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Friday, January 09, 2009 (Whoppers, ESPN, SMS)

Whopper Sacrifice

Drop 10 of your Facebook friends for a free Whopper. Fantastic!
ESPN.com redesign

Seeing a section for “My Headlines” on the redesigned ESPN.com reminds me of just how totally useless website personalization is. Imagine, instead of RSS, visiting a hundred sites to see what’s new in each of your “My Headlines” box. Hah!
What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting

“A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. In the wired portion of its journey, a file of such infinitesimal size is inconsequential.”

“Perhaps the costs for the wireless portion at either end are high — spectrum is finite, after all, and carriers pay dearly for the rights to use it. But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.”

“That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.”

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