Aw, poopsie! Don't worry, the move to CSS will be finished soon. Once that's done, you'll be able to select HumourImpaired.css, and stories like this will be enclosed in tags.
Did you know that this guy totally won a Gold Genius award, a Special Gold Award, and the prestigious Grand Prix for an Excellent Scientific Invention at the World Genius Convention in Tokyo, Japan?
I used to laugh at sites like this. Then the nanomicrons got me. I don't laugh anymore, man.
LONDON (AP) - The UK government today introduced a bill into parliament
that, if adopted, would allow the International Olympic Committee (IOC)
to reserve use of certain letters and digits, including "O", "2", "L",
and "g" through "r", to businesses who had signed official Olympic
sponsorship agreements.
Prime Minister Tony Blair passionately, though unintelligibly, defended
the controversial law, saying that "t[h]e I[O]C s [h]ave [it] [q]uite
cl[ea]r that [o]ur role [is] [t]o def[en]d the i[n]ve[stm]en[t]s of
[l]egiti[mat]e [adve]rti[s]er[s]" who have signed on with the IOC.
Blair also pointed to the limited timeframe of the bill, which only
allows surveillance during a two-year period before and after the
bill, and said that this showed that public opinion had been considered
strongly during the formulation period. "[Wh]at m[or]e [d]o th[ey]
wa[nt]?" he asked rhetorically
Free Software Foundation founder and figurehead Richard M. Stallman was
unavailable comment. A source close to the activist said that "he's
working on renaming GCC in Cyrillic".
Likely this is an isolated event, which became newsworthy because CNN
got infected. We do not see any new threats at this point. Zotob keeps
mutating and finding new victims. As seen with prior TCP worms, it is
reaching its peak around 3 days after the outbreak.
As reported by Slashdot t'other day, they raised their threat level from
Green to Yellow. They explain why they moved back to Green:
We moved to 'Yellow' on Friday, after we did see a number of exploits
released for last weeks Microsoft Windows vulnerabilities, in particular
MS05-039 (PnP) which is exploitable remotely.
As expected, we did see various bots, in particular 'Zotob' take
advantage of this vulnerability. At this point, the situation is however
static. New bot variations keep getting developed, but they do not add
any fundamental new variation of the exploit. We expect that most
exploitable systems have been compromised at this point.
[....] Yes, the Internet is still "broken", but it was never working all
that well to begin with. The Infocon is intended to measure change. We
can't stay on yellow for ever.
A Pentium is loud -- doubly so for any hard drive that's in there (I've learned to hate that high-pitched whine), or for any hard drive its BIOS will recognize. (Good luck trying to find a BIOS upgrade for a 10-year old mobo.)
It's bigger, bulkier and draws more power.
Depending on the mobo, you may also have problems finding an ISA network card that still works, and you may run into problems getting two or more to work together (though I might be misremembering what it was like...it's been a while.)
The wireless card alone will cost you more than $20 (and that's Canuckistan pesos, keep in mind). Good luck trying to find one that's ISA, and good luck trying to find one that works with a non-PCI 2.0 (2.2?) mobo. (Someone leave a link and prove me wrong.)
But let's assume you have a wireless card already.
Even an old Pentium, or (if you do have one around) whatever parts it's missing, could well end up costing more than $20. (Not much more than $20, I admit -- but still.)
You might not be up to the challenge of getting Linux to work on a random wiress router -- and hey, that's cool. But these people are. And that's cool: there's a ton of stuff to learn when you start getting your hands dirty like that. (Like I mentioned in my post, I'm very lucky that so much work has been done for me already -- otherwise I wouldn't have got nearly as far as I have. But it's still the hardest thing I've had to do with Linux, and I think it's taught me the most about how everything fits together.)
Congratulations to these guys -- this is very cool.
As TFA sez, a $20 embedded Linux box is Just A Good Thing; the flexibility
that'll come with getting Linux (or NetBSD or whatever) working on these
things will be amazing. I'm also glad to see that these guys are active
-- the HRI people, who have a very similar project, seem to have
fallen off the face of the earth. (Where are you guys?)
The guy who got it running originally hasn't responded to my emails, so it's a good thing he made his kernel tree available. Alsoplus, I think he used a JTAG adapter to load the image; since I wanted to make a firmware image that anyone could upload with the web interface, I had to reverse engineer the firmware checksum too. (Luckily it was a pretty simple checksum, or else I don't think I would've been able to do it...I'm really learning all this as I go along.)
