I think the real question is: what was your point. You listed a bunch of irrelevant half-truths in response to an article about "OMG they are killing teh startups". In reality, you are simply seeing a competitive market in action. For some reason that seems to bother you.
Please point out where I said it bothered me. I'm merely pointing out an interesting case where Google developed some technology to keep their market position. If you think what I said was untrue or irrelevant you didn't understand it.
Yes, apparently you do.
Already did and you still didn't get it. I'll try one more time. A huge pile of cash lets you buy your way out of almost any threat to your company including but not limited to 1) Buying your competition, 2) Buying into a new industry, 3) Buying your way out of massive strategy blunders, 4) Buying technology to keep their market position. Apple and Microsoft and Google and Facebook have cash hoards large enough to stave off nearly any threat aside from either weapons grade incompetence (which they have shown little of) or the very unlikely prospect of government intervention.
If Apple's business fails and only cash remains, then Apple shareholders are simply shareholders in cash.
No they are shareholders in whatever Apple management does with that gigantic pile of cash. HUGE difference. Very few companies have that sort of flexibility at that sort of scale. In reality they can probably simply buy out almost any threat to the company. There is almost no plausible business opportunity large enough that a sufficiently motivated Apple couldn't buy their way into or out of.
Google bought Android when they were already developing a smartphone OS.
Makes precisely zero difference if they started development in house or if they bought the tech and continued to develop it. Historical trivia about how the development process happened is unimportant to my point. The important point is A) Google recognized a threat to their business in the mobile market going forward and B) they developed (and yes bought) technology to defend their revenue streams.
Google didn't develop Android at all, they bought it. And Android development predates iPhone.
They bought it and then they developed the crap out of it. Android did not stop being developed after Google purchased the technology. The argument that Google bought Android and didn't develop it is an idiotic argument that only made sense for about a year. There is no real difference between developing a tech in house or buying a company that developed the tech and continuing the development in house after that. ZERO difference.
If Google or Apple fail to invest heavily in Android/iOS development, their platform will fail within a few years, just like all the previous mobile platforms.
Do you seriously think either of those companies is not well aware of that? What exactly is your point?
So what?
Do I really have to explain to you that having enough cash to completely abandon your original business and enter a new one is a big deal? Let's say the iPhone killer comes out tomorrow from MythicalTech Inc and Apple has no response to it. Does that mean Apple is dead? No. They could simply buy General Motors and become a car company tomorrow if they wanted to. That is a big deal.
Except they developed Android at the same time as Apple started developing iPhone and they did not really know about each other...
Google didn't need to know about the iPhone to know there was a threat to their ad revenue from a mobile device maker controlling their ability to reach end users. At the time they were probably more worried about Microsoft or Nokia or Blackberry but the threat was the same. They also probably were concerned about AT&T, Verizon and that bunch too having too much control over the software and ad platforms. Nobody really could have predicted the iPhone would be the smash hit it turned out to be but people were WELL aware prior to the iPhone that mobile was going to be a big thing and there was a lot of money to be made in mobile ads. So Google very astutely developed Android as a defensive play to protect their primary source of revenue. Google didn't need to actually make money on it, they just needed to make sure it kept their cash cow producing.
Same reasoning that Microsoft used in trying to get the XBox to market actually. Microsoft was worried (with some justification) that Sony would be able to supplant the PC by putting a computer on the TV. In hindsight it was obviously less of a threat then they feared but at the time it seemed like a genuine risk because nobody really knew what direction the market would take.
That's why the next disruptors will be entirely distributed.
You're going to have something more distributed than the internet? Good luck with that. I understand your argument and it's not a foolish idea but "more distributed" runs into some real world limits and it has little effect on certain companies including I think some of the ones being discussed here.
Cracking that stronghold will likely only happen with fully distributed services.
Conceivable but unlikely. The risk to each company is different. It's not likely to be something so obvious as a more distributed version of the internet or their particular services. It will have to be something quite different that they don't really perceive as a threat - at first.
I expect something like this to show up with the next 5 years or so.
I'll take that bet. You might be right but I seriously doubt we'll see anything that displaces the bit tech companies in this generation.
there is no sign of a new platform emerging which could disrupt the incumbents, even more than a decade after the rise of mobile."
Google developed Android strictly as a defensive play to prevent them from getting locked out of the mobile ad market (their overwhelmingly primary source of revenue) by Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, Nokia, and others. In this they succeeded wildly and it will be very hard to displace them.
All of these big tech companies have VAST amounts of cash available to them. They could easily buy most companies that present a threat to them or buy their way into entirely new industries if they wanted. Apple literally has enough cash to buy both Ford and GM and Fiat Chrysler at their current market capitalization. Microsoft and Alphabet/Google and to a lesser degree Facebook are similarly comfortable.
I walked into a library a couple years back and it had no fucking books. Fine... but the surreal shithole should either be replaced by a webportal or at least serve beverages and call it a "Public Internet Cafe." But "library??" Crazy, ignorant fucks.
I got a good chuckle how you proudly proclaim your ignorance of what libraries are and what they do. As if they should somehow be forced to conform to your preconceived and uninformed idea that they are merely repositories of paper books.
With no special care or handling, books will easily last a century or three.
Hogwash. You are suffering from survivorship bias. The vast majority of books experience no special care or handling and demonstrably do not last anywhere close to that long.
As a counterpoint to your preference for digital, I have a copy of the first software I developed back in the early 1980's. It's construction accounting software. I printed out the source code and documentation and also have copies on 5.25" floppy disk. I can still read the hard copy, but the digital copy is unreadable for me. You may have some old hardware available to you, but I'm not a collector. I'd have had to convert the format of that stuff several times over the years to keep a readable digital copy. I don't think I've had a machine with a 5.25" floppy drive in more than 20 years.
