yup, my favourite story was about the USA spending all that time and money developing a high tech non-leaky non gravity dependent ball point pen so their astronauts could write in space. Meanwhile the USSR gave their guys chinograph pencils and wipe clean tablets . teehee.
I think due to financial necessity as well as being smart the Russians are rather good at coming up with clever hacks rather than solving problems by throwing large amounts of money at their headaches. Anyhow, they've an awful lot more experience of long term space missions so it would be silly not to use that hard won wisdom.
Hey, we're all on the same planet so who gives a damn about this nationality nonsense anyway... I'm so glad we've got an international space station, let's just get the best people together and forget about checking their passports to see if they can come on board:-)
There are many ways you can make a change. Doing nothing isn't one of them. Do something.
If you find the idea of breaking the law to make a point a bit too scary, do some thinking. You'll find that there are many ways you can make a change without even breaking the law.
My favourite recent one in the UK was a protest to campaign against a pro clause 28 campaign in Scotland. Whatever your feelings about clause 28 (a legal clause making it illegal to promote teaching about homosexuality, but so badly worded it has severe repercussions about civil rights in general) this action was a stunning idea. The pro clause 28 people were sending out unstamped postcards getting people to sign up for their campaign (the law has already been passed but there's talk about it being repealed at the moment). The idea was that the campaign would pay for the postage and in exchange get lots of people signing up. But the folks who were unhappy with this pro clause campaign got the address of one of the postcards, and started a counter-campaign, getting anybody who opposed the pro-campaign to send household bricks with the campaign address on them.
The UK post service pretty well has an obligation to post anything with a proper address on it (especially, as I think in this case, the address starts with 'FREEPOST' ). The end result was that the pro campaign had to pay the postage on lots of bricks - cost of sending bricks not being low...and dispose of a lot of bricks. Genius.
So... use your brain...what ever you're passionate about... do something.
Err... this is an idea driven by the military, right? The primary objective seems to be to make very fast torpedos which will be more effective at killing people. Frankly I don't think they will really give a damn if they kill a few fish or dolphins while they're on their way.
(Mind you the idea of an ecologically sound military is even more scary in a bizarre kind of way)
Actually I live in Hackney and used to live in the Lothians (that's a bit of London and a bit of Scotland for those who aren't sure) but I couldn't resist the 'Tim nice but dim' upper class English twat gag and reckoned that Surrey worked better...;-)
No problem with the kilometres, we converted to metric in...I think it was 1971 (maybe that was decimalisation).. anyhow long enough we understand the units of measurement.
But would you mind explaining what 412,000 km represents in English Counties: how big is it compared to Surrey, perhaps?
yup mainly, which is a great pleasure to me, having tried many licit and illicit products and settling on sherbert as the finest...but I did notice that there was a mention of green ketchup this week. Each and every to their own but even I don't go as far as to call ketchup a sweet:-)
Off topic n appy poly logies but can somebody give me a US cultural lesson...can somebody explain the spiro-a.gnu ? Didn't you folks have a politician or something called Spiro Agnew or something... err , why is this funny?
I met a sound guy called Erik Hobijn at DEAF95 (Dutch Electronic Arts Festival) in Rotterdam. He had done a show with a midi controlled organ of a similiar description and used it at a show in Berlin previously. Showed me some excellent photos. Can't see his name on the material surrounding the LHPO so I am not sure if he was involved in this one or had built one of his own, but if you're into pyro then I suggest you do a search for "Erik Hobijn" and fire on Google or similar. Check out his "Delusions of Self-Immolation" for starters... he's out there, a cool guy...
But hey, I'm biased, I do fire festivals and fire sculptures as well...
Does anybody have any information on the groups of Australians who have been working for the last few years on their own attempt at a privately built manned orbiting rocket?
I remember seeing a programme on the BBC (in the UK) on the group, they were pretty serious and had built two or three successful prototypes of increasing size and complexity. As I remember from the prototype they were getting close to building rockets that could carry human weight payloads, and were starting to be given some funding from the Australian Government (or military, maybe). Until I saw the programme I thought private attempts were a bit of a joke but these guys were going for it. All very serious, the Oz authorities looked like they were letting them use an old missile testing range and control centre, getting very real. Actually having visited Cape Canaveral last summer and actually seeing the Mercury rocket and capsule, I realise that there's not such a great divide between these private attempts and the first mad scrambles into space those decades ago...
