qwertfisch

I was in Paris some years ago, and it surprised me that a jug of water for drinking was free on every table. Of course if you wanted any other beverage you’d pay for it, but just quenching your thirst was free.

In Germany water is not free, but instead another income for restaurants. Also it needs a law (only since 2001) that the cheapest beverage must be non-alcoholic. (Yet water could be more expensive than beer, as long as e.g. apple juice costs equal or less.)

Wow, I always had the impression the red flag is set by the mail carrier to indicate for the house owner (particularly in rural areas) that new mail is inside the box. (Hence it would save the owner a trip for checking.)

But this way around it makes a lot more sense.

Funny, I recently wanted to uninstall a bunch of fonts I tested for programming. Turns out, in the new font settings widget you cannot uninstall all fonts or even all styles of a font at once. I would have needed to select a font, then click "Uninstall" for the bold style, the semibold style, the medium style, the italic bold style etc.

Opening \Windows\Fonts instead gives you a nice view of all fonts, you Ctrl-select all you want, right click, uninstall, done.

And still I cannot create .ts files (with mp4 inside) using FFmpeg that will be accepted by my dad's TV media player. I have to put them through Avidemux, because somehow it uses a better TS muxer. More compatible with the TV.

Will there be a Bluray release afterwards?

I have seen the Japanese DVD cut with the fighting scene in full colour. This is a lot better. But also the black/white effect works with its own style. But … not several minutes long. Also if you have seen it in colour, you might not want to go back to black/white.

I haven’t seen the director’s cut, but it would be nice if Tarantino could use the Japanese cut in most scenes. Here is a (German) comparison: https://www.schnittberichte.com/schnittbericht.php?ID=1588 I like the first two differences (0.00.00 and 0.08.58) more in the international version.

Unfortunately there is no Bluray/HD version of the Japanese cut.

Also: yes, I very much like the first volume a lot, while the second part is really a bit boring with too quick fights. Seems like Tarantino already used the best scenes for chapter 1 and 2.

Because that’s a video compression format, from where only a single intra-frame is used.

Seems a bit too late? And also, JPEG XL supports all the features and uses already advanced compression (finite-state entropy, like ZStandard). It offers lossy and lossless compression, animated pictures, HDR, EXIF etc.

There is just no need for a PNG update, just adopt JPEG XL.

You don’t even have to make it thicker.

My Samsung A40 is less than 8mm thick. It has a FullHD display, 440dpi sharpness, weighs only 140g and is less than 145mm in length. The cameras support 16Mpx back and 25MPx front (not that it’s needed much). The quality is not the best, but very suitable.

It has support for fingerprint, microsd, 3.5mm jack – everything necessary. (Only thing missing is esim, but that can be added by an adapter.)

So it IS possible. The manufacturers just don’t WANT.

These are not smartphones. You cannot do anything with them except phone, SMS, some alarms and make pictures with very crappy quality. So these are effectively just phones, like 20 years ago. They are not extensible by any app, just what the manufacturer adds for factory provided programs.

I would be small (lightweight) phones. I cannot bare these 180–220g devices. If I want something heavy I buy a tablet.

The market? The manufacturers or the people?

Phones that were biggest size/weight only six or seven years ago are now not even available anymore. Why? I cannot imagine that all(!) people want phones that now weigh at least 180g (most even 200+g) and have huge displays.

Do people need to play games all the time? I don’t. I just want a phone to support me with some helpful apps like train/bus timetables, play music, do a quick internet search, make a picture, do alarms and notify about things. Nothing fancy, and nothing where a really need a 7" display nor a 5Ah battery.

When my current phone (Samsung A40) will die someday, I will be very sad as there is nothing today even remotely comparable to the compactness and usefulness of this device.

Everything may also be installed as a service, so then the application doesn’t need administrator privileges itself on every startup.

Maybe I'm not searching well enough, but is there any demo instance one can try? There's not even screenshots.

It's available on the Mediathek (streaming platform for public broadcast TV). Either from mediathekviewweb.de (search for Dinner for One), or direct links: https://mediandr-a.akamaihd.net/progressive/2024/1216/TV-202... (recoloured version) https://mediandr-a.akamaihd.net/progressive/2024/1216/TV-202... (original version)

Vodafone Germany already turned off MMS. Others will follow.

