Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2012 March 8

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March 8

1=

[1]

I have technical issue there with the template where including something like "this" will "break" the template. I thinking making it more userfriendly would be an improvement. Any help or discussion would be greatly appreciated.Curb Chain (talk) 01:42, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

The problem was to use an equal sign (as part of a url) in an unnamed template parameter. This is a general problem. See Help:Template#Usage hints and workarounds. For your situation, the documentation at Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard/Header could be changed from "please put {{DRN archive top|<reason for closure>}} at the top" to "please put {{DRN archive top|1=<reason for closure>}} at the top". Did you copy the code from there so this change would have fixed it? PrimeHunter (talk) 02:09, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Question about Sales Receipt Templates in Quickbooks 2010

I am currently using Quickbooks 2010 to record my daily sales. I have created a template, and I have added items for Sales and for the types of payments that we accept.

The problem that I am having is that every day, I have to re-enter each Item into the receipt. Since I use the same items every day, I would like quickbooks to just have these items listed on the receipts so that each day I can enter the totals.

How can I do this? I've searched google for "using the same items on a quickbooks sales receipt" but that's been no help.

Thanks. John173.243.168.189 (talk) 05:22, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

These comments aren't about Quickbooks specifically, but hopefully will still apply:

Do you sell each item separately ? If so, perhaps you need a receipt template for each item, and one without the item specified. Then just bring up the proper receipt template for each item, or, for unusual items, bring up the blank receipt template.

If you sell multiple items together, you could have a receipt template which lists all the items you sell, and you'd just indicate the quantity of each. However, this approach only works if you have a small selection of items you sell.

If you sell thousands of items, with dozens of different items sold each time, then you're out of luck, and will have to continue to do as you are currently doing. StuRat (talk) 05:40, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

"Delayed" page numbering in MS Word 2010

I have a multi-page document in which I need to number the pages from the third "physical" page. The first page is a title page, the second is a table of contents, the "actual" document only starts on the third page which must be numbered "Page 1" and onwards. For the purposes of page numbering the fist two pages must be ignored. Roger (talk) 08:08, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

It's traditional to ask a question on the Reference Desk, but my psychic powers tell me that you might find your answer here: [2]. Henry^Flower 08:47, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, but that supresses page numbering for the first page only. I need it to ignore the first two pages. Roger (talk) 09:23, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I was surprised to find that Word doesn't allow numbering to start at a negative page number. Dbfirs 09:45, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

You could put a section break after the table of contents. Turn "link to previous section" off in the footer formatting for the second section, so that you can control section footers separately. Add page numbers in the fotter for the second section, and start page numbers at 1. Gandalf61 (talk) 09:35, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

That works! Thanks, you're a wizard! Roger (talk) 10:29, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

What was the internet like...

I started using the internet in the late nineties, and I wonder what it was like before then. What content could be found on the internet? What did people use the internet for? How did people browse without indexing services? How did it differ from our current Darknet? Could anyone tell me, or link me to a place where it gets explained in more detail? Thanks.212.123.1.140 (talk) 08:43, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

There were lots of text-only pages, and we used Gopher (protocol) browsers to view them. There really weren't search engines, so somebody had to give you an address (which you had to type in flawlessly) or you had to follow a link to find new things. I used to look up David Letterman's Top Ten list each day, for example (just the text, not a video of them being read, like today). Electronic bulletin boards were popular then, kind of a bare-bones version of a wiki. StuRat (talk) 08:50, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Usenet, which still exists, was also big back then. Roger (talk) 09:35, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Honestly, I don't recall gopher having a significant presence until a year or two before the WWW exploded. In the Eighties it was mostly e-mail and Usenet, and sometimes ftp. --Trovatore (talk) 22:36, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

And of course if you wanted to know the opening times and price of something, you didn't use the internet. You phoned directory enquiries, got a phone number and waited to the next office hours before talking to a human. -- SGBailey (talk) 11:08, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Here's a Slate article on the web in 1996. If you google Internet in 1995 etc, you'll get lots of links.

