There is a German company called Softmaker Inc. and they make a commercial but quite affordable Office alternative. It's available for both Windows and Linux.
I haven't used this myself, but heard people who have used it talk about the software in the highest terms. Also, it appears that MS-Office format compatibility is far better than that of OpenOffice. Also, they sell professional fonts for Linux, too, so that alone will probably make the whole thing look much better. This may go a long way on its own.
Perhaps if you test drive this and show it to your boss, let him play with the Windows version for a while to prepare the ground etc etc, you might just get lucky and he might be more open to discuss Linux thin client deployment with the Linux version of them Softmaker folks' software as an alternative to MS-Office instead of OpenOffice. It may be worth a trial, I guess.
Also, how about running MS-Office via CrossOver on a Linux box. Not acceptable to your boss?
It's not VoIP koolaid. It's telcoligopolist koolaid if anything. You think being charged a buck or two for hot air is bad? You may want to consider Japan's NTT, the Japanese version of AT&T so to speak.
After WWII then Japanese government owned NTT introduced a kind of "membership fee" of about 700 USD per POTS line in order to aid the funding of infrastructure. At the time this made sense because most of Japan's telecommunications infrastructure was pretty much destroyed and the country was short both on natural resources and cash. However, this measure was meant to be _temporarily_ only.
Yet to this day, NTT still sells this strange concept of a phone line license. The price has come down a bit recently, though. I hear it's only about 400 or 500 USD now. It's not an installation fee cause you will pay for installation on top of it. It's not a deposit as you can't get your money back. But it's transferable so you can sell your phone line on the second hand market when you leave Japan or decide you can do without a PSTN line. There are phone line brokerage businesses doing nothing else but buying and selling phone line certificates.
Now imagine that Japan has some 40 or 50 million POTS lines for each of which somebody has at some point shelled out 700 bucks to NTT. How is that for legalised grand daylight robbery, eh?
This is what telcos have been doing for over 100 years. VoIP is kicking their butts and finally the revolution will kill its own children and the VoIP providers will be dead as well. We don't really need either of them.
And just in case you wondered how NTT is doing in the light of VoIP services. Not surprisingly they had one of their worst years ever losing some 20 or 30% of revenue. I hear that the telephone line selling scheme will soon be abandoned. At first, the yound Japanese decided they can do without POTS and use only cellphones instead and now the rest of the population is going VoIP. Nobody wants to pay for those silly phone line certificates anymore. About time!
Do you honestly believe Skype is going to remain free of charge if there was nothing else left but Skype?
With Skype being closed and proprietary, not even allowing interconnects, there are only two possible scenarios...
1) Skype will become the 800 pound gorilla of the telephony future cause everybody is using it but a few freedom of choice spirited 2% or 3%. In this scenario, quality will start to suck very badly because there will be zero incentive and of course Skype peer to peer calls will not stay free of charge. Monopolists always find a way to charge, and very much so.
2) Open standards will prevail and Skype will be just one of many alternative ways to carry out a VoIP call. In this scenario, Skype users will be charged for the privilege to communicate with other people using solutions other than Skype.
Skype is not the answer. Skype is the question and the answer is No.
Oh Jolly, by 2020 we will have so much bandwidth that VoIP packets will not even be the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Packets are only going to pile up if the amount of packets you feed into the pipe is higher than what the pipe can carry. If you have a pipe so outrageously oversized that you can't fill it up with all the packets you could possibly generate, then there will be no piling up and the scenario you describe is just a storm in a teacup.
We have got FTTH here, 100Mbit fibre full duplex. When I got this, I spent two months trying to do every imaginable and unimaginable thing in an attempt to saturate the link and trying to cause audio artifacts on my VoIP connections. Crazy stuff such as running multiple round-robin backups on cross mounted NFS disks (A backs up to B, B to C, D to E and E to A), inviting friends with notebooks to visit and use the ISP's video on demand service with as many multiple streams as possible, running oodles of VNC sessions with bandwidth wasting highest quality settings, hosting VoIP phone conferences with over 100 participants, downloading oodles of ISO CD images etc etc etc.
Believe me, no matter what I tried, I couldn't saturate the FTTH link and while this was going on, I had the clearest audio on my VoIP connections, no drop outs, no jitter. The mega conference was a big sea of chatter though. You couldn't understand a word. But that had nothing to do with packets piling up.
Quite frankly, your talk reminds me of stories I heard about doctors advising against the newly invented steam engines on railways because passengers couldn't possibly survive the incredible speed of more than 18 mph or whatever the limit was believed to be back then. Yet here we are two centuries later with millions of people reoutinely travelling on airplanes at over 600 mph. Naysayers are seldomly right.
Ok, let's put Gartner aside. I bet 10.000 USD that by 2020 there will be not a single POTS line left in any OECD country -- I am not so confident about third world countries although they might well be the first ones to switch off POTS because they haven't got much of a POTS infrastructure to begin with.
But of course we are talking real IP telephones here, not some softphone running on your PC. Yet, the transport will not be circuit switched. Even TV will be IP based by then. It's rather silly to assume that phone transport won't be IP based.
According to Gartner Group, VoIP is so much of a momentary fad that the last circuit switched telephone call on the planet will be made in the year 2020, a mere 15 years from now.
Besides, how do you think the large carriers are shuffling telephone traffic around the planet today? Much of that is VoIP based already, just that you don't know about it. Sure there is managed (private IP networks) and unmanaged bandwidth (public Internet) but the technology is steadily heading towards VoIP everywhere.
The DNS type scheme you are asking for is called ENUM aka E164, it exists today, it's an open standard and Asterisk supports it already. Roughly speaking, ENUM uses DNS to translate phone numbers into IP addresses.