In July I finally managed to get a kernel panic, am now trying
to get BusyBox working on the thing.
I keep getting these errors:
Unhandled fault: external abort on linefetch (D4) at 0x00000001 fault-common.c(97): start_code=0x740040, start_stack=0x71ffbc)
which, fromwhatIhave
been able to Google, may be because of differing opinions (libc/uClibc
vs. the kernel vs. the chip) about whether or not this thing has an FPU. If anyone's got
any suggestions, please leave a note -- I need all the help I can get.
It's been an incredible learning experience -- I know more now about how
the kernel interacts with CPUs, the filesystems, compilers and the bootloader than
I ever had. (Still got tons to learn, mind you.) I'm looking forward to the day I can get a Beowulf cluster of these things going.:-)
Plus, Steven Aftergood has been publishing CRS reports for a while now. Here's what he has to say on why the CRS won't release 'em in the first place:
"CRS HAS NO PUBLIC MISSION"
Why aren't non-confidential Congressional Research Service reports
automatically made available to the public? At first glance, the
policy appears to reflect institutional arrogance or reflexive
secrecy on the part of CRS and the Congress. But there is more to
it than that, congressional officials say.
CRS repeatedly stresses that it works for Congress, and only for
Congress.
"CRS assists every Member and committee," said Director Daniel P.
Mulhollan in May 23 testimony before the House Appropriations
Committee. "All of our work is confidential and focuses solely,
directly, and specifically on the needs of the congressional
community. CRS has no public mission."
By insisting on this point, CRS is distinguishing itself from the
larger and higher-profile Government Accountability Office.
More subtly, CRS is repudiating any comparison with the Office of
Technology Assessment (OTA), which was dismantled by Congressional
Republicans in 1995, an event that is seared in the consciousness
of CRS officials.
What CRS is saying is that it has no institutional agenda of its own
aside from support to members of Congress, and that, unlike OTA, it
takes no position on disputed policy matters.
CRS believes that its uniqueness as a congressional support agency,
which constitutes its central claim to continued funding, would
only be diluted by direct interactions with public consumers.
"Over time, CRS products might come to be written with a large
public audience in mind and could no longer be focused solely on
congressional needs," CRS Director Mulhollan said in a written
statement yesterday.
And the current congressional leadership apparently agrees.
"CRS has received clear indication from its oversight committees
that no change in the current policy is authorized," Director
Mulhollan wrote yesterday.
"It is important to recognize that while the restriction on public
access to CRS products is frequently characterized as CRS
'resistance,' the reality is that the policy is a congressional
one," he noted.
In any case, "As CRS obtains no copyright in its products, little
can be done to discourage the trend toward further public
availability of CRS products brought about without the permission
of a Member or committee."
A 1999 CRS memorandum outlined several reasons why it believed
direct public access to CRS products would have unfavorable legal
and institutional consequences.
See "Congressional Policy Concerning the Distribution of CRS Written
Products," March 9, 1999:
JS/UIX - A Short Documentation (based on v.0.42)
by Norbert Landsteiner
[Logo removed -- attempt to defeat lameness filter]
1) What it is
JS/UIX is a virtual OS written entierly in JavaScript to be run in any standard
web-browser (type 4.0 or higher).
The user interface - a simple 80 colums terminal - is implemented in DHTML but
could be implemented in any other JavaScript compliant application environment
as p.e. Macromedia Flash(TM).
JS/UIX features a UN*X-like operating environment with no intention of any full
POSIX compatibility. Some standard commands have been implemented at full range
others with just simple syntax or basic functionality, while new commands have
been added. The only application for now is a simple implementation of vi
(visual editor).
JS/UIX is now a mere demonstration object. A serious application could be its
use as an interface to a server-shell or CGI-process via a rlogin like
protocoll, where any transaction data could be encrypted and stored in an
additional HTML-[I]FRAME.
Fig. 1: Possible implementation of a remote interface [removed to get by lameness filter]
A second application could be an embedded service, which would be executed
local to the client but would retrieve remote data from a host via HTTP and
CGI.
Fig. 2: Possible implementation of a local service using remote data [removed to defeat lameness filter]
2) Features & Functions
a) Users and Files
JS/UIX accepts any valid user name as login with the exception of "exit" and
"root" (or any of their derevative spellings). "exit" will close the console
while "root" is a protected user showing a password prompt. (root:machtNix)
(Future versions might allow password control for all users via a "passwd"-
command. A practical implementation - see above, fig. 1-2 - would probably
not give access to unregistrated users. This should be a demo feature only.)
