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I often find that companies use for example megacorp.com for their corporate / investor relations website, and megacorp.co.uk for their consumer website.

My employer has esesntially that set it. We use a ".com" as a kind of global landing page that will link to the various regions as well as corporate/investor relations type of thing. Then each country has their own page, as well as some special domains for multinational entities that are still nevertheless sub-entities of the corporate whole.

It can sound confusing until you look at it:

Landing page for anyone, anywhere.
Japanese domestic market.
United Kingdom domestic market.
United States domestic market.
German domestic market.
Many, many, many, more domestic markets.
European headquarters (my employer) providing European-wide services (also hosts a lot of the content that appears on the various countries' sites)

Really pretty simple and clear for the most part.

On a different note, on the .TLD front, why not require that every generic TLD we currently have - .com, .org, .net, .gov, .edu, .mil be preceded by the country TLD to which it belongs? Thereby, one would have things like nasa.us.gov, mit.us.edu, oxford.eng.edu, dod.us.mil and so on. For the ones that already exist, alias them to such a new system, so that those handful of TLDs are generic. After that, there should be less of a proliferation of TLDs. And they all get to be managed by different countries. Only exceptions would be international organizations, like un.gov, nato.mil and so on.

With the large amount of international companies, you don't really gain much. The company I work for, Konica Minolta, has the following:

• - Global headquarters, company based in Japan and website hosted in Japan, but NOT specifically for Japan.
• - Japanese domestic company, company based in Japan, website hosted in Japan, and intended for Japanese market. Reports to Global headquarters.
• - European headquarters, company based in Germany, website hosted in Germany, but intended for entire European market, not just Germany. Reports to Global headquarters.
• - German domestic company, company based in Germany, website hosted in Germany (by EU HQ), and intended for German market. Reports to European Headquarters.
• - French domestic company, company based in France, website hosted in Germany (by EU HQ), and intended for French market. Reports to European Headquarters.
• - UK domestic company, company based in UK, website hosted in Germany (by EU HQ), and intended for UK market. Reports to European Headquarters.
• - New Zealand domestic company, company based in New Zealand, website probably hosted in New Zealand and intended for New Zealand market. Reports to Global headquarters.

  And of course many many more for each country where we have a direct presence.

  Under the system you propose, we'd have to keep our Global HQ site as is; and then simply add a ".com" after each of the others (and since countries like NZ with ".co.nz", AU with ".com.au" and UK with ".co.uk" already have this sort of system; you're essentially just proposing to change from ".co.nz" to ".nz.com" and from ".com.au" to ".au.com" which is annoying to the people there and also kind of pointless).
  Also, what do you propose be done for the "eu" situation? Should for example German companies become ".de.eu.com"? or just ".de.com"? If the former; what happens when new countries join the EU or countries leave? And if the latter, how do you propose current ".eu" are handled? As ".eu.com"? And if so, how is it any more clear under this system than the one we currently have?

  Basically speaking, I think the system you're proposing would be a huge pain to implement and then offer absolutely no benefits whatsoever over the current messy system we already have.

They also changed directives: http://konicaminolta.com/releases/2006/0119_04_01. html Omar

I am shocked everyone picked up on the camera part, but KM is also withdrawing from the mini-lab side of things.

http://konicaminolta.com/releases/2006/0119_01_01. html

That leaves two major players (Noritsu & Fuji) and a revamped comppany (DigitalPortal - aka KISS) still producing traditional labs. (and yes, they all print from digital images as well as film (neg/pos).

No one is printing images on real, traditional (cheaper) photographic, silver halide paper. Everyone seems content with spending their time and money on home solutions when they finally decide to print anything at all.

It is funny to me that most people take more pictures now on their camera or device since they don't have to buy film or pay for processing, but no one has a single print to show me!

I HATE seeing your family or fun shots on your 2.5" Horiz. - MAX size LCD! (even worse 1.5"!!!)
Come on!!! Get real!

Make prints people!!!!

Support your local lab or even local wholesale or major retailer and make some 4x5.5 or 4x6 or larger prints!
It still is cheaper and faster than doing it yourself and people can actually see if your eyes are open in your images.

MAKE MORE PRINTS PEOPLE!

I don't understand the problem here. This is not new technology. A number of planetariums around the world have been doing full-dome, 360 degree video for a number of years now. I don't know all the technical aspects of recording such video, but it is obviously already being done. The planetarium at which I am the director is currently negotiating with two companies to convert our planetarium to full-dome video. Projection is done by a single projector in the middle of the room. It can project any image which can be stuffed into a computer including full-motion, full-dome video, and still images. If you want to know more go to www.spitzinc.com and http://konicaminolta.com/kmpl/about/index.html

Why is it physically impossible to design VGA displays less than 2.4 inches? Too small pixels?

Because current LCD pixels require six lead lines, and we can't make lead lines small enough to shrink the pixels any further.

This is weird to me, because the Konica Minolta Dimage A2 has an electronic viewfinder (EVF, basically a small LCD screen) that's about half an inch diagonal with VGA resolution. That's been out since February or so. But maybe I'm missing something.

I could not do anything with it in the camera or my Windows box. Couldn't even format it.

When the PC with the CF reader in it finally got a real OS put on it, I gave it another shot and was able to resurrect it.

Although with my current camera, 8 MB only holds 1 or 2 images. I use it mostly as a "reserve tank". If I put that card in I have to go from the "it's digital, shoot everything" mode to "save your last bullet" mode.

Our department has Konica 7165 copier, which has the scan-to-email capability. It can e-mail the scanned document as multi-page-pdf or tiff files, thus you don't need to convert it to pdf page by page.

And, use a low resolution setting (say 100dpi) for handwritten documents. It will do just fine. Pdf (depending on the driver though) compresses the image. If you use a machine something like the Konica, try to set the threshold/brightness to a level such that the empty portion of the pages will appear as plain white; this will increase the compression ratio significantly.

So, my recommendation is that try to find a Kinkos which has this type of machine. If you can't find, just tell the professors that it is simply not a reasonable task that can be done in finite time.