Quick Tech Roundup

From The Inquirer: “Apple dumps Apple for Linux”
Speaks for itself, really. Motorola didn’t like having to cripple the phone’s music capacity so they moved on. If I had any use for a music phone, I’d be on this sucker like white on rice.

I found the next two items via /.:

Cheeseheads Wise Up
Wisconsin just passed a law requiring all voting machines be open source and spit out a printout showing the voter exactly how they voted. This means any voter can demand the source code to a voting machine and, if they’re savvy enough, review the code for any problems and/or “hidden features.” This should help prevent any problems such as the Diebold problems (see some of my previous Diebold rants).

Congress to Subsidize TV Commercials
The official date for the end of analog television is now 2/17/09. Of course, now people are bitching that their analog TV’s are going to be useless, and poor people won’t be able to receive free television, such as news and weather reports, so Congress is going to put money aside to give out vouchers for people to put toward digital-to-analog converters so these TVs won’t be usless.

This is bullshit. 1) People have three years to buy a new TV, and the prices are dropping all the time. Start taking the analog TV’s off the shelf now. 2) HDTV is not new. We’ve been expecting it for a long time, and has been available almost as long. 3) They brag about potentially making $10 billion in selling off the bandwidth, but they’re spending 15% of it out of the box. Yeah, that’s effecient. 4) The big businesses and networks love it, as this means people can keep watching commercials without having to spend a dime. I wonder how hard they lobbied to help make this happen?