Reflection. It need not be line-of-sight. (I really thought I made that clear.) Indeed that was what the research I was reading was about: How to handle reflections and other aberations with a low transistor count.
The plus would be that you'd not need point-to-point optical cables or some sort of optical router. Put a device in the case, give it electricity and it could "see", directly or indirectly all of the other components.
IMAP is a protocol designed for email. It only has a vocabulary for handling email. Download this message, now flag it "Read", move this to this folder, delete that. It hasn't the scope to handle other functions.
Calendars are fundamentally different then email. Their concepts are all different, the type of information is all different, and most importantly there's generally lots of complex rules on the backend that folks want to search out concordant times etc.
As to IMAP vs Exchange access ('cause MS Outlook can do both) they can be pretty much both be set to have the same load. The difference is that MS Outlook can take advantage of the propriatary calendering, address book, and message routing functions native to MS Exchange and IMAP + LDAP don't offer as many features (nor as many have pointed out is there yet a good open source standarized calendering option.)
Also, Time magazine reported last year about this, and they pointed out that the kind of speed offered by fiber is the only real bottleneck to creating a truly self aware computer.
Oh please, that old canard about intelligence spontaniously arising out of sufficient processing power.
Throwing hardware at AI hasn't resulted in any fundamental breakthroughs and it isn't likely to. Oh it makes things happen more in scale with us and enables a lot larger cycle budget for increasingly lower-yield strategies but it's really just more of the same.
Self-organizing systems and emergent complexity happen due to underlying architecture. Life has had billons of years and the best incentive possible to evolve this - we're only now beginning to understand the subject.
Assembling a computer with the speed and density of a human brain won't mean it'll suddenly magically become self-aware, open it's IO and and engage us in conversation.
There's been some interesting discussion recently about shifting data transmission off of electrical busses within computers.
The idea is that subsystems could communicate within a computer chassis entirely by light across open space or reflected off of the interior of the chassis. Instead of the complex process of wiring hundreds of chip leads down into packaging all of the data would be sent off and on the chip by tiny lasers & receivers, all built into the chip itself during fabrication. Through a window on the chip case and the CPU could "see" the RAM controller, perhaps even the RAM directly, the graphics controller, the high-speed IO subsystems, etc.
Card edge connectors would still be used for electrical supply and some signaling but it'd be relegated to slow-speed stuff. This would greatly simplify motherboard design as well as chip packaging. Of course this would come with it's own problem: Dust would be a showstopper. Reflections - their propagation and interference properties would become issues. The signaling systems might require an uneconomical transistor count on the chips. Overclockers would obsess about albedo and air filters.
I'm trying to find some good links for this but not finding any - anyone else come across any good discussion on this recently?
POP3is a lovely protocol but it has one terrible disadvantage: It's a download only process. Oh sure email can be left on the server but there's no flagging, folders, etc. possible.
IMAP4 is an interesting protocol. Many developers (Steve Dorner of Eudora being a notable one) complain that IMAP makes too many assumptions about how folks are implementing it, the underlying system, etc. On the other hand it works well at this point for managing remote mailboxes, setting flags, folders, partially downloading messages, etc.
So why one over the other? POP is fine for tied-to-one machine folks. You get your mail, you download it, it's your problem. IMAP is suited to those who work from multiple machines or prefer the security of their email being kept on a server.
Guess which population is growing? More importantly guess which population corporate types are part of?
As an email administrator which would you prefer to work with:
Every person having a mail file on their own computer where it can get damaged, stolen, lost along with the laptop, etc.
or
One server holding all of the mail safely & securely, backed up nightly, easy for you to trouble-shoot, folks able to access it from any machine?
Now you see why MS supports IMAP: Their customers really pushed hard for it. Is it part of some big MS-conspiracy? Possibly but there's no good evidence and certianly no rationale.
Furthermore IMAP doesn't give a whit about "Mailer Type" (if it even has such a thing as an option in it's protocol which I doubt.) MS is using their encrypted login as a means to enforce this, nothing so trivially hackable as a client ID string.
