I'll agree there is a bit of observer bias on my part as well. Among the D's I like Obama, Edwards, everyone else, and Clinton (actually including the whole field Richardson would rank between Obama and Edwards). Among the Republicans I like Romney, McCain, then Giuliani. Can't say I'd vote for anyone running under the GOP banner other than Ron Paul, but check back with me after the nominees are decided. Let's just say I'm not planning on voting for Sen. Clinton ever.
Currently Obama and Richarson are the ones I'm leaning toward supporting.
I think the "seeming to encourage supporter action/participation." is a lot more subjective than you do. I find Romney's to score 1st in that category. It's important to keep in mind that these candidates (at least on the R/D split in general) websites are going to attract different eyes. Which are motivated by and respond to different things.
To judge this I did a little digging rather than just going on what is on the front page. The Obama, Edwards, and McCain sites had some social networking/community building features which put them ahead of the others. Clinton and Romney seemed roughly equal on the participation front. Romney has one of the better front-page presentations of the action/participation portion of his site. I had to dig to get to that part of Edwards' and McCain's sites.
My rank of the sites is: D's: Obama, Clinton, Edwards R's: Romney, McCain, Giuliani
Again #2 is mostly by virtue of the fact that #3 is so awful.
The latter - so if I have a kilogram of good virgin nuclear fuel, and a reprocessing plant, after x number of cycles there's going to be y grams of material that I just can't do anything with anymore (for fuel in current reactors, at least). Not sure of the exact number and it varies a bit depending on what reactor design the fuel load is for.
Furthermore there is the issue of how far it is worth reprocessing fuel with current technology vs. using virgin fuel. At some point virgin fuel is going to be cheaper even when factoring in the storage costs. Indeed this is the current situation in North America.
IIRC the French are doing reprocessing, and I've heard that 97% number before - do you happen to know how much of it is left after reprocessing and what's done with it afterwards? Are you talking each trip through the reprocessing plant or the total amount of each fuel load that will ultimately have to be dealt with as waste?
Not sure of the exact numbers other than it is signifigantly less than storing the fuel elements after 1 trip through the reactor. Reactor design and fuel element management have an impact on the ultimate waste amount as well. IIRC the Canadian CANDU designs burn much more of the fuel each trip through and are much less picky about their fuel. (indeed they can use unenriched uranium).
From what I've heard the French are storing their nuclear waste, though they are calling the storage facility a "research center" for political reasons. Given that whats left will be down to the level of radioactivity present in natural uranium ore in 200 years or so I don't think their planning horizon is much longer than that.
Besides, we only need enough time on fission to get fusion perfected. That should take less than a hundred years. Then we only need to wait until we, as a race, consider that we have lift into space as a reliable technology. Then we just take all that old fission waste and send it into the Sun for the next generation of solar system to enjoy. And that's assuming we don't have a better solution for it by then. Why the heck would one go an throw perfectly useful radionuclides into space? Nuclear "waste" is 97% unburnt fuel. Far better to reprocess the fuel until it isn't practical to do so anymore. Some of the byproducts will have immediate uses too. Store the small volume of waste you are left with somewhere or even mix it with mine tailings and put it back in the ground.
The whole nuclear "waste" problem is grossly overblown.
I'm not so sure about that- in that I've got a medical condition that CFLs cause me migraines. First I don't think the law would ban most halogen lighting so you do have an alternative.
Second CFL's vary wildly in things like ballast frequency and phosphor color temperature and persistence. I assume you can watch TV or use an LCD monitor (for that matter the backlight on any LCD flickers at very high frequency).
So the trick would be to find a particular model or models that don't cause you problems. Best bet is to avoid the super-cheap no-name stuff.
CFLs are nice, but something about the 60 hz pulsing makes my eyes want to pop out of my head. If the CFL's you have experience with flicker at 60 Hz then you've only been around the cheap-ass ones.
Most of the good newer ones use a 22 kHz electronic ballast.
Lucky you. In the more established industries (reality is that IT is a fledgling industry and the companies inside of it don't have their processes fleshed out as thoroughly), for example mine is pharmaceuticals, the first day of employment is paper-signing with human resources. In the case of the employment agreement and NDAs they slide the packet to you and give you time to read it. Should you have any questions they are happy to answer them. Should you have any reservations they are happy to reply,"It is the standard corporate document. We cannot change it. That is up to the legal department." Any "concerns" over wording in the employment agreement or the NDA is negated with the same or a similar response. A refusal to sign the document is dealt with rather simply: "Your signature on that document is necessary to file the paperwork for your paycheck. We're sorry. It cannot be modified." The first day paperwork ritual is pretty standard in any professionally run company these days.
