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Note that smartphone sales are on the rise. Standalone PDAs are suffering, but the integrated devices are taking off.

Talk about being hungry an hour after eating...

Next we'll learn how to grill steaks on a Lexmark printer... soon there will be no need to leave the computer room for lunch!

where do we draw the line between complex and common

The test is that the invention (at the time it was invented) was not obvious to someone skilled in the area/field of the invention. If it was commonly known at the time then it won't qualify. There are other conditions, too, described on the USPTO website. Actually, they say it better than I did: "it may be said to be nonobvious to a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention".

It sure sounds like those "parabolic" TV antennas guaranteed to boost your reception after just a few viewings, doesn't it? Not to be cynical, but:

Using latest nanotechnology research, (we read an issue of Wired)
BatMax developed the first cellphone battery life booster that extends the mobile phone battery life (which is why we call it a "battery life booster")
and reduces charging time. BatMax is based on the IonXR, a new exclusively developed nanoceramic material, (we grind ceramic tiles into a fine dust)
resulting from years of laboratory research (it was hard to grind them small enough).
BatMax foil slows down the loss of capacity of Ni-CD, Ni-MH, Li-Ion and Li-Polymer batteries (we guarantee it works the same on all of these)
and thus provides improved battery performance (not to be redundant again).
BatMax is a small (1.14 x 1.92 in) rectangular sticker (we sandwich the dust between some sticky aluminum foil)
which is installed on the mobile phone battery (the hard part was keeping it really thin).
Users just need to attach BatMax to the battery or the cellphone (where they'll quickly forget about it once the cover's back on).
They claim users will notice a battery life improvement after 5 to 10 charging cycles (by then the placebo effect should kick in).

It's true, overuse of ALT attributes can just add noise to a page.

For a good overview of Web accessibility, check out the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessbility Guidelines.

Hey, I like Java as much as anyone, but if you're looking for a fast, multi-platform, zero-administration database be sure to check out SQL Anywhere Studio. The Developer Edition is completely free and runs on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Netware and most flavors of Windows, including CE/PocketPC. See the description of what's in SQL Anywhere Studio for details. (Note that some of you may remember SQL Anywhere as Watcom SQL.)

heads are rolling over having standardized on IBM (from Dell)

Does it really have anything to do with service? We've been switching from ThinkPads to Dells mostly because you can get the equivalent Dell laptop for (say) $500 cheaper. You sure it's not just the up-front cost (as opposed to after-market service) that's driving things?

people who had the most accurate self-perception were depressed people

Maybe you're thinking of this paper: Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. Good reading. Not that it applies to me, or anything.

This isn't unreasonable if you're a user who just wants to use the tools you know. I installed OpenOffice for someone for a similar reason, who needed to edit PowerPoint documents. He wasn't thrilled because OpenOffice didn't look exactly like office. It also kept asking him when she was saving his files if he really wanted to use the old Office format instead of the 'better' OpenOffice format. He needed the standard format because she was displaying the presentations with PowerPoint on machines where I couldn't go and install OpenOffice. The kicker for him, though, was that the presentations he edited with OpenOffice did not look the same when he ran them in PowerPoint. Sure, that's a bug that will probably (or may already have been) fixed, but that didn't help him get his job done.

In the end, he bought the version of Office that included PowerPoint and now he's happy.

Not everyone wants to be on the leading edge or to try out new things. You sometimes have to think of this from their viewpoint. Some people just don't care -- they've learned one tool and they don't want to learn another.

I was referring to TV + VCR or TV + DVD combos, not VCR + DVD combos.

And yes, I do realize that these things are disposable nowadays.

I have to agree. It's the same reason why the TV/VCR or TV/DVD combos aren't a great idea for most people. Do you really want to lose your TV when you send the player out be repaired? I don't think so. Those kinds of devices appeal to a niche market.

she still can't sing

Doesn't seem to stop anyone else from becoming a "recording artist"! If her sister wasn't famous, she'd be nowhere. Not sure why her sister got famous, though. It's certainly not her brains.

Ashlee Simpson will never make a lip-sync gaffe again

I suspect it's more likely that she'll never do a live show again. From now on, all you'll see at her concerts are video screens. Actually, she'd probably love holographic projection (with a time delay for editing) if it ever gets invented.

More fodder for Dan Brown: The Hipparchus Map, coming soon.

But then who polices the advertisers? Is Google supposed to trust you to tell them when a visitor who reaches your landing page converts into a sale? What if you're not selling anything, at least not directly? I can see all kinds of problems at that end, too.

