Why Text Messages Are Limited To 160 Characters 504
The LA Times has a story about Friedhelm Hillebrand, one of the communications researchers behind efforts to standardize various cell phone technologies. In particular, he worked out the 160 character limit for text messages.
"Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper. As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters. That became Hillebrand's magic number ... Looking for a data pipeline that would fit these micro messages, Hillebrand came up with the idea to harness a secondary radio channel that already existed on mobile networks. This smaller data lane had been used only to alert a cellphone about reception strength and to supply it with bits of information regarding incoming calls. ... Initially, Hillebrand's team could fit only 128 characters into that space, but that didn't seem like nearly enough. With a little tweaking and a decision to cut down the set of possible letters, numbers and symbols that the system could represent, they squeezed out room for another 32 characters.
I'll Be Damned (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:5, Funny)
Technically, it was the largest number that Hillebrand could count to in his mind before losing track.
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:5, Informative)
So the "real" cost of a SMS is 0.000000.
This is a broadly known fact.
Years ago, here in Chile anyway, SMS where free of charge.
Now is pure profit. (about 8ct/SMS at current exchange)
Re: (Score:3)
The cost is zero to the telcos, but the profit is gravy.
It is a complete rip-off scam to the consumer.
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>The cost is zero to the telcos, but the profit is gravy. It is a complete rip-off scam to the consumer.
I disagree. The retail cost is whatever the market will bear. This idea goes all the way back to John Smith, and is not necessarily tied to the actual cost of the good. You might call it a "ripoff" but it's a ripoff that customers *voluntarily* enter into. They could just as easily decide not to do texting (as I do).
The flip-side of this is that money collected from all these texters helps subsidize my (and your) voice calls. I pay just 18 cents a minute, which is a real bargain considering wired phone calls in 1990 used to be 25 cents a minute. Simple inflation says the price should have increased to 45 cents, but instead prices have dropped and with the added benefit of being wireless. Without texting the voice calls would have to be significantly higher in order to cover the maintenance/electricity costs.
Anyway it could be worse.
The cellphone company could be run by Congress (like Amtrak).
In which case you wouldn't have a choice;
instead they'd suck the money from your paycheck.
With today's private companies I can choose to buy or not buy, text or not text, make calls or not make calls. I control my own destiny and how much I want to spend (or not spend).
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Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. The retail cost is whatever the market will bear. This idea goes all the way back to John Smith, and is not necessarily tied to the actual cost of the good.
I think you mean Adam Smith, and I think you're misreading the GP. Cost != price. The retail price is whatever the market will bear, but the cost of providing SMS service is virtually zero.
You might call it a "ripoff" but it's a ripoff that customers *voluntarily* enter into. They could just as easily decide not to do texting (as I do).
It's awfully glib to say we shouldn't be upset about being ripped off just because we have a choice. In a free market, with healthy competition, the price of goods and services should fall to just above their actual cost. That obviously isn't happening with SMS: customers would like to pay less, but no one is offering SMS for less, even though it costs almost nothing to provide. Doesn't that suggest a market failure?
Anyway it could be worse.
The cellphone company could be run by Congress (like Amtrak).
In which case you wouldn't have a choice;
instead they'd suck the money from your paycheck.
Or perhaps it could be run like the US Postal Service, in which case it would provide world-class service at a far lower price than any of its competitors. The USPS will carry a physical envelope from my doorstep to someone else's doorstep, thousands of miles away, for less than the price of 3 text messages.
(I'm not saying we should nationalize cellular companies - just pointing out that services set up by the government aren't inherently inefficient as you seem to be implying.)
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:4, Informative)
Well let's see. You claim the cost per text is zero. Obviously that's not true since maintenance plus electricity for the towers costs money, but it's obviously quite cheap. So anyway..... my cellphone provider charges just 1 cent per text. That's about cheap as a plan can get, since you can't charge less than a penny (half-pennys were discontinued a long time ago).
That's impressive. Who's your cell phone provider and what sort of package do you need to get that deal? The carriers I know of charge 15 to 20 cents per message (although you can get a discount on the first N messages with a package).
