Big Splash today: PDC2008 - the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference - took off with the anouncement of "Windows Azure" - Windows in the cloud - as they called it.
Ok, sounds good, but is it really windows in the cloud ? seems more like a bunch of windows services in the cloud.
Undoubtly it's very cool to host your .net apps - but what about all the other cool stuff you can do on windows - like installing your favourite apps as cloud-desktop-backup, or running your own virtual server on top of it to fiddle around with ?

Apparently Dave Winer is exploring the same paths as we speak:
His Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3 quest to try out Amazon EC2 and a call for VPS hosting with a wealth of suggestions in the comments.
His conclusion seems to be to go for amazon - but to me - no matter how you slice it - it still is less expensive to hire some dedicated servers in a well-connected datacenter ...

Can't wait to see some commercial pricing for the Windows Azure platform - I bet it won't be cheap, but for hosting a large .net application - it might just be the thing.
Maybe someone at Cloudcamp has some more onfi on this.

In the meantime - something enirely different.
This must be one of the coolest and craziest things I've seen *EVER*

Insane !