Because the only way to have it work properly through most firewalls is to allow ALL outgoing ports.
If you're going to pretend to be a BOFH, you might at least take the trouble to research what you are talking about. Skype is highly configurable as to what ports it uses, and a more useful approach would be to ask your users to "please use such-and-such a port and bear in mind that the company's resources aren't unlimited, so please don't abuse them". You might even consider setting up their Skype client yourself so as to lock down port usage and turn off video calling.
Skype can be a productivity tool in the sense that users don't need to absent themselves from work to carry out short, but necessary conversations. Insisting on being a douchebag over a few kilobytes of bandwidth (non-video calls over Skype are NOT that heavy on traffic) just makes you look like an asswipe.
and don't even run enough of your own supernodes and monitor them in such a way that they cannot handle an outage effectively...
Seems the problem here is that Skype was crippled by its own success. I suspect the original designers never anticipated current usage levels, so the basic infrastructure required for expansion was never built.
Hopefully they'll learn from this experience. The outage never cost me more than minor inconvenience, so I'm not about to abandon Skype.
Well said. Skype is primarily a piece of technology aimed at the individual consumer. It is made completely clear at the outset that it doesn't claim to be a landline replacement, so anyone who lost business as a result of the outage doesn't get much sympathy from me.
The dowmtime period for me was about a day and a half, which amounts to 0.41% of the year. No biggie, I have SIP and mobile alternatives. Or both if I run a SIP client over my wireless internet dongle or phone tether.
I get very tired of those who insist on telling everybody to stop using Skype and to use this or that product instead. Skype has a commanding and undeniable position in peoples' headspace because it offers a fucking good product. For me, the combination of IM client with voice calling capability is a killer. My non-geek friends will never be pursuaded to run a separate IM and SIP client. I can (and do) leave video calling alone, since nobody needs to see me after (or during) an evening on the single-malts...:-}
I had my downtime like everybody else, but all was good by Christmas. Ironically though, when I was doing my phone-calls on the evening of the 25th, it was the battery in my cordless SIP handset that died (despite being new and supposedly fully charged).
So it was back to Skype, which worked like a champ.
Well, we can't depend on a court to display intelligence. All it can decide is who has the best lawyer. From TFA:
For example, as demonstrated by Exhibit 24, when a user receives a new Google Voice message, the Android Operating System and Google Voice software display a notification in the status bar screen for a short period of time.
This seems so damn similar to the decades-old biff, it's not funny.
It's about time patent offices and laws were closed down for good. They no longer serve any useful purpose as far as innovation is concerned (their original function), merely serving to enrich the lawyers who persist in acting like sharks.
Abrams is right about one thing: Wikileaks...revels in the revelation of "secrets" simply because they are secret. The whole mess around this affair is being polluted with issues totally unrelated to the blowing of any whistles. Building a personality cult around Assange (hero or villain) is unedifying.
Ultimately, the leaks thus released will be recognised as mundane trivia that had often been made known before. Wikileaks could have set its sights a bit higher, i.e. at exposing more culpable hypocrisy or duplicity. This would at least have had more effect in justifying its existence, while the scramble by various governments to nail Assange's hide to a fence only serves to expose a wide streak of nastiness.
Sort of. A few weeks ago, I bought a Sony/Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro android phone on the understanding from my telco that wireless tethering is perfectly acceptable. I have since discovered that this is not possible, since SE have gone to extreme lengths to block any kind of root access to the phone.
In fact, I can live without the tethering. I do like the hardware, but I really want to get rid of all the crapware the telco has loaded on it. I'm seriously considering returning the product as defective, since it doesn't meet the conditions under which I bought it.
I don't care if rooting the device voids the warranty (I'm an adult and I can live with that) but an open OS that has been locked down by the hardware manufacturer is no longer open.
If you enter a marriage on a basis of common trust, that implies that the two of you know something about each other and have learned to accept each other's weaknesses and strengths.
My wife and I have been married for 20 years (but together for 24), bickering for a lot of that time, but ultimately sharing a common viewpoint. Sharing finances at the outset is a big contributor to that stability. A refusal to do so speaks of a problem with commitment, and I know of many partnerships that have been doomed for that reason alone.
I'm not big on having my balls sucked (especially by guys), but this Jeff Atwood guy is clearly either very young or an idiot who only codes in toyland languages.
Back in the day, the only QWERTY keyboards on the Burroughs mainframes I had were the teletype devices used for a master console (or what Burroughs rather charmingly referred to as the SPO, or Supervisory Printer/Operator), and the action on those damn things was so damn stiff, not even God could have touch-typed on them.
Most of us evolved a heavy technique, mostly involving thumbs and two fingers on each hand. It's a hard habit to outgrow when you spend more time thinking than typing.
