But OpenGL is even more relevant on all non-PC devices. Whether it's done by software rendering in the old J2ME games, or now by hardware-acceleration on iOS and Android, the common point for all new platforms has been OpenGL ES. It will continue to see evolution and improvement, and nothing will prevent these improvements from going back to the PC. Notably because there is no hard distinction left between a Linux PC and an Android device nowadays.

That's what regulated, cost-oriented prices in a monopoly do. Gold plate everything, spare no expense in the research of perfection, and earn a fixed percentage on it. Nowadays, we spend money on advertisement instead, because it's much more efficient at recruiting clients than quality in a competitive market.

I recognize I was wrong in linking the low bandwidth problem with the number of pins, because I referred to the HDMI/DP standards, that used multiple lanes to increase the bandwidth, instead of USB3 or MHL, discussed elsewhere in this thread, that prove that the feature is possible.I spend long enough with hardware controllers to know that there is a wide set of protocols to interconnect two systems, and in my opinion the serial/parallel classification is not interesting.

In the end, others manufacturers achieve to do what Apple doesn't: a small, standard connector with good A/V support. It is Apple's choice when upgrading its connector to degrade a working feature, adding latency and artifacts, while producing a proprietary connector. You see it as a good thing because cables are useless; I don't.

The serial/parallel distinction is completely useless in here. But you're right on the pin count.

There are 9 pins in a full size USB3 connector, and 8 pins in a Lightning connector. But when the lightning connector has two data pairs, USB3 has a bidirectional pair for legacy, and two single-direction pairs for high-speed traffic. HDMI, and Displayport respectively have 3 pairs (+ 1 differential clock) and 4 pairs.

The real question is the nature of the signal on those pairs. USB2 is 480Mb/s with a lot of protocol overhead, HDMI has 3.40 Gb/s with only error correction, and USB3 is 5 Gb/s, but still has (parts of) its inefficient protocol. Depending from what Apple is doing, it could route only the high-speed signaling of USB3 on the Lightning connector's two pairs, and provide the same performance as a standard USB3 cable.

However, since Apple keeps all information about Lightning under wraps, only insiders can tell. And until now, all we've seen is quite underwhelming, with USB2 data cables, and now this adapter.

Don't get confused. The high-tech Intel interconnect once known as LightPeak is called Thunderbolt. Here, we are talking the proprietary, low-tech, USB-like symmetrical connector Apple uses on their recent iOS devices, whose name is on purpose confusing everyone with its better counterpart.

And from what we see here, it's markedly worse than the alternatives Apple shunned, but that were based on standards (MHL, USB3), because those would have prevented Apple from imposing drastic licensing conditions on accessory manufacturers.

Was the change really worth it?

With its limited pin count, it's not a surprise that the Lightning connector does not have the bandwidth to transfer uncompressed video. But it's disappointing for it to be so bad at compression, with the MPEG artifacts shown in the article, plus latency issues with encoding/decoding. On that point, the old connector was better, and micro-USB3 would have had enough bandwidth to avoid the issue completely.

Minecraft is a good example of indie game. It has no editor, the game is not sold on the physical retail market. It only sold 9,531,112 copies.

Unfortunately, the page you cite is utterly broken: Combined European GDP is below the sole German GDP. The value for the EU should be $17 Triillion, not the puny $3.6 trillion shown on the data.

It was a standard Soviet rhetoric tactic, and earned the nickname of "whataboutism".

The Canadian rules can be stupid too. If you're Canadian because you're born from Canadian parents outside of Canada, you need to be careful. Your children will only be Canadians if they are born in Canada.

In France, there are rules preventing 18+ games from being sown on TV before 22:30. Even channels broadcasting on cable, satellite and dsl networks must respect those rules. That poses a problem to channels like Nolife TV, specialized in video games, because a lot of games get a PEGI 18 rating - if the player is able to kill a human-looking enemy, and this is done in a somewhat realist context, it's PEGI 18. As a result, they must cram discussion of a lot of games in a small time slot.

The rule was originally designed for movies, by the way, but the French movie rating is much more relaxed than the games rating. For example, the last James Bond movie did not get any restriction at all, it would be PEGI 18 if it were a game. But the movie rating boards in Europe use different standards.

At then end; it looks like Nintendo took the most restrictive of those rules, and applied them to everyone, as if the WiiU was a TV channel. This will hurt them in more liberal markets. It does not help that Nintendo of Europe is headquartered in Germany, which has the most extreme restrictions on video games, and still requires a separate, different, ugly, enormous, unremovable logo on game packaging and game disks. And this is after the PEGI rating board mainly standardized on rules very close to the German ones...

Just implement the calculation of any irrational number. If I remember well, you get an infinite string of digits, non-repeating, in any base you take.

The company claims it does it differently, with base stations using the ISM band to discuss directly with the devices on the field, and advanced signal processing in the base station to detect those signals.

They have a pending patent on it, and they call it Forced Statistical FDMA

Flash memory is nowadays only rated for 10 years retention. And that duration is valid only with a strong error correction code, and will be reduced by reading and writing. I really wonder how long today's devices will last.

The problem is the static leakage of transistors. It increases as the node width decreases, and for a given node you have two choices to generate a transistor: either high-speed and high-leakage, or low-speed and low-leakage. Even with DVFS enabled, you will have better power results if you use the CPU with the slow transistors than the one with the fast transistors. Hence the switching between two types of cores with different optimizations but executing the same code.