I'm a former Kodak employee. Kodak will be facing hard times for a number of years, but I think what people forget is that most of the bad press they are getting is because they cut their divident by 3/4 so they can reinvent themselves. All of the people who owned stock are incredibly pissed, and every analyst will never give a positive review of a company who does this, probably because they are heavily into that stock.
Kodak will probably turn it around, because 5 years too late they realized what digital will mean. Executives at Kodak were so far behind that all employees were laughing when they were still talking about film not going away.
That said, Kodak is finally realizing that it needs to turn things around. The company will be much different in 5 years, but they are so far behind with their organizational structure drastic measures need to be taken.
Anyway, so what does Kodak do when it is trying to evolve into a technology services company rather than a manufacturing company? It lays off hundreds of young, agressive, future-minded people like me who are steeped in technology and keeps the slew of white-haired oldsters incapable of realizing what real change is about.
So the old time corporate culture of the good old boy's club still exists, and the company won't move on until the morons at the top realize this. Dan Carp (CEO), you better get your crap together.
Right. I used to get migraines. Then I found my trigger - MSG. I stopped the MSG (it's in EVERYTHING) and no migraines! Triptans didn't work for me, but I also noticed that when I drastically changed my caffiene intake either up or down I could get a migraine with massive aura.
Narcotics (eg dilaudid) w/ an anti-nauseant and/or analgesics with a mild sedative (Midrin) worked better for me than triptans.
Incorrect. Kidney stones can be either based on uric acid or calcium oxylate. Most are of the calcium sort. Caffiene is a diuretic, and dehydration and the combination of an oxylate-rich diet causes the calcium to bind together in the kidney, forming a stone.
Dehydration also forces the stones to break free from the kidney, and enter the uriter. This is what causes the pain. It's like forcing a golf ball though a garden hose. It doesn't work. And it hurts like a mofo. I have plenty of experience with this. Stones suck, although the drugs they give you for the pain are pretty nice.
Coke is a primary suspect because it causes dehydration because it has caffiene and because it gives you the false sense of quenching your thirst.
I love the DVR. Sure, the geeks here will complain about artifacts because of the compression, but give me a friggin' break. For $10 a month I'll take it.
Damn Brits, what do they know?:-) Actually, if you are comparing VHS/Beta recorded in Pal standard rather than NTSC, you may not see as big a difference. Pal TV standard has a better overall picture (more lines than NTSC's 550). Since the source is better you are going to get a better recording, even on VHS. People from the states always comment how good the TV picture was when they visit the UK.
Seriously. How much money would someone have to spend on books, videos, or trinkets to be able to produce that many reviews? Thousands and thousands of dollars.
How much time would someone have to spend reading, viewing, ordering, etc to get to all these products -- and still hold down a job? Hours... days... years.
Unless, of course, reviewing these products WAS their job. It's pretty obvious reviewing is all these people do, and pretty obvious that someone is paying these people to do it. Is it illegal for Amazon to pay reviewers in an attempt to increase sales? Probably not, but I question the morality of paying someone to review products you sell without letting people know you are paying them to do so.
oh look! someone who doesn't have a clue!
on
Sony Kills Betamax
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· Score: 1
Beta was far superior to VHS throughout the 80s and most of the 90s. That is a fact. It wasn't until improved electronics came along that VHS could even compare.
Have you ever compared the pause or slow rewind/ff feature on a beta machine compared to a VHS? There is no comparison -- on VHS it generally sucks, and on beta it is far superior.
Most innovations happened on beta first, anyway. Jog-shuttle, flying erase heads, Hi-Fi, etc. All on beta before VHS.
The truth is that there are basic reasons that beta is better. The tape winds at a higher speed, meaning you don't need to cram as much information on a smaller space as compared to VHS. Anyone familiar with analog storage technology can understand how this is better.
From a quality standpoint, beta is vastly superior to VHS, or the format would have been gone two decades ago. It isn't until another superior technology came around - DVR & DVD - that it was dethroned.
