Posts Tagged ‘technology’

This Is Why Sms Is Expensive, And Google Is Trying To Solve This Problem

August 19th, 2009

A few days ago I posed the question, “why is sms so expensive?“. In a related opinion article on the Wall Street Journal, Why AT&T Killed Google Voice, Andy Kessler explains how Google voice is bringing real competition to the market.

With Google Voice, you have one Google phone number that callers use to reach you, and you pick up whichever phone—office, home or cellular—rings. You can screen calls, listen in before answering, record calls, read transcripts of your voicemails, and do free conference calls. Domestic calls and texting are free, and international calls to Europe are two cents a minute. In other words, a unified voice system, something a real phone company should have offered years ago.

[...]

As any parent of teenagers knows, text messages are 20 cents each, or $5,000 per megabyte. After the first month and a $320 bill, we all pony up $10 a month for unlimited texting plans. Same for Internet access. With my iPhone, I pay $30 a month for unlimited data service (actually, one gigabyte per month). Is it worth that? The à la carte price for other not-so-smart phones is $5 per megabyte (one-thousandth of a gigabyte) per month. So we buy monthly plans. Margins in AT&T’s Wireless segment are an embarrassingly high 25%.

The trick in any communications and media business is to own a pipe between you and your customers so you can charge what you like. Cellphone companies don’t have wired pipes, but by owning spectrum they do have a pipe and pricing power.

Aren’t there phone competitors to knock down the price? Hardly. Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile and others all joined AT&T in bidding huge amounts for wireless spectrum in FCC auctions, some $70-plus billion since the mid-1990s. That all gets passed along to you and me in the form of higher fees and friendly oligopolies that don’t much compete on price. Google Voice is the new competition.

AT&T has an exclusive deal with apple in the US, and this, Mr. Kessler leads us to believe, is part of the reason why Apple rejected the Google Voice iPhone App.

There should be more companies like Google.

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Why Is SMS So Expensive?

August 16th, 2009

It’s a 160 character string of information. Why does it cost me 25c to send? 160 bytes of data at 25c is $1638.40 per MB! A decent wireless data plan in Sydney costs about 2.5c per MB, so an sms message costs 65,536 times as much as a Internet message of the same size!

Ok, I’m not being fair here. There are sms headers involved that make the message more than 160 bytes. There will be packet losses along the way that might require retransmission, but even so, it certainly will still be more than 50,000 times as expensive per MB.

The major advantage of sms is that it uses a push protocol rather than the pull protocol used in email. This means that when Jannet sends an sms to Margaret, she can be sure that Margaret will receive the message and find out about her wonderful new pair of shoes. In a push protocol, Janet’s message gets sent to an sms server that will keep trying to send the message to Margaret until Margaret’s phone receives the message and notifies Margaret with that annoying message ring-tone that you hate. If she was using a pull protocol, then the message will still be stored on a server, but Jannet will have to wait until Margaret logs into the server and checks for the message.

This surely isn’t 50,000 times as valuable as normal Internet messages. Most modern phone can be programmed to check for messages periodically and automatically. To Margaret, a phone that can do that will be no different from a phone that gets notified of a new message by a server. In fact, a third party can easily set up a server that can offer a push message service at a far lower price than sms. There are already iPhone applications that do this.

Sms is way overpriced. Telcos are not making an effort to make it cheaper because the majority of consumers don’t know that it can be cheaper and are happy to pay the higher price. As soon as smart phones become more common and push message services become more prominent, sms will be dead.

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Javascript Slow on Firefox 3, Switch To Chromium!

July 25th, 2009

Every popular website today uses a tremendous amount of javascript for both ajax and UI effects, this is bad news for firefox 3 users on linux because javascript is incredibly slow on linux versions of firefox. Firefox has been the dominant browser on linux and comes with most major distributions, and there aren’t many good alternatives. This issue is so bad that on slightly older computers, typing in a javascript wysiwyg text box is unbearably slow.

The solution? Switch to Opera or Chromium. Google’s chrome browser has one of the fastest Javascript engines around (next to safari’s), and although it’s still ‘unstable’, it’s quite usable for most people’s browsing needs.
Opera is available here, while chromium is available from google’s developer channel here.

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Nokia n73 key scancodes to remap your keyboard

January 31st, 2009

The gallery button on my Nokia n73 is broken, and because I bought a used phone that has passed it’s warranty, I couldn’t send it back to be fixed.

The only solution was to remap that key to another key when the camera is in use. Luckily there is an app called MagicKeys for the Symbian OS that does exactly that. Unfortunately, Nokia has some strict policies about the release of apps on the Symbian OS that makes it very difficult for many developers to write apps for the phone, so many have released their app “unsigned”.

Unsigned apps can’t be installed on an unhacked Symbian OS (you will receive a certificate error), but you can follow this short guide to hack your Nokia phone (works for most N series and E series phones).  Note that this will void your warranty, if you have a non-functioning button and still have warranty on your phone, I suggest that you send it back for repair.

After patching your phone, install MagicKeys which you download from here.

