My friends and I were recently chatting about cellular service providers. AT&T seems like it's going to be in control of the next generation of iPhone and we were comparing their plans. The scary thing we find is the nasty tendency to nickel and dime you for all kinds of services that, when you boil them down, are nothing but bits over a wire.

We all know the price of bits people. In the days of the internet, they're extremely cheap. In fact, as Slashdot recently posted, SMS messages cost 4x more than data transferred from the Hubble Space telescope! The only thing I can think of that would be analogous as far as worthless expense goes, is bottled water consumption in America.

Cellular providers are engaged in some pretty nasty anti-competitive business. Yes, we have a couple wins under our belt, (you can at least take your phone number with you when you change providers) but generally, you're still locked into using a provider for a couple years. As a result, when a competitive advantage between providers shifts around it does so at glacial speed.

Here's what I want... Cellular neutrality. I want you to provide me with 2 pipes. One for voice communications, one for data communications. Other than that, you leave me the hell alone. I'll send whatever I want over those two pipes, and you will charge me a fair rate for it.

If a company were to do that, and still give me a device to use on that network like the iPhone, I'd pay a premium.

Here is a nice little piece about when and why to distrust expert opinion.

His example about pain reminds me of a great article I found and used in my Media English class (to the befuddlement of student and colleague alike, I'm afraid). Do you remember being taught that the reason your muscles hurt after strenuous exercise was that there was a buildup of lactic acid? Well, it's totally unscientific bullshit.

As I've climbed higher (and really, I'm not that high) on the academic ladder, I've realized something: Experts are just people. They work hard, but they can make mistakes, and they actually have more important things to do than be right. They usually have to eat, and admitting everything you've said for your entire career is bunk can be very hard to do.

This is one of the longer posts I've made regarding Linux's viability as a Windows replacement. I've edited it a bit from the original for things that have changed since then:

Linux is a toy. A powerful toy. An-almost-infinitely-customizable toy. But a toy nonetheless. I say this because the people who use it do so because they enjoy fiddling around with config files. Even if they actually like using it--and of course they do--using it requires one to fiddle with config files in ways that one would only know how to do if he enjoyed learning about such things. I'm sorry, but that is a tiny subset of the computer-using public. Most people don't want to fiddle with things to get them to work or use weird, off-brand knockoff software developed by groups of people who do it as a hobby. It is a toy.

Invariably, this comment upsets a lot of people and there's the obligatory "It runs the internet!" and "dont be rediculous i use it for my business!" (sic) replies. But none of that means it's not a toy. OpenOffice or Crossover Office do not a real computer--as most people actually use them--make. Most businesses do more than type and make spreadsheets.

Here is a quick list of software my parents' company, for whom I do IT from time to time, uses. These are industry-standard applications:

PowerClaim [powerclaim.com]

Xactimate [exactimate.com]

Internet Explorer (for dealing with the head office)

Without these, their business does not run.

Another repost. I have intimated on this site before my thoughts on Linux, and have always wanted to write a monster post that details them more thoroughly, but the time doesn't come. Here is a slightly-edited-for-readability post from elsewhere on non-computer-savvy people's ability to set up and use Ubuntu Linux:

I build my own PCs. I think that's falling-off-a-log easy. But try to get a noob friend of yours into it. No really, try. They'll come up with the goofiest, craziest, hardest questions you've ever heard. I understand on a conceptual, top-down level what is going on when I'm putting a system together and getting drivers, etc. I've been doing it long enough that when I build a new one, it's a simple matter of just learning the changes since last time I did it. Usually I already know about them because I'm a geek and keep up on such things for fun. But, for example, the change from 20-pin to 24-pin ATX connectors caught me completely by surprise and required another trip to the store to get an adapter. It still happens. I know to look up beep codes. I know what to do if it doesn't start up. When all is said and done, I forget these little problems because they are not memorable--they are not salient events because I calmly and quickly solved them. This is not the case to a person who doesn't have that comparatively vast storehouse of latent knowledge.

For someone just starting out, though, that "24-pin ATX connector" confusion happens with every single step of the process. What seems simple to us only seems that way because we've got a massive backlog of understanding that we just take for granted. We only need to make adjustments to it.

Lately I have been bemoaning the fact that I don't have time to blog as much as I'd like. But then I realized that I actually write a lot, but they are on forums, and are usually only seen on that site by a few people. I am toying with the idea of reposting the longer ones here. Here is the first, which was in response to someone complaining about the hours they worked at their software dev job. Begin:

I'm an academic, and the single biggest reason is that I'm a workaholic and if the place didn't almost shut down for 4 months of the year, I'd work myself to an early grave. As it is now, though, I work my ass off 8 months of the year, and 4 months of the year I'm blessed and cursed to be able to get almost nothing done (well, nothing that requires the organization). It's been very good for my health and mental well-being, if not necessarily for my wallet.

