People fly in airplanes despite the schedule thing, because they are much much faster than cars. In other countries where they have real high speed trains, which the Acela Express is not, people ride trains because they are much much faster than cars. The Hyperloop will also be much much faster than cars, so people will use it.
Tesla plans to be making 500,000 cars a year by 2019. That's a lot of cars. Ramping up to be a volume car manufacturer costs money. A lot of money. The investors knew that going in. If Tesla succeeds at making reliable and desirable cars and people buy them, the investors will make a lot of money. If Tesla fails to do that the investors will lose a lot of money. No real news there.
The main news is that Tesla has managed to raise that much money to finance its vision, and that so far the investors are still behind it. That is no easy feat. Elon Musk has an amazing track record at raising money for pie in the sky... but he also has a good record for actually delivering the promised pie. SpaceX is launching real satellites, SolarCity has put solar cells on a lot of houses (with plans for many more with the new solar tiles), and Tesla has already sold about 200,000 cars. Even the Hyperloop has had some successful tests.
Not quite true. There are some Japanese EVs that aren't available in the US that use CHAdeMO. And I have no idea what the Chinese EVs are using. But it's pretty much true for EVs that are readily available in the US and Western Europe.
In the early stages, which we are still in, it makes sense for car companies to get involved to jump start the market. Basically, they're subsidizing charging station construction to promote car sales. The problem with that scenario is that there is an incentive for the car companies to make their charging stations proprietary (ie, Tesla Supercharger) so that other car companies don't get a free ride on the infrastructure.
In the long run, I expect that car companies will exit the charging station business and leave it to others. Once the market for charging is established, the car companies should have no trouble finding buyers for their charging networks. It's possible that Tesla, which also has major investments in battery manufacturing and solar cells, will choose to be a major player in the charging business as well as being a car maker. I don't see Ford or GM entering the business, as they don't have Tesla's other investments to make it make sense. The major oil companies (Exxon, BP, etc.) are likely to get involved, as they already have a network of retail locations that could be repurposed for charging or have charging added as a sideline to gasoline sales.
It depends on whether or not it is a refundable tax credit. Many are not, including the federal EV tax credit. In other words, you only get the full credit if you owe at least that much tax. Non-refundable tax credits are a perverse incentive; they punish people for being TOO POOR. (Major gripe: the federal tax credits for education are also non-refundable.) If you can't take advantage of the credit, you're better off leasing the car (the leasing company gets the credit and reduces your rate accordingly) and buying it out when the lease ends.
You could also just buy a used car; the original owner got the tax credit so the used price is reduced accordingly. That's why a used Nissan Leaf sells for so much less than the sticker price. But if you need a long range EV there aren't any used options currently; a Tesla Model S would be too expensive and the Chevy Bolt is too new for any significant number of used ones to be available. It will be a while before you can buy a used Tesla Model 3, a long-range Hyundai Ioniq, or any other future long-range EV.
A lot of us haven't had the opportunity to buy one because they're not 50 state cars; they're only sold in limited areas. The upcoming longer range version of the Ioniq (not the 124 mile version being sold now) will be Hyundai's first 50 state EV.
They might not be able to afford a new 35K car. But a used Nissan Leaf (7.5K-15K) might well be in reach, and is worth considering if a limited-range car will suit their needs and they have a place to charge it. Electricity is cheaper than gas, and maintenance costs for the Leaf will be lower so long as the battery is still in good condition.
That might be true if the cable was installed when the house was built. But for those of us in older homes, any cable TV wiring was pulled after construction and isn't stapled to anything. How could it have been without tearing down walls?
Similarly, power wiring that was installed when the house was built or that runs along beams in an exposed ceiling (typically in the basement if you have one) is stapled, unless you have older wiring like BX cable or (shudder) knob and tube. (The last of those is a major fire hazard. Here in Massachusetts it is now illegal to have any live knob and tube in your house, and if you hire an electrician to do any work in your house they MUST decommission any that they find before they are allowed to do anything else. They are not required to physically remove the disconnected wiring.) Power wiring that was added later to finished areas is not stapled, except near any outlets or switches that were installed.
They never did. All the compatibility effort is done by the makers of the players. Usually that's just the minimal effort of allowing the player to mount like a USB drive so you can drag files to it (which is exactly the same thing you do on a Windows or Linux system), and including AAC decoding support so you can play music from iTunes.
The only way that Apple could block the ability to play iTunes files would be to change the format of them. That would also break existing iPods so Apple isn't going to do that. Blocking the ability to mount the device as a file system would also break compatibility with all sorts of other devices, so again it's not going to happen.
Years ago there were non-Apple music players that would sync with iTunes. Apple no longer supports that capability for any non-Apple device, even the ones that were previously supported, and no new non-Apple device has offered iTunes synchronization for years. There is third party software that will sync non-Apple players with iTunes.
Just not a big enough market any more to interest them. Other companies will continue to produce music players so long as a demand for them exists. Current options include various Sansa models from SanDisk, the Mighty player that downloads Spotify playlists, high-options like the FiiO models and the Hi-Res Walkman, and a plethora of cheap no-name players from China that you can find on eBay.
Yes, you can capture audio on film. And for most of the history of film it's been the standard way of doing it. Most film without digital sound uses an analog optical soundtrack alongside the images. That eliminated the problems of early systems like Vitaphone that used records that were synchronized with the film; playback didn't always stay in sync, especially if the film was damaged and needed to be repaired.
There are three different brands of digital sound on film, one of which (SDDS) is now discontinued. Dolby and SDDS store the audio data on the film itself; Dolby uses the area between the sprocket holes and SDDS uses the area outside the holes. Datasat (formerly known as DTS) uses a time code that is next to the analog sound track and stores the actual audio on separate CD-ROMs.
70mm film (except for the short lived Fox Grandeur system) uses magnetic sound, not optical. The most common configuration is a 6 channel system with five main tracks and an LFE (bass) track, but there have been many variations over the years and Dolby noise reduction was added along the way. 70mm can also have a DTS time code and use the standard DTS system for film which is a 5 channel system; no separate LFE track is recorded though the low frequencies are separated out by the processor so they can be routed to the subwoofers in the theater.
I have not seen any information anywhere about implementation of more advanced DTS formats for 70mm film. It would be technically feasible, but it would require distributing the audio in a form with more capacity than the CD-ROMs that are used for standard DTS. So far as I know, none of the digital Dolby formats has ever been used with 70mm film.
IMAX never used on-film sound. The first version used a separate six channel magnetic film that was synchronized to the IMAX film. That was later replaced with a DTS digital soundtrack distributed on CD-ROMs, just like the version for 35mm and 70mm sound, and still later by a system using a hard drive with six uncompressed audio channels.
The Wikipeda article on SDDS (the articles on the other digital sound formats also contain the same picture) has a picture that shows the location of all the possible sound tracks on film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
No, it would be 8K. An 8K image has four times as many pixels as a 4K image, just as a standard 70mm image is four times the size of a 35mm image. IMAX is another matter; that image is even larger because it uses the 70mm film differently.
It was Fox being Fox. That network is where science fiction shows die. On the other hand, they put them on the air in the first place, much more than the other networks do - unless you count the superhero shows on The CW, which are a related genre but not the same.
Order something small. Things that only weigh a few ounces and can be shipped in a padded envelope will go by USPS because it's cheaper for packages like that. (If you have Prime they'll only go by USPS if they can offer two day delivery from an Amazon warehouse that stocks the thing you ordered.) Paperback books, optical discs, small electronic parts... things like that.
Private alternatives for parcel delivery do not exist in all locations. If you ship a package to some rural addresses by UPS or Fedex, the final delivery is done by the USPS. No USPS, no deliveries to those locations.
It won't be a mass transit system in the sense of an urban subway or the like. But it does have the potential to move a lot of people over large distances and displace a lot of air travel. Airplanes are expensive to build and operate, use a lot of expensive fossil fuel, and cause a lot of environmental damages (even worse that their carbon footprint would indicate because a lot of the fuel is being burned in the upper atmosphere where it's close to the important ozone layer).
To be pedantic, it's 1/5000 of a Siemens; note the S at the end. The unit is named for a person and so it always has the S, whether it's singular or plural.
The biggest problem with Multics was GE/Honeywell/Bull, the succession of companies that made the computers that it ran on. None of them were much good at either building or marketing mainframe computers.
So yes, Multics was a commercial failure; the number of Multics systems that were sold was small. But in terms of moving the computing and OS state of the art forward, it was a huge success. Many important concepts were invented or popularized by Multics, including memory mapped file I/O, multi-level file system hierarchies, and hardware protection rings. Security was a major focus in the design of Multics, which led to it being adopted by the military and other security-conscious customers.
