A duck.

It reliably dumps a longer stack trace than my scrollback can handle, anyway.

They sure have, but seeing what that was exposed on that film takes a while when you have to retrieve it from a satellite.

They have a lot of settlements like that with unions, groups, the DEC, etc etc. and there are still ongoing negotiations with some of those.

It does total a lot of money. They actually had the cash reserves to just pay that and continue business as usual. This was a company turning over multiple billions back then, with huge sustained growth.

If it did actually hurt that much, it would have made great business sense to be more in tune with the market, in order to profitably manage what they had left after that. Wouldn't you think?

All those other companies pulled it off. Kodak simply didn't WANT to do it because they were making big money maintaining their status quo.

It's a classic story of pride and hubris. They were the big dogs and making easy money today has a funny way of blinding people to the future. The execs in the early 2000s realized their error but it was too late. By then, the executives responsible were long gone. Most of them retired with their millions from the film era.

Their EMPLOYEES at the time are the ones who started that. They were privy to the meetings where those decisions were made. Go ahead. Find one and ask them! I have worked and do currently work with a lot of ex-Kodak people. It's accurate. People were telling them "digital is the future" for DECADES, they even invented the technology. It's not like they failed at one crucial moment. They continually made the conscious choice not to do it for about 25 years, in spite of clear trends for the latter 15 years of that span.

Absolutely, I agree with you. The point I make is that Photo CD was an expensive format that you couldn't make yourself. It cost the labs too much to make and you needed special software/equipment to view them. Regular CDs could contain whatever you wanted, including images at any resolution you wanted, and you could burn them yourself. So Kodak threw a pile of money away on that.

You should read up on it. Talk to some of the incredibly bitter ex-Kodak people. Here's a timeline.

1975, Kodak invents digital photography. Management does not see value in developing it to the point where it can be sold to consumers. (Why should they, film is doing multiple billions of business per year!) Patents are filed.

1980s: People decide to give digital a try. Kodak decides film is still better and pursues the medical diagnostic film market. Fujifilm eats away at their domestic consumer film sales. Kodak tries to enter the battery market and gets properly served by Duracell.

1990: Kodak introduces Photo CD because they just don't 'get it' that it's a huge waste of money when you can just exchange photographs in GIF or JPEG format. It's not very successful, and R&D costs are high.

1991, Kodak releases a 1.3 megapixel digital camera. It's not very good.

Mid 1990s: Various sub-par digital cameras are made while the bulk of their focus is still on film and paper. The film business is really, really good. New film products continue to be developed and introduced to the market.

Late 1990s: Kodak introduces APS, trying to divert consumer attention from the growing digital 'fad'.

2001: Kodak unveils the Easyshare system, which is years behind upon release. The gallery website you're supposed to use is terrible, the product is the epitome of crashy TWAIN junk. Image quality isn't comparable to film. Around this time, they have a series of market-dominating digital cameras, but that's not because they're good - that's because they're selling it so cheaply that they are taking a loss on every unit sold in the hopes that their consumables (Kodak photo paper and inks and Photo CDs and website products) will make up the difference. Maybe they're hoping enough people will have a bad experience that digital gets written off as a bad idea?

Mid 2000s: Nikon and Canon eat their lunch in digital cameras because they (and Sony, and Sigma, and Pentax, and Olympus, etc etc) saw fit to pour huge R&D into digital camera development, while Kodak was going strong after film, which made them a lot of money at the time. Epson, HP and Canon also destroy them in the inkjet printing space while Kodak attempts to enter the market with a small thermal printer, which fails because it can't compete on price and also can't be used to print the kids' homework. Profits fall because digital starts a major takeover once it reaches 3 megapixel resolution, which is about the minimum you need for a 4x6 or 5x7, and they aren't ready with good products in the consumer space. Proprietary interconnects and dodgy online galleries aren't helping. Stocks plummet. It gets so bad they are removed from Dow Jones. The death spiral begins. Shedding employees neuters digital R&D and puts them even further behind, which accelerates their decline.

Late 2000s: Cell phone companies, particularly Nokia and Apple, are now the biggest digital camera manufacturers in the world. They do it without Kodak's products. Kodak is a distant single-digit percentage of the market. They resort to lawsuits to try to sustain the business, which is barely surviving on medical imaging and cinema film at this point.

Early 2010s: After filing for bankruptcy, they have sold large portions of their patent portfolio. They have closed or sold many parts of the business. Film and paper are sold. Online galleries are sold to Shutterfly. Pension plans are outright cancelled, leaving many retirees without any options.

Ah, that might be. There were a few different brands with floppies around the same time. Maybe Kodak was the one with the SCSI port. Either way, the image quality of the first commercially-available Kodak digital cameras in the late '90s was pretty low.

