People still have dial up? I expect that Apple would ship disks on request but I wouldn't expect them for free. I've never had Apple refuse a reasonable service request but I've never asked for that. You can also stop in at an Apple Store if there's one in your area, and they'll usually give you a copy for free, from what I understand.
Gee, I wonder how separated people found each other before cell phones... We got by, but we wound up missing out on a lot of fun things because we had no way of contacting the rest of the group to make adjustments to our plans.
Tethering is awesome (I have a 12" iBook too), but every once in awhile I find myself somewhere that I was never expecting to need a laptop with me, so I don't have it with me and I need to use SSH on the phone itself.
It's pretty cold for a company to claim it supports T.R.C.'s humanitarian cause, while suing them. They support the American Red Cross' humanitarian cause, just not their commercial licensing cause.
Yeah, no kidding. Last I heard, Twitter was essentially a miniature blogging service where people post short little descriptions of what they're doing all day from their cell phone, which gets spammed out to everyone who has subscribed to their mini-blog thingie, so they can all keep track of the tedious minutiae of each other's lives.
Is Twitter also the name of a Slashdot troll now? I've only seen the whining about it, never the actual posts being whined about.
You can't fix the problem, but you may be able to work around the problem. For example, if you require a piece of hardware for authentication (fingerprint/smart card/RFID implant AND a password), then the risk of users giving people their passwords is reduced (because a password alone won't allow someone to authenticate).
I also want to point out that they WILL get into things when you're not looking. You might think that there's no possible way they could get into something without you knowing about it, because you're always going to be there. You're deluding yourself.
Teaching them what stuff is OK to play with and what stuff is not OK to play with (as opposed to just preventing them from playing with the stuff you don't want them to play with) is vitally important. Also, teaching them which things are boring and uninteresting is critical - for example, I try never to let a young child see me plugging something into an electrical socket, because I don't want them getting the idea that that might be fun to try. If they don't see anyone else doing it, it's probably not worth doing.
Any software that doesn't use sane version numbering that anyone could tell what the newest version is easily. Norton and Microsoft I'm looking at you. I'd add to this, any hardware! Apple, I'm looking at you!
Before Steve Jobs regained the helm, Apple offered a plethora of confusing version numbers. Which is better, the PowerMac 8100, the PowerMac 7200, the PowerMac 6300, or the PowerMac 5400? Are you sure? For the record, those are a 110MHz PPC601, 90MHz PPC601, 120MHz PPC603e, and 120MHz PPC603e, respectively. Yes, those last two have the same CPU, but the latter is an all-in-one model with a built-in monitor.
Anyway, that was a mess, so Steve Jobs came in, and introduced the iMac. No model numbers, just iMac. Simple, elegant. But then everything went downhill again - but down the other side of the hill this time. Now, we have no model numbers at all, and we have to use confusing and awkward documents like this to tell the difference between different models. By the way, I just upgraded to an iBook that was apparently released after that document was last updated, and my model isn't listed (I've just notified Apple, so hopefully they'll fix it).
iTunes...I have never understood WHY they have to reinvent the file browser, I mean, I guess most people DON'T oganize their files in folders with logical names, oh like Band/Album. Why do they insist on relisting all the files? iTunes trusts all your ID3 tags to be accurate (which they should be, more or less, if you bought the song on iTMS or ripped from a CD with CDDB enabled), and uses the ID3 tags to let you categorize your music in ways that a plain filename can't convey. It then builds a database of this information, so searches are instantaneous. An interface like WinAmp is fine when you're dealing with a handful of albums, but when you start getting into a several thousand songs, the iTunes Library really makes a lot of sense.
Seems easier to let me grab files and drop them on the player? Oh that works, but it never remembers them. You have two options: iTunes can leave the original file alone, and let you keep track of that yourself, and it will just add a database entry to the iTunes Library so it shows up in iTunes alongside all your other stuff. Or, iTunes can automatically make a copy of the file into the iTunes Library folder, adding that to the database and leaving you free to delete the original file. The latter option works great if you're downloading MP3s from a web site and you set your browser to download the file to a temp directory, open it automatically, and delete it when finished. Also, if you want to copy files from a removable drive, you can drag them directly into iTunes instead of copying them to your hard drive first (in fact, you can drag them directly into a specific playlist if you want).
I have no idea what you mean by "it never remembers them."