In the late 90s there were starting to be search engines like Altavista (launched at the end of 1995), but if you wanted to find info your first stop was usually Yahoo! (formerly Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web) which started out as a categorised directory of websites, all generated manually. There were a lot of text-heavy pages set up by people with access via their work or educational institution (on bands, TV programs, and everything else that interests geeks), but unless you had that sort of connection, few people had personal webpages, and also there were far fewer companies with web pages. Amazon.com launched in 1995, and eBay was another early site, though initially in the San Francisco area, and they didn't have the domination they have now.

Pre 1995, it was very different, as already mentioned - there were text pages available with Gopher (protocol), and Usenet, but not much in the way of pictures, and essentially no e-commerce; there were also "walled gardens" like Compuserve and AOL which offered email and syndicated content to subscribers, but no access to the public/academic internet until the mid 90s.

See History of the Internet. --Colapeninsula (talk) 16:23, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

My first ever connection with the Internet wasn't with WWW, Usenet, or even Telnet. It was with FTP. I looked at what my classmates were doing in computer class after the teaching had ended, and they told me they were connecting to Aminet. This was like a treasure trove to me. All that non-commercially-published software which I previously had had to order through mail-order was right there, for the taking, and for free. The only things I had to do was to type ftp some.site.somewhere at a DOS prompt (the computers we had there then only had Windows 3.1), then type cd pub/aminet, find some interesting file, and type get InterestingFile.lha. After about ten to fifteen minutes of displaying row after row after row of "#" marks on the screen, the file was there on the PC's hard drive. Then I'd just insert a floppy disk into the PC, copy the file to it, and when I got back home from school, copy the file from the disk to my Amiga (Amigas can read PC disks, but not the other way around) and start using the software. Soon afterwards I learned Amigas could connect to the Internet too, so I could cut out the middle man if I wanted to, but back then, modems were pretty expensive, and the Internet connection at school was faster and more reliable than the dial-up connection I had at home. JIP | Talk 20:50, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

And what's more, Aminet also gave me the opportunity to upload files, allowing me to publish software I had written myself. I would never have even imagined being able to do that with a mail-order company. But Aminet just accepted whatever I sent to it. And I remember that some people out there actually liked my software. I was much pleased when I got my first ever registration request for a Shareware game I had written, I think it was from an American man who had been stationed in Guam. I think I got something like four to six registrations in total. JIP | Talk 20:55, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

I got on in 1994. Most addresses were IP addresses, IIRC. You got files through FTP. I didn't have a graphical way to access the internet until after I got Windows 95 in 1996. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 22:18, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

In those days you could do USENET messages, email, download some files, and play text-based games. Then in late 94 or early 95 my wife took me down to her work and showed me the first graphics I saw on the internet. It showed the logo of the organization and you could click to get various information (although it wasn't working at the time.) Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 22:33, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Don't forget talk and IRC. -- BenRG (talk) 00:14, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Oh, and MUDs. Maybe that's what you meant by "text-based games", but I'm not sure that quite does them justice. -- BenRG (talk) 01:17, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Was it mainly applications and games that were shared? Or collections of books and information (that couldn't be obtained anywhere else, perhaps?) as well (think Darknet Library)? Were those files often infected with viruses or trojans? 212.123.1.140 (talk) 09:11, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Pretty much anything that could be put in digital format was shared. At least Aminet mainly shared applications and games, but there were also things like pictures, music, and text files. Everything uploaded to Aminet was user-created and licensed to be freely distributable - uploading pirated copies of commercial software was strictly forbidden. People could also share files on Usenet. As Usenet natively only supports text, this was done by appending the files as Uuencoded data to the text message. Clever Usenet clients could automatically extract these attachments from messages and offer to save them. Unlike Aminet, a significant portion of files shared on Usenet was porn. Outside porn, I'm fairly sure very few of the files were infected with viruses or trojans. JIP | Talk 15:57, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

When FTP was the main distribution method, archie was a reasonable way to find things. But there were a few sites that basically had everything. Everbody knew ftp.wustl.edu ("wuarchive"), ftp.uu.net, and, a bit later, ftp.cdrom.com the way people now know www.google.com. There was never any FTP feature war with sites demanding you use the latest version of their preferred client, since people in those days actually wanted their software to work with everyone else's.

