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  1. Re:And on a related note: on World's First Photo · · Score: 2, Insightful
    It's not. That's the sad part of the digital age: Everything just vanishes, and the concepts are so obscure and complicated that future attempts of reconstruction can only fail.



    I discovered a real treasure a few weeks ago: My grandmother's photo album containing top quality pictures of her parents as youngsters. That was in the late 1800s. Just by looking at these pictures, no technical gadgets needed, a time that is long past really came to life in my mind. I saw a picture of my great-grandfather on his way into the First World War, pictures from my grandfather when he met my grandmother, pictures of my hometown from a hundred years ago. It's better than any history book.



    What will be left of the digital pictures, M$ Word documents, MP3 music, what will be left of our lives that our grandchildren can look at or listen to in 150 years? Of our culture? How long does digital data live, how long do even today's printouts live? To be honest, the very fact that everything will just get lost unless much effort of preservation is taken bothers me so much that I'm asking myself whether I should move to digital photography at all. I want my time and life to come alive in my great-grandchildrens' minds as well.

  2. Re:Will This help? on Will Cable Unplug the File Swappers? · · Score: 1

    That's no argument. I'm on 64k ISDN, which was fucking fast when I upgraded from 28.8. But today, web pages are so insanely big that web browsing is no longer the fast fun it used to be five years ago.
    A single download maxes out the connection. Dual channel is bearable but insanely expensive. Response time is what it's all about! I think there's a definite market for lowcost broadband with a traffic limit.

  3. Re:Funny but True on AMD Introduces the Athlon XP 2200+ · · Score: 1

    I'm still quite happy with my P3/700 I bought almost two years ago for what I consider a horrendous price (290 EUR). Together with the GeForce DDR I bought at the same time for an equally horrendous amount of precious money I can play today's games quite well, not to mention desktop applications. No, I don't feel the urge to upgrade at all.

  4. Re:Times running out... on Fuel Cell Car Goes Cross-Country · · Score: 3, Informative

    I don't consider this as bad. Humanity's CO2 exhaust contributes only a small part to the climate change which is mostly natural, and car exhaust is only a fragment of that.
    Also remember that fuel cells are not an alternative energy *source*, but only enable a different way of storing it. Hydrogen production consumes a lot of power and is today mostly done with fossil resources, because splitting water eats even more energy. Fuel cell cars are a good way to become independent of petrol, but the main problem that there is not yet a real alternative to fossil or nuclear fuel will persist beyond 2010.
    Mass-produced fuel cell vehicles might speed up science in that direction, however.

    To stay on that topic: I've read about a guy who got silicon to react with nitrogen, producing sand. His idea was to use solar energy to extract silicon from African desert sand. Does anybody know anything about that?

  5. Re:Cheap way to extend copyright forever on George Lucas May Be Completely Evil · · Score: 1

    Aw, come on. Thanks to Disney's retroactive lawmaking mere 25 years of difference won't really matter any more in a few years.

  6. Re:What about the originals? on George Lucas May Be Completely Evil · · Score: 1

    They wouldn't be able to do this unless they give the original movie the same restoration that was done for the SE. Otherwise, the scenes that have been altered for the SE would stand out appearancewise if you were watching the classic.

  7. Re:But I dont HAVE a fucking STEREO!! on Post-it Notes vs. Copy-Inhibited CDs · · Score: 1

    You didn't get on my nerves, just on my Linux user pride ;)
    My PC is very silent with 12V Papst CPU fan at 5V, resistors in the GeForce fan cables and a noise-blocking case. I live in a quiet area and during the day with the windows open I can't hear the box at all. It annoys me at night, however.

  8. Re:Why Nvidia's on top on The Age of Nvidia · · Score: 1

    Amazed how they supplement the card's power by software? I think the opposite is true: poorly-crafted drivers are released ASAP to get the new cards in the market. Optimisation is done afterwards, leading to "amazing improvements" that are in fact just a normal part of software engineering coming late. This corresponds with my observation that nVidia drivers tend to be buggy and problem-filled, just think of all the discussions about which version is best for which game.

  9. Re:But I dont HAVE a fucking STEREO!! on Post-it Notes vs. Copy-Inhibited CDs · · Score: 1

    I fucking use Linux. I turn my computer off because I want to sleep at night. There you go.

  10. Re:circumvention devices? on Post-it Notes vs. Copy-Inhibited CDs · · Score: 1

    Now get this: In Germany, "fair use" even includes the right to make a personal copy from rented media, to make as many personal copies (in any form you desire) and you may even make copies for a well-defined small group of people.
    As another poster stated, this is bound to go away soon, however, because the EU is the US's bitch. :(

  11. Re:But I dont HAVE a fucking STEREO!! on Post-it Notes vs. Copy-Inhibited CDs · · Score: 1

    > Why have a TV/Stereo/DVD/VCR/whatever when you can have it all in your PC?

    Because it's nice to be able to watch TV/DVDs/tapes/listen to a CD/LP/whatever without having to use the loud, time-consuming to start up PC?

