Is the problem with Palm devices really that the underpinnings of their OS are bad?
In short, yes. The GUI is nice, the desktop applications are decent, but the PalmOS kernel is awful.
The PalmOS 6 kernel promised to be better, but I think they finally woke up to the fact that maintaining their own set of hardware drivers was costly and pointless, and that their licensees were tired of having to do drivers themselves. Linux provides an easy answer because Linux drivers exist for more and more chips.
Ultimately, however, I believe this move by PalmSource is too little, too late. Had this move been made with OS 5, they could have had something.
That's a serious concern. However, they still have lots of brand recognition, lots of applications, lots of developers, and lots of desktop conduits. All that, they get to keep. I think they have a good chance of staying in business with this move.
On the other hand, I think this is also great for handheld Linux, because it will make it trivial for hardware vendors to offer users a choice between Palm and other Linux-based environments, and I suspect it will be easy to replace Palm or run it side-by-side with non-Palm environments on Palm hardware.
Can they do all this without linking or modifying the underlying kernel Linux?
They will be modifying the Linux kernel, but there is no disadvantage to them to releasing those modifications; it's not their product.
This project sounds cool, but I think I would have chosen something like NetBSD & its less restrictive BSD license.
Even with BSD, they would have had to release their kernel modifications, not because of the license, but because that's the whole point behind using a standard OSS kernel: they want to get out of the driver and hardware support business and focus on applications and frameworks.
I think this is the right decision for Palm: it made no sense for Palm to try to maintain their own proprietary kernel and they obviously had a really hard time selling it. Since Linux is already a common and trusted multitasking protected-mode environment on mobile devices, it will greatly ease adoption of the new Palm software, since companies will feel that they aren't locked into a single software environment. And if they don't screw up, it will instantly make a huge amount of software available for the new PalmOS.
This decision comes very late, though. They could have put the Palm environment on top of Linux as soon as the first ARM-based Palm came out and just made any Microsoft effort in this area irrelevant. Palm's delay means they have lost a lot of marketshare to Microsoft. And they have probably seriously confused their developers in the meantime. Let's hope that it's not too late.
LOL! Oh man, this is great. Now Apple's *lying* about numbers of deployed systems running Mac OS X?
I'm just asking how they count them. For example, I have three Panther licenses, none of which I'm actually using. Do they count me? Probably.
you of course won't grant them, even based on clear sales numbers
No, I won't "grant" them that based on sales numbers because sales numbers tell you almost nothing about user numbers.
a.) they're still "far behind" UNIX or Linux (nope, sorry, they're not, and numerous publications you can find at my original Google link clearly confirm that, and this has been known for quite some time),
Your links just point to web pages that parrot Apple's claims; they don't contain any independent confirmation.
it's still bad, because it comes from one vendor and/or has proprietary components.
The UNIX market is about fully interoperable implementations from multiple vendors, while Apple tries to position itself as a "better UNIX" based on their proprietary window system and other additions. So, yes, from the perspective of what the UNIX market has traditionally been about, what Apple is doing is "bad". What's your problem with that statement?
Even though Apple is widely recognized as being the only remaining innovator is general computing, you manage to indict them on every front!
Pre-OS X MacOS deteriorated so badly under Apple's stewardship that they had to go out and buy someone else's OS to stay in business. So, Apple has proven over a span of 15 years that not only are they incapable of innovating in operating systems, they actually are incapable of even keeping an operating system updated and in working condition.
And today, with OS X, Apple is shipping basically NeXTStep with a new theme and some performance tweaks. NeXTStep technology was invented by CMU, PARC, Stepstone, Adobe, and AT&T in the 1980's and has changed little since. Where is Apple innovation in that?
And what reason do we have to believe that Apple won't run OS X into the ground just like they did with the older version of MacOS? So far, they have presented no non-trivial techniacl long-term strategy for OS X at all.
All that he's asserting is that it's Red Hat's flavor stands the best chance of taking marketshare.
