"I don't have the right to delete anyones video at whim either, so why should big companies. "
That's right. Because a company is considered equivalent to a person like you and... Oh wait. Never mind!
It takes months for big companies to verify that major software updates don't screw up their system. Microsoft Office was a biggie. For a while at work we could only legally use Internet Explorer, but we installed Netscape anyway. I never understood why we had to have a proprietary company version of Explorer. Maybe it was so all our security adjustment buttons would be grayed out. Yeah, that's it.
I'm getting the sinking feeling that these guys, while smarter than the average person, were also better educated than we are. He is British and yet writes this complex tome in Latin. I got the same sinking feeling when reading The Leatherstocking Tales series by James Fenimore Cooper (Last of the Mohicans etc.). There are passages of French dialog that are not translated. Apparently, as an educated person, you are just expected to know French. My language requirement in college was satisfied by taking Fortran! I hang my head in shame.
Yes, you are correct. My brother even has a Smart so I don't know how I overlooked this! I guess I don't think of the Smart being 100% French with its Mitsubishi engine and Mercedes connections. Memories of his previous Peugeot are overshadowed by the troubles getting it to run. And then there is the story of the roof of his Smart coming unglued at 60mph. We had to hold it down with duct tape to get home.
I was thinking more of the traditional marques like Renault, Peugeot and Citroen and their experience in the US market.
I think you are talking about the double locking mechanism that in many cases is never used. There is a trick to unlocking the door with the key involving lifting up the door handle while turning the key. Dead cars can be powered up by energizing the system through the license plate light. Locked cars can still have the hood opened with a long screwdriver stuck through the grill in the right spot.
My MINI has the interesting feature that the rear hatch is opened electrically and the battery is located under the trunk floor. If the battery is dead, you can't open the back to access it without pulling the emergency hatch release handle under the rear seat.
My wife's Prius also has the battery in the rear under an electrically unlatched hatch. There you have to crawl on your stomach through the rear cargo area to unlatch the rear. Great fun, but I don't understand the need for an electrical hatch release mechanism.
The BMW Z1 had doors that would not open unless the side window retracted so the door could sink down into the sills. A dead battery means the doors don't open. There is a story that some high-up BMW executive got stuck in his car when the battery failed.
Auto engineers clearly think that car batteries always work. They don't.
My BMW did lock me inside (1984 E23 7-series), but it was easy to get out and easy to fix the central locking module. You are thinking of Toyotas where the doors would lock and then blow a fuse that also ran the power windows. Only way to get out was to break the glass. There was a recall I believe.
I don't want my car to turn into a computer. There are a dozen computers in my house and when I was working, there were computers in every room I walked into. Computer hardware turns into junk in a few years and the most valuable part ends up being the power cord; I don't need my car to be junked because the hardware is no longer supported or the software has fatal security "issues".
Given how many French cars are sold in the US. Oh wait, it's NONE. This from an industry that once bragged that they have nothing to learn from the Japanese.
Any test that I fail must be irrelevant since I KNOW there is nothing wrong with me and there is nothing more I need to learn. My mom told me I was special!
I was thinking about reading a fake news article on The Onion about pretending to kill a virtual opponent in a video game I haven't bought yet. Even worse, now I feel bad about unnecessarily killing imaginary castle guards and not completing Thief Deadly shadows in pure stealth mode.
The article is 99% correct. Having worked at Kodak for 26 years in a non-film technical capacity, I can still remember when even digital products had the main goal of getting people to use more film. Sometimes I felt that all our early work in digital imaging was solely to prove how good film was in comparison.
Kodak's main thrust was overall image quality and print quality, but look what has happened. People use crappy cell phone cameras for most things and hardly print anything.
Telling example of arrogant thinking: When the disc film camera system was introduced, there was a big presentation in the Kodak auditorium explaining in gory detail why it was so wonderful. The lens was a miracle of optical engineering. It was an impressive display of whiz-bang charts and 3D graphs of the photographic space etc. Only problem was you could not take a good photo with a disc camera; all the pictures were uniformly mediocre. Kodak took years to develop the disc system and Fuji had a copy-cat camera for sale in 6 months. This from the company that invented video tape recording and decided "Nobody would want a VCR in their home." Similar logic was applied to ink-jet and thermal printing and to a lesser extent to image sensor micro-lens arrays.
More recently, Kodak tried to sell image sensors into the cell phone market. Have any of you tried to sell anything to a cell phone company? We thought they would be impressed with the Kodak name, image quality and our proprietary image processing algorithms. They are so big they didn't care. Pricing is brutal. They want millions of parts on time or else! VGA devices are so cheap you can't make a profit. HD devices are low-volume so you can't make a profit. That leaves the middle ground of...nothing! We were earnest and naive.
Ranting against the dumbness of big business is popular and there is certainly blame to be placed on a management that could not see into the future, relied on a high-profit fading technology and approved only boring products. I have no doubt that all the fantastically wealthy managers that have driven this once proud company into the ground will enjoy their retirement. The technical people I worked with were GREAT!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that explains why my 400MHz WINXP laptop with 128M memory has a heart attack trying to scroll down a page of comments on Slashdot.
Don't you guys mean ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan?
Open Door Mission in Rochester, NY.
Salvation Army
and yes, I had to look up the ASCII code for the cents symbol, but it does not display.
