Slashdot Mirror
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."
Nobody wants to admit it (yet), but now Skype is the standard. The only problem is that the protocol is proprietary and only Skype knows how it works. This seems to offend a lot of people.
My problem comes with who developed Skype (KaZaa). Sorry, but I have zero respect for companies that promote/promoted spyware.
One thing I can't figure out is how Skype got so popular, when AIM Talk, Paltalk, Yahoo, and MSN all had voice chat features. Yahoo even had Karaoke rooms. Apple's iChat touted voice and video chat as one of its selling points for the OS.
So why did Skype do so well? Was it the marketing, or the catchy name? Or simple cross-platform compatibility? Or was it just a new brand?
But for communications between two machines behind "unfriendly" NAT Firewalls then things did not work so well (because if one of the machines cannot act as a server then all communications must be routed through one or more "supernodes" which are really other user's machines, can you spell "unreliable"???). Here's what I'd like: to only allow skype to act as a server for conections to my friends and relatives. In other words (call me egoistic): I DO NOT WANT other people traffic through my machine! (and I do not want to send my traffic through anyone's machine either). Is there a tweat that would allow me to open the firewalls this way??
I've been using a USB device for Skype that allows me to use a normal phone with it for a few months now. Works great. Skype's not for everyone, and it doesn't work perfectly all the time, but it's the first one that I've actually used with some frequency (the "virtual" company I work for uses Skype and SkypeOut a lot, because it's cost-effective). It's great that there's a Mac, Windows, Linux and Windows Mobile version of Skype. I've used all but the Mac version of it (too lazy to install), and they all work great.
John Perry Barlow had an amusing blog entry about his experience with Skype. Personally, I disable strangers from trying to contact me, but so far, it seems like Skype is this decade's ICQ.
How it chooses the proxy to use if you're behind a firewall and can't accept incoming connections.
I'm in New Zealand, and when me & a friend in another part of NZ tried out skype, the connection was routed via another skype user in germany.
Some background: NZ is pretty much at the arse-end of the world, and national network traffic is very fast and reliable, but if you go out to the rest of the world you add in about 150 ms latency, each way.
Connections to europe are even worse, as the connection typically goes from NZ to the US west coast, then to the east coast, and then to europe. And back.
Although our network infrastructure here is very good, international bandwidth is expensive, so broadband connections have a monthly traffic limit, of 1-10gb per month, depending on your provider and plan. One bonus of the provider I use is only 1/10th of your national traffic counts towards your bandwidth allowance.
So here I was, thinking the voice quality is pretty good, but there were a few glitches (probably dropped packets etc), but there was a latency of close to one second, and this local call was using my precious international bandwidth. Other calls had similar results - the quality is basically hamstrung into the worst case scenario.
Skype is very good in that It Just Works, but its almost completely devoid of any configuration or logging that tells you what its doing behind the scenes. My router supports uPNP, but sykye didn't even seem to be making use of that to route calls directly to me.
Has anyone in NZ had similar results? Have these problems been improved since I last looked?
I had one problem with it though, and that is a recent one. To use SkypeOut, you have to buy credits. Now, I used to be able to simply charge credit to my credit card and it will virtually instantly appear in my account. Recently, though, Skype switched to using some English company to handle this (Moneybookers London, or something like that), and this shows up on my credit card as a cash withdrawal, which triggers another $10 charge. With the abundance of alternatives, this might drive me away from Skype.
Skype is doing phenominal. They are doing so well, in fact, that their competitors are exercising unfair business practices to deny Skype business. In one of my blog posts I wrote about how Telmex Blocks VoIP Traffic and Skype.com Web Traffic, and it should also be noted that teh United Arab Emirates is blocking Skype.com as well. I suppose these people are pissed that Skype is offering a service for free which they were hoping to charge customers for.. It's true that Skype is changing the way people communicate and traditional phone service providers are going to have a difficult time competing unless they keep up with the times. =)
Skype is very open: you can just send it text based commands. They even have a developer zone, so it looks like the parent was just trolling.
The voice protocol is provided by GIPS, they are quite open too about how their codec works with dynamic buffering.
That's not a zombie. That's a peer-to-peer node. Huge difference.
Remember that whole thing about how you can't shut down a P2P filesharing service when there's no central server? Well, there's no central server for Skype, either. That's how it can be a free service. If you use the service, you provide resources for managing the service. You don't pay for it in money....you pay for it in infrastructure.
I'd never even really thought of it like that before, either. Pretty simple concept, really....
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I concur with Dvorak's assessment of Skype. It's phenomenal. But, the true test of any technology is how it stands under the pressure of intense usage. We at Jewel of Indra plan on putting Skype to the test. In fact, we have received permission to integrate the Skype technology within our multi-user 3D Adults Only community. With so many folks whispering sweet nothings it should be interesting to see how Skype measures up. I will not post the Jewelofindra site url here because this is not intended to be an advertisement for the community. But, with VRML, X3D, Text to Speak, and now VoIP all integrated together, it will be interesting to learn if either of those technologies crack under the pressure. I will keep my eyes open for any signs of smoke.
VRML is NOT dead!