There's several old H.323 conferencing applications around, but I don't believe that there's any {0|o}pen {S|s}ource SIP applications functional yet, which is what most people mean by "VOIP" these days.
If your principles aren't so strong that they make you refuse to use stuff that's being given away for free, though, you could always grab our X-Lite softphone and sign up with Free World Dialup or the like.
Disclaimer: I do the OS X softphone versions and the X-Tunnels/X-Cipher/X-Vox servers, so I might perhaps be a bit biased towards assuming that our stuff doesn't suck.
Better to buy one two hundred dollar thing, that it will last forever, than fifty ten-dollar items, that only last six months..
Of course, when going by historical precedent any watch you buy will be either lost, stolen, or smashed against a brick wall while drunk within three months anyhow, the point of buying the theoretically longer-lasting one becomes rather moot.
I don't believe that it's a kit because they expect anyone in this market to be a DIY type. The motivation is almost certainly to avoid the essentially limitless liability for crashes they would have if they delivered it assembled which has all but destroyed the U.S. hobby airplane industry other than a couple outfits which basically state up front "we have no assets, so don't waste your time suing us."
If even the scientists don't know how the global climate works then it's downright crazy to go around altering the composition of the atmosphere.
Which shows that plants are much smarter than you.
They went ahead and altered the nitrogen-reducing atmosphere that the planet started with by spewing out waste pollutants -- and hey! look! Us animals can breathe now!
(The point here, for those of you that really ARE dumber than plants, is that the Earth has never ever been a stable system, so parent poster is terminally clueless.)
But what would the consequences be of an accidental release of those fish to the wild? A salmon that grows seven times faster than its wild relatives? C'mon, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what the impact would be -the wild salmon would probably get starved out of existence, and it'd be impossible to prevent that from happening.
Errrr... and having more and bigger fish in the oceans is a problem to you, why exactly? Seems like a GOOD idea, I think.
If you're going to be an asshat, at least get your facts straight.
"Supreme Court of Canada" is NOT its "proper" name. It is ONE of its coequal names. The other, of course, being "Cour supreme du Canada". There's that whole official bilingualism thing going on up here, doncha know?
[NB. Dumb-ass/. doesn't want to keep the circonflexe over the 'e' in Supreme when I hit 'Preview'. what-ever.]
Just the thought of 6 billion naked people shivering in the woods singing "cum by ya" is so warm in fuzzy I bet actually doing it would all but prevent hypothermia.
Actually, after about two days they'd be more likely to be singing stuff along the lines of Nothing But Flowers...
When are cell companies going to offer $20/month unmetered calling 24/7?
Weeee-lllll, if you're lucky enough to live in Vancouver BC, you've got a cell company offering US$29.93 (exchange rate of the moment on C$40.00) unmetered calling 24/7 right NOW. So pony up the extra $9.93 and live large, big guy.
Hmmmm... aside from the fact that you seem to be making a good bit less than I thought you were, that sounds an awful lot like my co-worker Steve. Is "Jennifer" actually you, Steve buddy?
If you're not Steve, Jennifer, you should apply to work with us here immediately, we're looking for someone to split Steve's workload and you sound pretty much perfect.
Sorry to burst your whiny little bubbles and all, Linux freakazoids, but you've got it exactly wrong. Apple would *love* to have QuickTime running on Linux, just like on Windows. That would further lock in QuickTime as the API of choice for video editing apps, which is all good for Apple; and Apple just plain can't give a rat's ass about "the Linux Desktop". So take your thumbs out of your mouths and put away the tin hats.
Nope, it's simple as simple can be; nobody in the Linux world is willing to pay for development and QA of a Linux port, and Apple doesn't see that the benefit to them of QuickTime/Linux could conceivably come within orders of magnitude of the resources needed to do it all themselves, especially considering the opportunity costs of everything else they could be working on.
So, Linux whiny boy; put up the cash, or quitcher whining, since you and your whiny little Linux friends being stupid little gits that want everything for free is the only thing stopping a port, it's there for the asking if you pony up.
Only if you're utterly and completely unfamiliar with such obscure industries as, oh, I don't know, BOOK PUBLISHING springs instantly to mind, for one.
and probably has a million holes that can be punched through it,
Only if you could come up with some substantive production and/or marketing discontinuity of process between the artistic product known as "music" and other artistic products, for one example the "books" referred to above.