Some of my code of which I am proudest was entered in hex via the control panel on the front of the computer. Touch-typing not necessary.
I maintain that the quickest editor for entering raw text is still TECO. It is also (probably) the fastest editor, period. Its only drawback was/is the amount of "meatware" memory required to remember all those commands.
Incidentally, for those here who are too young to remember, Emacs started out as a set of Editor macros for TECO. The difference is that it also stood for "Eight Megabytes And Continually Swapping".;-)
Back when I first started with computers, we wrote our Fortran or COBOL code on 80-column coding sheets with a device known as a "pencil". These stylus-like instruments allowed us to write our code very quickly and quietly. Thus, a programmer could carry out his (or occasionally her) work with an air of dignity and repose no longer possible.
The actual typing was done by keypunch ops who could all type faster than 250 words per minute, no matter what the Guinness Book of Records might say.;-)
By way of a postscript (early morning, Boxing Day) I might mention that reliability cuts many ways.
Like everyone else, I had a few difficulties with Skype while this was going on. But during the round of long-distance calls I had to make over the evening of Christmas Day, the battery in my SIP cordless handset died in the middle of a call, despite being new and supposedly fully charged, in a handset with a 100% fault-free record. So back to Skype, which I am happy to say worked like a champ.
So I guess the moral of the story it not to get obsessive over uptime, just allow yourself a few alternative workarounds to allow room for unforseen failures to occur without causing disruption.
Getting back to the issue: Has anyone yet explained what the cause of this outage is? If Skype's techs have indeed been working on it all day, they must (one hopes) have at least some idea of the cause by now.
"Year end" means different things in different countries, in any case. Here in Australia, the financial year ends on 30th June, while in the UK and other countries the date varies from one company to the next according to when it was fired up.
Skype doesn't suck any more than it did yesterday. OK, well I guess maybe it does, since at the moment it isn't working.
But there has been no deception: when we sign up, we are made completely aware that Skype is not a replacement for a permanent line.
If you are running a business that uses Skype (I don't say "depends" because it would be too stupid to build your business around something over which you have so little control), you should consider having at least one "fixed" line or at least a working and tested SIP setup.
In my case, since I use Skype for personal purposes, the outage isn't the end of the world. It could have happened at a better time of the year, but I have alternatives: I have a SIP handset hanging off the back of my modem and I have my mobile phone. And, of course if I have to, I could run a SIP client via my tethered phone or USB wireless dongle. Or I could get off my ass and do something radical like write a fucking letter. Whatever.
But I'm getting away from my point, which is that Skype is too good a service for me to abandon it because of one day's hiccup. Having the combination of an IM and VOIP client integrated in a product that already has near-universal "headspace awareness" among my non-geeky acquaintances is valuable. Sure, there are alternatives for each of these (and maybe both, for all I know), but my friends have to know about them too for them to be any use.
So hopefully, when the dust settles after this outage, the Skype developers will be able to use this experience to build more robustness into what is already a great product.
Slashdot gets "scooped" like this quite frequently, but that's not really the point. It's meant to be a forum where, in an ideal situation, users can discuss and expand their insight into such news. Sure, a lot of material of tangential, marginal or no relevance does come up, but that's part of what makes the openness of Slashdot so good. On a good day, anyway.
In my case, the first "contact" was being unable to login to Skype, then finding a newspaper article about the outage, which saved me the trouble of investigating whether the problem was anything I could fix. No biggie.
Ten out of ten. The system has (surprise!) yet again proved that it is there to protect the biggest financial interests against incursions from individuals or smaller players.
The face that Obama has caved shouldn't be seen as a surprise. The fact that he even paid lip service to net neutrality is more than his opponents ever did, but let's not forget that before he went into politics he was a successful and wealthy lawyer.
Lawyers are highly trained in distorting the truth, or presenting you with a version of the truth that they want you to hear. That's why so many politicians (professional liars) start their careers as lawyers. All the hype over Obama's election sort of encouraged us to forget his background, so everyone was led to expect too much of him.
And as long as Moore's law holds, it's not worth teaching them how to make things faster or cheaper...
Hmmm. Except that it is way cooler to be able to blow up the world (or another planet) with nothing more than a few unused bytes on an 8088 processor. Current practice (sadly) seems to discourage self-modifying code, but that is one of the areas where programming becomes really neat.
Slashdot Mirror
poor use of statistics in science. What was really the point of implying that truth can change?
There is also an implication that some "sciences" are in fact nothing more than pseudosciences, i.e. little removed from voodoo.
After all, they all have a lots of improvised individuals
Neat trick. Do they use needle and thread, or just Meccano?
Because the only way to have it work properly through most firewalls is to allow ALL outgoing ports.