"I don't have the right to delete anyones video at whim either, so why should big companies. "
That's right. Because a company is considered equivalent to a person like you and... Oh wait. Never mind!
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that...
Who could forget the "Bag o' Glass" from SNL?
It takes months for big companies to verify that major software updates don't screw up their system. Microsoft Office was a biggie. For a while at work we could only legally use Internet Explorer, but we installed Netscape anyway. I never understood why we had to have a proprietary company version of Explorer. Maybe it was so all our security adjustment buttons would be grayed out. Yeah, that's it.
Not USA. America! Crap!
And the monkey unemployment problem is solved!
Vestri cuspis est fortis.
Please tell me you are not mixing up Isaac Newton and Isaac Asimov.
I'm getting the sinking feeling that these guys, while smarter than the average person, were also better educated than we are. He is British and yet writes this complex tome in Latin. I got the same sinking feeling when reading The Leatherstocking Tales series by James Fenimore Cooper (Last of the Mohicans etc.). There are passages of French dialog that are not translated. Apparently, as an educated person, you are just expected to know French. My language requirement in college was satisfied by taking Fortran! I hang my head in shame.
If you serve free tea and cookies on your land, someone will come, take all the goodies, and sell them to the people that visit.
My father was cremated and was buried next to my mother who was not. Can't be that unusual. Maybe.
Yes, you are correct. My brother even has a Smart so I don't know how I overlooked this! I guess I don't think of the Smart being 100% French with its Mitsubishi engine and Mercedes connections. Memories of his previous Peugeot are overshadowed by the troubles getting it to run. And then there is the story of the roof of his Smart coming unglued at 60mph. We had to hold it down with duct tape to get home.
I was thinking more of the traditional marques like Renault, Peugeot and Citroen and their experience in the US market.
I think you are talking about the double locking mechanism that in many cases is never used. There is a trick to unlocking the door with the key involving lifting up the door handle while turning the key. Dead cars can be powered up by energizing the system through the license plate light. Locked cars can still have the hood opened with a long screwdriver stuck through the grill in the right spot.
My MINI has the interesting feature that the rear hatch is opened electrically and the battery is located under the trunk floor. If the battery is dead, you can't open the back to access it without pulling the emergency hatch release handle under the rear seat.
My wife's Prius also has the battery in the rear under an electrically unlatched hatch. There you have to crawl on your stomach through the rear cargo area to unlatch the rear. Great fun, but I don't understand the need for an electrical hatch release mechanism.
The BMW Z1 had doors that would not open unless the side window retracted so the door could sink down into the sills. A dead battery means the doors don't open. There is a story that some high-up BMW executive got stuck in his car when the battery failed. Auto engineers clearly think that car batteries always work. They don't.
My BMW did lock me inside (1984 E23 7-series), but it was easy to get out and easy to fix the central locking module. You are thinking of Toyotas where the doors would lock and then blow a fuse that also ran the power windows. Only way to get out was to break the glass. There was a recall I believe.
I don't want my car to turn into a computer. There are a dozen computers in my house and when I was working, there were computers in every room I walked into. Computer hardware turns into junk in a few years and the most valuable part ends up being the power cord; I don't need my car to be junked because the hardware is no longer supported or the software has fatal security "issues".
Given how many French cars are sold in the US. Oh wait, it's NONE. This from an industry that once bragged that they have nothing to learn from the Japanese.
Any test that I fail must be irrelevant since I KNOW there is nothing wrong with me and there is nothing more I need to learn. My mom told me I was special!
I was thinking about reading a fake news article on The Onion about pretending to kill a virtual opponent in a video game I haven't bought yet. Even worse, now I feel bad about unnecessarily killing imaginary castle guards and not completing Thief Deadly shadows in pure stealth mode.
This is a joke right?
Now if there were porn photos of Mark Z. Ewwww!
I give you... The Magic 8 Ball!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_8-Ball
http://www.indra.com/cgi-bin/spikes-8-ball
Kodak's main thrust was overall image quality and print quality, but look what has happened. People use crappy cell phone cameras for most things and hardly print anything.
Telling example of arrogant thinking: When the disc film camera system was introduced, there was a big presentation in the Kodak auditorium explaining in gory detail why it was so wonderful. The lens was a miracle of optical engineering. It was an impressive display of whiz-bang charts and 3D graphs of the photographic space etc. Only problem was you could not take a good photo with a disc camera; all the pictures were uniformly mediocre. Kodak took years to develop the disc system and Fuji had a copy-cat camera for sale in 6 months. This from the company that invented video tape recording and decided "Nobody would want a VCR in their home." Similar logic was applied to ink-jet and thermal printing and to a lesser extent to image sensor micro-lens arrays.
More recently, Kodak tried to sell image sensors into the cell phone market. Have any of you tried to sell anything to a cell phone company? We thought they would be impressed with the Kodak name, image quality and our proprietary image processing algorithms. They are so big they didn't care. Pricing is brutal. They want millions of parts on time or else! VGA devices are so cheap you can't make a profit. HD devices are low-volume so you can't make a profit. That leaves the middle ground of...nothing! We were earnest and naive.
Ranting against the dumbness of big business is popular and there is certainly blame to be placed on a management that could not see into the future, relied on a high-profit fading technology and approved only boring products. I have no doubt that all the fantastically wealthy managers that have driven this once proud company into the ground will enjoy their retirement. The technical people I worked with were GREAT!