Google already provides this. They have specific support for Gizmo.
Google bought Gizmo a while back, and I have a Gizmo account (I happened to have mine before the buyout, but my Google Voice account is also a migrated Grand Central account from before Google bought out Grand Central, so Google buying all of this out had no effect on me at all).
Gizmo is integrated with my Google Voice account, all free. Works great. I have a standard Linksys VoIP box that I bought that hooks into Gizmo's SIP gateway and when I want to make a call I simply log into Google Voice, tell it I want to call FROM my Gizmo box TO phone number xyz, my Gizmo phone rings, and when I pick it up it dials through to the number I want to call. Since it's all incoming minutes to Gizmo, that's free, and no charge for US calls in Google Voice. When I get an incoming call, my cell phone, office phone, and Gizmo line all ring, and I can answer them on any device I want.
Any and all SIP devices welcome, since Gizmo uses the bog standard SIP protocols.
Hmm, I took your post above and ran it through text-to-speech and all I got was this old screechy voice screaming "SPAM, SPAM, EGGS, AND SPAM! IT HASN'T GOT AS MUCH SPAM IN IT!"
I think the technology is further along than one might assume.
Interesting point. That depends on your interpreted definition of "performance" of the work.
When you purchase a book, you certainly have the right to read it aloud in a noncommercial performance. So, yeah, no one is coming after our respective copies of "Goodnight Moon".
However, Amazon doesn't own a license to read the book for profit. So selling text-only e-books on a device that can actually read them aloud is tantamount to offering a "free audio version" of the book with every e-book sold. That means that Amazon is, in effect, selling unauthorized audio versions of their e-books and not compensating the artist/publisher for same. Sort of.
I'm not saying I agree with this argument, because you could argue just as validly that making the font scalable should be considered unauthorized unless Amazon sells it as a separate large-print book edition.
You think you're buying a right to the text, but the publishers want limits put on those rights so they can sell you other rights separately. Is having a machine read you a book aloud considered an "unauthorized reproduction"? Is it giving you more book than the publishers thought they were authorizing Amazon to sell? Obviously the publishers seem to think so.
But buying a "licensed for text only" book along with a device that can turn it into an audiobook by reading it aloud is a whole new legal concept, and one that blurs the line between text-only books and their higher-priced brethren, audiobooks. And allowing it to be read in a synthesized voice could set a dangerous precedent (from the publisher's point of view) since Amazon could license some good voices and arguably make e-books better than the audiobooks the publishers produce (because you'd get your choice of voices), thereby cutting into audiobook sales, all for a cut-rate e-book margin.
Amazon could even sample an author's voice (as long as sufficient recordings exist) and use that to read the book. What would you pay for a Mark Twain-like voice to read Huck Finn? The publisher would see none of that income. The author might not even see it, unless we are copyrighting voices now, and that could get tricky because you could just hire a voice-actor who sounds similar enough.
How about an algorithm that assigns a voice to each character and reads it off, while dropping the "John said" and "Frank replied" bits, with a neutral narrator voice to fill in the background? That's not very hard to do once you have the book in electronic text format and a little processing power. It would compete with multi-actor complicated audiobooks that cost good money to produce.
Once the words get out there in electronic form, we can do all sorts of electronic things to them.
Variants like this on written books are pretty much free money sitting on the sidewalk. The publishers want to make sure no one else can pick it up.
I don't think their arguments are correct, but I see where they are coming from and why they'd want to make those arguments, and there are vast cans of worms yet to be opened on this subject.
No, but I know my wife's unlocked Nokia 5800 is a pretty capable PDA with no locked ties to a carrier for $220 including shipping from Amazon (US market).
If you've got your heart set on Android, though, sorry. Those appear to start in the $375 price range for the unlocked ones, and go up alarmingly fast from there.
So don't buy locked phones. Unlocked units are available starting in the $100 range, $200 if you want WiFi access to turn it into a decent Internet-connected PDA while you're home. Very simple unlocked phones with tethering are probably pretty damned cheap, since just about everyone supports tethering on even their very simple phones.
The "cell company evil" can be purchased at your local convenience store in the form of a disposable prepaid GSM chip if you like.
Unlocked phones can be expensive, but there are an interesting variety of inexpensive options available to you if you look around.
Nokia 5800. Works great as a PDA, comes with WiFi and GPS and turn-by-turn voice navigation free for life, a 5mpix camera plus a second one up front for video conferencing. Symbian OS so you can load a crapload of stuff on it if you want. Great music player, syncs to Google's Gmail and Calendar with no problems, handles other email accounts easily.
