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Senator investigates SMS

How come text messages now cost 20¢ each, when they used to cost 10¢ each?

That’s what Democratic Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin wants to know. Acting as head of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, he recently sent a letter to the presidents and CEOs of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile asking for clarification as to why text message costs have gone up 100% in 3 years… especially since the wireless carriers have been pushing data plans like there’s no tomorrow.

Let’s break it down, shall we?

My girlfriend’s boss recently purchased a laptop with built-in Wi-Fi and mobile Internet. Wi-Fi is, of course, free in most places, but mobile Internet requires a data plan from a cellular carrier. So the boss signed up for a 5GB/month data plan from Verizon. It costs $59.99 a month. That’s 1.1998 cents per megabyte, per month.

Text messages are limited to 160 characters, which is 160 bytes. Assuming that one sends the full 160 characters per each text message, and those messages cost 20¢ each, that’s $1,310.72 per megabyte. So if Lisa’s boss were to send the same 5GB worth of data via SMS instead of her mobile Internet plan, her monthly bill would be (are you ready for this?) $6,553,600.

Of course, 5GB of text messages would be around 33,554,432 texts per month, so that’s not a very realistic analogy. And most people that text a lot usually have some kind of “text messaging plan” from their carrier, which drives the cost down a bit. I’m also not comparing apples to apples, as the data plan I quoted is from Verizon and the SMS costs are from AT&T.

But still… that, my friends, is highway robbery, pure and simple. For some reason, the wireless carrier have seen fit to charge insanely high rates for text messages while at the same time they’ve cut costs for voice plans (even a ten-second voice call uses far more bandwidth than a text message). It’s insane, and I wish someone would do something about it. Sadly, it looks like it might be Uncle Sam instead of the market in this case.

Read more about it at Ars Technica here.

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Netbook prices starting to fall

Netbooks are small laptop computers that ship with the latest energy-saving processors, smallish amounts of RAM, small SSD storage devices, built-in Wi-Fi and stripped down operating systems that can run quickly on such meager hardware. Although you can buy a netbook with Windows XP installed, most netbooks come with some form of Linux on them. In a sense, they’re more like “extremely useful PDAs” than actual laptop computers, but the distinction is slight.

The big draw with netbooks was supposed to be their low price. When manufacturers announced pricing for netbooks, prices of $199 or $249 were bandied about. People were excited – and why not? A laptop computer with a color screen that could play back movies and mp3s and had built in wireless for less than 2 bills? Sign me up!

The only problem was that initial demand was so high that manufacturers felt free to ignore their previous quotes of $199, aiming instead for the $399 to $499 range. One manufacturer (Asus) really ran with the idea, releasing ever beefier netbooks with ever more bizarre price points. The Eee PC 1000, for example, comes with a 10″ widescreen LCD, a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom CPU, 2GB of RAM, an 8GB SSD, and a 32GB SDHC card for $650. That’s a lot of sexy new technology, but for that kind of money you can buy a “regular” notebook from Dell with Windows XP, a 14″ screen, and 80 GB hard drive.

Thankfully, a couple of things have happened that have started to push prices down. Initial demand has fallen off, so manufacturers are dropping prices to keep up sales. And Dell, the 800 pound gorilla of the IT world, just released their own netbook. So prices should fall considerably by Christmas time. Case in point? The afirementioned Asus Eee PC 1000 – the price has recently fallen from $650 to $449.

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Listen up, IT people!

Harry McCracken, founder and editor of Technologizer and former editor-in-chief of PC World, has posted this entry in his blog about the mistakes he’s made with IT implementations throughout the years. Most of it is pretty basic stuff, but it’s worth a read to refresh yourself on the causes of IT disasters. After all, most people tend to take their jobs a bit casually after doing them for several years. Harry’s entry just might slow you down and make you think before doing something that just might screw the pooch. Here’s a sample:

Biting off more than I can chew at once. You don’t need to address every issue that technology can solve for you all at once. In fact, if you try to, you’re more likely to create new problems. Worse, you may have more trouble diagnosing and fixing them than if you changed one thing at a time. I just wish I always remembered that.