The sooner that things like the RIAA die off the sooner you will find local bands getting success because they are actually good musicians, and not getting success because they have a manager that knows someone.
I am afraid it's always going to be about who you know. I got a copy of SuSE to learn linux simply because my friend Alex uses it and he's very experienced and happy to give me a hand when I'm stuck. And imagine if Linus T. was my next door neighbour...
I think CormacJ makes a good point about the problems with closed source knowledge, but people will always use their contacts and communicate to get things moving.
What we've got to do in the open source community is create a culture where even when money starts flowing dependent on knowledge, people still want to share that knowledge. Going to be interesting as linux moves (probably very soon) into being big commercial value to a lot of people...like people have said on slashdot before, there's goingto be a lot of pressure to pervert the spirit of GNU licences / open source terminology etc...
It's all a bit sad a certainly, and in the UK we're starting to have to deal with this a lot more in the education environment.
I guess - you want the money/ resources - you strike a deal with Babylon.
Trouble is these guys have hardened sales people trained to cut hard deals day in day out, and academics, well they have other things to deal with (and would prefer to spend their time doing). I expect schools and universities are going to get burnt frequently until they start hiring hardened full time marketing people to cut these kind of deals.
(minor rant tinged with sadness..) Ok so put the boot in on European social welfare models of economy, but hey at least when it works it protects the education sector from having to do this kind of dealing rather than educating people...sigh... (off rant)
Bit of a long way from Iraq! (check your world atlas...)
I think these folks have probably got away with their independent nation status game because at the end of the day not a lot of politicians or military people are that bothered by a bunch of eccentric individuals squatting a 50 year old gun platform a few miles out in the sea.
Now if they get their data haven up and running and it starts making a bit of money, or possibly hosting material that UK law doesn't like, then it'll be interesting to see what happens. Maybe the UK will send a tug boat or a small frigate with half a dozen sailors or summink.
I guess while the place itself is apparently outside UK territorial waters, the UK could always say they want their scrap metal back : the gun platform, ie. the actual dry land of Sealand. That could be interesting.
I don't think any other country is really going to kick up a fuss as it's off the shores of the UK and I can't see Belgium or the Netherlands really being that bothered...
Hey, as long as they don't do anything dodgy, good on them! Squatting the platform and declaring nation status kind of shows up how stupid a lot of the concepts of nationality really are.
Ok this is a bit off the record (apologies) but in view of the embarassing hiccups over metric vs Imperial units recently, can anybody tell me why the USA sticks with Imperial units (inches, yards, miles)? I suppose it's just inertia but I'd be interested to hear if there have ever been attempts to move to metric inline with other nations. It sure would make the maths a bit easier for those overworked NASA engineers:-)
Is the USA the only spacefaring nation to use Imperial units or are there others?
A squashy monitor that I could punch occasionally would be useful (hey, you been there, you know what I mean...). Mind you I suppose my current monitor could probably cope with a battering from this rubber keyboard.
Put the both together like AnthonyL says and you're getting into serious soft toy space....woooaahhhh...
What do the slashdot people say?
on
Why Not MySQL?
·
· Score: 1
"Is this a good or bad time to point out that slashdot uses mySQL? "
I'd be interested to hear an opinion from the/. people here. I don't know much about databases but slashdot seems to work every time I visit it...
There's an awful lot of loyalty in arts and design community towards the Mac.
Windows boxes are viewed by this community with a similar sort of suspicion that the linux / slashdot community holds for Microsoft products, though this is more due to poor interfaces, bad ports of software and perceived complexity of operation compared to the familiar Mac environment, than any issue of open or closed source software. In the UK art colleges are often strongholds of Macs, this is what most artists and graphic designers are professionally trained on.
However, there are a lot of graphic designers out there who are becoming aware of the whole open source philosophy and would love to join in. To drag up the old chestnut, they are just waiting for a decent set of tools that are suitable for their work environment. I work with a graphic designer who would love to convert to linux but the tools available are just not comparable to the commercially released latest versions of Illustrator, Flash, Quark Xpress etc.
With the linux heritage and community developing from people interested in unix server applications to including those interested in providing graphics and multimedia tools, I think we may be on the verge of seeing a new professional community embracing linux and open source.