Actually encrypted logins are a Good Thing. It's just unfortunate MS is using them as a club to force folks to use only their email products and not supporting industry standard login strategies.
So now we have AOL, the largest ISP requiring their email client (there were trials years ago with opening it up, indeed Claris Emailer still does so though the application was EOL'd 3 years ago by Apple) and now MSN doing the same. Indeed in spite of the fact that there are now perfecty good clients and secure ways of working these folks want to go back to the old "lock 'em in" strategy.
You mean MS Excel - the Mac program that got ported to Windows?
Yep kids, Excel started out as a Mac application. Developing MS Word & MS Excel gave Bill lots of access deep inside Apple. This came in handy when MS reinvented Apple's UI and put - what else - the Mac applications on it.
No, they don't need that as they're the only PC maker with a few billion in the bank, steady sales and lay-offs under 50. What Wintel or Lintel businesses are in such good shape? Mebbe some distribs should look into an AOL desktop icon so they can make some cash, stop going under.
If I want to eject my music CD from the CDROM I should be able to press the button labeled EJECT and have it pop out, not have to drag it to the trash! - Ease of use people..
Ease of use? How about knowing what you're talking about?
New Mac keyboards do have an "Eject" key. It's even labelled "Eject". Furthermore as the article noted (you did bother to read it before rushing here to pontificate, right?) the F10 key also acts as an eject button duplicating this functioniality on new keyboards but also extending it to all.
The rest of your posting is similarly clueless - have you considered actually using MacOS X before expressing such strong (and uninformed) opinions about it?
We really need a new moderate-option that would stick: Mouthy Bozo.
Not to throw any cold water but Mitch Kapor's record is not perfect. He was pretty much pushed out of Lotus. He then went on to found On Technology which was going to revolutionize the world.
The On Platform was developed with much money and some very big names. It was basically reusable software components - they lasted a few years in a couple of products, the company continued to blow through money and was sold off and now has nothing in common with the original. The breakthrough tech has long since dissapeared.
Since then he's had mixed success mostly trading in on his old-man-of-the-industry status. It's great that he's joining Ximian but this guy has had his share of misses along with a spectacular hit a generation ago.
Disclusure: I was hired the day On was bought from Kapor but never worked for him and his former staff seemed genuinely fond of him
There are numerous features included in Qt/Mac, and among these is an
extensive C++ framework for OS X, support for the Aqua look &feel, OpenGL
support, database support and rich text support. Qt/Mac runs native on Mac
OS X, of course, and is fully carbonised.
Fully native isn't Carbonised. Fully Native is Cocoa or Java. Thus this will likely miss out on many of the fully native features such as support for Aqua, not just "support for the Aqua look &feel".
A previous post aptly pointed out that
GNU always wants to re-invent the wheel. Linux is fine, but they still want to work on HURD, because Linux isn't made by GNU.
What a foolish statement. Linux is a lovely fairly traditionial unix kernel, HURD has always had far more radical goals.
What kind of benefits do you find resulting from having been a Star Trek actor?
I assume you've learned to handle the celebrity-side of "Ohhh - he was on Star Trek" by now but how does it affect you in your day-to-day life, particularly when you've been involved in the high-tech industry?
Does it ever get to be annoying when folks get fixated on your former role? Do you ever take advantage of it and get invited to events you wouldn't be otherwise? How about bring it up when dealing with phone-support ("If I can fix a dilithium interociter & phase through space I can be trusted with the ntp server address!".) How about vendors, try and get new gear out of shops: "But I'm Wil Wheaton, y'know, Wesley from Star Trek - it'd be great PR for you if I said I bought my Whizbang2000 at your store so howzabout it half-off and with that sweet wireless card thown in?"
Or is it you just make headlines when you slap a Beverly Hills cop ("Nooo mooore Beverly!...")
You don't let facts interfere with your opinions, do you?
The Cubes were ~$1500 (different models, discounts at the end.) That's triple $500. At the same time iMacs ranged from $800 up to $1500.