A valid login triggers the following steps:
- an entry in/etc/passwd is searched or generated
- an entry in/etc/group is searched or generated
- the home directory/home/ is generated if not found
- the home directory and user-variables are set
- the history file/home//.history is loaded or generated
- the file/etc/profile is searched and executed
"root" has the UID 0 and is allocated to the groups 0 (system) and 1 (wheel),
while a normal user acquires a UID greater than 100 and is allocated to the
groups 1 (wheel) and 2 (users) with GID 2.
The same steps are taken at "su" (switch user) but the working directory will
not be set to the home directory ($HOME). (See the note on "su" below.)
A typical allocation of users and groups after a login with user-id "guest" will
look like the following:
Fig. 3: Users and groups after login with user-id "guest"
After login the user will be prompted with the default prompt:
[guest@masswerk.at:2]$ _
showing the user-name, host and PID as defined in $PS.
(default value: [${USER}@${HOST}:${PID}])
A normal user's prompt will be marked with the suffix "$" while the root user's
prompt is marked with the suffix "#". (Hard coded, no $PS2 by now!)
Note:
Currently the prompt is not a function of the shell but of the kernel
(triggered by the TTY-interface). This should be fixed in future versions.
...as part of his book Free Culture (available now if you sign up as a member of the Free Software Foundation. Do it today!). Before you think it's boring, or that things today are completely different from how they ever have been, read:
As our own common sense tells us, Armstrong had discovered a vastly superior radio technology. But at the time of his invention, Armstrong was working for RCA. RCA was the dominant player in the then dominant AM radio market. By 1935, there were a thousand radio stations across the United States, but the stations in large cities were all owned by a handful of networks.
....Armstrong's invention threatened RCA's AM empire, so the company launched a campaign to smother FM radio. While FM may have been a superior technology, Sarnoff was a superior tactician. As one author described, "The forces for FM, largely engineering, could not overcome the weight of strategy devised by the sales, patent, and legal offices to subdue this threat to corporate position. For FM, if allowed to develop unrestrained, posed... a complete reordering of radio power... and the eventual overthrow of the carefully restricted AM system on which RCA had grown to power."
....Armstrong resisted RCA's efforts. In response, RCA resisted Armstrong's patents. After incorporating FM technology into the emerging standard for television, RCA declared the patents invalid--baselessly, and almost fifteen years after they were issued. It thus refused to pay him royalties. For six years, Armstrong fought an expensive war of litigation to defend the patents. Finally, just as the patents expired, RCA offered a settlement so low that it would not even cover Armstrong's lawyers' fees. Defeated, broken, and now broke, in 1954 Armstrong wrote a short note to his wife and then stepped out of a thirteenthstory window to his death.
....This is how the law sometimes works. Not often this tragically, and rarely with heroic drama, but sometimes, this is how it works. From the beginning, government and government agencies have been subject to capture. They are more likely captured when a powerful interest is threatened by either a legal or technical change. That powerful interest too often exerts its influence within the government to get the government to protect it. The rhetoric of this protection is of course always public spirited; the reality is something different. Ideas that were as solid as rock in one age, but that, left to themselves, would crumble in another, are sustained through this subtle corruption of our political process.
Dear god, I thought "blogosphere" was self-important.
But hey! This opens up all kinds of future blog-related positions. Watch for these coming Slashdot stories!
Blardinal Petrus writes: "As first Blardinal of the Holy Cathoblogic Church, I hereby announce that I am taking applications for BlogPope. Email your resume, your blog URL and 100 words on "Why I should be Blogpope" to blogpope@cathoblogic.blog. And good luck!"
Bloggus Torvalds writes: "Ever wanted to start your own nation? Now you can! BlogNation is a new association of Blogizens that are disassociblogging themselves from ordinary, land-based nationstates in favour of a new alliance of Blogs. Run for Blogident, Blog Minister, or Minister of Blogging by signing up on our blog!"
Bloggy Hilton writes: "Help! I've lost the password to my blog. It was right there on my SideKick (you know, the one with the special blog attachment), but it doesn't seem to be there anymore! Has someone taken it? I'm totally desperate here!"
"Right now we give you a library card with a bar code attached to it.
This is just a bar code, but it's built in," said Mark West, the
library's deputy director.
To be fair that does come after this paragraph:
Naperville library officials said the technology cannot be used to
reconstruct a person's actual fingerprint. The scanners, made by
Naperville-based U.S. Biometrics Corp., use an algorithm to convert 15
or more specific points into a unique numeric sequence.
