People ahould really stop treating Kodak like they were just a film company. I knew someone who worked for Kodak as a software engineer right before they started having financial problems. They had a massive patent portfolio of imaging technology and image detection algorithms that is being used by google and microsoft right now. Some of the portfolio was so advanced that there was a bidding war between microsoft and google for the entire portfolio. We couldn't figure out what the bidding war was about until a few of our friends saw what was in the patent portfolio from the 1960s. I can't say what was in the portfolio but if they had to recreate what Kodak built in 1965 it would take half of Google a decade to get close. I'm not even remotely exaggerating. Kodak burned out a lot of people proving out their portfolio.
Definitely. Kodak did a hell of a lot of research. however let me nit a little about your statement. you make it sound like they had patents from the 60's that others wanted. patents expire after 20 years, anything from the 60's would be public domain at this point.
But yeah all them jucy patents from the 90's were extremely desirable.
They had an end-to-end (scanning, compositing, film out) 4K system back in the early 90s. They were able to crack the colour technology allowing for an image to be accurately represented and recorded back out to film without deterioration. I believe they pioneered using Lasers for this (Kodak Lightning Film Recorder).
I used to work at a facility that had one of the first 16-bit laser recorders. It was very finicky about things like humidity levels and what not. Working for this company I learned that when films are digitally remastered they are often saved back out to film masters; except not color negatives. They instead are separated into RGB* channels with each channel being recorded back to its own B&W negative. When restored from negatives, they have to scan each bit of film to be recombined for a final image. This in itself poses new issues as film behaves differently when stored for long periods of time and can actually shrink. Times 3. So the recombining of the final image can be a bit "tricky".
*I don't know if it was actually RGB or a YUV type of format. I never asked. I was just told separate color channels, and assumed RGB on my own.
Indeed. 35mm is actually a good archiving format if stored correctly; good for 100 years. No need to continually change tape formats every couple of years.
I've heard for some of the 3 strip technicolor restorations, they scan the 3 individual B&W camera negative rolls separately (red, green, blue) and do the technicolor printing process in software effectively. This can give better results if the final technicolor print has issues.
IIRC, Snow White was the first digital corrected film that went through this process. Each frame scanned from negative, stored as digital file, digitally restored*, rescanned into channel separate negatives via laser recorder.
*Restoration has multiple stages like film scratch removal, dust removal, color correction, shape restoration from any warping/shrinking in the film being scanned, etc. Lots of work goes into this that most people never even consider
It didn't help them survive the transition to digital though did it. They were pioneers when it came to digital but when you look back now perhaps it wasn't such a good investment. They couldn't stop what was coming but I can't help feeling they would have been better off realising they were a chemicals business, not an imaging business.
Kodak basically invented the modern digital camera. They made the first digital still image sensor, had the first commercially available DSLR and pretty much owned the (admittedly very small) Pro DSLR market in the early-mid 90s.
However management was scared that digital would eat into their film profits and pretty much killed their digital business.
The thing is that Kodak was never really a _film_ company. Or a camera company. They were a chemical company.
The lions share of their profit came from producing the chemicals and equipment used to develop the film. The digital switch wouldn't have "eaten into" their profits, it would have required a massive restructuring and refocusing of the company and they would lose most of their employees in the process.
Of course they didn't, and it happened anyway, just a few years later. I'm not saying it was a good decision, but it would have been an incredibly difficult decision to go the other way.
Kodak comes up as the assignee name in ~22000 patents in the USPTO (search at [0]), only counting since 1976, so certainly incomplete. Of those, some have been superseded, some are worthless false paths, and some are incredibly valuable. The patents may be public, but nobody is going to give out the other information for free.
The ultimate significance of the patents contained within the portfolio (how they will empower business plans, why they may be quite valuable) will not necessarily be apparent from simply looking at the technology described. And a potential buyer would always want to keep these hidden things (essentially its own business plans) secret.
I'm from a family that has been in real estate since the 80s. Lead remediation was a mandatory requirement in the late 70s. There is almost no lead anywhere in the country except for cities where there were old industrial manufacturing plants or places where there was illegal dumping of materials.
You literally can't sell a home or purchase a home with lead issues because no one will purchase the property. There are exceptions where people are gaming the system by controlling the property and town inspection departments but largely lead paint poisoning is an old problem that was solved a long time ago.
The only reason children would have a drastic decreae in IQ is going to be a combination of Television and internet usage at extremely young ages which has deleterious affects on will-power, attentional focus, judgement, memory and visuo-spatial analysis. The lead argument really needs to go away it keeps popping up
and it is literally impossible in most of the country.
I can tell you that lots of houses weren't remediated like you'd expect. An extra layer of paint, and now 50 years on since the 70s both are chipping sort of thing.
Yeah OP is completely wrong. There is tons of lead paint on the walls in just about every city in the US. Remediation has been completely ad hoc and the restrictions on selling a house with lead paint are almost always a single sheet o paper that says “Sign here to acknowledge that there may be lead paint.”
It amazes me how long "the new thing has ruined the children" has been a trope.
You manage to combine two generations of it. Television started ruining children when the Boomers were growing up. The Millennials were ruined by the early internet. And now I hear the Zoomers are being ruined by TikTok. (Presumably Gen X was ruined by cable TV, which you left out.)
That's right, the kids have been ruined since before America existed! Truly, it's amazing this steady worsening of the youth has not destroyed life as we know it.
This is complete garbage, they were forced to do this years before the Trump election to keep people from abusing ad networks. They were all being abused to screw with the electoral process in the United States and abroad. President Obama even asked Russia repeatedly to stop meddling in the electoral process. Hint, the russians were abusing online advertising primarily. The entire Clinton email fiasco was just a way to draw attention someplace other than ad networks.
Please point me to where the US government ordered Google to inject a one second delay into ad auctions for everyone except Facebook, in order to prevent Russia from abusing online advertising.
There is no mind control program. It's just bahavioral biology, psychology and advertising. Calling it mind control is like saying I can control a person because I can get them to show up to a certain grocery store if I give them a coupon.
The internet is completely controlled server side and has been for over a decade. There isn't a single site or platform that isn't compromised in one form or another.
Those positions don't work the way people think they do. Some CEOs have to spend obscene amounts of money defending themselves from frivolous lawsuits and people constantly screwing around with their lives. You should be looking to see how much the CEO is actually keeping, not how much they are making.
Please provide a reference. It is customary for the company to purchase Directors and Officers insurance which covers litigation and liability for CEOs and often other executives.
I wasn't aware that was done for all CEOs. You still have to consider the idea that many CEOs have to deal with an array of problems in their personal lives that other people don't have to deal with. I mention that with the caveat that the level of problems other people bring to their personal lives in order to create distractions is cultural.
How was this study performed and who was included in the study?
That shouldn't be possible, its completely at odds with how reward and punishment pathways of the brain function. See the Orbital Frontal Cortex, motor cortex, pre-motor cortex and Striatum for more details.