The program uses keyboard scancodes to map keys, and different mappings can be defined for each app. It’s not easy to find scan codes for Nokia phones, but I’ve stumbled upon this set of key codes for the N73:

* – 42
# – 127
Number 0 – 48
Number 1 – 49
Number 2 – 50
Number 3 – 51
Number 4 – 52
Number 5 – 53
Number 6 – 54
Number 7 – 55
Number 8 – 56
Number 9 – 57
Left Soft Key – 164
Right Soft key – 165
Green Key – 196
Red Key – 197
Pencil – 18
Backspace(C)-Key – 1
Menu Key – 180
Multimedia Menu Key – 186
“Joystick Left” – 14
“Joystick Right” – 15
“Joystick Up” – 16
“Joystick Down” – 17
[OK]-Key – 167
Gallery Key – 230
Volume Up – 162
Volume Down – 163
Camera key (focus) – 226
Camera key (take pic) – 227
Power Off Key – 166
Open Slider – 168
Close Slider – 169
Open Multimedia Keys – 172
Close Multimedia Keys – 173
Multimedia Key Pause/Play – 182
Multimedia Key Stop – 183
Multimedia Key Forwards – 184
Multimedia Key Backwards – 185
Navigation key -239

I suspect that most nokia N series and some E series phones will have similar scancodes.

This link has been very useful in my search to find scan codes for the phone.

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Grand Theft Auto 4 PC, DRM, and why I’m not an early adopter

December 4th, 2008

It’s been at least a year since I last purchased a video game for the PC. Call me picky, but I don’t have much time for video games anymore, and if a game doesn’t grab my attention like finding an Asian who holds political office in Australia, I won’t spend more than a couple hours playing it. I’m sick of the sci-fi, alien-invading, zombie-infested distopia that has plagued the popular first-person-shooter genre, fuck half life 2.

Rockstar Games’ recent title ‘Grand Theft Auto 4′ did just that. To me it is like the entire Australian parliment being over run by Asians…ok, bad analogy. In the words of Dr. Kelso from scrubs, “there’s nothing like scoring a Caddie and mowing down street hoes”, and sometimes, that’s all I want to do in life; I don’t want to kill zombies or aliens. It’s a game that fulfills fantasies. Needless to say, I bought the game as soon as it was released on PC.

Commercially, GTA4 had been a huge success on the xbox 360 and PS3 receiving perfect scores from several reviews while breaking many sales records. It’s release on the PC yesterday (December 3, 2008) had be widely anticipated. I’m not normally an early adopter when it comes to new techology (which includes software), because technology today is very complex, and there’s an internal conflict between the marketers pushing for release dates and developers trying to meet quality assurance guidelines. In the case of GTA4 for the PC, marketers won the battle. The prospect of releasing just before the celebration of a few days of extravagant consumerism that we call christmas is too great an opportunity to miss. Thus, this release date was much too early. The game is plagued with bugs. A list of common ones with possible solutions can be found here.

Rockstar has quickly responded with some possible fixes and a statement stating that they are working on the problem.

An interesting bug that I’m experiencing is the “missing textures” bug, ironically it occurs on the video card listed as the card that meets the official minimum requirements for the game to be reasonably playable. This is alleged to be a problem with Nvidia’s drivers and Nvidia is “working on the problem”.

My guess is that many disappointed PC gaming fans of the series won’t be playing this for another couple weeks.

On another note, it’s sad to see PC games being over run by DRM. Not only do you have to install the game, but you have to authenticate online, get an account on something called social club, which needs to connect to a windows live account for online play. compare that to “put the disc in the drive and play” for a console game.

I understand that piracy is killing PC gaming, but having such complex and error prone DRM schemes is not a good solution. Those who pirate games will find a way to crack it, because it only takes one person to crack the game and release it for mass piracy to occur, and any computer security expert knows, nothing is secure, especially if you have physicall access to the machine running the software. Those who do the right thing and purchace the game legally are punished with a 10 step installation guide that takes about an hour to complete even for the tech savvy gamers.

I should have listen to my anti-early adopter voice and let the brave early adopters bare the risk. Maybe I should get an xbox 360, it’s been out for a while and they’ve fixed most of the kinks.

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how to disable g-talks Remember Password option

December 1st, 2008

I recently checked the “remember password” box when I signed into g-talk. I didn’t want to do that because I was using a work computer that might be used by others. There seems to be no obvious ways to uncheck that option once it’s ticked since once you start g-talk, you are automatically signed in. There have been a couple posts on this in the google support forums, the answers suggested are not very helpful because either they don’t solve the problem or the instructions aren’t clear. One person’s advice was to uninstall and reinstall, which I think is too much trouble for such a small issue to fix.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Talk/thread?tid=7643a9633f70a5d1&hl=en

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Talk/thread?tid=264c17af8235957e&hl=en

So here’s the solution:

1. Sign out of g-talk

2. Uncheck the remember password box

Done, simple as that. The solution just wasn’t very obvious, and the support forums were next to useless.

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