"Present laptop dying, battery of course," writes long-time Slashdot reader ClarkMills. It uses proprietary pouch Lithium cells. Wouldn't it be great to just swap in a new set of 18650s? Okay, it may not be a thin laptop but it would save me from turfing a perfectly good laptop otherwise...
The original submission drew some interesting comments -- including one from long-time Slashdot reader thegreatbob suggesting a used laptop might be the only option. "This seems to be due to the notion that 'thinner!' and 'lighter!' are more important than 'doesn't periodically turn into an incendiary pillow!' "

But are there other options? Share your own thoughts in the comments.

Is there a laptop that uses rechargeable 18650 cell batteries?

Slashdot reader ne0phyte73 writes: I got my first computer (a Commodore 64) when I was 13. My daughter got hers (One Laptop Per Child) when she was 5.

What are the current trends?

I see new AI-powered edutainment products coming to the market, targeted at toddlers. Would you give something like this to your 18 months old? (Kidshealth claims that there should be no screen time at all until 18 months, with the exception of "video chatting with grandparents or other family friends, which is considered quality time interacting with others."). Well, developers of "Animal Island Learning Adventure" claim that they provide quality interaction with AI-powered characters. Do you believe in the claims of developers that this or similar systems help toddlers to develop?

Would you give it to your child?

If this is, in fact, a "quality interaction", would you give it to kids even before they are 18 months old?
One review site said that particular learning adventure offers a tablet "pre-loaded with 60 days of ad-free content" focused on learning skills for preschoolers. Personally, that just makes me worry what would happen after 60 days. But share your own thoughts in the comments.

At what age should toddlers get screen time?

davidwr writes: If you were going to buy a desktop or laptop computer, how important is it to be able to upgrade memory and storage after your purchase? Is not being able to upgrade an "automatic no-buy," assuming you can get a computer that meets your needs that is upgradeable? If not, would you be willing to pay a little more for upgradeability? A lot more?

Personally, I like to keep computers 4-6 years, which means I prefer to buy an upgradeable machine then upgrade it after 2 or 3 years using then-much-cheaper or not-available-at-all-today parts. What are your thoughts?

Tablizer writes: Microsoft still dominates cubicle-land. Google is making a push into that domain, but it's unclear how far or how fast they can go. Most "serious" applications still run on only Windows and that doesn't seem to be changing much. What's keeping others out? Do we need new desktop-oriented, cross-platform standards? It seems everyone "went web" and forgot about the desktop niche, but it's a big niche still.

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen writes: If you don't watch YouTube, then more power to you, but if you do watch it, then I bet you have noticed more and more intrusive and noisy and much longer ads along with frequent reminders that you can pay up and make the noise go away.

Feels like extortion to me and I'm not going to pay a blackmailer. But someone must be paying up. Is it you? Or do you even know anyone who is paying?
The original submission also shares shanen's argument that Google is exploiting copyright loopholes to monetize other people's copyrighted content. "It wouldn't even matter how much pirate video is uploaded to YouTube if the Google didn't make it easy to find... If the Google actually wanted to stop the piracy, the algorithm is obvious... The famous content has famous keywords and the searches for those keywords can be whitelisted. Pirate results can be disappeared and replaced with results that belong to the actual creator with legitimate exceptions for fair use." (But instead, the argument goes, they're just asking you for money to remove their ads on that content...)

That's shanen's opinion -- but what's yours? And would you pay to subscribe to YouTube?

As we approach the weekend -- but more importantly, the end of the year -- it's good time as any to ask about the movies, TV shows, and documentaries from this year that you enjoyed the most or found incredibly insightful. Please list them below in the comments.

SomeoneFromBelgium writes: Yesterday I spoke to a friend of mine who works for a company developing mostly integrated network solutions which are purely Linux-based. He complained that he was unable to convince his IT department to provide him and his fellow developers and testers with a Linux desktop. They stated that "it was more secure when using a VM".