However the Cubes were not "an iMac with no monitor". They were significantly different internally and were clearly designed to bridge the gap between the intended-for-the-home iMac and the high-end big-box G3 line.
Unfortunately while folks are willing to accept limited expansion in an iMac they were unwilling to do so in a "professionial" model, especially when the cost to jump to a G3 wasn't all that much more and it was obviously a more flexible design.
So no, Apple has never sold a Mac in the $500 price range. The lowest they've ever gotten is $799 which then & now buys you an entry-level iMac that one would be well advised to pop some addt'l 3rd party memory in ASAP.
here is a market here: a cheap, small, self-contained printer for digital cameras (or, best, for digital images in general).
Already out. The problem is the digital camera costs a few hundred bucks for a good one, has finicky lighting requirements, and requires storage media & a printer. Things to worry about include camera batteries, printer paper, ink cartridges, outlet & transformer, proper cables, mebbe a laptop, knowing how to work the whole rig... Total investment is several hundred to several thousand dollars; lots of things to break, loose, get stolen, learn about.
A Polaroid camera costs (there numbers are just guesses - I haven't priced this stuff in a decade) under $100, the film is mebbe $1 a print, there's no skill required in getting the image out (Polaroid folks could never understand consumers need to "wave" the pictures) and it's all done automagically. Point - click - wait a minute, it's in your hand ready to look at, label, do again, whatever. A camera, some film, that's it no genius required.
Perhaps [Polaroid] should go with the flow and make [a cemera] that clamps to the "view finder" screen on digital cameras for quick (but expensive) hard copy?
This is almost exactly one of the devices they've been working on. The goal is/was to simultaniously take a digital photo & an instant photo - one for hardcopy and the other for archival or other uses.
Actually you're clearly completely clueless on this topic.
Instant photographs were an absolutely great thing to base a business on. It's certainly as good as sweet fizzy water or a million other things. Before Polaroid you took a photo and either developed it yourself or waited a few days for someone else to do so. After them you had it THERE, right NOW (well, a minute or so.) That's a profound thing - it was revolutionary then and still fundamental now.
This is fantastic in a consumer market. Put one on a table and the fun begins. Take the first picture, see how it came out, try a next, then a third, now it's the photographers turn to get snapped. Did Sue's tan come out - no - try again.
Industrially/governmentally they are also invaluable. For a generation any photo ID made that you could walk away with was a Polaroid. Driver's licenses, school IDs, badges, passes, whatever. Anyone who had to document things also loved these as they immediately saw what they had photographed, were sure if they'd captured what they wanted or not, could drop it in the folder and the matter was closed.
Professional photographers also find Polaroids invaluable. The look is distinctive yet mesmerizing. Rich colors that blended almost like pastels. Aside from their visual quality they were also the perfect tool for proofing a shot, seeing how it would come out before the "real" one was taken. Ask any studio photographer and they'll show you their stock of Polaroid film.
Can quick-develop machines do this? Well only if you want to go to the drop-off, come back in an hour, try and figure out what each shot was, hope they got what you wanted, etc. Quick is NOT the same as instant.
What about digital? If you want to lug along a camera with finicky light requirements and so-so resolution then go print it the pic. It only takes a set of electronics that costs from a few hundred to a few thousands of dollars and is often far less compelling in court then an less tamperable analog photograph.
No, Polaroid had a good business model. Unfortunately they didn't expand from that model (well, not in any significant way) so when it began to contract they were hurt. They also have/had a really dysfunctional culture and an inability to effect fundamental changes internally. Disposable cameras hurt them, digital cameras hurt them, debt-service hurt them, massive overhead hurt them, their pension plan and employee benefits hurt them, their pricey office spaces hurt them, the credit crunch hurt them, but they were broken inside long before these pushed them over the edge.
Frankly they should've outsourced the film & camera production side of things, cut instant-film R&D to maintenance mode, done some customer research and come up with things like the i-Zone ten years ago, streamlined their operations, accelerated their product development time from it's apparent many-year cycle to something reasonable, gotten over their not-invented-here phobia & partnered with a good maker of consumer digital cameras offering their brandname/distribution/cash in return for a private label series, slashed their staffing at all levels 50%, cleaned up their baroque & cumbersome internal policies, legendary bureaucracy and self-destructive infighting.
