AAAH HAH! IT DOES! I had a feeling it did run under Linux but I've been looking all over the place for more info on this and couldn't find it. Do you have any site/documentation to point me to? Has anyone dissected it and/or attempted some forensics? I'd really love to learn anything and everything i could learn from this marvelous little box.
Oh, and to top-it all off, free.fr is like super Linux friendly. I remember back in the day when all they did was offer free dial-up, they'd really stress the fact that they were a lean and mean operation because they used linux on commodity hardware. Now, if you look at their various FAQs, tutorials and manuals, you'll ALWAYS find very very precise instructions on how to configure Linux with, say, their freebox, outlining which kernel extensions you need to get, how to compile and load them, so you can do things like IP over USB and crazy shit like that.
thanks for playing. You read it well: 20Mbits/sec DOWN and 1Mbit/sec UP. No cap. and that's for 30 Euros per month.
The service comes with free telephony to any french landline (calls to mobile phones cost something), and very cheap international rate, like 3 eurocents to europe.
Once you've got all that, you can pay an extra monthly fee to get hundreds of TV channels. With 20Mbits/sec... that should do it.
All of this is given to you thru Free.fr triple-play box, the FreeBox. My Mom's been with them for a couple of years and has the original, more clunky incarnation of today's sleek freebox. Here's a picture of it.
while many would argue to the contrary, i'm not exactly seeing VoIP completely replace POTS in any foreseeable future. I'm thinking it will be a compelling alternative for people to communicate over longer distances, at cheaper costs, in location-agnostic ways. For example, while many people no-longer have a home phone line because they're satisfied with the coverage they get from their mobile phones, most people do still retain their POTS phone line. But I for one, don't spend money on long distance calls through my POTS line. I make a point of doing them using my mobile phone minutes. I just spend less money on my phone line. When VoIP and SIP become more pervasive, i may find myself spending less minutes on GSM and even less on POTS.
i highly doubt we'll ever see VoIP replace traditional telephone. I think there'll always be a need for the traditional phone, as it was built from the ground-up to serve very reliable, mission-critical purposes, as a closed ecosystem, with checks and balances.
that doesn't make VoIP any less of a very nice complementary alternative, especially SIP whereby end-to-end SIP communications are 100% free.
no no no, please do read the full spec. and try'n'read the articles. SIP's purpose is not to be a workaround for NAT. in fact one of the reasons SIP hadn't had a chance to get many mainstream applications was because of NAT. In 2003, a full spec for STUN was released. STUN is a standard way to work around NAT. Pretty-much all SIP clients have support for STUN.
if you read my "fun and frolics" article (last link in the post) and the article prior to that, you'll see there are already quite a few pure SIP providers out there, including pulver.com/fwd and iptel.org, who both are free. i use earthlink's SIP services because it comes with my account, and i often converse with a buddy who's linked his pulver.com account to a home-bound asterisk PBX system. anyway, the articles list a few providers. I'm hoping more will rise.
i'm trying to open minds here, and i know exactly who the target audience here: geeks. The point i'm trying to make is that SIP services are that much harder to set-up as SMTP/POP services, and now that SIP was made to work behind NAT thanks to STUN, and that you have free, open-source implementations of SIP presence/registration servers and STUN servers, it should be QUITE POSSIBLE for anyone with a bit of determination to at least provide SIP services to themselves, even to their friends, and/or add SIP services to an ISP they may already be running, or web hosting services they may already be running. try n' read the article. I'm not suggesting the telcos will be replaced any time soon. I'm merely pointing out that SIP provides for an open real-time communications framework, and we geeks would be silly to not take it for a ride. earthlink did it. pulver did it.
SIP was recently made to work behind NAT just fine thanks to STUN. read the article 'till the end. STUN was introduced in 2003, while SIP's been around for nearly a decade. I've even recently pushed the envelope to verify how well STUN works by making and receiving SIP calls from/to my earthlink SIP account behind 2 layers of NAT: 192.168.1.* network, linked to a 10.0.0.* network, linked to my earthlink (verizon) dsl.
This thread's context was bound to be left out. We're talking here about end-user machines, not machines built by nerds who enjoy doing things to computers. With this in mind, let me elaborate a little more:
you can't use Linux as a decent desktop operating system, and it really sucks on laptops. Beyond web browsing, e-mail, basic forms of text editing, and the clumsy-assed open-office suite, your average end-user productivity on a Linux system is limited.
