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.