Amazon "cloud" web services use up more bandwidth than Amazon.com

An interesting note from Amazon's fourth quarter earnings:

Adoption of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) continues to grow. As an indicator of adoption, bandwidth utilized by these services in fourth quarter 2007 was even greater than bandwidth utilized in the same period by all of Amazon.com’s global websites combined.

Build your own operating system in .NET with Cosmos

Cosmos looks like a project that could be fun to play with. It's goal is to allow you to build your own operating system in .NET!

The magic happens by compiling .NET CIL bytecode to x86 assembly.

The core is written in C#, but you should be able to use any .NET language to add your own extensions.

You can deploy your build as an ISO or PXE, or run it under a number of emulators like QEMU, VMWare and VirtualPC.

The project is still in the early stages, providing just console interaction. Future releases will add PCI enumeration, Ethernet, TCP/IP, extended file system support and maybe even GUIs.

UPDATE: There appear to be a couple of competitors, the open source SharpOS (very, very early stages) and Microsoft Singularity (available only to academic institutions).

Make Your Own Roll-Up Keyboard

Next time I get hold of an old USB keyboard I've got to make one of these :)

Web service to clean your computer screen

Too lazy to wipe the dirt and grease off your monitor? A clever programmer has created a web page that will clean your monitor for you.

(Original link was here, but I guess the site got too much traffic and was removed.)

Alternative Dictionaries

Apart from traditional dictionaries where you look up a word based on its spelling (e.g. dictionary.com) there are websites that provide alternative ways to find words:

• Reverse Dictionary - describe the concept to get the word. Checkout the matches for "computer programmer"
  
• Visual Dictionary - click on the images that describe the category, etc, drill down to the word
• Abbreviation and Acronyms Dictionary - checkout the matches for CEP
  

How long does is take to get from "Here" to "There"? 7 hours 51 minutes

Google truly knows everything! According to Google Maps it takes 7 hours and 51 minutes to drive from Here to There :)

(This trivia courtesy of Digg)

How to make a disco ball from used CDs

Finally, a good use for all of those old MSDN and Oracle CDs. Turn them into a disco ball!. You can hang it near your desk and use it as a conversation starter instead of that 3D SETI screensaver.