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John Dvorak Hypes Skype
Eh-Wire writes "John Dvorak gets all warm and fuzzy over Skype now that 30,000,000 users have registered for the free Internet telephony service. Dvorak extols the installation as, "smooth and elegant" and continues with, "Without any tweaking whatsoever it works immediately and works better than anything else I've used." Skype has appeared on the radar without pomp and fanfare and it doesn't look like it's going off screen any time soon."
But now that Dvorak is touting it, it doesn't have a prayer. He's the kiss of death, has anything he's ever predicted come true?
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
John Dvorak is famous for his fictitious lookout on technology.
One of his recent articles predicts the fall of the video game industry in the near-future, which has only grown, and continues to grow.
Skype has been around for a long time, and has been fairly popular. It was hyped when it came out a while back. This is not news. It has always had a smooth UI.
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
> Skype was written by the original authors of Kazaa, not Sharman Networks, the company who took it over and added all the malware.
True. The questions is when those guys sold their program to an evil corp, did they know what they were doing? How for so many ppl, Kazaa would be their first ugly encounter with spyware?
Would they do it again? Write a good app, build up a userbase, and then sell their users computers to be sacrifed to the Great Media Desktop?
I don't trust Skype yet. There are two equally bad scenarios. It is sold off to the spyware giants, or a virus infects the windows clients and users phone a premium rate number.
Read the Wikipedia article, and you'd be worried too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype
You can connect to the regular telephone network. This is important for me, as I live in China and the international charges are outrageous.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Skype isn't standard and Skype isn't technically better than other similar apps. What Skype got however is that you just click next a few time to install it and there is no config to change. This is the easiest VoIP app available.
While I would be able to learn another one, people I speak to could not.
And it's cross-platform which is also very convenient since most people I talk to don't run Linux.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
So what are the legal ramifications of reverse-engineering the protocol based on docs like these? If someone where to implement a reverse-engineered client, could the Skype folks come after developers with the DMCA?
a couple of Estonians (4 to be exact)
A couple of couples, to be exact.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
And when I try to be insightful? Flamebait. :)
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
I have been Skyping for a while now, my wife uses it instead of those cheap international dialing numbers; it works (which is pretty incredible if you have any insight into how). I make free and cheap calls from the US to Europe and Australia; I call my home for free from a remote hotel room. The only issue I have is if Skype get to monopoloy status and then start to milk the market but I think the market is still way too immature for that. IMO - rather Skype lead the market than AT&T.
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/sharps