Company killed by management, dog bites man bites dog

Kodak failed because they spun off or sold off all of their profitable or innovative ideas or divisions. Fujifilm transitioned well because their management kept the company diversified and making money across a wide spectrum of products. The divisions that Kodak spun off are doing very well, independent of Kodak stupidity.

The UK pension fund took the bait, er, deal, because they intend to use the profits to pay out the pensioners. The division includes color paper production, which is still going just fine.

Kodak's commercial printing isn't guaranteed to be successful. While the printer technology, PDF file to bound book, is great, they don't have inks as good as their competition. Perez came aboard with the agenda of making Kodak a digital printing company, even if that kills Kodak. No problem, Perez still gets his paycheck and bonuses.

Too much in too small a space

The only reason that bullets fly so far is because they are *dense* *as* *lead*. If they aren't that dense, they don't fly as far. Even with something as large as a .50-cal bullet (and I mean the /bullet/, not the entire cartridge), there isn't enough space for both electronics, navigation control, and *mass*.

Another critical point is that the bullet will be rotating in flight, and doing so very quickly. Is the navigational control going to be able to overcome wind drift? If it can't even do that, then it's useless.

Basically, this is a money-wasting project. Nothing new. A bullet has to be dense and travel extremely fast. Anything else defeats the purpose of it being a bullet.

Kodak keeps commercial end, sells consumer end

Kodak is keeping the commercial end of things, like motion picture film, films for industrial uses like producing PC boards, and big industrial printers that you can feed a PDF at one end and get a bound book at the other. If the purchaser is another company or corporation, they'll be producing the product. This is an area where Kodak can be strong.

Kodak is selling its still film business, axing the consumer printers, and whatever other individual-sale types of things they have. Once upon a time, still film was 95% of Kodak's business, and movie film was 5%. Now it's the reverse, and Kodak is shedding everything it can.

What remains to be seen is who will buy the still film business. Lucky Film in China? I have no idea.

Whether or not Kodak survives this, you can bet that you won't see Kodak Tri-X again.

New planet added, mountains removed

Hey, neat! Not only did we get a new planet over here, Mt. Rainier has been removed! I wonder if it's from the new planet's tidal actions... Hmmm...

But they laid off the OS developers!

HP laid off their OS development staff some time ago. How are they going to port HP-UX to anything?

$28.57 per user

Facebook paid $28.57 per user. Sure, that's cheap per user. But if a user is paying zero, then what is the worth of the user? Is Facebook hoping to own the copyrights on all of those bad photos? And if the users will happily abandon the app for something else now that Facebook snagged it, then what's the value?

Isn't the value going to the wireless carrier who is charging users for the excess data bandwidth used due to crap apps like this?

Crappy Polaroids on demand

Edward Land would have been ashamed if his Polaroid product turned out fresh photos looking like that.

Throwing losers overboard

Kodak never made a profitable dime in the digital consumer electronics area. Nothing. Its only digital profit came from the professional products, like packaging. Kodak sold its profitable professional image sensor fabrication plant last year for cash.

As for licensing, brands don't mean anything. The "Carl Zeiss" optics in a Nokia are designed by Carl Zeiss Optics. Kodak never developed a consumer brand for lenses, just bottom-grade consumer cameras and fabulous film. How many Kodak brand sensors are in cameras? Plenty, but would you ever know it? The Pentax 645D 40Mp camera has a Kodak sensor, but you'd never know it from looking at the box.

That beggar didn't get squat

Everybody does realize that the beggar in the photo didn't get a penny from any of that, right? Really, what beggar would have a smart phone and a web page? Believe me, the homeless whom I've seen outside a company in Redmond don't have an expensive phone *or* donations from passing people.

This is the Web 2.0 adaptation of, "Adopt this kitten or we'll blow its brains out."

Satellite lens made by Holga

Of course the lines are huge! Holga made the lens, so of course it's "low resolution." Probably also has vignetting and light leaks, too.

"Death, where is thy sting?"

Why are the bishops worried? The citizens of Wisconsin all carry three high power rifles in their vehicles (just look at the back of any pickup truck, there aren't any cars in the state), so what's the bishop's worry about pistols in the Sunday mass? Just because the communion glasses are a bit smaller than a whiskey shot glass doesn't mean the parishoners will miss.

Globalization != multiple sources

Just because it's cheap to manufacture something in a foriegn country does not mean that it is manufactured in multiple countries, cities, or even buildings. There are numerous products in relatively high demand which are manufactured in one city or even one building. Cameras, cars, glue, and hard drives. One building gets hit, and the whole product line is down until it's set up someplace else.

Beware rainbow tables

Password length = strength is based on time to crack, but beware the rainbow tables. Get a hash, then look up the hash. If your password is over 16 characters, you're probably good to go due to the size of the required table. (http://www.freerainbowtables.com/)

10Gb too expensive, need better backup

The first problem is with the setup. Instead of having just one or two ports to the great outside, put the tape on the "inside" of the storage server. Remember, that's what we used to do?? There are plenty of non-networked options for that. A SCSI Ultrium 5 drive does 140MBps native, so a full tape takes 2 hours. Stripe them, and that multi-terrabyte array will be backed up awfully quick.

