Psychologist Richard Weissbourd contends that parents who are obsessed with their children's happiness are ignoring other important values — like goodness, empathy, appreciation and caring — that are necessary to a well-rounded personality. Weissbourd is the author of The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development. A lecturer in education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Kennedy School of Government, Weissbourd has founded several interventions for at-risk children, including ReadBoston, WriteBoston and Project ASPIRE.

After a decade of earnest immersion in parenting, though, the times are ripe for a change. The first sign was the wave of confessionals — from anonymous Web sites like truumomconfessions​.com (where mothers admit to transgressions like feigning stomach cramps to steal quiet time hiding in the bathroom) to bylined blogs like the wildly popular dooce.com (where Heather B. Armstrong chronicled her postpartum depression and continues to write about her struggles as the mother of a charming but somewhat high-strung 5-year-old) to memoirs like Ayelet Waldman’s (in which she cops to such “sins” as using disposable diapers and loving her husband more than her children). But in the past few months, a second wave has taken hold — writers are moving past merely venting and are trying to gather the like-minded into a new movement. Carl Honoré is one. He calls it “slow parenting” — no more rushing around physically and metaphorically, no more racing kids from soccer to Suzuki. Lenore Skenazy is an

Small wonders: the 2009 Ars USB flash drive roundup Since our last roundup in 2005, USB flash drives have become ubiquitous. So ubiquitous, in fact, that we wondered whether there was any difference at all among models. In our 2009 roundup, we find out the answer.

From its bamboo floors to its rooftop deck, Clayton Homes' new industrial-chic "i-house" is about as far removed from a mobile home as an iPod from a record player.

What Ubuntu Server *could* be

Ubuntu Server should be a product that delivers a cool, integrated, sysadmin-friendly server experience. I want us to innovate. I want us to boldly go where nobody has gone before. I want Ubuntu Server to be something, rather than be anything. We should have a product that implements industry best practices, rather than just making them possible. Having configuration files under a revision control system, users always defined in a local or distant LDAP directory, screen on network shells, LVM always configured… We should deliver and integrate the right software solutions rather than just making all options available.

ZFS may be locked into the Solaris operating system but “Butter FS” is on the horizon and it’s boasting more features and better performance.

The Australian government has ditched its plan to fund a privately built fiber-to-the-node broadband network. Instead, it will directly build an open-access, 100Mbps+, fiber-to-the-home network that will reach 90 percent of Australian homes within eight years.