Patrick E. Bennett, Jr., Computer Consultant ... computing support for small business

Samsung Electronics announced its much-anticipated Android consumer tablet, due to ship in Europe in mid-September. The Samsung Galaxy Tab runs Android 2.2 on a 1GHz Cortex-A8 processor, and offers a seven-inch, 1024 x 600 capacitive touchscreen, a three-megapixel camera, a front-facing videocam, 802.11n, GPS, Bluetooth 3.0, and 3G with voice telephony, says the company.

Low Cost Computing: "The search for the perfect kernel scheduler is like searching for the Holy Grail. Linux 2.6 started with the O(1) scheduler, which solved a lot of issues for real-time processes. However, it didn't scale to large NUMA (non-uniform memory access) machines."

Desktop Engineering: "GPUs are now powerful enough to do more than just move images across the screen. They are capable of performing high-end computations that are the staple of many engineering activities."

eWeek: "Despite faltering financial results, Novell pushes on with partnerships such as that with VMware for the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware."

The next version of WriteType (1.0.98) is now available for download! WriteType is a word processor designed to make typing easier and more efficient for young students and students with disabilities.

Maximum PC: "In this guide, we'll show you how to get Cygwin set up, the basics of how to navigate a Unix file system, and how to find more information as you need it."

As MP3 players and mobile devices become very common, more and more people are beginning to convert their audio CD collection to music files so they will listen to them while on the move. In Windows and Mac, the conversion can be done automatically with Windows Media Player or iTunes. What about Linux? Let’s take a look.

The H Open: "At a press conference held yesterday, Intel and the WeTab developers, 4tiitoo, announced that the upcoming WeTab internet tablet, scheduled to arrive in September, will run the Linux-based MeeGo"

CIO: "The first beta release of Canonical's next Ubuntu Linux distribution, version 10.10 'Maverick Meerkat' is now available and promises a more refined desktop and netbook experience in preparation for the final release in October."

early four years after its launch, hackers have finally succeeded in jailbreaking the Playstation 3 (PS3) game console and circumventing its copy protection system. Just days after Sony obtained an injunction preventing the sale of a USB dongle for jailbreaking the PS3, hackers have now published source code under the name "PSGroove". This apparently allows a programmable USB development board with an AT90USB microcontroller to be used to circumvent the PS3's security systems and execute unsigned code. In contrast to the PS3 jailbreak, currently PSGroove can't be used to illegally copy PS3 games.

KDE.news: "The KDE PIM team has made available a beta version of the next-generation groupware client suite Kontact. The new Kontact is built on the Akonadi framework, sharing infrastructure for syncing with online services across applications"

Linux Devices: "Beijing-based international online reseller LightInTheBox.com announced it has had two months of surprisingly strong sales of a seven-inch, $140 Android tablet."

Nagios sent me a reminder yesterday, which I finally got around to reading today, to update to the latest version of Nagios Core, 3.2.2. We were running 3.2.0, so we were a couple versions behind, so after browsing through the list of fixed bugs I thought it would be good to go ahead and upgrade. I had a meeting in fifteen minutes, and Nagios was actively monitoring servers in production. I considered for a moment waiting till after the meeting. After all, what if something went wrong during the upgrade, what if there was some unforeseen problem that caused disastrous results and caused me to miss the meeting? And then I remembered, this is Nagios. I did the upgrade, and made the meeting in time to get a cup of coffee on the way. This is how upgrades should work for everything.

Linux Magazine: "Dell's 17-inch Studio 1747 laptop is a beefy desktop replacement that ships with Windows 7. But how does it fare with Linux instead? A few days hands-on with the laptop shows that the machine is almost perfect, save for one fatal flaw."

Softpedia: "The second beta of the next GNOME release has arrived full of bug fixes and updates. Many of the standard packages have been updated for GNOME 2.32 Beta 2 (2.31.91) and more translation work has been done."

My guide on how to make a webcam server has had a lot of feedback and so I decided to give two other methods to achieve it with two different software webcam-server and ZoneMinder Webcam-server is absolutely the easiest way to show on the net what is seen from your webcam, the software is very stable (I’ve just installed Ubuntu, and shows the date 2004) is based on Java and to make it work is enough to give these commands: #> aptitude install webcam-server #> export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so #> webcam-server Now point your browser at localhost:8888 and see a snapshot of that seen from the webcam.

Network World: "For better and sometimes for worse, Linux is the poster child for the open source movement. And why shouldn't it be"

Zona-M: "The OpenOffice.org conference celebrating the tenth birthday of OpenOffice.org started in Budapest yesterday morning. Here are some first notes from the field."

ApacheCon 2010 is now open for registration. The three-day convention takes place in Atlanta at the Westin Peachtree hotel. Lots of speakers and informative sessions. There will be professional training sessions during the two days prior to the conference. Early bird special runs now to September 10.

conceivably Tech: "Microsoft just received confirmation of a patent that hands the company the intellectual property of shutting an operating system down."