IT

I switched my long-distance telephone provider to SBC earlier this week. On general principle, I would rather avoid funding incumbent monopolies, but their $49/month unlimited local and domestic long-distance package is very attractive, and the competing alternatives like MCI’s The Neighborhood are not available in San Francisco yet.

The main factor leading to flat-rate plans is a series of FCC regulations named CALLS that entered in effect in July 2000. Prior to these rules, the local phone companies would skim 6 cents per minute in “access charges” from the long-distance company, which would have no recourse but to pass the cost on to consumers. This is why long distance prices were on a plateau of 10 cents per minute for such a long time.

The previous regulations entrenched the concept of cost per minute in the economic structure of telephony, even though it is almost entirely a fixed cost activity. Joe Nacchio, former CEO of Qwest, famously boasted that “Long Distance is still the most profitable business in America, next to importing illegal cocaine”. CALLS slashed these access charges, removing the main impediment to flat-rate pricing.

Former AT&T researcher Andrew Odlyzko has made a compelling argument for flat-rate pricing, noting that most people prefer it to metered plans, even if they pay more for it, flying in the face of most economists’ conventional wisdom (that says more about how disconnected from reality economists are than anything else).

I have managed a large telecoms billing system project, and an interesting point, seldom made, is that billing for metered services is in itself very expensive. Collecting all the traffic information, storing it, rating it, calculating the bills, invoicing, accounts receivables, dunning and handling customer complaints involves huge IT budgets and systems so complex that over 70% of new billing systems projects fail. For example, France Telecom spent almost half a billion dollars on its would-be next-generation billing system, Fregate, before pulling the plug. Most Baby Bells are still running CRIS, a creaking sixties-seventies mainframe-based billing system they inherited from Ma Bell.

There is clearly a point at which services become too cheap to meter, or more precisely, metering becomes too expensive. We may have reached that point already for voice, even if the dinosaurs don’t realize it yet. The only thing that is keeping per-minute charges alive is customers’ inertia, never a factor to be underestimated, to be sure.

HP introduced a new line of printers recently, with one model starting at $40, or barely more than the ink cartridges for it that cost $21. A British consumer magazine has exposed the deceptive and price-gouging practices of inkjet printer manufacturers. No wonder most of HP’s profits come from their printing business, their computer division being a mere hanger-on, and they have adopted King Gillette’s “give away the razor, sell the blades” business model with a vengeance.

Printing photos on an inkjet paper is particularly expensive since most of the paper surface is covered in ink, unlike conventional documents where the ratio is only 5% of so. If you are a digital photographer needing to make prints, you should look beyond the low purchase price for these printers, as there are far better options available.

There are many processes to produce prints from digital originals. You can use inkjet printers, dye-sublimation printers, Fuji’s Pictrography, and digital minilabs. Color laser printers are relatively economical, but are best used for office documents rather than photos as their output is not particularly vivid. Inkjet printers have vivid colors but their results fade very quickly (apart from a handful of pigment-based ink models from Epson in their 2000/2100/2200 series). Dye sublimation printers have excellent smooth colors, and last longer thanks to their protective overcoat layer, but are usually expensive to run and have limited paper size options. Fuji’s Pictrography process is a true photographic process, but both printers and media are expensive, and it is most suitable for professional photographers who need to produce in-house proof prints for clients on a deadline, but cannot afford a $175,000 digital minilab.

This leaves what is in my opinion the best option for obtaining prints, digital minilabs. These are machines that expose conventional (silver) photo paper with lasers or LEDs. The key players are Fuji with their Frontier system, Noritsu (Kodak’s partner) and Agfa with their d-Lab. All of these systems will yield excellent, smudge-proof and durable prints, and are invariably far more cost-effective than the alternatives. You can get 4in x 6in (10cm x 15cm) prints made for as low as 20 cents each online or at many places like Costco. In many cases, you can just insert a memory card or CD in a kiosk system like the Fuji Aladdin, select your pictures, crop and adjust contrast, and they will be sent to the minilab to be printed within an hour.

