> They didn't really shelve it, they continued to invest in the > development of the digital photography and made many achievements. > They improved the CCDs a lot, built the digital part of the first > professional SLRs (using bodies from Nikon and later Canon). However > they were unable to keep the pace and were soon surpassed by the > Japanese companies
I believe Kodak also built the only sensor package optimized specifically for black-and-white images, which sadly (but not surprisingly) didn't go anywhere in the market.
> The distrust of recruiters is well placed. I don't know how many of > them I've come across who say something like, "We need someone who > knows SQL databases." I've gone so far as to ask them, "Which one? > You realize that SQL is a language, not a database." I usually > get blank stares as a result.
I have substantial Oracle RDBMS experience on my resume, so of course whenever a company in my area is implementing Oracle Financials I get dozens of calls from fly-by-night recruiters who want to stuff me into one of their "open requisitions". I'm quite good at explaining technical topics to non-techies, but I must confess to one failure: I have never succeeded in explaining the difference between a back-end database and a front-end application suite, or how a company as large as Oracle can have more than one product line, to a single one of these body snatchers.
> Kodak has a share of the digital camera market but they have to compete with > companies known to consumers as camera manufacturers such as Canon and Nikon.
Of course they could have bought or merged with, say, Minolta, a company with an established brand and excellent camera technology that was always playing third fiddle behind Nikon and Leica [1] and put their digital efforts behind the combination.
sPh
[1] Minolta actually built the Rx series of SLRs for Leica which then charged 3x the price that Minota was able to charge for the exact same assemblies.
> How would you store these images? Again, nobody had computers. You couldn't write > these tapes to your HDD. You couldn't upload them to a server or burn them to CD. > You'd be storing a box of tapes. Why do that when you could just store photos instead?
And in fairness to those 1975 skeptics this question still hasn't been really answered; we as a family would find it far easier to make prints from my spouse's family's 1870-era glass plate negatives or our large collection of 1980-era negatives and prints than to locate and do anything with the digital shots we took in 2002.
> In terms of more cold hiring I think companies just have to put in some more > legwork. I work at a university and our hiring process is all our own. Does > mean that you have to work more at it, the manager has to write up the > position, HR posts it on the site (it can be posted/linked elsewhere is > you like), resumes are collected and the manager has to review them, decide > who to interview, etc. Not as easy as just telling some recruiter "Go find me > a programmer," but you get better candidates.
I've been both a participant in and the decision maker for hiring at some fairly large technology companies, and I have to say I have always been baffled by people who report that "HR screens the resumes". What the heck does HR know about the technical capabilities and backgrounds we need for this position or how to pick them up from a resume or cover letter? If the manager making the hire isn't directly involved in the process from the beginning what are the chances he will make a good decision? Similarly with all these filters people talk about their process using (advanced degrees, 23.7 years experience in a technology released in 1998, etc). I generally do specify a high school diploma (or GED), but what I want to know is what has this person _done_, what has he/she accomplished, what new things has he learned and successfully used rapidly when the chips were down.
And don't even get me started on "certificates", "certifications", etc. The one filter I have considered putting in place is "no one with a PMP certificate shall ever be hired", but that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of useless pieces of paper.
> "After repeated calls from NASA to wake up Mars Exploration Rover > Spirit from its low-energy hibernation mode, mission control is beginning > to realize the ill-fated robot may never wake up again.
I would wish to have such ill-fate as exceeding my predicted lifetime by a factor of 10x and accomplishing 20x more than believed possible within that lifetime.
I am a little unclear as to why my comment was scored "flamebait". At it happens I work in the large-scale electricity world, and the amount of aluminum and steel that is used for high-voltage transmission lines is staggering. As is the amount of copper used for underground high-voltage cables in places like NYC and Chicago. A room temperature superconductor is badly needed for those applications, but it would need to be almost as cheap as aluminum to be useful. Silver ain't.
