Best of the blogs: Paul Venezia came across some information that anyone in the market for Big Iron ought to know. Comparing prices for Opteron boxes from Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Sun, he found that Dell is charging $1.5k/DIMM, HP at $4k/DIMM, and Sun somewhere in the middle. “Either Dell’s throwing one heck of a loss-leader in a bizarre way, or someone messed up the site pricing,” he writes in Talk about a price difference. The news beat: Microsoft teams with researchers at the University of California to investigate how ‘search spammers’ work and how they can be stopped. Anonymous hackers say they will release a month of MySpace bugs beginning in April to “highlight the monoculture-style danger of extremely popular Websites.” And Fujitsu offers two models of flash-based notebooks for rugged applications. Columnist’s corner: Given a variety of market conditions “it’s unclear whether Dell will really be able to offer Linux systems at a price point that is as attractive as customers might expect,” Neil McAllister writes in Dell takes baby steps toward Linux. Dell, he adds, may be taking a wrong approach to the problem by going the way of one-off PC sales to hackers, enthusiasts and small businesses. “It should be clear by now that OS competition is in the long-term best interests of customers, but too much choice has a way of becoming no choice at all.” Technology Industry