I don't see how anyone could claim that. Flex is a 10U enclosure that holds, at best, 28 dual socket servers. The Dell M1000e can hold 32. IBM's own nextscale gets 12 in a 6U leading to theoretically 84 in a rack (which matches the low-speed bladecenter).
Of course, *highest* density is an overrated metric, since the densest solutions are rarely deployed since the power and cooling footprint frequently exceeds a datacenter's designed capacity. Atom based servers may mitigate that issue, but it is unclear whether their compute throughput will make it make sense compared to a well designed solution constructed out of higher power consuming hardware.
In any event, IBM's x86 business (apart from their high end x86 servers) is more about extremely thorough and detail oriented engineering and quality service and support rather than revolutionary innovation. They perhaps do some of the most in depth failure analysis in the industry and design their systems accordingly. They saw warranty costs due to corrosion of metal contacts in a dimm slot and they designed a coating to mitigate that, for example.
They will draw a line somewhere that keeps some x86 server architectures in the IBM stable
I'd guess the line could be somewhere around 'we can slap the IBM badge on the server on the way out the door' at best. Or else they'll have their brand completely removed from the boxes presuming that opens things up for IBM to be viewed as a logical provider for services and software on top of HP, Dell, or whatever server in x86 land.
Keeping some x86 business back from a divestiture could be pretty catastrophic for the bit that stays. When IBM sold PC, procurement got hit *hard* due to reduced volumes and had difficulty containing costs. Keeping, say, just their very expensive boxes would make that look like a walk in the park.
Actually, currently, they don't outsource their servers (in the sense of 'rebadging') for the most part. They are usually manufactured by the likes of foxconn, and sometimes much of the fine grained design work is done outside, but at the very least IBM does high level design (if not down to the nitty gritty). They even write their own UEFI implementation where pretty much everyone else goes to AMI. This doesn't necessarily mean good or bad things about the systems, it just happens to be that way.
Exceptions include things like the x3450, the e32*, and the x3755 m3. There may be some others, but at least their most common servers are actually IBM designed. Tower servers might have more outsourcing than the rackmounts...
In high performance computing, the enterprise drives make a large difference in performance characteristics.
In terms of failure, I will say that enterprise disk subsystems+disks are extremely more cautious about disk health and will fail a very workable drive. They also tend to be continually scrubbing in the background to avoid unreadable sectors on disk due to not checking.
Write-mostly workloads to a bunch of consumer grade disks will have errors that you may never detect. Frequently I have seen arrays comprised of consumer drives experience their first error and then in attempting to rebuild discover there are unreadable sectors elsewhere unnoticed before that make some stripes unrecoverable.
Right, but the risk picture for MS is not aligned with customer preference. They want to try and try and try to make 'metro' a common API across all devices (after all, using the usual desktop APIs did not do it for previous tablets or Windows Mobile before, so they feel a strong need to do *something* to be relevant to those devices). To that end, they will risk pissing off desktop and pc users in hopes that force feeding their captive audience will, eventually, lead to developer's targeting metro instead of the desktop apis and suddenly they would have 'synergy' between their desired direction and their 'sure thing'.
So the marching orders MS undoubtedly has right now is to make Metro an easier pill to swallow for the desktop users. I suspect foremost of such changes would be to have the option of running 'metro' apps in windowed format so they are more viable to write desktop applications in.
Of course, speaking strategically, the more logical course to pursue on that front is to offer a 'metro runtime' for Windows 7 for free. Since it's microsoft interests being pursued against the general will of their market, it's counter-productive to require customers to pay for the privilege of trying to advance microsoft's agenda. Sure, release Windows 9/8 including this runtime if that's what they want, but the goal is developer confidence in targeting that environment and that won't happen so long as Windows 7 share is so high and you don't invite those users to the party. Even if you announced 'free upgrade', most people wouldn't bother, but a runtime on the order of the.net runtime or redistributable directx/vc libraries could be prereqed by developers in a moderately seamless fashion.
Considering the entire gripe was not about unsolicited mail, but that your information in some way is searchable when it previously was not, the solution of ignoring it is not applicable.
Microsoft's goal is not to make laptop/desktop users happy. No mater how much they grumble, history has proven Microsoft needn't worry about other desktop/laptop platform alternatives. The people who need desktop/laptop that use Windows today will use it tomorrow. They might not get an upgrade for the sake of the new windows, but they were likely to not get an upgrade in the first place.
