Re:RH8... the good, the bad, the ugly....
on
Red Hat 8.0 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
All recent version of PHP have deprecated the REGISTER_GLOBALS option (and good riddance!). This is most likely what is causing your problems, poorly written scripts will no longer run on recent PHP's.
They haven't got rid of REGISTER_GLOBALS rather they have just made the default to be off. That is of course a good thing as they can often cause drastic security risks by people passing variables to your script and causing behaviour you didn't expect. For now you could re-enable it but I wouldn't recommend leaving it that way. Fix your scripts and then leave it off.
The first thing you should do after install is go through your list of services and see what is really needed. Start with xinetd because that can start up some really unnecessary beasts. Doing a "netstat -a" is a good way to find out what ports are open or alternatively "lsof -i" will tell you the name of a program attached to a port. Just go through all the things open and shutdown everything you don't really need.
The next thing to do is to setup some sort of firewall script. How you do this really depends on how confident you are. If you think you know what you are doing then use iptables to setup a custom restrictive firewall. There are many example scripts here and an excellent tutorial here. If you want a GUI to do the work, I would recommend Smoothwall. I know of quite a few novices who successfully use it.
You should then be reasonably secure. BUT, keep an idea on the Redhat updates; there are usually loads released in the first few weeks of a new distro.
Re:install 8.0 for a new server installation?
on
Red Hat 8.0 Reviewed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
is there a compelling reason to install 8.0 instead of 7.3?
For a server install I wouldn't bother. Usually what happens when any new distro comes out there are a flurry of bugs/security issues noticed in the first few weeks and loads of patches released. This is a natural process due to suddenly having a much wider test base that the Redhat 8 beta had. Also, since this is a new major version the are likely to be even more problems. Redhat 7.3 is stable and as long as you have applied all the updates it is adequately secure. I can't see that there is anything in 8.0 that is desperately needed for a server install. I would wait for the storm to calm and then take a look at it. Just my two pence worth.
It is impossible, with our current resources, to pull people out of poverty. It is work like this that will one day give us the chance to pull humanity out of the gutter.
That just isn't the case. There have been many marvelous inventions in the last, say, 20 years. The number of those that have actually helped more than a tiny fraction of the worlds population is very small. However, there are many things that could be done to help poverty in the world but only if those who are currently enjoying their thirst of consuming the worlds resources slow down . Currently the average US citizen consumes in the range of 50 times more resources than a citizen in Asia. In other words, the 10 billion light bulbs example would have powered a city in Asia that is 50 times bigger. So tell them that this is not a waste of resouces. Tell the guys who are living in poverty what use an anit-matter atom is going to do. Build a warp drive space ship....sure that would help them. Or perhaps a new weapon of mass destruction we can threaten them with?
Don't get me wrong I am not against scientific development: if the aim is to further humanity. In this particular case, that doesn't seem to be the motivation. And the crazy thing in this example is that so much resources are being consumed for something that can't be proven to actually work (or exist).
Yes! We all pay for it. This is my world as much as yours and theirs. Consuming so much energy eats from all of our resources and polutes all of our environment. To me it seems that there are so many more beneficial (to humanity that is not someones ego) projects around that could actually help the world. Especially since such a large proportion of the world lives in poverty. Instead though we have some egotistical scientist carrying out an experiment that can't be proven to work with the crazed hopefullness that one day his work might make a new weapon of mass destruction or be used in a star cruiser. Is this what the world really needs?
Making antiprotons requires 10 billion times more energy than it produces. For example, the antimatter produced each year at Cern could power a 100 watt light bulb for just 15 minutes.
10 billion lightbulbs! So, they used enough electricity to power a small city for a whole year and the result is....they might have been fooled into a false positive result. I am sure there are lots of better ways of using this power rather than chasing gold at bottoms of rainbows
How exactly does the image search feature work? Apart from the filename, what makes an image more likely to be returned in the search results? Have you considered using OCR software to read text in i mages and an image as text option on the search page that will extract the text from an image?
