CTDATA:The Internet Needs a Search Engine Driven Off RSS Feeds 

Interesting article and something to think about.  How difficult would it be to have a spider that feeds on RSS and then indexes the linked articles at a depth of one?  Then it is only a matter of avoiding or sperating out things like the NYT feeds to get at what bloggers are actually doing.

8:38:19 AM    comment []  

SCO Sues IBM for Sharing Secrets with Unix and Linux

SCO Sues IBM for Sharing Secrets with Unix and Linux

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday March 06, @11:17PM
from the suing-the-power-back dept.
bstadil writes "The information is still sparse but the expected lawsuits from SCO over Unix/Linux patent infringements has been filed." SCO is asking for a billion dollars. News.com and Forbes are also covering the story.

[Slashdot]

Everyone saw this coming.  The gist is that IBM licenses UNIX and that IBM gave Linux developers access to the licensed code which was then used to enhance Linux to the detriment of SCO/Caldera.  SCO/Caldera claims that Linux and IBM's support of the OS, have cost it at least 1 billion dollars in license fees.

This is interesting because the attack comes not against Linux directly, but against a company that supports it.  What happens to Linux if IBM pulls support of the OS?  Nothing good.

UPDATE: Linux Today is providing a link to a copy of the complaint filed by SCO/Caldera.

8:33:48 AM    comment []  

Cornell Implementing Bandwidth Charges

Cornell Implementing Bandwidth Charges

Posted by michael on Thursday March 06, @04:32PM
from the information-wants-to-be-expensive dept.
Sabalon writes "Cornell University is planning on implementing a plan where if faculty, staff or students use more than 2GB of bandwidth a month, they will be charged for the additional bandwidth usage. The article mentions that last year over 100,000GB worth of files were sent from Cornell's network. I'm sure this is not the only school doing this or moving to this. I'm sure the conspiracy theory people will see this as a suggestion by Microsoft to stop students from getting those pesky Linux iso images. At least, according to the RIAA, CD sales around Cornell should now skyrocket :)" It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Since students often have accounts on several different university machines, I suspect the more rebellious ones will be running an assortment of proxies and redirections to get around the restrictions.

[Slashdot]

I wonder how this will play with LII?  Surely they serve more than 2Gb month of stuff.  I suspect that this is just the beginning of a new wave of bandwidth charges that will be hitting universities. 

As costs have risen more and more schools have looked to some sort of cost recvovery model, usually and active port charge to offset the increases.  Sometimes a cost per port plan gets wacky though.  @EmoryLaw the school pays for more ports than it has IP addresses and it pays the same for open ports in the library study areas as it does for staff/faculty office ports.  The result is a cost that exceeds the amount the school could pay to bring in and maintain its own backbone.

UPDATE: Tom Bruce, Co-Director of the Legal Information Institute, located at Cornell Law School, discusses the impact of this decison in this post to the teknoids mailing list.

8:13:31 AM    comment []