No, much of the blame for Polaroid goes to the Board for never having put in place a strong President and giving her/him the backing to really go and fix things. It would have meant tearing out the broken parts of the company and slicing off much of the fat but it needed to be done and instead the whole place just ground along until it suffocated.
I've worked with a large number of recent refugees from Polaroid over the years and they all tell the same stories of intrigue, incompetence, infighting, dysfunction and lack of direction.
Net Folders are about worthless. They regularly crap out and nobody knows the voodoo to get them going again. It's another of those odd half thought out things MS pulls every so often which could be interesting yet die on the vine.
Check out Slipstick for more material on Net Folders but trust me now, they're not worth using.
It's all a bit more complicated then presented and all a bit more sad too.
Polaroid did pioneer instant photography. Dr. Edwin Land had the 2nd largest number of patents assigned to him personally in the US. Polaroid was the prototypical high-tech startup that pioneered a new market. They *owned* the instant film market.
Ironically Polaroid also did much of the early work on digital photography and held a number of early patents. They could have rolled out digital cameras long ago but feared cannibalizing their existing markets. So they stayed with the tried-and-true and eventually became irrelevant.
Polaroid was also the classic engineering-run company. Never did market studies. Never did usability testing. Never attempted to create a design identity. If anything they were known for the incredibly clever & complex folding of their cameras (the awesome chemistry was hidden.)
They did try to branch out a bit. In the late 70's they introduced "Polavision", their instant movie system which bombed in a big way. In the recriminations Dr. Land "moved on" and Polaroid was left to continue the course he had left it on, never to really change significantly afterwards.
Oh, they came out with kiddie cameras and cheap cameras and cameras that printed to stickers. Some were decent successes but nothing really ground shaking. Other companies slowly but steadily took away their drivers-license photos and other markets with alternative technologies. For the past few years there've been promises of a new line in digital photography but many of the proposed products are dubious (dual instant-photo with a digital copy?) and all are vapor still.
Polaroid does have about 2 billion in assets - properties, patents, plants, contracts, etc. Their employees have all been aware of what has been happening and even in a company famous for dedication folks have been jumping ship for the past few years. The retirees are all up in arms and are likely screwed as their benefits are tied up in the company.
Lessons? Don't stop innovating. Don't define yourself as "The Something Company". Complete domination of your market is only important as long as your market is unique. Don't rely only on completely amazing technology to sell your product; you need to identify, listen-to & cultivate your customers.
Sure folks still use 5 year old Wintel hardware but rarely as a desktop system and even more rarely do they go out and buy it just to put a new OS onto.
I stand by my words.
Few folks use PC's from '96 as a desktop system. Server, firewall, backup box, etc. sure, but not as their desktop system. Not most folks.
Furthermore few folks run out and buy a box from '96 with the goal of scraping off the OS it came with and putting on, in this case MacOS X, in others likely BSD, Linux, etc. and using them as a desktop box. I'm sure it happens but that's really reaching the horizon of practicality.
A 200MHz Pentium isn't much cheaper in up-front dollars then a PII-300 from a year or so later and likely a lot more hassle, BIOS issues, ISA bus, etc. Just to put it in perspective we're talking about boxes that shipped with either Win3.11 or Win95a.
I guess the folks I know are just more cluefull then your friends.
Now you were gonna start dragging out hypotheticals, right?
Yeah, and Apple's the only PC vendor healthy (a few billion in the bank, sales steady and layoff's totalling under 50 folks.)
Look at the legions of cheap PC makers that have evaporated: Leading Edge, Packard-Bell, E-Machines, Gateway struggling. A $500 buck Cube would've been suicidal last year.
... residents with high incomes who pay lots of property taxes and have a lot of money to spend in local businesses.
Residents with high incomes can pay for their own damn highspeed internet access. If they're making good money then it shouldn't be an issue. If they're not making good money I don't see it being as important as other things like infrastructure & job training.
