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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."
Backlash in 5, 4, 3, ...
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
when he makes painfully, pathetically obvious statements, he gets money. I just get derision, and strange looks.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If the line is noisy then desktop-to-POTS does not work. I have tried it to my parents in South Africa from USA. Desktopto-desktop works well.
Skype was written by the original authors of Kazaa, not Sharman Networks, the company who took it over and added all the malware.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
But Skype means talking to someone! *shiver*
The 30 million users figure appearing without any 'pomp and fanfare' does ring home when you consider that is roughly half the population of the United Kingdom.
MSN messenger is been horrible recently, with message lag and problems with connecting. Should I use Skype?
P.S. IRC forever.
For businesses wanting to cut costs between satellite offices, families wanting to cut long distance charges when calling between family members, etc., Skype is the natural solution.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Skype is amazing, I use it to play online games with my friends, and nothing else has even come close in terms of latency, clarity, and lack of audio break up.
I love it.
Gustave Flaubert "To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity
The company uses the apt catchphrase: "It just works!"
... and will soon be sued by Apple... and maybe Microsoft, too.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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?
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.
Interestingly enough just today a vendor of ours introduced a USB phone that works with Skype.
h tm
http://www.planet.com.tw/news/productnews/UP-100.
Sean Milheim
iDREUS Corporation
*dial tone*
"Hi honey, when are you coming home for..."
*buzzzzz*
"Automated voice: This service comes with bundled adware. Please listen to this ad and say 'click' at the end of it. Thank you"
"I will be home in a couple of hour. Please make sure...."
*buzzzzz*
"Automated voice: This service comes bundled with spyware. All your conversations will be recorded and used for targeted advertisement"
"byeeeeeeeeeeeeeee....."
fuvoo: watch something
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??
In case you wondered, I am an Estonian too and proud of our most successful international project to date.
The only problem is that the protocol is proprietary and only Skype knows how it works. This seems to offend a lot of people.
There's a good paper investigating how it all works here. Interesting stuff.
- shadowmatter
Netcr^H^H^H^H^HDvorak confirms it - Skype is dying.
> 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
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?
Since John Dvorak is always wrong, Skype must suck somehow.
I only hope he doesn't praise all VoIP solutions. This could bring dire consequencies to the whole market...
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
The only problem is that the protocol is proprietary and only Skype knows how it works.
There has been some effort put into figuring out the protocol. The control data itself is encrypted, but packet analysis to outline the behaviour of the protocol, and try to figure out just how it organises it's overlay structure has been carried out, and is potentially ongoing.
Paper here.
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"
Now we're gonna have to quit using Skype for fear of losing respect for agreeing with him. Sheesh, the guy needs to keep his nose in his own business.
I am Spartacus
SALT!
...and the fact the vendor is currently being sued into oblivion over their other product, Kazaa, in Australia.
Not to mention the protocol.
Nothing says stable technology like a wonderful closed-source product whose vendor might just soon evaporate.
skype only uses the middleman to connect the call, not to actually transmit the whole thing
In case you didnt know, supernodes only connect the call, they do not handle the whole thing. once the connection is made there is no work for the supernode
This article rightfully points out some very icky things about Skype. User beware.
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?
Maybe it could work like Google AdWords.... You talk to your doctor on the phone, and next thing you know your hearing ads for "Herpes medication at discount prices!"
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.
When netcraft confirms it, only then will I believe Skype is dying... *blinks*
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
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.
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. =)
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
^H = Backspace (control character)
http://jesus.everdense.com/
If you want real privacy, use SpeakFreely with your own choice of encryption library.
It would be MUCH better to use software like Speak Freely rather than Skype. However, my understanding is that Speak Freely is a hassle to install when you are behind a hardware firewall. Skype just routes everything over port 80; no hassles.
Speak Freely is not in active development: "News 01/04/2002 - Version 7.2 released!" That's the latest version.
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No, I don't.
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!