91–100 of 234 posts
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Sometimes I think nostalgically about my DOS 16 bit programming skills - all quite useless today. It's hard to give that up.
Retro indie games are making a comeback.
Rochester NY resident since 1982, Kodak's peak employment year. Wrote embedded software for Xerox for a couple years around 2000. My belief is that companies like Kodak, Xerox, HP, IBM, etc. have business structures that cannot survive in a low margin business. These companies drove and thrived with technological change for decades. The leadership could not accept the change of their key lines of business into low ma…
If that is true, I believe Google, MS wold have a similar problem but Amazon won''t
This is something I'd posted previously on HN: I worked at Kodak as a summer intern in '85. Was the era of the disk camera. Was also my first programming job. Lotus 1-2-3. Most people today can't comprehend the scale of American manufacturing as it still was at that time. The Elmgrove plant where I worked (one of a dozen facilities in the Rochester area) has over 14 thousand employees. Our start and end times were st…
The way I remember 1985 is that "made in China" wasn't a phrase but "made in Japan" absolutely was, see forex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_%28film%29 and reckon that that didn't get made in a vacuum.
This is something I'd posted previously on HN: I worked at Kodak as a summer intern in '85. Was the era of the disk camera. Was also my first programming job. Lotus 1-2-3. Most people today can't comprehend the scale of American manufacturing as it still was at that time. The Elmgrove plant where I worked (one of a dozen facilities in the Rochester area) has over 14 thousand employees. Our start and end times were st…
The way I remember 1985 is that "made in China" wasn't a phrase but "made in Japan" absolutely was, see forex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_%28film%29 and reckon that that didn't get made in a vacuum.
In Back to the Future Part III, Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown--the 1955 version of himself--discovers that the DeLorean time machine car has broken down because of a faulty chip made in 1985.
Doc Brown: Unbelievable that this little piece of junk could be such a big problem. No wonder this circuit failed. It says, "Made in Japan."
Marty McFly: What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan."
I'm also interested in the more specialist products - holography, xray, and movie film.
http://matmarrash.com/blog/2012/8/28/working-with-large-form...
I've experimented with similar film (Ilford Ortho Copy), but I generally prefer the look of contrasty skies (filter out blue and green), which is the opposite of what orthochromatic film will look like. (This is why older B&W photos have stunningly-bright skies, contributing to the characteristic look of photos from that era. Panchromatic film didn't exist, and the sky is very bright relative to terrestrial objects when all you have is blue light.)
Generally the stuff gets the job done, though. Here's a test shot of Ilford Ortho Copy:
https://goo.gl/photos/qkretyMoozuNXczXA
Versus the same scene on Tri-X 320:
https://goo.gl/photos/cwCn4c7XUzNM3xuh8
It was cloudy, so you don't really see the overexposed sky effect, but you can see how the trees on the top right look darker. Presumably there was some greenish moss on there or something.
This is something I'd posted previously on HN: I worked at Kodak as a summer intern in '85. Was the era of the disk camera. Was also my first programming job. Lotus 1-2-3. Most people today can't comprehend the scale of American manufacturing as it still was at that time. The Elmgrove plant where I worked (one of a dozen facilities in the Rochester area) has over 14 thousand employees. Our start and end times were st…
Could they have bought NeXT in the mid '90s? Then maybe we'd all be walking around with a "smartcam" that also makes calls.
Do you want to Make America Great Again?
The story of staggering institutional inertia and failure is amazingly similar to Xerox's, and similar to hundreds of other US corporate manufacturing giants declining into bankruptcy over the last 40 years, by failing to be concerned with, or collectively act on (board, executive, staff) the future year risks of on a several-decade time scale. This list of inertially failing organizations, among others, includes Gen…
The Bell System (that is, the old, pre-divestiture AT&T) routinely planned on a multi-decade basis. Switches built and installed in the 1920s and 1930s often lasted 40+ years. This was fine back when electromechanical switching technologies were all that existed, but little did they realize that, when they developed electronic switching in the late 1950s/early 1960s that the pace of technological change would far outstrip their own long-term planning.
By the mid-1970s, their competitors were introducing fully-digital central office switches, and the #3 ESS (a small switch for rural use) was still a reed-relay switch, while competitive switches such as Northern Telecom's DMS-10 and Stromberg-Carlson's DCO were fully digital. Never mind that Nortel and Stromberg would eventually vanish as well.
There were few enough takers for the #3 ESS that when equal access to long-distance networks was mandated, it was found that it would cost less to rip-and-replace with the digital #5 ESS than to write new software for the #3.
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Film is expensive but its still unbeatable in terms of dynamic range and details, especially if you go to larger formats than 35 mm.
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).
Film is the one with 14-15 stops. Plus its automatic S-shaped gamma curve, with gentle roll-off of the highlights, makes it easier to produce pleasing images. Movies, TV shows, and commercials that were shot on 35mm film in the 80s and 90s usually look better than the digitally shot ones today.