Wednesday June 15, 2005 
Wednesday June 15, 2005
Found this cute little emoticon over on mozillazine.org :
(2005-06-15 13:13:07 SGT)
[Musings]
Permalink
news.com :
David Duffield, the founder and former chief executive of PeopleSoft, a business software company, isn't just walking away from the thousands of workers who have been laid off since the Oracle Corporation acquired it last December after a bitter takeover battle. Instead, he is giving grants of up to $10,000 each to many former PeopleSoft employees who lost their jobs and have had problems finding work ...
Duffield is not resting on his largess. Ogden [a former PeopleSoft manager chosen to supervise the fund] said Duffield was planning a new software company, but he declined to discuss details. "Right now it's just called 'Dave's Next Move,' " he said ... if he needs help, Duffield could probably find a ready pool of workers among those he has helped through Safety Net. "I know plenty of people who would drop everything to work for him," Ogden said.
- nice of him. Wish we had such a boss around in the Fast Crash period.
(2005-06-15 13:10:44 SGT)
[Biz]
Permalink
news.com :
Five months after merging its PC business with its imaging and printing group, Hewlett-Packard split them up again on Monday and appointed Todd Bradley, former chief executive of PalmOne, as new leader of its personal systems group ...
- they might as well give up and call it Compaq.
(2005-06-15 12:51:39 SGT)
[Tech]
Permalink
It looks like the corporate world is starting to "discover" Skype. Separately, and literally within days of each other, the companies that Biow and I are currently with have had mandates passed down from corporate headquarters to use Skype instead of expensive IDD for calls. Heck, HQ even gave me my own headset to talk with.
These factors have probably helped :
1. All the hype on Skype - its astonishingly fast user-base growth. Like I told you before, companies (and our entire industrial society) respect "growth". And there's also the "121,161,994 downloaders can't all be wrong" (at time of writing) factor.
2. Free inter-country calls, replacing expensive IDD. That's the cost-saving angle that the hordes of companies and end-users are gunning for.
3. Ease of setup - even dummies can do it. Skype's firewall and NAT traversal algorithms make it look almost too easy.
4. Comparatively better voice quality compared to other free clients like Yahoo or MSN.
5. AES-256 encryption - just nice for the "mildly paranoid". The "deeply paranoid" who question the exact implementation, ask for source codes and peer reviews will never be satisfied (by any solution, actually).
And here are my own notes :
1. To turn Skype into an encrypted instant-messaging client, go to Tools, Options, General, and under "When I double-click on Contact or use the address field" select "Start chat" instead of "Start call". This way you can send IM messages Yahoo- or MSN-style.
2. Under Tools, Options, Privacy, under "Keep chat history" select "No history". The default is "Forever", which kind of defeats the purpose of encrypted communications, doesn't it.
3. It looks like you can log into the same account on multiple computers at the same time. It will not log you out on the other machine like Yahoo does or block you like MSN does. IM's will arrive at each machine where you have your Skype account logged in to. Not so sure about voice calls though, some report only the last machine will "ring", others say that all machines will "ring".
4. Another piece of "mildly paranoid" advice - turn off 80 and 443 (Tools, Options, Connection). Some ISP's may misunderstand and claim that you are running "servers" at these very well-known ports - well technically you are if you leave them open, but probably not what they had in mind. If you're behind a firewall, or perhaps multiple firewalls (like me), then it doesn't matter that much, but it's really a waste of CPU cycles and RAM for those extra listener threads, huh.
(2005-06-15 08:11:34 SGT)
[Tech]
Permalink
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