Again survivorship bias. Much data from that era has been transferred to other media. It's trivial to search on the internet to find software even older than yours and to copy it trivially. I can easily find software that perfectly replicates computers I used in the early 1980s. Yes some was lost but that's no different from paper. And once it is available online it is comparatively trivial to make innumerable perfect copies. Good luck doing that with paper.
Paper is hugely useful and I'm not arguing for or against it. I just think your arguments in favor of it are flawed. There are good arguments for continued use of paper books but you aren't using those arguments.
Not only that, but do you realize how few books are actually available as eBooks? Sure, most titles being published today are, but I seldom read new books.
So because you don't read ebooks they don't exist? Despite you admitting that they do? Despite the fact that it's unusual anymore for books to not be electronically available?
Had this conversation on a plane, once.
Wow, one conversation! That's proof if I ever saw it.
Even cheap paperbacks last longer than digital media.
Doesnt matter because you can copy digital content from one medium to another with as close to zero cost imaginable. You can easily make backups on multiple forms of media and easily have those backups self propagate to new media when available thanks to the internet. Not just backups either but perfect identical backups. Not true with paper. Paper has it's charms to be sure but if we're comparing the potential for longevity the only way paper will beat digital is the event of an apocalyptic EMP. Paper is kind of a least common denominator technology which will likely always be around and be useful but it isn't generally speaking more durable unless you are confining digital documents to a fixed medium which isn't really what happens these days.
People tend to forget that when they pull out decades or centuries old books as proof of how long books last that they are experiencing survivorship bias.
I'd say that overall the infrastructure to handle ebook readers and all the electronics associated with them including batteries and all the energy in producing all the infrastructure (servers, electronics, rare earths, global shipping, etc.) have a far worse ecological life cycle assessment than printed paper.
Then you have evidently never researched the issue. Paper accounts for about 25% of all solid waste. Paper production is hugely polluting and accounts for about 5% of all industrial pollutants. It also has issues with deforestation, evidently consumes about 35% of harvested trees, contributes to monocultures of planted trees, and uses more water to produce a ton of product than just about anything else we make. While at the end of the day your statement may be correct it isn't obviously so. Paper production isn't eco-friendly like many imagine it to be.
If we're going to get a handle on the environmentally destructive nature of capitalism then we're going to have to legislate that environmental capital be a real thing in all UN nations. That is that when you pollute the environment that you are held financially accountable for the costs required to remove it from the environment.
Nice sentiment but let's get real. Until we can do something as basic as forcing oil companies to actually pay the full cost of the pollution their products generate we're not going to get nation states to cooperate. Hell we still subsidize fossil fuel companies to the tune of around $5 trillion globally every year and barely regulate emissions. Good luck getting that under control.
This tragedy of the commons has been going on far too long.
And as long as we have economically selfish "leaders" who think anything that hurts oil company profits is some sort of evil plot it isn't going to change.
Can you tell me how sports/action photographers managed to achieve sharp focus before auto-focus came along? What? They used skills and expertise?
Calm down. I wasn't arguing that you cannot get great results manually. I'm pointing out that claiming that stuff line autofocus systems (which can be turned off) is somehow a negative is silly. To use your example now you not only can get sharp focus in a sporting event but you can keep it on a moving target at 10-20 frames per second with every frame in focus. Good luck doing that manually.
Please tell me you've used a manual camera. No auto light metering, and no auto focus. I'd like to be reassured that you've used both types, both extremes from electronic full auto to full manual, and then I'll be able to give credence to your argument.
What I've personally done has no relevance to the validity of my argument or lack thereof. That said depending on how old you are chances are good I was using pure manual gear before you were. I was using full manual cameras back in the 1970s and 80s. Autofocus wasn't really a thing back then and light meters weren't on a lot of cameras. Spent a lot of time with a manual Pentax (sold as Honeywell Pentax) back in the day. And of course every point and shoot camera back in the day had essentially no auto anything.
And by full manual, i mean an external light meter, and a hand-operated focus ring, or perhaps a bellows on a monorail.
Cameras don't see the world quite the way that we do and even with the minute or so that you'd have to wait for those "instant" photos to develop, you'd already have forgotten what exactly you expected it to look like in terms of colors and focus.
That's why I'm convinced SLR cameras are headed the way of the dodo. An optical viewfinder really makes very little sense now that we have high quality digital viewfinders available. The SLR mirror is an anachronism from the film era that just adds cost, complication, noise and cost. To my mind it's much better to see exactly what the camera sensor sees rather than having to try to mentally transpose from an optical viewfinder. Plus I can put histograms and other useful tools right on the screen so I know I have the exposure and other settings right while still in camera and without even chimping. You also don't have the blackout when the mirror moves out of the way so you can see the shot continuously.
And remember - when you pressed the shutter button, it took a picture.
So what? So does every camera if you want it to.
It didn't futz about trying to focus, that was something you did before pressing the shutter. It didn't blink lights at you warning about exposure, or camera shake, it took the picture.
??? Auto-focus systems are 100% optional on any decent camera and even with those it's generally a good practice to focus before pressing the button if you actually want a decent picture. And you can turn off the image stabilization and other helpful features too if you are bothered by them for some reason. But the exist because they are helpful. Very helpful in some cases. I defy you to pull and maintain focus on a moving target as fast as you can with a modern autofocus system. My camera will literally track a subject across the sensor keeping focus on their eyes the entire time.
And if you didn't have time to make exposure and focus perfect, but *HAD* to get the shot, you pressed the shutter button, and it happened.