What said substantive difference might be rather escapes me.
If your life is so boring and sucks so bad that you need to artificially stimulate it and essentially numb your mind so you forget who you really are,
No, no, no. You have it precisely backwards.
It's those of us that are brilliant and have fascinating lives that need to dumb ourselves down to be able to tolerate the vacuous boring idiocy of other people for more than a few minutes without dealing out Righteous Dumbass Bitchslaps(tm) in every direction; and alcohol is good for that.
I mean some people only talk when they are drunk and have no relations at any other time.
Exactly so! It would be better if we could avoid this necessity completely, I suppose; but hey, sex is more fun with other people. Not that you'd know or anything, but just take my word for it.
Just because a country has food problems, and is communist, does not imply that it has food problems because it is communist. Logic 101.
No, but because a country has food problems worse than before it went communist almost certainly DOES imply exactly that.
The canonical example being the good ol' USSR, which took 71 years, until 1987, to exceed the grain production of 1917, the last pre-communist harvest. Pretty darn hard to attribute that to anything other than complete incentive failure on the part of communism, one would think.
But pretty much anywhere I've been in Europe people don't reject you just because of your opinions
Try these out for starters.
1) George Bush is a statesman, scholar, and gentleman, a veritable Colossus athwart the ramparts of history.
2) The benevolent and kind American military is spreading freedom throughout the Middle East; God Bless their humanitarian rescue mission of the Iraqi people!
3) The Jewish people have a right mandated by God Himself to the Holy Land, and all the Palestinians should be immediately deported forthwith from what in righteousness should be the state of Greater Israel. (For even better effect, say this loudly, in an Arab immigrant district, wearing whatever those little hat thingys Jews wear are called.)
Now, I could go on here for quite a while, but why don't you try just those three out on these alleged Europeans that "don't reject you just because of your opinions", and report to us on whether you were still unrejected?
Or, you could just save yourself the righteous shitkicking you're likely to get for expressing these opinions -- most especially #3 -- at all, and you could just admit right now you're blowing smoke out your dumbass butt.
You are not seriously suggesting that DESKTOP dual G5 machines take less space than 2U rackmounted dual Xeons?
That's not the "cheapest commodity hardware" OP was referring to anymore then, is it? The appropriate comparison then would be to a G5 XServe. And chances are the statement would still hold, I'd say. Although you could certainly pick a specific task to prove whatever point you wanted to make, I'm sure.
Seriously though, why PowerMacs ? I've always been under the impression that intelloid machines are the cheapest commodity hardware around for equivalent processing power, if not the most exciting. Would anybody know why Powermac G5s are a better choice here?
Well, three physical big ones that spring to mind off the top of my head:
a) Space limitations -- better MIPS/ft^3 with PPC b) Power supply restrictions -- better MIPS/watt with PPC c) Environmental considerations (PPCs take high temperatures a whole lot better, as a general rule, and produce nowhere near as much heat for a given MIPS capacity to boot)
Of course, depending on the software you're running, as other people have already pointed out Altivec code may be capable of wiping the floor with any other architecture on the planet by pretty much any metric you propose.
If I thought a little more I could come up with some more esoteric reasons I'm sure, but those would cover all the major reasons that $/MIPS is not the only metric worthy of considerations I imagine.
Slashdot Mirror
There's several old H.323 conferencing applications around, but I don't believe that there's any {0|o}pen {S|s}ource SIP applications functional yet, which is what most people mean by "VOIP" these days.
If your principles aren't so strong that they make you refuse to use stuff that's being given away for free, though, you could always grab our X-Lite softphone and sign up with Free World Dialup or the like.
http://www.xten.com/
Actually, what's shipping with Lindows is our X-Lite softphone version, complete details on the product line here.
http://www.xten.com/
Disclaimer: I do the OS X softphone versions and the X-Tunnels/X-Cipher/X-Vox servers, so I might perhaps be a bit biased towards assuming that our stuff doesn't suck.
The people who like this stuff are like little kids who learn the names of the dinosaurs.
Hmmm, I like this stuff, and I learned dinosaur names when I was a little kid, so yeah, the statement holds up.
Now, was there some kind of a point to it?
As a matter of fact, here's some people that think software copying isn't stealing, yes.
http://www.gnu.org/
Perhaps you might familiarize yourself with their philosophy before beaking off like a dumbass again.
