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In case you’re unfamiliar with them, VoIP services leverage your broadband Internet connection to let you make and receive phone calls. The experience is virtually identical to using a landline, and in most cases you can keep your existing number.

ViaTalk provides a boatload of calling features as part of their “vt_unlimited” plan, everything from voice mail and caller ID to call recording and scheduled wake-up calls. You also get a free phone adapter, which plugs into your router or broadband modem.

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A Linksys phone adapter is included free when you sign up for ViaTalk

Bottom line: ViaTalk was already a deal at $199 per year, but $199 for two years? Well, that’s twice as good. Of course, if you really want to talk cheap (and don’t need all the fancy features), look no further than the MagicJack, which offers a full year of service for just $40 (and $20/year after that).

(Credit:
Linksys)

If you’ve been thinking about saving money on phone service by switching to voice over IP, allow ViaTalk to entice you: Sign up now for the standard $199-per-year rate, which includes unlimited local and long-distance calling, and you’ll get a second year free.

Last summer I reviewed ViaTalk for PC Magazine, and dinged them pretty heavily for poor customer service. But things have improved considerably since then, and I haven’t needed customer service even once in over 7 months. (Full disclosure: I’m a ViaTalk customer, but otherwise have no affiliation with the company.)

Icahn did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

The Google-Yahoo partnership was struck in June as a way to fend off acquisition attempts by Microsoft.

Google has been stepping up its moves to try to keep the deal on track despite opposition from a newspaper group in the U.S. and regulators and a newspaper trade group in Europe.

The new Yahoo board–which now includes Carl Icahn and two new directors he backed–plans to meet next week, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said the company does not comment on board meetings or agendas.

Icahn, Frank Biondi, and John Chapple joined the board this summer as part of an agreement in which Icahn agreed to drop his campaign against the directors for rejecting acquisition offers from Microsoft.

Carl Icahn

The board will meet at dinnertime on Monday and then again on Tuesday, but it was unclear whether Icahn would attend in person or not given that he often attends board meetings by phone, the report said, citing unidentified sources.

It’s likely the board will discuss antitrust challenges and scrutiny of the company’s proposed search ad deal with Google, as well as ongoing talks with Time Warner on a possible combination, according to the newspaper.

Consistent with MySpace’s roots as a music-based community–and perhaps to emphasize its content and media offerings as it loses ground in the social-networking sphere to smaller rivals like Facebook–the new MySpace Latino will offer interviews with Latin bands and “Secret Shows” concerts much like its English-language sibling.

The new “entertainment partners” in the MySpace Latino launch include the Spanish Broadcasting System, Hispanic news outlet ImpreMedia (which is powering a soccer news site, TodoFutbol), Gibson Guitar, local events site Remezcla.com, and Billboard.

MySpace has unveiled the full version of its bilingual MySpace Latino homepage, which has been in a beta test phase since last year and includes content in both Spanish and English. In conjunction with the launch, MySpace additionally announced deals with a number of content partners to kick-start new interest areas on the site.

Unlike MySpace’s array of internationally-focused brands, MySpace Latino is geared toward bilingual users in the U.S. The social-networking site, which has been owned by News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media since 2005, has 9 million Hispanic members among its U.S. users.

The most popular site that I can get stats for is a radio station in New York City. In January 2008 the site averaged 3,092 visits/day, 14,514 page views/day and 71,457 hits/day according to AWStats.

*All stats reported here are from Advanced Web Statistics version 6.6 (build 1.887).
**Not all users of the website are running Windows, of course, but the stats shown here are just for Windows users. Comparing the popularity of Windows vs. Macs is another topic. Unfortunately, AWStats does not break down visits or page views by operating system, only “hits”.
***All percentages are rounded off.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

Reporting software, such as AWStats*, reads the log file, examines the user agent field and can determine the operating system running on the computer that requested each web page.

The software that runs a web site is called a web server, the most popular programs being Apache and IIS. In addition to serving up web pages, every web server program also creates an activity log that includes information about visitors to the website. When a web browser requests a web page, it also sends information about itself to the web server in a character string called the “user agent”. You can see the user agent string for your web browser here.

Considering Vista just had its first birthday, this seemed like a good time to look at some statistics to get a feel for just how popular it is.

Slightly off-topic, but an interesting read: A computer shop’s sales pitch: ‘We remove Vista’ by Todd Bishop at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Put another way, for every Vista user there were eight Windows XP users.

My most popular website is javatester.org. It offers a free service, reporting on the version of Java being used by your web browser(s). In January 2008 the site averaged 1,859 visits/day, 3,682 page views/day and 26,734 hits/day according to AWStats.

