I'd have imagined that a huge non-tech organization like the NYTimes would be too full of PHB's to let anything "untested" like S3 or EC2 be used for a high profile project, but between this and their open sourcing some code (code.nytimes.com), I seem pretty wrong. What other non-obvious (Facebook, Google, Amazon) companies do you guys know of that are tech-open-minded?
Take-home message: "Amazon is so fast and cheap that I can run computations over 4TB data sets, notice that I screwed it all up, and run it again."
I think what is equally important was their extensive use of open source packages of all types using both Java and Python. Xen, Hadoop, and Boto just are examples showing that more often than not, open source is the way to go.
There is not shortage of PHB at nytimes but there are enough folks that get it and if you know now to manage the situation good things can happen. Things have really been changing in the last year and there are many more really interesting things to come. This was just one fun example.