August 2007
Intermediate to advanced
608 pages
20h 33m
English
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Chapter 1. A Telephony Revolution
It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.
—Samuel Adams
An incredible revolution is under way. It has been a long time in coming, but now that it has started, there will be no stopping it. It is taking place in an area of technology that has lapsed embarrassingly far behind every other industry that calls itself high-tech. The industry is telecommunications, and the revolution is being fueled by an open source Private Branch eXchange (PBX) called Asterisk™.
Telecommunications is arguably the last major electronics industry that has remained untouched by the open source revolution.[3] Major telecommunications manufacturers still build ridiculously expensive, incompatible systems, running complicated, ancient code on impressively engineered yet obsolete hardware.
As an example, Nortel’s Business Communications Manager kludges together a 15 year-old Key Telephone Switch and a 1.2 GHz Celeron PC.[4] All this can be yours for between $5,000 and $15,000, not including telephones. If you want it to actually do anything interesting, you’ll have to pay extra licensing fees for closed, limited-functionality, shrink-wrapped applications. Customization? Forget it—it’s not in the plan. Future technology and standards compliance? Give them a year or two—they’re working on it.
All of the major telecommunications manufacturers offer similar-minded products. They don’t want you to have ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.