Quote: Their original submission suggests that maybe Linux needs to buttress the perception of its reliability with a better financial model -- possibly through a new kind of crowd funding which could also be extended to all open source software, or even to journalism).
We do have one form of crowd funding up-and-running right now. I just became a Patreon supporter of Ubuntu MATE. I was skeptical of Patreon, but over time I've warmed to it and begun to think it's actually brilliant. I'd love to see more open source projects getting on Patreon. I mean, example. . . I was severely peeved when Adobe took Lightroom subscription-only, and that was the end of my dealings with them. So, now I'm using RawTherapee here, and I'd be fine with supporting it through Patreon. That's a different kind of subscription, and a far more palatable one to me.
Basically, I think most cars made by most companies now are very ugly. Teslas are the exception; they're sleek and clean looking. (And the homely, awkward Tesla Model X is the exception to the exception.)
Electric cars are already more convenient than gas cars today — for those who can charge at home, or who can park at night any place where they have access to electricity. Going to the gas station is a nuisance, believe it or not. Plugging your car in when you come home takes five seconds, not five minutes. And then there's the superior driving experience to consider.
Even on road trips, we're still looking at one or two 20-30 minute charging stops per day, which doesn't seem like any great burden. (Unless you're trying to make the Cannonball Run!) You don't have to stand next to your car and babysit it for half an hour; you can go grab lunch.
My HTC Vive doesn't make me dizzy, is only a bit cumbersome (largely because I haven't yet sprung for the new cordless upgrade), and I got prescription inserts that work Just Fine. I've been using it since the system was released, and there's a lot more software now. I have no idea about "hitting mainstream", since everyone seems to have a different idea of what qualifies as mainstream. What I do know is that VR is working pretty well for a lot of us out here, and it doesn't appear to be going away at all.
I saw this teaser yesterday, then today the "Valve Reveals" headline on Slashdot. Oh great, Valve are already giving us the lowdown on it! That was quick! Then look closer, and this is only about the teaser image. Somebody at/. needs to learn what "reveal" means, because this isn't it. Get back to us when you've got some info we can use, 'kay?
More expensive than a Model 3, but less range and acceleration, more homely looking. . But it has a hatch back! . Clearly this is the perfect car and will crush the 3 in sales.
Not true. Go configure one on Tesla's website. The base model with no options is $35,000 before savings. If you include the "imagined" fuel savings (an estimate — but yes, electricity really is cheaper than gasoline) and the tax break that's going away in a few months (but hasn't yet!), then the result is $26,950.
They're launching this service in New York and Paris now? I'd think waste streams in the USA and France are relatively well controlled. My understanding is that most of the ocean plastic is going down the rivers in developing countries, or did I hear wrong?
From TFA: "When people come to me for advice on buying a computer that comes with a Linux-based operating system pre-installed, my first suggestion is always System76. While other companies, such as Dell, also make great laptops running Ubuntu, for instance, System76 stands above the rest by also offering its own operating system -- Pop!_OS (which is based on Ubuntu). In other words, System76 has better control over the overall customer experience."
My own "overall customer experience" with the Thelio that I recently bought was this: It came with Pop!_OS, which I dutifully tried out. Its quirks and limitations were so irritating that within three days I gave up on it, wiped the drive and installed Ubuntu MATE, and everything has been running smoothly since then. Great hardware. I have no idea what they are trying to do with Pop!_OS, though.
I don't believe it. In my more than half century of life I've never heard of the -fold suffix being used in the way you describe, and quick search only turns up references (including a Wikipedia page) that equate it with "times". If you have any source for your assertion, I'd like to see that.
Your observations are right, but your explanation is wrong. You even named Metallica as an example, which is a dead giveaway, as they were notorious for releasing CDs with all the dynamic range crushed out of them. They don't sound bad because "digital", they sound bad because some recording engineer turned the compression dial to 11.
Yes. This. CDs can sound incredibly good if they're mastered right, but that's something record producers no longer have any interest in. Basically any rock or pop CD from about 2000 onward is going to sound crummy. Also, any recording from earlier than that if it has been remastered. When I see REMASTERED on a CD label, I mentally translate that as SPECIAL EBOLA EDITION.
