port7 – co – uk

Currently looking at ways to reduce costs at work I am investigating using Skype for international communications.

It seems quite good though it is evil in the fact that it’s a propriety protocol. It also is quite horrible network wise, it seems like you have to open lots of outgoing ports on firewall’s for it to work sensibly. Needless to say that if I can’t find a way round that little ‘feature‘ it will not see the light of day at work!

So I have Skype installed on my iBook at home, so if anyone wants to contact me, my Skype name is portseven

I know Apple is evil and propriety, but for a propriety company they do some damn cool stuff. Today I came across 2 announcments of theirs, the iPhone and Apple TV. Not sure about the Apple TV thing but I am tempted by the iPhone, though need to find out if there is a ssh client for it.

I can’t beleive the state of the market with regards Linux for EPOS / Retail systems. It is basically a one player market. You have either IBM’s Solution, which is basically SLES 8 with OpenLDAP and bunch of Perl scripts for managment. Or you have Novell’s offering which is basically SLES 9 with a bunch of managment stuff on top of that.

The managment stuff is just keeping info about each till and what config it has. It’s not rocket science, and there is a bunch of stuff to keep the OS up-to-date. Both are quite ugly under the hood.

What I want to know is how come Novell / SUSE have been let to corner the market? Where is the Debian based distro’s that could do this sort of thing with it’s eyes closed.

I am glad we are running Linux, but sort of annoyed that the choice of distro is limited.