hm, my copy of FA-18 came with my Amiga. I don't remember a code-wheel; maybe it was a special version.
My copy is certainly protected by it because I fired it up on my Amiga the other week to show a friend of mine a cute bug in the program - he was also an Amiga user, had played FA-18 endlessly but didn't believe this bug existed. We had to dig out the codewheel to get into it.
Oh, by the way, the bug is worth seeing - while in the air, you could point the nose downwards but put the engines in reverse so that you could actually climb at the same time!
I'm all for clear, succinct presentations but if you need to go this far with dressing up presentations then:
1. You probably have little of interest to say in your presentation
2. You do not have enough to do at work because of the time it would need to create these presentations.
3. You wear a suit, like buzzwords and probably sell things.
I remember those! FA-18 Interceptor on the Commodore Amiga springs to mind as a codewheel protected game.
There was also the coloured code card for certain ZX Spectrum games (didn't Jet Set Willy use that, I seem to remember?)
And the CRAZY "Lenslock" system where you put a plastic lens over the screen to decode jumbled blocks into readable characters that you had to type in.
You don't have to use Cedega - if you're that keen on gaming, you probably have a Windows license kicking about somewhere anyway so just install that for gaming purposes as a dual boot.
Doom 3 is about the first game I've noticed that doesn't run on Windows 98 (at least according to the box) but apart from that, 98 is fine for the occasional gaming session - just do I like I do and do all your important stuff in Linux.
They're also largely proprietors of warez and other forms of copyright violation/property 'theft'.
In the words of Robin Williams: "Whoa there, Sparky!"
That's something of a blanket statement, isn't it? It could be argued that if you have access to "warez", you're certainly not going to be inclined to move to a FREE operating system on the basis of saving money on software, are you? Kind of a reverse logic thing you've got going on there...
And if we're looking at copyright violation/property theft, doesn't most of the piracy of movies and music happen amongst the the teenagers to 25 year old age groups? These are hardly going to be free software users.
It was not by far the only reason but one reason I made the move to Linux was because I was sick and tired of paying for generally low quality commercial software and actually felt better about NOT having to pirate a commercial application I didn't want to pay for in the first place.
Not everyone will agree with this, but games are what will make Linux succeed as the #1 desktop in the world.
You're probably right but I don't see why it's that important that Linux is #1 in the world. Surely, it's more important to have open standards globally such that you can view any web site with any browser, exchange documents with anyone else's operating system & applications, etc? What does it matter what OS people choose to use to achieve that - sure, you and I porbably use Linux but others choose Windows which is fine also, as long as they have a genuine choice.
When you can buy the same games for Linux that you can for Windows and anyone can install them, there will be a massive push behind Linux as an operating system.
Unfortunately, the major problem here is that, like it or not, Microsoft DirectX provides a more readily available suite of games APIs for developers than does the cross-platform OpenGL standard and that's probably the biggest thing stopping games companies producing for Linux. Those that do, like ID, can do it because they work in OpenGL in the first place.
Games push hardware, which sell more computers, which spur the development of faster machines.
I'm not sure this is necessarily a good thing. In the days of the classic 8-bit and 16-bit machines like the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga, etc, upgrades were virtually unheard of and games developers were force to push the machines to their limits to achieve certain features in games. My personal belief is that this made games of old generally much better than most modern games - sure, graphics are thousands of times better now but I don't think that addictiveness or playability has got any better in all but a handful of titles.
having a Linux-based arcade machine is a very, very good thing
There may be some developments as a result of Linux going into the arcades but it's important to realise that although the Linux OS in these machine is Open Source (it has to be), the games definitely won't be (and don't have to be) so it's not as though you'll be able to play these at home unless a games publisher decides to releases them for home usage.
Any games exposure for Linux is a good thing but it always boils down to financial concerns in the end and games developers will only release Linux games if they are confident they can make money from it.
Also, disallow root access on ssh logons, use some normal user account first and then 'su -' to root
You can actually go a stage further and put the AllowUsers directive in/etc/sshd_config. Just stick in the list of users that can use ssh, leave out root and the common account names (you can always su once you're in as a normal user anyway) so that an intruder would need to know the account name of an allowed user before getting anywhere.
It just gives you an extra layer of security which is always a good idea to do if you can.
As it happens, I'm just looking at some attempted intrusions on my own server on which I run ssh & sftp for a few buddies to use.
