Links for 06-04-2008

• SmugBlog: Don MacAskill » Blog Archive » SkyNet Lives! (aka EC2 @ SmugMug) - SmugMug stores over half a petabyte of data on S3 (before replication). And lots of great details in this post about SmugMug's architecture.
• Amazon Web Services Blog: The Emerging Cloud Service Architecture - Interesting post about the buildout of the Amazon Web Services ecosystem.
• Trouble at eBay - ReadWriteWeb - Suggestions that online auctions are dead are perhaps hyperbolic, but it's clear that eBay's general direction is generally away from the "world's biggest flea market" towards a much more Amazon-esque ecommerce playform.
• Coding Horror: Whatever Happened to UI Consistency? - Great post. I've linked previously to a great talk about the Office 2007 UI from MIX08 but it's fair comment that such is an isolated and un-integrated example.
• Going Medieval: Time-Warner Begins Metered Bandwidth Testing - I'm of mixed feelings about this. The trend is certainly away from metered use. OTOH, to the degree that P2P creates a hugely bimodal distribution it may make sense to draw a line somewhere.
• Electronic Device Stirs Unease at BookExpo - NYTimes.com - Books and, to a lesser degree, movies have been protected because the technology for low-friction copies doesn't exist (as it does with music). Could e-books change that?
• U Try Being UTube! : NPR - UTube.com getting YouTube traffic. People are confused. People are morons. "As the lawsuit puts it, these unwanted visitors, "often fill out Plaintiff's sales request form, seeking more information in a vulgar and belligerent manner. Exhibit 1 is a message left by one visitor who asks, 'WHERE THE F*** ARE THE VIDEOS??? 1.5 BILLION DOLLARS FOR THIS PIECE OF S*** WEBSITE? GOOGLE GOT TAKEN.'""
• High gas prices promote 'digital nomad' lifestyle | Computerworld Blogs - I suspect that part of the issue here is that "green" is popular primarily when it saves money. But, in the case of telecommuting, it's the employees' money, not the companies--unless you start talking about really large scale remote work approaches as in the case of Sun.
• Applications for the Masses by the Masses: Why Engineers Are An Endangered Species - Nice presentation from Java One by Sun's Todd Fast about how application development is changing. via @ritam