Arr. Once again I am in computer telephony hell. In the hopes of achieving reliable echo cancellation and full-duplex performance, we acquired a very expensive Dialogic PCI telephony card and the package of (stupid, proprietary, gross) Linux software support. Well, it appears that the software support ... doesn't. And the documentation ... doesn't.

And as far as I can tell, Dialogic doesn't actually want to support people who try to use it. Their customer support e-mail directs you to a web forum or a pay-per-incident service. After paying $BIGNUM for this piece of crap board and proprietary crap software, the least they could do is write some bloody documentation for it that is good for more than toilet paper and give at least some complimentary e-mail support. Fuck you, Dialogic.

Surveying the landscape of computer telephony fills me with a deep feeling of helplessness and despair. All the software is broken, all the hardware is obscure as hell, it all costs unbelievable amounts of money, and it never seems to work correctly. And when it looks like I find a board that is actually useful for my applications, it turns out that it only works on Windows NT. (come on, people, you could at least support Solaris or some kind of semi-reasonable proprietary OS).

It looks like the Quicknet/IXJ stuff, as quirky as it may be, is the best thing there is for Linux and open source telephony at the moment. I hereby take back all the bad things I said about them :-)