It remembers me of the record labels saying they're losing profit because of the various P2P networks.
In most countries (if not all) the telcos are still the ones who carries most of the Internet traffic, as the dial-up connections are the most used. So what they lose (or, better said, do not earn) in terms of phone calls they get it for IP traffic over the phone lines, which goes to them anyways. And the proportion of the VoIP calls over the dial-up internet users is tiny compared to the number of total phone line suscribers who doesn't uses VoIP or doesn't have internet connections at all.
I think the Panama government is doing WAY wrong with this, as they're supposed to defend the PEOPLE rights over the COMPANIES and not the other way.
Has the telcos presented the government confident statistics about their lose of revenue because of the use of VoIP? Has the government made a deep study case?
And because of all this there comes to my mind another question: what happens with the ISP's contracts? They're supposed to give you access to the 100% of the Internet, not 99.9% of it. So this is not just a violation of the consumers rights, but also of the ISPs ones because they're forced to not to give their customers a complete service.
Althought I've been reading about Phoenix since its first release, I had never used it until now. And I must say that I'm very surprised and pleased with it.
It has the same (excellent) rendering engine as Mozilla, and is so standards-compliant.
All of my sites looks and works great, and I do use a lot of CSS/JavaScript stuff.
But the best of all, is its lightweight. Phoenix loads a lot faster than its big brother Mozilla, and same goes for the sites rendering.
It supports all the features I use in Mozilla (tabbed browsing, make animated images not loop, JavaScript Console, etc.) plus some unique ones (toolbar customization, sidebar download manager). Oh and it uses your GTK+ widget native look/theme, so you get a tighter integration with the whole environment.
A piece of software worth trying if you haven't done so yet, it still need some work (like on the stability side), and it seems not to have AA fonts support by now (I might be wrong, first time I run it and I haven't used for more than 10 minutes, heh) but it's sure a walk on the right path.
There already is a huge base of x86 users around the globe, and inside it, an ever-growing base of GNU/Linux, *BSD and all sort of *NIX and opensource enthusiasts. That gives them a pretty good testbed for debugging the system, and making it more compatible.
Backporting it to a completely different platform from what it was originally developed (FreeBSD/x86 -> Darwin/PPC -> Darwin/x86) is a pretty good sanity check in order to see they didn't break what was already there, gives them a good shot on portability (think byte order endianness) and gives them a nice try on moving from their current platform (Motorola PPC) to some future versions (IBM Power4). By making the base system more portable, it's just a matter of recompiling the upper layers (think GUI, APIs, etc.) to asure potential future compatibility.
I don't think the Darwin/x86 release is due to enter the *nix market which is already dominated by the various *BSD flavors and GNU/Linux. Besides what I've previously said, it shows commitment from the Apple people to the OpenSource community.
RedHat IS NOT Linux. Nor will ever be. If you like *BSD, try Slackware Linux (http://www.slackware.com). You'll LOVE IT and will never want to come back.
First of all, everyone is gonna love Microsoft for porting its great universal authentication solution to the *nices platforms, making it more universal. Big *NIX companies will buy the software and will offer Passport support to their clients.
Then, after a couple of (outdated) versions, specifications will change without previous notice and the implementation will be worthless, the performance will go much below that the native winXX version, big companies customers will start bitching around about lack of support and functionality, and the final response from M$ to big compianies will be 'our passport system was created to work from the ground up on the.NET framework, which uses native winXX functions not available in any other working environment, thus we cannot guarantee the correct behaviour on other platforms'.
End result: big company will migrate its *NIX servers to M$ platforms, and big company customers opinion about how *nix sucks, and how far winXX is superior at accomplishing the same tasks.
Don't you see it's all but just a FUD game the M$ people is trying to play with you?
It isn't to hard to follow the given links and take a look at what is it about... anyways for the lazy Moonlight 3D is (as the last two letters from its name suggests) is a 3D modelling software.
With the recent release of Blender as opensource software, and now that Moonlight 3D is 'coming back to life', the offer of quality 3D modelling software is increasing in an intreasting manner.
Not that I'm an expert 3D sculptor, but I've always admired the work created by the people that manages these pieces of software.
TCP/IP is not referred as just TCP, it's the name given to the suit of protocols that makes the Internet happen, namely TCP and UDP, and IP, ICMP and others on different layers.
I wouldn't be worried about a win** client not here yet. This is not a final release, and as with Vorbis, i'm sure there'll be broad support from windows clients to this technology (vorbis support is included in winamp by default now).
Anyways, we're just not talking about desktop computers running GNU/Linux (or your favorite *nix flavor for that matter) being able to support this software. This is a free implementation for already existing (or in progress) standards, and it being opensourced means that anyone can adopt it. And the Linux market is not reduced to just some desktop stations, its big potential is on embedded devices - media boxes, net kiosks, etc. - we already have Tremor, an integer only vorbis decoder libreary aimed at being used in such devices.
does *costs* means anything to you? Seriously, long distance calls can be very expensive, even more for people who must make them frequently (think foreign students, etc). Having the voice calls being transported over TCP/IP, using an already proven technology which covers almost the whole globe (and to some extent outside of it) reduces these costs to nearly 0, except for the VoIP hardware (gateways and such) needed, now think of the advantages to be able to do phone calls from your linux box using *free* software to anywhere in the world, for just the cost of your net link, which most of the time is flat-rated.
It's good to see the xiph people to bring to the masses such advanced projects - and under a free fashion. I hope the big companies start to take seriously all the Xiph's work by supporting their projects into commercial products, such as hardware OGG players and such.
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It remembers me of the record labels saying they're losing profit because of the various P2P networks.