Re:Windows has us on this one.
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 1
Well, I hate to admit it, but this area is one of the fiew that Windows is still king.
Like in other replies, there is just one file to install anything on a windows machine. The.exe creates directories, updates as needed (the updates are included usually in the.exe), coppies files to directories, writes to the regestry, and cleans up after its self. The.exe installer has become _very_ efficent.
Hmm...It isn't exactly a package managment utility though. Unless installation and removal are the only features that a package management system need to have. Windows installers don't give even half of the features that you would expect of a decent package management utility. Most notably, it can't even tell you what other packages rely on this package of which other packages this package relies on. Let alone other nifty features like md5 check sums, build and install information and a list of which files where installed where.
Linux, however, lacks in this arena. To just configure _source_ to be ready to compile the user/installer must go to shell and run./configure.sh And that's just to make source ready to go.
This can not be comapared to package managment. The configure script is for building and was never intended for managing installs. It serves it purpose well allowing the same source code to be built under multiple different architectures and operating systems. A truly excellent utility
Another shortfall of RPMs is the fact that when an RMP is downloaded, you _ONLY_ download the binary for the program you want to run. The RPM usually does not include updates to dependances, it expects you to fix them your self.
That is not a shortfall in itself. A package should only contain the binary for the program(s) the package is for. Shared libaries that are built independently should be provided independently. The trouble with RPM is that although it will tell you the name of the thing that it requires it won't tell you how or where to get it. The way around that is to use an apt-get type wrapper around RPM because really that sort of information should be stored in a repository not in the package itself. Otherwise, when the name of a mirror site changes, all the distributed packages would have the wrong mirror name.
So, my far fetched idiea is
1) Have a central repository for _ALL_ configuration and initialization files. (like a regestry?)
You mean like/etc ? Seriously, the idea of one file (registry) conatining all the configuration is a nightmare. Especially the way it is implemented in windows. It is very difficult to edit the registry (for a layman that is) under windows and easy to accidently change the configuration for the wrong program. With all the configuration files in a standard place like/etc they are easy to find. Typically the plain text styled configuration files that are used under Linux are easy to change even for the layman (ok...forget sendmail).
3) Have a standard that is agreed upon across the board for files to be included in an RPM and make them generic. ex. An RPM for Red Hat should also work under Mandrake. (I don't know if this is possible beacuse of file placement, directory, etc. discrepencies)
A lot of that, although not RPM specific, is covered in the Linx Standard Base that once adopted will help a lot of the compatability problems across distributions.
which means the fee was well over $100/year! that seems like a HUGE fee!! $5, or even $20 a seat/year would be more like it!
I don't think that your conclusion is right for following reasons:
A typical seat would not only involve an OS (probably something like Windows XP or NT4 client because Windows 9x/Me don't give the necessary security and control a big establishment needs) but it would also involve things like MS Office Proffesional, MS Publisher and perhaps Visio, Project, Anti-virus software etc. All of these cost big bucks.
On top of that, you would need file servers and database servers that are going to supply the core office functionality. Now we are talking hefty license fees. For 500,000 seats, we are talking a lot of servers.
You have to have people to manage the licenses which for 500,000 seats is a full time job.
As a result, the $100 a seat is quite realistic when you take everything into account.
I recently bid for a tender to make a particular software solution for a client. The client was worried that because I came from a small unknown company, there was no continuity. That is, they were worried who would look after the system if my company wasn't around after two or three years.
The solution to the problem was to release the software as open source. The client then felt that if anything happenned to my company it would be easy for a third party to pick up the pieces and give the necessary support to maintain the system.
In this case everyone benefited from Open Source. The client manages to get a system produced cheeper using Open Source technology rather than everything be proprietary, I benefit because I still get paid for the work and the community as a whole benefits as other people can use the same software without having to re-invent the wheel.
