Man, if only we could afford to use 64 bit values for things. I realize that transistors are simply too expensive right now; but perhaps, in the future, the miracles of science will make this possible...
I certainly have no useful information to add to the speculation about cause; but that is what would worry me. Having to reboot a system every 284 days or less is a nuisance; but not a terribly big one(especially since the system is connected to a giant mass of moving parts governed by comparatively strict regulations concerning maintenance, so it probably gets taken to the shop fairly frequently anyway). However, if there is some value incrementing its way up that eventually causes the system to crash; I'd want to be very sure that there is absolutely nothing else that might modify that value in a way that causes it to grow faster than expected.
Cue the "If they'd chosen Windows, it would be impossible for this bug to occur" jokes...
Those have mostly been unfair since the NT-derived era; but, in the spirit of the joke, there was a bug in win95 and 98 that would cause the system to crash after 49.7 days of uptime. It remained undiscovered for years.
I don't control the purse strings in this case, unfortunately.
Though, if you have any particular favorites(relatively small scale, rack-level stuff, for the most part), I'd be delighted to try to put a bug in the ear of anyone who does. Please, do tell.
Anyone with some legal experience able to clarify this? Given that grooveshark wasn't...exactly...apologetic about their strategy(nor has it changed all that much), my assumption is that the sudden shift to grovelling-apology-mode has much more to do with losing than it does with any change of heart.
Do courts give grovelling apologies enough weight that this 'contrition' is a logical strategy to try to reduce any awards of damages? Are such apologies sometimes added as conditions of a settlement, presumably so that the victor can grind the vanquished further into the dirt? Is there some other advantage to issuing one?
The specs allege "92% round-trip efficiency". I'm not sure how much weasel wording goes into that figure; but if it isn't a lie-for-all-but-legal-purposes, that could easily fall within the peak/off-peak price changes in many markets.
According to the spec sheet, the battery bank itself is a 400VDC unit and does not include an AC inverter(though a locally appropriate inverter, if not already available from a solar install or the like, would presumably be something you'd include in the project if you wished to install one). You are limited by the peak draw that the battery pack allows; but you can do absolutely whatever you feel like, subject to local codes and keeping your insurance, with the output. Unless you live in some really, really, freaky location where inverters that match your grid's flavor of power simply aren't on the market, it should be pretty trivial to spec an inverter suitable to the location.
Also, unless you are in an area without gas service, or in a house built with 100% electric heat, winter tends to be somewhat favorable to electrical demand. Lighting requirements go up, since the days are shorter; but contemporary lighting efficiency has increased by leaps and bounds of late(and anyone buying a Tesla battery pack is probably already running LED lights, or willing to consider it); and the cold reduces air conditioning demand to effectively zero, while heating is often accomplished substantially by on-site combustion heaters, which impose negligible electrical load(typically a trickle to keep the thermostats and other regulatory electronics up; but that's peanuts compared to AC load).
An area with proper winter would make outdoor installs problematic(Li-ion is better than most; but batteries still don't do any better for being below freezing); but otherwise the situation isn't so bad. If anything, places with brutal summers are probably the harder case, since AC is absolutely voracious in its demand, and almost always electrical, and the modest increase in available solar power doesn't necessarily negate the substantial increase in cooling requirements.
I don't know of any FBI-specific issues with DNA work; but various crime labs have had issues with atrociously sloppy practices that tend to go unchallenged, or overtly hidden, for some years. The big FBI story is definitely the "yeah, we basically didn't do a single hair analysis right for two decades; also hair analysis in general is probably bullshit" issue.
In general, DNA-based techniques have the advantage that they are actually 'science', as originally developed by scientists looking for useful research tools and facing some possibility of falsification, embarassing retractions, etc. It requires some skill, and considerable attention to good standards of cleanliness, bench technique, etc.(especially if PCR is involved; that technique is practically black magic it's so good at picking up otherwise impossible to detect DNA; but it is equally good at amplifying your accidental contamination of the sample by a few orders of magnitude)
Much of the rest of forensic 'science', is little better than polygraphs and phrenology. 'Bite mark analysis', in particular, is a tragicomedy.