You could sign up for a free account on e164.org and enter your existing telephone number. The system will call you back and an automated message tell give you a verification code which you type into a form on the web site to verify that you are in fact at that phone number. Then you enter the DNS name or IP of your Asterisk server or IP phone and anybody dialing your phone number from a VoIP device which supports ENUM lookup, like for example Asterisk, will then be connected directly peer to peer to you, without any phone company or VoIP service provider involved.
I think what you mean to say is that you would like to pick up an incoming call to your PSTN line at home while you are somewhere else, having the incoming call delivered to your via VoIP.
If so, this is quite straightforward. You could buy a little box called an FXO gateway. It's got at least one phone jack for connecting to a POTS line on one end and an Ethernet jack for connecting to a VoIP client on the other end. One of the most popular devices is probably the Sipura-3000.
The Sipura-3000 is actually a combo device as it has both an FXO and and FXS port. So you could also connect an analog phone to it, in addition to your POTS line. When you are out of the house and online with an IP phone or a softphone somwhere else, you could log in to the Sipura's web admin interface and change it's settings so that it will deliver incoming calls to your VoIP phone. By default it will pass incoming calls to the FXS port. You will need to have the Sipura on a public IP address though.
If you were to run your own Asterisk server, you can always tell all your friends to download Firefly from http://www.virbiage.com/ which is a software phone not unlike the Skype client software, but instead of a closed proprietary protocol it supports SIP and IAX.
Your friends will then be able to call you directly on your Asterisk server and you will be able to call them on their softphone, all free of charge.
If they have their PC on a public IP address, SIP is OK, if they are behind a NAT (private IP address, eg 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x) then there is a chance they will not get incoming calls from you without fiddling. In that case IAX is your choice of protocol.
There main thing about Skype is that they have bolted on all the NAT traversal troubleshooting hacks of SIP and shrinkwrapped them bolted on to their protocol. This means that the end user doesn't have to worry about NAT as the software picks the most suitable workaround automatically. You may call that built-in NAT troubleshooting.
With standard SIP based solutions, you have to do the NAT traversal troubleshooting manually. Yet, with Asterisk you can always avoid those troubles altogether by using IAX instead of SIP. IAX was designed so it wouldn't need any workarounds for NAT in the first place. You may call that NAT troublefree.
With Asterisk you definitely get the better technology and more importantly freedom to choose equipment, protocols, codecs, service providers. With Skype you are totally locked in just like it used to be in Ma Bell's days.
I have got precisely the setup you describe on my Asterisk server and I am happy to share the configuration. Can you send me a private message through Slashdot?
In a nutshell here is what's involved...
1) hook up your PSTN line to your Asterisk server
you do this either to a so called FXO port on an internal telephony interface card, the simplest one of which is an ordinary fax modem card which costs you 8 USD (any PCI modem with the Ambient MD3200 chipset will do) or you use an external VoIP gateway (phone jack in on one side, ethernet jack out on the other) such as the Sipura-3000 for example.
2) get your Asterisk connected to a VoIP service
this could be any VoIP service that supports SIP, IAX, MGCP or H323 and allows you to use your own equipment to connect. I usually recommend services that support IAX because it's a rocksolid protocol. There are many services that support IAX, the most well known ones are probably NuFone, Voicepulse and VoipJet.
3) enter your "trusted" phone numbers into the Asterisk database
this can be done on the Asterisk CLI with a one line command such as database put cidname 1234567890 "George W.Bush" or if you have a Mac, you can use a GUI based script applet for this. Maybe there is some GUI tool for Linux as well, I don't know about that.
4) edit your dialplan to forward known numbers to your mobile if you're out
there are several strategies to define what "out" means. You could just send all calls to your IP phone and if it is unavailable or if nobody picks it up in a certain time, send known callers (coming in via PSTN) to your mobile (via VoIP service). A little smarter way would be to define a certain shortdial to mean "I am out as of now", for example if you dial *555 or whatever you fancy. Of course you'll also need to define some code to mean "I am back". Finally, there are some interesting presence facilities. For example, if you have a Bluetooth phone, you could configure the Bluetooth Presence module of Asterisk to keep track of your phone via Bluetooth. If you are near and Asterisk can see your Bluetooth phone it means you are in, otherwise it means you are out. I think there is also a Jabber IM based presence scheme. If you can send email from your mobile, then you could even use that to remotely switch Asterisk between "in" and "out" and control where to forward calls from trusted phone numbers.
5) set up an auto-attendant and voicemail box
this involves setting up a voice menu in your dialplan to send incoming calls from unknown callers to and give them a choice to leave a voicemail or tell them when they should try to call you again or on which alternative number or whatever you fancy. You will also need to set up a voicemail box for Asterisk to put recorded messages into. Asterisk can forward those messages by email to you if you wish. Finally, you could use Asterisk's SMS module to send yourself an SMS message with the number of the caller and the time of the call.
In addition to the above, if you are in the US where local calls within a certain geographic area are unmetered, you might also like another feature of Asterisk which is called DISA (Direct Inward System Access). Basically this means you run your own private calling card service, just for yourself. The way this works is this... You call your PSTN line from your mobile phone while you are on the road, which might be within your included minutes or unmetered local calling facility. Asterisk will pick up the call and either identify you by your mobile phone's caller ID or ask you for a PIN number. After that Asterisk gives you a dial tone and you can use your VoIP service with its lower tariffs to make long distance and international calls.
As you can see, this is pretty exciting stuff, highly addicitive;-)
I did _not_ suggest anybody should run a PBX or VoIP server on Windows. I wouldn't even suggest to run a web or mail server on Windows.
The point is that if you want to suggest to the average IT department to give Asterisk a trial, it goes a long long way if their IT folks who are most likely Windows admins can just download an installer and play with Asterisk on their platform.
As soon as the Windows admins have convinced themselves that they can run Asterisk on their Windows boxes for testing and verifying stuff, they won't be that hostile anymore and the question what platform to use for a production deployment can usually be discussed in a reasonable fashion.
