>> (Most especially, "Amazon Mechanical Turk". WTF?)
> 
> The only WTF part of this for me is that people will actually work for a 
> penny a click or a nickel a result.  But without telling us how much you 
> actually looked into it (like whether you read Amazon's pages, etc) it's 
> hard to help explain.

Why would people do "work" (especially such mundane work) for a nickle? 
Why would companies pay for results which are likely to be garbage 
anyway? How does Amazon make money out of this? Which numpty thought 
this sounded like a good idea? ...the questions continue...

>> I'm not really seeing what SQS would be useful for.
> 
> Think of a renderfarm for POV renders. How do you manage machines vs 
> renders?  (The main problem with SQS in that sense is that you can't 
> easily set the time-out for retries.)
> 
> Lots of this stuff is used by Amazon internally. I suspect order 
> fulfillment is using SQS internally, and putting products up on the 
> store (like, writing descriptions or entering metadata) is using 
> something like Turk.

OK, so... it's a message delivery system. Where do the messages come 
from? Where does it deliver them to? What are they for? Why would you 
pay money for this? etc.

>> And I'm also wondering just how much all this stuff actually *costs*...
> 
> CPU hours are a bit expensive, but comparable to renting a shared server 
> somewhere else (except you get a "dedicated" server). The rest is really 
> cheap.  Hit aws.amazon.com for details.

Yeah, I'm currently looking at this.

One wonders how a small online shop such as Amazon ends up with such 
vast computational resources that it can profitably hire out the spare 
capacity, but still...

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