I expect MS to continue trying to throw the desktop users under the bus in the name of advancing their tablet/phone market. To them this probably means trying to evolve the 'modern' development environment (windows 8 modern apps are kind of crappy compared to the android/iOS alternatives in terms of navigation). One would reasonably hope that MS would wise up and give their desktop api rational capability to take advantage of higher DPI displays and window management capabilities that allow full screen apps without jumping headfirst into silverlight, but they don't have faith in Intel as a partner and still want to be on phones (even if they do see the doom in ARM tablets for them).
This is the nature of the software as a service beast.
With traditional software (Windows OS is a good example), you have three choices, embrace the change, discontinue use of the product, or keep using old product and ignore change.
The 'ignore change' evaporates in software as a service model.
If BitCoin became particularly pervasive, then a sufficiently well-resourced organization could brute force their way to the top. It's essentially an arms race. It's not even like it is necessarily *obvious* if they play it right (the sum of a set of seemingly unrelated pools could actually be under a singular interest and collude to mess with things.
You can make the same argument about 'the government' or the 'central bank'. Sure, you can bypass it if you have enough resources. The cost, risk, and consequences just aren't worth it in something like the US at the moment. Sometimes a critical mass of people think it is worth it to bypass, then you have overthrown governments and collapsed currencies. It's generally a nasty, terrible process, but if bitcoin were in a position in the ballpark of 'the currency', you can bet that 'law enforcement' and/or 'military' sorts of manpower would start manifesting to protect whatever dominant interest comes along and the process to 'fix' bitcoin would be on the order of any fiat currency.
What bitcoin zealots fail to realize is that the challenge of 'economic' control can't be fixed by math. Economies are ultimately governed by the collective will of the participants, not by some mathematical goodness in the system. We use currency and math to abstract things away to have a sort of quantitative feel to the whole shenanigan and to have *some* reference point, but the driving human nature behind it is what shapes the big picture.
The point being even that needn't be the end. It's like saying you measure people per square foot of land to assess the efficiency of a building. If you have a skyscraper, you can have multiple people per square foot of land because you stacked them. When thinking was defined particularly to one-story buildings, that would seem an odd concept because you are fitting more than one person into a spot that's not even quite big enough for one person. This is the state of semiconductors today, terminology/lay discussion based on 'single story' design, and current state of the art is basically a split-level home (very roughly) with a non trivial chance of more levels to come..
Through exploiting Xorg then it can likely exploit more *important* things like credit card numbers, bank account information, and so on and so forth. The likelihood is very high that the exploited X server is going to host an input of some great importance.
If the user is very fastidious in sorting every single little thing into distinct AppVMs, then the attack surface can be meaningfully reduced. However such a fastidious user is unlikely to do activities that would cause bitmap fonts to be read in from an untrusted source.
Qubes OS is a fascinating tool to help the careful be more effective in their effort, but the practical reality is that the people most afflicted by these attacks would not create a more secure environment in Qubes than a normal environment.
Basically Qubes OS is as likely to be affected as a modern linux distribution. Xorg does not run with special privilege and thus the scope of the attack is things for said user.
While that means the underlying integrity of the system and other users is intact, it does little to comfort the vast majority of desktop users, as xkcd succinctly expresses: http://xkcd.com/1200/
When someone says '22 nm', it doesn't resemble at all what one would have assumed it to mean 15 years ago. It means 'roughly equivalent' to what 15 year old technology would do if it hypothetically 22 nm. For example, the slide refers to different structures, and those are already happening (Intel 22 nm is kind of '2 and a half D'). If the argument is 'that won't count', then that statement has come way too late since the node name has already cease to mean anything particularly specific.
A bigger challenge will be whether the phenomenon of computing pretty much being 'good enough' for the mass market will make it unprofitable to do the R&D to advance the state of the art in semiconductors to keep pushing things forward. I know there is significant demand in a lot of places, but will that demand be tempered if that market has to bear the cost of those advancements on their own without the mass market to help justify the cost.
If the technology manages the same volume of labor demand as before, then it wouldn't be appealing as a cost saving measure. Yes, the IT industry is currently benefitting from this, but likely not as much as the postitions it is directly responsible for displacing. Now other industries may be finding things to do with that labor surplus, but I think it is silly to claim that IT is taking up all that slack.
