Now there is even a cruising-sailboat-specific linux distribution: Navigatrix.
Note - I have no relation, never tried it. I did download it last year but never got round to messing with it. But they guy behind it seems to have the right approach. Right now my boat is at least a year, maybe two, from being to the point where I need to think about it, but I do plan to run a 'glass cockpit' based on linux. Since I will be single handling most of the time, my goal is to be able to control most functions from anywhere on the boat, including via WiFi.
Navigatrix is a complete operating system for your computer. It is put together by people on boats for people on boats.
Navigatrix is a compilation of electronic tools for navigation, communication, information and security that you can use offshore, on shore, or at anchor. It is simple and lightweight and based on the latest Debian/Ubuntu has to offer.
Navigatrix is the fastest, most efficient, and versatile Linux distribution for cruisers and navigators available. Installed on the hard drive it works on most any personal computer built in the last 12 years.
Navigatrix is nearly indestructible running on a 4 gigabyte, or larger, USB stick or SD card. It allows access to your hard drive data if you choose, and even works if your hard drive doesn't.
Navigatrix can also be installed on your hard drive for increased speed and versatility.
Download Navigatrix, install your charts, and test it out. You may find it is exactly what you've been seeking. Navigatrix is free to use and copy. If you have been charged, or you charge, more than a nominal copying fee it's not right.
I believe that at present, installing a performance chip in the car's engine control voids the warranty. So, the issue is already in play. the interesting question would be, what if I root the environmental control so I can use my own music streaming service? Should that void the engine warranty? I think not, if for no other reason than the proposition that it should not be possible to mess up the engine by modifying the dashboard system, for security and federal emissions mandate reasons. Anything accessible by the driver should be in a sandbox.
They should never replace physical controls but merely augment them.
An interesting question - what is a physical control? AFAIK the gas pedals in almost all modern cars is merely a computer interface, asking the car's computer to make the car go faster. So it's a physical control in one sense, but a computer control in another. And of course in every recent car I've driven the dashboard instruments (speedometer, tach, etc.) are all computer output - you can watch them go through the start-up calibration sequence. I haven't kept up but I wouldn't be at all surprised if the same is true of the various knobs and buttons on the dashboard.
As sensor and display technologies march on, I suspect it will get harder to determine whether a given dashboard item is a physical device or some form of touch-screen technology. The actual squishy dashboard material itself could be the display.
the very first internet hack of a medical system (back in the late 1980s or mid 1990s IIRC) was, in fact, an MRI or CAT scanner in San Diego. This predated virus problems - it was just a computer that was on the internet, and someone was able to figure out the default user/pass. I suspect it was a CAT scanner, because according to what I read back then, the penetrator could have adjusted the parameters in such a way as to cause lethal injury. I can't imagine how an MRI could do that. In this case, the penetrator was a white hat - a researcher, IIRC.
A long time ago I worked for a medical equipment company, and learned that there are also some systemic biases that greatly increase the costs. Note I did not say 'inflate', because it truly is a complex problem with no magic solution.
So, this company made dialysis machines, which were largely sold to hospitals. These machines included a blood pump, which is basically a piece of clear 1/2" vinyl tubing formed into about 2/3 of a circle, with a triangular 'cam' with little rollers that went around and around, squeezing the tubing and forcing the blood to proceed. A simple, elegant machine.
The following factors applied: The tubing had to be replaced for each dialysis. For liability reasons, the hospitals had to buy it from the company - if a patient experienced any problem during dialysis, the fact that the hospital used an 'off-brand' tube supplier would make them effectively 100% liable in court regardless of whether the tubing had anything to do with the problem.
The tubing could not be sterilized and re-used. In the olden days hospital tools were commonly autoclaved and re-used, but in modern hospitals everything - scissors, scalpels, whatever - is disposable because this eliminates a whole raft of liability issues, and simplifies the supply chain inside the hospital.
The number of dialysis machines is not that large, so most pieces of medical equipment are not in the commodity marketplace. Think fancy CAD workstations vs. desktop PCs.
Anything that has to be approved by FDA (or FCC, or FAA, etc., plus UL and/or CSA, etc.) has a very large upfront certification cost - $millions. This has to be amortized over a relatively small number of items, and if even a resistor is changed in a piece of medical equipment, it has to be re-certified. If the original supplier of the tubing changes, it also has to be recertified.