> The point is, I would highly doubt that a news periodical like Time would > just pull a story out of their arses without any actual basis to them.
You do understand that even in their greatest era of actual news reporting, all news-providing entities are in the fundamental business of providing entertainment for their customers? And that newness, controversy, and oh-my-gawd-doom stories have been entertaining to the masses since, oh 30,000 BC? The idea that anything that appears in Time Magazine has a factual basis, or even a strong factual basis, can be easily refuted by scanning through a few issues from the 1930s.
As soon as you see the word "richer", as in "richer user experience", hold on to your wallet. The only thing rich about a "richer user experience" is how rich it is going to make the person forcing it on you.
> You know planes aren't held aloft by their engines, right? I mean, it can be hard > to find an appropriate landing surface, and you certainly have less maneuvering > capabilities, but a plane at 20,000' has a lot of potential energy, and a very > efficient mechanism for converting that energy into stable, controllable flight.
Besides the concept of depending on luck and chance to safely land thousands of passengers instead of the engineering, training, and procedures that ended the routine yearly death toll of passenger flying around 1960, the other minor point is that volcanic ash destroys gas turbine engines. Not "breaks them so they need a bit of maintenance", but destroys them. So now you have hundreds of airplanes with 1000 or so destroyed engines scattered all over northern Europe. And a global capacity for making new engines of a few dozen a month.
> No common IT infrastructure? I'd tell them to attack that before implementing anything > new company wide. Without a common IT infrastructure you'd have to get a poll for > exactly what each division has (does each division have a common infrastructure, I > hope so) and pray that each division has standardized on something whether it > be *Nix, Windows, Mac or whatever. Once you have that, getting an electronic document > handling system will be much easier as you'll have only to worry about file > formats from one office suite (and possibly PDFs).
Well, that's one school of thought. And one which has been on the ascendancy for the last ten years, in part because there are philosophical arguments for it and in part because it fits very well with the business/sales model of the large consulting/outsourcing firms. And of course if "standardized" means "standardized on Microsoft" then MS is in favor too;-)
However, there are other theories of business organization, and I have worked for quite large organizations which reject the concept of company-wide standardization. In their view, such efforts lead directly to lack of flexibility, growth of "preventer of IT services" bureaucracies (or any other service, not just IT), and rapidly inflating costs. So don't assume that the OP's executives _want_ a nice tidy "architecture" for their firm.
> Its the advertisers fault. I understand that advertising is all about making > sure your message is heard above the noise but they are the ones who jumped > the shark. > > When it was just banners and the occasional frame with some adds in it, I > never attempted to filter them out other than with my own mental powers. > When they started doing pop-ups and float overs, I even tolerated it. When > they started making adds that pretended to be system messages, virus scanner > alerts, and other applications that really struck me as fraudulent and abusive > and so I started blocking ads and helping others do the same.
The dirty secret here is that there has never in human history been a reliable way to measure the effectiveness of advertising. Macy's puts a 4-page spread of children's clothing in the Sunday newspaper and the next week sales of children's clothes go up. Is that a result of parents reading the ad, absorbing it, and making a purchase as a result? Is it the result of the ad jogging the parents' memory about the need to buy back to school clothes, but they would have gone to Macy's anyway because they always have? Or is it just back to school time and the sales would have gone up anyway? No one ever knew.
Now there are direct and provable methods to precisely measure the effectiveness of specific ads on the Internet, and a good measure of the effectiveness of advertising overall. The result? Advertising turns out to be very INeffective and has very little affect on people's decisions. The consumer goods industry and the ad-makers are having a really, really difficult time dealing with that.
> Other than the fact that it passingly mentions Greenpeace at all, > what do you find wrong with the summary? > > I'm genuinely curious. I tried to find any anti-nuclear spin (no > pun intended) there, but couldn't find any.
Byron Station has consistently been one of the best-run and best-performing nuclear power plants in the world from the day it went into service (well before that, actually), so any article that starts out by claiming the opposite is a bit, um, suspect as to the rest.
