Category Archives: Hardware

Computing Cloud

Databases, Hardware, SemWeb

Amazon is launching another Limited Beta, which seems to be the only way to launch anything these days.

This time they build on the S3 success, and add the next obvious component to the equation: Computing on demand, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

As with S3, you get what you pay for and vice versa, no signup fees. S3 is used (and paid for separately) to store the computing images, and the EC2 additional pricing seems at first glance to be quite reasonable:

  • $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
  • $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).

The bandwidth cost might be an issue, but depending on what you want to compute, it might not a problem.

I could envision running some serious reasoning on a thing like this…

New and Old

Hardware, Humour

It’s quite entertaining being back in a real anti-MS camp for a while. Haven’t really been there since my OS/2 days.

Reading Mac-news is simply plain fun:

Leopard’s top-secret secrets:

When I get a new Microsoft product in the mail it’s often like that moment when you’ve got both feet on the brakes but you know that the car can’t possibly stop in time. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You just hope it won’t hurt too much.

Digital Camcorder Considerations

GPS/Geo, Hardware, Image Description

We want to get a digital camcorder.

There’s a wedding coming up, some travelling, later perhaps more interesting “subjects”, and then of course there’s the gadget dimension.

Among the criteria for selection are:

  • Relative ease of use: OK, I’m geeky, but devices with less than 85 keys are often impossible to figure out…
  • Dependability: We’re prepared to back up to HD and other media, but we still want to be able to trust the media.
  • Quality: The raw footage should be raw, not compressed. The images are more important than the sound.
  • Future proof: I know, not possible in this world, but it seems it’d be OK to go for HD?
  • Comfortable: Small and handy, likely to just be available and ready to go when needed.

Currently on the short list is the Sony HDR-HC3. Compared to its predecessor, the HC1, there are improvements as well as changes to the worse, but overall it seems it’s progress.

What to do?

ObSemWebAngle: Ideally, it should also include GPS integration and other ways of content description! ;-)