Like I said… basic stuff, but well worth a read.

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Google Chrome: Meh

Last week, the guys from Google released their own web browser: Google Chrome. And thus, Google fanboys all over the ‘Net fell to their knees in religious ecstasy, chanting over and over again: “Google my master, Google my master…”

Look, I frankly just don’t see the point of all this. On the Windows platform you already have Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari. And now there’s another browser? And what does Chrome do that any other browser doesn’t? Well, nothing, actually. And it actually lacks a lot of the features that other browsers have, even boring old Internet Explorer.

After using it for about a week, I can honestly say that the one (and only) feature I like about Google Chrome is the “paste and go” feature in the address bar. If you cut and paste an address into Chrome’s address bar, you can either “Paste” it or “Paste and go”, which pastes the address then automatically loads the page in question. Nice, but hardly groundbreaking, especially when the “Right-Click Link” extension does the same thing in Firefox without the need to paste the address into the address bar.

As of this writing, Chrome doesn’t have any extensions. None. So you either get the full “Chrome experience” or you get nothing. No AdBlock, no Weave, no DownThemAll… nothing. Oh, you can hack together something similar to a lot of Firefox extensions – see this post from Lifehacker for instructions on setting up Privoxy as your ad blocker in Chrome, for example – but it’s nowhere near as elegant as Firefox.

So… for now… I’ll stick with Mozilla, thanks!

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Epic Fail from AA

Oh, now this is just horrific: when 57-year-old Teresa Olaya died, her husband Miguel arranged for the body to be shipped to her hometown of Guayaquil, Ecuador. Unfortunately for Migel, American Airlines lost the body for 4 days. When American finally found Teresa’s remains, she was “so badly decomposed… [that he] had to forgo a traditional open-casket funeral”.

It’s unclear what, exactly, happened here. Migel and his daughter Laura flew to Guayaquil ahead of the body to make arrangements. When the body didn’t show up, he was given contradictory information from American personnel, who told him at times that the body was in Miami, other times that she was in Guatemala City. What’s absolutely clear is that the body was not refrigerated. At all. “When I opened the casket, it was a terrible shock,” said Olaya. “I still can’t get it out of my mind”. It’s unclear whether Teresa’s body had been embalmed (it was picked up from a mortuary in Brooklyn, but the original article doesn’t say if embalming took place there or not). I also don’t know if embalmed bodies need refrigerating.

Dear God, people! What the hell happened here? This isn’t your average Samsonite bag we’re talking about here… it’s a giant fucking cardboard box with “HUMAN REMAINS” stamped in big letters on the side! American isn’t talking – Migel is suing for millions, and American won’t comment on “pending litigation”.  So we have no idea if the body was shuffled from airport to airport, held up in customs, or misplaced in an unheated warehouse for those four days.

This is, quite frankly, one of the most pitiful stories I’ve ever heard. It seems that American Airlines can even screw you over in death!

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Vote for the next History Blog article!

UPDATE: The people have spoken! Look for “The Border Blasters” as the next History Blog entry tomorrow morning!

I hope you guys are enjoying the History Blog! History is one of my favorite subjects, and the History Blog allows me shine a light into some of the forgotten or mysterious events in human history.

I’ve decided to do something different for my next History Blog article: to allow you to vote for which article you’d like to see!

Below are several ideas that I’ve been kicking around. In fact, I’ll probably do History Blog posts on all of them in the coming months. But which one should I do first?

Continue reading “Vote for the next History Blog article!”