I know database admins who run Oracle enterprise database servers on their notebooks. They would never suggest to deploy a production database on a notebook, but they feel all the more comfortable with it because they can run a sandbox environment on their notebooks.
Same principle applies to Asterisk.
Apart from that, since there are no Zaptel drivers available for Windows, the only way you could build a PBX would be to use external VoIP gateways, such as the Sipura-3000 for instance. The Sipura-3000, like many other such gateways have a passthrough feature. If anything goes wrong, such as the Asterisk server being unreachable, or even in the event of a power outage on the Sipura itself, any incoming PSTN call will automatically be passed to the FXS port on the unit to which you would probably have an analog telephone connected.
For a home PBX, this might just be all the redundancy you need and many folks might not feel too uneasy to run such a basic setup on a Windows box, especially not if the alternative is setting up a Linux box when they might not have any clue how to go about that.
Then again, there are other uses for Asterisk than being a PBX. You could use it as a VoIP server only setting up your own SIP URIs where people can call you on your email address, like sip:myname@mydomain.com. Again, for private use most people might not feel too uneasy running such a facility on a Windows box.
The more people run their own VoIP servers at home -- Windows or otherwise -- the better the network effect. Remember Metcalfe's law!
BTW, I run my Asterisk server on a Mac;-) so you can probably imagine that I am not all too fond of Windows myself.
Unfortunately, this article lends yet more support to those who like to dismiss Asterisk based on the cliche that it can only be handled by hard core Linux geeks.
Sure, if you want to use Asterisk to its full potential, then you have to learn a thing or two. But that isn't any different from any other tool, be it Apache, IIS, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel, InDesign, Photoshop, Bryce, Final Cut, etc etc etc.
The important thing however is that you can get started with Asterisk very easily and without any special skillset.
The article doesn't mention anything about the fact that you can download an Asterisk installer for MacOS X along with a few configuration wizards and have a running PBX within a few minutes. It also doesn't mention that there is a similar Asterisk installer for Windows. At present, the Mac is the easiest platform to set up a basic PBX with Asterisk, but it shouldn't be too long before there will be configuration wizards for Asterisk on Windows, too.
How can we expect decision makers in companies to consider Asterisk if it is always presented as a Linux toy which requires Linux gurus to set up and run. That's precisely the kind of perception the incumbent proprietary system vendors love to promote when they pinch their overpriced stuff.
Let those people know that Asterisk is multi-platform and have them play with it on their platform of choice and there will soon be more mainstream deployments and more ease of use front ends.
Other than for Linux, Asterisk is so far available for FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD and Irix (both through the NetBSD package manager), MacOSX/Darwin, Windows and Solaris. Zaptel drivers (to use telephony interface cards) are available or in the works for FreeBSD, NetBSD, MacOSX and Solaris. If that doesn't deserve mentioning in an article about an Asterisk cottage industry, then I don't know what does.
The overwhelming majority of spam filter deceiving techniques relies on HTML. If you block messages containing HTML on the mail server, the spam that gets through is near 100% identifiable as spam using bayesian filters.
So why on earth do people still use HTML in their email? Email should be plain text only anyway.
They specialise in PPC only, so if you insist on an x86 powered machine then you'd have to find another such shop. I am confident there must be companies just like Terrasoft who specialise in x86 based Linux pre-installed gear.
In fact, a quick google search for "linux preinstalled laptops" shows the this very interesting site as first hit...
You are mistaken about the justification for patents.
The only reason for the patent system is to give incentive to inventors to publish their inventions instead of keeping them secret, thus enriching the public domain. All patents end up in the public domain. It's a BARGAIN, not an award.
Any patent attorney will confirm this. Just ask one. If you don't know any, just google for "patent bargain" or visit the CIPA website (chartered attorneys of patent agents)...
We don't need to do anything about patent law. What we need desperately is to do something about proper enforcement of the existing rules.
Patent law forbids granting patents on inventions for which there is prior art. Yet there is a flood of patents for which there is prior art which is against existing patent law.
Patent law forbids granting patents on inventions which are obvious deductions from prior art. Yet there is a flood of patents which do not meet the criteria of non-obviousness, again against existing patent law.
Patent law also forbids granting patents on applications which are not described in enough detail to allow persons skilled in the art to carry out the invention (ie build the apparatus). Yet there is a flood of fuzzy patents which were not specified in the required detail, yet again against existing patent law.
The one primeval problem there is with the patent system today is that enforcement of existing legislation is anywhere from too lax to non-existant. That is the issue we ought to acknowledge and do something about.
The fact that we, the public, do not acknowledge this to be the root cause, that we usually talk nonsense when it comes to patent issues, that we consequently do not lobby for better enforcement, this only works into the hands of those who abuse the system, who take advantage of the lack of enforcement of patent law.
The issue you raise has absolutely NOTHING to do with whether or not there is a prototype.
You are confusing symptom and cause here. You might as well ask for special legislation applying only to red painted cars on highways, simply because a number photos from speed cameras show red sports cars to be breaking the speed limit.
There are already laws in place to deal with drivers breaking speed limits. If these laws are not enforced, no new laws relating to the colour of cars used for speeding will solve the problem.
Likewise, the example you are bringing up is a case of not enforcing existing rules of patentability, most notably the requirement for a specification detailed enough for "persons skilled in the art to carry out the invention", the requirement to specify at least one embodiment to that effect.
Not enforcing this requirement will leads patents with claims that are broader than what the invention actually is about, regardless of whether the invention works or not.
Such fuzzy patents are indeed a problem but the problem is caused by not enforcing existing rules. It is not a problem related to absence of a prototype requirement.
That reminds me of a holiday in Vienna, Austria. They have these T-shirts they're selling in the souvenir shops. The T-shirts have a slogan printed on them which goes
"There are NO kanagaroos in Austria."