We both agreed that the more likely problem is that the IT department is solely geared towards a Windows desktop environment and that they have neither the skills nor the inclination to support any other platform.

This got me wondering: is this also your experience?
I bet Slashdot's readers have stories to tell, with enlightening experiences in corporate workplaces over the years gone by. So feel free to share your thoughts, opinions, and anecdotes in the comments.

And is your company using Linux desktops?

Long-time Slashdot reader 50000BTU_barbecue likes using vintage computers from the 1980s and early 1990s -- " real hardware with all the weirdness that goes with it."

But what do you do for a monitor? Especially when "old CRTs are starting to lose sharpness and brightness and may get tossed or damaged when moving..." We still use the same electrical plugs, and keyboards and joysticks are still similar-looking. But display devices have become these enormous high-resolution devices with fewer and fewer analog inputs... The solution is to use some sort of video upscaler.

There are many devices offered, from cheap Chinese units for about $10 to old professional studio scalers from 10-20 years ago. The Chinese units have no controls and are quite variable in the results obtained. But they're cheap. The old scalers would deliver professional results but are not guaranteed to work with consumer monitors or lock onto the non-standard timings of the non-interlaced "240p" video common on 8-bit computers.

What device do you use?
Leave your own thoughts and suggestions in the comments. How can you use modern displays with vintage computing hardware?

Slashdot reader Thelasko says his oldest child made some "interesting" statements when they came home from first grade: One particular phrase that bothers me is, "I can read pictures." Recently, I heard a radio show on NPR about whole-language reading instruction, and how it's a terrible way to learn. I've since learned that this is a hotly debated topic. I learned to read in a phonics-only setting. To me, this is the only way to read. I don't look at pictures, or the rest of the sentence unless I am completely clueless about what a word is. This whole-language approach just seems wrong. Have any Slashdot members been through this experience with their children?

Did anyone find good research supporting one way or the other, not just opinion? What is your opinion on whole-language versus phonics only reading instruction?
Other Slashdot readers shared some thoughtful comments. I75BJC wrote: From my personal experience, the Whole Word Method of learning to read did not help me. It limited my vocabulary and, especially, my ability to learn new words by myself. In a word, the Whole Word Method "SUCKS". Big time!

My 3rd grade teacher was horrified at our lack of reading skills (after 2 years of the Whole Word Method) and began teaching Phonics to the class. That helped but she could not dedicate the time to Phonics as if it were the way to read. It helped a lot but it didn't undo the damage that the Whole Word Method caused. Having been taught both Phonics and the Whole Word Method, I would say, from experience, that Phonics is the better method. As an Education Major in college, I would state that my professional opinion is that Phonics is vastly superior.

BTW, the debate between Phonics and the Whole Word Method has been going on for decades -- more than 50 years...
And Iamthecheese wrote: Some children learn better by listening, some by reading, some by doing. Some will learn by phonics best, some by getting cues, and most from a combination of these. You know what a child needs? Teachers and parents who love them enough to try different methods if the child is struggling. That's what's missing.

Schools that are glorified daycare and parents who don't have time for their children are the problem. Fix that and everything falls into place. Love the children enough to make sacrifices for them and treat them as individuals...
Where do other Slashdot readers stand on this debate? Leave your own thoughts in the comments.

Are we teaching children the wrong way to read?

dryriver writes: Everybody seems to think these days that kids desperately need to learn how to code when they turn six years old. But this ignores a glaring fact -- the biggest shortage in the future labor market is not people who can code competently in Python, Java or C++, it is people who can actually discover or invent completely new and better ways of doing things, whether this is in CS, Physics, Chemistry, Biology or other fields. If you look at the history of great inventors, the last truly gifted, driven and prolific non-corporate inventor is widely regarded to be Nikola Tesla, who had around 700 patents to his name by the time he died. After Tesla, most new products, techniques and inventions have come out of corporate, government or similar structures, not from a good old-fashioned, dedicated, driven, independent-minded, one-person inventor who feverishly dreams up new things and new possibilities and works for the betterment of humanity.

