Maggie's Farm

What a great compilation of links The Editor put up today - so much to say, so little time to say it.

Creative Destruction

Kodak, much like Polaroid Land (which could be the subject of another how not to run a business model), became stuck in the too big to fail syndrome. They had so much of the market that they figured losing some share wouldn't hurt so they became stuck - paralyzed really, with a old film product line. Fuji made a superior product, was constantly tinkering with their film formulas and kept innovating moving into 35mm movie film basically killing Kodak's film market.

On the other hand, while Kodak relied on their film business to keep them going, their research and development department was innovating like crazy. Not only did they develop the very first digital camera, they worked alongside Olympus to develop the very first 35mm emulator sensor - the 4/3rds System. 4/3rds was the very first integrated camera/lens system in which a camera cpu controlled both the camera and the lens producing the most technologically advanced digital camera of its time. Neither Nikon or Canon had anything to compare and in fact, Nikon was so far behind that they almost made a hostile take over bid for Olympus to grab the technology and patents. Kodak management, in a typical bit of shortsightedness, handed over the licensing to Olympus along with the patents as they didn't see a future in digital photography - film would rule the day. How'd that work out for them?

Kodak didn't understand the nature of the upcoming digital revolution. To be fair, neither did Nikon, Canon, Leica or Hasselblad - the major camera makers of the era. A good example was their documentation system designed in the mid-80's. Based on the Sun Microsystems operating platform, the Kodak document system did origination, storage, editing, emulation (PC and Mac), direct transfer capability from Windows/Mac documents to Unix for editing, graphics, etc, - in short, it was far beyond state-of-the-art (almost science fiction really) and believe it or not, nothing came even close to its capabilities until 2005 when the entire publishing industry flipped over to LINUX based software on the PC platform. Kodak never capitalized on that either - they made a half hearted attempt to market the product then sold the whole shooting match to Xerox Corporation for peanuts. Xerox killed the system preferring to market their own documentation system which was inferior, but had better manufacturing margins.

So it wasn't just film that did Kodak in. They refused to recognize the direction technology was going to take them and refused to take advantage of their research and development teams preferring to sell the results rather than market them.

Al Gore + Kilimanjaro = alarmist hype

So what else is new? This is nothing unusual - every honest scientist would tell you that understanding how Kilimanjaro had glaciers in an equatorial climate was impossible even to the point of why they existed in the first place. That was all buried of course by the hyperbole of Al Gore's fraudulent claims.

WaPo: Time to scrutinize Obama's record

Really? NOW you want to scrutinize his "record"? He doesn't have a "record". I doubt he even graduated from Columbia. Wanna bet that his college transcripts never get released? I'll even give you odds.

Wasn't aware of the web site, but mountain lions? I'll tell you what....

I had a running battle with CT's DEP for eight years before I moved down here to SC about this. I had spoor pictures including paw prints, droppings, tree scratches including a very poor long distance shot of a mountain lion wandering along a line of apple trees at Woodstock Orchards across the lake from me and mutilated deer and turkey carcasses. There were at least two, possibly three if the tracks were any evidence - you could tell the difference because of the paw scars and one was missing a claw. I've also seen mountain lions up close and personal - well, ok, maybe not "up close" but closer than I would have liked - out west on fishing trips. I'm familiar with how they look standing, stalking, walking and running.

However, the brilliant biologists at DEP told me that (1) it wasn't a mountain lion, it was a really big bob cat (2) I didn't know the difference between feral dogs and cats (3) there couldn't be mountain lions in CT because it wasn't hilly enough and forage wasn't adequate (this despite the record numbers of deer, turkey, coyotes, etc.), (4) CT wasn't rural enough (5) there weren't any sightings in surrounding states (which was a flat out lie by the way), (6) see Item 1.

Meanwhile, sightings in Ashford, Pomfret, Woodstock, Woodstock Valley, Eastford, Tolland, etc., all kept coming in about a big mountain lion, maybe two, working along the geologic ridge stretching along the top part of the state. DEP kept up with the "nothing to see here, move along".

I kept on our local warden about it - good thing he was a friend because I rode this one hard. At one point, he did confess that "officially" mountain lions did not exist, but he knew damn well they did and more than one.

Then one got hit by a car down south near Wallingford I think.

HA!! No mountain lions my patootie....

Thanks for the link - that was interesting.