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Comment Re:I don't get it (Score 1) 394

Why don't publishers put the ads in a section of the page that can allow the rest of the page to load and render before the ad loads and renders?

Because you could stop the loading once the content you wanted was rendered, thus skipping the ad.

So the pages are set up so the ad loads and renders first.

Comment Re:Translation (Score 5, Insightful) 608

More importantly, the message here is that being right doesn't matter; being good and obedient preserves you, while being right only makes you a martyr. If you expose the corruption of those in power, that's well and good, and a great civil duty; however, you must understand that you will be punished.

The implication is that, civil duty or not, you should think long and hard about pitching your own skin into the cause, because we sure as hell aren't going to reward you just for doing a great service to humanity. Read carefully and you'll notice the government said he'd even have to accept the consequences of speaking out and engaging in constructive protest: they decree you can dissent against their rule, and that's well and good, as long as they can punish you for your dissent--which is precisely the situation in North Korea, where you may speak out against Kim Jong-Un, and, importantly, accept the consequences of speaking out against him.

Comment Re:SD Card? (Score 2) 154

So, find the parts that OnePlus put in the One and show the cost that they paid for those parts.

OnePlus One with 16GB NAND: $300

OnePlus One with 64GB NAND: $350

Run the cost of NAND chips. 64GB MLC NAND chips fluctuate at a spot price between $1.60 and $4.34. Adding 64GB of NAND to a platform costs $4.34, much less switching from an expensive 16GB NAND platform to a 64GB platform. A 32GB chip fluctuates between $1.70 and $2.93--two of those would cost $3.40 to $5.86--and the next common size down is 4GB MLC NAND. Once the manufacture process is reliable, the sheer silicon wafer size is what counts: a wafer carrying 32GB of NAND costs exactly as much as a wafer carrying 64GB NAND if exactly half of the 64GB NAND chips are non-functional due to manufacture errors and 100% of the 32GB NAND wafers are in working order.

Of course bulk agreements mean we can slim profit margins down: if I were to buy a million chips from a supplier, that supplier would make a large order from his silicon supplier, who would make a large order from his material supplier, who would make a large order from fuel and energy suppliers, and so forth. Each could negotiate a large purchase contract by which a sizable profit is made on large volume and slim margin, at each step compounding the per-unit cost savings in the final product, delivering to me at substantially below-market price.

I don't pretend to know that OnePlus paid $4 or $1.60 or so per 64GB chip; I am fully aware they likely paid substantially below-market, and that the market price I cite assumes they went fully off-the-shelf for small batches (which may have happened) and so paid more than they otherwise would have. I can't very well conjecture about how much less they might have paid than the amount I cite; I've had to run this based on the most expensive component prices available on the market.

Ask them what their profit margins are on both models, and ask them why the bigger one is $50 more.

The profit margin is demonstrably larger on the one with bigger NAND. You can ask them, but things like profit margins in specific are strategic business information: advertising that you're gouging people for additional luxury is a good way to destroy consumer faith by arrogance and entitlement, and of course lead competitors to create a strategic opportunity by advertising that they don't gouge quite so hard when add extra NAND (the opportunity is to discredit your operations and to capture your market).

Small business or not, you'd be a fool to be that transparent.

Comment Re:SD Card? (Score 0) 154

Right, that's why they're selling an unlocked top-shelf phone for $329, because they're all about making as much profit as possible and they really want to control exactly how you use the device.

Do you deny that the OnePlus One 64GB cost $50 more than its $16GB counterpart, while holding exactly the same specifications aside from an extra 48GB of NAND?

You seem to be using "since this, thus unrelated" logic: the phone is a low-cost phone, therefor all parts inside must not be overpriced. More directly, you're using a fallacy of division: since the phone itself is not an over-priced piece of shit, each part inside must carry no inflation of cost. The phone is cheap for its hardware, therefor the inclusion of $16 more hardware at a price of $50 additional simply must be an established falsehood--even though we can clearly demonstrate that the hardware does indeed cost less than $50.

you think they didn't include a removable SD card because of some profit motive. I bet its the other way, I bet they're trying to keep costs down.