This may not be the most typical situation or client but it does prove that the Open Source model can work for some people.
You are right. In fact it can not be classified as theft due to the fact that nothing has actually been stolen rather it has been copied. That is not haram (forbidden) in Islaam at all.
As a sunni Muslim I beg to differ with the opinion of Al-Ahzar. For something to be haram in Islam there has to be some prior example for it in previous laws from the time of the prophet Muhammed; from which an analogy can be drawn. For example we can say that cocaine is haram because it is an intoxicant and intoxicants are haram due to prior examples, even though cocaine was not known in the time of the prophet.
In this case there is no, afaik, prior example for any sort of intellectual property law. In the time of the prophet there was a lot of literature, especically poetry which the Arabs were very fond of, and none of this was ever protected by any sort of ownership law.
However, there are two things that are haram in Islam which Western intellectual property laws are meant to protect against. The first is trying to pass off as someone else and the second is breaking an agreement (which perhaps could be a EULA).
However, in the example of the EULA, there still has to be some sort of prior example that such an agreement is valid before third parties have to agree to it. For example, I can't make up a law saying "by standing in the rain you agree to pay me $1,000,000 bucks" because I don't have the right to do that. In this case, because intellectual ownership hasn't been proven under Islamic law the EULA has no place.
In conclusion, there are many Muslims (sunni and others) who would go to the other extreme and say there is no basis for intellectual property laws in Islam and in fact that they go against some of the basic principles of Islamic life like putting the welfare of the community before the individual and not hoarding money or knowledge for oneself. To me Islamic law would make everything Open Source.
I think they just copied the wind up radio idea that the US used for proaganda in Afganistan. Applying the idea to a laptop doesn't really warrant being called an invention.
I was disappointed by the bad speech encoding.
I had expected in 2002 you'd actually be able
to synthesize a voice that sounds close to
human or at least be understandable.
The old amiga 500 had a utility that was much
more understandable than this is.
I don't know about the Amiga but I had an old TI99-4A that had a speech synthesis module. It was quite good at reading most words but had a built in list of words it could read. You could get it to read other words but it meant that you had to express the word in a special way so that the module could pronounce it properly. That really defeats the point of text to speech.
I think text to speech has come on a long way since those days but it seems like slow progress which is due to the complexity of the subject. There is a good open source text to speech engine called Festival. You can test it with your own text here
So they're reinvented QuickTime, but only for audio used for telephony applications
You can see from the gstreamer download page that there are many plugins for gstreamer and that it is not just limited to audio. Gstreamer is an application frame work which can be used for any application that requires streaming. This would of course typically be audio/video apps.
Phonestreamer is built on top of the gstreamer architecture and provides a framework for building telephony applications. It does more than gstreamer because there are two major parts to telephony applications. The DSP functionality and the Call Control. The DSP functionality is where gstreamer comes in and the Call Control functionality is where phonestreamer comes in.
The newly combined Bayonne / PreViking teams will also be working on www.phonestreamer.com, built on top of GStreamer.
Just to elaborate on this project a bit for those interested. The aim of the phonestreamer project is to provide an easy frame work on which to build telephony applications. The system works by having a series of modules linked together connect through sources and sinks. For example, a source might be a MP3 file pulled from a web site, it might then go through a series of modules that do various manipuplations that convert the audio stream to 8bit U-Law that can be played straight out on an ISDN line. The sink would then be an ISDN card or something similar.
The phonestreamer project will provide sources and sinks for many different types of hardware starting off with those already supported in GNU Bayonne and PreViking. For example, Dialogic, NMS, Capi and eventually SIP and H323. If someone then wanted to create GUI telephone applications under Linux most of their work would already be done and they could concentrate their efforts more on the application and the GUI functionality and wouldn't need to worry about the low level telephony programming.
There will also be source/sink modules for all sorts of audio conversion. Many of these have already been written for the GStreamer architecture anyway.