A small computer speaker is incapable of emitting the frequencies required to repel those animals. Humans can hear from 20hz to 20khz. The speaker in your box can only emit sounds well within that range -- far too low to bother dogs, let alone repel rodents and insects.
Look - if it wasn't for poorly commented code, I wouldn't be able to code at all today. Sifting through junk code allowed me to learn more about programming (good and bad) than any book or class.
LDAP is so incredibly simple you don't need tools. If you need to provide a web interface to one, just write it.
If you aren't techy enough,
Cold Fusion and other application servers have excellent built-in functions to call, update, add, delete, etc., an LDAP directory.
Uhhh, what corporations are you talking about? Every large corporation I've worked in uses one. The corporation I work in now (I won't tell you the name but we sell film in a distinctive-looking box) is heavily into LDAP, and with good reason. It's a perfect standards compliant place to store and retrieve directory information, store authentication information, etc.
M$'s argument that AOL wouldn't open up their IM is silly. They can whine and complain about that, but when they play the same game they have a problem? That's hilarious. XP is an operating system, and not an application. When M$ started making it more difficult to run competitive software on their OS, they had to know they would be getting themselves in deep trouble.
I have VERY intimate knowledge of the Kodak vs. Microsoft spat that is going on right now, and Microsoft is clearly trying to undermine the efforts of Kodak to write an application that would compete with one that is bundled with their OS.
For these reasons, and for the reason that XP is expanding the illegal Microsoft monopoly in the face of the federal ruling with XP, the release should be deemed illegal and blocked.
.... but I'm certainly not reading it with one. Many of your points are baseless and actually quite funny.
Killustrator is not a competing product to Adobe Illustrator (I assume that's what you meant.) It can't be - the two products do not even run under the same operating system. They're aimed at different audiences.
That's a good one. I have a Linux box. If there is an application on Linux that I like better than a similar one that runs on my Windows box or my Mac, I use it. That's called competition. If that's not clear enough for you here's a direct statement: You are wrong, the products compete.
It's reasonable to say that the two products have the same derivation for the name, rather than one being derived from the other.
That's another good one. You've got to be a lawyer -- or at least a comedian. Which one came first? Adobe Illustrator. Clear lines can be drawn (har har) between the naming of Killustrator and the original naming of Adobe Illustrator. Sorry, you point is not taken.
Adobe's marketing of a product under that name may or may not "help" KIllustrator in ensuring users already know what the product is for
Good Lord, you've got to be kidding me! Stop now, my sides hurt!
Adobe's development of Linux software is not at issue here, though I feel compelled to point out that they do develop server products, such as Acrobat Distiller, for less prevelent operating systems than Linux, so the economic argument doesn't cut it.
I'd love to see those stats regarding operating systems and which ones aren't as prevalent as others. I don't believe it, and why don't you include the names of those operating systems. I'm pretty sure the stats you are using are regarding operating systems being installed, not operating systems that are existing installations. Please don't tell me you are one of those that believe there is a conspiracy against Linux spearheaded by software companies like Adobe. That's stupid.
You've got to understand what a market is. A market is NOT the general population. A market is a population of consumers who is a subset of the general population, and what statistics and assumptions that apply to the general population do NOT apply to a market. Adobe does excellent market research and product development. There are lots of Linux servers, but very few medium to large corporations use Linux as a server platform. It's changing (thankfully), but not that quickly. Why would Adobe develop a product for Linux when it's main customer for server applications (medium to large-sized corporations) doesn't even run the platform? Don't you think Adobe would develop and MARKET a product if they thought they could make money from it? The Linux community is NOT a money generating consumer base. Why would Adobe try to sell a product to folks who can get most of what they want for free?
Oh yeah, and thanks for catching my Copyright/Trademark slipup.
Okay, let me put it more bluntly. If Adobe loses ONE customer because someone used a similar product with a similar name... a VERY similar name... they have lost money. Adobe has the right to sue for LOST money, not money someone else has made. That's the crux of the problem, and it seems too many people can't see that.