Apparently, too many tourists, presumably from the US, did ask the taboo question over there;)
I apologise for my harsh opening paragraph. I reacted in this way because I felt that it has been presented sufficiently well enough in this thread that enforcement of existing rules is far more of a problem than the odd case that makes it into the headlines.
It's like having a patient with cancer, and you are concerned about him not having his toenails clipped cutting holes into his socks.
The trouble with that is that given enough noise about the toenails, nobody will be interested in treating the cancer anymore as everybody becomes convinced that toenail clipping will solve all the man's problems.
There is nothing solved by requiring prototypes because there is already a requirement that does the same thing if only it is enforced. Introducing a requirement for a prototype will solve nothing and create more problems than you _hope_ it will solve.
Let's look at the implications... there are so many patent filings, the patent office couldn't possibly keep all the prototypes around. Many patents are about manufacturing processes. Each of those patents alone would yield prototypes the size of a manufactuting plant. Then there are patents on industrial processes which incorporate toxic or otherwise dangerous materials. Think of the safety procedures patent offices would have to put in place to deal with those materials. Many pharmaceutical processes involve living substances which the patent office would then have to figure out how to keep alive for the duration of the patent. The administrative burden alone would make this unfeasible.
You would have no other choice than to water down the prototype system to something which doesn't require the prototype to be kept at the patent office. Instead you would have expert witnesses who would then testify to the validity of the prototype and furnish a report, much in the way an expert witness in a court of law would testify through a report. Then the patent office would have to resort to reading that report and more or less take for granted what it says. Needless to say, companies like Microsoft or Sony can "buy" expert witnesses and the whole system becomes a farce.
At the same time, small companies or individual inventors would lose out. Yet, the problem of bogus patents would remain. Nothing gained but additional bureaucracy.
As far as unenforcible patents go, you are making a big mistake to think that a few high profile cases that made it into the news are representative. Millions of applications are being filed, millions of times the examiner will ask an applicant to change or remove claims that are deemed too broad. This is a very common thing. Yet, amongst millions of filings, there are a handful of high profile cases that make it into the news. That's a very tiny percentage and in most of those cases you can show that existing rules had not been enforced.
Yet, the blood thirsty public asks for additional rules. Nobody ever asks for better enforcement. There is something very very wrong with that notion. For as long as we, the public don't ask for proper enforcement, the problem will persist, no matter what the rules are.
Indeed there are exceptions. For example, mathematical formulas are exempt from patentibility.
The rule which leads to the non-patentability of perpetual motion machines is that an invention must be of industrial utility. This has been introduced to avoid patent offices having their time wasted with applications that fulfil the criteria but add no value.
Perpetual motion machines may be novel, non-obvious and specified properly, but they are considered not to be of industrial utility because they are just curiousity toys. Perhaps if you patent such a device as a toy, you may get around the industrial utility rule by arguing that the utility is to provide entertainment. However, if you want to patent it just for the heck of it or to imply that it would be a source of energy, then it will be rejected on the grounds of lacking industrial utility.
In any event, this is not about "show me that it works" because there are many perpetual motion machines that do work. Of course, considering that they generally are implemented using a vacuum, patent offices could probably reject them on the grounds of prior art, so you may want to consider this rule a kind of shortcut.
Whether it is couch potato football coaches who know better than the real coaches how to turn the team around, whether it is wannabe CEOs who know better than the real CEOs how to run companies etc etc... it's always amazing how people who have absolutely no knowledge of the problem at hand come up with silver bullet solutions that contribute nothing but only attest to their ignorance.
The problem of the patent system today is too many obvious patents, too many patents where there was prior art. Requiring prototypes does absolutely nothing to avoid those, NOTHING!
At the same time, not all patents are equal. Some are very narrow, some are very broad. An application seeking to patent a concept that the applicant has no clear idea how to implement will always be very broad and it is very likely to be shot down because broadness is something even an inexperienced patent examiner can usually spot.
Even if it passes, it will become what is known as a weak patent. As a rule of thumb, the broader your claims, the weaker your patent. More often than not, very broad patents, if they are granted, are considered unenforcible. Holders of such patents are often told not to sue any infringer because they risk having the patent revoked if it was to come to a lawsuit. This is not an ideal situation, but the result is that the damage such patents cause is negligible compared to the damage that the bulk of bogus patents cause, that is patents which are not-novel or obvious or both.
No, you _cannot_ patent ideas. At least not lawfully.
A patent specification must be detailed and specific enough "for persons skilled in the art to carry out the invention" and you must specify at least one embodiment (an actual implementation of the invention) along with drawings.
The notion that requiring a prototype is a solution to the problem of bogus patents is not only showing total ignorance of the patent system, it is showing total ignorance of the problem, too. The problem is enforcement of existing patentibility rules. Adding more rules will only make the problem worse.
The short explanation is that IP phones are made for one sole purpose only and they are very good at fulfilling that purpose, while desktop computers are multi-purpose machines optimised for time sharing, not real-time apps like telephony.
BTW, Skype uses the ILBC codec only. It cannot negotiate other codecs if the circumstances allow or require it. ILBC is OK, but it's inferior to both uncompressed codecs such as G711 (aka aLaw and uLaw) and other compressed ones such as G729 or Speex.
And no, this is not about any particular call routing scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a German company called Softmaker Inc. and they make a commercial but quite affordable Office alternative. It's available for both Windows and Linux.
http://www.softmaker.de/index_en.htm/
I haven't used this myself, but heard people who have used it talk about the software in the highest terms. Also, it appears that MS-Office format compatibility is far better than that of OpenOffice. Also, they sell professional fonts for Linux, too, so that alone will probably make the whole thing look much better. This may go a long way on its own.
