Author: Corey

Facebook has exploded in the last twelve months. Leaving MySpace, Orkut, and the rag tag group of other social networking sites in the dust, it has single handedly surmounted the world of telling everyone everything regardless of whether or not they actually wanted to know. Only Twitter is able to stave off the blitzkrieg of Facebook, and then only because stupid people haven't figured out how awful it is.

I joined Facebook a few months ago at the incessant urging of small people from Scandinavia. Upon further inspection, I acquiesced to the request because Facebook looked like MySpace without the dumb. It was friends connected to other friends and there was some writing of stuff back and forth. It had a pretty clean interface and, minus the AJAX fetish that seems to permeate the site, it works pretty well.

Oh my, how wrong I was.

You see, on Facebook lies the concept of applications. These applications are about as varied as they come, but they all share one defining feature: they are all completely stupid.

Share a round of drinks! Send a hug! Give a smile! Take a quiz! Become a fan of crab people! Most of this crap isn't even possible, much less a passing excuse for social interaction. Never in all my life have I been more thankful for the, "block this application" feature than I am with Facebook.

Sure, Facebook is a lot less intrusive than MySpace, and certainly looks less like a drunk monkey vomited all over my computer screen than MySpace, but it is still sheer crap.

In a clean package.

Our good friend ltd posted a link to this story in The New York Times concerning how wireless carriers are essentially screwing over the consumer when it comes to the charge for text messages. While that point is more true than any carrier would like you to know, some of the details provided as a basis for this claim are incomplete.

But first, some nomenclature! The technical name for a text message is SMS (Short Message Service). It was designed and originally codified for use with GSM networks and devices during the 1980s. It consists of a short message, usually 160 total ASCII characters or less in length, transmitted between devices.

Another term thrown around is control channel. The control channel represents the very small piece of RF spectrum that is always active and serves as the, "always on" link between your device (usually a phone) and the network. All network information is transmitted over the control channel, including what RF channel to use and at which power setting to operate. Additionally, it is used to transmit paging messages, which is also why the control channel is often called the paging channel. Those page messages include alerts about incoming calls, outgoing calls from your device, incoming call waiting calls, network alerts, and other network/device communications. The other channel is called traffic channel, and is utilized when a call is made (either voice or data).

With that in mind, the central point of most of the articles published about this story is that SMS utilizes the control channel of the network, which does not require a traffic channel connection to be made that takes up valuable spectrum on a particular sector of a cell phone tower.

This point is flawed. Specifically, SMS messages are designed to roll over to the traffic channel any time the control channel is too busy to handle the additional traffic. This happens regularly in large cities during peak usage. Moreover, on non-US networks where the SMS size is greater than 160 characters, those messages are usually sent over a traffic channel. In CDMA, all devices have a setting that can force the device to send all SMS over the traffic channel if the carrier so chooses.

To be clear, most text messages are sent over the paging channel. But it is important to understand that SMS is not limited to use of the paging channel. The message must run through the SMS Concentrator (SMSC) and is then transmitted over wired networks, and often the Internet when sending messages from one network to the other. They are small, but they are utilizing network resources. And that does cost the carrier in terms of bandwidth and infrastructure. When that message has to be transmitted over the traffic channel, that message takes up a slot on that sector that cannot be used for other data calls or voice calls. That doesn't seem like a big issue when looking at a single sector, but if you weigh in the traffic on a national network, it does start to add up.

Now, carriers are of course screwing over the customer at any possible turn. Though the carriers do have some costs, the economies of scale they enjoy from a network infrastructure standpoint render those costs infinitesimal at best. So why have they doubled their rates over the last year? Simple: to pay for everything else.

Voice networks are not generating the revenue they used to. They used to make a lot of money off ringtones and pictures, and while that is still a viable market, it isn't what it used to be either. The real issue here is data usage. The amount of data used by subscribers is very significant, especially for EVDO Rev. A users on Verizon and Sprint. Both of those carriers have rolled out ridiculous limits on the service, such as Verizon's limit of 5GB per month for $60. Prior to these limits, they were virtually no gauges on data usage, and it was the same price. The huge margin they enjoy on SMS helped offset the loss of margin in voice and data services.