Of course, that's what he is asserting. The problem is that he is overinflating the importance of Solaris by leaving out some other important Linux players.
"Windows, RedHat, and OS X" or "Windows, RedHat, and SuSE" would be defensible lists of the top three; "Windows, RedHat, and Solaris" isn't IMO.
The statement above just clarifies that Red Hat's Linux is the particular distro under consideration. I don't believe it is a plot to assign ownership of all things Linux to Red Hat.
I fully agree that that was his intent. What it really is is either a profound misjudgement of the Linux market on the part of Schwartz (implausible), or a deliberate distortion of the facts. In reality, SuSe, Debian, and OS X are far more important operating systems than Solaris, and Schwartz should know that. By distorting the truth, Schwartz is just trying to inflate the importance of Solaris.
There are now over 12 million Mac OS X systems in use (source: 23:40 of WWDC keynote).
That's Apple's claim. Where are the facts to back up that claim?
Apple is the single largest vendor of "UNIX-based"[1] systems in the world. (Probably over 13 million now, according to sales since then.)
That's a meaningless statistic. Apple's OS is probably still far behind UNIX or Linux in terms of absolute installed numbers. The fact that it has large proprietary components and comes from a single vendor is a disadvantage, not an advantage.
Yes, and so he should have mentioned the operating systems that still matter: "increasingly evident the OS wars are down to Microsoft Windows, Red Hat's Linux, SuSe Linux, Debian Linux, and Macintosh OS X".
Let's talk hypothetical here - Let's say Sun releases Solaris under a nice license that satisfies everybody [...] Right there, the Linux pricepoint and community support is matched.
Linux may suck, but to me, Solaris and AIX suck much, much worse.
so if I am totally missing something, would some more-informed Linux guru clarify:-)?
You know, I can't presume to tell you what you should like.
To me, AIX's system management was a constant source of problems, their logical volume manager was a disaster, and their attempts at "improving" the UNIX linker were inept. SunOS/Solaris was even lower quality, with serious kernel and user level bugs and gaping security holes, and an utter unwillingness by Sun to address those.
I'm not sure what you see in AIX and SunOS/Solaris, but that's why they make all kinds. I was a SunOS/Solaris user for 15 years and an AIX user for 5 and you couldn't pay me enough to go back. I would hope to be able to use something nicer than Linux at some point, but so far, sadly, there is nothing that's better out there (no, Darwin doesn't cut it and neither did BeOS either; Windows NT seems hell-bent on repeating the mistakes of systems that even predate UNIX; Plan9 showed some promise, but it hasn't caught on so far).
Eventually, perhaps, when it has been devalued to the point to eliminate the trade deficit and when a fiscally responsible president comes into power again (Republicans need not apply--they love running up big deficits).
The economy is not failing. We are winning the war.
Geez. I thought people like you didn't believe in taking drugs.
Here's a lesson on tax cuts.
Not only is the "lesson" utter nonsense, its attribution to Kamerschen is as phony as your other "facts".
For all we know it was requested as part of a security review to be turned over to the company that made the e-voting equiptment to show them security holes that people were concerned about.
That interpretation makes no sense to me: why would they carry out a security audit in that way? If they did, that alone would demonstrate complete incompetence in security matters.
Now I have no proof, but if this is true at all, that would be my guess.
I don't know whether the original claim is true, but if it is, your analysis just doesn't work.
As long as most of us have reasonable faith in our electoral process, we can get through pretty much anything.
You mean like a plummeting dollar, a failing economy, a losing war, an unprecedented transfer of money to the wealthiest few, thousands of war deaths, and a dismantling of civil rights and our constitution?
Who we elect matters. And if people get into government by corrupt means, they are probably up to no good and can cause serious harm to everybody. The US was founded by people who did not want to have hereditary rulers. Do you want to bring that back? Is Jenna's husband automatically going to be the next president?
