Given the work they've put into having clients for most things, and broad 3rd party integration, they probably have some room to overcharge for small amounts of space (sure, you could just go shove S3 buckets yourself; but we've already done the integration work for you...); but they seem strangely overconfident about their ability to set prices for larger blocks of storage that just emphasize the discrepancy in per GB price.
That may actually be part of how Google and Amazon and Apple are hitting them hard now: DropBox offers a reasonably compelling deal if you don't need too much space. Sure, it costs too much per GB; but it's all nicely wrapped up and integrated with the programs you use, and life is just too short to go tinkering or comparison shopping to save a small amount. However, Google, Amazon, and Apple will all give you a modest amount of storage for nothing, as part of their respective plans to sell stuff, achieve platform dominance, or whatever. That obviously cuts the knees out from under DropBox's formerly cushy margins on small accounts; and, as you say, their price/GB has always been sufficiently high that they really start to look bad if you need nontrivial amounts of storage(which nobody will give you for free; but which players like Amazon will sell impressively close to cost).
I suspect that, aside from the high costs (and even higher PR costs) of air crashes, the way most contemporary flights are scheduled makes maximum-granularity/low-predictability information less valuable than lower granularity and higher predictability.
As much as you wouldn't guess it from a trip to Baggage Claim, mass market air travel is very much a 'just in time' operation. Every minute an aircraft spends sitting on the ground and waiting for something is money lost. Every minute one spends circling around and waiting for a landing slot is even more money lost. Customers who miss connecting flights are either foregone sales, pissed off, or people that unexpectedly need to be crammed onto later flights. Airplanes themselves have connections to make. After doing one route, the plane is almost certainly scheduled for a deeply cursory cleaning and another destination.
In such an environment, you do want timely alerts of unexpected emergencies(since the cost of having to replace multiple glassed engines, or an entire airplane and passengers is really bad); but the value of unexpected or unreliable good news is much less obvious unless it can be slotted neatly into an overall schedule that would survive if the news is bad(which definitely could happen, if a landing slot can be arranged to suit, learning that a flight will be faster and burn less fuel than expected would be good news; but not necessarily news you could bet the scheduling of the flight's next leg on).
It should take approximately no time at all for this to become an abject illustration of the adage that "Hell is other people". Definitely going to go well.
Even if MS and Google aren't willing to lose money on storage(they certainly are in the short term; but as a long game that strategy will not sell well), it isn't terribly obvious why repackaging AWS should be a particularly sustainable niche.
There is room(and dropbox exploited it) for the outfit that makes using AWS trivial and bodges together clients for OSes that allow fairly low level integration and 'app' integration for those that don't; but that's a goal where reaching 'adequate' is not a terribly high barrier to entry and where it isn't obvious what novel features one can add to continue justifying one's profit.
Once there are multiple players who have adequate client integration available what remains but to sell on price?
There is at least an argument to be made if one looks at how much...encouragement...the platform vendors, especially on the mobile side, provide to use their own blessed and proprietary 'cloud' service; depending on how closely controlled the OS is the advantage of being the platform-blessed option can be fairly substantial.
However, TFS seems to be worked up about the fact that the price/GB of deeply undistinguished storage has cratered over time. Yes, yes it has. Advances in disk density and datacenter operations have sharply reduced the absolute cost, and unless your service offers something really cool, or an airtight SLA, or some other nice feature, why wouldn't your margins reflect the fact that you provide a commodity?
It's almost like (barely) developing nations with pitifully low levels of human capital formation also have pitifully low levels of infrastructure investment. Funny that. It's probably their way of making our victory in the civil war seem completely pointless.
As much as I mourn my HP Touchpad (Oh man did WebOS multitasking curb-stomp Android multitasking at the time and even considerably later); if you are still running WebOS you probably have bigger security issues. The last update for any Pre models was December 2011, and Touchpad models January 2012. That's a long time for a relatively full featured OS to go without any fixing.
Especially for missile subs. There's a reason(aside from property values and a desire to keep tourists away) that the cold-war-classic hardened silos in the US were sprinkled around various parts of nowhere; because it was basically assumed that any fixed silo Team Ivan knew about would be getting nuked and so putting them near major cities and industrial centers was a bad plan; but the whole point of nuclear missile subs is highly resistant second strike capabilities through spending as much time sneaking around underwater as possible.
The risks of being caught in drydock are hardly zero; but a submarine base is a rather different asset from a silo.
