Tech Stuff

Amazon EC2 is now out of Beta after two year and now gets an SLA.

Service Commitments and Service Credits

If the Annual Uptime Percentage for a customer drops below 99.95% for the Service Year, that customer is eligible to receive a Service Credit equal to 10% of their bill for the Eligible Credit Period. To file a claim, a customer does not have to have wait 365 days from the day they started using the service or 365 days from their last successful claim. A customer can file a claim any time their Annual Uptime Percentage over the trailing 365 days drops below 99.95%.

The Gmail team has rolled out version 2.0 of their mobile client for J2ME-supported and BlackBerry phones.

Gmail has rolled out new emoticons to choose from when words just can describe what you are feeling.

Gmail announces a new Lab feature for Advanced IMAP Controls.  These new options will allow you to better control your IMAP experience down to the label level.

Today Amazon anounced new tiered pricing for the S3 service.

For the United States: 

Storage — Current Pricing (thru October 31st)

• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Storage — New Pricing (effective November 1st)

• $0.150 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used
• $0.140 per GB – next 50 TB / month of storage used
• $0.130 per GB – next 400 TB /month of storage used
• $0.120 per GB – storage used / month over 500 TB

Do you have a tendancy of sending emails late at night that you really shouldn’t?  Maybe after a long night out drinking?  Well the Gmail team has just rolled out Mail Goggles which may come to the rescue.  Once activate Gmail will prompt you with a couple simple math problems before an email can be sent.  By default this safeguard is only in place late at night on the weekends when we all know we are most vulnerable to this. However, you can adjust the time frame to meet you needs.  Now if there was only something for that cell phone.  Maybe the new Android OS will have this option.

The other day I was trying to help a client connect to the Console Session on a Windows 2003 Server from their XP computer.  For some reason connecting via mstsc.exe /console they were not getting connected to the console.  What was odd was that from my XP laptop I had no problems.  I was ready to pull out my hair when I found an article on the Terminal Services Blog.  If you are using a remote desktop connection from a Window XP SP3 machine the /console is silently ignored.  Now you need to supply a /admin instead of /console.

Amazon has announced that later this fall that they will offer the ability to run Windows Server and SQL Server in the EC2 environment.