In the past week or so, I've seen a couple of failed access attempts from an IP address at one of the universities in China and from one on comcast.net (surprise surprise) - whoever it is has tried a couple of "standard" account names that I (of course) don't have on my server so the logs have just reported the failed attempts.
It would be tempting to send an "abuse@" email to someone but the fact is that the script kiddie is probably using those IPs as compromised boxes anyway.
So all I'm doing now is putting a shell-script in place that emails me when the logs pick up any more illegal access attempts and just adding the IPs I have to a barred list on my firewall that just drops the packets from those IPs for an extra layer of security. The added advantage is that this is a "passive warning" to the cracker - instead of getting any form of login prompt, (s)he'll just get nothing back in future.
This change in behaviour from my server should alert the cracker that I am aware of their presence and maybe act as a deterrent in itself.
Unless there is actually a successful intrusion, I think this is the best way to proceed - just monitor the logs and put an extra layer of security in place when you see anything unusual.
I'd suspect a fair percentage of 'savvy' users are buying linux system to avoid paying for windows and then using dodgy knock off XP licences.
Much as I hate to admit it, I fear you are probably right.
I think these "Windows vs Linux" arguments are generally pointless anyway because there are essentially two types of Windows users:
1. Those that pay legitimately for all of their Microsoft products - in which case they've spent quite a large sum of money that they're hardly going to want to waste so will stick with and defend those products no matter what
or
2. Those who have never paid for an MS product (and there are a LOT of them) - but pass round MSDN CDs from work or download pirate copies from the Internet. Those people have the "perception" that all MS products are free and already have familiarity with Windows, Office etc. in which case, why *should* they consider Linux which they can also get for free but will require a steep learning curve from the outset.
What both groups seem to forget is that the people in 1. above would probably part with less money if the people in 2. legitimately bought all their software (because of higher volume sales) and the people in 2. would be much keener to look at a free alternative if they had no choice but to pay for their software.
the SIP phone doesn't need to be registered with anything.
That's true but you could also be taking calls on a laptop, a desktop PC, a PDA... therefore the SIP server needs to know what answering devices are available and what the capabilities of each one is.
Autodialers are not actually illegal and they're used in a lot of call-centres that make a lot of outbound calls - credit card companies are big users of autodialers.
What are illegal are nuisance calls. The idea behind an autodialer is that it makes a call without human intervention and, when the call is answered, it tries to detect if the answering party is a human or an answering machine. If it's a human, it'll transfer the call to an agent in the call-centre but if it's an answering machine, it'll probably drop the call.
Therefore, if the detection isn't set right (a lot of autodialers use algorithms based on the pattern of voice energy they hear to decide if it's a human or machine who answered), the autodialer can mistake a human for a machine and cut the call - the called party therefore suffers a nuisance call.
Incidentally, if you're careful, you can usually work out if a call is from an autodialler. Because the autodialer can sit there for about 3 seconds (with you going "Hello? Hello?" into the mouthpiece) making the machine/human decision, if someone doesn't speak immediately then you can be pretty sure it's a call centre autodialler on the other end and take appropriate action.
Another trick is to always answer the phone like an answering machine message by speaking a long sentence, with no pauses, as soon as you pick up the phone e.g. "Hi this is Joe Sixpack on 123-4567 how can I help you". Autodialers usually assume a human will leave pauses in voice whereas an answering machine won't so you can end up fooling it.
Mind you, it's a bit of a downer if that girl you've always fancied decides to ring you for that first date...
Oh, and while I think of it, there's also the issue of bandwidth.
Uncompressed voice needs around 64 kbits/s bandwidth (56 kbit/s in the US) - by the time you've compressed it down through, say, a G.729 codec, you've probably got that down to about 16 kbit/s without adding extra bandwidth for signalling information also.
On a 1MB DSL link, your practically looking at about 32 simultaneous calls maximum (and that's a way too optimistic number!), remembering that you've got to have a voice codec resource available for each of those calls for its entire duration.
Compare that to the couple of kilobytes used by a spam email and it rapidly becomes impractical as a technology for voice spamming.
I do wish these security people would read some decent books first!
Having read the article, I'm amazed that one very important fact has been almost completely overlooked - namely that every call will have a charge associated to it.
If the VoIP world goes the way of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) then everyone will need to use a service provider to assist in routing calls outside of a business network. That provider will assign a charge, albeit a small one, to each call.
Unlike sending spam email virtually free of charge, making 100,000 VoIP spam calls will cost a tidy sum of money - far beyond the purses of any 2-bit spammer!