In most countries (if not all) the telcos are still the ones who carries most of the Internet traffic, as the dial-up connections are the most used. So what they lose (or, better said, do not earn) in terms of phone calls they get it for IP traffic over the phone lines, which goes to them anyways. And the proportion of the VoIP calls over the dial-up internet users is tiny compared to the number of total phone line suscribers who doesn't uses VoIP or doesn't have internet connections at all.
I think the Panama government is doing WAY wrong with this, as they're supposed to defend the PEOPLE rights over the COMPANIES and not the other way.
Has the telcos presented the government confident statistics about their lose of revenue because of the use of VoIP? Has the government made a deep study case?
And because of all this there comes to my mind another question: what happens with the ISP's contracts? They're supposed to give you access to the 100% of the Internet, not 99.9% of it. So this is not just a violation of the consumers rights, but also of the ISPs ones because they're forced to not to give their customers a complete service.
Althought I've been reading about Phoenix since its first release, I had never used it until now. And I must say that I'm very surprised and pleased with it. It has the same (excellent) rendering engine as Mozilla, and is so standards-compliant. All of my sites looks and works great, and I do use a lot of CSS/JavaScript stuff. But the best of all, is its lightweight. Phoenix loads a lot faster than its big brother Mozilla, and same goes for the sites rendering. It supports all the features I use in Mozilla (tabbed browsing, make animated images not loop, JavaScript Console, etc.) plus some unique ones (toolbar customization, sidebar download manager). Oh and it uses your GTK+ widget native look/theme, so you get a tighter integration with the whole environment. A piece of software worth trying if you haven't done so yet, it still need some work (like on the stability side), and it seems not to have AA fonts support by now (I might be wrong, first time I run it and I haven't used for more than 10 minutes, heh) but it's sure a walk on the right path.
Then the first one wasn't THAT definitive!!
There already is a huge base of x86 users around the globe, and inside it, an ever-growing base of GNU/Linux, *BSD and all sort of *NIX and opensource enthusiasts. That gives them a pretty good testbed for debugging the system, and making it more compatible.
Backporting it to a completely different platform from what it was originally developed (FreeBSD/x86 -> Darwin/PPC -> Darwin/x86) is a pretty good sanity check in order to see they didn't break what was already there, gives them a good shot on portability (think byte order endianness) and gives them a nice try on moving from their current platform (Motorola PPC) to some future versions (IBM Power4). By making the base system more portable, it's just a matter of recompiling the upper layers (think GUI, APIs, etc.) to asure potential future compatibility.
I don't think the Darwin/x86 release is due to enter the *nix market which is already dominated by the various *BSD flavors and GNU/Linux. Besides what I've previously said, it shows commitment from the Apple people to the OpenSource community.
RedHat IS NOT Linux. Nor will ever be. If you like *BSD, try Slackware Linux (http://www.slackware.com). You'll LOVE IT and will never want to come back.
Or Microsoft Time, even... 17 seconds left... 45 seconds left... 3 minutes left... etc.
First of all, everyone is gonna love Microsoft for porting its great universal authentication solution to the *nices platforms, making it more universal. Big *NIX companies will buy the software and will offer Passport support to their clients. Then, after a couple of (outdated) versions, specifications will change without previous notice and the implementation will be worthless, the performance will go much below that the native winXX version, big companies customers will start bitching around about lack of support and functionality, and the final response from M$ to big compianies will be 'our passport system was created to work from the ground up on the .NET framework, which uses native winXX functions not available in any other working environment, thus we cannot guarantee the correct behaviour on other platforms'.
End result: big company will migrate its *NIX servers to M$ platforms, and big company customers opinion about how *nix sucks, and how far winXX is superior at accomplishing the same tasks.
Don't you see it's all but just a FUD game the M$ people is trying to play with you?
It isn't to hard to follow the given links and take a look at what is it about... anyways for the lazy Moonlight 3D is (as the last two letters from its name suggests) is a 3D modelling software.
With the recent release of Blender as opensource software, and now that Moonlight 3D is 'coming back to life', the offer of quality 3D modelling software is increasing in an intreasting manner. Not that I'm an expert 3D sculptor, but I've always admired the work created by the people that manages these pieces of software.
I think I still haven't seen a windows box without Winamp on it, even more, I think I still haven't seen anyone using WMP to play MP3 files...
TCP/IP is not referred as just TCP, it's the name given to the suit of protocols that makes the Internet happen, namely TCP and UDP, and IP, ICMP and others on different layers.
I wouldn't be worried about a win** client not here yet. This is not a final release, and as with Vorbis, i'm sure there'll be broad support from windows clients to this technology (vorbis support is included in winamp by default now). Anyways, we're just not talking about desktop computers running GNU/Linux (or your favorite *nix flavor for that matter) being able to support this software. This is a free implementation for already existing (or in progress) standards, and it being opensourced means that anyone can adopt it. And the Linux market is not reduced to just some desktop stations, its big potential is on embedded devices - media boxes, net kiosks, etc. - we already have Tremor, an integer only vorbis decoder libreary aimed at being used in such devices.
does *costs* means anything to you? Seriously, long distance calls can be very expensive, even more for people who must make them frequently (think foreign students, etc). Having the voice calls being transported over TCP/IP, using an already proven technology which covers almost the whole globe (and to some extent outside of it) reduces these costs to nearly 0, except for the VoIP hardware (gateways and such) needed, now think of the advantages to be able to do phone calls from your linux box using *free* software to anywhere in the world, for just the cost of your net link, which most of the time is flat-rated.
It's good to see the xiph people to bring to the masses such advanced projects - and under a free fashion. I hope the big companies start to take seriously all the Xiph's work by supporting their projects into commercial products, such as hardware OGG players and such.
what a cool way to remember those squared atari games using a voodoo 5 5500 :)