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Mad Men: “The Gold Violin”

Well, folks… let me begin by saying that I just don’t have it in me this week to do an exhaustive recap of this episode. Which is a bit of a shame, given that this was a damn fine episode, maybe my favorite of season 2 so far. Let me summarize the episode as best I can, then get into my thoughts on it:

The episode begins with Don at a Cadillac dealership. He wrecked his car a few episodes ago, remember? So now he needs a new ride. The thing is that while he’s talking to the car salesman, he has a flashback of his own days in the car business. Whilst trying to sell a car to a kid, a woman comes in asking for Don Draper. When Don introduces himself, the lady says that “you’re not Don Draper”:

Later that day, Don meets with the “Young Turks”, who share their vision of what “advertising” is for “young people of today”. Don, surprisingly, seems to like their ideas.

At the end of the day, Jane convinces Ken, Hal and Sal to sneak into Cooper’s office to look at his newest painting, something Harry and Paul decline for fear of getting caught. Paul even tells the group to “call me from jail.” Harry actually initiated all this by mentioning that Cooper wants to have a meeting with him. Harry is nervous because he thinks that the meeting will only be about about the new painting, and he doesn’t know if Cooper bought the abstract artwork because he actually likes it, or because he thinks it’s a joke and will enjoy seeing his employees try to kiss his ass with compliments for something that Cooper thinks is trash.

After looking at the picture, Sal, Ken and Jane share an elevator on the way out. Ken tries to flirt with Jane by mentioning that he’s a published author; amusingly, Sal picks up on this and talks about how much he liked Ken’s story. Later on in the episode, Ken asks Sal to read a story he has been working on, and Sal invites him over for Sunday dinner.

In an amusing scene, Cooper and Harry have their meeting. Harry still thinks that it’s to admire Cooper’s new painting. Come to find out, the meeting really is about the finances of Harry’s TV department, but Cooper and Harry have a fun discussion about the painting where Harry tries to be all “arty”, only to find out that Cooper has bought the painting solely as an investment.

There’s another scene with Cooper a few minutes later where he calls Don into his office to essentially orders him to take a seat on the board of a folk art museum. Cooper is not only giving Don money and power in the office, he now wants Don to have social status as well.

Continue reading “Mad Men: “The Gold Violin””

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SONGS I LOVE: “Jungle Drum”

Emilíana Torrini is one of my all-time favorite artists. Her 1999 album Love in the Time of Science is one of my favorite albums ever. It’s beautiful, lush and haunting and is one of the best electronic albums ever made (and it was produced by Roland Orzabal of Tears for Fears). For a time, it seemed that Emilíana was poised to eclipse the fame of her Icelandic counterpart, Bjork.

But then tragedy struck: her long-time boyfriend was killed in a hit and run accident, and shortly thereafter she was violently mugged in Bethnal Green, London. She withdrew from music and fame for several years, occasionally popping up to write a song (like Kylie Minogue’s smash hit “Slow”) or to sing one-off collaborations (like “Gollum’s Song” from The Lord of the Rings soundtrack, or “Hold Your Hand” from superstar DJ Paul Oakenfold’s Bunkka album).

Emilíana finally reemerged in 2005 with her second album, Fisherman’s Woman. Unlike Science, this album was almost entirely acoustic. The album is profoundly sad, perhaps as a way to exorcise the pain of losing her boyfriend. It’s an incredibly beautiful album – “Today Has Been OK” is one the best songs I’ve ever heard – but it is, for the most part, as sad as a This Mortal Coil album. It’s something you just can’t pop into the CD player on a whim.

It seems that Emilíana has gotten her mojo back with her newest album, Me and Armini. Like Fisherman’s Woman, this album has almost no electronic instruments (much less the whole “electronica” feel). Unlike Fisherman’s Woman, however, the album is mostly poppy and happy. Have a listen to “Jungle Drum”, a song slated to be the album’s second single:

[audio:jungle_drum.mp3]

I’m so glad that Emilíana’s back on track. The girl is as cute as a button (and I mean that more mentally than physically), and it just makes me all giddy inside to hear her being happy again.

Read Emilíana’s Wikipedia entry here.