No need to install a SIM chip, works just fine without it if you don't want a phone. $220 on Amazon for the US version, free shipping. Not a bad choice for a PDA, not a bad choice for a GPS, a pretty decent halfassed camera, and it conveniently comes with a cell phone in case you care about details like that.
If you later decide you want to carry it around as a phone, just buy a SIM chip month-to-month or minute-by-minute from your local GSM carrier of choice or convenience store, and have at it. Otherwise, you can turn the phone radio off to save battery.
My wife's got one, she wanted a smartphone but we didn't want to get into a monthly data plan. As far as AT&T knows, she still has a dumb phone - we don't use their GSM/EDGE/3G for data, only for voice, and since we didn't buy it from them they can't lock out the WiFi on us.
Sorry, wrong term. It's a Plugin, and they are located under Tools/Plugins on the Pidgin menu, the plugin you want is called "Voice/Video Settings".
Once you set up your webcam and mic, set up the account as XMPP, with your Gmail username (the bit before the @ only) as the user and gmail.com as the domain, and I have mine set up to force SSL and the connect port is 5222.
True, but you have to understand these are Trekkies. They figure, like security guards, if the relationship can survive the first three minutes until the commercial, it's good for the whole show.
There's a wiki out there that I contributed to some time ago - and coincidentally I got a notice that someone posted the solution in some detail to that page just today:
When I solved it, you couldn't unlink the two channels in the default GUI, so I had to download a more detailed control package (forget what it is) and solve it that way. That was in Mint 8, though, and Mint 9 probably has the more detailed controls as default (I think I had to get the detailed controls from a backport, so they may be default now).
The Linux Laptop Wiki is a great resource, regardless. It was where I found the brightness annoyances (and the easy workaround), so I figured I'd contribute my "boot to USB" tips there.
There are plenty of people who think that Linux doesn't matter that much any more. And, for them (and you), assuming you are talking about Linux on the desktop, you're right. Unless you want to make it matter, it doesn't.
Embedded devices like routers and cell phones and PVR/DVRs and the like are a whole separate discussion. Linux itself may matter to your lifestyle a little more than you think. But you don't need to worry about that any more than you have to worry about the brand of spark plugs in your car. It was part of the box you bought, that box would just have cost more if Linux wasn't available and the manufacturer had to license something else. Almost no one puts a sticker on their box that says "Linux Inside" any more than Ford puts "Delco Sparkplugs Inside" on their cars. It's part of what you bought, but not necessarily part of why you would want to choose that specific one over others.
But Linux on the desktop, whether you feel it matters to you or not, does benefit you in myriad small ways. Apple and Microsoft see Linux as a threat, and even as a minor threat Linux still drives Apple and Microsoft to improve their products. In the end, we all win when there's some form of perceived threat to the market leader that they can't simply destroy by discounting their product enough or buying out the competition or suing them into oblivion.
The threat the Linux community presents to Microsoft and Apple is that we are not not one person, it's not one organization, and they can't stop us. We are not one, we are legion. Microsoft (in particular) has to carefully consider the presence of Linux distros when setting pricing, adding features, fighting piracy, and attempting to position themselves as "worth the money" when compared to an operating system that is free for all to use and modify to suit their own tastes.
Linux on the desktop may never even approach Apple MacOS in terms of popularity. It's certainly not going to knock Microsoft off its perch in the near future. Maybe never. We penguinheads are perfectly fine with that, in fact most of us don't really care. We just want software we can use on our own terms. Some might prefer it because it costs no money, some might prefer it because no one can ever take it from us.
So does Pidgin, and has done for at least a few months. I'm not sure what the author of the summary was on about, I've had Gmail video chats between a Windows box and my wife's Linux box several times, her using Pidgin and me using the video chat client in Firefox.
Her eeePC has some microphone driver oddities we had to overcome in Linux (my one and only reason to drop to the command line in that install, turns out the eeePC identifies itself as having a stereo mic but only a mono is installed, and if signal comes in on both channels they cancel each other out, so you have to mute one of them), but the camera worked right out of the box in Linux Mint, and turning on video chat support in Pidgin was a matter of enabling the extension and using it, all in the Pidgin GUI.
In any case, it's nice to see it coming straight to the browser chat client.
No, the theory is that that $20 may or may not buy you a loaf of bread, and the price of that loaf of bread doesn't exist until you look on the shelf for it.
I wondered why I had such an awesome yield of pumpkins this year, and why the neighbor's dog sounded awfully loud when my nearest neighbor is about a half mile away. It's all so clear to me now.