> If you talking about the Valerie Plame thing, it turns out that there was > no cover up because it wasn't the administration that leaked the name. > Remember Dick Armitage
Remember that Patrick Fitzgerald said he could not complete his investigation because of the conspiracy to obstruct justice, and that there was "a cloud over the Office of the Vice-President"? Remember that Novak testified that Armitage leaked the information to him, but that in no way proved that Armitage was the only person who leaked information, or even that Armitage was the first to leak? Remember the notes in Libby's handwriting on the typed minutes of his meetings with Cheney?
Brilliant analysis. I would also add that you have to factor in Karl Rove retaining his e-mail account and Blackberry on the Republican National Committee server, which was not covered by the Presidential Records Act, for use in his role managing the Republican Party, and then conveniently "forgetting" to switch back to his White House userid when he handled e-mail related to official government business in his government-salaried job. Potentially including the routing of classified information through the non-secure RNC system.
>> Bush may or may not have been inept; on that we will actually >> will have to wait for the verdict of history.
> Then you aren't the type of person/attitude I was sarcastically aiming at:)
I suspect I will have to disappoint you then: personally I think the verdict on the outcomes of W Bush's/policies and actions/ is already in, and those outcomes were, are, and will be for the (now shortened) lifespan of the United States colossally bad. However, whether Bush was inept or was actually very ept and wily in executing those bad policies is something that will only become clear after a long time and with the release of such records as may still exist.
> No, because the Bush/Cheney administration are incredibly talented at > pulling one of the biggest conspiracies in the history of the US while > being inept, ignorant, uneducated, stupid, and a horrible public speaker.
Bush may or may not have been inept; on that we will actually will have to wait for the verdict of history. Cheney was however one of the most stunningly successful senior executives in US history, getting more of his agenda accomplished than any other President except FDR and possibly more than him as well (so much is still classified so we don't and may never know). To call Cheney "stupid" or "inept" is, well, foolish.
And if it is impossible for a large group to keep a secret in Washington DC, answer me this: besides Libby, Addington, and Yoo, who were the other 37 members of Cheney's staff from 2001-2009? Oh wait, their names, salaries, titles, and duties were kept secret for 8 years, Cheney used his self-granted power to classify the information secret, and it never leaked. Nor did the members or agenda of Cheney's 2001 oil conference ever leak. Again, after the events of 2002-2006 to say it is not possible to manage a secret concerted effort in DC is foolish.
I love the spin that is being put on this: "found", "technical problems", etc. - esp in the Washington Post. These e-mails just happened to have technical problems and get "lost" when 10 of the senior members of the Bush/Cheney Administration where under investigation concerning a conspiracy to violate foreign intelligence secrecy laws. Just happened to get "lost", yessirree.
So let's see if I understand: you want to take a simple, straightforward, easy-to-understand architecture with no single points of failure that would be very easy to recover in the event of a problem and extremely easy to recreate at a different site in a few hours in the event of a disaster, and replace it will a vastly more complex system that uses tons of shiny new buzzwords. All to serve 150 end users for whom you have quantified no complaints related to the architecture other than it might need to be sped up a bit (or perhaps find a GUI interface for the ftp server, etc).
This should turn out well.
sPh
As far as "distributed redundant system", strongly suggested you read Moans Nogood's essay "You Don't Need High Availability" and think very deeply about it before proceeding.
Slashdot Mirror
> They didn't really shelve it, they continued to invest in the
> development of the digital photography and made many achievements.
> They improved the CCDs a lot, built the digital part of the first
> professional SLRs (using bodies from Nikon and later Canon). However
> they were unable to keep the pace and were soon surpassed by the
> Japanese companies
I believe Kodak also built the only sensor package optimized specifically for black-and-white images, which sadly (but not surprisingly) didn't go anywhere in the market.
sPh
> The distrust of recruiters is well placed. I don't know how many of
> them I've come across who say something like, "We need someone who
> knows SQL databases." I've gone so far as to ask them, "Which one?
