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U.S. online sales in 2015 was $342 billion in 2015 The sum total of U.S. retail sales was $4.785 trillion in 2015 Yes online sales are growing. But they're still only about 7% of all retail sales.

I bought almost everything except groceries from Amazon and Newegg the last decade, but I'm finding myself buying more and more items from brick and mortar stores precisely for the reasons OP gives - counterfeit goods and easier returns. A big part of the reason I bought from Amazon was the no-hassle returns, but they killed that policy this year. Newegg is exempted only because their main warehouse and return center is 2 miles from where I work.

These guys have yet to learn that people are buying them not just for convenience and price, but because they trust that a big name like Amazon will stand behind the product they sell. If they're gonna mix their inventory with that of their third party sellers, well sorry I'm just gonna buy that item from a big name store whose inventory supply chain I trust. My Amazon orders are way down this year, my Costco purchases are way up (they have a great return policy). And I'm even buying stuff from Best Buy again.

This article talks about it.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/08...

More info
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/...
https://www.internetretailer.c...

http://www.fathead.com/ is pretty good. http://www.internetretailer.co...

I'm still okay with recommending Android to non-technical users, given that most of them manage just fine on Macs and PCs that face the same primary vector for attack (i.e. the user downloading and installing a trojan).

That said, yeah, Android is really getting a disproportionate share of the malware. More recent reports peg it at 99% of all mobile malware, and Pichai is trying to brush that away as a simple factor of market share, which is rather short-sighted. iOS currently sits around a 16% market share (and falling, due to Android outpacing iOS' rate of growth), which should be more than enough to attract malware. Especially so when you consider that iOS still attracts a comparable (some would argue better) amount of third-party support from developers making apps, as well as the fact that we still get reports like these (tl;dr: this last Christmas season, iOS users accounted for 5x more online purchases than Android users and spent roughly 2x as much on each purcase), making them potentially much more lucrative targets to developers of adware and malware.

Yet, despite all of that, iOS malware rates aren't even being registered on any of the mobile malware reports I can find from the last quarter. I recall them being at something like 0.07% the quarter before that, with Blackberry even registering more malware than them.

To drill down further: let's talk about websites that are significant in size and thus significant to the internet:

http://www.internetretailer.com/top500/list/

I'm also intrigued: will those sites have to change their subscription saving ways? What if it was just a subscription and you didn't save shit, does that fall under the patent?

You have to save shit if you are going to allow your customer to order a dozen bananas every other week on the truck that will just happen to be in their neighborhood at 6PM on Friday.

And when they add two pounds of Nuts for delivery 5 days before Christmas on the truck that will be near their house there at 3:30, all they have to do is drag the nuts to the delivery schedule for their neighborhood, mark it one time, instead of re-occuring.

Look, this is way more precise than "send me a newspaper every day".
You get to pick the day.
You get to pick the time of day slot.
You get to specify the re-occurrence frequency and day of the week.
You get to easily add/subtract from your scheduled deliveries, all on line or from your phone.
You get to see a list of exactly what time slots are available, (when the trucks will be near you), and select the one you want.
You get to put it on hold when you go out of town.

They aren't patenting the fact that its saved in a computer. They are patenting an entire delivery scheduling methodology for customer order management of groceries (etc) that will re-occur on a predictable and fairly precise time period of the customer's choosing. Not something that shows up in the mail sometime in the future.

To drill down further: let's talk about websites that are significant in size and thus significant to the internet:

http://www.internetretailer.com/top500/list/

I'm also intrigued: will those sites have to change their subscription saving ways? What if it was just a subscription and you didn't save shit, does that fall under the patent?

And the state doesn't ever check anybody's compliance who isn't operating a business.

Here's if you live in Colorado:
http://www.internetretailer.com/2010/03/03/colorado-to-online-shoppers-pay-your-own-sales-tax

The law also requires online retailers doing more than $100,000 a year in online sales in Colorado to file with the state’s Department of Revenue each year a list of all online Colorado customers and the dollar value and category of their online purchases.

Every online retailer who sells to a Colorado purchaser and doesn’t collect sales tax will be required to put a notice in the customer’s invoice that says, "You are obligated to pay sales tax in the state of Colorado for this purchase". The requirement to submit a list of customers and purchasing data each year is intended to support the state’s ability to check compliance with the law.

So, if you don't know which form to use, better find out quick. Sounds like a which hunt is brewing.

The brilliance of up-marketing Boot Camp on OSX is that it helps people overcome their fear of losing Windows compatibility. The idea is to get people onto the Mac platform in a way that makes OSX the primary desktop while Windows becomes 'just another application'. I think that long term this is a great strategy for weening leery Windows users off that platform as it hides the MS branding behind the OSX branding.

I would agree that Apple was not a direct competitor to MS for many years. They were not trying to be. However, it cannot be denied that their markets are overlapping considerably today. Apple has made its' iLife products very attractive to young people who are more involved in the 'online social revolution'. MS is trying desperately to find a way to exploit the same market segment, but have so far had little luck.