Vinyl is not the music equivalent of homeopathy. Vinyl is a way to sidestep the loudness wars and get recordings that aren't afflicted with horrible dynamic range compression. Pop and rock CDs from roughly 2000 onward have generally been sonically crushed and sound like garbage. LP releases, for the most part, don't. That's the decision of the record companies and their recording engineers, and you'd have to ask them for the explanation of why it's done that way, because I don't know. I just have to deal with the results, and that means always buying new releases on vinyl.
I always buy new rock music on vinyl, because new CD releases are always afflicted with crushing dynamic range compression. Yes, CD beats vinyl handily if both are mastered properly, but where are you going to get a properly mastered CD these days? A CD that's sonically crushed will sound like crap when new, and it will sound like crap forever. I find that any rock CD pressed after 1999 (more or less) is probably bad.
New LP releases are typically mastered "okay", not with as much dynamic range as they often had in the 1980s for example, but perfectly listenable. How we arrived at this point, I can't understand, but that's what record companies are shipping.
quote: "Automotive development cycles are long. What if they get it wrong and EVs don't prove to be universally applicable; for example because some can't charge at their homes?"
Autos made today also have a long service life. So, let's think about the used market. If electric cars take a substantial portion of the new market in the near future, there could be a glut of used combustion cars. Then companies still producing new combustion cars will find themselves squeezed on both sides, trying to compete both against desirable new BEVs and bargain used ICEs.
You might consider what happened to film cameras. Hardly anyone is making new film cameras today, and nobody is doing it on a large scale. It's partly because the use of film has declined so much, but also because those photographers still shooting film find a seemingly endless supply of dirt-cheap vintage cameras on eBay.
Well then. We just need to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea . . . and turn it on!
But substantial parts of it are, in fact, open source, and it is, in fact, made in the USA from domestic and foreign components. System76 have been very clear about what that means in their blog and their interviews. I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to tout what they've done, especially when nobody else is doing it. The only semi-valid gripe is that they haven't done as much as some people feverishly imagined they might.
I really shouldn't have even looked at the comment section. When any company tries to do something new, something different, something better, there's always a mob waiting to attack, attack, for any reason their vivid little imaginations can dream up.
It's not really open source! It's not really made in the USA! It's not really anything new! It's wildly overpriced! etc., etc
And they miss the big picture. These machines are far more attractive than the generic towers System76 were selling before, but not much more expensive. They appear to be thoughtfully designed and well constructed. The same company is now producing their own hardware and their own Linux distro to mate up with it, so everything should "just work". Who has done anything like this for Linux before? Who else was going to?
Fed up with Apple, coming from the Mac world Last year I built my own Linux rig based on Ryzan and Ubuntu MATE. I did a lot of research, didn't cut any corners, used all highly reviewed components. And it performs very well when everything is working right. OK, the Ncase M1 was kind of expensive and hard to get. I had to shuffle some components around and experiment to get the temps down. And I can't sleep it, because the video output never wakes up. And there's audio corruption that comes and goes at random. And there's an annoying vibration in the case that comes and goes, and I've never quite been able to track down and fix. And the system does lock up once in a while, not often, but more often than my Mac Pro ever did. But you know I've been wrangling computers for a long time, and I can learn to live with a some quirks. How many normal, non-geekish folk would put up with all that? Why should I even have to put up with all that?
The Thelio, by all reasoning, should be an unquestionably better machine than the one I built. I want it. I want to leave all this homebrew nonsense and constant troubleshooting behind.
I believe the SEC will also need to prove that Musk *intended* to manipulate the stock price with his dumb tweet. (There's no law against just being dumb.) I don't think Musk actually was trying to manipulate the stock, and how they're going to make they're argument I'm not sure. This may not be the slam-dunk that some people expect.
Furthermore, the SEC action may cause far more upheaval in Tesla's stock price and more harm to investors than the incident they are suing over. Is that really sensible? But you know, they want to make an example... They've said as much. This is about regulatory muscle-flexing and generating headlines.
This is a civil action, not a criminal one. Thus, even if he loses Musk does not become a felon and (I'm pretty sure) doesn't lose the security clearance that he needs for his SpaceX activities.
The SEC can ban him from serving as CEO or chair of a publicly traded company; they can remove him from top spot at Tesla, but not from SpaceX which is privately held.
Contrary to what many imagine, Tesla would not implode without Elon Musk. He probably thinks it would, because monumental ego, but he's wrong. Tesla is already set up to be a gold mine, a money-printing machine. It's not just the Model 3 that's on track to be profitable, but also the utility-scale battery storage systems. They haven't got a lot of press, haven't generated much drama, but since the facility in Australia proved wildly successful, demand for those is going to explode.