Now that's not to say the answer is to be luddites and turn away labor saving measures. Hopefully, one day we'll find ourselves with labor supply exceeding our ambition to do something with it, and we have to figure out how to cope with that potentially very nice circumstance. For example, people assume at least 40 hrs/week of work should be done. If we only need half the labor pool, it would be catastrophic if we had 50% unemployment, but it would be bliss if the standard work week decreased to 20 hours.
In relative terms, AWS is not the cheapest nor is it the fastest. It might have the 'best' api (a subjective measure) and undeniably it's the most familar to most of its customers and the cost of the work to leave might be higher than the reduction in cost). It doesn't take a large volume of staff to get those qualities and the stuff that might warrant a large set of technicians is the stuff that Amazon won't commit to.
AWS seems cheap to companies that are either so small that they can't get economies of scale going like Amazon, mismanage their own resources to incur higher cost, and/or can't bring themselves to make some of the operational/architectural/hardware choices that amazon makes in order to be in the right ballpark.
While there are scenarios like you describe where decent business acumen would have been able to foresee a likely erosion of value, I think the basic point is you don't always know it's going to be a failure until the money is spent.
Here, USSR had very little in-house scientific data to go on to be *sure* this was a dead end. If it had turned out not to be a dead end, that would have been very much worth the investment. This is actually what people should be embracing in scientific disciplines, willingness to expend at least some resources on scientific exploration when the result is far from guaranteed.
One thing to note that people looking up items was mostly phone. That is probably indicative of people seeing if the brick and mortar price is *really* a good deal or they would just as soon get the item online. I suspect most cell phone browsing is done in store (which would indicate a desire to better research the purchase in front of them) and probably same for purchases (brick and mortar highlighted awareness, and shopper bought from the cheaper source (this is why someone would get something online instead of 'where they are').
They also apply the term 'mobile' in a disingeneous way. They refer to both cell phones (which people tend to only resort to when truly on the move) and tablets (which generally are used in the same situations as the users would have used laptops otherwise). I personally would be using a laptop for any browsing activity (web navigation I find easier with conventional interfaces and tablet I tend to use only for reading and video ever so often), but a lot of people use tablets for almost all their computing activities nowadays. Some people draw the line at laptop v tablet for things that require complex cursor manipulation and/or text entry, but online shopping is generally neither of those things.
You mean that data that is stamped onto a plastic card in the clear in the wallet that is probably right next to said cell phone if someone robs you? The little card that people hand over freely to low paid waitstaff at a restaurant who might disappear for 5-6 minutes with your card out of sight? The card that is inserted into dozens of public card readers that might have a skimmer on them over the course of a week? Face it, the entire state of CC numbers is insanity from a security perspective (a single 'secret' that must be shared with everyone who you want to pay that is as able to authenticate the transaction you provided it for as it is able to authenticate any transaction to anyone.).
Maybe you mean to say a phone is a prime target for phishing and/or malware, but I would fail to see how that situation would differ from a run of the mill desktop pc.
Combine this with some reports that in-store shopping was down (even if including the days prior) and it may suggest that more people are moving to shopping online than in-store, not that revenue overall is up.
As a very well known xkcd points out, a great deal of the problem could be averted if people weer encouraged to use long passphrases with spaces and everything rather than a pass'word'. password as a concept was good enough for the time of it's popularity, to defend against people typing their way into someone else's account. When the model fell apart in a world with much more automation and network connectivity, the 'fix' was 'keep length about the same, but toss some numbers and maybe some punctuation in there'.
The madness comes in when a great deal of the sites I visit put a 12 character *maximum* on a password for their site.
My personal strategy: base64.b64encode(os.urandom(12)) for every site and store the values on a couple of my devices with a phrase that is about 32 characters long (but easy for me to remember and easy to type). hashing a master key with the domain to generate passwords like some chrome and firefox plugins (password hasher) can do is similarly nice without having to worry that you won't have access to the copy of the database.. Of course, the annoying thing is my 16 random numbers and letters frequently fail the 'complexity' check and I have to add some punctuation character to it.
Delivery trucks are massive beasts forced to take circuitous routes to accomplish their purpose.
These devices do indeed have the burden of being airborne, but on the other hand are much lighter weight (e.g. don't need a lot of safety features, don't have to size capacity to a max load' which might not be as close to average load, and can go direct without worrying about whether there are roads or not).