But it's still shockingly cavalier to describe the technology as
"just a bar code". I have difficulty understanding a) why this seems
like a good idea to anyone, and b) why this gentleman seems
incapable of understanding people's worries about a fucking library
requiring fingerprints!
...if you're talking about Linux desktops, Windows desktops or both.
If Linux, then follow the advice of the poster who told you to use Debian -- its package management is, IMNSHO, The Best, Ever! (tm) for Unix. If you can't go with Debian, then look at using rsync. We use that here (maybe 50 FreeBSD workstations and servers), and it's great: add stuff to The One True Machine and it shows up the next morning. We synchronize the usual suspects this way:/usr/local,/usr/X11R6.
If Windows...well, I presume you've got AD or some such. We don't (I'm trying to get away w/o a MS server in the house), and I've just come across wpkg. Looks pretty good, with two caveats:
You need silent installations of things. MSIs or silent.exes are good, anything with a window is bad.
The documentation is most charitably described as "scant". (Hoping to add to it at some point.)
Initial tests are pretty damned promising, though, and it works when run over SSH -- you don't need to be logged in, standing in front of the computer, or any of that nonsense. Almost makes me think of Windows as a real OS.
'cos with any luck, that'll mean everyone'll be selling off their old XBoxen, and that means more Linux on the XBox for me. Seriously, can't wait 'til the old ones are $50 a pop...and I also can't wait to see Linux running on the new version.
Honestly? It's like I've got religion (which is hilarious, since I'm a completely aspiritual atheist).
There are very good reasons for people to use Free software, no matter who we're talking about: adherence to standards, the ability of the community to improve the software (and vouch for its security), knowing that it won't just disappear because a company goes out of business, or become obnoxious because of a licensing change. You know the arguments as well as anyone here, I suppose.
But my zeal is harder to explain. Those are important things to me, but I really feel sometimes like I've got religion. It's great: black-and-white boundaries (well, sort of), good guys (Saint Linus, Saint RMS) and bad (Bill Gates, SCO), a nice sense of everything-has-been-building-up-to-THIS-MINUTE!, apocalypse (in the original sense of the word: a revealing that behind the petty, mundane battles of day-to-day life are huge, cosmic battles between Good and Evil)...everything a closet drama queen could want. (I'm serious about that; anyone who likes Sisters of Mercy songs for the lyrics would looooooove discussing Free Software.)
I try to keep it in check; I'm a sysadmin, and in my job it's most important to make sure people can do their job. But it pains me -- O! How it pains me! -- to see the growing number of Windows desktops here, and it's not just because I miss a decent command line.
I was just thinking that. Other deja-vu provoking lines:
We...experienced lots of basic compatibility problems. These ranged from a clash between the install program and the CD-ROM drive to -- where we could get that to work -- a failure to recognise the network or storage adapters being used.
Sun has a long way to go before it can claim to provide the same wide platform support that's available from the top Linux vendors.
Man, remember when everyone was saying that about Linux?
...but what I would really like is an in-depth intro (contradiction in terms, I know) to telephone technology. I can set up a web server, I know how to firewall in three different languages, and I can understand at least a third of any C you put in front of me -- but man, phone technology just makes my head hurt.
The company I work for is moving in a couple months, and we're taking the
opportunity to upgrade our voicemail system. For a while I had hopes
of maybe getting Asterisk to do it -- yay Free Software -- but then I
started looking into it. As near as I can figure, after a day's Googling,
our regular, analog, non-VOIP Meridian phones just won't talk to Asterisk-compatible hardware...but
that's what I told the boss. (That, and I didn't have time to do
it.)
The honest truth is, I suspected it couldn't be done, or at least
couldn't be done cheaply, but I couldn't wrap my head around what I
was reading. I began to understand how my father feels when I try to
explain to him what I'm doing.
I have rarely felt so ignorant as when I tried to understand what
hardware and what connections from the phone company would be needed:
to connect Asterisk to the telephone company's wires (the CO, I
think)
to connect Asterisk to our own phones so calls could come in
and to let us make phone calls out.
I tried finding some consultant or company who could do this for us, but
no luck. So we're getting a bigger and better version of the Norstar
system we've got now. And that's fine -- it's done, someone else is
doing it, and someone else is going to support it. But some kind of
phone-networking-for-dummies would've been great.
Slashdot Mirror
Aw, poopsie! Don't worry, the move to CSS will be finished soon. Once that's done, you'll be able to select HumourImpaired.css, and stories like this will be enclosed in tags.
