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Wednesday, September 10, 2003 |
 Field report. Jevon MacDonald and I just used Skype and it works great. Sound quality is very good without any lag. The technical literature on the Skype site says that it uses full peers to provide intermediary services for NATed/Firewalled peers that want to connect to each other. This radically increases the number of people that can connect to each other over traditional methods. Also, the fact that this is almost completely P2P means that the costs of running the network are near $0. I have finally found a reason to use my computer's microphone. Nice. Next step: get audblog to connect to this network so I can make audio posts. The genie is out of the bottle...
1:12:20 PM 
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Evan caught this: Skype. P2P telephony. From the Dutch developers of FastTrack (the system that powers KaZaA). In my opinion, this is the first true legitimate application of P2P technology. Next step: a pro version with call waiting, voicemail, etc. I am going to try it out to see if it does provide the quality level claimed. If you are on, let me know so we can try it out. Also, I wish they had skins for this so it won't look bad on my desktop (nobody needs an ugly ICQ-like system on their desktop).
9:03:02 AM
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Years ago, when I showed my father the Web (he was on CompuServe), he thought the Web was Yahoo. It says a lot about how people who aren't technologists think about things (and why certain software takes off). This statement from the mother of a file sharer demonstrates how many must be thinking about the daughters of Napster (and why they feel so confused by the RIAA's aggressive attacks on their customers):
"When my son was in Kazaa listening to music, other people could come in and listen to music off his machine, I guess that's how it works," she said. "So they are saying he is distributing music." "He's using the computer as a stereo like most other high school kids do," she said.
8:17:28 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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