There are already a dozen Vonage clones in the market. Skype is doing something different that meets different needs. Since Skype doesn't require any hardware, they got millions of users in a short time. Now stuff like this Siemens gizmo allow people to use regular phones to talk to all those Skype users.
If we're talking IBCS-style binary compatibility between Linux and Solaris, that could be interesting.
Sun calls that Project Janus. They need it because more and more apps are certified on RHEL and SLES, but not Solaris x86. Thus to run those apps Solaris must run Linux binaries....Linux evolving from being "just" a kernel and/or OS and into a Unix-like standard in its own right.... The idea that a "Linux Stanard" could appear, against which Solaris could be compliant or certified, would strengthen Sun's hand.
That's called the Linux Standard Base. I wouldn't be surprised if Solaris becomes LSB-compliant; then they can claim that it's "better Linux than Linux" and cheaper than RHEL at the same time.
If you use six sectors per cell, that means 360-420 customers per cell, which is quite a bit. If they have more customers they can always turn down the power and use more, smaller cells.
If you apply the tax at the VoIP/PSTN gateway, there's much less of a problem. VoIP taxes are not taxes on packets; they're taxes on the service of gatewaying those packets onto the PSTN.
Seems like the sensible thing to do would be to tax DSL and Cable in roughly the same way that telephone lines are taxed (is that feasible?), instead of regulating VOIP over DSL and Cable like telephone lines.
Yep; various people have proposed this as an alternative to the current regime. Another proposal is to tax phone numbers regardless of how they are connected to the customer.
Does this mean that all the phone company needs to do is send me a new phone and insure that, somehow or another, the phone uses IP to talk to the local station, and then suddenly a service that is (from my point of view) functionally identical is suddenly not regulated as phone service?
Wi-Fi usually operates at much smaller distances than WiMAX; that's why you can get away with a smaller antenna. Cellular operates at much lower speed than WiMAX; that's why you can get away with a smaller antenna.
Look at all the pre-WiMAX equipment out there -- it's all got large antennas. I suspect WISPs will need all the efficiency they can get if they want to be competitive.
Skype has several cool features: a distributed directory, bulletproof NAT/firewall traversal, hard crypto, etc. All of these things are understood in theory and may have even been demonstrated, but actually making it all work is obviously not easy.
Anyone heard of any plans for a version of this (or any other card for that matter) that can take a smartcard and show the encrypted channels??
Broadcast TV has no encrypted channels. The DRM requirements on encrypted cable are so strict that the stream isn't allowed to even go near a PC, so you can give up on that.
Or perhaps such a card with an easily hackable characteristic, such as removing a jumper or cutting a trace to disable the broadcast flag...
This is explicitly illegal. Save us all some trouble and turn yourself in to the authorities now.:-)
Would a free open-sourced driver fall under the flag restrictions after the requirement date, as if it's free it doesn't need to be "sold"?
It's illegal to distribute a non-flag-checking tuner at all.
PVRs will still exist, but you just won't be able to get video out of the PVR easily.
Analog video capture (which was included on Macs in the mid 90s) is dead. These days people are getting video over Firewire from camcorders or over SDI. Likewise, everybody has cable or satellite instead of broadcast TV now. The satellite providers don't want to be recorded, and you record digital cable using Firewire.
the cable companies will soon have to allow you to rent a little card with the decoding logic on board, which plugs into third party tuners . All we need is for someone to make one of those to go in a PCI slot and we're sorted.
Too bad such a PCI card is essentially not allowed by the OpenCable licensing agreement.
Wow, nice FUD. It is true that BG/L is not finished, but it's more mature than you make it out to be. The hardware is finalized; the only difference between the current system and the final LLNL system is the number of racks. The software is working well enough for people to run real apps; all that's left is fixing bugs and tweaking for better scalability.
Miguel, you are wrong. The license says "You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after accessing the Technology, except when such use violates Sun's copyrights or patent rights." In other words, you can read the code to learn how it works and use that knowledge. You just can't cut-and-paste Sun's code into another project.
Several papers about VMware have been published in academic conferences (try searching on CiteSeer), but I don't think they cover the core binary translation stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
There are already a dozen Vonage clones in the market. Skype is doing something different that meets different needs. Since Skype doesn't require any hardware, they got millions of users in a short time. Now stuff like this Siemens gizmo allow people to use regular phones to talk to all those Skype users.
If we're talking IBCS-style binary compatibility between Linux and Solaris, that could be interesting.
...Linux evolving from being "just" a kernel and/or OS and into a Unix-like standard in its own right. ... The idea that a "Linux Stanard" could appear, against which Solaris could be compliant or certified, would strengthen Sun's hand.
Sun calls that Project Janus. They need it because more and more apps are certified on RHEL and SLES, but not Solaris x86. Thus to run those apps Solaris must run Linux binaries.