On the other hand, everything really is negotiable, even with a Fortune 500 behemoth. Mind you that generally the bigger the company the hotter the property you have to be in order to get them to negotiate something non-standard with you. If that is the case you really have to ask yourself why the heck you aren't doing corp-to-corp contracting for highway robbery rates.
Also consider that even the big boys sometimes miss things. As an example I know someone who was hired by a large aerospace company who ended up never signing an employment agreement nor a NDA. It was only caught after he had been there nearly 2 years, and then only because he was in the process of getting a security clearance for a new position he was moving to.
One thing I've seen a lot of is unenforceable or illegal provisions in employment agreements and other related documents. In particular some non-compete clauses essentially make any future employment at the discretion of the company. Also many employment agreements will attempt to claim ownership of any inventions, creative work, or trademarks you produce during your term of employment, even if all of the work was done on your own time and equipment.
Fortunately this sort of thing tends to get tossed out in court, however it is very messy and expensive to get to that point. Therefore if you can get everything as clear and specific as possible prior to signing any agreement it can save everyone grief in the long run. This is especially important if you are employed as say a developer or sysadmin and contribute to open source projects as your employer may have a legal claim on your work even if it was done on your own time and equipment.
One thing I've seen done is to include a copy of the employment agreement and any related documents with the offer letter. This way you have an opportunity to review them before returning them. In some cases it may be wise to have an attorney review them before signing and returning. If this isn't standard practice for your perspective employer I'd ask for a chance to have it reviewed by an attorney prior to signing.
Terrorists will just attack somewhere else. The most obvious target is mass transit. Leave a bunch of bombs on the New York Subway, just like they did with the trains in Madrid- that would probably be a lot easier than smuggling a Stinger missile into the US. Or plant an IED on the Northwest Corridor and wait for a packed Acela train to go over it. Plant a limpet mine on the bottom of a ferry- if you can sink it fast enough you could kill a few hundred people. My personal favorites on this front would be sinking a large ship at the entrance to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach or setting off a bomb in one of those huge mega-churches one Sunday morning somewhere in the South.
It's all just a show: most of the security efforts I've seen in place do comparatively little to make anyone safer, they're just designed to make us *feel* safer. They're not security, they're a security blanket. Ah you mean security theater.
He didn't say that he said "be less of a dick" to me that means not getting invlolved where we have no business and stop playing world police, one in the same I suppose. I and many other Americans agree with this. We need to fix the problems here before we go galavanting around the globe playing cop. I believe a certain former US President warned the Nation about "foreign entanglements".
There are issues with putting the actual datacenter in someplace like Hyderabad or rural China. As other posters have pointed out there is a network latency problem for any application that might be sensitve to it. Furthermore outside the developed world grid power can be spotty at best, while you can run everything off generators, it is a lot easier if you don't have to. Also you typically want your datacenter someplace with good access to long-haul fiber, while not necessarily a problem in major cities in India it would definately be a problem in rural China.
Personally I see more companies in the future doing what many have done already, move their datacenters outside small US cities where land is cheap, the cost of living is low, there is plenty of fiber nearby, and power is reliable and preferably cheap. Witness the number of current datacenters around places like Omaha, NE or Springfield, OR. Look at Google's, MSN's, Yahoo's, and other's plans for datacenters all up and down the Columbia Basin in cities like Wenatchee, WA.
Well their AMD64 server line is rather nice with much to reccomend it over the kit of other server vendors like Dell or HP. Solaris has some advantages for certain problems over Linux or FreeBSD. ZFS looks pretty cool too.
But is Sun more than just another box vendor and sponsor of a UNIX flavor these days? It really doesn't seem like it anymore.
As a developer, I know I will be OK as long as the economy is good enough to afford such attitudes:)
[99.9% of the world would gladly wear a ties/turbans/uniforms/overalls just to have a programming job at anywhere near what we get paid...]
I should clairify that my objection to the shirt and tie has more to do with it being a sign of deeper problems at most companies in my area that have such a requirement for their technical positions, particularly any technology companies with such dress codes.
Around here a majority of companies allow their developers, testers, system administrators and the like to wear jeans and t-shirts to work so it hasn't really been a decision I've had to make.
I've also made the mistake of taking a job at a company that was a horrible fit for me. It didn't work out either for me or for my employer.
