True enough about consumer appetite cycles, but....
Or broad band was just too expensive for the market.
With the fiber optic installation boom that followed the.com crash, broadband is guaranteed to be widely available and as cheap as it needs to be for at least 50 years to come. Other market trends can also be predicted based on durability of the installed infrastructure - on the other hand, oil prices are notoriously slippery to predict.
Ya want to know how they could have REALLY kicked some digital ass? they should have worked on a digital camera that outputs film style pictures. and they could have cleaned up! What I mean by that is the warm tones that something like Kodachrome put out. folks still like that warmth and would be happy to give up some resolution if they had a camera that could crank out digital pictures that looked like they were taken on Kodachrome. Sure you can tweak it afterwards in Photoshop, but how many people have the skills to do it?
I bought a Kodak branded 1.0 Megapixel digital camera (back when 1MP cameras were going in the $2-300 range), and I got it because it was rated as having better color reproduction than the competition (and, in my opinion as an owner of previous and later cameras from the competition, it did.)
Kodak tried many different times to produce optical sensors, printers, etc., and some of their products were superior in a quality sense, but their name never got traction in the digital space. If they had co-marketed with a major camera manufacturer (like: Nikon-Kodak, lenses and digital processing by Nikon, sensor by Kodak), that could have been powerful, but I don't think any of the camera manufacturers felt like bringing Kodak on-board.
I disagree about people caring, or even being aware of, the warm tones of Kodachrome - 1% of the population, sure, 10% maybe, but nothing like 50% of the people. Kodachrome sold better than the Green saturated Fuji film mostly because it had more shelf space in the stores, and secondly (in the US at least) because it didn't have a Jap name on it.
The level playing field of digital camera sales via mail-order sunk Kodak as much as anything.
Re:Horse and buggy companies didn't make it either
on
The Rise and Fall of Kodak
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I find it interesting that the Kodak name plus their patent portfolio, only nets a $300M market cap. They must have a lot of liabilities to drag them down that low.
UPS generally comes around 5-6pm and leaves a package on the doorstep instead of a signature required, delivery exception, please drive yourself to our local service center and be frustrated that we can't find the package when you arrive.
Probably because you didn't request a will-call (hold) or didn't wait for the driver to get back? I've done this lots of times (I have Amazon Prime, and it's usually what they use) and only had a problem once where they forgot to record the re-arrival of my exceptionally large clothes-drying-rack box.
Possibly so, when it comes to packages arriving at our house, we prefer services that "just work" as to those we have to micromanage. It just so happens that UPS "just works" better than FedEx, for us.
To counter anecdote with anecdote, I have a 15" MacBook Pro and my wife has an 11" MacBook Air. 80% of the time, when I'm at home and want to surf, use Facebook, do email, Skype or watch streaming media, I'll grab my iPad. The MacBook comes out when I want to edit video or use Photoshop. I almost never want to access Flash enabled websites. Why don't you sell your iPad?
We got it for free, and I'm inclined to ride it out for what it's worth rather than trying to swap it through the used market for something that costs less. I also like having it around for contrast, it's kind of nice to have one of each, rather than a homogeneous pool of machines. Same reason the PPC based MacMini is still kicking around the family.
The paint mixer is an exaggeration, but, yes, before we started vibration testing, we had plenty of friction fit connections come loose during trans-oceanic shipment.
Obviously typing blog posts on an iPad doesn't work as well as the submitter wants to make himself believe.
Maybe he should stick to Twitter?
Seriously, I won an iPad over a year ago. The iPad sits on the nightstand by my bed - 95% of the time, I reach under the bed to retrieve my 13" laptop to do anything, including watching streaming media. The (8 and 10 year old) kids prefer the iPad to an eee Netbook, but only because it's swipey swipey fun to use and seems to be better at grabbing marginal WiFi connections than the Netbook is. I think if the kids had to choose between having a Netbook of their own, or 50/50 sharing the (twice as expensive) iPad, they'd probably go for having their own Netbook. Especially when they want to access Flash enabled websites.
