The politicians who wrote the laws about such things game themselves an exemption to call you. It is entirely possible that if you turn around it do it to them, you could be doing something illegal.
Remember, the deck is stacked, and not in your favor.
Exactly.
I've had to run a few of the robocall systems, and I frequently asked questions about it all.
Me: Can we give them a 'press 1 to unsubscribe' option?
Them: No, otherwise everyone would unsubscribe.
Me: What should I do with incoming calls (when people hit *69)?
Them: Just drop the call.
Me: I thought robocalling was illegal?
Them: It is. We're exempt because there are special provisions in $STATE-TELEMARKETER-BILL that allow for political calls.
Me: Hmm. The bill says we must stop calling at 6 PM, otherwise it says were 'harassing' people and could be liable...
Them: Look further down--it says political calls are exempt and can be run until 9 PM. And also on Saturday as early as 9 AM.
I remember waaay back in 7th grade, a kid was trying to impress everyone on the playground by saying he could build a 'screamer' bomb. It was a special 'pulse' you could send down the phone line that would blow up computers at the other end. Untraceable too.
*sigh* Every 4 years I start wishing that kid was right...;)
Yet another example of the 1% Overlords only using their money to build 1-acre hot tubs, drink 100-year-old Scotch from disposable diamand shot glasses, and keep other people poor because that's what makes them happy.
Yeah--because the 1% sends someone out to bitch slap any recruiter that tries to give you a job?
Or are you whining because you don't have the intelligence and skills to get into a position like Paul Allen?
I'll be the first to admit that I don't have those skills. And I'm not butt-hurt about it either. The entire world can't be billion-dollar-CEOs. Who would take out the trash, sweep the floors, build the products, run their servers, or design the next iPhone?
I know you've probably never given it a second thought, and now might seem like a reaaaallly bad time--but would you like to opt in to our defibrillation program?
Ok--real quick now CANIDEPLOYAIRBAGSRIGHTTHEFUCKNOW?
If I had to give that key anywhere else but at my desk, at home, or with people around me, or under any form of threat, I would most likely have trouble remembering the key.
There must be SOME way I can blame this on evil Microsoft. Were the fired execs open source, by any chance?
Forget blaming Microsoft for the moment. What we really need is a 9th-dupe of "Skype Alternatives for Linux" to get posted to Slashdot! Quick someone! Anyone!
Cool, I say that we should do this for every government department and that we should get to pick and choose. So while I'm willing to pay a buck a month for weather data I'm not willing to pay a goddamned dime for the War on Drugs, the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan, our new exciting war in Libya (fuck you President Obama), ethanol subsidies, farm subsidies, subsidies to oil companies, the Transportation Safety Administration, the Department of Homeland Security the DEA, NATO (the cold war is over, why does NATO still exist?), the defense of South Korea (you're the ninth largest economy in the world, you can take care of yourselves now), missile defense (it doesn't work), any parts of the FCC other than those concerned with setting technical standards (hey evangelical fucks, it's not the government's job to censor naughty words on television, why can't you fucking Christoids turn the damned box off if you're offended, are you really that fucking stupid?) and I'm only willing to pay for about 1/4 of what the Department of Defense is doing and shouldn't have to.
I'm a Christian and I wholeheartedly agree with you. It's no one's business what someone else does in the privacy of their own home as long as they aren't hurting someone else. Drugs? Go for it. But they're not for me. Wanna watch South Park? What business is it of mine to stop you? Or an organized religion?
I personally have a big beef with organized religion being in bed with the Government. Being tax-exempt is a pretty big win for them.
I'm all for the government protecting my homeland, but that's it. They don't need to go on the offensive unless we're attacked. Pearl Harbor? Sure, drop a nuke. They sucker-punched us.
But the most important job of government is to protect individual rights. I may not agree with all of what I see on Slashdot--but I sure as hell don't want the government in the censoring business. The freedom of speech is there to protect both popular *and* unpopular speech.
Here's a novel idea...start charging for access to the weather satellite data.
I'd pay $1/mo for being able to access the weather forecast...and there are what? 300,000,000 Americans? That should be enough to keep the damn satellites up. If not, charge $2/mo.
Real programmers don't need refactoring....whatever the hell that is.
reformatting
"%!tidy" works for me
class reflection
HTML doesn't have classes. Real programmers don't use JavaScript. My webserver is netcat and my ability to respond to incoming requests at 120 words-per-minute. Typing out a JPG is a bit of a pain though.
