The license allows SF Express to conduct commercial operation of drone deliveries in approved airspace nationwide. JD, China’s second-largest e-commerce player and Cainiao Network Technology Co Ltd, the logistics affiliate of Alibaba Group are also stepping up efforts in the area. Chinese authorities have granted the first license for commercial drone or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) deliveries in the country. On March 28, the East China Regional Administration of the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) granted operating (pilot) license to a subsidiary of China’s leading courier company, SF Express, in Jiangxi province. SF express is the second largest courier in China after China Post. The license allows the Shenzhen-based company to conduct commercial operation of drone deliveries in approved airspace nationwide. SF Express will start in a pilot zone in Nankang district of Ganzhou, a city in Jiangxi province, where it has been testing drone deliveries since June 2017. Tian Min, head of technology at SF Express, said that the next step would be to expand the drone delivery operations across the whole province and ultimately nationwide. Wang Zhiqing, deputy director of the CAAC, said, “The issuing of the license means that China has entered a new stage of drone transportation and it is also an integration of traditional airfreight with drones.” Chinese companies ramping up drone delivery efforts JD, China’s second-largest e-commerce player, formally opened a drone delivery station in Hainan province on 26 March. In February, the CAAC approved JD’s experimental drone deliveries in a pilot zone in Xi’an, capital of Shaanxi province. JD launched a competition offering 100 million Yuan (US$16 million) to find solutions for conducting widespread drone delivery services across China. In December 2017, it was reported that JD is planning to build 185 drone airports in Sichuan province , to develop logistics services for rural areas. It plans to use drones to deliver agricultural products from rural areas in Sichuan to cities across the country within 24 hours, reducing the logistics costs in rural areas by 50 to 70 percent. A few days ago, Cainiao Network Technology Co Ltd, the logistics affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, demonstrated its drone transportation technology, by transporting tea leaves from Shifeng Mountain, next to Hangzhou’s West Lake, to the tea processing center in less than two minutes. Previously, it took pickers more than an hour to bring tea leaves down from hillside tea plantations. Last year, Alibaba used drones developed by Cainiao to transport and deliver packages over water for the first time. According to China Daily, three drones carrying six boxes of passionfruit with a combined weight of around 12 kilograms flew from Putian in East China’s Fujian province to nearby Meizhou Island on 31 October. Globally, Amazon partnered with the UK Government in 2016 to trial drone deliveries. It has opened Prime Air development centers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Austria, France and Israel and is testing the vehicles in multiple international locations. In 2017, Amazon filed a patent for multi-level fulfillment centers that can accommodate the landing and takeoff of drones in dense urban setting. Powered by WPeMatico The post First license issued for commercial drone deliveries in China appeared first on PC Store Near Me. via Technology Latest News – PC Store Near Me https://ift.tt/2uGyKiu
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Dozens of high-tech phone smugglers have been apprehended by Chinese police, who twigged to the scheme to send refurbished iPhones into the country from Hong Kong via drone — but not the way you might think. China’s Legal Daily reported the news (and Reuters noted shortly after) following a police press conference; it’s apparently the first cross-border drone-based smuggling case, so likely of considerable interest. Although the methods used by the smugglers aren’t described, a picture emerges from the details. Critically, in addition to the drones themselves, which look like DJI models with dark coverings, police collected some long wires — more than 600 feet long. Small packages of 10 or so phones were sent one at a time, and it only took “seconds” to get them over the border. That pretty much rules out flying the drone up and over the border repeatedly — leaving aside that landing a drone in pitch darkness on the other side of a border fence (or across a body of water) would be difficult to do once or twice, let alone dozens of times, the method is also inefficient and risky. But really, the phones only need to clear the border obstacle. So here’s what you do: Send the drone over once with all cable attached. Confederates on the other side attach the cable to a fixed point, say 10 or 15 feet off the ground. Drone flies back unraveling the cable, and lands some distance onto the Hong Kong