Skype 4.0 (download) became available for free on Tuesday to Windows users. The free desktop VoIP communicator is a worthy final version that brings some key enhancements with video and audio bandwidth, though it leaves behind some of the extra adornments of version 3.8, the last stable build.

Those who have been following the triple release of betas since the summer won’t see more than a few changes. If 4.0 is new to you, however, the developments are more notable.

Skype concentrates on video size, quality, and performance in this version. From version 3.8 to version 4.0, every design change has been made to draw video and IM to the forefront, and for the most part it works. The video window has expanded and calls are easier to start. The classic two-pane interface has consolidated into one, though you can still split them apart if you prefer.

Skype’s beautifully staged marketing shot shows Skype 4.0′s new videotopia.

(Credit: Skype)

As the culmination of the beta series, Skype 4.0 gets a pumped-up video and a completely new audio engine. Compared with other codecs out there, the new audio engine, named Silk, is touted to give Skype superwide-band audio (which operates like broadband), but uses half the bandwidth. Fewer bandwidth demands gives Skypers with dial-up connections (like a lot of people in India and Brazil) a bigger boost, keeping calls from being dropped or mangled beyond recognition.

I’ll attest to the great call quality during my interview with Skype’s London-based product manager. It was clear and the vocal timbre sounded true. Keep in mind that I dialed in from a newish, memory-loaded Asus computer with full broadband support and a set of top-tier headphones. Quality will still depend on your Internet connection and hardware configuration. Using headphones that support ultra-wideband audio will help.

The video stream was similarly good. Though far from the perfection of TV, I noticed fewer jumps and blips and sound syncing that was very close to real-time. Problems that have beset Skype’s video calls in the past–a frozen or choppy image and packetized audio–were largely absent during test calls. According to Skype, that’s thanks to a new back-end addition that sticks a finger in the air of network conditions. As available bandwidth drops, the bandwidth manager tries to salvage audio first.

What my demo call looked like on a Vista set-up.

In choppy conditions, it helps steady the video, too, by lowering the rate of frames per second and by compressing images more heavily. Your friend on the other end may become blocky and the image delayed, but faces should also break up less than in previous versions.

Other new features include abuse reporting if you receive an invite from an unauthorized Skyper, and a light stub installer that pulls down the rest of the application.

Skype, it seems, has also been pulled into a toolbar partnership. Now when you install it, you’ll see that an optional toolbar that comes bundled with Skype 4.0. The free Browser Highlighter includes the ‘Compare on eBay’ tool for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Considering that eBay owns Skype, it’s not a surprising addition, but one I’ll nonetheless pass on every time.

What’s missing

There are two skins in version 4.0, the default light gray and blue combo called Skype ‘Chrome,’ and the classic hue. Skype hinted at more skin support in later versions coming out this year. There aren’t plans at the moment to support third-party skins, but customization, I’ve been assured, will get more attention.

Along these lines are absent customizations that had not been making beta testers happy. If you’ve been holding your breath for greater IM treatment in this release, or birthday reminders, you might breathe again until the next launch.

Those of you shouting about the cessation of public chats will be glad to know that Skype 4.0 for Windows will support those you already have, but it will keep you from adding new ones. Skype representatives told us they’re still playing around with ideas of how to become more Web-oriented. It could as easily look like a reshaped version of chats as it could go in a different direction.

That brings us to Skypecasts, another source of some users’ lamentations. Skypecasts was pulled last September because it just couldn’t grab the hoped-for attention. A similar(-ish) feature will probably be rolled into whatever public chats becomes in future releases.

For now, Skype has retreated to its bread-and-butter position of providing good, clean voice, video, and text chatting. If worldwide Windows users notice consistently improved audio and video quality, that’s not a bad place to be.

dwonload skype.

CAMDEN — Jeffrey Jones spent the first 10 years of his life in Camden, raised by his mother, a tutor, and his father, who held several jobs at a time to make ends meet.

Even as a boy, Jones said he was keenly aware of the poverty that ravaged the city. And when his family moved to Mickleton several years ago, Jones immediately realized there was a huge disparity in the opportunities available to Camden’s children and those in his new school.

He particularly noticed what he called the technological shortcomings of the city’s schools, and that thought stayed with Jones until he enrolled at Rutgers-Camden.

In September, Jones, 20, started a student group that initially focused on mentoring sick children in Cooper University Hospital’s pediatric ward. Its focus quickly shifted to education.

In December, Miracles became Miracles Global Inc., a nonprofit organization that’s independent of the university. Jones is the president of the organization, which has grown to include 25 members and a group on the social networking Web site Facebook.

The group’s aim is to collect money or computers that will be given to Camden schools and eventually, Jones hopes, to other ailing districts in the state and throughout the country, Jones said.

“We’re living in a globalized economy, a globalized world, and inner-city kids are being disconnected,” he said. “They’re at such an informational disadvantage.”

“We don’t need top-of-the-line equipment,” he said. “We pretty much just need to be able to word process and access the Internet. Those are the skills that we’re trying to focus on.”

