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Comment: Story is Bullshit. Use Rockbox. (Score -1, Flamebait) 608

by gnutoo (#26020441) Attached to: Obama's "ZuneGate"

Obama is an iPod user and someone lent him a Zune. Shame, that was not was not spotted before Slashdot was used as another Wintel advertisement vehicle for the very failed Zune players. Knowing M$, they had W.E. slip him one so they could splash the story around for Christmas. Sorry, Steve, it won't work.

People looking for a music player should buy a used iPod and install Rockbox. You keep good quality hardware out of a landfill and get software freedom for a better price than a Zune that way.

Linux Business

Ubuntu 8.10 Outperforms Windows Vista 689

Posted by timothy
from the windows-probably-runs-more-windows-apps dept.
Anonymous writes "By now a lot has been reported on the new features and improvements in Ubuntu 8.10; it also looks like the OS is outperforming Vista in early benchmarking (Geekbench, boot times, etc.) At what point does this start to make a difference in the market place?" (And though there are lot of ways to benchmark computers, Ubuntu 8.10 with Compiz Fusion is certainly prettier on my Eee than the Windows XP that it came with.)
The Internet

Why We Need Unlicensed White-Space Broadband Spectrum 179

Posted by timothy
from the 50,000-watt-internet-stations-at-the-border dept.
pgoldtho writes "PC Mag has a story about why the 'white-space' spectrum that will be freed when TV broadcasts switch to digital should be available for unlicensed use. This would allow it to be used to deliver broadband connectivity in rural areas and create a 'third pipe' alternative to the cable/telco duopoly. The FCC is scheduled to vote on this November 4th. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has filed an emergency appeal to block this vote. If the NAB succeeds, the issue will be kicked into next year. Which would mean a new FCC, Congress, and Administration."
The Internet

Sprint Cuts Cogent Off the Internet 413

Posted by timothy
from the is-that-an-ectomy-or-an-otomy? dept.
superbus1929 writes "I work as a security analyst at an internet security company. While troubleshooting an issue, we learned why our customer couldn't keep his site-to-site VPN going from any location that uses Sprint as its ISP: Sprint has decided not to route traffic to Cogent due to litigation. This has a chilling effect; already, this person I worked with cannot communicate between a few sites of his, and since Sprint is stopping the connections cold (my traceroutes showed as complete, and not as timing out), it means that there is no backup plan; anyone going to Cogent from a Sprint ISP is crap out of luck."
Government

Paper Ballots Will Return In MD and VA 420

Posted by timothy
from the but-this-baby-is-soaked-in-bathwater dept.
cheezitmike writes "According to a story in the Washington Post, 'Maryland and Virginia are going old school after Tuesday's election. Maryland will scrap its $65 million electronic system and go back to paper ballots in time for the 2010 midterm elections. In Virginia, localities are moving to paper after the General Assembly voted last year to phase out electronic voting machines as they wear out. "The battle for the hearts and minds of voters on whether electronic systems are good or bad has been lost," Brace said. The academics and computer scientists who said they were unreliable "have won that battle."'"
The Courts

RIAA Litigation May Be Unconstitutional 281

Posted by timothy
from the what-about-ritchie-chaz-and-margot? dept.
dtjohnson writes "A Harvard law school professor has submitted arguments on behalf of Joel Tenenbaum in RIAA v. Tenenbaum in which Professor Charles Nesson claims that the underlying law that the RIAA uses is actually a criminal, rather than civil, statute and is therefore unconstitutional. According to this article, 'Nesson charges that the federal law is essentially a criminal statute in that it seeks to punish violators with minimum statutory penalties far in excess of actual damages. The market value of a song is 99 cents on iTunes; of seven songs, $6.93. Yet the statutory damages are a minimum of $750 per song, escalating to as much as $150,000 per song for infringement "committed willfully."' If the law is a criminal statute, Neeson then claims that it violates the 5th and 8th amendments and is therefore unconstitutional. Litigation will take a while but this may be the end for RIAA litigation, at least until they can persuade Congress to pass a new law."
Google

Google Adopts, Forks OpenID 1.0 316

Posted by timothy
from the complicationism dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Right on the heels of Microsoft's adoption of the OpenID protocol by announcing their intention to enable OpenID authentication against all Live IDs, Google has announced their intention to join the growing list of OpenID authentication providers. Except it turns out they're using their own version of OpenID that is incompatible with everyone else. It seems that Google will be using their own 'improved' version of OpenID (based upon research and user feedback of the OpenID system) which isn't backwards compatible with OpenID 1.0/2.0, in hopes of improving end-user experience at the cost of protocol compatibility and complexity."
The Courts

Judge Tells RIAA To Stop 'Bankrupting' Litigants 332

Posted by CmdrTaco
from the also-bake-them-cookies dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Boston judge who has consolidated all of the RIAA's Massachusetts cases into a single case over which she has been presiding for the past 5 years delivered something of a rebuke to the RIAA's lawyers, we have learned. At a conference this past June, the transcript of which (PDF) has just been released, Judge Nancy Gertner said to them that they 'have an ethical obligation to fully understand that they are fighting people without lawyers ... to understand that the formalities of this are basically bankrupting people, and it's terribly critical that you stop it ...' She also acknowledged that 'there is a huge imbalance in these cases. The record companies are represented by large law firms with substantial resources,' while it is futile for self-represented defendants to resist. The judge did not seem to acknowledge any responsibility on her part, however, for having created the 'imbalance,' and also stated that the law is 'overwhelmingly on the side of the record companies,' even though she seems to recognize that for the past 5 years she has been hearing only one side of the legal story."
Displays

Samsung's New Carbon Nanotube Color E-Paper 87

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the in-living-color dept.
Iddo Genuth writes to tell us that Samsung and Unidym have shown the world's first carbon nanotube-based color e-paper. Interestingly, the new film is electrically conductive while remaining almost completely translucent and only 50 nanometers thick. "The company also mentions that the EPD [electrophoretic displays] has important advantages over conventional flat panel displays. EPDs have very low power consumption and bright light readability, which means that even under bright lights or sunlight, the user would be able to view the display clearly. Furthermore, since the device uses the thin CNT films, applications can include e-paper and displays with thin, flexible substrates. Power consumption is lowered due to the EPD's ability to reflect light and therefore able to preserve text or images on the display without frequently refreshing."
Windows

Vista May Still Have Its Day -- Just Like XP-> 2

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes "Twenty-one months after its initial release, what do we know about Windows Vista? That home users hate it, businesses are uninstalling it and — according to Gartner Inc. — it's proof that the 23-year-old Windows line is "collapsing" under its own weight. Meanwhile, predecessor Windows XP, which Microsoft stopped shipping to retailers and the major PC makers on June 30, has belatedly become so beloved that it's garnering more calls for "unretirement" than NFL icon Brett Favre did in his wildest dreams this summer. But all of the griping about Vista and instant nostalgia for XP covers up a dry, statistical reality: XP itself was slow to catch on with users — maybe even slower than Vista has been thus far. Could it be that Vista's day is coming?"
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I'm gliding over a NUCLEAR WASTE DUMP near ATLANTA, Georgia!!