Ok, I know it's very easy to say "forget the damn graphic designers, if they can't learn our way of working, we don't want to help them" but I think if the attitude is more "let's work out how to support these user needs" we'll find a large group of unsupported sympathisers becoming enthusiastic converts.
went over to see some friends in Brussels just before Christmas and they'd turned a bank into a projection screen like this. Red, green and blue lights set up to shine onto screens in front of each window. 52 by 7 display. Not a lot of pixels but given the full RGB and a nice bit of creativity on the part of the artists/ programmers, it should looked funky. Not interactive but a damn fine start.
The Financial Times (UK Financial Paper ) ran this today also, (page 14 , 25 March), also go to http://www.ft.com and do a search for Eidos for the whole story and a newer one on the same theme.
Won't bore you with the whole article but the drop in Eidos share prices appears to have been a result of Eidos themselves warning that games players were holding back on purchases in order to await the launch of the new generation of games consules.
Nitty gritty details "..Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, the broker, cut this year's pre-tax profit forecast of 23.6 million (pounds sterling) to losses of 17.3 million (pounds sterling). But Eidos will remain in the black following n 84 million (pounds sterling) gain from the sale of a 77 per cent stake in Opticom, a Norwegian technology company...."
Phew! all you market trading sharedealing big players are safe then:-)
Me, I *live* right next to the City (financial heart of London) but our little (web and information) company gets around on bicycles and the nearest I get to market trading is buying my veggies from the same fruit and veg market as the high flying city dealers down the road;-)
No, sorry, you missed me there, I've been playing D & D at least 8 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week, for the last 10 years (when I'm not programming fax machines for a job). Must be some real high level non player character type I've not come across.
My cat gets wound up enough with the tv, no way am I getting one of those digital fishbowls.
Definitely proves Japan makes it as one of the top geek heaven countries though, up there with Finland and Antarctica...the Japanese keep producing these most excellent mad technotoys.
(The scene - two cutting edge technologists talking about their favoured operating systems circa 2000 years BCE)
Gilgamesh (Bronze caster from the city state of Ur): I tell you Nergal, this technology you're using, it's going to die out and nobody will use it any more...
Nergal (Basket maker from the city state of Akkad): Ahh, away with you, everybody uses this technique of making baskets. Besides all the manuals are written in Akkadian, people will still be using Akkadian 5000 years from now!
Hahaha only joking, but hey....
Actually I heard the US military were looking at devising language / symbols to put on their high level nuclear waste bunkers, so when humans or whatever stumble across high level dumps 10,000 years from now they'll know what's inside is dangerous and should be treated with caution. When you consider that the history of human writing only goes back about 5000 years this is some task. Can anybody help me track down some of the literature/ urls/ research about this project? Many thanks.
"The Intel STS is America's oldest, and most prestigious, pre-college science scholarship competition, often considered the "Junior Nobel Prize." This year, Intel has increased award scholarships and equipment from $330,000 to $1.25 million."
First off, big respect and good on all the participants, and Intel. Encouraging young people in scientific endeavour is a Good Thing, and my respect and congratulations to all the individuals who worked hard and took part. I hope everybody got positive results out of taking part.
Here comes the rant, switch off now if you don't want it...
"Junior Nobel Prize"...err, come on Intel, that is an *international* prize. Sounds like this is a US only competition. Easy with the hype there. Better still - a challenge - make it an international prize! Why not open up this competition to schools across the planet? Now that would be a great competition, it truly would be a Junior Nobel Prize. Definitely a good thing.
It would be interesting to see who's doing research into this. Certainly much research has been carried out into the paper equivalence and as a result it's possible to get books printed onto archive quality paper 'guaranteed' (well, you stand a better chance anyway) of surviving for 500 years.
The archival paper and inks have been created to be as chemically neutral as possible - the great problem with paper is chemical reactions of consistuent parts and outside influences (light, heat, humidity, ink) gradually breaking down the material itself. In the British Library (UK national copyright repository) a vast number of books printed in the C19th are beyond salvation, crumbling away, early mechanically made paper is often very unstable.
I am sure that research into this must be beng carried out in the same way for CDs etc. Any references anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
yup, my favourite story was about the USA spending all that time and money developing a high tech non-leaky non gravity dependent ball point pen so their astronauts could write in space. Meanwhile the USSR gave their guys chinograph pencils and wipe clean tablets . teehee.