Those visiting the show, don't forget to come and check out telephony under Linux by making free International calls at booth #13.
I would suggest that web surfers are slightly more likely to be tech-savvy and therefore web-surfers will have a higher percentage of Linux desktop use than non-web users. So the figure may be even lower.
I would have thought it would be the other way around. They don't say anything about which websites people were visiting. I am sure if sites like/., freshmeat, kernel.org where counted the hits would change again. I am sure the sites I read every day weren't counted. The sites counted probably are the more commonly hit sites that aren't the same sites that the majority of Linux users read.
1) One million Iraqi civilians have not been "killed" in the course of the sanctions.
I am quoting Madeleine Albright who when questioned about the above said, "it is a price worth paying". The fact is that these Iraqi people are starving because they don't have food and that is a direct result of the sanctions placed upon them. The figure I quoted of the number of civilians that have been killed, oh wait lets say that have died if it sounds less harsh to you, is widely accepted as being accurate although it was somewhat less when Madeleine made her barbaric statement.
2) Any (far lesser) out-of-the-ordinary (for Iraq) deaths in the course of the sanctions are "a result of" the actions of their own miserable and vile government, which the citizens as a body allow to remain in place.
What? Just because most people in the West live in democracy it doesn't mean it is like that everywhere in the world. These people never choose their governement. They certainly don't want their government. They are dictated. How are they meant to, without arms, overthrow a heavily armed and protected government? May be if you have the answer to that you can tell the Iraqi people and give them a chance to finish this mess.
3) The Iraqi government is well known to have targeted groups of their own citizens. You need look no further for the culprit. People in glass houses...
Precisely! That is why sanctions are barbaric, unjustified and insane. Everyone knows that the Iraqi government aren't going to suffer at all because of the sanctions. Saddam still lives in this mulitude of elaborate palaces. It is the Iraqi people who suffer. The government are just going to hoard the countries money for themselve more than they did before. Knowing this, who do the sanctions target? The innocent!
for me terrorism has nothing to do with the actions and everything to do with the intent
Your reasoning isn't bad but what about a freedom fighter? By your definition a freedom fighter would always be a terrorist. Personally I don't think that is fair. Many groups of people may have a just reason for fighting a government because they are being occupied or discriminated against.
I'm also sure that it'll never take over the internet, because it's a different medium
I don't think that most people see it as being in competition with the web but rather in complement to it. Obviously, most of us sat at our computers all day would always prefer to read/. rather than having to listen to it. Text is just quicker to naviagate, you can skip bits and re-read bits as needed.
One application that we are working on in the PreViking project is to make a telephone gateway for the web. The VoiceXML (or CallXML) can be translated into IVR commands on the PreViking telephony gateway. You can then literally map a telephone number to a website.
For example, you would dial some 800 number to access/. PreViking fetches the VoiceXML from the/. webserver. Uses a text-to-speech engine and reads the headlines out to you. You can then select, either by DTMF or voice recognition, the story you want and have the article read to you. The opportunities for this are endless.
I would also much perfer when out-and-about to have voice interaction with the internet then having to fiddle around with a small and slow WAP interface. Companies can make there customers information, sales information, news stories available easily over the phone wihtout having to deploy any expensive telephony equipement. They just have to alter the web content to generate VoiceXML along with the HTML and have a Voice Application Service Provider to provide the voice facilities.
What is it about picking up a copy of Applied Cryptography and typing in one of the algorithms that's more challenging than either of those things?
Moreover, I think you will find that many of the terrorists have trainned in Western universities and that many of the terrorist groups will have access to much of the latest encryption techniques and protocols available. It wouldn't even suprise me if they had people inside the FBI, NSA etc. Quite frankly, any kind of system the governments want to introduce would be trivial for the terrorist to get round. I can't see anyone being inconvenienced by this type of law except your everyday innocent person.