I used a really early Kodak digital camera that had a floppy drive. It was pretty interesting but in no way threatened any of the competition, especially including their own film!

I partially disagree. The point may or may not be good, that is irrelevant to the parent poster's gripe. If an author wants the audience to respect his point, his supporting writing needs to be good. If he gives me comparisons that bad, I have a hard time believing the rest of the message was any better thought out.

Specifically, the issue is a comparison of a photography company that decided not to pursue digital for fear of cannibalizing paper and film, versus a company that made software which takes already-processed digital photographs and applies filters and shares the images. It's a very bad comparison of a source to a processor, like comparing a farmer to McDonald's, or a miner to an auto repair shop, or pizza & Mtn Dew to a programmer. There are a lot of large camera companies (mostly cell phone manufacturers) that I would call equivalent to a new Kodak, and that would have been a great comparison.

Unlimited LTE is only useful if you have network service in your area, and their tower deployments have been stalling and stalling and stalling... I have been to areas supposedly served by it, and got 3G speeds from it. NYC intermittently disconnected (although it worked great in one place) and I couldn't even use data in Atlanta! I dunno when they are going to build out a serious network, but as a customer I feel like I've been lied to about the quality of the network.

Legality is all about clever interpretation of language. Depending on what your definition of "is", is, or whatever. Here are some alternate interpretations for your enjoyment.

We reviewed the code = we looked at some code. This does not mean code was changed. In fact, it probably wasn't changed.

Ensure our customers' security = too nebulous to be meaningful. Security according to whom? Security in which sense? Do they think that the overall security of everyone is improved if their users can be spied upon to prevent violent crimes happening to other users? What is the timeframe between an exploit and a patch? You can't fix everything, because fixing costs money - so how much exploitation / negative PR does it have to reach before it gets acted upon?

Industry-leading security = some freebies for your game of buzzword bingo. You can't measure security like that. Sure, you can compile some metrics from past data, and maybe have a metric that you can compare to another company's metric, but that doesn't give you a complete picture of security. What about what the users are encouraged to do by popular software and blogs? The end-user's security is out of your control. As it should be.

Take appropriate steps = some coders were tasked with presenting options to their managers, who slimmed those options down for their managers, who decided whether various things were appropriate, using decision-making tactics that the coders may not have been privy to. Maybe they said no to the steps due to the cost of fixing it, or the upcoming new version making the broken one obsolete. Maybe that's where it stopped, and they called that appropriate steps. If not? Positive steps may not have been taken, profitable steps were probably taken, incompetent steps were almost certainly taken. Pork barrel maneuvering may have happened in those meetings too. You know, "we can fix it if we can increase our budget by X" or "we'll need to get more people working on project Y since it includes that fix". And it would be pretty simple to create a fix and put in a new back door in the same patch... fix it, say you fixed it, and shuffle the new one under the rug.

Stay ahead of malicious hackers = We're really hoping that these nerds are right that this is going to be hard to break, because we spent a lot of money letting them research it instead of making some other part of the experience more stylish.

Defend our customers = When they are attacked, we will shake our fingers and give those nasties such a tut-tutting! Maybe we'll release a patch in three to six months or a year or two, if the managers interpreting their budgets and allocating it to those spreadsheet columns allows that. Otherwise, we'll just tell the engineers to make sure they fix that in the next version but the deadline can't slip so if it doesn't make it in under the wire we'll maybe patch it after the fact. Sometimes, too, you have to take a hit from one enemy while you're stopping a hit from another enemy. Maybe you'll let the spiders in your kitchen live, hoping they will help you out with those fruit flies, or you'll let the huntsman spiders live in the basement to keep the black widows out. Could it be that they see an ecosystem and have decided that certain less-problematic enemies are keeping more problematic enemies away? Did someone wine and dine the relevant managers and convince them that they should be allowed to live in there under some pretext of security?

I've worked in a large company for long enough that I know that you say you're doing an "internal investigation" after the problem is in your face, then you probably have six months to two years to complete the investigation before enough people start to jump ship for it to matter. At that point, the product is probably obsolete and your faithful sales reps have been touting each new version as better and more secure.

Call me cynical if you must, but I don't see any actual descriptions of what's being done behind closed doors at any of these companies or what's changing in the patches they roll out.

Yes, you are correct.

Most people do want to work, they just don't want to do a job they hate. If not for a living, then for spending money to buy the luxuries that make them feel like they're the Joneses that everyone else keeps up with, or a sense of purpose, or the social aspect, or just for the sake of having something to do. Go ahead, ask around. Once you get past the "Man, it would be nice to sit around on a beach all day and not have to worry about money" then you can ask "Well what would you do after a few months of that? Wouldn't you eventually want to do something meaningful?" And usually the answer winds up being an existing job of some sort.