I think there are other logistical challenges that have me skeptical, but I could be convinced that overall the energy picture might not be too bad.
There are regular payload FPV flights currently out to over 3 miles.
I assume you meant 30 miles (and the record is currently just shy of 35 miles), 3 miles would be rather sad. That is 30 miles being in the ballpark of record setting RC FPV without payload.
Amazon is suggesting a 10 mile range for their design currently.
now to take the amazon of today and make a technology with a 10 mile range anything more than a 'gee-whiz' factor for urban areas would require a pretty dramatic change. When people think warehouse-level stock with insane coverage, they think 'wal-mart'. The nearest walmart to my parents house is 18 miles as the crow flies. One source claimed the average distance to a wal-mart from average house in US was 30 miles (which I think is a bit far but couldn't find quality data in short notice). Amazon would need a real-estate footprint on the order of 9 times as much as wal-mart to cover the market. Even assuming Amazon only has ambitions to service urban areas, they are still looking at a footprint roughly on the order of wal-mart. Amazon has been eating into brick and mortar in no small part due to having so low a footprint, not having to stock everything everywhere, and so on and so fourth. If Amazon gets some regulatory precedents set for this to happen, Wal-Mart can swoop in and implement it in pretty short order.
We post specific 'requirements' fully aware that no applicant will meet every single one (well, it happened once when someone applied for a position after having left our group a few months prior). For us, it's more about describing what the job will entail and attracting people who wouldn't mind working with the stated technologies.
We had once upon a time not bothered listing the technologies we already knew a candidate would not have experience with, but we were inundated with applicants that made clear they were unable/unwilling to work with things they were not already familiar with.
Now we list things knowing full well applicants won't have experience, but we still get applicants and almost always they might be a bit concerned they lack the 'requirements' but they always had the will to entertain learning new things and usually seemed to have the ability to actually become proficient.
I of course have seen the more common thing, some 'public' job offer that was tailor made for a specific guy, but I know first hand some of these things are crafted with total awareness the requirements are not going to be met.
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Not to mention PureFlex, which is the densest x86
I don't see how anyone could claim that. Flex is a 10U enclosure that holds, at best, 28 dual socket servers. The Dell M1000e can hold 32. IBM's own nextscale gets 12 in a 6U leading to theoretically 84 in a rack (which matches the low-speed bladecenter).
Of course, *highest* density is an overrated metric, since the densest solutions are rarely deployed since the power and cooling footprint frequently exceeds a datacenter's designed capacity. Atom based servers may mitigate that issue, but it is unclear whether their compute throughput will make it make sense compared to a well designed solution constructed out of higher power consuming hardware.
In any event, IBM's x86 business (apart from their high end x86 servers) is more about extremely thorough and detail oriented engineering and quality service and support rather than revolutionary innovation. They perhaps do some of the most in depth failure analysis in the industry and design their systems accordingly. They saw warranty costs due to corrosion of metal contacts in a dimm slot and they designed a coating to mitigate that, for example.
They will draw a line somewhere that keeps some x86 server architectures in the IBM stable
I'd guess the line could be somewhere around 'we can slap the IBM badge on the server on the way out the door' at best. Or else they'll have their brand completely removed from the boxes presuming that opens things up for IBM to be viewed as a logical provider for services and software on top of HP, Dell, or whatever server in x86 land.
Keeping some x86 business back from a divestiture could be pretty catastrophic for the bit that stays. When IBM sold PC, procurement got hit *hard* due to reduced volumes and had difficulty containing costs. Keeping, say, just their very expensive boxes would make that look like a walk in the park.
I knew IBM outsourced their x86 servers
Actually, currently, they don't outsource their servers (in the sense of 'rebadging') for the most part. They are usually manufactured by the likes of foxconn, and sometimes much of the fine grained design work is done outside, but at the very least IBM does high level design (if not down to the nitty gritty). They even write their own UEFI implementation where pretty much everyone else goes to AMI. This doesn't necessarily mean good or bad things about the systems, it just happens to be that way.
Exceptions include things like the x3450, the e32*, and the x3755 m3. There may be some others, but at least their most common servers are actually IBM designed. Tower servers might have more outsourcing than the rackmounts...
In high performance computing, the enterprise drives make a large difference in performance characteristics.