And now we have technology to help you take the shot right now AND get the focus and other settings right. The autofocus on my Sony A9 is astonishingly fast - far faster and more accurate in many cases than I could possibly hope to manage manually. It can take 20 frames per second and maintain near perfect focus on a person's eyes in literally every single frame. If that's not fast enough for you then I don't know what to say. You can get a REALLY good camera body with some astonishingly good autofocus for the price of a decent PC these days.
You might have got a less-than-optimum result, but it was better than missing the moment because your auto-focus couldn't make up its mind.
If your autofocus system hunts that badly you are using the wrong kit most likely. If you have some cheap point and shoot then yeah it might not be the best.
My dad still has an analog camera, and refuses to switch to a digital one.
Some people get very comfortable with what they already know. Learning something new can be hard work, even if the payoff is big at the end. I wouldn't be critical though if he actually enjoys using film. Nothing wrong with that. Especially if he isn't comfortable with computers.
He has taken to shooting photos on his flip-phone, so maybe there's hope for him yet.
Unless he is working with some high end film gear I suspect he'll just gradually realize how much easier the camera phone is and start leaving the film camera in the closet so to speak. It's pretty easy to get prints off a phone these days even at the local drug store if that's important to him.
It was easy to settle on a Nikon. A short period of research showed that Nikon and Canon were shooting it out for First and Second, and everyone else was well back in the pack.
That is no longer true. Sony has joined the conversation in a big way. Their A9, A7III and A7RIII and A6500 cameras are remarkable pieces of gear and they have a very good and rapidly improving lens lineup that any pro photographer can work with happily. (and the few holes in their lens lineup like super long telephotos have already been announced) Sony's G-Master glass is as good as anything Canon or Nikon sell that is similar and the big third party lens makers like Sigma and Tamron are releasing lenses with native Sony mounts. Canon and Nikon make great gear and have amazing lens lineups but they're having trouble (so far) with the transition to mirrorless. SLR cameras are something of an anachronism from the film era but neither Canon nor Nikon have yet released a pro grade or even enthusiast grade mirrorless camera.
I have been very satisfied with my D80.
A nice camera albeit a little dated at this point. I would have been satisfied with that too I think.
I do acknowledge that my "keeper" rate has gone down from about 1 in 10 shots with film to about 1 in 30 shots with digital.
If true that both are still amazingly high "keeper" rates. My keeper rate is considerably worse than that. Maybe 1 in 50 to 1 in 100 for images that I think are really worth a damn. I might go out to shoot some wildlife and come back with 3-5 decent shots out of several hundred. (Doing that on film would have been FAR too expensive) Depends of course on what you regard as a keeper. Not all the shots I take are bad but many are a little off to my eye for one reason or another.
Somewhere around here I still have my old Pentax K1000 “auto nothing” film camera. I keep telling myself I should pull it out and shoot some film... haven’t actually done it yet, though.
That's your deep realization that shooting film is an expensive pain in the arse unless you are really passionate about shooting film. We did it that way because we had to and because there weren't any better options at the time. Getting good at photography back in the day was an almost ludicrously expensive proposition so you had to be passionate about it. If you weren't the sort of person who though it was a great idea to put a dark room in your house, chances are you weren't that passionate about film cameras to begin with. I know I couldn't afford to do it when I was younger. It just cost too much and the feedback loop for learning was far too slow.
Debatable if you've ever had a tape eaten by a tape deck but not a major issue.
B) Easily recordable C) Re-recordable
For a very limited amount of content. It's just as easy and often easier to record on digital.
D) Portable
Individually yes. Once you get more than a few it becomes awkward VERY quickly. And substantially less portable than anything digital.
E) Inexpensive
Compared to what? I disagree with this strongly.
F) Small storage size
"Small"? I can literally have more music than I can listen to in a year on a device smaller than a single cassette tape. This is not a benefit of tape.
G) Trade-able (without DCMA fears)
I can do the exact same thing with digital media. I can trade you a CD just as easily as a tape if we are talking physical medium. And a lot of digital content isn't affected by DMCA at all.
H) No computer required at any step
I fail to see how this is a meaningful positive feature unless one dislikes computers. It's just a means to an end and not particularly relevant.
I) Was a universal format (bought and played anywhere)
Only because there weren't better options available at the time. And it's pretty easy to argue that digital is a far more universal format. Plus I can bring my own devices and plug it in almost anywhere which could not be said about tape decks.
J) Can leave in car
You left it in the car because you had to. You get looked at funny hauling a collection of tapes everywhere you go.
K) Good enough for most situations
It was "good enough" because we didn't have better options.
Are MP3s better today? Probably. But "garbage"? Eh...
Yes garbage. Conveniently you forgot the failures of tapes: 1) Small storage capacity 2) Bulky for a collection of any meaningful size 3) Wears out with repeat play and prone to breaking 4) Limited utility for anything other than sound recordings 5) Linear playback with no skipping or random access 6) Tape hiss 7) Enabled a monopoly on distribution of content 8) Bulky recording and playback gear 9) Required managing and organizing physical objects 10) Expensive and time consuming to back up and impossible to back up perfectly 11) Only can be "traded" with people you see face to face or via snail mail. 12) Very difficult to edit content without a lot of very expensive and complicated gear. 13) More difficult to preserve than digital 14) Expensive on a unit of content basis (digital is FAR cheaper)
Because you don't get to see the results instantly, so it forces you to slow down and think about what you are doing, and get it right in the camera.
I've heard that argument in favor of shooting film before and I think it's a flawed argument. There is literally nothing preventing you from doing exactly the same thing with a digital camera except your own lack of self control. On the other hand with digital you can try things, see if they work, and iterate until you get the result you want so you have the best of both worlds in that sense. I think there are great reasons to shoot film (see below) but I don't think this particular argument holds water.
