When people call Apple users elitist snobs, one only needs to look at Microsoft’s attempts at being “cool.” For example, here is a video promoting one of their early versions of Windows. Skip to about halfway through to get straight to the good stuff.
You soon realize that a Windows user calling a Mac user an elitist is just like a retarded person calling a super-genius elitist. It’s cute. No, really. If this was an episode of Full House and Michelle just told Uncle Jesse his music was immature, the audience would produce the very same “awwwwww….”
Okay, to be fair - that video was really old. It’s not like Microsoft is still so out of touch. Surely now they can afford to hire competent advertising agencies.
Ehh.. Nevermind.
Maybe for Apple’s next ad campaign they can just run Microsoft’s own advertisements.
Warning: the above videos are not suitable for people suffering from a heart condition, likelihood of aneurism, or anyone who is conscious. They should not have been watched.
Eat is a small application that will permanently delete files that are dragged onto it.
This is good for two reasons:
1. You are deleting a file off of a removable disk.
A really annoying problem with OS X is that files are not deleted from a removable disk until you empty the trash. So if you’re trying to free up space on your 1GB thumbdrive, you’ll end up needing to empty your entire trash which you just might not want to do.
This is also good for circumventing the trash for any other large file. If you’re deleting files to free up space, it’s best to just delete them rather then delete them then empty your trash.
2. It shreds
Eat will shred documents (delete by overwriting). You cannot restore the files once they have been eaten. This is good for any type of sensitive documents.
Usage suggestion:
I like to keep eat up in my Finder toolbar like this:
You can put it there by simply dragging it up and hovering for a second or two.
Other features:
-Eat will warn you before permanently deleting files
-Clicking on eat (as opposed to dragging something onto it) will eat all the files in the trash (with warning).
This program is adapted from a script by Jayson Kempinger.
I just noticed that Microsoft’s live.com has gotten pretty smart. Go ahead, hand it an algebraic equation and watch it solve for X.
That’s pretty snazzy, eh?
But wait! There’s more!
“More?”
Much more!
MS has launched a SMS search service much like Google’s (46645). You can now text search, queries, and yes - algebraic equations to 95483 (WLIVE) and get back the answers post haste. Follow that link to see what all 95483 can do for you (here’s a few: local search queries, reverse phone number lookups (!), area codes, word definitions, math calculations, spell-check, etc.)
I imagine this will be great news for any kid with a cellphone taking an Algebra test.
I’m particularly excited to be able to do reverse phone lookups. Next time someone calls me and I don’t have their number programmed in my phone, I can find out who they are by texting the number to WLIVE.
Despite the way I feel about Microsoft, their mobile guys are constantly impressing me.
Samulator is my very first Mac application. It sounds really cool but it’s actually a really boring calculator. But for anyone who collects simple calculator programs, here is one to add to you collection.
Here in the unassuming town of Orem, UT we have a little thing called Utopia. This is the city’s publicly backed fiber optic network. To the layman - that means we have fast internet here and the network is run by the city as a public utility, with carriers leasing the lines.
The carrier I use at my house is called XMission, and I’m quite certain they are the greatest ISP in the country - probably even the world. Not only do they have a technically-enabled staff on hand 24/7 via E-Mail, Phone, or even IRC (!), but all their services run on 100% renewable energy sources. Awesome, right? I have had nothing but great experiences and quick responses from their tech support team.
But that’s not even the best part. The best part is the speed. 50Mbit up/down - making it the fastest residential Internet connection in the United States (so far as I am aware). The next fastest is Verizon’s FiOS service (the “only” all digital, 100% fiber optic network straight to your home). I’ve heard FiOS is pretty awesome, but at only 30Mbit down and 15Mbit up it’s a fraction of the speed of our Utopia connection. Utopia FTW!
I’m surprised you haven’t seen more about this on the tech news sites. People need to know that Orem is the technological super-hub of the States! In fact, the only place with faster average internet speeds is Japan - with an average connection speed of 60Mbps.
But do we actually see these speeds? Not at first - as it turns out my wireless G router was acting as a bottleneck. I had to upgrade to an 802.11N router to get the full capabilities of our speed. Once I made the upgrade I started seeing speeds like this:
That’s a screenshot from my bandwidth meter program. That’s right, I’m actually uploading slightly faster than the theoretical limit of our connection (50Mbits/sec = 6.25MBytes/sec). I’ve also seen my download speed peak around 6MBytes/sec but what you see in the picture is more of an average.
An internet service provider who under promises and over delivers? Who would have thought it possible? That’s what you get with local companies.
At these speeds I can download large files - like linux distribution or movies (legal ones) in a matter of minutes. It’s pretty much the greatest thing ever.
I’m placing this one firmly in the “nerdy stuff” category. It’s pretty darn nerdy, and it will only really apply to you if you have an AT&T Tilt (that’s a kind of phone).