Actually, it would almost certainly be an extremely close analogue indeed to the moral issue under discussion here.
That's because for any given existing bike model, it would be impossible to replicate it exactly without infringing on someone or other's patent.
And patent infringement is of one and a piece with copyright violation, morality-wise, far as I can tell.
Duplicating a song that you do not own a copy of is theft.
Incorrect.
It is copyright violation.
And if I'm in one of the jurisdictions around the world which is not a signatory to the Berne Convention, it's not any kind of a violation at all.
Darn it, hard as I try, I still can't figure out where the logic breaks down.
Well, let me make this veeeerrrrrry simple for you:
It breaks down on word 4.
Now, count carefully, and you'll see that word is "takes".
"Duplicates" is not a synonym for "takes".
This is difficult, I know, but try hard to get your head around it since once you do the rest follows quite logically.
Better to buy one two hundred dollar thing, that it will last forever, than fifty ten-dollar items, that only last six months..
Of course, when going by historical precedent any watch you buy will be either lost, stolen, or smashed against a brick wall while drunk within three months anyhow, the point of buying the theoretically longer-lasting one becomes rather moot.
I don't believe that it's a kit because they expect anyone in this market to be a DIY type. The motivation is almost certainly to avoid the essentially limitless liability for crashes they would have if they delivered it assembled which has all but destroyed the U.S. hobby airplane industry other than a couple outfits which basically state up front "we have no assets, so don't waste your time suing us."
If even the scientists don't know how the global climate works then it's downright crazy to go around altering the composition of the atmosphere.
Which shows that plants are much smarter than you.
They went ahead and altered the nitrogen-reducing atmosphere that the planet started with by spewing out waste pollutants -- and hey! look! Us animals can breathe now!
(The point here, for those of you that really ARE dumber than plants, is that the Earth has never ever been a stable system, so parent poster is terminally clueless.)
But what would the consequences be of an accidental release of those fish to the wild? A salmon that grows seven times faster than its wild relatives? C'mon, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what the impact would be -the wild salmon would probably get starved out of existence, and it'd be impossible to prevent that from happening.
... and having more and bigger fish in the oceans is a problem to you, why exactly? Seems like a GOOD idea, I think.
Errrr
Its proper name is the Supreme Court of Canada.
/. doesn't want to keep the circonflexe over the 'e' in Supreme when I hit 'Preview'. what-ever.]
Tsk, tsk.
If you're going to be an asshat, at least get your facts straight.
"Supreme Court of Canada" is NOT its "proper" name. It is ONE of its coequal names. The other, of course, being "Cour supreme du Canada". There's that whole official bilingualism thing going on up here, doncha know?
[NB. Dumb-ass
Just the thought of 6 billion naked people shivering in the woods singing "cum by ya" is so warm in fuzzy I bet actually doing it would all but prevent hypothermia.
Actually, after about two days they'd be more likely to be singing stuff along the lines of Nothing But Flowers...
This is NOT a concept that is 'owned' by any one group of people.
Yes it is; us Slavic peoples. Where the hell do you think the word CAME from in the first place? Look it up, as they say.
When are cell companies going to offer $20/month unmetered calling 24/7?
Weeee-lllll, if you're lucky enough to live in Vancouver BC, you've got a cell company offering US$29.93 (exchange rate of the moment on C$40.00) unmetered calling 24/7 right NOW. So pony up the extra $9.93 and live large, big guy.
http://www.cityfido.ca/
Hmmmm ... aside from the fact that you seem to be making a good bit less than I thought you were, that sounds an awful lot like my co-worker Steve. Is "Jennifer" actually you, Steve buddy?
If you're not Steve, Jennifer, you should apply to work with us here immediately, we're looking for someone to split Steve's workload and you sound pretty much perfect.
How many people do you know that rip into AAC
Well, there's a million more since last week, less those that reset iTune's default rip settings...
Sorry to burst your whiny little bubbles and all, Linux freakazoids, but you've got it exactly wrong. Apple would *love* to have QuickTime running on Linux, just like on Windows. That would further lock in QuickTime as the API of choice for video editing apps, which is all good for Apple; and Apple just plain can't give a rat's ass about "the Linux Desktop". So take your thumbs out of your mouths and put away the tin hats.