Choice of medium always affects the final product. I think of it similar to choosing between watercolor or oil paints. Both are fine choices with their own interesting outcomes and artistic choices. Film has its own look which is hard to perfectly replicate with digital (and vice versa) and that's a good thing. Also film is super cool technology in its own right. The chemistry and optics and mechanics involved with film shooting is nothing short of amazing. There also is a cool nostalgia factor about it as well as a lot of fascinating history. And if you want to shoot in larger formats currently film is actually the cheaper way to get into those sizes compared with most decent digital medium format or larger cameras. And you can learn a lot about optics, chemistry and materials by working with film. Working with old film cameras can be a hoot for the same reason tinkering with any clever old technology is fun.
I think it is interesting how much film still influences our gear to this day. DSLRs are really something of an anachronism from the film era. The mirror had a lot of benefit in film but in a digital world it really just adds complication, cost, noise, and bulk. I get why they are still around but it it seems obvious that their days are numbered. Still, it's super cool engineering worthy of immense respect and I'm glad they'll be around for some time to come.
If you mean electric vehicle with EV, then no. america is decades behind Europe.
What color is the sky on your planet? You certainly aren't basing that claim on any facts (nor did you provide any) so one has to presume you are talking about a different America and a different Europe than the one here on Earth.
Tesla made a new and better battery and manages to sell a nice set of cars... but in the vehicle itself is nothing really innovative.+
Spare me your attempt to seem unimpressed. "Nothing really innovative"? You might have an argument if anyone else was making more innovative vehicles. Nobody has moved the auto industry more towards electrification than Tesla and to claim their cars aren't innovative is preposterous even if you don't like them.
And American employees want to stop seeing their jobs shipped overseas.
They can do this any time they want. They just have to accept the same wages as their overseas competitors. It's a hard reality but US wages are among the highest in the world. If you want to compete on price you have to have lower costs than the other guy.
Actually American's are too self absorbed to give a shit except when China literally steals American developed technology or cheats in the market with the help of their government. Not to say the US is pure in that regard either but if China could be bothered to just reasonably fair it would be fine for everyone but the most xenophobic among us.
Many Americans whine about jobs moving to China but they moved there because they pay their workers a lot less on average. If we were willing to work for Chinese wages then those labor intensive jobs could stay here. I don't think that's really what Americans actually want when they really think about it. That's why every time you hear a politician (falsely) promising to "bring back manufacturing jobs" they are so full of shit their eyes are probably brown. The only way that happens is if American accept a huge reduction in wages. There are lots of manufacturing jobs still here but you need more than just a high school diploma for a lot of them.
Are we so naive as to think that having a strong and capable military is somehow unnecessary in today's world?
When we spend more money on that military than the next 8 largest countries combined then the answer is that absolutely yes it is unnecessary. Yes we need a military. No we don't need one as big as we have.
Have we forgotten the lessons of WW1 so soon? Was the catastrophe of WW2, that demonstrated AGAIN the folly of not being prepared not enough of a reminder?
So America needs to be 8X as prepared for war as anyone else and borrow every dime of our military budget ($600 billion last year - all borrowed)? Neither of those wars started because countries were unprepared for war. I think you need need to go check your history books because your facts are wrong.
The company says the technology it's helping to build for the Pentagon simply "flags images for human review" and is for "non-offensive uses only."
There is no such thing when it comes to the military. "Flag images for human review"? WTF do they think humans IN THE MILITARY are going to do with such information? Furthermore once the technology is in the hands of the armed forces there is fuck-all Google can do to control how they use it.
This is basically the exact plot of the movie Real Genius. The smart geeks fail to comprehend what happens to military funded technology in the hands of the military.
After all, a number of the pathology steps involve looking at things closely and pattern matching, which are the same types of things being done by the AI being discussed.
Vision based expert systems (I wouldn't really call them AI) will certainly get used someday though there are a lot of technical challenges to get through before this is possible. There is much more to pathology than just pattern matching however.
I don't expect it to happen any time soon but I can certainly envision a system in 15-20 years that would have a nurse practitioner scan a patient, take biopsies of flagged spots and feed the biopsies into a "pathologist in a box" machine that would do all the checks required - probably down to the DNA level.
This already happens today. It's called Clinical Pathology. Every time you have blood drawn (for example) that tissue gets sent to the clinical pathology department. The tissue is processed through a machine which spits out a report. The pathologist then evaluates the report and communicates results to the clinician. Most of these reports are fairly uninteresting but some will be require detailed scrutiny. The job of the pathologist is still to make diagnosis but also to manage the laboratory. Anatomic Pathology (the folks who look through microscopes) will to some degree begin to resemble Clinical Pathology over time. No it won't be a nurse practitioner but rather a specialized pathology assistant or histotechnologist or similar doing the job. A lot of pathologists are dual certified in both AP and CP.
A lot of diagnosis also eventually won't require pattern matching but rather will rely on DNA tests or similar. A lot of stains and other tests they use today do this.
Moving the bulk of the cost of diagnosis to a capital expense rather than a labor expense could eventually drive down medical costs tremendously - once we have machines that can do most of the work, the relentless pace of technology and process improvement will make the machines cheaper and cheaper.
In theory yes but in practice it will be harder to drive out the labor costs than you think. There is a LOT of expertise that goes into slide preparation, much of which is challenging to automate beyond a certain point. The people that do this generally have a 4 year college degree specific to this work. Then turning that into a machine readable form is another big challenge. The main pathologists still use microscopes instead of computer screens isn't because they cannot scan the slides but rather because it is not economic to do so in most cases. There definitely is room to improve costs though one should be careful about this because it's really easy to prioritize speed and volume over quality. (many pathology labs do this unfortunately)
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I think the real question is: what was your point. You listed a bunch of irrelevant half-truths in response to an article about "OMG they are killing teh startups". In reality, you are simply seeing a competitive market in action. For some reason that seems to bother you.
