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Why Text Messages Are Limited To 160 Characters
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.
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.
My work here is dung.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
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.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Whoah, whoah, whoah.... Since when can we send messages using the rotary dials on our phones?!? I think that kind of thing has the potential to make it big!
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
Corporations wildly mis-underestimated how the internet would take off.
Who are you? Dubya?.
Well, there's always the test
And all these years later in 2009, I still have
/* No Comment */
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.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
John
Same as ever -- put the card in a cheap plastic sleeve, then make the user promise not to open it.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I think that 256 words should be enough for everyone. It's not like ???INEXPRESSABLE CONCEPT ERROR????
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
64K should have been enough for everybody.
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?