Nokia did and did not have a big share of the smartphone market. On the one hand, Symbian (Nokia's smartphone OS) allowed the installation of apps. On the other hand, there weren't all that many apps available, and many users either installed no apps at all or stopped at one or two. So there was a large base of theoretical smartphones but few that were actually being used in a way that we recognize as smartphone usage; most were effectively feature phones despite the presence of smart features in the OS.
Symbian had little presence in the US. That's in part because Nokia did not make the manufacture of CDMA-compatible phones a priority, and even their GSM phones often weren't offered in versions that supported the North American frequencies for mobile phones. Nokia phones were popular in the US in the 90s but faded away around the turn of the millennium, and most of the Symbian models were never offered here. Ignoring a key smartphone market was a bad decision on Nokia's part.
There was also Palm/Handspring. (Handspring was a spinoff of Palm that produced Palm-compatible PDAs and then pioneered smartphone/PDA hybrids with their Treo line. They were later reabsorbed by Palm.) They never had a large share of the smartphone market, but theirs was the first platform that people used in a way that is similar to modern smartphone usage, including installation of third party apps. Samsung also made Palm-based smartphones.
In the olden daisies, magnetic media often had track and sector counts that were aligned with binary numbers. It made the drivers easier to write, and back when every bit counted that was a real consideration. So the statement about "no persistent storage device ever made" is clearly false.
Once the advance of storage technology slowed down enough that there wasn't a factor of two gain every year or so, we started to see counts that weren't powers of two. Designers would squeeze a little more out of the tech by cramming in a few extra sectors, tracks, or both. It really all went out the window once we got variable density recording: magnetic media that store more bits on the outer tracks and fewer bits on the inner ones, keeping the bit density per unit of volume fairly constant. (The original Macintosh floppy drives were the most obvious example of that; they actually changed the motor speed based on which track you were using. Later versions changed the bit clock in the controller instead, which was faster and more reliable but less fun to listen to.) Hard drives also nearly always have some defective areas; in the old days the software on your computer had to be aware of that and avoid using those areas. But now it's all done invisibly by the drive, which has some extra space that is automatically used in place of the defective areas.
Now we have SSDs. Semiconductor memory is usually made in power of two sizes because it makes the chip layout easier. We see that with RAM. (When you see some device with an amount of RAM that isn't a power of two it's because it uses multiple RAM chips or modules, each of which IS a power of two size. For example, a phone with 3GB RAM (actually 3 GiB) probably has three RAM chips inside, each of which holds 1GB. It might instead have one 2GB chip and one 1GB chip.) But SSDs use flash memory and it wears out over time; each memory cell can only have data written to it a limited number of times. SSDs have to do things to spread out the writes over the entire drive, and also usually have some degree of overprovisioning to allow for bits to fail. (In other words, some of the memory is deliberately set aside when you buy the drive so it can be used to replace areas of the SSD that fail, just like the modern hard drive does.) The flash memory chips inside the SSD are usually in sizes based on powers of two, but the amount of space that the user sees is somewhat smaller. That's why we see 60GB, 120GB, 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB SSDs, rather than their natural sizes which would be 64GiB, 128GiB, etc (note the change of unit as well as number).
Walmart is just another store in major urban areas when they bother to show up at all. Here in Boston, for example, they have stores in the suburbs that duke it out with Target and zero presence in the city itself. But Walmart really is a monopoly in rural America; there are many places where you can live where there is no viable alternative to shopping there. Until Amazon came along.
That is why Walmart is so afraid of Amazon. It's pretty much impossible for another retailer to compete with Walmart in the small markets that they dominate; there isn't enough business to go around to support another big store like them, and Walmart has more economies of scale (and importantly, clout with suppliers). But Amazon is using a different model. One that makes it possible for them to be a viable competitor for Walmart, because they don't need to have scale in the local market to enter and compete.
The X Windows protocol itself does not include any security beyond a simple password check that is sent unencrypted, so running it straight up on a network that has any public connections is a bad idea. But these days people mostly run it tunneled through an SSH connection, which is encrypted, except for connections on the local host. So it has effectively gotten a security update even though the X protocol itself was not upgraded.
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People fly in airplanes despite the schedule thing, because they are much much faster than cars. In other countries where they have real high speed trains, which the Acela Express is not, people ride trains because they are much much faster than cars. The Hyperloop will also be much much faster than cars, so people will use it.
