"My dream cloud interface is not about booting virtual machines and monitoring jobs, but about spending money so my job finishes quicker. The cloud should let me launch some code, and get it chugging along in the background. Then later, I would like to spend a certain amount of money, and let reverse auction magic decide how much more CPU & RAM that money buys. This should feel like bidding for AdWords on Google. So where I might use the Unix command “nice” to prioritize a job, I could call “expensiveNice” on a PID to get that job more CPU or RAM. Virtual machines are hip this week, but applications & jobs are still the more natural way to think about computing tasks." Yes, this. And: lots of people _think_ the cloud works like this, but it really doesn't, yet. Parallelization/adding computing power is more practical, but it's not been made easy like a bunch of other things have (so far).

S3-backed, Mac-specific backup tool. Looks nice, and well-thought-through.

This is a pretty good guide - made sense, got me up and running fast, and nice and clearly written.

"A caution to people buying these: if you do not follow the "directional markings" on the cables, your music will play backwards. Please check that before mentioning it in your reviews." And so forth. Very funny reviews for a somewhat overpriced product.

"Merchants can store their own products to our fulfillment centers and then, using a simple web service interface, fulfill orders for the products. That’s right – make a web service call, ship a product to a customer!"

"Nocera mentions Bezos’ belief that if you do something good for one customer, they will tell one hundred others. [...] Put it all together, and you begin to see what a truly empowered, truly knowledge-based global economy looks like."

"It's one of the most awesome consumer products ever. It might even be a landmark moment in technology. ... and Amazon is promoting it as a $399 waffle maker." Andy Ihnatko on the Kindle

Mark Pilgrim looks at Kindle through what's been said about it so far, and what's been said about the act of reading in the past. His comparisons prove depressing, and worthy of at least some consideration.

Blimey. Wasn't expecting that at all; I'm hoping the site will remain (as they suggest) a "stand-alone operation".

"In case you missed it, let me repeat this: we will be charging the owner of the bucket for 403s and 404s, since they consume system resources." S3 jumps the shark, mayhap?

The ESV Bible team crowdsourced their interlinked search database to Amazon's Mechanical Turk. That turned out quite well for them.

S3’s early success makes you think that if the on-demand infrastructure can be delivered at an affordable price, the cost of setting up an online business is going to decline even further, perhaps prompting a whole cycle of new entrepreneurial activity.

As used by BSAG at www.rousette.org.uk . Quite interested in trying this out

Lots of handy things, especially scratchpads, for developing with AWS.