Really, you're paying Google for traffic. Qualified traffic, yes, but traffic just the same. How you convert that traffic into sales is not Google's worry.

I would sure hesitate to buy one of Tivo's lifetime subscriptions right about now.

That's the problem with lifetime subscriptions... most people assume such a subscription is valid for their lifetime when in fact it's valid for the company's lifetime.

But yeah, an annual subscription looks like the better deal right now...

There's a tactile aspect to reading a newspaper or a book that the electronic versions still can't duplicate. I still like my morning paper, what can I say? I can't be the only one, otherwise it would have folded a long time ago...

people will draft back to newspapers

Which is kind of funny, considering that most newspapers are full of ads. Actually, you normally pay for the paper and get ads, kind of like the same way you (in a theatre) pay for a movie and get ads. At least on the Web you just get ads.

it's index is actually peer-reviewed and moderated

Which guarantees that no one will read it. Next thing you know, they'll be charging us for it. That model will never work, trust me.

Well, maybe if you sell ads or something.

Yet another misinterpretation Richard Stallman's manifesto! It must drive him bonkers.

... the owners are responsible for the actions of their companies, even if they're not legally accountable.

There are different levels of legal accountability, actually. Courts will "pierce the corporate veil" when necessary to get at the people who are ultimately responsible for things. Regulatory bodies are getting more aggressive about this kind of stuff -- look at all the fuss over Nortel, where a bunch of board members have just quit and former senior executives are going to pay back millions in bonuses. You have to think carefully before being a company director these days.

That said, I'm sure that these spyware companies are doing things in a legal manner and getting end users to agree to being spied on. Whether this is ethical is another matter, but I don't think VCs are generally out looking for the most ethical investments, they're looking for the ones that make them the most money.

I'm not even sure how this bug could exist in any normal computing system.

It happens the same way that many (most?) bugs happen -- the human programmer forgot to check for boundary conditions in the data interpretation. As the old saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out" -- if you don't validate your data, you may be surprised at the results you'll get. Here the result is that it's exposing someone else's message to you. But it's not that surprising.

These things usually boil down to human error and incorrect assumptions. Nothing new here.

Put a copy of Puppy on a USB flash drive and have it put up the Blue Screen of Death on bootup. Share the key with your friends.

P.S.: Interesting experiment: put a Linux system on a key like this with a Windows-like desktop scheme, boot someone's PC with it when they're not looking, and see if they can tell if there's any difference.

Should they excrete?

It'd be better if they'd extrude.

4) The Recording Industries Association of America will continue to sue customers while their business slowly dissolves. The big threat here isn't file swapping, but affiliate programs like Apple's iTunes Affiliate Program that I am sure will be shortly copied by all the online music stores. These affiliate programs turn bloggers into shills and blogs into record stores, with the result that record company's last source of power -- marketing clout -- is taken away. This will take time, but it is the beginning of the end for old-style record companies.

I didn't realize iTunes had an affiliate program, but it seems like a logical step. Amazon's been doing this for a long time with music CDs, of course, as have other vendors. While viral marketing is definitely a good way to promote things, I don't see it reducing the record companies' marketing clout. I've posted before about how they used viral marketing to promote Christina Aguilera when she was new. This is just another marketing avenue for them. But really, you still need to reach people who don't read blogs. People still watch TV. Still listen to the radio. Still read magazines and newspapers.

If one of Linus' kids takes over from his father then that could be considered a kind of tuning of the kernel using genetic algorithms!

If one of Linus' kids takes over from his father then that could be considered a kind of tuning of the kernel using genetic algorithms!

Hmmm... I assume the classes are sufficiently independent from one another? In that case, there might indeed be hope yet.

I was able to extract the encryption classes I needed. See my tech tip Data Encryption for J2ME Profiles for details.

how could I implement that in such a way that the user will only have to click through a single "okay to access the internet?" confirmation dialog

This depends on the device, but in general with MIDP 2.0 you can use the permissions mechanism to basically have the user prompted only once instead of each time. See Understanding MIDP 2.0's Security Architecture.

Is there any J2ME forum you could recommend, by the way?

The hardcore J2ME types hang around on the KVM-INTEREST list run by Sun. See J2ME Mailing Lists.

A lot of people thought that 5 years ago, but it has yet to happen.

I really can't imagine how one could do any serious development if the emulator on one's development machine isn't 100% compatible (or at least as close to 100% compatible as possible) to the real thing.

Trust me, this is not an uncommon situation in mobile/handheld programming -- it's not unique to J2ME. Hard to say what exactly is the cause of your problem without seeing any code. What does the code look like?