Slashdot Mirror
All recent version of PHP have deprecated the REGISTER_GLOBALS option (and good riddance!). This is most likely what is causing your problems, poorly written scripts will no longer run on recent PHP's.
They haven't got rid of REGISTER_GLOBALS rather they have just made the default to be off. That is of course a good thing as they can often cause drastic security risks by people passing variables to your script and causing behaviour you didn't expect. For now you could re-enable it but I wouldn't recommend leaving it that way. Fix your scripts and then leave it off.
The first thing you should do after install is go through your list of services and see what is really needed. Start with xinetd because that can start up some really unnecessary beasts. Doing a "netstat -a" is a good way to find out what ports are open or alternatively "lsof -i" will tell you the name of a program attached to a port. Just go through all the things open and shutdown everything you don't really need.
The next thing to do is to setup some sort of firewall script. How you do this really depends on how confident you are. If you think you know what you are doing then use iptables to setup a custom restrictive firewall. There are many example scripts here and an excellent tutorial here. If you want a GUI to do the work, I would recommend Smoothwall. I know of quite a few novices who successfully use it.
You should then be reasonably secure. BUT, keep an idea on the Redhat updates; there are usually loads released in the first few weeks of a new distro.
is there a compelling reason to install 8.0 instead of 7.3?
For a server install I wouldn't bother. Usually what happens when any new distro comes out there are a flurry of bugs/security issues noticed in the first few weeks and loads of patches released. This is a natural process due to suddenly having a much wider test base that the Redhat 8 beta had. Also, since this is a new major version the are likely to be even more problems. Redhat 7.3 is stable and as long as you have applied all the updates it is adequately secure. I can't see that there is anything in 8.0 that is desperately needed for a server install. I would wait for the storm to calm and then take a look at it. Just my two pence worth.
www.openoffice.org
Yep...that's half the CD full.
PS: Isn't that the whole idea behind Open Standards?
This one always makes me laugh:
It is impossible, with our current resources, to pull people out of poverty. It is work like this that will one day give us the chance to pull humanity out of the gutter.
That just isn't the case. There have been many marvelous inventions in the last, say, 20 years. The number of those that have actually helped more than a tiny fraction of the worlds population is very small. However, there are many things that could be done to help poverty in the world but only if those who are currently enjoying their thirst of consuming the worlds resources slow down . Currently the average US citizen consumes in the range of 50 times more resources than a citizen in Asia. In other words, the 10 billion light bulbs example would have powered a city in Asia that is 50 times bigger. So tell them that this is not a waste of resouces. Tell the guys who are living in poverty what use an anit-matter atom is going to do. Build a warp drive space ship....sure that would help them. Or perhaps a new weapon of mass destruction we can threaten them with?
Don't get me wrong I am not against scientific development: if the aim is to further humanity. In this particular case, that doesn't seem to be the motivation. And the crazy thing in this example is that so much resources are being consumed for something that can't be proven to actually work (or exist).
Did the pay for it? If so, what do you care?
Yes! We all pay for it. This is my world as much as yours and theirs. Consuming so much energy eats from all of our resources and polutes all of our environment. To me it seems that there are so many more beneficial (to humanity that is not someones ego) projects around that could actually help the world. Especially since such a large proportion of the world lives in poverty. Instead though we have some egotistical scientist carrying out an experiment that can't be proven to work with the crazed hopefullness that one day his work might make a new weapon of mass destruction or be used in a star cruiser. Is this what the world really needs?
Making antiprotons requires 10 billion times more energy than it produces. For example, the antimatter produced each year at Cern could power a 100 watt light bulb for just 15 minutes.
10 billion lightbulbs! So, they used enough electricity to power a small city for a whole year and the result is....they might have been fooled into a false positive result. I am sure there are lots of better ways of using this power rather than chasing gold at bottoms of rainbows
Can we replace that? Can we work in another suite, or offer a choice? No. Nope. None. Nothing. No support for it.