From other experience of mine, the company's liability insurance costs were most likely in the range of 30% of gross revenues.
The result of all this was that a piece of vinyl tubing that was AFAICT identical to tubing that you buy at the hardware store for $1 per foot today, was cut in one foot pieces, sterilized and packaged by the company and sold to hospitals for $150 per piece back then, in the late 1970s. And they only made about 22% profit. This was/is a relatively small company, and not inhabited by a bunch of overpaid financial manipulators. The overall cost of the system just added up.
I think the biggest problem is that the present liability climate, though better than it used to be, is still greatly to the advantage of the insurance companies. The insurance companies, after all, make their profits as a relatively stable percentage of gross revenues, which are related to accounted and perceived risk. The worse the liability situation, the better for both plaintiffs and defendants, and worse for the rest of us. And, since government sees every failure as an excuse for more regulation and bureaucracy, that is also true of government.
Good explanation, thanks. this makes me ponder whether Lightsquared might do better to go to an Ultra Wideband technology, which IIUC would eliminate nearly all interference problems, and would also provide nearly ultimate privacy protection against third parties snooping the signal. (Which might make the 'official' snooper-types uncomfortable.) It would certainly make Lightsquared a disruptive technology, a generation ahead of anyone else.
OK - referred to logic, not morality. WRT Santa Claus, do not conflate questions of first-order logic (with inconsistent axioms one can prove anything) with Reconstructabiliity. I will expand a bit. One of the fundamental principles of systems theory is that the controller of any system has to have more degrees of freedom than the system. (If you think about it a bit, this is easily shown.) Otherwise it is not fully controlling the system. From this we find that no component of the system can prove that it 'knows' all of the possible mechanisms by which system states vary. This can be analogized as "the controller may or may not be able to 'reach into the system' and manipulate the system state by a mechanism not recognized within the system". The 'may or may not' is key - an outside observer might be able to tell, but entities that are within the system can not prove it either way.
That is not at all related to belief; it only shows that for this particular question of the existence of God, the answer is unprovable. So, be comfortable in you belief, and repect others' beliefs as _possible_ (however unlikely in your opinion), and we'll all get along. But if someone tells you that the Energizer Bunny is the true earthly manifestation of the Creator of everything, I would agree that they're probably wrong.
This reminds me of the Man Who Controlled the Universe in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He had the right attitude.
From first principles of systems science, it is fundamentally impossible to prove either the existence or non-existence of an entity outside the Universe that controls it. For every argument on one side, there is an equally valid counter-argument that can not be disproved from within the system.
It's perfectly OK and equally 'intelligent' to assume a God or assume no God, no need to put down those who disagree with you. Just relax, live and let live. See the Reconstructability Theorem. I would also note that insults and expressions of contempt are not useful logical arguments.
'Like' goes back a long way before Valley girls. It was a common usage among beatniks in the 1950s (as satirized by Maynard G Krebs in the 1960s TV show "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis"). Now I'm a bit curious to see how it originated - it seems to be connected to a certain way of thinking. I think 'Like' might have a bit more contextual/semantic meaning than 'um' as it seems to act as an approximate, non-committal referent to the following phrase. Perhaps this invites the listener to participate in the decision as to the validity of the relation between the phrases being connected by 'like'.
Dang!:P it should have been divide by 2^30, not 10^30! I must have had a brain fart. the numbers did seem pretty far off at the end, but I was at work...
I've wondered for a long time why nobody makes injection-molded keys with the letters going all the way through. I don't think the cost would be too much - probably twice as much per key, but how much of the price of a keyboard is that? It would complicate inventory etc. but I think that for at least high end keyboards, it could be successful.
They could even be backlit if the character part were translucent. Oooh, pretty!
I don't recall much about Kodachrome (I suppose Wikipedia is your friend), but in general most low end digital photography does not have the 'color gamut' of the best films, nor the maximum resolution. The color gamut is (more or less) the range between the darkest and lightest values for all the color spectrum. Low end digital cameras just don't have the range, which is why 'high dynamic range' photography, which uses Photoshop or Gimp or whatever to digitally merge several photos of the same scene taken at different brightnesses (f-stops), is a popular technique.
