On Sun, Apr 13, 2003 at 05:04:10AM +0100, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
I got a request from a (US) psychiatrist that m-o-o-t (m-o-o-t is a CD that boots on your computer, and does secure things) should include an implementation of VOIP, to allow his patients to securely connect to his server. I think they are mostly servicemen or spies, but so what.
It's actually easy to do a version that will do that, and if you're listening, I'll do it soon, and for free to you only :) - but m-o-o-t is based on OpenBSD, and isn't that good at modems. Linux isn't that good either...
Really? You got this mail through an old modem and linux box..
The problem is that the usual, everyday, modem is _only_ supported by Windows... which thereby gains a competitive advantage, based on it's monopoly position.
Google for 'winmodem' and linux finds: http://www.linmodems.org/ plus lots of other links you may find useful. Microsoft's lock on the winmodem appears to have been pretty short.
While I have no beef (and being a UK person I eat no beef anyway) with the idea that there should be a single computing platform/ interface, and I don't expect manufacturers to do the work, I do think that interfaces used en masse should, in general, be communal property.
Commonly used interfaces do eventually become well known. While they do have owners, the amount of market interia they develop makes then essentially unchangeable. But demanding that they be "communal property" sounds like the sort of socialism that can only be imposed by authority and fails when it is imposed.
I'd like to suggest that those who don't provide details of their modems' functionality (which is the main problem) should be boycotted.
That's been done before-- Diamond refused for years to supply info to Xfree86, so there was a boycott of Diamond graphic cards in the Linux community. They eventually saw the light (or market).
It's not a very libertarian perspective, and I like to think I am a libertarian - but so be it. The alternative is...
1. figuring out the winmodem interface. It's software, so its possible. But it appears that others have already done the work for at least some winmodem chips. 2. boycotting winmodem makers. Not likely to work in this case since most modem makers sell the things. Besides, the market drive for reduced chip count and the PC makers' hunger for anything that chews up CPU cycles and drives consumers to buy faster machines is a lot stronger than that for linux. 3. beg for some higher power to "do something". You can probably guess from my tone that I don't think much of this option. Eric