Skype

[Mr. 'H']

Anyone on Skype?

Discovered it the other week when a friend from college called me on my cell from his laptop! No kidding.

I got signed up and it saved me a helluva lotta $$$ when I was on to the States last week for 40 minutes. It cost me like, 10c or somethin' as it's charged at a local rate.

If anyone this side of the Atlantic wanted to call someone Stateside (for instance, if I called Art to go through what I wanted in a custom) I could stay on for as long as I needed without worry.

If anyone is going

to

then it's completely free.

Cool.

 

[Steve]

Ah yes, good ol' Skype. I use it to keep in touch with an Australian acquaintance of mind along with several other people I know around the U.S. Great service.

 

[scotrace]

I use it to keep up with friends in Boston, Switzerland and Taipei. Free= Good.

 

[Baron Kurtz]

I'm out of ...

.. the loop. As always. Technophobe.

what on earth is skype?

bk

 

[Steve]

www.skype.com

Free internet telephone through computer; almost free overseas rates through conventional phone.

 

[penfencer]

My brothers and I use it for online gaming. "Panzer northwest!" Sniper in the attic window to the east."

All for free. It's almost too good to be true.

 

[decodoll]

I use Skype to talk to my parents for free. The connection isn't quite as good as a regular phone (hmmm...maybe that's the extremely cheap USB phone I have), but it's saved me tons of money in long distance.

 

[matei]

We swear by it to stay in touch with our far-flung family. We used to spend loads of money calling Romania, but now we just use Skype. Once in a while we'll charge it up with £10 or so and make calls to landlines, but it is still reasonable. Now that they have the video bit working, it is even better.

The quality is so good (depends if the other party has a good camera as well) that video calls are finally feasible.

As an aside... I did actually do some contracting work for them at their London office. I was only there a few times and it was a strange experience.

It was a bit hippy-ish/utopian, very unorganised and a bit... I dunno - flash/hip/annoying. I can't explain. Full of young, driven, "career" types, throwing buzzwords around, making fusses and throwing tantrums. As a company, I don't think they expected to hit the type of growth they experienced.

There was no real infrastructure, no real IT policies and surprisingly enough - no landlines! Each employee had a laptop with either a headset or a USB handset and a Skype account. They brought in some poor overworked guy from the US (an IT security expert) to try and reign in the chaos there.

No RJ-45 cable either... Everything was wireless, and they even had another access point for free access to anyone who happened to be in the area.

That being said, the techno-hub of the operation was in Talinn when I was there, and London was either a sales or marketing office.

 

[Nathan Flowers]

My brothers and I use it for online gaming. "Panzer northwest!" Sniper in the attic window to the east."

All for free. It's almost too good to be true.

I use it for the same thing. Just last night, 5 of us were in the same squad on Battlefield 2. It helps out quite a bit.

There was no real infrastructure, no real IT policies and surprisingly enough - no landlines! Each employee had a laptop with either a headset or a USB handset and a Skype account. They brought in some poor overworked guy from the US (an IT security expert) to try and reign in the chaos there.

No RJ-45 cable either... Everything was wireless, and they even had another access point for free access to anyone who happened to be in the area.

They must have a server farm with a proper network administrator somewhere, don't they? Was this just their office?

Either way, having all desktops set up with wireless is a bad idea. I've seen setups with 50+ wireless computers all talking to the same access point with more packet collision than you can imagine.

 

[matei]

They must have a server farm with a proper network administrator somewhere, don't they? Was this just their office?

Yep - the server farm I think was in Talinn. This was some kind of sales or marketing office. It was almost like working in an episode of "The Apprentice", but sans grumpy Sir Alan Sugar.

A weird thing was that the employees didn't get free Skype credit to use in order to call landlines. They had to charge up their accounts with their own credit cards. I imagine that they were reimbursed at some stage, I don't know.

However if they needed to speak to some other Skype person in another office, they just "Skyped" him for free.

 

[Nathan Flowers]

.

Egad, sorry for making you repeat yourself. I missed that last sentence.

 

[matei]

No worries!

I think Skype works a lot better than some of the other programs that are out there, like MSN Messenger/Netmeeting or Yahoo's chat thingee...

 

[Nathan Flowers]

Yes, it does. And the quality is far and away much better than any land line phone I have ever used.

However, I don't like the newest windows client. The interface is much easier to use on the Mac client.

 

[Dr. Shocker]

I am on there too......

 

[ITG]

I have it too and am trying to talk Mr. Paddy into getting on it. Skype is much more reliable than Yahoo Messenger's voice chat. Thanks to Indiana Ken for introducting me to it.

 

[Lauren]

I used it almost exclusively to call my friends and family back in the US when we were filming Templars in Scotland. It was brilliant and a good recipe for missing those far away.