AWS Pricing Change
Shelley Powers and Don Park both have posts about the AWS price change for S3, specifically, about the penny per 10K GET charge. That doesn't seem terrible; that's $1.00 per million requests, but as Shelley points out, "Now, the costs aren't high, but they can be difficult to control." I commented on Shelley's post that given the per request charge, I'd want to maximize my hits using Cache-Control and Expires (if I'm paying per request, I'd probably take a pretty liberal view on what constitutes stale data). Don mentions EC2 as a possible alternative, but IIRC, EC2 is pretty much married to S3 for any kind of distribution. The EC2 docs mention that there's no per GB charge for data transferred between EC2 and S3, but other S3 charges still apply - so does this mean that the GET charge is still in effect. That leaves me with a number of questions about S3 and EC2 as a platform. I suppose the only way to really know is to compare costs between a DIY approach in a co-lo or outsourcing to Amazon. Still, I do wish there was more competition in this space. It would take a considerable amount of capital to support the infrastructure, but there are a few companies capable of this scale. Microsoft and Google are obvious suspects (and I suppose Google Base might work as an S3 substitute), but IBM's Global Services division is also obviously capable of doing the hosting - architecting the the actual solution would be another matter.
I also ran into a link to Web 2.0: Demand Strains Amazon Web Services from PC World, which says: "Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) -- a beta service launched in November to allow companies to rapidly provision large amounts of computer capacity and pay for it as needed -- is "completely capacity-constrained" right now.", the quote being from Jeff Bezos himself. That's not especially assuring. Hopefully for EC2 customers, Amazon can stay ahead of their demand, but I'd say that this is all the proof for potential competitors that there's definitely a demand for virtual hosting.
— Gordon Weakliem at permanent link
Photo Sand Trap
via Stefan Tilkov, Cell Phone Software: The Billion-Dollar Sand Trap. I laughed at this: "In order to load software, you need to buy the optional cable. No one owns the optional cable. Even if you gave your customers the optional cable for free, it only works with windows." I own the optional cable, and I've spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to get photos off my wife's old phone, still with no success. I've tried 3 different computers - my wife's laptop almost worked but hung during the copy process - not just an "oh, crap, let me kill the process", not "that didn't work, let me reboot", but "wow, the whole OS is hung - time for a hard poweroff" kind of hang. The other 2 computers I've tried it on won't even load the driver - Windows XP complains that the driver isn't certified, but the driver works equally poorly (that is, not at all) on Windows 2000.
So I took it to the Qwest store, thinking they could surely get the pictures off. No such luck, they claimed not to have the right cable or software, and told me the only way to get the pictures off was to sign up for PictureMail. However, this phone has been deactivated, so I'd have to sign up for a new account, along with PictureMail to get the pictures off the phone.
The good thing about cell phone service is that they all stink equally, so it makes choosing a provider a lot easier. It's frustrating, though. Cell phones should be the perfect medium for pervasive computing, it's just that at this rate, they never will be.