Completely agree. You don't have to be able to bang out an OS, but man, if everybody just knew how to grep through some files or automatically run an SQL query, dump the results into an Excel file and email it to somebody, the world would be a better place.

Pick your poison. Get robbed by your coworkers or get robbed by your boss. You're still getting robbed. But I bet your coworkers will rob you less, given that they're being robbed by the same process.

Resistance was futile!

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Oh, sure, I'm just saying it would be funny. Revenge for all the epithets /.ers have hurled at him from this site. Not nearly so many since he retired, but you remember what it was like in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Bill Gates.

Replaces the front page of /. with a picture of him naked, rolling in money, pointing at you and laughing.

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.

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.

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.

I don't think having access to the source code to VS 2015 is going to allow anyone to compile VS for any non-Windows platform. Not unless you have a few million man-hours available for porting and redesign (since much of the functionality present in VS wouldn't even make sense outside of Windows)

I'm not going to flame you, but the Perfect World called and wondered when you were coming back. They miss you.

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.

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.

Oh, you're absolutely right. I'm definitely not saying it would be impossible to hide a backdoor in an open core design. Absolutely could. Same thing with FOSS...just see the Underhanded C Competition.

But today you could have (and probably do have...) explicit backdoors in silicon, besides debugging interfaces, and you'd never know. With an open core design, you'd have to hide it.

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.

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.