Not having to work is a bleak, depressing, unsatisfying life. I've been there (unemployed, all needs provided for by kind a friend) and it was only enjoyable for a few weeks before I got restless and needed to feel like I had something to contribute to society. I wanted spending money to buy toys and software so I could do new things. Fret not, however. It only lasted a couple months that felt like they would never end. I have been a middle class wage worker in the years since then, fully subject to the whims of the free market.

So I don't think that descending into communism is going to work out. It's not within our human nature to have a common wealth among the people, if I may make such a bold claim. Greed is always going to want one more dollar for "me" because "I need it" and "I can't be satisfied as long as someone else has more". So as long as there's some resource freely available to be gobbled up by whoever can game the system the best, it will be, and the few who know how to get it for free will take all of it for themselves.

Counter-point to a lot of arguments from a theoretical viewpoint:

I want to make a living in my log cabin on the dairy farm with my fifteen cows, churning butter. I do not want to expand horizontally (more product variety) or vertically (more of the product). I want to continue making a few dozen pounds of butter every week. For a while, this works out okay, since the general store is buying it from me. Now over the course of some decades, along comes modern America with its modern grocery stores and mass-produced dairy. Now I have to lower my prices to compete with their prices, and less people are stopping by the general store because everything they need is in the store, so I'm not selling as much. These losses compound and I can no longer afford to do this. Or maybe I want to industrialize but I can't afford it because I waited too long and got too far behind the curve.

Do I have an ongoing, indelible right to make a living doing exactly what I'm doing? Maybe, maybe not. It's pretty gray. I have a right to do these activities, and nothing's wrong with getting paid for it. But I can't say I have a 'right' that someone else is trampling upon, if someone else is inventing new ways to do it or making profitable business decisions. Would I not be trampling on their rights if they were disallowed from doing so? Does anyone have a right to stay put and keep making a living there?

Should my living wage be artificially enforced somehow if I decide to keep doing this? How much would you expect the people who mass-produce to be paid? If I'm making a living off 100 units per week, and someone else with some fancy machines makes 10,000 units per week, should they then be allotted 100 times my living? If demand for my product goes down to 5 units per week, should the people with the machines subsidize me so I still make the same money? What if I suddenly find a market for my products in another town and my business explodes back up to 100? Do I have to pay back the subsidies out of fairness?

Do I need to face the obsolescence of my skills eventually? Yes. I can't expect to level off and then be carried for decades. I may need to learn a new trade if my current set of skills is eclipsed or the trade is rendered obsolete. My friend over the hill used to make buggy whips until automobiles became too popular. Now he's been out on the street for decades because he refuses to do anything other than make buggy whips. Eighteen guys down the street made barrels back in the day, now only one of them still makes barrels at all and he's only doing it part-time after his other job at the coal plant. (These examples are fictional but you get the point.)

Now if we modernize the argument - - - Suppose there is an inventory system coded in Visual Basic 3.0 and Access 97. The company keeps demanding more and more from it, wanting features like real-time updates to their website, more capacity, and on and on the list goes. The people maintaining it refuse to learn anything new because they're only paid to be good at VB 3 + Access 97. Should those people expect that they can stay employed doing that forever? What happens when the system is finally replaced, or the company goes under because it just couldn't live in the 1990s any longer?

Being secure in your living is not a right. If you cannot adapt, you will not survive. This is not a new phenomenon in history, and it shouldn't be news to anyone when it happens!

That doesn't make it suck any less or be any less regrettable when someone loses what they have. Perhaps the most regrettable loss occurs when someone loses everything because they're too stubborn to adapt and pick up something new in order to survive. I've seen people graduate from college with degrees in a field that became obsolete within a few years - think printing industry - and they're one step away from homeless, jumping from part time job to part time job, living with their parents (who have jobs that are in no danger), because they went to SCHOOL for that, so they won't do anything else. What ever happened to the idea that if digging ditches is the only job you can get, then go dig ditches?

Oh please, my AudioQuest cables heard that joke coming, with supremely high clarity, before you told it.

If you want to talk about power supplies... You are confusing the maximum available spec with the normal power draw of the system. I have an 800W power supply in my reasonably overpowered Wintel gaming box. It draws ~160W during normal use, up to 300W while gaming. Most people will be fine with a 450W power supply unless they add a whole bunch of extra hardware, especially hard drives. The other benefit you usually see with a higher-wattage power supply is that it's typically built with better power filtering and more efficient components, so you would save money with a more efficient power supply even though it is rated for higher maximum available power. It's not totally intuitive. The more you know!