Have you ever heard "Oh Muffy, we can't build the dream-house there - the monthly highspeed internet service bill is too high!"?
How about "The roads suck and the schools are lousy."?
There a couple of serious impediments to abolishing mail.
Universal penetration. Everyone in the USA has a postal address. Park benches are legitimate delivery addresses (yes - tested in court.) Only a fraction of the population has email or will likely have such in the near future.
Universal transmission. I can send a postal letter around the world and assume that the recipient will be able to recieve it. From major world capitols to off-the-map slums postal service has a reasonably good tradition of getting through. Email again requires that the recipient haave the same or some alternative last-mile system - not at all typical.
There are no good address-lookup or general-delivery mechanisms for email. If I want to contact Somebody at BigCorp I can look up BigCorp's address and send a letter to Somebody there, it'll generally get manually routed properly. If I know the town Somebody lives in I can often simply look them up in a ubiquitious phonebook or online and assuming they're listed and have a sufficiently unique name I've got their address. There are some services that attempt to provide this for email but they're mostly useless.
There's a large body of law concerning the privacy of letters, the delivery of such, etc. This is NOT the case for email. Frankly I trust the folks of the USPS to transport my mail securely & reliably far more then I do the monkeys at my ISP and the servers between me & my email's destination.
While there are encryption and authenticaion mechanisms for email they're about useless as far as the general population or even most businesses are concerned. Postal mail has no authentication but it does generally get delivered to the right place securely.
Most postal addresses are good for both letters & package deliveries, neither of which is true for email.
Postal mail is free to recieve and only costs the sender some change. Email requires either a computer system and ISP or access to a public facility offering this.
Courts don't recognize email as a delivery mechanism and certianly not for material that must be signed for.
Frankly with 1 case of transmission of anthrax by postal mail I think the whole topic is foolish and a sad attempt by a columnist to get some attention.
Slashdot Mirror
The plus would be that you'd not need point-to-point optical cables or some sort of optical router. Put a device in the case, give it electricity and it could "see", directly or indirectly all of the other components.
Calendars are fundamentally different then email. Their concepts are all different, the type of information is all different, and most importantly there's generally lots of complex rules on the backend that folks want to search out concordant times etc.
As to IMAP vs Exchange access ('cause MS Outlook can do both) they can be pretty much both be set to have the same load. The difference is that MS Outlook can take advantage of the propriatary calendering, address book, and message routing functions native to MS Exchange and IMAP + LDAP don't offer as many features (nor as many have pointed out is there yet a good open source standarized calendering option.)
Oh please, that old canard about intelligence spontaniously arising out of sufficient processing power.
Throwing hardware at AI hasn't resulted in any fundamental breakthroughs and it isn't likely to. Oh it makes things happen more in scale with us and enables a lot larger cycle budget for increasingly lower-yield strategies but it's really just more of the same.
Self-organizing systems and emergent complexity happen due to underlying architecture. Life has had billons of years and the best incentive possible to evolve this - we're only now beginning to understand the subject.
Assembling a computer with the speed and density of a human brain won't mean it'll suddenly magically become self-aware, open it's IO and and engage us in conversation.
The idea is that subsystems could communicate within a computer chassis entirely by light across open space or reflected off of the interior of the chassis. Instead of the complex process of wiring hundreds of chip leads down into packaging all of the data would be sent off and on the chip by tiny lasers & receivers, all built into the chip itself during fabrication. Through a window on the chip case and the CPU could "see" the RAM controller, perhaps even the RAM directly, the graphics controller, the high-speed IO subsystems, etc.
Card edge connectors would still be used for electrical supply and some signaling but it'd be relegated to slow-speed stuff. This would greatly simplify motherboard design as well as chip packaging. Of course this would come with it's own problem: Dust would be a showstopper. Reflections - their propagation and interference properties would become issues. The signaling systems might require an uneconomical transistor count on the chips. Overclockers would obsess about albedo and air filters.
I'm trying to find some good links for this but not finding any - anyone else come across any good discussion on this recently?