And people NEVER put their music on REMOVEABLE DISKS, like usb harddrives either... Here I'll agree with you. This sucks. At the very least, there should be an option to use a "Portable Library" - let iTunes manage a separate music library with its own database on a removable disk, network share, etc. iPods already behave this way (except that it won't let you copy stuff from an iPod to your Library, only the other way around).
And the lame standard Quicktime. Why does Apple think anyone would pay for the ability to play in full screen? Are you kidding me? Annoyware all the way. They finally fixed this a year or two ago. It still lists a ton of disabled features in the menus in QuickTime Player, but the full screen feature is no longer among them, and it no longer pops up a reminder to upgrade.
This situation is drastically improving. Yes, you still have to test your stuff in five different browsers (and if it's anything really important, a lot more than five), but as long as you're dealing with modern browsers (Firefox 2 or 3, Safari 3, Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Opera 9) the situation is a HELL of a lot better than it was five years ago. As long as you write valid HTML 4.01 and valid CSS, everything mostly works the same way across browsers, other than a few bugs and varying support for certain features.
Unless you're using JavaScript, which is often VERY different between browsers. For example, Firefox and Safari let you add an extra comma at the end of a list of items, which is very helpful because you don't have to keep track of your commas when you move items around in the list. Opera doesn't allow this. If you have a table row in a table, Firefox lets you refer to the tr as a child of the parent table, but Internet Explorer decides what you really meant was to put the tr inside a tbody element, and treats the tr as a child of that. These are just a couple examples I've been bitten by.
Actually I've seen a couple of new laptops that don't have that switch. I think it's being phased out, because people kept accidentally switching it off and then wondering why they couldn't get online.
Evolution sucks donkey balls. Thunderbird is better (PKCS#11 support, smartcards, etc). There is no good calendering unfortunately (Sunbird maybe some day). Have you tried Lightning? I've got a few clients who seem to be happy with it.
The best part about Quicktime? It's not as bad as Realplayer. Seriously, every time I see a file offered in real audio or video format, I'm just like WTF? Real offers absolutely no advantage over any other format, and a huge list of negatives...why is anyone still using it? Thankfully, the popularity of Podcasts has led a lot of places to realize that offering a plain old downloadable MP3 file instead of a streaming-only RealAudio link won't put them out of business. However, there are apparently still some legal issues that remain to be worked out - for example, "A Prairie Home Companion" is available in its entirety as a RealAudio stream, but only one excerpt from it is available as a Podcast. According to American Public Media,
Due to rights restrictions and existing contracts, we are unable to produce a podcast version of each week's entire show. However, since [Garrison Keillor] is the only one performing during the monologue "The News from Lake Wobegon," we are pleased to make that available - now as a free podcast.
Quicktime - It's both a terrible media player and it is insanely unwilling to be removed.
I've never had trouble removing QuickTime. The uninstaller always works for me.
Apple's central design concept seems to be preventing the user from doing what he wants. If I delete qttask.exe, it means I don't want that file anymore, not that I want it to be resurrected. If I disable it in msconfig, it doesn't mean that the next time Quicktime runs I want it to get a new startup entry.
You're definitely doing it wrong. If you delete random files, you're going to break things. Of course qttask.exe isn't required for QuickTime to work properly, but it is part of the package, and by deleting any file, you're compromising the integrity of the package as a whole. Apple decided that it's much more likely for the integrity of the QuickTime package to be compromised by Windows bugs or hardware issues or malware or incompetence, than that the user would deliberately go around deleting random files on purpose, so in the interest of providing the best user experience, they chose to go ahead and fix the problem automatically instead of bugging you about it or unexpectedly failing to work the way QuickTime is intended.
That's why they put this handy little checkbox in the preferences. If you don't want QuickTime to load in the system tray, simply uncheck the box to tell it not to.
iTunes - ituneshelper.exe is about the same as qttask, and iTunes is even worse at playing music than Quicktime is at playing movies. It's the single most bloated piece of software I've ever used. The iTunes store is another reason to avoid it, not to use it.
If you don't like iTunes, don't use iTunes. My only real complaint is that the UI design puts minimalism over intuitiveness (but since I've been using it for years, not being intuitive isn't a problem for me), and on Windows it takes forever to launch. I suppose it takes awhile to launch on Mac OS X too, but Mac apps always take awhile to launch so that's expected; on Windows it's not.
It also crashes way too much on a new MacBook Pro, and since I don't know what Apple compatible software is a good replacement for it, I can't just replace it for my friend as I would if he had Windows.