An SD slot with working controller costs $1.66, including all the voltage regulators, capacitors, and resistors to support the interface. You may need a dedicated $1.30 Atmel 8-bit microcontroller to control it, or you can pipe it into an existing microcontroller on your board (truth be told, a dedicated microcontroller probably won't save you the bus pins). Additional NAND costs $16, and they charge $50 for it.

Comment Re:Is this not the 21st century? (Score 1) 154

Wireless power is excessively inefficient. Current projections suggest cell phones use 10% of the world's energy per year; wireless power is 10% as efficient as direct contact charging, meaning the total worldwide energy draw required for wireless charging would be just about 100% of the world's current energy consumption.

How about putting your phone right side up in your pocket so when you take it out you can see your program right side up.

When reaching down into your pocket, your arm is oriented downward, wrist spatially above your hand. When you raise your hand up to your face, your wrist is spatially below your hand. Through the movement, you rotate the phone 180 degrees: the part of your phone at the bottom of your pocket is the part of your phone pointed upward when raised to view. This is largely because your hip is below your elbow and shoulder, while your face is above your elbow and shoulder.

I put my phone in my pocket while listening on headphones. Without a bottom jack, I must rotate it in my hand, then place it in my pocket; then, on retrieval, I must rotate it back. Each rotation is a complex free movement with an exceedingly high chance of dropping the phone, or a two-handed affair which carries a low but significant chance of dropping the phone. A bottom jack means the phone leaves and returns to my pocket with a firm grip upon it, due to already holding it firmly or being unable to remove it from my pocket without holding it firmly.

I suppose you could put a bulky, over-sized, insufficient case on your phone, making it 3 times thicker and more ungainly to handle--and still prone to damage when dropped.

Comment Re:No Compromises (Score 1) 154

My OnePlus One has NFC, but the OnePlus 2 doesn't. I used NFC to transfer my Google account settings, which didn't really transfer much. From what I can find, NFC is incredibly difficult to configure and use--sending an MMC to transfer a picture or video is a lot faster and easier.

Wireless charging is also a waste. You have to be right up with it, and it uses 10 times as much power to provide as much charge to the phone. Likewise, quick charging, while nice, just doesn't make much sense when every car with bluetooth has a USB port, and every car add-on to connect a phone to a non-bluetooth radio has a charge port for your phone, and both have dash controls so your phone isn't hampered by being cabled. While I find it tough to actually get a 100% charge on my OnePlus One, I've had trouble getting it under 80% as well--even with just charging it for an hour to 90%-95% each night.

I'm not sure why front speakers are supposed to be any better than bottom speakers, although I see quite well why a bottom headphone jack is far superior to a top headphone jack. On the other hand, they could have gone hardware buttons or gone screen area for those bottom buttons, instead of hardware touch buttons.

The big drawbacks are really no slide-out keyboard and no SD slot.

Comment Star-Lord (Score 2) 574

That has to be the most paranoid, pedantic and inane wiki article I've ever read.

The term "Democrat..." has been used countless times by DEMOCRATS themselves on television for as long as I can remember.

You might as well get your panties in a twist because people don't call you "Star-Lord".

Comment Re:How much is an AG these days? (Score 1) 256

yet most people somehow attribute to "whore" a worse meaning

Somehow?

Our market-value vigilance over who is zooming whom dates back a good six-million years.

Nowadays we get more upset when someone unworthy buys a home on our street, but the underlying sentiments were once the same.

This modern "whore" make-over as a small proprietor with high integrity is primarily a byproduct of dense urbanization, where there's an infinite number of fish in the sea to whitewash our old instincts—instincts pre-dating fire, language, cities, and agriculture.

"Somehow" you sound like you just fell off the turnip truck, five minutes ago.

Comment Re:Too big to fail (Score 1) 256

That is, the Australian government has $498 billion to spend on whatever, but Walmart gives most of its $468 billion on suppliers.

That's the least comprehension of "whatever" I've ever seen. But you're not first. It's a 100,000-way tie.

The vast majority of government expenditures are written into law, and the benefits go right back to the same people who provided the revenues. A government enjoys great discretion in how it expends, but not much discretion at all concerning what it expends upon.

Certainly in the circular flow, the government's "friends" skim a lot of cream. And why shouldn't they? They're all upstanding businessmen (and businesswomen) engaged in the profit motive, possessed of the oldest, most conservative, barnyard business model:

1) Pick winning horse.
2) Milk cow.

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