If this investigation causes the stock to tank, I'll call it a great opportunity to buy in.
quote: "If a second event (B) happens after a first event (A), for example, then B cannot affect the outcome of A."
But is that really what classical physics says? Does the chain of cause-and-effect not work when you trace the timeline in reverse? Then B can be interpreted as the cause of A. I think I can remember something about physicists struggling to explain why there is an arrow of time: why there is even a distinction between past and future.
Consider the decay of an unstable isotope. What "causes" the decay to happen when-and-where it does? It's random, isn't it? It can only be described statistically, by way of half-life. But if you mentally play that film in reverse, following the chain of events from future-to-past, then suddenly it becomes obvious why the decay event had to happen when-and-where it did, because that point is where the spray of decay particles intersect. The decay is "caused" by things in the future of its own timeline, and it's impossible to fit that into our spacetime continuum at any other point.
This was amazingly accessible, like BASIC if you had a BASIC where everything was created visually with a GUI—which is very different from having a visual GUI editor as some kind of mere accessory sidecar. Rather than create your code in one IDE, and a GUI in another, and then try to graft them together (like IB on the Mac), CanDo had you create your GUI which you could then embed code objects into. Your bits of code were simply properties of GUI objects, although it was also possible to have dedicated code-holding objects with no visual presence. It wasn't perfect, because large projects could become disorganized, but for relatively smaller stuff it was brilliant.
So why didn't it get traction; why didn't it take over the world? For one, CanDo was an Amiga thing, and therefore unknown to most of the world. For another, it came out exactly at the time when the internet was taking off, and the rest of the world was going gaga over HTML and Java, while CanDo had no concept of network connectivity.
I think you badly overestimate the cunning and the ability of the "big boys" to swoop in and take away the market Tesla has pioneered.
quote, "But they... can flood the market with a dozen models each in a year or so if they really want to." No, they can't. It takes several years to bring a new car from initial concept through design, engineering, testing and production engineering. On top of that, the supply of lithium-ion cells will be a constraining factor for a while. GM or VW or Toyota can't just flip a switch and then suddenly BEVs are rolling off the assembly lines. Getting competitive BEVs into production will require time and commitment.
I think you may also overestimate all the supposedly vast resources that these giant companies could bring to BEV production. They're big, but they aren't growth companies. Even if you had an executive team fired up and ready to commit (which is itself a bit of a stretch), they still have to justify new capital expenditures to corporate boards and stockholders who are conditioned to expect steady dividends from a cash cow, not this kind of unasked-for upheaval.
quote, "And the one thing that Tesla knows is that they aren't making money." But they are, in fact, making money on producing and selling cars. A couple of companies did independent tear-downs of the Model 3 and estimated that Tesla are making around 30% profit margin on it, which is quite good by auto industry standards. Meanwhile, the rumor mill keeps whispering that GM lose thousands on every Chevy Bolt they make. (Which is not crazy, considering that Toyota lost money on their entire first generation of Prius production--something I doubt they have any reason to regret.)
quote, "Do you think that not just one but EVERY manufacturer is that naive to do a Kodak and think "Ah, digital photography will never take off?"" That's not what happened with Kodak. I'm glad you brought it up, though, because the Kodak story is actually quite instructive. Kodak invented the digital camera, and Kodak management were perfectly aware that digital photography was the future, and they had elaborate plans for the transition to it. They even had early success in the market, with Kodak digital cameras briefly outselling Canon's. Then in 2004 it all fell apart. The DSLR fad hit, which was a category of digital camera Kodak didn't expect to become mass-market popular and didn't produce. At the same time, the public "snapped" over to digital photography much more quickly than anybody anticipated, and Kodak's film sales plummeted in a matter of months. Their business still revolved around film and processing, and there was no possible way for them to deal with that.
Will something similar happen in cars? It can't happen exactly the same way, because cars are a very different industry that operates on a different scale and different time frames. However, it's definitely possible for existing car makers to be put under a huge amount of stress if the market shifts under their feet much more suddenly than they had planned for. They are big but not that nimble.
Slashdot Mirror
Quote: Their original submission suggests that maybe Linux needs to buttress the perception of its reliability with a better financial model -- possibly through a new kind of crowd funding which could also be extended to all open source software, or even to journalism).