Please point out where I said it bothered me. I'm merely pointing out an interesting case where Google developed some technology to keep their market position. If you think what I said was untrue or irrelevant you didn't understand it.
Yes, apparently you do.
Already did and you still didn't get it. I'll try one more time. A huge pile of cash lets you buy your way out of almost any threat to your company including but not limited to 1) Buying your competition, 2) Buying into a new industry, 3) Buying your way out of massive strategy blunders, 4) Buying technology to keep their market position. Apple and Microsoft and Google and Facebook have cash hoards large enough to stave off nearly any threat aside from either weapons grade incompetence (which they have shown little of) or the very unlikely prospect of government intervention.
If Apple's business fails and only cash remains, then Apple shareholders are simply shareholders in cash.
No they are shareholders in whatever Apple management does with that gigantic pile of cash. HUGE difference. Very few companies have that sort of flexibility at that sort of scale. In reality they can probably simply buy out almost any threat to the company. There is almost no plausible business opportunity large enough that a sufficiently motivated Apple couldn't buy their way into or out of.
Google bought Android when they were already developing a smartphone OS.
Makes precisely zero difference if they started development in house or if they bought the tech and continued to develop it. Historical trivia about how the development process happened is unimportant to my point. The important point is A) Google recognized a threat to their business in the mobile market going forward and B) they developed (and yes bought) technology to defend their revenue streams.
Google didn't develop Android at all, they bought it. And Android development predates iPhone.
They bought it and then they developed the crap out of it. Android did not stop being developed after Google purchased the technology. The argument that Google bought Android and didn't develop it is an idiotic argument that only made sense for about a year. There is no real difference between developing a tech in house or buying a company that developed the tech and continuing the development in house after that. ZERO difference.
If Google or Apple fail to invest heavily in Android/iOS development, their platform will fail within a few years, just like all the previous mobile platforms.
Do you seriously think either of those companies is not well aware of that? What exactly is your point?
So what?
Do I really have to explain to you that having enough cash to completely abandon your original business and enter a new one is a big deal? Let's say the iPhone killer comes out tomorrow from MythicalTech Inc and Apple has no response to it. Does that mean Apple is dead? No. They could simply buy General Motors and become a car company tomorrow if they wanted to. That is a big deal.
Except they developed Android at the same time as Apple started developing iPhone and they did not really know about each other...
Google didn't need to know about the iPhone to know there was a threat to their ad revenue from a mobile device maker controlling their ability to reach end users. At the time they were probably more worried about Microsoft or Nokia or Blackberry but the threat was the same. They also probably were concerned about AT&T, Verizon and that bunch too having too much control over the software and ad platforms. Nobody really could have predicted the iPhone would be the smash hit it turned out to be but people were WELL aware prior to the iPhone that mobile was going to be a big thing and there was a lot of money to be made in mobile ads. So Google very astutely developed Android as a defensive play to protect their primary source of revenue. Google didn't need to actually make money on it, they just needed to make sure it kept their cash cow producing.
Same reasoning that Microsoft used in trying to get the XBox to market actually. Microsoft was worried (with some justification) that Sony would be able to supplant the PC by putting a computer on the TV. In hindsight it was obviously less of a threat then they feared but at the time it seemed like a genuine risk because nobody really knew what direction the market would take.
That's why the next disruptors will be entirely distributed.
You're going to have something more distributed than the internet? Good luck with that. I understand your argument and it's not a foolish idea but "more distributed" runs into some real world limits and it has little effect on certain companies including I think some of the ones being discussed here.
Cracking that stronghold will likely only happen with fully distributed services.
Conceivable but unlikely. The risk to each company is different. It's not likely to be something so obvious as a more distributed version of the internet or their particular services. It will have to be something quite different that they don't really perceive as a threat - at first.
I expect something like this to show up with the next 5 years or so.
I'll take that bet. You might be right but I seriously doubt we'll see anything that displaces the bit tech companies in this generation.
there is no sign of a new platform emerging which could disrupt the incumbents, even more than a decade after the rise of mobile."
Google developed Android strictly as a defensive play to prevent them from getting locked out of the mobile ad market (their overwhelmingly primary source of revenue) by Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, Nokia, and others. In this they succeeded wildly and it will be very hard to displace them.
All of these big tech companies have VAST amounts of cash available to them. They could easily buy most companies that present a threat to them or buy their way into entirely new industries if they wanted. Apple literally has enough cash to buy both Ford and GM and Fiat Chrysler at their current market capitalization. Microsoft and Alphabet/Google and to a lesser degree Facebook are similarly comfortable.
I walked into a library a couple years back and it had no fucking books. Fine... but the surreal shithole should either be replaced by a webportal or at least serve beverages and call it a "Public Internet Cafe." But "library??" Crazy, ignorant fucks.
I got a good chuckle how you proudly proclaim your ignorance of what libraries are and what they do. As if they should somehow be forced to conform to your preconceived and uninformed idea that they are merely repositories of paper books.
With no special care or handling, books will easily last a century or three.
Hogwash. You are suffering from survivorship bias. The vast majority of books experience no special care or handling and demonstrably do not last anywhere close to that long.
As a counterpoint to your preference for digital, I have a copy of the first software I developed back in the early 1980's. It's construction accounting software. I printed out the source code and documentation and also have copies on 5.25" floppy disk. I can still read the hard copy, but the digital copy is unreadable for me. You may have some old hardware available to you, but I'm not a collector. I'd have had to convert the format of that stuff several times over the years to keep a readable digital copy. I don't think I've had a machine with a 5.25" floppy drive in more than 20 years.
