Get unlimited international calls with Skype’s new plan
Friday, April 25th, 2008
With half my family living halfway around the world, I quickly embraced Skype, the program (or if you want to get technical, Voice Over Internet Protocol) that allows you to talk to other Skype users over your computer, for free. In fact, I’m always amazed that more of my friends and family haven’t signed up… it’s almost like they don’t want to chat to me for hours or something.
Anyway, despite Skype calls being free to other Skype users, if you wanted to use your account to call landlines or mobile phones in the past, you would still have to pay - and the cost would depend on the length of the call and where you were calling. But no more! Skype’s new calling plan aims to encourage more people to pick up the service, and it sounds like a bargain to me.
Pay just $9.95 per month and you can make an unlimited number of calls to landlines in 34 countries, including the United States, Canada, most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Malaysia. Calls to cells in the US and Canada, China, Hong Kong and Singapore and also included.
With Skype phones now meaning you don’t even need to be connected to your computer to make a call, I hope all you holdouts will be rushing to sign up when this new service is made available on Monday.
Via USA Today.
Sure, there’s plenty of basic dive computers out there, but if you really want to get some attention under the sea, you may want to consider something like Linde Wrdelin’s new “Sea Instrument,” which can even be had in a special 18K yellow gold edition if you want to go all out. Whether you opt for that or the basic anodized aluminum model, however, you’ll get the same transflective color display and sapphire crystal glass cover designed to be readable underwater, along with a 3-axis compass and access to all the vital information you’ll need including depth, dive time, decompression stops, and temperature, to name a few, not to mention a rechargeable battery that promises to deliver 28 hours of continuous use. Of course, all that doesn’t exactly come cheap, with the aluminum version alone running €2,100 (or about $3,000). Oh, and you’ll also need a Linde Werdelin Biformeter watch to attach it to, which is only a few grand more.
Windows XP has a date with destiny scheduled for June 30, but it looks like the plucky OS just isn’t ready to go: Ultraportable OEMs will be able to preload XP until “one year after the general availability of Windows 7,” whenever that is, and now we’re hearing reports that Dell’s telling customers it’ll sell XP on professional systems until 2012. The Dell thing is just a rumor for now, but what’s Steve Ballmer doing telling reporters that although XP is EOL, “if customer feedback varies, we can always wake up smarter” and extend XP sales? Um, Steve? Customers have been feeding back like crazy and Microsoft has kind of ignored them, remember? Maybe it’s time for a quick nap.
Ah ha! So this is what DISH Network was planning on doing with its recently-purchased swath of spectrum. Just under two months after analysts pondered what the firm was thinking throwing out bids for a smidgen of bandwidth — and not even a fortnight after the ICO G1 successfully launched in order to bring DVB-SH to America — out comes the whole truth. The satcaster is teaming up with Alcatel-Lucent to test the Digital Video Broadcasting - Satellite services to Handhelds technology right here in the US, with A-L providing the equipment, test tools and training. The evaluation will be taking place at a DISH facility in Atlanta from May until August, with the ultimate goal to “validate the performance and cost-efficiency of the DVB-SH standard.” As expected, we’re only given crumbs of information as to where this partnership may lead, but we should be much more clear on everything by the time the summer concludes.
It’s far from the first time a researcher has enlisted the help of his own family or kids, but MIT’s Deb Roy’s latest endeavor looks to be a bit more ambitious than most, as he’s aiming to do nothing short of understand how children learn language. To do that, Roy and his wife installed 11 video cameras and 14 microphones throughout their house to record just about every moment of their son’s first three years. That, obviously, also required a good deal of computing power, which came in the form of a temperature-controlled data-storage room consisting of five Apple Xserves and a 4.4TB Xserve RAID (you can guess why Apple’s profiling ‘em), along with an array of backup tape drives and robotic tape changes (and an amply supply of other Macs, of course). While the project is obviously still a work in progress, they have apparently already developed some new methods for audio and video pattern recognition, among other things, and it seems they’ll have plenty of work to sift through for years to come, with the project expected to churn out some 1.4 petabytes of data by the end of year three.
The Spoon Scale is probably going to be on the Christmas gift list of many drug dealers, because instead of having to carry a normal scale to measure the product, they can simply do it with a spoon that weighs 90 grams.
