nuohejiaoyu.com

It’s a very compelling vision, and one that I think we’ll see a range of open-source companies (and “proprietary” companies) follow suit. Sun is providing an exceptional example of how to turn downloads into dollars.

Lead to where? In a nutshell, and as communicated on his blog, Sun’s open-source strategy is as follows:

(Credit:
Zack Urlocker)

But Schwartz is wicked smart, and very persuasive. It’s now just a question of convincing prospective customers and his employees to follow his lead.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

What is that opportunity? Schwartz rhetorically asked, “What is the next big revenue opportunity?” He answered, “The cloud.” Emphasizing that the cloud enables Sun to deliver value that scales to its open-source user base: the cloud is the key to turning users into customers.

Jonathan Schwartz @ OSBC

If Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz is distracted by an alleged Sun takeover by IBM, he didn’t show it Wednesday in his Open Source Business Conference keynote speech, which focused on the commercial opportunities that follow in the wake of the world’s massive open-source adoption. “Open source is now a given,” said Schwartz, “What’s interesting is what comes next.”

It’s an intriguing question to be asked by the CEO of the world’s largest open-source company, but one that investors (and IBM?) increasingly demand of Sun. Based on his answers, Sun may well have a bright future, despite the fact that time is working against it.

Actually delivering on this vision is harder than articulating it. “It’s not enough to simply make software freely available,” said Schwartz. “Those companies that do this are missing significant commercial opportunity.”

Sun’s cloud services won’t be free. They will, however, be built on open standards, open source, and open data. It’s very similar to Canonical’s emerging strategy for Ubuntu. The cloud enables Sun to deliver “closed” value while promoting it through open-source distribution.

commentary

Step 1: Freely drive engagement/adoption;
Step 2: Execute with fantastic commercial innovation;
Step 3: Connect the two

Disclosure: I am the founder of the Open Source Business Conference and continue to serve as its program chair.

“China Unicom and China Telecom will see a positive reaction in terms of share price reaction,” Reuters quoted Tang Mingjun, a telecom analyst with Shenyin Wanguo Securities in Shanghai, as saying.

Under a telecommunications reorganization plan whose creation delayed issuance of the licenses, China Mobile is set to receive approval for a network using TD-SCDMA technology, a standard backed by Beijing, according to a Reuters report Wednesday. China Unicom would be awarded a WCDMA license and China Telecom a CDMA 2000 license, according to the report.

China’s state council said it’s approved licenses for higher-speed 3G mobile networks, a move expected to help bring higher-end services to phone users in the country.

WCDMA and CDMA 2000 standards are mature and globally accepted but come with royalties the Chinese government has sought to avoid.

The Chinese Ministry of Industry of Information, which expects Chinese telecommunications companies to spend about $41 billion on the next-generation phone equipment, has said the licenses are due to be issued by early 2009, according to the report.

“WiMAX 16e will have opportunities not just in developing countries, but also areas of developed countries where the DSL coverage is weak or nonexistent,” said Howard Wilcox, the author of the report. “The key for the industry ecosystem now is to overcome the challenges and ensure trials evolve into commercial services quickly.”

Though large-scale WiMax deployments have been delayed, many providers have so far been successful in countries ranging from Pakistan to the U.S., says Juniper.

The new 4G Clearwire wireless networks used by Sprint, Comcast, and other providers, runs over WiMax.

Juniper Research, however, believes that the global deployment of WiMax will drive its growth. The larger number of WiMax subscribers will be in the Far East and China region, says the report, due to that area’s early adoption of the technology.

(Credit: Juniper Research)

WiMax gains in Western Europe and, to a lesser degree North America, will occur in areas underserved by DSL. Growth in Africa and the Middle East is likely to surpass that of Western Europe, says Juniper, gaining 15 percent of the overall WiMax subscriber base by 2014.

More information about WiMax can be found here.

A report released Tuesday by the British research firm describes the growth in WiMax stemming from areas unreachable or unserved by broadband cable or DSL.

WiMax is a wireless technology that delivers broadband speeds over the last mile, ideal for locations where cabling is not available or feasible. Faster than current wireless 3G technology, WiMax can also serve large metropolitan areas as it covers a wider area than conventional Wi-Fi.

The number of people grabbing their Internet access through WiMax is expected to jump to 50 million by 2014, says Juniper Research.

