Ok, I'm going to go into rant mode. Why is everyone so enamored with Google these days? I read yesterday about their recent Google App Engine, and didn't really see anything that particularly turned my crank. I've been bouncing around the web today reading what people are saying, and for the most part, everyone is down in the People's Temple drinking the Kool-Aid. I don't think the App Engine is a bad idea, I just don't really get why you'd even consider it, especially considering AWS is around and has a much more flexible offering. First, I'm going to start by saying that 99% of web companies ...

For those of you who follow what goes on in the web services part of the internet, this little tidbit may interest you. Amazon has offered relatively cheap cloud computer for the last year or so, but one of the major downsides was that it didn't have a static IP address. So if all your machines / images were to crash at the same time (which has happened before due to a power or internet outage), you lose your IP address and potentially may be allocated a new one when you restart your service. Today Amazon announced that they are offered Elastic IP addresses (which is a funky way of saying Static ...