side. Smugglers attach a package of 10 phones to the cable with a carabiner, and the drone flies straight up. When the cable reaches a certain tension, the package slides down the cable, clearing the fence. The drone descends, and you repeat. I’ve created a highly professional diagram to illustrate this technique (feel free to reuse): It’s not 100 percent to scale. The far side might have to be high enough that the cable doesn’t rest on the fence, if there is one, or not to drag in the water if that’s the case. Not sure about that part. Anyway, it’s quite smart. You get horizontal transport basically for free, and the drone only has to do what it does best: go straight up. Two wires were found, and the police said up to 15,000 phones might be sent across in a night. Assuming 10 phones per trip, and say 20 seconds per flight, that works out to 1,800 phones per hour per drone, which sounds about right. Probably this kind of thing is underway at more than a few places around the world. Powered by WPeMatico The post Chinese police foil drone-flying phone smugglers at Hong Kong border appeared first on PC Store Near Me. via Technology Latest News – PC Store Near Me https://ift.tt/2GIhe28 A drone crashed Saturday in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV reported. According to the report, the drone was destroyed by Israeli fire after it crash-landed on the ground. Reports in Lebanon said the drone was armed with four missiles and landed between the villages of Baraachit and Beit Yahoun and was then destroyed by another drone, reportedly Israeli. Israeli Defense Forces confirmed the report in a statement from its spokesperson, saying the drone crashed in an open field in southern Lebanon as result of a technical malfunction. The incident will be investigated, said the statement. The al-Manar report said air traffic was lively in the southern Lebanese sky on Friday night. Powered by WPeMatico The post Israeli Drone Crashes in Southern Lebanon appeared first on PC Store Near Me. via Technology Latest News – PC Store Near Me https://ift.tt/2uEE0TY Insipred to reach new markets mini pc maker Azulle has sent us in their latest system for review. Sticking to their niche of fanless systems the Inspire is targeted at users who want more while using less offering a compact system with all of the modern trimmings. Getting a look at the InspireFrom the outside the Inspire is clearly taking cues from industrial systems. Looking around we have a varied port selection with a very modern selection. However the total USB count is down from it’s sibling with the missing 2.0 port. We do get a full Size Displayport which is excellent as it supports 4k60 output. I would have gladly traded the VGA for a pair of USB 2.0 and/or a second gigabit Ethernet port however. The introduction of larger detachable antennas dual antennas should offer the Inspire superior wireless performance. Rounding off the accessories is a thermal pad for the m.2 ssd, a sata cable and the same remote we saw with the byte 3. Specifications and comparison systems
Our review unit is the middle of the 3 Inspire options. Honestly of the three this is the option that provides the most value per dollar. Moving from the i3 to the i5 is a 65 dollar upgrade and nets you hyper-threading as well as turbo boost. However the move from an i5 to an i7 at 115 usd only gets you some moderately increased clock rates which I don’t expect to be adventurous long term due to the limitations of a fanless design. The three cpu’s Azulle is using can be compared directly on Intel ARK. The best comparisons for the Inspire will be other Azulle systems. We’ll also be using our previous mobile storage test system, as a reference point. Testing will be covering several applications where I would expect to see this system used in including signage, video playback , light gaming and emulation , as well as industrial applications. Industrial applications may seem an odd choice however considering the devices fanless nature it would fare very well in a shop. The lack of air fans means particulate including metallic fibers won’t be pulled into the system increasing it’s survivability. Synthetic PerformanceStarting with synthetic performance it’s a complete upset where the Inspire outperforms every other system we have in the lineup. Where the byte 3 was competitive with older systems the Inspire outshines laptops with active cooling that are only a few years old at this point. On the GPU side we see the Intel HD graphics posting similar results to the quadro 2000, a GTS 450 based gpu. For light openCL calculations the HD620 should perform very well. The reason the GTX470 looks odd is consumer drivers have limited compute capabilities compared to the professional quadro drivers. We’re going to skip storage performance for the Inspire since it’s entirely based on the choice of the user what SSD they use. The 950 evo sent for review was well beyond any fanless system we’ve looked at to date however. Utilmaker