Congratulations to Microsoft for buying Skype. They simply destroyed the compatibility with Linux.

Update: I actually seems to be working now. However, it's not brilliant at all, the quality is unacceptable for any standard, in my opinion. The sound tends to be very unnatural, and it gets stuck for a few times every single second, so you must sometimes guess what the person at the other end is saying. Furthermore, the video gets behind for about 7-10 seconds after just a few minutes of talking. I talked with a lot of  friends from twitter, and they all complain about Skype. I have no idea where Microsoft is heading towards. 

 Who has not heard of Skype? It's probably one of the most known and popular service for voice and video chatting over the web, and it's been a wonderful product a few years ago. The times in which the quality of both sound and video were great have disappeared a long time ago, and all that's left today is a poor service, with quality which is below any acceptable level and disastrous compatibility (given the fact that mobile and Linux usage have significantly increased over the last few years).

Skype's decay has actually started before it getting acquired by Microsoft, but Microsoft only made everything worse. Before the Microsoft story, Skype was somehow working for me. I am using Linux most of the time, because not only I enjoy it the most, but my University courseworks and tasks require me to use Linux for almost every single module I have on my course. So I had to use Skype under Linux, which used to work quite decent, I might say.

However, over the last few months, it's been getting worse and worse, and now it is completely unusable under Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (after being bought by Microsoft, coincidence?) . From the very beginning, video quality was a total mess under Linux, as the colors were completely out of their place and I always had a lot of shadows of different colors going on in the place where my image should have been (my image was still in the background, with all that going on on top of it). But recently, it started to crash frequently, mostly when I was trying to answer a call (calling worked just fine). And it still used to be decent, even like that!

But now, it reached the point when it signs in, and that's virtually all it can do. There are no connections going on at all between me and the other contacts, no matter what device/OS they use. All contacts appear as offline, I appear offline to them, I can't call, they can't call, so it's completely useless, and this has been happening for about a month now.

I gave up any chance that Microsoft will even think about fixing something, the last update they launched has done nothing good (it seems to have broken anything which was working), except bringing compatibility with MSN (which by the way, I heard they are planning to close and use Skype as their main messaging service). I just suppose they are probably trying to close down the compatibility with Linux because their recently-launched Windows 8 seems to be a flop, and Linux seems to be gaining more and more market share (or simply "users", because it doesn't really have market share as it's open source).

Therefore, the only chance of getting a Skype conversation is through Windows, but the situation is not exceptionally good even there, while doing Windows-to-Windows video calls (but this is another story). Microsoft's own software doesn't work good on their own operating system, so there is nothing new here. They simply deserve their Windows 8 to fail so bad that they will be motivated to do much better software, which works exceptionally at least on their own software!

Don't get me wrong, I am not asking for a flawless product from them for Linux. All I want is one which just does its job, on software it used work on.

The best alternative out there: Google hangouts. Unfortunately, its interface is sometimes confusing for some users, but quality and compatibility wise, it is absolutely perfect. Recommended trying.

DNS. What it does and why it's important.

DNS - domain name system - represents, in the most simple terms, a system on the internet which will automatically attributes to the internet address you're trying to view, the correct ip address. For example, if you type in the address bar of the browser "www.google.com", your DNS will correlate it with "74.125.43.103". Without the DNS, browsing the internet would be very difficult, because we should have to know millions of ip addresses.

There are many DNS services available. Most users are browsing the internet with default settings provided by ISP (internet service provider), so they're using the domain name systems provided by the ISP. Here come's the problem. These domain name systems might not work very fast, and they can be even not synchronized with some of the webpages on the internet, or they can even redirect some webpages (which is completely unpleasant).

There are a few DNS providers on the internet, that can offer you better internet experience than your ISP can. OpenDNS offers fast DNS services, for free or not, depending on the quality of services you want to have. If you make an account at OpenDNS (free), you can view detailed informations about what you're doing on the internet, and you can activate if you want, different filters, for blocking access to websites that contains pornography, hacking tutorials, mail services, messenger services, and many others. You can even have protection against phishing, botnet, and if you pay, against malware.

Google launched recently their own DNS services, and they actually offer the fastest internet on most of the regions on the globe. On my network (ClickNet Romania) they're the fastest. They're offering automatically protection against malware, but I don't know how efficient it is.

Now you probably want to know how to change domain name systems. If you're connected to the internet through a router or a modem, you should firstly try to change DNS addresses there (router/modem). If you connect to the internet directly (your computer makes the connection) or if your router or modem is set to bridge the connection or has automatically settings, try to change DNS addresses from your connection properties on your computer. Here is a guide from Google which will tell you how to do that: http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using.html.

Official Google DNS site: http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/

Official OpenDNS site: http://www.opendns.com/

Google DNS addresses are:

• 8.8.8.8
• 8.8.4.4

OpenDNS adresses are:

• 208.67.222.222
• 208.67.220.220

! You can follow that tutorial from Google even if you want to use OpenDNS, but be sure to put 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 instead of 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 .

For any problems, you can leave a comment to this post.

Opera 10.05 pre-alpha is available for download.

Opera 10.05 pre-alpha is now available. The new version has a nicer changed interface, and moves faster than the previous one. It seems that opera is again the leader when we are talking about the load time of the webpages, but I personally couldn't prove that. I will soon make some tests on the latest versions of browsers, and then I will tell you this version of Opera is the fastest browser available. As it is a pre-alpha, it is still recommended for testing purposes only. It might have problems displaying some websites, as it's not the final version. I can't actually post from it to my blog, because when I'm trying to do that, it gives me a 404 error and says that the page is not found (that's a strange error, Opera!). But I like it so far, so I think that the final version will be a real success.

Download link (Windows): http://www.4shared.com/file/186494407/f3251093/Opera_1050_3172_en.html

Download link (Mac): http://www.4shared.com/file/186516659/3b4b4d50/Opera_1050_8166_Intel.html