Newsweek’s Daniel Gross explains the Consumer Price Index (here’s the official BLS site) in a very simple video. I could do without the goofy sound effects, but it’s a good, 2 minute explanation of how the government tracks inflation.
Per David Simon’s Berkeley talk, though, the video doesn’t go into why this matters. Perhaps they’ll cover that in the next installment of the Economics 101 series.
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I didn’t get a chance to post this before, but it’s a pretty significant story, I think. Fanzter’s Facebook app, OneThing, leverages EC2 and S3. You can hit the link below or check out TechCrunch’s take.
February 2nd, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Regarding bandwidth, it doesn’t surprise me much. I use JungleDisk, which is a client to S3, to back up my photos. That’s about 1GB/quarter in new data. How much e-commerce does it take to generate that much data traffic?
Me:
1 GB/quarter
10 MB/day
Commerce:
Let’s say 100K per visit, given the pretty pictures.
So 100 people need to shop at Amazon to equate to the bandwidth of one traveling dork with an old digital camera.
Metric well-chosen.
February 2nd, 2008 at 1:45 pm
It’s not so much the absolute bandwidth, but the variety of businesses being supported by these services. They are providing infrastructure for a LOT of companies, not the least of which is my own employer.
Also, they’ve inspired a host (no pun intended) of other companies that build either the same service or similar grid style infrastructure.
Sujal
PS. 1GB a quarter in pictures is a LOT… I suspect you’re at the high end of that range.. that’s gotta be about 200 pictures every 3 months? If I’m doing the math right.
February 2nd, 2008 at 1:46 pm
PS. Amazon page weight is around 100K per page without the externals, all of which aren’t hosted at Amazon anyway (they’re using Akamai as a CDN).
February 3rd, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Sujal, I definitely agree that Amazon web services is a fantastic platform. I’m very happy to see it taking off. When I was with a startup in 1997, we lamented the high cost of servers, and wished that we could just rent a little computing power from someone with a huge server farm, like the local utility.
As a contrarian pest, I can’t help but point out when someone is choosing convenient statistics.
200 is on the low end…we have been traveling very well the last 3-4 years, and I shoot about 30-50 keepers (100 shots total) per day in a new city/region.