OK, then they won't use UPS if they want their discs to be intact.
EVERY. SINGLE. THING. that gets sent to me UPS appears to have been intentionally kicked, punched, or slashed. This goes for parcels as well as envelopes.
I got three new 1U servers sent to me via UPS last year. One of the cartons had a TIRE TRACK across the top of it.
Sorry to say that this is one obvious result of a "free market" competitive economy. It's the same reason you get spit-burgers delivered out the drive-thru window to your Mercedes.
I had a good relationship with my local KFC, I usually shambled in the door in holey T-shirts, cheap shorts and worn out flip-flops. I got really good chicken from them. Same thing when I came through the drive through in my 20 year old pickup truck with the big dent. I made the mistake of going through the drive through in my shiny (8 year old, Blue book value $1500) Mazda Miata one night - I got nothing but the nastiest greasiest garbage from there from that day forward. Doesn't matter that they spent more on the rims for their Caprice than my car is worth, it identified me as "one of them."
When we developed packaging for shipping, one of our qualification tests was to stand at the top of a 15' tall no-switchback stairwell and throw the package overhead down the stairs (was required to hit the midway landing and then bounce the rest of the way down.) 4x with no internal damage was a pass.
That worked pretty well for domestic shipping, trans-oceanic also required 16 hours in a paint mixer to be sure that the boards wouldn't vibrate out of their sockets by the time they got to Europe/Australia.
The fact that they treat you like an idiot by never telling you when they'll deliver it at your home (and doing this repeatedly) just adds insult to injury.
A lot depends on your local office. Here, FedEx is the one who times deliveries to our home for 1:30pm M,T,R,F and 12:30 on W (the exact time that nobody is home due to elementary school pickup.) UPS generally comes around 5-6pm and leaves a package on the doorstep instead of a signature required, delivery exception, please drive yourself to our local service center and be frustrated that we can't find the package when you arrive.
I also had a USPS local office that was horrid like this, took me 6 months to get a certified letter once - including 3 trips to the office in person where they couldn't find it. Ask to see the Postmaster? Yeah, the postmaster heard me making the request and promptly vanished herself to the back room..
All they have to do is package the DVDs such that they can survive being kicked off a loading dock down to concrete, 4 times on each transit. DVDs are pretty light, they'll probably be o.k.
The big question for me is when they are going to deploy these detectors... apparently the big Japan quake gave similar warnings days in advance. Once the detectors are in place, we'll start to figure out how many false positives, and quakes without warning we get.
ALL the stoners i know are professionals. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, PHARMACISTS, executives, salesmen.
You never went to high school?
A loser is gonna be a loser, whether they smoke pot or not.
Maybe true, but some losers I know are actually worth $7 per hour before they toke up, and you'd often be better off if they went home instead of coming back to work afterwards.
There are plenty of "stoners", if by "stoner" you include anyone who occasionally uses marijuana, in professional positions.
Um, no, by "stoner" I mean somebody who can't get through a couple of days without a joint. And, yes, there are plenty of marijuana users who can, and do, keep it under control, women who just have a joint or two for PMS symptoms, etc. (unlike cocaine).
However, what I was referring to was high level policy maker's fears, primarily the fear is that if marijuana is more readily available, there will be more stoners (heavy users), which will lead to lower overall productivity. Whether or not that is true to a significant degree, is questionable. There is probably a segment of the population that would not get into smoking at all if it were legal, since they get into it as a teenage rebellion thing, it's not nearly as rebel glamorous if it's legal and all you have to do is go see a counselor once a month to chat about your usage and what it's doing to your life.
Cocaine is vastly less destructive to the human body than an annoyed Zeta heavy, or a corrupt DEA agent. Not saying it will become legal anytime soon, but it's clearly the lesser of two evils.