CuraCura is a 3D slicing application. This means that it is used in the preparation of models to be printed on a 3D printer. Although this step can be done on the same PC that generated the models, it is quite common to in spaces where a 3D printer is shared between multiple systems of a dedicated system to this function. This allows a system to monitor the progress of the model as it is printed and to make adjustments and tweaks on the fly without having to go back to a primary production system. [embedded content] The first model that we generated is the same sphere we used with the byte. Even with the constant reslicing the Inspire maintains a fluid workflow as we tune the model to get the desired print settings. Jumping to the more complex model with additional curves and interior surfaces it’s refreshing to see the Inspire not miss a beat. Where performance on a system like the byte 3 was adequate the Inspire is besting systems like the laptop I use every day Office applicationsAs always I took time to use most of the office suite. I ran trough editing some larger spreadsheets(our SSD database) and well as some generic word processing. The Byte 3 impressed at such tasks with my only thoughts being it could use more room than it’s default internal storage. The same was true of simple picture and video manipulation. Video EditingWhile we took a peek at video editing with the byte 3 we’ve started using a new benchmark based on one of my favorite editing applications Shotcut. As video editing can be storage sensitive we’ll be testing each system with the fastest storage it has available to it. We’ll be adding this test to our SSD bench in the near future. Looking at the average of 5 runs the Inspire didn’t fail to impress. My S1 yoga took almost twice as long to handle the same clip on the x264 run although the Inspire didn’t keep the same lead with x265. It’s possible the more strenuous codec caused thermal throttling for the cpu, or ssd in the fanless system so lets take a look at the individual runs. Looking at the sub tests we see that later runs took longer thanks to the lack of active cooling. With the less stess the older codec showed smaller variances with a mere 30 second swing between the worst and best runs. x265 on the other hand kept both the CPU and SSD loaded for far longer periods of time showed a 233 second variance best to worst almost 4 minutes. Gaming performanceAs far as games are concerned I acknowledge that the Inspire is not equipped with a dedicated graphics card. The intel graphics in it are however fantastic compared to prior generations. Older games with higher settings and even some recent games should be more than manageable for the Inspire. In addition things that one may keep a older PC around for such as light emulation and a children’s PC are more than within the realm of capability for the Inspire. Minecraft[embedded content] Minecraft maybe ironically the newest application in our suite is it’s received constant updates since its release was most recently updated insert date here for the world of color update. With Minecraft running on a dedicated server we can see that the Inspire has no issues even on “fancy”. We see it’s bouncing well over 30FPS and trying to surpass 60 in some instances. Trying to move things to 4k unfortunately turned things to a slideshow once again. Unlike it’s smaller siblings the Inspire should have no issue acting as a host in a small multiplayer environment. Homeworld 2 Remastered[embedded content] Homeworld remastered represents a three dimensional real-time strategy game and is going to tax almost every function on the Inspire. Graphically it seems to have detected the Intel HD graphics and turn quite a bit of the eye candy down or off although that hasn’t left the models unpleasing it anyway, from a performance perspective I had no issues playing through multiplayer match the giving of the AI a bit of a trouncing . Performance in Homeworld feels smooth , I unfortunately don’t appear to have a frame rate quote for Homeworld. Once again HWR appears limited to the panels refresh, albiet with more eye candy this time Startrek Online[embedded content] Startrek online represents a modern MMO in our suite. Where the Byte3 had been rendered ineffective at 1080 thanks to a graphical update STO runs very well on the detected settings on the Inspire. It was a smooth and generally pleasant experience Retro gamingProject 64 and our video recorder unfortunately didn’t cooperate with each other. However in practice 5th gen(Nintendo 64, PS1 ect) and older consoles seem to run just fine on the intel chip. Taking a peek at the results it seems that there’s a bit of performance left on the table with only 2 cpu cores loaded by most emulators. However unlike it’s smaller sibling some newer emulators(like the gamecube) were playable. The wii although playable was more on a game per game basis likely due to the reliance on the IGP. VideoThe Inspire officially supports 4k decoding. In