Hollywood is churning out sex and violence because that is what the people want to see, not because they have some liberal agenda
Hollywood is not churning out sex: they are prudish in the extreme.
Hollywood is churning out violence, but that's the Republican agenda: guns everywhere.
If you want to talk stereotypes, Liberals want more sex and less violence on TV, while Republicans want less sex and more violence. Count me firmly in the Liberal camp there.
You are used to one particular toolchain: RAW conversion with lots of adjustments, black-box hardware color calibration, lots of features in Photoshop. Linux doesn't provide exactly what you are used to.
But that's not the only way to work, nor are your applications the only digital imaging applications. While the Macintosh is probably a convenient platform for your needs, many of the features that make it convenient for you also make it quite cumbersome for other purposes. Linux imaging is the way it is not because people haven't gotten around to making it like the Macintosh, it's the way it is because it serves its user communities (which includes a lot of scientists and engineers).
And even though the Macintosh gives you more convenience and handholding out of the box, it is not hard to do professional digital imaging on Linux: you basically have all the calibration, processing, and editing tools you need for day-to-day work, at a fraction of the cost and with full source code availability (meaning, you can modify it to suit your needs or improve it), you just need to spend a little more time initially figuring out how to use it all.
If you are truly a pro photographer than you time is worth a lot more than the purchase price of a decent iMac
And how is that going to help him save time? His flatbed scanner is still going to give him lousy quality. He still has to carry out color calibration for whatever capture device he uses. And he still has manually post-processs each slide.
Actually, with the Mac he is going to be worse off. For the price of an iMac, he could get a much more powerful Linux machine. Before he can do anything, he'll have to shell out some money for software. And he has a smaller range of scanners to choose from.
Linux (and other free unices) have their time and place, but as a professional photography scanning and retouching system it's just not ready yet. Does the GIMP even use ICC profiles?
Jeez: you rant and rave for two paragraphs about how supposedly un-ready Linux is for professional photography and then it turns out you don't even know whether Linux or the Gimp has color management. What about doing some background research before you dispense advice? I do have an iMac (and a Powerbook and an iBook).
There's a famous quote that gets thrown around quite a bit: "Linux is free only if your time has no value" - Jamie Zawinski
Zawinski is a UNIX-hating night-club owner who (according to his web site) spends hours wondering whether he has a brain disease because he sees funny colors when he presses on his eyeballs (in case you are wondering the same thing: you, you don't). That's not the kind of person you want to take advice from about what platform to use.
And just because companies promise to make your pain go away when you give them money doesn't mean they actually succeed. And by the time you have turned into a platform-X-expert and don't know much about other platforms (see above), you just assume that your way is the best way and will have turned into a zealous if uninformed advocate for your platform (see above again).
The sad fact is that slide scanning in particular, and image processing in general, is a lot of work on any platform. Doing it on Linux or Macintosh is a different experience. You get a lot more handholding on Macintosh, while on Linux, you have to learn more about what you are doing initially. On the other hand, for someone who actually understands image processingand may even develop image processing software, Linux is probably a more convenient and efficient platform.
(Sorry, I can't dump thousands into a piece of hardware---I'm looking for a way to make the most of my Epson Perfection 2400 with transparency adapter)."
A transparency adapter on an Epson 2400 or most other consumer scanners will not give you acceptable quality, not under Linux and not under Windows. If you want low-cost slide scanning that is of reasonable quality, your best bet is to put a slide adapter on a digital camera. But the only way to get good slide scans it to get a slide scanner.
For color correction, LCMS is a good bet. You can calibrate it using a digital capture of an image with known colors on (the SCARSE package helps you with that). Don't expect hand holding: you actually have to know what you are doing in order to use LCMS. The good news is that it is an excellent and flexible CMS and that batch processing is easy. (You can get a plugin for LCMS for the Gimp, but that is probably not the best way of using it.)
Getting good scans of slides is a lot of work, on any platform. Every slide will take some manual work to post-process. That's why commercial slide scanning costs so much money. One big area is dust and scratch removal, which is why scanners with automatic dust/scratch removal are so popular.