> You realize that SQL is a language, not a database." I usually
> get blank stares as a result.
I have substantial Oracle RDBMS experience on my resume, so of course whenever a company in my area is implementing Oracle Financials I get dozens of calls from fly-by-night recruiters who want to stuff me into one of their "open requisitions". I'm quite good at explaining technical topics to non-techies, but I must confess to one failure: I have never succeeded in explaining the difference between a back-end database and a front-end application suite, or how a company as large as Oracle can have more than one product line, to a single one of these body snatchers.
sPh
> Kodak has a share of the digital camera market but they have to compete with
> companies known to consumers as camera manufacturers such as Canon and Nikon.
Of course they could have bought or merged with, say, Minolta, a company with an established brand and excellent camera technology that was always playing third fiddle behind Nikon and Leica [1] and put their digital efforts behind the combination.
sPh
[1] Minolta actually built the Rx series of SLRs for Leica which then charged 3x the price that Minota was able to charge for the exact same assemblies.
> How would you store these images? Again, nobody had computers. You couldn't write
> these tapes to your HDD. You couldn't upload them to a server or burn them to CD.
> You'd be storing a box of tapes. Why do that when you could just store photos instead?
And in fairness to those 1975 skeptics this question still hasn't been really answered; we as a family would find it far easier to make prints from my spouse's family's 1870-era glass plate negatives or our large collection of 1980-era negatives and prints than to locate and do anything with the digital shots we took in 2002.
sPh
> In terms of more cold hiring I think companies just have to put in some more
> legwork. I work at a university and our hiring process is all our own. Does
> mean that you have to work more at it, the manager has to write up the
> position, HR posts it on the site (it can be posted/linked elsewhere is
> you like), resumes are collected and the manager has to review them, decide
> who to interview, etc. Not as easy as just telling some recruiter "Go find me
> a programmer," but you get better candidates.
I've been both a participant in and the decision maker for hiring at some fairly large technology companies, and I have to say I have always been baffled by people who report that "HR screens the resumes". What the heck does HR know about the technical capabilities and backgrounds we need for this position or how to pick them up from a resume or cover letter? If the manager making the hire isn't directly involved in the process from the beginning what are the chances he will make a good decision? Similarly with all these filters people talk about their process using (advanced degrees, 23.7 years experience in a technology released in 1998, etc). I generally do specify a high school diploma (or GED), but what I want to know is what has this person _done_, what has he/she accomplished, what new things has he learned and successfully used rapidly when the chips were down.
And don't even get me started on "certificates", "certifications", etc. The one filter I have considered putting in place is "no one with a PMP certificate shall ever be hired", but that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of useless pieces of paper.
sPh
> "After repeated calls from NASA to wake up Mars Exploration Rover
> Spirit from its low-energy hibernation mode, mission control is beginning
> to realize the ill-fated robot may never wake up again.
I would wish to have such ill-fate as exceeding my predicted lifetime by a factor of 10x and accomplishing 20x more than believed possible within that lifetime.
sPh
I am a little unclear as to why my comment was scored "flamebait". At it happens I work in the large-scale electricity world, and the amount of aluminum and steel that is used for high-voltage transmission lines is staggering. As is the amount of copper used for underground high-voltage cables in places like NYC and Chicago. A room temperature superconductor is badly needed for those applications, but it would need to be almost as cheap as aluminum to be useful. Silver ain't.
sPh
At least for the Flash cookies on Wintel, the BetterPrivacy plug-in seems to be doing a good job of deleting them for me.
sPh
> in _silver_ and aluminum layers deposited on a
Someone didn't get the memo: we need a /cheap/ room temperature superconductor that can be drawn into cable, not something made of silver.
sPh
> The point is, I would highly doubt that a news periodical like Time would
> just pull a story out of their arses without any actual basis to them.
