If you haven’t heard of Skype by now, I imagine the you’ve been living in a cave for the past year or so. Skype isn’t the only independent VoIP provider (there is also MagicJack and Vonage off the top of my head), but Skype is the only one that I am aware of that currently offers a connection offering that is a wireless hand held. In fact, Skype has two of these handsets offered on its products page and you can find more via Google. But the question is; Is it worth using this service, especially in lieu of a cell phone?

I have a Netgear SPH200W phone and live in a suburb type area. While Skype has only released numbers for my area a very short time ago, I can say that not having an incoming number does not make a significant impact to the service expectation when out of your house. I recently lost my primary employment and since I was about 20, my cell phone has always been provided to me by my place of employment. As I did not have any speakable income to rely upon for a monthly cellular bill, Skype seemed a good way to be able to have an open line of communication available. This being said, this post is based upon three solid months of a WiFi Skype phone being my primary “cell” phone.

The raw facts are this:

• Once you leave your house or a connected hot-spot, you cannot receive calls. You do have voicemail, but those alerts won’t come to you either until you connect to a hot-spot.
• You are dependent on open hot-spots.
• You have no control over the quality of a hot-spot.
• The service carries a fraction of the cost of a cellular service.

So you may be thinking that the facts make this sound like a pain in the ass to use. Contrary to this, I actually found that using a WiFi phone has it’s advantages. Cost is the biggest advantage. An unexpected advantage, though, is that I found that I was in control of communication. If I didn’t want to be reached, you couldn’t reach me. I still had a pay-as-you-go solution for kid emergencies, but most of my friends and family knew that I had the Skype and that was it. They could leave me a message and when I got it, I could return the call if I felt I needed to. We have gotten so used to having a cell on us that many people forget that it is not REQUIRED to answer every ring. Furthermore, it was a little surprising who was put off that I wasn’t going to be immediately available for contact at all times. My closest friends and family were all good with it, but some people seemed to be upset that I wouldn’t be able to take their call immediately if THEY wanted to contact me. These were people that I am not their emergency contact or close support group. I really wondered why they would need me all that badly. The answer was that they wouldn’t. So it was nice to have a buffer from those that I don’t have to have immediate contact with. After all, this was how things used to work when answering machines were the big convenience.

Next you would think that it would be hard to get a hot-spot. Not so. I can tell you that Burger King and some medical offices have completely open hot-spots, but auto shops normally don’t. You would think that a shop where you have to wait for an hour to get your car fixed would have one, but no. Schlotzkey’s, on the other hand, rules! Great sandwiches AND open WiFi! Residential areas are also a good thing here. Another unexpected benefit came from the WiFi issue. I couldn’t drive and talk. BOOM! Instant safer driver. If it wasn’t important enough for me to sit at the nearest hot-spot, I couldn’t make the call. It’s not that it wasn’t easy enough to find a hot-spot, but I suddenly found that I annoyed my wife a lot more with stupid questions. If I had a decision to make at the grocery store, I had to make it. It would be nice for grocery stores to have WiFi, though. They are just to big to pickup the signal from the CiCi’s pizza next door. That is really the only time I missed having a cell. To bug my wife about what type of frozen pizza she wanted (as if I didn’t already know).

Some of the time the hot-spot wasn’t of high quality. But if I had a good signal, the other party normally told me that I sounded fine. I take that as quality is not a big issue here. So really, most of the seemingly negative fact had beneficial balances, if you don’t feel that you MUST be connected at all times. The only other thing I really kind of missed about being tied to the Skype phone is that all it does is be a Skype phone. No games, no browser, no ringtones. What I really want to do now is get a WiFi ready BlackBerry or maybe a Nokia N97 and use a Skype application on a more robust platform. While I still don’t have really gainful employment, $700 for that equipment (especially just for review purposes) is not really an option for me. But I am looking at using Skype to host a dedicated number for my little computer consulting side business. The fact that I can just leave the Skype phone in the cradle when at home and then check it when convenient when out, makes this a GREAT business solution with a low cost of ownership in my eyes.

If anyone wants to donate the equipment to test Skype on other platforms, let me know.

-Mike      (a.k.a. itninja)

Courier: First Details of Microsoft’s Secret Tablet – Microsoft courier tablet – Gizmodo.