This is not normal. Safari has been crashing a lot lately for me, but iTunes is perfectly stable on my iBook. I would check to make sure your RAM is in good condition, then if the problem is reproducible, create a new user account and try to reproduce the problem there. If the problem goes away, then some file is probably corrupt somewhere in your ~/Library folder.
Apple Updater - Everyone I know just installed Safari. They didn't mean to.
Yeah, I can understand why Apple did this, but they shouldn't have. It also annoys me that iTunes pops up an alert when a new update is released, because the Apple Software Updater should be taking care of that, and having iTunes do it too is redundant.
Flash - Thank you, Flashblock, for making the internet useable again. Thank you, bad web designers, for sticking retarded flash "intro pages" on your sites so I can see that they've been blocked and then avoid your company on principal.
If bad web designers didn't have Flash at their disposal, they'd just use JavaScript and animated GIFs to create their horrible crap, just like they did in the late 90s. Don't blame the tool.
HP Printer Philosophy - Thanks to you, too, HP, for making a printer that needs an IP to be set via a web interface in order to access that same web interface. Thanks to my neighbor for having a parallel cable sitting around so I could access it in a more traditional way.
All the network printers I've seen let you set the IP via the front panel. My complaint with HP printers is the need for a 300MB driver download. What the hell is wrong with them?
Which user's preferences files should be removed when you delete an application? Just yours? Everybody's? I almost never want an application's preferences files to be deleted when I uninstall an application, because I usually intend to reinstall the latest version and I want it to keep all my settings; occasionally I'll try a new app and decide I don't like it, but a few wayward preferences files for these lying around don't bother me too much (although admittedly it would be nice if there were an easy way to clean them up).
What if the application was never copied to the Applications folder in the first place - should preferences be deleted if you delete an application from the Desktop? What if I create an Applications folder on a separate volume or partition, and install certain applications there?
What if I have two versions of an application installed? I've got both Firefox 2 and the latest Firefox 3 beta, happily coexisting; when I delete Firefox 2 I sure as hell don't want it to delete my preferences for Firefox 3.
Having said all of that, for applications that come as an Installer package (because they're not self-contained in an application bundle), it'd be awfully nice to have an uninstall option for them.
Assuming, of course, that your DNS server is returning the correct IP address for ftp.internic.net, rather than some other FTP server that happens to have a/domain/named.cache file...
Thanks for the detailed explanation... I have cell phones in 3 different countries, and in each the number starts very clearly with a different prefix, so everybody knows that they are calling a different number with different tarification: you have local, long distance and cell phone (and 800, 900, etc). I don't see anything strange with that, but I find it strange that some want to treat cells as if they were local numbers and have the callee eat the difference. Yeah, I failed to highlight this point in my excessively detailed post, but that's exactly it - we don't have a different prefix for cell phones here, so there's no way for the caller to know whether a particular number they're calling is a land line or a cell phone. Remember, by this time in the US, everyone had a flat monthly rate for local calls (the vast majority of calls most people ever made), while in the rest of the world, most people had to pay per minute for every call they made (with long distance calls just being billed at a higher rate). If you're paying per minute for every call anyway, then whether you're calling a local land line / cell phone / long distance number doesn't make so much difference - it's just a difference in cost per minute. If you have a flat rate for all local calls and only have to pay per minute for long-distance calls, then the psychological difference is huge - people avoid making long-distance calls because they want to avoid paying for them, but local calls are free so you can call as much as you want. Early cell phone adopters wanted people to feel comfortable calling them, and most Americans don't feel comfortable when they're paying by the minute.
I should also add that all of this is sheer speculation on my part, and I don't actually have any idea what I'm talking about.;-)
Sure: it goes back to how telephone service developed in this country.
Originally, everyone had to pay to make a phone call, but it was free to receive a call. Local calls were less expensive than long-distance calls, but both charged by the minute. Decades ago, phone companies started offering a monthly flat rate for unlimited local calls, and it was so popular that it's all they offer now. Long distance calls are still a per-minute charge for the caller (free to the recipient), except for some newer companies like Vonage that include unlimited long distance calls.
Enter cellular phones. Early adopters (mostly businessmen) wanted the convenience of being able to take a telephone with them in their car, without the rest of the world necessarily needing to know anything about what technology they were using, or having to pay any extra fees. The owner of the cell phone pays per minute for both incoming and outgoing calls, because the only alternative would be to treat all cell phones as long-distance numbers (requiring a 1 dialed in front of the number, and adding a per-minute charge to the calller's bill). People wouldn't have wanted to do that. Remember, the vast majority of calls to cell phones were from land lines, not from other cell phones (because the vast majority of people didn't have cell phones yet).
