Which granted, over millions and millions of devices, is NOT chump change.
But remember that Apple makes a ton of revenue, 233 billion in 2015. So much so they lost 5 billion dollars last year on fluctuations in the foreign currency exchange market(which might be an outlier here, because 2015 was a fucked up year but with Brexit, 2016 might still also be a weirder fluctuation).
So if you look at the raw numbers, in order to even make their revenues push up by 1%, they'd have to sell something like over half a billion headphones and charger docks and whatever else uses lightning. That's one lightning device for every two or three people in the US, Canada, Mexico and Europe. Every adult, every child, everyone young, everyone old, and everyone in between.
It's not revenue. They're also giving you a 3.5mm adapter for anything that you have laying around that isn't lightning enabled already, with replacements costing 9 dollars.
I came back to slashdot because I wanted to see the reaction to the loss of the headphone jack. Not shocked to see Slashdotters not up to the news why.
People aren't really seeing why Apple did it. It's not for water resistance. You can jam a metal rod down there and it won't screw up your phone. They can make the jack resistant.
It's the display driver and the new camera modules. The camera modules caused problems with the display driver board. When they moved the display driver, it interfered with the headphone jack. When that happened they toyed with the idea of removing the headphone jack. Which opened them up to improve the haptic feedback engine and all sorts of other improvements internally.
Had Apple not supported wide color gamut on their new display and camera, I don't think they would've killed the jack. I think everything could've fit. But some of the other improvements would've suffered. With the new space I wonder if it would even have the quad core CPU with the fancy low power cores. That whole thing is powered by the thread monitoring chip that assigns which thread goes to which core. I'm sure they could've done it in software but doing it in hardware means it's one less thing the OS has to worry about.
I had to help my mom out with her ailing Toshiba notebook. The thing shuts down randomly due to a heat related problem. I was trying to get all of the data off of it in a form that could be read by Windows Easy Transfer.
I go to reboot the machine with everything turned off in MSConfig. Then it decided it wanted to do 16 updates.
On a machine that shuts down randomly.
You can guess what happened.
On OSX funny enough migration assistant can just read OSX installs off of bootable volumes.
The reason why you can buy things with bitcoin is that you can use any number of services and cash out those bitcoins to fiat currency. If there wasn't this escape hatch, bitcoin wouldn't be seeing the traction it does.
Do you think a guy who's selling drugs on a darknet some where gives a shit that you think you're sticking it to some central banker?
Do you think that anyone who's involved with combining bitcoin with fiat currency transactions like BrainTree care about the ideology at all?
The ideology of bitcoin isn't what's driving bitcoin's value in the market right now.
The value of bitcoin has value because private entities with fiat currency is backing it.
Strictly speaking, every currency is a fiat currency because we decide what it's worth based on how we feel about either it, or what's backing it. Whether it's gold or the combined goods and services the economy it supports.
I'd imagine it's the materials more than the set symbol on top. Like, from Dragons of Tarkir, i have like 4 spindowns all of different plastic composition. I don't think the set symbol on top is going to make a difference but one's translucent, another's opaque, another's murky...
Wizards of the Coast has been distributing 20 sided counters that are shaped just like D20s. Only with out any sort of randomness. The next number up or down is adjacent to whatever number you're looking at. Hence, "Spin down".
Any chance of anyone running a statistical analysis on these?
The greatest liability of Star Wars from Lucas' point of view is the hypercritical fanbase.
The problem here is that the fans feel like they are entitled to having things their way and having it be what they want. If someone were to tell Lucas "no", would it automatically have been better or worse?
It's easy to come to the lazy come to "Lucas did it wrong and Lucas is a crappy hack." Maybe. But the sense of entitlement i get from the fans just stinks. It's as if they can't let go of their anger and their feelings are driving them to be destructive.:) They don't seem to understand that projecting their opinion as fact is just incorrect. It's factual that a lot of star wars fans hate 1-3 and the special editions of 4-6, but it's not factual that these are bad. That's an opinion.
Right now there's a generation of kids with fond memories of the original trilogy. Are they wrong factually? How do you prove that?
In the end it all comes down to taste and vision, and even though George Lucas might have questionable taste, he had a vision. It was ambitious. It might be rubbish, but there's a ton of cinema out there that has neither taste nor vision. Stuff that is so bland it makes plain tofu seem exciting.
So? The GDP of Finland is.3 trillion dollars. The GDP of the USA is 16.77 trillion.
