Slashdot | Linux to Replace Solaris at Duke
“At the end of the 2004-2005 academic year, the Sun Solaris computers available in public computing labs at Duke University will be replaced. The replacement computers in these spaces will be Dells, running a version of Centos 3.3 as supported by Linux@DUKE. Pragmatic and technical considerations have driven this change, as Linux continues to gain a greater userbase and more third-party commercial software is made available on the platform. Are other universities eliminating Solaris in favor of a Linux distribution?“
Open-Access Academic Journals: Where is Legal Academia?
Slashdot | Free/Open-Access Academic Journals Growing
“Wired News reports on the growing number of free/open-access academic journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists 1527 journals. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is launching three new open-access journals this year: PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens. The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Public Access Policy is also part of the movement. The traditional academic journals aren’t happy, saying that it’s unethical to accept money for publishing. But the traditional journals face their own ethical dilemmas by accepting money from advertisers.“
The DOAJ listing for law journals is here. 10 American law schools list 14 titles. CLearly there is room for expansion here:)
Hackers Using BLogs to Launch Malware
Internet Week > blogs spewing worms, viruses, spyware > Hackers Use Blogs To Spread Worms, Keyloggers > April 13, 2005
“While end-users can do little beyond keep safe and smart practices in mind — don’t open attachments, don’t travel to questionable links within e-mail or instant messages — Hubbard said there was plenty blog hosting services could do.“They need to add some type of security on top,” he urged. “Anti-virus is a good start. And limit the type of files that can be uploaded, by, for example, restricting executables.”“
Article seems to be part of new trend that is pushing the ‘evil blog’ meme.
Law Professor Teaching Loads @ Top 25 Schools
Conglomerate Blog: Law Professor Teaching Loads
“When I entered academe just over a decade ago, almost every law school had a standard teaching load of four courses or 12 credit hours per year. In the past decade, the norm among top law schools has shifted to three courses or 10 credits per year. Although I had noticed that most of my friends were teaching lighter loads, I didn’t realize how pervasive the shift was until my Associate Dean asked me to gather information from top law schools as background for a debate about teaching loads here at Wisconsin.“
The results of an informal poll of teaching loads at the top 25 law schools reveals what we’ve probably known for a long time: loads are lighter at top tier schools. Now, I don’t know exactly what this means, but it would seem easy enough to equate lighter teaching loads with better legal education.
Did I say that out loud? Of course that’s not completely true. The higher tier schools attract better students, better firms hire their grads, etc. Faculty may argue that it is the lighter load that helps the most, but I think it is a real chicken and egg problem.
Finally, it is worth taking a look at the comments section if you follow the link, there are some good ideas there.
Acrophobia: A Networked PDF Soft Printer
“Acrophobia is a Linux-based network PDF printer. Acrophobia appears as a standard network printer. Any jobs printed to the Acrophobia ‘printer’ are converted to PDF and sent via e-mail back to the originating user.Acrophobia is a project of the Open Source Software Peer Group of the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA – formerly LawNet) , an association of legal technology professionals. This project was created in order to demonstrate the usefulness of open source technology within the law-firm environment.“
ILTA is like teknoids for law firm/department technology types. There are things to learn here…
Swishd Cluster System: Distributed Doc Indexing
freshmeat.net: Project details for Swishd Cluster System
“Swishd cluster system is an application that will allow swish- e to scale to multiple machines, thus allowing the number of indexes (or collections) to become almost limitless. By scaling out to multiple swishd nodes the index sizes can remain small as the number of documents increase. This it typically measured in millions of documents/files.“
Open-Xchange Server 5 Released
Open-Xchange Server 5 Blends Proprietary, Open-Source Perks
“Netline Internet Service, of Olpe, Germany, has released Open-Xchange Server 5, which lets IT administrators create and implement applications without having to changing their existing infrastructure components such as databases, directory services, message transfer agents, e-mail servers or Web servers.“
LexisNexis: Up to 310,000 IDs Stolen
LexisNexis data on 310,000 people feared stolen – Computerworld
“Data broker LexisNexis Group said today that personal information may have been stolen on 310,000 U.S. citizens, or nearly 10 times the number found in a data breach announced last month.An investigation by the firm’s Anglo-Dutch parent, Reed Elsevier Group PLC, determined that its databases had been fraudulently breached 59 times using stolen passwords, leading to the possible theft of personal information such as addresses and Social Security numbers.“
VMware 5.0 Released
VMware Updates Desktop Virtualization Software
The new Teams feature, for example, “allows you to set up multiple virtual machine ‘developer classes’ and connect them together so you have an entire multitiered configuration running on one physical machine,” said Srinivas Krishnamurti, senior product manager at Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware Inc.< /blockquote>
RSDP – Really Simple Database Protocol
O’Reilly Network: RSDP: A Really Simple Proposal
“Most of what we use databases for, we can accomplish with XML-RPC and SQL. So why not define a simple XML-RPC interface (Really Simple Database Protocol, or RSDP), that allows applications to communicate with SQL databases without the need for troublesome external packages and middleware? People are already doing this with in-house projects, so all that is needed is for a couple of vendors to build simple XML-RPC front ends to existing systems.“
Sounds like a good idea, but I can already accomplish something pretty close to this with PHP and XML-RPC, I don’t think I need another layer.