Over the last summer break, I spent about a week staying with my friends who work at a major IT company as developers. I saw their lives, and was envious. They make a lot more money, they come home earlier, and it is virtually impossible for them to work at home, so they don't. "Damn," I thought, "I really did pick the wrong career." But then I noticed something: I was staying at their house in a different country from where I live for a week, and that was just one week out of about 7 or 8 in a row that I didn't have to report to work. I was still getting some things done on the laptop, but that had much more to do with my workaholic nature than necessity. "Damn," I thought, "maybe I picked the right career after all."

The point I'm trying to make is that you are ultimately in control of your time. You are. Really. It's your time. Your life. If you feel that you are losing it to a company, and the money isn't worth it, you need to change gears. It's not their fault. It's your fault for doing it.

Most people don't care that the iPhone is closed. They don't even know what the difference between open and closed is. And they most certainly don't care.

The iPhone is a phone. It was designed to address problems with phones. The problems it tried to address mostly had to do with the fact that cellphones are almost unusable. For example, I have no idea how to use most of the features on mine, and I'm a geek. It doesn't bother me.

Apple is not interested in hackers. No one is. There are only four of them in the world, but they write in blogs all day, so it seems like there are many more. The main people people who read the blogs are the other three hackers. These four people say the same things to each other for months straight, while companies like Apple and Microsoft rake in billions by serving the other 6.5billion people on the planet.

All the Apple bashing for closing down a piece of hardware that they designed to make money for them misses the point; they don't care about you. Not any more than they have to to get your money, anyway. The way Apple has found to get your money is by limiting options on their products to just what most people want to do. This is how they deliver ease-of-use and stability. Hackers/makers/copyfighters/freetards get angry at the company instead of at themselves for wanting the toys anyway.

But nobody cares what the hackers think. There are only four of them in the whole entire world. They are an insignificant minority.

Apple finally cracked down on iphone hackers. So today's the day I feel justified in not buying one yet. They've released a fantastically powerful tool and hobbled it to be nothing more than a shiny toy.

As consumers we need to demand access to the software of systems we buy. Software being in the hands of everyone to modify is what gives it great power.

Hackers STARTED Apple. The kind of innovation going on with the iPhone is precisely the kind that created the pc revolution in the first place! People weren't content to have a slice of time on a massive mainframe, they wanted their own computing power in their own hands. They wanted to run whatever code they wanted on computers without asking permission. Without that hacking, the internet as we know it wouldn't exist.

Once again, financial forces are causing people to make stupid choices. Good luck with that Apple. In order to preserve a relationship with a cellular provider that bought into a stupid deal, you've pissed off every iPhone owner with an ear to tech-news. (that's.. most of them)

If someone were to hand me such a system that was as open as my PC, I'd pay through the ass for it.

I don't know how many times lately I've been googling for info and found an article that describes what I need for some obscure CSS or javascript trick, or even server side programming language only to find that it's completely obsolete.

I dig through the whole thing then realize that it was obviously written in 1997 and is completely irrelevant. Put a date on your articles people! Tech is constantly in flux and your tips and tricks rot in obsolescence... I'm tired of googling articles about php 3, or javascript for Netscape navigator 4!

Math.

Math.

Here's the thing about math: People don't like it. I, for one, hated it in school. I remember math classes thusly:

1) Teacher writes some problems on the board and shows how to solve them.

2) Teacher gives an assignment of scores of similar problems, to be due the next day.

3) Teacher takes nap on desk while students start working on the assignment silently.

Is it any wonder that people don't like math or get "math anxiety" when it is "taught" like this? What was the point of that? Why was my youth squandered doing long division and endless algebra? We all knew that we'd never find a use for such skills, and for that knowledge, it seems, we were punished with hours of hunching over lined loose-leaf, scribbling with our pencils, watching the evening tick away into bed time. But that's the only way you learn, right? Right?

I know most of my readers (all 2 of you) will probably stare blankly at me over this topic, (I guess this is mostly for the search engines) but IE continues to piss me off, and I need to tell SOMEONE.

Today's problem is IE7's math, and their implementation of kerning. (having wiki'd that, I see I may be talking about tracking, but who cares.)

In css, you use a parameter called letter-spacing to change kerning on things. As with all other css, you can specify the units you want to use as pixels, points, percentages, or em. (there are others.)

An em is essentially the width of a standard 'M' character in your font of choice. For IE's mathematical purposes, it's a percentage of the font size you specified elsewhere.

So if I have a font-size: 12px; for my entire document. I can make my headers: font-size: 1.5em; and they will be displayed 150% of 12px. (18px)

So.. an example.

if you're using any recent browser, that should look all spready...

Now.. I rarely need massive letter spacing like that... (though it does come up.) More often than not, I get handed a nice layout from a pro graphic designer that has text in it that is crammed together, ever so slightly, but it really does change the look of certain things.

in IE.. the best you can do for 'ever so slightly' is this:

that's not so bad in trebuchet or whatever the hell i'm using here, but in an italic serif font, it looks pretty tight. Now, IE can take any unit ABOVE .05.. (or 5%).. which.. in negative kerning terms.. isn't too useful.. but I sleep well at night knowing that I can always choose to do something like: