Abstract: In a computer system having a display device with a display surface, a portion of the display surface is reserved for an exclusive use by a program, to allow contents rendered by the program to be persistently visible. In one embodiment, the reservation is accomplished through reducing the width and height of a shared portion of the display surface managed by a window manager, corresponding to a graphics resolution. In another embodiment, the reservation is accomplished by having the window manager work with a pixel resolution smaller than the operative pixel resolution of the display device driver. In one embodiment, the reservation is made only while the computer system is “on-line”. In one embodiment, the exclusive use is to render advertisements in the reserved portion by an advertising rendering program. The advertisements are HTML pages received from an advertisement web server through the Internet. The HTML pages are rendered in the reserved portion through a direct draw component.

Abstract: A telephone is equipped to enable a user to enter a dialing prefix, an append indicator, and a dialing request to quickly place a call to a callee from a location where calling the callee requires the dialing prefix. In response, the telephone places the call to the callee using the dialing prefix and a last placed call number. In an alternate embodiment, a previous dialed number may be used instead. In yet other embodiments, the telephone detects for a dialing error, using voice recognition technology, and either re-places the call or facilitates re-placement of the call in a corrected manner. In one embodiment, the telephone is a wireless mobile phone; in another, the telephone is a wired or cordless telephone handset.