we have packages for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and SuSe, as well as a static package. The versions listed on our download links are minimum versions. It is supported on latter versions as well. Many resourceful folks have it running on unsupported distros. We do have a system requirements page, but as I write this it is out of date: https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA10328/What-are-the-system-requirements-for-running-Skype
We made sure we kept true to the original UI. Seeing how the Mac user base had a collective cow when we went to a unified single window, we were pretty sure the Linux users would have gone nuclear if we'd done anything similar. There is a unified chat window that we think is an improvement over N separate chat windows. But you have a config option to go with the original N separate chat windows if you prefer. The rest of the UI is very similar to what you have been using. The real value in this release lies in the internals. Many, many person-years of improvements in A/V/Core technology since the last update that make a very tangible difference to end users.
And I repeat myself in case anyone is looking at this old thread: no ads of any kind in any screen in this client.
You presume incorrectly. Its part of the/. DNA, post quickly, having a clue optional.
The update has almost nothing to do with the Microsoft purchase, other than to server as more evidence of their commitment to building Skype as an ubiquitous, network-wide, open (as in platform neutral) platform for real time communication. The credit for this release belongs to the devs that kept the build alive over the years so our release team could hammer this release home. I will note that the Skype network and product ecology has always benefited from our Linux builds. I'm personally gratified to finally reward our Linux users with a long overdue infusion of the latest Skype tech.
My daughter is a student in Montreal and this is what we did for her. No smartphone. No data plan. But we have her on our AT&T family plan using an unlocked phone. In Canada she has a plan with Fido that is month to month, lets her use her phone, and (we are told) can either be parked or terminated for the summer months. She swaps cards when she crosses the border. Simple. Effective. She has managed to loose two SIM cards already, but now she seems to have the routine down.
The other nice thing about this plan is that the other Canadian cell plans with the major carriers required a 3 year contract. Since those plans would be suspended for the summer months, she would have been under contract for her full 4 years of undergrad studies. Month to month looks sweet by comarison (even if Fido's network has gaps. Not in Montreal so far.)
two books that stand out from my undergrad physic studies that may not give you a practical appreciation for ODE (but really, ODEs are so mind-numbingly rote, why would a math PHD be studying them?) but these are towering works of genius founded on beautiful mathematical arguments:
I read this book while vacationing in the woods outside of Yosemite. Pretty fitting place to read it, actually. I posted a review to my blog (shameless pimpin') and was pretty shocked when Steven Johnson himself (or a poser, I suppose) posted a complimentary comment. Gotta love the web.
Anyway, I thought his point about gaming being brain candy, and the stimulating complexity of modern TV programming were well done -- and a welcome antidote to CW. But he gets way ahead of himself on a lot of points. And he skims blithely past a lot of important elements of modern culture.
As he said, as a cultural critic, he gets to do that. The hard work of researching and analyzing the points he makes is left to academics and other experts. Which is good, because it allows him to put his ideas into a nice, light, provocative, fun little book.
I agree that Technorati is just about useless. They might actually be good if their servers were up to the task, but they are not. And trying to keep up but failing is worse than useless.
My problem with google blog search is also its virtue. It treats the blog world as a flat surface, with all blogs being of equal importance. If you want to search for some high frequency keyword like, say, "Katrina", the results are totally useless. But if you have a very specific post you want to find like, say, "tech ronin backpack" it is a killer tool. (And yes, I like that I can search for and find posts in my blogs using google, but I can't with technorati.)
It also doesn't help that it only lists results in chronological order -- at least with google news you can choose between relevance and date order. Pimping the post-of-the-minute reinforces the worst part of blogging -- the dreaded "first post" idiocy where masses of bloggers chase the meme-of-the-moment instead of taking a longer, more thoughtful view.
I love the idea of being able to load custom driving "skins" for different driving situations. One for driving the kids to school, another boring one for slogging to work, and some fun ones for lonely open roads,...
No, I want that now. Someone please put this in some PS2 game. I want to learn to drive hy-wire now.
Having an open, plain text format -- much less well written XML -- makes for a whole lot of openness even if it is not the default, most efficient, or widely used format. The DXF "open" format in AutoCAD is an example of what I'm talking about. It allowed end users a world of options for reusing, archiving, and exchanging data -- even though most data is stored in the "closed" DWG form. An open format is an easily opened door.
Of course, this goes (or will go) well beyond DXF since it promises to integrate all manner of Office documents.
The real challenge may be to convince authors to write structured documents. Think how few docs now use any sort of templates or employ style sheets.
Check out the story on Richard Pearse on Salon.com that was posted back on August 22: Bamboo Dick, first in flight (not sure if that is a premium article of not...) I remember that it was a good read.