I’ve been playing recently with the official AT&T ROM that comes on my phone. The ROM consists of the operating system, applications, look and feel, etc. Pretty much everything but your contacts and calendar items. The AT&T official software is fast, but it’s bogged down with crap and pretty darn ugly. Here’s a picture of what the phone looks like when you first pull it out of the box:
See what I mean? It has no life to it, just a list of crap. It’s actually a pretty decent Windows Mobile implementation - but you can’t expect anything too extreme when it’s designed for the masses. If you want something really hip and fashionable, you have to do it yourself.
So with the help of some people over at xda-developers.com I began work on my own ROM. This process consists of dumping the official ROM, stripping out the crap, optimizing it for better performance, adding in some applications, tweaking, re-tweaking, changing the look and feel, and on and on.
Over the past few weeks I’ve probably re-flashed the firmware onto my phone about 50 times. So if I missed your call, now you know why.
Here is my new ROM. I call it Blackwood because … well, I used black wood for most of the backgrounds. Pretty creative name, huh?
This is the new boot screen when you reset the phone or first turn it on. It used to be some kind of AT&T logo with their five bars thing above it.
Panel 1: This is the home screen. I skinned a big clock with a cool dark red font and made some cool buttons to scroll between different things like weather, media, quickdial, etc.
Panel 2: This just shows the red highlight on the popup notifications.
Panel 3: Shows the Start menu with some custom programs and shortcuts like newSMS. You can see the weather screen in the back.
Panel 3-4: This is my favorite feature - the subtle battery meter. It is basically a 3 pixel wide bar at the top of the screen that shrinks as the battery runs out. It is done in such a way that it doesn’t mess with the look of the phone but is there when you look for it.
Panel 1: shows “New SMS” shortcut that is mapped to the left soft key of the phone. Basically it used to take like 6 clicks to make a new text message, but now it only takes one.
Panel 2: Skinned phone dialer. I pretty much just changed the background and buttons.
Panel 3: Media browser, with the blackwood background.
Panel 4: Media player skin with a red wood background. I’m pretty proud of that one, actually.
Besides the look and feel I pretty much got rid of all the AT&T craperware (buy ringtones now!), made it run nice and fast, enabled some “locked-out” features that AT&T tries to turn off, and more.
So there you have it. Yes, I’m a big nerd and this is what I’ve been doing with my spare time for the last several weeks.
If you want to know more, or happen to have an AT&T Tilt, you can go here.
I just found out that AT&T (A-fee&fee?) is raising their text message pricing. When I first signed up for AT&T 6 or so years ago it cost 10 cents to send an SMS message, and it was free to receive them.
When AT&T switched to Cingular the price of sending a message dropped to 5 cents, but they started charging for incoming texts - also 5 cents. Assuming you send a message for every message you receive, this works out at about the same price as before.
AT&T came back online and phased out the CIngular brand name, and prices were again changed. This time to 15 cents each way.
More changes have taken place that I can’t quite remember. At one point text messages were 10 cents either way, and at another point they even included MMS (multimedia messages) at the same price as SMS.
As of March SMS messages on AT&T will cost 20 cents and MMS will cost 30 cents - both to send a receive.
So let’s do some math here, and figure out how much this simple transmission is actually costing us.
A standard SMS message contains up to 140 bytes (1120 bits) of data - this takes care of the 160 characters allowed in your text message. This might not make sense at first, until you realize that SMS uses 7 - not 8 - bit characters - leaving you with 128 possible character values instead of the normal 256. So 1120bits/7bits = 160 characters.
So our total message length is about a tenth of a kilobyte (.13671875 Kbytes). In terms that the iPod generation would understand - if you had an iPod with a tenth of a kilobyte you could fit 1/4000th of a song on it. I assume here and for the rest of this article that 1 song = 4 Megabytes.
If you divide 140 (the total number of bytes available to you) by 20 (the cost per message), you find that you are paying 1 cent for every 7 bytes of data. This leaves you with a cost of $1,497.97 for the 1024Kbytes contained in a single megabyte. iPod users: It would cost you $5,991.88 to transfer - not even to buy - a single song via SMS.
By comparison, I pay $50 a month for a soft bandwidth limit of 500 gigabytes through a local ISP. That comes out to 512,000 megabytes or 10,240 megabytes to the dollar. This allows me to transfer 2,560 songs for the same price as a Junior Bacon Cheeseburger off the value menu at Wendy’s: $1. I will use this my standard measurement for the rest of this article.
So far I can make the following statements concerning the costs of bandwidth:
Cost to transfer 2560 songs:
From my ISP: $1
Via SMS messaging: $15,339,212.80
But wait, there’s more!