Any more complains I can dismiss condescendingly?;)
And when we had higher defense spending before Clinton during the Cold War we created, trained, and funded Al Qaeda. So by the same logic if we have higher military spending we are just shooting ourselves in the foot further down the road.
More accurately, if the military/intelligence is spending money on things that don't pertain to defense of the homeland, we are shooting ourselves in the foot further down the road...
My brother-in-law was 16 when he was murdered by an acquaintance who was high on drugs at the time.
It's a shame no one was exercising their constitutional right to carry a firearm.
I don't care if people use drugs, but I damn well better be able to carry a firearm to shoot them if they try to get into my house or harm my family. Problem solved.
Actually, support starts at $195 per incident and there are several different plans.
I went to microsoft.com/support and clicked on server support. It starts at $259 everywhere I looked. The same server support for Ubuntu is more expensive for your first incident--but if you have two incidents, you're ahead of Microsoft.
There is no charge if Microsoft is unable to rectify the complainant's problem..
You have conveniently failed to address what I was stating in my original post; ie, the "free" factor evaporates once support is required. In effect both Microsoft and any allegedly "free" OS, the cost is the same for support as long as it is not required.
The free factor doesn't evaporate. Something like Ubuntu still costs $0 while Microsoft's offerings do not start at $0.
In 20 years I have never called MS for any technical support. I am able to read and comprehend technical manuals, etcetera rather well. Plus, when a new device is released I do not have to wait for months (years, never) for support for that device with Microsoft. I have customers that demand high quality service.
Really? You've been able to fix your own bugs with Windows ME, Windows Vista, Exchange 5.5, Sharepoint, etc? You're telling me in 20 years, you've never run into a developer-created bug or that you've magically prayed to the Ballmer and it wasn't an issue? I haven't even done that in Linux. The difference is I can fix most of my own Linux bugs. With Microsoft, you must call them--even if they end up acknowledging it and reversing the support charge at the end.
Which new devices have you used in Windows that weren't already available in Linux?
USB was supported first in Linux.
IPv6 was supported first in Linux.
I know wireless sucks in Linux, but that's because communication with a wireless card isn't a standard like IPv6 or USB is a standard.
Plugging crap into my windows box generates endless popups and disk thrashing while it searches for drivers and usually fails. In Linux, I plug it in and by the time I look back up at the screen, I have a camera or USB drive mounted, or even a bluetooth device ready to use...
Now, I do have a FreeBSD server at home. It is a nice hobbyist toy and I do enjoy playing around with it from time to time. However, I would never use it in a mission critical environment.
Funny--I talked with a guy yesterday who runs a site used heavily by the insurance business. He said when he launched the site he chose BSD because the Microsoft option was prohibitively expensive. He had 5 servers and two load balancers. He said other than the hardware, it cost him nothing. Contrast that with whatever server version of Windows does clustering and load balancing. I remember running it back in the 2000-era (iirc) and it was tens of thousands of dollars.
And here comes the religious dogma I was talking about!
Yes, your ability to forsee that someone might disagree with you makes you correct.
Isn't it funny that the argument against having stable functioning drivers always comes down to IDEOLOGY,
Funny--I remember some bitching about ABI, but there was a whole ton of other crap you put in there about your ideology. I remember you bitching about having to hunt through forums (ever had to wade through a forum full of Windows noobs? "Uh, I rebooted and it fixed everything."), bitching about your time being oh so important, your retail woes, and other things completely irrelevant.
with the rant most people link to going so far as to call those that refuse to hand over source "leeches" and hope the kernel futzing breaks their drivers?
Nope--I don't call you a leech. I think you have a chosen business model (not to release the source because you want to lock people in), and that's fine. Just don't keep bitching about your inability to keep up. You seem like the kind of person who would have a business model around sending morse code via telegraph and then bitch that the internet costs way too much because the protocols keep changing every few decades (IPv4/IPv6) and you have to upgrade your router and switch your thinking from morse code to SMTP...all the while the telegraph becomes more and more obsolete.
I mean WTF is it to you if some do and some don't? Is that ANY different than right now? Nope, as you still have companies like Nvidia that makes binary blobs, only now you get to watch them break every six months.
Yup--and I don't buy their crap. The machines that I do work with that have nvidia work well though because they are using the open source driver made by the community. And while it has occasional issues too, it gets fixed faster than the Nvidia blob.