I'm two weeks into using a laptop (Dell) fulltime and the keyboard is not the horror I was expecting. I've still got lots to get used to, but the keys and the hand positions seem to work well.
What I'm not liking so far is the mouse / tablet / joystick stuff. Maybe I'll grow to like the thumb tablet pointer device. But for now I'm using an external mouse -- and the tablet just generates noise, errors. Let me turn it off.
Oh, and the Ctrl-Alt-Del gesture sucks on my laptop. Why do we still have to Ctrl-Alt-Del? Why not offer other ways to turn it on?
There have been a number of techniques for regenerating and replacing cartilage that have progressed to clinical trials, so the process of restoring or regrowing cartiledge is not entirely new.
The one procedure that I nearly tried on my on meniscus involved using a collagen scaffolding. The callagen was, I believe, sewn up with the remaining cleaned up meniscus. It acts as a scaffolding, holding the bones apart and creating a lattice into which the meniscus cartilage can regrow. Early results were good, the cartilage was regrown and was working. But the trials were stopped for a while when the FDA reclassified the procedure -- or something. I missed my chance for the procedure and had the traditional excavation/repair done on that knee. I have no idea how the folks that had this procedure are doing now.
The big goal, at least to me, in regrowing the cartilage is to avoid arthritic old knees. Who cares about never playing ____ again. I want to be hiking into my 80's! Removing torn meniscus is pretty effective at getting the knee to work OK again. Its the long term wear and tear on the knee with trimmed meniscus that many, many of us "old knees" are facing.
Take a look at groove at http://www.groove.net/
The raw pper to peer features of Groove might be sweet for classroom application. And it supports security and control that you'd need. Customizing it to suit specific classroom requirements sounds like a good challenge.
Cheap Russian labor gets to the date line. Then the really costly work begins. And that's where the project completely falls apart -- in Alaska.
I'd be very surprized if a rail line could compete with cargo shipping between the US and Asia -- even Vladivostok or "Chumikan", even without the cost of the tunnel. Maybe I think that because the idea of a terrestrial link between Asia and America sounds so grandiose.
It is interesting to read that they are breaking ground on the Hokkaido - Sakhalin tunnel. I'll have to look around for more news on that! It makes a lot more sense to link two heavily used rail infrastructures such as Japan's and Russia's. Very cool.
I tried to dig out more info on the ORIGIN technology they cite as the underpinning of their JVM. I didn't find much, but I did find this piece, "The Next Big Thing". I'd be interested to hear comments on the claims therein.
So what if the folks at one80 have a flawed understanding of a turing machine. So what if one80 is using FORTH to get it done. Their claim is that they have a full 1.2 compliant, not just personal java, implementation that is tiny. Pretty cool.
Cool, you seem to have touched a zenophobic nerve. But I think you are right w.r.t. wireless technology deployment and adoption. The U.S. lags, and the networks are not, or have not been, as good here in the states.
I also think you have a point about publicly managed or centrally planned infrastructure having advantages over privitized alternatives. The phone networks are a good example. Rail would arguably be another.
I'm told DoCoMo's i-mode service is a fully controlled "walled garden" of the web. You go only where they lead you. That will have to change here, I hope.
"A University of Chicago graduate
student presented a paper that likened the free software movement,
epitomized by the widespread Linux operating system, to the guild system
of craftsmen apprentices in the Middle
Ages."
That's the paper I've been waiting to read. I'm not sure if open source is like guilds as mush as it is like monastic work. Linux fanatics and Open Source
apostles are often guilty of elevating their endeavors into a sort of religion.
I've long believed that Open Source software development is akin
to monastic pursuit of knowledge. It is done collectively, iteratively,
without particular regard to temporal factors such as schedule, market,
or even plebeian usability concerns. Their work is owned not by individuals,
but by the church.
Trappists make great beer -- because they've had centuries to perfect
it, and the nature of beer is not changing. Likewise, the linux monks have
made a great unix and over time it may become the ultimate unix -- assuming
we will continue to need any unix. But I don't expect them to make the
first great PDA, or make any other stunning technological breakthroughs.
The monastic pursuit of knowledge has it limits
According to CNET, Autodesk and three other companies are
being sued by a company in Mexico City for being wrongfully
targeted in a 1998 raid aimed at finding pirated
software. The raid produced no evidence that led to criminal
charges and caused sales at Consultores en Computacion y
Contabilidad to drop.
Consultores' suit seeks unspecified damages for slander and
invasion of privacy from Autodesk, Microsoft, Adobe Systems,
Symantec and the Business Software Alliance trade
group. Consultores said it appeared on the evening news as a
"busted counterfeiting operation" -- even though none of its
employees were arrested and no counterfeiting machines were
found. It also claims the BSA had alerted Mexican news
organizations of the raid in advance. BSA organizes 75 to
100 raids a year in Mexico.
The best approach to benefits that I have seen up close is the benefits menu approach that includes child care or child care subsidies. The company figures out how much of your compensation is allocated to benefits overall. They offer a menu of choices, each one with an assigned cost, and you get to pick and choose what benefits you want. Many companies do this for a choice of health care options: HMO, PPO, etc. But it is pretty easy to generalize for all benefits. If you're young and you want to maximize take home pay, you can. If you have kids and health care and child care rule, you have choices. Everyone wins on their own terms.
Autodesk, where I used to work, has done this very well. You could choose from a long list of benefits -- from pet insurance, legal insurance, FSAs for health care costs, dependent care,... The choices were presented via an intranet application each year during health care open enrollment periods. It really was a nice program.
No, Autodesk does not offer child care on site. I believe they studied it and concluded it would cost too much, and there was not guarantee that employees would choose it. Only large companies with large campuses can really offer this by themselves. Autodesk relied on community child care providers -- and I think that may be the more realistic solution for most employees and employers. But I did get a lot of my kids' daycare subisdised by an Autdesk sponsored FSA. The other benefit they offered was flex time and some PTO for school and daycare volunteers.
Slashdot Mirror
The above post was accidentally posted anonymously by me. It was meant to be posted in my name. Obviously, I'm not a regular contributor here.
Yes, and it has been fixed. Updates available now.
we have packages for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and SuSe, as well as a static package. The versions listed on our download links are minimum versions. It is supported on latter versions as well. Many resourceful folks have it running on unsupported distros. We do have a system requirements page, but as I write this it is out of date: https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA10328/What-are-the-system-requirements-for-running-Skype
We made sure we kept true to the original UI. Seeing how the Mac user base had a collective cow when we went to a unified single window, we were pretty sure the Linux users would have gone nuclear if we'd done anything similar. There is a unified chat window that we think is an improvement over N separate chat windows. But you have a config option to go with the original N separate chat windows if you prefer. The rest of the UI is very similar to what you have been using. The real value in this release lies in the internals. Many, many person-years of improvements in A/V/Core technology since the last update that make a very tangible difference to end users.
And I repeat myself in case anyone is looking at this old thread: no ads of any kind in any screen in this client.
You presume incorrectly. Its part of the /. DNA, post quickly, having a clue optional.
The update has almost nothing to do with the Microsoft purchase, other than to server as more evidence of their commitment to building Skype as an ubiquitous, network-wide, open (as in platform neutral) platform for real time communication. The credit for this release belongs to the devs that kept the build alive over the years so our release team could hammer this release home. I will note that the Skype network and product ecology has always benefited from our Linux builds. I'm personally gratified to finally reward our Linux users with a long overdue infusion of the latest Skype tech.
OK, I'm about an eon late in /. time, but as an author of the update, let me clue you in. No ads in this client. Not in any screen or in any form.
My daughter is a student in Montreal and this is what we did for her. No smartphone. No data plan. But we have her on our AT&T family plan using an unlocked phone. In Canada she has a plan with Fido that is month to month, lets her use her phone, and (we are told) can either be parked or terminated for the summer months. She swaps cards when she crosses the border. Simple. Effective. She has managed to loose two SIM cards already, but now she seems to have the routine down.
The other nice thing about this plan is that the other Canadian cell plans with the major carriers required a 3 year contract. Since those plans would be suspended for the summer months, she would have been under contract for her full 4 years of undergrad studies. Month to month looks sweet by comarison (even if Fido's network has gaps. Not in Montreal so far.)
two books that stand out from my undergrad physic studies that may not give you a practical appreciation for ODE (but really, ODEs are so mind-numbingly rote, why would a math PHD be studying them?) but these are towering works of genius founded on beautiful mathematical arguments:
The Principles of Quantum Mechanics
Dirac
Classical Mechanics
Goldstein, Poole, Safko
I read this book while vacationing in the woods outside of Yosemite. Pretty fitting place to read it, actually. I posted a review to my blog (shameless pimpin') and was pretty shocked when Steven Johnson himself (or a poser, I suppose) posted a complimentary comment. Gotta love the web.
Anyway, I thought his point about gaming being brain candy, and the stimulating complexity of modern TV programming were well done -- and a welcome antidote to CW. But he gets way ahead of himself on a lot of points. And he skims blithely past a lot of important elements of modern culture.
As he said, as a cultural critic, he gets to do that. The hard work of researching and analyzing the points he makes is left to academics and other experts. Which is good, because it allows him to put his ideas into a nice, light, provocative, fun little book.
