The fine article notes that Kodak failed to turn its technical innovations into marketable products, so you haven't said anything revelatory there.
The trouble with the notion of Kodak compacts as loss leaders is... what were they loss leaders for? Canon and Nikon have very nice DSLRs and a lifetime wallet tap for the concomitant lenses. What are you claiming Kodak were selling compacts as a loss leader for?
Well, not "sucked" (mostly). But Kodak digital cameras (all compacts) were mediocre at best, and really didn't compare to similarly-priced offerings from Canon and Nikon - both of which companies got big making cameras, not making film.
Their entire digital strategy appeared to be wishing that they were still selling consumables. Canon and Nikon were actually trying new stuff.
And now it's quite possible Canon and Nikon's compact camera business will be eaten by phones. A good 2011 Android phone is a better camera (though without zoom) than a 2005 Canon compact. Everything is turning into a tricorder.
More usefully: write this shit up for yourself. Point your boss at it to show you're on top of stuff, but write the doc you would want to read, and so you know what the hell you did six months ago. This is what I do on our intranet wiki. I then point other people at it 'cos that's where the info actually lives, but as far as I'm concerned it's my online notepad.
The £500 LG Optimus 3D, the world’s first 3D smartphone, has been delayed until June, possibly due to 3D on a phone being stupendously pointless rubbish that doesn’t work.
3D technology has been the next big thing for only the last sixty years and is readily available on television, movies and video games. It offers amazing improvements over ordinary moving images: darkness, muddier colours, blurriness, headaches from watching for more than twenty minutes and slower action sequences so the viewer doesn’t throw up.
In video games, the Nintendo 3DS has been a huge hit with tens or even hundreds of end users, some of whom have left the 3D on for a whole day before switching it off forever. 3D on a phone has been heralded by manufacturers, mobile operators, the entertainment industry, the technical press, optometrists drumming up business and everyone else except the actual consumer.
“Five hundred quid for this tremendous advance in telephony?” said industry analyst Mobile Salestwat. “Who wouldn’t bootleg Avatar onto their phone for that! It’s worth every penny for the athletic catgirl boobs to actually poke out the screen at you.”
The phone’s dual five-megapixel cameras also offer the opportunity to drunkenly send grainy 3D photos of your tits to precisely the wrong person, and not remember until you get copies forwarded to your work email via ten other people three days later. “With 3D, people can take the photos and turn them into a 3D-printed plastic sculpture. Just the thing for your desk. Or theirs.”
There's plenty of shitty open sores code out there too. ActiveMQ is one particular example we've been hitting our foreheads against - little weirdnesses with OpenJDK that disappear with Sun Java. Even with Sun Java, we were running a tweaked internal version for a while, something that's on the big list of "NEVER DO THIS unless you actually have to THEN YOU'RE FUCKED ANYWAY."
Then those distros are now either violating Oracle's licence on its proprietary software or distributing packages with known security holes with known exploits in the wild. I'm not entirely convinced either of those is a good idea.
That would be us! I'll be handrolling a deb for now, and then we'll do extensive testing to move to OpenJDK.
Ah fuck, that means OpenJDK on devs' Windows boxes. And there's no OpenJDK 6 for Windows, only 7. And I thought Java 5 to Java 6 was politically tedious. Arsebiscuits.
The problem is that proprietary software is generally badly-written rubbish, well below the typical quality of open source (and many studies have shown this). However, many companies still run proprietary software, and being terrible rubbish with no peer-review it's often only certified against specific versions of Java and will actually break with any other version. Heck, one package we're stuck with was only certified against Sun Java 6 a few months ago, and Java 5 was EOLed end 2009!
tl;dr proprietary software, being shit, can be very platform-specific.
It doesn't - bad summary conflates "no license to distribute" with "security hole" - the security hole is why Ubuntu needs to fix this, but the only fix they can apply is to remove the package since they can't distribute the fixed version any more.
Remove the distro package, do the fiddling about to hand-install from the Oracle tarball for Sun Java 6 latest. We're doing something similar at work. (Well, I'll be handrolling a deb for internal maintainability, but I'll be starting with the Oracle tarball.)
I have ten years' Solaris experience. Oracle buying Sun was when I took my boss and my boss's boss aside and strongly put the case that we needed to get the hell off Solaris immediately and go to Linux. (That I was advocating against my own CV was persuasive in itself.)
We commissioned a new box (12-core x86) to run a proprietary Java app; Linux versus Solaris would have made no difference; but Oracle charged another £300 for one year's Solaris licensing when CentOS was free. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE HELL THEY THINK THEY'RE DOING.
Bet it's a subtle bug that only works because of implementation-specific behaviour. We just got bitten by one of those, relating to different behaviour between Sun Java 6 on Solaris SPARC and Sun Java 6 on Linux. Never trust, always verify!
Slashdot Mirror
The fine article notes that Kodak failed to turn its technical innovations into marketable products, so you haven't said anything revelatory there.
The trouble with the notion of Kodak compacts as loss leaders is ... what were they loss leaders for? Canon and Nikon have very nice DSLRs and a lifetime wallet tap for the concomitant lenses. What are you claiming Kodak were selling compacts as a loss leader for?
Well, not "sucked" (mostly). But Kodak digital cameras (all compacts) were mediocre at best, and really didn't compare to similarly-priced offerings from Canon and Nikon - both of which companies got big making cameras, not making film.
Their entire digital strategy appeared to be wishing that they were still selling consumables. Canon and Nikon were actually trying new stuff.
