Amazon

 

10.25.13

Amazon Stock May Be Up, but the Company Still Doesn’t Make Any Money

That glowing new bestseller, that Friday stock bump, that rosy Christmas outlook—they can’t hide that after 20 years, the company still hasn’t managed to turn a profit. Daniel Gross on whether it ever will.
Amazon.com and Jeff Bezos, its founder and chief executive officer, are having a moment. They are the subject of a new, admiring bestselling book, The Everything Store, by Brad Stone. Bezos just plunked down $250 million to buyThe Washington Post. The buoyant stock, up 64 percent in the past year, got a nice jolt on Friday as investors were enthused about its third-quarter results: revenues were up 24 percent from a year ago, and Amazon issued a positive forecast for the Christmas season. The company is killing it in books and retailing goods, has a rapidly growing cloud storage and computing business, and is getting into original content and devices. It sports an impressive market capitalization of about $166 billion.

And yet.

The company, first founded in 1994, still doesn’t make any money. In the third quarter, it reported a $41 million net loss.

 

Think Lean

Lean manufacturing, lean enterprise, or lean production, often simply, “lean“, is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, “value” is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for.

Essentially, lean is centered on preserving value with less work. Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS) (hence the term Toyotism is also prevalent) and identified as “lean” only in the 1990s.[1][2] TPS is renowned for its focus on reduction of the original Toyota seven wastes to improve overall customer value, but there are varying perspectives on how this is best achieved. The steady growth of Toyota, from a small company to the world’s largest automaker,[3] has focused attention on how it has achieved this success.

Continue reading “Think Lean”

Definitely fake

Messages asking for personal information:  http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=8253

Reporting suspicious messages:  http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=29381

I ‘ve received this message:

Estimado Usuario de Gmail,

Sus dos correos entrantes se colocaron en estado de espera debido a la reciente actualización de nuestra base de datos. Con el fin de recibir los mensajes haga clic aquí para iniciar sesión y esperar la respuesta de nuestro servidor.

Les pedimos disculpas por las molestias que este cambio les pueda ocasionar y gracias por su comprensión.

Atentamente,

Atención al Cliente.”

It’s a scam called phishing to try steal your private info / password ,  click on the down arrow at the top right of the email and select “Report phishing” from the drop down menu.  This will help Gmail warn others that the email is a scam , or use the following form:  http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=abuse_phishing

some info :

never give out your password to emailed requests , any email from Google must end @google.com – also click the show details arrow and make sure the domain you see next to the ‘mailed-by’ or ‘signed-by’ lines matches the sender’s email address. If you see messages claiming to be from google.com, but are not properly authenticated as coming from google.com, then they are, phishing messages.   Google will never ask you for your password (other than in their normal sign in screens, etc.). If you ever get an email asking for your password, you can be guaranteed that it isn’t from Google/Gmail.

DNS cache in Firefox

Clear DNS cache in Firefox

 

During the day I switch my VPN connection on and off several times. When I try to hit a server inside my company’s network while the VPN connection is down, it obviously fails and because I’m using OpenDNS every hostname resolves to an ip-address (in this case an ip-address of a server at OpenDNS).

I connect to VPN and then reload the page in Firefox and the same error page shows up. The reason for this behavior is Firefox’s internal DNS cache. The only remedy at that point is to close Firefox and restart it, which clears the in-memory DNS cache.

However, there’s a solution that does not require a restart.

  1. type about:config in Firefox’s address bar
  2. acknowledge the warning that appears next
  3. find an entry called network.dnsCacheExpiration and set it’s value to 0
  4. if there’s no such entry, create a new integer item with the name above and a value of 0
  5. now go back and change the value to 3600

In step 3 (or 4) we tell Firefox that the expiration time for DNS cache is 0 seconds, which means that cache entries expire immediately, essentially clearing the existing cache. In step 5 we go back to the standard 3600 seconds (1 hr) cache expiration. The net effect of these steps is an empty DNS cache, meaning that the next time you hit the trouble server above, Firefox will attempt to resolve the hostname to an ip-address.

Autonomous Drones

Published on Apr 19, 2013

We chat with Kyle Moore, a member of the Stanford Robotics Club, about his project that converts cheap remote-controlled toy helicopters into autonomous drones that can map and navigate around environments.