My problem with google blog search is also its virtue. It treats the blog world as a flat surface, with all blogs being of equal importance. If you want to search for some high frequency keyword like, say, "Katrina", the results are totally useless. But if you have a very specific post you want to find like, say, "tech ronin backpack" it is a killer tool. (And yes, I like that I can search for and find posts in my blogs using google, but I can't with technorati.)
It also doesn't help that it only lists results in chronological order -- at least with google news you can choose between relevance and date order. Pimping the post-of-the-minute reinforces the worst part of blogging -- the dreaded "first post" idiocy where masses of bloggers chase the meme-of-the-moment instead of taking a longer, more thoughtful view.
I love the idea of being able to load custom driving "skins" for different driving situations. One for driving the kids to school, another boring one for slogging to work, and some fun ones for lonely open roads,...
No, I want that now. Someone please put this in some PS2 game. I want to learn to drive hy-wire now.
Of course, this goes (or will go) well beyond DXF since it promises to integrate all manner of Office documents.
The real challenge may be to convince authors to write structured documents. Think how few docs now use any sort of templates or employ style sheets.
Check out the story on Richard Pearse on Salon.com that was posted back on August 22: Bamboo Dick, first in flight (not sure if that is a premium article of not...) I remember that it was a good read.
Yeah, that does sound far-fetched.
But I bet that level of coordination becomes expected now.
And it should be.
What I'm not liking so far is the mouse / tablet / joystick stuff. Maybe I'll grow to like the thumb tablet pointer device. But for now I'm using an external mouse -- and the tablet just generates noise, errors. Let me turn it off.
Oh, and the Ctrl-Alt-Del gesture sucks on my laptop. Why do we still have to Ctrl-Alt-Del? Why not offer other ways to turn it on?
The one procedure that I nearly tried on my on meniscus involved using a collagen scaffolding. The callagen was, I believe, sewn up with the remaining cleaned up meniscus. It acts as a scaffolding, holding the bones apart and creating a lattice into which the meniscus cartilage can regrow. Early results were good, the cartilage was regrown and was working. But the trials were stopped for a while when the FDA reclassified the procedure -- or something. I missed my chance for the procedure and had the traditional excavation/repair done on that knee. I have no idea how the folks that had this procedure are doing now.
The big goal, at least to me, in regrowing the cartilage is to avoid arthritic old knees. Who cares about never playing ____ again. I want to be hiking into my 80's! Removing torn meniscus is pretty effective at getting the knee to work OK again. Its the long term wear and tear on the knee with trimmed meniscus that many, many of us "old knees" are facing.
Like chess, on-line go is often played against a clock. Of course. It is no less a turn based game.
Take a look at groove at http://www.groove.net/
The raw pper to peer features of Groove might be sweet for classroom application. And it supports security and control that you'd need. Customizing it to suit specific classroom requirements sounds like a good challenge.
I'd be very surprized if a rail line could compete with cargo shipping between the US and Asia -- even Vladivostok or "Chumikan", even without the cost of the tunnel. Maybe I think that because the idea of a terrestrial link between Asia and America sounds so grandiose.
It is interesting to read that they are breaking ground on the Hokkaido - Sakhalin tunnel. I'll have to look around for more news on that! It makes a lot more sense to link two heavily used rail infrastructures such as Japan's and Russia's. Very cool.
So what if the folks at one80 have a flawed understanding of a turing machine. So what if one80 is using FORTH to get it done. Their claim is that they have a full 1.2 compliant, not just personal java, implementation that is tiny. Pretty cool.
I also think you have a point about publicly managed or centrally planned infrastructure having advantages over privitized alternatives. The phone networks are a good example. Rail would arguably be another.
I'm told DoCoMo's i-mode service is a fully controlled "walled garden" of the web. You go only where they lead you. That will have to change here, I hope.
Trappists make great beer -- because they've had centuries to perfect it, and the nature of beer is not changing. Likewise, the linux monks have made a great unix and over time it may become the ultimate unix -- assuming we will continue to need any unix. But I don't expect them to make the first great PDA, or make any other stunning technological breakthroughs. The monastic pursuit of knowledge has it limits
Autodesk, where I used to work, has done this very well. You could choose from a long list of benefits -- from pet insurance, legal insurance, FSAs for health care costs, dependent care,... The choices were presented via an intranet application each year during health care open enrollment periods. It really was a nice program.
No, Autodesk does not offer child care on site. I believe they studied it and concluded it would cost too much, and there was not guarantee that employees would choose it. Only large companies with large campuses can really offer this by themselves. Autodesk relied on community child care providers -- and I think that may be the more realistic solution for most employees and employers. But I did get a lot of my kids' daycare subisdised by an Autdesk sponsored FSA. The other benefit they offered was flex time and some PTO for school and daycare volunteers.