On the other hand I do realize that one does what one needs to do in order to eat and pay the bills. I've been there before and I hope not to be there again.
The thing is the shirt and tie company will likely lay off all of its technical staff and outsource overseas during the next economic downturn before most of the jeans and t-shirt places will.
I wasn't just thinking 'programmers' but network administrators, system integrators, and the like.
Mind you the felony thing is more of a technicality, like duping a DVD or removing the copy protection from an iTunes file. Remember that depending on the jurisdiction and specific curcumstances any unauthorized access to a computer system or network is a felony. Use of borrowed accounts to get arpanet access might qualify as well.
Funny because I've known some really superb programmers and NONE of them committed "multiple felonies". Maybe the people you know weren't all that good?
No I'm pretty sure the people I'm thinking of are among the top talent in the industry. One did most of the inital implementation of SSL (v2 and v3) TLS, as well as the smart card API for Microsoft. Another is a fairly well known security consultant. Another has designed a heck of a lot of products for a lot of companies.
Funny thing is most people I know who are really good at IT, especially anyone with strong security skills, has probably commited multiple felonies. At least as defined by the computer crime and/or toll fraud statutes. Thing is none of them have ever been charged or convicted of a crime. Sure some were caught, but typically the worst that happened was they lost access to their campus network.
Of course all hacked out of curiosity or to get internet/arpanet access back in the days (14-18 years ago) when that was a rare thing.
If these sorts of "demands" - clean casual office ware and a minimum of body hardware - are so "superficial", what's the problem? Put on a pair of Dockers, and change after work. Put in your nose ring on the way out the door after work. What's the big deal?
It depends, I would suspect any West Coast technology company that expected "business casual" and "no visible piercings, tatoos, or weird hair" had far deeper problems than just thier dress code. On the other hand I would consider it a fairly enlightened dress code for a big investment bank.
Around here I have a choice of plenty of companies where my jeans, t-shirts or flannels, and long hair make me one of the more normal looking techies. I'd have to think long and hard about taking a job anywhere that expected Dockers and a polo as a minimum. No way am I prepared for the amount of soul sacrificing that would be required to work in a place that expected I wear a tie. (note this does depend on what position I'm being hired for, if I'm in a customer contact position I can understand the dress code)
I did buy such a "portable desktop" laptop this week: a Fujitsu Lifebook N6410. Dual core T2400 @ 1.83 GHz, 2GB RAM (upgraded myself from 512KB), 80 GB hard drive + second hard drive bay (uses SATA laptop drives; be warned that it doesn't come with the bracing frame for the 2nd hard drive; I'm still working on that), full size keyboard + numeric pad, 17" display, stereo speakers + subwoofer, 256MB nVidia graphics (128MB dedicated/128MB shared), lots of ports, DVD-write drive, etc. Size of a boat anchor, weighs a ton, only lasts about 2 hours on battery, so it's definitely not my light, lithe ThinkPad X41, but it's right up there with all my desktop systems, and it's definitely easier than packing one of my Shuttles + a flat screen in a suitcase (which I've done before).
I'm really supprised you went with a giant brick like this. A Thinkpad Z or T series would likely do everything your Fujitsu does but while being more compact, weighing less, and having longer battery life. A further benefit is the Thinkpad keyboards are actually better than most modern desktop keyboards and they have the only touchpads in the industry other than Apple's that I don't find completely maddening.
To me a high-end desktop replacement laptop would be a Z61p or T60p not the Fujitsu or Toshiba models you mention.
I'll second all of the endorsements for RT, OTRS, and IRM. We're currently using a combination of RT and IRM for our IT helpdesk and asset tracking needs though we're looking at converting over to OTRS from RT.
However I think Kayako SupportSuite might be worth a look. We're switching our customer support department over to it from Cerberus Helpdesk and it looks pretty nice. While it isn't FOSS the license cost is fairly reasonable ($500/year per server). It's all AJAX and PHP with source code so you can make your own modifications. A fair number of companies seem to be using it to power their support sites.
National supermarket chains are offering home shopping services they just don't promote them heavily.
Albertson's (#2 US) and Safeway (#3 US) have offered online shopping and home delievery in many of the metro areas they operate in for years now.
In addition one of the remaining "buy groceries online" companies (Peapod.com) is now owned by Royal Ahold who also owns the Giant supermarket chain. When they took over Peapod they cut it back to markets they already served in the US and made is essentially the home delievery arm of their stores.