Note that the big strength of Linux is the large number of powerful and high-quality image processing software available for it (in particular, scientific image processing), and the way you can easily combine that software through scripting. A good place to start is to look for image-related packages on your Linux distribution (Debian has pretty good coverage).
That's not determined by building materials. People have made sheds out of concrete or brick and palaces out of bamboo and paper. Many Europeans look at US wood construction as cheap, temporary housing, while Americans look at European concrete buildings and think of low-income government housing. A lot of this is cultural.
Every person in the corporation is still a person, and the process of making decisions rather resembles a dysfunctional family fighting over who gets to carve the Thanksgiving turkey.
Sure, as everybody who has worked in a corporation knows. That merely demonstrates that corporations are prone to the same fallacies that affect other human decision making.
The idea that corporations make "cold" and "calculated" decisions is a lot of hooey,
What's a lot of "hooey" is your belief that because people inside corporations make decisions, therefore we can think of corporations like people.
Taken literally that would viturally guarantee that corporate acts are evil.
Concepts of "good" and "evil" just don't apply to corporations. The legal construct of a corporation is merely intended to achieve that corporations act legally and in a profit-maximizing manner. Any other behavioral interpretations you apply to them are a dangerous fiction.
Individual people inside corporations may behave in "good" or "evil" ways, but those individual people are replaceable. And if the people working inside, or running, a corporation don't act in a profit maximizing way, they will get replaced.
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Is the problem with Palm devices really that the underpinnings of their OS are bad?
In short, yes. The GUI is nice, the desktop applications are decent, but the PalmOS kernel is awful.
The PalmOS 6 kernel promised to be better, but I think they finally woke up to the fact that maintaining their own set of hardware drivers was costly and pointless, and that their licensees were tired of having to do drivers themselves. Linux provides an easy answer because Linux drivers exist for more and more chips.
Ultimately, however, I believe this move by PalmSource is too little, too late. Had this move been made with OS 5, they could have had something.
That's a serious concern. However, they still have lots of brand recognition, lots of applications, lots of developers, and lots of desktop conduits. All that, they get to keep. I think they have a good chance of staying in business with this move.
On the other hand, I think this is also great for handheld Linux, because it will make it trivial for hardware vendors to offer users a choice between Palm and other Linux-based environments, and I suspect it will be easy to replace Palm or run it side-by-side with non-Palm environments on Palm hardware.
Can they do all this without linking or modifying the underlying kernel Linux?
They will be modifying the Linux kernel, but there is no disadvantage to them to releasing those modifications; it's not their product.
This project sounds cool, but I think I would have chosen something like NetBSD & its less restrictive BSD license.
Even with BSD, they would have had to release their kernel modifications, not because of the license, but because that's the whole point behind using a standard OSS kernel: they want to get out of the driver and hardware support business and focus on applications and frameworks.
Palm's actual support for Linux has been fairly good, in the sense that the platform is pretty well documented.
In particular now that they are moving to a non-proprietary kernel, I wouldn't be too harsh on them if they go through with it.
I think this is the right decision for Palm: it made no sense for Palm to try to maintain their own proprietary kernel and they obviously had a really hard time selling it. Since Linux is already a common and trusted multitasking protected-mode environment on mobile devices, it will greatly ease adoption of the new Palm software, since companies will feel that they aren't locked into a single software environment. And if they don't screw up, it will instantly make a huge amount of software available for the new PalmOS.
This decision comes very late, though. They could have put the Palm environment on top of Linux as soon as the first ARM-based Palm came out and just made any Microsoft effort in this area irrelevant. Palm's delay means they have lost a lot of marketshare to Microsoft. And they have probably seriously confused their developers in the meantime. Let's hope that it's not too late.
LOL! Oh man, this is great. Now Apple's *lying* about numbers of deployed systems running Mac OS X?