Also, except at the very high end, digital photography still does not have the resolution. There are two senses - first, film is made of grains, which vary in size somewhat and are placed randomly (as a natural physical process). So the resolution is not a single number but a range - it's like a mosaic made of randomly sized stones, which maps edges in a more natural way. Second, the grain size of even good 35mm film is still better (at least IMHO) than equivalent digital camera sensors, depending on various parameters (film speed, type of film, etc.) Digital images are a fixed array of pixels. I suppose some of this might be a kind of analog to the differences that some folks argue about, between LP records and CDs. But it's more true for images.
One prize winning professional nature photographer I used to know takes pictures using an 8x10 camera, similar to what Ansel Adams used to take his famous Yosemite and other pictures. He uses special very high resolution long exposure film (I think direct from Kodak). Then he scans the negative using a very high (2000dpi?) scanner, and generates a 300 MB image file. He then goes into that image and corrects the image, fixing areas of too much shadow or whatnot. Then he prints on a 1000 dpi 48 inch by 36 inch photo printer, generating a small number of signed prints that you can hang on the wall. I don't know that I have all the numbers correct. But I have looked at a mountain scene with trees in the distance, so small you can barely distinguish them with the naked eye, and when you look at it with a magnifier you can distinguish leaves on those tiny trees. I like to think they look more like windows than pictures. The prints sell for several thousand dollars each - a good combination of film and digital technology.
So, assuming that every person on the planet was a Kodak engineer... there are now 0.5E-30 * 7E9 = 3.5E-21 engineers at Kodak now. Or, put another way, 2/700000000000000000000000000000 of one engineer, who could stand stand on a proton and have plenty of rooms for friends - about a billion of them.
That reminds me of a project I was involved in - my company built scanning and vectorizing systems. One of the baby Bells was interested in converting their paper drawings to CAD. It turns out that there is at least one drawing for every one of those little green cans at the side of the road, where the local phone wires are routed to each home. And so also with their bigger boxes, and switches, etc. This company had tens or hundreds of thousands - I forget exactly.
And, of course, all of them were out of date. Many changes had been made and never documented.
We were able to show great efficiencies in using our system (with human involvement) to convert their drawings, which were generally done using good design rules. Then, based on tests, they determined that with a staff of hundreds working, it would take at least two years to convert even one district, during which time they would have to run parallel systems at a huge cost. We tried to convince them to break the problem into smaller pieces, but that was the end of it.
It's been 30 years now, so maybe they finally bit the bullet. But maybe not.
Ha. I used to know (distantly) the scion of a self-made man (I've known several of those, actually). The founder of the company started out during the early days of the Depression. He was homeless, no education, either 1st or 2nd generation immigrant. He walked along the roads picking up bits of metal, and carrying them to the scrap recyclers to make a dime. He slept under bridges. Soon he found enough materials to build a little push cart, and he was able to pick up and bring more scrap in each trip. (I don't know but I assume he also picked up and sold or used stuff that was too good to go to the scrap guys.). Eventually he scrounged up enough money to buy a truck. By then he was able to afford a room in a small fleabag hotel.
By the time of WWII he had a rather successful business, recycling metal.
After WWII he got in to scrapping out war materiel - old ships, jeeps, etc., cutting them into pieces and sending them to the steel plants for reuse. By the time I was sentient Zidell Explorations was a huge presence on the waterfront in Portland OR, running a half mile or a mile along the waterfront. There were always from four to six old ships, military and commercial, getting torn apart. By the late 1960s most of the metal was getting loaded onto ships and sent to Japan, where it was turned into Toyotas. Zidell was one of the largest companies in Oregon by then.
He died. His son had no interest in the business AFAIK. From what I was told he just bought houses and cars, and white powder, and women. He was, by all accounts, a very rich and very bad MF. He did spend some time in jail, IIRC for felony assault.
And thus, just as in The Good Earth, the money recycles back through the system. Others made lots of money selling him toys.
Folks who grow up rich have a very serious disadvantage - they don't have that driving motivation to NOT BE POOR. So they don't work that extra hour. So, generally, they end up working for someone else. They may get paid a lot, but they are still working for the guy, or the family of the guy, who built the company.
And that is the point. Except for the very biggest corporations that were formed out of mergers, back in the day there was one person, or a few persons, who started from almost nothing and BUILT THAT SUCKER. And those are the CEOs and Chairman of MOST corporations. I'm not saying they are nice people - but most of them are indeed self-made, still to this day.