Perhaps if you test drive this and show it to your boss, let him play with the Windows version for a while to prepare the ground etc etc, you might just get lucky and he might be more open to discuss Linux thin client deployment with the Linux version of them Softmaker folks' software as an alternative to MS-Office instead of OpenOffice. It may be worth a trial, I guess.
Also, how about running MS-Office via CrossOver on a Linux box. Not acceptable to your boss?
anyway, good luck.
It's not VoIP koolaid. It's telcoligopolist koolaid if anything. You think being charged a buck or two for hot air is bad? You may want to consider Japan's NTT, the Japanese version of AT&T so to speak.
After WWII then Japanese government owned NTT introduced a kind of "membership fee" of about 700 USD per POTS line in order to aid the funding of infrastructure. At the time this made sense because most of Japan's telecommunications infrastructure was pretty much destroyed and the country was short both on natural resources and cash. However, this measure was meant to be _temporarily_ only.
Yet to this day, NTT still sells this strange concept of a phone line license. The price has come down a bit recently, though. I hear it's only about 400 or 500 USD now. It's not an installation fee cause you will pay for installation on top of it. It's not a deposit as you can't get your money back. But it's transferable so you can sell your phone line on the second hand market when you leave Japan or decide you can do without a PSTN line. There are phone line brokerage businesses doing nothing else but buying and selling phone line certificates.
Now imagine that Japan has some 40 or 50 million POTS lines for each of which somebody has at some point shelled out 700 bucks to NTT. How is that for legalised grand daylight robbery, eh?
This is what telcos have been doing for over 100 years. VoIP is kicking their butts and finally the revolution will kill its own children and the VoIP providers will be dead as well. We don't really need either of them.
And just in case you wondered how NTT is doing in the light of VoIP services. Not surprisingly they had one of their worst years ever losing some 20 or 30% of revenue. I hear that the telephone line selling scheme will soon be abandoned. At first, the yound Japanese decided they can do without POTS and use only cellphones instead and now the rest of the population is going VoIP. Nobody wants to pay for those silly phone line certificates anymore. About time!
Do you honestly believe Skype is going to remain free of charge if there was nothing else left but Skype?
...
With Skype being closed and proprietary, not even allowing interconnects, there are only two possible scenarios
1) Skype will become the 800 pound gorilla of the telephony future cause everybody is using it but a few freedom of choice spirited 2% or 3%. In this scenario, quality will start to suck very badly because there will be zero incentive and of course Skype peer to peer calls will not stay free of charge. Monopolists always find a way to charge, and very much so.
2) Open standards will prevail and Skype will be just one of many alternative ways to carry out a VoIP call. In this scenario, Skype users will be charged for the privilege to communicate with other people using solutions other than Skype.
Skype is not the answer. Skype is the question and the answer is No.
Oh Jolly, by 2020 we will have so much bandwidth that VoIP packets will not even be the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Packets are only going to pile up if the amount of packets you feed into the pipe is higher than what the pipe can carry. If you have a pipe so outrageously oversized that you can't fill it up with all the packets you could possibly generate, then there will be no piling up and the scenario you describe is just a storm in a teacup.
We have got FTTH here, 100Mbit fibre full duplex. When I got this, I spent two months trying to do every imaginable and unimaginable thing in an attempt to saturate the link and trying to cause audio artifacts on my VoIP connections. Crazy stuff such as running multiple round-robin backups on cross mounted NFS disks (A backs up to B, B to C, D to E and E to A), inviting friends with notebooks to visit and use the ISP's video on demand service with as many multiple streams as possible, running oodles of VNC sessions with bandwidth wasting highest quality settings, hosting VoIP phone conferences with over 100 participants, downloading oodles of ISO CD images etc etc etc.
Believe me, no matter what I tried, I couldn't saturate the FTTH link and while this was going on, I had the clearest audio on my VoIP connections, no drop outs, no jitter. The mega conference was a big sea of chatter though. You couldn't understand a word. But that had nothing to do with packets piling up.
Quite frankly, your talk reminds me of stories I heard about doctors advising against the newly invented steam engines on railways because passengers couldn't possibly survive the incredible speed of more than 18 mph or whatever the limit was believed to be back then. Yet here we are two centuries later with millions of people reoutinely travelling on airplanes at over 600 mph. Naysayers are seldomly right.
Ok, let's put Gartner aside. I bet 10.000 USD that by 2020 there will be not a single POTS line left in any OECD country -- I am not so confident about third world countries although they might well be the first ones to switch off POTS because they haven't got much of a POTS infrastructure to begin with.
But of course we are talking real IP telephones here, not some softphone running on your PC. Yet, the transport will not be circuit switched. Even TV will be IP based by then. It's rather silly to assume that phone transport won't be IP based.
According to Gartner Group, VoIP is so much of a momentary fad that the last circuit switched telephone call on the planet will be made in the year 2020, a mere 15 years from now.
Besides, how do you think the large carriers are shuffling telephone traffic around the planet today? Much of that is VoIP based already, just that you don't know about it. Sure there is managed (private IP networks) and unmanaged bandwidth (public Internet) but the technology is steadily heading towards VoIP everywhere.
The DNS type scheme you are asking for is called ENUM aka E164, it exists today, it's an open standard and Asterisk supports it already. Roughly speaking, ENUM uses DNS to translate phone numbers into IP addresses.
;-)
http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/enum/
You could sign up for a free account on e164.org and enter your existing telephone number. The system will call you back and an automated message tell give you a verification code which you type into a form on the web site to verify that you are in fact at that phone number. Then you enter the DNS name or IP of your Asterisk server or IP phone and anybody dialing your phone number from a VoIP device which supports ENUM lookup, like for example Asterisk, will then be connected directly peer to peer to you, without any phone company or VoIP service provider involved.
http:www.e164.org/
So if everybody was to get a VOIP device with ENUM support, we get rid of phone companies and VoIP service providers altogether
Asterisk also supports another similar but decentralised scheme called DUNDi, short for Distributed Universal Number Discovery.
http://www.dundi.info/
I think what you mean to say is that you would like to pick up an incoming call to your PSTN line at home while you are somewhere else, having the incoming call delivered to your via VoIP.