Does having open drivers keep Linux from breaking? Nope again as the open drivers break just as often thanks to Linus and his kernel fucking, because if you could look at it logically instead of a faith based perspective you'd see that there are only so many devs, and there are fewer of them than drivers to fix so drivers will ALWAYS be broken when Linus gets a wild hair up his ass, every. single. time!
...except that I can easily recompile the driver if I found my self in that situation. And with DKMS, the system recompiles it for me. So I really never find myself in the situation you are talking about. But if I did, I could always pay Canonical a small support fee to support my workstation for the next 365 days (not per-incident like with Microsoft...)
And allow me to say that if your way "worked" in any kind of reasonable fashion retailers wouldn't avoid your OS like the clap which I can assure you we most certainly do.
Yeah--Amazon really *hates* linux. It's constantly fscking up their retail business... </sarcasm>
Not just all the thousands of mom&pop shops, dotting the entire country, but big names like Best Buy, Staples, Walmart, do you think they avoid your OS because of its "quality construction" or a secret conspiracy? NO! It is because they take the box home, run updates when the little icon tells them to and get a broken machine like it is 1993 all over again, and promptly take that broke ass shit back!
...I think ACE Hardware runs on a Linux platform too. And then there's Lowes. They appear to run a customized version of Gnome on their staff kiosks. I work for a mom-and-pop shop that maintains Linux computers. We spend 99% of our time reinstalling windows due to virus infections and almost never see Linux boxes come back in.
And since we retailers can't sell used as new that means
I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out but its true: Linux is free if your time is worthless.
You misunderstand time then. It costs me nothing but time to setup a linux workstation for my wife. I spend under an hour, and she has a clean, non-virus-infected netbook. If I went the Windows route (because as you say, my time isn't worthless), I have to go shell out ~$150ish for Windows for her netbook...and I have to go work for almost a full day in order to pay for that. So not only do I waste an hour of time installing it for her, I waste a day working on my day job to pay for it. No thank you.
As for the business world, would you rather pay someone $1,000 for a mail server install or $5,000 for a mail server install. In case you're confused, the $1,000 install is entirely paying for my time to setup whatever mail options you want. In the case of the $5,000 install, $3,500 is for Microsoft software licensing and $1,500 is for my install time with the options Microsoft lets you have.
But whatever--keep telling yourself that linux sucks because of ABI breakage instead of the real reason: you want to keep your drivers closed source so you can lock users in, and you're too slow or stupid to recompile your drivers.
My wife has been running Ubuntu for 4 years now, the only time she called me was when her SSD died. She did the upgrades too. So where's the problem?
Until you need technical support or drivers for new devices.
I know math is hard--but let's see if I can break it down for you. Microsoft is $259 per incident. Ubuntu us $320 per year.
I know the Ubuntu number looks bigger until you realize that you can call 50 times for that same price. Calling 50 times for Windows would cost you just under $13,000.
But who calls for tech support for Linux anyways? I build and maintain ubuntu-based firewalls, spam filters, mail servers, virtual servers, and VoIP servers. I've never had to call for support.
Without some serious corporate funding a a real alternative cant exist. Google talk + voice comes very close though... a more open alternative wold be very hard, as you really need a central authority with these kinds of services to work around technical complexities that would otherwise make things useless for mom/dad etc.
You don't need a central authority for e-mail and it works well.
What really needs to happen is for internet providers to setup VoIP servers in addition to e-mail servers. Set up SRV records and tie in the authentication to the same database as the e-mail addresses. I should be able to fire up a SIP client, type in 'joe@comcast.net' or 'joe@mydomain.com' and be talking via SIP to a server that can route my calls to 'bob@aol.com' or '555-1234'. It's really not that hard--there's just no motivation for an ISP to do it because no one else has done it yet...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying throw lightning bolts at Congress, or am I?
That fits pretty well with your sig. ;)
Or, it might get you into trouble.
The politicians who wrote the laws about such things game themselves an exemption to call you. It is entirely possible that if you turn around it do it to them, you could be doing something illegal.
Remember, the deck is stacked, and not in your favor.
Exactly.
;)
I've had to run a few of the robocall systems, and I frequently asked questions about it all.
Me: Can we give them a 'press 1 to unsubscribe' option?
Them: No, otherwise everyone would unsubscribe.
Me: What should I do with incoming calls (when people hit *69)?