Yeah, I agree. I find it very hard to write a virus for any other office or productivity suite.
How exactly does the image search feature work? Apart from the filename, what makes an image more likely to be returned in the search results? Have you considered using OCR software to read text in i mages and an image as text option on the search page that will extract the text from an image?
Well, I hate to admit it, but this area is one of the fiew that Windows is still king.
Like in other replies, there is just one file to install anything on a windows machine. The .exe creates directories, updates as needed (the updates are included usually in the .exe), coppies files to directories, writes to the regestry, and cleans up after its self. The .exe installer has become _very_ efficent.
Hmm...It isn't exactly a package managment utility though. Unless installation and removal are the only features that a package management system need to have. Windows installers don't give even half of the features that you would expect of a decent package management utility. Most notably, it can't even tell you what other packages rely on this package of which other packages this package relies on. Let alone other nifty features like md5 check sums, build and install information and a list of which files where installed where.
Linux, however, lacks in this arena. To just configure _source_ to be ready to compile the user/installer must go to shell and run ./configure.sh And that's just to make source ready to go.
This can not be comapared to package managment. The configure script is for building and was never intended for managing installs. It serves it purpose well allowing the same source code to be built under multiple different architectures and operating systems. A truly excellent utility
Another shortfall of RPMs is the fact that when an RMP is downloaded, you _ONLY_ download the binary for the program you want to run. The RPM usually does not include updates to dependances, it expects you to fix them your self.
That is not a shortfall in itself. A package should only contain the binary for the program(s) the package is for. Shared libaries that are built independently should be provided independently. The trouble with RPM is that although it will tell you the name of the thing that it requires it won't tell you how or where to get it. The way around that is to use an apt-get type wrapper around RPM because really that sort of information should be stored in a repository not in the package itself. Otherwise, when the name of a mirror site changes, all the distributed packages would have the wrong mirror name.
So, my far fetched idiea is 1) Have a central repository for _ALL_ configuration and initialization files. (like a regestry?)
You mean like /etc ? Seriously, the idea of one file (registry) conatining all the configuration is a nightmare. Especially the way it is implemented in windows. It is very difficult to edit the registry (for a layman that is) under windows and easy to accidently change the configuration for the wrong program. With all the configuration files in a standard place like /etc they are easy to find. Typically the plain text styled configuration files that are used under Linux are easy to change even for the layman (ok...forget sendmail).
3) Have a standard that is agreed upon across the board for files to be included in an RPM and make them generic. ex. An RPM for Red Hat should also work under Mandrake. (I don't know if this is possible beacuse of file placement, directory, etc. discrepencies)
A lot of that, although not RPM specific, is covered in the Linx Standard Base that once adopted will help a lot of the compatability problems across distributions.
which means the fee was well over $100/year! that seems like a HUGE fee!! $5, or even $20 a seat/year would be more like it!
I don't think that your conclusion is right for following reasons:
As a result, the $100 a seat is quite realistic when you take everything into account.
I recently bid for a tender to make a particular software solution for a client. The client was worried that because I came from a small unknown company, there was no continuity. That is, they were worried who would look after the system if my company wasn't around after two or three years.
The solution to the problem was to release the software as open source. The client then felt that if anything happenned to my company it would be easy for a third party to pick up the pieces and give the necessary support to maintain the system.
In this case everyone benefited from Open Source. The client manages to get a system produced cheeper using Open Source technology rather than everything be proprietary, I benefit because I still get paid for the work and the community as a whole benefits as other people can use the same software without having to re-invent the wheel.
This may not be the most typical situation or client but it does prove that the Open Source model can work for some people.
You are right. In fact it can not be classified as theft due to the fact that nothing has actually been stolen rather it has been copied. That is not haram (forbidden) in Islaam at all.