If memory serves, even more of the post Soviet republics didn't have much in the way of proper warheads-ready-to-roll; but were largely cooperative with international efforts to bundle up the alarming quantities of fissile goodness hanging out in various abandoned facilities that were 'guarded' mostly in the sense that some of the looters were also drawing paychecks.
Nukes, at least, can be waved around; but suddenly unfunded nuclear R&D programs are just a nightmare for everyone involved.
I don't know what the wacky world of inheriting nukes in state breakups looks like in terms of precedent(given that our only real experience with it is 'making shit up while the Soviet Union crumbled' there may be little more than handwaving); but it wouldn't at all surprise me if both Scotland and the (slightly less)United Kingdom would have a very strong shared incentive to come up with an amicable deal.
Unless you have the ability(decent strategic air force, missile sub capabilities, or hostile neighbors within easy shooting range) and the desire to wave your nukes around, being a nuclear power is actually kind of a shitty job. Nukes are, well, the nuclear option, so they are of little use except in extreme circumstances; they are expensive and technically demanding to maintain, their PR value is deeply mixed, you have to protect them to avoid proliferation, and they have finite shelf life.
If Scotland wants to get out of the nuclear game; but the UK wants to hold on to some Global Influence, it would be a very, very, mutually convenient arrangement for Scotland to offer a sweetheart deal(if they have some sort of legal claim, maybe a relatively token payment or concession, otherwise just some handshakes and a photo-op) on the warheads in exchange for the UK packing them up, remediating any especially badly contaminated facilities, and otherwise making them Not Our Problem Anymore.
The hypothetical Scottish exit would likely be cleaner than that of the former Soviet republics, so they wouldn't be quite as badly situated; but the post-Soviet states that inherited fissile goodies were generally quite happy to accept Russian, American, or any other outside assistance in just getting the stuff off their hands as fast as possible. Having a real nuclear arsenal is expensive and requires commitment. Having a decaying one is just a proliferation clusterfuck waiting to happen.
In the specific case of humans(and other placental mammals, presumably), it probably doesn't help that "aggressively invade immunologically foreign tissue, stimulate growth of blood vessels to support voracious demand for oxygen and nutrients" is one of the qualifications that you must have to avoid dying before your mother even noticed you.
That sort of capability is classic tumor; but you aren't going to hack it as an embryo unless you are capable of it.
The stakes are obviously higher when the subject is sentient(at least the subject tends to think so...); but even organisms that are barely 'multicellular', like slime molds, have some rather fascinating mechanisms surrounding the issue of maintaining organism-level cooperation between individual cells subject to their own selective pressures.
With the slime molds some of the really tricky bits happen when the normally free-living cells congregate and form a stalk that is mostly (dead) structural cells with some spore forming bodies at the tip. This behavior is apparently adaptive at a colony level; but it involves a bunch of formerly independent cells deciding which 90% get to die in order to form the support structure and who gets to be the reproductive structure. All without access to general purpose cognition, game theory, or any similarly handy tools.
Multicellular organisms do have a variety of lethal failsafes that are supposed to stand in the way of cancer. Unfortunately some fraction of potentially cancerous cells are sufficiently defective that apoptosis is interrupted and they can proliferate.
I'm not sure why this has you so worked up; but nothing about my proposal requires assuming that all true aliens are made of silicon and element-115 or similar sci-fi handwaving.
Looking at terrestrial organisms, we see various limits on what biochemistries actually work; but we also see a lot of variation. Some of it in fairly critical systems, much of it churn. Depending on the exact resources available and any special difficulties involved we can, and do, build robust phylogenetic trees. In cases that we care more about, or are better behaved, we can sometimes nail heredity down to the individual level despite the fact that conspecifics employ pretty much identical chemistry.
It may well be the case that an alien is based on pretty much the same chemistry as terrestrial life, even that there aren't any other options; but a carbon based alien with DNA that just coincidentially fits neatly into a terrestrially evolved phylogenetic tree? That would be quite a trick.
Given that attack where they used the acoustic emissions of a CPU's voltage regulator circuitry to extract an RSA key I'm going to consider that one guilty until proven innocent...
The hospital had an Internet-facing router that was accessible via SSH or HTTPS?
If they were stupid enough to do that, then someone else had probably stolen all their data already.
What if it was a Juniper SSL VPN Appliance? TFA is a bit vague; but if the system has VPN access and Juniper gear it seems pretty likely that they might be using that, which would necessarily involve SSL on an internet facing device, though not necessarily SSH or HTTPS.
