Byte: G+ gonna take your kidz

I wrote this in response to an article on wired here:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/01/google-facebook-teens-safety/

Google+ is late to the party, and they're taking it slowly. Doesnt mean they are worse off, FB was pretty slow starting off in the beginning, and pitiful compared to myspace. When Myspace kept shooting its functionality in the foot, only then did FB start to pick up steam.

G+ needs to find something that makes it atractive to the young people before they will flock to it. Still won't be as fast as FBs rise because at the moment they aren't self destructing as fast. FB may have had privacy issues, and ad issues, and hacking issues, but none of that messes with their core functionality, people canstill get on there and do what they like doing.

As much as the nerd in all of us wants to proclaim the g+ feature-set superior, it doesnt really matter because its not the nerd in all of us that they need to appeal to in order to get a full share of the mass market. They need something 'neat', music, or cool decorations on your page, or something that every little teeny bopper will love as the new shiny thing. . ...not just something technically superior.

They may still win out, but its just blatant guessing to predict it right now.

Kodak and the US

Why is Kodak in trouble? Because they're not Kodak anymore. Really that
says a lot about the US in general as well.

As noted in my last post I'm doing a lot of scanning of old photos right now, mostly from the 50s to the 70s for the todays crop. So of course that means a lot of exposure (haha) to Kodak slides and all the promo material surrounding it.

Of course in the business news the last few days are headlines of Kodak's bankruptcy. They want to sell and sue their way out of their financial problems, but that's no long term strategy, that's desperately grasping at straws.

Dealing with old Kodak products you really get a feeling for what that company was. It cared about a good product. ..no that's not even true, they cared about having the absolute best product, always, every time even as a sprawling international company.


Back in the days when you payed for long distance calls, paper mail was the norm, and it took a week to get a letter to Europe they maintained an epic network of the best products. The pictures I'm dealing with were were supplied, taken, and developed from Europe, to Texas, Kansas, and Alaska. Yet they maintain the same quality from place to place.

We can do that nowadays no problem, but I was just thinking that was quite a feat back then. It must have been incredibly difficult to just get a memo out talking about the new graphic to put on the slides. ..just that kind simple problem that they innovated solutions for back then.

What made them really the best though, wasn't consistency. It was quality, they had it, and they invested in it, and they promoted it.

Reading posts from archivist nowadays the old timers praise endlessly their 30, 40, sometimes 50 year Kodachrome slides and prints for not fading. At the same time they show a stream of competitors products losing all the information they were entrusted with. This didn't happen by luck either, there were many formulas used even by Kodak alone, but they invested in the research to know what would last.

Still we didn't know that for sure until today. So you couldn't base your success on that alone. In fact that kind of focus on the long term would be unheard of nowadays. You don't get something built to last unless you pay an especially high premium for archival quality. Pay any less and you're assumed to be losing your data and merchandise in about a 5 year period. Though you will most likely get lucky and outpace that by a fair amount.

So if even long term quality wasn't the secret what was it? Detail I think, craftsman level detail, even on a mass produced, heavily franchised product. No matter where you bought a Kodak product you knew you were getting the best available, and you were happy to pay a little bit more for it. Note I say a little, because even though it was the best it was still priced at a usable point, not out of reach even for the everyday user.

I notice things like a special little note put into the boxes announcing how every slide would now be dated. Even such a small improvement in the process is brought to your attention to appreciate, when it could have been ignored just as easily. At the same time this wasn't just marketing hype, showing you an obvious feature in the hopes you wouldn't notice its flaws, because again it was Kodak and assumed to be among the best.

Currently when you go to purchase Kodak you don't get anything near that. You get a jumble of digital cameras mixed in with the rest. To be fair they have decent if not ground breaking features. Sadly they have lackluster software that is decent, but nothing more then that. You may look around and see rebadged accessories like SD cards, nothing special other then the packaging sealed with the otherwise generic item in China was printed to go with your new camera.

Why would you buy that? ..and of course no one does. The thing is they, and we as the US need to start making our own products, and caring whether or not they suck. ..then amazingly people will start coming back to our brands.

Unfortunately its a bit of work.. like communicating that graphic was in the 50s. We can do it though, its just a matter of whether we want to. Whether we want to continue renting our country from the Chinese, or would rather start affording our lifestyle.

HP Scanjet 4670 - the beauty and the.. well..

The HP Scanjet 4670

Starting off my 2nd post with my first piece of antiquated tech. Its a pretty scanner actually, and you don't hear that in a sentence too often.

It's fast, quiet, and doesn't take up much space on the desktop. They could have gone a long way with this one, unfortunately its a dead series. :(

They stopped making this scanner back in the days of XP. Which really isn't all that far off in the real world. In compuland however thats ages ago! Worse then even that however, they stopped making drivers for it before Vista even came out. Apparently they teased some people with the idea of drivers the first few years Vista was out in the wild, but then cancelled the whole thing.

This is really one of the reasons that Corporations suck! They dont have to, and they don't alway, but quite often, its just a pile of suckage after the glitzy ad campaign wears off. They could have a legacy department that slowly works on updating drivers for things, supports older epuipment, puts up documentation for when they finally figure its no longer worth it. All things that would be cheap for them. ..maybe even make the drivers part an unofficial thing with rewards to their coders for legacy drivers. ..or even opensource the old ones when they are clearly no longer interested in taking care of the brand they nurtured all they way into our pocket books.

I'm not that mad about it really. I bought this particular one used. Though I do remember being impressed when I saw the thing new in at Fry's. Never saw one again until this one popped up on Craigslist for $25.

Its great because it doesn't have any lid. The holder doubles as a lid if you want it to, but you can lift it out of the cradle and put the glass up against anything you want to scan! This is very cool, and I've found it to be handy a number of times, especially when trying to get to certain parts of larger books or magazines.

The reason I'm so deeply involved with it right now is that I'm working on scanning in the piles of slides that my family have generated over the eons. I'd dearly love to afford one of those dedicated slide scanners with the "digital ice" technology and all that magic. As you can probably guess from the $25 price point though a $1500 dedicated film scanner just isnt in the budget right now. So I make do.

Unfortunately that brings me to the weak part of this scanner, driver quality. :( HP does have a generic driver that will run this scanner in Vista and win 7, "yay"! But it won't run the "transparent materials adapter", the part that scans film and slides. "Boo!".One awesome thing I've discovered though is Vuescan. One of the top few sets of scanning software out there. Why is it so awesome you might ask? ..because the developer has a similar sense for older tech to myself. Vuescan supports just about every scanner ever made, out of date ones, even SCSI ones.

So I can now run my scanner, and even the TMA adapter that I need for the slides. (So many slides!) So this is where the speed comes in handy.

Unfortunately theres still a problem.. the quality of the scans for these slides is somewhat questionable. Its clearly a software issue, but one that will never be resolved since HP gave up the ghost on this one. Any very dark slide will come up with vertical banding across the entire length of the picture. :( This is very noticeable in any dark picture that you have to lighten up to see the subject matter.

Good enough for my current needs, and Ill be working long hours into the night with photoshop repairing the damage to some of these. But with just a little tweak to the firmware HP could have made me a believer in their products. Maybe even enough to go out and by some more of them. Come at the tech world the way I do however it gives me a good scope to see just how well a company is going to treat a customer after they buy that shiny bauble at the store. ..and in this case it screams, "Not very well."

Good things Ive discovered - Vuescan
Bad Things Ive learned - HP doesnt like supporting legacy products, the HP scanjet 4670 had real potential but will just make most people angry.
Things broken for this article - none. yay!