I had nothing to do with the original Slashdot story... someone else submitted that. I'm just clarifying the link.

The comments can be funny, though, like the kerfuffle that was caused earlier today by my use of "kerfuffle" in the story I did submit.

And this is also why search-based systems like GMail and Zoe that let you group and classify things on the fly are so useful. And it's not limited to computer stuff, either. Haven't you ever tried to figure out which of your (manila) file folders you should use to file a receipt?

How do Slashdot readers make international phone calls?

For countries within the North American Numbering Plan, I dial "1" + area code + local number. For other countries, I dial "011" + country code + local number. It's pretty simple, eh.

Here are some articles I wrote related to this topic:

• How to detect Internet Explorer
• Masquerading your browser
• HTTP header viewer

Here are some articles I wrote related to this topic:

• How to detect Internet Explorer
• Masquerading your browser
• HTTP header viewer

Here are some articles I wrote related to this topic:

• How to detect Internet Explorer
• Masquerading your browser
• HTTP header viewer

Funny, I wrote about this at the beginning of October, but apparently I got the prediction wrong. Mind you, I still say that Vioxx is like Prozac for lawyers.

Funny, I wrote about this at the beginning of October, but apparently I got the prediction wrong. Mind you, I still say that Vioxx is like Prozac for lawyers.

I think most of the research gets published anyhow as part of various governmental approval processes. Certainly anything patented gets published. Really, this initiative is more about republication rights and increasing access to published material than about getting it published in the first place.

I didn't know that a cellphone could wreak havoc with Microsoft's distributed network architecture... oops, wrong decade...

Doesn't releasing something under GPL pretty much guarantee a loss of standardization? GPL = "Go, procreate and live".

Hmm... semi off-topic, but it would be neat if search engines like Google could be trained to ignore negative score Slashdot comments. On systems where there's built-in feedback, that would be one way to combat the spam, just train the search engine crawlers to ignore comments with poor scores.

How to detect Internet Explorer and encourage IE users to switch to Firefox...

What, as opposed to paying $2 at a concession stand for a Coke that is essentially a few cents of concentrate with some water added to it? Printer ink isn't the only thing that's sold for a huge markup.

There's a place for both kinds of printing, I think. Sometimes I don't want to move the pictures I want to print onto a memory card and drive down to a photo place, sometimes I just want to print two or three. There's nothing that says you have to stop using commercial services if you own a printer.

I wonder if in their survey they bothered to make sure that the wedding photographers they surveyed were using different labs... I don't think many pro photographers print their own pictures these days. Well, maybe for black-and-white pictures, which is probably a rare capability for a lab.

Is this really any different than paying 7.5 million dollars for a domain name?

Your security is only as strong as the weakest link on the system. Forget the Google Desktop, if you have all your mail sitting around unencrypted on your hard disk, it doesn't take much to write code that finds and sniffs through it, no matter which email client you're using. (Makes me wonder what kind of security an email "librarian" like Zoe offers...) Again, the key is to do the right things to keep the malware out in the first place.

No, the work's not over yet, and I think it's time to focus attention on Thunderbird, because Outlook Express is also a security risk. Just replacing IE on a machine won't be enough, in my opinion.

Now, I've not had as good an experience with Thunderbird as with Firefox, so that's a problem. Large message databases that open very quickly with OE take on the order of 10-15 seconds with Thunderbird 1.0, which is a significant difference. That could give newbies a bad impression of TB, even though feature-wise it's way ahead of OE.

Because you might be using web applications that make use of ActiveX controls or have web pages that use other IE-specific features. If you've built an entire corporate infrastructure using IE, you might be tied to IE for a while.

Copyright protects the expression of an idea, it doesn't mean the idea is unique, only that the expression is original. So if I sat down and wrote my own dictionary using my own wordings for the definitions, I could certainly claim copyright on it. That's in fact what dictionary companies do... they basically rewrite definitions to publish new editions that are protected by copyright even if the older editions run out of copyright protection. Same thing happens with translations of old Latin and Greek works -- the original text isn't subject to copyright, but the translations sure are. That's why publishers commission new translations every (long) once in a while.

I've heard of dictionary compilers sometimes throwing in spurious definitions or other errors. If someone copies a dictionary verbatim to make their "own" dictionary it then becomes easy to show that they violated the original dictionary's copyright. Hopefully these "errors" don't happen too often :-)

Hopefully they understand how to detect Internet Explorer server-side and further encourage relunctant students to switch.