So, the owner of the cell phone pays for the privilege of having a mobile phone, paying for both sending and receiving calls. Over time, calling between cell phones becomes increasingly popular, but if one person with a cell phone calls another person with a cell phone, BOTH people pay per minute for the call.
And if you're going to pay for sending and receiving phone calls, you're gonna pay for sending and receiving text messages.
Of course, the per-minute fees are exorbitant, so to soften the blow, companies start offering "free" minutes included with the monthly plan, along with a certain number of "free" text messages. The more money you pay per month, the more "free" minutes and text messages are included.
Enter the marketing department. In an attempt to differentiate themselves from the competition, somebody starts offering unlimited calls during non-peak hours (nights and weekends), and all their competitors jump on board. Then, as mobile-to-mobile calling becomes increasingly popular, companies start offering "free" mobile-to-mobile calls within their own network, to entice people to recommend that everyone they know sign up with the same company. But since most people don't even know how to use text messages (my first cell phone didn't support them), there's no marketing reason to offer free text messaging. It's much more profitable to charge $0.10 per message (after the first few hundred per month that are included with the plan).
We now have a new generation who has grown up with cell phones and is perfectly comfortable typing entire conversations on a keypad, abbreviating anywhere they can save keystrokes just as we did when chatting on computer bulletin boards and IRC in the late 80s and early 90s. Some people here remember the days before 300baud modems; abbreviating was essential.
As demand for text messaging increases among this new generation and improving technology reduces actual per-call and per-message costs, marketing departments will decide that they stand more to gain from offering unlimited calls and text messages (because they can advertise it to attract customers) in their standard monthly rate than then do from charging $0.10/message. They're already moving in this direction, offering unlimited calls and texts to/from a certain number of "favorite" people. Eventually we'll all have one flat monthly rate for unlimited usage, and the whole question of paying to receive calls and text messages will be irrelevant.
I was about to say it will be forgotten, but it has never occurred to most Americans that things could work differently in the rest of the world, so there's no question to forget.
Slashdot Mirror
If you already have root access, passwd does not prompt you for the old password. His method is sound.
Tethering is awesome (I have a 12" iBook too), but every once in awhile I find myself somewhere that I was never expecting to need a laptop with me, so I don't have it with me and I need to use SSH on the phone itself.
Yeah, no kidding. Last I heard, Twitter was essentially a miniature blogging service where people post short little descriptions of what they're doing all day from their cell phone, which gets spammed out to everyone who has subscribed to their mini-blog thingie, so they can all keep track of the tedious minutiae of each other's lives.
Is Twitter also the name of a Slashdot troll now? I've only seen the whining about it, never the actual posts being whined about.
You can't fix the problem, but you may be able to work around the problem. For example, if you require a piece of hardware for authentication (fingerprint/smart card/RFID implant AND a password), then the risk of users giving people their passwords is reduced (because a password alone won't allow someone to authenticate).
How many Libraries of Congress is that?
You should maybe look into rewriting this so it doesn't sound precisely like an urban legend chain letter.
I also want to point out that they WILL get into things when you're not looking. You might think that there's no possible way they could get into something without you knowing about it, because you're always going to be there. You're deluding yourself.
Teaching them what stuff is OK to play with and what stuff is not OK to play with (as opposed to just preventing them from playing with the stuff you don't want them to play with) is vitally important. Also, teaching them which things are boring and uninteresting is critical - for example, I try never to let a young child see me plugging something into an electrical socket, because I don't want them getting the idea that that might be fun to try. If they don't see anyone else doing it, it's probably not worth doing.
Before Steve Jobs regained the helm, Apple offered a plethora of confusing version numbers. Which is better, the PowerMac 8100, the PowerMac 7200, the PowerMac 6300, or the PowerMac 5400? Are you sure? For the record, those are a 110MHz PPC601, 90MHz PPC601, 120MHz PPC603e, and 120MHz PPC603e, respectively. Yes, those last two have the same CPU, but the latter is an all-in-one model with a built-in monitor.
Anyway, that was a mess, so Steve Jobs came in, and introduced the iMac. No model numbers, just iMac. Simple, elegant. But then everything went downhill again - but down the other side of the hill this time. Now, we have no model numbers at all, and we have to use confusing and awkward documents like this to tell the difference between different models. By the way, I just upgraded to an iBook that was apparently released after that document was last updated, and my model isn't listed (I've just notified Apple, so hopefully they'll fix it).