...
If so, this is quite straightforward. You could buy a little box called an FXO gateway. It's got at least one phone jack for connecting to a POTS line on one end and an Ethernet jack for connecting to a VoIP client on the other end. One of the most popular devices is probably the Sipura-3000.
The Sipura-3000 is actually a combo device as it has both an FXO and and FXS port. So you could also connect an analog phone to it, in addition to your POTS line. When you are out of the house and online with an IP phone or a softphone somwhere else, you could log in to the Sipura's web admin interface and change it's settings so that it will deliver incoming calls to your VoIP phone. By default it will pass incoming calls to the FXS port. You will need to have the Sipura on a public IP address though.
There are other FXO gateways, too. Check
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-VOIP+Gateways/
If you were to run your own Asterisk server, you can always tell all your friends to download Firefly from http://www.virbiage.com/ which is a software phone not unlike the Skype client software, but instead of a closed proprietary protocol it supports SIP and IAX.
Your friends will then be able to call you directly on your Asterisk server and you will be able to call them on their softphone, all free of charge.
If they have their PC on a public IP address, SIP is OK, if they are behind a NAT (private IP address, eg 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x) then there is a chance they will not get incoming calls from you without fiddling. In that case IAX is your choice of protocol.
There main thing about Skype is that they have bolted on all the NAT traversal troubleshooting hacks of SIP and shrinkwrapped them bolted on to their protocol. This means that the end user doesn't have to worry about NAT as the software picks the most suitable workaround automatically. You may call that built-in NAT troubleshooting.
With standard SIP based solutions, you have to do the NAT traversal troubleshooting manually. Yet, with Asterisk you can always avoid those troubles altogether by using IAX instead of SIP. IAX was designed so it wouldn't need any workarounds for NAT in the first place. You may call that NAT troublefree.
With Asterisk you definitely get the better technology and more importantly freedom to choose equipment, protocols, codecs, service providers. With Skype you are totally locked in just like it used to be in Ma Bell's days.
I have got precisely the setup you describe on my Asterisk server and I am happy to share the configuration. Can you send me a private message through Slashdot?
...
... You call your PSTN line from your mobile phone while you are on the road, which might be within your included minutes or unmetered local calling facility. Asterisk will pick up the call and either identify you by your mobile phone's caller ID or ask you for a PIN number. After that Asterisk gives you a dial tone and you can use your VoIP service with its lower tariffs to make long distance and international calls.
;-)
In a nutshell here is what's involved
1) hook up your PSTN line to your Asterisk server
you do this either to a so called FXO port on an internal telephony interface card, the simplest one of which is an ordinary fax modem card which costs you 8 USD (any PCI modem with the Ambient MD3200 chipset will do) or you use an external VoIP gateway (phone jack in on one side, ethernet jack out on the other) such as the Sipura-3000 for example.
2) get your Asterisk connected to a VoIP service
this could be any VoIP service that supports SIP, IAX, MGCP or H323 and allows you to use your own equipment to connect. I usually recommend services that support IAX because it's a rocksolid protocol. There are many services that support IAX, the most well known ones are probably NuFone, Voicepulse and VoipJet.
3) enter your "trusted" phone numbers into the Asterisk database
this can be done on the Asterisk CLI with a one line command such as database put cidname 1234567890 "George W.Bush" or if you have a Mac, you can use a GUI based script applet for this. Maybe there is some GUI tool for Linux as well, I don't know about that.
4) edit your dialplan to forward known numbers to your mobile if you're out
there are several strategies to define what "out" means. You could just send all calls to your IP phone and if it is unavailable or if nobody picks it up in a certain time, send known callers (coming in via PSTN) to your mobile (via VoIP service). A little smarter way would be to define a certain shortdial to mean "I am out as of now", for example if you dial *555 or whatever you fancy. Of course you'll also need to define some code to mean "I am back". Finally, there are some interesting presence facilities. For example, if you have a Bluetooth phone, you could configure the Bluetooth Presence module of Asterisk to keep track of your phone via Bluetooth. If you are near and Asterisk can see your Bluetooth phone it means you are in, otherwise it means you are out. I think there is also a Jabber IM based presence scheme. If you can send email from your mobile, then you could even use that to remotely switch Asterisk between "in" and "out" and control where to forward calls from trusted phone numbers.
5) set up an auto-attendant and voicemail box
this involves setting up a voice menu in your dialplan to send incoming calls from unknown callers to and give them a choice to leave a voicemail or tell them when they should try to call you again or on which alternative number or whatever you fancy. You will also need to set up a voicemail box for Asterisk to put recorded messages into. Asterisk can forward those messages by email to you if you wish. Finally, you could use Asterisk's SMS module to send yourself an SMS message with the number of the caller and the time of the call.
In addition to the above, if you are in the US where local calls within a certain geographic area are unmetered, you might also like another feature of Asterisk which is called DISA (Direct Inward System Access). Basically this means you run your own private calling card service, just for yourself. The way this works is this
As you can see, this is pretty exciting stuff, highly addicitive
You are completely missing my point.
;-) so you can probably imagine that I am not all too fond of Windows myself.
I did _not_ suggest anybody should run a PBX or VoIP server on Windows. I wouldn't even suggest to run a web or mail server on Windows.
The point is that if you want to suggest to the average IT department to give Asterisk a trial, it goes a long long way if their IT folks who are most likely Windows admins can just download an installer and play with Asterisk on their platform.
As soon as the Windows admins have convinced themselves that they can run Asterisk on their Windows boxes for testing and verifying stuff, they won't be that hostile anymore and the question what platform to use for a production deployment can usually be discussed in a reasonable fashion.