Digital minilabs are usually limited to 8in x 10in or 11in x 14in prints. For larger sizes, you need to use a professional lab that uses high-end large-format machines like the Cymbolic Lightjet or Durst Lambda, which use lasers as well, but operate on large rolls of photo paper for advertising and other high-end applications. I have had a 4in x 100in panoramic print (yes, you read that right) made on a Lightjet by Pictopia.com, with excellent results. These services are usually more expensive, about $10-15 per square foot, but use higher quality professional grade paper rather than the consumer-level kind (usually thinner and not quite as durable) used by mass-market shops.

I installed Mozilla Firebird today. As I am encouraging my father to migrate away from the stale IE (since Microsoft obtained near-monopoly status, that browser hasn’t been updated to include such vital features like tabbed browsing), and I have already switched to Safari on my Mac, I also decided to have a new look at Firebird (I had tried an early version of Phoenix, 0.3 I believe). Firebird (formerly Phoenix, soon to be renamed Mozilla Browser) is based on Mozilla, but is less resource-intensive because it does not try to be all things to all people and is just a browser (and not a HTML editor, email program, newsreader, IRC client, dessert topping and floor wax). Firebird will be the official Mozilla browser, replacing the current Mozilla suite in the medium term.

The core rendering engine is the same, and it uses the same XUL cross-platform UI toolkit, so migrating from Mozilla is relatively painless. Bookmarks are compatible. You can even copy over saved passwords, albeit at the cost of removing strong cryptographic password protection on them. To do so, reset the Master password to empty, uncheck the “Use encryption when storing sensitive data”, and copy a file called XYZ.s from your Mozilla profile to your Firebird profile, where XYZ is a random series of digits, for more information see this article.

First impressions:

• It certainly loads faster.

• It honors the Windows default mail and newsreader settings, so when a mailto: URL is encountered, it starts Outlook for me as I would like it to, not the half-baked Mozilla mail client. Big plus!

• The toolbars are customizable

• It does not yet have the DOM inspector and Venkman JavaScript debugger, both very useful for web development, but they will eventually be available as extensions

• No annoying download manager to clean up, instead, a simple download box like IE and Netscape 4

• With a few simple changes to the config files, ads and popups are blocked without having to install a blocker such as WebWasher.

• The “Add bookmarks” command opens a dialog with the complete bookmarks folders hierarchy flattened into a single list (as opposed to a Tree control in Seamonkey). When you have a bookmarks hierarchy as large and complex as mine, this is unusable. I could use the bookmarks sidebar instead, but a more efficient way is to drag-and-drop into the menu, in a way reminiscent of how the Windows Start menu can be rearranged. Neither method is as efficient as Netscape 4’s “File as” functionality, but this comes close.

• The tabs don’t quite look as nice as Seamonkey’s. You do not have the ability to add a group of tabs as a single bookmark, but you can add them as a bookmarks folder, and all bookmarks folders havean “Open in tabs” option. Gain some, lose some.

• Bookmark keyword searching is amazing. For example, I can search IMDB for Hank Azaria by just typing “imdb hank azaria in the URL bar. Admittedly, Seamoney had that capability as well.

• Bookmark separators can have names, which makes for cleaner organization of bookmarks when subfolders are overkill.

I will try it a little bit longer, but I think I might well migrate to Firebird as my primary browser.

Last Tuesday, Microsoft Outlook started behaving strangely, exiting silently a few minutes after starting. after a number of fruitless attempts to revive it, I finally realized my Cloudmark SpamNet beta was causing Outlook to exit, probably when checking for updates. I went to their website and discovered the program was out of beta, with a version 1.0.1 out. A less pleasant surprise was that using it now requires a $5/month subscription. This change has already raised quite a ruckus among beta-testers.

Cloudmark’s original material did imply the basic SpamNet product would remain free, but I don’t mind a subscription plan so much (although I would have preferred a yearly plan to the monthly one they are proposing). The program is extremely effective – when coming back to work on a Monday, I often have over a hundred spam emails waiting for me, and SpamNet will more often than not catch all but a couple or so. This 99% effectiveness is well worth $60 per year in my book.