I have no idea what you mean by "it never remembers them." And people NEVER put their music on REMOVEABLE DISKS, like usb harddrives either... Here I'll agree with you. This sucks. At the very least, there should be an option to use a "Portable Library" - let iTunes manage a separate music library with its own database on a removable disk, network share, etc. iPods already behave this way (except that it won't let you copy stuff from an iPod to your Library, only the other way around).
This situation is drastically improving. Yes, you still have to test your stuff in five different browsers (and if it's anything really important, a lot more than five), but as long as you're dealing with modern browsers (Firefox 2 or 3, Safari 3, Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Opera 9) the situation is a HELL of a lot better than it was five years ago. As long as you write valid HTML 4.01 and valid CSS, everything mostly works the same way across browsers, other than a few bugs and varying support for certain features.
Unless you're using JavaScript, which is often VERY different between browsers. For example, Firefox and Safari let you add an extra comma at the end of a list of items, which is very helpful because you don't have to keep track of your commas when you move items around in the list. Opera doesn't allow this. If you have a table row in a table, Firefox lets you refer to the tr as a child of the parent table, but Internet Explorer decides what you really meant was to put the tr inside a tbody element, and treats the tr as a child of that. These are just a couple examples I've been bitten by.
Does one of them allow another user on your LAN to connect to the QuickBooks database on your computer? I have clients who use that a lot...
Actually I've seen a couple of new laptops that don't have that switch. I think it's being phased out, because people kept accidentally switching it off and then wondering why they couldn't get online.
Apple has a much broader selection of non-DRM'd music available for sale than Magnatune does.
Quicktime - It's both a terrible media player and it is insanely unwilling to be removed.
I've never had trouble removing QuickTime. The uninstaller always works for me.
Apple's central design concept seems to be preventing the user from doing what he wants. If I delete qttask.exe, it means I don't want that file anymore, not that I want it to be resurrected. If I disable it in msconfig, it doesn't mean that the next time Quicktime runs I want it to get a new startup entry.
You're definitely doing it wrong. If you delete random files, you're going to break things. Of course qttask.exe isn't required for QuickTime to work properly, but it is part of the package, and by deleting any file, you're compromising the integrity of the package as a whole. Apple decided that it's much more likely for the integrity of the QuickTime package to be compromised by Windows bugs or hardware issues or malware or incompetence, than that the user would deliberately go around deleting random files on purpose, so in the interest of providing the best user experience, they chose to go ahead and fix the problem automatically instead of bugging you about it or unexpectedly failing to work the way QuickTime is intended.
That's why they put this handy little checkbox in the preferences. If you don't want QuickTime to load in the system tray, simply uncheck the box to tell it not to.
iTunes - ituneshelper.exe is about the same as qttask, and iTunes is even worse at playing music than Quicktime is at playing movies. It's the single most bloated piece of software I've ever used. The iTunes store is another reason to avoid it, not to use it.
If you don't like iTunes, don't use iTunes. My only real complaint is that the UI design puts minimalism over intuitiveness (but since I've been using it for years, not being intuitive isn't a problem for me), and on Windows it takes forever to launch. I suppose it takes awhile to launch on Mac OS X too, but Mac apps always take awhile to launch so that's expected; on Windows it's not.
It also crashes way too much on a new MacBook Pro, and since I don't know what Apple compatible software is a good replacement for it, I can't just replace it for my friend as I would if he had Windows.
This is not normal. Safari has been crashing a lot lately for me, but iTunes is perfectly stable on my iBook. I would check to make sure your RAM is in good condition, then if the problem is reproducible, create a new user account and try to reproduce the problem there. If the problem goes away, then some file is probably corrupt somewhere in your ~/Library folder.
Apple Updater - Everyone I know just installed Safari. They didn't mean to.
Yeah, I can understand why Apple did this, but they shouldn't have. It also annoys me that iTunes pops up an alert when a new update is released, because the Apple Software Updater should be taking care of that, and having iTunes do it too is redundant.
Flash - Thank you, Flashblock, for making the internet useable again. Thank you, bad web designers, for sticking retarded flash "intro pages" on your sites so I can see that they've been blocked and then avoid your company on principal.
If bad web designers didn't have Flash at their disposal, they'd just use JavaScript and animated GIFs to create their horrible crap, just like they did in the late 90s. Don't blame the tool.