  12. Re:Font Weirdness on AbiWord 1.0.1 Released · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The problem is that the X font system is pretty much useless for anything that involves sophisticated layout work. It has to be addressed at the root, either by the X consortium, or by someone creating an application-independent font system that makes fonts of all flavors available to X applications, bypassing X's font mechanism, to the printing filters, to whatever part of the system has to access fonts in some way. Keith Packard (great guy, really helps getting X out of the past with RENDER and the like) has designed a mechanism called fontconfig (I hope everybody at the GUADEC has listened to him), but I don't know exactly how powerful that is.

    However, the current situation is a horrible mess and in my opinion also the biggest Linux usability hurdle of them all.

  13. Re:Not quite there yet on Nomad Jukebox 3 Officially Out · · Score: 1

    Silly me. The Nomad 3 has an analog/digital input jack. Which leaves only support of open standards on my wishlist.

  14. Not quite there yet on Nomad Jukebox 3 Officially Out · · Score: 1

    Those things are improving, but this isn't quite there yet. There are some most simple features that are lacking:
    1. I want analog and digital input jacks. Not everybody (me) stores music exclusively on their PC. And some people (me) might even want to record music from analog media to their portable player.
    2. I want that jack to be able to record Ogg Vorbis. Advantages for the user would be better sound quality than mp3 or WMA, advantages for Creative would be that they needn't pay royalties as they would have to with mp3 recording.
    3. I want Vorbis playback, of course.
    4. Damn it, who the hell needs 20 GB of storage? They advertise this as space for 333 hours of music in mediocre quality. I'd rather have 128 MB memory cards, with 90 minutes of hifi music on each, with an open standard filesystem to promote exchangeability between devices using the same type of media.

    When a digital music player with those features comes out, it will be a definite buy for me. Too bad that I lack the engineering skills to make my own Embedded Linux device.

  15. Re:Not so amazing, really on Leaked FEMA/ASCE Draft Report On WTC Collapse · · Score: 1

    No, only the velocity goes in squarely. The mass is halved (E = m/2 * v) Still, it's 50% more energy.

  16. Re:Screenshots! on GNOME 2.0 Desktop Beta 3 Released · · Score: 1

    These screenshots are ancient. I know the date says Mar 27, but they're pre-alpha shots. See the dotplan site.

  17. Re:Fonts... on GNOME 2.0 Desktop Beta 3 Released · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I fail to see how TrueType is a bad thing. If it weren't for Apple and MS pushing TrueType and releasing fonts for free, we would still be stuck with eight-bit encoded fonts that are not hinted at all.
    Even with all that patent bullshit, TrueType fonts render prettier and are less of a pain in the ass to handle.

  18. Re:Dear God, is there no way... on Intel Puts The Squeeze On ... A Yoga Foundation? · · Score: 1

    I can understand Telekom's case at least in part. They have a product line whose names consist mainly of T-something, like T-Online, T-DSL, T-InterConnect, T-Net, T-ISDN (no, I didn't translate those names. German marketeers use English as their primary language) and whatnot. Their argument was that T-something could trigger "Telekom" in peoples minds, perhaps increasing some other guy's products' sales or, in case of a bad product, (which they were more concerned of) damage their reputation. I believe, however, that this is far more understandable than Intel suing a Yoga foundation. That magenta thing was indeed ridiculous, though. IIRC, that case was rejected in court.

  19. File format? on gobeProductive 3.0 - Office XP killer? · · Score: 1

    I'm not having much hope here, but is the file format sane, i.e. a plain-text one (read: XML)?

  20. Re:True Type fonts?!? on Mozilla 0.9.9 Released · · Score: 1

    They're also saying that Linux users have to install some ancient Type 1 fonts for MathML...

  21. True Type fonts?!? on Mozilla 0.9.9 Released · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure, but in my world, stock Mozilla + True Type fonts has worked since the first TT font servers showed up. What's the point of programming around the assumption that the users use obsolete (XFree 3 w/o TT font server) software? Which UNIX systems are there where the *application* actually has to deal with FONT MANAGEMENT?

  22. Re:Xft and fontconfig on Xft Hack Improves Antialiased Font Rendering · · Score: 1

    So what you're saying is that somebody with influence (X core developer) is developing a unified font selector/manager? Distribution-independant? Simple? Not obsolete and completely backwards? What's next, Hell freezing over and the RIAA becoming nice?

  23. Re:Give us the voice over. on (Another) Cut of Blade Runner · · Score: 1

    Well, the voice over is an improvement, but I'd rather have no voice over than the theatrical version's cheesy happy end. The DC ending is how it's got to be - elevator goes SLAM, black screen. Summary: DC + voiceover - unicorn = perfect version

  24. Re:Can't do without either on SuSE 7.3 vs XP · · Score: 1

    And all those things are related to Konqueror's integration exactly how? There's no need for integrating a monster like IE if there's a decent framework.

  25. Re:Glib? on SuSE 7.3 vs XP · · Score: 1

    Of course. Windows functionality is one of the main features of glib 2. After all, that's what it's for.