That was hiliarious. The U.S.P.S. is losing money year-after-year and only survives because of taxes drawn from out of our paychecks (see my previous post).
No, that's completely false. If someone told you that, they were lying.
"The Postal Service is a self-sufficient agency. The cost of postal operations, including the costs to extend service to an additional 1.2 million new deliveries in 2008, must be financed by the revenue generated from the sale of postal products and services." (link [usps.com])
And when I have something important to ship, I definitely don't use the government company. Instead I go to one of the private companies because (1) they cost less (2) they don't lose stuff and (3) if they did it's insured for free (upto $100). Oh and (4) they are the only ones who offer overnight package service; the government does not.
And when you need to send a letter, return a warranty card, pay a bill... do you use FedEx or UPS? I sure hope not: it'd cost much, much more and probably be less reliable. Sending packages is one thing, but private companies simply cannot provide the same service as the USPS for regular mail.
I can't think of a single government company that is as efficiently-run as its commercial counterpart.
That's because you're deliberately ignoring the prime example.
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I have Verizon and pay $4/month for 400 txt messages...
That's $0.01/message.
Correction: that's $0.01 per message if you use exactly 400.
If you only use one, it's $4 per message.
And if you use more than 400, you pay an extra 20 cents for the 401st message (and each message after that).
Why is there no option to pay a reasonable per-message fee without having to commit to buy more messages than you actually use?
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The retail cost is whatever the market will bear. This idea goes all the way back to John Smith
Adam Smith?
Without texting the voice calls would have to be significantly higher in order to cover the maintenance/electricity costs.
Wouldn't the voice calls also cost whatever the market would bear, as you assert for text messages, and if not, why is this a special case?
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, SMS is like a "stowaway" of a signal your cell must receive from time to time.
So the "real" cost of a SMS is 0.000000.
This is a broadly known fact.
Just like the "real" cost of a phone call is also practically zero for the operator, as the extra electricity used for one call is basically nothing. So every call charged by minute is pure profit for the operator.
Which is (partly) why there are packages with a lot of free minutes and messages. At least in Finland, for around 50 eur / month you can even have unlimited audio and video calls, unlimited SMS and MMS messages and unlimited 3G data.
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I've written application software for telco/carrier back ends, that's been deployed at carriers on every continent.
My layer sat on top of the infrastructure layer for SMS, but here's my best recollection from the internal training I got years ago.
Just like the article said, SMS was carried over the control path for call setup/takedown.
That path had very low bandwidth compared to the data (voice data, not IP data) path for calls. It was a control path and didn't need much. It was a limited resource with de
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Are you kidding? They lose interest based on who it's from long before any reading of text messages is required.... except for mobile twitterers. Nobody can explain that.
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:5, Funny)
The few times I've tried messaging from my cell phone, my thumbs cramp after about 50 characters, so the "limitation" never affects me.
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:4, Funny)
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I guess you had something interesting to say after that comma,
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:5, Funny)
And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone us...
I totally lost interest past that.
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And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone user could read before completely losing interest.
I don't get your point. All I read was: "And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone u".
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't start me. I know any number of supposedly intelligent people who are apparently incapable of reading a simple email containing a series of questions or points.
They will respond to the first question, but anything after that is consigned to
I don't know whether it's my circle of acquaintances, but the worst offenders seem to be MBAs. (Maybe it really does mean Master of Bugger-All). Or maybe it's just the Simpsonisation of society that gives it the attention span of a flea.
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:5, Interesting)
This may be my number one pet peeve when it comes to professional communication. I have tried a number of ways of getting multiple questions to register, but nothing seems to be perfectly effective. The best tactic I've managed to come up with is including only the following in the body of an email:
1. A preamble, no longer than two sentences, that says something along the lines of "[Person's name here], I need your response to the following questions by [date]:". Using their name is key, even if no one else is on the To: or CC: line.