I know database admins who run Oracle enterprise database servers on their notebooks. They would never suggest to deploy a production database on a notebook, but they feel all the more comfortable with it because they can run a sandbox environment on their notebooks.
Same principle applies to Asterisk.
Apart from that, since there are no Zaptel drivers available for Windows, the only way you could build a PBX would be to use external VoIP gateways, such as the Sipura-3000 for instance. The Sipura-3000, like many other such gateways have a passthrough feature. If anything goes wrong, such as the Asterisk server being unreachable, or even in the event of a power outage on the Sipura itself, any incoming PSTN call will automatically be passed to the FXS port on the unit to which you would probably have an analog telephone connected.
For a home PBX, this might just be all the redundancy you need and many folks might not feel too uneasy to run such a basic setup on a Windows box, especially not if the alternative is setting up a Linux box when they might not have any clue how to go about that.
Then again, there are other uses for Asterisk than being a PBX. You could use it as a VoIP server only setting up your own SIP URIs where people can call you on your email address, like sip:myname@mydomain.com. Again, for private use most people might not feel too uneasy running such a facility on a Windows box.
The more people run their own VoIP servers at home -- Windows or otherwise -- the better the network effect. Remember Metcalfe's law!
BTW, I run my Asterisk server on a Mac
Unfortunately, this article lends yet more support to those who like to dismiss Asterisk based on the cliche that it can only be handled by hard core Linux geeks.
Sure, if you want to use Asterisk to its full potential, then you have to learn a thing or two. But that isn't any different from any other tool, be it Apache, IIS, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel, InDesign, Photoshop, Bryce, Final Cut, etc etc etc.
The important thing however is that you can get started with Asterisk very easily and without any special skillset.
The article doesn't mention anything about the fact that you can download an Asterisk installer for MacOS X along with a few configuration wizards and have a running PBX within a few minutes. It also doesn't mention that there is a similar Asterisk installer for Windows. At present, the Mac is the easiest platform to set up a basic PBX with Asterisk, but it shouldn't be too long before there will be configuration wizards for Asterisk on Windows, too.
Asterisk for MacOS X: http://www.sunrise-tel.com/
Asterisk for Windows: http://www.asteriskwin32.com/
How can we expect decision makers in companies to consider Asterisk if it is always presented as a Linux toy which requires Linux gurus to set up and run. That's precisely the kind of perception the incumbent proprietary system vendors love to promote when they pinch their overpriced stuff.
Let those people know that Asterisk is multi-platform and have them play with it on their platform of choice and there will soon be more mainstream deployments and more ease of use front ends.
Other than for Linux, Asterisk is so far available for FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD and Irix (both through the NetBSD package manager), MacOSX/Darwin, Windows and Solaris. Zaptel drivers (to use telephony interface cards) are available or in the works for FreeBSD, NetBSD, MacOSX and Solaris. If that doesn't deserve mentioning in an article about an Asterisk cottage industry, then I don't know what does.
The overwhelming majority of spam filter deceiving techniques relies on HTML. If you block messages containing HTML on the mail server, the spam that gets through is near 100% identifiable as spam using bayesian filters.
So why on earth do people still use HTML in their email? Email should be plain text only anyway.
that's not true.
the article talks about radio broadcasting over the internet.
what's the difference between this and iTunes radio channels?
So, why don't you buy a Linux-only laptop then?
...
Terrasoft Solutions sell Linux-only laptops, desktops and servers using Fedora Core 2 based YDL.
http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/
They specialise in PPC only, so if you insist on an x86 powered machine then you'd have to find another such shop. I am confident there must be companies just like Terrasoft who specialise in x86 based Linux pre-installed gear.
In fact, a quick google search for "linux preinstalled laptops" shows the this very interesting site as first hit
http://mcelrath.org/laptops.html
according to that site, there are plenty of options for people interested in x86 based Linux-only laptops.
You are mistaken about the justification for patents.
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The only reason for the patent system is to give incentive to inventors to publish their inventions instead of keeping them secret, thus enriching the public domain. All patents end up in the public domain. It's a BARGAIN, not an award.
Any patent attorney will confirm this. Just ask one. If you don't know any, just google for "patent bargain" or visit the CIPA website (chartered attorneys of patent agents)
http://www.cipa.org.uk/pages/advice-patents
... the problem is ENFORCEMENT.
We don't need to do anything about patent law. What we need desperately is to do something about proper enforcement of the existing rules.
Patent law forbids granting patents on inventions for which there is prior art. Yet there is a flood of patents for which there is prior art which is against existing patent law.
Patent law forbids granting patents on inventions which are obvious deductions from prior art. Yet there is a flood of patents which do not meet the criteria of non-obviousness, again against existing patent law.
Patent law also forbids granting patents on applications which are not described in enough detail to allow persons skilled in the art to carry out the invention (ie build the apparatus). Yet there is a flood of fuzzy patents which were not specified in the required detail, yet again against existing patent law.
The one primeval problem there is with the patent system today is that enforcement of existing legislation is anywhere from too lax to non-existant. That is the issue we ought to acknowledge and do something about.
The fact that we, the public, do not acknowledge this to be the root cause, that we usually talk nonsense when it comes to patent issues, that we consequently do not lobby for better enforcement, this only works into the hands of those who abuse the system, who take advantage of the lack of enforcement of patent law.
The issue you raise has absolutely NOTHING to do with whether or not there is a prototype.
You are confusing symptom and cause here. You might as well ask for special legislation applying only to red painted cars on highways, simply because a number photos from speed cameras show red sports cars to be breaking the speed limit.
There are already laws in place to deal with drivers breaking speed limits. If these laws are not enforced, no new laws relating to the colour of cars used for speeding will solve the problem.
Likewise, the example you are bringing up is a case of not enforcing existing rules of patentability, most notably the requirement for a specification detailed enough for "persons skilled in the art to carry out the invention", the requirement to specify at least one embodiment to that effect.
