Seriously, a DSLR sensor is 35mm because the film it replaced is 35mm.
Mostly wrong. Only high-end professional-oriented DSLRs have 35mm-sized sensors, the majority use smaller APS-C sized sensors or something in that ballpark.
Even with Slashdot's slightly hyperbolic headline, the summary correctly reports the planet as having been "detected" rather then "discovered", and clarifies that this was "only" an already-discovered exoplanet (as does the original article).
If that was your implied criticism, then, it's not valid.
If you understood this, but your point was that "detecting" an already-known exo-planet was pointless because it's alredy been done... even though the person involved did it with equipment orders of magnitude cheaper and lower-end than that originally used by NASA less than a decade back, and which few of us would have assumed possible, which *is* the point here... then Slashdot probably isn't the place for you.
reminds me of coverage of deals Walmart entered into with many suppliers in its history where they become the vast majority of some vendors products then finds a cheaper source and leaves them screwed over from expansion costs with no place to sell their new manufacturing capacity.
Coincidentally, this is broadly similar to something I already mentioned elsewhere in this thread!
A lot of historical documents are written in Olde English or Saxxon
Wasn't that a popular diagonally-scrolling shooter in the Early Middle Ages?
Historical records in many countries are written in cursive, and not just English wring ones. Only a complete idiot would want to sever children from their past.
There's a difference between being able to read cursive (i.e. "joined up" in Commonwealth English) handwriting and actually being able to write it yourself. Besides which, even *my* joined-up handwriting isn't the same style as some of the more elaborate "copperplate" styles favoured in the past.
And while we're talking about it, the headline "Finland dumps handwriting"- which the original story used and Slashdot copied- is misleading anyway. From the article itself, it's joined-up writing that's being dumped, not writing altogether. The latter would be far more serious- IMHO kids should learn to write, but joined-up? Well, it makes me slightly uncomfortable to think of ditching it, but then *I* remember how little I actually write these days. (*) As long as they can at least write half-competently, that's the main thing.
FWIW, I certainly think that kids should be being taught basic typing skills, and if you're going to explicitly teach it anyway, it makes sense to go with touch typing. I'd been using computers for around 15 years before I learned to touch type in the late 90s, and that only happened because I explicitly learned to do so. I'd got pretty good at "hunt and peck" (**), but I would never have picked up touch typing skills from that alone.
I used Mavis Beacon, and to be honest, it didn't take *that* long to become good enough that I switched completely to touch-typing. I'm pretty sure that most kids could pick it up as fast, so it shouldn't waste too much schooltime anyway, even if typing (say) became obsolete in fifteen years time.
"Texting" skills, OTOH... stupid waste of time. Smacks of a slightly out-of-touch and conservative middle-aged person having belatedly caught up with this new "texting" fad and mistaking it for an important skill. Even if old-style (numeric keypad) texting needed a bit of practice to learn, it's not something that kids needed to be- or should have been- taught. More importantly, that typing style is being quickly rendered obsolete by the move to smartphones that use virtual QWERTY keyboards instead.
(*) And how rubbish it is often when I do- mainly because the speed of typing has made me impatient with writing speed- even though rushing it doesn't speed things up that much. If I actually make an effort to write, I'm still as neat as I ever was.
(**) My classmates were quite impressed with my typing speed, but this was back in the late 80s/early 90s when computers hadn't permeated everyday life as much, and most domestic use by non-geeks was for games or very basic use that didn't need much typing skill. (I was a geek, of course!)
" Either they were utterly, *utterly* struck blind or there is something strange and dubious going on. "
Or they were led on by Apple and a bit naive. They probably over-extended themselves trying to please Apple on the implied promise of a large contract.
That's essentially what I was implying by the first of those two options.
Eventually they dropped Disney when it was realized the bragging rights were not worth the abuse.
The problem is that- depending upon the contract- the smaller company being screwed over is now in a position where they *can't* pull out of the contract because their large customer has them over a barrel. They've expanded and/or dedicated significant resources to supplying and pleasing that customer they thought would be a cash cow- possibly dropping other markets- and if the large company was to terminate the contract as threatened, they'd then have a massive production operation to fund with no-one to buy the end result.
It's either that quick death, or the slow death of having your margins ruthlessly squeezed beyond a sustainable point.
