====* -- Joke

    O
    \|/ --- You
    / \

His point was that the big feature for 10.1 was hardware acceleration for flash (and therefore h264), which Linux doesn't get. Linux gets nothing but downsides from this.

I'm not seeing much real time commentary on twitter, mostly dozens of people Re-Tweeting the same article. If you want to see the commentary, search #TurkeyCensorGoogle -"Access to certain Google services blocked from Turkey"

• If you're keeping track of code, use a code repository. Subversion, GIT, Bazaar, etc.
• If you're trying to keep config files, documents, pictures, etc synced, use DropBox.
• For bookmarks, use one of the numerous Firefox bookmark syncing extensions, or the Del.icio.us extension (or use DropBox to sync your .mozilla/firefox folder).
• For multi-GB files, use a portable hard drive, or rsync with a file server in your house/office

I wouldn't recommend using one tool for every purpose. I wouldn't want to store multi-GB files in SVN, and I wouldn't want to store all my code on an external hard drive. Maybe using DropBox, or rsyncing with a server somewhere would work.

This might get me some flak, but I've found that there are at least a few females in Ubuntu LoCo teams. LoCo teams in my experience do a wide range of things, from doing Install Fests, to having GeekNics, to having Linux LAN parties. I don't know if the California Team is active, but it might be worth a try.

Please only pursue joining the team if you actually give a frak about Ubuntu or doing Linux stuff, though. Women don't join Ubuntu groups to be hit on.

Even though blu-ray won, there were still tons of HD DVD players. They went somewhere, and it wasn't landfills. Stores had fire sales on HD DVD players, many selling them as upconverting DVD players.

Makes sense to me. Microsoft sees other companies making truckloads full of money (read: mostly VC funding) with their cool Web 2.0 names (Digg, Twitter, ZigZagZoodilyDoo). Microsoft goes where the money is.

Skype provides better rates to some places. That's not what I'd use it for.

I'd use it to talk to people that use Skype! If my mom uses skype, and I have Skype connected to my Asterisk system, she can call me and I can talk on my normal phone. If I have a call center using Asterisk, I can start offering support over Skype without changing our system at all. We have clients in third world countries who pay for great internet connections, but have terrible phone lines. They use skype for everything, so it would be much better to use skype to talk to them.

From everything I've read about this, it looks like they'd be setting it up similar to Gizmo's OpenSky. Skype would handle the bridging from Skype to SIP for you, and you just connect to them through SIP (as a SIP trunk, like you would with any SIP VOIP provider). So, while Skype is a huge pain to deal with in a corporate environment, you wouldn't have to. None of your apprehensions are necessary.

Now, Skype isn't doing this out of the goodness of their heart. They'll charge something for it -- either monthly or per minute. Look at the prices for OpenSky for an idea of what it might cost. Maybe they'll make calls to and from Skype users free. Maybe. If you don't want to be beholden to Skype for this, see my full comment below.

Now that I think about it more, I see one reason why Skype's SIP trunking might be better: the codec.

The codec for SIP/Skype calls is the same idea as codecs for music files: mp3, ogg, wma, etc. You take a drop in quality in exchange for less data. And if you convert from one to another, you take another drop in quality, because each codec strips out different things.

Any of the current solutions (SipToSis, OpenSky, etc) work by taking the output from Skype, converting it to PCM, and converting it to the codec of your choice. This works, but involves a drop in quality. Unlike music, you don't really care if you lose the sound quality of the lead guitarist, because it's a phone call. But if you're a stickler, the drop in quality may bother you.

When you sign up for Skype's beta, they specifically require you to be able to handle the G.729 codec (a common SIP codec). This means one of two things: either Skype is extremely lazy (I haven't ruled that out), or they have some efficient method of converting to and from G.729 and their own proprietary codec -- without converting to PCM, and without a large quality drop. It's possible, because they hold the keys. If that's the case, Skype for SIP or their (eventual) Asterisk channel driver may be worth it for you, if sound quality is a concern. I'd still say give SipToSis a try though.

SIP is the underlying protocol that makes most VOIP work. If you're using Vonage, or Asterisk, or most other VOIP systems/providers, your phone calls are getting coordinated over SIP, with the audio sent back and forth on the side. Using SIP, Cisco systems can communicate with Asterisk systems, which can communicate with Microsoft SoundPoint systems, etc. Any of those systems can connect to a "SIP Provider" to get phone service.

Skype is off in its own little walled garden, with a special protocol and codec. There have been many attempts to link Skype and SIP, and they're usually pretty painful (and proprietary).

SipToSis is a program that will allow you to have a skype "server" that will connect sip calls to skype users and vice versa. It's a bit of a pain to set up, but it walks. He also offers a set of scripts to have multiple skype clients set up, load and unload them as necessary, redirect calls, etc. It's a huge, huge hack, but it works, and is much cheaper than previous solutions of this type.

There was apparently a beta test for an Skype channel driver for asterisk. This would allow someone to setup skype as just another input type (like a Zaptel analog phone connection, or a SIP trunk), and seemed to be the ideal solution. Either it never went anywhere, or they decided they didn't want me in the beta :(

Gizmo also offers a Skype trunking solution, similar to what Skype seems to be offering. They call it OpenSky. It looks like it would work pretty well for home users, but it would get pretty steep for businesses -- and how many home users would set up friggin asterisk, besides me?

So if you're a business, OpenSky or Skype's current beta is probably what you're looking for. If you're a home user or an admin who either can't wait or has too much time on your hands, give SipToSis a try. It's a bit of a pain to set up, but it costs $2-$14 dollars one time, as opposed to everyone else, who will charge monthly or per minute.

Besides the summary making it seem like Steve Jobs is dead, the title made it seem like the economy was going to bounce back in less than 5 years.

This is another proposed solution. A voluntary (for your ISP, not for you) "music tax", that is an awful idea. It was discussed here, and here's my extended list of why it's a bad idea.

I currently have both python2.4 and python2.5 installed in Ubuntu. They're different packages, and can easily be installed alongside each other.

For distributions with dependency management (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, any modern distribution), this isn't a hard issue -- in the distros I'm familiar with (Debian/Ubuntu) the different versions of python are just separate packages, apps have a list of dependencies and can list that they depend on a certain version of python, and the python package is just a dummy package that "depends" on the latest version of python.

The same thing is done with different versions of Java, GTK, etc. When a toolkit or language makes a huge backward-incompatible change, it's rare that they can't just be installed alongside each other. Different 2.x versions of Python work just fine alongside each other, and I don't see how Python 3 would be any different.

One of the main qualities of GNU/Linux that makes it work so well is that no matter how many forks there are, the good stuff gets into the other distros.

If someone makes a distro dedicated to killing puppies, but in the process comes up with a feature that's invaluable to everyone else, the other distros can easily take that feature and integrate it. The other distros don't have the change their direction, and the new puppy-mashing distro developers can work in an environment they're confortable with and with a purpose they feel strongly about, while still contributing to the community as a whole.