sgerenser (u/sgerenser)

sgerenser commented on A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/selvan

IAmBroom · 14 hours ago

So Kodak clung to the design of one product, but Fujifilm diversified?

Yep, that's completely different from the post you replied to.

sgerenser · 9 hours ago

It sounds like you’re being sarcastic, but yes, it is indeed completely different. The person I responded to said that Kodak clung to the film business too long, implying they did not embrace digital cameras. The reality is that despite embracing digital photography they still failed. The idea that they stuck with film too long is a common trope that the parent poster was repeating even though the article itself disagreed.

sgerenser commented on Ford kills the All-Electric F-150 wired.com/story/ford-kill... · Posted by u/sacred-rat

AtlasBarfed · 14 hours ago

We simply need an engineering generation of 50 mile range PHEV vehicles. It will get a huge percentage of low-efficiency driving electrified, won't be too big of a burden on the grid, educate more people on EV-style driving, adds regen braking, should still be able to provide high-torque towing and driving.

sgerenser · 13 hours ago

So basically a return of the Chevy Volt? I drive one for about 5 years before I went full EV and I could do about 80% of my driving on all electric.

sgerenser commented on A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/selvan

GlibMonkeyDeath · 3 days ago

I'd encourage people to look at the history of Fujifilm (the Japanese peer to Kodak) to see why they didn't fail, but Kodak did.

https://petapixel.com/why-kodak-died-and-fujifilm-thrived-a-...

TL;DR: Fujifilm diversified quickly, Kodak clung to the film business for far too long.

sgerenser · 3 days ago

That’s not an accurate summary of the article. The problem was that Kodak stuck to the photography business for too long. As the article states, in the early 2000s they were the number one seller of digital cameras. It just turns out making consumer digital cameras was a “crappy business” as their CEO went on to say. Fujifilm diversified into healthcare, cosmetics, and making LCD display films.

sgerenser commented on Amazon EC2 M9g Instances aws.amazon.com/ec2/instan... · Posted by u/AlexClickHouse

Octoth0rpe · 6 days ago

Inversely, I think it's siloed things in somewhat unhealthy ways. We now have a number of vendors that sell/rent you machines that are not generally purchasable. I don't think we've seen too many negative consequences yet, but if things continue in this direction then choosing a cloud provider for a high performance application (eg, something you'll want to compile to machine code and is therefore architecture specific in some way as opposed to a python flask app or something), one may have to make decisions that lock one into a particular cloud vendor. Or at least, it will further increase the cost of changing vendors if you have to significantly tweak your application for some oddities between diff arm implementations at different hosting providers, etc.

I would much rather see some kind of mandatory open market sale of all cpu lines so that in theory you can run graviton procs in rackspace, apple m5 servers in azure, etc.

sgerenser · 6 days ago

Graviton CPUs are just Neoverse cores (V3 in this case). While it’s true that you can’t just buy a box with the same cores, the cores are basically the same as what you’ll get on a Google or Azure cloud instance (eventually… the latter two have yet to make available anything with Neoverse V3 yet).

sgerenser commented on Italy's longest-serving barista reflects on six decades behind the counter reuters.com/lifestyle/cul... · Posted by u/NaOH

sho_hn · 6 days ago

I've never seen this either. I'm just interpreting what I think OP meant.

I used to live in Seoul, and new special food or drink items definitely would cause fad waves and would appear on Instagram feeds (Seoul is notorious for this), but I doubt it was the major parts of Starbucks' business.

sgerenser · 6 days ago

The sweet latte-based drinks are a huge part of Starbuck’s business. They make far more money on these things (and frappucinos and iced lattes, etc.) than coffee or espresso. But it’s mostly just selling them to people who like the taste (and don’t really care for plain coffee at all). The people posing for instagram are a small minority.

sgerenser commented on When a video codec wins an Emmy blog.mozilla.org/en/mozil... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

notatoad · 6 days ago

video decoding on a general-purpose cpu is difficult, so most devices that can play video include some sort of hardware video decoding chip. if you want your video to play well, you need to deliver it in a format that can be decoded by that chip, on all the devices that you want to serve.

so it takes a long time to transition to a new codec - new devices need to ship with support for your new codec, and then you have to wait until old devices get lifecycled out before you can fully drop support for old codecs.

sgerenser · 6 days ago

To this day no AppleTV boxes support hardware AV1 decode (which essentially means it’s not supported). Only the latest Roku Ultra devices support it. So obviously Netflix, for example, can’t switch everyone over to AV1 even if they want to.

sgerenser commented on Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

zahlman · 8 days ago

... American "dollar stores" have items in the first place at $10+? I thought it was already amusing when Dollarama reached the $5 CAD threshold.

sgerenser · 8 days ago

Family Dollar and Dollar General (the subjects of this piece) are not traditional “dollar stores” (and haven’t been in a long time) despite having Dollar in the name. They’re just discount stores, like a smaller Wal-Mart. Dollar Tree, on the other hand, had long been a traditional dollar store where most items are priced at a dollar. However after pandemic-induced inflation they have mostly changed to a $1.25-$1.50 price point and now have a number of items marked above that as well.

sgerenser commented on Uninitialized garbage on ia64 can be deadly (2004) devblogs.microsoft.com/ol... · Posted by u/HeliumHydride

pjc50 · 8 days ago

Am I right in thinking that the old PA-Semi team was bought by Apple, and are substantially responsible for the success of the M-series parts?

sgerenser · 8 days ago

PA Semi (Palo Alto Semiconductor) had no relation to HP’s PA-RISC (Precision Architecture RISC).