Web pages use SVG to render vector graphics. It uses the exact same imaging model as PDF and is implemented in all modern browsers. The web in general has taken a lot of lessons from Adobe because Warnock and Geshke, in the PostScript Red Book, got so much right about how to build an image model that many GUI developers are still learning today. If you start with a PDF, it should be possible to machine-translate it to SVG and present it as a web page.

PDF exists because it is trivial to generate it from the document renderer meant for printing. Although I have once in a while run into an improperly scaled PDF meant to be printed 8-up, I'm just not

I had thought I disabled automatic updates by following a guide online. I was giving a presentation in front of over 100 people on my laptop, which because it is a laptop mostly used in the field is not on my domain. You can guess what happened when I booted up.
Luckily I was able to borrow someone else's laptop and they had Powerpoint installed and I had the presentation on a thumbdrive.

Fuck Microsoft. I complained to them but they said it was my fault for wearing slutty clothes.

Are you just trolling or do you not understand anything about the words you are saying? CMR and SMR are physically different ways of storing the data on the surface. Why doesn't my car have a setting to be an airplane?

ALL tape formats, whether open-reel or inside a cassette or cartridge, are vulnerable to this form of failure. So your dad's 8-tracks and cassettes are hardly immune. In fact, 8-tracks, even when they're not left in the sun on car dashboards, die because they're an endless loop and the glue that holds the metal foil splice that signals the track change has a tendency to fail... and the lubricant on the tape might even exacerbate the failure of the binding. 8-tracks were marginal at best when they were new; most machines of the day basically knocked their heads out of alignment four times with each album. But they were designed for car audio at a time when a good car sound system was a 5x7" speaker in the dashboard and road noise drowned out the tape hiss.

The Philips Compact Cassette (a cassette, to most people) was designed for dictation machines where sound quality was not a design criteria. It's a miracle of our technology that they ever sounded good enough for things like the Sony Walkman to happen.

The machines were, and still are, beautiful. Good ones were usually pretty expensive and represented the state of the art in their day, like a flagship smartphone or laptop computer now. Even obsolete, you can see the quality and the beauty.

But the real problem is the recordings. It's not just stuff like home recordings off the radio, it's original masters of albums. The Beatles early BBC stuff was recorded on Ferrograph machines (I love that name, think about what it means). God only knows what the tape formulation was; iron oxide, for sure, but what were the binders?

Most Slashdotters will be familiar with cassettes moving the tape at 1-7/8 inches per second. 7-1/2 inches per second was common in home audio. 15 inches per second in professional/studio audio use was fairly slow! At those speeds, as the tape plays, the oxide breaks free from the binder and blocks the head gap pretty quickly. Slowing down the tape and digitally replaying it faster might help, but it doesn't change the fact that A Day In The Life is a lot of tape at 15IPS - and a it's distance, not speed, that really clogs the head gaps. 5 minutes and 35 seconds is 418 feet of tape at 15IPS. No matter how quickly or slowly you play it, you could tie one end to the balcony railing of a 42nd floor apartment and the reel would still be unwinding when it hits the sidewalk below. And that's A Day In The Life, not something crazy long!

Now you add video recording with high-velocity spinning video heads to tape with flaky backing, and you're going to have a real problem playing this media down the road. You need the machine, stable tape, and someone who actually knows how to do it.

With commercial video formats far before VHS, there aren't many people alive who know how to maintain and run an Ampex Quad machine, for example. And with that, it's the end of countless hours of video recordings since the dawn of VTRs in the 1950s - Dr. Who, Coronation Street, WKRP. Life-altering news events, triumphs and tragedies. This is akin to losing our literary history because no one knows how to read.

I read a fiction so I know this is possible... durrr

Yeah. This could easily result in more deaths than World War II. Don't be flippant about this. This is the biggest crisis since then.

I am in a high-risk population for bad complications to this disease, and probably a great many Slashdotters are. Come on, we don't generally lead the healthiest lifestyles.

Give me one of those stickers now. I'll take my chances. Someone's got to be the test pilot for every new fighter jet design, right?

Okay; not guaranteed to work yet, I get it. But already scalable to mass production, unrefrigerated transportation in the form of a flat sticker in the mail, and basically a "Place on clean hairless skin anywhere on your body. Leave sticker on until it falls off." is a hell of a lot faster/cheaper/safer and with more population compliance than an injection campaign. Even if it only protects 25% of patients, it's already a game-changer in herd immunity or herd isolation. So what are the chances that this is safe on humans?

If it's safe on humans, then yeah, I'll be a guinea pig for a study. Just don't give me the placebo. :)

We will know if GM built a bettter car battery in 8 years or so. I am sort of dubious, because it's more like your cell phone battery than a lithium car battery. It uses cobalt. GM brags that their EV battery uses less cobalt "than other EV batteries", but Tesla uses none. We know that Tesla batteries last. It will take a while to know that about GM batteries.

Musk is great. He took a lot of things that everyone knew about and nobody would dare to do, and made them work from a business perspective. We need lots more people like that.

And any app that takes advantage of this will be uninstalled instantly.