It is being done in the states. Like the UK big grocery chains US chains such as Albertson's (#2 US grocery retailer) and Safeway (different company from the UK Safeway) (#3 US grocery retailer) have been offering online shopping and home delievery for a while now.
However it does seem that few actually use this service. Probably the 2 biggest customers in this area are businesses ordering for employee snacks and people living downtown who don't own cars.
There are a number of web stores out there who sell hard to find or gourmet items online. In fact I believe either Amazon itself or some of its partners are already selling gourmet foods.
The trick is to sell things where you aren't competing with local grocery stores or where volume can give you a huge price advantage.
That's about the same resolution as the highest-quality HDTV format, and people don't seem to mind looking at that even on a 61" TV screen.
Nope... that would be 1920x1080.
FWIW my IBM ThinkPad with a 14.1" screen does 1440 x 1050 and my 20" panel at home does 1600 x 1200
Video is a very different animal from text, line art, or even still photographs. Due to the motion people tend not to notice the low resolutions also people tend to sit much further from a screen when they are watching video versus reading/editing text or CAD drawings.
Personally since I work with lots of text I tend to prefer very high resolution screens. Anything less than 1280 x 1024 tends to feel cramped.
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I probably went more for the eye candy than you did.
(Consider me a very tepid and unhappy supporter of Hillary.)
Eth, how could you? She has got to be the worst choice among the Dems other than Biden or Kucinich. Richardson at least merits a look.
Note that I'm in the "no way in hell" camp on Hillary. I'll vote for her in the general but only if the GOP nominee scares the hell out of me.
I'll agree there is a bit of observer bias on my part as well. Among the D's I like Obama, Edwards, everyone else, and Clinton (actually including the whole field Richardson would rank between Obama and Edwards). Among the Republicans I like Romney, McCain, then Giuliani. Can't say I'd vote for anyone running under the GOP banner other than Ron Paul, but check back with me after the nominees are decided. Let's just say I'm not planning on voting for Sen. Clinton ever.
Currently Obama and Richarson are the ones I'm leaning toward supporting.
I think the "seeming to encourage supporter action/participation." is a lot more subjective than you do. I find Romney's to score 1st in that category. It's important to keep in mind that these candidates (at least on the R/D split in general) websites are going to attract different eyes. Which are motivated by and respond to different things.
To judge this I did a little digging rather than just going on what is on the front page. The Obama, Edwards, and McCain sites had some social networking/community building features which put them ahead of the others. Clinton and Romney seemed roughly equal on the participation front. Romney has one of the better front-page presentations of the action/participation portion of his site. I had to dig to get to that part of Edwards' and McCain's sites.
My rank of the sites is:
D's: Obama, Clinton, Edwards
R's: Romney, McCain, Giuliani
Again #2 is mostly by virtue of the fact that #3 is so awful.
Furthermore there is the issue of how far it is worth reprocessing fuel with current technology vs. using virgin fuel. At some point virgin fuel is going to be cheaper even when factoring in the storage costs. Indeed this is the current situation in North America.
Not sure of the exact numbers other than it is signifigantly less than storing the fuel elements after 1 trip through the reactor. Reactor design and fuel element management have an impact on the ultimate waste amount as well. IIRC the Canadian CANDU designs burn much more of the fuel each trip through and are much less picky about their fuel. (indeed they can use unenriched uranium).
From what I've heard the French are storing their nuclear waste, though they are calling the storage facility a "research center" for political reasons. Given that whats left will be down to the level of radioactivity present in natural uranium ore in 200 years or so I don't think their planning horizon is much longer than that.
The whole nuclear "waste" problem is grossly overblown.
Ah, so the issue is the brightness of the light rather than flicker or other factors.
In that case there are dimmable CFL lights. Or go with a real low-wattage/dim light when things go wonky (such as LED night-lights)
Second CFL's vary wildly in things like ballast frequency and phosphor color temperature and persistence. I assume you can watch TV or use an LCD monitor (for that matter the backlight on any LCD flickers at very high frequency).
So the trick would be to find a particular model or models that don't cause you problems. Best bet is to avoid the super-cheap no-name stuff.
Most of the good newer ones use a 22 kHz electronic ballast.
On the other hand, everything really is negotiable, even with a Fortune 500 behemoth. Mind you that generally the bigger the company the hotter the property you have to be in order to get them to negotiate something non-standard with you. If that is the case you really have to ask yourself why the heck you aren't doing corp-to-corp contracting for highway robbery rates.