Another reason is that the consumer is willing to bear the cost of the service as offered. If people didn't use it, they would lower the cost, but text messaging is (lamentably) growing in popularity. That's a classic example of supply and demand at work.

Without a doubt, carriers are screwing over the consumer. They charge outrageous fees for services in order to maintain margins. That's right boys and girls, not revenue, but margins. The revenue continues to cover operational costs, but margin has been adversely impacted. A synonym for margin is profit.

They're all greedy jerkfaces. and I'm all for Congress investigating these companies for failing to compete, but the problem with that is that the only body we have responsible for this is Congress. I suppose time will tell, but I don't expect anything to come of it that favors the consumer. What say you?

"If your warrior of love is too small, you will lose this war."

Spam is, if anything, just as prevalent as it ever was. However, instead of the random strings of characters, someone is apparently trying to insert some humor into the equation. I received a spam message this morning with the above phrase as the subject.

Effective or not, at least it is slightly more entertaining. Post some of your favorites in the comments.

Update: "Banana Necklace Kitchen Paintbrush Rifle" - I gotta get me one of those!

For years, those of us so afflicted with the ability to fix, repair, or further damage computers have spent a great deal of otherwise valuable time decrying the mind boggling decisions made by OEM computer manufacturers when it comes to case design and usability. Of course, most of this is by design; they want you to pay them when something breaks instead of being able to fix it yourselves. However, in the world of laptops, this was seemingly a necessity and not just the post-defecation thought of an evil and angry design engineer at Compaq.

Wiser men than I have said that only fools do hardware repairs on laptops. In the long run, it just isn't worth it. The way things are designed and laid out to fit all of that junk into a small space does not give way to ease of access. It has always been utterly inexcusable for desktop computers; for laptops it is excused but still unnecessary!

It is possible to engineer a laptop so that the chassis, motherboard, and associated components are able to be removed and replaced/repaired. This idea goes deeper than memory or hard drives: it goes down to individual components like card slots, I/O ports, heat dissipating units, and flux capacitors. In a surprisingly ironic turn of events, one of the most hated companies in terms of desktop case design was also the purveyor of some of the most functional laptop designs on the market. That company: Dell.

As Tommy will attest, when we first met and worked at SFA together, we had a huge bank of laptops from Dell. Both of us had spent time taking them apart and fixing them at various times and for various reasons. It was not the simplest task in the world but it was at least possible. I've spent the last three days trying to work on a four year old model from Toshiba and it has been an abject failure.

Nothing has come apart with this unit. The chassis and motherboard are attached via non-removable ribbon cables. The connections themselves are surface mounted onto the motherboard PCB. To unplug them would be to separate a PATA ribbon cable from the connector. After fighting, cursing, sweating, and even a little blood (as any true computer repair demands), I have given up. All of this to attempt to replace a faulty fan. I guess Toshiba will get their additional revenue for this unit.

It's a real shame that these things are so poorly designed with no real reason behind it. I wonder how they would feel if I walked into Frys and started taking apart a new laptop before I purchased it. I've got $5 that says I'd be thrown out of the store before I got the hard drive out.

I apparently got into a new program from Microsoft which is beta testing Windows Home Server. They have granted beta users permission to publicly discuss the software but not give it out to anyone. I'm currently downloading the DVD installer package and will be converting my Windows 2003 server into this new operating system.

Early looks into the documentation for it point to the normal client/server relationship between the Server and other Windows-based hosts on your network. Among the interesting features are an actual useful backup tool (single instance storage for the win), media server (instead of shares on every individual host), media streaming, and a host of other odds and ends.

Support exists for Windows XP and Vista flavors only; no 2000 or 2003 and certainly nothing earlier than that. The only downside I can see thus far is that each host must have client software installed in order for the whole mess to work. I would have rather seen something that integrated seamlessly. That being said, Windows Networking is notorious for being slow and unable to correctly count time, among other things. Perhaps this is a move to correct some of those problems; time will certainly tell.

I hope to do a series of updates about my experience with this and turn it into my latest project that, for once, doesn't blow up in my face. I'm quite certain I will experience some issues as my hardware is not terribly robust. It meets/exceeds the minimum requirements but is not ready for running Vista or anything like it. Ahoy matey, thar be geekery ahead!

Editor's Note: This is the first post in what I hope becomes a series that is cross-posted at DownToZero.Org.