The ticket was accidentally routed to cardiology. The attending physician checked it out and the router's heartbeat was absolutely normal and there was no evidence of bleeding in the chassis.
what makes you so sure it is of terrestrial origins?
Unless this is Star Trek, where the entire biodiversity of the galaxy can be accounted for by face paint and is sexually interoperable with starfleet captains, we can make an overwhelmingly likely inference based on the chemistry. If its DNA and assorted important chemistry closely matches a terrestrial species it is very likely to be from around here.
Is it really a 'hostile takeover' if the management voluntarily decide to do it for their own interests(whether perceived quality, ad revenue, subscriber base, or some combination of the above)?
Between the first amendment and the explicit immunities specified by section 230 of the Communications Decency act, a site operator is pretty damn ironclad even in the case of absurdly nasty forums (so long as the copyright infringement is kept to a dull roar and the service isn't linked to too many gruesome murders). If they wanted to take a stand on the matter they would have little difficulty doing so. Apparently they don't see that as worth the trouble.
On the plus side, even if we accept the assertion that the disorder is nonsense (which is questionable; but for the sake of argument); the usual treatment has the virtue of being sufficiently useful, safe, and even pleasant that plenty of people who don't even suspect ADHD will try to score some through alternate channels or complain until they get a prescription.
The risks aren't zero, and there are certain people who should stay away; but psychostimulants are some very nice drugs.
Not all confessions are true; but the incentive to lie about having done good is obvious, while the incentive to lie about having done bad is less clear.
As soon as the tools were added for a web page to open a new web-page, I'm sure pop-ups were "invented" simultaneously across numerous ad agencies.
On the other hand, if somebody confesses to such a heinous crime it's probably worth at least giving their sincerity the benefit of the doubt...
This isn't like people fighting over a patent or the glory associated with some scientific discovery. This is a guy voluntarily admitting that he's guilty of a sin for which there will not, must not, and can not, be any forgiveness.
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Given the work they've put into having clients for most things, and broad 3rd party integration, they probably have some room to overcharge for small amounts of space (sure, you could just go shove S3 buckets yourself; but we've already done the integration work for you...); but they seem strangely overconfident about their ability to set prices for larger blocks of storage that just emphasize the discrepancy in per GB price.
That may actually be part of how Google and Amazon and Apple are hitting them hard now: DropBox offers a reasonably compelling deal if you don't need too much space. Sure, it costs too much per GB; but it's all nicely wrapped up and integrated with the programs you use, and life is just too short to go tinkering or comparison shopping to save a small amount. However, Google, Amazon, and Apple will all give you a modest amount of storage for nothing, as part of their respective plans to sell stuff, achieve platform dominance, or whatever. That obviously cuts the knees out from under DropBox's formerly cushy margins on small accounts; and, as you say, their price/GB has always been sufficiently high that they really start to look bad if you need nontrivial amounts of storage(which nobody will give you for free; but which players like Amazon will sell impressively close to cost).
I suspect that, aside from the high costs (and even higher PR costs) of air crashes, the way most contemporary flights are scheduled makes maximum-granularity/low-predictability information less valuable than lower granularity and higher predictability.
As much as you wouldn't guess it from a trip to Baggage Claim, mass market air travel is very much a 'just in time' operation. Every minute an aircraft spends sitting on the ground and waiting for something is money lost. Every minute one spends circling around and waiting for a landing slot is even more money lost. Customers who miss connecting flights are either foregone sales, pissed off, or people that unexpectedly need to be crammed onto later flights. Airplanes themselves have connections to make. After doing one route, the plane is almost certainly scheduled for a deeply cursory cleaning and another destination.
In such an environment, you do want timely alerts of unexpected emergencies(since the cost of having to replace multiple glassed engines, or an entire airplane and passengers is really bad); but the value of unexpected or unreliable good news is much less obvious unless it can be slotted neatly into an overall schedule that would survive if the news is bad(which definitely could happen, if a landing slot can be arranged to suit, learning that a flight will be faster and burn less fuel than expected would be good news; but not necessarily news you could bet the scheduling of the flight's next leg on).
It should take approximately no time at all for this to become an abject illustration of the adage that "Hell is other people". Definitely going to go well.
Even if MS and Google aren't willing to lose money on storage(they certainly are in the short term; but as a long game that strategy will not sell well), it isn't terribly obvious why repackaging AWS should be a particularly sustainable niche.
