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  • FryUp: Mean Greenie

    — Mean Greenie
    — Format War Flare Up
    — The Great SMS Rip-Off
    Mean Greenie
    What's badly spelt, ill-informed and hawked in various electorates around our nation? Sue Kedgley's statement "intrusive telecommunications equipment" being installed on "power poles" of course.
    I never had Kedgley down as a die-hard NIMBY, but she really seems to be one. Concerned about the aesthetic effects of telco equipment on power poles, Kedgley doesn't stop there. Not content with the NIMBY angle, Kedgley resorts to scare tactics about the "potentially significant health risks" of "untested technologies". Please. There's a huge amount of research into electro-magnetic radiation, most of it readily available to the public. What's wrong with reading at least some of this?
    The money shot in Kedgley's missive to voters isn't the NIMBY-ism or concern about their health. No, it seems to be about money: “There is no obligation under the proposed national standard for the companies to pay rentals for the usage of power poles, which in many cases are owned by state-owned enterprises." Right, so as long as the telcos stump up, it's OK to stick the gear up the power poles? Where should they send the Czech then?
    Perhaps a suggestion on how else to do deploy said telco equipment would've been in order, especially from the allegedly tech-savvy greenies. How very disappointing.
    — Greens seek to stop telco rollout on power poles
    Format War Flare Up
    No, not the HD stuff. This is the Open Office eXtended Mark-up Language or OOXML versus the present International Standards Organisation document format, Open Document Format or ODF.
    Microsoft lost the vote at ISO last year, but the Redmondians ain't giving up. A second vote is coming up in March, and opponents are girdling their loins in preparation. I'd be surprised if the vote swung in Microsoft's favour this time, but less so if the flames that poured in last time when I wrote about the OOXML voting controversy don't arrive after this Fry Up goes out.
    — Format war erupts again as international vote nears
    — ISO votes to reject Microsoft's OOXML as standard
    — GNOME Foundation defends OOXML involvement
    The Great SMS Rip-Off
    It is heartening to see that Vodafone's phone charges are going down when the cost of just about everything else is going up. While some may say that the publicity around this is just a sop to the Commerce Commission, to stave off regulation, you would have to be churlish to not to give Vodafone a nod for reducing costs instead of jacking them up, being a duopoly operator together with Telecom.
    That said, you have to wonder why it's taken so long for charges to drop and also, how much less they'd be if we had more competition in the mobile phone market.
    Those are imponderables, but I am as always struck by how expensive the Short Messaging Service or SMS text messages are. FryUp has already looked at how expensive per byte SMS is, but it's nice to see others have struck on the same thought.
    GThing's calculations on how much it would cost to send data across SMS are mind-boggling in their own right, but the quote in the post is even more interesting: namely, it doesn't actually cost mobile providers anything to transmit SMS texts. Instead of 10, 20, 30 or 50 cents, mobile providers could still make a massive profit with prices a tenth of the current ones.
    As it is, however, SMS is a gold mine for providers so without effective regulation that introduces competition, prices ain't gonna move. ALso, it does make you wonder how high the profit margins are for voice ...
    — GThing: The True Cost of SMS Messages
    XKCD

  • FryUp: Google Docs rox

    Google Docs rox
    Who put the bullet in The Bulletin?
    There's no regulation like no-regulation

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