Author: JT Smith
Author: JT Smith
Author: JT Smith
Category:
Author: JT Smith
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact: Free Software Foundation
Bradley M. Kuhn
Phone: +1-617-542-5942
Free Software Foundation Announces Milestone 6 of GNU Bayonne
Boston, Massachusetts, USA - May 2, 2001 - The Free Software Foundation
announced today the sixth milestone release of Bayonne, a key part of
the
effort to provide and promote free software solutions for the
telecommunications industry. Bayonne is a telephony application
server,
and is released under the GNU General Public License. Bayonne provides
the ability to perform enterprise telephony functions such as unified
messaging, and is capable of scaling to support enhanced carrier
services.
Bayonne can be integrated with scripting languages and tools commonly
found on free software systems such as GNU/Linux. Bayonne is the first
major package of GNUCOMM, the GNU Telephony project, and integrates
GNUCOMM with the GNU Enterprise project.
David Sugar, the maintainer of GNU Bayonne, said: "In distributing the
sixth milestone release of Bayonne, we have chosen to focus on
extending
Bayonne to provide a free software platform for creating and deploying
next generation XML integrated voice applications. Traditionally such
systems have primarily been available only as limited proprietary
software."
This initial release of Milestone 6 includes the first functional
snapshot
of Bayonne XML services, including a plugin which introduces an XML
dialect, BayonneXML. BayonneXML will extend the existing CallXML
dialect
and will provide support for additional features and functionality
specific to Bayonne. Through plugins, Bayonne will support a wide body
of
XML languages, including those that fully conform to existing XML
language
specifications. Additional plugins will provide voice browsing of
other
XML-based data via Bayonne.
Milestone 6 represents the last major release before the development of
RTP trunking features for GNU Bayonne, and the subsequent final release
of
Bayonne 1.0. Volunteer developers who are interested in helping
develop
GNU Bayonne are encouraged to contact the Free Software Foundation.
The
website for Bayonne is located at http://www.gnu.org/software/bayonne/.
About the Free Software Foundation:
The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to
promoting
computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute
computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free
(as
in freedom) software---particularly the GNU operating system (used
widely
today in its GNU/Linux variant)--- and free documentation. The FSF
also
helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of
freedom
in the use of software. Their web site, located at http://www.gnu.org,
is
an important source of information about GNU/Linux. They are
headquartered in Boston, MA, USA.
About GNUCOMM, the GNU Telephony Project:
GNUCOMM, a subsystem of GNU, provides free software solutions to common
telecommunications problems. GNUCOMM will free users of voicemail,
PBX,
and call-center applications from reliance on the proprietary software
that currently dominates such telephony equipment. The system aims to
be
scalable and configurable enough to allow end-users to develop their
own
telecommunications systems with little or no special knowledge of
GNUCOMM's internals. GNUCOMM will support both VoIP and PSTN
interfaces,
as well as interfaces to existing phone systems. GNUCOMM will scale
from
individual user installations to carrier-class sites. The website of
GNUCOMM is located at http://www.gnu.org/software/gnucomm/gnucomm.html.
About GNU Enterprise:
GNUe aims to provide a suite of tools and applications for solving the
specific needs of the enterprise. GNUe will handle the needs of any
size
business, including applications for human resources, accounting,
customer
relationship management, project management, supply chain and
e-commerce.
GNUe is a free software project developed by volunteer software
developers
worldwide. The website of GNU Enterprise is
http://www.gnu.org/projects/gnue/.
About GNU/Linux:
GNU/Linux is the combination of the GNU system and the kernel named
Linux,
modified to work together smoothly. Although there is no way of
actually
counting them, this combination has millions of users, probably over
twenty million.
The GNU/Linux combination is often confusingly called "Linux", which
leads
people to an inaccurate picture of the history and nature of the
system.
Distinguishing between GNU/Linux, the complete system, and Linux, the
kernel, helps correct the confusion.
More on this issue is available at
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html.
_______________________________________________
Press-release mailing list
Press-release@fsfeurope.org
http://mailman.fsfeurope.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/press-release
Author: JT Smith
But if you are running on an x86 processor, what’s the point? According to
Connectix, it’s all because you want to run multiple operating systems
simultaneously without having to reboot from one to another. Virtual PC lets you run
an extra x86 OS, which thinks it’s running on a PC all of its own; Connectix’s code
simply relays all the relevant hardware calls directly or via Windows.”
Category:
Author: JT Smith
Conversay said its speech recognition and text synthesis engine will be incorporated into the device for worldwide release in the first quarter of 2001.
‘[The device] nicely complements the work we’ve done with other platforms, such as Pocket PC,’ said Matt Scheuing, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Conversay.
For more information goto http://www.gmate.com/english/news/gmate-news/21-01 -09.htm.”
Author: JT Smith
Category:
Author: JT Smith
Between the dot-com crash, the hobbling of Napster, and the end
of Bianca’s Smut
Shack, I guess we media pundits can all start crowing about the end of
the ‘Net era, or at least the closing of the dot-com chapter. Which, admittedly, I haven’t been worried about, not even after two
people forwarded me an essay published by the Orange County
Register (and reprinted in The Washington Post) on the very
subject (Taking stock of Gen X: It’s fallen sharply ). But the author, Stephen
Lynch, did do something interesting while speculating on how history would
and should view the past five years: He fused Generation X with the
dot-com crowd.
It had never really occurred to me that Gen X, much derided as listless
slackers by the mainstream press in the early ’90s, was largely
responsible for scaling up the Internet. The sweat needed to build this new
infrastructure came from the brows of the same generation that supposedly
wasn’t enthused about much of anything. And why was this news hidden
from us? Why, it was those baby boomers, the ones who propagated the
slacker stereotype, blithely failing to correct the record as the
e-commerce ventures which Xers built were padding boomer retirement funds.
“Funny,” the 28-year-old Lynch opines, “but no one rushed to correct
that stereotype when, four years later, companies founded mainly by
people in their twenties and early thirties jump-started the economy and
developed a whole new system for communication, education and commerce.”
Could Lynch be right? Was Gen X the larval stage for the hyperactive
‘Net generation to follow, and are we not getting the props we deserve?
I’m one of the 50 million folks born between 1963 and 1981, the
generally accepted Gen X brackets, and I’m here to tell you (sorry, Mr. Lynch)
that the slacker stereotype wasn’t entirely off the mark. In 1992, I
was post-bachelor’s and not the least bit interested in participating in
corporate America. I was halfheartedly churning through grad school,
only because it was the least uninteresting option available. I didn’t
dress for success. More than once I found myself thinking, You want me
to do what for 40 hours a week? I had plenty of the
“sarcastic, sardonic cynicism” Lynch characterized as the prevailing
generational attitude.
The problem with the world at the time, I now recall, was that
everything seemed so defined. There was little that anyone with even a
modicum of creativity could do that somehow didn’t already fit into some
sort of predetermined pattern. Everything seemed handed down from the
boomers with horrible contracts of conformity — like rock music, for
instance, which 10 years before had seemed to me to offer freedom itself.
If you wanted to rock out in the early ’90s, your options were the
ready-made nostalgia of classic-rock stations and Hard Rock Cafés or the
mannered avenues of indie and grunge rock, in which a band’s value was
gauged by its proximity to a Sub Pop or a Mammoth Records. Ditto with
literature, comedy, drugs, and art. All seemed so ossified.
I only really recognized this stiffening of culture after logging onto
the ‘Net for the first time. Even with a text-only screen and a
9600-baud modem, I experienced a feeling I can liken only to free fall. Holy
crap, I thought. There literally is no end to this stuff.
And that was in the pre-Web days when one got around by telnet and
gophers. It wasn’t so much the amount of information but how it cut across
all sorts of boundaries. It leveled playing fields. It produced a void
with no set order, one that needed to be populated. It was a brave new
world, one that could be dangerous to existing orders.
So, as you can tell, by hopping on the ‘Net, I blossomed from despondent
corporate outcast to cloying techno-babblist. And as such, I suppose I
understand why Lynch wants so badly for his peers to get the credit.
The Internet was something alive that seemed to be replacing much that
was dead. It was a feeling I’m sure many of my peers experienced.
But understanding why he wants the credit doesn’t mean he — or
we — deserves it. The idea that the ‘Net was even largely Gen X-grown is laughable.
The ‘Net wasn’t so much the result of any particular generation’s labor
and creativity as it was a storm that simply blew the roof off the
whole theater of cultural continuity in the first place. Many of the early
movers and shakers I interviewed when I started writing about online
culture didn’t fall largely into any age cohort. I talked to innovators
in their 50s and others in their early teens. The heavy infrastucture
work had been going on since the ’60s of course, and even much of the
‘Net’s cultural sovereignty had been forged by radical-thinking fogies like
the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s John Perry Barlow and Howard
Rheingold. Similarly, Open Source and free software gurus Eric Raymond and
Richard Stallman were too iconoclastic to be part of anyone’s
generation, demographically or culturally. It just wasn’t a generational thing.
You were simply on the bus or off the bus, as author Ken Kesey said of
an earlier time. It was just a different kind of bus.
Of course, a lot of work did come from those falling under the Gen X
rubric, I won’t lie. I just part with Lynch when he claims that it showed
we were misunderstood from the get-go; I believe it shows we were
primed to leap onto something that offered a viable alternative. As my
friend Dave, who e-mailed me about the article, pointed out, “The people who
found the most utility in the ‘Gen X’ label were the marketers — baffled
by the way they couldn’t come up with strategies for selling things to
a generation that was already savvy to their stupid tricks. ‘What a
baffling enigma,’ the marketers would say. ‘They are truly the mysterious
Generation X.’ ”
Maybe what marketers defined as cynicism was really pent-up energy
unusable in a world too set in its ways. It took something undefined, like
the ‘Net, to harness such powers. But it harnassed the powers of a lot
of other people who were fed up with the status quo as well.
It’s a theory for those writing the history books, anyway.
Category:
Author: JT Smith
On Tuesday, an assistant U.S. attorney told a federal appeals court hearing arguments in the Universal Studios v. Reimerdes
et al case that the DeCSS utility, which the Motion Picture Association of America has sued to take off a website, should be
banned. Attorney Daniel Alter likened DeCSS to ‘software programs that shut down navigational programs in
airplanes or smoke detectors in hotels.’ He warned: ‘That software creates a very real possibility of harm.
That is precisely what is at stake here.’ ”
Author: JT Smith