How long will last our documents?

We accumulate more and more documents on our computers and on the Internet. Text, photos, music, videos. It feels it will last forever. But what will we be able to read in 20 years from now? Can we ensure that our data remains accessible "forever"?

The other day I was remembering some of the LP records that I used to listen at my parents' place. I have been regularly looking for a CD edition of my favorite ones, like these oboe concertos by Heinz Holliger, but I am afraid that many of them will never be re-edited. I also still have a few favorite tracks on audio cassettes, but I have no player anymore. As I don't even know their title, I will never find them again. They seem to be dying with the technology.

I've got a STARCK product

When your screen suddenly goes off and any attempt to restart your computer ends up in a whining sounds like "whiiii shtAK!", it most probably means that your hard drive crashed. If you had no backup, you've just lost all your data!

Philippe Starck is a world famous French product designer. His most famous product is undoubtedly the Juicy Salif. You know, the aluminum lemon squeezer that looks like Tintin's rocket with longer legs. Starck said that it was actually not meant to squeeze lemons (...) but to start conversations. One day I almost bought one, but I had second thoughts: I felt I do not have the right house to put around it.

A fascinating person

Hildon/GTK+ update for N800 & N810

You heard it, the new N810 internet tablet is there, and together will come a new OS for both N800 & N810, based on Chinook beta SDK.

On the UI toolkit side, we now proudly ship gtk-2.10, a clean stable hildon API, and a much improved theme framework. The fork of gtk-2.6, experimental code and historical names are now gone!

This colossal tedious work has been done by fer, mdk, tko, and xan in close collaboration with the community, and especially with expert help and support from GTK+ people. It was not easy every day, and took lot of time and energy. They did it, Congratulation to each of them!

The new hildon stack will be stamped 2.0.

Because of the resulting API incompatibility, all applications using GTK+ and Hildon need to be updated. Overall it is a minor technical update, with mostly name changes and other trivial changes. See the migration documentation, and run hildon-audit which can give you hints too. Our toolkit heroes will support You through mailinglist or #irc.

I wish we could get most applications updated before the N810s hit the shops, so we would offer the very best open source applications to all future N810 users too!

Read more at:

• MDK's post
• Xan's post
• Hildon 2.0

To all developers, good luck with the update!

And to all, Enjoy your brand new OS!