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Comment Re:Who cares? (Score 2, Insightful) 170

Or just put one of the Linux or BSD distributions on there. They're certainly more usable and more stable than Mac OS 9 ever was.

I will not feed the troll, I will not feed the troll, I . . .

Are you out of your mind? The point other commenters are making is that a non-trivial number of folks, with an emphasis on schools and other educational institutions, have old hardware that runs Mac OS 9. It might be that, in some abstract, general sense, Linux or BSD is more usable and stable than OS 9 (although I disagree), but the question is what's more usable on the hardware available to these folks. As somebody who spent too much time in college (computer science program, university known for computer science) trying to get linux to run on apple hardware of this era, I can assure you that getting other OSes to work is nigh-impossible, and that few, if any, of the institutions that are *still* using this hardware could realistically take that option. So this is great for those users.

Comment Put honest links in the @#$@ summary (Score 5, Interesting) 95

Seriously? A link to "http://bit.ly/4S53f"? There is no *good* reason why slashdot shouldn't use direct links, rather than this URL shortening nonsense, in story summaries. I'd like to know where I'm going in deciding whether to RTFA. Here, the link actually does go to the WSJ's "All Things Digital" site, at http://d7.allthingsd.com/20090528/d7-interview-mitchell-baker-and-john-lilly/ .

Also, as for Timothy's "not-a-transcript-but-better-than-one" heading: no. This summary in the text is not as good as a transcript, and the video is not as good as a transcript, because reading a transcript is faster, and is something I can do at work. (Yes, I know that it's Sunday).

Comment Forget street view, how about decent maps (Score 5, Insightful) 274

As a bicyclist, I'd love it if google had decent maps of off-street bike paths, such that I could use google maps' normal direction-finding feature with these. I've lived in lots of cities with numerous such paths, and they're usually out of the way and hard to find if you don't already know that they're there. It would be great to have a feature that a) lets me find them, and b) tells me exactly how far out of my way I'd need to go for the added safety/pleasantness of using them.

Comment Re:What about the root of all evil, Microsoft? (Score 1) 249

[Rant]
Compare

If you own a dominant position in the market and you abuse that position to exclude competition, you open yourself up to a monopoly hearing.

with

judges . . . don't care about whether or not there CAN be competition, they only care about what there is.

I am not an antitrust lawyer, but you said it yourself. Having a dominant position in the market is not sufficient to make you a monopoly: you also have to abuse that position to exclude competition. If there can be competition, then you have not abused your position to exclude such competition.

The ancestor post (too many generations) was about whether use of open standards could, by definition, mean that you were not abusing a dominant position. Parent poster replied by saying that AT&T (presumably back in the days of Ma Bell) could have open sourced its switches, but AT&T still would have been a monopolist. That's because what AT&T was selling at the time was better understood as hardware and access to that hardware.

Another topic discussed up there somewhere was whether Apple is abusing its market dominance with the iPod. In this case, open standards, etc., might be able to themselves ensure that Apple is not excluding other music vendors from that market. These standards have less to do with whether Apple is abusing its position to exclude other hardware manufacturers from the relevant market, but that's another story (FWIW, I don't think Apple is abusing this position).

My point is that it's important to determine what the relevant market is--this thread has identified markets in software sales, hardware sales, and software support. If the market is actually selling software that works, a company that uses open standards might, by definition, be incapable of abusing their position to exclude others.
[/Rant]

Comment Re:Warrant does not say 2 OSes -- Hacking (Score 3, Informative) 1079

Mea culpa--EFF does link to the warrant application, as Exhibit A to their motion for emergency relief, although they don't exactly highlight that fact. http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/inresearchBC/EXHIBIT-A.pdf Reading over it, the mention of the two OSes is clearly part of the "Basis of Probable Cause," and not merely meant to identify which items are covered by the warrant.

Comment Warrant does not say 2 OSes -- Hacking (Score 4, Informative) 1079

Normally, I'd say RTFA, but here, the FA goes beyond the actual excerpts of the warrant.

The excerpts EFF have posted do not say "he has two operating systems, and that's evidence that he's up to no good." Instead, the warrant says

[redacted] reported that Mr. Calixte uses two different operating systems to hide his illegal activities. One is the regular B.C. operating system and the other is a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on.

Paraphrased, that says that somebody directly told the police that they observed the suspect doing illegal activities, and that the dual OSes are an aspect of those activities. That's almost, although not exactly, the inverse of what the summary and most of the commenters assume. And if I was going to be up to something I shouldn't be doing on a computer, if I wasn't going to have a dedicated computer for it, then I might limit those activities to a separate OS with separate filesystems.

Finally, as another commenter noted, warrants have to state with some particularity the objects to be searched and seized. EFF isn't giving us enough context for this part of the warrant, but it could be that the warrant is talking about a computer with two OSes just so the officers know which computer to seize, the propriety of the seizure having been established elsewhere.

Not saying that this warrant was proper, that this guy did anything, etc., but I am saying that the problems most people are complaining about, and that EFF is implying, aren't necessarily there.

Comment Southwest's test program speeds (Score 5, Interesting) 303

I was on a Southwest flight that was testing this out about a month ago, where it was free for passengers. I ran speakeasy's speed test on it, http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ , and got about 3000 kbps down, and something like 200 kbps up. I ran the test about five minutes after they announced that we could use the service, and it seemed like more than half the people on the plane had laptops out and were playing with the service, even though none of us knew that the service would be available until we got on the plane.

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