries' companies who act so bully. For example Deutsche Telekom, who had a daughter T-Online sued anyone who had a word beginning with 'T-' as mark, e.g. "T-arif". They even sued someone who used magenta as main color in his website because, according to them, the color was associated with Telekom too much.

To the contrary, monopolies are allowed in Germany, even if a company did not grow to that by itself. The Deutsche Telekom (telecommunications) and the Deutsche Post (postal service) are two examples of such companies. The latter even has its monopoly on delivering letters granted by the government (albeit for a limited time only).

Like in the U.S., abuse of a monopoly is not allowed in Germany.

Incidently, as the article says, Krayon is not even included in SuSE 7.3, apart from a KDE-Menu entry. Krayon is unmaintained upstream and so not longer part of Koffice.

The article finishes with the question whether Distributors will have to scan their packages for possible namespace clashes and in doing so, might abandon a loarge portion of free software that's not cleared.

In a land where you can get sued for using the colour Magenta anything can happen, I guess.

Michael

We need a logical volume manager! Heinz Mauelshagen has written one (read about it here, and it appears to be stable. This has got to be part of the Linux core before using it in a large environment is reasonable. Those of us coming from other Unix backgrounds have been gritting our teeth at the lack of both a mature JFS AND an LVM.