The consumer version bears a disconcerting resemblance to a coffin for a particularly obese child; but I'm liking the looks of the rack-based unit.
This might have something to do with a recent spate of obnoxious fights with some of our APC UPSes and their surprisingly touchy and death-prone lead acid battery modules. Even when the UPSes themselves arent' dropping dead, swapping out SLA modules every 2-3 years, at best, gets real old, real fast.
He is probably the most effective example in reasonably contemporary history. Which isn't terribly impressive given that most people couldn't actually tell you what he was for or against, his activities had no visible effect on any federal activity he was against, and he ended up getting executed, and his main assistant sent to ADX Florence to rot more or less without controversy.
Also (like most people who want to get some asymmetric warfare done) he didn't bother with the abject futility of a gun battle against superior forces, and opted for explosives and stealth instead.
Definitely the best example available; but not...exactly...a striking demonstration of effectiveness.
People do enjoy saying that; but that doesn't seem to change the more or less total absence of any repressive measures, activities, or persons being literally shot down.
Maybe whoever pinged a few rounds off the NSA's windows deserves some credit for effort; but he's pretty lonely.
Hell, the last person to even unnerve the DC area was probably the beltway sniper, and he was some shithead gunning for his ex wife or something.
Seriously guys, let's see some blood of patriots and tyrants, or the admission that guns are a fun hobby; but spare us the empty chest-beating nonsense.
I just can't believe that an agency that (voluntarily, no less) works out of a headquarters named in J Edgar Hoober's 'honor' would have some ideas about encryption that are anything other than technologically cutting edge and fourth amendment compliant.
They should probably just stick to doing their...special...brand of forensic science and leave policy to people who don't goose-step to the short bus every morning.
"But a group of British and American skeptics say the Pope is being fed "mistaken" advice from the UN and that he should stick to speaking out on matters of morality and theology rather than getting involved in the climate change debate"
While I would have no reason to consider the pope's opinion on a scientific matter to be particularly interesting; doesn't climate change count as a glaringly obvious moral issue under all but the very, very, most optimistic models of its expected effects? I realize such statements are a polite way of saying 'go back to talking about financially irrelevant stuff like homosexuals and the slut menace, and let us do as we wish'; but if the imposition of negative externalities, on a substantial scale, isn't a moral issue, what would be?
What I'm surprised by is the fact that this problem just suddenly cropped up on a given day(and with enough units that it wasn't just a hardware fluke).
These ipads were replacements for a big bag of relatively static documentation. For that purpose, you'd think that you would freeze the iOS version for long periods of time(and have IT test the hell out of any updates), and have a similarly static app that Nobody Touches without substantial approval, with only some PDF or HTML documents specific to the flight swapped out as needed.
Ipads aren't formally proven ultra-reliable systems or anything; but it seems a little weird that they'd unexpectedly fall over under the relatively undemanding task of displaying documentation generated by a non-hostile source.
Are these 'electronic flight bags' actually a great deal more complex than that? Was American Airlines monkeying with production systems on a tight schedule? Anyone have a plausible scenario here?
I thought that I'd heard some pretty compelling OS sales pitches in my time; but "Perhaps the #1 choice of impoverished peasants buying their first finite state machine!, if we can get the OEM deals through" simply redefines my expectations of what is possible in the genre. What could possibly be more thrilling than that?
Very true; though (on the whole) the end user has made the same choice when they'd either have to buy more hardware or spend more for software and/or make do with fewer features.
Even situations that are highly cost sensitive and have customers who bear the entire cost of the extra hardware or the extra software engineering (like embedded systems) have seen a fair amount of hardware growth. Cortex-M0 or a bunch of extra squeezing to get it into an 8 or 16 bit micro?