And there is a substantial business risk in transferring the corporate processes to a new, different process. Case in point - a company I used to work for bought SAP, and budgeted 1 year and $300 million for the cost of the software, changing their systems and training for the US half of the company. Three years and almost $1 billion later, they finally were mostly done. The company cancelled the rollout to the overseas half of the company, and SAP stock dropped 20% the next day.
That old computer system is ingrown into every aspect of a company, down to the color and layout of the receipts handed out for petty cash. Replacing it is very much like replacing the nerves in a body without putting the patient to sleep during the operation. And when, as is common, the big company is the result of a dozen or two dozen mergers of many smaller companies (themselves also mergers), it is likely that each of those smaller divisions is still running on their old systems for the same reason, and it's just too expensive AND dangerous to change.
Citibank reportedly spent $500 million just fixing Y2K bugs in their existing system - and saved their company, according to the reports. Imagine changing operations to fit to a new system written from scratch.
Probably 1/2 of the problems that will crop up will have to do with business processes that nobody realized even existed.
Ten or fifteen years ago, Fortune Magazine (IIRC) published a study of the occupants of the 'head shed' - Chairman and C-level down to VP level executives. They found that a large majority of the whole set had graduate degrees, mostly MBAs. But taking only Chairman and CEO, a majority did not have college degrees, and quite a few did not graduate from high school. Those folks were the ones who had whatever it takes to go out and build a company, and hired the rest. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are examples. Hewlett and Packard may also be examples - they had degrees, but were electrical engineers.
Based on this, I concluded that the drop-out path is much higher risk and requires more self-determination but has higher rewards if you make it - and a job at McDonalds awaits you if you don't make it. Taking the MBA path you are more likely to do well, but unlikely to do extremely well. Some take the ski jump, some ski down the fall line.
Interestingly, a study I read a long while back said that entrepreneurs have a much higher than average incidence of ADD - along with explorers, fighter pilots, and creatives of all types.:D
A long while back I had got transferred from SE to a tech job within the marketing department, and had to at least wear a sport coat and tie. (I bought a Harris Tweed.) I learned fairly quickly that a business suit is just a toolbox. Some of the outer pockets are mostly for show (or some very thin materials - notes, etc., maybe a few business cards), but the inner pockets are designed to carry the tools of the trade - daytimer, wallet+checkbook thing, business cards, etc. Keys and some other personal items go into the pants pockets. Properly designed suits (and sport coats) are what allows men to carry all that stuff around without a purse. So it's just like a mechanic's toolbox.
Suit coats used to have watch pockets, but those are no longer necessary. It might be interesting to re-introduce a similar pocket for the cell phone. Although that might be better in an inner pocket, with a pickpocket preventative of some kind - maybe a mechanism that keeps that pocket closed unless the arm is raised into the position to remove it?
It has long been the case that (except for the fashion plate 'shiny suit' types), the more expensive suits were built in such a way that you could carry more in them without it showing. A very good tailor will ask you "Which side do you carry?", which refers to which side you put your wallet in. The tailor will adjust the suit to hang straight when the wallet is in that breast pocket, so it's hard to tell that it's there.
Actually that's our job - as the HW geeks keep making things faster, we have to work hard to use up all those extra cycles! I remember the days when we could fill all of RAM (actually core) with a single subroutine! Now we have to make all these wisy things, useless services, and general useless cycle-burners to try to keep up. It used to be that we could just toss in an extra FOR I=1,1000; NEXT I and use up a second or two. Now we have to load up the I/O with hundreds of packets in a dozen different phony protocols tossing messages back and forth across the network to do the same thing.
It's a tough job, but we're up to it! Object oriented programming has helped a lot, and scripting languages have helped even more, but those HW folks aren't making our lives any easier. It's like they don't even WANT to slow things down.
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Now there is even a cruising-sailboat-specific linux distribution: Navigatrix.
Note - I have no relation, never tried it. I did download it last year but never got round to messing with it. But they guy behind it seems to have the right approach. Right now my boat is at least a year, maybe two, from being to the point where I need to think about it, but I do plan to run a 'glass cockpit' based on linux. Since I will be single handling most of the time, my goal is to be able to control most functions from anywhere on the boat, including via WiFi.