From another letter in the comments section of that article (from "Mugs"):-
I was once stuck on a train with a colleague ranting about a similar contract. The contract was in the 40s between Woolworth and his grandfather who ran a broom factory. Woolies started off with a small order, gradually increased until they took all the output then drove the price down until the factory went bust.
This was behaviour I was already familiar with relating to Wal-Mart, but it shows you it happened even back then. You can bet your life that in every case, the large customer knew exactly how this was going to play out in advance.
See this:- The Wal-Mart you don't know
And this:- The Man Who Said "No" to Wal-Mart
Why on earth would you have a problem with scotland getting their energy from renevables?
He didn't say that anywhere. His problem was solely about whether particular energy uses had been included or not, and whether those *should* count towards the claim made.
You're entitled to agree or disagree with him on that- and I'm not saying I entirely agree- but he didn't say anything about being opposed to Scotland getting its energy from renewables, and it's pretty unreasonable to put words in his mouth on that count.
it would take an extremely good businessman to [terminate] at that point, most would already be counting the money Apple would make them. But if a deal is wrong you need to walk away. They're hardly the first company to fail because they made a bad decision to take on a contract they weren't ready for.
The Register ran an opinion piece when the details on this story were first appearing a couple of weeks back. It noted an almost unbelievable point others have commented on elsewhere in this thread:-
[The usual form of the contract is that companies agree] to build whatever to [the agreed] standard and by that time. Excellent. If we do so then you have to either take them and pay for them or if you don't take them you've still got to pay for them. If we don't make them to standard or in time then here's the damages we'll pay. But if we hit the spot then you're committed to pay for them.
But here's what it actually did sign up to:
Those agreements, said Daniel Squiller, GTAT's chief operating officer, were almost entirely one-sided. By the time Cupertino's lawyers were done, he said, GTAT was presented with an deal that, among other terms, required it to: commit to producing millions of units of sapphire, even though Apple was not obligated to buy any of them.
Something the author describes as "sheer lunacy". Either they were utterly, *utterly* struck blind or there is something strange and dubious going on. Oddly, the "struck blind" explanation isn't as improbable going by a comment in the letters section (from "Edwin"):-
The sexiness of having Apple (or some other A-list brand) as a major customer is extremely seductive to many 'executives'. Not only because it's great advertising, but the bolstering of the supplier's individual executive ego.
Let's see you sell them games as "free of any sexy", "does not contain sexy", or the R rated "may contain traces of sexy".
Why does this make me imagine the voice of the teenage son Steve from "American Dad"?
Also, obligatory paraphrasing here:-
Sexism = Sexy these days
Ian Publisher: Sweden is gonna give the game an "R" rating... because they have decided that it is sexist.
Nigel G Amergate: Well, so what? What's wrong with bein' sexy? I mean there's no...
Ian Publisher: Sex-IST!
As every INTELLIGENT person knows, diamonds are only semi-precious stones
Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? (from 1982, but still relevant today), and The diamond myth,
Netflix made 71m off of the 'there's no money to be made slinging content' game
Netflix is a content producer, in addition to a content slinger.
Not when they first started.
What the article states is "No one makes money selling media for consumption anymore [..] The media market is now so efficient that all profit is completely sucked out of the equation by the time you get to the consumption delivery system" (my emphasis).
Netflix started a long time ago, and even their streaming offering began quite a number of years back now. Things have moved on a lot since then.
Not saying I necessarily agree with the article's claim myself, just pointing out that since it *is* clearly referring to the present-day situation, Netflix's circumstances a number of years back aren't a valid counter-example to that.
Well all that money brought in your fly by night companies like US Gold [..] they took the old stock to companies like US Gold for new carts only to find empty buildings
Seems to tie in with other accounts I've heard of the US videogaming crash.
However... US Gold? The only videogames company I've ever heard of- and can still find anything about- under that name is the UK-based U.S. Gold.
They started out as a republisher of US software for the UK market in 1984, i.e. *after* the crash (which didn't have as much impact on the home-grown, home computer dominated UK market anyway) and back then only published for home computer formats, not consoles.
So either this is an entirely different (and obscure) company of the same name or you were thinking of someone else?
Putin on a horse half naked is not gay.
No, it's not. The horse was definitely female.
"Look! There! Evil!.. pure and simple, total evil from the Eighth Dimension!" -- Buckaroo Banzai
