November 2007 Archives
The emotions about reading books in digital form and the Amazon Kindle are running high, already before the device was released. For me there are two features that sold me on the device: the networked content push and the content interaction. I have had many pda's, phones and tablets over the years that I setup to automatically pull in feeds such I could read them on the bus or plane. But none of these devices were designed for easy reading of longer articles, or if they were, like my tablet, they would be difficult to use outside and often awkward given their size. The Kindle is a very different kind of reading experience, much closer to a book than a pda. The pictures don’t do justice to its size and weight. I have had pda’s that were heavier. You do not need to connect, ever; your newspapers will show up no matter where you are. And you leave the charger at home when you travel, there is more than enough jiuce for a multi-day trip. The content interaction is interesting; dog-ears, bookmarks, annotations are easy and useful.
Technology-wise there is a nice quote in Jeff Bezos' Newsweek interview
This isn't a device, it's a service.
On May 31 2008 a tribute will be held at UC Berkeley to honor Jim Gray, who went missing during a solo sailing trip in January of this year. Although Jim is listed as missing, and will be until 2011, a Tribute be held to honor him before too much time has passed. There are two parts to this event: The morning event, which will be in a very large hall, is open and public; the technical session, which is in a smaller hall, and for which you need to register. More details at the Tribute website.
Jim amongst fellow UC Berkeley Turing Award winners:
Ken Thompson, Butler Lampson, Jim Gray and Nicklaus Wirth.
(Image courtesy of the UCB COE web site)
I am about to go on stage at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin where we will announce the ability for Amazon S3 customers to store their objects in Amazon’s European storage cloud. This has been a frequently requested feature by our European customers for various reasons, better latency control being the most important one. This is very important first step as it brings Amazon Web Services closer to the world-wide application development platform our customers want it to be. There is a lot of work that still needs to be done to make the services the absolutely best tools for international internet-scale application development, but the ability to control where you store your objects is an important first step.
Developers who want to make use of the European storage option can do so when they create a Bucket. A bucket is a named container in S3 within which a developer stores his/her objects. When you create a bucket you can now pass in <localconstraint> configuration that can be set to EU. This will create the bucket in Amazon’s European storage cloud and all objects that are stored in this bucket will automatically be stored on the Europe.