Usenet was already mentioned, but I'd like to emphasize that it was much more usable in the past, because the spam volume was low. Here's the message we used to see when sending out a post:

This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire
civilized world.  Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of
dollars to send everywhere.  Please be sure you know what you are doing.
Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this? [ny]

talk (especially ytalk) is a great improvement over its successors. Shortly after the first big wave of Windoze users had arrived, one of them excitedly demonstrated the great new thing which was ICQ. You can chat with people in real time! Not impressive if you've seen talk, which sent every character as it was typed, where this new competitor waited for you to press Enter before sending the whole line. And this agonizing slowness was called "instant" messaging.

Another critical tool was finger. Finger your friend's address and get some basic information: whether they're currently logged in, where their last login was from, when they had last received and read mail... stuff that isn't often published in any way today. The Internet was more functional when it was less paranoid. Sometimes we'd ask whoever was logged in nearby "finger me, see if I have mail"

If you wanted to publish information but didn't have a web page, finger was the answer again. Stick it in your .plan and tell people "finger me for my public key" or whatever. It was limited to about a screenful of text though so you had to be brief. An early Internet-capable appliance was a Coke machine that could be fingered to find out how full it was, or maybe it was the temperature, I forget exactly... (Note I don't mean that this was a product you could buy... I mean there was one Coke machine on the Internet that some geeks had wired up, and it was famous.)

And the other form of finger, finger @hostname gave a list of people logged into the host of your choice. If you were bored, you could pick someone and talk them. And you thought ChatRoulette was an original idea! We did that in the early 90's, we just didn't have the bandwidth for the video and audio to go with the text (but did have the bandwidth for the character-at-a-time transmission of text. I seriously don't understand why everybody settles for line-at-a-time now.)

Where finger was good for looking up people on remote machines, you should also realize that there was a whole other category which has disappeared: people on the local machine. Your Internet connection was probably a Unix login, on a machine which dozens of other people were also using at the same time, where things like who and w were a lot more interesting than on a modern Linux box where the only users are you and root (which is also you). People on the same host were aware of each other like neighbors, a situation which has no analogue today. (You have neighbors in the DHCP pool that your ISP assigns your IP address from, but you don't know who they are and if you ever found out it'd be called a "privacy violation".) 68.60.252.82 (talk) 03:59, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

The fingerable Coke machine was at CMU and apparently dates back to the mid '70s (history). The similarly famous Trojan Room coffee pot only dates back to 1991, but that's still old enough for this thread. Like you, I miss character-by-character chat. The other thing I really miss is Usenet's hierarchical threading. The fact that Wikipedia has it (kind of) is one of the reasons I'm here and not on some random web forum... -- BenRG (talk) 08:17, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

When you say "your friend's address", do you mean IP address, or hostname.domain? Did they have dynamic IPs back then? 212.123.1.140 (talk) 09:11, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm quite sure he doesn't mean either. He means something like e-mail address. One could type something like finger joe@cthulhu.myuniversity.edu and get information about user joe on the host cthulhu.myuniversity.edu. If one was logged in to cthulhu.myuniversity.edu oneself, then just finger joe would do the same thing, as far as I remember. 194.100.223.164 (talk) 09:56, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Best practices for application protocol and library API design

I'm looking for best practices for application protocol and library API design. I sometimes deal with systems that are structured as a collection of services interacting with one another using custom application layer protocols. I'm looking for guidelines and best practices for the design of these application layer protocols. I'm also interested in guidelines and best practices for the design of software library APIs. The libraries here are for some rather specialized purposes but are intended to allow multiple applications to be built using them across several device platforms. I can think of some good practices but would like to benefit from the experience of others. Thanks in advance. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.49.9.204 (talk) 11:26, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Some rules I've found helpful:

1) Try to categorize your APIs. For example, those dealing with graphics might go into one library, those dealing with database access in another, etc. Avoid any APIs that fit into multiple categories, by breaking them up. In your case, you might want libraries for each platform and a library of APIs which work on all platforms (and a "That platform not supported." error would also be nice).

