i need to preface this post with a brief statement.
I bought beos once upon a time, and it was my first dable into AltOS. I loved it and nothing has really been the same since. I used linux for a bit afterwards, decided gentoo was better than mandrake, and decided niether was worth the hassle. i used windows until about a month ago…
in the last year, being between College and Grad School, i’ve started doing some freelance it work to save for my education (not in an IT related field, im a Liberal Arts Major), and one of my projects is to install an asterisk server or two in a few of my clients offices.
suddenly im using linux full time again, because im doing something i think is fun and useful. i find myself rigging my appartment, whcih has no landlines and a broken doorbell, with an intercom and internal extensions.
all that linux stuff got me wanting to use BeOS, or something BeLike, and I thought to myself “since voip is verry CPU intensive, and BeOS was renound for ‘unchaining your hardware’ wouldnt it lend itself to a scalable voip server?”
i know this is very against what beos is about. i know beos isnt/wasnt a serveros. i know i know nothing (well, little) about coding, or if this is even feasable, and i know the obvious questions…
“why would someone who uses asterisk give a hoot about a “media os”?”
when i ask in the asterisk channel if people put there firewall on their asterisk server, people say things like “i put an HTPC on mine.” Sure, most people who use asterisk use it for work related purposes, but I, and at least some people on #asterisk, chose to switch to linux because they enjoy playing with phones.
“where do voip and a desktop os have to do with one another?”
what do the internet and a desktop os have to do with one another? i coulda spent the last mouth learning HTML so I could build a web page w/o MS Publisher, but i thought playing with asterisk would be more fun, and it was.
thats today. in ten years voip switched phone system will replace the PSTN, and video chat will be no longer exclusive to computers, or expensive proprietry pbx systems. i can do it now with esoteric OS software.
i guess im saying, if it made sense 5 years ago that the PC and the Home Entertainment Center would merge, doesnt it seem logical, audio, and eventually video communication with others will be the next big thing? and if people are going to start chatting with streaming video with relatives in china for the cost of the internet conenction they want anyway, wont they want a fast, responsive desktop envornment to do it in? do either windows or macos support asterisk HW or the SW itself?
I think people use asterisk for the same essential reason people used the beos, because it allowed them to use their computer in an inovative way.
if, give propper HW support the beos would make a good DVR, why would Haiku (one day) not make a good Asterisk server? Surely reliability wont be the issue.
And in the end if you can use 25% more softphones with a computer running BeOS, than running linux (one day), that in itself will persuade people the OS has instant merit, which warrants its immediate use.
I thought beos was gonna be huge because of the HTPC thing. riding VoIPs popularity is a stretch, but maybe like Bush’s ideas, its just dumb enough to work.
its something like promoting the use of linux by telling people to install cygwin, but if it expands the OS’s userbase by a factor of 2, and it is a simple port away (big IF) , why not?
i know this is just a strange flavor of the killer app theory, but what the heck, i thought i would share my private thoughts.
p.s. be gentle, its my first post.