Secondly, in a SIP environment, any call needs to go via a SIP registration server so that the caller is able to get information on what devices and messaging services the called party has available as well as obtaining the called party's IP address (remembering of course that if the called party is mobile, the IP address he or she is registered to is rapidly changing anyway!) I have no doubt that it's a relatively simple task to provide some connection blocking at the SIP server so that it's possible to create a blacklist of callers that will never get a connection.
Sure, I've no doubt that telemarketers will make use of VoIP but while both telemarketers and spammers should burn in hell, telemarketers target specific individuals (based on information they have on that individual that makes them believe they can sell something to him or her) and therefore generate far less junk traffic than spammers.
Personally, this is just FUD spread by a bunch of "think-they-know-it-all" security cowboys out to make a fast buck.
Progress: Cloning a 1970's OS. Next up: 1980's technology.
Boeing 747 - an airliner in service since the 1970s but still in service because of it's success and reliability
Volkswagen Beetle - a German car designed during World War 2 that is still manufactured as a reliable & economical car
Lord Of The Rings - a trilogy of fantasy novels first published in 1954 but continually republished (and recently filmed) due to it's continuing popularity.
Hoover Vacuum Cleaner - core functionality essentially changed since 1908.
...I've done a lot with Linux and dabbled with the BSDs, Solaris, HP-UX and SCO in my time on this earth.
Out of all of them, SCO has always been the biggest nightmare to setup and sysadmin out of all of them.
- The SCO documentation is rubbish. It was spread over a huge number of volumes that took you hours to try and find the answer to any problem
- Bearing in mind that SCO's an x86 UNIX, the driver support is minimal
- No publishers have ever taken much interest in writing specific books for it. Aside from generic UNIX books, there's not a lot else compared to the very good books on all the UNIXes
- Even Evi Nemeth's "UNIX System Administration Handbook" (the UNIX bible for those who don't know) has never even mentioned it (at least in the 2nd & 3rd editions I have) whereas even IRIX and DEC OSF/1 get their own sections!
- I don't even remember it coming with a C compiler by default
Hmm, never heard of NeTraverse Merge... who develops it ?
Off the top of my head, weren't Netraverse the company that developed "Win4Lin" a few years ago? AFAIK (never used Win4Lin) it was basically a commercial equivalent to Wine - provided a Windows emulation layer to run Windows apps on top.
Then I guess OSS in general and Stallman in particular don't belong in an article titled, "The Business Value of Open Source" - one having no business value and the other having no business objective.
Red Hat, IBM, Novell, etc have identified a business value for OSS - as I said in another post, those organisations are the corporate-facing front-ends to OSS and have created profitable businesses on the back of OSS.
Stallman is a defender of OSS and the GNU project specifically. If someone says something about OSS that Stallman does not believe in, he will be the first to stand up and make an objection. However, he's got no interest in the business side of OSS, he's happy to let the front end companies handle that (and has occasionally spoken out against some of the practices of the distro vendors like Red Hat).
I've not read that specific article to comment on Stallman's input but I'm sure he was his usual vocal self in promoting the cause of free software.
You said you wanted it to "Just Work". From that statement, I don't think it's a great leap of faith to assume that you might have been new to Linux. If I was wrong, then perhaps you should have made your experience level clearer in your original post.
If you think I've exposed any lack of comfort level in anything that I have said, then I am more than willing to be challenged by you on that - however, all of the issues you have mentioned I too have met in my work with Linux.
Let's just not get into "I know more than you do" arguments because they're pointless.
All the great OS dekstop programs are playing catch up with their commercial relatives and most of them are lagging well behind.
Sorry, I don't see that at all.
OSS is developed freely by a lot of people who like programming. Having no commercial pressures in developing a "pretty looking" product, they go for stability and speed as prime concerns. Many of them will also argue that "usability" is not about having a pretty interface but a few text-based config files held in a well-known location like/etc and let the sysadmin create wrappers and shell scripts to ease the configuration process if he so wishes.
KDE and Gnome may be trying to emulate the Windows interface to a degree but they are also both quite bloated products with a lot of GUI-based config tools that a lot of expert users neither want nor care about.
There is no remit by OSS people to encourage people away from Windows by copying it. It's there to make the transition for those who want to simpler, nothing more.
How about making computing available to as many people as possible even the poor. I guess that's not a good enough goal for you. There is an entire world for whom a $100.00 for an operating system is a half years salary.