Are these undocumented syscalls somewhere documented? ;)

So there were at most 19 spacecraft deployed that were NOT Starlink satellites, although 34 launches involved third parties. How? How can I distribute 19 spacecraft on 34 launches?

Thanks. :)

The developer surely knew that there would be people that asked for the Program Manager, because it wasn't only a name for the desktop itself (like the Explorer with additional file manager windows). It was Windows. If you closed the Program Manager application, you were prompted a message box "Wanna exit Windows?"

So there's a difference between implementing Windows 3 style desktop, and implementing the Program Manager (as kind of an early Start Menu).

This is the window managing part which handles decoration and displays running applications as desktop icons if minimized.

But where is the Program Manager?

Also after writing this, I noticed the inconsistency (from my view) that in English there are exceptions with words written uppercased, too, like "German", despite being an adjective and not a noun. Which might be irritating, as these words can also be used as noun (also for other words which are not nationalities and written lowercase), and there is no distinction between an adjective and a noun.

In German all adjectives are lowercase, all nouns uppercase.

More precise it should be called Pascal case, with the first letter being uppercase, as for all German nouns. The German Wikipedia article about "Binnenmajuskel" provides a bit more information about usage in natural languages.

The combined address/search bar was presented by Chrome first iirc. Maybe IE was earlier? I cannot remember, never used it (first Netscape, then Mozilla, then Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox).

Interesting. But of course there is a lot of investment bottleneck (or whatever the translation for „Investitionsstau“ is). For example take the „Neue Alpentransversale“ [1][2] which was a 40 year project for modernizing the tracks through Swiss with connections to all neighbouring countries. The Swiss are finished. Germany did not even start and will be ready around 2040, for just 190km of tracks.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neue_Eisenbahn-Alpentransversa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRLA

If the German government would have sticked to the plan of building a Transrapid track between Hamburg and Berlin instead of upgrading the current tracks being able to support an ICE with only 250km/h (which took as many years as building the Transrapid track would have), then there would be much more capacity of transporting people and a functioning an future-proof track for high speed transport with over 500 km/h. Take into account the very short entrance times, compared to flying, and you save even more time. Air routes between Hamburg and Berlin would have been pointless for many years.

There were a lot of political changes at the end of the 90s, some spurious arguments were made, also saying „it would be too expensive“, despite having a huge history of building train stations and airports for much much more then the planned costs … this was just an excuse to not build it because they did not want it.

They said the passenger estimations were too high and it would not be profitable. Today this route is the most used one in Germany with 17000 passengers per day and a capacity of 8.7 million per year[1].

Transrapid (already the model TR08) would have been able to reach the destination in way under 60 minutes, including two intermediate stops. The ICE was able to do this in 90 minutes (when the reconstructed track was finished in 2004), but today the scheduled duration is 104–110 minutes. Also the track is shared with local trains.

[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnstrecke_Berlin%E2%80%93Ham...

In Germany it is not possible to call emergency without an active SIM (if it is PIN protected, the PIN has to be entered before). This has been deliberately disabled since February 2009 because there were too many anonymous calls for fun or (how idiotic!) to test if a secondhand phone still works.

Would be great if one could have at look at the site without being forced to register.

The referenced comment does not even take into account that also the lossless compression is more efficient than PNG. This and the easy handling and efficient storing of (short) animations could in total combine the three major image formats: JPG, PNG and GIF.

Even when gifs are now mostly replaced by webm and HTML5 viideo tag, the unification of image formats for both orthogonal uses (natural images vs. technical or generated images) is a big advantage.

    }
  }

}

It’s the same in languages with C-Syntax.

Except that the walrus operator “:=” is an assignment expression, whereas in Pascal it is an assignment statement, like “=” in many languages. In Pascal, the boolean comparison operator is “=” instead of “==” (in the same many languages).

And there is C where the assignment expression is just “=”, there is no assignment statement, and many forgotten double equals led to bugs …

Just a number. Remember ICQ? They simple had a number increasing for each new registered account. I mean, if the users still get to set an arbitrary display name, then just give everyone a number as user„name“. Sorted by registration date, this would be the most fair process.

And then yes, there is no validation that someone named „@verge“ is really from TheVerge – simply because there is no such name, and users just need to tell people that 3728348 is their handle. Like a phone number. Unique, easy, fair.