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Vatican Chooses Open FITS Image Format
@10u8 writes "The Vatican Library plans to digtize 80,000 manuscripts and store them in the open data format FITS, originally developed for astronomy and maintained under the IAU. The result is expected to be 40 million pages and 45 petabytes. FITS was chosen because it 'has been used for more than 40 years for the conservation of data concerning spatial missions and, in the past decade, in astrophysics and nuclear medicine. It permits the conservation of images with neither technical nor financial problems in the future, since it is systematically updated by the international scientific community.'"
Not really. Nowhere in TFA does it mention these records being available to the general public, let alone free to download over the net. Just because they are digitizing the archives for some safety/redundancy does NOT mean that the church is suddenly backtracking and opening the archives up to everyone.
Right. And by that, you mean that Slashdot said this other site said the Pope said. Did you ever consider looking at what he actually said, or are you just making another Regensburg lecture out of it? :)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) data format was developed in the late 1970s to interchange astronomical image data. The final negotiations on its design occurred in March 1979. By 1981, the year that the specifications were published in an astronomical journal, FITS had become the de facto standard data interchange format of astronomy. This fact was recognized by the IAU, which adopted FITS as its standard data interchange and archiving format by a resolution at the Patras (1982) General Assembly.
40 years is a bit of a stretch, but if you go from the time FITS was first thought of it is ~ 35 years old. Not bad for ANYTHING related to computing. Imagine if filesystems has 30+ year lifetimes ;p
Isn't the Vatican one of the more reasonable major religions when it comes to science and technology? Obviously, you can't expect any religious group to completely dismiss any role for God to play (if they did they wouldn't be a religion), but they've gone on record saying that Evolution is correct.
It's the folks that read a few Bible verses and then take them as the 100% literal History Of The World that really oppose all things science (as opposed to being a book that man needs to interpret).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
But everyone looks the other way from what the dick is doing.