Very little Mac OS X can do that linux can't? Get real. iLife anyone? iSync? YOU might not care, but many of us do. Where's the linux address book application that interoperates with many other applications. iCal? It's a whole package, i'm not looking at the kernel. Sure if you say "well, if you install OS X kernel and basic extensions and you do the same with Linux, well you've got basically the same thing". Well you can install and run Darwin, the core of Mac OS X, with X11, for free, on both X86 and PowerPC architectures. Butl that's not what Mac OS X is, it's a complete package of an operating system and productivity apps.
Furthermore, try closing your linux laptop and reopening it. How do you deal with multiple network profiles in Linux? Mac OS X handles this beautifully. Network ports are clearly laid out, for each network profile, each port is easily configurable, in a user-interface that makes sense. Windows' network configuration has always been horrible. Linuxconfig isn't much better.
Linux can't deal with external devices, be they USB, FireWire, Bluetooth, without hunting-down some damned drivers. I can plug ANYTHING to an OS X machine and it just works. Digital Still Cameras, DV Camcorders, i'm using a USB IBM 5 buttons + scroll wheel mouse for which I didn't have to install any software, same goes for ALL USB mice on the market, Bluetooth phones (i use sony ericsson t610), external hard drives, printers, you-name-it, if it you can plug it in, it works.
When was the last time you built a laptop yourself? Or upgraded a laptop's CPU? It ain't exactly the cake-walk that building desktops is. Portable Athlon64 with Linux? I dare you to buy one and use it as your everyday machine.
I've pretty clearly established that there are, indeed, quite a few things that Mac OS X can do, that Linux cannot do. What was the thing you mentioned that Mac OS X can't do that Linux can? Oh yah... hovering over a window to gain focus? You don't gain focus when hovering in X11, you gain a response from that window, focus is still governed by clicking. But hey, if you don't like Aqua, that's fine, you can run X11 on your mac just fine. Apple ships its own version of X11 on the developer CD that ships with Mac OS X. You can install most everything you run on Linux on OS X, including X11 apps, thanks to projects such as Fink. You had also prefaced your sentenced with "at the expert user, server maintainer, or developer", again, this is not what this whole thread is talking about, we're talking about your average end-user here. I don't believe in machines that are hybrid server/client. While OS X and Linux both allow you to do that, it is asking for trouble. If i run server services in any permanent way, i stick debian or netbsd on some cheap-ol' PC.
Linux on desktop or laptop might be very sufficient to many people who have very limited use for their computer as a typical end-user machine, and a very cost-effective solution too. That doesn't make Mac OS X any less of a far better, more useful operating system than Linux is.
G5 laptops are very-much on the horizon. Java 1.5 has been seeded to developers who are now testing it.
I love Linux, have used it quite a bit, set-up a few servers here and there, used it as a desktop a bit, on a PPC processor via LinuxPPC and also x86 with Debian. It's functional. It's nice. and It's free. Makes for insanely great bang for the buck on server platforms.
Furthermore, there is a largelysymbioticrelationship between the Open-Source Community and Mac OS X. Innovations on each side are typically great benefits to the Community at large.
With all that said, Mac OS X still blows Linux out of the water, hands-down. I'd be happy to elaborate, but i don't think i need to. Feel free to ask me to. And I will, you better believe it.
earthlink gives you a pure SIP address and handles gatewaying when needed. So you can send and receive calls to/from any other SIP user. or something:)
We don't need numbers to get in real-time touch with one-another. We need smarter devices interconnected with address books, presenting users with actual contact information, and obscuring the means by which you're getting in real-time touch with each-other.
All statistics you quote are government-donated funds. They do not take into account donations made from the private sector, companies and individuals. If you take those into account, America dwarfs everyone and leaves France far behind. Some countries tax their citizens more than others. Having grown-up in France, i know for a fact from both my parents that companies and individuals get taxed into oblivion.
Having built my professional life in America, I know I can easily donate to relief organizations without straining my budget too much, and most of the time, write it off on my U.S. taxes, which means money that would otherwise go to the U.S. government now goes to Red Cross, with Uncle Sam's benediction.
In the end, what matters is how much money relief organizations get, and which countries it's coming from. Let's see who's ahead in terms of income percentage.
I gave $250 to redcross via amazon as soon as it went up.
We're not martyrs. We're setting the record straight. And we're here to help.
Salon is here to slander and make sensationalistic headlines. That's what sells. Use grains of salt and don't take everything you read at face value, and most certainly not anything I write. Do your own research.
on top of RetroGeek's points, i'll point out that a good java servlet container such as apache/Tomcat lets you architect web applications that minimize disk I/O and allow you to make full use of available memory.
I've never been able to find a way to cache data in memory using PHP. Every request requires some sort of disk or database IO. Now, that's not an issue for 99.99% of all sites out there, including anything you've built. But it does make every last bit of difference on heavily loaded applications. A Java Servlet Container lets you build custom in-memory caching layers that allow concurrent requests to share said data.
hello fellow slashdotters. a couple of months ago i put together this thing which i've officially just named the "Firefox advocator". If you like it, please, oh please spread the word:)
In Mac OS X Panther, I hear fast-user switching is a boon for this type of illicit activity. Create a separate user, say, "batman", with no admin rights, turn-on file vault for that specific user to make sure everything gets encrypted. When the urge comes... fast-user-switch, do thy bidding, fast user-switch-back... lah lah lah.
Throughout WWDC, Apple put a great emphasis on Spotlight's plugin architecture. Apple really, really, REALLY wants to make it easy for developers to write plugins for just about anything under the sun. They are constantly exhorting developers to write their own Spotlight plugins. That's what their developer article is all about. Apple will be shipping Tiger with a bunch of plugins for many file types, but expect many esoteric software vendors to be releasing their own Tiger/Spotlight metatada plugins at roughly around the same time, which was the whole point behind seeding Tiger almost a year before its public release.
Very-well put. While a staunch advocate of the OS X platform vs Windows, I always do my best to emphasize that security only exists in relative terms.
Lemme know what you think of this little rant i put out back in june.
Slashdot Mirror
AAAH HAH! IT DOES! I had a feeling it did run under Linux but I've been looking all over the place for more info on this and couldn't find it. Do you have any site/documentation to point me to? Has anyone dissected it and/or attempted some forensics? I'd really love to learn anything and everything i could learn from this marvelous little box.
Oh, and to top-it all off, free.fr is like super Linux friendly. I remember back in the day when all they did was offer free dial-up, they'd really stress the fact that they were a lean and mean operation because they used linux on commodity hardware. Now, if you look at their various FAQs, tutorials and manuals, you'll ALWAYS find very very precise instructions on how to configure Linux with, say, their freebox, outlining which kernel extensions you need to get, how to compile and load them, so you can do things like IP over USB and crazy shit like that.
uh sorry, that was 3 eurocents to the U.S., from france. that's what it costs Mom to call me, by just picking-up the phone.
thanks for playing. You read it well: 20Mbits/sec DOWN and 1Mbit/sec UP. No cap. and that's for 30 Euros per month.
The service comes with free telephony to any french landline (calls to mobile phones cost something), and very cheap international rate, like 3 eurocents to europe.
Once you've got all that, you can pay an extra monthly fee to get hundreds of TV channels. With 20Mbits/sec ... that should do it.
All of this is given to you thru Free.fr triple-play box, the FreeBox. My Mom's been with them for a couple of years and has the original, more clunky incarnation of today's sleek freebox. Here's a picture of it.
while many would argue to the contrary, i'm not exactly seeing VoIP completely replace POTS in any foreseeable future. I'm thinking it will be a compelling alternative for people to communicate over longer distances, at cheaper costs, in location-agnostic ways. For example, while many people no-longer have a home phone line because they're satisfied with the coverage they get from their mobile phones, most people do still retain their POTS phone line. But I for one, don't spend money on long distance calls through my POTS line. I make a point of doing them using my mobile phone minutes. I just spend less money on my phone line. When VoIP and SIP become more pervasive, i may find myself spending less minutes on GSM and even less on POTS.
i highly doubt we'll ever see VoIP replace traditional telephone. I think there'll always be a need for the traditional phone, as it was built from the ground-up to serve very reliable, mission-critical purposes, as a closed ecosystem, with checks and balances.
that doesn't make VoIP any less of a very nice complementary alternative, especially SIP whereby end-to-end SIP communications are 100% free.
no no no, please do read the full spec. and try'n'read the articles. SIP's purpose is not to be a workaround for NAT. in fact one of the reasons SIP hadn't had a chance to get many mainstream applications was because of NAT. In 2003, a full spec for STUN was released. STUN is a standard way to work around NAT. Pretty-much all SIP clients have support for STUN.