Shown above are the stats for Windows users of the radio station’s website. The percentages are surprisingly similar to the Javatester site - 82% of Windows users ran XP and 10% ran Vista. Next up was Windows 2000 at 5% and Windows 98 at 1%.

I’ve said before that I think Windows XP is the better choice for Windows users than Vista.
Apparently, many of you agree with me.

Microsoft issues sales figures for Vista licenses, but they have a vested interest and a corporate history that makes trusting them difficult. Market researchers come out with numbers based on surveys but the sample size is always small. That leaves usage statistics, specifically website usage.

Shown above are the stats for “hits” by Windows users of the website**. Simple division shows that XP accounted for 80% of the traffic and Vista accounted for 10%.*** Next up, were Windows 2000 at 4% and Windows Server 2003 with 3%. Amazingly, someone is still using Windows 3.1.

(Credit:
Creative)

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It’s a leap-day special: Creative is clearing out refurbished Zen V players for $19.99 shipped. Don’t expect any color or capacity choices: This is the 1GB model in white with orange accents (pretty sharp-looking, I think).

There’s nothing terribly fancy about this player–no FM tuner or expansion slot, for instance–but it does support music-subscription services. It also allows for line-in recordings, which I suppose is pretty fancy. Perfect little player for the gym, especially if you add the armband (on sale for $9.99). Don’t wait: The deal expires today.

As for what Myhrvold is up to, in addition to running Intellectual Ventures, the French-trained chef is also writing a cookbook on high-tech cooking, or molecular gastronomy as it is dubbed in some circles. For those with less educated palates, it includes cooking foods using things like liquid nitrogen. (Don’t worry, I thought a George Foreman grill was going high-tech.)

We had a throughly interesting discussion on such topics as the global food shortage and his travels to photograph glaciers and penguins as well as his forthcoming high-tech cookbook (more in a minute on that). With the grudging indulgence of the others at the table, I ham-handedly shifted the table’s conversation over to Microhoo.

“There’s no big definitive book on this, so I’m trying to write it,” Myhrvold said, adding that he hopes to finish the writing and photography this year, with a goal of having the book out late next year.

Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.

CARLSBAD, Calif.–Over lunch, I had the chance to catch up with former Microsoftie Nathan Myhrvold, who’s due to speak this afternoon.

Myrhrvold said that he can see both the potential and potential pitfalls of a deal.

“If it is indeed ‘get big or go home,’ you have to take a serious look” at acquisitions, he said. “It’s easier to buy that scale than to build it.”

“I think it would be a challenge to manage it,” he said of a deal. At the same time, he said he tends to agree with the notion that the Internet is a scale business.

Earlier this month, I traveled to Denver for Denvention 3, the 66th World Science Fiction Convention. I first attended Worldcon in 1977, when it happened to take place in Miami, where I was living at the time.

Anecdotally, I can report that the Kindle owners I know (and others I ran into at the Worldcon) are happy with the gizmo and regularly buy books in electronic form rather than buying paper copies.

But these claims are simply inconsistent with the facts. Amazon’s Kindle, according to various published
reports, is selling very well, as are Kindle books. Citigroup estimates that Amazon will sell 380,000 Kindles this year, 150,000 in the fourth quarter alone.

Since then, I’ve been to 15 more Worldcons, including in Denver. (I’ve been pretty lucky–the Worldcon has been held in my home state six times.) I’ve also been to four North American Science Fiction Conventions (NASFiCs), which are held in the United States when the Worldcon is overseas.

This year, it seemed that there was a panel on issues related to e-books and electronic publishing in virtually every time slot. I went to several of these sessions. It seems to me that there’s a serious conflict between the preferences of some professionals and the way the e-book market is actually developing.

Also, the furor over DRM on music downloads seems to be dying down, and Apple’s sales of music, TV shows, and movies through the iTunes Store continue to grow rapidly.

Obviously, DRM is commercially practical and acceptable to many consumers.

Baen’s a smallish publisher, and what it’s doing here isn’t necessarily transferable to the major publishing houses, but it’s good to see someone offering an alternative to Amazon’s Kindle Store and Sony’s eBook Store.

Several panelists in two of the panel sessions, for example, strongly asserted that digital rights management (DRM) for e-books is ineffective, commercially impractical, and unacceptable to most users.

I think the disconnect in this case lies with the philosophical positions some people have taken against DRM, positions that generally date back to well before commercial electronic publishing was well established. Now that electronic publishing–with DRM–is achieving significant success and user acceptance, these people need to rethink their positions.