I think due to financial necessity as well as being smart the Russians are rather good at coming up with clever hacks rather than solving problems by throwing large amounts of money at their headaches. Anyhow, they've an awful lot more experience of long term space missions so it would be silly not to use that hard won wisdom.
Hey, we're all on the same planet so who gives a damn about this nationality nonsense anyway... I'm so glad we've got an international space station, let's just get the best people together and forget about checking their passports to see if they can come on board :-)
There are many ways you can make a change. Doing nothing isn't one of them. Do something.
If you find the idea of breaking the law to make a point a bit too scary, do some thinking. You'll find that there are many ways you can make a change without even breaking the law.
My favourite recent one in the UK was a protest to campaign against a pro clause 28 campaign in Scotland. Whatever your feelings about clause 28 (a legal clause making it illegal to promote teaching about homosexuality, but so badly worded it has severe repercussions about civil rights in general) this action was a stunning idea. The pro clause 28 people were sending out unstamped postcards getting people to sign up for their campaign (the law has already been passed but there's talk about it being repealed at the moment). The idea was that the campaign would pay for the postage and in exchange get lots of people signing up. But the folks who were unhappy with this pro clause campaign got the address of one of the postcards, and started a counter-campaign, getting anybody who opposed the pro-campaign to send household bricks with the campaign address on them.
The UK post service pretty well has an obligation to post anything with a proper address on it (especially, as I think in this case, the address starts with 'FREEPOST' ). The end result was that the pro campaign had to pay the postage on lots of bricks - cost of sending bricks not being low...and dispose of a lot of bricks. Genius.
So... use your brain...what ever you're passionate about ... do something.
Err... this is an idea driven by the military, right? The primary objective seems to be to make very fast torpedos which will be more effective at killing people. Frankly I don't think they will really give a damn if they kill a few fish or dolphins while they're on their way.
(Mind you the idea of an ecologically sound military is even more scary in a bizarre kind of way)
hahahaha!
Actually I live in Hackney and used to live in the Lothians (that's a bit of London and a bit of Scotland for those who aren't sure) but I couldn't resist the 'Tim nice but dim' upper class English twat gag and reckoned that Surrey worked better... ;-)
Terribly sorry old chap, I'm English.
No problem with the kilometres, we converted to metric in...I think it was 1971 (maybe that was decimalisation) .. anyhow long enough we understand the units of measurement.
But would you mind explaining what 412,000 km represents in English Counties: how big is it compared to Surrey, perhaps?
yup mainly, which is a great pleasure to me, having tried many licit and illicit products and settling on sherbert as the finest...but I did notice that there was a mention of green ketchup this week. Each and every to their own but even I don't go as far as to call ketchup a sweet :-)
NTK does a good job of consistently reporting the best food products available in the UK as well :-)
Off topic n appy poly logies but can somebody give me a US cultural lesson...can somebody explain the spiro-a.gnu ? Didn't you folks have a politician or something called Spiro Agnew or something... err , why is this funny?
Hey, I'm just a stoopid foreigner... ;-)
I met a sound guy called Erik Hobijn at DEAF95 (Dutch Electronic Arts Festival) in Rotterdam. He had done a show with a midi controlled organ of a similiar description and used it at a show in Berlin previously. Showed me some excellent photos. Can't see his name on the material surrounding the LHPO so I am not sure if he was involved in this one or had built one of his own, but if you're into pyro then I suggest you do a search for "Erik Hobijn" and fire on Google or similar. Check out his "Delusions of Self-Immolation" for starters... he's out there, a cool guy...
But hey, I'm biased, I do fire festivals and fire sculptures as well...
Does anybody have any information on the groups of Australians who have been working for the last few years on their own attempt at a privately built manned orbiting rocket?
I remember seeing a programme on the BBC (in the UK) on the group, they were pretty serious and had built two or three successful prototypes of increasing size and complexity. As I remember from the prototype they were getting close to building rockets that could carry human weight payloads, and were starting to be given some funding from the Australian Government (or military, maybe). Until I saw the programme I thought private attempts were a bit of a joke but these guys were going for it. All very serious, the Oz authorities looked like they were letting them use an old missile testing range and control centre, getting very real. Actually having visited Cape Canaveral last summer and actually seeing the Mercury rocket and capsule, I realise that there's not such a great divide between these private attempts and the first mad scrambles into space those decades ago...
