I was reading the news releases over on 8×8.com today, and they just got another patent. I don’t know what the patent does, because it looks like the person who wrote the press release didn’t know what it did either, or they didn’t want to give too much information away.

Let’s see if I can describe what the new patent is about…… I recognized the word “Voice”, but that’s about it. Does anyone know what anything in this statement means?

The invention covered by the patent relates generally to speech signal processing and, more specifically, to multi-pulse speech analysis and synthesis systems. According to certain embodiments, the invention provides a speech processing method and arrangement including a process applicable for use in connection with various standard speech encoding recommendations. Certain embodiments of the invention are also applicable to multipulse, maximum likelihood quantization coding systems and processes.

Oh, wait, if they would have just explained that, “Certain embodiments of the invention are also applicable to multipulse, maximum likelihood quantization coding systems and processes“, then it would have cleared up a lot of my confusion early on in the paragraph. Now I know exactly what the product, uh process, uh, thingy…. does. LOL

If you want to see if you can figure it out and come back here and tell the rest of us, the news release is located here.

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Lots of Skype users aren’t buying the story that Skype went down last week due to user updates of their Microsoft Windows program. There are lots of theories out there wondering if it was a hack, and if so, are Skype user’s machines at risk?

Read Gregg Keizer’s report over at ComputerWorld.com for interesting reasons put forth by experts on why Skype’s “Windows Update Story Doesn’t Fly”. After reading Greg’s article, then read Skype’s official answer that was posted on their website….

Here’s what happened according to Villu Arak, over at Skype’s Heartbeat Website,

On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.

The high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.

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