It is redistribution of wealth. When people hear that they freak the fuck out. It's an uneven distribution of wealth. Your six or seven or however large income isn't going to be split evenly.
In America wages have stagnated and productivity has skyrocketed.
Quite frankly as long as being poor doesn't suck and isn't humiliating, I don't care how bad the gap between the wealthy and poor gets. If the economy grows, everyone wins in that model. Granted, if the economy shrinks, everyone loses but people hit the ground in less critical ways.
You mention building engines. Ok, we've got unreal, frostbite and maybe a few others. No one builds engines, they LICENSE them.
Konami built the Fox Engine, Treyarch built the Frostbite engine, CryEngine... etc.
Why are these reduced costs not being passed to the customer?
3 bucks sounds about right when you take manufacturing out of the picture. It doesn't cost more than a few dollars to put a disk into a box and send the box to the store.
Like complaining about paying full price for broken games IS an issue I'm on board with. Because fuck that. That's a huge problem in the industry.
But when PC gamers complain that their games are crippled for consoles, then balk at paying full price, then I have zero sympathy for PC gamers. I don't care about someone's system specs, they are aware that it takes more time and money to make a texture that looks nice at 4k versus one that looks nice at 1080p right?
Maybe I'm just playing the right games, the last few games I've bought have been Metal Gear Solid 5(aside from that whackass save bug with Quiet), Splatoon, and Smash Bros. So, maybe I'm just not that hardcore of a gamer anymore? I don't know.
Big Hollywood movies tend to have a theatrical run which is the bulk of the returns on investment.
When that BluRay is in your hand, most of the money for the film has been made back when it was running in the theaters.
Games priced at $50 bucks need to sell more copies than a Blu Ray of a Hollywood blockbuster.
Not only that, but there's different support costs for a Blu Ray than there are for games. Game has an online component? That costs a ton of money to upkeep.
So, either games are going to have to be not as pretty as console versions, or PC gamers are going to have to put their money where their mouths are with regards to paying for prettier content.
Right, my point is that people bragging about buying PC games when they're cheap, bragging about how nice they look and wondering why anyone would pay retail fail to realize that those games cost money.
Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are all making profit right now.
All the GPU and CPU power in the world is nothing with out assets and engines to actually use all of that power. Building those engines and assets cost time and money in the form of human effort(procedural generation won't save the industry here; they still have to look nice and fit well into the environment).
So, tell me exactly how paying way less for games that require way more work is sustainable?
Like, League, and WoW and so on are an easy answer because it's basically SaaS, but more like GaaS. But what about anything else?
I don't understand how the PC gaming market works. You release a game that cost some $millions to produce, and you can't even get full price out of some customers.
I wonder how many problems, like day one DLC, micro transactions, etc, would go away if we were willing to pay the true cost of games development.
As gaming hardware improves, how can games dev be sustainable? We demand more graphical fidelity, richer, prettier assets, etc. Yet, sales numbers need to be ridiculously high to just break even. More than just PCs mind you, there's going to be at least one or two more console generation. Not mention mobile, which will never go away.
Either we need to pay more for games up front or there's going to be an economic calamity in games.
Which, fine by me. My favorite game series is done(not unless Kojima and Konami make up). I don't have a major desire for AAA games.
What kind of proof would satisfy you? Why aren't you satisfied with the numerous screencaps, videos, actual threats given, etc. etc. especially in light of the r9k murders?
You do know the reasons why PHP CMSes like Wordpress are ridiculously popular is that it is dead easy to find a host that already runs PHP and MySQL right? Most of those installs aren't owned by developers. They're owns by regular people.
Slashdot Mirror
http://appleinsider.com/articl...
4 dollars.
that's the fee.
Which granted, over millions and millions of devices, is NOT chump change.
But remember that Apple makes a ton of revenue, 233 billion in 2015. So much so they lost 5 billion dollars last year on fluctuations in the foreign currency exchange market(which might be an outlier here, because 2015 was a fucked up year but with Brexit, 2016 might still also be a weirder fluctuation).
So if you look at the raw numbers, in order to even make their revenues push up by 1%, they'd have to sell something like over half a billion headphones and charger docks and whatever else uses lightning. That's one lightning device for every two or three people in the US, Canada, Mexico and Europe. Every adult, every child, everyone young, everyone old, and everyone in between.
It's not revenue. They're also giving you a 3.5mm adapter for anything that you have laying around that isn't lightning enabled already, with replacements costing 9 dollars.