I'm just asking how they count them. For example, I have three Panther licenses, none of which I'm actually using. Do they count me? Probably.
you of course won't grant them, even based on clear sales numbers
No, I won't "grant" them that based on sales numbers because sales numbers tell you almost nothing about user numbers.
a.) they're still "far behind" UNIX or Linux (nope, sorry, they're not, and numerous publications you can find at my original Google link clearly confirm that, and this has been known for quite some time),
Your links just point to web pages that parrot Apple's claims; they don't contain any independent confirmation.
it's still bad, because it comes from one vendor and/or has proprietary components.
The UNIX market is about fully interoperable implementations from multiple vendors, while Apple tries to position itself as a "better UNIX" based on their proprietary window system and other additions. So, yes, from the perspective of what the UNIX market has traditionally been about, what Apple is doing is "bad". What's your problem with that statement?
Even though Apple is widely recognized as being the only remaining innovator is general computing, you manage to indict them on every front!
Pre-OS X MacOS deteriorated so badly under Apple's stewardship that they had to go out and buy someone else's OS to stay in business. So, Apple has proven over a span of 15 years that not only are they incapable of innovating in operating systems, they actually are incapable of even keeping an operating system updated and in working condition.
And today, with OS X, Apple is shipping basically NeXTStep with a new theme and some performance tweaks. NeXTStep technology was invented by CMU, PARC, Stepstone, Adobe, and AT&T in the 1980's and has changed little since. Where is Apple innovation in that?
And what reason do we have to believe that Apple won't run OS X into the ground just like they did with the older version of MacOS? So far, they have presented no non-trivial techniacl long-term strategy for OS X at all.
All that he's asserting is that it's Red Hat's flavor stands the best chance of taking marketshare.
Of course, that's what he is asserting. The problem is that he is overinflating the importance of Solaris by leaving out some other important Linux players.
"Windows, RedHat, and OS X" or "Windows, RedHat, and SuSE" would be defensible lists of the top three; "Windows, RedHat, and Solaris" isn't IMO.
The statement above just clarifies that Red Hat's Linux is the particular distro under consideration. I don't believe it is a plot to assign ownership of all things Linux to Red Hat.
I fully agree that that was his intent. What it really is is either a profound misjudgement of the Linux market on the part of Schwartz (implausible), or a deliberate distortion of the facts. In reality, SuSe, Debian, and OS X are far more important operating systems than Solaris, and Schwartz should know that. By distorting the truth, Schwartz is just trying to inflate the importance of Solaris.
There are now over 12 million Mac OS X systems in use (source: 23:40 of WWDC keynote).
That's Apple's claim. Where are the facts to back up that claim?
Apple is the single largest vendor of "UNIX-based"[1] systems in the world. (Probably over 13 million now, according to sales since then.)
That's a meaningless statistic. Apple's OS is probably still far behind UNIX or Linux in terms of absolute installed numbers. The fact that it has large proprietary components and comes from a single vendor is a disadvantage, not an advantage.
I think he meant Red Hat's "offering" of Linux, not necessarily implying that they were the only one, just the only contender at that level.
Yes: that is exactly why it bothers people, since Schwartz's statement is both arrogant and wrong.
SuSE is at least as much of a contender than RedHat. Debian is arguably even more important.
On the other hand, Sun Solaris is already out of the running and not a serious contender anymore.
Yes, and so he should have mentioned the operating systems that still matter: "increasingly evident the OS wars are down to Microsoft Windows, Red Hat's Linux, SuSe Linux, Debian Linux, and Macintosh OS X".
You must be British then.
Let's talk hypothetical here - Let's say Sun releases Solaris under a nice license that satisfies everybody [...] Right there, the Linux pricepoint and community support is matched.
:-)?
Linux may suck, but to me, Solaris and AIX suck much, much worse.
so if I am totally missing something, would some more-informed Linux guru clarify
You know, I can't presume to tell you what you should like.
