Question: Registry Edit Programs

[Andy Hall]

Ah. I was looking at Asterisk. Seems quite nice although quite a bit of configuring to do. Have you got anything working? Using the cards they sell or some other way?

[Bob Eager]

ISDN and a cheap ATA. No other cards needed for me.

[Andy Hall]

ISDN I understand for the exchange lines, but how would you connect the phones? or are they ISDN phones?

[Andy Burns]

The ATA is an analogue telephone adapter, essentially an ethernet/PSTN connection, different ones allow connection to phone(s) and/or line(s), (oftern called FXO and FXS), asterisk can send calls to them for your extensions.

[Bob Eager]

The ATA. A box with an Ethernet interface and a couple of phone sockets. Not as cheap as the cards, but reckined to work a lot better.

[Andy Hall]

Ah, OK. Do you have an example of one you've tried?

[Bob Eager]

Don't think it's current, so just Google 'Sipura'.

[John Rumm]

I had a very brief play with the older versions of these. They may do what you want. Whether there is much cost advantage over a VoIP phone these days is debatable:

sure how well they will play with Asterisk, but there is no obvious reason why they should not.

[Andy Hall]

Mmm.... I see the point. For the house side, one might as well sling out all or most of the analogue phones and then just use ISDN for the exchange line side.....

[The Natural Philosopher]

More or less thoroughly tested SYS V Unix then.

nice enough if it does what you need.

[Neal Reid]

Can you please relate these 2 paras for me? Last I dug into Darwin, fink, et al, I couldn't do with my Mac box that I could do with my linux boxes.

I content that Mac OS X is the nicest front end to a linux box available. As a long time UNIX admin, I find a number of things added and nothing missing ... (And before I get flamed, let me emphasize I'm talking function, not form. It took me a while, for example to get it clear where /etc files were still needed and where Netinfo files had replaced them)

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well it s NOT a front end to a linux box, is it? Its a whole OS and GUI based on FreeBSD running (officially) only on macintosh hardware.

What's missing is third party software and hardware support.

As an OS and GUI alone, its the best around.

However the purpose MOST people have an OS an GUI FOR, is to do something else.

That's where the Mac is sadly lacking: Programs that run on it. Expensive and not enough OF them....you CAN get a lot of Linux stuff ported across to run under X11, but that rather begs the question of having a Mac, the main point being that the GUI is NOT X11..and you CAN run widows-in-a-box, but that rather defeats the idea that a Mac GUI is NOT WINDOWS.

Thats the salient thing that came through to me. By breaking away from X, and making a radical statement of difference in terms of the API to the MAC GUI, Apple have left 3rd party developers in a curious position. Its a BIG job to port an app to a Mac, not the least because its not JUST a different set of calls into the graphics: There are a whole new set of ways in which things are to be done to make them conform to the OS-X look and feel.

Now if they had made OS-X run on generic Intel hardware, then it would have been worth the pain to port stuff, but Apple chose to keep the whole thing in the family. So a potential developer will look at PC's - which is a must have, look at Linux, and think 'not that hard a port' and look at Mac OS-X and say 'Ee bai gum lad, that bain't worth the effort for 5% of the desktop market'

If you choose to be exclusive rather than ubiquitous, exclusive you will be..in the sense of excluding a lot of people who might have rather gne your way..

[Neal Reid]

Um - see my reply to Michelle

I have not found ANYTHING I needed to do that I couldn't do on a Mac. And what does X11 have to do with anything. It's a network protocol over which one can run process control and a windowing system (pretty much) platform independently. For e.g., you CAN run X11 on Mac OS - but I never have.

Um - have you ever DONE it? What you claim was true pre-OS X days, but now it's fairly trivial to develop an app that will run on Mac OS, other Linuxs or Windows (Think QuickTime, iTunes...)

What did I miss? Last I looked, OS X has run on Intel hardware for quite a while. Agreed, not on BIOS dependent Intel hardware, but certainly on EFI compliant Intel hardware.Or you could just tell XCode

Or you code just set you target(s) appropriately in XCode and make your stuff available to anyone (including the approaching 14% share of Apple users)

[The Natural Philosopher]

Shows how narrow your application field is then ;-)

And what does X11 have to do with anything. It's a network

Er.thats what I was saying.You can rapidly port Linux apps to X11, because its on the mac, but the look and feel is completely different.

I suspect they are Mac apps that got ported to PCs, not the other way round.

Intel hardware made by Apple is NOT *generic* Intel hardware. To run OS-X on non apple hardware required a hack. Its probably a violation of the license of OS-X. You cannot by a PC down the locals store and shove an OS-X disk in is CDROM and juts install OS-X. If you could, sales of OS-X would rocket.

for

Xcode is apple specific.

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[Wes Groleau]

Porting is not necessary to make the look and feel "completely different" of an X11 app on any platform.

Just change your window manager to any of the dozen plus that are available. There's even one that tries to look like Windows 95 !

(I admit that there are not very many window managers for OS X)

[Duncan Wood]

Super, how do I program a simatic PLC with one?

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