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ViewSonic has begun selling a $200, seven-inch tablet that runs Android 2.3. The ViewPad 7e is equipped with a 1GHz Cortex-A8 processor, 4GB internal storage, 800 x 600 pixel screen resolution, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, dual cameras, and a micro-HDMI port, says the company....

HTC announced they want to upgrade as many HTC devices as possible. This is completely in line with Google's statement last week about Android 4 upgrades.

First Jobs, then Ritchie, and now McCarthy. This has been a sad month.

The desktop Linux setup of Chris Forster, an academic from the humanities. Forster shows how scholarly research and Linux aren't mutually exclusive.

As most of us already WEP encryption has become a joke. WPA is quickly going the same way thanks to many tools such as Aircrack-ng. On top of this, wired networks are no strangers to unwanted guests as well. Anyone serious about security should have a good Intrusion Detection system in their toolbox. There are already some very good IDS's (Intrusion Detection Systems) available. Why would anyone want to re-invent the wheel in Bash??? There are a couple of reasons for this. Obviously Bash scripts can be very light weight. Especially compared to some of the GUI programs that are out there.

Contec announced a fanless box PC intended for embedded applications, with a height of just 1.4 inches. The BX-956 includes an Intel Atom D510 processor, two CompactFlash slots, two gigabit Ethernet ports, four USB 2.0 ports, plus a VGA port and a serial port, according to the company....

Here's some new features and other upcoming work that may excite Linux enthusiasts in the Phoronix software/hardware playground...

Microsoft has signed a patent agreement with $28 billion Taiwanese original device manufacturer (ODM) Compal Electronics. With this tenth Android agreement, over half of all Android devices are now being made by companies that have signed Android-related licensing pacts with Microsoft, claims the company....

Released several weeks late due to malware attacks on kernel.org in August, the Linux 3.1 kernel is out now, with a variety of enhancements to performance, virtualization, and power management. It also includes support for near field communication (NFC), the OpenRISC open source CPU, Nintendo's Wii controller, and 3D acceleration with Nvidia GEForce graphics processor units (GPUs)....

The Wine development release 1.3.31 is now available.

The Web site http://www.kickstarter.com is an interesting place. Basically, it's a site that allows people to invest in various projects, giving people real money to develop an idea. Those ideas vary from film-making to programming video games, but the concept is the same regardless of the project.

While there are all kinds of interesting new performance and scalability bits in Linux 3.1, there is also something that you might not expect to see. The Linux 3.1 kernel officially includes a driver for the Nintendo Wii Remote.

Yes! After ten release candidates, Linus Torvalds marked a few minutes ago (October 24th) the Linux kernel 3.1 sources as final/stable and ready for immediate download.

It seems that the Firefox for mobile project is in full swing. With tablet support already underway, Firefox’s Android version will soon be getting a bunch of exciting new features. Planned for Firefox 10 are features like Flash Support, camera UI and safe browsing which will put the open source browser at par with competitors like Dolphin and Opera. Here’s a look at the features in a little more detail.

The day ICS(Ice Cream Sandwich – Android 4.0) will be made open-source is not too far. Once it is out, developers around the world(including OEMs like HTC, Samsung, Sony Ericcson) will start building the source code and start rolling out the update for android devices. But what bewilders me is the need for workstations with no lesser than 16 GB RAM to build the source code(I am not kidding). Ice Cream Sandwich is a Vampire that requires twice the amount of blood that GingerBread needed.

Two weeks ago AMD introduced the Bulldozer FX-Series CPUs to much excitement, although many were letdown by the initial results, and it was months after showing the first Linux benchmarks of an AMD Dual-Interlagos pre-production system. In the days that followed I delivered some initial AMD FX-4100 Linux benchmarks when securing remote access to a low-end Bulldozer system running Ubuntu 11.04 (and there were also some Linux benchmarks from independent Phoronix readers), but then last week a Bulldozer kit arrived from AMD. The centerpiece of this kit is an eight-core AMD FX-8150 CPU, which is now being used to conduct a plethora of AMD Bulldozer benchmarks on Linux.

Microsoft’s current strategy is to make Android more expensive by means of extortion, as last we mentioned just a few days ago. Or as Geek.com puts it, “Microsoft now earning royalties for every Kindle Fire sold?”

Earlier this month I wrote about the AMD porting their open-source Linux graphics driver to Windows EC7. Here's a few details that were learned in the past two weeks...

Canonical, through Allison Randal, announced on October 21st, that the next LTS (Long Term Support) versions of the Ubuntu operating system will be supported for 5 years.