We do have one form of crowd funding up-and-running right now. I just became a Patreon supporter of Ubuntu MATE. I was skeptical of Patreon, but over time I've warmed to it and begun to think it's actually brilliant. I'd love to see more open source projects getting on Patreon. I mean, example. . . I was severely peeved when Adobe took Lightroom subscription-only, and that was the end of my dealings with them. So, now I'm using RawTherapee here, and I'd be fine with supporting it through Patreon. That's a different kind of subscription, and a far more palatable one to me.
Basically, I think most cars made by most companies now are very ugly. Teslas are the exception; they're sleek and clean looking. (And the homely, awkward Tesla Model X is the exception to the exception.)
Electric cars are already more convenient than gas cars today — for those who can charge at home, or who can park at night any place where they have access to electricity. Going to the gas station is a nuisance, believe it or not. Plugging your car in when you come home takes five seconds, not five minutes. And then there's the superior driving experience to consider.
Even on road trips, we're still looking at one or two 20-30 minute charging stops per day, which doesn't seem like any great burden. (Unless you're trying to make the Cannonball Run!) You don't have to stand next to your car and babysit it for half an hour; you can go grab lunch.
My HTC Vive doesn't make me dizzy, is only a bit cumbersome (largely because I haven't yet sprung for the new cordless upgrade), and I got prescription inserts that work Just Fine. I've been using it since the system was released, and there's a lot more software now. I have no idea about "hitting mainstream", since everyone seems to have a different idea of what qualifies as mainstream. What I do know is that VR is working pretty well for a lot of us out here, and it doesn't appear to be going away at all.
I saw this teaser yesterday, then today the "Valve Reveals" headline on Slashdot. Oh great, Valve are already giving us the lowdown on it! That was quick! Then look closer, and this is only about the teaser image. Somebody at /. needs to learn what "reveal" means, because this isn't it. Get back to us when you've got some info we can use, 'kay?
More expensive than a Model 3, but less range and acceleration, more homely looking. . But it has a hatch back! . Clearly this is the perfect car and will crush the 3 in sales.
Not true. Go configure one on Tesla's website. The base model with no options is $35,000 before savings. If you include the "imagined" fuel savings (an estimate — but yes, electricity really is cheaper than gasoline) and the tax break that's going away in a few months (but hasn't yet!), then the result is $26,950.
My 2010 Tesla Roadster can't communicate with Tesla anymore, because it depends on the 2G phone service that's been phased out almost everywhere.
They're launching this service in New York and Paris now? I'd think waste streams in the USA and France are relatively well controlled. My understanding is that most of the ocean plastic is going down the rivers in developing countries, or did I hear wrong?
From TFA: "When people come to me for advice on buying a computer that comes with a Linux-based operating system pre-installed, my first suggestion is always System76. While other companies, such as Dell, also make great laptops running Ubuntu, for instance, System76 stands above the rest by also offering its own operating system -- Pop!_OS (which is based on Ubuntu). In other words, System76 has better control over the overall customer experience."
My own "overall customer experience" with the Thelio that I recently bought was this: It came with Pop!_OS, which I dutifully tried out. Its quirks and limitations were so irritating that within three days I gave up on it, wiped the drive and installed Ubuntu MATE, and everything has been running smoothly since then. Great hardware. I have no idea what they are trying to do with Pop!_OS, though.
I don't believe it. In my more than half century of life I've never heard of the -fold suffix being used in the way you describe, and quick search only turns up references (including a Wikipedia page) that equate it with "times". If you have any source for your assertion, I'd like to see that.
Your observations are right, but your explanation is wrong. You even named Metallica as an example, which is a dead giveaway, as they were notorious for releasing CDs with all the dynamic range crushed out of them. They don't sound bad because "digital", they sound bad because some recording engineer turned the compression dial to 11.
Yes. This. CDs can sound incredibly good if they're mastered right, but that's something record producers no longer have any interest in. Basically any rock or pop CD from about 2000 onward is going to sound crummy. Also, any recording from earlier than that if it has been remastered. When I see REMASTERED on a CD label, I mentally translate that as SPECIAL EBOLA EDITION.
Vinyl is not the music equivalent of homeopathy. Vinyl is a way to sidestep the loudness wars and get recordings that aren't afflicted with horrible dynamic range compression. Pop and rock CDs from roughly 2000 onward have generally been sonically crushed and sound like garbage. LP releases, for the most part, don't. That's the decision of the record companies and their recording engineers, and you'd have to ask them for the explanation of why it's done that way, because I don't know. I just have to deal with the results, and that means always buying new releases on vinyl.