I came back to slashdot because I wanted to see the reaction to the loss of the headphone jack. Not shocked to see Slashdotters not up to the news why.
People aren't really seeing why Apple did it. It's not for water resistance. You can jam a metal rod down there and it won't screw up your phone. They can make the jack resistant.
It's the display driver and the new camera modules. The camera modules caused problems with the display driver board. When they moved the display driver, it interfered with the headphone jack. When that happened they toyed with the idea of removing the headphone jack. Which opened them up to improve the haptic feedback engine and all sorts of other improvements internally.
Had Apple not supported wide color gamut on their new display and camera, I don't think they would've killed the jack. I think everything could've fit. But some of the other improvements would've suffered. With the new space I wonder if it would even have the quad core CPU with the fancy low power cores. That whole thing is powered by the thread monitoring chip that assigns which thread goes to which core. I'm sure they could've done it in software but doing it in hardware means it's one less thing the OS has to worry about.
I had to help my mom out with her ailing Toshiba notebook. The thing shuts down randomly due to a heat related problem. I was trying to get all of the data off of it in a form that could be read by Windows Easy Transfer.
I go to reboot the machine with everything turned off in MSConfig. Then it decided it wanted to do 16 updates.
On a machine that shuts down randomly.
You can guess what happened.
On OSX funny enough migration assistant can just read OSX installs off of bootable volumes.
The reason why you can buy things with bitcoin is that you can use any number of services and cash out those bitcoins to fiat currency. If there wasn't this escape hatch, bitcoin wouldn't be seeing the traction it does.
Do you think a guy who's selling drugs on a darknet some where gives a shit that you think you're sticking it to some central banker?
Do you think that anyone who's involved with combining bitcoin with fiat currency transactions like BrainTree care about the ideology at all?
The ideology of bitcoin isn't what's driving bitcoin's value in the market right now.
The value of bitcoin has value because private entities with fiat currency is backing it.
Strictly speaking, every currency is a fiat currency because we decide what it's worth based on how we feel about either it, or what's backing it. Whether it's gold or the combined goods and services the economy it supports.
There's no explicit gold to bread conversion.
it's slashdot. Consider your audience. I know who Khronos and Phoronix are, and what Vulkan is because I'm a tech nerd.
It's like going to a foodie blog and asking that they clarify what kale is
While in some benchmarks, the Pi 2 can keep up, it's clear it's overshadowed at times by the P4s.
What I want to know is, if we have a cluster of Pi 2s that consume the same amount of power as the P4, how different are the results?
I'd imagine it's the materials more than the set symbol on top. Like, from Dragons of Tarkir, i have like 4 spindowns all of different plastic composition. I don't think the set symbol on top is going to make a difference but one's translucent, another's opaque, another's murky...
Wizards of the Coast has been distributing 20 sided counters that are shaped just like D20s. Only with out any sort of randomness. The next number up or down is adjacent to whatever number you're looking at. Hence, "Spin down".
Any chance of anyone running a statistical analysis on these?
i was making the joke that Windows is the Chevy Chase of software. Or that Chevy Chase is the Windows of comedy.
Either way I'm not sorry.
From a certain point of view.
The greatest liability of Star Wars from Lucas' point of view is the hypercritical fanbase.
The problem here is that the fans feel like they are entitled to having things their way and having it be what they want. If someone were to tell Lucas "no", would it automatically have been better or worse?
It's easy to come to the lazy come to "Lucas did it wrong and Lucas is a crappy hack." Maybe. But the sense of entitlement i get from the fans just stinks. It's as if they can't let go of their anger and their feelings are driving them to be destructive. :) They don't seem to understand that projecting their opinion as fact is just incorrect. It's factual that a lot of star wars fans hate 1-3 and the special editions of 4-6, but it's not factual that these are bad. That's an opinion.
Right now there's a generation of kids with fond memories of the original trilogy. Are they wrong factually? How do you prove that?
In the end it all comes down to taste and vision, and even though George Lucas might have questionable taste, he had a vision. It was ambitious. It might be rubbish, but there's a ton of cinema out there that has neither taste nor vision. Stuff that is so bland it makes plain tofu seem exciting.
look, we all take a break from shitting in Chevy Chase's cereal during his birthday.
I think Windows deserves the same respect.
I mean, Windows is terrible; but I think there's a time and a place for shitting on Windows and Windows' birthday is not it.
Non ironic Beowulf clusters.
Bandwidth.
4k at 30fps is like 45 mbps.