Jones wants Miracles Global to reach students who otherwise would have limited to no access to computers and other technology.

“Hopefully we can bring these technologies into the classroom and eliminate some of the pressure these kids face,” he said. “They’re at a disadvantage and just can’t compete with other students in the region.”

“We’re all human beings and our environment shapes a lot of what we become,” Jones said. “I lived in Camden for 10 years, but there are a lot of others who lived in the city who didn’t turn out as well as I did.”

“That’s not because they’re any less of a man or a woman,” he added. “If they had been given access to the same tools, they could’ve been as great as anyone.”

FOLLOW on Twitter @MiraclesGlobal

Computers sought for city’s kids | CourierPostOnline.com | Courier-Post.

In Bad Times, Free Resources Are a Hot Commodity

Hannah Lee, 4, grabs a book during a visit to the Germantown library with her dad, Samson Lee, and sleeping 1-year-old sister, Jenna. (By Nikki Kahn — The Washington Post)

Nearly every study table is full with patrons sipping lattes and surfing the Web. Teens are curled up in easy chairs. In a worried knot by the doorway, job seekers gather around a sign-up station for the Internet, waiting for their turn.

Before the Germantown library opened in 2007, there was hardly any “downtown” to speak of in the Montgomery County community, where houses and strip malls grew before anything else. Now it’s an important civic anchor, a main street where none existed, and the busiest library in the county.

In the past few months, it has become even busier. The library, like most in the Washington area, has had a rising tide of users as patrons look for free computer access, DVD loans and activities for children during the recession. Circulation in the last six months of the year rose as much as 23 percent in libraries around the region, records show.

The influx comes just as county managers are preparing budgets for the coming fiscal year in a time of huge shortfalls. Libraries, like other services, face drastic cuts that could mean reducing staff and hours or even shuttering branches.

“It’s a cruel irony that use is going up and budget cuts are occurring simultaneously,” said Jim Rettig, president of the American Library Association and a librarian at the University of Richmond. “What I think doesn’t get enough recognition is the role libraries play in the economic vitality and development of a community.”

Cultural soothsayers once thought libraries would become obsolete in the Internet age. Not so. They have modernized, digitized, virtualized.

Patrons can bring their own beverages; Arlington County hopes to add a cafe in one of its branches. They can access databases, read Chinese newspapers or the latest graphic teen novel. Users have more and more access from home; they can text in reference questions to a Fairfax County librarian, for example, or listen to podcasts. Fairfax card holders can read an e-book online. Librarians are trying to tailor services to community needs, hoping to add more babysitting certification classes in Silver Spring or résumé-writing workshops in Prince George’s County.

More than 68 percent of American adults now have a library card, the highest number since the ALA began tracking the numbers in 1990.

“One thing I hear quite frequently is ‘Gee, it’s cheaper to come here than Borders,’ ” said Nancy Savas, the library manager at Germantown. “It makes me laugh, because we’ve always been here.”

Business Brisk at Area Libraries – washingtonpost.com.

Michigan cut welfare rolls 13 percent despite the fact that its October unemployment rate topped 9 percent. An office cubicle at the welfare agency in Detroit.

WASHINGTON — Despite soaring unemployment and the worst economic crisis in decades, 18 states cut their welfare rolls last year, and nationally the number of people receiving cash assistance remained at or near the lowest in more than 40 years.

The trends, based on an analysis of new state data collected by The New York Times, raise questions about how well a revamped welfare system with great state discretion is responding to growing hardships.

Michigan cut its welfare rolls 13 percent, though it was one of two states whose October unemployment rate topped 9 percent. Rhode Island, the other, had the nation’s largest welfare decline, 17 percent.

Of the 12 states where joblessness grew most rapidly, eight reduced or kept constant the number of people receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the main cash welfare program for families with children. Nationally, for the 12 months ending October 2008, the rolls inched up a fraction of 1 percent.

The deepening recession offers a fresh challenge to the program, which was passed by a Republican Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 amid bitter protest and became one of the most closely watched social experiments in modern memory.

The program, which mostly serves single mothers, ended a 60-year-old entitlement to cash aid, replacing it with time limits and work requirements, and giving states latitude to discourage people from joining the welfare rolls. While it was widely praised in the boom years that followed, skeptics warned it would fail the needy when times turned tough.

Supporters of the program say the flat caseloads may reflect a lag between the loss of a job and the decision to seek help. They also say the recession may have initially spared the low-skilled jobs that many poor people take.

But critics argue that years of pressure to cut the welfare rolls has left an obstacle-ridden program that chases off the poor, even when times are difficult.

Even some of the program’s staunchest defenders are alarmed.

“There is ample reason to be concerned here,” said Ron Haskins, a former Republican Congressional aide who helped write the 1996 law overhauling the welfare system. “The overall structure is not working the way it was designed to work. We would expect, just on the face it, that when a deep recession happens, people could go back on welfare.”

Read more…

Welfare Aid Not Growing as Economy Drops Off – NYTimes.com.