And now it's quite possible Canon and Nikon's compact camera business will be eaten by phones. A good 2011 Android phone is a better camera (though without zoom) than a 2005 Canon compact. Everything is turning into a tricorder.
More usefully: write this shit up for yourself. Point your boss at it to show you're on top of stuff, but write the doc you would want to read, and so you know what the hell you did six months ago. This is what I do on our intranet wiki. I then point other people at it 'cos that's where the info actually lives, but as far as I'm concerned it's my online notepad.
The original article on Poynter also conspicuously fails to mention the recent RightHaven debacle.
Skype found the killer app for videophones: grandmothers. My mother literally got broadband just for Skype, to talk to her kids and grandkids.
The £500 LG Optimus 3D, the world’s first 3D smartphone, has been delayed until June, possibly due to 3D on a phone being stupendously pointless rubbish that doesn’t work.
3D technology has been the next big thing for only the last sixty years and is readily available on television, movies and video games. It offers amazing improvements over ordinary moving images: darkness, muddier colours, blurriness, headaches from watching for more than twenty minutes and slower action sequences so the viewer doesn’t throw up.
In video games, the Nintendo 3DS has been a huge hit with tens or even hundreds of end users, some of whom have left the 3D on for a whole day before switching it off forever. 3D on a phone has been heralded by manufacturers, mobile operators, the entertainment industry, the technical press, optometrists drumming up business and everyone else except the actual consumer.
“Five hundred quid for this tremendous advance in telephony?” said industry analyst Mobile Salestwat. “Who wouldn’t bootleg Avatar onto their phone for that! It’s worth every penny for the athletic catgirl boobs to actually poke out the screen at you.”
The phone’s dual five-megapixel cameras also offer the opportunity to drunkenly send grainy 3D photos of your tits to precisely the wrong person, and not remember until you get copies forwarded to your work email via ten other people three days later. “With 3D, people can take the photos and turn them into a 3D-printed plastic sculpture. Just the thing for your desk. Or theirs.”
(source)
> It surprises me that they still are used by many high-profile sites who are now only transferring.
The Wikimedia one was like:
"WIKIPEDIA! WHY YOU USE GODADDY?!?!!"
"... We do?"
It's plumbing. No-one thinks about it. Until it turns out their plumber is HITLER. [citation needed]
https://twitter.com/#!/jimmy_wales/status/150287579642740736
It'll take a week or two at least to go into effect (it's holidays!), but there you are.
Yes - does anyone have a screencap of the "support" post?
Yuh. I'm not looking forward to the testing process.
They apparently plan to replace it with an empty package.
If you have Sun Java, rather than OpenJDK, it's because you put it there.
Java has long been known to be the new Cobol. Win32 will be the other new Cobol.
There's plenty of shitty open sores code out there too. ActiveMQ is one particular example we've been hitting our foreheads against - little weirdnesses with OpenJDK that disappear with Sun Java. Even with Sun Java, we were running a tweaked internal version for a while, something that's on the big list of "NEVER DO THIS unless you actually have to THEN YOU'RE FUCKED ANYWAY."
It was that or negotiate to give Oracle money. That'll never happen.
In further news, it turns out that proprietary software is utter shit that's full of traps.
(shudder) I feel their pain.
Then those distros are now either violating Oracle's licence on its proprietary software or distributing packages with known security holes with known exploits in the wild. I'm not entirely convinced either of those is a good idea.
That would be us! I'll be handrolling a deb for now, and then we'll do extensive testing to move to OpenJDK.
Ah fuck, that means OpenJDK on devs' Windows boxes. And there's no OpenJDK 6 for Windows, only 7. And I thought Java 5 to Java 6 was politically tedious. Arsebiscuits.
Yuh. The problem is existing code by mediocre programmers.
We got bitten at this at work between Sun Java 6 on Solaris SPARC versus Sun Java 6 on Linux x86. What the fuck.
Yep. Been there, done that.
The problem is that proprietary software is generally badly-written rubbish, well below the typical quality of open source (and many studies have shown this). However, many companies still run proprietary software, and being terrible rubbish with no peer-review it's often only certified against specific versions of Java and will actually break with any other version. Heck, one package we're stuck with was only certified against Sun Java 6 a few months ago, and Java 5 was EOLed end 2009!
tl;dr proprietary software, being shit, can be very platform-specific.
It doesn't - bad summary conflates "no license to distribute" with "security hole" - the security hole is why Ubuntu needs to fix this, but the only fix they can apply is to remove the package since they can't distribute the fixed version any more.
Remove the distro package, do the fiddling about to hand-install from the Oracle tarball for Sun Java 6 latest. We're doing something similar at work. (Well, I'll be handrolling a deb for internal maintainability, but I'll be starting with the Oracle tarball.)
I have ten years' Solaris experience. Oracle buying Sun was when I took my boss and my boss's boss aside and strongly put the case that we needed to get the hell off Solaris immediately and go to Linux. (That I was advocating against my own CV was persuasive in itself.)
We commissioned a new box (12-core x86) to run a proprietary Java app; Linux versus Solaris would have made no difference; but Oracle charged another £300 for one year's Solaris licensing when CentOS was free. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE HELL THEY THINK THEY'RE DOING.
Bet it's a subtle bug that only works because of implementation-specific behaviour. We just got bitten by one of those, relating to different behaviour between Sun Java 6 on Solaris SPARC and Sun Java 6 on Linux. Never trust, always verify!