It really depends how many calls you're making and what they cost now. Where I am (Australia) the cost of an ordinary local phone call is 20c, but the cost of VOIP to anywhere in the country is 10c untimed. That sort of price will probably never be matched by the phone companies.
But obviously if you only make $50 of calls as-is, there isn't as much to gain. Our household, though, regularly makes over $100 per month, and will stand to save a lot when we switch this week.:-)
My point was that Bob might not even be signed in on MSN at all. And it's not really my choice which service all my contacts are on (if it were, we would have solved the interconnectivity issue years ago using Jabber.)
Sure, MSN is more popular in some locations and AIM or Yahoo are more popular in others. But the statistics I posted were, of course world-wide statistics. If you ask AOL directly, they will actually give away their statistics to you directly, and are quite proud of it. If you ask MSN or Yahoo, you will have less luck, so the figures I quoted above are actually from a newspaper a few months ago which had a story about the increasing use of IM.
9 million at any one time, according to Wikipedia. But note that the official figures from the other companies are the number of users which logged in over a month, not the number which are logged in concurrently.
On my own, tiny instant messenger service, Jabber.ZIM, we typically have between 100 to 150 users online at any point in time, but 500 accounts are active each month. I'm not going to say that we can assume the same ratio will apply elsewhere, but if it does, then you can expect QQ's actual monthly usage statistics to still be higher than the entire AOL cluster combined.
I wonder what they'll do about user IDs for transporting between the two services. What I mean is, from MSN's side, you want to add a Yahoo user, say he's called "Bob" on Yahoo.
Maybe they'll let you add him just as "Bob" on MSN, which would be a significant problem for MSN because they assume that all IDs are emails for various purposes.
They can't let you add him as "bob@yahoo.com", because Bob might actually be using that Yahoo email address as his username on MSN.
Maybe they'll have to go about it to the extreme and add to both the IDs. So you would add Bob as "bob@Yahoo", but you would add your fellow MSN contact as "jane@example.com@MSN".
The range of their phone is 300m outdoors and 50m indoors. With Class 1 Bluetooth, it should be about 100m outdoors and 15m indoors. 15m is enough for the majority of houses, I'm sure.
It's all about cost of investment vs. ongoing costs. Phone calls are a great deal cheaper on VOIP, especially if you regularly make calls internationally, or even interstate.
But that being said, forking out for something which just runs Skype is a waste of money, because you miss out on free calls to the much larger number of accounts using the (more standard) SIP. That is, unless Skype have properly opened up their SIP interface lately and not informed Slashdot.:-)
A widespread Jabber net is already in place, it just needs the users to come to it. As more users come to it, the network will grow;
Client -> Server encryption has been around for as long as I can remember. It used to be just plain TLS negotiated over port 5223, but turned into STARTTLS over standard port 5222. Every client supports this in one way or another, or more accurately, a client which doesn't is a joke;
Client -> Client encryption has been here for ages now. The fact that people don't seem to want encryption or can't be arsed setting it up, doesn't mean that there is no encryption. OpenPGP works over Jabber already, and has been implemented in multiple clients, though by no means all. And finally;
Transport stability has NOTHING to do with Jabber stability. Repeat after me: Jabber is not the transports. Transports actually impede Jabber progress in by giving newbies the false idea that Jabber is a means for connecting to multiple networks at once. They then proceed to dismiss it as an option because "I already have Trillian."
Recent usage statistics actually look a bit like this:
AOL (sum of ICQ, AIM and AOLIM) = 41.6 million
Yahoo = 19.1 million
MSN = 14.1 million
Of course, there is also Jabber which was 10 million at last count which was a couple of years ago but more than likely growing. There is also QQ messenger, which supposedly has over 100 million users, but every news story like this conveniently ignores.
Since this thing has 802.11b, do you think we can have a VOIP client on it? I'm sick of paying mobile phone rates when I work within range of at least two free hotspots.
Yeah, Rails migrations are a fairly good solution. They market it as a migration framework, but really there isn't any difference between migration from some tables and migration from no tables.
There's a reason why stored procedures are important, and it doesn't have anything to do with perceived performance increases from not having to re-parse the same SQL code every call (that's definitely a benefit, but it's minor). In this case, stored procedures shelter you from SQL injection attacks
Whereas this is true, it's also true that using "?" parameters for any user-entered values can solve the SQL injection problem just as well.
That's pretty cool, and definitely a step in the right direction. I wonder how long it will be until that sort of thing even works without having to manually install software on the host.:-)
As a long-time fan of IntelliJ IDEA, I have to say that your claims are complete bullshit. IDEA is at least as responsive (and not to mention more featureful) as Visual Studio, and certainly as responsive as an IDE written in a scripting language.
