Screencasts: Amazon dropped the other shoe and added EC2, a metered virtual server farm to its existing S3 storage cloud — and Jon Udell just couldn’t resist screencasting this demo in which he runs a search application on his home server then swaps in the Amazon domain name of an instance he just created. “There’s the same application running on Amazon’s grid,” Udell explains. “That’s just cool.” Podcasts: Seagate finally lays down its plans for the Maxtor brand — a low-end line distinct from the higher-end Seagate one. But it remains to be seen if the strategy will work in a top-heavy disk drive market. Tune in to Storage Sprawl. Open source: If there are winners, then there must be losers, right? Matt Asay learned something like that in school anyway and in some twisted way that same lesson can be applied to open source. “With all the open source momentum (and it is winning), who is losing?” he asks. Not Oracle. It doesn’t like Microsoft or Sun are losing either. Well, perhaps there are a few years of peaceful co-existence at hand. “Long term, you can see whom I think will win. It’s open source, and by a landslide.” The news beat: Apple gets a recall all its own, and to the tune of 1.8 million laptop batteries. As were Dell’s problematic batteries, Apple’s were made by Sony, which estimates that the recalls will cost it between $172 million and $258 million. Intel now plans to re-release a critical security patch for Centrino due to a memory-hogging bug. And a U.S. judge penalizes Microsoft with a $25 million fine and ‘enhanced damages’ for willfully infringing on patents held by z4 and withholding evidence. Software Development