But WiMax faces an uphill climb against the competing wireless broadband standard Long Term Evolution, or LTE. A recent study by research firm In-Stat, predicted that WiMax may ultimately lose the battle against LTE, which is already backed by major telcos AT&T and Verizon.

Referenced in the report, the most advanced WiMax standard, WiMAX 802.16e, delivers greater throughput than other WiMax standards.

The three images, which show Facebook, Last.fm, and Twitter integrated directly into iTunes, came from a Chinese discussion forum, conveniently after several days of rumors bouncing around about everything from Blu-ray to Twitter making an appearance in iTunes 9 later this year. The images mainly show what it would look like if Last.fm’s online music streaming and recommendation service were built into Apple’s music software. It appears under a tab on the left menu bar called “Social.” And then at the bottom of the iTunes window, there are two small icons, one the familiar blue ‘f’ of Facebook, and the powdery blue lowercase ‘t’ of Twitter.

Last.fm (also owned by CNET News publisher CBS Interactive) is far from being an established brand. It’s simply one of many streaming music services available on the Web. And the inclusion in iTunes seems contrary to Apple’s purposes. The point of iTunes is to sell you music, not let you listen to songs for free whenever you want. And the other useful features Last.fm offers aren’t new to iTunes: there are already plug-ins, like the one from iLike, that connect to your iTunes account, analyze your library, find music you’ll like, direct you to concerts you may want to attend, and provide artist info–all things Last.fm does, too.

This is how the Facebook icon currently looks in iPhoto.

• Second, Apple doesn’t just partner with anybody. When it does link up with other companies, they’re established brands: think Motorola, Nike, U2, AT&T, Google, and Microsoft. Twitter does not appear at the moment to fit that bill. While it might be the word on the lips of celebrities and journalists, Twitter is a tiny San Francisco outfit that hasn’t shown it knows how to turn a profit, and one whose service isn’t very reliable. Not exactly a rock-solid partner for a company like Apple that prides itself on offering products that “just work.” Plus, Twitter seems a little trendy for Apple, a company that rarely races ahead with the latest technological obsession–see its stance on Blu-ray for the past few years as an example.

• And finally, cosmetically, the images just don’t look all that convincing. Comparing the implementation in iPhoto and the two little logos of Facebook and Twitter below, the Facebook logo in the screenshots just doesn’t look right. The blog Pocket-lint UK talked to some image experts, who point out that many of the pictured logos show a lot of imperfections: including the “9″ in relation to the “iTunes,” and other clues that point to a Photoshop job.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

CNET News’ Caroline McCarthy contributed to this report.

Sure, the idea of iTunes including integration directly with some of social networking’s most promising brands is a nice thought, as blogs like Boy Genius Report have excitedly reported.

Juicy screenshots purporting to show new features in the next version of iTunes popped up online Tuesday morning and are generating a lot of excitement. But here’s the thing: they’re probably fake.

But the entire proposition seems out of character for Apple, and is leading us to think we won’t see these features in iTunes 9 when it is released. Here’s why:

• First, Facebook already launched Facebook Connect for iPhoto earlier this year. Getting that partnership in place was a big deal for Facebook. But the implementation is very subtle. The fuzzy screenshots show a slightly confusing implementation, at least when it comes to the visual organization, with the tiny (and misaligned) Facebook icon on the bottom of the iTunes window. And more importantly, people in a position to be familiar with the situation suggest to CNET that Facebook-iTunes hooking up is unlikely, at least for now.

However, setting up sharing is much more tedious in Office Web Apps than it is in Google Docs. In Office Web, you don’t share files, you share folders. So to share a spreadsheet, you first save it to a particular folder, and then share that folder with the people who you want to let into the file. That’s no big deal if you’re just sharing one file, but if you want to share different files with different groups of people, it’s confusing and tedious, since you have to create a different folder for each set of people you want to share with. If you want to change the sharing specifics on one document in a folder but not others, you’ll have to move the document to a different folder. This is a catastrophic design flaw. Worse, there’s not even a clear “share” link. You have to find the “Shared with” entry in each folder, click on the “People I selected” link, then “Edit permissions,” then enter the name of the person or people you want to share with, and then, once that person shows up in your sharing list, you have to change the default permission from “view” to “edit.”

Google, for its part, lets you share files from within the files themselves, by selecting “Invite people” from the “Share” menu. It makes much more sense. You can also see all your Google docs in one big list. With Microsoft, you have to page through your folders to see your documents. Microsoft does have a nice browser plug-in for drag-and-drop uploading of files, however. That’s a bonus, but not enough of one to offset the awful sharing workflow.

Office Web Apps is a fundamentally different product from Google Docs. The apps run more slowly than the lightweight online Google productivity apps, but Microsoft will offer more features and commonality with the desktop apps.

Like the online version of Excel, PowerPoint on the Web is a high-fidelity experience. Documents come through just as they appear on the PC, and can be edited in place on the Web. Most of the graphically intensive features, like adding animations and design elements, are not yet in this preview, though, so we could not evaluate the experience of creating complex builds and graphics over a Web connection. PowerPoint documents displayed very well on the Web, as I said, but I’d like to see a real full-screen slideshow viewer (the current version displays just a touch of browser frame) for showing presentations over the Web.

In summary, Office Web Apps is, very clearly, the desktop Office suite put on the Web. It’s feature-rich and appears to be targeted at individuals creating complex documents on their own. New users who don’t need or want the complexity of a desktop app, or who are more accustomed to working hand-in-hand with others, may be put off. Certainly, if Microsoft releases this product to the public without fixing the collaboration workflow, even die-hard Office users will avoid the service when they’re in a hurry and have work to do with colleagues.

As in Excel on the Web, only new Office 2007 files (.PPTX for Powerpoint; .XLSX for Excel) can be edited online. Older .PPTs can be viewed and displayed, but not edited.

In raw editing capability, Excel on the Web beats Google. It will have features approaching the PC counterpart of the app, not to mention the same user interface (the “ribbon” Office users are accustomed to) instead of Google’s old-timey but clear pull-down menus. The commonality between the Web and PC versions of the products should make it easier for people to pop between the desktop Office apps and their Web counterparts.

The version of Excel that we have access to is the most similar to Google Docs in capabilities. It allows simultaneous editing — two or more people working on a spreadsheet at the same time. As in Google Docs’ spreadsheet app, as soon as one person updates a part of the spreadsheet, everyone else viewing the sheet gets the change in real time, or close enough to it. Users don’t have to “save” their file for the changes to get pushed out.

Finally, while online Word editor isn’t available yet (the viewer is, and it works well), we did learn a few things about the capability — none good. First of all, Word online won’t get you simultaneous editing. When you open a file to work on it you will lock it, and other people won’t be able to get in to change things. If you want simultaneous editing, you’ll apparently be able to do it from within the Word 2010 installed app. Online simultaneous editing is “on the road map,” we’re told, but won’t be ready even when Office Web Apps goes public in 2010.

Excel

Sharing in Office Web Apps is unbelievably tedious.

OneNote is on the same track as Word, and will get editing capabilities online when Word does.

The technical preview of Office Web Apps shows how similar the online apps will be to their desktop counterparts, even though many features are missing in this early version.

PowerPoint

It’s no Google

The capability to edit a PowerPoint doc from any Web-connected PC right before you have to make the actual talk will make many presenters a lot less nervous about making last-minute changes before a pitch.

In what appears to be a childish move, but one that Microsoft is defending by saying, “we had to prioritize,” Office Web Apps doesn’t work on Google’s Chrome browser. That’s a shame, since for Web apps (as opposed to more-static sites), I have found Chrome to be a faster and thus more usable platform than
Firefox or Internet Explorer. (Office Web Apps also supports
Safari.)

Word

You also won’t be able to embed your Word documents in other Web pages, Scribd-like. There will be options to embed Excel files. (The feature does not seem to be turned on yet.)

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

For people and companies that have standardized on
Microsoft Office, the preview shows that Office Web Apps will do a good job of extending the desktop experience to the Web. But the desktop legacy may also be a liability. File management — moving documents between desktop and Web, or keeping them in sync across platforms — is going to be complex, and it’s unclear how Microsoft is going to integrate its desktop apps, PC sync products like Mesh, and Web-based storage services like Skydrive, where Office Web Apps stores files for consumers. Also, Enterprise customers can use SharePoint for storage, which may not integrate well with workers’ personal file stores, online or offline.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

In the preview we saw the user interface of the Web-based version of Excel is extremely close to the traditional version of the app. Getting comfortable with the app took no time at all. It’s just a lot slower than the desktop version. Given that this is such an early preview, we were not surprised that many tabs and features were missing from the Web app. But complex formatting, database elements, and charts from Excel files created in Windows transferred with good “fidelity” (that’s Microsoft’s word) to the Web. It appears users won’t lose anything in translation in the move from editing documents on a desktop to the Web.

Microsoft has finally started to open up its Web-based versions of Office apps to early testers. Thursday we got access to a “technical preview” of Excel and PowerPoint on the Web (not, notably, Word). The obvious comparison that will be made is to Google Docs.

In the 1980s, e-mail started blossoming in earnest as a killer application for the Internet, and the World Wide Web arrived in the 1990s. These innovations vaulted the Internet from academia into the mainstream. Exploding popularity led to companies that sold Internet access, equipment, and services–and the first dot-com bubble.

There now are 226 million Web sites registered for use.

What’s perhaps notable about the Internet is how organic it is. In the short term, there are plenty of disruptions as one company or another suffers problems or technology can’t match new demands. But in the long run, the system continues to function as researchers, computing companies, standards groups, and start-ups constantly upgrade the infrastructure and offer new reasons to use it.

Its early years involved just a relative handful of computers sending data to one another over increasingly large distances. The 1970s brought a key innovation, the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) that governs how data is broken down into packets, routed across numerous networking devices, and reassembled into their original form at the other end of the pipe.

Today’s cloud computing applications are primitive compared to PC-based equivalents, but the browser is evolving to meet the new demands with accelerated graphics, much of the native power of a PC’s processor, and maturing programming tools. That increased power fuels the arrival of more sophisticated applications.

Actually, it would be more accurate to say some important seeds of the Internet sprouted with that data transfer on September 2, 1969. There’s plenty of debate about when the Internet was actually born, but one thing is certain: it’s been a constant work in progress.

The dark side
The Net is by no means perfect or universally beneficial.

So the Internet poses plenty of problems. But it’s only gaining in importance, power, and reach, so my advice is to embrace it and try to shape it for the better for the next 40 years.

It began as a Defense Department-funded project called Arpanet that drew on plenty of research elsewhere. It grew to offer a useful electronic mechanism to send mail, then the virtual real estate of World Wide Web, then a backbone for commerce, and now a core part of globe-spanning social activity. And it’s well on its way to becoming the foundation for how the world’s population uses computers.

The ease with which it’s enabled communications has led to a series of new conduits–e-mails, instant messages, blog posts distributed over RSS, tweets, and Facebook updates. That’s handy for keeping in touch, but it also means people must grapple with a constantly shifting collection of oversaturated communication conduits.

(Credit:
Netcraft) Technology tour de force
The Internet itself is a mind-boggling complex overlay of technologies that spans every level from steering photos down a glass fiber to showing where your friends are on a dynamically generated map. But the first half of its 40 years were spent largely in obscurity.

Woodstock concert
First man on the moon
Stonewall riot for gay rights
Birth of the Internet

Woodstock embodied the rising power of a new generation. Stonewall opened the door to a radical reshaping of morality. Men on the moon showed us how small the Earth is. But the Internet changes everything–and it will be instrumental in the next chapters of humanity’s future.

The bursting of that bubble was cataclysmic in the industry, but it was a mere blip in the Internet’s history. According to Netcraft, there were 226 million Web sites in August, nearly 10 times the number around when the bubble burst. Google filled the void left by the collapsed start-ups with a powerfully profitable business making sense of the Internet’s information chaos.

I acutely feel the financial pains of journalism that arrived when the Internet brought an oversupply of news. Arguably, the ever-shrinking number of reporters is offset by the arrival of new voices and the ease of tracking what’s going on, but I share the concerns about the waning power of the press to uncover corruption or other problems.

The most worrisome issues I see stem from problems people themselves have adapting to social interaction on the Net.

Sifting the signal from the noise can be nearly impossible–and that’s before dealing with the spam.

The Net has enabled more than just talk, of course. The Net powers a huge amount of commerce, whether it’s buying songs over Apple’s iTunes, hiring cheap labor through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, or managing the supply chain of inventory used to build
cars.

That’s because the Internet has enabled communities based on interests, not geography. Latin speakers, macro photographers, Philip K. Dick fans, and college roommates can stay in touch with their respective peers. Jets, phones, and letters made this possible before, but the Internet builds it into daily life so it’s as ordinary as going shopping.

It seems our brains are hard-wired for a social circle about the size of a tribe, but now parts of our lives are on display to the whole world. Just closing your curtains now won’t get you privacy, and good luck teaching Facebook’s information sharing mechanisms to somebody not steeped in the subtleties of the social graph.

Likewise, the Internet has given a megaphone to many who had none before–protesters in Iran and Myanmar are recent examples in which the people were able to comprehend what was going on in hard-to-see parts of the world and decide for themselves whether they liked it or not.

The Net also has fueled the globalization that led to job losses and resentment as expensive labor in wealthier countries was replaced by cheaper workers elsewhere.

View results

At the time, it would have been hard to predict which of these events 40 years ago would prove to be most momentous:

CNET News Poll Top 40th anniversaries
Which 40th anniversary this year turned out to be the most important to history? Share comments below, too.

The Net also has brought with it plenty of new crime, facilitating identity theft and financial scams. Stalking has never been easier, and distributed denial-of-service attacks by armies of compromised computers can cripple a business’ operations.

The next phase of growth is through cloud computing, in which people use software that’s housed on the Net rather than on their own machines. Giant farms of servers house the applications people use, making them available to personal computers and mobile phones today and in-car computers and other devices tomorrow.

You may disagree, but in my opinion, it’s the last of the list: four decades ago today, the Internet was born.

The global community
I’ve been moved since childhood at how Apollo 11 photographs of Earthrise as viewed from the moon make my planet seem a single entity rather than a bunch of squabbling factions of humanity. But because of its practical effects, the Internet has done more to unify the world.

• Humans step out of a spaceship and walk on the moon.
• The Woodstock concert becomes a seminal cultural moment for the baby-boomer generation.
• A New York City police raid leads to the Stonewall riots and modern gay-rights movement.
• A handful of engineers at UCLA send some data from one computer to another.

The Internet can abet governmental censorship and propaganda efforts, too. My gut instinct tells me that the Net’s power to disseminate information–especially when augmented by technology such as Google Translate–ultimately will prevail, but it’s not a sure thing.

In its early years, there were objections to the arrival of the profit motive on the Net, but that transformation out of academia has been one of its greatest assets. Economic ties are powerful and often durable, and corporations are willing to pay real money to make sure the infrastructure they’re using stays up and running.

This isn’t Kielty’s first encounter with Megan’s law. In December, he defended a 21-year-old woman accused of sending harassing and threatening text messages to a 17-year-old girl in a dispute over a male.

A cyberbullying case in Saint Charles County, Missouri, will test a year-old state law on electronic harassment. The law makes it a felony for someone 21 years or older to communicate with someone 17 years or younger by phone or electronic means in order to recklessly frighten, intimidate, or cause emotional distress to that person.

Banas doesn’t believe the law singles out the Internet specifically other than that it’s the vehicle used to commit the crime. He pointed out that Missouri harassment statutes are not just for electronic communications. “They’re written for any type of communications done to frighten or intimidate or cause emotional distress,” he explained, “whether the purpose is to harass somebody through the Internet, over the phone, or face to face.”

Thrasher was then charged with the crime of cyberbullying under the statute 565-090, passed in Missouri in August 2008. Unofficially known as Megan’s law, the statute is named after 13-year-old Megan Meier who committed suicide in 2006 after being the victim of an Internet hoax set up by a schoolmate’s mother.

The attorney also believes the case targets Internet speech specifically and that it wouldn’t be a felony had it not occurred in cyberspace. “She was arrested and had to post bond for words. No actions, no threats. For words. There’s something wrong with that. If it was a newspaper ad, it would not have been criminal. It certainly wouldn’t have been a felony. If it was on a street corner or a bathroom wall, it wouldn’t have been a felony.”

“If it goes to trial, and there’s a verdict of guilty, then the defendant would have a right to appeal it. But I think this statute is very much within the constitutional boundaries. I think it should withstand the scrutiny of the appellate court.”

If convicted, Thrasher might receive a penalty of up to four years in prison. “Up to four years in prison for a practical joke gone awry,” said Kielty. “For words spoken through an Internet medium that would not be criminal if spoken on the corner of the street. I’m going to fight them every step of the way because I don’t think it’s a properly crafted statute. I believe that ultimately the statute will be overturned and should be.”

Kielty sees the law as a knee-jerk reaction on the part of local politicians to the Megan Meier case. All the media attention and public outcry over Meier’s suicide led to the new statute, he believes. And now the prosecutor is in a position to enforce that statute.

The 21-year-old was charged under the same statute, but in this case it was a misdemeanor, not a felony. Kielty said she pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor and received probation. “But she was never arrested, and she never had to post bond,” he said. “And I would argue that case was more egregious than (the Thrasher case) because as the facts came out at the plea, there were actual threats made.”

The defense speaks
Hired to defend Thrasher, Michael Kielty finds fault with the law itself, pegging it as too vague. “It’s a terribly crafted statute,” he told CNET News. “I think ultimately it’s going to be found unconstitutionally overly broad and vague.”

Is posting a phony, sexually suggestive ad online about another person free speech, an inappropriate prank, or a felony? That’s what the Missouri court system will decide.

In the new case, CNET News recently spoke by phone with defense attorney Michael Kielty and Saint Charles County prosecutor Jack Banas.

“Whether or not the law was common knowledge, I think it was common knowledge that what she did was wrong,” said Banas. “You’re presumed to know what the crimes are in the state of Missouri.”

Kielty acknowledges that Thrasher’s action was improper and a mistake. “It wasn’t thought out and it was not the appropriate thing to do. However, I don’t think it raises to the level of a felony, much less a misdemeanor.”

Conflict then started to surface between various family members, according to Kielty. The alleged victim’s mother started making derogatory comments about the defendant’s daughter, he said. Kielty claims there was harassment by the alleged victim and and her mother directed at the defendant.

The attorney explained that it’s in an appeals process where the statute’s constitutionality would be tested.

After that, the case would then travel to the circuit court, requiring another arraignment where Kielty would again enter a plea of not guilty. The case would then be set for trial, which the attorney believes could happen mid- to late spring of 2010.

Kielty also discussed the complicated back-story between the defendant and alleged victim. One of the client’s daughters was dating the alleged victim’s younger brother, he said. That led to a meeting between the ex-husband of the defendant and the alleged victim’s mother, who apparently hit it off and moved in together soon after.

Elizabeth Thrasher, 40, allegedly posted a photo and personal contact details of a teenage girl in the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist during the spring. The teen reportedly received phone calls, e-mails, and text messages from strange men, prompting her to call the police.

The prosecution speaks
Saint Charles County prosecutor Jack Banas is charged with enforcing Megan’s law. As opposed to Kielty, he said he believes the statute will stand up in court. “I think it’s drawn narrowly enough to punish people only when they’ve done something intentional for the purpose of intimidating or frightening or causing someone emotional distress. I can only say that as it’s written right now, we’re enforcing it and will enforce it.”

“This didn’t just happen in an isolated incident,” he said. “There is context to the transaction. But my client never initiated contact with the victim. Your typical harassment statute would be a series of threatening or harassing statements, maybe some stalking, maybe threats of abuse or something of that nature. This is nothing of the sort.”

Kielty’s problems with the law rest partly on free speech issues. He said the statute states that if you cause somebody under 17 emotional duress via electronic communication, then you’re a felon. “Can you imagine the application of that in everyday life?” he asked. “With your children? With teachers and students? It is a slippery slope.”

Megan’s law was passed to update Missouri’s prior harassment statute, which Banas said was archaic because it only covered intimidation by writing or by phone. A large committee of prosecutors, defense attorneys, and a victim in another case worked with legislators to upgrade the statute for the modern world to cover electronic communications.

An arraignment is set for Monday, in which Kielty will enter a plea of not guilty on behalf of his client. He expects the case will be set for either a disposition or preliminary hearing. The hearing would require the state to show probable cause that a crime was committed and that Thrasher was the person who committed it.

Banas explained that much time and effort have been spent educating people about the new law and the issue of harassment. Local newspapers and news stations have done stories on cybercrimes and the problems they’ve created.

Megan Meier’s mother has also focused on public awareness. “Mrs. Meier had organized a nonprofit agency in which she went to schools to make parents and everyone else aware of this,” said Banas. “There are bullying and cyberbullying classes. My wife is a teacher, and that’s part of their curriculum.”