Again survivorship bias. Much data from that era has been transferred to other media. It's trivial to search on the internet to find software even older than yours and to copy it trivially. I can easily find software that perfectly replicates computers I used in the early 1980s. Yes some was lost but that's no different from paper. And once it is available online it is comparatively trivial to make innumerable perfect copies. Good luck doing that with paper.
Paper is hugely useful and I'm not arguing for or against it. I just think your arguments in favor of it are flawed. There are good arguments for continued use of paper books but you aren't using those arguments.
Not only that, but do you realize how few books are actually available as eBooks? Sure, most titles being published today are, but I seldom read new books.
So because you don't read ebooks they don't exist? Despite you admitting that they do? Despite the fact that it's unusual anymore for books to not be electronically available?
Had this conversation on a plane, once.
Wow, one conversation! That's proof if I ever saw it.
Even cheap paperbacks last longer than digital media.
Doesnt matter because you can copy digital content from one medium to another with as close to zero cost imaginable. You can easily make backups on multiple forms of media and easily have those backups self propagate to new media when available thanks to the internet. Not just backups either but perfect identical backups. Not true with paper. Paper has it's charms to be sure but if we're comparing the potential for longevity the only way paper will beat digital is the event of an apocalyptic EMP. Paper is kind of a least common denominator technology which will likely always be around and be useful but it isn't generally speaking more durable unless you are confining digital documents to a fixed medium which isn't really what happens these days.
People tend to forget that when they pull out decades or centuries old books as proof of how long books last that they are experiencing survivorship bias.
I'd say that overall the infrastructure to handle ebook readers and all the electronics associated with them including batteries and all the energy in producing all the infrastructure (servers, electronics, rare earths, global shipping, etc.) have a far worse ecological life cycle assessment than printed paper.
Then you have evidently never researched the issue. Paper accounts for about 25% of all solid waste. Paper production is hugely polluting and accounts for about 5% of all industrial pollutants. It also has issues with deforestation, evidently consumes about 35% of harvested trees, contributes to monocultures of planted trees, and uses more water to produce a ton of product than just about anything else we make. While at the end of the day your statement may be correct it isn't obviously so. Paper production isn't eco-friendly like many imagine it to be.
If we're going to get a handle on the environmentally destructive nature of capitalism then we're going to have to legislate that environmental capital be a real thing in all UN nations. That is that when you pollute the environment that you are held financially accountable for the costs required to remove it from the environment.
Nice sentiment but let's get real. Until we can do something as basic as forcing oil companies to actually pay the full cost of the pollution their products generate we're not going to get nation states to cooperate. Hell we still subsidize fossil fuel companies to the tune of around $5 trillion globally every year and barely regulate emissions. Good luck getting that under control.
This tragedy of the commons has been going on far too long.
And as long as we have economically selfish "leaders" who think anything that hurts oil company profits is some sort of evil plot it isn't going to change.
Can you tell me how sports/action photographers managed to achieve sharp focus before auto-focus came along? What? They used skills and expertise?
Calm down. I wasn't arguing that you cannot get great results manually. I'm pointing out that claiming that stuff line autofocus systems (which can be turned off) is somehow a negative is silly. To use your example now you not only can get sharp focus in a sporting event but you can keep it on a moving target at 10-20 frames per second with every frame in focus. Good luck doing that manually.
Please tell me you've used a manual camera. No auto light metering, and no auto focus. I'd like to be reassured that you've used both types, both extremes from electronic full auto to full manual, and then I'll be able to give credence to your argument.
What I've personally done has no relevance to the validity of my argument or lack thereof. That said depending on how old you are chances are good I was using pure manual gear before you were. I was using full manual cameras back in the 1970s and 80s. Autofocus wasn't really a thing back then and light meters weren't on a lot of cameras. Spent a lot of time with a manual Pentax (sold as Honeywell Pentax) back in the day. And of course every point and shoot camera back in the day had essentially no auto anything.
And by full manual, i mean an external light meter, and a hand-operated focus ring, or perhaps a bellows on a monorail.
Yeah I know what manual means.
Cameras don't see the world quite the way that we do and even with the minute or so that you'd have to wait for those "instant" photos to develop, you'd already have forgotten what exactly you expected it to look like in terms of colors and focus.
That's why I'm convinced SLR cameras are headed the way of the dodo. An optical viewfinder really makes very little sense now that we have high quality digital viewfinders available. The SLR mirror is an anachronism from the film era that just adds cost, complication, noise and cost. To my mind it's much better to see exactly what the camera sensor sees rather than having to try to mentally transpose from an optical viewfinder. Plus I can put histograms and other useful tools right on the screen so I know I have the exposure and other settings right while still in camera and without even chimping. You also don't have the blackout when the mirror moves out of the way so you can see the shot continuously.
And remember - when you pressed the shutter button, it took a picture.
So what? So does every camera if you want it to.
It didn't futz about trying to focus, that was something you did before pressing the shutter. It didn't blink lights at you warning about exposure, or camera shake, it took the picture.
??? Auto-focus systems are 100% optional on any decent camera and even with those it's generally a good practice to focus before pressing the button if you actually want a decent picture. And you can turn off the image stabilization and other helpful features too if you are bothered by them for some reason. But the exist because they are helpful. Very helpful in some cases. I defy you to pull and maintain focus on a moving target as fast as you can with a modern autofocus system. My camera will literally track a subject across the sensor keeping focus on their eyes the entire time.
And if you didn't have time to make exposure and focus perfect, but *HAD* to get the shot, you pressed the shutter button, and it happened.