I'm no expert; but my off-the-cuff assumption would be that it could be made quite fast:
At least with Debian and derivatives, you have a locally stored cache of package data(not the packages themselves, but their metadata). Searching that is pretty fast unless you have a lot of repositories or a brutally slow storage system.
The obvious(and probably flawed in some less obvious way that I'm not thinking through) extension would be to add the VID/PID combinations (or device classes, for class drivers) to which a driver package applies to the existing metadata about the package. You might also have a 'driver package vs. 'non-driver package' distinction to reduce the search space). During the hotplug process, if nothing suitable is already available, apt-cache search for the VID/PID pair would be run, and a match downloaded, if available(the amount of security prompting would obviously be a matter of configuration: sometimes it would be desireable that admin authorization always be required, sometimes it would be better if downloads from already-blessed repositories are acceptable, depends on the use case).
The local search would be reasonably fast, barring very slow storage, the download and install obviously depending on the size of the driver and the speed of the connection. In the not-terribly-valuable opinion of a layman, it seems like it could be reasonably quick.
This wouldn't be the kernel's problem; but it might be kind of neat to make the package manager aware of the hotplug process; in order to allow largely automated hunting of the repositories for the appropriate modules for a newly inserted device; but the amount of space saved may just not be enough to be worth the trouble. It'd arguably be more elegant than preloading more or less everything, or having the user grovel around with VID/PID combinations looking for helpful advice on Google; but storage tends to be cheaper than any human labor you'd want touching important software...
In addition to being cool stuff, mercury also has a very long history of use in gold extraction. I don't know about the people who built this particular structure; but mercury-amalgamation gold extraction is known to have been in use in South America well before the Spanish showed up. Given the human enthusiasm for gold, that's another point in mercury's favor as a funerary good, along with being weird and cool looking.
(Large scale extraction is now usually done by cyanide leaching, since that's somewhat less nasty than mercury amalgamation; but small scale miners often still use mercury. As one might imagine, the 'now heat the amalgam with a blowtorch to drive off the mercury and recover the gold' step is about as good for you as it sounds, possibly worse.)
They've been trying(in part by developing, in part by buying, they ate Softlayer and Cloudant fairly recently); but they've been finding it a bit tricky.
IBM wants to sell you some sort of unique, value-added, hardware and/or software feature that makes going with them worth it over going with the commodity product(presumably, this is why they sold of PCs and low-end servers). Some customers do want this; but it's a very, very, different offering from the more commodified cloud providers(Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all differ a bit in where they are on the spectrum from 'what you do with them is your problem; but our VMs are cheaper than you can believe' to 'we can provide automagic email accounts and SQL server instances abstracted from the host OS'; but all of them are very much on the 'we aren't going to hold your hand; but look at how cheap this stuff is' side, an area where IBM has no obvious advantages.)
The one other element in the cycle you identify is arguably 'management/administration'.
This can work both for and against both local and remote/cloud options: Back when anything that touched the mainframe needed 6 signatures and a blessing; but you could classify an IBM-compatible as an 'office supply' and just have it on your desk and doing stuff, part of the virtue was in cutting through red tape, not in enjoying DOS on a slow machine with virtually no RAM. These days, especially for individuals or small outfits, without technical expertise available, 'the cloud' wins not so much because local computers are expensive(since they aren't, they've never been cheaper, either absolutely or per unit power); but because 'the cloud' is something you can use just by plugging in a URL and following directions. IT geeks are correct to point out that 'the cloud' is neither impregnable nor as well-backed-up as it likes to pretend to be; but for a non-techie user who will lose all their data as soon as their HDD dies or they lose their phone, it's still a step up.
For larger outfits, who have technical expertise available(and whose needs are complex enough that they will need IT and/or developers whether they go 'cloud', local, or some combination of the two), it is much more a straight battle on cost, security, and reliability; but ease of use and ease(or nonexistence) of management is huge for the consumer side.
