AWS is a byproduct of Amazon's e-commerce business, that became a viable service of it's own. It was a brilliant move to monetize the excess compute power Amazon had to have on hand for it's e-commerce business. Without the e-commerce business, AWS wouldn't exist.
This is a myth, and it needs to die. AWS was not designed for amazon's infrastructure, nor was it spare capacity of said infrastructure at any point. It was built from the ground up to be an independent service selling to third parties, on independent servers in independent data centers.
It took many years for amazon.com retail stuff to migrate to it, and supposedly some parts still aren't migrated.
I mean, I'm gullible so I believe you, but I also believe Steve Yegge who wrote about this:
> Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure they'd built for selling and shipping books and sundry could be transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform. So now they have the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and the Amazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel' o' other services browsable at aws.amazon.com. These services host the backends for some pretty successful companies, reddit being my personal favorite of the bunch.
Both of you can be right. It's possible that Bezos saw the opportunity in taking advantage of their tech infra expertise and building that into a public product, but maybe it wasn't just taking what they already built and making it public.
The story I always heard was they had a ton of extra capacity that was very seasonal and then someone came up with the great idea to sell that extra capacity in the off season.
SQS as the first publicly available service sounds weird to me but I don't have any sources to cite otherwise.
Part of that success was a mandate back in the earlier days of the company that all development and systems administration assets be designed with the presumption that they may be converted into a customer accessible frameworks one day.
The internet these days is alot more accessible than it use to be. Back in the 90's you had to be more tech savy and you needed to be able to code because no one has written the software that could do that thing and there was even less documentation. Now these days, you get a web hosting account. run C-panel and install WordPress in just one click (Wix if you know even less). Heck, you don't even have to code the HTML, just select a template you like. Probably 50% of the static sites are CMS. The point is, as the software and platforms become standardized commodities where you don't have to learn anything to use it, the less innovation you will see from individuals as most people don't want to learn, they want the benefits without paying their dues.
I'm more curious about how they hacked into the SEC database? Did they use an email trojan? Exploit an existing flaw or backdoor? If they did this via e-mail, who did they send the mail to?
> The hackers used malicious software sent via email to SEC employees. Then, after planting the software on the SEC computers, they sent the information they were able to gather from the EDGAR system to servers in Lithuania, where they either used it or distributed the data to other criminals, Carpenito said.
I guess you need to be selective about who your clients are. Just because they can pay you very well and buy any equipment or service you suggest, doesn't mean you should have them as a client. You don't want a client who will hunt you down and kill you if the network goes down. :(
It's interesting that Amazon Web Service (AWS) makes them profitable, NOT the e-commerce business. Like many others, I buy plenty of stuff there, but without their cloud infrastructure, there would be no Amazon. In fact, they found a way to monetize their excess cloud capacity for their e-commerce platform which is probably the most expensive resource to build and keep idle is a stroke of genius in hindsight.
Brick and Mortar retail has to adapt and change with the technology and the times. Sears COULD have integrated retail with online shopping IF they remembered to focus on what ONLINE couldn't deliver. Brick and Mortar retail isn't going away for those who understand it's real value. It has to focus on what the online business can't do... customization of products, personal service and relationship building. If their salespeople became consultants and the products they sold were better suited for customization, they would have built a LOYAL customer base that needed their expertise.
Dr Wible who wrote the article on med students on medication (antidepressants and/or stimulants) did a TEDMED talk on "Why doctors kill themselves" http://www.idealmedicalcare.org/why-doctors-kill-themselves/
which refers to the problem with the medical system itself.
If the healer is mentally ill (and most of them are), how can we expect the best medical care? The fact that med students take medication is just the tip of the iceberg.
How would you write a program to use these exploit? Unless I'm mistaken, I'm under the impression you have to talk directly to the processor through the kernel in order to do any of these exploit. You would have to write the code in assembler or use a special library to do predictive branching?
Your code always talks directly to the cpu. Your program 'just' runs in a env where it is not allowed to do a few things the kernel is allowed to.
Probing the cpu for timings of memory access you don't have access to, or forcing it to something somewhere where you do have access to, you don't need the kernel for that. Thats the problem.
You don't need to write assembly or C; it is possible to perform an exploit by utilizing any high-resolution clock, like the one JavaScript on most browsers provided until recently.
Depends on what model you use for the AI and in what field.
With ML you have a model that dictates your constraints and how it applies what it learns.
If you have an AI that models let's say Hannibal and his tactics on a battlefield, well you may do well against many opponents in a battle simulation. On the other hand if you modeled "Bevis and Butthead" and had that AI run a restaurant, you may have a colorful but disastrous result.
You would have to find an appropriate context for the model to be useful.