Also consider that even the big boys sometimes miss things. As an example I know someone who was hired by a large aerospace company who ended up never signing an employment agreement nor a NDA. It was only caught after he had been there nearly 2 years, and then only because he was in the process of getting a security clearance for a new position he was moving to.
One thing I've seen a lot of is unenforceable or illegal provisions in employment agreements and other related documents. In particular some non-compete clauses essentially make any future employment at the discretion of the company. Also many employment agreements will attempt to claim ownership of any inventions, creative work, or trademarks you produce during your term of employment, even if all of the work was done on your own time and equipment.
Fortunately this sort of thing tends to get tossed out in court, however it is very messy and expensive to get to that point. Therefore if you can get everything as clear and specific as possible prior to signing any agreement it can save everyone grief in the long run. This is especially important if you are employed as say a developer or sysadmin and contribute to open source projects as your employer may have a legal claim on your work even if it was done on your own time and equipment.
One thing I've seen done is to include a copy of the employment agreement and any related documents with the offer letter. This way you have an opportunity to review them before returning them. In some cases it may be wise to have an attorney review them before signing and returning. If this isn't standard practice for your perspective employer I'd ask for a chance to have it reviewed by an attorney prior to signing.
There are issues with putting the actual datacenter in someplace like Hyderabad or rural China. As other posters have pointed out there is a network latency problem for any application that might be sensitve to it. Furthermore outside the developed world grid power can be spotty at best, while you can run everything off generators, it is a lot easier if you don't have to. Also you typically want your datacenter someplace with good access to long-haul fiber, while not necessarily a problem in major cities in India it would definately be a problem in rural China.
Personally I see more companies in the future doing what many have done already, move their datacenters outside small US cities where land is cheap, the cost of living is low, there is plenty of fiber nearby, and power is reliable and preferably cheap. Witness the number of current datacenters around places like Omaha, NE or Springfield, OR. Look at Google's, MSN's, Yahoo's, and other's plans for datacenters all up and down the Columbia Basin in cities like Wenatchee, WA.
Well their AMD64 server line is rather nice with much to reccomend it over the kit of other server vendors like Dell or HP. Solaris has some advantages for certain problems over Linux or FreeBSD. ZFS looks pretty cool too.
But is Sun more than just another box vendor and sponsor of a UNIX flavor these days? It really doesn't seem like it anymore.
As a developer, I know I will be OK as long as the economy is good enough to afford such attitudes :)
[99.9% of the world would gladly wear a ties/turbans/uniforms/overalls just to have a programming job at anywhere near what we get paid...]
I should clairify that my objection to the shirt and tie has more to do with it being a sign of deeper problems at most companies in my area that have such a requirement for their technical positions, particularly any technology companies with such dress codes.
Around here a majority of companies allow their developers, testers, system administrators and the like to wear jeans and t-shirts to work so it hasn't really been a decision I've had to make.
I've also made the mistake of taking a job at a company that was a horrible fit for me. It didn't work out either for me or for my employer.
On the other hand I do realize that one does what one needs to do in order to eat and pay the bills. I've been there before and I hope not to be there again.
The thing is the shirt and tie company will likely lay off all of its technical staff and outsource overseas during the next economic downturn before most of the jeans and t-shirt places will.
I wasn't just thinking 'programmers' but network administrators, system integrators, and the like.
Mind you the felony thing is more of a technicality, like duping a DVD or removing the copy protection from an iTunes file. Remember that depending on the jurisdiction and specific curcumstances any unauthorized access to a computer system or network is a felony. Use of borrowed accounts to get arpanet access might qualify as well.
Funny because I've known some really superb programmers and NONE of them committed "multiple felonies". Maybe the people you know weren't all that good?
No I'm pretty sure the people I'm thinking of are among the top talent in the industry. One did most of the inital implementation of SSL (v2 and v3) TLS, as well as the smart card API for Microsoft. Another is a fairly well known security consultant. Another has designed a heck of a lot of products for a lot of companies.
Funny thing is most people I know who are really good at IT, especially anyone with strong security skills, has probably commited multiple felonies. At least as defined by the computer crime and/or toll fraud statutes. Thing is none of them have ever been charged or convicted of a crime. Sure some were caught, but typically the worst that happened was they lost access to their campus network.
Of course all hacked out of curiosity or to get internet/arpanet access back in the days (14-18 years ago) when that was a rare thing.
Most have grown up quite a bit since then.