Amazon is a bit tepid when they try anything too novel(their phone went from flagship pricing to free-after-contract how fast?); but they have three basic virtues that make them a terrifying force to be reckoned with:
1. Cultural disinhibition: They started selling books; but never seemed to have fossilized into the 'We are a bookstore. I can see maybe expanding into selling some bookmarks, or paperweights; but hand tools? How absurd!' model. 'Books' was merely a special case of more or less rectangular objects that are legal to send through the mail. They've since expanded into an ever larger collection of more or less rectangular objects that are legal to send through the mail, without much concern about what they are.
2. Adequately competent implementation: Remember 'Microsoft PlaysForSure', the killer ecosystem of hardware, software, and a competitive marketplace of music sellers(almost always cheaper than iTunes)? No? That's not very surprising, they don't really deserve to be remembered. How about 'Ultraviolet', the 'cloud-based digital rights library' that is somehow associated with blu-ray, some media players and streamers, and various retailers; but is so dysfunctional that I can't actually summarize exactly what the hell it is? No? I can't imagine why.
Amazon, though, while they don't lead the pack, knows how to get the job done well enough (their Kindle e-readers and 'FireOS' tablets all have at least adequate industrial design and build quality, and 'FireOS' is arguably nicer than some Google-blessed-but-vendor-skinned versions of Android, despite being a hostile fork; and their media-streamer hardware and software are both more or less painless). You don't necessarily go to them for the premium gear; but they are definitely good enough that they don't actively sabotage the appeal of the low prices.
3. Logistics. I don't know how they do it(if I did, I'd probably be a whole hell of a lot wealthier); but when they decide to sell something, they know how to make it impressively cheap compared to the competition, whether it be books or VM time.
On the very small plus side, perhaps this will make using Ireland as the tax dodge for your tech company slightly less convenient. Otherwise, isn't this the same country that decided that outlawing blasphemy would be a cool idea in 2009? There may be a screw or two loose.
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Man, if only we could afford to use 64 bit values for things. I realize that transistors are simply too expensive right now; but perhaps, in the future, the miracles of science will make this possible...
I certainly have no useful information to add to the speculation about cause; but that is what would worry me. Having to reboot a system every 284 days or less is a nuisance; but not a terribly big one(especially since the system is connected to a giant mass of moving parts governed by comparatively strict regulations concerning maintenance, so it probably gets taken to the shop fairly frequently anyway). However, if there is some value incrementing its way up that eventually causes the system to crash; I'd want to be very sure that there is absolutely nothing else that might modify that value in a way that causes it to grow faster than expected.
Cue the "If they'd chosen Windows, it would be impossible for this bug to occur" jokes...
Those have mostly been unfair since the NT-derived era; but, in the spirit of the joke, there was a bug in win95 and 98 that would cause the system to crash after 49.7 days of uptime. It remained undiscovered for years.
"Really short mission" technology, while it simplifies many problems quite considerably, is pretty limiting...
I don't control the purse strings in this case, unfortunately. Though, if you have any particular favorites(relatively small scale, rack-level stuff, for the most part), I'd be delighted to try to put a bug in the ear of anyone who does. Please, do tell.
Anyone with some legal experience able to clarify this? Given that grooveshark wasn't...exactly...apologetic about their strategy(nor has it changed all that much), my assumption is that the sudden shift to grovelling-apology-mode has much more to do with losing than it does with any change of heart.
Do courts give grovelling apologies enough weight that this 'contrition' is a logical strategy to try to reduce any awards of damages? Are such apologies sometimes added as conditions of a settlement, presumably so that the victor can grind the vanquished further into the dirt? Is there some other advantage to issuing one?
The specs allege "92% round-trip efficiency". I'm not sure how much weasel wording goes into that figure; but if it isn't a lie-for-all-but-legal-purposes, that could easily fall within the peak/off-peak price changes in many markets.