Did you know that this guy totally won a Gold Genius award, a Special Gold Award, and the prestigious Grand Prix for an Excellent Scientific Invention at the World Genius Convention in Tokyo, Japan?
I used to laugh at sites like this. Then the nanomicrons got me. I don't laugh anymore, man.
made it to Mars...this time, she's going straight for the Kuiper Belt!
Another vote for greylisting. Works a treat.
Prime Minister Tony Blair passionately, though unintelligibly, defended the controversial law, saying that "t[h]e I[O]C s [h]ave [it] [q]uite cl[ea]r that [o]ur role [is] [t]o def[en]d the i[n]ve[stm]en[t]s of [l]egiti[mat]e [adve]rti[s]er[s]" who have signed on with the IOC.
Blair also pointed to the limited timeframe of the bill, which only allows surveillance during a two-year period before and after the bill, and said that this showed that public opinion had been considered strongly during the formulation period. "[Wh]at m[or]e [d]o th[ey] wa[nt]?" he asked rhetorically
Free Software Foundation founder and figurehead Richard M. Stallman was unavailable comment. A source close to the activist said that "he's working on renaming GCC in Cyrillic".
As reported by Slashdot t'other day, they raised their threat level from Green to Yellow. They explain why they moved back to Green:
It's bigger, bulkier and draws more power.
Depending on the mobo, you may also have problems finding an ISA network card that still works, and you may run into problems getting two or more to work together (though I might be misremembering what it was like...it's been a while.)
The wireless card alone will cost you more than $20 (and that's Canuckistan pesos, keep in mind). Good luck trying to find one that's ISA, and good luck trying to find one that works with a non-PCI 2.0 (2.2?) mobo. (Someone leave a link and prove me wrong.)
But let's assume you have a wireless card already. Even an old Pentium, or (if you do have one around) whatever parts it's missing, could well end up costing more than $20. (Not much more than $20, I admit -- but still.)
You might not be up to the challenge of getting Linux to work on a random wiress router -- and hey, that's cool. But these people are. And that's cool: there's a ton of stuff to learn when you start getting your hands dirty like that. (Like I mentioned in my post, I'm very lucky that so much work has been done for me already -- otherwise I wouldn't have got nearly as far as I have. But it's still the hardest thing I've had to do with Linux, and I think it's taught me the most about how everything fits together.)
Proving you have the larger e-penis is never useless. :-)
I've been working on something similar: last Christmas, I picked up 3 Network Everywhere NWR04B wireless routers on sale -- $18 each! -- and have been trying ever since to duplicate this guy's success in getting uClinux (a version of Linux for CPUs with no MMU) running on the thing.
The guy who got it running originally hasn't responded to my emails, so it's a good thing he made his kernel tree available. Alsoplus, I think he used a JTAG adapter to load the image; since I wanted to make a firmware image that anyone could upload with the web interface, I had to reverse engineer the firmware checksum too. (Luckily it was a pretty simple checksum, or else I don't think I would've been able to do it...I'm really learning all this as I go along.)
In July I finally managed to get a kernel panic, am now trying to get BusyBox working on the thing. I keep getting these errors:
which, from what I have been able to Google, may be because of differing opinions (libc/uClibc vs. the kernel vs. the chip) about whether or not this thing has an FPU. If anyone's got any suggestions, please leave a note -- I need all the help I can get.
It's been an incredible learning experience -- I know more now about how the kernel interacts with CPUs, the filesystems, compilers and the bootloader than I ever had. (Still got tons to learn, mind you.) I'm looking forward to the day I can get a Beowulf cluster of these things going. :-)
piss-poor writing, too; a sentence like:
For instance, he cited Oracle's On Demand
Center in Austin, Texas, which comprises 10,000
servers and 2.5-petabytes of storage, runs
Linux.
should never make it past the editor.
Plus, Steven Aftergood has been publishing CRS reports for a while now. Here's what he has to say on why the CRS won't release 'em in the first place:
Dude, if I had mod points right now I wouldn't be taking the time to compliment you. Excellent points, all of them.
But hey! This opens up all kinds of future blog-related positions. Watch for these coming Slashdot stories!
"Right now we give you a library card with a bar code attached to it. This is just a bar code, but it's built in," said Mark West, the library's deputy director.
