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January 16

When did the internet reach one million users?

—azuki (talk · contribs · email) 10:26, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

If you haven't already done so, make sure you're familiar with the history of the internet and at least vaguely familiar with the technical details of the internet protocol, because the correct answer to your question depends a lot on the details.

To answer this question correctly, you need to recognize that the internet is simply the current, largest network that uses the internet protocol. In the very early days of networked computing, many separate networks existed, and over time - mostly throughout the 1980s, most of those networks started to use the internet protocol as their primary mode of software interconnection. Gradually, many of those networks started to combine; most of them began to honor and respect the databases managed specifically by IANA, the central database that is now generally regarded to be the canonical root of the Internet as we know it today.

Importantly, internet addresses can be allocated even if they are not used; and at the same time, because of the inherent way that internetworking works, (with things like network address translation), it is possible to have one, or a thousand, or even a billion users who all share a single address.

Our article on global internet usage has a few charts that imply the "million machine" mark was passed sometime during the late 1980s. (That chart actually counts hosts, not users). All of these articles provide overviews, and link to many research articles, explaining more detail.

The most important take-away from this should be that it is quite complicated to define the number of "users" on the internet. While it can be very trivial to use some measure as a proxy for that value - like the total number of DNS registrations, or the total number of allocated IP addresses - the technicalities of the way the internet works mean that any such statistic is really a poor approximation for "user count."

Nimur (talk) 19:26, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Data from which our article chart was constructed is now hosted at the ISC: Internet Domain Survey, July, 2017. By 1993, more than 1.3 million hosts were listed in the main DNS system; by July 1995, more than 1.1 million hosts actually responded to pings. As documented here and in this spectacular RFC1296, (published by some fine folks at my old haunt, SRI International) there are all sorts of technical problems with collecting and analyzing this data. There is strong reason to believe that by 1992, more than one million machines were actually on the internet as we know it today.

Of course, in 1992, the "world wide web" did not yet exist, and only a tiny community of users were even aware of HTTP, which is essentially the core technology that makes your web-browser possible. Internet data traffic took the form of pure text and file data, conveyed via older and more esoteric protocols, the most famous of which we now call forms of ftp, email, nntp, uucp, and gopher - and thousands of other application protocols that have been largely superseded by modern software.

When you look back at the statistics for the old internet, it's kind of nice to see that the overwhelming majority of the internet services registered in the domain name system were in the ".edu" domain; much of the rest was in the ".gov" top-level domain. Bear in mind that in the glory-days of the internet, most people interpreted use of the shared network to be "use of a Government-funded service": commercial use of the network was widely regarded to be against the rules, if not actually outright illegal. The Internet was simply a means for programmers and scientists to share technical computer data.

Nimur (talk) 00:56, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

By 1 million users, I mean people, not machines.—azuki (talk · contribs · email) 08:55, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Since people do not have individual "accounts" on the internet, I don't see how anyone can estimate the number of people who had access to the internet in its early days with any degree of accuracy. The first widely used web browser, Mosaic was not released until 1993. Before that, most people using the internet would have accessed it through multi-user minicomputers and mainframes. Gandalf61 (talk) 10:40, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm pretty certain the figure of a million people would have already been exceeded in the 1980's. But they'd only occasionally use it. It wasn't exactly easy to use, one had to do one's own routing putting in a list of ip mumbers to get anywhere and there wasn't exactly a lot of content!. Dmcq (talk) 11:03, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

I never had any trouble with ease-of-use! I frequently observe that there are many instances in which technology from 1983 was easier to use than technology today!

If I wanted to connect to the internet in the 1980s, all I had to do was swap out my CONFIG.SYS from the one that worked on the IPX games with the one that used the Modem, and reboot. That took less time than rebooting my iPhone. In actual fact, modern computer boot-up times have been getting slower at an accelerating pace. I can literally tell you that it was faster to get on the internet in 1988 than in 2018, and the games were more fun back then, too. So much for progress!