2. A *numbered* list of questions (not bulleted), each ending in a question mark.
The other thing I've started doing is keeping a running list called "waiting on" that serves the sole purpose of listing the responses and tasks I'm waiting on from other people, no matter how small. As a consultant, I've found that "due diligence" means "one reminder email at least every other work day" when it comes to getting questions answered. Otherwise, getting chewed out for not adequately following up is a very real possibility. I've been asked for a paper trail before, and I always get a laugh of approval when I spool out the reams of email I've sent trying to get the simplest questions answered.
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you tried picking up the phone. You can always send your e-mail (but with the answers) as a paper trail of your conversation.
It provides two benefits:
1) Developing relationships. It's amazing how far a few seconds of idle chat can go to put a human side to your interactions with the people you need things from. This is really important with gatekeepers.
2) Forces you to be concise: If you have 30 seconds to ask for something - you'll be forced to get to the point more quickly.
If you don't get them, don't leave a vm. Just send your e-mail and call them later.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
1) Developing relationships. It's amazing how far a few seconds of idle chat can go to put a human side to your interactions with the people you need things from.
It's also amazing how annoying your idle chatter can be to a busy person who is trying to do things for you. Email is asynchronous, so the busy person can attend to it when they have time. A phone call is always an interruption.
2) Forces you to be concise: If you have 30 seconds to ask for something - you'll be forced to get to the point more qui
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:4, Funny)
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Our last President had an MBA from Harvard. Just what are you trying to say?
His dad pulled some serious strings?
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(I'll probably attract flames for that quoted word, so let's just say that's my prejudice and leave it at that.)
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Is that 1968s from North facing rooms or South? I tend to find the latter are a little less full bodied, though the former sometimes have a slihtly musty nose to them, almost as if they're corked.
no, its because 160 (Score:5, Funny)
is the bastard offspring of the union of the hexdecimal and the decimal, literally 16*10
all of us techies straddle these two worlds. 160 is our numerology of frustration, the techie 666
Re:no, its because 160 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:no, its because 160 (Score:5, Informative)
80 characters (bytes) just happened to be how many punched you can normally fit on a standard punch card.
BINGO! (Score:5, Informative)
And a full-screen terminal (3270, etc.) is really just 25 punch cards. You press "Enter" and they get submitted. Your batch processes and the system returns you 25 punch cards which your smart 3270 punch card reader/editor displays for you.
Punch cards are based on the civil-war-era dollar bill because there were already machine to count and stack dollar bills.
Punch cards were IBM's most profitable product ever until the introduction of the IBM PC.
Re:BINGO! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:BINGO! (Score:4, Informative)
The parent is mostly correct regarding the Civil War and the wikipedia entry is lacking. I can't speak for the parent, but I am aware of this from a portion of James Burke's Day the Universe Changed series.
The punch card reading technology came from looms, sure - unless you count music boxes. Looms used continuous punched paper first - the music box again.
The punch card was used in 1880 US Census - that statistical application that you talk about - not so much because of the machinery to handle it - it was because of its size, and that was by design.
There were a glut of older cash drawers that could used for keeping the stacks neat and/or in sorted piles.
So, you've got the computing machinery and techniques in place - do you use a strip or a card? When using a card, do you contract to build new carrying boxes or do you re-purpose the vastly available and nearly-useless-therefore-cheap surplus cash drawers? Note the supporting statement from your own wiki reference:
The Columbia site says Hollerith took advantage of available boxes designed to transport paper currency.
I not sure about your analysis of why IBM grabbed the market over Univac. I do recall that in the old days, there was IBM and then there was BUNCH - Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell.
I think if you look back to 1929 and thereafter (read: the rebuilding of American business after the Great Crash), IBM was the key producer of cards and card-related technologies. So the real reason that IBM computers were compatible with the cards that corporations had was more likely that they were IBM cards in the first place.