Not to mention that hardware is very cheap these days anyway and that Open Source allows a lot of old legacy hardware to still work - charities can recycle thrown-out PCs and provide some sort of computing infrastructure, virtually free of charge, to poorer countries.
With Internet connectivity in these places, the effect on education of the local populace must be one of the greatest benefits there is.
It could be argued that because university geeks were passing out AT&T UNIX between themselves freely during the early 1970s, the free software movement actual pre-dates any ideas of commercial software-only vendors.
Sure, Digital were charging money for VMS at the same sort of time but that was an OS specific to their hardware and it was the hardware they made the money on.
I assume you are talking about the "new economy" where the "old" economic rules doesn't exists.
No, I'm talking about a Free Software movement that has been going on seriously for some 20 years now that is more than happy to co-exist alongside commercial software.
I'm sorry to break it to you but the dot-com bubble has burst. Several years ago.
Sorry, your point is??? I thought the dot.com bubble was more about idiotic financeers overvaluing companies - what's this got to do with free/commercial software development?
You can't spent countless man-hours on man-hour intensive kind of labour (lots of manhours=high cost) like software development and make money on some low-margin side channel like customization services or support.
IBM, Novell, Red Hat, etc. seem perfectly capable of working within that model. My company, which sells telephony platforms on Linux-based systems makes a profit from services and support while developing the software in-house. I still don't see what's the problem?
That is true. They are giving something away for free that kills another persons livehood. Of cause, someone else is making something free that kills their own livehood as well.
Ah, I think I get it now. In your vision of the world, generosity and volunteer work are not allowed then on the basis that it might stop someone else profiting from it. In your world there is no room for altruism, eh?
By the same logic, rather than having the Red Cross and Oxfam goint into the Sudan with free food parcels, we send in K-Mart or ASDA (if you're in the UK) to go sell them the food. Hmmm...
I assume he does that but the commercial sector is highly affected by free products. It also drives the offshoring trend since lower labour cost is needed to counter marketloss to people who work for free.
Then how about you get your local politician/senator to speak up in the appropriate government chambers and gets a bill passed that taxes company profits heavily if they use cheap off-shore labour? In my world, a company that makes profits in a particular country should be obligated to create a certain percentage of jobs in that country also - "you take something, you give something back."
This has nothing to do with Open Source but everything to do with your commercial enterprise pandering to the rich fat shareholders.
No one has any godgiven right to live on a specific line of career and anyone can give away their own work for free of cause. But don't kid yourself, it does hurt everyone working in the industry.
So what? Virtually all of our coal-mining industry in the UK has been annihilated - not because there's no more coal to mine but because it became too expensive to mine compared to importing it (much of it from the US).
However, if I complained about that I would be a hypocrite because I also like cheaper electricity as a result of that business decision.
Sure, it sucks if you lose your livelihood but invariably it's as a result of this bigger thing called progress.
OSS is great, but many people (myself included) sometimes want it to Just Work.
If you've come from a Windows environment into using Open Source then that is commendable. But you really have to drop this mindset of expecting it to "Just Work" and getting it for free simultaneously.
You have the option of paying SuSE, Red Hat, Mandrake, etc. money for a boxed Linux distro which will include some degree of support from those companies. Do that and the types of problems you've mentioned will, I'm sure, be rectified very quickly by them. This is no different to paying Microsoft for support on Windows.
If, on the other hand, you download a free distro (which you, I and the rest of the world have every right to do) then you might strike lucky and have a trouble-free installation with, say, Mandrake's free distro or Fedora.
However, if you don't, then you have to accept that at that point your only option is to search the Internet for an answer to your problem, maybe go buy a Linux book or two but have to embark on a learning curve to be able to progress further.
You need to appreciate that people in the OSS/Linux community are generally pretty helpful to newcomers but, at the same time, newcomers have to accept a degree of personal responsibility for what they are doing.
One of the issues newcomers fail to appreciate is that just about everything in UNIX or Linux is configured via (usually) a complex looking text file at the lowest level - GUI utilities for configuration that are provided by Red Hat, SuSE etc are merely convenient front ends to those configuration files to make the job easier. However, any UNIX guru will tell you that once you've mastered shell-scripting, there is nothing more powerful than a "Swiss Pocket Knife" of personally designed scripts that let you automate the more mundane tasks.