Nimur (talk) 17:37, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

I think you're reminiscing about bulletin board systems, which used phone lines and dialup modems. Lots of individuals ran BBS's on which they hosted chat boards and games. Companies also ran them, listing items for sale. As that article points out, the introduction of dialup internet access and the Mosaic web browser in 1992 led to the demise of BBS's in 1994. I think it's safe to say that the internet as we know it today, with browsing (jumping from site to site without having to dial a new server), did not exist until the early-mid 1990s. Akld guy (talk) 20:59, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

I used many networked computer systems, including the actual internet (pre-HTTP!), IPX, IBM WoW (a long-since-forgotten proprietary technology!), and various dial-up BBSes. While all the kids I knew were playing with PCJrs and Amigas and Nintendos, I had true PCs: a couple of Model 25 and Model 60s (PS/2) and a '70. Later, I even got a Sun4m. For a while, I even tried token-ring in the house! I was an early-adopter of heterogeneous computing!

Nimur (talk) 22:06, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

January 17

Speculative execution exploits and effect of their patches

CPU exploits attacking speculative execution are in the news, with patches coming out. I've heard that these patches can slow down the computer. I run some programs with a lot of looping, so I suppose that they are doing a lot of speculative execution. How much do these patches affect something like that? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 03:44, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Apple published its claim that security patches to address speculative execution vulnerabilities "resulted in no measurable reduction in the performance of macOS and iOS..." as measured by many common benchmarks. In other cases, a small performance hit was measured.

In its detailed whitepaper, Intel's analysis of speculative execution side-channel attacks suggests that mitigation, in the linux kernel, resulted in "minimal performance impact."

It is important to understand that the mitigations proposed are categorically not disabling speculative execution. Rather, the concept embodied in these fixes is to prevent the side-channel information leak. In some cases, this enforces serialized memory ordering or induces a pipeline stall; those cases yield slower performance.

Excerpting Intel's statements: "Note that the insertion of LFENCE must be done judiciously; if it is used too liberally, performance may be significantly compromised. ... Intel’s analysis of the Linux kernel for example has only found a handful of places where LFENCE insertion is required, resulting in minimal performance impact."

The effectiveness and provenance of these fixes will surely be analyzed by many researchers over the next weeks, months, years. Keep in mind that in the case of correct enforcement of serial operations, this means the CPU will stall, instead of executing exploitative instructions at high performance. In a perfect world, these changes only impact exploitative abuse of speculative execution. In practice, it's up to the skill and effort of each system vendor to provide a fix with low side effects - we still want all non-exploitative instructions to proceed with low latency.

You may see different performance, depending on your use case, and on your CPU type and operating system.

Nimur (talk) 05:07, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm using Intel I7s with Windows 7 and 10. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 06:41, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Understanding the performance impact of Spectre and Meltdown mitigations on Windows Systems, from Microsoft's vice president for Windows Software.

"i7" is an entire family of CPUs - if you're running an i7 CPU newer than c. 2014 era, you probably will see very little impact. "With Windows 10 on newer silicon (2016-era PCs with Skylake, Kabylake or newer CPU), benchmarks show single-digit slowdowns, but we don’t expect most users to notice a change because these percentages are reflected in milliseconds." If you have an older i7:

"With Windows 10 on older silicon (2015-era PCs with Haswell or older CPU), some benchmarks show more significant slowdowns, and we expect that some users will notice a decrease in system performance. With Windows 8 and Windows 7 on older silicon (2015-era PCs with Haswell or older CPU), we expect most users to notice a decrease in system performance."

If you aren't sure which CPU vintage your i7 is: How to Identify My Intel® Processor, a software tool from Intel that works on Windows.