You do understand that even in their greatest era of actual news reporting, all news-providing entities are in the fundamental business of providing entertainment for their customers? And that newness, controversy, and oh-my-gawd-doom stories have been entertaining to the masses since, oh 30,000 BC? The idea that anything that appears in Time Magazine has a factual basis, or even a strong factual basis, can be easily refuted by scanning through a few issues from the 1930s.
sPh
This is but one of many shenanigans the new Virginia AG is involved in.
sPh
As soon as you see the word "richer", as in "richer user experience", hold on to your wallet. The only thing rich about a "richer user experience" is how rich it is going to make the person forcing it on you.
sPh
Here's some information from Boeing on the volcanic ash and airliners.
sPh
> You know planes aren't held aloft by their engines, right? I mean, it can be hard
> to find an appropriate landing surface, and you certainly have less maneuvering
> capabilities, but a plane at 20,000' has a lot of potential energy, and a very
> efficient mechanism for converting that energy into stable, controllable flight.
Besides the concept of depending on luck and chance to safely land thousands of passengers instead of the engineering, training, and procedures that ended the routine yearly death toll of passenger flying around 1960, the other minor point is that volcanic ash destroys gas turbine engines. Not "breaks them so they need a bit of maintenance", but destroys them. So now you have hundreds of airplanes with 1000 or so destroyed engines scattered all over northern Europe. And a global capacity for making new engines of a few dozen a month.
sPh
> No common IT infrastructure? I'd tell them to attack that before implementing anything
> new company wide. Without a common IT infrastructure you'd have to get a poll for
> exactly what each division has (does each division have a common infrastructure, I
> hope so) and pray that each division has standardized on something whether it
> be *Nix, Windows, Mac or whatever. Once you have that, getting an electronic document
> handling system will be much easier as you'll have only to worry about file
> formats from one office suite (and possibly PDFs).
Well, that's one school of thought. And one which has been on the ascendancy for the last ten years, in part because there are philosophical arguments for it and in part because it fits very well with the business/sales model of the large consulting/outsourcing firms. And of course if "standardized" means "standardized on Microsoft" then MS is in favor too ;-)
However, there are other theories of business organization, and I have worked for quite large organizations which reject the concept of company-wide standardization. In their view, such efforts lead directly to lack of flexibility, growth of "preventer of IT services" bureaucracies (or any other service, not just IT), and rapidly inflating costs. So don't assume that the OP's executives _want_ a nice tidy "architecture" for their firm.
sPh
> Its the advertisers fault. I understand that advertising is all about making
> sure your message is heard above the noise but they are the ones who jumped
> the shark.
>
> When it was just banners and the occasional frame with some adds in it, I
> never attempted to filter them out other than with my own mental powers.
> When they started doing pop-ups and float overs, I even tolerated it. When
> they started making adds that pretended to be system messages, virus scanner
> alerts, and other applications that really struck me as fraudulent and abusive
> and so I started blocking ads and helping others do the same.
The dirty secret here is that there has never in human history been a reliable way to measure the effectiveness of advertising. Macy's puts a 4-page spread of children's clothing in the Sunday newspaper and the next week sales of children's clothes go up. Is that a result of parents reading the ad, absorbing it, and making a purchase as a result? Is it the result of the ad jogging the parents' memory about the need to buy back to school clothes, but they would have gone to Macy's anyway because they always have? Or is it just back to school time and the sales would have gone up anyway? No one ever knew.
Now there are direct and provable methods to precisely measure the effectiveness of specific ads on the Internet, and a good measure of the effectiveness of advertising overall. The result? Advertising turns out to be very INeffective and has very little affect on people's decisions. The consumer goods industry and the ad-makers are having a really, really difficult time dealing with that.
sPh
> Other than the fact that it passingly mentions Greenpeace at all,
> what do you find wrong with the summary?