For that reason, it's simply rarely going to be the case that OSS programmers focus on configuration tools instead of core software functionality and stability - again, configuration utilities you see in distros have invariably been designed by the distro publisher, like Yast in SuSE, for example, not by the OSS programmers.
Finally, you seem to forget that even installing a driver in Windows for, say, a printer requires a degree of familiarity with it - average Joe Sixpack even has problems doing something as simple as that.
People seem to forget that they went through a learning curve even when they first started with Windows and I'm sure that if you added that time up, from first learning to use a mouse to manoevering competently around the Windows desktop, you would find that it took you a fair number of learning hours to get event that far.
It's important to compare like-for-like - remember, if you use Windows legally, you will have paid money for it and you've probably got free help from a local Windows guru on a number of occasions without really thinking about it - perhaps even your corporate IT department.
On the other hand, you probably got Linux for free and don't have a local Linux guru to hand to assist you - it's therefore up to you to go find documentation, bulletin boards or a person to give you that help.
Slashdot Mirror
My copy is certainly protected by it because I fired it up on my Amiga the other week to show a friend of mine a cute bug in the program - he was also an Amiga user, had played FA-18 endlessly but didn't believe this bug existed. We had to dig out the codewheel to get into it.
Oh, by the way, the bug is worth seeing - while in the air, you could point the nose downwards but put the engines in reverse so that you could actually climb at the same time!
1. You probably have little of interest to say in your presentation
2. You do not have enough to do at work because of the time it would need to create these presentations. 3. You wear a suit, like buzzwords and probably sell things.
There was also the coloured code card for certain ZX Spectrum games (didn't Jet Set Willy use that, I seem to remember?)
And the CRAZY "Lenslock" system where you put a plastic lens over the screen to decode jumbled blocks into readable characters that you had to type in.
You don't have to use Cedega - if you're that keen on gaming, you probably have a Windows license kicking about somewhere anyway so just install that for gaming purposes as a dual boot.
Doom 3 is about the first game I've noticed that doesn't run on Windows 98 (at least according to the box) but apart from that, 98 is fine for the occasional gaming session - just do I like I do and do all your important stuff in Linux.
In the words of Robin Williams: "Whoa there, Sparky!"
That's something of a blanket statement, isn't it? It could be argued that if you have access to "warez", you're certainly not going to be inclined to move to a FREE operating system on the basis of saving money on software, are you? Kind of a reverse logic thing you've got going on there...
And if we're looking at copyright violation/property theft, doesn't most of the piracy of movies and music happen amongst the the teenagers to 25 year old age groups? These are hardly going to be free software users.
It was not by far the only reason but one reason I made the move to Linux was because I was sick and tired of paying for generally low quality commercial software and actually felt better about NOT having to pirate a commercial application I didn't want to pay for in the first place.
You're probably right but I don't see why it's that important that Linux is #1 in the world. Surely, it's more important to have open standards globally such that you can view any web site with any browser, exchange documents with anyone else's operating system & applications, etc? What does it matter what OS people choose to use to achieve that - sure, you and I porbably use Linux but others choose Windows which is fine also, as long as they have a genuine choice.
When you can buy the same games for Linux that you can for Windows and anyone can install them, there will be a massive push behind Linux as an operating system.
Unfortunately, the major problem here is that, like it or not, Microsoft DirectX provides a more readily available suite of games APIs for developers than does the cross-platform OpenGL standard and that's probably the biggest thing stopping games companies producing for Linux. Those that do, like ID, can do it because they work in OpenGL in the first place.
Games push hardware, which sell more computers, which spur the development of faster machines.
I'm not sure this is necessarily a good thing. In the days of the classic 8-bit and 16-bit machines like the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga, etc, upgrades were virtually unheard of and games developers were force to push the machines to their limits to achieve certain features in games. My personal belief is that this made games of old generally much better than most modern games - sure, graphics are thousands of times better now but I don't think that addictiveness or playability has got any better in all but a handful of titles.
having a Linux-based arcade machine is a very, very good thing
There may be some developments as a result of Linux going into the arcades but it's important to realise that although the Linux OS in these machine is Open Source (it has to be), the games definitely won't be (and don't have to be) so it's not as though you'll be able to play these at home unless a games publisher decides to releases them for home usage.
Any games exposure for Linux is a good thing but it always boils down to financial concerns in the end and games developers will only release Linux games if they are confident they can make money from it.