I will probably not subscribe to their plan, however. What Cloudmark failed to realize is the effectiveness of the program is directly related to the number of users who participate in its distributed peer-to-peer data collection. If most of the beta testers decide to leave SpamNet, its effectiveness will be compromised and thus the value of the program dwindle.

I am experimenting right now with SpamAssassin and the bayesian filtering programs bogofilter (in spite of lead author Eric S. Raymond’s racist and bigoted remarks), Annoyance-filter by John Walker (a co-founder of AutoDesk and author of the excellent Hacker’s Diet, a.k.a. “How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition”) and the Python-based SpamBayes which is available as an Outlook plug-in.

In an earlier article, I described my first experiences with Bluetooth. I had managed to get both my Palm Tungsten T and my Sony Ericsson T68i to sync with Outlook. I had since managed to get my laptop on the Internet via Cingular Wireless’ GPRS service.

Yesterday, I finally stopped procrastinating and configured my Tungsten T to browse the web and send/receive email via Bluetooth and GPRS. Cingular, like all other US carriers, very poorly documents its GPRS service but some Google footwork (and using Mergic Ping to find out their documented DNS servers do not work) got the job done.

Cingular doesn’t operate an outgoing SMTP server to allow its customers to send email, and any public SMTP server without authentication is likely to be blacklisted by spam filters as an open relay. Fortunately my company’s Postfix SMTP server supports SMTP AUTH, as does the Palm VersaMail 2.0 client bundled with the Tungsten T (no SSL/TLS, though, you have to use VersaMail 2.5 which requires a PalmOS 5.2 device like the new Zire 71 or Tungsten C).

All in all, this confirms my earlier assessment of Bluetooth as a technology not quite ready for prime-time yet. This whole set-up procedure is certainly nowhere near user-friendly, thanks in great part to voice-dominated wireless telcos’ general cluelessness about data.

Interestingly, Bluetooth works better between devices such as my TT or my T68i than between devices and my PC (where associations keep resetting), in spite of the limited software upgradability of these devices compared to a PC. Obviously, it helps that the TT-T68i combination is explicitly tested as part of an agreement between Palm and Sony Ericsson, but still, it’s rather worrisome for the likes of Microsoft that the PC’s software entropy defeats its higher capabilities. Admittedly iMac works better with Bluetooth than my PC, so this probably tells more about the immaturity of Bluetooth middleware stacks on Windows than the whole PC as digital hub approach in itself.

Browsing the web from my PDA is very neat, but I doubt I will use it very often, because of the incredibly high prices US carriers charge for wireless data. Cingular charges $6.99 per month for 1MB, with 3 cents per extra kilobyte. Compare this to Orange France, who charge € 6 per month for 5MB and 3 euro-cents for 10KB, i.e. US carriers charge almost ten times as much. Just checking out a handful of test pages ate up 15% of my monthly quota… (email is more efficient, however). Compare this also with how much Cingular charges for voice ($39.99 per month for 600+5000 minutes at 13kbps, $0.49 per minute afterwards, which works out to 7.5 cents per megabyte of voice).

Wireless carriers still consider wireless data a business-oriented service (i.e. license to gouge). This attitude explains in large part why in a recent Metrinomics survey, only 1 in 8 respondents thought 3G wireless would be their wireless data technology of choice over IEEE 802.11 “WiFi”. To paraphrase an old saying about IBM, telcos seem to think when they piss on something, it improves the flavor… (for a contrarian perspective, read this The Register article). Unfortunately, WiFi hot spots do not have universal coverage today, and you still need GPRS as a fall-back, but the new WiFi-equipped Tungsten C does not include a Bluetooth port (otherwise I would have bought one).

If you need help with such a setup using Cingular, don’t hesitate to drop me an email via the “Contact Me” icon for some tips.

Update (2003-09-04):

I tried to use GPRS while in the Chicago area over Labor day weekend. Unfortunately, when you roam, the GPRS settings of the other network do not match, in this case DNS lookups were failing. Since I had no way to determine what the correct settings for AT&T Wireless were, I had to fall back to dialup. Just more evidence of just how clueless mobile phone companies (and the standardization committees they support) are about data.

Update (2004-01-14):

Here is a cute real-life story of a wireless Internet via Bluetooth saving the day