John Cherry

A transformation is taking place in telecommunications to meet the demands of new voice and data technologies. These technologies include Voice-over-IP (VoIP), the packet-switched alternative to old-fashioned circuit-switched telephony. To enable VoIP traffic, application servers must provide carrier-grade reliability that guarantees high service availability (99.999% uptime or better). These systems must also scale to handle hundreds of thousands of calls and provide predictable performance and high speech quality. The telecommunications industry is undergoing enormous changes as equipment providers migrate from proprietary platform architectures to open software environments and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) platform architectures. Open software and COTS hardware are seen as a means for rapidly deploying new voice and data services, while cutting capital expens... (more)

The Desktop Linux Initiative at OSDL

Public and commercial Linux distributions already contain most of the functionality expected by most users from their computers. However, when it comes to Linux establishing a beachhead on the desktop, the battle turns to applications, applications, and more applications. Certainly Linux distributions contain hundreds of useful desktop applications, but the lack of familiar productivity apps, the problems with document interchange between system platforms, the delayed support of popular desktop hardware, and the lack of preinstalled product offerings have limited the growth of L... (more)