You can actually go a stage further and put the AllowUsers directive in /etc/sshd_config. Just stick in the list of users that can use ssh, leave out root and the common account names (you can always su once you're in as a normal user anyway) so that an intruder would need to know the account name of an allowed user before getting anywhere.
It just gives you an extra layer of security which is always a good idea to do if you can.
In the past week or so, I've seen a couple of failed access attempts from an IP address at one of the universities in China and from one on comcast.net (surprise surprise) - whoever it is has tried a couple of "standard" account names that I (of course) don't have on my server so the logs have just reported the failed attempts.
It would be tempting to send an "abuse@" email to someone but the fact is that the script kiddie is probably using those IPs as compromised boxes anyway.
So all I'm doing now is putting a shell-script in place that emails me when the logs pick up any more illegal access attempts and just adding the IPs I have to a barred list on my firewall that just drops the packets from those IPs for an extra layer of security. The added advantage is that this is a "passive warning" to the cracker - instead of getting any form of login prompt, (s)he'll just get nothing back in future.
This change in behaviour from my server should alert the cracker that I am aware of their presence and maybe act as a deterrent in itself.
Unless there is actually a successful intrusion, I think this is the best way to proceed - just monitor the logs and put an extra layer of security in place when you see anything unusual.
Just keep outsmarting them...
Much as I hate to admit it, I fear you are probably right.
I think these "Windows vs Linux" arguments are generally pointless anyway because there are essentially two types of Windows users:
1. Those that pay legitimately for all of their Microsoft products - in which case they've spent quite a large sum of money that they're hardly going to want to waste so will stick with and defend those products no matter what
or
2. Those who have never paid for an MS product (and there are a LOT of them) - but pass round MSDN CDs from work or download pirate copies from the Internet. Those people have the "perception" that all MS products are free and already have familiarity with Windows, Office etc. in which case, why *should* they consider Linux which they can also get for free but will require a steep learning curve from the outset.
What both groups seem to forget is that the people in 1. above would probably part with less money if the people in 2. legitimately bought all their software (because of higher volume sales) and the people in 2. would be much keener to look at a free alternative if they had no choice but to pay for their software.
That's true but you could also be taking calls on a laptop, a desktop PC, a PDA... therefore the SIP server needs to know what answering devices are available and what the capabilities of each one is.
What are illegal are nuisance calls. The idea behind an autodialer is that it makes a call without human intervention and, when the call is answered, it tries to detect if the answering party is a human or an answering machine. If it's a human, it'll transfer the call to an agent in the call-centre but if it's an answering machine, it'll probably drop the call.
Therefore, if the detection isn't set right (a lot of autodialers use algorithms based on the pattern of voice energy they hear to decide if it's a human or machine who answered), the autodialer can mistake a human for a machine and cut the call - the called party therefore suffers a nuisance call.
Incidentally, if you're careful, you can usually work out if a call is from an autodialler. Because the autodialer can sit there for about 3 seconds (with you going "Hello? Hello?" into the mouthpiece) making the machine/human decision, if someone doesn't speak immediately then you can be pretty sure it's a call centre autodialler on the other end and take appropriate action.
Another trick is to always answer the phone like an answering machine message by speaking a long sentence, with no pauses, as soon as you pick up the phone e.g. "Hi this is Joe Sixpack on 123-4567 how can I help you". Autodialers usually assume a human will leave pauses in voice whereas an answering machine won't so you can end up fooling it.
Mind you, it's a bit of a downer if that girl you've always fancied decides to ring you for that first date...
Point taken.
Uncompressed voice needs around 64 kbits/s bandwidth (56 kbit/s in the US) - by the time you've compressed it down through, say, a G.729 codec, you've probably got that down to about 16 kbit/s without adding extra bandwidth for signalling information also.
On a 1MB DSL link, your practically looking at about 32 simultaneous calls maximum (and that's a way too optimistic number!), remembering that you've got to have a voice codec resource available for each of those calls for its entire duration.
Compare that to the couple of kilobytes used by a spam email and it rapidly becomes impractical as a technology for voice spamming.
I do wish these security people would read some decent books first!
If the VoIP world goes the way of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) then everyone will need to use a service provider to assist in routing calls outside of a business network. That provider will assign a charge, albeit a small one, to each call. Unlike sending spam email virtually free of charge, making 100,000 VoIP spam calls will cost a tidy sum of money - far beyond the purses of any 2-bit spammer!