[sound of shotgun being cocked]
"Time for some pumpkin pie, muthafuhkas! Harvest starts now!"
This guy is just combining fear-mongering, american exceptionalism, and paranoid delusions to try and make his political opponents look bad. He is saying nothing of value.
Umm, yeah. He's a politician. That's what we voted him in for. He's a Republocrat, and will save us from the Evil Demoblicans.
True, but line speeds are variable, and can't be controlled as well as bags of chips.
A more amusing, though probably no more enlightening, analogy is a crowded all-you-can-eat restaurant with very small plates.
- Those sitting right near the buffet line get the best throughput. They can see when interesting new things come out, and it's a shorter walk, so they can make more trips in less time.
- Those sitting a little bit away can make fewer trips, because the trips are longer. There's also a chance they'll be delayed by the crowd between them and the buffet line.
- Those sitting the furthest away can make the fewest trips and will be blocked more frequently by closer patrons.
- The restaurant owner realizes that the average person eats 2 plates, so he charges for three in his "all you can eat" plan.
If everyone eats 4 plates of food, he loses money. So he's got to come up with a way to get people to like his restaurant enough to pay for the 3 plates but only eat 2. If everyone decides they want 4 plates, he's going to have to charge for 5. So he'll take the people who are more likely to eat more than 2 plates and try to find a way to get them to not like the restaurant, or eat less while they are there, or charge them a premium for access to larger plates, or something.
So, of course, he takes the larger folks and places them as far away from the buffet line as possible, to reduce their throughput of food. OK, that's really not a good part of the analogy, but I used to weigh a lot more than I do now, and don't think for a second that I'm making that part up.
Slashdot Mirror
Correction: My apologies, I didn't realize they weren't accepting new users for Gizmo yet. Maybe that's what the Gmail launch is all about.
Google already provides this. They have specific support for Gizmo.
Google bought Gizmo a while back, and I have a Gizmo account (I happened to have mine before the buyout, but my Google Voice account is also a migrated Grand Central account from before Google bought out Grand Central, so Google buying all of this out had no effect on me at all).
Gizmo is integrated with my Google Voice account, all free. Works great. I have a standard Linksys VoIP box that I bought that hooks into Gizmo's SIP gateway and when I want to make a call I simply log into Google Voice, tell it I want to call FROM my Gizmo box TO phone number xyz, my Gizmo phone rings, and when I pick it up it dials through to the number I want to call. Since it's all incoming minutes to Gizmo, that's free, and no charge for US calls in Google Voice. When I get an incoming call, my cell phone, office phone, and Gizmo line all ring, and I can answer them on any device I want.
Any and all SIP devices welcome, since Gizmo uses the bog standard SIP protocols.
Hmm, I took your post above and ran it through text-to-speech and all I got was this old screechy voice screaming "SPAM, SPAM, EGGS, AND SPAM! IT HASN'T GOT AS MUCH SPAM IN IT!"
I think the technology is further along than one might assume.
Interesting point. That depends on your interpreted definition of "performance" of the work.
When you purchase a book, you certainly have the right to read it aloud in a noncommercial performance. So, yeah, no one is coming after our respective copies of "Goodnight Moon".
However, Amazon doesn't own a license to read the book for profit. So selling text-only e-books on a device that can actually read them aloud is tantamount to offering a "free audio version" of the book with every e-book sold. That means that Amazon is, in effect, selling unauthorized audio versions of their e-books and not compensating the artist/publisher for same. Sort of.
I'm not saying I agree with this argument, because you could argue just as validly that making the font scalable should be considered unauthorized unless Amazon sells it as a separate large-print book edition.
You think you're buying a right to the text, but the publishers want limits put on those rights so they can sell you other rights separately. Is having a machine read you a book aloud considered an "unauthorized reproduction"? Is it giving you more book than the publishers thought they were authorizing Amazon to sell? Obviously the publishers seem to think so.
But buying a "licensed for text only" book along with a device that can turn it into an audiobook by reading it aloud is a whole new legal concept, and one that blurs the line between text-only books and their higher-priced brethren, audiobooks. And allowing it to be read in a synthesized voice could set a dangerous precedent (from the publisher's point of view) since Amazon could license some good voices and arguably make e-books better than the audiobooks the publishers produce (because you'd get your choice of voices), thereby cutting into audiobook sales, all for a cut-rate e-book margin.
Amazon could even sample an author's voice (as long as sufficient recordings exist) and use that to read the book. What would you pay for a Mark Twain-like voice to read Huck Finn? The publisher would see none of that income. The author might not even see it, unless we are copyrighting voices now, and that could get tricky because you could just hire a voice-actor who sounds similar enough.