Tesla plans to be making 500,000 cars a year by 2019. That's a lot of cars. Ramping up to be a volume car manufacturer costs money. A lot of money. The investors knew that going in. If Tesla succeeds at making reliable and desirable cars and people buy them, the investors will make a lot of money. If Tesla fails to do that the investors will lose a lot of money. No real news there.
The main news is that Tesla has managed to raise that much money to finance its vision, and that so far the investors are still behind it. That is no easy feat. Elon Musk has an amazing track record at raising money for pie in the sky... but he also has a good record for actually delivering the promised pie. SpaceX is launching real satellites, SolarCity has put solar cells on a lot of houses (with plans for many more with the new solar tiles), and Tesla has already sold about 200,000 cars. Even the Hyperloop has had some successful tests.
Not quite true. There are some Japanese EVs that aren't available in the US that use CHAdeMO. And I have no idea what the Chinese EVs are using. But it's pretty much true for EVs that are readily available in the US and Western Europe.
In the early stages, which we are still in, it makes sense for car companies to get involved to jump start the market. Basically, they're subsidizing charging station construction to promote car sales. The problem with that scenario is that there is an incentive for the car companies to make their charging stations proprietary (ie, Tesla Supercharger) so that other car companies don't get a free ride on the infrastructure.
In the long run, I expect that car companies will exit the charging station business and leave it to others. Once the market for charging is established, the car companies should have no trouble finding buyers for their charging networks. It's possible that Tesla, which also has major investments in battery manufacturing and solar cells, will choose to be a major player in the charging business as well as being a car maker. I don't see Ford or GM entering the business, as they don't have Tesla's other investments to make it make sense. The major oil companies (Exxon, BP, etc.) are likely to get involved, as they already have a network of retail locations that could be repurposed for charging or have charging added as a sideline to gasoline sales.
It depends on whether or not it is a refundable tax credit. Many are not, including the federal EV tax credit. In other words, you only get the full credit if you owe at least that much tax. Non-refundable tax credits are a perverse incentive; they punish people for being TOO POOR. (Major gripe: the federal tax credits for education are also non-refundable.) If you can't take advantage of the credit, you're better off leasing the car (the leasing company gets the credit and reduces your rate accordingly) and buying it out when the lease ends.
You could also just buy a used car; the original owner got the tax credit so the used price is reduced accordingly. That's why a used Nissan Leaf sells for so much less than the sticker price. But if you need a long range EV there aren't any used options currently; a Tesla Model S would be too expensive and the Chevy Bolt is too new for any significant number of used ones to be available. It will be a while before you can buy a used Tesla Model 3, a long-range Hyundai Ioniq, or any other future long-range EV.
A lot of us haven't had the opportunity to buy one because they're not 50 state cars; they're only sold in limited areas. The upcoming longer range version of the Ioniq (not the 124 mile version being sold now) will be Hyundai's first 50 state EV.
They might not be able to afford a new 35K car. But a used Nissan Leaf (7.5K-15K) might well be in reach, and is worth considering if a limited-range car will suit their needs and they have a place to charge it. Electricity is cheaper than gas, and maintenance costs for the Leaf will be lower so long as the battery is still in good condition.
That might be true if the cable was installed when the house was built. But for those of us in older homes, any cable TV wiring was pulled after construction and isn't stapled to anything. How could it have been without tearing down walls?
Similarly, power wiring that was installed when the house was built or that runs along beams in an exposed ceiling (typically in the basement if you have one) is stapled, unless you have older wiring like BX cable or (shudder) knob and tube. (The last of those is a major fire hazard. Here in Massachusetts it is now illegal to have any live knob and tube in your house, and if you hire an electrician to do any work in your house they MUST decommission any that they find before they are allowed to do anything else. They are not required to physically remove the disconnected wiring.) Power wiring that was added later to finished areas is not stapled, except near any outlets or switches that were installed.
They never did. All the compatibility effort is done by the makers of the players. Usually that's just the minimal effort of allowing the player to mount like a USB drive so you can drag files to it (which is exactly the same thing you do on a Windows or Linux system), and including AAC decoding support so you can play music from iTunes.
The only way that Apple could block the ability to play iTunes files would be to change the format of them. That would also break existing iPods so Apple isn't going to do that. Blocking the ability to mount the device as a file system would also break compatibility with all sorts of other devices, so again it's not going to happen.