If you came back from the potential awesomeness that was contained in the above link, here is a serious question:

Why have tablet PCs never caught on?

I want one so bad it hurts sometimes, but I am a huge geek. The iPhone took off even bigger than the original iPod did. Common depictions of the future show natural interaction directly with a display as being natural progression. This would make it seem that the next big thing should be a touch screen laptop or tablet PC.

Thing is that they have been out for a long time already. The only huge advancement seems to have been multi-touch technology (the pinching motion to zoom a screen on the iPhone). Apple is bringing out a 10-inch tablet and Microsoft is countering with the book style, dual 7-inch Courier. The big boys are counting on interest to be there in the touch computing market. But will it be?

If you can type on one of the screens of the Courier, I could see it displacing a large portion of netbook sales, but otherwise I think both devices will fall short of expected main-stream acceptance. I believe this for the same reason that I have not bought my own tablet PC. The screen is too small.

Sure a lot of people are buying netbooks these days for a portable browsing solution. But the price that a 10-inch tablet PC commands puts it into the price range of a good laptop. When I’m looking at spending over $1000, I want to get something that has functionality beyond word-processing and web-browsing these days. Sure the Apple may play music, double as an eReader, or basicly be a large iPod touch, but is that really worth the price of a fully functional laptop? Even though I WANT one, I still say no.

What they need to do is make a 14 or 15 inch laptop with a multi-touch screen and full laptop specs. I would expect it to cost a little more than a standard laptop, but it would be WORTH it.

When the devices fail to get the mainstream interest they are looking for, they will say they don’t really care because they were just fleshing out the technology, but don’t be fooled. The tech is already in use and they are just not willing to make it useful to its fullest potential.

Just my two cents, though.

-Mike

I told you I would explain why I felt comfortable referencing Wikipedia as a valid source in a post on the use of the term Democracy (here).

Who seriously uses Wikipedia as a trusted source?

A ton of college students and Joe Schmoe. And who can blame them? It’s fast, free and easy.

But is it a good idea?

I believe the better question is: Are the alternatives really all that much more trustworthy? The fact is that WikiPedia is just like ANY reference source. You don’t REALLY know who wrote it (unless you ARE the one who wrote it, of course).

Wait, wait, wait! What do you mean “you don’t know who wrote it?” The fine people at EB wrote that good Ol’ encyclopedia for us! Who are you to say they’re wrong?

But who are you to say they are RIGHT? The fact is, encyclopedias are written by humans. Often written by humans without credit to the author. Is that author an expert on the subject? What were the sources used for the information? Even a BAD research paper is required to have sources in order to be accepted as a bad research paper. Otherwise, it may as well be a work of fiction. And this is my point. Most accepted reference sources don’t site THEIR sources or don’t even give writing credits. So the question is: Why should we blindly trust them?

Ok, so maybe I’m putting blind faith in classic sources. But why trust Wikipedia? I heard that they are just publicly written articles without any editing.

But therein lies the beauty of Wikipedia. It IS a set of publicly written articles. But who else would want to write an article about a semiempirical quantum chemistry method, developed by Roald Hoffmann (Extended Huckel method) but someone who was ACTUALLY interested in such an obscure topic. Not someone who is just simply assigned the topic. Not only that, but instead of no editing at all, the whole thing is edited by the public at large. That means that if someone who knows the subject BETTER comes along, they can change it. Yep, just like that. In addition to that, an article must have SOURCES to be valid. That means that if the subject is important to you, you can track down where the author got THEIR information and verify its validity.

So is Wikipedia the perfect source? Should I use it for ALL KNOWLEDGE?!!

NO!! Egads you are dense, mysterious inquisitive voice! It just means that you can verify that the article is telling a reasonable approximation of the truth. Maybe. Fact is, Wikipedia gets errors, vandalism, and attacks like many other sites and references. While the big guys in the encyclopedia world are quick to disagree that the error rate could be relatively close between their product and Wikipedia, there are studies that show just that.  The Wikipedia article that mentions this (reliability of Wikipedia) even sites the source and says that it was not a peer reviewed study.