2) Clearly state which arguments are input only, input/output, and output only. I also suggest always keeping them in that order, separated by an extra space between types, to make it obvious which is which without having to bring up the API documentation and read through the comments ("inp1,inp2, io1,io2, out1,out2" but with more useful argument names, of course). Argument names should also include the variable type, and, where applicable, the length. So, "FilenameC32" instead of just "Filename". I can't stand trying to use an API which isn't properly documented.

3) Return useful error messages. So, "The string length parameter can't be zero" is more useful than "Division by zero error".

4) Clearly state whether each API can have multiple instances running at once, and, if not, the second API instance should ideally return an error saying that an instance of the API is already in use.

5) Allow a debug flag to be passed in, perhaps with multiple levels, to specify the detail of the output traces produced.

6) API name should fully describe what it does. So, names like "OpenDbTbl", not "MyAPI38". StuRat (talk) 16:28, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

My own suggestions for API stuff:

1. Never assume there is just one of anything (just one screen, one network adapter, one user, one mouse). Almost always it's sensible to have the API allow for multiples, even if your implementation doesn't. The Java AWT implementation is (was) hamstrung by having a singleton Toolkit object, which was bound to a single graphics output device. Want to open windows on two different screens? Want to do font-rendering in an offscreen context, without a round-trip to the X server? No dice. They fixed that later, but had to complicate the API to do so. If they're just had an explicit CreateToolkit(device foo) call this wouldn't happen.
2. No implicit global state. This is almost a corollary of my first point. API users get state objects (which are opaque to them) and pass them to other calls. Your implementation may (will, surely) have global state, but this shouldn't be overt in the API. This way to can add and change stuff later, and you don't have to guess which thing the caller is talking about.
3. Use abstract types, even when you think it's obvious what type something will always be. X11 is very good about this. Even though many of their types resolve to uint32_t, the API doesn't admit to that. That way, ten years from now, if you decide to add vastly more support for something, no-one can have legitimately made assumptions about how many things are supported. So the API should be full of connection_t, user_t, pid_t, even if they're just typedefs for int. An example: a while ago I worked on adapting an existing networking library. Its author hadn't obeyed my first rule: he'd assumed there was only one network adapter. My job was to make it work with 16 adapters. But the author had been good about using abstract types - so he used connection_id_t for each connection, which was just a synonym for an int. I redefined this to a struct which had the adapter_id_t and a local connection_t, and I only had to change the places where a connection_id_t was created, destroyed, read, or written. In 95% of the code it was just passed around (per point #2) and that code didn't change at all.
4. Worry about synchronisation and reentrancy now (and when you do you'll see again why #1/#2 is such good sense). Retrofitting reentrancy is hard if you didn't think of it at the beginning. But remember that synchronisation can also be expensive; some APIs deliberately chose not to be reentrant (Java Swing, QNX-Photon); Swing makes very good provision where multi-threaded applications can use Swing effectively, even though it's single threaded (Photon doesn't, and is a pain). In many languages, accessors (getters/setters) are easier to synchronise than direct access (e.g. in Java one can implicitly synchronise foo.setHeight(2) but not (really) foo.height=2
5. Worry about resource deallocation (in both normal and error/exception circumstances). The abstract objects your API presents may correspond with concrete OS objects like memory allocations, sockets, threads, file descriptors, etc. If a caller hangs onto a bunch of those, they may innocently consume system resources and cause subsequent calls to fail. So you need to understand where those resources are going, and be able to tidy up and reclaim them, perhaps aggressively. And you may choose not to allocate such "real" things until they're actually needed. For example the Java JVM allows a program to have code synchronised on potentially thousands of different locii (which logically confirms to thousands of OS mutex objects) - but the JVM doesn't actually allocate an OS mutex until one is actually needed (and some implementations aggressively cull unused ones).
6. Design for virtualisation. You might be coding with real users talking to real disk drives on real connections, but design for all that stuff to be pluggable so a user can be a script, a disk drive can be remoted over a network, etc. This makes design-for-test much easier, because you can plug in a test script in place of a user, and another for remote parties, disks, etc.