Nimur (talk) 16:00, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

One of mine is a Haswell but most are Sandy Bridge and two are Ivy Bridge. :( Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 23:24, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Can cause up to 30% performance loss on Haswell and older CPUs i have read. You can check how much performance your programs take from your cores. Windows has some monitoring tools build in to check the performance of selected processes and there are allot additional tools available from 3.parties for such tasks. So you can find out the exact answer for your PC and workload right after reading the windows help or here about the monitoring tool "perfmon". --Kharon (talk) 02:29, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

That is way too much of a performance hit for me! Only one of my computers has sensitive data on it. From what I read, these patches are disabled by default. Is that right? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 03:30, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm running performance monitor on two computers running a light load, and it is showing as expected. However, my main applications take all of the CPU, so I won't be able to tell if the patch is affecting them, will I? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 04:30, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

You can measure performance by the time some application needs to solve a task like counting/looking up Kernal time or cycles or how long it takes to get a result. If you have multiple computers in a local net its generally a bad idea to not update all for whatever reason. That sounds like opening the toilets of an army base for public access because "there are no weapons stored in there". --Kharon (talk) 15:18, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

There are 17 computers on my network (18 if you count my wife's, but I don't use it) - all of them are being updated but I can't tolerate a 30% performance hit! I'm running task manager and performance monitor, and they aren't showing a performance hit when not much is running. Does this performance hit only apply when a program is running?

Have you read the links discussing this which have been provided? As nearly all the links discussion this say, the precise performance hit will depend on the specific workload [1] [2] [3]. If you have specific workloads in mind on your 17 computers you should measure the performance of these, and probably some far more reliable way than in looking at Task Manager. (I.E. The average runtime of some repeatable test or some similar benchmark.) If it's something that matters to you and these aren't new workloads, then I would expect you already have one and probably more measurements from before, so you can now see if or how things have changed that the patches have been applied. (Of course if it's extremely important you probably should have measured it on one or more test systems before applying the patches [4].) If it is a new workload, or for some reason even though it does matter, you don't already have reliable measurements which you can use for comparison you could probably find a way to downgrade to the prepatch state to get prepatch measurements if you manage these computers. If you just want a general idea of how things are going to change various people are testing this e.g. the earlier Intel benchmarks, and Intel have said [5] they are in the process of collecting more data so you can pay an eye on these although when viewing these you should recognise, as anyone should, it's not always easy to know how these are going to translate to your specific workload so if you do have a specific workload in mind you should test it rather than worrying about general issues which don't apply to your specific requirements. Nil Einne (talk) 03:15, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

I've mostly read the ones that apply to Intel and Windows, and I see you've given me several more to read. The best thing would be if I had pre-patch benchmarks on the things I do - I made those but I didn't keep them in an organized way. But I do have Geekbench benchmarks from before. I did updates before I know about the change. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 03:30, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

I've read more, and Intel's figures for CPU-intensive integer operations isn't too bad. However they measured on a new Xeon, whereas I have old I7s. I found this website https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm that says whether or not you are vulnerable and gives you the option of disabling protection. I can try that (but don't have the time right now) - to compare the kind of stuff I run. Only one of my computers has sensitive data on it. About three of them still have Windows 7 so I might need to upgrade them to Windows 10. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 03:53, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

I've used that program to test my main computer (a Haswell) and one of my number-crunchers (an Ivy Bridge). The Haswell is protected against both and performance is "good". The Ivy Bridge is not protected against Spectre and performance is "slower". Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 04:03, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Test results

I've been gone a few days, but I ran some tests on two of my computers on a CPU-intensive program I'm developing now. Both have Windows 10. The first is a 4.0 GHz Haswell I7 - overclocked so no Turbo Boost and the second is a 3.4GHz Ivy Bridge, with Turbo Boost.

On the Haswell, InSpectre (repease #5) says that it is not vulnerable to Meltdown but is vulnerable to Spectre and performance is good. On it the test program runs in 126.5 seconds.

On the Ivy Bridge, Inspectre says that is is not vulnerable to Meltdown but is vulnerable to Spectre and performance is slower. There is a button to enable or disable Meltdown protection, but it does not change the text in the window.

On the Ivy Bridge, the program took 141.1 seconds to run with Meltdown protection enabled and 141.0 seconds with it disabled. This is such a small amount that enabling or disabling the Meltdown protection (if it works) doesn't have a measurable effect. Also, the difference between 126.5 seconds on the Haswell and 141.1 seconds on the Ivy Bridge can probably be accounted for by the newer CPU running at a higher clock rate.