IBM's history stretches continuously back to the 19th century, and its name means International Business Machines. Univac came from Remington Rand in 1950 - a large industrialist that made, among other things, typewriters, as I recall. So from the Great Crash to 1950, you have nothing from Univac to buy - but you do have IBM. Now computers come along, and the one company that survived the crash and is helping your business get Really Organized is selling you a new type of Business Machine - supply compatible with some of their old. Or - you could buy a Univac.
I could be wrong - I don't think I am, though, for what that's worth.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, cool, I can see that. At the same time, I honestly wonder if it worked that well or if it was just part of IBM's sale's pitch.
In any case, I think it's pretty safe to say and bet that any of the BUNCH machines were better than the IBM - technically. But just like the Windows user's adherence to that OS because he has less change to cope with (insofar as his belief system supports) - if you did change, you were happier.
Can't fight marketing. You don't have to have the #1 product. Having the #2 produc
Re:BINGO! (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder what type of DRM you can put on a punch card
You could print shadowed boxes that look like punched holes, that way if someone puts them on a photocopier or in a fax machine it'll look like the holes are there, but a real reader wouldn't see them.
You could put transparent tape over a few of the holes. The common cheap, at-home card readers which read cards optically to save a few bucks will not notice the transparent window. But the Big Iron IBM punch card readers that use real steel fingers to read the holes will simply ignore the taped-over holes.
Along the same vein, you could put red colored tape over the holes, and build the Genuine IBM readers with blue laser readers instead of red. They'll be transparent to the at-home punch-card copy machines that use cheap red lasers, but opaque to the blue frequencies.
Or you could punch some extra or oversized holes in some non-standard locations, like the old half-tracks on the floppy disks. Only official IBM punch machines would be able to accurately copy them.
I got it! Embed a smart chip in the corner of each JCL card, with some cryptographic verification or signature algorithm. As each punch card travels through the system, electrical contacts would verify the authenticity of the card. 4096-bit RSA on the chip ought to do the trick nicely.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Same as ever -- put the card in a cheap plastic sleeve, then make the user promise not to open it.
Re:no, its because 160 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:no, its because 160 (Score:5, Informative)
is the bastard offspring of the union of the hexdecimal and the decimal, literally 0xF*10
fixed that for you
Are you joking?
0x10*10...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why bother to sub a 1 for the I if you're just going to go nuts with an L at the end?!
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The number of characters that can be printed across CowboyNeal's buttocks. He has a very long yet narrow ass that contains a tattoo of every sig in slashdot.
Why text messages instead of email? (Score:5, Insightful)
The real question should be "Why are we still using ancient text messages instead of regular email?" All of my friends in Japan regularly do full-on email on their phones, and only have a vague-if-any notion of what a regular "text message" is elsewhere. 160-character limit? That is *so* 1990s.
Re:Why text messages instead of email? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why text messages instead of email? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why text messages instead of email? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the packet data plans are insanely overpriced!
In the usa it's all about raping the consumer.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Because phone Internet access is incredibly expensive compared to text messages. Japan isn't a good example, they love any expensive gimmick.
Re:Why text messages instead of email? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why text messages instead of email? (Score:5, Insightful)
If 160 latin characters can be compressed into about 128 bytes, how many hanzi can fit? Maybe forty?
Probably more like 64; two bytes is usually enough to represent just about anything. A clever encoding scheme might squeeze as many as 80 in. OTOH, each of those characters carries more information than a single character of English text. Not sure about Japanese, but most common Chinese words [pandagator.info] are only two characters long, so being able to include fewer characters shouldn't be a real issue.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is reminding me of Shannon Entropy [wikipedia.org]. I'm guessing human thought contains a similar amount of bits whether it's expressed in Chinese (high bits/character) or French (low bits per character).
Re:Why text messages instead of email? (Score:5, Interesting)
128, at least, assuming UTF8. And the Japanese can say things a lot more compactly than we can:
èããY - I woke up.
åå¾OEãé£Yãã¾ã--ãY - I ate in the afternoon.
éf½éYã®åé"ãé話ã'ã--ã¾ã(TM) - I am talking on the telephone with my friend in Tokyo.
(Of course, the above won't come through correctly on Slashdot, but they are about half the characters of the English phrases.)