To me, AIX's system management was a constant source of problems, their logical volume manager was a disaster, and their attempts at "improving" the UNIX linker were inept. SunOS/Solaris was even lower quality, with serious kernel and user level bugs and gaping security holes, and an utter unwillingness by Sun to address those.
I'm not sure what you see in AIX and SunOS/Solaris, but that's why they make all kinds. I was a SunOS/Solaris user for 15 years and an AIX user for 5 and you couldn't pay me enough to go back. I would hope to be able to use something nicer than Linux at some point, but so far, sadly, there is nothing that's better out there (no, Darwin doesn't cut it and neither did BeOS either; Windows NT seems hell-bent on repeating the mistakes of systems that even predate UNIX; Plan9 showed some promise, but it hasn't caught on so far).
The dollar is falling; it will rise again.
Eventually, perhaps, when it has been devalued to the point to eliminate the trade deficit and when a fiscally responsible president comes into power again (Republicans need not apply--they love running up big deficits).
The economy is not failing. We are winning the war.
Geez. I thought people like you didn't believe in taking drugs.
Here's a lesson on tax cuts.
Not only is the "lesson" utter nonsense, its attribution to Kamerschen is as phony as your other "facts".
For all we know it was requested as part of a security review to be turned over to the company that made the e-voting equiptment to show them security holes that people were concerned about.
That interpretation makes no sense to me: why would they carry out a security audit in that way? If they did, that alone would demonstrate complete incompetence in security matters.
Now I have no proof, but if this is true at all, that would be my guess.
I don't know whether the original claim is true, but if it is, your analysis just doesn't work.
As long as most of us have reasonable faith in our electoral process, we can get through pretty much anything.
You mean like a plummeting dollar, a failing economy, a losing war, an unprecedented transfer of money to the wealthiest few, thousands of war deaths, and a dismantling of civil rights and our constitution?
Who we elect matters. And if people get into government by corrupt means, they are probably up to no good and can cause serious harm to everybody. The US was founded by people who did not want to have hereditary rulers. Do you want to bring that back? Is Jenna's husband automatically going to be the next president?
Hollywood is churning out sex and violence because that is what the people want to see, not because they have some liberal agenda
Hollywood is not churning out sex: they are prudish in the extreme.
Hollywood is churning out violence, but that's the Republican agenda: guns everywhere.
If you want to talk stereotypes, Liberals want more sex and less violence on TV, while Republicans want less sex and more violence. Count me firmly in the Liberal camp there.
I consider Bush indecent and obscene. So, if I complain 10 million times to the FCC, I don't have to see him anymore?
You are used to one particular toolchain: RAW conversion with lots of adjustments, black-box hardware color calibration, lots of features in Photoshop. Linux doesn't provide exactly what you are used to.
But that's not the only way to work, nor are your applications the only digital imaging applications. While the Macintosh is probably a convenient platform for your needs, many of the features that make it convenient for you also make it quite cumbersome for other purposes. Linux imaging is the way it is not because people haven't gotten around to making it like the Macintosh, it's the way it is because it serves its user communities (which includes a lot of scientists and engineers).
And even though the Macintosh gives you more convenience and handholding out of the box, it is not hard to do professional digital imaging on Linux: you basically have all the calibration, processing, and editing tools you need for day-to-day work, at a fraction of the cost and with full source code availability (meaning, you can modify it to suit your needs or improve it), you just need to spend a little more time initially figuring out how to use it all.
If you are truly a pro photographer than you time is worth a lot more than the purchase price of a decent iMac
And how is that going to help him save time? His flatbed scanner is still going to give him lousy quality. He still has to carry out color calibration for whatever capture device he uses. And he still has manually post-processs each slide.
Actually, with the Mac he is going to be worse off. For the price of an iMac, he could get a much more powerful Linux machine. Before he can do anything, he'll have to shell out some money for software. And he has a smaller range of scanners to choose from.