How do you teach inventing to kids? By teaching them the methods of Genrikh Altshuller, for example. Seriously, does teaching five to seven year olds 50-year-old CS/coding concepts and techniques do more for society than teaching kids to rebel against convention, think outside the box, turn convention upside down and beat their own path towards solving a thorny problem? Why does society want to create an army of code monkeys versus an army of kids who learn how to invent new things from a young age? Or don't we want little Nikola Teslas in the 21st Century, because that creates "uncertainty" and "risk to established ways of doing things?"

dryriver writes: In an episode of the BBC's Tomorrow's World broadcasted all the way back in 1984, a presenter shows hands-on how a laser hologram of a real-world object can be recorded onto a transparent plastic medium, erased again by heating the plastic with an electric current, and then re-recorded differently. The presenter states that computer scientists are very interested in holograms because the future of digital data storage may lie in them. This was 35 years ago. Holographic data storage for PCs, smartphones, etc. still is not available commercially. Why is this? Are data storage holograms too difficult to create? Or did nobody do enough research on the subject, getting us all stuck with mechanical hard disks and SSDs instead? Where are the hologram drives that appeared "so promising" three decades ago?

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen "just got the darnedest phone call..." The caller knew my name and the name of a bank that I've done business with, and obviously my phone number, but beyond that I have no idea what was going on... There is no problem with my account. She was quite clear about that, but she had no clear reason for calling. As I got more and more suspicious, she asked me to wait and she eventually transferred the call to a man, who claimed to be a manager at the bank, but the entire thing stinks to high heaven.

All I could think of was to suggest that I call him back, but he was apparently unable to provide a phone number that I could independently verify. Why not give me the bank's phone number that I could check on the Internet? One would think that I could then transfer to his extension. After almost nine minutes I just hung up, and now I realize that I have the caller's phone number, but that isn't definitive evidence of anything. A scammer might know that blocking the phone number would have made things more suspicious...

So what should I have done? Do you have any similar experiences to share? Or have I missed warnings about some new scam that's going around? Now I realize that they could start from names and phone numbers and just guess for the largest banks. Maybe I got suspicious too quickly, before she could start asking for the personal information she was really after?
The original submission also includes this question: "If it's an identity theft in progress, then I want to stop it and fast, but how can I tell what's going on?" So leave your own thoughts in the comments.

What should you do if you think someone is trying to steal your identity?

"If you've gone shopping for a new laptop lately, you may notice something missing in all newer models regardless of make," writes Slashdot reader ikhider.

There's no removable battery. Whether mainstream or obscure manufacturer, the fact that pretty much all of them are made in the same area denote a similar approach to soldering batteries in. While battery technology may have improved, it is not to the extent that they no longer need to be replaced. Premium retention of charges generally tend to deplete in about a year or so. This impacts the device mobility and necessitates replacement. Also, the practical use of having a backup battery if you need one cannot even be applied.

While some high-end models may have better quality batteries, it does not replace popping in a fresh, new one. This leads to one conclusion, planned obsolescence.If you want your laptop to still be mobile when the battery fizzles out, forget about it. Buy new instead. Pick your manufacturer, even those famed for building 'tank' laptops that last forever, all you need is a fresh battery, upgrade the RAM, and a new HD or SSD and away you go. While the second hand market still has good models with replaceable batteries, it is only a matter of time before that too fizzles away. If you had a limited budget, you could still get a good, second-hand machine [in the past], but now you are stuck with the low end.

Consumers need to make their case to manufacturers, for their own best interest to leverage the life of a machine on their own terms, not the manufacturers. Bring back the removable laptop battery.

Slashdot reader dryriver writes: More and more professional 3D software like 3DMax, Maya, AutoCAD (Autodesk) and Substance Painter (Adobe) is now only available on a monthly or yearly subscription basis — you cannot buy any kind of perpetual license for these industry standard 3D tools anymore, cannot offline install or activate the tools, and the tools also phone home every few days over the internet to see whether you have "paid your rent". Stop paying your rent, and the software shuts down, leaving you unable to even look at any 3D project files you may have created with software.