>
> I'm genuinely curious. I tried to find any anti-nuclear spin (no
> pun intended) there, but couldn't find any.
Byron Station has consistently been one of the best-run and best-performing nuclear power plants in the world from the day it went into service (well before that, actually), so any article that starts out by claiming the opposite is a bit, um, suspect as to the rest.
sPh
Interesting - a couple of Cheney fans with mod points apparently just hit the thread. Hi guys!
sPh
> If you talking about the Valerie Plame thing, it turns out that there was
> no cover up because it wasn't the administration that leaked the name.
> Remember Dick Armitage
Remember that Patrick Fitzgerald said he could not complete his investigation because of the conspiracy to obstruct justice, and that there was "a cloud over the Office of the Vice-President"? Remember that Novak testified that Armitage leaked the information to him, but that in no way proved that Armitage was the only person who leaked information, or even that Armitage was the first to leak? Remember the notes in Libby's handwriting on the typed minutes of his meetings with Cheney?
sPh
Brilliant analysis. I would also add that you have to factor in Karl Rove retaining his e-mail account and Blackberry on the Republican National Committee server, which was not covered by the Presidential Records Act, for use in his role managing the Republican Party, and then conveniently "forgetting" to switch back to his White House userid when he handled e-mail related to official government business in his government-salaried job. Potentially including the routing of classified information through the non-secure RNC system.
sPh
>> Bush may or may not have been inept; on that we will actually
>> will have to wait for the verdict of history.
> Then you aren't the type of person/attitude I was sarcastically aiming at :)
I suspect I will have to disappoint you then: personally I think the verdict on the outcomes of W Bush's /policies and actions/ is already in, and those outcomes were, are, and will be for the (now shortened) lifespan of the United States colossally bad. However, whether Bush was inept or was actually very ept and wily in executing those bad policies is something that will only become clear after a long time and with the release of such records as may still exist.
sPh
> No, because the Bush/Cheney administration are incredibly talented at
> pulling one of the biggest conspiracies in the history of the US while
> being inept, ignorant, uneducated, stupid, and a horrible public speaker.
Bush may or may not have been inept; on that we will actually will have to wait for the verdict of history. Cheney was however one of the most stunningly successful senior executives in US history, getting more of his agenda accomplished than any other President except FDR and possibly more than him as well (so much is still classified so we don't and may never know). To call Cheney "stupid" or "inept" is, well, foolish.
And if it is impossible for a large group to keep a secret in Washington DC, answer me this: besides Libby, Addington, and Yoo, who were the other 37 members of Cheney's staff from 2001-2009? Oh wait, their names, salaries, titles, and duties were kept secret for 8 years, Cheney used his self-granted power to classify the information secret, and it never leaked. Nor did the members or agenda of Cheney's 2001 oil conference ever leak. Again, after the events of 2002-2006 to say it is not possible to manage a secret concerted effort in DC is foolish.
sPh
I love the spin that is being put on this: "found", "technical problems", etc. - esp in the Washington Post. These e-mails just happened to have technical problems and get "lost" when 10 of the senior members of the Bush/Cheney Administration where under investigation concerning a conspiracy to violate foreign intelligence secrecy laws. Just happened to get "lost", yessirree.
sPh
I am unfortunately fairly old, and I agree with the grandparent that "ess que ell" was the common pronunciation through the 1980s.
sPh
So let's see if I understand: you want to take a simple, straightforward, easy-to-understand architecture with no single points of failure that would be very easy to recover in the event of a problem and extremely easy to recreate at a different site in a few hours in the event of a disaster, and replace it will a vastly more complex system that uses tons of shiny new buzzwords. All to serve 150 end users for whom you have quantified no complaints related to the architecture other than it might need to be sped up a bit (or perhaps find a GUI interface for the ftp server, etc).
This should turn out well.
sPh
As far as "distributed redundant system", strongly suggested you read Moans Nogood's essay "You Don't Need High Availability" and think very deeply about it before proceeding.