Navigatrix is a complete operating system for your computer. It is put together by people on boats for people on boats.
Navigatrix is a compilation of electronic tools for navigation, communication, information and security that you can use offshore, on shore, or at anchor. It is simple and lightweight and based on the latest Debian/Ubuntu has to offer.
Navigatrix is the fastest, most efficient, and versatile Linux distribution for cruisers and navigators available. Installed on the hard drive it works on most any personal computer built in the last 12 years.
Navigatrix is nearly indestructible running on a 4 gigabyte, or larger, USB stick or SD card. It allows access to your hard drive data if you choose, and even works if your hard drive doesn't.
Navigatrix can also be installed on your hard drive for increased speed and versatility.
Download Navigatrix, install your charts, and test it out. You may find it is exactly what you've been seeking. Navigatrix is free to use and copy. If you have been charged, or you charge, more than a nominal copying fee it's not right.
mixes his coolant fluid with the oil.
Someone who did this was on Car Talk asking for advice on what to do just within the last couple of months.:)
I believe that at present, installing a performance chip in the car's engine control voids the warranty. So, the issue is already in play. the interesting question would be, what if I root the environmental control so I can use my own music streaming service? Should that void the engine warranty? I think not, if for no other reason than the proposition that it should not be possible to mess up the engine by modifying the dashboard system, for security and federal emissions mandate reasons. Anything accessible by the driver should be in a sandbox.
They should never replace physical controls but merely augment them.
An interesting question - what is a physical control? AFAIK the gas pedals in almost all modern cars is merely a computer interface, asking the car's computer to make the car go faster. So it's a physical control in one sense, but a computer control in another. And of course in every recent car I've driven the dashboard instruments (speedometer, tach, etc.) are all computer output - you can watch them go through the start-up calibration sequence. I haven't kept up but I wouldn't be at all surprised if the same is true of the various knobs and buttons on the dashboard.
As sensor and display technologies march on, I suspect it will get harder to determine whether a given dashboard item is a physical device or some form of touch-screen technology. The actual squishy dashboard material itself could be the display.
the very first internet hack of a medical system (back in the late 1980s or mid 1990s IIRC) was, in fact, an MRI or CAT scanner in San Diego. This predated virus problems - it was just a computer that was on the internet, and someone was able to figure out the default user/pass. I suspect it was a CAT scanner, because according to what I read back then, the penetrator could have adjusted the parameters in such a way as to cause lethal injury. I can't imagine how an MRI could do that. In this case, the penetrator was a white hat - a researcher, IIRC.
A long time ago I worked for a medical equipment company, and learned that there are also some systemic biases that greatly increase the costs. Note I did not say 'inflate', because it truly is a complex problem with no magic solution.
So, this company made dialysis machines, which were largely sold to hospitals. These machines included a blood pump, which is basically a piece of clear 1/2" vinyl tubing formed into about 2/3 of a circle, with a triangular 'cam' with little rollers that went around and around, squeezing the tubing and forcing the blood to proceed. A simple, elegant machine.
The following factors applied:
The tubing had to be replaced for each dialysis. For liability reasons, the hospitals had to buy it from the company - if a patient experienced any problem during dialysis, the fact that the hospital used an 'off-brand' tube supplier would make them effectively 100% liable in court regardless of whether the tubing had anything to do with the problem.
The tubing could not be sterilized and re-used. In the olden days hospital tools were commonly autoclaved and re-used, but in modern hospitals everything - scissors, scalpels, whatever - is disposable because this eliminates a whole raft of liability issues, and simplifies the supply chain inside the hospital.
The number of dialysis machines is not that large, so most pieces of medical equipment are not in the commodity marketplace. Think fancy CAD workstations vs. desktop PCs.
Anything that has to be approved by FDA (or FCC, or FAA, etc., plus UL and/or CSA, etc.) has a very large upfront certification cost - $millions. This has to be amortized over a relatively small number of items, and if even a resistor is changed in a piece of medical equipment, it has to be re-certified. If the original supplier of the tubing changes, it also has to be recertified.
From other experience of mine, the company's liability insurance costs were most likely in the range of 30% of gross revenues.