practice it handles this quite well for both local content and network based streams coming from a Plex server. Thanks to the increased cpu performance the Inspire can also serve 4k content for a single stream easily. However I’d still avoid it as a server if your library is more than a few TB. Going past 5TB in a system like the Inspire is difficult and offers no redundancy unless you use expensive external storage options. Final thoughtsLooking at it, the Azulle Inspire takes most of of the strengths of the Byte 3 and builds upon them. Storage is expandable internally, wireless antennas are removable and I got my displayport connector. Adding CEC to the HDMI port by default would make this device an easy choice media centers. As with it’s smaller sibling I want to see features like power using USB-C. For users needing more cpu power, or who would have expanded the storage of it’s smaller siblings the Inspire is an obvious choice. The Inspire is available starting at 269.99 although many users would be benefited by a step up to the i5-7200u which we reviewed at 349.99. Share this:Powered by WPeMatico The post Azulle Inspire reaching new fanless heights. appeared first on PC Store Near Me. via Technology Latest News – PC Store Near Me https://ift.tt/2GLvkAc Most people are introduced to Docker and Linux containers as a way to approach solving a very specific problem they are experiencing in their organization. The problem they want to solve often revolves around either making the dev/test cycle faster and more reliable while simultaneously shortening the related feedback loops, or improving the packaging and deploying of applications into production in a very similar fashion. Today, there are a lot of tools in the ecosystem that can significantly decrease the time it takes to accomplish these tasks while also vastly improving the ability of individuals, teams, and organizations to reliably perform repetitive tasks successfully. That being said, tools have become such a big focus in the ecosystem that there are many people who haven’t really spent much time thinking about all the ways containers alone can provide interesting solutions to problems that can occur in the course of any technical task. To get the creative juices flowing and help folks start thinking outside the box, we’ll examine a few scenarios and explore how containers can be used to provide possible solutions. You’ll notice that many of these examples utilize file mounts to access data stored on local machines. Note that all of these were tested on Mac OS X running a current stable release of Docker: Community Edition. Also, most of the examples assume you have a unix-based operating system, but they can often be adjusted to work on Windows. PreparationIf you are planning on running these examples, go ahead and download the following images ahead of time so you can see how the commands run without the additional time required to pull down the images the first time:
Scenario 1Using containers for console commandsThere are often applications that are very useful to have but don’t run or are very difficult to compile on the platform we are using. Containers can provide a very easy way to run these applications, despite the apparent barriers (and even if we can run the application natively, containers can be a very compelling approach to packaging and distributing programs). In this example, we are using an ImageMagick container to resize an image. Although this particular example is easy to accomplish in other ways, it should give some insight into how a container can be used to take advantage of a wide variety of similar console-based tools.
Scenario 2Using containers for development environments
By using containers, it is possible to ensure your builds are repeatable, even for complex development environments. In this example, we are using a Docker image that contains a robust Go development environment to compile a small console game for Linux, OS X, and Windows.
Mac OS X
Linux
Windows
Scenario 3Using containers to solve OS version incompatibilitiesThis example will only work on a Linux server running on Dell hardware, but it provides a good example of how containers can make it easier to run certain classes of software. Dell’s OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) is critical for monitoring and configuring Dell hardware, but Dell supports only a few Linux distributions and can be slow to provide updates for newer releases. By using containers, we can ensure that OMSA is packaged with the Linux platform (e.g., CentOS 7) and libraries that it requires, while still having the freedom to run it on the Linux platform (e.g., CoreOS) that we require. In the example below, we launch a container that runs continuously in the background with a few processes that Dell uses to facilitate communication between the Dell tools and the underlying hardware. We then wait 40 seconds while the container finishes starting up all the background process that it launches.
