$1498 for a single SMS.

ZDNet have raised questions about the costs of SMS taking into consideration the very small amount of data that they consume.

At present, according to ZDNet AT&T charges 20c per message in the USA, which after one does the calculations amounts to around $1 310.72/MB of data used.

The calculation was done by doing the following. A SMS message consists of 160 characters with a single character equalling 1 byte. (according to Gthing Science Project a standard SMS message contains up to 1120 bits of data). Though, SMSes use 7 - not 8 - bit characters - which leaves you with 128 possible character values instead of the 256 in computer systems. So therefore, 1120bits/7bits = 160 characters.

So once we have done this part of the calculation, the rest is fairly easy. With 1 048 576 bytes in a megabyte around 7490 SMS's will make up a megabyte. At a rate of 20c per SMS it equates to $1498 per MB of data (before any other deductions such as headers and who is charged for the sending and receiving), which is a very far way from the current US data rates charged by ISP's.

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Intel Releases 7 New Chips, including a 6-core.

Intel has released seven new Xeon processors (just after AMD released their tri-core processors) including one with six cores per chip that all have a 16MB shared cache memory.

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The Xeon 7400 series has set new four and eight socket records virtualisation, database, enterprise resource planning and e-commerce.

The specs of the chips are; frequencies of up to 2.66GHz and power levels down to 50 watts, the 6-core is x86 compatible with a 65-watt version is also available.