I haven’t tried it myself so no guarantees but this sounds a potentially excellent solution to resizing misery: http://www.onthegosoft.com/shrink_pic.htm

Don, you should obviously proceed as you see fit.

However, in the course of life in general and your pursuit of patenting in particular you will invariably encounter people that may be helpful in commercialising you idea sometime down the road.

Do yourself a favour and undertake some basic business planning of the type I mentioned above in advance so you can demonstrate a modicum of business/market awareness and generally don’t look a complete novice.

First thing to do is to try to estimate ballbark business potential for your idea. Try to put together a spreadsheet with the following:

*Total potential market (eg pros+enthusiasts)
* Estimated total customers as % of potential market
* Marketing ramp up (x % of market potential in year 1, y in year 2, etc)
* Selling price & cost per unit

=> profit per annum

That should give you a rough idea of the value of the idea and whether it is worth proceeding.

Next step is to move to secure patent protection. For North-American coverage you should expect to pay anywhere north of US$ 10,000 for competent representation. In other words it is fairly substantial money, but it is not payable in one sum up front; instead there are milestones with payments staggered over perhaps 2-3 years. Ask around to find somebody local with a good reputation; this is not an area you want to try to save pennies on.

Depending on your resources, you probably want to raise some financing at that stage. However, it is still too early to go for venture capital. Instead try what is known as a ‘friends and family’ round of financing, where you tap the aforementioned close contacts for say 1.5-2.5x of the estimated legal fees and other identified costs for the first 12-18 months. In return they should get somewhere between 10-30% of a purpose formed company that will own the commercial rights to the idea.

Once the ball is rolling with the patent process you will either need a second round of financing this time from venture capital or from a strategic/trade partners depending on the product and potential.

You probably know more about the latter than I do. As for venture capital I have several good contacts in Toronto but your situation is very early stage and a specialist field that is not of interest to my guys. Try to enquire from local/state business development agencies as to suitable partners; there may even be some public money/grants available. If you don’t turn up anything suitable let me know and I’ll try to get some names.

Good luck!

I have now installed Windows 7 on my main desktop pc and can report no problems with Firefox whatsoever. Indeed I am still struggling to understand the astonishing performance improvement I am seeing with Win 7.

One of the reasons I stuck with XP x64 for so long was that I use an aging financial analysis application that wasn’t supported under Vista; basically a tarted up 16-bit program but one that does a job I need.

However, it is both fragile and slow and once launched your really shouldn’t touch the mouse or keyboard at all otherwise it is liable to crash, which is highly inconvenient given the lengthy start up period needed to churn through a bunch of calculations.

For comparison purposes I used to run it under XP Pro on an Intel P4 early this decade, where the start-up time was around 35-40mins. My current laptop has a Core2Duo T7400 and the start up time on that is around 20mins. My main desktop now has an Intel Xeon E5435 with 16gb of ram, and under XP x64 the start-up time was around 12mins.

Now I am running the program still on XP Pro x64 but installed on a VMWare virtual machine running under Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit, to which I have allocated 4gb ram and 2 processor cores. The start up time now is around 8mins!

Given virtualisation by definition imposes some resource overhead, since it introduces an extra processing layer between the ‘guest’ operating system and hardware, Windows 7 must have significant architectural improvements under the hood. Wowza.

And with the benefit of nifty new resource monitoring tools I can see that my CPU isn’t even breaking into a sweat as it churns through the start up processing load, with total utilisation never more than around 35%.

This is great news, because I have also successfully tested a hack that enables multiple concurrent/logged on users (google if interested). This means I can keep my family on energy/cost-efficient notebooks & laptops with remote desktops clients and give them access to 7 Windows goodness, processing power and applications (excluding Adobe as far as I can see), while maintaining comprehensive anti-malware defenses centrally.

I am absolutely delighted.

Thanks everybody.

I have just installed Windows 7 on my PC and could really use a link for that download if you have it handy.

TIA

Well there are several different flavours of Windows 7, which might be causing results to vary.

But on reflection I also recently saw something about Firefox implementing enhanced security features due to a large number of insecure flash installations causing browser vulnerabilities.

As such an out of date flash installation could conceivably be the problem and it might be worth downloading the latest version from the Adobe site.

I don't like the sound of this all since the problem must be Windows 7 related, and I have an installation of that on my to do list.

One thing you might try depending on your hardware and level of comfort with technology is to install VMWare Server (free for personal use) under Windows 7. See http://www.vmware.com/products/server/

This program enables 'virtualisation' which allows you to install and run multiple operating systems concurrently in separate 'virtual machines' alongside you host operating system - in this case Windows 7 - on a single physical pc with a newish multi-core processor.

As such you could for example set up a virtual machine running linux where Firefox should work as intended with flash, while at the same time providing you with a considerably more secure browsing environment in terms of viruses, trojans, etc.

I bought a K10 just under two years ago on the basis of reviews, hands on feel, perceived reputation of Pentax and value for money.

I have generally been very happy indeed with the camera, and have taken a large number of pictures of my family I consider priceless.

My one gripe about the camera itself is that over the first year or so I took what I believe to be an unnecessarily large number of out of focus shorts, caused - I have no doubt - by some sort of incorrect alignment, which I subsequently fixed in debug mode thanks to the advice gleaned here. (I understand the received wisdom is that this is a lens issue, but if all lenses are front- or back-focussing by roughly the same amount Occam's Razor dictates the problem is with the camera.)

I have on occasion also missed some shots due to slow autofocus, but really that is not a major problem for me.

However, knowing what I know today about Pentax as a company I would be very unlikely to make the same purchase decision again, nor would I recommend this to friends or family because I simply have practically no faith that the system can survive in the medium term due to the decline in market position.

I want to emphasise I consider error upon management error compounded over the years to be responsible for creating the current desperate business position as opposed to product deficiencies per se. And of course there are no certainties in this type of situation but in my professional opinion the future looks very grim indeed.

For this reason I have through a monumental display of self restraint resisted the not inconsiderable LBA urge to buy a stack of fancy new lenses. However, I have recently been picking up a few cheapish secondhand primes and have been astonished by the quality I am obtaining. For example a 50mm A series F/1.7 has got to represent the best ten quid I ever spent.

I genuinely hope I am wrong about this and that new models can arrest and in time reverse the decline in the Pentax brand. I'm not holding my breath though.

When I saw this thread I thought you were linking to this site: Newsmap