Nope, it's simple as simple can be; nobody in the Linux world is willing to pay for development and QA of a Linux port, and Apple doesn't see that the benefit to them of QuickTime/Linux could conceivably come within orders of magnitude of the resources needed to do it all themselves, especially considering the opportunity costs of everything else they could be working on.
So, Linux whiny boy; put up the cash, or quitcher whining, since you and your whiny little Linux friends being stupid little gits that want everything for free is the only thing stopping a port, it's there for the asking if you pony up.
I know that it's a weird idea
Only if you're utterly and completely unfamiliar with such obscure industries as, oh, I don't know, BOOK PUBLISHING springs instantly to mind, for one.
and probably has a million holes that can be punched through it,
Only if you could come up with some substantive production and/or marketing discontinuity of process between the artistic product known as "music" and other artistic products, for one example the "books" referred to above.
What said substantive difference might be rather escapes me.
If your life is so boring and sucks so bad that you need to artificially stimulate it and essentially numb your mind so you forget who you really are,
No, no, no. You have it precisely backwards.
It's those of us that are brilliant and have fascinating lives that need to dumb ourselves down to be able to tolerate the vacuous boring idiocy of other people for more than a few minutes without dealing out Righteous Dumbass Bitchslaps(tm) in every direction; and alcohol is good for that.
I mean some people only talk when they are drunk and have no relations at any other time.
Exactly so! It would be better if we could avoid this necessity completely, I suppose; but hey, sex is more fun with other people. Not that you'd know or anything, but just take my word for it.
Just because a country has food problems, and is communist, does not imply that it has food problems because it is communist. Logic 101.
No, but because a country has food problems worse than before it went communist almost certainly DOES imply exactly that.
The canonical example being the good ol' USSR, which took 71 years, until 1987, to exceed the grain production of 1917, the last pre-communist harvest. Pretty darn hard to attribute that to anything other than complete incentive failure on the part of communism, one would think.
Well, here in Canada, at birth through age 11. Not until age 12 do you become deemed criminally liable for your actions.
Makes for good human interest stories in the news fairly consistently about theiving car-stealing window-breaking 11 year old hellions...
But pretty much anywhere I've been in Europe people don't reject you just because of your opinions
Try these out for starters.
1) George Bush is a statesman, scholar, and gentleman, a veritable Colossus athwart the ramparts of history.
2) The benevolent and kind American military is spreading freedom throughout the Middle East; God Bless their humanitarian rescue mission of the Iraqi people!
3) The Jewish people have a right mandated by God Himself to the Holy Land, and all the Palestinians should be immediately deported forthwith from what in righteousness should be the state of Greater Israel. (For even better effect, say this loudly, in an Arab immigrant district, wearing whatever those little hat thingys Jews wear are called.)
Now, I could go on here for quite a while, but why don't you try just those three out on these alleged Europeans that "don't reject you just because of your opinions", and report to us on whether you were still unrejected?
Or, you could just save yourself the righteous shitkicking you're likely to get for expressing these opinions -- most especially #3 -- at all, and you could just admit right now you're blowing smoke out your dumbass butt.
You are not seriously suggesting that DESKTOP dual G5 machines take less space than 2U rackmounted dual Xeons?
That's not the "cheapest commodity hardware" OP was referring to anymore then, is it? The appropriate comparison then would be to a G5 XServe. And chances are the statement would still hold, I'd say. Although you could certainly pick a specific task to prove whatever point you wanted to make, I'm sure.
Seriously though, why PowerMacs ? I've always been under the impression that intelloid machines are the cheapest commodity hardware around for equivalent processing power, if not the most exciting. Would anybody know why Powermac G5s are a better choice here?
Well, three physical big ones that spring to mind off the top of my head:
a) Space limitations -- better MIPS/ft^3 with PPC
b) Power supply restrictions -- better MIPS/watt with PPC
c) Environmental considerations (PPCs take high temperatures a whole lot better, as a general rule, and produce nowhere near as much heat for a given MIPS capacity to boot)
Of course, depending on the software you're running, as other people have already pointed out Altivec code may be capable of wiping the floor with any other architecture on the planet by pretty much any metric you propose.
If I thought a little more I could come up with some more esoteric reasons I'm sure, but those would cover all the major reasons that $/MIPS is not the only metric worthy of considerations I imagine.