The other part is good backup software. When a company doesn't care about its backups, the you're lucky if you even use the provided backup software. The other part is using software which works with how you work, for a minimum system load.

Sure, we have more protocols, but the problem is the software, not the stack on the OS. How many times have you seen something supporting SCTP? At all? That's where things go awry. (I've met more than one programmer who had never heard of TCP "out of band." Ouch.)

Absolute overclocking PITA

IIRC from the Toms Hardware project, the motherboard power components have to be upgraded, and other components also need to be refrigerated. Plus there's the condensation to deal with, etc. The old Crays were bathed in nonconductive coolant. It would be easier to have a sealed system with the motherboard in a Freon bath.

Write once, run anywhere -- really?

Whatever happened to the "write once, run anywhere" goal? First NaCl makes a goofy x86 pseudo-sandbox, then turns to LLVM. Is LLVM better than .NET MSIL or Java JVM bytecode? Or is it just that its open source? Are there benchmarks for native code derived from each?

This really doesn't look anything at all like the original goal of web applications. For enterprise software requiring performance, the solution might as well be ActiveX plugins. Otherwise, just load up a game and be done with it.

Bad link in article

Proper link to John Ashcroft's testimony: http://www.justice.gov/ag/testimony/2001/1206transcriptsenatejudiciarycommittee.htm

DNS protocol not subverted, controlling servers subverted

Since the attack was SQL injection, it wasn't the DNS protocol that was subverted. When the servers are hacked via SQL injection, then the web-based management has died, so you can fill the databases with whatever you like. Once the attacker has global access, a script can be employed to make a complete mess of everything. How many people check the full chain of the SSL cert before entering CC details and the like?

Of course SQL injection still works with poorly implemented WEB sites. That shouldn't be a surprise. DNS is still working fine, so secure the site management.

Where are the moon stations??

We put people on the moon, and then we've sat on our butts. No moon stations, no space factories, nothing but a scientifically irrelevant station and shuttles. Now all we have are some tourist snaps.

Anonymity prevents dueling

There was a very good reason for anonymity, and it was a matter of life and death: being challenged to a duel. Hamilton was shot and mortally wounded by Burr in a duel, and I have no doubt that many of the critical pundits would also have been in duels if not for their anonymity. It is not merely the "freedom" of disassociation from the comments, but it preserves the critic's life as well.

Abacus

Do something completely different, and make your headstone a granite abacus. It's the only calculation engine that will still be running eons from now.

Demise of PC or rise of personal smart entertainment?

I think that what's happening is that the industry is failing to realize that the tablet is not replacing the PC, it's going into a niche which wasn't already served. The notebook computers with the swivel display were used like fondleslabs. The problem was that these cost $2,000 and up, while the fondleslab is a couple hundred.

But "fondleslabs" aren't a replacement when actual productivity is desired. Fondleslabs are for fun, and notebooks are for productivity.

BART owns cell system?

Perhaps BART owns the cell system that's on its platform. Therefore, it's easy for them to shut down their own equipment. What would be disturbing is if specific messages could be filtered, but I suppose that already exists within the system.

Remember, in the US it's not the right to use someone else's media to disseminate your opinion, it's the right to be barred from using your own media. So until the protesters use their own cell system (which theoretically could be done) I suppose what was done is constitutional.

PC is dead because their revenue stream died long ago

Of course the PC is dead! How much of a revenue stream was it for IBM in the first place? It was copied not long after its release, and finally after losing money on it they sold it to Lenovo. The fact of the matter is that most people who interact with a PC only use a bare fraction of its functionality. Who needs a keyboard when you only want to watch a movie and browse the web?

If Mark Dean was still *designing* hardware, then of course a tablet *wouldn't* be his primary device. Why, he'd need something with a keyboard, decent display, and a mouse! He's now an executive, so now he just needs to read a few things and have a secretary type something for him.

Not helping!

Not only may the email be inadmisable, but the defense can say that it is tampered evidence. Plus the police don't know if the email hasn't been tampered.

The only way now for the police to get good evidence is to obtain an order for the backups.

Need more samples

Take a look at that graph over time.

As of 2006, the smarties used IE, and the Opera users were merely normal. Now there seems to be a migration. Is it because Opera has become so difficult to use that the average person has abandoned it? Also, look at the differences between IE8, Chrome, and then IE8 with the Chrome frame. Bit of a rise along the way, there.

Now, graph out the IQ of those who are using a browser they built from source, as opposed to mere users.

"Tired of the Silicon Roundabout? You're tired of life"

... and the suicide rate quadrupled overnight.

It drives me nuts when somebody calls me about web development. They're just matching key words and have no clue what I've done.