POP3is a lovely protocol but it has one terrible disadvantage: It's a download only process. Oh sure email can be left on the server but there's no flagging, folders, etc. possible.
IMAP4 is an interesting protocol. Many developers (Steve Dorner of Eudora being a notable one) complain that IMAP makes too many assumptions about how folks are implementing it, the underlying system, etc. On the other hand it works well at this point for managing remote mailboxes, setting flags, folders, partially downloading messages, etc.
So why one over the other? POP is fine for tied-to-one machine folks. You get your mail, you download it, it's your problem. IMAP is suited to those who work from multiple machines or prefer the security of their email being kept on a server.
Guess which population is growing? More importantly guess which population corporate types are part of?
As an email administrator which would you prefer to work with:
Now you see why MS supports IMAP: Their customers really pushed hard for it. Is it part of some big MS-conspiracy? Possibly but there's no good evidence and certianly no rationale.
Furthermore IMAP doesn't give a whit about "Mailer Type" (if it even has such a thing as an option in it's protocol which I doubt.) MS is using their encrypted login as a means to enforce this, nothing so trivially hackable as a client ID string.
Actually encrypted logins are a Good Thing. It's just unfortunate MS is using them as a club to force folks to use only their email products and not supporting industry standard login strategies.
So now we have AOL, the largest ISP requiring their email client (there were trials years ago with opening it up, indeed Claris Emailer still does so though the application was EOL'd 3 years ago by Apple) and now MSN doing the same. Indeed in spite of the fact that there are now perfecty good clients and secure ways of working these folks want to go back to the old "lock 'em in" strategy.
Yep kids, Excel started out as a Mac application. Developing MS Word & MS Excel gave Bill lots of access deep inside Apple. This came in handy when MS reinvented Apple's UI and put - what else - the Mac applications on it.
Catty comment, catty reply.
Ease of use? How about knowing what you're talking about?
New Mac keyboards do have an "Eject" key. It's even labelled "Eject". Furthermore as the article noted (you did bother to read it before rushing here to pontificate, right?) the F10 key also acts as an eject button duplicating this functioniality on new keyboards but also extending it to all.
The rest of your posting is similarly clueless - have you considered actually using MacOS X before expressing such strong (and uninformed) opinions about it?
We really need a new moderate-option that would stick: Mouthy Bozo.
The On Platform was developed with much money and some very big names. It was basically reusable software components - they lasted a few years in a couple of products, the company continued to blow through money and was sold off and now has nothing in common with the original. The breakthrough tech has long since dissapeared.
Since then he's had mixed success mostly trading in on his old-man-of-the-industry status. It's great that he's joining Ximian but this guy has had his share of misses along with a spectacular hit a generation ago.
Disclusure: I was hired the day On was bought from Kapor but never worked for him and his former staff seemed genuinely fond of him
Any other measurements you'd care to share?
Polaroid Instant Camera: $25 - $50
Polaroid Instant Film: ~$1 a shot
Digital Camera: $250+
Digital Printer: $250+
Digital Printer Consumables: $1+ a print
ps See http://www.polaroid.com/polinfo/digital_printing
Fully native isn't Carbonised. Fully Native is Cocoa or Java. Thus this will likely miss out on many of the fully native features such as support for Aqua, not just "support for the Aqua look &feel".
What a foolish statement. Linux is a lovely fairly traditionial unix kernel, HURD has always had far more radical goals.
I assume you've learned to handle the celebrity-side of "Ohhh - he was on Star Trek" by now but how does it affect you in your day-to-day life, particularly when you've been involved in the high-tech industry?
Does it ever get to be annoying when folks get fixated on your former role? Do you ever take advantage of it and get invited to events you wouldn't be otherwise? How about bring it up when dealing with phone-support ("If I can fix a dilithium interociter & phase through space I can be trusted with the ntp server address!".) How about vendors, try and get new gear out of shops: "But I'm Wil Wheaton, y'know, Wesley from Star Trek - it'd be great PR for you if I said I bought my Whizbang2000 at your store so howzabout it half-off and with that sweet wireless card thown in?"