Please try to tell me with a straight face that Killustrator is:
Not a competing product of Illustrator.
The name was not derived from said competing product.
The name of the product does not benefit greatly from the inclusion of the competing product's own name in it's moniker.
People may not like Adobe just because they don't write stuff for Linux, but that is Adobe's choice. A company that is out for profit isn't obligated to write software for a particular platform just because many people feel that it's the right thing to do. This is a company that sells stock and is obligated to turn a profit. Writing this type of software for the Linux OS may not be the right thing to do for the business.
Remember, this is the company that didn't write stuff for Windows until the early to mid-90's simply because they didn't think it was economically feasible.
But getting back on topic, maybe people should consider copyright infringement issues before they name their software. Being contrarian for it's own sake is silly.
God NO! Unions are for wussies.
on
Dial U for Union
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· Score: 1
Man, why do people like unions? The problem with unions is they are based on the (incorrect) belief that people have the right to a job, even if they don't do it as well as someone else. That goes against everything I've ever felt as an employee. The way to keep your job is to keep your skills up, and find a place where you are treated well. It's worked for me for the past 10 years quite well.
More importantly, unions usually demand that if you belong to that union, you pay dues for "protection" on every job you work. If you belong to a union, you can't take a non-union job. Think about that for a second. Would you be allowed to do work on an open-source project if you belong to a union? Probably not.
Unions are for wussies who fear their lack of skills and ability to keep up with the times.
Just do the maintenance on it now. It know it's difficult working on crappy code and/or a poor conceptual design, but think of it as a learning experience. Usually rewrites become more of a chore than something challenging and fun because of all the things that go along with it. For example, you will have to convince management to allow you to spend your time on that task, you will have to support it when you're done, you will have to write documentation and scope out the project before hand, you will provide justification for why you did things the way you did. The time you spend coding will be 1/2 the time you spend on the project. To me, that's not fun.
I had a similar project, and waited until we switched the backend from SQL Squirter/NT to Oracle/Solaris to make the big changes. Difficulty in maintenance is not usually enough justification for management.
I used to live in a geekhouse on 91 Argyle Street from about 1994 to 1997. Pretty damn cool, it was. We had the place wired with BNC because RJ was too expensive. The absolute FIRST geekhouse in Rochester - at least that I know of.
Ha! So did I, and one was a girl. The house was wired with BNC cable. It was 1994, and Netscape was still new. Twogoons.com - The 91 Argyle Street Geekhouse. Those were the days!
I lived in one of the first - The 91 Argyle St. Geekhouse in Rochester, NY. Since been retired. It was late 1994 and we wired the house with BNC cable because RJ was too expensive. Doom was amazing back then - and not everyone had a web site and way too many people snagged their stuff from Matt's Script Archive. If you were around then, you might understand.
Anyway, a geekhouse just has to happen. You can't decide that you want one and then seek it out. It doesn't work that way. It's just gotta happen naturally or it isn't a real geekhouse.
Slashdot Mirror
3.4 ghz processor, ati 9700 vid card, 7200 rpm drive, bluetooth, wifi, 15.4 in screen, subwoofer.
About 1 hour of battery life.
I'm a former Kodak employee. Kodak will be facing hard times for a number of years, but I think what people forget is that most of the bad press they are getting is because they cut their divident by 3/4 so they can reinvent themselves. All of the people who owned stock are incredibly pissed, and every analyst will never give a positive review of a company who does this, probably because they are heavily into that stock.
Kodak will probably turn it around, because 5 years too late they realized what digital will mean. Executives at Kodak were so far behind that all employees were laughing when they were still talking about film not going away.
That said, Kodak is finally realizing that it needs to turn things around. The company will be much different in 5 years, but they are so far behind with their organizational structure drastic measures need to be taken.
