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Submission + - Amazon Launches 'Home Services' For Repair, Installation, and Other Work (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has quietly rolled out a new business called "Home Services," which aims to be a middleman between customers and all sorts of contracted services. It includes things like appliance repair, home cleaning, installation/assembly of products in your car or home, tutoring (academic and musical), and even performance art. Amazon makes money on this by taking a cut of the total price — between 10 and 20 percent. Since everything is geolocated, they have many more options available in big cities than in small rural communities. One of Amazon's goals is to help standardize the price for various services, so there aren't any surprises when the bill comes due.

Comment Re:Way to piss off customers, Apple. (Score 1) 193

At a price of $350, it's hardly expensive for a watch.

It's not a watch. It's a fashion accessory. And nobody who is somebody would be caught dead wearing a $350 version . . . Apple is going after the folks who will dish out $10,000 for a watch: http://www.engadget.com/2015/0...

$350 for a watch? How vulgar and ordinary!

Comment Re:Way to piss off customers, Apple. (Score 1) 193

This is an excellent marking tactic. For that price, Apple wants to make sure that you get the feeling that the iWatch is "exclusive". Not every ordinary dweeb can walk into a store and buy one. It's like getting a membership in country club or other exclusive club. You're not just buying a watch . . . you are buying a legacy. That's how the ultra expensive Swiss watchmakers advertise their watches in The Economist.

So, in order to sell it to dumb rich folks, you need to wrap the purchase process in a wee bit of prompt and circumstance . . .

Comment Re:No it isn't (Score 1) 167

any innovation packed its bags and walked a decade ago.

That's why F1 never really interested me: I don't want to watch a race where all the cars are the same. I would like to see a "no holds barred" race, where you could enter anything from a teenager on a skateboard with a jet pack, to the Mammoth Car. How about a Russian T-Series tank with a MIG Fighter engine mounted on it? (That actually exists. The Russians used it to extinguish Gulf War oil well fires).

Now THAT would drive real innovation, and be a hoot and a half, as well, when folks came up with some wacky ideas, that went terribly wrong. Think of those old black and white film clips of the first attempts at powered flight.

Comment Re:This is great! (Score 2) 353

. . . you forgot the part about how she is going to lay off Americans . . . revoke their citizenship, and force them to leave the country, and try their luck elsewhere in the world.

She also ditched the old concept of "The HP Way". I'm guessing that she will change the "Pledge of Allegiance, to the Flag" to "With Freedom and Justice . . . for the Rich".

Comment Re:SpaceShipTwo (Score 1) 447

"Hi, welcome to your flight to Hell! Our flight attendants will now show you our emergency procedures!"

"There is no life vest underneath your seat. If you would like one, they are available for rent for this flight for an extra $50."

"If the cabin loses pressure, oxygen masks will fall down. However, oxygen will only flow through the mask, if you have purchased our oxygen plan, also for $50. First, pay the flight attendant. Then put the mask on yourself. Then share the oxygen with any infants or incapacitated passengers next to you . . . "

Comment Re:Won't everything need to be recompiled? (Score 1) 85

AIX is full of "hacks" or "modifications" in the TCP/IP stack to greatly improve the performance on POWER architecture on MP systems. Have any of these made it into mainstream Linux? Are they even valid on Intel architecture?

For instance, when running a benchmark on an AIX POWER system, try increasing the load, and see if your results go up. It can happen, that you increase the load, the CPU utilization climbs, but you benchmark remains the same. Well, you might be hanging in spin locks. AIX supports instrumented locks, so you can check this with the lockstat command.

Another potential problem is that two many global variables are located in the same CPU cache line. So you can pad single variables, so that they are in separate cache lines. Or, even worse, you have one global variable that is being constantly updated by all processors, and is constantly causing cache invalidation on the memory bus. Then you need to do a hardware memory bus trace, with an HP logic analyzer that looks like something out of Hentai Porn. Then you need to write up a patent or something:

https://patents.justia.com/patent/6430659

So I'm just wondering if all this poop will be done for Linux on OpenPOWER . . .

Comment Re:Won't everything need to be recompiled? (Score 2) 85

AIX was pretty cool way back when, when they introduced 64-bit support. The processor was 64-bit. However, you could run a 32-bit kernel or a 64-bit kernel. And you could run a 32-bit process or a 64-bit process on either of the kernels.

So what does some poor chump (i.e. me) who is tasked with writing a device driver for AIX need to do? Well, first #ifdef the code, so you compile different stuff, depending on if you are building a 32-bit or 64-bit version of the device driver. Then you needed to add simple "if" statements in the device driver, to check if you were running a process in 32-bit or 64-bit mode. Then according to the mix, you would have to thunk the addresses, when copying the data from user space into kernel space.

Fun stuff. I can't believe that I actually did this in a former life . . .

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