Once the container is running, we can utilize
And then we can immediately run another command to clear the ESM log, or whatever else we might need.
Scenario 4Using containers to explore the underlying hostDocker: Community Edition (CE) does a great job of making the Docker server feel like it runs natively on Mac OS X and Windows. Honestly, it does too good a job. When you are first trying to learn how Docker works, it can actually be very deceiving because Docker: CE launches a lightweight Linux virtual machine (VM) on both of these platforms, but it is not obvious to the end user that this is the case, and there is no way to log in to this VM and take a look around. So, given all this, how do you learn more about how the Docker VM works? In this scenario, we can utilize a partially privileged container and Linux namespaces to launch a container that will allow us to see all the processes that are running on the underlying host and explore its filesystem. $ docker run --rm -it --cap-add SYS_ADMIN --cap-add SYS_PTRACE --pid=host debian:latest nsenter -t 1 -m -u -n -i sh / # cat /etc/os-release PRETTY_NAME="Docker for Mac" / # exit Note: This is an important example of why running privileged containers in production can be very dangerous. Although we have only shared the host’s PID namespace with this container and given it two Linux capabilities, it can easily access the host’s underlying filesystem. Scenario 5Using containers to sidestep a read-only filesystemAnother quirk of Docker: Community Edition is that the virtual machine’s root filesystem has been made read-only in recent releases. This was done to help prevent people from breaking Docker by fooling around inside the VM, utilizing techniques like the one we just showed. This is understandable since they need to be able to support their product in such a wide range of environments, but it can also be problematic. While teaching classes about Docker and specifically trying to demonstrate how Linux Control Groups (cgroups) impact the resources that are available to a container, it is often desirable to run a simple tool on the Linux host that makes it easy to monitor the processes that are running and see how they are performing. In class, we will often run a container that stresses the underlying VM by generating some load on the CPU and memory so that we can see what effect it has on the underlying VM.
A simple and visually appealing tool, like $ docker run --rm -it --cap-add SYS_ADMIN --cap-add SYS_PTRACE --pid=host debian:latest nsenter -t 1 -m -u -n -i sh / # apk update ERROR: Unable to lock database: Read-only file system ERROR: Failed to open apk database: Read-only file system / # exit So, instead of using the VM directly, we can run a container that shares the host’s PID (process) namespace so that $ docker run --rm -it --pid=host alpine:latest sh / # apk update fetch http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.6/main/x86_64/APKINDEX.tar.gz ... OK: 8437 distinct packages available / # apk add htop (1/4) Installing ncurses-terminfo-base (6.0_p20171125-r0) ... OK: 11 MiB in 15 packages / # htop -p $(pgrep stress | tr 'n' ',') # Press q to exit / # exit Scenario 6Using containers to run X11 graphical applicationsThis specific example is designed for Mac OS X, but it can be easily modified for Linux and Windows. On Windows, you will also need to install a third-party X11 server, like Xming, Cygwin/X or MobaXterm. On Mac OS X, if you do not already have the To make this X11 container work, we need to prepare our system the first time by installing socat and Xquartz, an X11 server, on the Mac. Once Xquartz is installed, we need to reboot the Mac so that the X11 server is set up properly for the current user.
After this one-time setup, we can now run a Linux X11 graphical application by running
After a few moments you should see a usable Firefox browser window open on your system. Note: On the Mac, it is actually possible to set the DISPLAY to ConclusionHopefully this article has helped expose you to some of the less obvious ways that containers can be used. I can’t recommend enough that you take the time to become familiar with the underlying technologies that enable containers and how things like namespaces, cgroups, Linux capabilities, and even hardware virtualization can be combined to solve problems in new and creative ways. Powered by WPeMatico The post 6 creative ways to solve problems with Linux containers and Docker appeared first on PC Store Near Me. via Technology Latest News – PC Store Near Me https://ift.tt/2uCbCBS |
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