And now we have technology to help you take the shot right now AND get the focus and other settings right. The autofocus on my Sony A9 is astonishingly fast - far faster and more accurate in many cases than I could possibly hope to manage manually. It can take 20 frames per second and maintain near perfect focus on a person's eyes in literally every single frame. If that's not fast enough for you then I don't know what to say. You can get a REALLY good camera body with some astonishingly good autofocus for the price of a decent PC these days.
You might have got a less-than-optimum result, but it was better than missing the moment because your auto-focus couldn't make up its mind.
If your autofocus system hunts that badly you are using the wrong kit most likely. If you have some cheap point and shoot then yeah it might not be the best.
My dad still has an analog camera, and refuses to switch to a digital one.
Some people get very comfortable with what they already know. Learning something new can be hard work, even if the payoff is big at the end. I wouldn't be critical though if he actually enjoys using film. Nothing wrong with that. Especially if he isn't comfortable with computers.
He has taken to shooting photos on his flip-phone, so maybe there's hope for him yet.
Unless he is working with some high end film gear I suspect he'll just gradually realize how much easier the camera phone is and start leaving the film camera in the closet so to speak. It's pretty easy to get prints off a phone these days even at the local drug store if that's important to him.
It was easy to settle on a Nikon. A short period of research showed that Nikon and Canon were shooting it out for First and Second, and everyone else was well back in the pack.
That is no longer true. Sony has joined the conversation in a big way. Their A9, A7III and A7RIII and A6500 cameras are remarkable pieces of gear and they have a very good and rapidly improving lens lineup that any pro photographer can work with happily. (and the few holes in their lens lineup like super long telephotos have already been announced) Sony's G-Master glass is as good as anything Canon or Nikon sell that is similar and the big third party lens makers like Sigma and Tamron are releasing lenses with native Sony mounts. Canon and Nikon make great gear and have amazing lens lineups but they're having trouble (so far) with the transition to mirrorless. SLR cameras are something of an anachronism from the film era but neither Canon nor Nikon have yet released a pro grade or even enthusiast grade mirrorless camera.
I have been very satisfied with my D80.
A nice camera albeit a little dated at this point. I would have been satisfied with that too I think.
I do acknowledge that my "keeper" rate has gone down from about 1 in 10 shots with film to about 1 in 30 shots with digital.
If true that both are still amazingly high "keeper" rates. My keeper rate is considerably worse than that. Maybe 1 in 50 to 1 in 100 for images that I think are really worth a damn. I might go out to shoot some wildlife and come back with 3-5 decent shots out of several hundred. (Doing that on film would have been FAR too expensive) Depends of course on what you regard as a keeper. Not all the shots I take are bad but many are a little off to my eye for one reason or another.
Somewhere around here I still have my old Pentax K1000 “auto nothing” film camera. I keep telling myself I should pull it out and shoot some film... haven’t actually done it yet, though.
That's your deep realization that shooting film is an expensive pain in the arse unless you are really passionate about shooting film. We did it that way because we had to and because there weren't any better options at the time. Getting good at photography back in the day was an almost ludicrously expensive proposition so you had to be passionate about it. If you weren't the sort of person who though it was a great idea to put a dark room in your house, chances are you weren't that passionate about film cameras to begin with. I know I couldn't afford to do it when I was younger. It just cost too much and the feedback loop for learning was far too slow.
A) Not delicate
Debatable if you've ever had a tape eaten by a tape deck but not a major issue.
B) Easily recordable
C) Re-recordable
For a very limited amount of content. It's just as easy and often easier to record on digital.
D) Portable
Individually yes. Once you get more than a few it becomes awkward VERY quickly. And substantially less portable than anything digital.
E) Inexpensive
Compared to what? I disagree with this strongly.
F) Small storage size
"Small"? I can literally have more music than I can listen to in a year on a device smaller than a single cassette tape. This is not a benefit of tape.
G) Trade-able (without DCMA fears)
I can do the exact same thing with digital media. I can trade you a CD just as easily as a tape if we are talking physical medium. And a lot of digital content isn't affected by DMCA at all.
H) No computer required at any step
I fail to see how this is a meaningful positive feature unless one dislikes computers. It's just a means to an end and not particularly relevant.
I) Was a universal format (bought and played anywhere)
Only because there weren't better options available at the time. And it's pretty easy to argue that digital is a far more universal format. Plus I can bring my own devices and plug it in almost anywhere which could not be said about tape decks.
J) Can leave in car
You left it in the car because you had to. You get looked at funny hauling a collection of tapes everywhere you go.
K) Good enough for most situations
It was "good enough" because we didn't have better options.
Are MP3s better today? Probably. But "garbage"? Eh...
Yes garbage. Conveniently you forgot the failures of tapes:
1) Small storage capacity
2) Bulky for a collection of any meaningful size
3) Wears out with repeat play and prone to breaking
4) Limited utility for anything other than sound recordings
5) Linear playback with no skipping or random access
6) Tape hiss
7) Enabled a monopoly on distribution of content
8) Bulky recording and playback gear
9) Required managing and organizing physical objects
10) Expensive and time consuming to back up and impossible to back up perfectly
11) Only can be "traded" with people you see face to face or via snail mail.
12) Very difficult to edit content without a lot of very expensive and complicated gear.
13) More difficult to preserve than digital
14) Expensive on a unit of content basis (digital is FAR cheaper)
Basically tapes sucked.
Because you don't get to see the results instantly, so it forces you to slow down and think about what you are doing, and get it right in the camera.
I've heard that argument in favor of shooting film before and I think it's a flawed argument. There is literally nothing preventing you from doing exactly the same thing with a digital camera except your own lack of self control. On the other hand with digital you can try things, see if they work, and iterate until you get the result you want so you have the best of both worlds in that sense. I think there are great reasons to shoot film (see below) but I don't think this particular argument holds water.