In terms of failure, I will say that enterprise disk subsystems+disks are extremely more cautious about disk health and will fail a very workable drive. They also tend to be continually scrubbing in the background to avoid unreadable sectors on disk due to not checking.
Write-mostly workloads to a bunch of consumer grade disks will have errors that you may never detect. Frequently I have seen arrays comprised of consumer drives experience their first error and then in attempting to rebuild discover there are unreadable sectors elsewhere unnoticed before that make some stripes unrecoverable.
If you work for the NSA and the vendor has conveniently backdoored the target for you...
Right, but the risk picture for MS is not aligned with customer preference. They want to try and try and try to make 'metro' a common API across all devices (after all, using the usual desktop APIs did not do it for previous tablets or Windows Mobile before, so they feel a strong need to do *something* to be relevant to those devices). To that end, they will risk pissing off desktop and pc users in hopes that force feeding their captive audience will, eventually, lead to developer's targeting metro instead of the desktop apis and suddenly they would have 'synergy' between their desired direction and their 'sure thing'.
So the marching orders MS undoubtedly has right now is to make Metro an easier pill to swallow for the desktop users. I suspect foremost of such changes would be to have the option of running 'metro' apps in windowed format so they are more viable to write desktop applications in.
Of course, speaking strategically, the more logical course to pursue on that front is to offer a 'metro runtime' for Windows 7 for free. Since it's microsoft interests being pursued against the general will of their market, it's counter-productive to require customers to pay for the privilege of trying to advance microsoft's agenda. Sure, release Windows 9/8 including this runtime if that's what they want, but the goal is developer confidence in targeting that environment and that won't happen so long as Windows 7 share is so high and you don't invite those users to the party. Even if you announced 'free upgrade', most people wouldn't bother, but a runtime on the order of the .net runtime or redistributable directx/vc libraries could be prereqed by developers in a moderately seamless fashion.
Considering the entire gripe was not about unsolicited mail, but that your information in some way is searchable when it previously was not, the solution of ignoring it is not applicable.
Microsoft's goal is not to make laptop/desktop users happy. No mater how much they grumble, history has proven Microsoft needn't worry about other desktop/laptop platform alternatives. The people who need desktop/laptop that use Windows today will use it tomorrow. They might not get an upgrade for the sake of the new windows, but they were likely to not get an upgrade in the first place.
I expect MS to continue trying to throw the desktop users under the bus in the name of advancing their tablet/phone market. To them this probably means trying to evolve the 'modern' development environment (windows 8 modern apps are kind of crappy compared to the android/iOS alternatives in terms of navigation). One would reasonably hope that MS would wise up and give their desktop api rational capability to take advantage of higher DPI displays and window management capabilities that allow full screen apps without jumping headfirst into silverlight, but they don't have faith in Intel as a partner and still want to be on phones (even if they do see the doom in ARM tablets for them).
This is the nature of the software as a service beast.
With traditional software (Windows OS is a good example), you have three choices, embrace the change, discontinue use of the product, or keep using old product and ignore change.
The 'ignore change' evaporates in software as a service model.
If BitCoin became particularly pervasive, then a sufficiently well-resourced organization could brute force their way to the top. It's essentially an arms race. It's not even like it is necessarily *obvious* if they play it right (the sum of a set of seemingly unrelated pools could actually be under a singular interest and collude to mess with things.
You can make the same argument about 'the government' or the 'central bank'. Sure, you can bypass it if you have enough resources. The cost, risk, and consequences just aren't worth it in something like the US at the moment. Sometimes a critical mass of people think it is worth it to bypass, then you have overthrown governments and collapsed currencies. It's generally a nasty, terrible process, but if bitcoin were in a position in the ballpark of 'the currency', you can bet that 'law enforcement' and/or 'military' sorts of manpower would start manifesting to protect whatever dominant interest comes along and the process to 'fix' bitcoin would be on the order of any fiat currency.
What bitcoin zealots fail to realize is that the challenge of 'economic' control can't be fixed by math. Economies are ultimately governed by the collective will of the participants, not by some mathematical goodness in the system. We use currency and math to abstract things away to have a sort of quantitative feel to the whole shenanigan and to have *some* reference point, but the driving human nature behind it is what shapes the big picture.
Game hardware requirements are now driven largely by the developer's desires to be able to sell into the console market.
ergo, *PC* gaming requirements aren't increasing like they used too.