Linux (and other free unices) have their time and place, but as a professional photography scanning and retouching system it's just not ready yet. Does the GIMP even use ICC profiles?
Jeez: you rant and rave for two paragraphs about how supposedly un-ready Linux is for professional photography and then it turns out you don't even know whether Linux or the Gimp has color management. What about doing some background research before you dispense advice? I do have an iMac (and a Powerbook and an iBook).
There's a famous quote that gets thrown around quite a bit: "Linux is free only if your time has no value" - Jamie Zawinski
Zawinski is a UNIX-hating night-club owner who (according to his web site) spends hours wondering whether he has a brain disease because he sees funny colors when he presses on his eyeballs (in case you are wondering the same thing: you, you don't). That's not the kind of person you want to take advice from about what platform to use.
And just because companies promise to make your pain go away when you give them money doesn't mean they actually succeed. And by the time you have turned into a platform-X-expert and don't know much about other platforms (see above), you just assume that your way is the best way and will have turned into a zealous if uninformed advocate for your platform (see above again).
The sad fact is that slide scanning in particular, and image processing in general, is a lot of work on any platform. Doing it on Linux or Macintosh is a different experience. You get a lot more handholding on Macintosh, while on Linux, you have to learn more about what you are doing initially. On the other hand, for someone who actually understands image processingand may even develop image processing software, Linux is probably a more convenient and efficient platform.
(Sorry, I can't dump thousands into a piece of hardware---I'm looking for a way to make the most of my Epson Perfection 2400 with transparency adapter)."
A transparency adapter on an Epson 2400 or most other consumer scanners will not give you acceptable quality, not under Linux and not under Windows. If you want low-cost slide scanning that is of reasonable quality, your best bet is to put a slide adapter on a digital camera. But the only way to get good slide scans it to get a slide scanner.
For color correction, LCMS is a good bet. You can calibrate it using a digital capture of an image with known colors on (the SCARSE package helps you with that). Don't expect hand holding: you actually have to know what you are doing in order to use LCMS. The good news is that it is an excellent and flexible CMS and that batch processing is easy. (You can get a plugin for LCMS for the Gimp, but that is probably not the best way of using it.)
Getting good scans of slides is a lot of work, on any platform. Every slide will take some manual work to post-process. That's why commercial slide scanning costs so much money. One big area is dust and scratch removal, which is why scanners with automatic dust/scratch removal are so popular.
Note that the big strength of Linux is the large number of powerful and high-quality image processing software available for it (in particular, scientific image processing), and the way you can easily combine that software through scripting. A good place to start is to look for image-related packages on your Linux distribution (Debian has pretty good coverage).
Is it possible that the usefulness of TV has decreased with the internet so expansive these days?"
No, that's not possible. Rather, the "usefulness of TV" just never was very high.
The bad news is that a shed is still a shed.
That's not determined by building materials. People have made sheds out of concrete or brick and palaces out of bamboo and paper. Many Europeans look at US wood construction as cheap, temporary housing, while Americans look at European concrete buildings and think of low-income government housing. A lot of this is cultural.
Every person in the corporation is still a person, and the process of making decisions rather resembles a dysfunctional family fighting over who gets to carve the Thanksgiving turkey.
Sure, as everybody who has worked in a corporation knows. That merely demonstrates that corporations are prone to the same fallacies that affect other human decision making.
The idea that corporations make "cold" and "calculated" decisions is a lot of hooey,
What's a lot of "hooey" is your belief that because people inside corporations make decisions, therefore we can think of corporations like people.
Taken literally that would viturally guarantee that corporate acts are evil.
Concepts of "good" and "evil" just don't apply to corporations. The legal construct of a corporation is merely intended to achieve that corporations act legally and in a profit-maximizing manner. Any other behavioral interpretations you apply to them are a dangerous fiction.
Individual people inside corporations may behave in "good" or "evil" ways, but those individual people are replaceable. And if the people working inside, or running, a corporation don't act in a profit maximizing way, they will get replaced.