Years ago there were non-Apple music players that would sync with iTunes. Apple no longer supports that capability for any non-Apple device, even the ones that were previously supported, and no new non-Apple device has offered iTunes synchronization for years. There is third party software that will sync non-Apple players with iTunes.
Just not a big enough market any more to interest them. Other companies will continue to produce music players so long as a demand for them exists. Current options include various Sansa models from SanDisk, the Mighty player that downloads Spotify playlists, high-options like the FiiO models and the Hi-Res Walkman, and a plethora of cheap no-name players from China that you can find on eBay.
I don't have the space for a analong system. Guess I'll have to settle for anashort.
Yes, you can capture audio on film. And for most of the history of film it's been the standard way of doing it. Most film without digital sound uses an analog optical soundtrack alongside the images. That eliminated the problems of early systems like Vitaphone that used records that were synchronized with the film; playback didn't always stay in sync, especially if the film was damaged and needed to be repaired.
There are three different brands of digital sound on film, one of which (SDDS) is now discontinued. Dolby and SDDS store the audio data on the film itself; Dolby uses the area between the sprocket holes and SDDS uses the area outside the holes. Datasat (formerly known as DTS) uses a time code that is next to the analog sound track and stores the actual audio on separate CD-ROMs.
70mm film (except for the short lived Fox Grandeur system) uses magnetic sound, not optical. The most common configuration is a 6 channel system with five main tracks and an LFE (bass) track, but there have been many variations over the years and Dolby noise reduction was added along the way. 70mm can also have a DTS time code and use the standard DTS system for film which is a 5 channel system; no separate LFE track is recorded though the low frequencies are separated out by the processor so they can be routed to the subwoofers in the theater.
I have not seen any information anywhere about implementation of more advanced DTS formats for 70mm film. It would be technically feasible, but it would require distributing the audio in a form with more capacity than the CD-ROMs that are used for standard DTS. So far as I know, none of the digital Dolby formats has ever been used with 70mm film.
IMAX never used on-film sound. The first version used a separate six channel magnetic film that was synchronized to the IMAX film. That was later replaced with a DTS digital soundtrack distributed on CD-ROMs, just like the version for 35mm and 70mm sound, and still later by a system using a hard drive with six uncompressed audio channels.
The Wikipeda article on SDDS (the articles on the other digital sound formats also contain the same picture) has a picture that shows the location of all the possible sound tracks on film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
No, it would be 8K. An 8K image has four times as many pixels as a 4K image, just as a standard 70mm image is four times the size of a 35mm image. IMAX is another matter; that image is even larger because it uses the 70mm film differently.
It was Fox being Fox. That network is where science fiction shows die. On the other hand, they put them on the air in the first place, much more than the other networks do - unless you count the superhero shows on The CW, which are a related genre but not the same.
Order something small. Things that only weigh a few ounces and can be shipped in a padded envelope will go by USPS because it's cheaper for packages like that. (If you have Prime they'll only go by USPS if they can offer two day delivery from an Amazon warehouse that stocks the thing you ordered.) Paperback books, optical discs, small electronic parts... things like that.
Private alternatives for parcel delivery do not exist in all locations. If you ship a package to some rural addresses by UPS or Fedex, the final delivery is done by the USPS. No USPS, no deliveries to those locations.
It won't be a mass transit system in the sense of an urban subway or the like. But it does have the potential to move a lot of people over large distances and displace a lot of air travel. Airplanes are expensive to build and operate, use a lot of expensive fossil fuel, and cause a lot of environmental damages (even worse that their carbon footprint would indicate because a lot of the fuel is being burned in the upper atmosphere where it's close to the important ozone layer).
To be pedantic, it's 1/5000 of a Siemens; note the S at the end. The unit is named for a person and so it always has the S, whether it's singular or plural.
The biggest problem with Multics was GE/Honeywell/Bull, the succession of companies that made the computers that it ran on. None of them were much good at either building or marketing mainframe computers.
So yes, Multics was a commercial failure; the number of Multics systems that were sold was small. But in terms of moving the computing and OS state of the art forward, it was a huge success. Many important concepts were invented or popularized by Multics, including memory mapped file I/O, multi-level file system hierarchies, and hardware protection rings. Security was a major focus in the design of Multics, which led to it being adopted by the military and other security-conscious customers.