Re:Why text messages instead of email? (Score:5, Interesting)
I could never figure out why the main Slashdot site garbles all 2-byte character sets, since clearly the Slashcode itself can [slashdot.jp] handle it.
Re:Why text messages instead of email? (Score:4, Insightful)
I woke up. -> I woke.
I ate in the afternoon. -> I lunched.
I am talking on the telephone with my friend in Tokyo. -> I'm phoning my Tokyo pal.
Re: (Score:3)
I ate in the afternoon. -> I lunched.
Verbing weirds language.
Re:Why text messages instead of email? (Score:4, Informative)
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I've seen stylus's and "stroke" entry. (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know what's actually more popular, but I have seen two ways for Chinese input into phones. There are probably more, I'm by no means an expert.
1. Handwriting recognition on a touchscreen, like a PDA. This, I saw a few years ago, I imagine it's a higher-end option.
2. Recognition based on strokes. It's like predictive text. There are only so many directions to draw the a stroke that combines to make the glyph. So you just pick them off the phone, I guess there's a standard pattern, like starting fr
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"Why are we still using ancient text messages instead of regular email?"
I can't speak for everybody, but I use a Tracfone. Talking costs $.10 a minute, but text messages only cost me $.03 per message. I pay $6 per month for my phone (it's mostly for emergencies), and communicating by text message helps to spread out the amount of use I can get each month. One thing that's even better is the fact that my wife or I can text each other from our e-mail. It's easier if I'm at the store and my wife texts me to pick up eggs, milk, what-have-you, so I'll only use $.03 to get the same
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Thats because the majority of Internet Providers restrict their users from sending email from relaying off network to their network. These same providers refuse to enable authenticated SMTP to fix the problem of open relays.
Luckily my cell phone provider, Rogers, in Canada has a mobile SMTP server accessable from the cellular network only specifically for the purpose of relaying SMTP from mail accounts configured on smart phones.
Re:Why text messages instead of email? (Score:5, Interesting)
It occured to me shortly after, that I don't have internet on my cell phone either. A sad truth.
Interestingly, quite a few companies all have a vested interest in keeping society from progress. I mean, just a few articles back, we had an example of the newspaper industry just not getting it. My gut feeling? Wouldn't it make sense, instead of a billion different newsbook-readers, each for it's own brand of newspaper, just let me get my news on the cell phone?
And suddenly I see the problem- we don't have internet on our phones because NOBODY wants us to have the access that snuck up on US companies.
Corporations wildly mis-underestimated how the internet would take off. Instead of investing in it then, or learning from their mistakes, they're not investing in it now. So we still have companies fighting the internet. Even the internet companies are fighting us having internet.
Too late though, cat's out of the bag, and once you've seen it, you can never go back. I will never settle for a dumbed-down version of the internet, and going back to buying CDs (I buy mp3s) and purchasing cable (I watch hulu, and rent netflix).
Once we ALL have email on our internet enabled phones, we won't be able to be charged for each txt message. The internet is a pipeline, we can use email, IM, twitter, or whatever we please to communicate. This will be the undoing of the txt addons in the same way internet TV has/will ruin subscription cable.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Corporations wildly mis-underestimated how the internet would take off.
Who are you? Dubya?. [dubyaspeak.com]
Well, there's always the test [bbc.co.uk]
SMS vs email (Score:5, Interesting)
An exercise in cartel economics: compare the costs of SMS traffic vs. email traffic and explain the differences. :-)
Re:SMS vs email (Score:5, Informative)
Differences:
- SMS is available: it's built-in, e-mail is not present on every phone and relies on a third-party service provider plus settings
- SMS is faster: because there is no GPRS/TCP/IP/SMTP/IMAP/POP connection and transfer overhead
- SMS is clean: no risk of having to retrieve large attachements, hardly any spam due to sender costs
- SMS is cheaper: most plans offer a sufficient amount of free messages a month for most users, e-mail requires an additional GPRS data plan
YMMV but SMS is not as bad as some people claim.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
SMS is available: it's built-in, e-mail is not present on every phone and relies on a third-party service provider plus settings
Translation: phone providers suck for not broadly offering decent services.