The point being even that needn't be the end. It's like saying you measure people per square foot of land to assess the efficiency of a building. If you have a skyscraper, you can have multiple people per square foot of land because you stacked them. When thinking was defined particularly to one-story buildings, that would seem an odd concept because you are fitting more than one person into a spot that's not even quite big enough for one person. This is the state of semiconductors today, terminology/lay discussion based on 'single story' design, and current state of the art is basically a split-level home (very roughly) with a non trivial chance of more levels to come..
Through exploiting Xorg then it can likely exploit more *important* things like credit card numbers, bank account information, and so on and so forth. The likelihood is very high that the exploited X server is going to host an input of some great importance.
If the user is very fastidious in sorting every single little thing into distinct AppVMs, then the attack surface can be meaningfully reduced. However such a fastidious user is unlikely to do activities that would cause bitmap fonts to be read in from an untrusted source.
Qubes OS is a fascinating tool to help the careful be more effective in their effort, but the practical reality is that the people most afflicted by these attacks would not create a more secure environment in Qubes than a normal environment.
Basically Qubes OS is as likely to be affected as a modern linux distribution. Xorg does not run with special privilege and thus the scope of the attack is things for said user.
While that means the underlying integrity of the system and other users is intact, it does little to comfort the vast majority of desktop users, as xkcd succinctly expresses: http://xkcd.com/1200/
When someone says '22 nm', it doesn't resemble at all what one would have assumed it to mean 15 years ago. It means 'roughly equivalent' to what 15 year old technology would do if it hypothetically 22 nm. For example, the slide refers to different structures, and those are already happening (Intel 22 nm is kind of '2 and a half D'). If the argument is 'that won't count', then that statement has come way too late since the node name has already cease to mean anything particularly specific.
A bigger challenge will be whether the phenomenon of computing pretty much being 'good enough' for the mass market will make it unprofitable to do the R&D to advance the state of the art in semiconductors to keep pushing things forward. I know there is significant demand in a lot of places, but will that demand be tempered if that market has to bear the cost of those advancements on their own without the mass market to help justify the cost.
If the technology manages the same volume of labor demand as before, then it wouldn't be appealing as a cost saving measure. Yes, the IT industry is currently benefitting from this, but likely not as much as the postitions it is directly responsible for displacing. Now other industries may be finding things to do with that labor surplus, but I think it is silly to claim that IT is taking up all that slack.
Now that's not to say the answer is to be luddites and turn away labor saving measures. Hopefully, one day we'll find ourselves with labor supply exceeding our ambition to do something with it, and we have to figure out how to cope with that potentially very nice circumstance. For example, people assume at least 40 hrs/week of work should be done. If we only need half the labor pool, it would be catastrophic if we had 50% unemployment, but it would be bliss if the standard work week decreased to 20 hours.
In relative terms, AWS is not the cheapest nor is it the fastest. It might have the 'best' api (a subjective measure) and undeniably it's the most familar to most of its customers and the cost of the work to leave might be higher than the reduction in cost). It doesn't take a large volume of staff to get those qualities and the stuff that might warrant a large set of technicians is the stuff that Amazon won't commit to.
AWS seems cheap to companies that are either so small that they can't get economies of scale going like Amazon, mismanage their own resources to incur higher cost, and/or can't bring themselves to make some of the operational/architectural/hardware choices that amazon makes in order to be in the right ballpark.
While there are scenarios like you describe where decent business acumen would have been able to foresee a likely erosion of value, I think the basic point is you don't always know it's going to be a failure until the money is spent.
Here, USSR had very little in-house scientific data to go on to be *sure* this was a dead end. If it had turned out not to be a dead end, that would have been very much worth the investment. This is actually what people should be embracing in scientific disciplines, willingness to expend at least some resources on scientific exploration when the result is far from guaranteed.
One thing to note that people looking up items was mostly phone. That is probably indicative of people seeing if the brick and mortar price is *really* a good deal or they would just as soon get the item online. I suspect most cell phone browsing is done in store (which would indicate a desire to better research the purchase in front of them) and probably same for purchases (brick and mortar highlighted awareness, and shopper bought from the cheaper source (this is why someone would get something online instead of 'where they are').
