Asterisk is an open-source software-based telephone system. Those overpriced little boxes called "telephone systems" that give you little control over how your phone system works, are giving way to PCs and routers running Asterisk and similar open-source PBXes. Asterisk allows unprecedented flexibility while still providing the full-featured experience that companies need. If you're still using one of those old closed-box telephone systems, give Asterisk a try.

After using my own cobbled-together blogware for a few years, I realized I'd probably never find the time to "finish" writing it. So, I decided to get something better. Around this time somebody called my attention to a web-based blogging package called Pebble, and that's what I'm now using. I think I've managed to convert everything that matters, so here goes...

Late note: the Comment feature doesn't seem to work so I've turned off comments for the articles that appear on the front page; to be continued...

Strange but true - estimates from Ohio State history professor Robert Davies put the estimate at 1 to 1.5 million whites taken as slaves by the North Africans during the slave era. Interesting reading material in the full article.

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There are too many packaging formats. And, projects that don't put up immutable numbered source archives in a standard format are the bane of the porting person's existence.

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CBR Online quotes senior Microsofthead Steve Ballmer speaking to analysts about their deal with Novell: "I would not anticipate that we make a huge additional revenue stream from our Novell deal, but I do think it clearly establishes that open source is not free," he said, "and open source will have to respect intellectual property rights of others just as any other competitor will."

Clearly Balmer is arranging his smoke and mirrors to try to make it seem that all open source consisted of violating Microsoft's intellectual property. In fact, the converse is true: Microsoft remains a net consumer of open source, going all the way back to using the BSD TCP stack in early Windows, to basing "Windows for Unix" on OpenBSD's userland code. And, the position he is clearly trying to advocate - without coming out and saying it, of course, is equally false. Microsoft is well known for patenting things they did not invent; see their recent embarassment at trying to patent ideas they freely admit they copied from the BlueJ IDE.