“As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher education community and by patrons of public libraries,” University Library Director Robert C. Darnton said in a message to library staff. “The settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable, especially since the subscription services will have no real competitors [and] the scope of access to the digitized books is in various ways both limited and uncertain.”

Which is not to say that Harvard doesn’t believe that universal access to the world’s books is mission-critical for universities. It clearly does, and will continue to work with the company to digitize books that have fallen out of copyright. But until the quality of the book scans improves (see sample below) and Google (GOOG) sets a clear pricing scheme, the university can support, Harvard will be providing the company only with out-of-copyright works pulled from its Depository collection.

Facebook really is That company. Which company? That one. That company that shows up once in a very long while–the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company where large numbers of stunningly-brilliant people congregate and feed off each other’s genius. That company that’s doing with 60 engineers what teams of 600 can’t pull off. That company that’s on the cusp of Changing The World, that’s still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization, where you think about working now and again, and where you know you’ll kick yourself in three years if you don’t jump on the bandwagon now, even after someone had told you that it was rolling toward the promised land. That company where everyone seems to be having the time of their life. … I’m serious. I have drunk from the Kool-Aid, and it is delicious.”

– Facebook manager Justin Rosenstein, June 15, 2007

Facebook manager Justin Rosenstein once described the social network as “the Google (GOOG) of yesterday, the Microsoft (MSFT) of long ago.” Today, Rosenstein perhaps views it as the Facebook of So Totally Last Week because he’s leaving the company, along with departing Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Together the two hope to develop some sort of new extensible enterprise productivity suite, something that will be “to your work life what Facebook.com is to your social life,” according to a post on Rosenstein’s Facebook page.

“We see this new venture as very complementary to Facebook,” Rosenstein explained. “We hope our products will become to your work life what Facebook.com is to your social life. Our software will use Facebook Connect as the default option for identity and authentication. Our user interface will adopt many of Facebook’s conventions, creating a seamless and familiar experience for current Facebook users. And if our new development tools turn out to be useful, we hope the Facebook engineering team will come to adopt them.”

The departures are a blow to Facebook, which has been suffering something of a brain drain recently, and more specifically, to CEO Mark Zuckerberg who founded the company with Moskovitz while the two were undergraduates at Harvard.

According to a new study of coffee drinking, people who drink several cups of coffee every day are less likely to die of heart disease than those don’t. The study, one of the largest and longest on the subject, tracked 129,000 men and women for between 18 and 24 years and found that men who drank more than five cups of coffee a day were 44% less likely to die of heart disease. Women who drank four to five cups per day were 34% less likely to die. “Our results suggest that long-term, regular coffee consumption has several beneficial health effects,” explained Esther Lopez-Garcia, lead author of the Harvard School of Public Health report. “The more coffee you drink, the less risk of mortality you have.”

[Image credit: Shannon Wheeler]

Assuming the IPO goes off as planned–and given the healthy market for tech IPOs, there’s every reason to believe it will–NetSuite shares will price out in the range of $13 to $16, raising the company some $99 million with which to pay off some debt, make new investments and further enrich Ellison, who controls about 60% of NetSuite’s outstanding stock.

To be fair, though, he does plan to set aside some 31.9 million shares for charitable purposes–perhaps another $115 million pledge to make and then withdraw from Harvard University?

Add another memorable hack to the MIT practical joke canon. Earlier this week, pranksters from the school dressed up Harvard University’s statue of founder John Harvard in Halo warrior drag. “In recognition of the release of Halo 3, a highly anticipated video game by Microsoft and Bungie, MIT hackers adorned the John P. Harvard statue, in Harvard Yard, with a Spartan helmet,” MIT newspaper the Tech reports. “The back of the helmet, which is worn by the protagonist of the game, Master Chief, was labeled with ‘Master Chief in Training.’ The statue was decorated with an assault rifle (bullet count of 2E), as well as a Beaver emblem on the right shoulder.”