To be fair that does come after this paragraph:
Naperville library officials said the technology cannot be used to reconstruct a person's actual fingerprint. The scanners, made by Naperville-based U.S. Biometrics Corp., use an algorithm to convert 15 or more specific points into a unique numeric sequence.
But it's still shockingly cavalier to describe the technology as "just a bar code". I have difficulty understanding a) why this seems like a good idea to anyone, and b) why this gentleman seems incapable of understanding people's worries about a fucking library requiring fingerprints!
As I mentioned, you need a silent install. For F., there's different ways to do that:
- Use FrontMotion's MSI for Firefox
- Follow the instructions and created your own MSI using MakeMSI (which is free as in beer, not speech)
- Follow the instructions on Unattended's wiki and roll a silent install from the
.exe
I've tested the first and last w/o any problems.Now that's a helplful link. Thanks!
If Linux, then follow the advice of the poster who told you to use Debian -- its package management is, IMNSHO, The Best, Ever! (tm) for Unix. If you can't go with Debian, then look at using rsync. We use that here (maybe 50 FreeBSD workstations and servers), and it's great: add stuff to The One True Machine and it shows up the next morning. We synchronize the usual suspects this way: /usr/local, /usr/X11R6.
If Windows...well, I presume you've got AD or some such. We don't (I'm trying to get away w/o a MS server in the house), and I've just come across wpkg. Looks pretty good, with two caveats:
- You need silent installations of things. MSIs or silent
.exes are good, anything with a window is bad.
- The documentation is most charitably described as "scant". (Hoping to add to it at some point.)
Initial tests are pretty damned promising, though, and it works when run over SSH -- you don't need to be logged in, standing in front of the computer, or any of that nonsense. Almost makes me think of Windows as a real OS.http://www.schneier.com/blog
Sorry about that!
'cos with any luck, that'll mean everyone'll be selling off their old XBoxen, and that means more Linux on the XBox for me. Seriously, can't wait 'til the old ones are $50 a pop...and I also can't wait to see Linux running on the new version.
There are very good reasons for people to use Free software, no matter who we're talking about: adherence to standards, the ability of the community to improve the software (and vouch for its security), knowing that it won't just disappear because a company goes out of business, or become obnoxious because of a licensing change. You know the arguments as well as anyone here, I suppose.
But my zeal is harder to explain. Those are important things to me, but I really feel sometimes like I've got religion. It's great: black-and-white boundaries (well, sort of), good guys (Saint Linus, Saint RMS) and bad (Bill Gates, SCO), a nice sense of everything-has-been-building-up-to-THIS-MINUTE!, apocalypse (in the original sense of the word: a revealing that behind the petty, mundane battles of day-to-day life are huge, cosmic battles between Good and Evil)...everything a closet drama queen could want. (I'm serious about that; anyone who likes Sisters of Mercy songs for the lyrics would looooooove discussing Free Software.)
I try to keep it in check; I'm a sysadmin, and in my job it's most important to make sure people can do their job. But it pains me -- O! How it pains me! -- to see the growing number of Windows desktops here, and it's not just because I miss a decent command line.
We...experienced lots of basic compatibility problems. These ranged from a clash between the install program and the CD-ROM drive to -- where we could get that to work -- a failure to recognise the network or storage adapters being used.
Sun has a long way to go before it can claim to provide the same wide platform support that's available from the top Linux vendors.
Man, remember when everyone was saying that about Linux?
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/revelations/revelat ions_film_large.wmv.torrent
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/revelations/day-1.m ov.torrent
The company I work for is moving in a couple months, and we're taking the opportunity to upgrade our voicemail system. For a while I had hopes of maybe getting Asterisk to do it -- yay Free Software -- but then I started looking into it. As near as I can figure, after a day's Googling, our regular, analog, non-VOIP Meridian phones just won't talk to Asterisk-compatible hardware...but that's what I told the boss. (That, and I didn't have time to do it.)
The honest truth is, I suspected it couldn't be done, or at least couldn't be done cheaply, but I couldn't wrap my head around what I was reading. I began to understand how my father feels when I try to explain to him what I'm doing.
I have rarely felt so ignorant as when I tried to understand what hardware and what connections from the phone company would be needed:
- to connect Asterisk to the telephone company's wires (the CO, I
think)
- to connect Asterisk to our own phones so calls could come in
- and to let us make phone calls out.
I tried finding some consultant or company who could do this for us, but no luck. So we're getting a bigger and better version of the Norstar system we've got now. And that's fine -- it's done, someone else is doing it, and someone else is going to support it. But some kind of phone-networking-for-dummies would've been great.