The result of all this was that a piece of vinyl tubing that was AFAICT identical to tubing that you buy at the hardware store for $1 per foot today, was cut in one foot pieces, sterilized and packaged by the company and sold to hospitals for $150 per piece back then, in the late 1970s. And they only made about 22% profit. This was/is a relatively small company, and not inhabited by a bunch of overpaid financial manipulators. The overall cost of the system just added up.
I think the biggest problem is that the present liability climate, though better than it used to be, is still greatly to the advantage of the insurance companies. The insurance companies, after all, make their profits as a relatively stable percentage of gross revenues, which are related to accounted and perceived risk. The worse the liability situation, the better for both plaintiffs and defendants, and worse for the rest of us. And, since government sees every failure as an excuse for more regulation and bureaucracy, that is also true of government.
Good explanation, thanks. this makes me ponder whether Lightsquared might do better to go to an Ultra Wideband technology, which IIUC would eliminate nearly all interference problems, and would also provide nearly ultimate privacy protection against third parties snooping the signal. (Which might make the 'official' snooper-types uncomfortable.) It would certainly make Lightsquared a disruptive technology, a generation ahead of anyone else.
OK - referred to logic, not morality.
WRT Santa Claus, do not conflate questions of first-order logic (with inconsistent axioms one can prove anything) with Reconstructabiliity. I will expand a bit. One of the fundamental principles of systems theory is that the controller of any system has to have more degrees of freedom than the system. (If you think about it a bit, this is easily shown.) Otherwise it is not fully controlling the system. From this we find that no component of the system can prove that it 'knows' all of the possible mechanisms by which system states vary. This can be analogized as "the controller may or may not be able to 'reach into the system' and manipulate the system state by a mechanism not recognized within the system". The 'may or may not' is key - an outside observer might be able to tell, but entities that are within the system can not prove it either way.
That is not at all related to belief; it only shows that for this particular question of the existence of God, the answer is unprovable. So, be comfortable in you belief, and repect others' beliefs as _possible_ (however unlikely in your opinion), and we'll all get along. But if someone tells you that the Energizer Bunny is the true earthly manifestation of the Creator of everything, I would agree that they're probably wrong.
This reminds me of the Man Who Controlled the Universe in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He had the right attitude.
Actually - if there is a God, he could have created life on an infinity of worlds, and separated all the worlds intentionally.
Yup. Every observation is compatible with the God Hypothesis.
Thus it has no predictive power. A hypothesis that "explains" anything actually explains nothing. You might as well say "something made it happen".
Kinda like String theory. ;)
From first principles of systems science, it is fundamentally impossible to prove either the existence or non-existence of an entity outside the Universe that controls it. For every argument on one side, there is an equally valid counter-argument that can not be disproved from within the system.
It's perfectly OK and equally 'intelligent' to assume a God or assume no God, no need to put down those who disagree with you. Just relax, live and let live. See the Reconstructability Theorem. I would also note that insults and expressions of contempt are not useful logical arguments.
All life really needs is a liquid solvent, energy, and enough time.
Actually it needs one more thing - a way to store and manipulate information.
'Like' goes back a long way before Valley girls. It was a common usage among beatniks in the 1950s (as satirized by Maynard G Krebs in the 1960s TV show "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis"). Now I'm a bit curious to see how it originated - it seems to be connected to a certain way of thinking. I think 'Like' might have a bit more contextual/semantic meaning than 'um' as it seems to act as an approximate, non-committal referent to the following phrase. Perhaps this invites the listener to participate in the decision as to the validity of the relation between the phrases being connected by 'like'.
Are you by any chance from descended from Cretans?
No, probably Goedel. :)
Dang! :P it should have been divide by 2^30, not 10^30! I must have had a brain fart. the numbers did seem pretty far off at the end, but I was at work...
I think Apple is becoming the new Godwin's law.
I've wondered for a long time why nobody makes injection-molded keys with the letters going all the way through. I don't think the cost would be too much - probably twice as much per key, but how much of the price of a keyboard is that? It would complicate inventory etc. but I think that for at least high end keyboards, it could be successful.
They could even be backlit if the character part were translucent. Oooh, pretty!
