Trillian will talk to AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, and IRC. The only catch is that you have to have your own user ID for each service you want to use. So, if you want to talk to someone who only has ICQ, you'll need an ICQ ID, too. Once you have it, though, Trillian lets you talk to all the services from a single interface. Very handy.

Forget Trillian. Use open-source GAIM. [link] Compatible with AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, MSN, Jabber, and more.

even though ICQ and AIM are both owned by AOL, they use different servers, so they can't communicate directly with each other.

This isn't true anymore. You can have AIMers on your ICQ list. I regularly message buffistas on their AIM accounts from ICQ. The only restriction is that they have to be online (which is why I still love ICQ, for the offline messaging).

Trillian is also unable to log into the Yahoo interface. Believe me, I've tried.

It's working fine for me, with v 2.013 pro.

Anyone know where I can get a good deal on an iPod? Refurbished or otherwise?

try overstock.com

then try dealnews.com

So why is IM better than email? If the person you're IMing isn't online, what's the difference?

If the person you're IMing isn't online, what's the difference?

None, I guess, except that you're able to see that they're offline, so you know why they're not responding. And when they are online, not having to wait for emails to go through lets you have more naturally paced conversations.

IM isn't necessarily better than e-mail. It's just another way of communicating. As Jessica says, it's more conversational.

It's working fine for me, with v 2.013 pro.

Huh. I gave up trying about five months ago and dled the YIM app. I'll have to check my Trillian to see if it's the same release as you have.

Zenkitty, IM is for instant communication. For instance, Katie gave me beta notes on a story last night, but then I pinged her in IM and got her to clarify some of her comments and stuff right then. It's much more immediate, like a phone call, although slowed down by the speed of someone's typing.

In case you're, um, looking for something to read: The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software

Long, but interesting (if you're a programmer) article....

Your free lunch will soon be over. What can you do about it? What are you doing about it?

The major processor manufacturers and architectures, from Intel and AMD to Sparc and PowerPC, have run out of room with most of their traditional approaches to boosting CPU performance. Instead of driving clock speeds and straight-line instruction throughput ever higher, they are instead turning en masse to hyperthreading and multicore architectures. Both of these features are already available on chips today; in particular, multicore is available on current PowerPC and Sparc IV processors, and is coming in 2005 from Intel and AMD. Indeed, the big theme of the 2004 In-Stat/MDR Fall Processor Forum was multicore devices, as many companies showed new or updated multicore processors. Looking back, it’s not much of a stretch to call 2004 the year of multicore.

And that puts us at a fundamental turning point in software development, at least for the next few years and for applications targeting general-purpose desktop computers and low-end servers (which happens to account for the vast bulk of the dollar value of software sold today). In this article, I’ll describe the changing face of hardware, why it suddenly does matter to software, and how specifically it matters to you and is going to change the way you will likely be writing software in the future.