I'm pretty sure that both of those things are necessary (and neither of them, separately, is sufficient) in order to transform the idea of a "car phone" into what we think of as "mobile phones" today. Transistors allowed us to get to pocket-sized, battery-powered devices; cellular allowed us to get more calls into a given spectrum, so more than a dozen people could be using their mobile phones at the same time in the same city.

Because this kind of naming has worked out so poorly for brands like Mercedes and BMW . Not too mention Lexus and Acura with similar naming schemes for most of their cars.

Maybe Mr. Harper should pull his head out of his butthole?

The version I'm getting explicit states "Upgrade Tonight" rather than simply "Upgrade Later". You can see a screenshot here. They don't make it obvious but you can just close it with the X in the upper right corner and it doesn't upgrade; there's no "Don't upgrade ever" button. It's only a slightly dirty trick on MS's part - you need to train your wife to read better before clicking on things....and yes I know difficult of a problem that is, I'm married, too.

Smartphones are very good currently. Within the next year or two, I think they'll have mostly caught up with desktop PCs for casual and office-type tasks. So currently specs MOSTLY matter if you're a hardcore phone gamer, doing something like running a bitcoin miner on your phone, or are WAY behind the curve (like me). But in the reasonably near future, there are only going to be a couple of specs that matter: How fast is the mobile connection? How long does the battery last? How big is the screen?

I'd have modded you up if you weren't already at +5. This echoes my own feelings on the subject quite eloquently, although I have owned a smartphone, and browsed on it. IMO, the ONLY reason to browse on a smartphone is that you don't have a desktop available - it's a terrible experience all around; I'm glad that developers are trying to get all the functionality they can into mobile browsers, but when you throw a current mobile browser against a web site that's designed for a desktop PC, which have the ability to make changes to the page on the "mouseover" event, usually a lot more processing power, and a far wider range of available plug-ins for browsers....it's seems likely to utterly fail, not because it's not a good for mobile, but because it's not a good for desktop.

I can see some purpose to HAVING a mobile interface...but mobile is SUCH a different environment from desktop that it deserves to have a totally separate UI. A mobile UI might also be worth copying for, say, an Android-on-a-TV type device that use Wiimote style pointer for input...but is definitely NOT worth copying for the desktop space, where a mouse and keyboard are the expected interface devices.

You don't understand how natural selection or evolution work, do you? The innumerate are winning at the natural selection game because they can't figure out how bad having another kid is going to be for them financially. And the "survival of the fittest" doesn't imply fittest for anything but producing lots of offspring. (Of course, this is self-limiting, since this planet has a finite carrying capacity, and the innumerate are incapable of running a space program...)

Do you ever wonder if it would be cheaper and easier just to go back to using horses? I mean, we've been breeding them for hundreds of years...and I'm sure we could make some Kevlar-and-ceramic armor for them to protect them from bullets and shrapnel...

I suppose the advantage is that robots don't need to trained not to panic in the middle of battle. But I still wonder if chasing a technological solution is the wrong path.

I was bored this morning, so for those interested, since the article makes it hard to extract this information:

All iOS versions total 84.36% of crashes; all Android versions total 15.49% of crashes. The worst offenders for iOS are version 5.0.1 at 28.64% and 4.2.10 at 12.64% (with seven other version listed at above 1% of crashes). The worst offenders for Android are versions 2.3.3 at 3.86% and 2.3.4 at 3.65%, with 4 other versions listed at above 1%.

I wonder that, too. Seems like they'd be perfect for things that regularly get used outdoors in bright sunlight - like cell phones. Last I look, Pixel Qi wasn't offering a screen that was suitable for use in cell phone.

Rob,

It's been a pleasure to have been part of this community since 1998 or so. And the community and I thank you for your service in steering the ship for all of these years, despite system issues, trolls, and memes that would not die. (We had memes before we knew what memes were. "First Post!") And who from the early days doesn't remember things like Voices from the Hellmouth? (http://news.slashdot.org/story/99/04/25/1438249/Voices-From-The-Hellmouth) Slashdot appeared during the expansion of the World Wide Web from localized communities of geeks to ubiquitous access to practically everyone across the globe. (And in space... like Geeks in Space!) It helped pioneer large aspects of news aggregation and delivery and aspects of social networking. You know, that's one fun thing about being a geek. Sometimes in our creativity, we don't really know we're creating something new or forging new paradigms. It's good to look back and reflect on where we've been. And Slashdot will always be remembered to be a key player in this era of computing and hopefully continue to be on the cutting edge as time marches on.

P.S. You have our permission to guest post as much as you want on April Fool's Day. And turn Slashdot pink again!