According to the spec sheet, the battery bank itself is a 400VDC unit and does not include an AC inverter(though a locally appropriate inverter, if not already available from a solar install or the like, would presumably be something you'd include in the project if you wished to install one). You are limited by the peak draw that the battery pack allows; but you can do absolutely whatever you feel like, subject to local codes and keeping your insurance, with the output. Unless you live in some really, really, freaky location where inverters that match your grid's flavor of power simply aren't on the market, it should be pretty trivial to spec an inverter suitable to the location.
Also, unless you are in an area without gas service, or in a house built with 100% electric heat, winter tends to be somewhat favorable to electrical demand. Lighting requirements go up, since the days are shorter; but contemporary lighting efficiency has increased by leaps and bounds of late(and anyone buying a Tesla battery pack is probably already running LED lights, or willing to consider it); and the cold reduces air conditioning demand to effectively zero, while heating is often accomplished substantially by on-site combustion heaters, which impose negligible electrical load(typically a trickle to keep the thermostats and other regulatory electronics up; but that's peanuts compared to AC load).
An area with proper winter would make outdoor installs problematic(Li-ion is better than most; but batteries still don't do any better for being below freezing); but otherwise the situation isn't so bad. If anything, places with brutal summers are probably the harder case, since AC is absolutely voracious in its demand, and almost always electrical, and the modest increase in available solar power doesn't necessarily negate the substantial increase in cooling requirements.
I don't know of any FBI-specific issues with DNA work; but various crime labs have had issues with atrociously sloppy practices that tend to go unchallenged, or overtly hidden, for some years. The big FBI story is definitely the "yeah, we basically didn't do a single hair analysis right for two decades; also hair analysis in general is probably bullshit" issue.
In general, DNA-based techniques have the advantage that they are actually 'science', as originally developed by scientists looking for useful research tools and facing some possibility of falsification, embarassing retractions, etc. It requires some skill, and considerable attention to good standards of cleanliness, bench technique, etc.(especially if PCR is involved; that technique is practically black magic it's so good at picking up otherwise impossible to detect DNA; but it is equally good at amplifying your accidental contamination of the sample by a few orders of magnitude)
Much of the rest of forensic 'science', is little better than polygraphs and phrenology. 'Bite mark analysis', in particular, is a tragicomedy.
The consumer version bears a disconcerting resemblance to a coffin for a particularly obese child; but I'm liking the looks of the rack-based unit.
This might have something to do with a recent spate of obnoxious fights with some of our APC UPSes and their surprisingly touchy and death-prone lead acid battery modules. Even when the UPSes themselves arent' dropping dead, swapping out SLA modules every 2-3 years, at best, gets real old, real fast.
He is probably the most effective example in reasonably contemporary history. Which isn't terribly impressive given that most people couldn't actually tell you what he was for or against, his activities had no visible effect on any federal activity he was against, and he ended up getting executed, and his main assistant sent to ADX Florence to rot more or less without controversy.
Also (like most people who want to get some asymmetric warfare done) he didn't bother with the abject futility of a gun battle against superior forces, and opted for explosives and stealth instead.
Definitely the best example available; but not...exactly...a striking demonstration of effectiveness.
People do enjoy saying that; but that doesn't seem to change the more or less total absence of any repressive measures, activities, or persons being literally shot down. Maybe whoever pinged a few rounds off the NSA's windows deserves some credit for effort; but he's pretty lonely. Hell, the last person to even unnerve the DC area was probably the beltway sniper, and he was some shithead gunning for his ex wife or something. Seriously guys, let's see some blood of patriots and tyrants, or the admission that guns are a fun hobby; but spare us the empty chest-beating nonsense.
I just can't believe that an agency that (voluntarily, no less) works out of a headquarters named in J Edgar Hoober's 'honor' would have some ideas about encryption that are anything other than technologically cutting edge and fourth amendment compliant. They should probably just stick to doing their...special...brand of forensic science and leave policy to people who don't goose-step to the short bus every morning.
"But a group of British and American skeptics say the Pope is being fed "mistaken" advice from the UN and that he should stick to speaking out on matters of morality and theology rather than getting involved in the climate change debate"
While I would have no reason to consider the pope's opinion on a scientific matter to be particularly interesting; doesn't climate change count as a glaringly obvious moral issue under all but the very, very, most optimistic models of its expected effects? I realize such statements are a polite way of saying 'go back to talking about financially irrelevant stuff like homosexuals and the slut menace, and let us do as we wish'; but if the imposition of negative externalities, on a substantial scale, isn't a moral issue, what would be?
What I'm surprised by is the fact that this problem just suddenly cropped up on a given day(and with enough units that it wasn't just a hardware fluke).
These ipads were replacements for a big bag of relatively static documentation. For that purpose, you'd think that you would freeze the iOS version for long periods of time(and have IT test the hell out of any updates), and have a similarly static app that Nobody Touches without substantial approval, with only some PDF or HTML documents specific to the flight swapped out as needed.
Ipads aren't formally proven ultra-reliable systems or anything; but it seems a little weird that they'd unexpectedly fall over under the relatively undemanding task of displaying documentation generated by a non-hostile source.
Are these 'electronic flight bags' actually a great deal more complex than that? Was American Airlines monkeying with production systems on a tight schedule? Anyone have a plausible scenario here?
I thought that I'd heard some pretty compelling OS sales pitches in my time; but "Perhaps the #1 choice of impoverished peasants buying their first finite state machine!, if we can get the OEM deals through" simply redefines my expectations of what is possible in the genre. What could possibly be more thrilling than that?
Very true; though (on the whole) the end user has made the same choice when they'd either have to buy more hardware or spend more for software and/or make do with fewer features.
Even situations that are highly cost sensitive and have customers who bear the entire cost of the extra hardware or the extra software engineering (like embedded systems) have seen a fair amount of hardware growth. Cortex-M0 or a bunch of extra squeezing to get it into an 8 or 16 bit micro?
I'm no expert; but my off-the-cuff assumption would be that it could be made quite fast:
At least with Debian and derivatives, you have a locally stored cache of package data(not the packages themselves, but their metadata). Searching that is pretty fast unless you have a lot of repositories or a brutally slow storage system.
The obvious(and probably flawed in some less obvious way that I'm not thinking through) extension would be to add the VID/PID combinations (or device classes, for class drivers) to which a driver package applies to the existing metadata about the package. You might also have a 'driver package vs. 'non-driver package' distinction to reduce the search space). During the hotplug process, if nothing suitable is already available, apt-cache search for the VID/PID pair would be run, and a match downloaded, if available(the amount of security prompting would obviously be a matter of configuration: sometimes it would be desireable that admin authorization always be required, sometimes it would be better if downloads from already-blessed repositories are acceptable, depends on the use case).
The local search would be reasonably fast, barring very slow storage, the download and install obviously depending on the size of the driver and the speed of the connection. In the not-terribly-valuable opinion of a layman, it seems like it could be reasonably quick.
This wouldn't be the kernel's problem; but it might be kind of neat to make the package manager aware of the hotplug process; in order to allow largely automated hunting of the repositories for the appropriate modules for a newly inserted device; but the amount of space saved may just not be enough to be worth the trouble. It'd arguably be more elegant than preloading more or less everything, or having the user grovel around with VID/PID combinations looking for helpful advice on Google; but storage tends to be cheaper than any human labor you'd want touching important software...
In addition to being cool stuff, mercury also has a very long history of use in gold extraction. I don't know about the people who built this particular structure; but mercury-amalgamation gold extraction is known to have been in use in South America well before the Spanish showed up. Given the human enthusiasm for gold, that's another point in mercury's favor as a funerary good, along with being weird and cool looking.
