I wanted to learn more about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service (wikipedia), and perhaps also figure out how I feel about it. Named after a historical faked chess-playing machine, it uses the Web to allow people around the world to work on short low-pay ‘micro-tasks’. It’s a disturbing capitalist fantasy come true, echoing Frederick Taylor’s ‘Scientific […]
Tag Archives: cent
Amazon EC2: My 131 cents
Early this afternoon, I got it into my head to try out Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud” (EC2) service. I’m quite impressed. The bill so far, after some playing around, is 1.31 USD. I’ve had the default “getting started” Fedora Linux box up and running for maybe 7 hours, as well as trying out machine images […]