This has caused so much frustration, concern and anxiety among 3D content creators that, increasingly, everybody is trying to replace their commercial 3D software with Open Source 3D tools. Thankfully, open source 3D tools have grown up nicely in recent years. Some of the most popular FOSS 3D tools are the complete 3D suite Blender, polygon modeling tool Wings 3D, polygon modeling tool Dust3D, CAD modeling tool FreeCAD, PBR texturing tool ArmorPaint, procedural materials generator Material Maker, image editing tool GIMP, painting tool Krita, vector illustration tool Inkscape and the 2D/3D game engine Godot Engine.

Along with these tools comes a beguiling possibility — while working with commercial 3D tools pretty much forced you to use Windows X in terms of OS choice in the past, all of the FOSS 3D tool alternatives have Linux versions. This means that for the first time, professional 3D users can give Windows a miss and work with Linux as their OS instead.
In a comment on the original submission, dryriver offers some anecdotal evidence: Go on any major 3D software forum on the Internet and it is filled with enraged 3D users revolting against forced software subscriptions and threatening to switch to FOSS Blender as soon as possible.

Some major 3D animation studios are also working Blender into their CGI pipeline. Companies like EPIC and Nvidia have begun donating to the Blender foundation. Its happening. The move away from commercial closed source tools - which are expensive, stagnant and don't offer you permanent licenses anymore - is in full swing. The fact that Blender has an innovative GPU accelerated realtime render engine called EEVEE that none of the commercial software has has only accelerated this trend.

Blender is widely believed to have 2 - 3 million active users already, and the fact that V 2.80 comes with a much more usable UI is only accelerating things.

Slashdot reader dryriver writes: Using a compressed disk drive or hard drive has been possible for decades now. But when you do this in software or the operating system, the CPU does the compressing and decompressing. Are there any hard drives or SSDs that can work compressed using their own built in hardware for this?

I'm not talking about realtime video compression using a hardware CODEC chip -- this does exist and is used -- but rather a storage medium that compresses every possible type of file using its own compression and decompression realtime hardware without a significant speed hit.
Leave your best thoughts and suggestions in the comments. Are there storage devices with hardware compressiong built in?

An anonymous reader writes: I have met approximately two bullies in my career so far in which I have had about 15 bosses. One of them I was able to spot during the interview itself but I took the job (I shouldn't have) and left five months later. The other boss only revealed his bully persona to me in secret and only to me in one-on-one meetings. I had to announce I am starting to record all meetings and he promptly fired me the next meeting, after my first month on the job. I got my old no-bully job back last month and I am happy as always, but I wish I could have detected the bully during the interview itself and avoided them.

How do you spot bullies? What commonalities have you noticed? Fun fact: I have noticed bullies start their bullying when they see you doing something they cannot do.

Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, writes: You can learn anything on the internet, so why do I so often learn things I don't want to know? When I'm surfing the web I want to be drawn in by articles on Europe's political history or the nature of quasars, but I end up reading trivia like a menu from Alcatraz prison. Why am I not curious about the things I want to be curious about? Curiosity feels like it's outside your control, and trying to direct it sounds as ill conceived as forcing yourself to find a joke funny. But if you understand what prompts curiosity, you may be able to channel it a little better. Across evolutionary time, curious animals were more likely to survive because they learned about their environments; a forager that occasionally skipped a reliable feeding ground to explore might find an even better place to eat.

Humans, too, will forgo a known payoff to investigate the unknown. In one experiment, subjects were asked to choose one of four photos, each carrying some chance of paying a cash prize. Photos repeated, so subjects learned to pick the best-paying, but when a novel photo popped up, they chose it more often than the odds dictated they should. This preference for novelty is, of course, the reason manufacturers periodically tweak product packaging and advertising. But it's good to know about your environment even if it doesn't promise a reward right now; knowledge may be useless today, but vital next week. Therefore, evolution has left us with a brain that can reward itself; satisfying curiosity feels pleasurable, so you explore the environment even when you don't expect any concrete payoff. Infants prefer to look at novel pictures compared with familiar ones. Preschoolers play longer with a mechanical toy if it's difficult to deduce how it works.

