An anonymous reader writes "Speaking at the World Economic Forum, YouTube CEO Chad Hurley has revealed that the company plans to financially compensate users who produce and upload their content. With Google's purchase of YouTube last year, followed by more aggressive attempts to monetize the site (such as the deal struck with Verizon Wireless), it was inevitable that YouTube would come under pressure to share some of those fruits with ordinary users. But why didn't YouTube pay its users from the start? Hurley said: 'We didn't want to build a system that was motivated by monetary reward. We wanted to really build a true community around video. When you start out with giving money to people from day one, the people you do attract will just switch to the next provider who's paying more. We're at a scale now that we feel we can do that and still have a true community around video.'"

The official GenCon website is hosting the official press release with the news: the West coast GenCon is no more. Citing 'competing shows' in the Southern California area, the RPG convention is closing up shop so that staff can focus on the Midwestern/East Coast Flagship event GenCon Indy. In an open letter from Peter Adkinson, he states how much he regrets this decision, and describes the four years of the event as well as the decision-making that led to this state of affairs. In his long discussion of the event, he downplays the attempt to merge with the IDG event and the inclusion of videogames into the GenCon formula. Though it's not listed as a root cause, the death of E3 would seem to be having a ripple effect here as well. He makes sure to point out that GenCon Indy isn't going anywhere, and that this year's 40th anniversary should be an interesting one.

Nom du Keyboard asks: "Is it possible to use The GIMP (or Photoshop) to improve my digital photos? I have a mid-range 7.1MP Olympus camera capable of shooting in Raw mode. When I inspected a section of clear blue sky on a bright, sunny day (which I've long believed to be relatively good reference of uniform color and brightness) I was surprised (disappointed, since I expect digital perfection) at the variance in adjacent pixels. It's also a quick way to identify any bad pixels. Surprisingly, actual photos from this camera look pretty good despite this variance so far. Moving on from that point it led me to wonder that, if you shot a uniform white surface, perhaps blurred as much as possible to avoid any imperfections in the surface itself, could a correction (adjustment) layer be created in GIMP or Photoshop exactly tuned to your camera that fixed the variations in your CCD sensor and improved the image quality in the process. Any thoughts?"

NinjaKicks writes "Intel has decided to make public details of their new 45nm manufacturing process and also has broken news that next-gen Penryn core processors are running various versions of Windows and Vista successfully. Penryn will offer a host of core tweaks over Conroe, larger cache sizes, and SSE4 support. Also, although clock speeds will be increased, processors based on Penryn should fall within the same thermal power range as Conroe. Word is Penryn will also be compatible with some of the existing motherboards on the market while others will need either a BIOS update or perhaps other board-level changes."

Cache22x writes "Scientists at the University of Alberta have published the first draft of the Human Metabolome Project, the chemical equivalent of the human genome. In the same spirit as the human genome project, the information has been made freely available to the scientific community and the general public through the project's website. Knowing the makeup of the metabolome will lead to potentially enormous medical advances as clinicians now have a comparative base for analyzing the metabolite levels found in our bodies."