Anyone using this?
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/09/29/1096401633260.html
Your call is important to us
By Garry Barker
What KaZaA did for music sharing, Skype could do for phone calls. The potential is huge, with the added benefit that telephone companies are unlikely to hire gumshoes to stage midnight raids on Skypers, as the music companies have done over KaZaA, because no copyright issue is involved in a phone call.
Skype is not a replacement for the telephone system, but it could be the start of a revolution leading to virtually free calls to and from anywhere.
Michael Powell, chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission, believes Skype could change the world.
"I knew it was over when I downloaded Skype," he told Fortune magazine recently. "When the inventors of KaZaA are distributing a program you can use to talk to anybody else and the quality is fantastic and it's free - it's over. Inevitably the world will change."
On my iMac and PowerBook using the Mac OS X version of Skype, the sound quality through the computers' speakers is better than on an average phone call.
Les Posen, a
Melbourne psychologist, used Skype to talk from New
York to
Melbourne and locally in the US with his PowerBook on the broadband line in his hotel room. A call to a patient in one of those aforementioned Greek islands cost less than a dollar.
Charmian Gaud, secretary of the
Melbourne Macintosh User Group, makes calls around Australia to computers and the POTS (plain old telephone system).
Skype is a free download from www.skype.com. You register a user name and buy "SkypeOut"credits in euros (you pay in Australian dollars using a credit card). Calls to fixed and mobile phones are seen as local at the receiver end and costs are deducted from your Skype account. Skype-to-Skype calls are internet data traffic and thus "free". You can conference with up to five people, but you cannot call Skypers from mobiles or the POTS.
Skype is peer-to-peer telephony for voice and instant messaging, not Voice Over Internet Protocol, such as Telstra is introducing for homes and which many corporations use for internal calls. The concept is not new (see Net2Phone and NetMeeting) but done better.
Because it is peer-to-peer there is a chance you could be "lurked" by a person you would not use for alligator bait, but you can block all but acceptable people.
Apple's iChat AV provides internet chat, with the advantage of video on broadband using an iSight camera - not possible with Skype. But with Skype you can call a conventional phone system, and that is the real difference.
Mac file
A pet peeve among users of Entourage and the Mac O S X Address Book is that its handy web-link map feature, which shows the location of your contacts, does not admit the existence of a place called Australia.
Stephen Withers,
Melbourne Mac expert, took this shortcoming as a personal challenge and has written a neat Address Book plug-in and an AppleScript that fetches maps and driving instructions from the WhereIs service (whereis.com.au), run by Sensis, the WhitePages and Trading Post outfit.
Withers, who believes in economy of motion, says he started with the Entourage map script "because that's where I store my contacts and I was fed up with retyping addresses into WhereIs when I needed maps".
He shared that with members of iMUG, the
Melbourne Macintosh User Group, who instantly challenged him to include Address Book. This time he used Apple's powerful scripting language that integrates neatly into Mac applications.
The scripts are a free download from stephenwithers.com/scripts, but I reckon they're so good they are worth a couple of dollars' donation, which you can contribute through his site.
If you have any queries about Macs, contact Garry Barker at gbarker@theage.com.au