How about an algorithm that assigns a voice to each character and reads it off, while dropping the "John said" and "Frank replied" bits, with a neutral narrator voice to fill in the background? That's not very hard to do once you have the book in electronic text format and a little processing power. It would compete with multi-actor complicated audiobooks that cost good money to produce.
Once the words get out there in electronic form, we can do all sorts of electronic things to them.
Variants like this on written books are pretty much free money sitting on the sidewalk. The publishers want to make sure no one else can pick it up.
I don't think their arguments are correct, but I see where they are coming from and why they'd want to make those arguments, and there are vast cans of worms yet to be opened on this subject.
No, but I know my wife's unlocked Nokia 5800 is a pretty capable PDA with no locked ties to a carrier for $220 including shipping from Amazon (US market).
If you've got your heart set on Android, though, sorry. Those appear to start in the $375 price range for the unlocked ones, and go up alarmingly fast from there.
So don't buy locked phones. Unlocked units are available starting in the $100 range, $200 if you want WiFi access to turn it into a decent Internet-connected PDA while you're home. Very simple unlocked phones with tethering are probably pretty damned cheap, since just about everyone supports tethering on even their very simple phones.
The "cell company evil" can be purchased at your local convenience store in the form of a disposable prepaid GSM chip if you like.
Unlocked phones can be expensive, but there are an interesting variety of inexpensive options available to you if you look around.
One (of many) possible options:
Nokia 5800. Works great as a PDA, comes with WiFi and GPS and turn-by-turn voice navigation free for life, a 5mpix camera plus a second one up front for video conferencing. Symbian OS so you can load a crapload of stuff on it if you want. Great music player, syncs to Google's Gmail and Calendar with no problems, handles other email accounts easily.
No need to install a SIM chip, works just fine without it if you don't want a phone. $220 on Amazon for the US version, free shipping. Not a bad choice for a PDA, not a bad choice for a GPS, a pretty decent halfassed camera, and it conveniently comes with a cell phone in case you care about details like that.
If you later decide you want to carry it around as a phone, just buy a SIM chip month-to-month or minute-by-minute from your local GSM carrier of choice or convenience store, and have at it. Otherwise, you can turn the phone radio off to save battery.
My wife's got one, she wanted a smartphone but we didn't want to get into a monthly data plan. As far as AT&T knows, she still has a dumb phone - we don't use their GSM/EDGE/3G for data, only for voice, and since we didn't buy it from them they can't lock out the WiFi on us.
Sorry, wrong term. It's a Plugin, and they are located under Tools/Plugins on the Pidgin menu, the plugin you want is called "Voice/Video Settings".
Once you set up your webcam and mic, set up the account as XMPP, with your Gmail username (the bit before the @ only) as the user and gmail.com as the domain, and I have mine set up to force SSL and the connect port is 5222.
Hope this helps.
Standard procedure is to slump senselessly to the ground.
True, but you have to understand these are Trekkies. They figure, like security guards, if the relationship can survive the first three minutes until the commercial, it's good for the whole show.
Just don't wear a red shirt.
Pidgin does Google Voice (including video) just fine. Others have reported that Empathy is also good at it.
There's a wiki out there that I contributed to some time ago - and coincidentally I got a notice that someone posted the solution in some detail to that page just today:
http://www.linlap.com/wiki/asus+eee+pc+1005pe#comment_daacb79590433e3b0a2ffdf557f1c2ea
When I solved it, you couldn't unlink the two channels in the default GUI, so I had to download a more detailed control package (forget what it is) and solve it that way. That was in Mint 8, though, and Mint 9 probably has the more detailed controls as default (I think I had to get the detailed controls from a backport, so they may be default now).
The Linux Laptop Wiki is a great resource, regardless. It was where I found the brightness annoyances (and the easy workaround), so I figured I'd contribute my "boot to USB" tips there.
No. It's not just you.
There are plenty of people who think that Linux doesn't matter that much any more. And, for them (and you), assuming you are talking about Linux on the desktop, you're right. Unless you want to make it matter, it doesn't.
Embedded devices like routers and cell phones and PVR/DVRs and the like are a whole separate discussion. Linux itself may matter to your lifestyle a little more than you think. But you don't need to worry about that any more than you have to worry about the brand of spark plugs in your car. It was part of the box you bought, that box would just have cost more if Linux wasn't available and the manufacturer had to license something else. Almost no one puts a sticker on their box that says "Linux Inside" any more than Ford puts "Delco Sparkplugs Inside" on their cars. It's part of what you bought, but not necessarily part of why you would want to choose that specific one over others.