Secondly, in a SIP environment, any call needs to go via a SIP registration server so that the caller is able to get information on what devices and messaging services the called party has available as well as obtaining the called party's IP address (remembering of course that if the called party is mobile, the IP address he or she is registered to is rapidly changing anyway!) I have no doubt that it's a relatively simple task to provide some connection blocking at the SIP server so that it's possible to create a blacklist of callers that will never get a connection.
Sure, I've no doubt that telemarketers will make use of VoIP but while both telemarketers and spammers should burn in hell, telemarketers target specific individuals (based on information they have on that individual that makes them believe they can sell something to him or her) and therefore generate far less junk traffic than spammers.
Personally, this is just FUD spread by a bunch of "think-they-know-it-all" security cowboys out to make a fast buck.
Boeing 747 - an airliner in service since the 1970s but still in service because of it's success and reliability
Volkswagen Beetle - a German car designed during World War 2 that is still manufactured as a reliable & economical car
Lord Of The Rings - a trilogy of fantasy novels first published in 1954 but continually republished (and recently filmed) due to it's continuing popularity.
Hoover Vacuum Cleaner - core functionality essentially changed since 1908.
"If it ain't broke, why fix it?"
Out of all of them, SCO has always been the biggest nightmare to setup and sysadmin out of all of them.
- The SCO documentation is rubbish. It was spread over a huge number of volumes that took you hours to try and find the answer to any problem
- Bearing in mind that SCO's an x86 UNIX, the driver support is minimal
- No publishers have ever taken much interest in writing specific books for it. Aside from generic UNIX books, there's not a lot else compared to the very good books on all the UNIXes
- Even Evi Nemeth's "UNIX System Administration Handbook" (the UNIX bible for those who don't know) has never even mentioned it (at least in the 2nd & 3rd editions I have) whereas even IRIX and DEC OSF/1 get their own sections!
- I don't even remember it coming with a C compiler by default
IMHO SCO is UNIX from the Dark Ages.
Off the top of my head, weren't Netraverse the company that developed "Win4Lin" a few years ago? AFAIK (never used Win4Lin) it was basically a commercial equivalent to Wine - provided a Windows emulation layer to run Windows apps on top.
I assume "Merge" must be from the same stable...
Red Hat, IBM, Novell, etc have identified a business value for OSS - as I said in another post, those organisations are the corporate-facing front-ends to OSS and have created profitable businesses on the back of OSS.
Stallman is a defender of OSS and the GNU project specifically. If someone says something about OSS that Stallman does not believe in, he will be the first to stand up and make an objection. However, he's got no interest in the business side of OSS, he's happy to let the front end companies handle that (and has occasionally spoken out against some of the practices of the distro vendors like Red Hat).
I've not read that specific article to comment on Stallman's input but I'm sure he was his usual vocal self in promoting the cause of free software.
If you think I've exposed any lack of comfort level in anything that I have said, then I am more than willing to be challenged by you on that - however, all of the issues you have mentioned I too have met in my work with Linux.
Let's just not get into "I know more than you do" arguments because they're pointless.
OSS gives away products.
Therefore OSS is not a business.
So why does it need a business model?
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Salesmen need to look smart to sell to customers.
Richard Stallman is a programmer and advocate of OSS that anyone can take freely.
Therefore what Stallman does with his hair is irrelevant.
Sorry, I don't see that at all.
OSS is developed freely by a lot of people who like programming. Having no commercial pressures in developing a "pretty looking" product, they go for stability and speed as prime concerns. Many of them will also argue that "usability" is not about having a pretty interface but a few text-based config files held in a well-known location like /etc and let the sysadmin create wrappers and shell scripts to ease the configuration process if he so wishes.
KDE and Gnome may be trying to emulate the Windows interface to a degree but they are also both quite bloated products with a lot of GUI-based config tools that a lot of expert users neither want nor care about.
There is no remit by OSS people to encourage people away from Windows by copying it. It's there to make the transition for those who want to simpler, nothing more.
Not to mention that hardware is very cheap these days anyway and that Open Source allows a lot of old legacy hardware to still work - charities can recycle thrown-out PCs and provide some sort of computing infrastructure, virtually free of charge, to poorer countries.
With Internet connectivity in these places, the effect on education of the local populace must be one of the greatest benefits there is.
Sure, Digital were charging money for VMS at the same sort of time but that was an OS specific to their hardware and it was the hardware they made the money on.
No, I'm talking about a Free Software movement that has been going on seriously for some 20 years now that is more than happy to co-exist alongside commercial software.