New submitter aaronb1138 writes: So my apartment (UDR) pulled a bit of a blitz last Friday (10/11) to install new "Smart" IoT stuff in my home today (10/15) under the umbrella of SmartRent management. According to a CNET article from earlier this year, this seems to be SmartRent's usual method of attack. UDR is usually pretty miserly, so I suspect the monetization of my apartment usage is being sold at a nice price to advertisers. SmartRent FAQ claims no data sales, but their privacy policy is wide open and gives no such assurances. Further, they won't acknowledge if they also operate in California and as such provide me with their CCPA compliance information (I'm in TX, but figured, take the shot).

I asked SmartRent's Project Manager, Steven, as well as SmartRent's support not to plug into the electrical power I pay for, but I doubt that will be respected and instead I'll find them stealing my electricity for their own purposes when I get home. The install list is a smart lock (one of the hackable Yale cheapos), smart thermostat, a couple leak detectors, a dimmer plug -- and the scary part -- SmartRent's own Alloy brand SmartRent Hub with 4G backup (who pays the extra for 4G?). I'll do a full hardware teardown to find out what else is inside the Hub -- hopefully just minimally functional cheap ARM stuff and radios. But what else do I do from here /.? I don't really have time to file a lawsuit, and my gut tells me every step I take against the landlord is going to bring their more onerous leasing agreement line items on my head.

dryriver writes: Picture this: You want to buy 3 small items from some online retailer totalling about 50 bucks. A programming book, a USB thumbdrive and an HDMI cable. But you don't want to give this online retailer your full name, credit card number, email address, home postal address, phone number or other data for this insignificant little 50 Dollar online transaction, nor do you want to bother with 'registering an account' at the online retailer's webpage with password hassles and such. You want to buy quickly and anonymously, just like you can from a bricks and mortar shop with cash. You now instruct your bank -- or another online shopping intermediary you DO trust with your data -- to pay for those 3 items, receive them, and send them on to your home address. The online retailer gets 50 bucks as usual, but does NOT get identifying private data about you. You just shopped online, without having to bend over and ID yourself in X different ways to some online retailer, and your private info didn't go into yet another who-knows-where forever-database that may some day be hacked or compromised. Why is this simple, simple service not really a thing in the real world? Why can you walk into a bricks and mortar shop in most countries, pick out some products, pay in cash and walk out, and when you want to buy the exact same (non-dangerous) items online, you have to tell some profit-oriented retailer all sorts of stuff about yourself? Why is real world store shopping pretty much anonymous -- as it has been for centuries -- and online shopping almost like being ID'd before boarding a flight at an airport?

iTunes is officially dead with the release of macOS Catalina today. Apple decided to break apart the app into separate Apple Music, Podcasts and TV apps. "Each is better at its individuals task than it was as a section within iTunes, which was teetering on collapse like the Jenga tower of various functions it supports," writes Dieter Bohn via The Verge.

"In the early days, iTunes was simply a way to get music onto Apple's marquee product, the iPod music player," reports Snopes. "Users connected the iPod to a computer, and songs automatically synced -- simplicity unheard of at the time." It was the first service to make songs available for 99 cents apiece, and $9.99 for most albums -- convincing many people to buy music legally than seek out sketchy sites for pirated downloads. "But over time, iTunes software expanded to include podcasts, e-books, audiobooks, movies and TV shows," recalls Snopes. "In the iPhone era, iTunes also made backups and synced voice memos. As the software got bloated to support additional functions, iTunes lost the ease and simplicity that gave it its charm. And with online cloud storage and wireless syncing, it no longer became necessary to connect iPhones to a computer -- and iTunes -- with a cable."

What did you like or dislike about iTunes? When you look back at the media player, what are you reminded of?