Or is it you just make headlines when you slap a Beverly Hills cop ("Nooo mooore Beverly!...")
The Cubes were ~$1500 (different models, discounts at the end.) That's triple $500. At the same time iMacs ranged from $800 up to $1500.
However the Cubes were not "an iMac with no monitor". They were significantly different internally and were clearly designed to bridge the gap between the intended-for-the-home iMac and the high-end big-box G3 line.
Unfortunately while folks are willing to accept limited expansion in an iMac they were unwilling to do so in a "professionial" model, especially when the cost to jump to a G3 wasn't all that much more and it was obviously a more flexible design.
So no, Apple has never sold a Mac in the $500 price range. The lowest they've ever gotten is $799 which then & now buys you an entry-level iMac that one would be well advised to pop some addt'l 3rd party memory in ASAP.
Already out. The problem is the digital camera costs a few hundred bucks for a good one, has finicky lighting requirements, and requires storage media & a printer. Things to worry about include camera batteries, printer paper, ink cartridges, outlet & transformer, proper cables, mebbe a laptop, knowing how to work the whole rig... Total investment is several hundred to several thousand dollars; lots of things to break, loose, get stolen, learn about.
A Polaroid camera costs (there numbers are just guesses - I haven't priced this stuff in a decade) under $100, the film is mebbe $1 a print, there's no skill required in getting the image out (Polaroid folks could never understand consumers need to "wave" the pictures) and it's all done automagically. Point - click - wait a minute, it's in your hand ready to look at, label, do again, whatever. A camera, some film, that's it no genius required.
This is almost exactly one of the devices they've been working on. The goal is/was to simultaniously take a digital photo & an instant photo - one for hardcopy and the other for archival or other uses.
Instant photographs were an absolutely great thing to base a business on. It's certainly as good as sweet fizzy water or a million other things. Before Polaroid you took a photo and either developed it yourself or waited a few days for someone else to do so. After them you had it THERE, right NOW (well, a minute or so.) That's a profound thing - it was revolutionary then and still fundamental now.
This is fantastic in a consumer market. Put one on a table and the fun begins. Take the first picture, see how it came out, try a next, then a third, now it's the photographers turn to get snapped. Did Sue's tan come out - no - try again.
Industrially/governmentally they are also invaluable. For a generation any photo ID made that you could walk away with was a Polaroid. Driver's licenses, school IDs, badges, passes, whatever. Anyone who had to document things also loved these as they immediately saw what they had photographed, were sure if they'd captured what they wanted or not, could drop it in the folder and the matter was closed.
Professional photographers also find Polaroids invaluable. The look is distinctive yet mesmerizing. Rich colors that blended almost like pastels. Aside from their visual quality they were also the perfect tool for proofing a shot, seeing how it would come out before the "real" one was taken. Ask any studio photographer and they'll show you their stock of Polaroid film.
Can quick-develop machines do this? Well only if you want to go to the drop-off, come back in an hour, try and figure out what each shot was, hope they got what you wanted, etc. Quick is NOT the same as instant.
What about digital? If you want to lug along a camera with finicky light requirements and so-so resolution then go print it the pic. It only takes a set of electronics that costs from a few hundred to a few thousands of dollars and is often far less compelling in court then an less tamperable analog photograph.
No, Polaroid had a good business model. Unfortunately they didn't expand from that model (well, not in any significant way) so when it began to contract they were hurt. They also have/had a really dysfunctional culture and an inability to effect fundamental changes internally. Disposable cameras hurt them, digital cameras hurt them, debt-service hurt them, massive overhead hurt them, their pension plan and employee benefits hurt them, their pricey office spaces hurt them, the credit crunch hurt them, but they were broken inside long before these pushed them over the edge.
Frankly they should've outsourced the film & camera production side of things, cut instant-film R&D to maintenance mode, done some customer research and come up with things like the i-Zone ten years ago, streamlined their operations, accelerated their product development time from it's apparent many-year cycle to something reasonable, gotten over their not-invented-here phobia & partnered with a good maker of consumer digital cameras offering their brandname/distribution/cash in return for a private label series, slashed their staffing at all levels 50%, cleaned up their baroque & cumbersome internal policies, legendary bureaucracy and self-destructive infighting.
