"With the agreement between Eucalyptus and Amazon to cooperate on ensuring API fidelity between the two technologies comes the question of defining what it means for two independent implementations to support the same API. The API itself consists of a large number of different "commands" or "service requests," each of which triggers many different operations within the system that are visible to the user. Moreover, the API makes specific assumptions about "things" (VMs, storage volumes, network addresses, etc.) it is defining and manipulating. Launching two different VMs with different network and storage characteristics through the identical API call doesn't capture fidelity.

Thus, API fidelity measures three dimensions of compatibility in the interface "calls" it implements:

the calls and parameterizations of each call
the actionable responses generated by each call
the similarity between the objects manipulated by each call"

epic rant on google not acting like a platform

Disruption occurs given two criteria. The first: that incumbents move upmarket to the most profitable segments, ignoring low-end competitors at the bottom of the market. The second: that the low-end competitor introduces a product with a scalable technology or business model advantage at its core that has the potential to displace the incumbent.

This is exactly what Amazon has with the Kindle Fire. It's not just a low-end competitor to the iPad. There is scalable technology at its core that the present-generation iPad lacks — the extensive use of the Cloud. That is why Amazon can get away with shipping a device that has only 8GB of memory. What's more, the Fire has a business model advantage too — Amazon is using content to subsidize the hardware.

Whoa, it's hard to great free

The product definition process works backwards in the following way: we start by writing the documents we'll need at launch (the press release and the faq) and then work towards documents that are closer to the implementation.

Nice price trend info

"Last night, Dolores Labs hosted what was billed as the first-ever Mechanical Turk meetup, and I was fortunate enough to have been able to squeeze into what turned out to be a great series of presentations. While Amazon was the pioneer and remains the largest provider in the space, other services like Dolores Labs and Nathan Eagle's txteagle have emerged to expand the pool of users and turks. "

"Then, go the any Amazon product page, and click “Link to this Page” in the Amazon Affiliates Toolbar on the top of the page (note: you must be signed into Amazon and have an affiliates account for this toolbar to appear). Once you are on the link builder page, click the “bitlyAmazonAffiliateLink” bookmarklet in your toolbar, and you will be redirected to bit.ly with a short, trackable link waiting for you."

"Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article -- sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument."

"how to use boto to start a server instance then how to send a file to the instance and execute a command on the remote server, and finally I’ll show how to terminate the instance."

"President Obama reportedly gave an iPod, loaded with 40 show tunes, to England's Queen Elizabeth II as a gift. Did he violate the law when he did so?"

handy tool for comparing several amazon items at one time

profile of the Cloud's first officer

"offers programmatic access to Alexa’s web search engine. Developers can incorporate search results directly into their web sites or services, or answer complex queries that can’t be answered with traditional search engines."

"a variety of best practices for use of Amazon S3. Many of the recommendations come from the work and findings of those who make this forum such a valuable resource for developers. Other recommendations come from the Amazon S3 Team's unique internal perspective on the service."

lists files in public S3 buckets. For when you want to share a bucket with the world.

useful for finding cheap items you might need instead of paying for shipping.

restrict a search to items with free shipping

The guy quoted in the Coding Horror battery article

parameters for better amazon searching

accept credit and debit card payments with Amazon.com's new Amazon Payments ™ Service

"There is perhaps no better way to understand global warming and all its implications than to carefully study the history of New Orleans"

The set of web services APIs allows the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers. It is built on top of Amazon's reliable and scalable payment infrastructure.

A video that walks through the process of running an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from Windows.

make a DNS alias to your bucket == cleaner custom urls for S3 hosted files

provides an user friendly interface for Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service) . Its interface is very much similar to the FTP interface that lists local folders in the left panel and S3 buckets/files/folders in the right panel

# WebDAV is a protocol for remote file access supported by all modern operating systems. # As you copy data to your Jungle Disk, it is transparently cached, encrypted, and uploaded to Amazon.com. Since uploads occur in the background, copying files to you

After you make a purchase, visit our web site and enter the purchase information into our database along with your email address. We do the rest. We'll check the prices everyday and send you a message if the price has dropped. In the message will be a lin

Amazon clearance items and tips

search amazon for deals

A Lighter Interface to Amazon.com

Did you know that if the price on something you buy drops, within 30 days of your purchase date, Amazon.com will credit you the difference if you ask for it?