There is room(and dropbox exploited it) for the outfit that makes using AWS trivial and bodges together clients for OSes that allow fairly low level integration and 'app' integration for those that don't; but that's a goal where reaching 'adequate' is not a terribly high barrier to entry and where it isn't obvious what novel features one can add to continue justifying one's profit.
Once there are multiple players who have adequate client integration available what remains but to sell on price?
There is at least an argument to be made if one looks at how much...encouragement...the platform vendors, especially on the mobile side, provide to use their own blessed and proprietary 'cloud' service; depending on how closely controlled the OS is the advantage of being the platform-blessed option can be fairly substantial.
However, TFS seems to be worked up about the fact that the price/GB of deeply undistinguished storage has cratered over time. Yes, yes it has. Advances in disk density and datacenter operations have sharply reduced the absolute cost, and unless your service offers something really cool, or an airtight SLA, or some other nice feature, why wouldn't your margins reflect the fact that you provide a commodity?
It's almost like (barely) developing nations with pitifully low levels of human capital formation also have pitifully low levels of infrastructure investment. Funny that. It's probably their way of making our victory in the civil war seem completely pointless.
As much as I mourn my HP Touchpad (Oh man did WebOS multitasking curb-stomp Android multitasking at the time and even considerably later); if you are still running WebOS you probably have bigger security issues. The last update for any Pre models was December 2011, and Touchpad models January 2012. That's a long time for a relatively full featured OS to go without any fixing.
Especially for missile subs. There's a reason(aside from property values and a desire to keep tourists away) that the cold-war-classic hardened silos in the US were sprinkled around various parts of nowhere; because it was basically assumed that any fixed silo Team Ivan knew about would be getting nuked and so putting them near major cities and industrial centers was a bad plan; but the whole point of nuclear missile subs is highly resistant second strike capabilities through spending as much time sneaking around underwater as possible.
The risks of being caught in drydock are hardly zero; but a submarine base is a rather different asset from a silo.
If memory serves, even more of the post Soviet republics didn't have much in the way of proper warheads-ready-to-roll; but were largely cooperative with international efforts to bundle up the alarming quantities of fissile goodness hanging out in various abandoned facilities that were 'guarded' mostly in the sense that some of the looters were also drawing paychecks.
Nukes, at least, can be waved around; but suddenly unfunded nuclear R&D programs are just a nightmare for everyone involved.
I guess we would have to detonate them all the second Scotland declares independence ;)
Silence, AC! Omega Override: Exigent Haggis is a heavily classified program. You can't discuss those sorts of security matters in a public forum.
I don't know what the wacky world of inheriting nukes in state breakups looks like in terms of precedent(given that our only real experience with it is 'making shit up while the Soviet Union crumbled' there may be little more than handwaving); but it wouldn't at all surprise me if both Scotland and the (slightly less)United Kingdom would have a very strong shared incentive to come up with an amicable deal.
Unless you have the ability(decent strategic air force, missile sub capabilities, or hostile neighbors within easy shooting range) and the desire to wave your nukes around, being a nuclear power is actually kind of a shitty job. Nukes are, well, the nuclear option, so they are of little use except in extreme circumstances; they are expensive and technically demanding to maintain, their PR value is deeply mixed, you have to protect them to avoid proliferation, and they have finite shelf life.
If Scotland wants to get out of the nuclear game; but the UK wants to hold on to some Global Influence, it would be a very, very, mutually convenient arrangement for Scotland to offer a sweetheart deal(if they have some sort of legal claim, maybe a relatively token payment or concession, otherwise just some handshakes and a photo-op) on the warheads in exchange for the UK packing them up, remediating any especially badly contaminated facilities, and otherwise making them Not Our Problem Anymore.
The hypothetical Scottish exit would likely be cleaner than that of the former Soviet republics, so they wouldn't be quite as badly situated; but the post-Soviet states that inherited fissile goodies were generally quite happy to accept Russian, American, or any other outside assistance in just getting the stuff off their hands as fast as possible. Having a real nuclear arsenal is expensive and requires commitment. Having a decaying one is just a proliferation clusterfuck waiting to happen.
In the specific case of humans(and other placental mammals, presumably), it probably doesn't help that "aggressively invade immunologically foreign tissue, stimulate growth of blood vessels to support voracious demand for oxygen and nutrients" is one of the qualifications that you must have to avoid dying before your mother even noticed you.