As a sunni Muslim I beg to differ with the opinion of Al-Ahzar. For something to be haram in Islam there has to be some prior example for it in previous laws from the time of the prophet Muhammed; from which an analogy can be drawn. For example we can say that cocaine is haram because it is an intoxicant and intoxicants are haram due to prior examples, even though cocaine was not known in the time of the prophet.
In this case there is no, afaik, prior example for any sort of intellectual property law. In the time of the prophet there was a lot of literature, especically poetry which the Arabs were very fond of, and none of this was ever protected by any sort of ownership law.
However, there are two things that are haram in Islam which Western intellectual property laws are meant to protect against. The first is trying to pass off as someone else and the second is breaking an agreement (which perhaps could be a EULA).
However, in the example of the EULA, there still has to be some sort of prior example that such an agreement is valid before third parties have to agree to it. For example, I can't make up a law saying "by standing in the rain you agree to pay me $1,000,000 bucks" because I don't have the right to do that. In this case, because intellectual ownership hasn't been proven under Islamic law the EULA has no place.
In conclusion, there are many Muslims (sunni and others) who would go to the other extreme and say there is no basis for intellectual property laws in Islam and in fact that they go against some of the basic principles of Islamic life like putting the welfare of the community before the individual and not hoarding money or knowledge for oneself. To me Islamic law would make everything Open Source.
I think they just copied the wind up radio idea that the US used for proaganda in Afganistan. Applying the idea to a laptop doesn't really warrant being called an invention.
I was disappointed by the bad speech encoding. I had expected in 2002 you'd actually be able to synthesize a voice that sounds close to human or at least be understandable. The old amiga 500 had a utility that was much more understandable than this is.
I don't know about the Amiga but I had an old TI99-4A that had a speech synthesis module. It was quite good at reading most words but had a built in list of words it could read. You could get it to read other words but it meant that you had to express the word in a special way so that the module could pronounce it properly. That really defeats the point of text to speech.
I think text to speech has come on a long way since those days but it seems like slow progress which is due to the complexity of the subject. There is a good open source text to speech engine called Festival. You can test it with your own text here
.So they're reinvented QuickTime, but only for audio used for telephony applications
You can see from the gstreamer download page that there are many plugins for gstreamer and that it is not just limited to audio. Gstreamer is an application frame work which can be used for any application that requires streaming. This would of course typically be audio/video apps.
Phonestreamer is built on top of the gstreamer architecture and provides a framework for building telephony applications. It does more than gstreamer because there are two major parts to telephony applications. The DSP functionality and the Call Control. The DSP functionality is where gstreamer comes in and the Call Control functionality is where phonestreamer comes in.
The newly combined Bayonne / PreViking teams will also be working on www.phonestreamer.com, built on top of GStreamer.
Just to elaborate on this project a bit for those interested. The aim of the phonestreamer project is to provide an easy frame work on which to build telephony applications. The system works by having a series of modules linked together connect through sources and sinks. For example, a source might be a MP3 file pulled from a web site, it might then go through a series of modules that do various manipuplations that convert the audio stream to 8bit U-Law that can be played straight out on an ISDN line. The sink would then be an ISDN card or something similar.
The phonestreamer project will provide sources and sinks for many different types of hardware starting off with those already supported in GNU Bayonne and PreViking. For example, Dialogic, NMS, Capi and eventually SIP and H323. If someone then wanted to create GUI telephone applications under Linux most of their work would already be done and they could concentrate their efforts more on the application and the GUI functionality and wouldn't need to worry about the low level telephony programming.
There will also be source/sink modules for all sorts of audio conversion. Many of these have already been written for the GStreamer architecture anyway.
Those visiting the show, don't forget to come and check out telephony under Linux by making free International calls at booth #13.
Linux Sucks Windows Roolz! Just look at the market share for Windows on the desktop system for proof you bunch of blind rats!
Ford have a higher market share than Ferrari. But I know which car I would prefer. Market share has never been a measure of how good any product is.