It seems like the first rule of contracting should be to actually get a contract. Then when the employer does this, you still get all your money and as an added bonus you don't have to do the rest of the work you originally had to do to earn it.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
It really depends how many calls you're making and what they cost now. Where I am (Australia) the cost of an ordinary local phone call is 20c, but the cost of VOIP to anywhere in the country is 10c untimed. That sort of price will probably never be matched by the phone companies.
But obviously if you only make $50 of calls as-is, there isn't as much to gain. Our household, though, regularly makes over $100 per month, and will stand to save a lot when we switch this week. :-)
I thought I already did.
My point was that Bob might not even be signed in on MSN at all. And it's not really my choice which service all my contacts are on (if it were, we would have solved the interconnectivity issue years ago using Jabber.)
http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=197 48
Sure, MSN is more popular in some locations and AIM or Yahoo are more popular in others. But the statistics I posted were, of course world-wide statistics. If you ask AOL directly, they will actually give away their statistics to you directly, and are quite proud of it. If you ask MSN or Yahoo, you will have less luck, so the figures I quoted above are actually from a newspaper a few months ago which had a story about the increasing use of IM.
9 million at any one time, according to Wikipedia. But note that the official figures from the other companies are the number of users which logged in over a month, not the number which are logged in concurrently.
On my own, tiny instant messenger service, Jabber.ZIM, we typically have between 100 to 150 users online at any point in time, but 500 accounts are active each month. I'm not going to say that we can assume the same ratio will apply elsewhere, but if it does, then you can expect QQ's actual monthly usage statistics to still be higher than the entire AOL cluster combined.
I just left ICQ for Jabber. Or rather, I started using Jabber ages ago and just recently ditched all the legacy services.
The article doesn't talk about the "best" Linux instant messenger at all, it talks specifically about Gaim.
I wonder what they'll do about user IDs for transporting between the two services. What I mean is, from MSN's side, you want to add a Yahoo user, say he's called "Bob" on Yahoo.
Maybe they'll let you add him just as "Bob" on MSN, which would be a significant problem for MSN because they assume that all IDs are emails for various purposes.
They can't let you add him as "bob@yahoo.com", because Bob might actually be using that Yahoo email address as his username on MSN.
Maybe they'll have to go about it to the extreme and add to both the IDs. So you would add Bob as "bob@Yahoo", but you would add your fellow MSN contact as "jane@example.com@MSN".
The range of their phone is 300m outdoors and 50m indoors. With Class 1 Bluetooth, it should be about 100m outdoors and 15m indoors. 15m is enough for the majority of houses, I'm sure.
It's all about cost of investment vs. ongoing costs. Phone calls are a great deal cheaper on VOIP, especially if you regularly make calls internationally, or even interstate.
But that being said, forking out for something which just runs Skype is a waste of money, because you miss out on free calls to the much larger number of accounts using the (more standard) SIP. That is, unless Skype have properly opened up their SIP interface lately and not informed Slashdot. :-)
I wouldn't mind knowing how running Trillian makes it possible for me to invite an MSN and an AIM user into the same chat...
I think you're mixing topics a bit here:
Was this a troll? Microsoft and Yahoo interconnecting doesn't necessarily mean that any standards will even be used.
Recent usage statistics actually look a bit like this:
Of course, there is also Jabber which was 10 million at last count which was a couple of years ago but more than likely growing. There is also QQ messenger, which supposedly has over 100 million users, but every news story like this conveniently ignores.
Since this thing has 802.11b, do you think we can have a VOIP client on it? I'm sick of paying mobile phone rates when I work within range of at least two free hotspots.
Yeah, Rails migrations are a fairly good solution. They market it as a migration framework, but really there isn't any difference between migration from some tables and migration from no tables.
There's a reason why stored procedures are important, and it doesn't have anything to do with perceived performance increases from not having to re-parse the same SQL code every call (that's definitely a benefit, but it's minor). In this case, stored procedures shelter you from SQL injection attacks
Whereas this is true, it's also true that using "?" parameters for any user-entered values can solve the SQL injection problem just as well.
ActiveRecord basically autogenerates methods to link classes together based somewhat on the data found in the SQL database.
What people are talking about here is the exact opposite... generating the SQL from the code.
Of course, Ruby also has at least one method to do this already... it just isn't part of Rails. Yet.
That's pretty cool, and definitely a step in the right direction. I wonder how long it will be until that sort of thing even works without having to manually install software on the host. :-)
Is there a CPU in there yet? No? Wake me up when it's in.
As a long-time fan of IntelliJ IDEA, I have to say that your claims are complete bullshit. IDEA is at least as responsive (and not to mention more featureful) as Visual Studio, and certainly as responsive as an IDE written in a scripting language.
Therefore it makes sense to sacrifice a little bit of program performance to get more productive programmers.
And therefore, all enterprise development should switch to using Ruby.
It seems like the first rule of contracting should be to actually get a contract. Then when the employer does this, you still get all your money and as an added bonus you don't have to do the rest of the work you originally had to do to earn it. :-)
I hope you're right, because HD-DVD certainly has all the major studios already.