Anyway, so what does Kodak do when it is trying to evolve into a technology services company rather than a manufacturing company? It lays off hundreds of young, agressive, future-minded people like me who are steeped in technology and keeps the slew of white-haired oldsters incapable of realizing what real change is about.
So the old time corporate culture of the good old boy's club still exists, and the company won't move on until the morons at the top realize this. Dan Carp (CEO), you better get your crap together.
Right. I used to get migraines. Then I found my trigger - MSG. I stopped the MSG (it's in EVERYTHING) and no migraines! Triptans didn't work for me, but I also noticed that when I drastically changed my caffiene intake either up or down I could get a migraine with massive aura.
Narcotics (eg dilaudid) w/ an anti-nauseant and/or analgesics with a mild sedative (Midrin) worked better for me than triptans.
Incorrect. Kidney stones can be either based on uric acid or calcium oxylate. Most are of the calcium sort. Caffiene is a diuretic, and dehydration and the combination of an oxylate-rich diet causes the calcium to bind together in the kidney, forming a stone.
Dehydration also forces the stones to break free from the kidney, and enter the uriter. This is what causes the pain. It's like forcing a golf ball though a garden hose. It doesn't work. And it hurts like a mofo. I have plenty of experience with this. Stones suck, although the drugs they give you for the pain are pretty nice.
Coke is a primary suspect because it causes dehydration because it has caffiene and because it gives you the false sense of quenching your thirst.
Wow! Rochester people on /.!
I love the DVR. Sure, the geeks here will complain about artifacts because of the compression, but give me a friggin' break. For $10 a month I'll take it.
Damn Brits, what do they know? :-) Actually, if you are comparing VHS/Beta recorded in Pal standard rather than NTSC, you may not see as big a difference. Pal TV standard has a better overall picture (more lines than NTSC's 550). Since the source is better you are going to get a better recording, even on VHS. People from the states always comment how good the TV picture was when they visit the UK.
There's a few people there with 4000+ reviews!
... days ... years.
Seriously. How much money would someone have to spend on books, videos, or trinkets to be able to produce that many reviews? Thousands and thousands of dollars.
How much time would someone have to spend reading, viewing, ordering, etc to get to all these products -- and still hold down a job? Hours
Unless, of course, reviewing these products WAS their job. It's pretty obvious reviewing is all these people do, and pretty obvious that someone is paying these people to do it. Is it illegal for Amazon to pay reviewers in an attempt to increase sales? Probably not, but I question the morality of paying someone to review products you sell without letting people know you are paying them to do so.
Have you ever compared the pause or slow rewind/ff feature on a beta machine compared to a VHS? There is no comparison -- on VHS it generally sucks, and on beta it is far superior.
Most innovations happened on beta first, anyway. Jog-shuttle, flying erase heads, Hi-Fi, etc. All on beta before VHS.
The truth is that there are basic reasons that beta is better. The tape winds at a higher speed, meaning you don't need to cram as much information on a smaller space as compared to VHS. Anyone familiar with analog storage technology can understand how this is better.
From a quality standpoint, beta is vastly superior to VHS, or the format would have been gone two decades ago. It isn't until another superior technology came around - DVR & DVD - that it was dethroned.
A small computer speaker is incapable of emitting the frequencies required to repel those animals. Humans can hear from 20hz to 20khz. The speaker in your box can only emit sounds well within that range -- far too low to bother dogs, let alone repel rodents and insects.
CNN has been had.
Look - if it wasn't for poorly commented code, I wouldn't be able to code at all today. Sifting through junk code allowed me to learn more about programming (good and bad) than any book or class.
I've clustered Windows boxes plenty of times. I leave them clustered in a corner of a dark closet. Unplugged.
If you aren't techy enough,
Cold Fusion and other application servers have excellent built-in functions to call, update, add, delete, etc., an LDAP directory.