I would suggest that web surfers are slightly more likely to be tech-savvy and therefore web-surfers will have a higher percentage of Linux desktop use than non-web users. So the figure may be even lower.
I would have thought it would be the other way around. They don't say anything about which websites people were visiting. I am sure if sites like /., freshmeat, kernel.org where counted the hits would change again. I am sure the sites I read every day weren't counted. The sites counted probably are the more commonly hit sites that aren't the same sites that the majority of Linux users read.
1) One million Iraqi civilians have not been "killed" in the course of the sanctions.
I am quoting Madeleine Albright who when questioned about the above said, "it is a price worth paying". The fact is that these Iraqi people are starving because they don't have food and that is a direct result of the sanctions placed upon them. The figure I quoted of the number of civilians that have been killed, oh wait lets say that have died if it sounds less harsh to you, is widely accepted as being accurate although it was somewhat less when Madeleine made her barbaric statement.
2) Any (far lesser) out-of-the-ordinary (for Iraq) deaths in the course of the sanctions are "a result of" the actions of their own miserable and vile government, which the citizens as a body allow to remain in place.
What? Just because most people in the West live in democracy it doesn't mean it is like that everywhere in the world. These people never choose their governement. They certainly don't want their government. They are dictated. How are they meant to, without arms, overthrow a heavily armed and protected government? May be if you have the answer to that you can tell the Iraqi people and give them a chance to finish this mess.
3) The Iraqi government is well known to have targeted groups of their own citizens. You need look no further for the culprit. People in glass houses...
Precisely! That is why sanctions are barbaric, unjustified and insane. Everyone knows that the Iraqi government aren't going to suffer at all because of the sanctions. Saddam still lives in this mulitude of elaborate palaces. It is the Iraqi people who suffer. The government are just going to hoard the countries money for themselve more than they did before. Knowing this, who do the sanctions target? The innocent!
then you fight the military. targetting civilians is always wrong.
So 1 million Iraqi civilians killed as a result of US sanctions is what? "A price worth paying", according to the us governement!
for me terrorism has nothing to do with the actions and everything to do with the intent
Your reasoning isn't bad but what about a freedom fighter? By your definition a freedom fighter would always be a terrorist. Personally I don't think that is fair. Many groups of people may have a just reason for fighting a government because they are being occupied or discriminated against.
I'm also sure that it'll never take over the internet, because it's a different medium
I don't think that most people see it as being in competition with the web but rather in complement to it. Obviously, most of us sat at our computers all day would always prefer to read /. rather than having to listen to it. Text is just quicker to naviagate, you can skip bits and re-read bits as needed.
One application that we are working on in the PreViking project is to make a telephone gateway for the web. The VoiceXML (or CallXML) can be translated into IVR commands on the PreViking telephony gateway. You can then literally map a telephone number to a website.
For example, you would dial some 800 number to access /. PreViking fetches the VoiceXML from the /. webserver. Uses a text-to-speech engine and reads the headlines out to you. You can then select, either by DTMF or voice recognition, the story you want and have the article read to you. The opportunities for this are endless.
I would also much perfer when out-and-about to have voice interaction with the internet then having to fiddle around with a small and slow WAP interface. Companies can make there customers information, sales information, news stories available easily over the phone wihtout having to deploy any expensive telephony equipement. They just have to alter the web content to generate VoiceXML along with the HTML and have a Voice Application Service Provider to provide the voice facilities.
What is it about picking up a copy of Applied Cryptography and typing in one of the algorithms that's more challenging than either of those things?
Moreover, I think you will find that many of the terrorists have trainned in Western universities and that many of the terrorist groups will have access to much of the latest encryption techniques and protocols available. It wouldn't even suprise me if they had people inside the FBI, NSA etc. Quite frankly, any kind of system the governments want to introduce would be trivial for the terrorist to get round. I can't see anyone being inconvenienced by this type of law except your everyday innocent person.