Anybody got any details/ updates on these guys?
The sooner that things like the RIAA die off the sooner you will find local bands getting success because they are actually good musicians, and not getting success because they have a manager that knows someone.
I am afraid it's always going to be about who you know. I got a copy of SuSE to learn linux simply because my friend Alex uses it and he's very experienced and happy to give me a hand when I'm stuck. And imagine if Linus T. was my next door neighbour...
I think CormacJ makes a good point about the problems with closed source knowledge, but people will always use their contacts and communicate to get things moving.
What we've got to do in the open source community is create a culture where even when money starts flowing dependent on knowledge, people still want to share that knowledge. Going to be interesting as linux moves (probably very soon) into being big commercial value to a lot of people...like people have said on slashdot before, there's goingto be a lot of pressure to pervert the spirit of GNU licences / open source terminology etc...
It's all a bit sad a certainly, and in the UK we're starting to have to deal with this a lot more in the education environment.
I guess - you want the money/ resources - you strike a deal with Babylon.
Trouble is these guys have hardened sales people trained to cut hard deals day in day out, and academics, well they have other things to deal with (and would prefer to spend their time doing). I expect schools and universities are going to get burnt frequently until they start hiring hardened full time marketing people to cut these kind of deals.
(minor rant tinged with sadness..) Ok so put the boot in on European social welfare models of economy, but hey at least when it works it protects the education sector from having to do this kind of dealing rather than educating people...sigh... (off rant)
ha ha ha ... you got to be writing this from the Netherlands, right? ;-)
Bit of a long way from Iraq! (check your world atlas...)
I think these folks have probably got away with their independent nation status game because at the end of the day not a lot of politicians or military people are that bothered by a bunch of eccentric individuals squatting a 50 year old gun platform a few miles out in the sea.Now if they get their data haven up and running and it starts making a bit of money, or possibly hosting material that UK law doesn't like, then it'll be interesting to see what happens. Maybe the UK will send a tug boat or a small frigate with half a dozen sailors or summink.
I guess while the place itself is apparently outside UK territorial waters, the UK could always say they want their scrap metal back : the gun platform, ie. the actual dry land of Sealand. That could be interesting.
I don't think any other country is really going to kick up a fuss as it's off the shores of the UK and I can't see Belgium or the Netherlands really being that bothered...
Hey, as long as they don't do anything dodgy, good on them! Squatting the platform and declaring nation status kind of shows up how stupid a lot of the concepts of nationality really are.
Ok this is a bit off the record (apologies) but in view of the embarassing hiccups over metric vs Imperial units recently, can anybody tell me why the USA sticks with Imperial units (inches, yards, miles)? I suppose it's just inertia but I'd be interested to hear if there have ever been attempts to move to metric inline with other nations. It sure would make the maths a bit easier for those overworked NASA engineers :-)
Is the USA the only spacefaring nation to use Imperial units or are there others?
A squashy monitor that I could punch occasionally would be useful (hey, you been there, you know what I mean...). Mind you I suppose my current monitor could probably cope with a battering from this rubber keyboard.
Put the both together like AnthonyL says and you're getting into serious soft toy space ....woooaahhhh...
"Is this a good or bad time to point out that slashdot uses mySQL? "
I'd be interested to hear an opinion from the /. people here. I don't know much about databases but slashdot seems to work every time I visit it...
There's an awful lot of loyalty in arts and design community towards the Mac.
Windows boxes are viewed by this community with a similar sort of suspicion that the linux / slashdot community holds for Microsoft products, though this is more due to poor interfaces, bad ports of software and perceived complexity of operation compared to the familiar Mac environment, than any issue of open or closed source software. In the UK art colleges are often strongholds of Macs, this is what most artists and graphic designers are professionally trained on.
However, there are a lot of graphic designers out there who are becoming aware of the whole open source philosophy and would love to join in. To drag up the old chestnut, they are just waiting for a decent set of tools that are suitable for their work environment. I work with a graphic designer who would love to convert to linux but the tools available are just not comparable to the commercially released latest versions of Illustrator, Flash, Quark Xpress etc.
With the linux heritage and community developing from people interested in unix server applications to including those interested in providing graphics and multimedia tools, I think we may be on the verge of seeing a new professional community embracing linux and open source.