I don't know about that... I knew a coke dealer in college, bright kid, totally unable to resist using copious quantities of his product himself... In fact, I never met a single coke user who "had it under control." Scarcity of supply, or money, was basically the only thing I ever knew to stop a user from using.
I am all for legalization of grass, coke, heroin, LSD, and whatever else... legalization, taxation, and total transparency about who uses, what they use, how much they use, and when they use it. But, I am not o.k. with semi-truck drivers who drink while on the job, or smoke grass. Coked up police officers would probably be a very bad thing too, and accountants on LSD is just wrong...
I had an alcoholic CEO once upon a time, it was sort of fun when he was all gregarious, but the "senior moments" when he would totally forget what he had said a day or even an hour ago really got annoying after awhile. If you're hiring for a position in which former drug use could impair an employee from executing their job function, I think you should have a right to know if you're getting somebody who has completely toked memory of their Bachelor's Degree in Engineering out of their head.
Making weed legal will add to the death rate not lower it.
Stats out of countries with legalized drugs disagree with your statement.
And just how are you going to insure no one will drive while high?
By executing violators on the spot, of course. It's the only way to be sure.
Its against the law to drink and drive but people still do it and the same would happen if weed was legalized.
True. Counterpoint (I've never read that particular site, but at a glance, it appears to carry most of the standard arguments and statistics, which are nearly always more convincing than naked assertions that we're all gonna die if the wacky weed gets out of hand...)
What is it about people altering their consciousness so many are really so afraid of? I mean... if prohibition was working and actually prevented anyone from obtaining drugs then we could discuss its merits. But it doesn't even accomplish any of its stated goals. It's a completely invalid idea.
I've always thought it was because habitual use of cannabis tends to impair one's ability to contribute to society in a meaningful manner. Know any stoners in professional positions? Are they generally as punctual, competent and productive as their non-toking counterparts? I'm not talking about artists or entertainers, more like mechanics, factory workers, construction workers, truck drivers, etc. You know, the kinds of endeavors that help a country win a war like WWII. Most people I've worked with are considerably less competent at the job they are being paid to do after a joint break.
I am all for individuals' rights to do as they please in the privacy of their own homes, but I believe that the "powers that be" are afraid that if THC became a legalized drug, it would increase in popularity enough to significantly damage our GDP and make us less competitive in the world. Similarly for other drugs that could potentially take productive members of society and turn them into navel contemplating hippies.
If a phone is stolen, they get another sale. If the phone is unusable after being stolen, it's less likely to be stolen, so there are fewer thefts and fewer sales.
Exactly. This is why there are consumer protection laws; yes, I know, more laws = big government, but that's not always bad. In cases like cell phone carriers where there are precious few choices and very little difference among the choices there are, having a law requiring the service provider to brick the customer's property at the customer's request only makes good sense.
I've played this parallel cost analysis game several times, and if you don't need high bandwidth communication between the threads, I usually come up with the Google solution: a big farm of cheap machines. AMD chips start looking good compared to Intel because you're not after a single thread finishing as fast as possible, you're after as many FLOPS per $ as you can get. We even did the analysis for an extreme Apple fanboi: MacPros vs MacMinis back in 2007, and a stack of 25 minis came out way more powerful than the 3 or 4 Pros you could get for the same money.
I think Lord British is being ridiculous. Tablets can't "replace" consoles. Consumers may buy less consoles because they own a tablet, but that doesn't mean they "replaced' the console. More likely they're less likely to buy portable devices... But consoles? I don't think so.
I think Lord British is older than you. If not this year, or next, in 5 or 10 years, 30 day battery life tablets will have processing power that makes today's console games look like the (5 year old) PS3 makes the Wii look now.
5 years may sound like an irrelevantly distant future when you're 15 or 20 years old, it's not nearly as long when you're 50.
Slashdot Mirror
True enough about consumer appetite cycles, but....
Or broad band was just too expensive for the market.
With the fiber optic installation boom that followed the .com crash, broadband is guaranteed to be widely available and as cheap as it needs to be for at least 50 years to come. Other market trends can also be predicted based on durability of the installed infrastructure - on the other hand, oil prices are notoriously slippery to predict.