SMS is faster: because there is no GPRS/TCP/IP/SMTP/IMAP/POP connection and transfer overhead
And a Prius is faster than a Ferrari because it doesn't have those big, heavy brakes.
SMS is clean: no risk of having to retrieve large attachements, hardly any spam due to sender costs
Translation: it's not a bug, it's a feature!
SMS is cheaper
ROTFLMAOWTFBBQ!1!
Assuming you're serious, data plans here start at $30/month for browsing + messaging + whatever else you can send over a socket. Unlimited texting is $20, or you can pay $0.25 as you go. Send 3 text messages a day and it's cheaper just to buy the best plan.
Re:SMS vs email (Score:5, Informative)
Here's what's ridiculous. I have a Blackberry, and do not have an SMS plan with my carrier, thus each text costs me 25 cents to send. Receiving SMS is free and unlimited. I have an unlimited data plan for Blackberry, so I simply send emails using the carrier email SMS gateways for "free". The only downside is that the recipient cannot directly reply to my message. Here's the stupid part. The amount of bandwidth, processing, and inter-service gateways my emails have to pass through must require at least 100 times the resources of sending an actual SMS. The final kicker is that even if I keep my actual message under 160 chars, they are usually broken up into more than one SMS message because of the header attached by the SMS gateway that contains my email address, etc.
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Well.... I haven't seen a 160 character limit in Europe for years because *every* handset automatically splits/reassembles arbitrary length messages. And the cost hasn't been a factor as I haven't seen a call-plan that charges for text messages in years either...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Two words in response: Watermelon rutabaga.
My response is only slightly more inscrutable than yours. Care to explain how one or two packets being worth more than thousands of packets can be explained by the fact that all the data has to be carried by towers? Text messagers should be encouraged. You just ratchet up the base rate, and give away text messaging. That way you save money when people text, and they thank you for it. Then they do more texting, and you can use less-performant towers because you're c
Standards that won't go away (Score:2)
Hmm, reminds me of the joke about why the standard railway gauge is 4'8.5" -- going back to the width of ancient roman roads. There's also the (urban legend?) that legal size paper (In the US) is 8.5"x14" because that's the largest sheet that could fit into a pony express bag without folding.
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The ruts in Roman roads are 4'whatever wide because that's how wide the cart wheels were spaced.
Cart wheels were spaced that wide because that's what fits around two horses.
The first railways used horses to pull the loads.
The width of a horse hasn't changed since Roman times, so the width is the same.
Re:Standards that won't go away (Score:4, Informative)
No need for more (Score:4, Funny)
bc whn u txt u typ lik ths so ther isnt any ned fr mor thn 160 chars. I'm a teen, I know best.
biocompression (Score:2, Funny)
My 17 yr old (mostly stupid) step-daughter is already using what looks like huffman coding in her text messages... why doesn't some genius study that.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Step-parent of the year. (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I find the honesty refreshing.
The ones I have a low opinion of are the parents that insist "My child is really smart and beautiful! It's the school/teacher/environment to blame for my child's inability to multiply single-digit numbers without a calculator!"
Mayhaps if more parents took a realistic view of their crotch-fruit, we wouldn't have the self-absorbed, narcissistic bozos who feel entitled to do whatever they want.
...and before anyone asks, yes, I *am* a parent.
Re:Step-parent of the year. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well it's easier for the GP since it is some other guys crotch-fruit, not his.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Step-parent of the year. (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, excusing bad behavior as "honesty" is something I'm rather tired of.
Which makes her less stupid how?
I have friends that're dumb, and are the first to tell you "Ah ain't up on all that-thar book-larnin'..." I don't think any less of them for it, and they're some solid friends. Y'know, the kind you could trust at your back when the going gets nasty. Another fave anecdotal moment:
My dad retired to a rural area. A young couple {friends of the family} was getting married, and dad decided to give 'em a book on managing your budget. However, the young wife, barely 18, refused the gift. Dad asked why, and she explained that her husband, Reed wouldn't use it. Her exact words:
"Y'see, Reed don't read."