Published on Apr 13, 2013

Check out some Home security Drone Available In the Market you can buy

http://www.dailysmartstuff.com/2013/0…

Tens of thousands of domestic drones already in use nationwide, with more to come
Increase of use in drones by law enforcement, movie studios, environmental organizations and the news media, comes as the U.S. government prepares to issue commercial drone permits in 2015. Many of those already flying do so without the proper permits.

This video Uploaded for educational purposes only;

The Black Hornet Nano

Published on Oct 6, 2013

The PD-100 Black Hornet is a nano UAV developed by Prox Dynamics. The Black Hornet offers intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance support to armed forces in mission critical operations. The UAV gives access to remote locations and provides situational awareness on the battle field.The Black Hornet has been deployed in Afghanistan to meet the surveillance requirements of the UK Armed Forces. The UAV is also in service with the security forces of several other countries.

BRITISH ARMY $195,000 SPY DRONE That Fits in the PALM of Your HAND – Intro to the Black Hornet Nano

The Black Hornet Nano is a military micro unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) developed by Prox Dynamics AS of Norway, and in use by the British Army.

The unit measures around 10 cm x 2.5 cm and provides troops on the ground with local situational awareness. They are small enough to fit in one hand and weigh just over half an ounce (including batteries). The UAV is equipped with a camera which gives the operator full-motion video and still images and were developed as part of a £20 million contract for 160 units with Marlborough Communications Ltd.

The aircraft are being used by soldiers from the UK’s Brigade Reconnaissance Force at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan.[4] Operation Herrick personnel in Afghanistan deploy the Black Hornet from the front line to fly into enemy territory to take video and still images before returning to the operator.

Designed to blend in with the muddy grey walls in Afghanistan, it has been used to look around corners or over walls and other obstacles to identify any hidden dangers and enemy positions. The images are displayed on a small handheld terminal which can be used by the operator to control the UAV.

Sergeant Carl James Boyd of the 1st Royal Regiment of Fusiliers demonstrates how the Norwegian-designed Black Hornet Nano will be used by troops on the front line in Afghanistan.

The tiny handheld surveillance helicopters contains a camera that beams back video and still images to a handheld control terminal, allowing soldiers to see past obstacles to identify potential hidden dangers.

The remote-controlled drone measures about 4in by 1in and weighs 0.6oz

Black Hornet: British Army unveil latest weapon against the Taliban
Sergeant Carl Boyd shows off a remote controlled miniature helicopter with three cameras on-board.

British troops in Afghanistan are now using 10-centimeter-long 16-gram spy helicopters to survey Taliban firing spots. The UK Defense Ministry plans to buy 160 of the drones under a contract worth more than $31 million.

­The remote-controlled PD-100 PRS aircraft, dubbed the Black Hornet, is produced by Norwegian designer Prox Dynamics. The drone is a traditional single-rotor helicopter, scaled down to the size of a toy. British troops use the drones for reconnaissance missions, sending them ahead to inspect enemy positions.

Each drone is equipped with a tiny tillable camera, a GPS coordinate receiver and an onboard autopilot system complete with gyros, accelerometers and pressure sensors, which keeps it stable in flight against winds as strong as 10 knots, according to reviews. The tiny aircraft is agile enough to fly inside compounds, and is quiet enough not to attract unwanted attention. If detected, the drones are cheap enough to be considered expendable.

The auto-pilot either follows a preprogrammed flight plan or receives commands from a manual control station, which is about the size of a large smartphone. The drone’s camera can feed compressed video or still images to an operator up to a kilometer away, and its rechargeable battery provides power for about 30 minutes of flight.
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In addition to the drone and the controller, each system comes with a ground base station, which houses the operating system, main electronics, internal batteries and chargers. It also protects the drone while being transported. The weight of the entire kit is about a kilogram, easily portable in the field.

Prox Dynamics started working on the nano-drone in 2008, and released a video of the first prototype in flight a year later. The manufacturer initially planned for it to be put to civilian use, to scout sites of natural or man-made disasters for survivors and provide intel to rescue teams. A marketable version of the Black Hornet was first presented at the Counter Terrorist Expo in London in April 2012.