There is an old Japanese proverb that goes, "Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher." This week's mail is all about teaching. Whether it is about the seriousness of psychic ability, a short history of trolls or explaining how much free time and malice your dad's attorney has, these people just want to impart information. If what they sent me is any indication, they had a lot of sick days. Click on the link below to become enlightened.

Vigile writes "In a somewhat surprising move from a company that is used to holding its proprietary technologies close to its chest, NVIDIA has announced that it is opening up a 'certified SLI motherboard' program for boards using the upcoming Intel X58 chipset. The X58 is Intel's core logic offering for Nehalem/Bloomfield processors and many people wondered how NVIDIA would support SLI on a platform for which they had admitted to not developing a chipset. At first, NVIDIA was pushing the use of their dedicated nForce 200 chip, but have instead decided to open up the SLI technology to X58 motherboards that meet certain NVIDIA requirements. This leaves a lot of questions about NVIDIA's previous SLI statements, how the pricing of the certification affects partners, and if NVIDIA's chipset business is truly at its end now."

Tim writes "English, German, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese versions of Internet Explorer 8 have been released for public beta. New features include accelerators, which provide instant context menu access for a number of common tasks; automatic crash recovery, which prevents a single page's failures from taking down your entire browser; and browser privacy, a feature that didn't make Firefox 3. I'm primarily a Firefox user, and I've been using IE8 at work (MS) for the past few weeks. It's a definite improvement over previous versions, and brings a lot to the table that Firefox requires extensions for. Give it a spin, submit feedback, and help keep all browser makers on their toes by facing each other's competition."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Wikileaks seems to be a bit hard-up for cash, so they're trying a little experiment. They plan to auction off an archive with three years worth of Hugo Chavez' email. The winner will get a period of embargoed access to break any stories they can find in the files, while Wikileaks will later publish the archive in full. Wikileaks plans to use the profits for their legal defense fund, but they may run into trouble because most reputable news outlets have policies against paying sources."

Mathieu Lutfy writes "The CBC is reporting that 'Quebec's open-source software association is suing the provincial government, saying it is giving preferential treatment to Microsoft Corp. by buying the company's products rather than using free alternatives. ... Government buyers are using an exception in provincial law that allows them to buy directly from a proprietary vendor when there are no options available, but Facil said that loophole is being abused and goes against other legal requirements to buy locally.' The group also has a press release in English."

risinganger writes "BBC News is reporting that a customer had his password changed without his knowledge. After some less than satisfactory service the customer in question changed his password to 'Llyods is pants.' At some point after that, a member of staff changed the password to 'no it's not.' Requests to change it back to 'Llyods is pants,' 'Barclays is better,' or 'censorship' were met with refusal. Personally I found the original change funny, like the customer did. After all, god forbid a sense of humour rears its ugly head in business. What isn't acceptable is the refusal to change it per the customer's requests after that."