-blink-
Note, that wasn't "Reed can't read", or "Reed doesn't read much"... Now, you can call me ill-mannered for saying that Reed is probably not the brightest bulb in the marquee, but I'm telling you, some people are just plain dumb, whether it's politically correct to say so or not. That's the problem with the whole PC movement; you can polish a turd all you want, but it's still a turd. BTW, I'm not moderately hearing-impaired, I'm mostly deaf... and have no problems saying so.
Bad article (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting 160 chars in 128 bits. (Score:5, Informative)
For those that were wondering how they got 160 characters into 128 bytes (6.4 bits/char), they didn't. The increased the length of the frame to 140 bytes, which is is 160 characters using a 7 bits/char. Curiosity forced me to look this up [wikipedia.org], expecting to find some snazzy compacting algorithm for a non power-of-two alphabet.
Re:Getting 160 chars in 128 bits. (Score:5, Informative)
There are some straightforward compaction algorithms for non power-of-two sizes. The simplest approach is to take n symbols in your alphabet, treat it as an n-digit number base b (the number of different symbols), and convert that to base two. You'll use at most ceiling(n * log2(b)) bits.
You can be more sophisticated by using a compression algorithm of some sort (Huffman with a standardized dictionary, for a simple example). Anything that does better than the above n * log2(b) will produce a variable length output, though, which means that while you could usually fit more than 160 characters into 140 bytes, sometimes the limit would be lower (since rare characters take more bits to encode).
text messages longer than160 characters (Score:4, Interesting)
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Why were CD's 650MB/72 Minutes? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because that was the amount of space required to fit Beethoven's 9th Symphony on one side of a disc. And the researcher apparently loved that Symphony and hated having to switch to different sides of a tape or record.
It's always interesting to the reasons why. Sometimes there is a purely logical reason, and other times, it's just because.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Snopes says undetermined on that one... http://www.snopes.com/music/media/cdlength.asp [snopes.com]
Silly me. (Score:4, Informative)
Here I was, in my dumb ignorance caused by blind experience on the field, thinking that the limit was actually caused by the magic 255 number less protocol overhead (result: 140) plus 7-bit encoding compression (result: 160).
In 2009 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In 2009 (Score:5, Funny)
How they got more characters. (Score:4, Informative)
If anyone is interested - the way they got more characters available was by cutting down characters to 7bits instead of the normal 8, thus limiting the possible characters to 128.
1120bits/7bits = 160 characters.
At 3600 baud, even (Score:3, Informative)
In AMPS, the cell phone technology being described, there's a 3600 baud control channel shared between all the phones in a cell. Text messages had to be crammed into that. Voice was analog FM, with the control channel telling the handsets which voice channel to use.
That's why SMS is so data-limited. The data channel was tiny.
Makkonen vs. Hillebrandt (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Lame Typing (Score:4, Informative)
Which is why iPhone texts are ANNOYING (Score:4, Informative)
Mind you, my iPhone has no 160 character limit, I'm sure other smart phones just piece together the rapid recieving of messages in to one while the "dumb" phones display them in 160 character chunks.
I absolutely hate when my iPhone friends text me. I end up getting this stream of text messages that are received backwards and cause a lot of hassle just to understand the message on my cell phone.
It would be nice if the iPhone limited texts to 160 characters for those of us without the jesus phone (or a smart phone that supports it).
Oh wait... that's probably why Jobs did that :)
Re:Which is why iPhone texts are ANNOYING (Score:4, Insightful)
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Are people willing to freely pay that nickel? Do they choose to pay that nickel of their own free will?
Yes.
So why the snark?
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If only we had a crystal ball and could see how a technology might be preferred 2 - 10 years from now!
Had Twitter been anticipated at the conception of mobile communications, cell phones would have been designed with dials.