87.114.9.76 (talk) 17:25, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Another one: combine rough- and fine-grained errors. Fine grained is vital for actually pinning down problems: imagine you get a report from the field, and it simply says that some user is getting a "network_error" - that's obviously not much for you do go on. If the error is "network_error(dns_lookup_failed)" you're much further along. But wrapping that with rough grain is essential (because most users of errors just care that it's a network_error, not which specific type of network_error). Python's habit of having an error as as a tuple, which contains (perhaps nested) payloads is a good one; unix/C's errno isn't a good example to follow, if you have the choice. 87.114.9.76 (talk) 17:36, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

A corollary of #5 is that an implementation of your API, and a user of it, is quite entitled to ask for a detailed accounting of what's been used. As best as you can, design the API so an implementation can track who owns what resource. That way to can have accounting APIs that will list all the scarce resources, to allow someone to track down which apps or subsystems are hanging on to stuff they could be releasing. And a test harness can deliberately push the system into the red (where there aren't any more sockets or IPC queues or memory left for apps to get) to verify the system, and the apps, behave as best as possible when system resources get exhausted. 87.114.9.76 (talk) 17:45, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Google ads

Did we start having google ads in Wikipedia? Why?--188.4.233.216 (talk) 13:07, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

I don't see any ads. --Mr.98 (talk) 13:12, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

I use Google Chrome and now in all pages but the main, there is a Google Ad. I tried Explorer too. What can I do?--188.4.233.216 (talk) 13:15, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

There are no ads. Are you sure you are viewing http://en.wikipedia.org/ or just some other site replicating Wikipedia content? Astronaut (talk) 14:46, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Absolutely! Even in this page, there is an ad in the top. I really don't make fun. I talk seriously.--188.4.233.216 (talk) 14:53, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

I suspect you have a virus/malware or something that is inserting ads into the pages. There are no ads on Wikipedia. --Mr.98 (talk) 15:12, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Can I do anything? I must say that yesterday night, there were ads only in the GREEK Wikipedia. This didn't have.--188.4.233.216 (talk) 15:49, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Try running Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware and see if it finds anything. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:13, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Well, I think it's not a virus. From the... symptoms I mean!--188.4.233.216 (talk) 17:33, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

We all think it is, since if the site is not sending out the google ads, but you are receiving them, then something is interfering with your browsing pleasure. Either your PC is inserting the ads, or your internet service provider is doing so. If we can exclude the latter - can we? - the the former looks the likely perp. And if you did not tell the PC to do this, then someone else did. We tend to call that a virus. Why exactly do you think the symptoms point away from a virus? What do you think are the symptoms of a virus? --Tagishsimon (talk) 18:12, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Well, I haven't searched viruses that good, so I think you're right. However, these three points:

1. it does not happen in the Main Page.
2. It happened first at the minor Wikipedias and then at the central (english).
3. It doesn't happen at any other part of the Wikimedia Project or any other site.

make me think it's not a virus. Am I wrong? Anyway are here any Chrome users to tell us--188.4.233.216 (talk) 19:23, 8 March 2012 (UTC)?