If these sorts of "demands" - clean casual office ware and a minimum of body hardware - are so "superficial", what's the problem? Put on a pair of Dockers, and change after work. Put in your nose ring on the way out the door after work. What's the big deal?
It depends, I would suspect any West Coast technology company that expected "business casual" and "no visible piercings, tatoos, or weird hair" had far deeper problems than just thier dress code. On the other hand I would consider it a fairly enlightened dress code for a big investment bank.
Around here I have a choice of plenty of companies where my jeans, t-shirts or flannels, and long hair make me one of the more normal looking techies. I'd have to think long and hard about taking a job anywhere that expected Dockers and a polo as a minimum. No way am I prepared for the amount of soul sacrificing that would be required to work in a place that expected I wear a tie. (note this does depend on what position I'm being hired for, if I'm in a customer contact position I can understand the dress code)
I find Thinkpads to be quite cost-competitive with equivalent models from other vendors.
Certainly for the same or similar features you'll be paying roughly the same price in Dell's Latitude or HP's business notebook line.
I did buy such a "portable desktop" laptop this week: a Fujitsu Lifebook N6410. Dual core T2400 @ 1.83 GHz, 2GB RAM (upgraded myself from 512KB), 80 GB hard drive + second hard drive bay (uses SATA laptop drives; be warned that it doesn't come with the bracing frame for the 2nd hard drive; I'm still working on that), full size keyboard + numeric pad, 17" display, stereo speakers + subwoofer, 256MB nVidia graphics (128MB dedicated/128MB shared), lots of ports, DVD-write drive, etc. Size of a boat anchor, weighs a ton, only lasts about 2 hours on battery, so it's definitely not my light, lithe ThinkPad X41, but it's right up there with all my desktop systems, and it's definitely easier than packing one of my Shuttles + a flat screen in a suitcase (which I've done before).
I'm really supprised you went with a giant brick like this. A Thinkpad Z or T series would likely do everything your Fujitsu does but while being more compact, weighing less, and having longer battery life. A further benefit is the Thinkpad keyboards are actually better than most modern desktop keyboards and they have the only touchpads in the industry other than Apple's that I don't find completely maddening.
To me a high-end desktop replacement laptop would be a Z61p or T60p not the Fujitsu or Toshiba models you mention.
I'll second all of the endorsements for RT, OTRS, and IRM. We're currently using a combination of RT and IRM for our IT helpdesk and asset tracking needs though we're looking at converting over to OTRS from RT.
However I think Kayako SupportSuite might be worth a look. We're switching our customer support department over to it from Cerberus Helpdesk and it looks pretty nice. While it isn't FOSS the license cost is fairly reasonable ($500/year per server). It's all AJAX and PHP with source code so you can make your own modifications. A fair number of companies seem to be using it to power their support sites.
National supermarket chains are offering home shopping services they just don't promote them heavily.
Albertson's (#2 US) and Safeway (#3 US) have offered online shopping and home delievery in many of the metro areas they operate in for years now.
In addition one of the remaining "buy groceries online" companies (Peapod.com) is now owned by Royal Ahold who also owns the Giant supermarket chain. When they took over Peapod they cut it back to markets they already served in the US and made is essentially the home delievery arm of their stores.
It is being done in the states. Like the UK big grocery chains US chains such as Albertson's (#2 US grocery retailer) and Safeway (different company from the UK Safeway) (#3 US grocery retailer) have been offering online shopping and home delievery for a while now.
However it does seem that few actually use this service. Probably the 2 biggest customers in this area are businesses ordering for employee snacks and people living downtown who don't own cars.
http://www.safeway.com/ and http://www.albertsons.com/ offer home delievery in most of the areas they have stores. That would be Amazon's real competition along with other local grocery stores.
There are a number of web stores out there who sell hard to find or gourmet items online. In fact I believe either Amazon itself or some of its partners are already selling gourmet foods.
The trick is to sell things where you aren't competing with local grocery stores or where volume can give you a huge price advantage.
That's about the same resolution as the highest-quality HDTV format, and people don't seem to mind looking at that even on a 61" TV screen.
... that would be 1920x1080.
Nope
FWIW my IBM ThinkPad with a 14.1" screen does 1440 x 1050 and my 20" panel at home does 1600 x 1200
Video is a very different animal from text, line art, or even still photographs. Due to the motion people tend not to notice the low resolutions also people tend to sit much further from a screen when they are watching video versus reading/editing text or CAD drawings.
Personally since I work with lots of text I tend to prefer very high resolution screens. Anything less than 1280 x 1024 tends to feel cramped.