Gucci makes lots of money too - hell of an innovator in the leather bag space they are.
Ya want to know how they could have REALLY kicked some digital ass? they should have worked on a digital camera that outputs film style pictures. and they could have cleaned up! What I mean by that is the warm tones that something like Kodachrome put out. folks still like that warmth and would be happy to give up some resolution if they had a camera that could crank out digital pictures that looked like they were taken on Kodachrome. Sure you can tweak it afterwards in Photoshop, but how many people have the skills to do it?
I bought a Kodak branded 1.0 Megapixel digital camera (back when 1MP cameras were going in the $2-300 range), and I got it because it was rated as having better color reproduction than the competition (and, in my opinion as an owner of previous and later cameras from the competition, it did.)
Kodak tried many different times to produce optical sensors, printers, etc., and some of their products were superior in a quality sense, but their name never got traction in the digital space. If they had co-marketed with a major camera manufacturer (like: Nikon-Kodak, lenses and digital processing by Nikon, sensor by Kodak), that could have been powerful, but I don't think any of the camera manufacturers felt like bringing Kodak on-board.
I disagree about people caring, or even being aware of, the warm tones of Kodachrome - 1% of the population, sure, 10% maybe, but nothing like 50% of the people. Kodachrome sold better than the Green saturated Fuji film mostly because it had more shelf space in the stores, and secondly (in the US at least) because it didn't have a Jap name on it.
The level playing field of digital camera sales via mail-order sunk Kodak as much as anything.
I find it interesting that the Kodak name plus their patent portfolio, only nets a $300M market cap. They must have a lot of liabilities to drag them down that low.
UPS generally comes around 5-6pm and leaves a package on the doorstep instead of a signature required, delivery exception, please drive yourself to our local service center and be frustrated that we can't find the package when you arrive.
Probably because you didn't request a will-call (hold) or didn't wait for the driver to get back? I've done this lots of times (I have Amazon Prime, and it's usually what they use) and only had a problem once where they forgot to record the re-arrival of my exceptionally large clothes-drying-rack box.
Possibly so, when it comes to packages arriving at our house, we prefer services that "just work" as to those we have to micromanage. It just so happens that UPS "just works" better than FedEx, for us.
One man's insightful is another man's Troll.
To counter anecdote with anecdote, I have a 15" MacBook Pro and my wife has an 11" MacBook Air. 80% of the time, when I'm at home and want to surf, use Facebook, do email, Skype or watch streaming media, I'll grab my iPad. The MacBook comes out when I want to edit video or use Photoshop. I almost never want to access Flash enabled websites. Why don't you sell your iPad?
We got it for free, and I'm inclined to ride it out for what it's worth rather than trying to swap it through the used market for something that costs less. I also like having it around for contrast, it's kind of nice to have one of each, rather than a homogeneous pool of machines. Same reason the PPC based MacMini is still kicking around the family.
The paint mixer is an exaggeration, but, yes, before we started vibration testing, we had plenty of friction fit connections come loose during trans-oceanic shipment.
This is a blog entry, and a short one at that.
Obviously typing blog posts on an iPad doesn't work as well as the submitter wants to make himself believe.
Maybe he should stick to Twitter?
Seriously, I won an iPad over a year ago. The iPad sits on the nightstand by my bed - 95% of the time, I reach under the bed to retrieve my 13" laptop to do anything, including watching streaming media. The (8 and 10 year old) kids prefer the iPad to an eee Netbook, but only because it's swipey swipey fun to use and seems to be better at grabbing marginal WiFi connections than the Netbook is. I think if the kids had to choose between having a Netbook of their own, or 50/50 sharing the (twice as expensive) iPad, they'd probably go for having their own Netbook. Especially when they want to access Flash enabled websites.
Really? Nothing for the people growing your food? It is not wise to SHIT on the people who feed you.
