Random bits

I have used a blackberry for some time, mostly to get inexpensive email from T-Mobile when I travel outside of the USA. This week I spent $150 from Amazon to buy the Samsung Galaxy Prevail, which is a smartphone that relies upon the Boost Mobile/Sprint CDMA network, running the Android 2.2 OS. It is a very nice phone for the money, and I’m kind of astonished at how much you can do with it. I still have my other phone, so I put it on a pay as you go plan with Boost Mobile, for $2 on the days I use it, and zero when I don’t. Now I’m wondering how I can live without the Blackberry email when I travel outside the US.

I have moved this post to the new URL for Random Bits. The current link for this blog entry is:
http://randombits.workingagenda.com/node/12

I use Ubuntu, and like some Adobe AIR applications, like the Adobe AIR implementation of Tweetdeck, so this is a disappointment.

This now from Adobe: “Beginning June 14 2011, Adobe AIR is no longer supported for desktop Linux distributions. . . . Lifetime AIR for Linux desktop downloads represent less than 0.5% of total AIR desktop downloads, which number over 450 million. Therefore, Adobe has decided to change the distribution model for Linux and direct these resources toward its mobile efforts. Adobe’s efforts are focused on supporting operating systems that are most important to its customers, and that demonstrate the greatest opportunity for future growth for our partners and developers.”

This is a playlist I created at Grooveshark last March. I’m not sure how they do this, in terms of legal issues.
http://grooveshark.com/#/playlist/20110312/50324881 (more…)

After experiencing a lot of frustration with my work computer freezing up, I bought a new Gateway FX6860, tested it home over the weekend (my evaluation here), and brought it to work today. But at the office, the new computer had exactly the same issues as the old one. (more…)

Last Friday I purchased a Gateway FX6860 tower computer. It came with 8 gb of DDR3 ram (The maximum is 16 gb), a 1.5 tb drive of unknown make or speed, an n-wireless device, an AMD Radeon 6750 video card with 1 gb of video memory, and an Intel i-7 2600 CPU. It has been a while since I bought new computer for my own use, and I wanted something fast. (more…)

On July 3, 2011, I searched the USPTO database patents issued from 1995 to 2010 that mention the word cancer in the specification field. There were a total of 81,062 such patents. Then I narrowed the search to find out how many patents have at least one inventor (there are often multiple inventors). who was listed as a resident of a country other than the U.S. The number of patents by country of the inventor are reported in figure 1. (more…)