Uhhh, what corporations are you talking about? Every large corporation I've worked in uses one. The corporation I work in now (I won't tell you the name but we sell film in a distinctive-looking box) is heavily into LDAP, and with good reason. It's a perfect standards compliant place to store and retrieve directory information, store authentication information, etc.
The rights couldn't be bought for a reasonable fee, or someone owns them and won't sell them.
I loved the Hobbit. It's very different from LOTR, so I don't know how someone could compare the two.
M$'s argument that AOL wouldn't open up their IM is silly. They can whine and complain about that, but when they play the same game they have a problem? That's hilarious. XP is an operating system, and not an application. When M$ started making it more difficult to run competitive software on their OS, they had to know they would be getting themselves in deep trouble.
I have VERY intimate knowledge of the Kodak vs. Microsoft spat that is going on right now, and Microsoft is clearly trying to undermine the efforts of Kodak to write an application that would compete with one that is bundled with their OS.
For these reasons, and for the reason that XP is expanding the illegal Microsoft monopoly in the face of the federal ruling with XP, the release should be deemed illegal and blocked.
You've got to understand what a market is. A market is NOT the general population. A market is a population of consumers who is a subset of the general population, and what statistics and assumptions that apply to the general population do NOT apply to a market. Adobe does excellent market research and product development. There are lots of Linux servers, but very few medium to large corporations use Linux as a server platform. It's changing (thankfully), but not that quickly. Why would Adobe develop a product for Linux when it's main customer for server applications (medium to large-sized corporations) doesn't even run the platform? Don't you think Adobe would develop and MARKET a product if they thought they could make money from it? The Linux community is NOT a money generating consumer base. Why would Adobe try to sell a product to folks who can get most of what they want for free?
Oh yeah, and thanks for catching my Copyright/Trademark slipup.
Okay, let me put it more bluntly. If Adobe loses ONE customer because someone used a similar product with a similar name ... a VERY similar name ... they have lost money. Adobe has the right to sue for LOST money, not money someone else has made. That's the crux of the problem, and it seems too many people can't see that.
The lawsuit is over the name, not the function of the software.
People may not like Adobe just because they don't write stuff for Linux, but that is Adobe's choice. A company that is out for profit isn't obligated to write software for a particular platform just because many people feel that it's the right thing to do. This is a company that sells stock and is obligated to turn a profit. Writing this type of software for the Linux OS may not be the right thing to do for the business. Remember, this is the company that didn't write stuff for Windows until the early to mid-90's simply because they didn't think it was economically feasible.
But getting back on topic, maybe people should consider copyright infringement issues before they name their software. Being contrarian for it's own sake is silly.
Man, why do people like unions? The problem with unions is they are based on the (incorrect) belief that people have the right to a job, even if they don't do it as well as someone else. That goes against everything I've ever felt as an employee. The way to keep your job is to keep your skills up, and find a place where you are treated well. It's worked for me for the past 10 years quite well.
More importantly, unions usually demand that if you belong to that union, you pay dues for "protection" on every job you work. If you belong to a union, you can't take a non-union job. Think about that for a second. Would you be allowed to do work on an open-source project if you belong to a union? Probably not.
Unions are for wussies who fear their lack of skills and ability to keep up with the times.
In other news, Microsoft has decided to change it's name to "McCarthysoft"
I had a similar project, and waited until we switched the backend from SQL Squirter/NT to Oracle/Solaris to make the big changes. Difficulty in maintenance is not usually enough justification for management.
I used to live in a geekhouse on 91 Argyle Street from about 1994 to 1997. Pretty damn cool, it was. We had the place wired with BNC because RJ was too expensive. The absolute FIRST geekhouse in Rochester - at least that I know of.
Ha! So did I, and one was a girl. The house was wired with BNC cable. It was 1994, and Netscape was still new. Twogoons.com - The 91 Argyle Street Geekhouse. Those were the days!
Anyway, a geekhouse just has to happen. You can't decide that you want one and then seek it out. It doesn't work that way. It's just gotta happen naturally or it isn't a real geekhouse.