The Internet

Google ignited a bit of a firestorm when it claimed that Bing was poaching its search results. To test their theory, they baited a honeypot and caught Bing with its hand in the jar.

Yesterday’s ruling by the FCC regarding “Net Neutrality” allows those of us whose livelihood depends on the Internet to breath a very limited sigh of relief. The Good: the FCC upheld the concept of Net Neutrality for broadband connections; the Bad: they didn’t for wireless connections and they may not have the legal basis to enforce their policy over wireline providers.

Recently Cooks Source editor Judith Griggs touched off a maelstrom, not when she lifted other’s material and used it illegally in her magazine – she’s been doing that for years – but when she refused to fess up. I always get questions about what can and cannot be done with material found online, so here’s a quick review of what happened.

I’ve been tossing about the idea of moving some of the sites I host to Amazon Web Services, specifically EC2 (server), S3 and EBS (storage) and CloudFront (content delivery network).  Price was my excuse for not jumping (OK, the real reason is the inevitable pain that comes with moving hosting providers) but with today’s introduction of “Micro” instances, I no longer have that excuse.

AWS now can host my sites for roughly the same price I pay for shared hosting!

It's an oh-so-basic blog feature that's been missing from Blogger since the beginning of time.  Finally, they caught up with the rest of the world and announced they now support static pages.  Until now, poor Blogger users had to hack their templates half to death to build static pages and even then, they would still pop up in your blog's feed and other odd places.

Representatives from Google, Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia are meeting at the Vatican to help the Church better understand the Internet.  That’s good since the Vatican seemed unable to do a basic Internet search.

Criticisms of Google data aggregation and privacy policies abound.  In hopes of stemming some of that negative press, Google recently announced the Google Dashboard, to “offers a simple view into the data associated with your account.”

While cleaning my office – a once-a-decade event – I came across a receipt from 2 Dec., 1998. It was for a 10.1 GB hard drive costing $245. Last week I bought a 1TB drive – 100 times the capacity – for just over $90. Though Moore’s law originally predicted processing power, it’s often quoted for any tech-related increases. In this case, storage per dollar increased 27,000% over roughly 11 years – it doubled every 16 months – even faster than Moore predicted!

I haven't had time to more than twiddle a few buttons but I sure was hyping it earlier, so I hope it lives up to expectations.  I did try a few queries, such as "Drupal", an open-source content management framework I've been doing a ton of work with recently.  Instead I got information about "Rukai," I dialect spoken in Taiwan by 10,543 people.  Very precise yet exactly wrong.

In late March, Kodak Gallery (neé Ofoto) changed its terms of service, now requiring a minimum annual purchase to keep your photos safely stored on their servers.  That got me thinking: how much does it cost to host all of Kodak Gallery's photos?  What if I were to build a Kodak Gallery site and host it myself?  I got out my calculator and sharp pencil to find out.

Let's start with some basics: