“We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.” Or
Charter Communications, apparently, as Dennis E. Powell discusses
in this week’s column. Learn all about yet another wilderness of
ineptitude as Code Red is downgraded from “major security threat”
to “phantom line noise.” They’re just the low point, though.
gimp-print is “great” in its role as the source of some of the best
Linux device support going; and eComStation (possibly the terminal
incarnation of OS/2) is merely “pretty bad” as it quietly dashes
the hopes of a past computing generation’s answer to Microsoft:
“…Once that little bump had been flattened, I was
able to get a full print. I compared it to its professionally
produced counterpart. It was better. Skin tones were more subtle,
contrast was not excessive. Some of the colors were not as bright
as in the photo-shop version, so I decided to fiddle with some of
the other controls. Kicking up contrast slightly and color
saturation a bit more produced the full range that the photographic
print had, while losing nothing I’d gained from the locally
produced print. It was now much better than the one that had cost
$10.A world of opportunity now beckons: A high-quality digital
camera, more than decent image manipulation software, and a solid
printing system provide creative control that’s usually available
only to the black-and-white photographer skilled in darkroom work.
And it all works under Linux. I’ve begun to think of the multitude
of silver-based negatives and slides I have, how a scanner for such
is available, and how I could remove scratches, correct
oddly-exposed slides, and archive it all to CD. And I still have an
open USB port . . . “