You see, there is really no way to be sure of the source of your information unless YOU wrote it, but then it is not a reliable source outside of yourself. It is a catch-22 from which there is no real escape. I,of course, just don’t believe that a paper should be counted against due to Wikipedia being sited as a source yet not if some independent article or paper is cited when the party reviewing the work is not studiously following up on the sources for full verification. And by that I mean track down the bastard that wrote the source and BEAT the truth out of him (or her). Or at least read the damn source articles. It would be much easier to allow a citing to Wikipedia.

So now you are thinking that I am going to droll on about the injustices of our government, right? Well that’s wrong. So I’m going to start on about conspiracy theories about how our government is REALLY run by a magic duck that can magically speak to five people who pass it’s message through the President, right? Not a chance. That’s just silly (which is how they get us all to believe it’s not true! But I digress…).

So what moves me to take time out of studies and family to write about it? The use of the term “democracy” by people who are chosen to have the mantle of leadership of our country bestowed upon them. Why does this bother me? That’s an easy one that any 8th grader should be able to tell you: We do NOT live under a democracy, we live under a REPUBLIC! To be exact, we live under a constitutional republic. It even says so on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States).

Wait. Wikipedia?

That’s right. I used Wikipedia as a reference. I know your professors, parents, or other people told you Wikipedia is wrong because it is publicly edited. But can they provide sources for their information? Oh, wait, that information can actually be gotten from Wikipedia, too. Anyways, this is another whole subject that I will address later. **edit: or now. Right here.*** Just trust my judgment for the moment.

So WHY does this irk me?

I was watching president Obama the other day and heard him reciting some drivel about preserving our democracy. Then I realized, anytime I heard Obama or any other politician speak, they referred to our government as a democracy.

These are the people who are the law-makers, law-enforcers, and law-interpreters (or as they are best known; the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch; in order) and should know our system the BEST. The real troubling thought is that they DO know the system and that they are purposely using this terminology to lull us into submission. After all, if we think we know what’s going on, we will not question it.

So what is the difference?

There is a world of difference. I am NOT just picking over semantics here. Besides the fact that a republic is truly what we should (and still do, but barely. But again, I digress), a republic is a government where representatives speak for the masses while a democracy is where the masses speak directly. Democracy has been called “Mob Rule” in the past, and for good reason. In a Democracy, every person does have the power to put forth his or her interests, but on the other side of the coin, the majority easily crushes the minority. This gives a feeling of power to the people, which is why it would be a preferred term for the politician to make us feel all warm and cozy. The big downturn to democracy is that it QUICKLY shifts into oligarchy! This is called the “Oligarchical Shift” or the “Iron Law of Oligarchy”. While the Iron Law theory says that all types of government will eventually shift into oligarchy, a republic MAY be the exception to the rule.

Those who crave power may genuinely look to force us into a democracy to see the  shift to oligarchy solidify their power. That is just pure conjecture on my part, though.

This is where some MAY say, “But wait! Wasn’t Rome a republic and it turned into an oligarchy eventually, too?”

Well, yes and no. Rome WAS a republic at one point, but before it was an oligarchy, the republic was taken over by a dictatorship. This was NOT a natural shift. And besides that, our fore-fathers weren’t dimwits. They specifically sought a way to keep the majority threat of pure democracy under control. This brought a Constitutional Republic into being (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_republic, yep more wiki). That means our government was thought up by a group of guys who saw how things deteriorated in the past and tried to prevent that.

So here is the point of the history lesson today:

I see the current use of the term “democracy” as a deliberate attempt at weakening our governmental checks and balances to allow politicians on a national level to pull more power into the federal government than there should be. And I don’t appreciate it.

Does that mean I’m conservative? Maybe. But if you see the same trend, the only way to stop it is to speak up. Ironically, democratic behavior is the only way to keep our republic in check. It’s funny, but I have a feeling that this was intended at some level by those clever fore-fathers.

Data Recovery & Computer Forensics Blog.

If you are here, you may be of the geek persuasion. At least that is what the authors here are. Being that as it is, I thought the site linked above to be of the highest quality in informative yet geeky fare. If the admin of that site reads this post, kudos to you for making what many would consider a dry subject interesting enough to be read and yet still informative enough to hold the attention of a professional in the same field.

I have added this blog to MY favorites and fully intend to keep reading.