Exactly. Those squids are people too. We have way too many insensitive clods in here these days.

Nobody (or nearly nobody) is doing or wants 384khz in studios. 192khz is next to non-existant as well and it gets pretty heated in the forums when people discuss whether there's any benefit to 192 over 96 and it usually comes down to "it's good if your equipment supports it because it will be more accurate at lower sample rates". Some tracking engineers will record at 88 or 96, but it's usually 48k. The tradeoff between disk space and sound quality for higher sample rates just isn't attractive. When you have 30, 40, or more tracks plus alternate takes plus renders plus bounced down tracks, all at several minutes long, that gets huge really fast and you can't just burn a CD with those files for backups anymore. Having a bunch of in-flight projects on the computer at the same time, you have to be mindful of disk space. The CPU use required to process that gets really big too, especially if you use a lot of plugins and a lot of tracks, and most plugins don't even support 192, never mind 384. Forget about tracking a lot of them at once, the latency can get pretty big. I have not seen software that advertised support for 384. Also in the mix is the fact that many of the ADC/DAC interfaces in common use don't even support a 192khz samplerate, and you'd possibly need more digital clocks. That gets expensive real fast. Now, I know some people would do it and I'd see massive threads in the engineering forums if it became an advertised feature! There would even be one or two people who would claim you can hear a difference, and a huge argument about that.

24-bit is fairly standard and 32-bit is in use by a lot of people who want that nearly infinite headroom while mixing.

It all gets downsampled to 44/16 (CD, MP3, AAC, YouTube) or 48/16-48/24 (Dolby Digital, DTS) for the end product anyway. We'll see what happens with the next gen stuff like Pono or whatever Apple is doing, if it goes the way of SACD and DVD-Audio.

Yeah, exactly.

Line 66 of that page...

script type="text/javascript" src="http://www-images.panasonic.com/includes/js/jquery-1.7.1.min.js"
script type="text/javascript" src="http://www-images.panasonic.com/includes/js/header/jquery.hoverIntent.minified.js"

Duh.

Can I recommend some of these?

http://www.amazon.com/Etymotic...

Huge noise reduction and a lot lighter weight.

Or learn how to access it...

Remember, if "They" can do it, for any value of They, so can someone else.

If Google can merge Samsung's camera stuff into stock Android... win for everyone!

Partial downtime / reduced capacity still represents money though. In some cases, large amounts of money. There are a lot of realtime call processing systems that run 2003 because the vendor doesn't support, or charges a lot of money to upgrade to software supporting, Server 2008 or newer. The systems need to come online in a specific order instead of all at once (might be 4-10 or more) and if you have a vendor onsite doing maintenance, charging by the hour, who can't leave until it's verified operational, that 15-60 minutes per server gets really expensive.

Yup, frequent and sane fliers do. The rest of us who might fly once or twice in our lifetimes would prefer not to hear conference calls on that 12 hour day of flying.

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.