Simon Willison’s Weblog

Windows Server and SQL Server on EC2 (via) Launched today, the pricing includes rental of the Windows license. Regular Windows is 25% to 50% more expensive than Linux, but SQL Server comes in at a hefty $1.10 per hour, which is $9636 per year (nearly three times as much as a Linux server running an open source database).

# 3:54 pm / cloud-computing, ec2, open-source, pricing, sqlserver, windows

Learning to Fear the Semantic Web. Paul Ford raises the liability issue with regards to building sites around other people’s metadata, pointing out that OpenCalais is owned by Thomson Reuters who have a bad track record with regards to intellectual property lawsuits elsewhere in the organisation.

# 4:14 pm / intellectualproperty, opencalais, paul-ford, semanticweb, thomson-reuters

CSSHttpRequest (via) Devious cross-domain Ajax hack that uses CSS for transport (@import rules with data URIs, but it still works in IE). Similar to JSONP but safer, since JSONP can cause arbitrary JavaScript to execute.

# 6:25 pm / ajax, atimport, crossdomain, css, csshttprequest, javascript, json, jsonp