Earlier quoted context omitted.
Retro indie games are making a comeback.
Well, the Digital Mars C/C++ compiler still supports DOS programming (I just can't seem to let that go!)
Can I write DOS code in D?
Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
201–210 of 234 posts
Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish I had saved the article but I remember reading somewhere (and just paraphrasing here) that the team that works on the iPhone make it good enough so you'll use your iPad (tablet) less, then the iPad team makes it so good you'll use your MacBook less, and so on. I think it's great forward thinking to be always trying to put one of your largest product lines out of business as a way to constantly innovate. In so…
Unlike Apple, Kodak was caught in a very hard place. With film they would collect revenue for every picture taken, through the film itself, developing, and printing. With digital you could make money on the cameras themselves, but your per-picture revenue opportunities were limited - this was the great attraction of digital. It's not the same as Apple replacing devices one-for-one.
> With digital you could make money on the cameras themselves
You could, but you rarely do. The profit margin on the consumer-level DSLRs is really low. They make money from the stuff around it.
Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
#203Thought experiment..even if you could time travel, how would you have saved Kodak?
The answer is not to save Kodak, but rather sell the patents and chemicals business, and wind down the photography business in a way that maximises shareholder returns (ie. without ploughing capital into a low margin business like digital cameras, or a business where they had no competitive advantage such as ink jet printers).
Michael Dell received a lot of criticism for saying in the 90s that if he was CEO of Apple he would wind down the company and return capital to shareholders. But far too many CEOs are blind to this option.
Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know what happened to the facilities? I'd imagine Kodak's 2nd largest manufacturing facility had quite a footprint.
According to http://bizwest.com/deconstruction-on-kodak-campus/ , demolition began on 2011-06-01, but that didn't get rid of the entire campus, since a few buildings were still being used. In 2012 Kodak sold 320 acres of it to become a part of the 1,800-acre Great Western Industrial Park [0][1]. In 2013 they sold of the last 200-person facility (which makes Kodak kiosk media) to the "U.K. Kodak Pension Plan", which h…
Thanks for these links, I hadn't been back in a long while and this fills in the gaps of what's happened since I left. Glad to see C29 still stands and is in use even if it's days are certainly numbered.
Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a sense they did - with Eastman Chemicals, which was also founded by George Eastman and which was spun off in 1994? It is a Fortune 500 company with around 20,000 employees.
One way to survive international competition is to ship heavy bulk stuff. I clicked around Eastman's site and reading between the lines their revenue is about $9B and figure a buck per pound accurate to one sig fig so they're shipping maybe ten billion pounds of product annually. Now China's entire export economy to the entire world is only thirty-something million TEU annually. Figure 50K pounds cargo per TEU and co…
Taking this to the geographic extreme, some of the most competitively solid businesses are things where you just can't move the product very far. I'm thinking quarries* and trash.
*The exception being highly sought after material not available nearby.
Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not really true anymore. While large format film may still have a slight resolution advantage IF you have high resolution lenses to match, most high-end sensors have better dynamic range than film (~14-15 stops vs ~13 stops).
> While large format film may still have a slight resolution For 4x5 format it's not "slight resolution" advantage, it's a major resolution advantage. The most expensive sensors these days go in the range of 50~80 M pixels, 4x5 goes way beyond that if you want to use pixels to reproduce the kind of details it provides. That's why film is still used for stuff like very large posters.
90 Mpixels at 9m by 5m (if the sensor matches the format) would be sqrt(2) Mpixels per metre.
That's a dot-pitch of 1400 dots-per-millimetre or 36000 dpi; standard magazine print is 300dpi.
I really can't believe that something higher than that can be useful resolution for billboards unless you're cropping to a very small section of the full image. The stretching of the image with the glue is going to give you lots of distortion, never mind the ridges they usually have in them. http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/3651/what-d... suggests a max working ppi of 75 for an actual reproduction of ~9dpi for a billboard.
A very large poster that you want to see close up I can imagine doing at 600dpi, maybe even 1200dpi; but you're going to need a magnifying glass to see that pixelation with normal eyesight I feel.
Even for film reproduction other errors in the process would seem likely to wash out any higher resolution, like dust on the lens in the cinema [do they have some sort of laser cleaning mechanism??], or indeed dust in the air in the cinema?
E&OE.
Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
#207From the warren buffet autobiography ... “What about Kodak? asked Bill Ruane. He looked back at Gates to see what he would say. “Kodak is toast,” said Gates.8 Nobody else in the Buffett Group knew that digital technology would make film cameras toast. In 1991, even Kodak didn’t know that it was toast.9 “Bill probably thinks all the television networks are going to get killed,” said Larry Tisch, whose company, Loews C…
Even amongst more technically minded folk, there were some having difficulty accepting that the technical challenges facing digital photography would, in fact, be overcome. Here's quite an interesting thread from rec.photo, Dec 1990 onwards, discussing just that. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.photo/ZnqcQVzAln...
"Right now, 1 Megabyte of memory costs about $45 retail. This will not drop by an order of magnitude in the next decade without a breakthrough, or an economical Gallium-Arsenide process to replace Silicon."
I love this line. Even in 1990 people didn't believe Moore's Law.
Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
#208From the warren buffet autobiography ... “What about Kodak? asked Bill Ruane. He looked back at Gates to see what he would say. “Kodak is toast,” said Gates.8 Nobody else in the Buffett Group knew that digital technology would make film cameras toast. In 1991, even Kodak didn’t know that it was toast.9 “Bill probably thinks all the television networks are going to get killed,” said Larry Tisch, whose company, Loews C…
Even amongst more technically minded folk, there were some having difficulty accepting that the technical challenges facing digital photography would, in fact, be overcome. Here's quite an interesting thread from rec.photo, Dec 1990 onwards, discussing just that. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.photo/ZnqcQVzAln...
There's a lot of good gems in there:
"Right now, 1 Megabyte of memory costs about $45 retail. This will not drop by an order of magnitude in the next decade without a breakthrough, or an economical Gallium-Arsenide process to replace Silicon."
"It's much easier to pass a stack of prints among a group of people than to set up a viewing session on the TV."
It makes you wonder what new technologies we dismiss today will actually start a revolution. Of course, not everyone was wrong about the future of digital film; this guy was spot on:
"In my opinion, the popularity of electronic camera is dependant upon the popularity of computers. If this so call multimedia become a reality, then more people may want electronic cameras."
Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know what happened to the facilities? I'd imagine Kodak's 2nd largest manufacturing facility had quite a footprint.
According to http://bizwest.com/deconstruction-on-kodak-campus/ , demolition began on 2011-06-01, but that didn't get rid of the entire campus, since a few buildings were still being used. In 2012 Kodak sold 320 acres of it to become a part of the 1,800-acre Great Western Industrial Park [0][1]. In 2013 they sold of the last 200-person facility (which makes Kodak kiosk media) to the "U.K. Kodak Pension Plan", which h…
The pension plan owns and operates the old facility?
That's just weird.
Re: Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even amongst more technically minded folk, there were some having difficulty accepting that the technical challenges facing digital photography would, in fact, be overcome. Here's quite an interesting thread from rec.photo, Dec 1990 onwards, discussing just that. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.photo/ZnqcQVzAln...
"Right now, 1 Megabyte of memory costs about $45 retail. This will not drop by an order of magnitude in the next decade without a breakthrough, or an economical Gallium-Arsenide process to replace Silicon." I love this line. Even in 1990 people didn't believe Moore's Law.
And yet we still have people who don't think Moore's law will cause us to reach the end of MOSFET at some point.