Choice of medium always affects the final product. I think of it similar to choosing between watercolor or oil paints. Both are fine choices with their own interesting outcomes and artistic choices. Film has its own look which is hard to perfectly replicate with digital (and vice versa) and that's a good thing. Also film is super cool technology in its own right. The chemistry and optics and mechanics involved with film shooting is nothing short of amazing. There also is a cool nostalgia factor about it as well as a lot of fascinating history. And if you want to shoot in larger formats currently film is actually the cheaper way to get into those sizes compared with most decent digital medium format or larger cameras. And you can learn a lot about optics, chemistry and materials by working with film. Working with old film cameras can be a hoot for the same reason tinkering with any clever old technology is fun.
I think it is interesting how much film still influences our gear to this day. DSLRs are really something of an anachronism from the film era. The mirror had a lot of benefit in film but in a digital world it really just adds complication, cost, noise, and bulk. I get why they are still around but it it seems obvious that their days are numbered. Still, it's super cool engineering worthy of immense respect and I'm glad they'll be around for some time to come.
If you mean electric vehicle with EV, then no. america is decades behind Europe.
What color is the sky on your planet? You certainly aren't basing that claim on any facts (nor did you provide any) so one has to presume you are talking about a different America and a different Europe than the one here on Earth.
Tesla made a new and better battery and manages to sell a nice set of cars ... but in the vehicle itself is nothing really innovative.+
Spare me your attempt to seem unimpressed. "Nothing really innovative"? You might have an argument if anyone else was making more innovative vehicles. Nobody has moved the auto industry more towards electrification than Tesla and to claim their cars aren't innovative is preposterous even if you don't like them.
And American employees want to stop seeing their jobs shipped overseas.
They can do this any time they want. They just have to accept the same wages as their overseas competitors. It's a hard reality but US wages are among the highest in the world. If you want to compete on price you have to have lower costs than the other guy.
Actually American's are too self absorbed to give a shit except when China literally steals American developed technology or cheats in the market with the help of their government. Not to say the US is pure in that regard either but if China could be bothered to just reasonably fair it would be fine for everyone but the most xenophobic among us.
Many Americans whine about jobs moving to China but they moved there because they pay their workers a lot less on average. If we were willing to work for Chinese wages then those labor intensive jobs could stay here. I don't think that's really what Americans actually want when they really think about it. That's why every time you hear a politician (falsely) promising to "bring back manufacturing jobs" they are so full of shit their eyes are probably brown. The only way that happens is if American accept a huge reduction in wages. There are lots of manufacturing jobs still here but you need more than just a high school diploma for a lot of them.
Are we so naive as to think that having a strong and capable military is somehow unnecessary in today's world?
When we spend more money on that military than the next 8 largest countries combined then the answer is that absolutely yes it is unnecessary. Yes we need a military. No we don't need one as big as we have.
Have we forgotten the lessons of WW1 so soon? Was the catastrophe of WW2, that demonstrated AGAIN the folly of not being prepared not enough of a reminder?
So America needs to be 8X as prepared for war as anyone else and borrow every dime of our military budget ($600 billion last year - all borrowed)? Neither of those wars started because countries were unprepared for war. I think you need need to go check your history books because your facts are wrong.
The company says the technology it's helping to build for the Pentagon simply "flags images for human review" and is for "non-offensive uses only."
There is no such thing when it comes to the military. "Flag images for human review"? WTF do they think humans IN THE MILITARY are going to do with such information? Furthermore once the technology is in the hands of the armed forces there is fuck-all Google can do to control how they use it.
This is basically the exact plot of the movie Real Genius. The smart geeks fail to comprehend what happens to military funded technology in the hands of the military.
After all, a number of the pathology steps involve looking at things closely and pattern matching, which are the same types of things being done by the AI being discussed.
Vision based expert systems (I wouldn't really call them AI) will certainly get used someday though there are a lot of technical challenges to get through before this is possible. There is much more to pathology than just pattern matching however.
I don't expect it to happen any time soon but I can certainly envision a system in 15-20 years that would have a nurse practitioner scan a patient, take biopsies of flagged spots and feed the biopsies into a "pathologist in a box" machine that would do all the checks required - probably down to the DNA level.
This already happens today. It's called Clinical Pathology. Every time you have blood drawn (for example) that tissue gets sent to the clinical pathology department. The tissue is processed through a machine which spits out a report. The pathologist then evaluates the report and communicates results to the clinician. Most of these reports are fairly uninteresting but some will be require detailed scrutiny. The job of the pathologist is still to make diagnosis but also to manage the laboratory. Anatomic Pathology (the folks who look through microscopes) will to some degree begin to resemble Clinical Pathology over time. No it won't be a nurse practitioner but rather a specialized pathology assistant or histotechnologist or similar doing the job. A lot of pathologists are dual certified in both AP and CP.
A lot of diagnosis also eventually won't require pattern matching but rather will rely on DNA tests or similar. A lot of stains and other tests they use today do this.
Moving the bulk of the cost of diagnosis to a capital expense rather than a labor expense could eventually drive down medical costs tremendously - once we have machines that can do most of the work, the relentless pace of technology and process improvement will make the machines cheaper and cheaper.
In theory yes but in practice it will be harder to drive out the labor costs than you think. There is a LOT of expertise that goes into slide preparation, much of which is challenging to automate beyond a certain point. The people that do this generally have a 4 year college degree specific to this work. Then turning that into a machine readable form is another big challenge. The main pathologists still use microscopes instead of computer screens isn't because they cannot scan the slides but rather because it is not economic to do so in most cases. There definitely is room to improve costs though one should be careful about this because it's really easy to prioritize speed and volume over quality. (many pathology labs do this unfortunately)