When calculating SMS charges, most people don’t take into consideration that the message is really being paid for twice! If I send a message to another AT&T user, I am paying to send it AND they’re paying to receive it! This should probably be illegal, but that’s for another discussion.
So how much does an SMS message actually cost? Not 20 cents - but 40 cents! This doubles all of my numbers above.
Furthermore, my above figures estimate that people actually use all 160 characters available to them. Say people on average actually only used half of that (which is still being generous) - then their price of data has again doubled from the numbers I gave above!
Making adjustments for both of the above statements, we realize that our above number isn’t even close to correct! Corrected, the comparison looks more like this:
COSTS OF TRANSFERING 2,560 MP3s:
via my ISP: $1
via SMS: $61,356,851.20
Phew! THAT is premium data! It’s no wonder that SMS texting alone is a 100 Billion dollar a year industry!
How big is that? Take all of hollywood movie box office revenues worldwide. Add all of the global music industry revenues. And add all of videogaming revenues around the world. Even all those three together, we don’t reach 100 billion.
Let’s even go more premium - how much would it cost to hand deliver data?
The U.S. Postal service is currently charging 41 cents for this privilege (hmm.. only one cent more that AT&T charges to automatically handle an SMS message). So how much written data could we send in a letter?
Google says 250 is considered the standard words per page measurement, and a sheet of paper weighs about 4.5 grams. The U.S. postal service allows your letters to weigh up to 1 ounce before charging you more, which is just over 28 grams. So you could send 6 sheets of paper, minus 1 for the envelope. If you write on both sides that gives you 2500 words (10 pages x 250 words).
According to this page, the average english word is 5 characters long. Add in a space for every word and you have 6 characters per word or 1500 characters for page for a total of 15,000 characters.
Now we are not limited in any way in the types of characters we can use, but let’s assume we are using a 256 character (8 bit) set.
Our letter therefore gives us ~14Kbytes for 41 cents. To transfer an MP3 using this method, we would be looking at about $119.95. To transfer 2,560 MP3s, that comes out to only $307,072. We would also need to take into consideration the bulk rate, but for the sake of argument (and because I don’t feel like figuring it out), let’s leave it where it’s at.
The cost would drop dramatically if we compressed the data onto, say a DVD and our cost would be something more like $1.20.
Updating our chart from above:
COSTS OF TRANSFERING 2,560 MP3s:
TCP/IP: $1
TCP/SMS: $61,356,851.20 TCP/USPS: $307,072.00 (Bits written out on paper)
So getting a SMS delivered is bit for bit 200x more expensive than getting a message hand delivered to your doorstep anywhere in the United States.
What exactly justifies making SMS messages sixty one million times more expensive than ISP data and 200x more expensive than TCP/USPS? How come technology, communication, and infrastructure is getting cheaper while the costs of SMS messages are increasing exponentially? My theory: SMS messages are transfered over air made of solid gold.
edit: A few readers pointed out that from the title, this article sounds more like it’s about the carrier’s internal cost for transmitting SMS messages. For that, we turn to an informed slashdot poster:
I know the true cost of SMS messages!
I made a paper for the univeristy some years ago. The marginal cost of a SMS is 0.
They do have a little cost/opportunity. As a matter of fact SMS messages are sent on the control channel. Initially SMS were implemented in the GSM standard as a control system, just like the ICMP protocol of the IP stack. Then NOKIA though to implement a actual instant message function using SMS. The Contol channel is the channel that your mobile listens to in order to receive calls. So for receiving a SMS a control signal is sent. Since bandwidht is somehow limited on these channels it could happen that in a situation of massive usage of texting the control channel gets saturated and normal voice protocol initiation is disrupted. To prevent this carriers nowadays apply a kind of QoS delaying SMSs until there is no risk of congestion. So we can state that the marginal cost is 0 and the cost/opportunity is also 0
Another story is for the MMSs. Their cost/opportunity is even lower since they run almost enterely on GPRS thus using most bandwidht on normal data channels. Thus a MMS with pictures sounds and maybe video SHOULD cost less than a SMS.
So you wonder, why do I pay so much for a SMS or a MMS or even a Call: after the debts for the initial hardware infrastructure have been paid by the carrier you are still paying because of market segmentation (You won’t change the carrier on the fly) and a little monopoly (Almost impossible to start a new carrier from 0).
A little while back I decided it was time to get some accounting software to keep track of money coming in and going out for various projects that I am doing. I really only had one requirement: the software needed to figure out my taxes.
I looked at AccountEdge for Mac and QuickBooks.
In the end, I bought QuickBooks. It had the added benefit of allowing me to process credit cards right from the software. I thought this would be a good benefit to have in working with clients.
Since day one, I have regretted that decision. Not only does QuickBooks nickel and dime you for every last feature, but doing even simple tasks is endlessly complicated.
