Spoken

Watching Anders Hejlsberg reinvent the relationship between programs and data: A lot of the time, when we use the web, we’re effectively performing joins among data sources. You visit one site to look up some data, then you grab some of it and plug it into another site. If you’re lucky, somebody will have built a mashup, on a third site, to facilitate that join. But what if your browser had the data manipulation chops to help you do that mashup directly? I’m hoping that technologies like Silverlight and LINQ will enable things like that to happen. [Will Microsoft stumble all over itself? Do they have a plan? I don’t know but they’ve started to release a lot of potentially powerful technology (Silverlight, DLR, etc.) Lots of potential for those of us who often work in Microsoft’s sandbox. ]
Source: Jon’s Radio

Amazon S3: New pricing model: For us, this is great. We’ll save money right off the top (we upload a lot, so $0.10/GB uploaded vs $0.20/GB uploaded is a big deal) first of all, and secondly, they finally have tiered download transfer costs. This is a big one for us, because we buy enough bandwidth that $0.20/GB wasn’t cost-effective enough for us. [It gets better…]
Source: SmugBlog: Don MacAskill

Joyent Slingshot Demo Notes: Eric Wagoner gave a demo of the Joyent’s newly released offline Rails application toolkit, Slinghot. He’s had access to Slingshot for a couple weeks ahead of the public release, and shared his early impressions with us tonight. These are rough notes from his presentation.[Interesting.]
Source: SoylentFoo

[RELEASE] Plugems Runtime: One sentence summary: “Everything is a gem, most things work from within the gem, and all dependencies are accounted for.”
We’ve been using this internally for quite a few months, and are really interested in feedback from the community. Please tell us what you think! [Hmmm.]
Source: Revolution On Rails

Are you kidding me, Saturn?: Somewhere at Saturn, someone had the idea of producing the least possible environmentally friendly “welcome” package and delivering it to their environmentally conscious customers in the least environmentally friendly delivery system imaginable. And someone else approved it, signed off on the budget and had a lot of people oversee it. Awesome. [Nice one. What a mess.]
Source: Attention Deficit David