The growth in Asia is similar. MS has historically looked the other way while Asia pirated their software. With the introduction of Vista MS has implemented several new initiatives aimed at getting the millions of Asian users that already have pirated copies of Windows XP to upgrade to a legal copy of Vista. The fact that these users are now paying for Windows (at a much reduced cost, btw) does not imply a larger install base.
I am not, however, implying that the growth will not increase substantially in Asia. It should be noted that much of that growth has been in the low-cost segments, where Linux products like the EeePC really shine. Will Asian consumers prefer cheaper Linux alternatives over more expensive Windows? I don't know, but if even a small percentage, say 5%, chose to do so in the next few years as the market grows it will be a success for Linux and a chink in MS' armor in the future.

With Apple pushing that much hardware the only plausible conclusion is that people are switching and where the US market goes, others' tend to follow.

Is MS doing well? Sure. But is it climbing faster than their competitors? I think the numbers refute that claim. Given a decade or two we may see a market in which Apple commands as much as 30% and Linux may be approaching double-digits. With such adoption of competing platforms MS would be forced to put more effort into interoperability, open standards, and real innovation. I think we can agree that would be good for everyone.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/03/19/apple_us_retail_sales_feb/
http://www.internetretailer.com/internet/marketing-conference/30424-applecom-at-top-computer-hardware-sites-nielsen-netratings-reports.html

Sure, Perl is pretty much on everyone's shit list these days. But as the Director of Development for Zappos.com from 2000 through 2006, I have to take exception with his claim that perl is unacceptable for high-performance applications. Of course it depends what type of high performance applications you're talking about, but for high performance web applications it's actually quite good.

Specifically, the Zappos site, built with Perl, was rated the fastest retail website in the world for broadband customers for much of 2006. It beat out Amazon, Dell, Best Buy, etc, etc, you name it. It was also the most consistent speed and the fewest errors. Search Internet Retailer for the more numbers. It always places in the top 5.

Also, the claim that one might mix HTML in scripts is a sign that this guy hasn't actually used Perl in the past decade. Everyone switched to powerful templating systems sometime in 98. There are several very nice web development frameworks for Perl these days. Just like almost any other language.

The rest of his criticisms are more valid. I wouldn't try writing graphic intensive applications, or anything with heavy math processing in Perl. And the most common complaint, that it doesn't prevent you from writing messy code, is certainly true. Of course, just because your code looks neat doesn't mean it's good code either :)

Cheers.

"Wasn't the deal that DRM be replaced with some kind of watermark? Kinda nasty that with the plaintext name and e-mail though..."

Yes. Keeping people honest is nasty. Especially seeing as they can't do it themselves.

Any DB misconfigured is going to die under load. MySQL can be configured to be extremely stable -- we've been running the fastest & most reliable retail site online for the past year now with MySQL as the DB.

I've got nothing against PostgreSQL -- just never used it. I'm sure it's a fine piece of software, but please don't spread falsehoods about MySQL just because people don't know how to configure it. That would be like me claiming PostgreSQL sucks because I couldn't get it working easily. It's all about knowing what you're doing in any case.

Specifically, most of the errors you're seeing are because they've got it configured to use more memory than their 32 bit arcitecture supports. It's fairly easy to misconfiure so that in a high traffic situation the MySQL process will use over 2GB and then the OS shuts it down. The options are to go 64 bit or to configure it to use less memory for performance or limit the connections -- just like with Apache's MaxClients option.

Cheers.

Any DB misconfigured is going to die under load. MySQL can be configured to be extremely stable -- we've been running the fastest & most reliable retail site online for the past year now with MySQL as the DB.

I've got nothing against PostgreSQL -- just never used it. I'm sure it's a fine piece of software, but please don't spread falsehoods about MySQL just because people don't know how to configure it. That would be like me claiming PostgreSQL sucks because I couldn't get it working easily. It's all about knowing what you're doing in any case.

Specifically, most of the errors you're seeing are because they've got it configured to use more memory than their 32 bit arcitecture supports. It's fairly easy to misconfiure so that in a high traffic situation the MySQL process will use over 2GB and then the OS shuts it down. The options are to go 64 bit or to configure it to use less memory for performance or limit the connections -- just like with Apache's MaxClients option.

Cheers.

Yet the only company that actually kept it below 4 seconds was Zappos.com. Yeah, I admit I'm patting my team on the back :)

Cheers.

If everyone can calm down for a moment, I think there's a mixture. My dev team is roughly split on alcohol-- 5 non drinkers, 4 drinkers. And though I think most of us are okay with caffiene nobody seems to have an major addiction... just a soda or tea once in a while. I think only one or two of us drink coffee with any regularity. One of us even smokes cigarettes. And maybe even a couple of us have tried pot.

And yes, we're REAL programmers, as everyone seems to like to claim (in fact we just won the fastest downloading retail site, though Akamai helps there).

And, here's the amazing part: we all do good work and we all get along. TMTOWTDI, as they say.

Cheers.

Well, according to ForeSeeResults.com, their recent survey of customer and browser experience satisfaction had one company doing better than Amazon.

Obligatory disclaimer: I manage the web QA group for Netflix, so I have both a vested interest and a certain amount of pride in people discovering this particular fact.