That sort of capability is classic tumor; but you aren't going to hack it as an embryo unless you are capable of it.
The stakes are obviously higher when the subject is sentient(at least the subject tends to think so...); but even organisms that are barely 'multicellular', like slime molds, have some rather fascinating mechanisms surrounding the issue of maintaining organism-level cooperation between individual cells subject to their own selective pressures.
With the slime molds some of the really tricky bits happen when the normally free-living cells congregate and form a stalk that is mostly (dead) structural cells with some spore forming bodies at the tip. This behavior is apparently adaptive at a colony level; but it involves a bunch of formerly independent cells deciding which 90% get to die in order to form the support structure and who gets to be the reproductive structure. All without access to general purpose cognition, game theory, or any similarly handy tools.
Multicellular organisms do have a variety of lethal failsafes that are supposed to stand in the way of cancer. Unfortunately some fraction of potentially cancerous cells are sufficiently defective that apoptosis is interrupted and they can proliferate.
I'm not sure why this has you so worked up; but nothing about my proposal requires assuming that all true aliens are made of silicon and element-115 or similar sci-fi handwaving.
Looking at terrestrial organisms, we see various limits on what biochemistries actually work; but we also see a lot of variation. Some of it in fairly critical systems, much of it churn. Depending on the exact resources available and any special difficulties involved we can, and do, build robust phylogenetic trees. In cases that we care more about, or are better behaved, we can sometimes nail heredity down to the individual level despite the fact that conspecifics employ pretty much identical chemistry.
It may well be the case that an alien is based on pretty much the same chemistry as terrestrial life, even that there aren't any other options; but a carbon based alien with DNA that just coincidentially fits neatly into a terrestrially evolved phylogenetic tree? That would be quite a trick.
Given that attack where they used the acoustic emissions of a CPU's voltage regulator circuitry to extract an RSA key I'm going to consider that one guilty until proven innocent...
Can we just succumb to the inevitable and work on building a list of the parts of a smartphone that can't be used to spy on you?
I'm thinking 'maybe the battery door'. Any other suggestions?
The hospital had an Internet-facing router that was accessible via SSH or HTTPS?
If they were stupid enough to do that, then someone else had probably stolen all their data already.
What if it was a Juniper SSL VPN Appliance? TFA is a bit vague; but if the system has VPN access and Juniper gear it seems pretty likely that they might be using that, which would necessarily involve SSL on an internet facing device, though not necessarily SSH or HTTPS.
The ticket was accidentally routed to cardiology. The attending physician checked it out and the router's heartbeat was absolutely normal and there was no evidence of bleeding in the chassis.
what makes you so sure it is of terrestrial origins?
Unless this is Star Trek, where the entire biodiversity of the galaxy can be accounted for by face paint and is sexually interoperable with starfleet captains, we can make an overwhelmingly likely inference based on the chemistry. If its DNA and assorted important chemistry closely matches a terrestrial species it is very likely to be from around here.
Miniature giant space plankton, as it happens.
Is it really a 'hostile takeover' if the management voluntarily decide to do it for their own interests(whether perceived quality, ad revenue, subscriber base, or some combination of the above)?
Between the first amendment and the explicit immunities specified by section 230 of the Communications Decency act, a site operator is pretty damn ironclad even in the case of absurdly nasty forums (so long as the copyright infringement is kept to a dull roar and the service isn't linked to too many gruesome murders). If they wanted to take a stand on the matter they would have little difficulty doing so. Apparently they don't see that as worth the trouble.
On the plus side, even if we accept the assertion that the disorder is nonsense (which is questionable; but for the sake of argument); the usual treatment has the virtue of being sufficiently useful, safe, and even pleasant that plenty of people who don't even suspect ADHD will try to score some through alternate channels or complain until they get a prescription.
The risks aren't zero, and there are certain people who should stay away; but psychostimulants are some very nice drugs.
Not all confessions are true; but the incentive to lie about having done good is obvious, while the incentive to lie about having done bad is less clear.
As soon as the tools were added for a web page to open a new web-page, I'm sure pop-ups were "invented" simultaneously across numerous ad agencies.
On the other hand, if somebody confesses to such a heinous crime it's probably worth at least giving their sincerity the benefit of the doubt...
This isn't like people fighting over a patent or the glory associated with some scientific discovery. This is a guy voluntarily admitting that he's guilty of a sin for which there will not, must not, and can not, be any forgiveness.