…you know something is wrong.

This is a rant I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. It costs cell phone operators practically nothing to deliver an SMS within their own network, and maybe a little to deliver it to another network – so why do they charge the end user so much? Would a broadband internet subscriber agree to paying 10 cents for transferring 160 bytes of data? That’s how much data is in a single SMS, and everytime you send one, your cellphone company enjoys profit margins of close to 98%.

We’ve got even better technology reaching the mobile market – 3G networks can offer data speeds of upto 7.2Mbits/sec (the theoritical limit is 14.4Mbits/sec). Combined with VOIP systems, that should mean cheap telephony and communication for everyone. It means you could reduce your mobile phone bills to 10% of what you’re paying now.

But no. You’re not allowed to use VOIP on your smartphone unless you’re in a WiFi hotspot. Why not? Because the cell phone operators don’t want you to – that would be bad for business wouldn’t it? I thought the whole point of technology was to make things cheap and easier for the end users. Apparently not.

This situation is a bit like when the old vinyl record companies tried to push back the compact disk revolution just because it would be “bad for business”. This is what happens when you put technology into the hands of giant corporates whose only reason to exist is profit. It’s like all the cell phone operators all over the world have an unspoken agreement to fleece the consumer collectively.

What we need is just one company to take a bold move forward by breaking this pact. It’s not like they have to invest huge amounts of money, the technology and infrastructure is here and now. Please, just charge the consumer how much it actually costs to make a call or send an SMS, with a reasonable profit margin. The rest will follow suit, as the free market dictates. That’s how the cell phone rates in India dropped drastically, and it’s our only ray of hope.

It’s not enough if we have open mobile phones, we need operators that are as honest and open as the handset. Communication simply doesn’t cost as much as the cell phone operators tell you it does, and it’s about time more people realized it.

I couldn’t help but notice that close to 70% of developers who attended foss.in had Macs with them. And half of them had even upgraded to Leopard, giving me a few glimpses of what Apple’s new operating system looked like.I decided to upgrade to Leopard too, and got myself a copy from the iStore on M.G. Road. It cost me Rs. 6,200 which is (suprisingly?) a little more than the dollar-converted rate. Anyway, I decided to do a clean install after backing up all my data – it was the perfect chance to remove all the cruft in the system. The installation went smoothly and the traditional multi-lingual ‘Welcome’ was simply stunning. Now I began installing the applications one by one:

• QuickSilver: The first app that anyone would need. It worked with all the standard plug-ins on Leopard without any glitches. I did notice, however, that it wouldn’t launch any applications that you just installed (specifically, those that you downloaded; yes, Leopard keeps track of that!). You have to manually launch the application once (you get a dialog asking you whether you really want to) before it appears in QuickSilver’s catalog. Mildly irritating, but it’s a one-time thing for every app.
• Macports: I compiled this one, also worked out-of-the-box without any problems. All the ports I used so far work fine, although I will expect some of them to fail (which isn’t a macports, but rather an upstream problem).
  
• Adium/Colloquy: Clean install, no trouble. Imported old logs just fine.
• iScrobbler: Version 1.5.2 wouldn’t post to last.fm for some reason, version 2.0beta works great (and has a bunch of new features).
• VMWare Fusion: Works great, but it looks like you’d need some small tweaks to get the tools for Linux to work fine. I’m going to give Fusion a try for sometime to see how it measures up to Parallels (which is what I was using earlier).
• Poisoned: This one doesn’t work on Leopard. It starts up fine, and gIFT appears to start but none of the networks connect. After searching the forums for a bit, I settled for FrostWire which works fine.

Let’s take a look at all the new features that caught my eye:

• Tabbed Terminal.app! There’s no need to use iTerm now. I did, however, have to spend a couple of hours in trying to get the key combinations to work in a sane manner. This post proved to be very helpful, DoubleCommand didn’t.
• Uniform interface. Finally. I was getting sick of the varied brushed-metal/grey/what-not styled interfaces. Leopard finally has a smooth grey across all applications. No need for UNO anymore.
• Spaces. Eliminates the need for VirtueDesktops (Notice the pattern here?). Really nifty if you run a Fusion virtual machine in full-screen on every space and assign sane keyboard shortcuts to switch.
• Stacks: Snazzy looking way of representing Downloads and Documents. You can add your own folders to ’stack’. I like the new Downloads directory, I used to create one in Tiger anyway
• dtrace. The all-encompassing debugger from OpenSolaris made easy. I haven’t used it for anything useful yet but I like what I see.
• Mail 3.0. Slicker interface, and I really love the Mail Activity area which tells me exactly what Mail is upto – Mail 2.0 always left you wondering!

I haven’t had a chance to look at Quick Look yet, but that should be another thing to look forward to. All-in-all a good experience so far, but was it worth the 6 grand? I’ll wait and see.

Finally! VMWare has rolled out a beta version of its virtualization software for the OS X as promised, and its called Fusion (Beta). I’ve already used the Parallels Desktop on my Mac and it was good; but I know I can expect much more from VMWare

Here’s a list of features that VMWare claims to offer with Fusion:

• Create and run a wide variety of 32- and 64-bit x86 operating systems on OS X without rebooting. You can simultaneously run PC applications next to your OS X applications.
• Leverage Virtual SMP capabilities to gain additional performance improvements. On any Mac with dual-core processors, you can assign multiple CPUs to your virtual machine to gain additional performance for CPU-intensive workloads.
• Access physical devices from the virtual machine: read and burn CDs and DVDs, and use USB 2.0 devices like video cameras, iPods, printers, and disks at full speed. Even devices that do not have drivers for OS X will work in a virtual machine.
• Drag and drop files and folders between OS X and virtual machines to easily share data between the two environments!
• Leverage the cross-compatibility of VMware virtual machines. VMware virtual machines created with existing VMware products are all cross compatible, including virtual machines created by VMware Workstation, VMware Player, VMware Server and VMware Infrastructure 3.
• Run any of the 360 virtual appliances available from the Virtual Appliance Marketplace .

Downloading the 111MB DMG right now, can’t wait to try Gentoo on it!