But Linux on the desktop, whether you feel it matters to you or not, does benefit you in myriad small ways. Apple and Microsoft see Linux as a threat, and even as a minor threat Linux still drives Apple and Microsoft to improve their products. In the end, we all win when there's some form of perceived threat to the market leader that they can't simply destroy by discounting their product enough or buying out the competition or suing them into oblivion.
The threat the Linux community presents to Microsoft and Apple is that we are not not one person, it's not one organization, and they can't stop us. We are not one, we are legion. Microsoft (in particular) has to carefully consider the presence of Linux distros when setting pricing, adding features, fighting piracy, and attempting to position themselves as "worth the money" when compared to an operating system that is free for all to use and modify to suit their own tastes.
Linux on the desktop may never even approach Apple MacOS in terms of popularity. It's certainly not going to knock Microsoft off its perch in the near future. Maybe never. We penguinheads are perfectly fine with that, in fact most of us don't really care. We just want software we can use on our own terms. Some might prefer it because it costs no money, some might prefer it because no one can ever take it from us.
So does Pidgin, and has done for at least a few months. I'm not sure what the author of the summary was on about, I've had Gmail video chats between a Windows box and my wife's Linux box several times, her using Pidgin and me using the video chat client in Firefox.
Her eeePC has some microphone driver oddities we had to overcome in Linux (my one and only reason to drop to the command line in that install, turns out the eeePC identifies itself as having a stereo mic but only a mono is installed, and if signal comes in on both channels they cancel each other out, so you have to mute one of them), but the camera worked right out of the box in Linux Mint, and turning on video chat support in Pidgin was a matter of enabling the extension and using it, all in the Pidgin GUI.
In any case, it's nice to see it coming straight to the browser chat client.
I start to flail about and gape and make little clucking noises. I expect there are a fair number of physics fellas doing the same.
Yeah, but we gave Hawking a voice simulator years ago.
[sorry, I know I'm going to Slashdot Hell for that one]
No, the theory is that that $20 may or may not buy you a loaf of bread, and the price of that loaf of bread doesn't exist until you look on the shelf for it.
Funny, I thought your name was Agador? Or are you insisting on being called by your full name again?
I wondered why I had such an awesome yield of pumpkins this year, and why the neighbor's dog sounded awfully loud when my nearest neighbor is about a half mile away. It's all so clear to me now.
[sound of shotgun being cocked]
"Time for some pumpkin pie, muthafuhkas! Harvest starts now!"
[sound of gunfire and whimpering pumpkins]
This guy is just combining fear-mongering, american exceptionalism, and paranoid delusions to try and make his political opponents look bad. He is saying nothing of value.
Umm, yeah. He's a politician. That's what we voted him in for. He's a Republocrat, and will save us from the Evil Demoblicans.
Certainly adds new definition to the term screening.
Ah, so you have ACHD, "Amonymous Coward Hypermodding Disorder".
There's a cure for that. It's called "logging-in".
No, no, no, that newfangled gimcrackery runs on electricity, son. ;)
Still, cool pic.
At the risk of being serious, factual, and pedantic
No risk, you were all that. But you were also correct. It was a lowercase "L". Thanks for the correction.
My memory ain't what it used to be.
And 50% of the users like their ISPs 50% more than they deserve...
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
True, but line speeds are variable, and can't be controlled as well as bags of chips.
A more amusing, though probably no more enlightening, analogy is a crowded all-you-can-eat restaurant with very small plates.
- Those sitting right near the buffet line get the best throughput. They can see when interesting new things come out, and it's a shorter walk, so they can make more trips in less time.
- Those sitting a little bit away can make fewer trips, because the trips are longer. There's also a chance they'll be delayed by the crowd between them and the buffet line.
- Those sitting the furthest away can make the fewest trips and will be blocked more frequently by closer patrons.
- The restaurant owner realizes that the average person eats 2 plates, so he charges for three in his "all you can eat" plan.
If everyone eats 4 plates of food, he loses money. So he's got to come up with a way to get people to like his restaurant enough to pay for the 3 plates but only eat 2. If everyone decides they want 4 plates, he's going to have to charge for 5. So he'll take the people who are more likely to eat more than 2 plates and try to find a way to get them to not like the restaurant, or eat less while they are there, or charge them a premium for access to larger plates, or something.
So, of course, he takes the larger folks and places them as far away from the buffet line as possible, to reduce their throughput of food. OK, that's really not a good part of the analogy, but I used to weigh a lot more than I do now, and don't think for a second that I'm making that part up.