if you read my "fun and frolics" article (last link in the post) and the article prior to that, you'll see there are already quite a few pure SIP providers out there, including pulver.com/fwd and iptel.org, who both are free. i use earthlink's SIP services because it comes with my account, and i often converse with a buddy who's linked his pulver.com account to a home-bound asterisk PBX system. anyway, the articles list a few providers. I'm hoping more will rise.
i'm trying to open minds here, and i know exactly who the target audience here: geeks. The point i'm trying to make is that SIP services are that much harder to set-up as SMTP/POP services, and now that SIP was made to work behind NAT thanks to STUN, and that you have free, open-source implementations of SIP presence/registration servers and STUN servers, it should be QUITE POSSIBLE for anyone with a bit of determination to at least provide SIP services to themselves, even to their friends, and/or add SIP services to an ISP they may already be running, or web hosting services they may already be running. try n' read the article. I'm not suggesting the telcos will be replaced any time soon. I'm merely pointing out that SIP provides for an open real-time communications framework, and we geeks would be silly to not take it for a ride. earthlink did it. pulver did it.
SIP was recently made to work behind NAT just fine thanks to STUN. read the article 'till the end. STUN was introduced in 2003, while SIP's been around for nearly a decade. I've even recently pushed the envelope to verify how well STUN works by making and receiving SIP calls from/to my earthlink SIP account behind 2 layers of NAT: 192.168.1.* network, linked to a 10.0.0.* network, linked to my earthlink (verizon) dsl.
You mean ... THIS Doom 3?
This thread's context was bound to be left out. We're talking here about end-user machines, not machines built by nerds who enjoy doing things to computers. With this in mind, let me elaborate a little more:
you can't use Linux as a decent desktop operating system, and it really sucks on laptops. Beyond web browsing, e-mail, basic forms of text editing, and the clumsy-assed open-office suite, your average end-user productivity on a Linux system is limited.
Very little Mac OS X can do that linux can't? Get real. iLife anyone? iSync? YOU might not care, but many of us do. Where's the linux address book application that interoperates with many other applications. iCal? It's a whole package, i'm not looking at the kernel. Sure if you say "well, if you install OS X kernel and basic extensions and you do the same with Linux, well you've got basically the same thing". Well you can install and run Darwin, the core of Mac OS X, with X11, for free, on both X86 and PowerPC architectures. Butl that's not what Mac OS X is, it's a complete package of an operating system and productivity apps.
Furthermore, try closing your linux laptop and reopening it. How do you deal with multiple network profiles in Linux? Mac OS X handles this beautifully. Network ports are clearly laid out, for each network profile, each port is easily configurable, in a user-interface that makes sense. Windows' network configuration has always been horrible. Linuxconfig isn't much better.
Linux can't deal with external devices, be they USB, FireWire, Bluetooth, without hunting-down some damned drivers. I can plug ANYTHING to an OS X machine and it just works. Digital Still Cameras, DV Camcorders, i'm using a USB IBM 5 buttons + scroll wheel mouse for which I didn't have to install any software, same goes for ALL USB mice on the market, Bluetooth phones (i use sony ericsson t610), external hard drives, printers, you-name-it, if it you can plug it in, it works.
When was the last time you built a laptop yourself? Or upgraded a laptop's CPU? It ain't exactly the cake-walk that building desktops is. Portable Athlon64 with Linux? I dare you to buy one and use it as your everyday machine.
I've pretty clearly established that there are, indeed, quite a few things that Mac OS X can do, that Linux cannot do. What was the thing you mentioned that Mac OS X can't do that Linux can? Oh yah ... hovering over a window to gain focus? You don't gain focus when hovering in X11, you gain a response from that window, focus is still governed by clicking. But hey, if you don't like Aqua, that's fine, you can run X11 on your mac just fine. Apple ships its own version of X11 on the developer CD that ships with Mac OS X. You can install most everything you run on Linux on OS X, including X11 apps, thanks to projects such as Fink. You had also prefaced your sentenced with "at the expert user, server maintainer, or developer", again, this is not what this whole thread is talking about, we're talking about your average end-user here. I don't believe in machines that are hybrid server/client. While OS X and Linux both allow you to do that, it is asking for trouble. If i run server services in any permanent way, i stick debian or netbsd on some cheap-ol' PC.