Them: Just drop the call.
Me: I thought robocalling was illegal?
Them: It is. We're exempt because there are special provisions in $STATE-TELEMARKETER-BILL that allow for political calls.
Me: Hmm. The bill says we must stop calling at 6 PM, otherwise it says were 'harassing' people and could be liable...
Them: Look further down--it says political calls are exempt and can be run until 9 PM. And also on Saturday as early as 9 AM.
I remember waaay back in 7th grade, a kid was trying to impress everyone on the playground by saying he could build a 'screamer' bomb. It was a special 'pulse' you could send down the phone line that would blow up computers at the other end. Untraceable too.
*sigh* Every 4 years I start wishing that kid was right...
Actually, I was being sarcastic. Too subtly, apparently.
My subtlometer is either broken or off-scale low. ;)
Yet another example of the 1% Overlords only using their money to build 1-acre hot tubs, drink 100-year-old Scotch from disposable diamand shot glasses, and keep other people poor because that's what makes them happy.
Yeah--because the 1% sends someone out to bitch slap any recruiter that tries to give you a job?
Or are you whining because you don't have the intelligence and skills to get into a position like Paul Allen?
I'll be the first to admit that I don't have those skills. And I'm not butt-hurt about it either. The entire world can't be billion-dollar-CEOs. Who would take out the trash, sweep the floors, build the products, run their servers, or design the next iPhone?
This comment was brought to you courtesy Waggener Edstrom, a Microsoft marketing partner.
The name 'Waggener Edstrom' says all you need to know about how much they 'get' the social media environment now-a-days.
Everything should be opt-in. Never opt-out.
I know you've probably never given it a second thought, and now might seem like a reaaaallly bad time--but would you like to opt in to our defibrillation program?
Ok--real quick now CANIDEPLOYAIRBAGSRIGHTTHEFUCKNOW?
If I had to give that key anywhere else but at my desk, at home, or with people around me, or under any form of threat, I would most likely have trouble remembering the key.
Hence the 'Anonymous Coward' posting on Slashdot.
....ugly as the old site.
There must be SOME way I can blame this on evil Microsoft. Were the fired execs open source, by any chance?
Forget blaming Microsoft for the moment. What we really need is a 9th-dupe of "Skype Alternatives for Linux" to get posted to Slashdot! Quick someone! Anyone!
We do not have choose your own taxes in america, and we aren't going to start it over the f\/ck!ng weather satellites.
"I'm sorry sir, I know you walk to the bus and back for work, but you are too poor to know whether or not it is supposed to rain today"
Sure we do.
A government derives its just powers from the consent of the government.
When a government becomes a terror to good people and good works, it is the duty of those good men to rise up and put government back in its place.
Cool, I say that we should do this for every government department and that we should get to pick and choose. So while I'm willing to pay a buck a month for weather data I'm not willing to pay a goddamned dime for the War on Drugs, the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan, our new exciting war in Libya (fuck you President Obama), ethanol subsidies, farm subsidies, subsidies to oil companies, the Transportation Safety Administration, the Department of Homeland Security the DEA, NATO (the cold war is over, why does NATO still exist?), the defense of South Korea (you're the ninth largest economy in the world, you can take care of yourselves now), missile defense (it doesn't work), any parts of the FCC other than those concerned with setting technical standards (hey evangelical fucks, it's not the government's job to censor naughty words on television, why can't you fucking Christoids turn the damned box off if you're offended, are you really that fucking stupid?) and I'm only willing to pay for about 1/4 of what the Department of Defense is doing and shouldn't have to.
I'm a Christian and I wholeheartedly agree with you. It's no one's business what someone else does in the privacy of their own home as long as they aren't hurting someone else. Drugs? Go for it. But they're not for me. Wanna watch South Park? What business is it of mine to stop you? Or an organized religion?
I personally have a big beef with organized religion being in bed with the Government. Being tax-exempt is a pretty big win for them.
I'm all for the government protecting my homeland, but that's it. They don't need to go on the offensive unless we're attacked. Pearl Harbor? Sure, drop a nuke. They sucker-punched us.
But the most important job of government is to protect individual rights. I may not agree with all of what I see on Slashdot--but I sure as hell don't want the government in the censoring business. The freedom of speech is there to protect both popular *and* unpopular speech.
Here's a novel idea...start charging for access to the weather satellite data.
