Want a hacker friendly phone? Why not build one yourself, like the guys at WildDucks are doing? Might not fit in your pocket, but carrying that thing will certainly enhance your hacker credentials.

I hate to break it to you - but from what I can gather, most Chinese communist party apparatchiks don't look much like this. Don't go trading in your human rights just yet...

Personally, I'd have gone for +1 Insightful for this. It potentially serves to emphasise to the mainlanders that they are somehow second class to the citizens of HK. A former colleague once described going from HK to the mainland to visit a supplier as like going from West Berlin to communist East Berlin. He was talking about all the security involved - and having to be followed around by a communist party apparatchik all the time. However, you do have to wonder if there are other parallels to be drawn there...

Make sure you visit the Faraday Museum. I'm amazed that I've not seen this recommended yet, but if you value all things electrical and electronic it's like making a pilgrimage. Faraday's original workshop is still preserved as part of the museum at the Royal Institution.

Just think how much money they could have saved by making a quick call to Larry Elisson or Scott McNealy. On the other hand, I can imagine the responses:

Larry E. : Yes, I know we weren't successful with the network computer last time around, but it was all down to the network infrastructure. Now that everyone in the world has 100% guaranteed broadband access all the time, I'm sure it will fly...

Scott M. : Yes I know we weren't successful with the JavaStation last time around, but it was probably as a result of limiting it to running just the Java application stack. I'm sure that if you use something more enterprise ready like (cough, splutter, cough) a combination of Javascript and AJAX hacks you'll do much better...

No top secret island bases, personal space stations, gold cigar holder and lighter combos that can double as a handgun and definitely no sharks with frikkin laser beams. In short, nothing that any self respecting billionaire /. reader would want to spend their money on.

I can't point you to a definitive comparison, but here is my understanding: Jazelle can be used as a speed-up for conventional interpreted JVMs without any extra memory overhead, which makes it ideal for resource constrained devices such as low-end Java enabled phones. JIT compilation gives faster execution than using an interpreted JVM (including Jazelle accelerated ones), but it comes with a memory overhead. So, for a device like the N810/N900, ARM JIT compilation is best.

I agree that a full blown desktop/server JVM would be OTT. The CDC (connected device configuration) profile is designed for devices which are smarter than the bog-standard Java-ME phone, but not up to running a full SE stack. Have a look at the overview here. A cut and paste of the 'target devices' section:

What's more, the open source implementation released by Sun has an excellent ARM targeted JIT compiler. All in all, apart from the out of date GUI implementation (QT3 based) it would be an ideal Java platform for something like the N900.

I'll add another thing that's missing from my N810 which looks like it's still missing from the N900, which is an 'official' JVM. The Java CDC profile was designed for devices like this - and the GPL'd Sun version is very ARM-friendly. I managed to get the foundation version up and running on my N810, but it needs quite a bit of work to get the GUI layers working (I ran into some QT3 versus QT4 threading voodoo when I tried).

So, if anyone from Nokia is reading this - I'd like to see a supported CDC personal profile JVM with Jambi support!

Yes - I know that this is all GPL'd code and I should be able to take it and fix it all myself, but having it as a standard part of the platform makes a huge difference.

OK, since we're doing shameless plugs here, I can say with a high degree of certainty that there will be a Linux friendly ZigBee solution arriving RSN. The product in development is a smart USB adapter which embeds all the proprietary ZigBee code so that the host-side can be 100% Free Software friendly - although it will be dual-licensed to allow 3rd parties to create Tivo-ised products on commercial terms.

As far as the host side is concerned, it will be based Java/OSGi in order to take advantage of the modularity that platform gives. The idea here is that different developers can create their own applications for home security, lighting control, remote control cat flaps, etc and plug them into a running system. Of course, you'll still need to buy into one of the commercial vendors if you want to build your own ZigBee powered gadgets - but their dev kits are generally pretty good value and many can be had at hobbyist-friendly prices.

If you're not wanting to roll your own ZigBee powered gadgets, third party products are slowly coming to market which implement the standard ZigBee profiles for home automation, smart energy and RFCE (remote controls on steroids). The intention is to support all these standards as plugins to the host platform.

However, before everyone gets over-excited, I need to point out that the initial batch of 32 USB devices will be for conformance testing and trusted early beta testers only. As with all these kinds of projects, availability of the final product will depend on how many late-night coding sessions I manage to get in and how much money I can persuade the bank manager to lend me ;-)

The spam postings on the various different forum sites didn't originate from my system, so I think that I'm safe from rootkits! It looks like someone is running a spam sweatshop in somewhere like Elbonia. All the postings seem to be by new members who've successfully bypassed any capchas, etc that the different forums had in place. The more actively managed forums have deleted the spam and canceled the corresponding accounts, but it's getting rid of all the other posts which is going to be a major PITA - especially the ones where the forum administrator appears to be AWOL.