Quickbooks will indeed figure out your taxes, but only if you buy some stupid add-on subscription for “payroll.” Then, even when you’ve purchased that, it won’t fill out your tax forms for you unless you also purchase a more advanced package. The basic package only gives you the hard numbers which you then have to work with yourself.
Credit card processing only appears to work through their dumb gateway service, but they wouldn’t give me an account. So I am not able to use that feature even though that’s the only reason I paid for the “pro” package.
Don’t even get me started on how complicated it is. Every single time I try to do something, I end up having to troll the forums on their website for answers. Doing something like “Billing a Client” which seems like it should be pretty straightforward, usually consist of no less than 50 steps and navigation of dark, hidden, dust-covered sub-menus in some obscure corner of the software.
I’m constantly inundated with advertisements and alerts to upgrade or buy this or that to make the software do what it should just do out of the box. It was, after all, a few hundred dollars. What did I get with that amount of money? Nothing but invitations to buy actual functionality after I installed.
I really don’t understand how or why people use QuickBooks. I’d think you’d need a 4 year degree in QuickBooks just to operate it.
Note to Intuit (The maker’s of QuickBooks): Decide what you want to include in your software and include it. Charge people up front for it. I’d rather pay $400 for software that does what it says than $200 for software that does nothing and keeps asking me to buy crap.
Oh, and fire your interface designer/poorly trained monkey.
If you’re like me an you use FTP servers a lot, you’ve probably noticed a lack of decent FTP clients for Mac OS X.
For the longest time I used Cyberduck, probably the most popular FTP client around (and its free, too!) But as I used FTP more and more, Cyberduck’s annoyances kept getting in my way. For starters, transferring files is slow as all get out. If you are uploading a large group of files - say a Wordpress or Drupal installation, it would fail several times through. Every time it failed, it had to go back through each file to verify its size before it could continue where it left off.
Things got weirder with Leopard. Cyberduck suddenly did things like tell me every single transfer had failed - whether or not it actually had. It would upload all of a 5 megabyte file, keep uploading (???), then finally fail after it had uploaded 6 megabytes. Checking the file on the server would reveal the transfer was a success.
These annoyances (and a few others), lead me to seek out a new FTP client. I first turned Transmit, an FTP client by Panic. I was familiar with some of their other software and always thought they did a great job. However, Transmit left me disappointed. It was still slow like Cyberduck and beyond fixing the bugginess of Cyberduck, it didn’t offer anything new or revolutionary.
I kept search, eventually giving up and resigning to my fate of using Cyberduck - hoping the developers might someday fix it.
The name didn’t do much for me, but I decided to give it a try anyway. What did I have to lose? What I found was a breath of fresh air. A fast, stable FTP client with auto error-correction, multi-threading, and a simple interface. Everything I need!
I started using Yummy a month or two ago and haven’t looked back since.
The first thing I noticed was how fast it was. Cyberduck and Transmit would take forever to upload a Drupal installation to a server, but Yummy did it in record time. I noticed in the transfer window it was actually opening multiple connections to the server.
Awesome!
But how does it do with error handling? One of the best FTP clients for Windows is called “Bullet Proof FTP.” It’s called that because it is bullet proof - any transfer error that comes up it will ignore. It will just keep trying until the file is transfered. This makes sense - because if you’re trying to transfer a file you don’t want a bunch of error windows, you just want it to get transfered.
Yummy FTP features similar error recovery. It just works. The prefs window even lets you fine tune the error handling, but the defaults were fine for me.
It’ll try enough times to get around common transfer hiccups, but not too much in case there is actually a problem.
Another cool thing is the dock menu, which allows you to quickly connect to any of your bookmarked servers.
Yummy allows you to also create FTP droplets. These are icons that you can drop files onto and all your transfers will take place automatically, without any further intervention.
One thing that annoyed me (the only thing, really) about Yummy was that it automatically opened up to a “new connection” window where you could type in FTP details rather than the bookmarks window, which seems like the logical place you would want to be.
This was easily fixed in the preferences. You can toggle the behavior of both windows upon startup. I simply disabled the new connection window and enabled the bookmarks window.
The wording is a bit strange. They should probably both just say “Show xxx window at launch.” I don’t know why they worded the new connection one differently. It just made it a bit confusing at first.
Yummy is packed full of a bunch of other features I am discovering all the time. Batch and scheduled transfers, advanced syncing, color labels and organization options, and more. I was even able to hook it up to my favorite text editor Smultron for quick and easy editing of on-server files.
Yummy FTP costs $25, but for me the price is worth what you get. If you have several servers you connect to, run a few websites, or otherwise use FTP a lot then Yummy is a must. I highly recommend it.
If you use FTP servers once every six months, you could probably stand to use Cyberduck.
There is a full-featured 30 day trial available if you’d like to try it out.