HP Printer Philosophy - Thanks to you, too, HP, for making a printer that needs an IP to be set via a web interface in order to access that same web interface. Thanks to my neighbor for having a parallel cable sitting around so I could access it in a more traditional way.
All the network printers I've seen let you set the IP via the front panel. My complaint with HP printers is the need for a 300MB driver download. What the hell is wrong with them?
Windows Desktop - Why do you lose my icon pla
Which user's preferences files should be removed when you delete an application? Just yours? Everybody's? I almost never want an application's preferences files to be deleted when I uninstall an application, because I usually intend to reinstall the latest version and I want it to keep all my settings; occasionally I'll try a new app and decide I don't like it, but a few wayward preferences files for these lying around don't bother me too much (although admittedly it would be nice if there were an easy way to clean them up).
What if the application was never copied to the Applications folder in the first place - should preferences be deleted if you delete an application from the Desktop? What if I create an Applications folder on a separate volume or partition, and install certain applications there?
What if I have two versions of an application installed? I've got both Firefox 2 and the latest Firefox 3 beta, happily coexisting; when I delete Firefox 2 I sure as hell don't want it to delete my preferences for Firefox 3.
Having said all of that, for applications that come as an Installer package (because they're not self-contained in an application bundle), it'd be awfully nice to have an uninstall option for them.
Assuming, of course, that your DNS server is returning the correct IP address for ftp.internic.net, rather than some other FTP server that happens to have a /domain/named.cache file...
I should also add that all of this is sheer speculation on my part, and I don't actually have any idea what I'm talking about.
Sure: it goes back to how telephone service developed in this country.
Originally, everyone had to pay to make a phone call, but it was free to receive a call. Local calls were less expensive than long-distance calls, but both charged by the minute. Decades ago, phone companies started offering a monthly flat rate for unlimited local calls, and it was so popular that it's all they offer now. Long distance calls are still a per-minute charge for the caller (free to the recipient), except for some newer companies like Vonage that include unlimited long distance calls.
Enter cellular phones. Early adopters (mostly businessmen) wanted the convenience of being able to take a telephone with them in their car, without the rest of the world necessarily needing to know anything about what technology they were using, or having to pay any extra fees. The owner of the cell phone pays per minute for both incoming and outgoing calls, because the only alternative would be to treat all cell phones as long-distance numbers (requiring a 1 dialed in front of the number, and adding a per-minute charge to the calller's bill). People wouldn't have wanted to do that. Remember, the vast majority of calls to cell phones were from land lines, not from other cell phones (because the vast majority of people didn't have cell phones yet).
So, the owner of the cell phone pays for the privilege of having a mobile phone, paying for both sending and receiving calls. Over time, calling between cell phones becomes increasingly popular, but if one person with a cell phone calls another person with a cell phone, BOTH people pay per minute for the call.
And if you're going to pay for sending and receiving phone calls, you're gonna pay for sending and receiving text messages.
Of course, the per-minute fees are exorbitant, so to soften the blow, companies start offering "free" minutes included with the monthly plan, along with a certain number of "free" text messages. The more money you pay per month, the more "free" minutes and text messages are included.
Enter the marketing department. In an attempt to differentiate themselves from the competition, somebody starts offering unlimited calls during non-peak hours (nights and weekends), and all their competitors jump on board. Then, as mobile-to-mobile calling becomes increasingly popular, companies start offering "free" mobile-to-mobile calls within their own network, to entice people to recommend that everyone they know sign up with the same company. But since most people don't even know how to use text messages (my first cell phone didn't support them), there's no marketing reason to offer free text messaging. It's much more profitable to charge $0.10 per message (after the first few hundred per month that are included with the plan).
We now have a new generation who has grown up with cell phones and is perfectly comfortable typing entire conversations on a keypad, abbreviating anywhere they can save keystrokes just as we did when chatting on computer bulletin boards and IRC in the late 80s and early 90s. Some people here remember the days before 300baud modems; abbreviating was essential.
As demand for text messaging increases among this new generation and improving technology reduces actual per-call and per-message costs, marketing departments will decide that they stand more to gain from offering unlimited calls and text messages (because they can advertise it to attract customers) in their standard monthly rate than then do from charging $0.10/message. They're already moving in this direction, offering unlimited calls and texts to/from a certain number of "favorite" people. Eventually we'll all have one flat monthly rate for unlimited usage, and the whole question of paying to receive calls and text messages will be irrelevant.
I was about to say it will be forgotten, but it has never occurred to most Americans that things could work differently in the rest of the world, so there's no question to forget.