So for this little test, I don't think I'm seeing any slowdown. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 20:22, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

Printing 2015 Tax Return from Turbo Tax

I have Turbo Tax 2016 (Tax Year 2016, Filing Year 2017) installed. This is the version that installs on my PC and maintains the return on my PC. What I want to do now is to open my 2015 tax return (filed in 2016) and print it. This year I have decided that I will have a CPA prepare my taxes, so I don't have a 2017/18 version of Turbo Tax. I succeeded in printing my 2016 return, but I need to print my 2015 return to mail it to the CPA. If I try to open the 2015 return, it tries to "transfer" it, that is, to use the data in it as a skeleton for me to create a new return. I don't want to transfer it. I want to print it. I don't have Turbo Tax 2015 installed on this PC; it was installed on an older PC that failed, but the hard disk was recovered.

How do I print the old return? Robert McClenon (talk) 03:54, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Customer support may be a good start. Log into the TurboTax website and talk with a representative by copying and pasting the message you sent here as it is kinda made for those sorts of things. 129.55.200.20 (talk) 16:17, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

For a different approach, you can get a copy of a previous tax return you filed from the IRS. You will need some information to identify yourself. I'm not sure if all states that assess income tax offer this for their returns. Check with your state tax agency, if applicable. --47.157.122.192 (talk) 09:41, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Also, you say "the hard disk was recovered". What do you mean? Did you run the manufacturer "recovery" software and wipe the disk? Or did you copy the data somewhere? If TurboTax was installed, and you have access to the disk's data, you can probably just copy the old TurboTax onto your current PC. Everything might not work perfectly, but all we need is for it to spit out the return. Or, do you have an Intuit account that you used with the 2015 version? If so, it looks like you might be able to download the past version at no cost. Worst case scenario, you can probably buy a used copy. --47.157.122.192 (talk) 09:56, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Let me clarify. First, I have in the past had a real problem with technical support from Intuit. Does someone have a phone number that will actually get a human? I don't want another robot. Alternatively, do they have a "chat" facility to talk to a human? Robert McClenon (talk) 16:10, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Second, I have the original Tax2015 file. I also have the image of 2015/2016 Turbotax. However, it won't launch properly, which doesn't surprise me at all, because it isn't being installed in a way that updates the registry. So I can't run the original old Turbotax program. I would be satisfied with running the 2017 program if it would load the tax file correctly, rather than "transferring" it, that is, loading it as a skeleton. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:10, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Third, I don't understand the question about the manufacturer. I have a copy of everything that was on the hard disk. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:10, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Fourth, I don't want to spend a month or two waiting for the IRS to provide me with a copy of the return.

Are there any more questions or answers? Robert McClenon (talk) 16:10, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm assuming you mean you have the .tax file for your 2015 tax return. This page suggests you need to have the right version of TurboTax for the tax year [6]. Is your version of TurboTax from a CD or a download? If it's a download I think you can probably get the older version from here by clicking on the 'Access my downloads' link and logging in [7]. Once you have downloaded the version of TurboTax suitable for your tax file, you need to install it. For Windows this probably involves running the file you downloaded, or if it's a archive file, extracting it and then running the file called setup or installer or whatever. If you have the CD version, it's possible if you registered you can download a copy. If not, you will need to find the original CD and install it. I'm not really sure what you mean by 'image of 2015/2016 Turbotax'. Is this an image (ISO) of the CD? Or the downloaded installer file? If it's either of these you could mount the image and install from there. If it's simply a copy of the installed program, getting these to work can sometimes be difficult or almost impossible, so it's often far better to try and get a copy of the installer. Considering the hoops Inuit makes you jump through, may I suggest it may be useful to keep a printed PDF or XPS copy of the tax return rather than simply the .tax file. BTW have you tried asking the CPA whether they are able to accept .tax files from TurboTax 2015/2016? Nil Einne (talk) 04:06, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