I don't recall much about Kodachrome (I suppose Wikipedia is your friend), but in general most low end digital photography does not have the 'color gamut' of the best films, nor the maximum resolution. The color gamut is (more or less) the range between the darkest and lightest values for all the color spectrum. Low end digital cameras just don't have the range, which is why 'high dynamic range' photography, which uses Photoshop or Gimp or whatever to digitally merge several photos of the same scene taken at different brightnesses (f-stops), is a popular technique.
Also, except at the very high end, digital photography still does not have the resolution. There are two senses - first, film is made of grains, which vary in size somewhat and are placed randomly (as a natural physical process). So the resolution is not a single number but a range - it's like a mosaic made of randomly sized stones, which maps edges in a more natural way. Second, the grain size of even good 35mm film is still better (at least IMHO) than equivalent digital camera sensors, depending on various parameters (film speed, type of film, etc.) Digital images are a fixed array of pixels. I suppose some of this might be a kind of analog to the differences that some folks argue about, between LP records and CDs. But it's more true for images.
One prize winning professional nature photographer I used to know takes pictures using an 8x10 camera, similar to what Ansel Adams used to take his famous Yosemite and other pictures. He uses special very high resolution long exposure film (I think direct from Kodak). Then he scans the negative using a very high (2000dpi?) scanner, and generates a 300 MB image file. He then goes into that image and corrects the image, fixing areas of too much shadow or whatnot. Then he prints on a 1000 dpi 48 inch by 36 inch photo printer, generating a small number of signed prints that you can hang on the wall. I don't know that I have all the numbers correct. But I have looked at a mountain scene with trees in the distance, so small you can barely distinguish them with the naked eye, and when you look at it with a magnifier you can distinguish leaves on those tiny trees. I like to think they look more like windows than pictures. The prints sell for several thousand dollars each - a good combination of film and digital technology.
So, assuming that every person on the planet was a Kodak engineer ... there are now 0.5E-30 * 7E9 = 3.5E-21 engineers at Kodak now. Or, put another way, 2/700000000000000000000000000000 of one engineer, who could stand stand on a proton and have plenty of rooms for friends - about a billion of them.
Sorry, couldn't resist! :D
That reminds me of a project I was involved in - my company built scanning and vectorizing systems. One of the baby Bells was interested in converting their paper drawings to CAD. It turns out that there is at least one drawing for every one of those little green cans at the side of the road, where the local phone wires are routed to each home. And so also with their bigger boxes, and switches, etc. This company had tens or hundreds of thousands - I forget exactly.
And, of course, all of them were out of date. Many changes had been made and never documented.
We were able to show great efficiencies in using our system (with human involvement) to convert their drawings, which were generally done using good design rules. Then, based on tests, they determined that with a staff of hundreds working, it would take at least two years to convert even one district, during which time they would have to run parallel systems at a huge cost. We tried to convince them to break the problem into smaller pieces, but that was the end of it.
It's been 30 years now, so maybe they finally bit the bullet. But maybe not.
Ha. I used to know (distantly) the scion of a self-made man (I've known several of those, actually). The founder of the company started out during the early days of the Depression. He was homeless, no education, either 1st or 2nd generation immigrant. He walked along the roads picking up bits of metal, and carrying them to the scrap recyclers to make a dime. He slept under bridges. Soon he found enough materials to build a little push cart, and he was able to pick up and bring more scrap in each trip. (I don't know but I assume he also picked up and sold or used stuff that was too good to go to the scrap guys.). Eventually he scrounged up enough money to buy a truck. By then he was able to afford a room in a small fleabag hotel.
By the time of WWII he had a rather successful business, recycling metal.
After WWII he got in to scrapping out war materiel - old ships, jeeps, etc., cutting them into pieces and sending them to the steel plants for reuse. By the time I was sentient Zidell Explorations was a huge presence on the waterfront in Portland OR, running a half mile or a mile along the waterfront. There were always from four to six old ships, military and commercial, getting torn apart. By the late 1960s most of the metal was getting loaded onto ships and sent to Japan, where it was turned into Toyotas. Zidell was one of the largest companies in Oregon by then.
He died. His son had no interest in the business AFAIK. From what I was told he just bought houses and cars, and white powder, and women. He was, by all accounts, a very rich and very bad MF. He did spend some time in jail, IIRC for felony assault.
And thus, just as in The Good Earth, the money recycles back through the system. Others made lots of money selling him toys.