It's almost certainly some form of extension you've installed in Chrome - perhaps unintentionally, as this sort of thing often masquerades as a harmless download manager, etc. Try looking at your extensions (which I believe are under the preferences menu), turning some off, and seeing what happens. Shimgray | talk | 19:38, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

The fact that it apparently shows up in IE makes me think it is not a Chrome extension but something else. (And I can confirm that Chrome isn't, by default, showing ads on Wikipedia.) Perhaps if the OP took a screenshot and uploaded it, we might get a better idea of what's going on. --Mr.98 (talk) 19:44, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Well, I just installed AdBlock and the're gone...--188.4.233.216 (talk) 19:59, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

I uninstalled it, because it seems that with it installed, I cannot have a spages sequence. However, I just remebered that when I first installed internet, with Firefox there were Google Ads at Wikipedia for some weeks and then diappeared. I hope that it is such a situation.--188.4.233.216 (talk) 20:19, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Why don't you try running Malwarebytes as suggested? It is free. It will help rule out it being a virus. It is really not that much work. --Mr.98 (talk) 21:32, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

I have to agree with the others here. There's no innocent way for Google ads to appear on a web site that doesn't display third-party material of any kind. This has got to be malware. It might just be designed to collect ad revenue, but it might also be reporting every page you visit to a third party, or even stealing your passwords. Don't just block the ads and assume the problem is solved. -- BenRG (talk) 04:31, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

User contribution pages

I checked through the Village Pump but couldn't find anyone complaining of the same problem. Using Firefox on Ubuntu with several tabs open. All the pages, both Wikipedia and non-Wikipedia, look fine except for user contribution pages, and my watchlist, which are in a larger font. I can reduce the user contribution size but that also reduces the size in the other tabs. I checked and the problem is not there in Chrome. Any suggestions? CambridgeBayWeather (talk) 21:42, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Have you tried to clear your entire cache, close the browser and restart it? Does it happen when you are logged out? PrimeHunter (talk) 00:12, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks that worked. Weird though, why would it only make the user contributions, not just mine but everyone, larger? I just realised that some of the Twinkle stuff was missing and that has returned as well. Thanks again. CambridgeBayWeather (talk) 00:32, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

MSN

I'm having a couple of problems with MSN messenger. I used to have it pop up on my desktop every time I turned my computer on and found this annoying because I never used it, and eventually found some way of getting rid of it. Now, though, I do want to use it and can't find out how to get it back. Any ideas, because otherwise I have to have my emails open on another tab for anyone to contact me.

Second problem, I can't get to send anyone messages on it, I have to wait for them to send me one. I've tried every page on the site I can find, nothing seems to work, even when I followed the instructions given to me by someone on another site, it just opened the profile page over and over.

148.197.81.179 (talk) 23:53, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Another IM question

I have thousands of free text messages on my new phone that I rarely use, is there any way of sending messages to someone's IMs using these texts, rather than my limited mobile internet time? Or any way I could text someone and have them reply through free IMs or anything like that? I know Skype allows the opposite, sending messages to a phone, but what about sending from one? Anything like this on AIM, YIM,MSN, Skype, Trillian, anything else at all?

148.197.81.179 (talk) 23:59, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

It's not quite IM, but this sounds exactly like what Twitter was set up to do. You need to set up an account from the website, but after that you can tweet simply by sending a text. In the UK the 'shortcode' number is 86444. - Cucumber Mike (talk) 07:11, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Just curious about why would you buy a contract with thousands of text messages that you rarely use - usually the more "free" texts and minutes, the more expensive the contract. Why not get more minutes and fewer texts for the same cost, or pay less for your contract? Astronaut (talk) 13:31, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

I don't speak for the OP, but in a general case many people take out a contract primarily as a credit arrangement on the cost of the handset, moreso than the service plan that comes with it. An expensive contract may provide more minutes and/or texts than the customer will ever use, but may be necessary to get the model they want. AJCham 21:11, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Actually I was talking to someone a lot, but not any more, and I still have the old contract. Also, it was really quite cheap. 148.197.81.179 (talk) 01:07, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

If you run the Android OS, you can route all of your web traffic through text messages. It would certainly route web-based IM traffic as well, but I'm not sure about dedicated app-based IM traffic. http://www.pcworld.com/article/239756/ingenious_android_app_allows_web_browsing_over_sms.html gnfnrf (talk) 14:25, 10 March 2012 (UTC)