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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Reputation is such a strange phenomenon. XP was considered a disaster at launch. It took them years to repair everything that didn’t work.

    The rollout of 64 bit architecture support was so sloppy that people were holding on to old hardware so as to not have to install the x64 version of XP. The premiere of the NT kernel meant that nothing had drivers, most software wasn’t compatible yet. DirectX 9 broke half of old games compatibility. There were also two entirely different versions of the shell with dramatically different start menus. Some versions didn’t support multi core CPUs.

    Not to mention that XP actually spans three different OSs. Upgrades were just a reinstall wizard of the OS.

    It wasn’t until the end life of XP and the launch of Vista that people started to cling to XP SP2 and its reputation switched due to a mix of nostalgia and fear of the much worse launch of Vista.




  • dustyData@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    4 days ago

    Inkscape? Maybe.

    Gimp is not a drawing software, so it makes sense it doesn’t have a dedicated “draw complex geometric figures” tool by default. It does have a shape selection tool. Anyways, it all depends on what you’re trying to achieve. Krita is for painting, gimp is for image manipulation, inkskape is for vector graphics. Paint.net is a weirdo that does everything but doesn’t do any of those things well enough.



  • Oh boy, they weren’t fuzzy. Some film outclass the clarity and sharpness of modern OLED, even when it was for B category low budget movies, just that most people watched a 4 week old piece of film in bumfuck middle of nowhere cinema. With a scratched up and badly calibrated focus lens and dirty and deteriorated film over a dirty screen.

    Anyways, the biggest problem that physical media solves is not the number of pixels, but the bitrate. Tons of information, specially about color, is lost to streaming compression. Pixel density equation means that the quality of what you see is rarely distinguishable between 1080p, 2k and 4k, depending on how far away you sit from the screen and how big it is. For the typical seating accommodation at home and commercial theaters, you won’t notice a significant change within FHD and UHD. However, you can definitely tell the difference between the 10Mbps 4k (down to as little as 2Mbps if your connection sucks) that you get from Netflix¹ and the steady 32Mbps that Blu-ray can give you.

    ¹: BTW, it doesn’t matter how fast your internet connection is, the data transferred can get to you at as high speed as you want, but the bitrate of the video file inside the container that the streaming services give you is usually hard capped rather low anyway.





  • In what I’ve seen, the best masons are on construction sites planning the work before hand. The inexperienced and newby masons mix mortar and carry bricks around. The top elder guys lead the prep work planing when and where stuff needs to be for what is being built. But once the machine starts mixing the cement all those guys do is lay bricks.

    They don’t shovel, they don’t mix mortar, they don’t carry materials. Just laying brick after brick until they run out of materials or the construction is done. It’s quite mesmerizing to see a good contractor working efficiently, rare but fascinating.



  • Traffic segregation, car free zones, public transport, lower speed limits, car size based taxing, stricter driver license conditions, three strike limitations, temporal license suspensions schemes, these are all measurements that would reduce car accidents just as much, and could be implemented within the next week anywhere at very low cost. It’s not a pipe dream, it’s a lack of political will.

    It doesn’t take several billion dollars of R&D onto a tech that will never work outside of 1% of the road network and could actually not reduce cars accidents at all once it faces real world conditions.

    If the goal is to reduce traffic accidents, this is the most expensive, slowest and inefficient way to do it.

    EDIT: Autonomous driving will solve traffic and traffic deaths as much as EVs are going to solve global warning. They are plausible lies that techno oligarchs use to distract from the real causes of the problems they purport to solve and are actually just new money funnels for the oil industrial complex.





  • Yeah, I don’t think you understand Calibre at all, because you are somehow annoyed by it. I get it. But there’s no e-reader on the market that supports Calibre. Quite the contrary, there’s a titanic effort from the Calibre team (it’s been several people since 2009) to reverse engineer support with every single e-reader and tablet in the market that should not be minimized. You’re also painting a picture as if somehow Calibre is the Windows of e-book and everyone hates it but is forced to use it, when in reality that is not at all the case. Yes, it has quirks and people have constructive criticisms, but calling a guy’s name “rough” is not positive criticism. Overall, most people appreciate and like Calibre for what it has achieved and enabled for readers all around the world.

    Again, it’s fine if you don’t like it, don’t understand it, and don’t want to understand it. But that doesn’t excuse insulting a person who actively is making your petty life a bit easier and free from corporate control. It takes a very weird person to feel like commenting negatively on someone’s name is somehow appropriate, it’s bully attitude. If that is all the criticism you can bring to a discussion of software, save it for yourself and stop replying. You’re all over this thread complaining, completely unprovoked like a little wuss. No one is forcing you to use Calibre, it just so happen that no one has done anything better, as you yourself admitted in another comment.


  • dustyData@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldWhat else should I selfhost?
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    1 month ago

    Good, so if you know what needs to be fixed it should be easy for you to make a new alternative, with modern web UX, self-hosting in mind and NO quirks whatsoever.

    Really, it’s so easy to insult those who are making solutions when you have never contributed at all. There’s constructive criticisms, but calling people who are fronting free labor for your benefit as nerd aliens is not it.


  • dustyData@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldWhat else should I selfhost?
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    1 month ago

    Calibre is so old that it’s use case and architecture precedes the current popularity of self-hosting. It is as old as the premiere of the very first e-ink reader in 2006. It’s not obtuse or weird, it was just the way things were done 20 years ago. The problem is that adapting it to work as a self hosted app or even multi user sync requires rewritting all of its backend from scratch with fundamentally different principles and use cases in mind. And guess what? Everyone is way too lazy to face that massive undertaking. Thus the hobbled together solutions.

    Fortunately, one way backup to a NAS works perfectly fine to keep libraries secure. It’s not this way out of caprice, and the Dev is definitely not an nerd alien.

    There have been attempts to create modernized replacements for calibre. But they all fall through because, Calibre already does 99% of what they want to achieve. That one percent is covered by addons and shoddy workarounds? Yes. But that’s an effort to reward analysis any Dev is faced with. Calibre does much more than what the average user need, and they keep adding features. Because they’re not catering to one particular user but a community of a complex mix of users. Developing software is hard, rebuilding 20 years of features is daunting.