This isn’t a free speech issue according to Banas, but pure harassment. “Free speech does not involve speech directed at someone to intimidate, frighten, or otherwise harass them,” he said. “That’s not what free speech is about. This is directing something at a specific individual for the purpose of intimidating or frightening or causing emotional harm. It takes it out of the realm of some type of public speech.”

A Borders customer survey asks about a mystery Apple iPad large-screen reading device.

More specifically, after getting a sense of my taste in books and buying habits, Borders asked about my familiarity with digital-reading devices and whether “I plan to buy an Apple iPad (large-screen reading device) this year.” Hmmm, that was a toughie.

There are a gazillion rumors swirling out there about a forthcoming Apple tablet of some sort. And while we certainly don’t feel the need to point you to each and every supposed leaked photo or tip from a super-secret inside source, this potential clue is too interesting to pass on.

This story was updated Tuesday with some clarification about the origin of the
iPad reference. See details below.

(Credit:
Borders/Screenshot by Michelle Meyers/CNET)

MacLife appears to be the first to have noticed that a survey Borders e-mailed to customers, for which those willing to participate earn a coupon for 20 percent off, referenced a device called the Apple iPad.

It’s hard to know what to make of this reference. Perhaps Borders has some sort of inside knowledge, or perhaps the third-party producer of this survey reads Apple fan blogs. Or maybe Borders is just listening to CNET readers, who seemed to like the name iPad in our “Name that Netbook” poll.

In other words, we still don’t know if someone was trying to predict the future, has inside knowledge, or is simply having fun with Apple watchers.

Only time (and Apple’s anticipated September event) will tell.

Updated at 3:15 p.m. PDT on Tuesday: A Borders representative said book audience research firm Codex Group conducted the poll on behalf of Borders and “included the term iPad in the survey.” However, Codex Group founder and CEO Peter Hildick-Smith declined to explain the origin of the term, deferring to his client, Borders.

Larrabee will be targeted initially at the gaming market. The demonstration was based on the game Enemy Territory: Quake Wars from Splash Damage (See video.)

SAN FRANCISCO–Heads up, Nvidia. Intel demonstrated its Larrabee graphics chip for the first time Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum.

Larrabee will be Intel’s first discrete, or standalone, graphics processor in about 10 years and is expected to compete with graphics chips from Nvidia and AMD’s ATI unit. The demo used an early “stepping,” or version, of Larrabee, which is expected to come out commercially sometime next year.

Mark said the same thing can be done on a standard multicore Intel processor but with Larrabee there is more parallelism–or the ability to do more things at the same time.

“If you look at the water. That’s done with only 10 lines of…code,” he said. The demo was written in C++.

Mark described ray tracing technology as allowing “you to simulate the interaction of light with matter in a way that’s accurate and makes it really easy to get effects like light and shadows.”

“This is a ray tracing demo,” said Intel senior research scientist Bill Mark during the demonstration. “We took the content, the textures, and geometry, pulled it out of that game and put it into our ray tracing engine.”

Adobe Systems on Friday introduced a new Photoshop app for iPhone users that lets them edit photos from both their phone and their online library on Photoshop.com.

Photoshop for iPhone lets you do all sorts of things to your photos, including beaming them back to Photoshop.com when you're done.

(Credit:
CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

More pics after the break.

What makes the app notable (besides from being from Adobe) is that the entire editing control set works off gestures. Instead of using dials or sliders, users just need to swipe their finger across the screen to change things such as brightness or color values. The same goes for its filters, which can be whisked from one end of the screen to the other instead of taking up more screen real estate or using a drop-down menu. It’s one of the more intuitive control methods I’ve seen on a mobile photo-editing app, and can be quite precise once you get the hang of it.

Photoshop's famous filter effects come to the iPhone version as well.

(Credit:
CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

The app is free of charge and offers tools such as cropping, image rotation, color controls, and simple one-touch filter effects that can change the look and feel of shots all at once. It also features undo and redo controls so that if users make a mistake, or want to revert back to the original, it takes just a few taps.

As soon as users are done editing any photo, they can either save it back to their phone or upload it to their Photoshop.com account. The app also doubles as a photo-taking tool since you can simply take a photo, then have it upload right away.

Users can edit photos in portrait, or landscape view.

(Credit:
CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

The app is available now and is free of charge, although Adobe’s free Photoshop.com service has a 2GB limit, which can be expanded with an annual paid storage plan.