I'd pay $1/mo for being able to access the weather forecast...and there are what? 300,000,000 Americans? That should be enough to keep the damn satellites up. If not, charge $2/mo.
Even better, the The American Society for Microbiology could change their URL to www.org.asm. I imagine that'd get them a few extra page hits.
*facepalm*
My first though was "You mis-spelled 'organism'".
but being able to flip between documents
What part of "o <filename>" don't you understand?
use refactoring
Real programmers don't need refactoring....whatever the hell that is.
reformatting
"%!tidy" works for me
class reflection
HTML doesn't have classes. Real programmers don't use JavaScript. My webserver is netcat and my ability to respond to incoming requests at 120 words-per-minute. Typing out a JPG is a bit of a pain though.
;)
Any more complains I can dismiss condescendingly?
And when we had higher defense spending before Clinton during the Cold War we created, trained, and funded Al Qaeda. So by the same logic if we have higher military spending we are just shooting ourselves in the foot further down the road.
More accurately, if the military/intelligence is spending money on things that don't pertain to defense of the homeland, we are shooting ourselves in the foot further down the road...
No no... the Clinton era was actually reducing our debt.
Sure--unfortunately when you make huge defense cuts, you have consequences. So thanks Clinton for reducing our debt...
We've not had wealth since the Clinton administration.
I think you mean "...since the Roosevelt administration".
...or maybe you meant "...since the Wilson administration".
My brother-in-law was 16 when he was murdered by an acquaintance who was high on drugs at the time.
It's a shame no one was exercising their constitutional right to carry a firearm.
I don't care if people use drugs, but I damn well better be able to carry a firearm to shoot them if they try to get into my house or harm my family. Problem solved.
Actually, support starts at $195 per incident and there are several different plans.
I went to microsoft.com/support and clicked on server support. It starts at $259 everywhere I looked. The same server support for Ubuntu is more expensive for your first incident--but if you have two incidents, you're ahead of Microsoft.
There is no charge if Microsoft is unable to rectify the complainant's problem..
You have conveniently failed to address what I was stating in my original post; ie, the "free" factor evaporates once support is required. In effect both Microsoft and any allegedly "free" OS, the cost is the same for support as long as it is not required.
The free factor doesn't evaporate. Something like Ubuntu still costs $0 while Microsoft's offerings do not start at $0.
In 20 years I have never called MS for any technical support. I am able to read and comprehend technical manuals, etcetera rather well. Plus, when a new device is released I do not have to wait for months (years, never) for support for that device with Microsoft. I have customers that demand high quality service.
Really? You've been able to fix your own bugs with Windows ME, Windows Vista, Exchange 5.5, Sharepoint, etc? You're telling me in 20 years, you've never run into a developer-created bug or that you've magically prayed to the Ballmer and it wasn't an issue? I haven't even done that in Linux. The difference is I can fix most of my own Linux bugs. With Microsoft, you must call them--even if they end up acknowledging it and reversing the support charge at the end.
Which new devices have you used in Windows that weren't already available in Linux?
USB was supported first in Linux.
IPv6 was supported first in Linux.
I know wireless sucks in Linux, but that's because communication with a wireless card isn't a standard like IPv6 or USB is a standard.
Plugging crap into my windows box generates endless popups and disk thrashing while it searches for drivers and usually fails. In Linux, I plug it in and by the time I look back up at the screen, I have a camera or USB drive mounted, or even a bluetooth device ready to use...
Now, I do have a FreeBSD server at home. It is a nice hobbyist toy and I do enjoy playing around with it from time to time. However, I would never use it in a mission critical environment.
Funny--I talked with a guy yesterday who runs a site used heavily by the insurance business. He said when he launched the site he chose BSD because the Microsoft option was prohibitively expensive. He had 5 servers and two load balancers. He said other than the hardware, it cost him nothing. Contrast that with whatever server version of Windows does clustering and load balancing. I remember running it back in the 2000-era (iirc) and it was tens of thousands of dollars.
And here comes the religious dogma I was talking about!
Yes, your ability to forsee that someone might disagree with you makes you correct.
Isn't it funny that the argument against having stable functioning drivers always comes down to IDEOLOGY,
Funny--I remember some bitching about ABI, but there was a whole ton of other crap you put in there about your ideology. I remember you bitching about having to hunt through forums (ever had to wade through a forum full of Windows noobs? "Uh, I rebooted and it fixed everything."), bitching about your time being oh so important, your retail woes, and other things completely irrelevant.
with the rant most people link to going so far as to call those that refuse to hand over source "leeches" and hope the kernel futzing breaks their drivers?
