For the last year Disney’s ESPN has been trying to bring the basic cable model to the Web, charging ISPs to let their subscribers deliver its ESPN360 service.

In this case Comcast, which we have been hammering on here for throttling BitTorrent, is the innocent victim. Rather, you might argue its subscribers are. Or, you might argue its’ competitors’ subscribers are. Read on.

In flogging the service in February, ESPN executives were quite explicit, claiming future growth for ISPs will depend “on the value of the content they offer.”

So far  AT&T and Verizon, have jumped at the chance to make their services “better” than cable Internet, even at a price. Most cable companies are holding firm. In July ESPN claimed it had 30 deals.

So, is this a violation of net neutrality? If subscribers could buy their own subscriptions, at some price, I would see no problem. That’s not being offered maybe because ESPN failed in this area with its Insider service.

Advocates for the phone companies insist this is a good thing, that ESPN360 would not exist without such “experimentation.” What is in fact happening is phone companies are charging non-fans for something only fans want.

Will it work? There are already indications ESPN is hedging its bets, adding free access to colleges and the military, admitting in February it had streamed only 500,000 hours of programming.

Personally I’d be pissed if my ISP were charging me for something I wouldn’t use, giving in to a site owner too lazy to manage subscriptions.

As mad as I am at my cable operator for doing essentially the same thing?

A shift from multi-core power-gobbling monsters toward whisper-quiet systems with single-digit power consumption is rippling through the desktop market. This trend plays right into the hands of a Paris-based company called Linutop, which offers a miniature Linux-based desktop system. The latest version of the machine appeals to customers who are in the market for a machine with green credentials and low maintenance costs. After testing one myself, I found the tiny desktop has a lot going for it.

Linux.com correspondent R. Scott Belford caught up with Open Invention Network CEO Keith Bergelt at the 2008 LinuxWorld Expo and had a pleasant (on-camera) conversation with him.

Cluster computing has played a pivotal role in the way research is conducted in educational environments. Because the amount of available money and hardware varies between university researchers, often it's necessary to find a clustering solution that can work well on a small scale, but also can be expanded into a large computing cluster. To maximize grants, researchers typically ask for an open source solution to meet their needs. Despite the lack of certain desirable features, Rocks clusters are among the best open source solution for building a computing cluster.

Incoming freshman Ricky Zhou of Carnegie-Mellon University (go Tartans)  is the first winner of a Fedora Scholarship, funded by Red Hat.

Zhou is an active member of the Red Hat Fedora community, working on the group’s web site and infrastructure. He has also worked on localizing the project Web site.

In addition to getting money for college Zhou wins a trip to the project’s annual development conference, FUDcon.

There is a FUDcon scheduled for the Czech Republic next month. I suspect RedHat is actually sending him to the December conference in Boston.

The scholarship project is a win-win-win. You raise the profile of major open source projects, you honor contributors when they’re approaching career decisions, and you win scads of free publicity.

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