Linux on desktop or laptop might be very sufficient to many people who have very limited use for their computer as a typical end-user machine, and a very cost-effective solution too. That doesn't make Mac OS X any less of a far better, more useful operating system than Linux is.
G5 laptops are very-much on the horizon. Java 1.5 has been seeded to developers who are now testing it.
I love Linux, have used it quite a bit, set-up a few servers here and there, used it as a desktop a bit, on a PPC processor via LinuxPPC and also x86 with Debian. It's functional. It's nice. and It's free. Makes for insanely great bang for the buck on server platforms.
Furthermore, there is a largely symbiotic relationship between the Open-Source Community and Mac OS X. Innovations on each side are typically great benefits to the Community at large.
With all that said, Mac OS X still blows Linux out of the water, hands-down. I'd be happy to elaborate, but i don't think i need to. Feel free to ask me to. And I will, you better believe it.
earthlink gives you a pure SIP address and handles gatewaying when needed. So you can send and receive calls to/from any other SIP user. or something :)
Advocating SIP
Advocating a better connected lifestyle
Finally, my Xmas wish: The Ultimate Handheld device for, now, 2005.
We don't need numbers to get in real-time touch with one-another. We need smarter devices interconnected with address books, presenting users with actual contact information, and obscuring the means by which you're getting in real-time touch with each-other.
speaking of helping, i put together this handy page to place an amazon donate badge on someone's site.
please spread the word. and donate.
I've set-up a torrent you can get here. It's got the 4 videos. A couple of us are seeding it right now. Please help.
All statistics you quote are government-donated funds. They do not take into account donations made from the private sector, companies and individuals. If you take those into account, America dwarfs everyone and leaves France far behind. Some countries tax their citizens more than others. Having grown-up in France, i know for a fact from both my parents that companies and individuals get taxed into oblivion.
Having built my professional life in America, I know I can easily donate to relief organizations without straining my budget too much, and most of the time, write it off on my U.S. taxes, which means money that would otherwise go to the U.S. government now goes to Red Cross, with Uncle Sam's benediction.
In the end, what matters is how much money relief organizations get, and which countries it's coming from. Let's see who's ahead in terms of income percentage.
I gave $250 to redcross via amazon as soon as it went up.
We're not martyrs. We're setting the record straight. And we're here to help.
Salon is here to slander and make sensationalistic headlines. That's what sells. Use grains of salt and don't take everything you read at face value, and most certainly not anything I write. Do your own research.
... this little rant of mine was also kinda directed at them.
on top of RetroGeek's points, i'll point out that a good java servlet container such as apache/Tomcat lets you architect web applications that minimize disk I/O and allow you to make full use of available memory.
I've never been able to find a way to cache data in memory using PHP. Every request requires some sort of disk or database IO. Now, that's not an issue for 99.99% of all sites out there, including anything you've built. But it does make every last bit of difference on heavily loaded applications. A Java Servlet Container lets you build custom in-memory caching layers that allow concurrent requests to share said data.
<jack> yy..yooouu..mm..mmmuust promise me ...yy..you'll never ..ll.lllet go ...
<rose> i'll never let go jack!
*cue music*
hello fellow slashdotters. a couple of months ago i put together this thing which i've officially just named the "Firefox advocator". If you like it, please, oh please spread the word :)
THIS IS ALL HYPOTHETICAL.
In Mac OS X Panther, I hear fast-user switching is a boon for this type of illicit activity. Create a separate user, say, "batman", with no admin rights, turn-on file vault for that specific user to make sure everything gets encrypted. When the urge comes ... fast-user-switch, do thy bidding, fast user-switch-back ... lah lah lah.
Throughout WWDC, Apple put a great emphasis on Spotlight's plugin architecture. Apple really, really, REALLY wants to make it easy for developers to write plugins for just about anything under the sun. They are constantly exhorting developers to write their own Spotlight plugins. That's what their developer article is all about. Apple will be shipping Tiger with a bunch of plugins for many file types, but expect many esoteric software vendors to be releasing their own Tiger/Spotlight metatada plugins at roughly around the same time, which was the whole point behind seeding Tiger almost a year before its public release.
Very-well put. While a staunch advocate of the OS X platform vs Windows, I always do my best to emphasize that security only exists in relative terms. Lemme know what you think of this little rant i put out back in june.