If you're going to pretend to be a BOFH, you might at least take the trouble to research what you are talking about. Skype is highly configurable as to what ports it uses, and a more useful approach would be to ask your users to "please use such-and-such a port and bear in mind that the company's resources aren't unlimited, so please don't abuse them". You might even consider setting up their Skype client yourself so as to lock down port usage and turn off video calling.
Skype can be a productivity tool in the sense that users don't need to absent themselves from work to carry out short, but necessary conversations. Insisting on being a douchebag over a few kilobytes of bandwidth (non-video calls over Skype are NOT that heavy on traffic) just makes you look like an asswipe.
and don't even run enough of your own supernodes and monitor them in such a way that they cannot handle an outage effectively...
Seems the problem here is that Skype was crippled by its own success. I suspect the original designers never anticipated current usage levels, so the basic infrastructure required for expansion was never built.
Hopefully they'll learn from this experience. The outage never cost me more than minor inconvenience, so I'm not about to abandon Skype.
Well said. Skype is primarily a piece of technology aimed at the individual consumer. It is made completely clear at the outset that it doesn't claim to be a landline replacement, so anyone who lost business as a result of the outage doesn't get much sympathy from me.
:-}
The dowmtime period for me was about a day and a half, which amounts to 0.41% of the year. No biggie, I have SIP and mobile alternatives. Or both if I run a SIP client over my wireless internet dongle or phone tether.
I get very tired of those who insist on telling everybody to stop using Skype and to use this or that product instead. Skype has a commanding and undeniable position in peoples' headspace because it offers a fucking good product. For me, the combination of IM client with voice calling capability is a killer. My non-geek friends will never be pursuaded to run a separate IM and SIP client. I can (and do) leave video calling alone, since nobody needs to see me after (or during) an evening on the single-malts...
I'm just glad it's back up...
I had my downtime like everybody else, but all was good by Christmas. Ironically though, when I was doing my phone-calls on the evening of the 25th, it was the battery in my cordless SIP handset that died (despite being new and supposedly fully charged).
So it was back to Skype, which worked like a champ.
These days, I wouldn't put it past anyone.
Well, we can't depend on a court to display intelligence. All it can decide is who has the best lawyer. From TFA: For example, as demonstrated by Exhibit 24, when a user receives a new Google Voice message, the Android Operating System and Google Voice software display a notification in the status bar screen for a short period of time.
This seems so damn similar to the decades-old biff, it's not funny.
It's about time patent offices and laws were closed down for good. They no longer serve any useful purpose as far as innovation is concerned (their original function), merely serving to enrich the lawyers who persist in acting like sharks.
Abrams is right about one thing: Wikileaks ...revels in the revelation of "secrets" simply because they are secret. The whole mess around this affair is being polluted with issues totally unrelated to the blowing of any whistles. Building a personality cult around Assange (hero or villain) is unedifying.
Ultimately, the leaks thus released will be recognised as mundane trivia that had often been made known before. Wikileaks could have set its sights a bit higher, i.e. at exposing more culpable hypocrisy or duplicity. This would at least have had more effect in justifying its existence, while the scramble by various governments to nail Assange's hide to a fence only serves to expose a wide streak of nastiness.
Yup, it doesn't work with the current firmware. :-{
Sort of. A few weeks ago, I bought a Sony/Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro android phone on the understanding from my telco that wireless tethering is perfectly acceptable. I have since discovered that this is not possible, since SE have gone to extreme lengths to block any kind of root access to the phone.
In fact, I can live without the tethering. I do like the hardware, but I really want to get rid of all the crapware the telco has loaded on it. I'm seriously considering returning the product as defective, since it doesn't meet the conditions under which I bought it.
I don't care if rooting the device voids the warranty (I'm an adult and I can live with that) but an open OS that has been locked down by the hardware manufacturer is no longer open.
If you enter a marriage on a basis of common trust, that implies that the two of you know something about each other and have learned to accept each other's weaknesses and strengths.
My wife and I have been married for 20 years (but together for 24), bickering for a lot of that time, but ultimately sharing a common viewpoint. Sharing finances at the outset is a big contributor to that stability. A refusal to do so speaks of a problem with commitment, and I know of many partnerships that have been doomed for that reason alone.
It might not be a crime, but it certainly is creepy.
I'm not big on having my balls sucked (especially by guys), but this Jeff Atwood guy is clearly either very young or an idiot who only codes in toyland languages.
Back in the day, the only QWERTY keyboards on the Burroughs mainframes I had were the teletype devices used for a master console (or what Burroughs rather charmingly referred to as the SPO, or Supervisory Printer/Operator), and the action on those damn things was so damn stiff, not even God could have touch-typed on them.
