Telling it like it is

When you send an SMS from your cellphone, the carrier company is making pure profit from you. The SMS travels in the carrier identifier signal that has to be present for a cellphone to talk to a cell tower. It costs the network nothing because without the signal, there's no cell network. ie. the presence of your cellphone on a tower means you can text and it costs nobody anything. The carriers don't want you to know this which is why they charge extortionate rates for SMS plans - it's pure profit for them. However you can get around this with device-to-device messaging. If you have a Blackberry (I feel sorry for you) you have BBM - Blackberry Messenger. It's a texting service that uses your data plan to send messages directly to a device using the device's unique ID instead of your cellphone number. Apple has a similar thing now - iMessage works in the same way, device-to-device. It's why you can now text someone with an iPod from your iPhone (as long as the rec...

You can tell Walmart isn't set up for tech savvy shoppers. Because the other nine places I tried were out of the item I wanted today I ended up at Walmart for only the third time in ten years. To minimize my exposure to the hateful place, I ordered online for an in store pickup. Mistake. Their employees have no idea how to deal with this. Well. When someone turns up and bothers to help. I stood waiting at the pickup area for 15 minutes ringing the bell and trying to get someone's attention. Then it took another 15 minutes for them to figure out what was going on. Im sure if id walked in and just picked the item off the shelf it would have been much easier but in theory that would have taken longer. So much for that great idea. Their prices aren't brilliant either. They were a good 30% more than everywhere else which I guess is why they were the only ones with stock left. If I hadn't need the item today, and had anywhere else in town had what I wanted, I would have been ...