That's called the Linux Standard Base. I wouldn't be surprised if Solaris becomes LSB-compliant; then they can claim that it's "better Linux than Linux" and cheaper than RHEL at the same time.
And Microsoft and Oracle etc. won't use GPL'ed code in their main products either. That has nothing to do with Sun being "founded on open source".
Moore's Law applies to phone service but not to electric utilities.
I've seen estimates of $10,000 for WiMAX base stations.
If you use six sectors per cell, that means 360-420 customers per cell, which is quite a bit. If they have more customers they can always turn down the power and use more, smaller cells.
Why is that better than storing profiles in a network-mounted home directory?
If you apply the tax at the VoIP/PSTN gateway, there's much less of a problem. VoIP taxes are not taxes on packets; they're taxes on the service of gatewaying those packets onto the PSTN.
Seems like the sensible thing to do would be to tax DSL and Cable in roughly the same way that telephone lines are taxed (is that feasible?), instead of regulating VOIP over DSL and Cable like telephone lines.
Yep; various people have proposed this as an alternative to the current regime. Another proposal is to tax phone numbers regardless of how they are connected to the customer.
Does this mean that all the phone company needs to do is send me a new phone and insure that, somehow or another, the phone uses IP to talk to the local station, and then suddenly a service that is (from my point of view) functionally identical is suddenly not regulated as phone service?
Correct! Regulatory arbitrage, here we come.
AT&T/Cingular has a national EDGE network already IIRC.
Wi-Fi usually operates at much smaller distances than WiMAX; that's why you can get away with a smaller antenna. Cellular operates at much lower speed than WiMAX; that's why you can get away with a smaller antenna.
Look at all the pre-WiMAX equipment out there -- it's all got large antennas. I suspect WISPs will need all the efficiency they can get if they want to be competitive.
All the systems on the Top 500 list are benchmarked running Linpack. If you can run Linpack on SETI@home, you're welcome to count it.
Skype has several cool features: a distributed directory, bulletproof NAT/firewall traversal, hard crypto, etc. All of these things are understood in theory and may have even been demonstrated, but actually making it all work is obviously not easy.
Anyone heard of any plans for a version of this (or any other card for that matter) that can take a smartcard and show the encrypted channels??
:-)
Broadcast TV has no encrypted channels. The DRM requirements on encrypted cable are so strict that the stream isn't allowed to even go near a PC, so you can give up on that.
Or perhaps such a card with an easily hackable characteristic, such as removing a jumper or cutting a trace to disable the broadcast flag...
This is explicitly illegal. Save us all some trouble and turn yourself in to the authorities now.
Would a free open-sourced driver fall under the flag restrictions after the requirement date, as if it's free it doesn't need to be "sold"?
It's illegal to distribute a non-flag-checking tuner at all.
PVRs will still exist, but you just won't be able to get video out of the PVR easily.
Analog video capture (which was included on Macs in the mid 90s) is dead. These days people are getting video over Firewire from camcorders or over SDI. Likewise, everybody has cable or satellite instead of broadcast TV now. The satellite providers don't want to be recorded, and you record digital cable using Firewire.
the cable companies will soon have to allow you to rent a little card with the decoding logic on board, which plugs into third party tuners . All we need is for someone to make one of those to go in a PCI slot and we're sorted.
Too bad such a PCI card is essentially not allowed by the OpenCable licensing agreement.
The 915 and 925X Express ushered in a new era for personal computer hardware and left Intel's chipset competitors choking in the dust.
I love my computer too, but isn't this a little much? At least you can't accuse them of being biased towards one vendor, though.
For WiMAX you need a relatively large, outdoor antenna that is pointing towards the tower. It physically won't fit in a laptop.
Now 802.16e is a different story, but it's also vaporware.
Just like their "built-in RAID" is software RAID. They draw no distinction between what is implemented in hardware and what is in the driver.
No no, BlueGene/L is a cluster, so you have to imagine a single node of it.
Wow, nice FUD. It is true that BG/L is not finished, but it's more mature than you make it out to be. The hardware is finalized; the only difference between the current system and the final LLNL system is the number of racks. The software is working well enough for people to run real apps; all that's left is fixing bugs and tweaking for better scalability.
It sounds like you were looking at the class library source code instead of the VM source code. It's all there; you just have to know where to look.
Miguel, you are wrong. The license says "You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after accessing the Technology, except when such use violates Sun's copyrights or patent rights." In other words, you can read the code to learn how it works and use that knowledge. You just can't cut-and-paste Sun's code into another project.
Yes, Xen is inspired by z/VM and Virtualization Engine.
Several papers about VMware have been published in academic conferences (try searching on CiteSeer), but I don't think they cover the core binary translation stuff.