of ephemeral value...

It looks like Amazon have come up with the first sensibly priced remote storage service. They have called it S3. It is 15 cents per gig. per month, and a 20 cent per gig charge for transfer into or out of the storage. The nice thing about this is that you charged for exactly the amount of storage you are using and not in preset big chunks that other services have. Also other services are only reasonably priced for very small amounts of data, usually measured in single digit gigabytes.

It will be interesting to see what the API is like. They are talking about REST and SOAP, but I would like to be able to rsync to it also.

I found this comment on /. interesting...

When Amazon lets me pay for the storage, and have other registered users pay the bandwidth charges (plus my profit) to access my content, then they'll have an interesting business. Unless Google beats them to it.

It would indeed be an interesting business model, although thinking about what data ordinary people would like to share, photos, movies & music, it would seem that these are already covered with flickr, google video/youtube and our media, which are all free.

I have just stumbled across these early maps of ARPANET. On the December 1969 map there are just four nodes; SRI, UTAH, UCSB & UCLA. It is quite fascinating to see the early growth.

We recently retired our old kitchen computer which was acting as a print server for our HP LaserJet 3300. The 3300 was attached to the network via a JetDirect box. On the, now retired, PC I had installed all the software that came with the printer and print server and then shared out the printer so that other PCs on the network could print to it. When it came to setting up my wifes iBook to use the printer, nothing could be simpler, I told it to look for printers, it found the printer and knew what it make and model it was.

Today, with our new kitchen PC installed, printing from the other PC's in the house stopped working. I thought about installing all the HP software again on the new kitchen PC, but did I really want to bog down the machine as a print server and have a load of useless tray icons kicking around doing nothing. At this point I remembered that Apple released Bonjour (nee Rendezvous) for Windows so I thought I would give it a try.

Well, after the download ( Google for "apple bonjour windows download" to find it) and install, it was like being on a Mac. It found our network printer, it knew what make and model it was, and then setup a default printer. Much quicker than installing all the HP software, and no reboots required. I have installed it on the other PC's in the house, highly recomended.

A great little video on how caffeine works, and why you want another cup every two hours.