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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."
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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......