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We've heard from these Downhill Battle people before. They proposed the a scheme to try to collect Apple/Pepsi winning-cap codes for iTunes downloads that neglected the fact that there were limits to how many songs a given person could download, neglected the fact that the rules said non-transferable, and that the group didn't disclose just how they selected the artists they wanted to favor.

In short, these guys come up with nice ideas that don't work due to real world constraints.

For those of you who aren't customers of EV1, like I am, you might want to notice that they can't take very many new servers right now because their one operational datacenter is full. However, their new datacenter more than doubles their capacity and opens this week. Oh, and a 2-week long $1 setup fee special starts soon after that new datacenter goes online.

Considering that they didn't pay the "going rate" of $699 per server, and likely got a huge discount for allowing SCO to use their name, I'm pretty sure this one's being written off as an advertising expense. Slashdot and the rest of the tech media is taking the bait hook, line, and sinker.

With Yahoo owning Inktomi and Overture, and Overture in turn owning both Alta Vista and AllTheWeb, this was a move that everybody could see coming. I even wrote about it about a month ago in my little blog.

In short, Yahoo's been on a quiet buying spree. Without attracting too much attention, they've aquired enough resources so that they no longer have any need to buy anything from Google, it's all available in-house.

So, Yahoo's out to take back its role as the #1 search site that Google took from it. Google for the first time in a while has a serious threat that's going to force it to improve just at at time where the result quality is starting to slip... this should be fun to watch.