Not enforcing this requirement will leads patents with claims that are broader than what the invention actually is about, regardless of whether the invention works or not.
Such fuzzy patents are indeed a problem but the problem is caused by not enforcing existing rules. It is not a problem related to absence of a prototype requirement.
That reminds me of a holiday in Vienna, Austria. They have these T-shirts they're selling in the souvenir shops. The T-shirts have a slogan printed on them which goes
;)
"There are NO kanagaroos in Austria."
Apparently, too many tourists, presumably from the US, did ask the taboo question over there
I apologise for my harsh opening paragraph. I reacted in this way because I felt that it has been presented sufficiently well enough in this thread that enforcement of existing rules is far more of a problem than the odd case that makes it into the headlines.
... there are so many patent filings, the patent office couldn't possibly keep all the prototypes around. Many patents are about manufacturing processes. Each of those patents alone would yield prototypes the size of a manufactuting plant. Then there are patents on industrial processes which incorporate toxic or otherwise dangerous materials. Think of the safety procedures patent offices would have to put in place to deal with those materials. Many pharmaceutical processes involve living substances which the patent office would then have to figure out how to keep alive for the duration of the patent. The administrative burden alone would make this unfeasible.
It's like having a patient with cancer, and you are concerned about him not having his toenails clipped cutting holes into his socks.
The trouble with that is that given enough noise about the toenails, nobody will be interested in treating the cancer anymore as everybody becomes convinced that toenail clipping will solve all the man's problems.
There is nothing solved by requiring prototypes because there is already a requirement that does the same thing if only it is enforced. Introducing a requirement for a prototype will solve nothing and create more problems than you _hope_ it will solve.
Let's look at the implications
You would have no other choice than to water down the prototype system to something which doesn't require the prototype to be kept at the patent office. Instead you would have expert witnesses who would then testify to the validity of the prototype and furnish a report, much in the way an expert witness in a court of law would testify through a report. Then the patent office would have to resort to reading that report and more or less take for granted what it says. Needless to say, companies like Microsoft or Sony can "buy" expert witnesses and the whole system becomes a farce.
At the same time, small companies or individual inventors would lose out. Yet, the problem of bogus patents would remain. Nothing gained but additional bureaucracy.
As far as unenforcible patents go, you are making a big mistake to think that a few high profile cases that made it into the news are representative. Millions of applications are being filed, millions of times the examiner will ask an applicant to change or remove claims that are deemed too broad. This is a very common thing. Yet, amongst millions of filings, there are a handful of high profile cases that make it into the news. That's a very tiny percentage and in most of those cases you can show that existing rules had not been enforced.
Yet, the blood thirsty public asks for additional rules. Nobody ever asks for better enforcement. There is something very very wrong with that notion. For as long as we, the public don't ask for proper enforcement, the problem will persist, no matter what the rules are.
Indeed there are exceptions. For example, mathematical formulas are exempt from patentibility.
The rule which leads to the non-patentability of perpetual motion machines is that an invention must be of industrial utility. This has been introduced to avoid patent offices having their time wasted with applications that fulfil the criteria but add no value.
Perpetual motion machines may be novel, non-obvious and specified properly, but they are considered not to be of industrial utility because they are just curiousity toys. Perhaps if you patent such a device as a toy, you may get around the industrial utility rule by arguing that the utility is to provide entertainment. However, if you want to patent it just for the heck of it or to imply that it would be a source of energy, then it will be rejected on the grounds of lacking industrial utility.
In any event, this is not about "show me that it works" because there are many perpetual motion machines that do work. Of course, considering that they generally are implemented using a vacuum, patent offices could probably reject them on the grounds of prior art, so you may want to consider this rule a kind of shortcut.
Whether it is couch potato football coaches who know better than the real coaches how to turn the team around, whether it is wannabe CEOs who know better than the real CEOs how to run companies etc etc ... it's always amazing how people who have absolutely no knowledge of the problem at hand come up with silver bullet solutions that contribute nothing but only attest to their ignorance.
The problem of the patent system today is too many obvious patents, too many patents where there was prior art. Requiring prototypes does absolutely nothing to avoid those, NOTHING!
At the same time, not all patents are equal. Some are very narrow, some are very broad. An application seeking to patent a concept that the applicant has no clear idea how to implement will always be very broad and it is very likely to be shot down because broadness is something even an inexperienced patent examiner can usually spot.
Even if it passes, it will become what is known as a weak patent. As a rule of thumb, the broader your claims, the weaker your patent. More often than not, very broad patents, if they are granted, are considered unenforcible. Holders of such patents are often told not to sue any infringer because they risk having the patent revoked if it was to come to a lawsuit. This is not an ideal situation, but the result is that the damage such patents cause is negligible compared to the damage that the bulk of bogus patents cause, that is patents which are not-novel or obvious or both.
No, you _cannot_ patent ideas. At least not lawfully.
A patent specification must be detailed and specific enough "for persons skilled in the art to carry out the invention" and you must specify at least one embodiment (an actual implementation of the invention) along with drawings.
The notion that requiring a prototype is a solution to the problem of bogus patents is not only showing total ignorance of the patent system, it is showing total ignorance of the problem, too. The problem is enforcement of existing patentibility rules. Adding more rules will only make the problem worse.
Get a real IP phone and see for yourself.
The short explanation is that IP phones are made for one sole purpose only and they are very good at fulfilling that purpose, while desktop computers are multi-purpose machines optimised for time sharing, not real-time apps like telephony.
BTW, Skype uses the ILBC codec only. It cannot negotiate other codecs if the circumstances allow or require it. ILBC is OK, but it's inferior to both uncompressed codecs such as G711 (aka aLaw and uLaw) and other compressed ones such as G729 or Speex.
And no, this is not about any particular call routing scenario.