Henry McClyde writes "Chris Anderson of The Long Tail posted an article yesterday in which he claims that "spare cycles" — or boredom and the tons of people who wish they had something better to do — is what drives Web 2.0.... and the open source development community. While Web 2.0 in general is driven by "the long tail," NeoSmart seems to have taken up issue with Anderson's claims that open source developers (and other freeware programmers in general) do what they do because they're bored and have nothing better to spend their time on. Same with Wikipedia contributors, and bloggers in general."

eZtaR writes "NAVisis is introducing a new USB gadget (for Windows only including Vista) called LaptopTablet. You mount it onto the side of your regular LCD monitor to transform it into a fully functional touchscreen, controlled with an included pen. The gadget is priced at around $100 and seems a good alternative for Photoshoppers."

An anonymous reader sends us a link to a report in The Age about an Australian resident, who had never set foot in the US and broke US intellectual-property laws in Australia, being extradited to the US to face trial. Hew Raymond Griffiths pleaded guilty in Virginia to overseeing all aspects of the operation of the group Drink Or Die, which cracked copy-protected software and media products and distributed them for free. He faces up to 10 years in a US jail and half a million dollars in fines.

enharmonix writes "A bit of an update on the recent Digg revolt over AACS. The NYTimes has taken notice and written quite a decent article that actually acknowledges that the take-down notices amount to censorship and documents instances of the infamous key appearing in purely expressive form. I was pleased to see the similarity to 2600 and deCSS was not lost on the Times either. More interesting is that the EFF's Fred von Lohmann blames the digg revolt on lawyers. And in an opinion piece, John Dvorak expands on that theme."

openeducation writes "I have been researching open source solutions for K-12 education pretty heavily for the past year and have been disappointed to find no real alternatives to the large administrative applications like student information systems, data warehouse, ERP, etc. But recently, I ran across Open Solutions for Education. This group appears to be making a serious effort at creating a stack of open source applications that are alternatives to the large and costly commercial packages. Centre, an open source student information system that has been around for a while, is part of the solution stack. They have a data warehouse and are proposing an open source SIF alternative and an assessment solution. While the proof is in the pudding, these guys have working demos and they look pretty good for a first run. K-12 education is in dire financial straits and solutions like these could help with lower TCO. Plus, education is a collaborative industry already, which makes it a good fit for open source."

Reader gbulmash sends us to his essay on the fallacy of those who would abolish copyright. The argument is that without copyright granting an author the right to set licensing terms for his/her work, the GPL could not be enforced. The essay concludes that if you support the GPL or any open source license (other than public domain), your fight should be not about how to abolish copyright, but how to reform copyright.

Reader reporter tips us to a story just up at the NYTimes reporting that the tough-talking conservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has won election as the president of France. His opponent, Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal, the first woman to get as far as the runoff in a presidential contest in France, has conceded defeat. The vote went 53% to Sarkozy and the turnout was a remarkable (by American standards) 85% of registered voters. Sarkozy is seen as a divisive figure for his demand that immigrants learn Western values (and the French language).

Eric Goldman writes "A couple of years ago Utah enacted a 'Child Protection Registry.' The idea was to allow parents to register kids' email addresses and then to require certain email senders to filter their lists against that database before sending their emails. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, the Utah registry has been a 'financial flop.' Initially projected to generate $3-6 million in revenues for Utah, it has instead produced total revenues of less than $200,000. 80% of this has gone to Unspam, the for-profit registry operator; Utah's share of the registry's revenues has been a paltry $37,445. Worse, Utah has spent $100,000 (so far) to defend the private company from legal challenges by free-speech, advertising, and porn interests."

An anonymous reader writes "New technology from Microsoft Research India in Bangalore could end the waiting game in offices with limited computers. Researchers are developing software that splits a computer screen in two halves, each side with its own operating system, desktop, applications, cursor and keyboard." Mom! Timmy is on my side of the screen again!

An anonymous reader writes "AOL.com users may think they have up to sixteen characters to use as a password, but they'd be wrong, thanks to this security artifact detailed by The Washington Post's Security Fix blog: "Well, it turns out that when someone signs up for an AOL.com account, the user appears to be allowed to enter up to a 16-character password. AOL's system, however, doesn't read past the first eight characters." This means that a user who uses "password123" or any other obvious eight-character password with random numbers on the end is in effect using just that lame eight-character password."

There is an good video on NPR about how real human reactions translate to the virtual world. It's interesting in view of the question posted here about rape in Second Life. The video covers a little experiment in SL where a reporter gets together with a psychologist to see if some unspoken human rules apply in the virtual world — such as staring or standing too close to someone. Perhaps surprisingly, in this world where you can be or do just about anything, you can't break these unspoken rules with impunity.

Tjeerd writes in to alert us to the publication in a highly respected, peer-reviewed journal of results indicative of table-top fusion. The US Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, CA (called Spawar) has apparently been conducting research on "cold fusion" since the days of the discredited report of Pons and Fleischmann. They are reporting on the reproducible detection of highly energetic charged particles from a wire coated in palladium-deuterium and subjected to either an electric or a magnetic field. Their paper was published in February in the journal Naturwissenschaften (which has published work by Einstein, Heisenberg, and Lorenz). New Scientist also has a note about the fusion work but it is available only to subscribers.

eldavojohn writes "124 bands — including R.E.M., Sarah McLachlan, and Pearl Jam — and 24 music labels are sending a clear message to keep Net traffic neutral. The Rock the Net campaign wants all traffic to be equal instead of allowing providers to charge a fee for certain pages to load faster than others. These musicians are the latest to join the Save the Internet campaign, which has the chair of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet in its camp. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., spoke at the campaign's kickoff. I think it's obvious that musicians (especially independents and small labels) will find themselves with the short end of the stick if they are asked to pay a fee to have their music streamed as fast as larger bands or even corporations."

Many readers wrote in with news of Intel's revelations yesterday about its upcoming Penryn and Nehalem cores. Information has been trickling out about Penryn, but the big news concerns Nehalem — the "tock" to Penryn's "tick." Nehalem will be a scalable architecture with some products having on-board memory controller, "on-package" GPU, and up to 16 threads per chip. From Ars Technica's coverage: "...Intel's Pat Gelsinger also made a number of high-level disclosures about the successor to Penryn, the 45nm Nehalem core. Unlike Penryn, which is a shrink/derivative of Core 2 Duo (Merom), Nehalem is architected from the ground up for 45nm. This is a major new design, and Gelsinger revealed some truly tantalizing details about it. Nehalem has its roots in the four-issue Core 2 Duo architecture, but the direction that it will take Intel is apparent in Gelsinger's insistence that, 'we view Nehalem as the first true dynamically scalable microarchitecture.' What Gelsinger means by this is that Nehalem is not only designed to take Intel up to eight cores on a single die, but those cores are meant to be mixed and matched with varied amounts of cache and different features in order to produce processors that are tailored to specific market segments." More details, including Intel's slideware, appear at PC Perspectives and HotHardware.

czei writes "This just-released research report, Load Testing a Virtual Web Application, looks at the effects of virtualization on a typical ASP Web application, using VMWare on Linux to host a Windows OS and IIS web server. While virtualizing the server made it easier to manage, the number of users the virtualized Web app could handle dropped by 43%. The article also shows interesting graphs of how hyper-threading affected the performance of IIS." The report urges readers to take this research as a data point. No optimization was done on host or guest OS parameters.