January 19

Undocumented color names

Web colors lists 140 X11 color names. I have noticed that there are some non-X11 color names that are accepted in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome in <font color> markup, but not in <span style> markup, and I have not succeeded in finding a list of them and their hexadecimal code values. Here is a list starting with one X11 color, one totally made-up name (to prove that you can't just make up any color name) and then nonstandard colors I've come across:

• <font color="red">red</font> : red; <span style="color:red">red</span> : red
• <font color="gewalt">gewalt</font> : gewalt; <span style="color:gewalt">gewalt</span> : gewalt
• <font color="burntorange">burntorange</font> : burntorange; <span style="color:burntorange">burntorange</span> : burntorange
• <font color="coal">coal</font> : coal; <span style="color:coal">coal</span> : coal
• <font color="darkgblue">darkgblue</font> : darkgblue; <span style="color:darkgblue">darkgblue</span> : darkgblue
• <font color="saffron">saffron</font> : saffron; <span style="color:saffron">saffron</span> : saffron
• <font color="vermilion">vermilion</font> : vermilion; <span style="color:vermilion">vermilion</span> : vermilion
• <font color="vermillion">vermillion</font> : vermillion; <span style="color:vermillion">vermillion</span> : vermillion

Where is a list of non-X11 colors including burntorange, coal, darkgblue, saffron, vermilion, and vermillion, recognized by by major browsers in <font color> markup but not in <span style> markup, along with their hexadecimal codes? —Anomalocaris (talk) 07:05, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

I haven't the foggiest but I can guess that at some stage W3C were considering putting them in but decided not to and a file is still hanging around with them in. Reporting it as a bug to the browsers is what I'd advise - they're good at fixing things. Dmcq (talk) 11:15, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Probably these are some '90s pre-CSS-era holdouts that were obsolete when CSS 1.0 was published, but are being kept for compatibility with old webpages. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.142.70.141 (talk) 01:05, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

Android "No photos selected" when phone plugged into computer

When I charge my Android phone from a computer USB port the screen goes black and a message says "No photos selected". I suppose it has to do with an opportunity to transfer pictures to my computer, but I don't remember setting anything like that up. It's very slightly annoying (I know, this is a 'First world problem') and I'd like to turn it off. How?Hayttom (talk) 07:19, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

What phone is this, and what version of Android is it running? (The version can be found in Settings. Try a Web search for "find android version" followed by the name of your device if you need more help.) Android devices can differ quite a bit, because manufacturers often heavily customize the Android builds for their devices, and, unsurprisingly, successive Android versions change things. I know my Galaxy Note 8 (running OEM Android 7.1) doesn't have this behavior. --47.157.122.192 (talk) 09:45, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

... and it doesn't happen with any Android phones that I've used. Have you downloaded some photo app? Dbfirs 14:57, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Does the message show up on the phone or on the computer? In any case, this sounds like an MTP driver problem to me. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.142.70.141 (talk) 01:07, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

January 20

8051 programmer

I came across this page and I remember reading the same story about the 8051 programmer getting schooled by car mechanics in greater length earlier, but I can't find it in my browser history, and Google search is saturated with guides for 8051 programming. Does anyone know more about this?

weird instruction

The page linked above reminds me that I once knew a programmer who liked to brag of having once found a use for an opcode that swapped the bytes of the program counter. What device had such a weird instruction? —Tamfang (talk) 08:47, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Byte swap is a common machine code instruction. You give it a register and it swaps the bytes. In a 16-bit machine (very very old), it is obvious that it will swap the high and low bytes of the register. The program counter is commonly referred to as the PC or IA register, depending on the processor you are using. So, you can execute the byte-swap instruction on that register to swap the bytes of the program counter. Why would you do that? It would be equivalent to a jump. The next instruction would start somewhere else in the code. It is just coincidence that swapping the bytes is useful and that will fail if either the start-point or the end-point of this "creative" jump moves. It isn't really beneficial either. You can jump in one instruction if that command is available. If not, you jump by placing a value in the PC register, which is one instruction. Nothing is saved by using your one instruction to swap bytes of the program counter. 209.149.113.5 (talk) 14:01, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