The phrase "grammar nazi" has taken on a life of its own. Using it is no longer an invocation of Godwin's Law.
Nokia did and did not have a big share of the smartphone market. On the one hand, Symbian (Nokia's smartphone OS) allowed the installation of apps. On the other hand, there weren't all that many apps available, and many users either installed no apps at all or stopped at one or two. So there was a large base of theoretical smartphones but few that were actually being used in a way that we recognize as smartphone usage; most were effectively feature phones despite the presence of smart features in the OS.
Symbian had little presence in the US. That's in part because Nokia did not make the manufacture of CDMA-compatible phones a priority, and even their GSM phones often weren't offered in versions that supported the North American frequencies for mobile phones. Nokia phones were popular in the US in the 90s but faded away around the turn of the millennium, and most of the Symbian models were never offered here. Ignoring a key smartphone market was a bad decision on Nokia's part.
There was also Palm/Handspring. (Handspring was a spinoff of Palm that produced Palm-compatible PDAs and then pioneered smartphone/PDA hybrids with their Treo line. They were later reabsorbed by Palm.) They never had a large share of the smartphone market, but theirs was the first platform that people used in a way that is similar to modern smartphone usage, including installation of third party apps. Samsung also made Palm-based smartphones.
In the olden daisies, magnetic media often had track and sector counts that were aligned with binary numbers. It made the drivers easier to write, and back when every bit counted that was a real consideration. So the statement about "no persistent storage device ever made" is clearly false.
Once the advance of storage technology slowed down enough that there wasn't a factor of two gain every year or so, we started to see counts that weren't powers of two. Designers would squeeze a little more out of the tech by cramming in a few extra sectors, tracks, or both. It really all went out the window once we got variable density recording: magnetic media that store more bits on the outer tracks and fewer bits on the inner ones, keeping the bit density per unit of volume fairly constant. (The original Macintosh floppy drives were the most obvious example of that; they actually changed the motor speed based on which track you were using. Later versions changed the bit clock in the controller instead, which was faster and more reliable but less fun to listen to.) Hard drives also nearly always have some defective areas; in the old days the software on your computer had to be aware of that and avoid using those areas. But now it's all done invisibly by the drive, which has some extra space that is automatically used in place of the defective areas.
Now we have SSDs. Semiconductor memory is usually made in power of two sizes because it makes the chip layout easier. We see that with RAM. (When you see some device with an amount of RAM that isn't a power of two it's because it uses multiple RAM chips or modules, each of which IS a power of two size. For example, a phone with 3GB RAM (actually 3 GiB) probably has three RAM chips inside, each of which holds 1GB. It might instead have one 2GB chip and one 1GB chip.) But SSDs use flash memory and it wears out over time; each memory cell can only have data written to it a limited number of times. SSDs have to do things to spread out the writes over the entire drive, and also usually have some degree of overprovisioning to allow for bits to fail. (In other words, some of the memory is deliberately set aside when you buy the drive so it can be used to replace areas of the SSD that fail, just like the modern hard drive does.) The flash memory chips inside the SSD are usually in sizes based on powers of two, but the amount of space that the user sees is somewhat smaller. That's why we see 60GB, 120GB, 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB SSDs, rather than their natural sizes which would be 64GiB, 128GiB, etc (note the change of unit as well as number).
Walmart is just another store in major urban areas when they bother to show up at all. Here in Boston, for example, they have stores in the suburbs that duke it out with Target and zero presence in the city itself. But Walmart really is a monopoly in rural America; there are many places where you can live where there is no viable alternative to shopping there. Until Amazon came along.
That is why Walmart is so afraid of Amazon. It's pretty much impossible for another retailer to compete with Walmart in the small markets that they dominate; there isn't enough business to go around to support another big store like them, and Walmart has more economies of scale (and importantly, clout with suppliers). But Amazon is using a different model. One that makes it possible for them to be a viable competitor for Walmart, because they don't need to have scale in the local market to enter and compete.
The X Windows protocol itself does not include any security beyond a simple password check that is sent unencrypted, so running it straight up on a network that has any public connections is a bad idea. But these days people mostly run it tunneled through an SSH connection, which is encrypted, except for connections on the local host. So it has effectively gotten a security update even though the X protocol itself was not upgraded.
A relevant article popped up on InfoWorld today: http://www.infoworld.com/artic...