I always buy new rock music on vinyl, because new CD releases are always afflicted with crushing dynamic range compression. Yes, CD beats vinyl handily if both are mastered properly, but where are you going to get a properly mastered CD these days? A CD that's sonically crushed will sound like crap when new, and it will sound like crap forever. I find that any rock CD pressed after 1999 (more or less) is probably bad.
New LP releases are typically mastered "okay", not with as much dynamic range as they often had in the 1980s for example, but perfectly listenable. How we arrived at this point, I can't understand, but that's what record companies are shipping.
quote: "even years after it turned out everyone else cheated too and generally significantly worse"
Examples? What's your source on that? This is the first I've even heard of anything like that, and I think I follow automotive news pretty closely.
quote: "Automotive development cycles are long. What if they get it wrong and EVs don't prove to be universally applicable; for example because some can't charge at their homes?"
Autos made today also have a long service life. So, let's think about the used market. If electric cars take a substantial portion of the new market in the near future, there could be a glut of used combustion cars. Then companies still producing new combustion cars will find themselves squeezed on both sides, trying to compete both against desirable new BEVs and bargain used ICEs.
You might consider what happened to film cameras. Hardly anyone is making new film cameras today, and nobody is doing it on a large scale. It's partly because the use of film has declined so much, but also because those photographers still shooting film find a seemingly endless supply of dirt-cheap vintage cameras on eBay.
Well then. We just need to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea . . . and turn it on!
But substantial parts of it are, in fact, open source, and it is, in fact, made in the USA from domestic and foreign components. System76 have been very clear about what that means in their blog and their interviews. I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to tout what they've done, especially when nobody else is doing it. The only semi-valid gripe is that they haven't done as much as some people feverishly imagined they might.
I really shouldn't have even looked at the comment section. When any company tries to do something new, something different, something better, there's always a mob waiting to attack, attack, for any reason their vivid little imaginations can dream up.
It's not really open source!
It's not really made in the USA!
It's not really anything new!
It's wildly overpriced!
etc., etc
And they miss the big picture. These machines are far more attractive than the generic towers System76 were selling before, but not much more expensive. They appear to be thoughtfully designed and well constructed. The same company is now producing their own hardware and their own Linux distro to mate up with it, so everything should "just work". Who has done anything like this for Linux before? Who else was going to?
Fed up with Apple, coming from the Mac world Last year I built my own Linux rig based on Ryzan and Ubuntu MATE. I did a lot of research, didn't cut any corners, used all highly reviewed components. And it performs very well when everything is working right. OK, the Ncase M1 was kind of expensive and hard to get. I had to shuffle some components around and experiment to get the temps down. And I can't sleep it, because the video output never wakes up. And there's audio corruption that comes and goes at random. And there's an annoying vibration in the case that comes and goes, and I've never quite been able to track down and fix. And the system does lock up once in a while, not often, but more often than my Mac Pro ever did. But you know I've been wrangling computers for a long time, and I can learn to live with a some quirks. How many normal, non-geekish folk would put up with all that? Why should I even have to put up with all that?
The Thelio, by all reasoning, should be an unquestionably better machine than the one I built. I want it. I want to leave all this homebrew nonsense and constant troubleshooting behind.
Forgot to add...
I believe the SEC will also need to prove that Musk *intended* to manipulate the stock price with his dumb tweet. (There's no law against just being dumb.) I don't think Musk actually was trying to manipulate the stock, and how they're going to make they're argument I'm not sure. This may not be the slam-dunk that some people expect.
Furthermore, the SEC action may cause far more upheaval in Tesla's stock price and more harm to investors than the incident they are suing over. Is that really sensible? But you know, they want to make an example... They've said as much. This is about regulatory muscle-flexing and generating headlines.
First, IANAL. With that said...
This is a civil action, not a criminal one. Thus, even if he loses Musk does not become a felon and (I'm pretty sure) doesn't lose the security clearance that he needs for his SpaceX activities.
The SEC can ban him from serving as CEO or chair of a publicly traded company; they can remove him from top spot at Tesla, but not from SpaceX which is privately held.