(Large scale extraction is now usually done by cyanide leaching, since that's somewhat less nasty than mercury amalgamation; but small scale miners often still use mercury. As one might imagine, the 'now heat the amalgam with a blowtorch to drive off the mercury and recover the gold' step is about as good for you as it sounds, possibly worse.)
They've been trying(in part by developing, in part by buying, they ate Softlayer and Cloudant fairly recently); but they've been finding it a bit tricky.
IBM wants to sell you some sort of unique, value-added, hardware and/or software feature that makes going with them worth it over going with the commodity product(presumably, this is why they sold of PCs and low-end servers). Some customers do want this; but it's a very, very, different offering from the more commodified cloud providers(Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all differ a bit in where they are on the spectrum from 'what you do with them is your problem; but our VMs are cheaper than you can believe' to 'we can provide automagic email accounts and SQL server instances abstracted from the host OS'; but all of them are very much on the 'we aren't going to hold your hand; but look at how cheap this stuff is' side, an area where IBM has no obvious advantages.)
The one other element in the cycle you identify is arguably 'management/administration'.
This can work both for and against both local and remote/cloud options: Back when anything that touched the mainframe needed 6 signatures and a blessing; but you could classify an IBM-compatible as an 'office supply' and just have it on your desk and doing stuff, part of the virtue was in cutting through red tape, not in enjoying DOS on a slow machine with virtually no RAM. These days, especially for individuals or small outfits, without technical expertise available, 'the cloud' wins not so much because local computers are expensive(since they aren't, they've never been cheaper, either absolutely or per unit power); but because 'the cloud' is something you can use just by plugging in a URL and following directions. IT geeks are correct to point out that 'the cloud' is neither impregnable nor as well-backed-up as it likes to pretend to be; but for a non-techie user who will lose all their data as soon as their HDD dies or they lose their phone, it's still a step up.
For larger outfits, who have technical expertise available(and whose needs are complex enough that they will need IT and/or developers whether they go 'cloud', local, or some combination of the two), it is much more a straight battle on cost, security, and reliability; but ease of use and ease(or nonexistence) of management is huge for the consumer side.
Amazon is a bit tepid when they try anything too novel(their phone went from flagship pricing to free-after-contract how fast?); but they have three basic virtues that make them a terrifying force to be reckoned with:
1. Cultural disinhibition: They started selling books; but never seemed to have fossilized into the 'We are a bookstore. I can see maybe expanding into selling some bookmarks, or paperweights; but hand tools? How absurd!' model. 'Books' was merely a special case of more or less rectangular objects that are legal to send through the mail. They've since expanded into an ever larger collection of more or less rectangular objects that are legal to send through the mail, without much concern about what they are.
2. Adequately competent implementation: Remember 'Microsoft PlaysForSure', the killer ecosystem of hardware, software, and a competitive marketplace of music sellers(almost always cheaper than iTunes)? No? That's not very surprising, they don't really deserve to be remembered. How about 'Ultraviolet', the 'cloud-based digital rights library' that is somehow associated with blu-ray, some media players and streamers, and various retailers; but is so dysfunctional that I can't actually summarize exactly what the hell it is? No? I can't imagine why.
Amazon, though, while they don't lead the pack, knows how to get the job done well enough (their Kindle e-readers and 'FireOS' tablets all have at least adequate industrial design and build quality, and 'FireOS' is arguably nicer than some Google-blessed-but-vendor-skinned versions of Android, despite being a hostile fork; and their media-streamer hardware and software are both more or less painless). You don't necessarily go to them for the premium gear; but they are definitely good enough that they don't actively sabotage the appeal of the low prices.
3. Logistics. I don't know how they do it(if I did, I'd probably be a whole hell of a lot wealthier); but when they decide to sell something, they know how to make it impressively cheap compared to the competition, whether it be books or VM time.
On the very small plus side, perhaps this will make using Ireland as the tax dodge for your tech company slightly less convenient. Otherwise, isn't this the same country that decided that outlawing blasphemy would be a cool idea in 2009? There may be a screw or two loose.