They also apply the term 'mobile' in a disingeneous way. They refer to both cell phones (which people tend to only resort to when truly on the move) and tablets (which generally are used in the same situations as the users would have used laptops otherwise). I personally would be using a laptop for any browsing activity (web navigation I find easier with conventional interfaces and tablet I tend to use only for reading and video ever so often), but a lot of people use tablets for almost all their computing activities nowadays. Some people draw the line at laptop v tablet for things that require complex cursor manipulation and/or text entry, but online shopping is generally neither of those things.
You mean that data that is stamped onto a plastic card in the clear in the wallet that is probably right next to said cell phone if someone robs you? The little card that people hand over freely to low paid waitstaff at a restaurant who might disappear for 5-6 minutes with your card out of sight? The card that is inserted into dozens of public card readers that might have a skimmer on them over the course of a week? Face it, the entire state of CC numbers is insanity from a security perspective (a single 'secret' that must be shared with everyone who you want to pay that is as able to authenticate the transaction you provided it for as it is able to authenticate any transaction to anyone.).
Maybe you mean to say a phone is a prime target for phishing and/or malware, but I would fail to see how that situation would differ from a run of the mill desktop pc.
Combine this with some reports that in-store shopping was down (even if including the days prior) and it may suggest that more people are moving to shopping online than in-store, not that revenue overall is up.
As a very well known xkcd points out, a great deal of the problem could be averted if people weer encouraged to use long passphrases with spaces and everything rather than a pass'word'. password as a concept was good enough for the time of it's popularity, to defend against people typing their way into someone else's account. When the model fell apart in a world with much more automation and network connectivity, the 'fix' was 'keep length about the same, but toss some numbers and maybe some punctuation in there'.
The madness comes in when a great deal of the sites I visit put a 12 character *maximum* on a password for their site.
My personal strategy: base64.b64encode(os.urandom(12)) for every site and store the values on a couple of my devices with a phrase that is about 32 characters long (but easy for me to remember and easy to type). hashing a master key with the domain to generate passwords like some chrome and firefox plugins (password hasher) can do is similarly nice without having to worry that you won't have access to the copy of the database.. Of course, the annoying thing is my 16 random numbers and letters frequently fail the 'complexity' check and I have to add some punctuation character to it.
Delivery trucks are massive beasts forced to take circuitous routes to accomplish their purpose.
These devices do indeed have the burden of being airborne, but on the other hand are much lighter weight (e.g. don't need a lot of safety features, don't have to size capacity to a max load' which might not be as close to average load, and can go direct without worrying about whether there are roads or not).
I think there are other logistical challenges that have me skeptical, but I could be convinced that overall the energy picture might not be too bad.
There are regular payload FPV flights currently out to over 3 miles.
I assume you meant 30 miles (and the record is currently just shy of 35 miles), 3 miles would be rather sad. That is 30 miles being in the ballpark of record setting RC FPV without payload.
Amazon is suggesting a 10 mile range for their design currently.
now to take the amazon of today and make a technology with a 10 mile range anything more than a 'gee-whiz' factor for urban areas would require a pretty dramatic change. When people think warehouse-level stock with insane coverage, they think 'wal-mart'. The nearest walmart to my parents house is 18 miles as the crow flies. One source claimed the average distance to a wal-mart from average house in US was 30 miles (which I think is a bit far but couldn't find quality data in short notice). Amazon would need a real-estate footprint on the order of 9 times as much as wal-mart to cover the market. Even assuming Amazon only has ambitions to service urban areas, they are still looking at a footprint roughly on the order of wal-mart. Amazon has been eating into brick and mortar in no small part due to having so low a footprint, not having to stock everything everywhere, and so on and so fourth. If Amazon gets some regulatory precedents set for this to happen, Wal-Mart can swoop in and implement it in pretty short order.
We post specific 'requirements' fully aware that no applicant will meet every single one (well, it happened once when someone applied for a position after having left our group a few months prior). For us, it's more about describing what the job will entail and attracting people who wouldn't mind working with the stated technologies.
We had once upon a time not bothered listing the technologies we already knew a candidate would not have experience with, but we were inundated with applicants that made clear they were unable/unwilling to work with things they were not already familiar with.
Now we list things knowing full well applicants won't have experience, but we still get applicants and almost always they might be a bit concerned they lack the 'requirements' but they always had the will to entertain learning new things and usually seemed to have the ability to actually become proficient.
I of course have seen the more common thing, some 'public' job offer that was tailor made for a specific guy, but I know first hand some of these things are crafted with total awareness the requirements are not going to be met.