Most of us evolved a heavy technique, mostly involving thumbs and two fingers on each hand. It's a hard habit to outgrow when you spend more time thinking than typing.
Some of my code of which I am proudest was entered in hex via the control panel on the front of the computer. Touch-typing not necessary.
I maintain that the quickest editor for entering raw text is still TECO. It is also (probably) the fastest editor, period. Its only drawback was/is the amount of "meatware" memory required to remember all those commands.
;-)
Incidentally, for those here who are too young to remember, Emacs started out as a set of Editor macros for TECO. The difference is that it also stood for "Eight Megabytes And Continually Swapping".
So why are they named debuggers, not reverseengineers?
Because any non-trivial program is buggered until it has been debuggered.
Back when I first started with computers, we wrote our Fortran or COBOL code on 80-column coding sheets with a device known as a "pencil". These stylus-like instruments allowed us to write our code very quickly and quietly. Thus, a programmer could carry out his (or occasionally her) work with an air of dignity and repose no longer possible.
;-)
The actual typing was done by keypunch ops who could all type faster than 250 words per minute, no matter what the Guinness Book of Records might say.
By way of a postscript (early morning, Boxing Day) I might mention that reliability cuts many ways.
Like everyone else, I had a few difficulties with Skype while this was going on. But during the round of long-distance calls I had to make over the evening of Christmas Day, the battery in my SIP cordless handset died in the middle of a call, despite being new and supposedly fully charged, in a handset with a 100% fault-free record. So back to Skype, which I am happy to say worked like a champ.
So I guess the moral of the story it not to get obsessive over uptime, just allow yourself a few alternative workarounds to allow room for unforseen failures to occur without causing disruption.
Getting back to the issue: Has anyone yet explained what the cause of this outage is? If Skype's techs have indeed been working on it all day, they must (one hopes) have at least some idea of the cause by now.
I don't use Facebook.
"Year end" means different things in different countries, in any case. Here in Australia, the financial year ends on 30th June, while in the UK and other countries the date varies from one company to the next according to when it was fired up.
Skype doesn't suck any more than it did yesterday. OK, well I guess maybe it does, since at the moment it isn't working.
But there has been no deception: when we sign up, we are made completely aware that Skype is not a replacement for a permanent line.
If you are running a business that uses Skype (I don't say "depends" because it would be too stupid to build your business around something over which you have so little control), you should consider having at least one "fixed" line or at least a working and tested SIP setup.
In my case, since I use Skype for personal purposes, the outage isn't the end of the world. It could have happened at a better time of the year, but I have alternatives: I have a SIP handset hanging off the back of my modem and I have my mobile phone. And, of course if I have to, I could run a SIP client via my tethered phone or USB wireless dongle. Or I could get off my ass and do something radical like write a fucking letter. Whatever.
But I'm getting away from my point, which is that Skype is too good a service for me to abandon it because of one day's hiccup. Having the combination of an IM and VOIP client integrated in a product that already has near-universal "headspace awareness" among my non-geeky acquaintances is valuable. Sure, there are alternatives for each of these (and maybe both, for all I know), but my friends have to know about them too for them to be any use.
So hopefully, when the dust settles after this outage, the Skype developers will be able to use this experience to build more robustness into what is already a great product.
Slashdot gets "scooped" like this quite frequently, but that's not really the point. It's meant to be a forum where, in an ideal situation, users can discuss and expand their insight into such news. Sure, a lot of material of tangential, marginal or no relevance does come up, but that's part of what makes the openness of Slashdot so good. On a good day, anyway.
In my case, the first "contact" was being unable to login to Skype, then finding a newspaper article about the outage, which saved me the trouble of investigating whether the problem was anything I could fix. No biggie.
Winston Smith, welcome to the Ministry of Truth.
It seems like a criticism of a flawed system
Ten out of ten. The system has (surprise!) yet again proved that it is there to protect the biggest financial interests against incursions from individuals or smaller players.
The face that Obama has caved shouldn't be seen as a surprise. The fact that he even paid lip service to net neutrality is more than his opponents ever did, but let's not forget that before he went into politics he was a successful and wealthy lawyer.
Lawyers are highly trained in distorting the truth, or presenting you with a version of the truth that they want you to hear. That's why so many politicians (professional liars) start their careers as lawyers. All the hype over Obama's election sort of encouraged us to forget his background, so everyone was led to expect too much of him.
And as long as Moore's law holds, it's not worth teaching them how to make things faster or cheaper...
Hmmm. Except that it is way cooler to be able to blow up the world (or another planet) with nothing more than a few unused bytes on an 8088 processor. Current practice (sadly) seems to discourage self-modifying code, but that is one of the areas where programming becomes really neat.