I really wonder what use he found, and if a any processor would have this capability. Joepnl (talk) 22:42, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

Cyrillic URLs in FB profiles

It seems that in Facebook user profiles internationalized domain names, like Cyrillic URLs, are displayed via ASCII and Punycode, so that e.g. Russian www.фантастика.рф becomes outlandish www.xn--80aaa5akp3agco.xn--p1ai. Is there a way to fix this when logged in so that Russian URLs in my profile are displayed correctly? Thanks. 78.11.167.237 (talk) 14:16, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

January 21

Job interview question

I have a job interview for a programming job coming up tomorrow morning. I have found myself over and over again with the same problem in job interviews.

How do I explain to the interviewer that at work, I would need some channel to actually receive the work tasks I am supposed to do? I can't just sit there at my desk wondering what I should do or go around asking people for work to do.

At my previous jobs, there has been an issue tracking system, such as Atlassian Jira, where my superiors have assigned me work to do, such as "We need a software component that does this and this", sometimes with a specification of what information to fetch from where and what to do with it. My actual task has been figuring out the best solution to actually implement this in actual code, starting with planning the overall design of the code structure in my head, and then getting to the actual coding work.

I don't have experience of designing new features to the company's product out of the blue. I wouldn't even know if anyone would ever need or use them. How do I explain this without sounding like I'm some sort of beginner coder who needs someone to hold my hand and explain the code to me line by line? JIP | Talk 22:56, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

Unless you're applying for an extremely junior, or perhaps extremely specialised, coding job, then your problem is the problem. When someone his hiring for a more senior position, they're not necessary looking for a "better" coder, they're looking for someone with a broader understanding of the problem domain (and of the company's and customer's needs) and someone who knows how to determine the real technical problems that exist and how to solve them with the technology available. That's someone who does understand the company's product, the competitors', the market space, and the needs (and desires) of current and potential customers. That's not out of the blue, but it's certainly a task for someone who is multi-skilled and self-starting. If you only want to be the rather passive recipient of a technically-detailed todo list provided by someone else, you run the risk of being a low-status, low-value mushroom coder. And those, bluntly, are the easiest jobs for a company to out source to comparatively low wage remote workers. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 23:52, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

January 22

2016 TeamViewer hack/"hack"

In 2016 it was widely reported that many TeamViewer accounts had been compromised and that attackers had used access to steal from targets. It was suggested by some that the compromise was not due to hacking a flaw in the TeamViewer software but rather that the username/password combination had been determined by other means. I'm trying to find out whether the people affected were at fault for using the same username/password elsewhere or whether the TeamViewer software is/was flawed because I sometimes still need to use a remote desktop service. --129.215.47.59 (talk) 15:19, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Some security guys suspected that Teamviewer had been hacked. TV said no. It was people using the same username/password at other sites that were hacked, such as LinkedIn. Then, the news cycle went on to the next item of interest. 209.149.113.5 (talk) 16:46, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Blockchain without cryptography

If you want something akin a blockchain, but do not want to secure its links using cryptography (since, sometimes you trust the system), how would you call it? --Hofhof (talk) 17:43, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Delta encoding? Nimur (talk) 20:34, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Distributed ledger is what you're looking for.

But I'm not aware of any implementation that doesn't include at least some cryptography.

ApLundell (talk) 22:06, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

International Conference Call option

Hello, greetings, I want to know if there is any service that allows international conference call for free (or paid, please tell the options)? It might be similar to http://www.sabsebolo.com/ Sense Bolo]. For some reason Hangout or Skype do not work sometimes for us. It'll help in a few works. Thanks. --Tito Dutta (talk) 18:26, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

I have used (but not as an organizer) "Free Conference Call.com" for international conference calls. --Tardis (talk) 03:45, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

Zoom works better than Skype for my company. You can get a weekly call of up to 40 minutes for free, which is all we need.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 09:58, 23 January 2018 (UTC)