No, much of the blame for Polaroid goes to the Board for never having put in place a strong President and giving her/him the backing to really go and fix things. It would have meant tearing out the broken parts of the company and slicing off much of the fat but it needed to be done and instead the whole place just ground along until it suffocated.
I've worked with a large number of recent refugees from Polaroid over the years and they all tell the same stories of intrigue, incompetence, infighting, dysfunction and lack of direction.
Check out Slipstick for more material on Net Folders but trust me now, they're not worth using.
Polaroid did pioneer instant photography. Dr. Edwin Land had the 2nd largest number of patents assigned to him personally in the US. Polaroid was the prototypical high-tech startup that pioneered a new market. They *owned* the instant film market.
Ironically Polaroid also did much of the early work on digital photography and held a number of early patents. They could have rolled out digital cameras long ago but feared cannibalizing their existing markets. So they stayed with the tried-and-true and eventually became irrelevant.
Polaroid was also the classic engineering-run company. Never did market studies. Never did usability testing. Never attempted to create a design identity. If anything they were known for the incredibly clever & complex folding of their cameras (the awesome chemistry was hidden.)
They did try to branch out a bit. In the late 70's they introduced "Polavision", their instant movie system which bombed in a big way. In the recriminations Dr. Land "moved on" and Polaroid was left to continue the course he had left it on, never to really change significantly afterwards.
Oh, they came out with kiddie cameras and cheap cameras and cameras that printed to stickers. Some were decent successes but nothing really ground shaking. Other companies slowly but steadily took away their drivers-license photos and other markets with alternative technologies. For the past few years there've been promises of a new line in digital photography but many of the proposed products are dubious (dual instant-photo with a digital copy?) and all are vapor still.
Polaroid does have about 2 billion in assets - properties, patents, plants, contracts, etc. Their employees have all been aware of what has been happening and even in a company famous for dedication folks have been jumping ship for the past few years. The retirees are all up in arms and are likely screwed as their benefits are tied up in the company.
Lessons? Don't stop innovating. Don't define yourself as "The Something Company". Complete domination of your market is only important as long as your market is unique. Don't rely only on completely amazing technology to sell your product; you need to identify, listen-to & cultivate your customers.
I stand by my words.
Few folks use PC's from '96 as a desktop system. Server, firewall, backup box, etc. sure, but not as their desktop system. Not most folks.
Furthermore few folks run out and buy a box from '96 with the goal of scraping off the OS it came with and putting on, in this case MacOS X, in others likely BSD, Linux, etc. and using them as a desktop box. I'm sure it happens but that's really reaching the horizon of practicality.
A 200MHz Pentium isn't much cheaper in up-front dollars then a PII-300 from a year or so later and likely a lot more hassle, BIOS issues, ISA bus, etc. Just to put it in perspective we're talking about boxes that shipped with either Win3.11 or Win95a.
I guess the folks I know are just more cluefull then your friends.
Now you were gonna start dragging out hypotheticals, right?
Digital signatures have been legally supported in both the USA & Canada but they've nothing to do with delivery.
Yeah, and Apple's the only PC vendor healthy (a few billion in the bank, sales steady and layoff's totalling under 50 folks.)
Look at the legions of cheap PC makers that have evaporated: Leading Edge, Packard-Bell, E-Machines, Gateway struggling. A $500 buck Cube would've been suicidal last year.
Residents with high incomes can pay for their own damn highspeed internet access. If they're making good money then it shouldn't be an issue. If they're not making good money I don't see it being as important as other things like infrastructure & job training.
Have you ever heard "Oh Muffy, we can't build the dream-house there - the monthly highspeed internet service bill is too high!"?
How about "The roads suck and the schools are lousy."?
Frankly with 1 case of transmission of anthrax by postal mail I think the whole topic is foolish and a sad attempt by a columnist to get some attention.