I'm sorry to break it to you but the dot-com bubble has burst. Several years ago.
Sorry, your point is??? I thought the dot.com bubble was more about idiotic financeers overvaluing companies - what's this got to do with free/commercial software development?
You can't spent countless man-hours on man-hour intensive kind of labour (lots of manhours=high cost) like software development and make money on some low-margin side channel like customization services or support.
IBM, Novell, Red Hat, etc. seem perfectly capable of working within that model. My company, which sells telephony platforms on Linux-based systems makes a profit from services and support while developing the software in-house. I still don't see what's the problem?
That is true. They are giving something away for free that kills another persons livehood. Of cause, someone else is making something free that kills their own livehood as well.
Ah, I think I get it now. In your vision of the world, generosity and volunteer work are not allowed then on the basis that it might stop someone else profiting from it. In your world there is no room for altruism, eh?
By the same logic, rather than having the Red Cross and Oxfam goint into the Sudan with free food parcels, we send in K-Mart or ASDA (if you're in the UK) to go sell them the food. Hmmm...
I assume he does that but the commercial sector is highly affected by free products. It also drives the offshoring trend since lower labour cost is needed to counter marketloss to people who work for free.
Then how about you get your local politician /senator to speak up in the appropriate government chambers and gets a bill passed that taxes company profits heavily if they use cheap off-shore labour? In my world, a company that makes profits in a particular country should be obligated to create a certain percentage of jobs in that country also - "you take something, you give something back."
This has nothing to do with Open Source but everything to do with your commercial enterprise pandering to the rich fat shareholders.
No one has any godgiven right to live on a specific line of career and anyone can give away their own work for free of cause. But don't kid yourself, it does hurt everyone working in the industry.
So what? Virtually all of our coal-mining industry in the UK has been annihilated - not because there's no more coal to mine but because it became too expensive to mine compared to importing it (much of it from the US).
However, if I complained about that I would be a hypocrite because I also like cheaper electricity as a result of that business decision.
Sure, it sucks if you lose your livelihood but invariably it's as a result of this bigger thing called progress.
If you've come from a Windows environment into using Open Source then that is commendable. But you really have to drop this mindset of expecting it to "Just Work" and getting it for free simultaneously.
You have the option of paying SuSE, Red Hat, Mandrake, etc. money for a boxed Linux distro which will include some degree of support from those companies. Do that and the types of problems you've mentioned will, I'm sure, be rectified very quickly by them. This is no different to paying Microsoft for support on Windows.
If, on the other hand, you download a free distro (which you, I and the rest of the world have every right to do) then you might strike lucky and have a trouble-free installation with, say, Mandrake's free distro or Fedora.
However, if you don't, then you have to accept that at that point your only option is to search the Internet for an answer to your problem, maybe go buy a Linux book or two but have to embark on a learning curve to be able to progress further.
You need to appreciate that people in the OSS/Linux community are generally pretty helpful to newcomers but, at the same time, newcomers have to accept a degree of personal responsibility for what they are doing.
One of the issues newcomers fail to appreciate is that just about everything in UNIX or Linux is configured via (usually) a complex looking text file at the lowest level - GUI utilities for configuration that are provided by Red Hat, SuSE etc are merely convenient front ends to those configuration files to make the job easier. However, any UNIX guru will tell you that once you've mastered shell-scripting, there is nothing more powerful than a "Swiss Pocket Knife" of personally designed scripts that let you automate the more mundane tasks.
For that reason, it's simply rarely going to be the case that OSS programmers focus on configuration tools instead of core software functionality and stability - again, configuration utilities you see in distros have invariably been designed by the distro publisher, like Yast in SuSE, for example, not by the OSS programmers.
Finally, you seem to forget that even installing a driver in Windows for, say, a printer requires a degree of familiarity with it - average Joe Sixpack even has problems doing something as simple as that.
People seem to forget that they went through a learning curve even when they first started with Windows and I'm sure that if you added that time up, from first learning to use a mouse to manoevering competently around the Windows desktop, you would find that it took you a fair number of learning hours to get event that far.
It's important to compare like-for-like - remember, if you use Windows legally, you will have paid money for it and you've probably got free help from a local Windows guru on a number of occasions without really thinking about it - perhaps even your corporate IT department.
On the other hand, you probably got Linux for free and don't have a local Linux guru to hand to assist you - it's therefore up to you to go find documentation, bulletin boards or a person to give you that help.