Net radio's silent Tuesday

Much of Internet radio was silent on Tuesday in protest of a dramatic copyright royalty fee hike, reports Australian PC World.

But is anyone listening? Net radio industry group SaveNetRadio, which organised the event, thinks so. The group estimates between 20 000 and 30 000 people called congressional representatives as a result of the National Day of Silence event.

SaveNetRadio says the rate hike will increase fees for large Webcasters by 300% and those for smaller ones by as much as 1 200%. The new higher rates will go into effect on 15 July, and are retroactive to the beginning of 2006.

A six-month research project has revealed a sharp division along class lines among the American teenagers flocking to social network sites, reports BBC News.

The research suggests those using Facebook come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college. By contrast, MySpace users tend to get a job after finishing high school rather than continue their education.

The conclusions are based on interviews with many teenage users of the social networking sites by PhD student Danah Boyd from the School of Information Sciences at UC Berkeley.

IBM claims to have nearly tripled the performance of the technology behind the world's fastest and most energy-efficient supercomputer, developing a system that is potentially 100 000 times more powerful than a home computer, reports Linux World.

It will be used by the US Department of Energy and the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science. The supercomputer's operating system is based on open source Linux.

At a price of $1.3 million, one Blue Gene/P supercomputing rack can perform 13.9 trillion operations per second and 350 million operations per watt.

Microsoft late yesterday fired off a return legal salvo at Google, and filed a memorandum with a federal judge arguing its rival should not be allowed to intervene in the anti-trust case settled in 2002, reports Computer World.

Earlier on Monday, Google submitted a request to file a "friend of the court" brief with judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.

In the brief, Google said last week's deal over changes to Windows Vista's desktop search did not go far enough, and it asked the judge to extend her oversight to make sure Microsoft made good on its promises.