Folks who grow up rich have a very serious disadvantage - they don't have that driving motivation to NOT BE POOR. So they don't work that extra hour. So, generally, they end up working for someone else. They may get paid a lot, but they are still working for the guy, or the family of the guy, who built the company.
And that is the point. Except for the very biggest corporations that were formed out of mergers, back in the day there was one person, or a few persons, who started from almost nothing and BUILT THAT SUCKER. And those are the CEOs and Chairman of MOST corporations. I'm not saying they are nice people - but most of them are indeed self-made, still to this day.
And there is a substantial business risk in transferring the corporate processes to a new, different process. Case in point - a company I used to work for bought SAP, and budgeted 1 year and $300 million for the cost of the software, changing their systems and training for the US half of the company. Three years and almost $1 billion later, they finally were mostly done. The company cancelled the rollout to the overseas half of the company, and SAP stock dropped 20% the next day.
That old computer system is ingrown into every aspect of a company, down to the color and layout of the receipts handed out for petty cash. Replacing it is very much like replacing the nerves in a body without putting the patient to sleep during the operation. And when, as is common, the big company is the result of a dozen or two dozen mergers of many smaller companies (themselves also mergers), it is likely that each of those smaller divisions is still running on their old systems for the same reason, and it's just too expensive AND dangerous to change.
Citibank reportedly spent $500 million just fixing Y2K bugs in their existing system - and saved their company, according to the reports. Imagine changing operations to fit to a new system written from scratch.
Probably 1/2 of the problems that will crop up will have to do with business processes that nobody realized even existed.
Sturgeon's Law
Ten or fifteen years ago, Fortune Magazine (IIRC) published a study of the occupants of the 'head shed' - Chairman and C-level down to VP level executives. They found that a large majority of the whole set had graduate degrees, mostly MBAs. But taking only Chairman and CEO, a majority did not have college degrees, and quite a few did not graduate from high school. Those folks were the ones who had whatever it takes to go out and build a company, and hired the rest. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are examples. Hewlett and Packard may also be examples - they had degrees, but were electrical engineers.
Based on this, I concluded that the drop-out path is much higher risk and requires more self-determination but has higher rewards if you make it - and a job at McDonalds awaits you if you don't make it. Taking the MBA path you are more likely to do well, but unlikely to do extremely well. Some take the ski jump, some ski down the fall line.
Interestingly, a study I read a long while back said that entrepreneurs have a much higher than average incidence of ADD - along with explorers, fighter pilots, and creatives of all types. :D
A long while back I had got transferred from SE to a tech job within the marketing department, and had to at least wear a sport coat and tie. (I bought a Harris Tweed.) I learned fairly quickly that a business suit is just a toolbox. Some of the outer pockets are mostly for show (or some very thin materials - notes, etc., maybe a few business cards), but the inner pockets are designed to carry the tools of the trade - daytimer, wallet+checkbook thing, business cards, etc. Keys and some other personal items go into the pants pockets. Properly designed suits (and sport coats) are what allows men to carry all that stuff around without a purse. So it's just like a mechanic's toolbox.
Suit coats used to have watch pockets, but those are no longer necessary. It might be interesting to re-introduce a similar pocket for the cell phone. Although that might be better in an inner pocket, with a pickpocket preventative of some kind - maybe a mechanism that keeps that pocket closed unless the arm is raised into the position to remove it?
It has long been the case that (except for the fashion plate 'shiny suit' types), the more expensive suits were built in such a way that you could carry more in them without it showing. A very good tailor will ask you "Which side do you carry?", which refers to which side you put your wallet in. The tailor will adjust the suit to hang straight when the wallet is in that breast pocket, so it's hard to tell that it's there.
Actually that's our job - as the HW geeks keep making things faster, we have to work hard to use up all those extra cycles! I remember the days when we could fill all of RAM (actually core) with a single subroutine! Now we have to make all these wisy things, useless services, and general useless cycle-burners to try to keep up. It used to be that we could just toss in an extra FOR I=1,1000; NEXT I and use up a second or two. Now we have to load up the I/O with hundreds of packets in a dozen different phony protocols tossing messages back and forth across the network to do the same thing.
It's a tough job, but we're up to it! Object oriented programming has helped a lot, and scripting languages have helped even more, but those HW folks aren't making our lives any easier. It's like they don't even WANT to slow things down.