There were some other interesting topics addressed in Worldcon panels this year, and if I have time, I’ll write about them here–but I have to get caught up on Siggraph 2008 from last week, and the Intel Developer Forum is this week. Busy, busy.

I’m having the same experience myself. I’d be happier if I could read Kindle books on my
iPhone 3G or my
Mac, or if I could print individual pages or copy text into an e-mail, but I figure that I get 99 percent of the potential enjoyment from just reading a book. At least with fiction; I still regard the Kindle and the Sony Reader as marginal for much nonfiction and completely inadequate for textbooks.

That said, Baen Books continues to offer DRM-free e-books through its WebScription Ebooks service, and completely free books through the Baen Free Library.

(Incidentally, I need to write another blog post about the Reader. Sony has recently released some updates for the PRS-505 that make it much better for reading PDFs and add support for Adobe’s Digital Editions service.)

A good fraction of the attendees at a Worldcon are San Francisco-based professionals–writers, agents, editors, publishers, artists, and others. Along with some of the more well-known fans, they participate in panel discussions on a variety of topics. These panels are my favorite part of the Worldcon.

(Credit:
CNET News)

Although the video was compelling and entertaining, at least some of the people I talked to who saw the video at Thursday’s analyst meeting also stressed that early demos of Vista also looked good. The video, necessarily, doesn’t show what it is like to, say, install software or hook Vista up to a home network. My guess is the participants didn’t have to endure frequent User Account Control notifications either.

For now, Microsoft has put up a teaser site, with plans to show the actual video footage next week. (As I mentioned before, Mojave was something put together in the past couple of weeks by internal Microsoft people and is not the larger advertising campaign coming from new ad agency Crispin Porter and Bogusky.)

REDMOND, Wash.–Evidently spurred on by the reception it got at Thursday’s financial analysts meeting, Microsoft has decided to move ahead with plans to turn the Mojave project into a full-fledged
Windows Vista marketing effort.

Still, it represents a more aggressive Microsoft that wants to go on the offensive with its Vista marketing. Earlier on Friday, Microsoft’s Windows Vista Team Blog got unusually combative over this week’s Forrester study that was critical of Vista’s adoption among large businesses.

As first reported by CNET News, Microsoft last week interviewed XP users who were skeptical of Vista and showed them what it called a secret new version of Windows, “Mojave.” It was in fact Vista. The results, according to Microsoft executives, were almost universally positive, with participants expressing surprise when told it was actually Vista they had been using.

“Forrester Gets Schizophrenic on Windows Vista,” read the headline of the posting from Windows team member Chris Flores.

Microsoft has created a teaser site for its Mojave project.

If she signs off on the deal, Tate will join two other commissioners, also Republicans, who have already given their blessing to the deal. The two remaining commissioners, both Democrats, from the five-member board oppose the deal.

According to the Journal, Tate is expected to vote to approve the deal, provided that a consent decree is drafted that would call for a fine of roughly $20 million and address several enforcement issues, such as complaints revolving around satellite radio receivers surpassing the FCC power limit.

The report, however, notes that FCC commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate, seen as the swing vote, has yet to vote on the proposed merger, but is expected to take the plunge shortly.

After more than a year of kicking the tires on a proposed merger between XM Satellite Radio Holdings and Sirius Satellite Radio, the Federal Communications Commission has reached a tentative deal with the companies, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

What is it? I’ll hand the reins over to Fake and let her explain:

Fake, the co-founder of Flickr, announced on her blog Friday afternoon that her new start-up, Hunch, is sending out invitations to try the service, now in beta test.

Look. Decision-making is difficult, and decisions have to be made constantly. What should I be for Halloween? Do I need a Porsche? Does my hipster facial hair make me look stupid? Is Phoenix a good place to retire? Whom should I vote for? What toe ring should I buy?

Hunch is a decision-making site, customized for you. Which means Hunch gets to know you, then asks you 10 questions about a topic (usually fewer!), and provides a result–a hunch, if you will. It gives you results it wouldn’t give other people.

Once you’re lucky, twice you’re good? So went the title of a recent book about Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. Pretty soon, we may have an idea whether it applies to Caterina Fake.

It’s dark and lonely work. Coin-flipping, I Ching consultation, closing your eyes and jumping, postponing the inevitable, Rock-Paper-Scissors, and asking your sister are all time-honored means of coming to a decision–and yet we think there’s room for one more: Hunch.

Will it fly? Who knows, but in the midst of this miserable economic depression, there probably are lots of people out there who feel as if they don’t have a clue anymore.