Ok, I know it's very easy to say "forget the damn graphic designers, if they can't learn our way of working, we don't want to help them" but I think if the attitude is more "let's work out how to support these user needs" we'll find a large group of unsupported sympathisers becoming enthusiastic converts.
Yup
went over to see some friends in Brussels just before Christmas and they'd turned a bank into a projection screen like this. Red, green and blue lights set up to shine onto screens in front of each window. 52 by 7 display. Not a lot of pixels but given the full RGB and a nice bit of creativity on the part of the artists/ programmers, it should looked funky. Not interactive but a damn fine start.
The Financial Times (UK Financial Paper ) ran this today also, (page 14 , 25 March), also go to http://www.ft.com and do a search for Eidos for the whole story and a newer one on the same theme.
Won't bore you with the whole article but the drop in Eidos share prices appears to have been a result of Eidos themselves warning that games players were holding back on purchases in order to await the launch of the new generation of games consules.
Nitty gritty details "..Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, the broker, cut this year's pre-tax profit forecast of 23.6 million (pounds sterling) to losses of 17.3 million (pounds sterling). But Eidos will remain in the black following n 84 million (pounds sterling) gain from the sale of a 77 per cent stake in Opticom, a Norwegian technology company...."
Phew! all you market trading sharedealing big players are safe thenMe, I *live* right next to the City (financial heart of London) but our little (web and information) company gets around on bicycles and the nearest I get to market trading is buying my veggies from the same fruit and veg market as the high flying city dealers down the road ;-)
Girlfriend...Girlfriend?...
No, sorry, you missed me there, I've been playing D & D at least 8 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week, for the last 10 years (when I'm not programming fax machines for a job). Must be some real high level non player character type I've not come across.
My cat gets wound up enough with the tv, no way am I getting one of those digital fishbowls.
Definitely proves Japan makes it as one of the top geek heaven countries though, up there with Finland and Antarctica...the Japanese keep producing these most excellent mad technotoys.
(The scene - two cutting edge technologists talking about their favoured operating systems circa 2000 years BCE)
Gilgamesh (Bronze caster from the city state of Ur) : I tell you Nergal, this technology you're using, it's going to die out and nobody will use it any more ...
Nergal (Basket maker from the city state of Akkad): Ahh, away with you, everybody uses this technique of making baskets. Besides all the manuals are written in Akkadian, people will still be using Akkadian 5000 years from now!
Hahaha only joking, but hey....
Actually I heard the US military were looking at devising language / symbols to put on their high level nuclear waste bunkers, so when humans or whatever stumble across high level dumps 10,000 years from now they'll know what's inside is dangerous and should be treated with caution. When you consider that the history of human writing only goes back about 5000 years this is some task. Can anybody help me track down some of the literature/ urls/ research about this project? Many thanks.
"The Intel STS is America's oldest, and most prestigious, pre-college science scholarship competition, often considered the "Junior Nobel Prize." This year, Intel has increased award scholarships and equipment from $330,000 to $1.25 million."
First off, big respect and good on all the participants, and Intel. Encouraging young people in scientific endeavour is a Good Thing, and my respect and congratulations to all the individuals who worked hard and took part. I hope everybody got positive results out of taking part.
Here comes the rant, switch off now if you don't want it...
"Junior Nobel Prize" ...err, come on Intel, that is an *international* prize. Sounds like this is a US only competition. Easy with the hype there. Better still - a challenge - make it an international prize! Why not open up this competition to schools across the planet? Now that would be a great competition, it truly would be a Junior Nobel Prize. Definitely a good thing.
(rant over!)
It would be interesting to see who's doing research into this. Certainly much research has been carried out into the paper equivalence and as a result it's possible to get books printed onto archive quality paper 'guaranteed' (well, you stand a better chance anyway) of surviving for 500 years.
The archival paper and inks have been created to be as chemically neutral as possible - the great problem with paper is chemical reactions of consistuent parts and outside influences (light, heat, humidity, ink) gradually breaking down the material itself. In the British Library (UK national copyright repository) a vast number of books printed in the C19th are beyond salvation, crumbling away, early mechanically made paper is often very unstable.
I am sure that research into this must be beng carried out in the same way for CDs etc. Any references anyone?