Contrary to what many imagine, Tesla would not implode without Elon Musk. He probably thinks it would, because monumental ego, but he's wrong. Tesla is already set up to be a gold mine, a money-printing machine. It's not just the Model 3 that's on track to be profitable, but also the utility-scale battery storage systems. They haven't got a lot of press, haven't generated much drama, but since the facility in Australia proved wildly successful, demand for those is going to explode.
If this investigation causes the stock to tank, I'll call it a great opportunity to buy in.
quote: "If a second event (B) happens after a first event (A), for example, then B cannot affect the outcome of A."
But is that really what classical physics says? Does the chain of cause-and-effect not work when you trace the timeline in reverse? Then B can be interpreted as the cause of A. I think I can remember something about physicists struggling to explain why there is an arrow of time: why there is even a distinction between past and future.
Consider the decay of an unstable isotope. What "causes" the decay to happen when-and-where it does? It's random, isn't it? It can only be described statistically, by way of half-life. But if you mentally play that film in reverse, following the chain of events from future-to-past, then suddenly it becomes obvious why the decay event had to happen when-and-where it did, because that point is where the spray of decay particles intersect. The decay is "caused" by things in the future of its own timeline, and it's impossible to fit that into our spacetime continuum at any other point.
He mentioned Hypercard. I'd say, bring back something like the CanDo programming environment that we used to have on Amiga.
Re: https://randocity.com/2018/03/...
This was amazingly accessible, like BASIC if you had a BASIC where everything was created visually with a GUI—which is very different from having a visual GUI editor as some kind of mere accessory sidecar. Rather than create your code in one IDE, and a GUI in another, and then try to graft them together (like IB on the Mac), CanDo had you create your GUI which you could then embed code objects into. Your bits of code were simply properties of GUI objects, although it was also possible to have dedicated code-holding objects with no visual presence. It wasn't perfect, because large projects could become disorganized, but for relatively smaller stuff it was brilliant.
So why didn't it get traction; why didn't it take over the world? For one, CanDo was an Amiga thing, and therefore unknown to most of the world. For another, it came out exactly at the time when the internet was taking off, and the rest of the world was going gaga over HTML and Java, while CanDo had no concept of network connectivity.
I think you badly overestimate the cunning and the ability of the "big boys" to swoop in and take away the market Tesla has pioneered.
quote, "But they ... can flood the market with a dozen models each in a year or so if they really want to." No, they can't. It takes several years to bring a new car from initial concept through design, engineering, testing and production engineering. On top of that, the supply of lithium-ion cells will be a constraining factor for a while. GM or VW or Toyota can't just flip a switch and then suddenly BEVs are rolling off the assembly lines. Getting competitive BEVs into production will require time and commitment.
I think you may also overestimate all the supposedly vast resources that these giant companies could bring to BEV production. They're big, but they aren't growth companies. Even if you had an executive team fired up and ready to commit (which is itself a bit of a stretch), they still have to justify new capital expenditures to corporate boards and stockholders who are conditioned to expect steady dividends from a cash cow, not this kind of unasked-for upheaval.
quote, "And the one thing that Tesla knows is that they aren't making money." But they are, in fact, making money on producing and selling cars. A couple of companies did independent tear-downs of the Model 3 and estimated that Tesla are making around 30% profit margin on it, which is quite good by auto industry standards. Meanwhile, the rumor mill keeps whispering that GM lose thousands on every Chevy Bolt they make. (Which is not crazy, considering that Toyota lost money on their entire first generation of Prius production--something I doubt they have any reason to regret.)
quote, "Do you think that not just one but EVERY manufacturer is that naive to do a Kodak and think "Ah, digital photography will never take off?"" That's not what happened with Kodak. I'm glad you brought it up, though, because the Kodak story is actually quite instructive. Kodak invented the digital camera, and Kodak management were perfectly aware that digital photography was the future, and they had elaborate plans for the transition to it. They even had early success in the market, with Kodak digital cameras briefly outselling Canon's. Then in 2004 it all fell apart. The DSLR fad hit, which was a category of digital camera Kodak didn't expect to become mass-market popular and didn't produce. At the same time, the public "snapped" over to digital photography much more quickly than anybody anticipated, and Kodak's film sales plummeted in a matter of months. Their business still revolved around film and processing, and there was no possible way for them to deal with that.
Will something similar happen in cars? It can't happen exactly the same way, because cars are a very different industry that operates on a different scale and different time frames. However, it's definitely possible for existing car makers to be put under a huge amount of stress if the market shifts under their feet much more suddenly than they had planned for. They are big but not that nimble.