That's what's going to hold back 4k and why whinging about the lack of 4k is meaningless for now.
it'd be awfully nice if we had single payer, then you wouldn't be forced into paying for shit tier insurance.
You're off by a factor of ten. The per capita GDP of Finland is not half a million a year. It's 50,000.
So? The GDP of Finland is .3 trillion dollars. The GDP of the USA is 16.77 trillion.
It is redistribution of wealth. When people hear that they freak the fuck out. It's an uneven distribution of wealth. Your six or seven or however large income isn't going to be split evenly.
In America wages have stagnated and productivity has skyrocketed.
Quite frankly as long as being poor doesn't suck and isn't humiliating, I don't care how bad the gap between the wealthy and poor gets. If the economy grows, everyone wins in that model. Granted, if the economy shrinks, everyone loses but people hit the ground in less critical ways.
FWIW, I don't give a toss about marketing budgets too much.
Maybe GTA V wouldn't have sold the way it did if it wasn't for the fact that billboards and busses were wrapped with GTA V ads and so on, but...
Depends on the game.
GTA 5? 137 million in development costs. Metal Gear Solid 5? 80 million. Destiny? 140 million.
Triple A games hitting the 50 to 100 million in development cost mark isn't uncommon, which is right along the same cost as a hollywood film.
You mention building engines. Ok, we've got unreal, frostbite and maybe a few others. No one builds engines, they LICENSE them.
Konami built the Fox Engine, Treyarch built the Frostbite engine, CryEngine... etc.
Why are these reduced costs not being passed to the customer?
3 bucks sounds about right when you take manufacturing out of the picture. It doesn't cost more than a few dollars to put a disk into a box and send the box to the store.
Like complaining about paying full price for broken games IS an issue I'm on board with. Because fuck that. That's a huge problem in the industry.
But when PC gamers complain that their games are crippled for consoles, then balk at paying full price, then I have zero sympathy for PC gamers. I don't care about someone's system specs, they are aware that it takes more time and money to make a texture that looks nice at 4k versus one that looks nice at 1080p right?
Maybe I'm just playing the right games, the last few games I've bought have been Metal Gear Solid 5(aside from that whackass save bug with Quiet), Splatoon, and Smash Bros. So, maybe I'm just not that hardcore of a gamer anymore? I don't know.
Big Hollywood movies tend to have a theatrical run which is the bulk of the returns on investment.
When that BluRay is in your hand, most of the money for the film has been made back when it was running in the theaters.
Games priced at $50 bucks need to sell more copies than a Blu Ray of a Hollywood blockbuster.
Not only that, but there's different support costs for a Blu Ray than there are for games. Game has an online component? That costs a ton of money to upkeep.
So, either games are going to have to be not as pretty as console versions, or PC gamers are going to have to put their money where their mouths are with regards to paying for prettier content.
Right, my point is that people bragging about buying PC games when they're cheap, bragging about how nice they look and wondering why anyone would pay retail fail to realize that those games cost money.
Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are all making profit right now.
All the GPU and CPU power in the world is nothing with out assets and engines to actually use all of that power. Building those engines and assets cost time and money in the form of human effort(procedural generation won't save the industry here; they still have to look nice and fit well into the environment).
So, tell me exactly how paying way less for games that require way more work is sustainable?
Like, League, and WoW and so on are an easy answer because it's basically SaaS, but more like GaaS. But what about anything else?
I just don't understand it.
Instant gratification.
I don't understand how the PC gaming market works. You release a game that cost some $millions to produce, and you can't even get full price out of some customers.
I wonder how many problems, like day one DLC, micro transactions, etc, would go away if we were willing to pay the true cost of games development.
As gaming hardware improves, how can games dev be sustainable? We demand more graphical fidelity, richer, prettier assets, etc. Yet, sales numbers need to be ridiculously high to just break even. More than just PCs mind you, there's going to be at least one or two more console generation. Not mention mobile, which will never go away.
Either we need to pay more for games up front or there's going to be an economic calamity in games.
Which, fine by me. My favorite game series is done(not unless Kojima and Konami make up). I don't have a major desire for AAA games.
What kind of proof would satisfy you? Why aren't you satisfied with the numerous screencaps, videos, actual threats given, etc. etc. especially in light of the r9k murders?
You do know the reasons why PHP CMSes like Wordpress are ridiculously popular is that it is dead easy to find a host that already runs PHP and MySQL right? Most of those installs aren't owned by developers. They're owns by regular people.