I also ride bikes, thanks. I'm not good at getting into that whole exercise mode in the morning, though, I'm not a morning person.

Also, the Segway is a totally different mode of locomotion. It is like Wii Fit on steroids. On smooth roads you don't do much, but on the uneven sidewalks were I live you constantly have to shift your weight around. It some ways it feels like skiing.

Finally, I'm not sure why people always call out Segway users for being lazy. At least they are standing up for a while, people in cars don't even do that.

1. I'm not about to give up walking. I work five miles from home, so I'm not about to start walking that.

2. I always yield for and go slow around pedestrians. I consider pedestrians highest on the chart of locomotion. It goes pedestrians, bicyclists, public transit, Segway, cars.

Segway! (Pictured here in my breakfast nook)

For the last year and a half I've ridden the bus to work. It was great when I worked above a major bus station, but I switched buildings and now I'm in a more remote area not well served by transit. They do run a company shuttle from my old office to the new, but having a transfer twice a day is annoying.

Anyway, I've wanted a Segway since the day they were announced. However, only now that I'm employed full time am I able to afford one. The office move combined with some bus issues recently (breakdowns and such) have made me seriously consider a Segway. In fact, yesterday I rented one from the local dealer. They are letting me keep it until Wednesday, so I'll be able to try it for a couple of commutes. In the two days I've used it, I've come to realize just how awful my city's sidewalks are. It doesn't help when people park in front of the wheelchair ramps. If I decide to buy this thing, I'll probably end up becoming a pedestrian advocate.

Amazon MP3 is available in the UK now.

And if you are annoyed by how US-centric many big companies are, then maybe you should move here and reap the benefits :)

Fine, you can accept $1.29 for the latest hits from Apple, but I'll stick with Amazon, where the top 100 tracks are 79 cents.

Well, the storage cost per gigabyte-month is $0.15 and the storage cost for transferring a gigabyte outbound is $0.17, so if you download the stored data once per month then transfer is the dominant cost.(1)

Someone is always paying for the cost of storage and transfer. Before the person who owns the bucket would pay for both, but now they can make the accessor pay for the transfer. Amazon isn't offering either for free, so as long as they are making a marginal profit on storage and transfer, they aren't eating any loss.

(1) Both numbers are for the base tier.

In that case I agree with toddestan. The memory market is too competitive for that. I believe a bunch of memory manufacturers are hurting this year (and their stock is being pummeled) because their margins on flash chips are extremely small. The price differentiation will occur based on the performance of the firmware and controller. The memory is dirt cheap, but the manufacturers with good firmware (such as Intel) will be able to provide a price premium until other SSD manufacturers catch up.

Really? Due to the physical moving components of a hard disk, they tend to bottom out at $30. With smaller disks, you get diminishing returns because the price of the moving parts dominates. With SSD, however, the price scales fairly linearly all the way to the bottom. Applications that don't need much storage (such as netbooks or low end laptop/desktops) will move to SSD when the price SSDs for the necessary amount of storage is less than $30. If you only need 30 GB in a netbook, SSD is a more logical choice.

Also, it depends on how you quantify priced below regular drives. I assume you are talking about $/GB. However, if you look at $/IOPS (IOs per second), then Intel's SSD is way cheaper than any hard disk. SSDs are going to quickly take over database servers in 2009.

I posted this as a comment on the blog post, but I'm copying it here as well:

http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/06/03/skynet-lives-aka-ec2-smugmug/

Outside of one instance where it launched 250 XL nodes, it seems to be performing pretty well. Their software takes into account a large number of data points (30-50) when deciding to scale up or down. It also takes into account the average launch time of instances, so it can be ahead of the curve, while at the same time not launching more than it needs.

Contemporary libertarians remind me of children who never learned to share.

I consider myself a libertarian and I donate to philanthropic causes. However, I believe that the free market is a better way to organize the distribution of the my wealth and that I have a better idea of where to donate my money than the government. You want to take my money and give it to people who you believe are worthy. I want everyone to keep their money and (optionally) give it to organizations they individually believe are worthy. Big difference there, see?

I should have been more specific/clear. If you read do a full read of a terabyte disk a dozen times, you are likely to see an unrecoverable read error:

"Typically, [Unrecoverable Error Rate (UER) for read operations] will be 1 per 10^14 bits read for consumer class drives and 1 per 10^15 for enterprise class drives. This can be alarming, because you could also say that consumer class drives should see 1 UER per 12.5 TBytes of data read."

That quote is from a Sun blog that has lots of information about Mean Time To Data Loss. His other posts are interesting as well.