Nobody is shitting on Monsanto.
OK, then they won't use UPS if they want their discs to be intact.
EVERY. SINGLE. THING. that gets sent to me UPS appears to have been intentionally kicked, punched, or slashed. This goes for parcels as well as envelopes.
I got three new 1U servers sent to me via UPS last year. One of the cartons had a TIRE TRACK across the top of it.
Sorry to say that this is one obvious result of a "free market" competitive economy. It's the same reason you get spit-burgers delivered out the drive-thru window to your Mercedes.
I had a good relationship with my local KFC, I usually shambled in the door in holey T-shirts, cheap shorts and worn out flip-flops. I got really good chicken from them. Same thing when I came through the drive through in my 20 year old pickup truck with the big dent. I made the mistake of going through the drive through in my shiny (8 year old, Blue book value $1500) Mazda Miata one night - I got nothing but the nastiest greasiest garbage from there from that day forward. Doesn't matter that they spent more on the rims for their Caprice than my car is worth, it identified me as "one of them."
When we developed packaging for shipping, one of our qualification tests was to stand at the top of a 15' tall no-switchback stairwell and throw the package overhead down the stairs (was required to hit the midway landing and then bounce the rest of the way down.) 4x with no internal damage was a pass.
That worked pretty well for domestic shipping, trans-oceanic also required 16 hours in a paint mixer to be sure that the boards wouldn't vibrate out of their sockets by the time they got to Europe/Australia.
The fact that they treat you like an idiot by never telling you when they'll deliver it at your home (and doing this repeatedly) just adds insult to injury.
A lot depends on your local office. Here, FedEx is the one who times deliveries to our home for 1:30pm M,T,R,F and 12:30 on W (the exact time that nobody is home due to elementary school pickup.) UPS generally comes around 5-6pm and leaves a package on the doorstep instead of a signature required, delivery exception, please drive yourself to our local service center and be frustrated that we can't find the package when you arrive.
I also had a USPS local office that was horrid like this, took me 6 months to get a certified letter once - including 3 trips to the office in person where they couldn't find it. Ask to see the Postmaster? Yeah, the postmaster heard me making the request and promptly vanished herself to the back room..
All they have to do is package the DVDs such that they can survive being kicked off a loading dock down to concrete, 4 times on each transit. DVDs are pretty light, they'll probably be o.k.
The big question for me is when they are going to deploy these detectors... apparently the big Japan quake gave similar warnings days in advance. Once the detectors are in place, we'll start to figure out how many false positives, and quakes without warning we get.
ALL the stoners i know are professionals. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, PHARMACISTS, executives, salesmen.
You never went to high school?
A loser is gonna be a loser, whether they smoke pot or not.
Maybe true, but some losers I know are actually worth $7 per hour before they toke up, and you'd often be better off if they went home instead of coming back to work afterwards.
There are plenty of "stoners", if by "stoner" you include anyone who occasionally uses marijuana, in professional positions.
Um, no, by "stoner" I mean somebody who can't get through a couple of days without a joint. And, yes, there are plenty of marijuana users who can, and do, keep it under control, women who just have a joint or two for PMS symptoms, etc. (unlike cocaine).
However, what I was referring to was high level policy maker's fears, primarily the fear is that if marijuana is more readily available, there will be more stoners (heavy users), which will lead to lower overall productivity. Whether or not that is true to a significant degree, is questionable. There is probably a segment of the population that would not get into smoking at all if it were legal, since they get into it as a teenage rebellion thing, it's not nearly as rebel glamorous if it's legal and all you have to do is go see a counselor once a month to chat about your usage and what it's doing to your life.
Totally agree - how much bootleg liquor gets imported into Scandinavia?
Cocaine is vastly less destructive to the human body than an annoyed Zeta heavy, or a corrupt DEA agent. Not saying it will become legal anytime soon, but it's clearly the lesser of two evils.
I don't know about that... I knew a coke dealer in college, bright kid, totally unable to resist using copious quantities of his product himself... In fact, I never met a single coke user who "had it under control." Scarcity of supply, or money, was basically the only thing I ever knew to stop a user from using.
I am all for legalization of grass, coke, heroin, LSD, and whatever else... legalization, taxation, and total transparency about who uses, what they use, how much they use, and when they use it. But, I am not o.k. with semi-truck drivers who drink while on the job, or smoke grass. Coked up police officers would probably be a very bad thing too, and accountants on LSD is just wrong...
I had an alcoholic CEO once upon a time, it was sort of fun when he was all gregarious, but the "senior moments" when he would totally forget what he had said a day or even an hour ago really got annoying after awhile. If you're hiring for a position in which former drug use could impair an employee from executing their job function, I think you should have a right to know if you're getting somebody who has completely toked memory of their Bachelor's Degree in Engineering out of their head.
The loss of one life is unacceptable.
Cue: Monty Python's "Every Sperm is Sacred"
Making weed legal will add to the death rate not lower it.
Stats out of countries with legalized drugs disagree with your statement.
And just how are you going to insure no one will drive while high?
By executing violators on the spot, of course. It's the only way to be sure.
Its against the law to drink and drive but people still do it and the same would happen if weed was legalized.
True. Counterpoint (I've never read that particular site, but at a glance, it appears to carry most of the standard arguments and statistics, which are nearly always more convincing than naked assertions that we're all gonna die if the wacky weed gets out of hand...)
How long after legalization before Hookah bars spring up? Kind of hard to be a designated driver when the intoxicant is "in the air."
What is it about people altering their consciousness so many are really so afraid of? I mean ... if prohibition was working and actually prevented anyone from obtaining drugs then we could discuss its merits. But it doesn't even accomplish any of its stated goals. It's a completely invalid idea.
I've always thought it was because habitual use of cannabis tends to impair one's ability to contribute to society in a meaningful manner. Know any stoners in professional positions? Are they generally as punctual, competent and productive as their non-toking counterparts? I'm not talking about artists or entertainers, more like mechanics, factory workers, construction workers, truck drivers, etc. You know, the kinds of endeavors that help a country win a war like WWII. Most people I've worked with are considerably less competent at the job they are being paid to do after a joint break.
I am all for individuals' rights to do as they please in the privacy of their own homes, but I believe that the "powers that be" are afraid that if THC became a legalized drug, it would increase in popularity enough to significantly damage our GDP and make us less competitive in the world. Similarly for other drugs that could potentially take productive members of society and turn them into navel contemplating hippies.
If a phone is stolen, they get another sale. If the phone is unusable after being stolen, it's less likely to be stolen, so there are fewer thefts and fewer sales.
Exactly. This is why there are consumer protection laws; yes, I know, more laws = big government, but that's not always bad. In cases like cell phone carriers where there are precious few choices and very little difference among the choices there are, having a law requiring the service provider to brick the customer's property at the customer's request only makes good sense.
I've played this parallel cost analysis game several times, and if you don't need high bandwidth communication between the threads, I usually come up with the Google solution: a big farm of cheap machines. AMD chips start looking good compared to Intel because you're not after a single thread finishing as fast as possible, you're after as many FLOPS per $ as you can get. We even did the analysis for an extreme Apple fanboi: MacPros vs MacMinis back in 2007, and a stack of 25 minis came out way more powerful than the 3 or 4 Pros you could get for the same money.
I think Lord British is being ridiculous. Tablets can't "replace" consoles. Consumers may buy less consoles because they own a tablet, but that doesn't mean they "replaced' the console. More likely they're less likely to buy portable devices... But consoles? I don't think so.
I think Lord British is older than you. If not this year, or next, in 5 or 10 years, 30 day battery life tablets will have processing power that makes today's console games look like the (5 year old) PS3 makes the Wii look now.
5 years may sound like an irrelevantly distant future when you're 15 or 20 years old, it's not nearly as long when you're 50.