Nope--I don't call you a leech. I think you have a chosen business model (not to release the source because you want to lock people in), and that's fine. Just don't keep bitching about your inability to keep up. You seem like the kind of person who would have a business model around sending morse code via telegraph and then bitch that the internet costs way too much because the protocols keep changing every few decades (IPv4/IPv6) and you have to upgrade your router and switch your thinking from morse code to SMTP...all the while the telegraph becomes more and more obsolete.
I mean WTF is it to you if some do and some don't? Is that ANY different than right now? Nope, as you still have companies like Nvidia that makes binary blobs, only now you get to watch them break every six months.
Yup--and I don't buy their crap. The machines that I do work with that have nvidia work well though because they are using the open source driver made by the community. And while it has occasional issues too, it gets fixed faster than the Nvidia blob.
Does having open drivers keep Linux from breaking? Nope again as the open drivers break just as often thanks to Linus and his kernel fucking, because if you could look at it logically instead of a faith based perspective you'd see that there are only so many devs, and there are fewer of them than drivers to fix so drivers will ALWAYS be broken when Linus gets a wild hair up his ass, every. single. time!
And allow me to say that if your way "worked" in any kind of reasonable fashion retailers wouldn't avoid your OS like the clap which I can assure you we most certainly do.
Yeah--Amazon really *hates* linux. It's constantly fscking up their retail business... </sarcasm>
Not just all the thousands of mom&pop shops, dotting the entire country, but big names like Best Buy, Staples, Walmart, do you think they avoid your OS because of its "quality construction" or a secret conspiracy? NO! It is because they take the box home, run updates when the little icon tells them to and get a broken machine like it is 1993 all over again, and promptly take that broke ass shit back!
And since we retailers can't sell used as new that means
I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out but its true: Linux is free if your time is worthless.
You misunderstand time then. It costs me nothing but time to setup a linux workstation for my wife. I spend under an hour, and she has a clean, non-virus-infected netbook. If I went the Windows route (because as you say, my time isn't worthless), I have to go shell out ~$150ish for Windows for her netbook...and I have to go work for almost a full day in order to pay for that. So not only do I waste an hour of time installing it for her, I waste a day working on my day job to pay for it. No thank you.
As for the business world, would you rather pay someone $1,000 for a mail server install or $5,000 for a mail server install. In case you're confused, the $1,000 install is entirely paying for my time to setup whatever mail options you want. In the case of the $5,000 install, $3,500 is for Microsoft software licensing and $1,500 is for my install time with the options Microsoft lets you have.
But whatever--keep telling yourself that linux sucks because of ABI breakage instead of the real reason: you want to keep your drivers closed source so you can lock users in, and you're too slow or stupid to recompile your drivers.
My wife has been running Ubuntu for 4 years now, the only time she called me was when her SSD died. She did the upgrades too. So where's the problem?
Until you need technical support or drivers for new devices.
I know math is hard--but let's see if I can break it down for you. Microsoft is $259 per incident. Ubuntu us $320 per year.
I know the Ubuntu number looks bigger until you realize that you can call 50 times for that same price. Calling 50 times for Windows would cost you just under $13,000.
But who calls for tech support for Linux anyways? I build and maintain ubuntu-based firewalls, spam filters, mail servers, virtual servers, and VoIP servers. I've never had to call for support.
I could go for a Ballmer Zombie instead.
Ballmer-monkey. (Developers!)
Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of bullcrap!
Can you imagine the licensing costs of Windows bullcrap(tm)? At least with Linux it's free...
Without some serious corporate funding a a real alternative cant exist. Google talk + voice comes very close though... a more open alternative wold be very hard, as you really need a central authority with these kinds of services to work around technical complexities that would otherwise make things useless for mom/dad etc.
You don't need a central authority for e-mail and it works well.
What really needs to happen is for internet providers to setup VoIP servers in addition to e-mail servers. Set up SRV records and tie in the authentication to the same database as the e-mail addresses. I should be able to fire up a SIP client, type in 'joe@comcast.net' or 'joe@mydomain.com' and be talking via SIP to a server that can route my calls to 'bob@aol.com' or '555-1234'. It's really not that hard--there's just no motivation for an ISP to do it because no one else has done it yet...